Times 26343 – cricket, golf and sex… what’s not to like?

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Faced with this, bleary-eyed after a sleepless night coping with an ill and distressed Ted (our elderly wire-haired fox terrier), I was relieved to find I had finished this off in 20 minutes or so, with only one word ‘unknown’ but deduced correctly from wordplay. It’s a solid, MOR puzzle with a couple of definitions (11a, 17d) which made me smile.

Across
1 FLOATY – OAT (grass) inside FLY (insect); D light and delicate. I toyed with a new strain of marijuana called UFF before OAT popped up.
4 CLADDING – CL (exterior of cell), ADDING (building up); D an insulating layer.
10 CATAMARAN – CAT (Tom, maybe), A MAN insert A R(iver); D boat.
11 GIMME – Hidden word in BA(G I’M ME)RRY; D putting piece of cake. It’s putting, as in golf, not putting as in placing. A gimme is a very short putt which your matchplay opponent concedes rather than wasting time holing out. Not allowed in competition play, unless you’re French it seems.
12 DON – NOD = bow, reverse; D flower, rivers in Aberdeenshire, Yorkshire, and probably others.
13 LIQUIDATION – (LATINO, I)* around QUID (some tobacco); D company’s demise?
14 LOUCHE – D ignominious; LO then initial letters of all the following words in the clue (except ‘initially’ of course).
16 TRICKLE – Insert R (king) into TICKLE (please, as in amused, by Ken Dodd perhaps); D move slowly.
19 ON THE GO – (ONE GOT)* around H; D very busy.
20 ENTOMB – (NOTE)*, MB (doctor); D bury.
22 BUMBERSHOOT – Insert UMBER (brown), SH (extreme letters of SmootH) into BOOT (rear of car); D brolly, umbrella. Ironic that Wiki tells me this is American slang for a brolly, but no doubt our US and other non-UK solvers are wondering what footwear has to do with the rear of a car.
25 SIR – STIR (slang for prison); T to escape; D knight.
26 EXTRA – Attach RA to the final (right-wing) letters of ThE BronX NoT; D particularly.
27 ESTIMATED – E (justice finally), STATED (said), insert IM (Mimi’s heart); D rough.
28 SPENDERS – SUSPENDERS (garters) is missing US; D shoppers perhaps.
29 CREASE – CEASE = stop; insert R (rear of flanker); D ruck.

Down
1 FACADE – Insert A C(old) into FADE (melt); D front.
2 OUT-AND-OUT – D total; if you’re OUT and OUT, you’re dismissed twice in cricket.
3 TAMIL – Insert M (problem, ultimately) into TAIL (behind); D Asian.
5 LONG IN THE TOOTH – Witty DD, and a write-in.
6 DOGMATIST – DOG (trail), MIST (film); insert A T(ermagant); D opinionated type.
7 IAMBI – A giant may say I AM BIG; briefly = drop the G; D more than one foot, plural of iambus, a metric foot in poetry.
8 GREEN TEA – GREEN = politician, TEA sounds like T (Tory leader); D drink.
9 CROQUE MONSIEUR – CROQUE sounds like CROCK (container), (SOME URN I)*; D French dish, a sort of toasted ham sandwich with bechamel sauce on top, add a fried egg and you have a Croque Madame, even more delicious.
15 CLEVELAND – C (Conservative), LEVEL (matched) AND (with) ; Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th President of the United States (1885-89 and 1893-97). The only one to serve two non-continuous terms. Impressive in the moustache department too, I see.
17 KAMA SUTRA – Cryptic D, ‘relations’ of a sexual nature; a text not recommended for those like me with dodgy backs.
18 COBBLERS – Cryptic DD.
21 BRIDGE – Another DD, part of a violin and a card game.
23 MITRE – Insert R(ector) into MITE (little one); D headgear, as worn by a bishop.
24 TAMAR – All reversed (‘rising’), RAM AT (force in the direction of); D the river which forms a border between Devon and Cornwall, also famous for its rail bridge (Royal Albert) designed by Brunel.

48 comments on “Times 26343 – cricket, golf and sex… what’s not to like?”

  1. Needed the iPad to get BUMBERSHOOT. Another word that has been disinterred. No wonder I had never heard of it.
  2. 12m, but with BAMBERSHOOT. I love it when an obscure foreign word is clued with ambiguous wordplay.
      1. Brownish-yellow (Collins, Chambers) or yellowish-brown (ODO, via ‘honey’). As opposed to umber, which is, er, yellowish-brown (ODO).
        Dictionaries aside, the amber in my personal mind-picture is a yellowish-brown colour. And it has an ancient fly stuck in it.

        Edited at 2016-02-24 09:29 am (UTC)

        1. I initially biffed this one as a half-remembered BUMPERSHOOT, then ‘corrected’ it after checking the wordplay. I was seeing that fly, too. I wonder if it’s always the same fly in the pictures? If so, it’s the world’s most photographed insect [insert own US politician joke here]
          1. A quick google throws up lots of different pictures of amber containing lots of different prehistoric flies. The one thing they all have in common is a distinct yellowish-brown colour.
  3. Fast top half, slow bottom half results in 21 minutes. Once I got it, BUMBERSHOOT rang a bell, but only as a distant tinkle.
    Only in a crossword might a rector aspire to a MITRE, even a little one, but that’s one of the reasons I like crosswords.
    A lot of contributory letters from the front, back and sides of words today: possibly a record?
  4. My best since starting doing the crossword again, 25 minute. Didn’t know Bumbershoot. Last year in Sussex I popped in to a cake shop for a ham sandwich and a vanilla slice, only to come out with a croque monsieur and a millefeuille.
      1. There was nothing as good as le boudin noir and le bonnet at the UCP on a Saturday before walking down the Manny Road to see the Burnden Aces. I liked the cow heel the best but I can’t find a translation for that!
        1. I could just imagine John McGinlay tucking into a bit of black pudding before a game. Trust a Trotter to like the heel.
          1. Neat. I go back a lot further than Super John though the Manny Road song was from round then. I reckon Nat was fond of the UCP. Hartle and Tommy Banks only ate raw meat.
  5. Pip I had 14a as LO (look) + the initial letters of unfortunately confronting His Excellency.

    25 minutes with some fine surfaces – 1d, 11a, 3d and 17d for example.

    Edited at 2016-02-24 09:25 am (UTC)

  6. 35 minutes but with a crossing typo and also ‘bambershoot’. Whatever the dictionaries might say, my amber is the thing you get between green and red at the traffic lights (AKA orange), and I was never happy with my stab. If I’d have thought of ‘umber’, I’d have popped it in, not least because of the morphology.

    Anyroad, a cracking crossword, I thought, with my last two in (CLEVELAND – nicely clued, with not an Ike in sight – and LOUCHE – nicely hidden) my joint CODs.

    1. Once I’ve found a valid wordplay route to an unknown answer, I don’t generally devote a lot of time to wondering if there’s another one that might look a bit better. For much the same reason this sort of thing must be hard to spot from a setter/editor point of view to be fair, but I reserve the right to be grumpy about it.

      Edited at 2016-02-24 09:48 am (UTC)

  7. 27:16. Having read above I realise I was fortunate that amber didn’t cross my mind so I managed BUMBERSHOOT.

    I saw GIMME quite early but didn’t put it in until quite late as I wondered if this was maybe a French word sounding like gym. Funny how sometimes you see a word you know but don’t recognise it like that. Reminds me of the time I wondered why there was a one coat paint called Once which I saw as a word rhyming with bonce. Maybe it’s just me.

    1. ‘Once’ does rhyme with ‘bonce’! But I think I see what you mean.
      I spent several minutes yesterday trying to work an anagram in this week’s Azed puzzle into some obscure unheard-of term until finally realising it was an entirely commonplace six-letter word. The last thing I considered!
        1. I’m not sure what I’d call my English but when I say ‘once’ and ‘bonce’, they rhyme.
        2. In Lancastrian English once rhymes with bonce. I think it does in all northern England.
  8. Worked my way round this one steadily with FOI CATAMARAN until I was left with the SW looking bare. Put GREEN TEA in with a shrug wondering why it was clued as GREEN TEG, so thanks to Pip for enlightening me on that one. Having got EXTRA and MITRE I was left puzzling over the completely unknown brolly, but managed to contruct it from wordplay and checkers with umber coming to mind instead of amber. COBBLERS then followed as LOI. About 45 minutes all told with the last 15 spent on the last 4 or 5 clues in the SW. A pleasant solve. Just waiting for the plumber to replace the blocked arteries to my bathroom radiator now. John.
  9. 40 minutes of steady solving with nothing giving too much trouble, even BUMBERSHOOT from wordplay though I did consider AMBER for a moment. For future use it might be worth pointing out that it’s a sort of portmanteau word from Umbrella and Parachute, and that should dispel any lingering doubts as to why it needs a U rather an an A.
      1. Didn’t the makers of Bullseye attempt to cash in on the programme’s success by trying to persuade Bamber Gascoigne to host a game show that combined basketball with tough general knowledge questions? I’m pretty sure that was going to be called Bambershoot.
      2. Well of course if you know it you know it and the problem doesn’t arise, but if you don’t know it you don’t know whether it exists or not.
        1. Ah, I see what you mean now. But of course the question of which looks more likely only arises if you think of both, which I for one didn’t, since BAMBERSHOOT looked like a perfectly good option from a wordplay perspective. So for me the greater plausibility of BUMBER was of no more use than confirming the non-existence of BAMBERSHOOT in a dictionary (or in my case from the iPad app highlighting the error).
  10. Back in the lands of the sub-10 minute solve again, which was nice.

    BUMBERSHOOT was no problem for me as I spent a few years living in rainy Seattle, whose main music festival is self-deprecatingly called that. But I can see how many non-Pacific-Northwesterners might throw the newspaper across the room.

    Edited at 2016-02-24 11:28 am (UTC)

  11. Resorted to aids for CROQUE MONSIEUR, COBBLERS was just a guess, then somehow I fumbled LOQUIDATION.

    Can’t even be happy with sussing out BUMBERSHOOT. I’d rather have got it wrong and gone out in sympathy with my fellow solvers, who have every reason to be stroppy IMHO.

    All of which adds to the delights of solving, sort of. Thanks setter and Pip.

  12. 30 minutes with the predictable unknown BUMBERSHOOT. Funny, I never even thought of AMBER…and I’m glad I didn’t.
  13. 16 mins and a much earlier solve than I have been used to for the last six months or so. COBBLERS was my LOI after BUMBERSHOOT. Once I’d finally seen the wordplay for the brolly I didn’t have a problem with it because I always think of “umber” as brownish and “amber” as somewhere between yellow and orange, and I did consider both. The answer looked vaguely familiar but if I’d have seen it on its own I might have thought I was looking at the name of one of Dickens’ minor characters that I’d forgotten.
  14. A little under 13 minutes but I’m another who bambered when I should have bumbered.

    I enjoyed the def for gimme and didn’t know cobbler as a drink: in culinary terms I thought it was a dumpling.

    1. Were people thinking of Bamber (did his parents really choose that name for him) Gascoigne’s brolly?
      1. Arthur Bamber Gascoigne, they called him. Take your pick. Wiki tells all:
        there was an earlier Bamber in the family.
        Gascoigne is the elder son of Lieutenant-Colonel Derek Ernest Frederick Orby Gascoigne (himself the son of Brigadier-General Sir Ernest Frederick Orby Gascoigne) by his marriage in 1934 to Mary Louisa Hermione O’Neill, a daughter of Captain the Hon. Arthur Edward Bruce O’Neill and Lady Annabel Hungerford Crewe-Milnes.
        His great-grandfathers include Robert Crewe-Milnes, 1st Marquess of Crewe, and Edward O’Neill, 2nd Baron O’Neill.[3] He is a nephew of Sir Julian Gascoigne who was in charge of the Household Division during the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.[4]
        He is a direct descendant of the 18th-century Lord Mayor of London Sir Crisp Gascoyne and the 19th-century Tory politicians Bamber Gascoyne (the elder) and Isaac Gascoyne. Isaac’s son General Ernest Frederick Gascoyne, of Raby Hall (1796–1867),[1] was his great-great-great-grandfather.
  15. Hard to follow the ancestry post from Pip, what with all those hyphens. About 35 minutes, ending with COBBLERS, where both definitions aren’t familiar. To me it’s a dessert mix of fruit, sugar and something biscuit-like. I also would have thought BUMBERSHOOT more UK than US slang, and I apparently have been pronouncing CROQUE incorrectly my entire life (so it doesn’t sound like ‘croak’, eh?). Learned a few things today, so thanks to the setter and Pip, and regards to everyone else.
  16. Bamber: and Wiki tells a tad too much perhaps. What a punctilio of names. Not too happy with louche as ignominious: I see louche characters as having a certain presence. 21.45, steady solve, amused by the unknown bumbershoot and agree with Mr Borrows on the umber-amber revolving signpost. Thanks pk for the croque madame tip; my life now more or less depends on ordering one soon.

    Edited at 2016-02-24 05:17 pm (UTC)

  17. My professional life involved many many trips to Luxembourg where the snack of choice was always a Croque Monsieur. DNK BUMBERSHOOT, I got lucky. Apart from the more public appearances of Bamber Gasgoine, he was also the ‘secret celebrity’ who witnessed the burying of the Golden Hare in Kit Williams’s Masquerade. LOUCHE = ignominious? 23:19
  18. Enjoyed this one, not fast but no trouble with any clues except……another one with bambershoot!
  19. I don’t normally buy The Times on a Weds so was interested to see what this was like.

    If this was a medium one then my times are coming down as it took me around 40m.

    I could see the Gimme in 11ac but never 100% understood the clue until coming on here (so still plenty to learn).

    That said, I didn’t really think for long about Bumbershoot as 1. it fitted the clue and 2. it put me in mind of a similar portmanteau type brolly construct: the Brumbrella used at Edgbaston cricket ground.

    Very enjoyable test.

    Edited at 2016-02-24 09:20 pm (UTC)

  20. Fun puzzle, which I completed o.k., though I did not parse everything.
    Somewhat distracted by listening to Man. City remembering how to play footie.
    Much better after my lousy performance yesterday.
  21. Failure here. I too confused my umber with my amber. Just to screw things up completely I managed to get “bumbersnoot”, somehow, so I don’t even get the chance to complain about ambiguous clueing of obscure words.

    Moreover, I had “flouty” for 1ac, which is apparently not a word in any language known to Google.

  22. One mistake (BAMBERSHOOT, as I never thought of UMBER), but with so many frustrating unknowns (TAMAR, COBBLERS etc.) and obviously so little chance of ever understanding the right answers that I just bunged in my guesses and submitted. Very surprised that I ONLY had one letter wrong. And BUMBERSHOOT, now that I see it, does ring a very faint bell … Oh well, I’m in good company.
  23. 18:15 for me, with the last five minutes or so spent agonising over BUMBERSHOOT. I felt that if the word actually existed, then I ought to have heard of it, but I’ve obviously led a sheltered life. I considered BAMBERSHOOT as a possibility, but “brown” seemed to lead much more obviously to UMBER, and BUMBERSHOOT was clearly closer to UMBRELLA if that was its derivation.

    I join those unhappy with LOUCHE = “ignominious”. Maybe it’s me, but there always seems to be something rather attractive about people described as “louche”. I see that among the citations in the OED there’s “I knew of a louche little bar quite near here.” from Brideshead Revisited – clearly just the sort of place to spend an interesting evening :-).

  24. Nice to see the good old river Tamar appearing twice, once in its own and once in catamaran, which is traditionally clued along the lines of “a river in a metal container” so I bunged it in without thinking. Now see the river was just “r” on this occasion

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