Times 26,387: A Veritable Smorgasbord

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I’m not sure if it’s just because I’ve been doing the 5:2 “intermittent fasting” diet with my wife for the last couple of weeks (don’t know why really, I’m already quite thin, but then I don’t really know why I spend so much time doing crosswords, either?) but this puzzle made me quite hungry, with its buffet of barely compatible foodstuffs front and centre, and a good selection of drinks to go with them in the NW…

Beyond the high calorie count, what we had was a slightly unusual puzzle definitely on the funny/punny/groanworthy end of the spectrum: barely an anagram to be seen, loads of double defs instead and many clues that defy the “equational” style of parsing that I have been striving (failing) to perfect a notation for since I started blogging here all those months ago. I imagine it might have proved to be a grind if you found yourself off the wavelength, but conversely I think this would be a great crossword for inducting a relative beginner into the bigger leagues: if it’s hard it’s hard because you need to think a bit more laterally than usual, rather than because you haven’t spent decades assimilating all the little technical flourishes in the setters’ arsenal. Possibly.

Some notable biff traps at 12ac and 13dn (if your ability to spell is shaky, anyway). On the nice clues front there’s something very aesthetically pleasing about the rising ALLIES in 11dn, but I think my COD today was 8dn, or perhaps that’s just nominative determinism and I’d have hated an equally technically proficient clue for DISAPPOINTING. Tip of the hat to the setter – I had a jolly good time. (11 minutes of one, as I see from consulting the leaderboard which I’m still on top of as of 8am – that won’t last long, I’m sure!)

Across
1 HOGSHEAD – a lot of drink: HAD [taken] – O.G. SHE [embarrassing mistake (i.e. own goal) | woman] admitted
5 SHEARS – cutter: HEAR [judge] in S.S. [“on board”]
9 CAMOMILE – plant: “reversing” LIMO [car] inside CAME [arrived]
10 SILENT – double def of: like lead character of knight (pron. “night”), say ; old film
12 CONTRACTIONS – spasms: CONTRA{p}TIONS [weird devices “losing power”] interrupted by C [constant]
15 RAITA – yoghurt dish: reverse [“backed”] of A TAR [a | preservative] “to protect” I [one]
16 RASPBERRY – rude gesture: and I’m no horticulturalist, but I’m pretty sure canes are a major part of raspberry cultivation
18 SPAGHETTI – Spaghetti is made up of strands ergo “stranded”, and also the sobriquet of an infamous junction (Gravelly Hill Interchange in Birmingham)
19 LENIN – a red: reverse [“moving left”] of NINE L [square | {ra}L{ly} “in the centre”]
20 COLD SHOULDER – ignore: and if you’re wearing a strapless dress your shoulder may well be cold
24 TOWING – pulling: and away from the centre of the pitch is possibly TO WING
25 VISIGOTH – barbarian: GO [try] to interrupt VISIT [call] by H [husband]
26 REDEEM -save: RE-DEEM [think again]
27 LEGAL AID – this may enable further proceedings: GAL [girl] given A1 [fine], LED [taken] outside
Down
1 HOCK – double def of: pledge ; wine
2 GAMY – a little off: G AMY [good | girl]
3 HOMEOPATH – quack: O [duck] blocking HOME PATH [local | walkway]
4 ALLITERATION – poetic device: and if something is ALL ITERATION it is “nothing but repeats”
6 HOIST – flags (as in “a group of flags raised as a signal”): I [one] beset by HOST [a great number]
7 AXE TO GRIND – personal notice: AXE [cut] + reverse of O.T. [books “up”] + GRIND [laborious work]
8 SATISFYING – meeting: SAYING [expression] restraining (FIST*) [“flying”]
11 MARSEILLAISE – anthem: reverse [“lifting”] of ALLIES RAM [saym NATO | force] + IS E [is | European]
13 PROSECUTOR – counsel: PROSE [plain text] + homophone of CUTER [smarter, “it’s said”]
14 DISALLOWED – refused to accept: SALLOW [looking sickly], DIED [departed] “to fix it”
17 BALLERINA – artiste: B{o}A{t} [“regularly”] covering ALL ERIN [the whole of | Ireland]
21 SINGE -char: SINE [function] including {dustin}G [“at the back”]
22 GOYA – artist: YOGA with the first and third letters swapped [meditative exercise “oddly mixed up”]
23 SHED – refuge for husband: SHE’D [woman had]

42 comments on “Times 26,387: A Veritable Smorgasbord”

  1. Just over 3V for me on this excellent Friday offering.At least half a V wasted by my blind faith that 18 was sealine related.Thank you for parsing 24 which I failed to see inspite of playing there for the majority of my rugby career.
    1. Unspammed. You need gaps between full-stops and the next letters, old bean, otherwise LJ sends you to the sin bin!
  2. There seems to be a strong correlation between my solving speed and the number of anagrams. Only half an anagram in the entire grid today, so I was never going to finish in a hurry.

    Not complaining mind you, I really enjoyed this one and was pleased to finish after being held up at the end in the NE corner.

    Thanks setter and V.

  3. 17m. I found this quite tricky, but I enjoyed it enormously. Perhaps because, as you say, it relies more on lateral thinking (and resulting aha! moments) and isn’t always susceptible to the usual sort of analysis.
    My only real quibble was with 16ac, where I wasn’t sure that a RASPBERRY is really a ‘gesture’, but that is a tiny nit and more than made up for by 3dn, which gets my COD for fighting the good fight with its entirely factual definition.
    I had a worrying ER/OR moment at 13dn but thankfully the wordplay gives you the correct spelling.
    Thank you setter, and Verlaine.

    Edited at 2016-04-15 09:45 am (UTC)

  4. MARSEILLAISE is not the title. It’s La Marseillaise.

    Rather heavy going akin to Tuesday’s ordeal for me but unlike then I got started right away (with 1dn) and never felt I was not going to finish. I needed all but 3 minutes of an hour though.

    Edited at 2016-04-15 08:01 am (UTC)

    1. …and 0 is not duck, it’s “a duck”. But life’s too short.

      Edited at 2016-04-15 08:48 am (UTC)

    2. My singing is so bad that if I attempt it, it can’t really be called “the Marseillaise”, just “a Marseillaise”. More like mayonnaise, to be honest.
  5. Found this fairly straightforward, perhaps my predilection for groanworthiness helped. The only spelling challenge for me was 11dn

    Good to see the homeopath correctly described as a quack. If there is one thing I cannot stand, it is claptrap dressed up in pseudoscientific jargon with intent to deceive.

    Edited at 2016-04-15 09:16 am (UTC)

    1. To be fair to homeopaths (not a phrase you will find me uttering very often) there is often no intent to deceive.
      1. Infinitesimally tiny quantities of deception do go an awful long way for these people, mind you.
        1. I suppose a homeopath with no deception in him might still be able to deceive if you stirred him round and round quite a lot and banged him on a bit of leather.
  6. Went well apart from NE corner. I was determined that the personal motive was EGO TRIP in 7d and tried to fit letters round it, until I saw SHEARS for 5a, and biffed LENIN having grinded my axe. FOI VISIGOTH, remembered from my history textbook, 1066 and all that. A SATISFYING puzzle, taking nearly the hour.
  7. Put 19ac in, couldn’t parse it, too many possibilities, and kept seeing St. Basil’s, and remembering being whistled at when I stepped over a painted line near the Kremlin in 1979. Forgot that I’d seen the man himself in the nearby mausoleum. Wonder if there’s a hidden MUSCOVY DUCK somewhere? 25′, which seems to be my modal time.
  9. Garden sheds are nowadays being marketed as ‘she sheds’, places of tranquility for women, cf ‘man cave’. So 23d could be ‘Society man had refuge for wife?’
  10. Very enjoyable, 22 minutes = 2V, a pleasure to have to think laterally rather than just grind down anagrams. SHEARS was oddly my LOI. I agree with jerrywh about homeopathy, as I expect does Jimbo; scientifically, it has to be utter nonsense.
  11. 35min, with over 5min on LOI 7dn failing to think of anything for A?E that made sense. Carelessly had -ER at 13dn, missed on pre-submit check.
    Agree on 3dn, but many of them are deceived by placebo effect into sincerely believing that their nonsense really works.
  12. 23.19 this time suggests a puzzle that required a different solving style to the norm, and in my case rewarded a general process of look, come up blank, look at something else, come up blank, go back and say “aha!”. Which is fine, but rather limps when you get towards the end and there’s nothing else to look at. GOYA for me was a clue of the type “you can’t get there from here”, only to be fathomed once you’d got the answer, though I suppose there are only so many 4 letter painters and meditative exercises. Just as well I’m not a devotee of Rimo.
    While generally I share the opinion of the apparent majority on homeopathy (does Chas not do the Times?) I owe my life (or at least the quality of it thus far) to a homeopath, who prompted the discovery that my zinc levels were stupidly low. Taking large doses of said element (and not just drinking water that had been in the same house as an old style battery, you’ll be pleased to know) greatly increased my flagging vitality, and for that I am grateful.
    1. Z8b8d8k, I worry that you may next find that you need more zebras and zithers in your life.
    2. I meant to mention earlier that I did get GOYA by thinking of YOGA and moving the pieces. There are lots of artists (mostly RA) but I thought of YOGA the instant I saw ‘meditative exercise’.

      Edited at 2016-04-15 02:26 pm (UTC)

  13. 35′ for me, enjoyable puzzle. I agree wholeheartedly with others’ comments about HOMEOPATHY. Didn’t we also have REIKI the other day (or was that in the QC?).

    I have a personal 7d on such subjects. Some years ago, by way of entertainment, I was at a Psychic fair in the Valley (Desert Springs or similar township) where I was persuaded, by the slightly more gullible Mrs Rotter, to have my ‘aura’ photographed . I agreed and insisted that the deed be done twice (and paid twice), with the second photograph taken immediately after the first. The result was two completely different ‘aura’ and consequent personality readings of the same individual within seconds of each other. QED.

  14. A satisfyingly alliterative 16:16 and like K I had a brief panic about how to spell prosecutor and brief misgivings about the gestureliness of a raspberry.

    Thanks for the explanations for alliteration and (La) Marseillaise V, I just had to biff those. I panicked a bit at the end when I couldn’t see what SILENT might be and thought I was going to have to bung in something entirely wrong like yesterday. Not only was it an uncommon device but the definition could easily have been the first one, two or three words.

    Fun puzzle.

  15. A chewy 45 minutes for this challenging offering, with the NE blank until all other clues were solved. Didn’t get a way in to the puzzle at all until RAITA, then slugged my way through until CONTRACTIONS and SATISFYING finally gave me a start in the NE corner. Didn’t know the required meaning of LOI HOIST so wondered what ALIOT might mean for some time before finally twigging SHEARS. Liked 10ac and 4d. Didn’t spot the complete parsing for LENIN, but knew it was something to do with 3 x 3 and L so biffed it. Thanks to V for the full parsing, and to the setter for an enjoyable challenge.
  16. Dear God! It’s Friday! and what should have been 35mins led to an eternity because of the Geordie Corner.

    5ac SHEARS did for me as I couldn’t get my head around what appeared to be a plural but wasn’t.

    Thus 6dn went in and LOI 10ac SILENT which I thought for a long time was ERRANT! COD 16 ac RASPBERRY!

    I think we should be allowed a more recent photo of Verlaine in order to enjoy his new A4 slimness.

    horryd Shanghai

    1. How funny that 5ac is a singular appearing to be a plural and 6dn a plural appearing to be singular. Intentional I wonder?

      I’m not sure that Times-Xwd-Times is ready for glamour shots of its bloggers. Though if we ever wanted to raise funds for some good cause, I guess we could do a calendar…

  17. I found this very 8d for the most part, particularly the NE corner, but I came unstuck in the NW, and after 45 minutes I resorted to aids. After 45 minutes I’m only prepared to press on if the clues are stunners, which they weren’t here, though there were some good ones. I hoped 9a would help me break into the NW, but the placing of the comma after ‘inside’ makes it pretty difficult to see the container as it’s meant to be seen. As it is, the cryptic syntax is really clunky. This is where I resorted to Bradford’s and saw CAMOMILE.
    Commendations to to 5a and 8d; 16’s to 9, 16, 20 and 23.
  18. Very good puzzle with few write-ins and a fair bit of thinking required for most clues though a bit gentler than Tuesday’s offering. I was held up by HOIST which I hadn’t come across as a collective noun for ‘flags’ before and by much of the SW corner. Yes, I suppose 11 should have included the definite article, but otherwise no complaints. My favourites were SILENT, RASPBERRY and SHED.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

  19. Well, it took me 38 mins from start to finish but there was a lot of shuteye in the middle of it. When I became alert again I finished off the second half of it fairly quickly, so it was a puzzle that would probably have been in the middle of my time range had I been wide awake the whole way through. I have to say that I really enjoyed this one once I realised how quirky some of the setting was, and SILENT was my LOI after AXE TO GRIND.
  20. Very enjoyable challenge today and great blog as always.

    I wondered about 22dn though, isn’t there a rule that the anagram fodder should be contained in the clue itself rather than needing to be guessed at indirectly?
    Perhaps the instruction to transpose two particular letters of an unknown makes the clue specific enough to not qualify as a true indirect anagram?

    Stuart

    1. I actually wrote “indirect anagram?” next to the clue in angry ink but having read the blog I’m now of the view that the “oddly mixed up” instruction is sufficiently precise for that not to be the case here. “Oddly” is the critical element.
  21. I should take a page from Andy’s book perhaps and try to catch some sleep while doing the puzzle. It always helps to leaver it briefly and come back again. Viz., without shut-eye, I got through unaided in 40 minutes, so apparently I found it trickier than usual. My LOI’s were the unconnected CAMOMILE, which I just couldn’t bring to mind for the longest time, and SILENT, clever. Happy to have gotten through sans the stupid mistake a la yesterday. Regards.
  22. Didn’t start ’til late so nowhere near a finish, and looking at the blog wouldn’t have done anyway, but all worthwhile for 3d. How often do you laugh out loud at a clue?

    Tyro Tim

  25. I’m going to use continuing tiredness as an excuse for my 16:23, but I’m worried that it’s really a sign of something more sinister, since: 1) I thought of GRIND as a possible third word of 7dn but still took an age to come up with AXE TO; and 2) I took a ridiculously long time to twig why SILENT – which I thought of comparatively quickly for the “film” once I had the checked letters in place – fitted the rest of the clue. (Doh!)

    At least I managed to correct MARSAILLAISE before submitting, but how on earth did I come to type it in in the first place? (Commiserations, sotira.)

    This was a delightful puzzle, but one I should have cracked in less than half the time it eventually took me. (Deep sigh!)

    1. The mighty Magoo inevitably aside, it looks as though there was a real shortage of impressive performances on this puzzle among Club Members – I don’t know *why* it was harder than it looks, but I really think it was!

      At a mere 41 years of age, I already find myself typing ridiculous things into textboxes and having to go back to correct myself continually. I’m sure that never used to happen, and my trepidation about the years to come is starting to grow…

  26. A bit late to post perhaps, but I did finally finish correctly, after taking ages to even get started. The latest method is to do the recalcitrant last two clues (it’s almost always just two) the next morning when I have a fair chance. Total solving time at the keyboard, though, a bit over an hour. HOIST seemed much better than ALOIT in the end and sounded as if it might describe a group of flags, since that is what you do to them. Couldn’t parse HOGSHEAD (well, the HO GAD part of it) nor SILENT, my LOI, which I tried to turn into an &lit (old film or, with some insinuation, “like lead” as the definition, and SILT as an old film of dirt in a river around EN, the chess knight, say). Well, at least the answer was right.

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