Times 26467 – Quia viderunt oculi mei explicationem ultimi indicii!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 26 minutes

Music: Mozart, Symphony #40, Fricsay/Vienna Symphony Orchestra

I found this a bit more difficult than usual for a Monday, and was stuck on 11 down for a while, finally seeing it just as the final chords of the fourth movement sounded. Fortunately, Fricsay takes the symphony at a rather stately tempo, typical of the older school of German-influenced conductors – HIP they were not.

I was a little worried after failing to finish all five weekday puzzles from last week in a catchup solve on Thursday and Friday. I had been away cleaning out and preparing for sale an estate condo in my capacity as executor and heir, and didn’t get back until Thursday night. However, with a little effort I got over the hump on this one.

As many of you probably expect, I will conclude by congratulating Henrik Stenson on his extraordinary achievement. If you’re leading The Open going into the fourth round, and you shoot a record score, you certainly deserve to win. Here in the US, the coverage has been taken over by Golf Channel/NBC, and they showed about 12 hours of live golf for all four days.

Across
1 INAUGURATE, IN AUG + U + RATE, where ‘class’ is a verb.
6 HERB, HER + B.
9 THEATRICAL, THE ATRI(C)A + L.
10 MAIL, double definition.
12 CHEESEBURGER, CHE(anagram of SEE GRUB)ER.
15 HOMEWARDS, HO(ME + W)ARDS, where the ‘perhaps’ goes with the literal, since some workers may chose to adjourn to the pub.
17 COLON, double definition…where does that leave the semicolon?
18 PYLON, hidden in [unhap]PY LON[doners].
19 SIDE ISSUE, SIDE + IS SUE? Not at all…
20 ENTHUSIASTIC, anagram of THIS NUTCASE, I.
24 POMP, P + O + MP, not a chestnut but using every crossword cliche.
25 PAPER TRAIL, P.A. PERT + LIAR backwards.
26 RARE, the obvious answer, but I don’t understand the cryptic. It appears to be a letter-removal clue, but there is no word meaning ‘savory dish’ with an ‘I’ or ‘O’ added to ‘rare. Audience participation time!
27 PERMISSION, PER MISSION, a chestnut.
 
Down
1 INTO, I(NT)O, more cliches.
2 ADEN, [l]ADEN.
3 GET THE WIND UP, double definition. ‘Colicky’ would have been more the mot juste here.
4 RAISE, [p]RAISE.
5 TRAVERSED, TRA(VERSE)D. ‘Trad’ is definitely the most useful kind of jazz to setters.
7 EVANGELIST, anagram of LINE, TV SAGE, a bit of an &LIT.
8 BELL RINGER, BELL(RING)E + [love]R.
11 NUNC DIMITTIS, NUN + CD + I + MITT + I’S. Nothing to it, right? Well, I did need the cryptic!
13 SHOPKEEPER, [manageres]S HOP[es], so the phrase is a “‘shop’ keeper”.
14 SMALL TIMER, double definition, where the grandfather clock is presumably a ‘large timer’.
16 RUSTICATE, RUS(TACIT upside-down)E.
21 STEAM, ST[r]EAM.
22 BALI, I LAB upside-down.
23 CLAN, CL[e]AN – this setter is rather fond of letter-removal clues!.

68 comments on “Times 26467 – Quia viderunt oculi mei explicationem ultimi indicii!”

  2. 11 mins, so not quite as quick as I probably should have been. I was fully alert for the whole solve as well so I don’t have any excuses. It isn’t like I was held up by 11dn either because I biffed it after I had the first two checkers much like Z8 did. I confess that I also biffed SHOPKEEPER and I never did bother to parse either of them, which is a shame really because the clues for them were excellent. RUSTICATE was my LOI after PAPER TRAIL.
  3. Beaten by NUNC DIMITTIS – I plumped for the “fist” option. I suppose if I had thought of “mitt” I would have thought it more plausible than “fist”, but I didn’t. Damn.

  4. Normally stick to the QC and occasionally try the “biggie” without much success. But hey presto managed it today. Red letter day. As usual thanks to the bloggers for their explanations which have been invaluable in our learning curve. Took slightly longer than 11 minutes but who cares we did it.
    1. Congratulations andxles. We have all slogged through to where we are and it is always a pleasure to see others getting there too.

      Edited at 2016-07-18 08:52 pm (UTC)

  5. A bit less than 15 minutes, LOI NUNC … via the wordplay. I am not familiar with the tune, but the wordplay wasn’t hard to follow, given that I thought of mitt immediately, and never considered fist. I then checked its existence. Happy day. Regards to all.
  7. Pretty quick by my standards, but I confess that I didn’t parse them all. I had a bit of a wobbler due to my poor spelling, – I thought that nunc dimittis was spelt with one ‘t’, but that was quickly sorted out. I should have known better having sat, most enjoyably, through evensong many times at Durham Cathedral.
  8. A slow, but reasonably steady, 8:49 here for this pleasant straightforward start to the week.
  9. First serious attempt on the 15×15, after a few months on the QC nursery slopes. Pretty pleased to be just one clue short (RUSTICATE ??) after calling time at about one hour. Fellow QC-ers had flagged it as one of the easier ones.
    NUNC DIMITTIS no problem – ex choirboy.
  10. Late on parade but was too tired to comment after a long hot day in London yesterday.

    I think this was close to my PB for a Times puzzle, being on a train, I didn’t use the stopwatch on my phone, so I’d better just say it was a “PB on a train”!

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