Times 26536 – you could ski straight through this one

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 9:33 – I thought I was going to be inside 7 minutes, but the ski resort held me up for a long time trying to work through the possibilities. Either I was on the wavelength of the setter to a great extent or this was a particularly straightforward one.

Hmmm – just as I am ready to submit there’s only one better time than me and it is Verlaine. So it might be more wavelength.

Away we go…

Across
1 S,CREAM
5 CHENILLE: inside CE, put HEN(female) and ILL(evil)
9 DEFENDANTS: anagram of SENT,DAD containing FEN(since 12 is MARSHY)
10 TOAD: this may trick a few – TOD is scots for FOX, stick A inside. Why knot? Some sources (though not Collins or Chambers) give knot as the collective noun for toads
11 SOLECISM: anagram of SEMICOLONS missing ON
12 MARSHY: MARS, H(astil)Y
13 M,EAT
15 TELEMARK: eventually dredged this up – L inside two targets – TEE(the mark in quoits) and MARK
18 SHILLING: SING(grass, spill the beans) around HILL
19 NODE: N,ODE – a work with several meanings
21 EMBALM: MBA in ELM
23 AMARANTH: AMAH (not our most common nurse, but one we have seen before) surrounding RANT
25 ERGO: or ER, GO!
26 UPHOLSTERY: anagram of POULTRY,SHE
27 BLIGHTER: B, and then once you shed pounds you are LIGHTER
28 DEN,TON: got this from wordplay
 
Down
2 CREDO: CO containing RED
3 ELEMENTAL: ET AL surrounding LE(the french),MEN
4 MAD,RID
5 CINEMATOGRAPHER: anagram of CHARIMAN and PROTEGE
6 ENSEMBLE: double definition
7 INTER: Harold PINTER’s plays have been described as comedies of menace, so chop his head off for the answer
8 LEATHERED: THERE in LEAD
14 EPHEMERAL: anagram of HARPE(r),LEE surrounding M
16 MANHATTAN: this raised a smile – MAN(guy),HAT(busby),TAN(brown)
17 DISMOUNT: I think this is a cryptic definition, I don’t think there is a mountain anywhere called Clydesdale
20 BALLAD: ALL in BAD
22 AMONG: hidden in gleAM ON Gabled
24 TORSO: T, OR SO

68 comments on “Times 26536 – you could ski straight through this one”

  1. As many of you will have spare time after this, I recommend today’s QC which I found harder than this overall.
    Annoyingly I did get one clue wrong in this -10a -rejecting Toad for Trap. David
  2. I thought I’d have a crack at the QC after some of the mentions here. Having finished, the ipad edition said it took me 2 hours something. How come each su doku has its own timer which pauses when you close the ipad? Why not do the same with each crossword? I’d mention it to The Times but on past experience it’s like talking to a brick wall.

    Rant over.

    1. Yes, I found the timer useless in just the same way today. Thank you for providing me the opportunity to rant a little myself! Bloody thing.
    2. You continue solving The Times crossword in your subconscious when off doing other things, so elapsed time as per Times’ timer is correct. If you could pause the timer you would get deceptively, incorrectly too-low times. The timer works properly, as it should.
      I’m not a sudoku-er, but I suspect there is no subconscious retrieval of answers possible, it’s more a logic & pattern recognition puzzle. So Id guess the sudoku timers work correctly, also.
      What’s the problem?

      Rob – knew TOD but not KNOT, knew AMAH but not AMARANTH, knew TELEMARK as a region, after saying to myself, “I couldn’t name a single region of Norway!” but not TEE. 3 poor clues I luckily got right. And CINEMATOGRAPHER needed all the crossers except second A.

      1. There is one cumulative timer for all three crosswords. If I start with the cryptic I’ve not been subconsciously solving the concise before I’ve even looked at it.
  3. There is a mention of AMARANTH on page 5 of today’s TIMES 2.

    Apparently it bears comparison with quinoa.

    1. I often find that there’s a word I don’t know in the crossword that I then see somewhere soon after. A case of life imitating crosswords?
  4. All done in 20 minutes except TOAD, for which I had no answer. Mrs
    K being from up north knew Denton was in MCR. The rest was fine.
  5. About 15 minutes, only hold ups being why a tee is a target, and to make a guess and get TOAD. Didn’t know of tods or knots, but I read the clue as needing a creature for the answer, so it seemed likely. No problem with the amah, as stated it has been a perennial in the NYT. Regards.
  6. Am I the only one who can’t access any puzzles on the Crossword Club homepage? I just get a strange error message telling me that “(Type Error): null is not an object…”.
    1. Nope, you’re not the only one. Just got exactly that when I tried. I don’t know if it’s been doing it all day—I did the puzzles within the Times app on my iPad today. I also got a “Too many redirects” error when I tried to see if anyone had reported it in the Forum.

      Edited at 2016-10-06 06:31 pm (UTC)

      1. Glad it’s not just me! I expect it’s leaves on the line, or the wrong kind of snow. I expect they will ensure that null is an object in due course…
  7. Can anyone help please? The Crossword site says that I am logged in but when I try to access any crossword, I get the error message (Type error) PU(…) is null.
    Thanks
    1. Same here and can’t get the forum either. Glad it’s the site that’s buggy and not my computer!
  8. Aah I see I am not the only one! Should have read the comments before posting. At least it isn’t my technological buffoonery as is the usual case. Let’s hope it works itself out. I will pour another glass of wine and have a go at the Guardian on line crossword.
  9. I’m glad other people are having problems with access to the crossword club (well no, not really. But I am glad I’m not the only one, so I assume the Times will eventually take note). I am NOT glad that the Times is taking so long to take note, though. This should be a simple problem to put right.

    Especially annoying that the Forum is not accessible, so it’s not easy to complain. But I was able to solve the puzzle simply by accessing the newspaper and then proceeding to the Puzzles section. You can solve the puzzle online, there is a timer (but no leaderboard), and you can check the solution when you are finished and it shows you where your mistakes are. You can even edit them after submission and you don’t have to wait a day to see the solution.

    By this method I did manage to solve correctly in 61 minutes, my LOI being DENTON (a good thing I was skeptical about BOW being a fashion).

    Edited at 2016-10-06 10:07 pm (UTC)

  10. I wondered if the Crossword Club had finally terminated my membership, but it seems not :-). Anyway, at the end of a busy day (and after doing tomorrow’s puzzle, No. 26,537) I was quite glad to have an easy one that I could fill in in 7:24 despite feeling desperately tired.

    Like others, I hadn’t heard of a “knot” of toads, nor had I heard of DENTON, but the rest was straightforward enough – though trying to start 5dn with CON made it my LOI.

    Ballroom dancers will be familiar with various forms of TELEMARK (Open (in Waltz possibly followed by Cross Hesitation or Wing), Natural, Hover, Natural Hover … or just plain). I assume they’re named after the skiing manoeuvre, but I could be quite wrong.

  11. Came back to this one after being unable to access it on Thursday, having tried to avoid reading any clue-related comments here! That said, DENTON did catch the corner of my eye when I was posting my question about the site being down, though I think I’d have got it anyway from the wordplay. Twenty-three minutes, which is a good-to-middling time for me, with TELEMARK my LOI.

    Not too much trouble with a “knot” of toads, though I was distracted by thinking it was a collective noun for some sort of bird (which it isn’t, of course – it’s just a bird, silly me), nor with AMARANTH (“Amah” was hiding in a dusty corner of my memory).

    My only dislike was 9ac, where “12” for “marshy” was a bit clunky and unsubtle.

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