Times 26,539 – Who, me?

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 66 minutes 29 seconds

Music: None, still in Connecticut.

This was a real toughie. It’s not a bank holiday,
so I wonder what got into them. Maybe they’re out to disprove the ‘easy Monday’ canard?

In any case, there were a number of very subtle clues, with either the literal or the cryptic very difficult to find and interpret. I still have a couple of clues not fully parsed, although my answers are guaranteed to be completely correct according to the official Crossword Club website.

And, yes, I forgot I was the blogger, I thought it was Ulaca’s turn. Fortunately, I happened to look at the calendar, which we try to keep properly posted. I was distracted this week by various activities related to my move out of New York, so I hadn’t really been paying attention.

Across
1 PIPER. You remember the Who song, “Can’t Explain”? Well, have at it, I don’t have a clue. Actually, I do have the clue, which is even worse! It turns out that ‘piper’ is the stage-Cockney pronunciation of ‘paper’.
4 CHEONGSAM, anagram of M[a]O + CHANGES.
9 SHORTSTOP, SHO(RT + ST + O)P, where ‘grass’ and ‘shop’ have their penny dreadful meanings, and ‘o’ represents the ball.
10 CHURN, CH + URN, one of the few straightforward cryptics and literals, and my FOI.
11 RUSSET, [c]RUS[t] + SET, perfectly obvious, right?
12 PRESERVE, P[astries] + RESERVE, i.e. RE-SERVE, geddit?
14 DOWN AT HEEL, DOWN + A + THE + [jew]EL[ler]. I wasted a lot of time with D _ _ S / AD / THEA, a Latin phrase that was not going anywhere, because there’s no three-letter word starting with ‘d’ meaning ‘shabby’. I checked.
16 PLOT, TO + LP backwards.
19 ROOD, ROO + D[resser].
20 CRACKING UP, C(RACKING)UP. Two difficulties here. ‘Cracking up’ usually means breaking out into unquenchable laughter, which hides the old meaning which is mainly preserved in the negative phrase ‘not what it’s cracked up to be’. On the cryptic side, ‘racking’ is hard to explain. It might be R[oyal] A[utomobile] C[lub] KING, but if so it’s quite outrageous. Other suggestions welcome.
22 EXECRATE, EXEC RATE. A chestnut, but an ‘exec’ is not really a board member, except in very loose usage.
23 ALISON, A + LIS[t]ON. Not as many solvers remember Sonny Liston as I might have expected.
26 LOONY, LOON + [ma]Y.
27 BROWN BEAR, BRO + W(N + B)EAR, where ‘sport’ has the sense of ‘wear jauntily’.
28 TRENDIEST, TR(END)IEST[e]…where Joyce wrote most of Ulysses.
29 RIPEN, [g]RIPE + N.
 
Down
1 POSTRIDER, POST + RIDER, not so simple if you forgot the meaning of ‘rider’ in a contract.
2 PROFS, PRO(F)S[e].
3 ROTHESAY, anagram of OTHERS + AY. Never heard of it, so had to use the cryptic.
4 CATS, C[omedy] + A[r]T[i]S[t]. Another easy one, that makes two.
5 EXPERIENCE, EX P(ERI)ENCE. Well, I think that’s the parsing. ‘ER’ I could explain, but ‘ERI’, or maybe ‘RIE’, is a bit obscure. Your go! Yes, it’s E[lizabeth] R[egina] I.
6 NICEST, N([w]IC[k])EST, another easy one.
7 SQUARE LEG, SQUARE + LEG
8 MONTE, M(ON + T)E.
13 CHARITABLE, CHAR + I + TABLE…I think. The ‘I’ is difficult to account for. So there is actually a newspaper ‘I’, in the form of the truncated and tablet-based Independent.
15 WHOLESOME, sounds like HOLES, SOME. Any other ideas? Yes, sounds like HOLE, SUM is another idea, and a better one!
17 TIP AND RUN, TIP + AN + DRUN[k]. I hope you didn’t biff tic-tac-toe!
18 MILLINER, MILL INER[t]. Yes, hats are a ‘garment’, but not in common parlance.
21 PRAYED, P + anagram of READY.
22 EILAT, TAL[k]IE upside-down.
24 STEEP, anagram of PETE’S.
24 LOFT, hidden in [ful]L OF T[at].

42 comments on “Times 26,539 – Who, me?”

  1. It’s the dread cockney stuff: PIPER for “paper”. Once seen as Australian “sandpiper”. Enough!
  2. Well done, vinyl – a tricky one for sure, not so much to solve as to parse. I think you’re spot on with all your parsing: the ERI in 5d refers to Queen Elizabeth I, as she is now known.

    I did this in 38 minutes, but despite a swift check still managed a typo. LOI and COD to WHOLESOME, which is a nice word.

  3. I went over the hour, as did our blogger, but I still needed aids to complete three words the end and also to rule out a couple of ideas that were holding me up. One such being the unknown 9ac where having made sense of the inner wordplay I had almost convinced myself that Americans might use the term “sportster” for a player. But as things were I still needed a solver to come up with the correct answer.

    The Chinese garment has caught me out before and managed to beat me again despite realising it was an anagram. I should have worked methodically through all the options but lacking the second checker didn’t help.

    I also used aids to search for an alternative to CRACKING UP which I biffed but was unable to explain RACKING (was there a champion driver of this name? For all I know of the sport of cars being driven in circles, there might have been). I rather like the RAC KING explanation and am now sure it’s what was intended.

    It’s one of the misfortunes of approaching old-age that one has increasing difficulty finishing off what one has started and for me it’s proving true with crosswords at the moment.

    Edited at 2016-10-10 06:45 am (UTC)

  4. The clue is: Kind of Daily newspaper found on desk. CHAR-I-TABLE. I am sure the ‘i’ is from the new newspaper called i launched in 2010. Not that I read it!
  5. Funnily enough, I thought this was an average-difficulty puzzle, and finished it in about 35mins, with all parsed except for the INER(t) bit of MILLINER.

    LOON the bird rang a faint bell (more so than ‘loop’ anyway), as did the card game MONTE. ‘Liston’ the boxer was u/k.

    I had no problem with ERI for the Virgin Queen, nor with the ‘I’ for the newspaper. I did however struggle with POSTRIDER, and had ‘postcoder’ with ‘coster’ pencilled in for the apple for a short while… (var ‘costard’???), until I looked again and it all fell into place.

  6. 18:17 … submitted with a few niggling doubts but all correct.

    I also figured the ‘I’ of CHARITABLE had to be the newspaper formerly known as The Independent (sort of).

    And the RAC KING was all that was left once everything else had been excluded. I think the RAC still has some sort of links with motor sport, doesn’t it?

    By coincidence, vinyl, I was reading about Joyce in Trieste only last night in Paul Theroux’s The Pillars of Hercules.

    1. The Indy is still going, but only online. i is an abridged version in tabloid format.

      Edited at 2016-10-10 09:08 am (UTC)

  7. Thought this was tough for a Monday, and mused several times that overseas solvers may have challenges. Apart from the US SHORTSTOP (baseball?), we have these, some of them noted above:

    ERI – the Virgin Queen, the one and only

    i – the electronic newspaper, after the sad demise of the printed Independent

    ROTHESAY – no idea where it is, apart from Scotland, and know this because Prince Charles, when in Scotland, is the Duke of Rothesay

    CRACKING UP – my LOI, but RAC KING makes perfect sense

    EXEC – only exists as EXECUTIVE really in the UK, other usage is imported Amercian

    PIPER – I am a genuine Cockney, but it took me many goes at saying PIPER to parse this. I am not sure it’s accurate, more like Martin Shaw’s accent in George Gently.

    Nonetheless, completed in 36′, which after last week is good for me.

    1. Don’t know about Martin Shaw but PIPER sound more like Dick Van Dyke. The i still exists as a daily printed newspaper.
    3. In my early teenage years, the splendid Mr Adam Faith made a thing about pronouncing ‘baby’ as ‘biby’ in ‘What do you want’, so much so that his actually very good songwriter Johnny Worth penned ‘Someone else’s baby’ as a follow-up. To me in Lancashire, it sounded totally authentic. I even married a cockney, who knows, maybe as a result.
  9. Wow. Is this Monday or have I slept for five days? 32.54, and only realising after coming here that, despite trying earnestly to parse everything (except the bear, which I gave up on with a “what else?” shrug) I’d missed at least three. EXPERIENCE I clearly biffed, because I Saw you all discussing the Virgin Queen and thought where was she? And I missed the Indy, just too relieved to have found a word which fitted the rest of the wordplay. EILAT I was too busy kicking myself (it wasn’t HAIFA after all) to work out where the AM version of a thousand had been taken from what backwards.
    PI/APER is definitely (as previously discussed) from the Miry Poppins school of Cockney acting.
    I thought the CRACKING UP clue was rather good. RAC often stands in for “driver”, and it doesn’t have to be a F1 sort of driver, does it? Any old driver and champion/KING, surely?
  10. 26 min. but several unparsed – at 23ac couldn’t get beyond Ali, tried to find something (possibly with an M) in E.T. at 22dn, while didn’t see how 27ac worked at – even toyed with BRUIN till I saw the hidden 25dn, which was LOI.
  11. This was too rich meat for me. There were too many I just couldn’t parse and was unsure of to the point of being wrong. It was unfortunate that this included POSTCODER, COSTER, CONSERVE and CRANKING UP, which meant that it’s a pretty miserable Monday. I suppose I could always blame it on being up half the night watching the Presidential so-called debate which made me glad I’m not American.
  12. Stopped at 45 minutes. Had to check CHEONGSAM. DNF anyway, not getting CRACKING UP or TRENDIEST. Might be my age, but I see trendy people as the opposite of cool, not that I’ve ever been either. I’ll accept exec for a board member, as directors are divided between execs and non-execs, and I have been both of those. You know the difference between a non-exec and a shopping trolley.? The trolley has a mind of its own, but you can fit more food and drink into the non-exec.
    1. I like your joke (and will certainly use it), but I fear that recent events have rendered it obsolete. Non-execs still don’t generally know anything about the businesses they’re supposed to supervise of course, but they certainly have a mind of their own when it comes to matters of governance, procedure, compliance and generally all things related to the covering of their own bottoms.
  13. 39:55. Tough going today, being stuck near the end for some time until CRACKING UP and EXPERIENCE finally came to me. It didn’t help that I thought 9A was going to begin with sport and so I had a tentative SPORTSTAR thinking that there might be a spar grass.

    Nice to see something new in the ‘i’ newspaper alongside some staples like CHEONGSAM.

  14. 13m. Clearly on the wavelength today: I found most of this very easy indeed, and was only moderately held up by four or five trickier ones at the end.
    CHEONGSAM has gone from mysterious obscurity to total familiarity in the last couple of years. However this meaning of CRACKING UP and POSTRIDER were new to me so I needed the wordplay, which was tricky in the latter case. Of course I did know it from the phrase mentioned by our esteemed blogger but I didn’t think of that.
    I spend a lot of time in Canada so 26ac posed no problems. The definition could have been ‘dollar’!
    An exec is not necessarily a board member, but can be in the UK at least, although in many countries this isn’t the case.
    1. Agreed on CHEONGSAM – I don’t even need to parse it any more, it’s a case of “Oriental garment? 8 letters? Done.”
  15. Thought I struggled because I was so tired, but it seems from the comments that I struggled because it was hard.

    EILAT was my LOI, and I also took ages over CRACKING UP, not believing the definition until reading Vinyl’s explanation.

    So seven over par to start the week. Hopefully Monday’s puzzle will appear tomorrow.

    Thanks setter and Vinyl.

  16. A DNF to start the week. Gave up after 54 minutes with 22d not completed and 26a undecided between ROOKY and KOOKY. LOON unknown. Managed to parse the rest apart from the cRUSt of RUSSET and the i of CHARITABLE. so thanks to Vinyl for enlightening me on those.
  17. Steady 19m 35s so seemed quite straightforward therefore surprised to see this was a fairly decent time. Good to see the old loon making a guest appearance, and also the favoured apparel of Suzie Wong at 4ac. Never heard of ‘I’ though as a newspaper so couldn’t fully parse this one. LOI Eilat but clear from the cryptic.
  18. 12:45 and on the whole a similar experience to Keriothe, i.e. mostly seemingly easy with just a few tricky ones thrown in. Cheongsam has definitely gone from “what’s that?” to “oh, that again”.

    I biffed the US sportsman and the apple so thanks for the explanations.

  19. Whooa! not the usual Monday fare. Took me over an hour and managed to get one wong 27ac – I opted for BROWN DEER not BROWN BEAR.

    Had trouble with 1dn POSTRIDER – so very American.

    20ac CRACKING UP but finally spotted the RAC – where was the AA when they were needed?

    23ac ALISON I assumed that the boxer was ALI and left it at that!

    3dn ROTHESAY what a BUTE! – not having a football team in the

    Caledonian Highland League. Division Three doesn’t help.

    25dn LOFT LOI – finally extracted.

    Altogether a bloody start to the week!

    horryd Cheongsamland

    1. Actually in Shanghai you are in Changshan land surely. Cheongsam is Cantonese.

      I went through this pretty steadily and never thought it especially difficult. Came here to find out how newspaper was “i” to discover there is a newspaper called “i”. Who knew? Not me for sure.

      Since Rothesay (which is the main town on the isle of Bute) has a population of under 5000 I think anyone who isn’t from the highlands is forgiven for never having heard of it.

      Despite living in the US so being completely familiar with SHORTSTOP, it took me a long time to get out of the idea that it started SPORTS… (since shows could be SPORTS as, indeed, it is at 27a)

      1. Your are indeed correct – here is Changshanland but when in Xiang Kong it is Cheongsamland.

        horryd Suzhou

  20. Did 3/4 of this before going out for Monday coffee, with the NW corner vacant and looking likely to stay that way. Gave it another go later on, surprised to find the tricky corner fell in right away before I had to wave the white flag. So about 40 minutes all told. Nothing impossible but certainly tougher than a usual Monday pseudo-quickie. Didn’t know postrider was a real word but obvious from the wordplay.
  21. Hole + sum (problems).
    Short-lived newspaper called simply ‘I’.
    Rothesay is the chief town of Greater Bute, an island in the Clyde estuary.

    🙂

  22. Glad I wasn’t the only one struggling – this was a biff-fest, as I couldn’t fathom wordplay for ALISON, EILAT, CRACKING UP or RUSSET!
  23. About 40 minutes, a veritable crawl through the clues. Largest problem was CRACKING UP, which in my mind doesn’t suggest what’s needed, until like vinyl I thought of the negative phrase. Besides, nothing else would fit – nothing that made any more sense, anyway. I assumed “I” was the Independent, but I had no idea of all the background mentioned above. And ROTHESAY went in because it was an anagram. Regards.
  24. 13 mins. I was back to work today after a week off and I thought I’d be too tired to post a decent time, but like keriothe and penfold it seems I was on the wavelength. I actually had the most trouble in the SW and finished with WHOLESOME after EXECRATE.
  25. 18:09, horribly tired (after a busy weekend and an exhausting day) and unable to find the setter’s wavelength.

    I’m going to have to try to get to bed earlier over the next 12 days in the hope of not making a complete idiot of myself at the Championship.

  27. This proved too tough for me of a Monday, with brain limp and expecting the usual breaking-in offering one expects at this early juncture. Mentally knackered. Drinking wine to compensate for the frustration.

  28. 20 ac, “cracked up (to be)” may (more or less) mean “praised”, but–however illogically–I doubt that “cracking up” is EVER used to mean “praising”.

Comments are closed.