Times 26672

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Around 30 minutes for this fairly straightforward puzzle that was perhaps more suited to a Monday than Monday’s puzzle was. There’s not a lot to say, but here’s what there is…


As usual definitions are underlined in bold italics, {deletions are in curly brackets} and [anagrinds, containment, reversal and other indicators in square ones]

Across
1 Outcast in revolt on the counter (5)
LEPER – REPEL (counter) reversed [in revolt] REPEL (revolt – as in finding something repellant or revolting) reversed [on the counter]. Thanks to Guy for querying this and to Galspray for his comment below. On checking my notes I find that I must have misread or  ignored them when the time came to write up this clue.
4 Very dark stream, second to circle lake (3,5)
JET BLACK – JET (stream), BACK (second) containing [to circle] L (lake)
8 Disapproving cry from New Zealanders having little time for a stick-in-the-mud? (10,4)
WELLINGTON BOOT – WELLINGTON BOO (disapproving cry from New Zealanders), T (little time). A somewhat whimsical definition.
10 Con party eccentric (9)
SCREWBALL – SCREW (con), BALL (party)
11 Passage into India is legendary (5)
AISLE – Hidden in [into] {Indi}A IS LE{gendary}
12 In the role of an old king, Canute ultimately perceptive (6)
ASTUTE – AS (in the role of), TUT (old king), {Canut}E [ultimately]
14 Boxed in turn, a kid beaten remains flattened (8)
ROADKILL – A + anagram [beaten] of KID contained by [boxed in] ROLL (turn). Wildlife that’s killed by passing traffic. Sometimes it’s gathered for food in which case it’s preferable if not actually flattened.
17 Cool to pour in wine (8)
RESERVED – SERVE (pour) in RED (wine)
18 In expression of amazement, nothing but delight (6)
WALLOW – ALL (nothing but) in WOW (expression of amazement). All together now: Follow me, follow, down to the hollow…
20 Ancient kingdom largely evacuated, charity recalled (5)
LYDIA – L{argel}Y [evacuated], AID (charity) reversed [recalled]
22 Device for drawing level after a few games (3,6)
SET SQUARE – SET (a few games – tennis), SQUARE (level)
24 Numbing feeling, doctors end endless pain (4,3,7)
PINS AND NEEDLES – Anagram [doctors] of END ENDLESS PAIN
25 Last part in document, thorough (8)
DETAILED – TAIL (last part) in DEED (document)
26 Out to lunch — like some fruit? (5)
NUTTY – Two meanings. All together now: Everyone’s a fruit and nutcase…
Down
1 Writer reporting the song of an East Sussex town? (5,7)
LEWIS CARROLL – Sounds like [reporting] “Lewes” (East Sussex town), “carol” (song)
2 River bird stopping short of the far north, perhaps? (5)
POLAR – PO (river), LAR{k} (bird) [stopping short]
3 Hiding in temple, raised seat drops from above (9)
RAINWATER – IN + WAT (temple) contained by [hiding] REAR (seat) reversed [raised]. Every time this Buddhist temple comes up I have to drag it from the recesses of my mind.
4 Dance understood to be a puzzle (6)
JIGSAW – JIG (dance), SAW (understood)
5 I’m going to impersonate flipping lion and duck! (6-2)
TOODLE-OO – TO, DO (impersonate) reversed [flipping], LEO (lion), 0 (duck). All together now:
Good-bye-ee! good-bye-ee!
Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee.
Tho’ it’s hard to part I know,
I’ll be tickled to death to go.
Don’t cry-ee! don’t sigh-ee!
There’s a silver lining in the sky-ee.
Bonsoir old thing, cheerio! chin chin!
Nah-poo! Toodle-oo!
Good-bye-ee!
6 Old party leader in retreat, a sign (5)
LIBRA – LIB (old party – now subsumed into the Liberal Democratic party), R{etreat} [leader], A
7 Put out statement in flier (9)
CROSSBILL – CROSS (put out – annoyed), BILL (statement). Lots of bird names end in “-bill” but I didn’t know this one.
9 Chicken ahead of cow, leader’s top (6,6)
YELLOW JERSEY – YELLOW (chicken – cowardly), JERSEY (cow). Worn by the current leader as each stage of a cycle rally begins. Apparently. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I knew what I was talking about.
13 First spin in cricket match getting shot of a batsman (4,5)
TEST DRIVE – TEST (cricket match), DRIVE (shot of a batsman). Spin / drive as in motoring rather than sport.
15 One performing as a woman putting burden on man (4,5)
DRAG QUEEN – DRAG (burden), QUEEN (man). It seems that all chess pieces are called “men” regardless of apparent gender. Take to the streets!
16 Intimate relationship’s beginning, boy wearing ring (8)
PERSONAL – R{elationship’s} [beginning] + SON (boy) contained by [wearing] PEAL (ring)
19 Completely gone — as are cherries? (6)
STONED – Two definitions, the first being slang for “drunk”. Before I came to this clue I had thought of “stoned” as a possible answer for the double-definition at 26ac. Being 6 letters it wouldn’t fit of course, but it helped to have it already in mind.
21 Where junk may be / all over the shop (2,3)
AT SEA – Another clue with two-meanings.  A junk is a flat-bottomed boat.  “All over the shop” means disorganised and in a mess as does “at sea”
23 Set aside first of logs in piles (5)
ALLOT – L{ogs} [first] in A LOT (piles)

51 comments on “Times 26672”

  1. Think I made this harder than it needed to be, failing to see some easy ones like JET BLACK and WELLINGTON BOOT. LEWIS CARROLL might have helped, but obviously I didn’t know the town, so that took ages as well.

    Lack of sleep may be a contributing factor.

    Thanks setter and Jack.

  2. After staying up half the night to see our heroic failure at Stamford Bridge, I was up early and whizzed through this in 28 minutes – sleep may not be a contributing factor!

    FOI 8ac WELLINGTON BOOT – although not all New Zealanders are Wellingtonians. From ‘some’ New Zealanders – might have been more accurate.

    LOI 5ac TOODLE-OO

    COD 1dn LEWIS CARROLL WOD SCREWBALL

    1. This has a question mark which, if taken to apply to the whole clue should cover any misgivings about “New Zealanders”, I think.
      1. I saw the question mark as simply helping the understanding of ‘stick-in-the-mud’ – however on refection wellies aren’t meant to stick in the mud – although they often do!
  3. Pretty easy, as John says, but I thought ROADKILL was a clue of the first water. 16 minutes but a typo at 4 across that testifies to fat fists rather than fingers, with a T somehow in place of the K.
    1. As a clue roadkill seemed flawed to me, because of the pretty rubbish surface reading. I did like the definition though 🙂
  4. I didn’t find this as easy as yesterday – 16:24 and a few places, like LEWIS CARROLL where I was trying to go through the alphabet to think of a first name with a W in the middle, having given up on the second name. Kicked myself when I saw it. TOODLE-OO was clever.
  5. a typo where 4d and 8ac intersect. Had no idea about the East Sussex town, but the checkers convinced me. CROSSBILL took a while, because I was thinking of ‘put out’ as transitive, ‘put X out’. I agree with Ulaca about ROADKILL; ‘remains flattened’ is lovely. There’s evidently a roadkill cookoff somewhere in (rural, of course) Virginia or North Carolina; doesn’t really bear thinking of, does it?
  6. I came here to see how this was parsed. I didn’t realize that “counter” was a synonym for “repel,” but now that I get that, I still think the grammar’s a bit odd: “revolt on the counter.” Of course, “revolt” is a somewhat loose way to indicate something going backward, but we’re used to that kind of thing. I’m talking about “on.” How? And “the” is totally extraneous.
    1. Didn’t notice when reading the blog that my parsing was different to Jack’s (doesn’t mean he’s wrong). I had REVOLT = REPEL, with “on the counter” as the reversal indicator.

      Quite common for a try in rugby to be scored “on the counter”, as in “on the way back”, when a defensive scenario is converted to an attacking one. Analogies exist in many other sports, and presumably in military situations.

      1. Quite, right. I misread my notes when writing the blog and have now amended my comment.
  7. Very slow today, 42 minutes, last 15 or more on the NW corner with 1 ac & 2 dn the last ones in. LEPER took a complete alphabet trawl; and parsed as galspray above.
    Loved the definition for ROADKILL. Quite liked WELLINGTON BOOT and the PINS AND NEEDLES clue, too.
  8. I got 20/28 clues before running out of time/cheating.

    Thanks for the blog which helped to explain the clues I biffed.

    Everything understood except for 4a, why does second = back?

        1. This went in smoothly – perhaps because the grey cells perceived the hand of Myrtilus who sets for the TLS. He is wont to use homophone puns such as 1D. A few weeks ago we had “Robinson Caruso” and we just had another one which I can’t give away but it featured “moi”. A venerable Washington DC reporter (Bob Shieffer of CBS) plays in a band called “Roadkill Stew”. Don’t ask if it’s any good.

          Why am I up at this hour (3A.M NY time)? Husband woke me with a throbbing tooth. Now he’s asleep and I’m not. Just when I was planning to sleep in too because we’re expecting 2 feet of snow by tomorrow afternoon. Giving it another try. 14.02

          Edited at 2017-03-14 07:30 am (UTC)

          1. Sadly not me. I enjoyed this one hugely, although I couldn’t parse Rainwater. Watch out for Buddhist temples in future TLSs.
  9. 23:13 … so anything but straightforward for me, perhaps because LEWIS CARROLL and WELLINGTON BOOT were almost my last ones in.

    Can a puzzle with wordplay like that for TOODLE-OO or RAINWATER really be described as ‘Monday-ish’?! I found parts of this distinctly tricky.

  10. Found this more tricky than yesterday’s, and, like Isla, spent several minutes at the end alphabet-running to get 1ac and 2dn. Couldn’t lift and separate ‘river’ from ‘bird’.

    Oh, and I had One Error again today: ‘tootle oo’, which was kind of half parsed…

  11. 9:47. Obviously on the wavelength today. Quite a lot of biffing for me, including 1ac where I’m not sure I’d ever had figured out the wordplay: ‘in revolt’ is so obviously a reversal indicator. I don’t remember seeing ‘on the counter’ as a reversal indicator before, and I’m not sure I’d have spotted it, so thanks to galspray for explaining it.
    My last in by some distance was 7dn, and I panicked a little. Birds aren’t as bad as plants, but they’re not far off.
  12. 25 minutes. Only paused over TOODLE OO. I have a Roadkill Cookbook sent by friends in Iowa to my late wife whose interest in cars far exceeded her interest in cooking. One section tells you how to wrap the meat in foil and which part of the car engine to use for the right temperature and for how long.
  13. A DNF for me, having put in “toodle-do” as one of many biffs—much of the wordplay passed me by—and running out of my allotted hour as I was trying to crowbar anything at all into _D_D_I_L for 14a. I knew how the clue worked and if I’d thought of “roll” for “turn” I might well have reconsidered, but as I was already over my limit, I gave up.

    It’s possible that my mis-biff was produced by seeing out the “to do”, “leo” and “o” bits and quickly mangling the results with a “to do” application I used daily for years, Toodledo.

    Ah well. Thanks to setter and blogger.

  14. Judging from comments here I guess I was ‘on the wavelength’. Only hold up was thinking understood=got so having a tentative JIGGOT at 4D for a while. Thankfully that didn’t fit with SCREWBALL, thus avoiding an embarrassing failure.
  15. No problems here with a lot of “knee jerk” substitutions e.g lion=LEO, duck=O, chicken=YELLOW, cow=JERSEY. Agreed ROADKILL the best of the bunch
  16. 16.09, feeling much slower as a rather piecemeal solve coming to terms with some stretchy connections: delight/wallow, put out/cross, that sort of thing.

    Driving around the WW1 battlefields of Belgium I remember being puzzled by the IEPER signs all over the place, as I was sure I would remember a place called leper.

    Edited at 2017-03-14 09:55 am (UTC)

    1. I thought the same about delight/WALLOW: you most often hear that people are WALLOWing in negative things like self-pity. This is perhaps an ironic usage and it is possible to wallow in lovely things: ODO gives as an example ‘I was wallowing in the luxury of the hotel’.
      When I was solving I actually got myself happy with it by thinking of the hippos, but of course they are wallowing in a much more literal sense, irrespective of their enjoyment or otherwise of the experience.
      1. As alluded to in my reference above (and bolton wanderer’s comment below) I never see WALLOW without thinking of hippotami wallowing in glorious mud – a very pleasurable experience.
        1. Yes, that was my thought process too. But where mud is concerned ‘wallow’ has a literal meaning that has nothing to do with pleasurability, and the pleasurabilitiy in this case is probably species-dependent. Or if not, at least a matter of taste…
  17. 27.34 for this bottom up solve. Having got nothing from the top rows I looked for a foothold in the SW and worked steadily upwards. Not that long ago I would just have panicked.
    Never did see WAT was going on in 3d. Generally liked the rather whimsical air of many of the clues.
  18. I still wallow in memories of my younger boy in pre-school singing The Hippopotamus Song on his own, relishing “a regular army of hippopotami”, at the age of 4. I thought we had a poet, but he’s become a mathematical physicist. Late off again today with the old dog refusing his pill and more worryingly not wanting his breakfast. He’s been for his walk though. Perhaps more than a bit distracted, I took 40 minutes over this with LOI ROADKILL, not helped by spelling TOODLE-OO as TOODLE-LO. Never would say it anyway, just as I can never ‘go to the loo’. Life can get uncomfortable. I read yesterday an article about words that are dying, TARA for goodbye being one of them. The Bog, for lavatory, went a long time ago sadly. Is my entire world to be stolen from me? COD LEWIS CARROLL, eventually seen through the looking glass darkly. Nice puzzle.

    Edited at 2017-03-14 10:48 am (UTC)

  19. J, I just noticed you have ‘hiding in’ for the containment. This may confuse people, since IN is transferred from clue to solution.
  20. Wallowed in anguish at 5 my LOI. 25. Toodle pip Ty To J and setter

    Edited at 2017-03-14 11:08 am (UTC)

  21. As a stalker on this blog for some years, I’d like to thank you all. Under your tutelage I’ve graduated to regularly finishing without aids, even if it takes a long time.

    Galspray is Austrlian – moi aussi. I rarely finish in a single sitting but did today in 45 minutes, so it must have been fairly easy. I’m delighted to have finished within two “Australian magoos” and will be looking for some way to slow galspray down to achieve this again 😉

    Thanks again for your wit and wisdom.

      1. Many thanks – good to share in the various comments directed at the down-under stalls
        1. Another Aussie here (expat, actually, so I knew about Lewes, but I’ve been in Melbourne for 15 years and counting)
    2. Welcome Starstruck, good to have you on board. If you’ve really been following this blog, you’ll know that many of Ulaca’s comments are tinged with irony. When he coined the term “Australian Magoo” he took the leap from tinged, through laced, right into drenched.
      1. Thanks for the clarification and the welcome. I did detect some tongue and cheek, but anyone who finishes in just over 20 minutes on average without the background knowledge of a UK native deserves some recognition 🙂
  22. I think my brain is beginning to atrophy. Although I finished all correct, this one took me 67:39 and I felt as though I was swimming through treacle. I didn’t solve a clue until 26a, then the SE came together with DRAG QUEEN falling next. Then it was like pulling teeth until I finally finished with RAINWATER where I could see the raised seat but struggled with the lifting and separating to put the temple in the seat rather than the seat in the temple. Perhaps I should go back to pen and paper! I did like ROADKILL when I finally expunged GO for turn from my thought processes. Took ages to see WELLINGTON BOOT as my JIGSAW had gone in as JJIGSA, giving me an I where I needed a G. Thanks setter and Jack.

  23. My, my …… this all fell into place without too much trouble. What’s going on???

    Time: all correct in 23 mins.

    Thank you to setter and blogger.

  24. 13:45 which surprised me. I felt I was plodding along a lot more slowly than that. This was one of those occasions when I remembered to look out for a pangram (I started in an odd place with drag queen) but there wasn’t one.

    Definite tick for “remains flattened”.

  25. Not on the wavelength.. plodded through it, rather. Found it tricksy, some clever clueing but no feel for a smooth surface. LOI roadkill which I thought a poor clue bar the def., symptomatic of the whole
  26. I am probably the slowest time here -around 60 minutes. But I was pleased to complete this as I swallowed every misdirection. Held up by the lovely Roadkill and (less lovely) Toodle Oo clues. Looking forward to Chris Froome wearing the yellow jersey but I think he may be in for an even harder time than I had with this. Thanks blogger
  27. Around 25 mins today with no significant hold-ups except 2-3 minutes on my LOI which was TOODLE-OO.
  28. Phone trouble yesterday (which took out my broadband with it) meant that I solved yesterday’s and today’s in quick (or rather slow) succession. And what with feeling desperately tired after a busy day and taking an age over yesterday’s (SUBSET the main culprit), I’m with those who found today’s tough going, struggling home in a miserable 15:43 after an appallingly slow start.

    I had your original explanation of 1ac (LEPER) but agree that galspray’s is better.

  29. Chin up, Tony. Your miserable 15:43 wasn’t that bad. My own time was 1:58, but that would be hours:minutes because I left the timer running while I went away to do something more straightforward for a time. Actual time was probably 40-50min, though – I was held up badly by the north-east, south-ease, and both westerly corners. Ah well – on to today’s.

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