Times 26677 – Half a Dozen Chappies Looking for an Emperor

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
A very pleasant Monday offering with a smattering of European clues with the potential to stretch the grey matter of those who cry with Aguecheek that they wish they had followed the arts! My favourite was 3 down for the cunningly concealed definition of a very serviceable word, even if it is too frequently associated with those who enjoy the sound of their own voice more perhaps than others do. 5 down was also rather good, I thought, as an example of a charade that had you looking for the definition at the wrong end of the clue. I’m not sure about you, but as I get more experienced at these things, I find the charade type of clue perhaps the hardest. 21 minutes.

ACROSS

1. DOWNRIGHT – DOWN + [f]RIGHT; already the setter has got some of us looking for the answer at the wrong end.
6. COWES – ‘port in island [of Wight]’; ‘of Jersey’ might be taken, in context, to stand for “cow’s”, which sounds like the town.
9. GOING FOR A BURTON – ‘making final exit’; if you criticised Richard Burton’s performance in, say, The Sandpiper, you might be accused of ‘going for a Burton’. The derivation of the expression may be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_for_a_Burton
10. SUPPLY – SUP + PLY.
11. SEA TROUT – S + [R in EAT OUT].
13. PIRANDELLO – OP reversed around IRAN + DELL for the Italian writer best known, in the English-sparking world, at any rate, for the play ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’, which I have seen, but forgotten, as I do most plays.
14. STAB – a hidden clue.
16. SINE – S[h]INE.
17. CONTRIBUTE – CO[i]N + TRIBUTE.
19. HAPSBURG – a reversal of GRUBS + PAH (Blackadderese for ugh!)
20. LEASED – A in an anagram* of LEEDS.
23. SPEECH THERAPIST – PS THIS PE TEACHER*.
24. EASES – [t]EASES.
25. CONCERNED – CONCERN + ED.

DOWNS

1. DEGAS – EG (for one) in SAD (blue) reversed.
2. WHIPPERSNAPPERS – WHIP + PER (a) + SNAPPERS.
3. REGALING – E + GAL in (wearing) RING.
4. GOOD – O in reversed DOG.
5. TRADE PLATE – ‘early number features on it’ (the temporary number plate given a vehicle before it is registered); TRAD + EP + LATE.
6. CRUSTY – a double definition, one referring to bread, the other to a cantankerous individual.
7. WITHOUT QUESTION – ‘certainly’; well, I think a poll can consist of statements, but obviously the setter doesn’t!
8. SAND TABLE – STABLE around (clothing) AND (with) for the sort of thing one can imagine General Melchett using to show approximate positions of expected slaughter zones.
12. DEMOCRATIC – ‘popular’ in the sense that representatives are elected by the people, if in no other; another charade: DEMO + C (‘about’ – that most versatile ingredient in the setter’s kitchen) + RAT + IC.
13. POSTHASTE – POS (Petty Officers) + H in TASTE.
15. LIVEWARE – L + A REVIEW* for a particularly ugly word to describe nerdish types by analogy with software.
16. ABACUS – A + C in A BUS; ‘one flew east, one flew west, one flew out of the Quickie nest…’
21. DATED – alternate letters in DeAd TrEnDy.
22. BEAN – BEA[t] (as in ‘dead beat’) + [maratho]N.

54 comments on “Times 26677 – Half a Dozen Chappies Looking for an Emperor”

  1. I didn’t know the bread meaning of ‘bloomer’–actually, maybe I came across it once here, but–and missed, as I often do when running madly through the alphabet–the possibility of S. DNK TRADE PLATE, SAND TABLE, and DNKANWTSA (did not knnow and never want to see again) LIVEWARE. Not a good start to the week. (It’s also my last day in this office; getting the boot tomorrow, to go share an office with the other emeriti.)
    1. I’ve just been given the identical boot! Some of our said emeriti are not persons to whom I’d speak if they’d just pulled me from a burning plane. It’s a recipe for disaster.

      My more paranoid alter ego now tells me that university administrators all over the world are in fact a single alien hive mind whose goal is to extinguish human intelligence wherever it manifests itself.

      1. As wordsmiths you may be interested to learn that the word is odd in English, being derived from two – and not one – classical languages. E of course comes from the Greek for , and meritus from the Latin for !
        Best wishes from a fellow emeritus.
        D.
  2. As per Kevin with DNKANWTSA the ugly Orwellian slang 15dn LIVEWARE! Ruined a pleasant 33 minutes. I notice that there is also, heaven forfend, MEATWARE and JELLYWARE! OMG!

    FOI 1dn DEGAS.

    COD 9ac GOING FOR A BURTON WOD PIRANDELLO

    Edited at 2017-03-20 04:25 am (UTC)

  3. Typical Monday fare. The hard work is reserved for Ranchi today.

    Never heard of GOING FOR A BURTON, PIRANDELLO, LIVEWARE, SAND TABLE or TRADE PLATE, but that just made for a more interesting solve.

    Thanks setter and U. Nerdish types, eh? Ok.

  4. … as per Galspray above. Except that I did know several of the more N. Hemisphere references. Even studied Pirandello for a mod. drama course. (That’s not to say that I understood it very well.) Still, for all that, forgot the types of English bread and wondered why flowers might be crusty.

    I’d always assumed that LIVEWARE referred to any computer user. Our IT crowd are always referring to “liveware error” when users screw up. Just to annoy H.: there is also “Wetware” (a novel by Rudy Rucker) — the term his robots use to refer to human beings. Hybrid human/robots are “meatbops”.

    Edited at 2017-03-20 05:30 am (UTC)

    1. We refer to user errors as IdD10t or PICNIC (Problem In Chair Not In Computer).
  5. Delayed well over my half-hour target, but only by two answers, CRUSTY and SAND TABLE, the second of which I have never heard of. I was perfectly at home with “bloomer” as bread once I’d thought of it, which took far too long. LIVEWARE was also unknown but pretty straightforward
  6. Couldn’t get 13a, 16a, 17a, or 5d.
    I think jazz = trad in 5d scuppered me.

    COD 3d regaling.

    1. It seems to me that every time ‘jazz’ appears here, it’s trad; no progressive, no bebop, trad.
  7. 12:17 … same experience as others and joining in the general shrug over SAND TABLE. There must be someone who knew what that was, but it certainly wasn’t me.

    I also didn’t twig what a TRADE PLATE was while solving, although I have come across it before. At the time I thought we were in the world of the stock market and opening numbers or whatever. There are, Grasshopper, many paths to enlightenment.

  8. We’ve had boogie-woogie as the answer before now and clued as “jazz” on at least one occasion in a puzzle I blogged.
  9. 14:23. A bit tricky for a Monday, I thought. I was held up by the unknown SAND TABLE, and by thinking that 16ac must be SAND and 6dn must be COUNTY. Funny how any idea of what the answer is, even when it’s clearly wrong, can prevent you seeing others.
  10. Not much to add to the comments of others – LIVEWARE, TRADE PLATE and SAND TABLE all seemed particularly obscure, certainly by Monday standards, and I couldn’t have told you what GOING FOR A BURTON meant even though it was obviously the answer here. I was unconvinced enough about all of the wordplay, the definition part and the actual existence of 8dn that I spent several minutes enumerating every other possibility for S_N_, pushing my time up over the 10 minute mark.

    Not my favourite clue of recent memory, then: I’d rather a “penny drop moment” than “once you have eliminated all the impossible pennies, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”.

    1. It does though have the not inconsiderable merit of slowing down the speedsters, as my time vis a vis the K, the V and the Australian Magoo today well illustrates. Veering towards my COD, now I come to think of it…
      1. I am loath to disagree with the general tenor of your comment, BUT: the correct way to slow down the speedsters is to pepper the crosswords with lots of obscure Latin etymology and Greek mythology knowledge! If any editors happen to be reading this, that’s definitely what they should do.
  11. Think an exit poll might come with (an) out question. Thanks blogger and setter.
  12. 47 minutes for me, with the last five on LIVEWARE. Must have pockets of regional use, that one; I can’t recall having heard it, and I’ve worked in IT all my life. It’s kosher, though: my ancient copy of The New Hacker’s Dictionary (3rd. ed) has “Synonym for wetware. Less common”.

    I spent less time conjuring up SAND TABLE and PIRANDELLO; I suppose it’s easier to make the leap to unknowns in areas you’re not meant to be familiar with!

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

    Edited at 2017-03-20 08:48 am (UTC)

  13. The wiki derivation of “Gone for a burton” is self-evidently wrong, since the phrase is completely unknown before the 1940s. a more considered review is here, on the excellent World Wide Words website.

    I liked this crossword, including the potentially useful “liveware” .. I know several uppity programmers & analysts

  14. …as in 20a. Found this pretty easy today, with one or two exceptions. Peg-Leg, my English master, whose praises I never cease to sing, had us read in the Lower Fifth the Pirandello play, which was very hip in the fifties for some reason. As was Trad Jazz, although it seemed you had to have leather elbow patches on your sports jacket before you could listen to it. Had a few EPs in my time, including a great early Joan Baez one. No idea about SAND TABLE but what else could it be? 17 minutes with LOI CRUSTY, when I eventually thought of the right sort of bloomers. There was a sandwich place when I was in the Midlands called The Crusty Batch, a great place for Spoonerisms that sounded right but didn’t quite work. COD WITHOUT QUESTION. Enjoyable puzzle and blog.
  15. And again. Easy except for the obscurities. Never heard of LIVEWARE or SAND TABLE and just derived them from the cryptic. No problem with BURTON – a clue I think I’ve seen before. Thought WITHOUT QUESTION a bit of a weak clue.
  16. 27.19 with over half of that mopping up the last three. Very pleased to find that Mr Pirandello was indeed a writer after constructing his name from the wordplay.

  17. Same as others, needed to alphabet-run for some minutes to settle on SAND (LOI). Thought it was going to be my One Error today, but no!

  18. 32′, with fingers crossed on SAND TABLE. Very good to be reminded of BURTON, but the answer makes little sense in the present tense. CRUSTY excellent, just like bloomers. Thanks ulaca and setter.
    1. Actually, the answer isn’t in the present tense, or any tense. I was struck by the number of expert solvers, English ones yet, who didn’t know the phrase. For some reason, once I had some checkers, I thought, “Of course! Going for a Burton!”; I had no idea what the phrase meant, but I was sure that I’d seen it, and that it was, like “spend a penny” or “SFA”, something anyone on that sceptred isle knew.
      1. Hmmm, think my point stands, but no matter. Nice to be reminded of the phrase on Dame Vera’s hundredth. Also discovered only today what ‘bluebirds’ actually means!
        1. Coincidentally, the lyric to The White Cliffs of Dover was written by a Mr Burton (Nat).

          I always thought his Americanness was the reason we ended up with the non-indigenous bluebirds in the song, but I see Wikipedia claims it’s a reference to RAF pilots. news to me that they were ever called that.

  19. A curious experience: at the halfway point in my just <20 minutes I had all the bottom section in and only WHIPPERSNAPPER like a lonely skyscraper puncturing the pristine sky of the upper half: couldn’t even fill in the bit above QUESTION.
    I was surprised to see POSTHASTE as one word, but Chambers isn’t, so I leave it as a pronunciation test for unwary EFL students. Of course, neither LIVEWARE (I’ve been to Ware, don’t think it’s true) nor SAND TABLE should exist, but they do, so heigh ho. Spent ages looking for a model ?N?. Pah!
  20. All this has reminded me that I was in a production of Six Characters… while studying at UCL in the late nineties. Only as the Stage Hand, though, nicely prefiguring my status in the world of competitive crosswording (on stage, but no better than seventh in importance, on the best days).
  21. Bit of a struggle for a Monday, though I got there in the end, and feeling sufficiently entertained. In these circumstances, you just have to be pleased to have learned a new word or two and hope you remember them the next time. I can’t see myself using the term LIVEWARE outside a crossword context, anyway.
    1. I was amazed to discover that LIVEWARE is apparently a real word, and not just something from The Matrix, to be honest.
  22. 30 mins having got stuck in the NE after a good start. Only DNK was the table but bunged it in finally. I never thought that being forced to read the totally incomprehensible (to me) “Sei personaggi …” in Italian would one day come in useful.
  23. This word was used by the BBC rugby commentator Brian Moore (ex England hooker) to describe a passage of play in the France v Wales match on Saturday. Quality! I thought. Describes my efforts today perfectly . DNK Pirandello,sand table, Liveware (ugh). About 35 with divers interruptions.

    Edited at 2017-03-20 12:20 pm (UTC)

  24. Well I had a different problem – was convinced the port was LEWES and was stuck with a real problem in the top right. Eventually twigged COWES as a possibility and got there in the end. Needed wordplay for SAND TABLE and TRADE PLATE – 18 minutes and a bit.
  25. Struggled a bit with this, harder than expected for a Monday, had to return to it after usual jaunt into town for coffee with chums. DNK Pirandello but guessed, DNK SAND for the table but guessed, DNK and DNL (Did Not Like) LIVEWARE as a human extension of software and hardware presumably. Otherwise some nice clues and a prompt to search the origin of the Burton expression.
    I would have thought Hapsburg was Austrian – it was known as the House of Austria – but I suppose German family can be German speaking family.
  26. Shoved DEGAS and SUPPLY straight in, but then had to root around the grid picking off the short answers before making any more progress. Took me ages to finish off GOING FOR A….. despite metaphorically slapping my forehead when I finally saw it. The NE held me up for ages as I struggled with S(IDE?) TABLE, CRUSTY(penny drop moment) BURTON and WITHOUT. CRUSTY was eventually the key and I finished in 44:52. Didn’t see how HAPSBURG worked until coming here. U’s description of Melchett playing soldiers finally lit the light bulb over what a SAND TABLE could possibly be. I’d been considering something for metal casting! I did a Z on the unknown Italian and assembled him from components. An enjoyable puzzle. Thanks setter and U.
    On edit: Oh yes: LIVEWARE Ugh!!

    Edited at 2017-03-20 12:58 pm (UTC)

  27. 13:33, pretty much everything that needs saying, has been.

    I just wonder if 1 & 6 across are some kind of comment on the latest goings on between T. May & N. Sturgeon.

    2. Ha! Trust you. Not sure if no one else had spotted it or if they were all too polite to mention it, but you did make me laugh. Thx.
  28. 18:16 Got to Cowes in the end but started with MACAO, like a Scots version of a Jersey I own. SAND TABLE completely unknown but Pirandello yes, so a winner there. Tougher than usual for a Monday I thought.
    1. Like it! And it works, after a fashion. In a similar vein, the Italian word for cow is “MOO-COW” using crossword-standard-dodgy-homophonese. Actually MUCCA, but the U is pronounce as OO in moo.
      Nothing further to add re: the puzzle. Mostly easy, a few DNKs.

  29. Blown out of the water by computer personnel and my total failure to see that it was an anagram…… sigh..

    Time: DNF in about 50 mins.

  30. This took around 40 minutes, held up by the same unfamiliar ones as others. LOI’s were the COWES/CRUSTY pair, where I was fully aware of the port, but it didn’t come to mind because I too was stuck on Lewes. Finally saw it, but I also didn’t know the bread meaning of CRUSTY, and the “…BURTON” clue took a while, and was a guess, really. LIVEWARE totally unknown before today as well. Nevertheless, I eventually fought through. Regards.
  31. I didn’t time it exactly but it was about 20 mins done at Heathrow at 8.30 a.m. this morning while I was waiting for the shuttle to Manchester after having had about 2 hrs of fitful sleep on my flight from DFW. I wasn’t at my sharpest. My experience was like many of you as I finished with TRADE PLATE after PIRANDELLO, and SAND TABLE took a while to see.
  32. Very pleased to complete this in about 45 mins. Some of the answers were unknowns (Pirandello, sand table etc..). But the pleasing thing for me (as I still count myself as an improver) is that I am now analysing the clues better in order to help derive the answer. Things like looking for “with” and “about” whereas in the past I would ignore these aids. All thanks to you experts and bloggers. And well done Ireland – hopefully it will make the white rose realise they have a long way to go.
  33. All ok for me today, except how does “old” equate to “late” in trade plate? Thanks
    1. An example of them being synonymous is “the late king”/”the old king”.
  34. 11:11 for me, only a second slower than verlaine, but without his excuse since there was nothing even remotely unfamiliar about any of the answers. At least age (and having worked in IT) brings some advantages.

    An interesting and enjoyable start to the week.

  35. The use of the word ‘early’is misleading. A ‘trade plate’ is temporarily fixed to ANY vehicle, either unregistered (ie new) or used, which is currently unlicensed, if you want to drive it on a public road. Eg when you test-drive a used car the salesman will usually put these on. I suppose crossword compilers (and editors) are so rich they only buy new cars.

    Didn’t twig ‘old’ = ‘late’ till I cam here. Thanks.

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