Times 26809 – There are that raise up strife and contention

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
As if the cruciverbal gods sought to wreak vengeance on those who have attempted to incite rebellion against the Order of Things, this second-day-of-the-week offering presented more difficulty than the average Monday puzzle – an observation which I am confident will be supported by the marvellous Snitchometer, now back up and running after a well earned period of recuperation and recalibration. Oh, how good and pleasant it is to see computers functioning in the service of mankind!

My time of 49 minutes will do nothing to scare the horses, but may be just enough to see me keep my fundamental position propping up the aforementioned Superranker. And talking of fundamentals, my time would have been significantly quicker had I been able to cotton onto 25 across faster than I was able. I suppose my daughter would say it was karma for all my failed attempts to get her into 70s comedy. My favourite line from that era? Undoubtedly, Frankie Howerd in Up Pompeii! determined to finally get his Prologue out (no, no, don’t titter – you’re making up your own jokes…), struggling to get himself comfortable in his toga as he prepares to settle on his stone bench. “Ooh, I know why they call these ‘Jockey’ shorts – they’ve got Lester Pigott in there!!”

ACROSS

1. CRIBBAGE – RIB + B in CAGE.
5. MINION – If Dick Emery’s Mandy had a mini on, she would be showing a bit of thigh. It might be awful…but I like it.
9. FRACTION – FR + ACTION. I vaguely remember vulgar and common fractions from my schooldays. Naturally, I preferred the former.
10. REVIEW – [c]REW around VIE.
12. EVENS – simply [s]EVENS; I was trying to shoehorn SP in there somehow.
13. GREAT OUSE – EAT in GROUSE; a tributary of the River Great Ouse (for thus it is appelled) is the Cam, of which the less said the better.
14. PERFECT PITCH – PERFECT (as in perfect/complete fool) + P + ITCH.
18. ANIMATRONICS – being technology that combines traditional puppetry techniques with electronics to create lifelike animated effects; anagram of IS ACT IRON MAN*. Mary Poppins was the first feature film to use this Disney-developed technology.
21. CONSTABLE – CON + STABLE; a semi-&lit, by my reckoning.
23. INPUT – P[rinciple] in I NUT, to give a word I’ve never much cared for, like ‘heads up’ and, indeed, ‘head up’.
24. IRITIS – I + RIT + IS, where I stands for i, a “compact” daily newspaper in the UK.
25. BACKSIDE – BACK + SIDE.
26. NEEDLE – if you bait someone, you needle them; and a needle has a loop through which it is easier for a dromedary to proceed than a rich geezer to negotiate the pearly gates.
27. HYDROGEN – if an OWL (wise bird) gets H (hydrogen), you end up with HOWL…and a gas. Thanks to Jack

DOWN

1. COFFER – CALL minus ALL + OFFER (present). I liked this.
2. IMAGES – I + M + AGES.
3. BATHSHEBA – (order of the) BATH + Rider Haggard’s SHE + BA; Bathseba was wife first of Uriah the Hittite, then David son of Jesse, by whom she bore, among others, Solomon, the third king of Israel, if I have my maths right.
4. GEORGE FORMBY – GORGE (stuff) around E + FORM + BY (attributed to); an entertainer best known for cleaning winders.
6. INERT – IN (not out – still batting) + initial letters of England Rarely Tested. Liked this too.
7. INIQUITY – I QUIT in IN + [turke]Y.
8. NEW DELHI – WE HELD* in NI.
11. TERCENTENARY – TEARY around [RECENT* +N].
15. PICNICKER – if you were an admittedly down-market art thief, you might be dubbed a nicker of pics.
16. SANCTION – CONTAINS*; neat clue.
17. BIG NOISE; plays on the fact that a report is a loud noise made by a gun.
19. SPRING – double definition.
20. STREWN – ‘broadcast’ is the literal; NEWS + RT* (where RT are the outside letters of R[epor]T)
22. TRILL – final letters of [cabare]T [singe]R + ILL (poorly).

57 comments on “Times 26809 – There are that raise up strife and contention”

  1. 30 minutes, so bang on target for me and I suppose that puts it at the easier end of the spectrum. I thought 27ac rather clever and don’t think it involves double duty. I see ‘gas’ as the definition and preceding words lead us to ‘H’ to tell us which one.
  2. It’s great to see the Times puzzle keeping up with the times with words like ANIMATRONICS. I had no idea, of course, about “I” as a compact daily newspaper in the UK, and I would have driven myself crazy by dawn trying to figure it out without this blog. This was certainly not the easiest Monday. Nice surfaces. I like the way 27 is all about the abbreviation for the element that is the answer. I’m not sure I had ever heard of GEORGE FORMBY before I started working these things.

    Edited at 2017-08-21 02:35 am (UTC)

  3. was a write-in at 4dn – probably Lancashire’s most famous daughter – although she famously fled Rochdale for Naples! But after half an hour she wasn’t the one! It was bloody GEORGE FORMBY after all! I was biffed-out!

    Thus 49 minutes rather than 30 mins as it should have been for a Monday!

    FOI 6dn INERT. LOI and COD 16dn SANCTION brilliantly disguised anagaram. It may have been obviouis for others!

    WOD IRITIS but Lord ULALACA your explanation is wanting!? Is ‘i’ a newspaper? Not reached Shanghai yet and perhaps never will!

    1. i was originally a compact version of The Independent launched in 2010, and I assume that’s from where its name was derived. It was later bought by the owners of The Yorkshire Post and The Scotsman.
    2. Poor chap, I realise one of the factors contributing to you hardship posting is censorship if large swathes of the Internet. The i newspaper was founded in 2010 and is currently owned and published by Johnston Press, which also publishes T’ Yorkshire Post and Yon Scotsman.
    3. Not having a go at you, h, but I noticed a couple of typos in your post and was going to suggest that you might like to turn on the auto spellchecker in order to avoid these in future. But in drafting my response I made some typos myself (none of us is perfect!) and realised I wasn’t getting the wavy red underlines as I have been used to in the past.

      So I looked at my LJ settings and couldn’t find an option to turn spellchecker on/off. I then consulted LJ ‘Help’ which informs me there is a spell checking option at the top RH of each Comment form and I should click this to reveal errors in my message and then select corrected spellings individually.

      There is nothing top RH of the Comment form as stated but a ‘Check spelling and preview’ option underneath it which allows me to preview what I have written and suggests errors and corrections, however these aren’t clickable to select a correct spelling so one has to edit the errors manually which is in itself open to error!

      It seems The Times is not alone in taking a feature of a system that worked perfectly well for years, buggering about with it and in the process ending up with something far inferior to the original. I ask myself what was wrong with the old system by which I got a red line as I typed if I made an error and could correct it immediately without the need for messing about with a preview system that doesn’t work as stated anyway?

      Edited at 2017-08-21 05:29 am (UTC)

      1. The wavy red lines as you type should be provided by your browser; LJ’s system of proofing-on-submit is so old it predates browser spell-checkers and is a vestige of a time long past… Have you changed browser or operating system recently? Safari on my Mac is still providing the red underlines for misspellings as I type this…
        1. Thanks, Matt. I see now that it is browser based as the red lines appear for me in Firefox, but my default browser these days is Chrome and has been for ages – over a year now, and I have not been without spellcheck for that long so something else must have changed.
          1. Browsers can get their knickers in all sorts of twists. Have you, dare I ask, tried turning it off and on again? Spell checking is working fine for me here in Chrome and Safari on Mac…
        1. Thanks for confirming this, Penfold. As mentioned in my response to Matt above, I have just found that spellcheck works for me in Firefox but not in my default browser which is Chrome and has been for ages, so this is a recent change for me. I have checked my Chrome settings and they show Spellcheck as being turned on – at least the language is set to American English (English English is grey out and therefore not available). I can’t see that there is a separate On/Off setting.

          Edited at 2017-08-21 05:26 pm (UTC)

      3. Never had that function and usually EDIT after SENT (which is in Chinese!)when possible! Busy day today so I didn’t re-check. LJ is not favourite but we struggle on. WOD buggering about!
        As Lord ULALACA points out the Internet is something else in these parts! As long as VPN remains viable I’ll be fine.

        Edited at 2017-08-21 03:07 pm (UTC)

    4. My first thought was Gracie – and I tried hard to get the Gracis to work.
      As a child, I had a near death experience choking on a pear drop, laughing at a George Formby film.
      How is the greengage jam?
      1. Lovely – but it will be gone too soon as I only made a couple of pounds – her indoors does not approve of my adoration of jams, marmalades or the decadent, western pudding culture!

        On reflection, she doesn’t mind a bit of fig jam (de Carrefour) I’ll be making my own in October!

  4. 27:55 … and pretty surprised that it came back all correct. IRITIS finally went it on the grounds that it fit with the 3 Is and sounded plausible as an eye condition. My parsing got as far as “there’s an -IS on the end.”

    I liked the difficulty elsewhere much more, especially for HYDROGEN.

  5. An absorbing solve, not at all Mondayish with lots of wit, MINION, PICNICKER cited as witnesses. I took a fair bit of my 21.12 fiddling around in the Cornish section, where I never did spot the anagram for SANCTION but took it as a double or even triple definition (you have to squint. A lot). IRITIS seemed an awfully short word for an awfully long bit of wordplay, not least because newspaper is always FT and slowing down is deceleration. NEEDLE my last in, possibly because bait is for fish, is it not?
    A crossword full of very fine clues, and a great start to the week.
  6. 55 mins with overnight oats (plus macadamia nuts) – and cheated (a bit) on IRITIS. The ‘is’ on the end is ok, but you have to be a true crossworder to get I-Rit (IMHO). Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this one – mostly I liked: Mini-on, Con-stable, Pic-nicker and Needle. Brilliant. Nice to see the crossword-novel, She, making an appearance. Thanks jokey setter and Ulaca.
  7. 13:18. Very much on the wavelength for this first solve of the week, it seems. I struggled a bit in the middle, as I solved the NW and SE first, with very little by way of helpful checkers to give me a foothold in the (for me) harder corners. Not for too long though, obviously.
  8. …a window cleaner you should be. George F and Leonard C both had a PERFECT PITCH, at least until they got IRITIS, a biffable eye condition. Is there any name where the two associations are so different as Uriah? I think of Julie Christie, my teenage fantasy from when she emerged in A for Andromeda, whenever I hear Bathsheba mentioned. Never have got far enough from the madding crowd.
    31 minutes on this thinking, “Didn’t I do well?” COD has to go to HYDROGEN, although I did like GREAT OUSE too. Held-up a while in SW before I threaded the NEEDLE. Good puzzle. Thank you U and setter.
  9. 15 minutes plus but managed not to spot I had typed INIQUUTY. Had to use the pause button to go in search of a pencil for the long anagram at 18ac. I have previously tried proof-reading my entry before submitting but I’m rubbish at that too. A most enjoyable puzzle for all the reasons others have mentioned.
  10. Certainly no Monday stroll this one. Similar experience to Sotira on the ocular affliction, and in enjoying HYDROGEN.

    Thanks setter. Thanks U, and congratulations on raising a daughter whose comedic judgment far exceeds that of her father.

  11. When 30:28 came up on the ipad I thought I had made heavy weather of this but perhaps not. Quite a lot of clever stuff to unpick and some unusual words. ANIMATRONICS took much old fashioned scribbling with pen and paper to unravel and the I-I-I- checkers for IRITIS brought on a panic attack.
    I’m another who biffed Gracie Fields; after all how many performers from Lancashire (6.6) starting with G can there be? Well at least two obviously…

    Edited at 2017-08-21 10:01 am (UTC)

  12. Another in a string a failures for me; not sure what’s been wrong with me the last few days. I was fixated on the bird being a grebe at 13a, which didn’t help, but then I didn’t know that the GREAT OUSE was a river, either, though the unmodified OUSE is obviously familiar.

    Speaking of things I didn’t know, I knew neither RIT for slowing—though I figured I was looking for an Italian musical term—nor IRITIS, and I didn’t get that one, either.

    It took me about an hour and half to admit defeat. Bah. I do, of course, thank our setter and blogger nonetheless.

  13. Lots of whimsy to enjoy here, and in terms of solving ease, it felt quite Mondayish until I reached the SW corner, where there was an impasse for some time. I even twigged that RIT might fit in somewhere, but crossword tradition dictated that the paper must be the FT, so it took a while for that penny to drop (*adds ‘i’=paper to list of useful crossword devices*).

    My kitchen contains a device I inevitably refer to as the George Formby Grill, which makes excellent toasted sandwiches. I am not strong enough to resist saying “it’s turned out nice again” every time I make one.

    1. excellent. I trust when selecting pungent salad ingredients you also declare “That’s shallot!”
      1. George Formby Senior, our George’s father and a big music hall star at the turn of the last century, had a song called Funicular. This does seem more like a conflation of funny peculiar than a railway up a mountain. He starts the song saying he’s dressed in the skin of a Spanish Onion, not a shallot. You’d better have a word with your researcher. I’ve always claimed to be both the last Victorian and the first baby boomer. Having just read these lyrics, I’m not so sure. The past is a foreign country alright.
      2. Aye, aye, that shallot! was the sign-off of the comedian Jimmy Wheeler who, like George Formby, was still around to appear on TV and radio in my childhood.
  15. 22:24 although with a few crossers, 15dn was a write-in for PECULATOR which did not help. Some nice clues so thanks setter and u.
  16. I stayed up for this one even though I was already tired, and I think I’m going to have to stop as it doesn’t “go live” at midnight any more, does it, it’s more likely to be 1am? Not sure why that should be. Anyway I would have kept my time under 10 minutes except that 16dn completely bamboozled me (a very neat clue, as you say) and I also couldn’t see 24ac… I thought of RIT immediately but then couldn’t get past the idea that the answer must be SPIRIT, somehow. As I say I think/hope I wouldn’t fixate like that if my energy levels were a bit higher. But who can wait a whole six hours to tackle an exciting new tranche of Times puzzles?!
    1. Oh and I thought of George Formby as soon as I read the clue, but couldn’t actually summon up his name until I’d got some crossers to work with. Blasted exhaustion!
  17. Rider Haggard wrote another book called She and Allan, which brought together his two main characters, including my namesake which he spelt wrongly..
    Seized up in the SW, where I was barking up several wrong trees. V enjoyable
  18. Having bungled the Concise and the QC with one wrong in each this morning(due to dodgy cluing, I submit M’lord!), I came to this with trepidation, which seemed to be justified, as at 30 minutes in, the RHS was completed but the LHS was almost blank. However after gritting my teeth and finally spotting 1a, the NW fell and Gracie became George(whose name had eluded my brain, as indeed it had eluded V’s, despite my telling myself it’s the window cleaning ukulele man). TERCENTENARY took a while to spot as I’d biffed NITROGEN at 27a as something to sound like a night bird, until the penny dropped. Liked BATHSHEBA, which baffled me until 1a went in and I remembered Mr Haggard, and MINION which was my FOI. I eventually managed to parse my LOI IRITIS, and hit submit at 42:31. I thought SANCTION was particularly well hidden. Thanks setter and U.

    Edited at 2017-08-21 12:09 pm (UTC)

  19. I’m suffering from lying awake waiting for the extra early alarm to go off before a horrible journey to Gatwick to get No2 son and girlfriend there for an early flight, so, having taken longer than usual on a Monday to solve this one, it is very comforting to know that I’m not alone.
  20. 18:23 so definitely not your normal Monday. I’m glad to see I wasn’t alone in taking ages to see that SANCTION was an anagram.

    Thanks for the parsage of IRITIS and George F, U.

    Without the wordplay I’d probably have called yer woman Bethsheba, so I was grateful for the hint.

  21. Great news – at weekend found I could get the crosswords and submit them on the website (including Mephisto, which I’d needed to print from the old version.)
    Today took just over the half-hour, as I wasn’t clear about the parsing for several clues, so thanks ulaca for explanations.
    By the way, Chrome gives me the red waves here, though of course that doesn’t help with the actual puzzle. 🙂
  22. Thirty-seven minutes, and I found this one fairly hard. Looking back, I can’t see why, since none of the clues seems particularly difficult, but then again not many of them were particularly easy either.

    Still solving on the newspaper’s general page, since the Crossword Club isn’t working for me.

  24. Hi all. I went through this without particular trouble, in 20 minutes, which is pretty much par for the course for me. LOI was REVIEW. I had to scribble a bit to get ANIMATRONICS anagram after I had a couple of crossing letters, and the I?I?I? mess called for a little head scratching, but I then just biffed and moved along (not knowing the newspaper or the slowing direction). Regards.
  26. Well, I still have a problem with PERFECT equating to COMPLETE BEGINNER.
    I did like MINI ON, though
    So, now I have to add the I to the Sun and the FT as newspapers in crosswordland.
    Lastly, talking of I’s, I counted 16 x I’s in the grid today. Must be some sort of record!
    51m 18s
    1. Martin – PERFECT is just “Complete”. “Beginner on piccolo” gives the P at the beginning of the second word. Quite a nice clue, I thought.
  27. DNF. Bah! I must have been lulled into a false sense of security expecting a usual Monday puzzle and had nothing left in the tank when I got to the SW corner. I saw the Rit and the Is but not the “i” in 24ac and couldn’t see the Needle or the brilliant Sanction at all. Ah well, I’ll be ready for it tomorrow. I’ve never read the three-letter novel in 3dn so beloved of setters but saw it was on one of the movie channels recently so I’ve recorded it. It features Ursula Andress, John Richardson, Peter Cushing and Bernard Cribbins. I usually judge the quality of a film on how many car chases / times Jason Statham punches a baddie in the face in the opening ten minutes. Haven’t watched this one yet, hopefully Bernard Cribbins goes high octane and kicks some ass.
  28. 18:28. I enjoyed this – very neat. I liked HYDROGEN and PICNICKER especially. I see I’m not the only one who failed to recognise “i” as being a newspaper, but with 3 I’s as checkers and a knowledge of musical terms there was no doubt in my mind. ANIMATRONICS made me wonder if they are used anymore now CGI is so sophisticated.

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