Times 26847 – one of those ninety-ten jobs

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
How often do we find a puzzle where most of the clues fall into place quite quickly and a few stubborn ones hold us up, even with checkers in place? For me, this was one of those, with the SE corner being slow to show up and the correct reading of 7d also a late PDM. Twenty minutes for all but those and another ten to finish. We’ll probably find though that others’ ten per cent of trickiness turns out to be different from mine; it’s all in the mind.
Oh, and there’s a less common antelope, for those who (unlike me) don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of four-legged lion bait; it’s a good Scrabble word, to boot.

Across
1 Vulgar young person losing head confronts superior officer — big trouble (5)
HAVOC – CHAV loses its C, OC for superior officer. I know what a CHAV is but not its etymology, so looked it up. Uncertain, but I liked the non-PC idea (probably constructed afterwards, a “backronym”) that it stands for “council housed and violent”.
4 Musicians turn out to be inadequate dilettanti (9)
COMPOSERS – Parsing seems a bit vague here, I think it is COM(E) = turn out, to be inadequate i.e. lose its ending; POSERS = dilettanti.
9 The French female has to get ready for bed — she’s washing (9)
LAUNDRESS – A stock clue; LA = the French feminine, UNDRESS = get ready for bed.
10 Symbol put back by weather forecasters with books (5)
TOTEM – Reverse MET and OT (Old Testament).
11 A cold island off the Irish coast (6)
ACHILL – A, CHILL. Very nice place to visit, with empty beaches and big skies, as painted by Paul Henry.
12 Primitive weapon has a gentle hit stopping movement (8)
CATAPULT – Insert A TAP into CULT = movement.
14 Faithful old individual grabbing paper is granted solitude (4,5)
LEFT ALONE – LEAL a Scottish dialect word for LOYAL; insert FT the paper and add ONE individual.
16 Joyful bit of song from central Africa (3-2)
TRA-LA – Hidden in CEN(TRAL A)FRICA.
17 Female group run by male (5)
HAREM – HARE = run, M.
19 Robbers having similar drinks outside and inside? (9)
PILLAGERS – Two similar drinks here; PILS outside LAGER. Nice work.
21 Boss to carry player on a lap of honour? (8)
CHAIRMAN – I see this as a sort of weak DD; if you chair a man around the pitch, you’re be carrying him on your lap?.
22 I may be put out by outrageous leading lady (6)
GLENDA – It’s an anagram of LEADING without its I, indicated by ‘outrageous’.
25 Spread the gospel but not quietly to gain influence (5)
REACH – PREACH loses its quiet P.
26 Savage old lover appearing with naughty erotica (9)
EXCORIATE – EX = old lover, (EROTICA)*. Apologies, I blogged this initially but it somehow got highlighted and deleted, now restored.
27 Is backward-looking politician exposed as a fool? (9)
SIMPLETON – Another stock clue. IS reversed, MP, LET ON = exposed.
28 For riser, inactivity’s ending — whence comes the dawn? (5)
YEAST – Y = end of inactivity, EAST = whence comes the dawn.

Down
1 Control the situation before laying down requirements for others at the table? (4,3,3,5)
HOLD ALL THE CARDS – Cryptic definition, my second one in after the long anagram at 8d.
2 Guarantee given with very little indication of pain (5)
VOUCH – V = very, OUCH = little indication of pain.
3 A linguistic sign from the Man in Black? (7)
CEDILLA – Thankfully we had the reference to this Liverpudlian lady recently, else it might have caused me more trouble. Insert ED = Man, into CILLA = Black. The twiddly 5 shaped thing under a French C to make it sound like S not K before an A, as in ça va.
4 College student humoured, though denied a sign of affection (2-2)
CO-ED – There may be a clearer (better?) explanation than mine here: I think it is COAXED = humoured, losing its A, X where X = sign of affection.
5 Stinky meal prepared incorrectly (10
MISTAKENLY – (STINKY MEAL)*.
6 Unfashionable model gets to survive (7)
OUTLAST – OUT = unfashionable, LAST = model, as in cobbler’s.
7 Train journey going on time — Euston evacuated earlier (9)
ENTOURAGE – I spent too long thinking of a synonym for TRAIN as in teach. It’s TRAIN as in people hanging on behind. EN = Euston evacuated, TOUR = journey, AGE = time.
8 Commentators finally interpret a man’s rambling, not completely clear (15)
SEMITRANSPARENT – (S INTERPRET A MANS)*, the S being end of commentators. for some reason I saw this transparently as soon as I read the clue, my FOI.
13 Grumble when church is seen as one being smug (10)
COMPLACENT – COMPLAINT would be grumble, replace the I in it by CE = church.
15 Dynamism, as befits marines giving warning of danger (4,5)
FIRE ALARM – FIRE = dynamism, A LA RM = as befits marines.
18 Officer damages room, scratching floor (7)
MARSHAL – MARS = damages, HAL(L) = room, scratching floor = removing the last L.
20 Hypersensitivity of friend without some measure of work (7)
ALLERGY – Insert ERG = measure of work, into ALLY. Ergs are outdated these days, not being SI units, and very small (ten million ergs in a Joule). Someone with nothng better to do has calculated it’s as much work as done by a house fly bending one leg down and up.
23 Wild animal in article about place to the north (5)
NYALA – [Edited later] All reversed i.e. to the north; AN = article, insert LAY = place. Quite a nice antelope, as they go, with spiral horns and stripes.
24 Cold caught in the course of school hospital examination (4)
SCAN – Insert C into SAN = school hospital.

50 comments on “Times 26847 – one of those ninety-ten jobs”

  1. I hadn’t gotten around to looking up CHAV, and I am absolutely sure I’d never heard of it. “Coax” for “humour” seems a bit of a stretch, but it’s the only explanation I could think of too. I neglected to parse CHAIRMAN, and your guess is as good as mine (as mysterious as your guess is; does it have something to do with cricket?). Again my geographical knowledge expands, with the discovery of ACHILL.

    Edited at 2017-10-04 06:37 am (UTC)

    1. I was suitably vague about this. Some sort of pun between sitting on one’s lap, as in a chair, and being carried chair-like on a lap of honour e.g. around a football pitch or athletics stadium, but a crisp, precise explanation eluded me. Probably because there isn’t one.
  2. 40 mins with croissant and home-foraged blackberry jam. And what a joy – except for 5 mins at the end not realising 22ac was just a random lady – (and a quite nicely disguised anagram indicator).
    Some really neat clues, I thought. Mostly I liked: the double-lager robbers, Simpleton, For riser, Man in Black, Stinky meal, ‘church is seen as one’.
    COD to 27ac – it has everything: reversal, abbreviation, one word for two, concatenation and a great surface. Top notch.
    Thanks v clever setter and Pip.

    PS to ‘chair’ someone is to carry them aloft as in a celebration of victory – like a lap of honour – so it made sense to me.

    Edited at 2017-10-04 07:21 am (UTC)

  3. Around 40 minutes for all but 22ac which I left overnight, having considered GLENDA but unable to parse it until this morning. DK LEAL or ACHILL. Lost time considering ‘nonchalant’ for 13dn before rejecting it.
  5. Without I hope giving too much away, there is an intriguing synchronicity today, especially for those who get the paperware version:
    Daily Quiz: 1. Which planet is named after the Roman god of war?
    QUick Cryptic (immediately below the quiz): 5a Spoils of war personified
    15×15: 18d Officer damaging room, scratching floor.
    Any conspiracy theorists out there?
  6. Another easy one except for the Glenda/nyala crosser which took me a while to sort out, having finally given up on “llama..”

    The winner of the Queen’s Prize at Bisley (and other target shooting events) is chaired around the camp afterwards, on a chair kept specially for the occasion.. if you google “queens prize chair” on google images, you will see what I mean..

  7. 32 minutes for this, with LOI GLENDA, wondering either why that particular leading lady had top billing or why Private Eye’s top columnist had butted in. Never heard LEAL before, but LEFT ALONE had the paper and individual in, so it had to be. I liked Cilla but she’s in danger of over-exposure. Can we have some Dusty please? Thought COMPOSERS a bit weak, not being quite sure for a while about it. Picking up on yesterday’s debate and having been CHAIRMAN of several companies, I don’t think you should behave as the boss. There’ll usually be a far-too-determined CEO who wants to be that. It’s the Chairman’s job to save the CEO from himself and to make sure everyone else is heard too. And of course to enjoy the lunch! I’ll make LAUNDRESS COD. Thank you Pip and setter.
    1. In Hong Kong, at any rate, being on the board – not to mention chairing it – brings in a pretty penny too. For turning up 6 times a year, your average director (who typically sits on half a dozen or more boards) typically ‘earns’ the same as a junior manager does in a year.
      1. I think you earn your corn far more in smaller companies, AIM quoted or private equity, where the execs haven’t the breadth of knowledge or contacts, as DorsetJimbo mentions.. In my experience, too many FTSE company NEDs, self-anointed members of the great and the good, say their piece without worrying too much if it fits the circumstances. Nobody else is in a position to control the greed of the exec directors, but the proof of how bad the non-execs have been at it is to be seen in almost every Directors’ remuneration report you read. It’s a corporate scandal as big as the banking crisis.

        Edited at 2017-10-04 06:57 pm (UTC)

      1. Thank you for the birthday wishes, M. Another year older, but still no wiser.
  8. Nothing too difficult here as I knew NYALA and both it and Ms Slag were write-ins. Like others slightly baffled by parsing of both CO ED and CHAIRMAN. Already getting tired of Cilla Black

    I agree with boltonwanderer about the role of Chairman but would add using contacts to raise awareness, facilitate introductions and gain access to finance. Certainly its the CEO who should run the show day to day

  9. Was doing Ok until Miss Jackson failed to make an appearance. Stuck in COED unparsed but thinking coax, cosset or coddle must be involved somewhere. DNK leal and not enthusiastic about CHAIRMAN.
  10. Definitely one of those days, with steady progress until five fully checked clues were left scattered around the grid. Picked them off one by one but stared at 21/22 for ages before losing the will to live. GLENDA is a clever construction, although random names irritate me, but CHAIRMAN is a rather feeble clue.
  11. Similar experience to Pip, taking 25 minutes for all bar Glenda and Nyala, and a further 14 minutes for those two. Like the foraging Myrtilus, I thought the anagram indicator for 23a was excellent, but ‘leading lady’ for our Glenda seemed a bit, well, the opposite of de trop. If the erstwhile Socialist MP, Jackson, is the intended surface referent, then the surname would be more apropos, I’d have thought.

    Not too crazy either about the clues for Chairman and Hold all the cards, but Tra-la provided a welcome bit of light relief.

    1. I think the definition is simply ‘lady’, ulaca, not necessarily any particular Glenda, MP, actress or otherwise. Could be Glenda Slag from those Private eye days!
  12. Another day, another island I didn’t know. And I too did some head-scratching over the boss. Vinyl would know but I think we get NYALA in the NY Times puzzles with some frequency. In everyday writing I would tend to remove the hyphen from from COED and put it in SEMI-TRANSPARENT, but it wouldn’t all all suprise me to be wrong. 19.47
  13. 31.22. Isn’t Glenda J. still with us? Spent a lorra time on 3 and 11 through blindness and ignorance but finally biffed it tra-la. – joekobi
    1. She is but she doesn’t appear in the clue, except perhaps by implication in the surface reading.
  14. So shorter and more fun than yesterday’s egghead test. Today the puzzle was in the parsings of the novella-length clues and the obscure stuff (Achill, chav, leal) wasn’t required. Liked laundress and simpleton, even if I have seen them before
    Only complaint is the use of “by” in the totem clue — It makes no sense
    1. Don’t think the clue makes sense without it. What would “Symbol put back weather forecasters with books” mean? Whereas I have a mental image of Michael Fish (I’m of that vintage) reapplying the symbol indicating heavy winds after consulting the Boy’s Book of Hurricane Forecasting on the weather map in the days of stick on (and sometimes fall off) overlays. Makes sense to me.
      1. The surface makes sense, yes, but at the expense of the instruction, which becomes: put back by met + ot. Which makes no sense
        1. The answer, TOTEM, is “put back by,” meaning spelled backward by, the METeorologists and the OT books. That’s how you spell “TOTEM” backward, by MET + OT.
  15. I read this as article = AN, around (about) LAY = ALAYN, with “to the north” indicating reversed.

    I also thought CHAIRMAN was fine, as to chair a man could be to carry a player aloft.

    Relatively easy, although my time of 44:16 will seem a little pathetic to most!

    Mr Chumley

    1. I agree with your comment on NYALA. Without “to the North” we have no reversal indicator, and A on its own can’t be around LAY.

  16. 26 mins with COMPOSER and OUTLAST entered more with hope than experience. Last is one of those crosswordland words which don’t seem to penetrate my head.
    When I was 5 I had a book of mammals which I read every day, and NYALA was in there so a bit of long-term knowledge there. I still have the book!
  17. 12:55. I also did most of this quickly and then slowed down quite a lot on the last half-dozen or so.
    I didn’t know the required sporting meaning of ‘chair’ so I hesitated. In my world an important part of the CHAIRMAN’s role is to act as a go-between and peace-maker between us finance types and the people with a real job.
    ACHILL also unknown and entered with crossed fingers.

    Edited at 2017-10-04 11:13 am (UTC)

  18. A surprise perfect completion in 23 minutes with OUTLAST not understood (is last a model, even if it belongs to a cobbler?) and COMPOSER unparsed – thanks Pip, I think your version works well enough.

    Of course I knew not ACHILL, and later checking on Google brought the predictable “did you mean Achilles?”) and to be fair it barely looks feasible.

    No problem with CHAIR MAN: possibly, as others have indicated, a rather old-fashioned Oxbridge sort of celebration. But Chambers has “to carry publicly in triumph” for chair, and I’ve seen it happening in black and white movies, though not, as far as I remember, in cricket.

    I thought 13d was pretty clever, though I think in recent days the replacement device has been proliferating to the extent that I’m beginning to spot it on first reading.

    Well blogged, Pip, especially on the dodgier clues: FWIW, I think you’re right about CO-ED, though I think coaxed and humoured are barely kissing cousins.

  19. My small run of under 30s finished as I did when after 40 mins I could not get 22ac which turns out to be GLENDA! Unfortunately I had 8dn as SEMITRANSLUCENT and not SEMITRANPARENT – so no wonder, missing the anagram!

    COD I rather liked 28ac YEAST but it has to go to 9ac LAUNDRESS!

    WOD the Irish Isle ACHILL.

    The setter’s ‘stir’ was a litle lumpy! With 4ac COMPOSERS and 4dn COED particularly lumpen.

  20. I floundered around for just over an hour with this one, still having 22a and 23d outstanding. I totally failed to see the anagram at 22a and eventually Googled it. I then finally saw NYALA and submitted at 1:11:05. Another ignominious effort for which I expect to be chastised by Judge Meldrew. The NW resisted my efforts, so I started with TOTEM and proceeded in a clockwise direction leaving gaps here, there and everywhere. VOUCH was the first clue in the NW to yield, opening up the rest of the corner. I was happy enough with CHAIRMAN and COMPOSERS, liked CEDILLA and took ACHILL on trust from wordplay. Didn’t know LEAL, but as BW said, having an FT and ONE in there didn’t leave much doubt. CO-ED was shrugged into place too. I did like the pair of thieving beers. COMPLACENT was a nice clue too. Thanks setter and Pip.
  21. That anagram in 22a was a bit of a Glenda-bender!!! Geddit!!?!? Don’tchajustloveit!!?!! Byeeeee!!!!

    That’s quite enough of that – 42:42 for me.

  22. 18:53 and all correct but I couldn’t parse a few – I had never heard of LEAL or ACHILL, for example, nor understood CHAIRMAN. I enjoyed the beers at 19a, though. I echo Pip’s appreciation of the NYALA, remembering seeing some as a boy at a game reserve in South Africa in the 1960s. A good test, I thought.
  23. Had come across NYALA before but not LEAL which I guessed was an old LOYAL. Thought 22 across a nicely hidden anagram indicator …. & thank you for the blog to explain COMPOSERS.
  24. I didn’t quite complete this one. I was pretty sure the answer to 4d was CO-ED, but I couldn’t see how to get to it from the clue. If your explanation is right, then I think it is a bad clue; there is no way that the meaning of “coaxed” is even vaguely similar to the meaning of “humoured”.

    Because I didn’t go with my gut feeling on that, I didn’t get 4a wither, although how COMPOSERS didn’t even occur to me I’m not sure. But again I think it is a bad clue: “come” doesn’t come close in meaning to “turn out” and “posers” isn’t really a synonym for “dilettanti”; some dilettanti may be posers, but that isn’t the definition of dilettante at all.

    When I do get stuck on a clue it is most often where the setter has used a dubious synonym for the answer, and it always leaves me feeling cross 🙂

  25. Finished in championship mode i.e. slapping them in without worrying over the parsing. It’s only when you come here you realise how much work goes into it all. Talking about the chmshp can someone point me in the direction of a website or posting proclaiming this years event. I’ve mislaid my piece of paper and getting worried that it won’t turn up in time. In the event of there being no web page or similar that can be easily found can someone just tell me (address and date) though everyone has probably gone home for the day.
  26. Beaten by GLENDA and her NYALA. I did toy briefly with GLENDA (stop sniggering at the back – it’s your own time you’re wasting), but since I had the parsing farce-about-ace I couldn’t justify it.

    I’ve also never encountered a NYALA in veldt, dictionary or menu. The entire catalogue of antelopes seems, like cricket positions and growth-stages of salmon, to have been created solely for people who like to make up silly words.

    My CoD would have been the neat HAREM if I had finished and weren’t grumpy, but I didn’t and I am so it isn’t.

  27. DNF. Bah! Found much of this tricky and made it harder for myself at 25ac by bunging in a made up “glose” as an anagram of gospel minus the p, before realising that was wrong and bunging in “raise” as praise minus the p. Sometime after that I finally realised it was “preach” minus the p. That was when I bunged in the correct answer and finally stopped taking the p. Managed to get as far as the SE corner before jacking it in with 22ac and 23dn left blank. Annoyed not to have seen them but missed the anagram indicator and couldn’t call to mind the antelope.
  28. 21 minutes in Chmshp mode btw where and when is the championship nothing online and I have mislaid my bit of paper
  29. I had put in ‘Call All The Shots’ for 1D (table being snooker table) which threw me for some time. Especially as ‘Laundress’ fitted too…
  30. Why do antelopes seem to appear so often in Times crosswords? Is it a running joke?

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