Times 26,861: What’s The Naughtiest Nina You’ve Ever Found?

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I had a similar experience with this puzzle to yesterdays: it seemed above averagely hard due to some original and devious cluing, but steady progress was possible and I hit stop on my timer at 9m16. I think it’s always a good sign, when writing these things up, when I have to repeatedly ask myself “gosh, how do I elegantly annotate *this*?” – I like a setter whose thought processes are no stuck in the usual box. And yet all the surfaces are impressively sensical and concise. So yes, I thought this was very good indeed, thanks setter! And there’s even a discreet political Nina if you look carefully.

Hopefully keriothe will have managed to avoid putting either EXRA or EYRA at 1dn and the Citizens Against Dodgy Homophones brigade won’t be too angry about 15ac. PEDICAB at 2dn is added my list of words that turn up in crosswords way more than statistically probable, and I was delighted to see a bit of basic Swedish being added to the list of requirements for being a fully functional Times solver. (Of course, we all already knew that EUREKA is the perfect active indicative first singular of “heuriskein”, to discover.) 23dn gave me a laugh but I’ll give my COD to the rather clever &lit at 12dn, always good when one of those comes off. How about yourselves?

Across
1 One way to expand MP’s permit (7)
EMPOWER – expand the elements of MP separately to EM + POWER
5 Capital college (2,5)
ST JOHNS – double def, being the capital of Antigua & Barbuda and an Oxford or Cambridge college
9 Memorable dog having left for second (3-6)
RED-LETTER – RED {s->L}ETTER [dog “having left (L) for second (S)”]
10 Fruit tree separated from fruit (5)
APPLE – {pine}APPLE
11 Openly belittle OCD advice to quilt maker? (3,4,2,4)
CUT DOWN TO SIZE – if you squint at this you can imagine an OCD quilt maker cutting bits of (eider)down to be the optimal size for stuffing. Maybe
13 Overturning beer ban, is a French writer (8)
RABELAIS – reverse ALE BAR [“overturning” beer | ban] + IS
15 Trapped in yard, you say? (6)
CAUGHT – dodgy homophone one COURT [yard, “you say”]
17 Mistake rued, partly retracted in bingo? (6)
EUREKA – hidden reversed [“partly”, “retracted”] in {mist}AKE RUE{d}
19 Conservative puts away records (6,2)
CLOCKS UP – C [Conservative] + LOCKS UP [puts away (as in arrests)]
22 Drink no longer available in canteens — it changed (7,6)
INSTANT COFFEE – OFF [no longer available] in (CANTEENS IT*) [“changed”]
25 Move first to last in middle ground (5)
EARTH – {H—->}EART [“move first to last in” middle]
26 Edited liberal article about Fonteyn, perhaps (9)
BALLERINA – (LIBERAL*) [“edited”] + AN reversed [article “about”]
27 Pet survey cut short by obligation (7)
SWEETIE – SWEE{p} [survey (as in a comprehensive search)] by TIE [obligation]
28 The largest bird withers inwardly (7)
TIDIEST – TIT [bird] (with) DIES [withers] “inwardly”. Tidy as in “a tidy sum”

Down
1 Biblical book, unknown in time (4)
EZRA – Z [unknown] in ERA [time]
2 Tart in live performance initially reversing vehicle (7)
PEDICAB – ACID [tart] in BE P [live | P{erformance} “initially”], all “reversing”
3 Grass with post-crime police activity (5)
WHEAT – W HEAT [with | post-crime police activity]
4 Keep interrupting row about updated component (8)
RETROFIT – FORT [keep] “interrupting” TIER [row], all “about”
5 Steadfast astronaut losing limb (6)
STRONG – {arm}STRONG
6 Heroine of German agreement accommodating nothing Franco ordered (4,2,3)
JOAN OF ARC – JA [German agreement] “accommodating” O [nothing] + (FRANCO*) [“ordered”]
7 Expecting to double power for making transatlantic flight? (7)
HOPPING – HO{P->PP}ING [expecting, “to double power”]
8 Categorise abstract poetry in abridged guide (10)

STEREOTYPE</b> – (POETRY*) [“abstract”] in STEE{r} [“abridged” guide]
12 What could spawn new desires, for example (10)
GREEDINESS – (N DESIRES EG*) [“what could spawn…”] &lit
14 Large well-known store ruined immediately (4,1,4)
LIKE A SHOT – L IKEA SHOT [large | well-known store | ruined]
16 Pitch isn’t black when it’s this (8)
FLOODLIT – cryptic def, playing on two different definitions of “pitch”
18 Minister yet again to hold back (7)
RESERVE – to RE-SERVE could be “to minister, yet again”
20 Local name for land I found in small strip (7)
SVERIGE – I found in S VERGE [small | strip]
21 Balanced stock book getting put away (6)
STABLE – STALE [stock], B [book] “getting put away”
23 Commentator’s wrongly felt for all the runners (5)
FIELD – homophone of FEELED [“commentator’s” wrongly, felt]
24 Massive stop after start is annulled (4)
VAST – {a}VAST [stop, “after start is annulled”]

61 comments on “Times 26,861: What’s The Naughtiest Nina You’ve Ever Found?”

  1. 60 mins with porridge and banana – and proper coffee.
    Hmm.. what to make of this one? I enjoyed it – but it was another toughie. I guess we should applaud the original constructions, the mix of vocab and the visit to foreign shores – but my hands were too busy head-scratching to do much applauding at the time.

    I am indebted to Mrs M for remembering the list of language options at the start of DVDs – which I have the habit of reading aloud in an exaggerated Yorkshire accent. I also do this with the labels in Ikea to cheer myself up. I don’t go there to buy anything, just read the labels, but who can resist 5 pairs of scissors for a pound?
    Mostly I liked: Instant coffee, Earth, Floodlit (COD), Feeled.
    Mostly I struggled with: Empower, Retrofit, Sverige and the anagram fodder in 12dn.
    Thanks boundary pushing setter and V

  2. Managed all but 12dn in average time of 30mins, then struggled with the anagram… is ‘wreediness’ even a word? Came back to it 10 mins later and worked out the correct anagrist. Very sneaky.

    Couldn’t parse VAST, APPLE or WHEAT (still don’t really see how ‘heat’ works…), but in they went.

    COD to the cheeky FIELD today.

    2. Janie Elliott Ness used turn on the HEAT to the Mob! Ya never lived on the Sarth Side, honey!
  3. A bit harder than average perhaps .. both 10ac APPLE and 21dn STABLE went in with a shrug, unparsed .. but not too bad. last in was Sverige, a hard word to find, even trawling the alphabet.

    SNITCH is currently saying right at the top end of harder, but not quite very hard.

    Note to the genius who produced the SNITCH website.. I wonder if it might be possible to insert columnar averages, which would have the result of indicating how hard each day is. One set of averages per year, perhaps?

    Edited at 2017-10-20 08:48 am (UTC)

    1. Yes, I had to resort to aids to find Sverige, even after an alphabet trawl and knowing we were looking for a “local name for land”.

      Thanks for the interest in the SNITCH. For the columnar averages, did you want something more than the Trends page, which shows a rolling six-month average for each weekday?

        1. Thanks, Jerry, that’s very kind. I must confess to not feeling much of a genius in solving some of the crosswords – but it’s fun nonetheless 🙂
  4. Staggered through much like Jack. A country hour but finally nailed 12dn GREEDINESS my LOI.

    FOI 6ac ST. JOHNS Antigua. 20dn SVERIGE came early courtesy of philately.

    COD 14dn LIKE-A-SHOT with a bit of assembly from the instructions in the IKEA-style! Also praise to 16dn FLOODLIT.

    WOD RABELAIS which gives us the lovely, but
    coarsely indecent RABELAISIAN! (Shades of Hancock)

    I loathe 22ac INSTANT COFFEE. Glad to see My Mate Myrtilus enjoying proper coffee. Mine was BLUE MOUNTAIN as ever from the Mavis Bank district.I’ve had it with French tangerine marmalade! Back to the Swiss.

    10ac PINE-APPLE what tosh!

    I swear the numbers on the grid are getting smaller – they are so damned hard to read on the print out – can this not be fixed!? If the numbers on the PAINTING-BY-NUMBERS KITS were as small, where would we be!?

    Meldrewvia Revisited.

    Edited at 2017-10-20 09:05 am (UTC)

    1. I never know if you are pulling my leg. Mrs M likes Blue Mountain, but I can’t thoil it (now there’s a word you don’t see in crosswords).
      Tangerine marmalade – you gourmand!
  5. Cracked this in 42 minutes but DNK SVERIGE. I even guessed it would be a local name for Sweden and thought it would begin with SVE but then biffed SVELINE. Still, it’s nice to have had a EUREKA moment. ST JOHNS continued my walk down St Giles after the Martys Memorial last week. FOI EZRA, made super-easy by the setter. I trust they’re not being influenced by the heckles they’re receiving here. I was gobsmacked that SWEETIE was correct, and wasn’t totally convinced I’d got VAST right either. I assume STALE meaning STOCK is as in ‘a stock answer’ usage. COD FLOODLIT, followed by EMPOWER.Thank you V and setter.
    1. Really! BOLTON is fairly close to SVERIGE is it not? I assumed you’d be fairly fluent. NORGE, DANMARK, ‘Game of Frones’ and all that.

      I didn’t parse STABLE!

      1. Very close, but the M62 gets crowded around Manchester. I only briefly collected stamps. I have a dreadful confession to make, as I’ve been rumbled today. I got my wolf cub stamp collecting badge using my sister’s album. I just hope that this is not the unforgiveable sin, but I suspect it might be.
        1. That’s the death penalty in most civilised countries! ‘Philaticide’ – now there’s a word one hardly encounters.

          horryd FRPSL

          Edited at 2017-10-22 10:02 am (UTC)

        1. My instinct is that “stale” for a broom handle is just too obscure, and that it must really be “a stale/stock joke”, but my instinct is often completely wrong of course.
  6. A very untidy and unsatisfying solve for me, the latter because I was unable to comnplete it without resorting to aids once the clock had past the hour and I still had 4 or 5 clues unsolved. I spotted the possibility of EMPOWER at 1ac but didn’t write it until the last minute as I never worked out how the wordplay was intended to work. SVERIGE didn’t occur to me although I knew it from stamp-collecting more than half-a-century ago. Time lost thinking 11ac started with ‘put down’ for ‘belittle’.

    Edited at 2017-10-20 08:19 am (UTC)

    1. Me too with the stamps but I did remember it. Who said philately will get you nowhere?

      Edited at 2017-10-20 09:19 am (UTC)

  7. All bar 12d done in under 30 minutes, but just could not see what was required and finally threw in the towel. So near…
  8. Ran out of time with GREEDINESS and SVERIGE missing. As I wrote in APPLE I thought it was an awful clue taking the OAK from OAK APPLE. Never thought of PINEAPPLE. Trying to come up with a fish from an anagram of ‘new desires’ also proved fruitless. In my High School library Rabelais was the only author whose books were kept in a locked cabinet.
    1. As a classicist of a certain age I remember the smutty likes of Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars being readily available… but the naughtiest bits going into Latin (or Greek if they were REALLY obscene). It was certainly a great incentive to excel at classical languages!
  9. Only the second finish of the week, so pleasing. Liked SVERIGE, stamps the way in for me too.Can’t see a nina. Failed to parse STABLE or EMPOWER. Incidentally, Naughty Nina has the most films credited on the above website. 36′, thanks verlaine and setter.
    1. Nina: 5dn and 21dn, 23dn of 3dn. A week in politics being a long time, it may be slightly past its best-before date…
        1. Brilliant, M. When Ken was at Health, my wife, then a young civil servant, was his diary secretary. She always had to keep a regular space for Ronnie Scott’s.
      2. ….. and Apple’s vast greediness cut down to size. Oh, that was just wishful thinking.
  10. Technical DNF in a whole hour: although I knew 20dn (from stamps of course) didn’t think of it till resorted to aid to fit checkers. Couldn’t see how to parse 1ac, so thanks verlaine – I’d also read 11ac as ‘quill’, so needed blog to clarify that.
  11. 24 mins. I got through most of it quickly but it then took an age to get SVERIGE and GREEDINESS. I always thought indirect anagrams were a no-no, including partial ones, and surely substituting “eg” for “for example” to complete the anagram fodder counts as a partial one.
  12. I was advised yesterday, via this blog, to remember the books of the bible. So 1d slipped in and things went smoothly until the SE. Thankfully my elder brother’s mania for stamps helped me (and postcards and postmarks etc etc – very odd). So completed in just under 40 mins. Thanks V for the full parsing. I didn’t spot the nina and, frankly, I’m glad I didn’t.
  13. Beaten by SHELTIE and S_E_I_E, which I’d never heard of. Took 55:53 to get that far. Not one of my best efforts. Definitely on the trickier end of the Snitch scale. Didn’t see how EMPOWER worked. A bit of a slog which I didn’t really enjoy, having got one wrong in each of the Concise and QC today. I think I’ll go and lie down in a darkened room. Thanks setter and Verlaine.
  14. Only EZRA and JOAN OF ARC fell readily into place with the rest needing some arduous unpicking.

    DNF in the hour with nine still unsolved. Looking above, at least four of those would probably not have come to me however long I carried on.

    Thanks anyway for the blog. Hopefully tomorrow’s jumbo will bring some light relief.

  16. Quick to nearly-finish then slow to get the last few, 1a, 2d, 4d, and had the wrong anagrist for 12d at first. 35 minutes. SVERIGE was easy as I’ve been often on biz and on holiday. And did once collect stamps. Had SHELTIE for 27a but couldn’t see why so then did a swee(p) for other ideas.
  18. 60 mins of brain-warping which left me with 2 unfilled holes which had to be filled by resorting to my Scrabble app – RETROFIT and CAUGHT. On submission, like many others apparently I failed with SHELTIE. Wasn’t sure about TIDIEST for largest, but I guess I have to accept it.
  19. About 20 minutes but I’m lodging an objection about the indirect anagram within the “rather clever &Lit” at 12d. I didn’t imagine for one moment that “for example” would indicate that the letters E and G had to be bunged into the anagram so I went, with pretty much zero confidence, for the momble WREEDINESS, which at least fitted what the anagram fodder should have been.

    The reference to Neil Armstrong was timely as last night I went to see the popular beat combo Public Service Broadcasting, who of course played the excellent Go!: if you like moon landings and good music, you’ll love it.

  20. I messed up the SE corner. I put TALL (stall for stop, without its first letter). I was a little suspicious since massive doesn’t really mean tall, but it seemed close enough. But that mean I couldn’t get TIDIEST. I was half on the right track for SVERIGE too, wondering how it could be “swedish”. Oh well. Friday still seems to be the new friday.
      1. I can see the STRONG/STABLE thing but what has FIELD of WHEAT got to do with anything? Might as well have said TIDIEST BALLERINA.
        1. When asked if she had ever done anything wicked – (a tricky question) – our leader confessed she had once walked through a field of wheat.
  22. My brain is definitely on daylight saving already, since this one took me thirty-five minutes and should have been quicker.
  23. Double dodgy homophone: apart from “court” also “quart” which at 2 pints is also (sometimes – also up to 4.5 pints) a yard (of ale)
  24. St John’s is also the capital of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. I didn’t know about Antigua.
  25. I found this a relatively smooth solve but my strong and stable start to negotiating a strong and stable exit to this crossword (crexit) was undermined by the Jean-Claude Juncker in the ointment, 20dn, where despite knowing Sverige from being too lazy to turn the DVD off when the film has finished and seeing the copyright warning in numerous languages, I unaccountably bunged in Swedige. Enjoyed it nonetheless. I also raised an eyebrow at the indirect anagram at 12dn, the clue was perfectly solvable of course but it did take me a while to get there because I did not expect to throw into the anagrist letters not actually present.
  26. Sorry to be so late today. Not easy again, say 40 minutes, ending with SVERIGE which to me in the US is obscure, and only vaguely remembered as a word. The wordplay helped. GREEDINESS just before that. The rest didn’t present any overwhelming problem today, but took a while nonetheless. Regards.

    Edited at 2017-10-20 09:28 pm (UTC)

  27. 26:56. By the time I got to this yesterday I was too knackered to finish it, so I paused it. The new website doesn’t keep the clock running for leaderboard purposes, unlike the old one.
    I didn’t like this puzzle at all. There was some clever stuff in it but for me too many clues that were difficult only by dint of obscurity, breaking the rules or using non-commonplace foreign words.
    I can’t seen anything remotely dodgy about the homophone in 15ac though.

    Edited at 2017-10-21 11:26 am (UTC)

  28. The crossword number in the title is wrong, so my usual google search ‘times 26861’ only yielded inferior offerings.
    Martin from Bonn

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