Times 26977 – Over the Tree-tops I Float Thee a Song

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Not much to say about this puzzle, with its multiple use of charades (A + B type clues). It was so straightforward that my time of 18:41 may not see me safely Snitchified. Nonetheless, I thought it was a pleasant little puzzle, and just what the doctor ordered after Friday’s tricky one and Sunday’s Deano Special.

Some people may be familiar with Walt Whitman’s poem ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d’, others again with the better known works of Gustav Holst (The Planets Suite and ‘I vow to thee my country’ – that’s a joke, before the fly-by posters level their sights on me). But many, I think, will be in the position that I was in until a month ago, before I started rehearsing a choral piece called ‘Ode to death’. After the Great War, Holst took the the last section of Whitman’s poem, which operated at one level as an elegy to those who died in the American Civil War, as well as to Abraham Lincoln, and set it to hauntingly beautiful music to mourn friends who were killed in that senseless conflict.

I hope I may be forgiven this indulgence…

ACROSS

1 Indignant sons joined forces (7,2)
STEAMED UP – S + TEAMED UP
6 Current breaking up fish grounds (5)
BASIS – I in BASS
9 Soul singer needing backing for a title (7)
BARONET – BA + TENOR reversed; BA is the soul in Egyptian mythology, represented as a bird with a human head
10 A seven days period of conflict with daughter being difficult (7)
AWKWARD – A + WK + WAR + D
11 Old magistrate always backed imprisoning English (5)
REEVE – E in EVER reversed for the Praetor Cruciverbalis
12 Control what teacher does in time off work (9)
RESTRAINT – TRAIN in REST
14 Flirts regularly — that’s socially acceptable (3)
FIT – F[l]I[r]T[s]
15 Instrument Vince plays with three learners and old, old, Oscar (11)
VIOLONCELLO – anagram* of VINCE + LLL + OOO; The spelling with one more O than you might expect is because the French word for ‘violin’ is adopted
17 Repent a plot involving corrupt team member (6,5)
ROTTEN APPLE – REPENT A PLOT*
19 Short cut to get fuel (3)
GAS – GAS[h]
20 Advocate of support unit not being left empty (9)
PROPONENT – PROP + ONE + N[o]T
22 Bent half of a German sausage (5)
KNACK – KNACK[wurst], being a type of German sausage. They have many, often curried
24 Rich not working after Spring? (4-3)
WELL-OFF – WELL + OFF
26 First piece of writing, one I found in Latin needing going over (7)
INITIAL – I (‘one’) + I (‘I’) in LATIN reversed
27 Frost, perhaps, recited poem (5)
RHYME – sounds like ‘rime’, of which there has been plenty in the UK recently
28 Most appropriate deposit just south of the Thames in London? (5-4)
RIGHT-BANK – RIGHT + BANK; ‘most appropriate’, as in ‘she was the right man for the job’

DOWN

1 One who cries half-heartedly without having a drink (5)
SOBER – SOB[b]ER
2 Serious musical ability — something birds build up (7)
EARNEST – EAR + NEST
3 Crew works to get in position (9)
MANOEUVRE – MAN (as a verb) + OEUVRE
4 Decline to discourage start of Irish pontificate (11)
DETERIORATE – DETER + I + ORATE
5 A lot of fruit and some veg (3)
PEA – PEA[r]
6 Able follower once — one generating turnover, perhaps (5)
BAKER – Before the English International Phonetic Alphabet was adopted in 1955, there were a number of pretenders, including the US Navy Radio Alphabet, which commenced Able Baker. Why is it that M&S no sooner introduce their wonderful fresh cream apple turnovers to Hong Kong than they never appear on the shelves again?
7 Sales pitch about a new breed of dog (7)
SPANIEL – A + N in SPIEL
8 Revolutionary is outside fomenting unrest (9)
SEDITIOUS – IS OUTSIDE*; Hong Kongers are so given to this apparently that the CCP claim they have no option but to introduce an anti-sedition law gagging journalists, controlling teachers and curtailing freedom of speech
13 In the event, photo needs something done on greens (4-7)
SHOT-PUTTING – SHOT + PUTTING
14 A lot of artillery being used to sack country (9)
FIREPOWER – FIRE + POWER; the charades just keep on coming…
16 Reminder of reported nickname of Prague piano virtuoso? (9)
CHECKLIST – sounds like Czech Liszt
18 Old city contains lines with key mode of transport (7)
TROLLEY – LL + E in TROY
19 Thickened water ice using egg in a mixture of agar (7)
GRANITA – NIT (a louse, or louse egg) in AGAR*; tricky if, like me, you’re only vaguely familiar with the beverage
21 Australia has a certain invigorating air (5)
OZONE – OZ + ONE
23 Cut cabbage the nation over for rich peasant (5)
KULAK – KAL[e] + UK reversed
25 Reduced cost of travel over large distances (3)
FAR – FAR[e]

74 comments on “Times 26977 – Over the Tree-tops I Float Thee a Song”

  1. Technical DNF for me as I needed aids for the unknown KULAK. Otherwise I was done in 25 minutes despite not understanding several bits of wordplay. Namely BA, able/BAKER. I also never heard of the RIGHT-BANK of the Thames in London, only North and South, though of course Paris has a left bank.
    1. A quick google suggests this is the first outing for KULAK since TftT began – never even in a Mephisto!

      Also, googling more generally, I found very few examples of RIGHT-BANK with reference to the south side of the Thames. The main one was in the Wiki article on Geography of London which has sections headed ‘Left bank tributaries’ and ‘Right-bank tributaries’ but the presence of a hyphen in one but not in the other doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Our Shanghai correspondent may well be correct about ‘left’ and ‘right’ being used by rowers on the Thames, but my only knowledge of that subject is the Uuiversity Boat Race where in the days when I took and interest, the commentators only spoke of the Surrey side and the Middlesex side.

      Edited at 2018-03-05 06:09 am (UTC)

    2. The RIGHT BANK clue has a question mark, which I think covers the fact that people don’t really say this.
      2. I’m not convinced that a question mark necessarily excuses an answer that’s something people don’t really say. It may work for ‘Uxbridge English Dictionary’-type clues because they’re tongue-in-cheek and mildy amusing, but RIGHT-BANK? Really?
        1. To be more precise I should have said that people don’t say this about the Thames. They do say it about the Seine in Paris, and this clue is just extending that principle in a logical way to London.
          1. Or indeed to any river flowing eastwards such as the Tees, as the south side will be the right bank, without implying it is ever called that, I think. But then as tidal rivers both the Thames and Tees also flow westwards when presumably the south side might be called the left bank.
            1. Indeed: so the question mark is perhaps covering a bit of DBEishness as well.
              Tide or not, the general direction of travel is to the sea so I think it’s clear enough which is right and which is left!
            2. As far as I know, “downstream” is always towards the sea and left/right banks are determined accordingly. What you’re describing is an upstream flood tide, but the right bank is still the right bank.

              The expression does seem more common in France than here – a lot of the Loire and Bordeaux wine regions are referred to as left or right bank.

  2. The ‘tight-fists’ 23dn was a write-in.

    As was most of this Monday MOR. 28 mins on the clock.

    FOI 10ac AWKWARD
    LOI 2dn EARNEST
    COD 23dn KULAK
    WOD VIOLONCELLO

    Isn’t 28ac RIGHT BANK a rowing term used on the Thames?

  3. Able, Baker, Charlie was as far as I ever got; but then I never needed to get even that far. I thought of GRANITA, but couldn’t see how combining EGG+AGAR would get that result; the penny finally dropped. As did the sausage A not O; I had the same problem as Vinyl.
  4. Only one ‘son’ in 1ac as far as I can see. No problem with ‘able’, ‘Baker’ etc although I was brung up on the modern NATO alphabet, Alpha,Bravo etc. I nearly fell for the biff trap in 15ac with violIncello but that would have made for very interesting reading in 13d!!
    Ulaca’s comment about Dean’s Sunday Special resonated with me. That puzzle took me 3 sessions and 2hrs 37mins of solving time, much of it spent in the NE corner. I didn’t finish it until gone 1130pm Eng-er-land time/1230pm NZ time. Time to walk the doggies!

    Edited at 2018-03-05 04:14 am (UTC)

    2. Yes, regarding yesterday Ulaca clearly has a typo – he meant “Diablo Special” but typed “Deano Special”.
  5. 30 mins with croissant and Lime&Gin marmalade. Hoorah.
    Should have been quicker – but I’m up early today, braving a long drive from Edinburgh.
    Sort of remembered Ba – but only from crosswords.
    Minor Eyebrow Raise (MER) at country=power.
    Mostly I liked: Able Baker.
    Thanks setter and Ulaca.
  6. Gustav Holst was my grandmother’s music teacher, that’s my claim to fame for this morning, or will have to be once my sub-5-minute time is left in the dust by the actual pros. The only possible hiccup would have been uncertainty about the 5th letter of VIOLONCELLO but fortunately the crossers resolved that burning question for me.
    1. A sub-4 by mohn, perhaps? I had great hopes for K on this one, but he seems to have shot his bolt.
      1. Mohn does seem to have cracked the Times 15×15… I’m hoping he can also crack a Crossword Championship some year soon, if only in the name of a bit of variety!
    2. Holst’s secretary Dulcie Nutting later ran a choral class at Morley College my wife attended. Lesser claim to fame, admittedly; but I did once run on the Iffley Road track, some twenty years after Roger Bannister circled it somewhat faster.
      1. I think if I’d started running at the same time as Roger Bannister, I might well have finished at the same time as your good self!
  7. 10:21 … easy, but only 60% peasy.

    KULAK unknown but sounded right (I’m assuming the Russians have about 100 different words for peasant). I always thought it was a knockwurst, rather than a knack—, but it had to be so. Anyone who watched last night’s Endeavour will recall a rather peculiar photograph of two German spies posing with a stein of beer in one hand, a knockwurst in the other.

    I can recite a fair bit of Frost, mainly as a result of reading Robert B Parker. One of those high-thru-low-brow things, like the Ninja Turtles who popped up here recently

    Thanks, ulaca and setter

    1. I got KULAK immediately, remembered from studying Soviet history 30-odd years ago. Funny how even an appalling memory like mine retains the occasional nugget for no obvious reason.
        1. The reason I remembered KULAK was because when I first read the word, not that long ago, I thought it was an alternative trans-literation of GULAG – which it ain’t! No crossers req’d.

          Molotov – Mazel tof!

    2. You should have been a detective, S. Inspector Knocker of the Yard, as Private Eye could have described you. I’m still trying to work out quite how and why the hotel key got into the fish tank. I should concentrate more.
      1. Ah, yes, the hotel key in the fish tank. I’d like to say ‘elementary’ but … We know the other chap who tried to get into the factory got chased out, and presumably dropped his key, but why arch villains a) have fish tanks, and b) feel the need to keep clues in them, I’m not so sure.
  8. 9:57, but with a silly typo. I’m doing that a lot at the moment.
    I managed to Frenchify 15C in the wrong places with VIOLINCELLE, but the crossing answers put me right quickly.
    I never figured out what the sausage was so knock/knack didn’t bother me.
  9. DNF for me. Raced through the first three quarters but then slowed down a lot, finally losing the will to live at 58 minutes and coming here with 22a unfinished. Couldn’t see “bent” for “knack” (still can’t, really, but I’m sure the dictionary does…) and didn’t know the sausage.

    I think 13d held me up the longest of the clues I finished, but then I’ve never really been sporty, so a sport definition with sports wordplay is never my cup of tea. Not having 17a and 20a until late didn’t help with that one, as I kept on trying to cram in “pic” for “photo” or come up with a new type of bowling..

    Edited at 2018-03-05 07:46 am (UTC)

    1. You might have a bent for something which means you have an aptitude for it and by extension perhaps a knack for it.

      Edited at 2018-03-05 08:19 am (UTC)

      1. Yes, I’m sure that’s how it was intended. I suppose up until this point they were quite separate meanings for me, with a bent being something I was enthusiastic about and a knack being something I was good at. I can see the through line now, but without knowing the sausage…

        I suppose “see a K, try an N” might be a good new rule to add to my list of “why can’t I get this one?” tricks. But in this case I’d spent so long being off the wavelength with the last 20% of the puzzle I really did just want to get it over with.

  10. Cannot think why this took me so long on reflection. It may be because I got up at 0430 to get back home from a snowy weekend in Devon.
  11. Would have been 9.37 but for the dreaded pink square – probably hurried my Czech Liszt.
    Pity really, as I was feeling really smug about passing the spelling tests at MANOOVER, KNA/OCK and VIOLI/ONCELLO. Martin P’s comment on the impact of getting the cello wrong on 13d made me giggle. I think that event was outlawed after a fan was hit.
    I merely shrugged at London’s RIGHT-BANK. If it is ever used, it does cover that fact that there are bits of it that are not actually south of the river: at Richmond, for example, the right side is actually NE of the river.
    Many thanks for the blog U, making the crossword more interesting than it might otherwise have been. Best of luck with the Holst.
    1. Thank you – we actually performed it to a near full house on Saturday. Okay, tickets were free, but they still turned up.
    2. Waterways are resistant to this sort of classification by flowing in unexpected ways. One of my favourite quiz questions asks which direction you’d travel if you were using the Panama Canal to go from Atlantic to Pacific, to which the answer is a somewhat unintuitive south-east…
      1. No offence but that’s so unintuitive I’ve just checked on Google maps! Surprised I haven’t heard that before.
        1. No offence taken (the first time I heard it, our team similarly thought “that can’t be right, this fool of a quizmaster has copied it out wrong or got it off some fact-free part of the internet” until we were able to look at a map…)
  12. A similar experience to others in that I was glad of the crosser giving VIOLONCELLO when it sounded wrong and I’ve never heard of RIGHT BANK being used in reference to the Thames.

    COD to MANOEUVRE for such a nice concise surface.

  13. 28 minutes on this, feeling dense this morning. LOI KNACK, surprisingly not knowing the German sausage and ‘bent’ meaning only seen when the unknown KALUK constructed. Otherwise, I can’t see what held me up, apart from putting in violincello until SHOTPUTTING hit me. My wife is a Cockney who won’t go south of the river so it certainly isn’t the RIGHT BANK for her. My first job in London was in Southwark so I don’t share her inhibitions. Thank you U and setter.
    1. As a naturalised South-of-the-riverer, I would have stern words to say to your wife! Surely the likes of the South Bank, Greenwich, Richmond, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs and the annual Times Crossword Championships are at least as good as anything the frosty desolation north of Old Father Thames has to offer…
      1. I had bedsits in Tooting and Streatham, V. Based at Bankside, we used to drink at the Anchor. Or the wine bar in St Thomas Street. I think it was called the Loose Vine. You could get a huge piece of Gala Pie and wash it down with a bottle of Bulls Blood there. We knew how to live. This is the first time for forty years I’ve found something good to say about both the seventies and south of the river!
  14. 25’42. Also felt dense, esp. in SE. Bit of a left curve on some of these clues, if that’s the term for the unexpected angle. Liked the Irish pontificate.
    1. A reasonably fine time, but it sure makes dull fare for the rest of us! Go on you Villain, add a little interest to this blog, other than numbers!!

      Edited at 2018-03-05 01:11 pm (UTC)

  16. 12 mins. This is another Monday puzzle that I feel I should have solved a little quicker but I was slow to see the wordplay for a few answers and I didn’t want to biff. Like several others I finished in the SE with GRANITA my LOI after KNACK/KULAK.
  17. Twenty-eight minutes, but with “kulok” at 23d. I didn’t even consider “kale”, and the closest I could get was “cole” which, potentially, might be spelled “kole”, except that it isn’t.
  18. A pleasant Monday-ish puzzle. As seems popular, no delays here until the SE corner, where I dredged up the peasant, presumably from some long-ago study of Russian history, shrugged at the right-bank (you never get cabbies refusing to go right of the river, do you), and managed to avoid the Tourette’s like urge to write in KRAUT, which would obviously have been wrong for so many reasons…
  19. 50m DNF, grinding to a halt in the SE corner, with the unknown peasant, not equating KNACK with either sausage or bent, not remembering nit for egg and….oh well you get the picture. No doubt all fair but I had VIOLIN… for a while and that slowed me up anyway until the event looked rather unlikely to say the least. Shades of Blaster Bates perhaps. The rest of the puzzle went in fairly smoothly though I doubt I would have linked invigorating air and Ozone (in fact I’m not sure what image all the coverage of the damaged ozone layer has left in my brain, but clearly not that anyway). But the Australia reference didn’t leave much doubt about the answer. Reading the blog I was also bemused by the cabbage/kale connection. Looking deeper into it I see it would be as valid to define Brussels sprout and cauliflower as ‘cabbage’ which doesn’t work in my gardening head. They are though all brassicas I guess and that must be enough of a link. Thanks for the blog, which cleared up all of these muddles. Disappointed of Darlington today.

    Edited at 2018-03-05 12:06 pm (UTC)

  20. Forget right and left, the Thames has only the posh (think boat race) Surrey and Middlesex sides. For those like me fortunate enough to be born south of the river, anything the other side was ‘over the water’. Oddly, this included Ipswich where I went to school.

    15′, with one typo as having to do it online. Thanks ulaca and setter.

    Edited at 2018-03-05 12:16 pm (UTC)

  21. Indeed, that was a relief after the rack-stretching administered by Anax yesterday. My only hold-ups were the VIOLONCELLO spelling – like Martin I saw that SHOT-PUTTING settled that laughably clearly – and the sound of many sirens stopping outside our apartment building which I had to go and look out of the window at. No idea what was going on. 14.24
    1. Funnily enough I didn’t find yesterday’s Anax as hard as expected from the blog comments on last week’s puzzle. I did think the foreign language, without indication, clue a bit naughty though.

      Edited at 2018-03-05 01:19 pm (UTC)

  22. An easy one… except that I didn’t know KULAK and instead took a shot at KULEK – in honesty, I didn’t know that kale was a type of cabbage, but I thought vaguely that kelp might be. Oh dear. 6m 02s with that error.

    I wasn’t able to parse the ‘Able follower’ part of BAKER, and have never heard of a knackwurst, but they were pretty clear from definitions and checking letters.

  23. Like Kevin and Vinyl and others, I was delayed by KNOCK, but seeing GRANITA eventually put me right. I had KALKU at 23d until RIGHT BANK caused a rethink and I applied “over” to the whole of the clue. Luckily I’d solved 13 down before I tried to install the instrument so I avoided describing my efforts on the golf course. An enjoyable 26:58. Thanks setter and U.
  24. 22 minutes. LOI was 1 AC., since ‘swelded up’ threw me a bit. Didn’t know ‘ba’, but it worked.
  25. More of a steady slog than a dash through for a Monday puzzle. On submission, I discovered that I hadn’t filled in FIREPOWER fully, being a bit dubious about country = power, but no-one seems to have commented so I guess its OK.
  27. DNF 17.30

    I must improve my knowledge of German cuisine. I gave up on 22A which totally floored me – didn’t think of “bent” in the correct context, and biffed KRANK through sheer impatience.

    LOI 3D as a result of struggling with 1A/1D when I shouldn’t have had to.

    COD 6D – we still have BAKER among our radio call signs since we have more than 26 cabs.

  28. Thanks for the blog. I found this fairly average and finished accordingly in 48:12 without resorting to aids.

    DNK KULAK or VIOLONCELLO but the wordplay was generous in both cases. Biffed BAKER but on reflection I know about the obsolete phonetics.

    COD 15a just for the clever reference to three Ls and three Os.

  29. I did not spend much time on Dean’s puzzle yesterday so was fresh for this challenge. Most of it went in quite easily. Like others I had to correct my Violincello but I ended up getting stuck on two clues -the sausage and the peasant (sounds like a candidate for best foreign language film at The Oscars).
    I thought I knew my Wursts but nothing came to mind except Kraut (= German and is half of Sauerkraut which means cabbage (link to 23d? ; and maybe the setter’s German wasn’t up to it? …).
    That led to Toluk for the peasant. Noluk there.
    David

  30. I’m feeling fairly chuffed with myself as this was my first completed 15×15, although a number of clues were unparsed. The SE nearly caused me to give up until I remembered that kale was a type of cabbage and an alphabet trawl led to LOI, 22a.
    Thanks for the blog
    1. I thought some of the vocab in this puzzle quite tricky so congratulations and well done on your first completion!
  31. Late in the day, having migrated from Rutland to Oxfordshire now the snows are melting. 14 minutes with the guessed peasant and the horrible sausage LOI. The rest was Monday stuff.
  32. 42 minutes, the BA in BARONET the only real unknown, and after I decided that SPIC-PUTTING sounded extremely unlikely (after filling in my next-to-LOI RESTRAINT), I too corrected the spelling of VIOLINCELLO (carefully counting the Is and Os in the anagram) and finally completed the puzzle.

    Edited at 2018-03-05 07:12 pm (UTC)

  33. 25:31 mostly plain sailing but dithered a bit over the vaguely remembered Kulak, the right-bank and the half a German sausage. Knockwurst more familiar than knackwurst as the go to comedy sausage for Allo Allo characters to stuff with forged paintings or dynamite and then hide down trousers causing them to walk in comically ginger fashion.
  34. Only two days, which, unfortunately, is great for me. Surprisingly, I did know KULAK but never heard of GRANITA and still don’t understand RIGHT BANK. But what’s bugging me is why ‘i’ means CURRENT in 6ac. Can anyone help? I know it’s going to be obvious.
    1. It’s not that obvious if you don’t know it! In physics and electronics, electrical current is typically represented in equations as ‘i’, e.g. in Ohm’s Law: v=ir.
    2. PS: well done on finishing, and remember GRANITA. Likely to come up again, that one.
      1. Of course! I remember that from my physics lessons now. That’s another code to add to the list. Thank you very much for that kind reply.

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