Times 26983 – “Trains it down on the quarter past…..

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Time: 41 minutes
Music: Stan Getz, Sweet Rain

Well, I thought this was going to be a quick one.   I started off at a gallop so to speak, and put in the whole NW corner with scarcely a pause.   I filled in a few more, opened up a new front at the bottom, and everything was rolling.   Then I began to slow down, and became completely stuck.   There were things I didn’t know, and words that mean entirely differet things in the UK and the US.   Worst of all, my printout had cut off the clue for 27, and I had written it in by hand leaving out a crucial word.

My difficulties had to be tackled one by one, and eventually yielded.  Some of the clues were quite clever, and required close analysis.   The clues for ‘Flaubert’, ‘evocative’, ‘Senna’, and ‘chargehand’ were particularly good, although others may have their own favorites.   I will point out the UK/US problems as I eludicate the individual clues.

Across
1 Rush to have surgery on neck (6)
GALLOP – GALL + OP.  ‘Gall’ = ‘neck’ = ‘effrontery’, but ‘neck’ is UK-centric.
5 Food rating badly received (8)
GRILLADE – GR(ILL)ADE, where I nearly put the momble ‘guillide’.
9 Caught teacher of religion and head showing ill-temper (10)
CRABBINESS – C + RABBI + NESS, a starter clue.
10 What’s very popular with oenophiles, principally? (4)
VINO – V + IN + O[eniphiles]
11 Writer’s problem with tyre: taxi firm called in (8)
FLAUBERT – FLA(UBER)T, showing the Times is keeping up with the times.
12 What might have enabled drivers to communicate, seeing road junction? (6)
CARFAX – Double definition, one jocular.  However, while in the UK ‘carfax’ is a road junction in Oxford, in the US it is a company that sells you a report on the history of the used car you are considering for purchase.
13 Shop soiled? Not so, the reverse (4)
DELI – [so]ILED backwards.
15 Woman’s not affected by European Union till now (8)
HEREUNTO – HER + EU + anagram of NOT.
18 Promise man bread with this starter (8)
COVENANT – COVE + NAN + T[his].   If you biffed ‘forecast’ with those crossers, you should have been forced to reconsider by the cryptic.
19 Wild animal centre being spoken of (4)
HART – Sounds like HEART
21 Moroccan dish with name in English (6)
TAGINE – TAG + IN + E, more correctly spelt ‘tajine’, but then the cryptic wouldn’t work.
23 Start to swot a month before exam — that’s most clever (8)
SMARTEST – S[wot] + MAR + TEST.
25 Early showings of Falling In Love: mediocre movie (4)
FILM – F[alling] I[n] L[ove], M[ediocre]
26 Workman indicted after pinching short length of material (10)
CHARGEHAND – CHARGE(HAN[k])D,  Well, I think it’s ‘hank’, if ‘material’ can be stretched to include yarn and twine.
27 We’re told much-loved explorer does appear here (4,4)
DEER PARK – Sounds like DEAR +  (Mungo) PARK.
28 Apartment suitable for the family taken by an Italian (6)
PADUAN – PAD + U  + AN.   Much more difficult if you leave out the ‘an’!

Down
2 Trouble crossing Peru, oddly, some time in spring (5)
APRIL – A(P[e]R[u])IL
3 Socialist mostly concerned with ceremony supporting left (9)
LABOURITE – L + ABOU[t] RITE.   Definition is a little loose, but lets keep politics out of the blog.
4 Strait-laced journalist prepared to be fired (6)
PRIMED – PRIM ED.
5 Swimmer ultimately floundering: where is that wretched rescue vessel? (5,5,5)
GREAT WHITE SHARK – anagram of [flounderin]G WHERE IS THAT + ARK
6 I smoke, holding nose to block out oxygen: that’s dangerous (8)
INSECURE – I(N[o]SE)CURE, where I actually used the cryptic instead of biffing.
7 Offal, small portion with top sliced off (5)
LIVER – [s]LIVER.   I was delayed because I thought ‘small’ would be S.
8 Rovers team agreed to recruit players, right? (9)
DONCASTER – DON(CAST)E + R.
14 Reminiscent of Morse’s last case (9)
EVOCATIVE – [mors}E + VOCATIVE, a brilliantly deceptive clue.
16 Such eggs a Dutch hen abandoned? (9)
UNHATCHED – Anagram of A DUTCH HEN.
17 During holiday, Leonard and I head for ancient Spanish city (8)
VALENCIA – VA(LEN)C + I + A[ncient], a bit of lift and separate.
20 Suffering setback, boxer facing arrest and jail (4,2)
BANG UP – PUG + NAB upside down.
22 Turkish city is on lake, we’re told (5)
IZMIR – sounds like IS + MERE.  I was caught out by this in the past, but unlike some I seem to still be able to pick things up.   Don’t hold me to that!
24 Former driver about to leave Riviera town, heading north (5)
SENNA – [c]ANNES upside-down, another fellow who has come up before.

63 comments on “Times 26983 – “Trains it down on the quarter past…..”

  1. 22 minutes, so pretty much par for a Monday. Embarrassingly for someone who studied there, CARFAX was my last in.

    Enjoyable foreign fare today, I thought, with TAGINE unknown but eminently gettable.

  2. I don’t know why I typed in ‘Ismir’, or why, having typed it left it that way. One more in a series of stupidities that have caused me to plummet in both leaderboards. I was surprised to see Uber (someone in the forum quarelling with ‘taxi firm’, preferring ‘Ponzi scheme’). Biffed DONCASTER, and GREAT WHITE SHARK on the basis of ARK. Barely remembered SENNA, NECK, and CARFAX (which I learned for some reason ages ago derives from ‘carrefour’). Jon, you’ve got a typo at TAGINE (I also wondered about the spelling): TAG+ etc.
  3. 45 min. Every time my football club gets relegated I learn a little more the names and locations of Championship towns. But I don’t think Doncaster has ever been up when we were down, so I needed all the crossers and a little luck. On the other hand, due to past requirements for late-night greasy food (the eponymus chippie, in my view, is possibly a more important landmark than the tower) I did know Carfax. And until I got the shark, I was quite happy with Beer Hall as the explorer’s current location; the explorer might have been, too. A nice Monday puzzle.
    Vinyl, you have a T for G typo at both 20 and 21.
  4. Never seen the tagine spelling (has it been in the Times crossword?) so Tajine it was, which is eminently acceptable IMHO. Taj meets the Times’ criteria for a name: a few random letters, pronounceable, and at least one exists in real life – Taj Burrow was nearly world surfing champ a while back. If it were the finals I’d be protesting.
    Otherwise carfax, Flaubert and laourite were slow; Doncaster and Izmir known, luckily.
    1. I’ve only seen the spelling with a “g.” Both times I’ve had it. But I should really have had it more often, as this is the one I gave up on, as I had a wrong checker after guessing a wrong name for a Turkish city.

      Edited at 2018-03-12 08:47 pm (UTC)

  5. Vinyl1, you have a typo in the explanation at 27ac, ‘sounds like DEER’ for ‘sounds like “dear”‘.

    I only know the TAGINE spelling of the word and that’s the one preferred by all the usual sources.

    CARFAX doesn’t have to be the one in Oxford; it’s a fourway junction where principle roads in the centre of a city meet. There’s one in Bath, for example. However Oxford uniquely (I believe) has The High, which has come up before and caught people out who never lived or went to youknee there.

    I like to work tidily when solving, within reason, so it’s very rarely that I reach a stage as I did today where I have most of the grid complete but still with two or three gaps in every quarter. I filled them in gradually but ended up with two bunged in when I had passed my boredom threshhold, both of which turned out to be incorrect. There was some excuse for ISMER instead of IZMIR because I was only vaguely aware of its existence as a city and simply didn’t know the spelling. At 19 I was caught between HARE and HERD and opted for the latter on an assumption that it was some sort of play on “heard” (spoken of) which on reflection was silly, and I should have checked for more animal related options to fit the checkers.

    As a footnote: IZMIR came up in puzzle 26143 in July 2015 clued as:
    Port is without additives, from what we hear (5)

    This was also blogged by Vinyl1 who wrote: Sounds like “is mere”. Not so difficult if you have heard of this port AND know how to spell it; otherwise, impossible.

    Quite! My excuse for not remembering it is that I was apparently absent that day which is a puzzle in itself.

    Edited at 2018-03-12 07:40 am (UTC)

    1. IZMIR didn’t catch me out in July 2015 because I had fallen into exactly the same trap in May 2014 (25783) and remembered it. Today I remembered being caught out by it in the past but still wasn’t sure whether S or Z was the trap. I got it right in the end.

      Edited at 2018-03-12 08:56 am (UTC)

      1. Ah, I missed the 2014 appearance when googling. I see I didn;t know it then either. It came up once before in 2009 when I posted without commenting on it so I assume it didn’t give me a problem on that occasion.

        Edited at 2018-03-12 09:09 am (UTC)

      2. I remembered you being caught out by it in 2014, I think! Might have been doing this blogging gig a bit too long…
    2. thanks for the carfax expansion. annoying to think it’s only for the Oxford types
  6. 21ac TAGINE – I have only known it with a G and like marmite it is the actual dish (crock) itself that has become synonymous with its contents.
    50 minutes for a Monday with my
    COD 11ac FLAUBERT (UBER were kicked-out of Shanghai last year!)I also like 27ac DEER PARK

    FOI 2dn APRIL

    LOI 5ac GRILLADE

    WOD 15ac HEREUNTO – very James I

    I thought 26ac CHARGEHAND was a poorish clue, sorry Lord Vinyl

    And 8dn Doncaster Rovers are a bastion of the middle divisions but then The Times tends to a bit UK centric – except when Geoffrey Dawson was editor!

    Edited at 2018-03-12 06:16 am (UTC)

  7. Too much in the way of unknowns for me today. Managed to come up with the GRILLADE, the football team, the road junction, the CHARGEHAND and the Italian, but was finally left staring at the Turkish city until I gave up at about 55 minutes. Experiencing some 9a after what felt more like a GK test than a crossword. Ah well. Sure I’d have been perfectly happy if I’d happened to know the GK…
  8. 16:10 … and a bit amazed when CARFAX came back correct. I worked in Oxford for a while but don’t remember hearing it then, or at any other time. Dictionaries suggest it comes straight from the Latin quadrifurcus (how very Oxford!), from which carrefour also derives.

    I remembered misspelling IZMIR last time it came up and managed to put a Z in it this time.

    Quite a testing Monday, this one, and very satisfying. COD to FLAUBERT, even if ‘real’ taxi drivers would be appalled at the definition of the UBER bit

  9. Nice crossword though surely a bit harder than your usual Monday.
    At 26ac it is not necessary to think of yarn or twine since “hank” is a cloth measure as well. ODE: “measurement of the length per unit mass of cloth or yarn, which varies according to the type being measured.” Still, it was my second last in, Carfax being the last. Not totally unheard of, but I went to Cambridge, which doesn’t have one. And fax machines are so 80s, aren’t they?
    1. My bank still insists on fax communication for payment instructions, which is baffling and infuriating to me. I can never find a fax machine that I can get to work so I end up just sending the forms in the post!
  10. Uber would no doubt object to ‘taxi firm’ too. It’s not often you get a definition that is the subject of current litigation!
  11. 11:35, with a couple of minutes at the end resisting the temptation to bung in FORECAST. Like Paul, CARFAX at least as familiar from the chippie as from the place itself.
    My first instinct was to put TAJINE but I knew the other spelling and I would have said it’s more common so I don’t know why the J version occurred to me first.
    3dn is arguably a bit loose but that’s generally true of political terms like ‘socialist’. None more so than ‘neoliberal’, a word that you’re now only allowed to use in the context of a discussion about what it means.
    1. We use the word quite freely around The Nation. When I explained a few terms recently to my brother, who quite recently had a political awakening because of the public employees’ strike in our home state of West Virginia (where his wife and daughter both teach in public school), I said it means pretty much the same thing as “libéral” on the Continent.
  12. 34 minutes, so a bit trickier than sometimes on Monday. Similarly to Ulaca, LOI CARFAX, despite being a New College man. The clue can’t have been evocative enough of Morse. Cracking episode of Endeavour last night though. We’ve lost another great in Doddy, truly a one-off. There’s a great story that he was once playing the Opera House in Blackpool while the Stones were on in the adjacent Winter Gardens. Keith Richards got into a fight there with police called. A note was passed on to Doddy to stay on a bit longer so that his audience didn’t get mixed up with the brawlers. He needed no further invitation. He was still cracking jokes two hours later. COD to FLAUBERT. Thank you V and setter.
    1. I really enjoyed that one, too (as always). Especially taken with the evil schoolboys, and those creepy class register scenes “adsum … adsum …. adsum …. absent”

      Never really saw much Ken Dodd, but anyone who comes up with the word ‘tattifalarious’ has earned his place in history

      1. The schoolroom interaction with the creepy schoolboys was pretty much a direct pinch from the 1971 film ‘Unman, Wittering and Zigo’ in which David Hemmings played the replacement schoolmaster whose predecessor had possibly been murdered by his class.

        Some pupils in ‘Endeavour’ answered what sounded like ‘choir’ when their names were called but I have been unable to find out what this means and its origin. Would you happen to know?

        1. Oh, good catch with the film. I’d never heard of it but a read of the Wiki entry does sound awfully familiar.

          I didn’t notice the ‘choir’ bit while watching. I can’t think of a Latin word that would sound like that. At the risk of being prosaic, is it possible that choristers among the boys would miss registration because of early morning choir practice? Perhaps it was other boys saying that so-and-so was at choir. We need input from the minor public schoolboys in our midst (we definitely have a few!)

          I see Wikipedia credits the film with inspiring Rowan Atkinson’s famous schoolmaster sketch

          1. I qualify in that category myself, but this was a new one on me. Your suggestion sounds possible.
        2. I watched it with the subtitles – as is my wont these days. The word was subtitled as “choir”. I just assumed, as Sotira suggests, that these boys had choir practice. Now you’ve got me wondering…
          1. Thanks. I just rewatched with subtitles and ‘choir’ is definitely what they showed, however one can’t necessarily rely on them as sometimes they are created by a speech-recognition program that doesn’t always ‘hear’ correctly. One of the subs was ‘absum’ which means ‘I am absent’ and wouldn’t make sense – the correct response in that case being ‘ab est’. That was subbed accurately when Morse called the name of the boy who had been expelled. I laughed when the gangster’s son (Nero) responded ‘Here’ and was dubbed an ‘oik’ by the snooty lot.

            Edited at 2018-03-12 08:36 pm (UTC)

            1. I didn’t catch that it was ‘ab est’ for absent, though the sense was clear. I may have to start using subtitles!
              1. I’ll have to look out for all this. I’m still a week behind on Endeavour…
  13. No complaints. A good crossword that beat me. Never heard of CARFAX. Although I knew an eminent QC who had one in his Rolls Royce for use at public inquiries.

    With the H at the start of 15a, I happily biffed HANNUKAH. The woman is HANNAH and “not affected by the EU” is UK.

  14. Drat. Now I remember falling into the ISMIR trap before. Particularly galling because at 10.29 I had entered the home straight in time to see Verlaine limping over the line. The only football match I have attended in the last 30 years was Doncaster v Gillingham in the Rovers’ rather smart new stadium. COD to FLAUBERT too.
  15. I found this slow going, with 1ac blank until near the end (couldn’t see what the clue was on about) and most of the NE resisting effectively.
    5ac, “badly received”, struggled to be a stretch version of GARBLED, which messed everything else up, and I couldn’t believe “Rovers” was looking for a real football team, and Melchester didn’t quite fit. CARFAX eventually emerged from the mists. I’m pleased to learn from Sawbill that the device was a real thing. My last in was the simple HART: I was obsessed with HARE but couldn’t quite make it sound like “centre” (cross hair, perhaps?). 27 minutes, all but, so in my book tough for a Monday. Or indeed any day.
  16. oh well, dnk CARFAX, have driven to Oxford many times……Stopped after 20′. Thanks vinyl and setter.
  17. A bit chewy in parts this one – had to work quite hard at times

    There’s a CARFAX in Winchester, which is not so far from here. Don’t recall ever visiting DONCASTER which I think is better known for its racecourse rather than its football team

  18. DNF in 22 mins. Two wrong. Got stuck on Carfax and went for Carwax. I also didn’t know Izmir and went for Ismer.

    I’ve visited Morocco and eaten Tagines, Doncaster and cheered at St Legers, Padua and marvelled at Giottos. I’ve also visited Oxford many times, but never knowingly come across Carfax before.

  19. Spent time trying to fit “wanderers” into 8d – football being a great lacuna in my gk, but I do remember the old singsong recitation of scores while waiting for something I wanted to watch on tv on a Sunday back when (Wolverhampton I think it was). No trouble with CARFAX after doing some light reading lately with the Joan Paton Walsh Lord Peter Wimsey pastiche. It did remind me of the animatronic fox in the used car ads that Vinyl mentions. Sometime in the last few years I was defeated by SENNA the driver (Formula 1 being another blind spot) – I only knew it for its medicinal properties. 14.53
    1. Can’t have been Wolverhampton, surely? “We’re the one and only Wanderers” is the Boltonian’s most frequent chant, however factually incorrect.
      1. I see that wikipedia claims that Wolverhampton has a “wanderers” FC but clearly you must be right!
  20. I was also off to a quick start, thinking I might be on for record time, but slowed in the second half and finished in 7m 54s… however, put me down as an ISMIR man. The phrasing of the clue leads you down that route, I think, but is just about fair.
    Never heard of CARFAX, PADUAN, CHARGEHAND, GRILLADE or Park, but all were gettable from wordplay, even if CARFAX took a bit of believing.
  21. I found this quite hard, even despite having had the wisdom this bleary morning to wait till my second cup to coffee before starting the puzzle, and took 10 minutes about it. DNK GRILLADE, DONCASTER took longer to fall into place than perhaps it would for any sportsball fan, and I made life hard for myself by confidently biffing in GREAT WHALE SHARK and then wasting lots of time wondering how a COVERALL could be.a promise. But eventually I worked out what was actually going on and was able to enter 18ac as my LOI.

    Would’ve been CARFAX, though as an old Oxonian, once I had CAR_A_ that was clearly the place on the crossroads where we were always buying our greasy chips at around midnight. If Carfax Chippy closed before you got there, you had to put your life into the hands of the men in the kebab vans… never the most appealing prospect!

  22. I hate clues such as Carfax. I know the clue is meant to be amusing but cars and fax machines please! And am I meant to know a road junction in Oxford? I’m just amazed how many do. Otherwise found this straightforward in about 40 mins. Not much fun here though. Thanks blogger.
  23. Mizzpelled Izmir (although I appear to have got it right in 2015), couldn’t think of anything sensible to fit CARFAX (didn’t know the junction).
  24. I thought I’d been positively sluggish, but I discover I was far from alone in finding this tough for a Monday. Having found it difficult to get the HARE out of my mind, I, too, found myself staring at C_R_A_ for quite a long time at the end, despite being yet another with long experience of the chip shop. For those who follow international football, Izmir is reasonably familiar, as it’s the place where Turkey send the national team to play fixtures which they think will benefit from a particularly hostile atmosphere.

    P.S. For those who like that sort of thing, tonight’s Only Connect is…well, I won’t risk spoilers, but the people who took part haven’t forgotten it, I can tell you.

    Edited at 2018-03-12 02:55 pm (UTC)

      1. What the final edit doesn’t show, of course, is the fifteen nerve-shredding minutes it took to set up the tie-breaker, during which the opposition captain and I discussed why the hell we’d volunteered for it…
    3. I’ve just watched Only Connect. Congratulations. I was hoping to see what you looked like but there were 2 Tims. Were you the good looking one or the other one?
      1. We have dealt with there being two Tim H’s in our peer group for over three decades now, so I decided to grow a beard to help people distinguish between us…
  25. Well, I had to look up CARFAX and IZMIR in the end. So a DNF here. I simply did not know those two, at all. Regards.
  26. A major triumph for me today, the first time I’ve finished quicker than Verlaine (8.53).

    FOI 9A, which led me all too quickly to 11A, which made me use foul and abusive language.

    I retired yesterday after 44 years as a taxi driver. That is a TAXI, a vehicle you may flag down on the street for immediate hire, which is generally allowed to use most bus lanes, and has a driver who actually knows how to reach the next street corner, and points beyond, without a postcode for his satnav (which he has probably set to “fastest” rather than “shortest”).

    Uber is a PRIVATE HIRE company (the ponzi scheme reference earlier in this blog is also pretty accurate), and they are an abomination on numerous levels – licenced in areas away from where they actually operate so that enforcement is well nigh impossible, and often driven by unchecked criminals.

    ALL COMPILERS PLEASE NOTE !!!!!

    Right, rant over. I confess to biffing 5D and 24D.

    LOI 12A, though I knew CARFAX through being a life-long bus enthusiast. The erstwhile Southdown bus company in Sussex terminated services in Horsham at “Carfax”. Chambers defines it as the meeting of four roads, and also gives the alternative CARFOX which was new to me.

    COD 27A for using “does” in its cervine sense.

    1. Totally with you on this!
      It’s such a misconception that’s becoming more prevalent these days. Hope the compilers take note. Hope you enjoy your retirement
      Steve #67964

  27. Carfax ungettable for me as a northerner doesn’t exist up here. Or rather there as I’m in France supposedly skiing but in fact stuck indoors with a blizzard outside. Such are the joys…
    1. Usually called ‘Four Lane Ends’ in my native Lancashire. But I did know of Carfax from my Oxford days. Hope the blizzard blows away.
  28. Spent a long time looking at c.r.a., but eventually opted for the correct answer based on wordplay rather than knowledge.
  29. Having got less than halfway through I had to pause the puzzle to attend to attend a friend’s father’s funeral. On returning I was getting nowhere almost as quickly as in the original session, but then things started to come together and after 37 minutes in total I was left with C_R_A_, which I stared at for another 18 or so minutes before dismissing CARFAX as too remote a possibility and looking it up to find it did exist after all! Having thus cheated, I was still undone by the unknown IZMIR, having entered ISMIR. I was held up in the NE by biffing WANDERERS until HART blew it out of the water. Having worked out several other tricky clues from wordplay, it was disappointing to be foiled by two relatively obscure places. Thanks setter and V.
  30. Ah well. At least I’m not alone in being an Ismirist. I have trawled the internet in vain to justify “Ismir”, but alas the closest I got was “Ismira” – one of numerous (but clearly not _that_ numerous) alternative names for the place. But wait! Wikipedia now tells me that “Ismir” can mean “[t]he Turkish city of Izmir”.

    In any event, my time (40min) was nothing to fax home about.

  31. I managed to get most of this with a couple of popular errors: Ismir and Forecast ,unparsed, for want of anything better. Defeated by 6d and 12a where I had the pleasing Portal (drivers in computers, so clever …)
    COD to FLAUBERT, a popular choice it seems.
    David
  32. Phew – I love TAGINE and remember IZMIR and CARFAX from various other places, so this fell into place pretty quickly. I did muse when my 8:30 ish time was the leader on the board at the time, so I must have gotten lucky.
  33. 35:23. I would’ve been comfortably sub-30 mins but for 12ac. Carfax Abbey rang a bell (it’s the property Count Dracula buys in England to facilitate some holiday bloodsucking away from Transylvania). I thought the Abbey might well have been at a crossroads. So after an alphabet trawl which yielded fax as the most promising communication device I bunged it in using that and a possible connection to Carrefour to justify it. At 26ac I wondered whether “hang” might be a length of material and put in chargehand on that possibly erroneous basis. Everything else fell into place quite smoothly.
  34. We lost an hour last week, which you people over there still have!
    It’s hard to wait an extra hour for the puzzle!
  35. 31 mins. Remember the days when I could drink pints all evening in the Old Tom, collect a substantial supper from the Carfax chippy and wander back to Ch Ch all for less than a fiver, and just a few hundred yards on foot. Life was never better 🙂
  36. As a London Cab Driver it grieves me to see The Times referring to the Uber app as a taxi firm. Only licensed taxis can be referred to as taxis.
    Was CARFAX alluding to a homonym of car facts, I’m wondering?

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