Times 27,023: And May There Be No Moaning Of The Bar

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I’m running late this morning but have a quickie. This seemed like a fun puzzle from a setter who was really enjoying themselves – a quick scan down my parsings reminds me of numerous “cryptic defs”, “semi-&lits”, “dodgy homophones”, and “quirky” flourishes. These kind of things are inevitably about getting on the wavelength, and I did pretty well on the top half before running aground for some minutes in the bottom. MAO sprang to mind for the revolutionary but I was expecting him to be the container for CO etc. Eventually deriving the unknown (though visually very familiar) item of clothing from wordplay, this gave me the K I need for the penny to drop in 24ac, which is turn brought 16dn within my reach and then 19dn my LOI. I didn’t time myself but probably a similar difficulty level as yesterday, in the 10-15 minute bracket for me.

Lots of entertaining clues here with most of the surfaces telling a plausible story, but I shall bestow my Clue of the Day upon 16dn because it reminded me of the great Inquisitor barred puzzle CTRL-ALT-DELETE by Ifor from last year, and also of the mighty Poet Laureate himself of course. Once a TLS blogger, always a TLS blogger…

ACROSS
1 Put hands together round middle of stomach and squeeze hard (5)
CLAMP – CLAP [put hands together] round {sto}M{ach}

4 Frank not needed here relieved of job (4-4)
POST-FREE – quirky double def. If the envelope says “post-free” you don’t need to add a stamp or frank, if you are made redundant or relieved of your job you are freed from your post.

8 Ground the chopper, conflict being over (4,3,7)
BURY THE HATCHET – quirky cryptic def, a hatchet being a chopper and burying it involving sticking it in the ground

10 Love speed, joining a modern industry (9)
AEROSPACE – EROS PACE [love | speed], joining A

11 See smoke circling: reason? (5)
LOGIC – LO [see] + CIG reversed [smoke “circling”]

12 English girl said to be a sweet little thing (6)
ECLAIR – E [English] + homophone of CLAIRE or CLARE

14 You’re blocking my view? How should I react? (3,2,3)
LET ME SEE – double def of the highly literal and slightly figurative meanings of LET ME SEE.

17 After terrible weather, no heart to unite in prayer (4,4)
HAIL MARY – After HAIL [terrible weather], MA{r}RY [“no heart to” unite]

18 Good and ancient, this age? (6)
GOLDEN – G + OLDEN [good + ancient], semi-&lit

20 Indicates approval of some clock noises (5)
TICKS – double def

22 Possibly heat burns for her? (9)
SUNBATHER – (HEAT BURNS*) [“possibly”], semi-&lit

24 Rasher to enter this high-level discussion? (5,9)
POWER BREAKFAST – cryptic def, rasher indicating here a slice of bacon, not “more reckless”.

25 Orchestra, heading off to play in cathedral (8)
CHARTRES – ({o}RCHESTRA*) [“heading off”, “to play”]

26 House train unruly dog, offering reward upfront (5)
TUDOR – T{rain} U{nruly} D{og} O{ffering} R{eward}

DOWN
1 Flyer taking taxi: airline say upset as snow appears (7,5)
CAB [taxi] + B.A. [airline (British Airways)] + E.G. reversed [say “upset”] + WHITE [as snow appears]

2 Republic once sounded drier (5)
AIRER – dodgy, depending on your tastes, homophone of EIRE [republic once, “sounded”]

3 Wrong assumption, discounting knight — here’s a K (9)
POTASSIUM – (ASSUMPTIO{n}*) [“wrong” “discounting (N for) knight”]. K is the chemical symbol for potassium, not to be confused with P for phosphorus, though *I* reckon if would be easier if P was potassium, F was phosphorus, Fl was Fluorine and Flerovium could be quietly undiscovered.

4 Home not yet wonderful? (6)
PREFAB – quirky double def, positing that PREFAB could also stand for pre-fabulous, cue various Beatles and Rutles gags.

5 A lake confined by raised banks that should be higher than this (3,5)
SEA LEVEL – A L [a | lake] confined by reversed LEVEES [“raised” banks], semi-&lit

6 Such an attractive point about breaking a horse (5)
FOCAL – C [about] “breaking” FOAL [a horse]

7 With queen’s entrance, intended briefly to rise with new vigour (9)
ENERGISED – with ER [queen] entering, DESIGNE{d} reversed [intended “briefly”, “to rise”]

9 Worker in Hollywood to vet, heard to be not so leftwing?(12)
SCREENWRITER – SCREEN [to vet] + homophone of RIGHTER [“heard to be” not so left wing]

13 Colin strangely reluctant to put this on? (9)
LOINCLOTH – (COLIN*) [“strangely”] + LOTH [reluctant], semi-&lit

15 Company about to put old sailor in revolutionary clothing (3,6)
MAO JACKET – TEAM reversed [company “about”], to put O JACK [old | sailor] in

16 One links posts, as Tennyson finally expected to (8)
CROSSBAR – that which links goalposts, and referencing the wonderful 1889 Tennyson poem, Crossing The Bar

19 Gets down name to board ships (6)
KNEELS – N [name] to “board” KEELS [ships]

21 Unpleasant expression when born cradled by sister (5)
SNEER – NEE [born] “cradled” by SR [sister]

23 Sort of frost on front of department store (5)
HOARD – HOAR [sort of frost] on D{epartment}

86 comments on “Times 27,023: And May There Be No Moaning Of The Bar”

  1. Lays me down with my Mao Jacket on…
    I’ve often tried to work out what those lyrics are. Now I know.
    Well, I made a Doge’s Breakfast of this – taking 45 mins with croissant and Gin&Lime Marmalade (hoorah).
    And couldn’t be bothered to work out -O-E- Breakfast. ‘Money’? Foxes? That’s the problem with cryptic definitions when you’ve already got the cryptic bit (in this case the breakfast).
    Ok – now you’ve told me, I vaguely remember the phrase from 1980s American films.
    Mostly I liked: Prefab
    Thanks setter and V.
    1. Golden Brown is that great rarity, a melodious song by a punk band. All about heroin, and don’t let anyone tell you different..
      1. Punk? Dave Greenfield joined after responding to an ad for a keyboard player for a soft rock band.
        1. They may not have been a punk band but judging by the audience at the Roundhouse in the summer of ’77 all their fans were punks.
    2. I realised far too late (L’esprit de l’escalier) that instead of complaining to you about the Abba earworm you gave me the other day I should have said Thank You for the Music
      1. Oh great, now I’ve got an earworm. Excuse me while I listen to a spot of Rage Against the Machine at ear-bleeding volume to expunge it…
      2. BBC News. Thank you for the music. ABBA have produced their first two new songs together since their split in 1982.

  2. 23:30 .. bravura, often quirky stuff and much enjoyed.

    The cathedral and its (I suppose appropriate) crosser KNEELS were last in after a fair amount of head-scratching. Like the rest of the puzzle, though, very satisfying when the penny dropped.

    Referencing Crossing the Bar is obviously fair since I know the poem quite well.

    I loved everything, especially the surface, about LOINCLOTH

    v — you’ve got the wrong side of the homophone as the solution for 2d

    1. The Daily Mail reports that scientists at Goldsmiths, University of London have found through brain scans that an AHA moment in crossword solving releases the same ‘reward’ chemical dopamine that is released by having sex. Am off to do the Guardian now.
  3. Much enjoyed this one .. not hard but some witty clues and nothing unfair. Though if your 12ac is a “little thing” you bought the wrong one.
    Not many know that prefabs are still being built; nowadays, they call them “affordable housing”
    1. And of course Chambers tells us that an eclair is ‘long in shape but short in duration’, so on that basis the clue is inaccurate.
  4. Curses. Did most of this in 45 minutes, then had to drive the car in for its MOT. Another half hour in the waiting room here and I was still staring blankly at 24a and 19d.

    I was so close to the right lines for both—I’d tried a K on the front of 19, and I was assuming a bacon connection at 24–but just never managed to make either connection. I suppose having only the vaguest recollection of POWER BREAKFASTs being a thing didn’t help.

    Oh well. The car won’t be ready until 10, and I’ve still got the Guardian to go…

  5. 21 minutes, much the same as yesterday, with the last in the PREFAB/POST-FREE crossing (with a slight nudge of déjà vu, suggesting this precise pairing and cluing has been here before, though I can’t find it) and the innocuous KNEELS. That was so very nearly ENTERS, gets down name/ board: ENTER, S(hip) but it didn’t quite feel right.
    Is “once” necessary to EIRE? I thought it still was. It’s surely still a Republic. Or is it now pronounced differently? Or is this the setter/editor (like several entries yesterday) trying to avoid possible dodgy homophone controversy?
    Nice to see love cluing EROS, and not just 0, though it took me ages to twig. Good to think that Auntie Times still thinks of it as a “modern” industry.
    1. I’m curious to know why aerospace shouldn’t be thought of as modern. It very much is.
      1. Well, “modern” is a relative term in relation to the history of the world — and certainly that industry wasn’t recognised by Shakespeare — but it was around at a time when men routinely wore trilbies and Brylcreem.
        1. I don’t think the ….space bit was around when men wore trilbies and brylcreem, unless some of Elon Musk’s people have gone all retro.
    2. I had the same Enters problem, and the same misgivings; but I forgot to go back and re-think.
  6. Just couldn’t get KNEELS despite several trawls of the alphabet, during which I never considered K as the first letter. A straightforward enough clue with hindsight.
  7. Fast for me, but then I biffed a bunch, starting with 8ac. 18 and 20ac seemed more like Quickie fodder. Like Jerry, I thought ‘little’ not the best descriptor of an eclair. Loved 13d.
      1. Why wasn’t I informed? More to the point, why weren’t the NYT xword setters? EIRE shows up there often enough, although I have to wait for checkers because so does ERIN.
    2. From 1938 it was called Eire, in DeValera’s Constitution, which is the Gaelic name for the whole island, although it does appear optimistically on the stamps. The British insisted wrongly on using the Irish language word Eire rather than the English name Ireland or Republic of Ireland until 1998 when Ireland dropped its official claim to the six provinces. When we lived there, 1974-88, Irish friends were always expressing annoyance that the Brits called it Eire.
      1. Thanks, Pip. I’ve since learned that the Gaelic pronunciation is rather different–the r sounding rather like zh– from the British version, which homophonizes with RP AIRER.
  9. Fun puzzle as others have said

    Two trips down memory lane. As a lad I remember Tooting Bec Common covered in PREFABS to house those that used to live in what were now bomb sites. They were good housing.

    I had to attend several POWER BREAKFASTS when I was working with our American cousins and they were all the rage. I found them a complete waste of my time

    1. Breakfast meetings are a regular feature of life in the city these days, but I avoid them like the plague. I regard them as nothing more than a way of being more tired and not seeing my kids.
      1. The first CAMRA Good Beer Guide in 1974 had the pithy comment on Watneys ‘Avoid like the plague’. Watneys objected and unsold copies were recalled and reissued with the new comment ‘Avoid at all costs’. I have a plague copy.
            1. Do they get progressively bigger? I think real beer drinkers haven’t ever had it so good as in recent times.
              1. They might just think they have it better because they’re getting progressively drunker?
  10. 34 min 42 secs. I enjoyed this. Like others it was a while before I got my Kneels down. Like Prince Harry’s dilatory request to his brother to be his best man, we are told.

    Hail Mary gives me the opportunity to repeat my tale of an old RC lady I knew who spent most of her childhood in the erroneous belief that the mother of Jesus was a natant member of a closed religious order.

  11. 32’41”, so a typical Friday for me. It’s not the heat which burns a sunbather, but the UV. I have been to Chartres, on the bicentenary of the French Revolution. Went there to avoid Paris, but Chartres was closed – everyone was in Paris, so I didn’t get to see the inside of the cathedral. Love PREFABs, we need more of them. Thanks verlaine and setter.
    1. I remember singing in a concert there – fabulous acoustic. The air was smoky with burned incense and we were lit from high above in a cone of light. Very atmospheric. The audience told us afterwards they could see bats flitting through the smoky light.
  12. I did like PREFAB. Tres amusant. But I cannot see KEELS as a synonym for SHIPS. It’s certainly not listed as one in the eight pages devoted to SHIP in thesaurus.com
    I’ve never read the Tennyson poem so I’m now motivated to do so.
    1. It is not a definition but a synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part is used to refer to the whole, although Chambers has keel = a ship (poetic)

      Edited at 2018-04-27 11:32 am (UTC)

      1. I think a number of translators of Homer would agree – both the usage and its being poetic.

        Edited at 2018-04-27 02:46 pm (UTC)

  13. 38 minutes which I think was a decent show for this interesting puzzle. LOI LET ME SEE once MAO JACKET finally dawned on me. I’d be upset if I got a little ECLAIR from any cake shop worth its name. I’m afraid our esteemed blogger’s heading brought up Tom Lehrer before Alfred Lord Tennyson and I had CROSSBAR from the other half of the clue. I quite liked breakfast meetings, particularly if they involved a cooked breakfast and not just croissants. The best I had was a one-to-one with Gordon Brown at the Horseguards when he wanted the lowdown on electricity privatisation. I have to say that I really liked the guy. Maybe he’s an example of someone over-qualified for the job. There haven’t been many like that as Prime Minister! Good puzzle. Thank you V and setter.
  14. After I put in CLAMP and POST-FREE at the start, I was obsessed with the word LAMP POST thinking there was some George Formby nina. Lots of good clues including PREFAB, POST FREE and CABBAGE WHITE but COD to LOINCLOTH.
  15. I suspect the unbridled affection for pre-fabs, evident in these comments, comes from those who have never lived in one. Great clue, though.
    45 mins. Misled by the sprinkling of easy-peasy ones (BURY HATCHET, GOLDEN, TICKS, CHARTRES) into thinking this might be a clickety-click solve, but then got stuck and thoroughly entertained by clues such as those for TUDOR, AIRER, LET ME SEE. We live quite near the Bar at Salcombe, so CROSSBAR dropped in without too much trouble. POWER BREAKFAST was clued very loosely, I thought, but since the ‘K’ checker was available, I guess the setter reckoned no further help was required.
    This was most enjoyable, and I loved the semi-&lits and quirky cryptics.
    Thanks, V, for excellent blog, too.
    1. My prep school put up what we called prefabs back in the mid 60s. Ugly but they served a purpose. Today, parents wouldn’t be seen dead sending their preciouses to such schools. Instead, the dreaded development office would launch telephone campaigns using current students to prise cash out of parents and alumni, leaving fat-cat contractors and sub-contractors licking their lips.
      1. I assume these are the same thing that we had in the 80s, but which, I seem to recall we called Portakabins? So much of my childhood sighed away in those.
        1. A little more upmarket – cheap pebbledashed panels. The buildings are still there 50 years on.
      2. Yes, I think you (ulaca) are maybe thinking of Portakabins rather than prefabs: my primary school (early 1960s) was almost entirely accommodated in those plywood boxes. The prefabs came as a complete house in a pre-Ikea flat-pack: the kitchen, living-room, bedroom, etc. were manufactured out of concrete (I believe) to a standard template. So your prep-school buildings — had they been prefabs — would probably have had a kitchen sink in one of the four very small rooms!
  16. Got there in the end, took me over an hour of plodding, somewhat distracted waiting for a medical phone call probably not good news. A good puzzle which should have taken me half an hour. No complaints, liked K for kalium and PREFAB, LoI KNEELS.
  17. 14:30. My solving experience and order was pretty much identical to yours, v. Nice puzzle.
    I don’t remember seeing POST-FREE before. ‘FREEPOST’ is much more familiar. Or ‘postage paid’.
    I often hesitate when blogging over whether clues are or aren’t double definitions. I would say that 14ac isn’t, because the ‘get out of my way’ sense is a sentence, rather than a recognisable expression. However it can be hard to tell sometimes. Obviously this matters a lot.
    1. Postage Free franking made me think fondly of the days when scandals in Washington DC were modest in scale and somewhat amusing. Congress is given free franking so as to allow communication with constituents; in the 1970s and 1980s several members were done for sending aides down to the Congressional Post Office to collect tens of thousands of dollars of, effectively, free postage stamps which were then used as scrip for other purposes. The scam was probably a topic of discussion at the Power Breakfasts Olivia avoided at 61st and Park.
  18. Found it much easier than yesterday’s. Gently entertaining. Will the modern approach to poetry ever allow a poem with the driven sail of Tennyson’s to be written again? Or at least recognised. Just moaning. 15’10.
  19. The parsing of 2D above should actually be reversed. AIRER = Republic once sounded (homophone of EIRE (sounded))
  20. This would have been a speedy one for me had I not confidently entered “duty free” at first glance. Like my fellow TLS bloggers I knew the Tennyson, and it is indeed a good poem. In a more recent connection the line Verlaine quotes is the cue for reported “laughter in court”. POWER BREAKFASTS reminded me of the triple-parked limos disgorging their contents dressed in “power ties” outside a certain Park Avenue hotel restaurant that was famous/notorious for them back when I was taking my children to nursery school in the 80s. How glad I was not to have to be there! 16.34
    1. ‘In a more recent connection the line Verlaine quotes is the cue for reported “laughter in court”.’

      How so? I’m intrigued.

      1. Ulaca – it’s something a judge would quote if opposing counsel were getting a bit too hot under the collar.
  21. 55 minutes ending with PREFAB.

    2007’s magnificent Bourne Ultimatum features a power meal, identified as such by the fact an egg white omelette was being consumed.

    He: Don’t second-guess an operation from an armchair.

    I’ll see you at the office.

    She: Enjoy your egg whites.

    Classic stuff

  22. A very pleasant solve, in which my only leap of faith involved Tennyson, who has somehow passed me by to the extent that my knowledge of him comes largely from his words being uttered by Chief Inspector Morse. Today’s self-created dead-end involved musing on LASSIE, where the sweet thing would be a LASSI, but fortunately I decided that would only apply to a Scottish girl, and thought better of it.
    1. Tim — you’ll be pleased to see an opinion piece in The Times today bemoaning the number of tourists in Venice (and Rome) and suggesting measures for reducing same.

      I was especially happy when the writer deployed ‘La Serenissima’, though he forgot to hyphenate Rial-to in the phrase: “as they grimly scrum their way between the Rialto and San Marco”

      https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/venice-can-save-itself-with-a-price-revolution-6zxddmtdv

      1. Thank you for pointing this out to me. I have cheered up a grey Friday by reading it to myself in Stephen Fry’s voice, especially that sentence, and “Via della Conciliazione” 🙂
  23. 41 minutes of fun. My only query was not understanding what Tennyson had to do with CROSSBAR. On looking it up I found his poem, also unknown to me although I recognise ‘moaning at the bar” from the lyric of Tom Lehrer’s Armageddon song, ‘We’ll all go together when we go…’
  24. 9m 15s (including a short break to make a ‘good Korea move’ to a colleague, which is not necessarily relevant) so it looks like I was more or less on the wavelength, after a pretty bad week.
  27. 15:48 of which the last two minutes were spent alphabet trawling LOI KNEELS.

    FOI CLAMP, followed immediately by AIRER, which made me grind my teeth like others here.

    Thanks as ever to Verlaine for his excellent blog, which resolved my two biffs (MAO JACKET unparsed, and CROSSBAR unreferenced).

    Didn’t like ground = bury at 8A. If you ground an item, surely you place it on the ground, not in it.

    COD HAIL MARY, also liked PREFAB.

    WOD MAO JACKET.

  28. 25 min, but with a careless CLASP as FOI, which I missed on pre-submit typo check. LOI KNEELS, as checkers not helpful – after finding S—-S was no good, I was also trying to justify ENTERS for a while.
  30. is the yam – as served from braziers all over northern China.

    Late again today as I visited Sasha’s for lunch and not a lady dentist in sight!

    39 minutes

    FOI 1ac CLAMP
    LOI & COD 19dn KNEELS
    WOD 15dn MAO JACKET

    Not much sign of the Lord Verlaine this week – today a v.short blog with no subsequent interjections or bon mots. Might the new job be cramping your style?

    Meanwhile back on the Korean Peninsula………

    Edited at 2018-04-27 01:17 pm (UTC)

  31. Some of this went in quickly, starting with CLAMP, AIRER and CABBAGE WHITE, then I hit the wall for a while. Things gradually came together as I got on the wavelength, and I hit the CROSSBAR without knowing the poem(I have read it now though, very nice too), before having a POWER BREAKFAST and settling POST FREE into the PREFAB. KNEELS came easily to this Left Footer once Breakfast and the Cathedral had given me the final crossers. A most enjoyable puzzle. 32:15. Thanks setter and V.

    Edited at 2018-04-27 01:36 pm (UTC)

  32. Back in a blog-manageable East Coast time zone for a couple days before a return to California until moving parents are well-settled. Sometimes when I don’t do the puzzle for ten days I lose it all; this time it seemed to sharpen dull skills. Other than failing to return and re-think Enters it went quickly for me for a Friday. I liked the literary reference, and (sad man) I quite liked the dodgy double definitions.
  33. Steady solve for 30 minutes, but then the dog started moaning for a walk and my patience evaporated. It took 3 checks in the helper prog to complete the thing in the end – including KNEELS, MAO JACKET (never heard the expression) and finally PREFAB which was too clever for this simple soul to solve. Still plenty of ‘aha’ moments though, so very enjoyable..
  34. I finished in a decent for me 20 minutes, after not much success through the week. LOI KNEELS, as vinyl says, elusive. COD to PREFAB, raised a smile. I hadn’t known of the CABBAGE WHITE before, so thanks to the setter. Regards.
  37. …real help.

    It’s been three years since I first picked up the QC and I’ve already achieved my ambition of being able to complete the crossword more often than not.

    Couldn’t have done it without these blogs, so thank you to all who take the time to explain the answers, and to all who comment on them.

    Edited at 2018-04-27 06:48 pm (UTC)

  38. Late to this today as I’ve been half-heartedly celebrating the completion of another orbit around the sun.

    13:53, all very enjoyable.

    1. Met RW in the street this afternoon and chatted briefly – he was charming. Great show; hope you enjoyed it too 🙂
      1. I certainly did thanks, he was most entertaining. Mrs Penfold, who barely knows who he is, thoroughly enjoyed it too. I saw him in the village yesterday too and we briefly exchanged pleasantries across the street.
  39. I found this hard and was a bit slow on the uptake – the rather obvious “bury the hatchet” took ages to see. Still, I had all but LOI 4ac done inside the hour. That one pushed me just over as I didn’t really recognise it as an expression, despite saying it over to myself a few times and once I had alit upon the “open” meaning of frank, it took a while to see it as anything else. Power breakfasts are all very well (I imagine), as long as you follow them up with a power nap (I imagine).
  40. Did this early but coming to the blog kind of late in the piece.. 10:35 with my nail-biters being AIRER, POST-FREE and CHARTRES, but fortunately all goodo.

  41. Dear Verlaine, I have read your recent comments re: science (and med?) and don’t understand your probs….you being a classicist. Eg ‘carbohydrate’in Monday’s xword. As I understand it, the etymology of carbohyrate derives from the Gk for sugar: saccharide so, if ‘carbohydrate’ is the definition, it’s likely to be prefaced by either mono,di,oligo or poly.
    Similarly, if an alkane (gas,oil,wax,or paraffin) is clued then it’s likely to be methane,ethane,propane,butane,pentane,hexane,heptane,octane. (As you will have immediately noticed, it only changes with the number of carbon atoms attached!)
    I’m just a newbie to the cryptics (since March 2017) and I’m sure there are many others who are better qualified and can give better advice but I don’t think you need to start learning science or understand the mechanisms – it’s just words.
    In the meantime, my thanks to you for your terrific blogs and to the setter for a v. entertaining xword. I didn’t quite finish but sometimes I do and it is due, in large part, to all the very helpful and generous bloggers.
  42. Oh dear. I mis-parsed 2d, and assumed that I was looking for some obscure former republic that sounded like AIRER, but presumably wasn’t actually AIRER. Since EIRE didn’t fit, I decided there had to have been a republic called AYRER. Yes, obviously now that I see my reasoning in black and white, it all starts to fall apart, but it seemed flawless at the time.
    1. Don’t beat yourself up Thud, I had Ayrer (and even considered Ayrur) on exactly the same basis. I was only saved by a Columbo moment.
  44. I was another CLASP guy, seeing CLAP and Stomach immediately and not bother enough with the other words of the clue. So I confidently submitted after a reasonably quick time (given I was filling it in during a conference call with at least half an ear on that). Annoying pink square and d’oh.

Comments are closed.