Times 27,041: Glass Half Empty / Glass Half Full

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
[Whoops – managed to post this to my own blog instead of the community first thing this morning by mistake. Sorry about the delay!]

A straightforward puzzle by recent standards, with a not unpleasant mid-20th-century feel about it. I did it on paper, untimed, but I felt it was neither egregiously easy nor particularly difficult anywhere, and would guess I’d have clocked in at 7-8 minutes ish.

My FOI was 13ac (any other well-known three letter places in India?), my LOI 24ac because of its slightly more elaborate wordplay, compared to the rest of the puzzle.

I liked the low-level general knowledge requirement infusing the puzzle – nothing too obscure, but you do have to know an old prime minister, poet, author or archbishop when you hear one. And the (probably accidental) juxtaposition of the gloomy and happy fellows in the thirteenth row, which gave my blog its title today.

COD to 14dn, not a hard clue (although it took me a little while as I was looking for synonyms for “engaged, betrothed” at first) but I like the quaintness of the term and it put me in a happy reverie. Thanks to the setter, and also for going a little easier on us after Tuesday’s festivities. Good to see those of you I did see at the George!

ACROSS
1 Backward-looking archbishop is issue for TV announcement (4,6)
TIME SIGNAL: reverse all of LANG IS EMIT [archbishop | is | issue]. Cosmo Gordon Lang was Archbishop of Canterbury at e.g. the time of the 1936 abdication crisis.
Not sure how many time signals you get on TV in these days of ubiquitous mobile phones, but I assume they used to be happen and be very useful in the day?

6 Publisher wants opening chapter to be a stunning success (4)
COUP: OUP [= Oxford University Press = publisher] wants a C [chapter] at the front

9 Old king keeping dry for the most part in carriage (7)
CARIOLE: COLE [old king (in the nursery rhyme)] keeping ARI{d} [dry “for the most part”]

10 Let down after US agent returned behind schedule (7)
DEFLATE: after FED reversed [US agent “returned”], LATE [behind schedule]

12 PM very familiar with good fashion (10)
WELLINGTON: WELL IN [very familiar] with G TON [good | fashion]

13 Area at end of journey somewhere in India (3)
GOA: A [area] at end of GO [journey]

15 Couple of eggs — potentially boring tea (6)
OOLONG: O O [two eggs] + LONG [potentially boring]

16 Tighten up legal agreement (8)
CONTRACT: double def

18 Manoeuvring honestly or sneakily? (2,3,3)
ON THE SLY: (HONESTLY*) [“manoeuvring”]

20 Sports ground with companies backing game (6)
SOCCER: reverse all of REC COS [sports ground + companies]

23 Bit of scale revealed by fish (3)
RAY: double def. RAY as in doh-ray-mi-fah, the second note of the diatonic scale.

24 Degrees needing particular days — be avoiding one month for collection (10)
DOCTORATES: DATES [particular days], collecting OCTO{be}R [one month, but with BE “avoided”]

26 Left-wing sphere without love set about deep thinker (7)
BROODER: reverse all of RED O ORB [left-wing | sphere, “without” (as in outside of) O for love]

27 Sportsperson digesting very quiet team talk from him? (7)
SKIPPER: SKIER [sportsperson] “digesting” PP [pianissimo = very quiet]

28 Remainder to despatch? Put first bit to the back (4)
ENDS: SEND [to despatch], its first letter moved to the end

29 Possibility for “mint”: create money (10)
REMITTANCE: (MINT CREATE*) [“possibility for…”]

DOWN
1 Food — one who looked overfed? (4)
TUCK: double def with Robin Hood’s famously fat friar friend.

2 Feel astonishment meeting line produced by poet (7)
MARVELL: MARVEL [feel astonishment] meeting L [line]

3 Well as he’d done, it’s out of order to be conceited (7-6)
SWOLLEN-HEADED: (WELL AS HE’D DONE*) [“it’s out of order”]

4 Author with endless dynamism about to pen end of tale (6)
GREENE: reverse ENERG{y} [“endless” dynamism] and have it “pen” the last letter of {tal}E.
Graham Greene surely must be the author to have made most appearances in cryptics due to his helpful letters. Are there any other contenders?

5 Rider in habit, not cold (8)
ADDITION: ADDIC{t}ION [habit, losing its C for cold]

7 I start to grimace a lot — a nasty sort of pain (7)
OTALGIA: (I G{rimace} A LOT A*) [“nasty”]

8 Inferior writers presenting author with samples (10)
POETASTERS: POE [author] gets presented with TASTERS [samples]

11 Philosopher loud with obsequiousness when meeting bunch of celebrities (13)
FUNCTIONALIST: F [loud] with UNCTION [obsequiousness] meeting A-LIST [bunch of celebs].
How many functionalist philosophers can you name? I’ve got Hilary Putnam. All rather bleeding-edge for someone weaned on Plato and Aristotle, though no doubt refuted already too.

14 Intending to go on to the match? (10)
HONOURABLE: cryptic def referring not to any sporting fixture, but to one with “honourable intentions”, i.e. to marry the girl, not just waste her time. Sounds rather old-fashioned now I try to articulate it.

17 A wagon with beer brought round, offering a choice (1,2,5)
A LA CARTE: A CART [a | wagon] with ALE [beer] brought round. Set menus aren’t that much of a thing any more are they? At least not in the shabby circles I move in.

19 Your clothes designer brought up something hidden under the neck (7)
THYROID: THY [your] + DIOR reversed [mid-20th-c fashion designer Christian, “brought up”]

21 Reduce price of pile in exhibition centre that’s mounted up (7)
CHEAPEN: HEAP [pile] in NEC reversed [(Birmingham’s) exhibition centre, “that’s mounted up”]

22 What’s good in Paris — Tuilleries’s latest thing, excellent garden feature (6)
BONSAI: BON [what’s good in Paris] + {tuillerie}S + A1 [excellent]

25 Indian having long passage sealed off at either end (4)
CREE: {s}CREE{d} [long (written) passage, topped and tailed]. A usual suspect in crosswordland, due to the convenient letters. I remember by grandfather having a copy of the Bible in Cree, which was a thing of great alphabetic wonder.

53 comments on “Times 27,041: Glass Half Empty / Glass Half Full”

  1. 29 minutes (it takes quite a bit of time in my current circumstances just to read each clue).
    I’m not sure what a TV time signal is, or ever has been. Radio, for sure: bip bip bip bip bip beeep (I think) occasionally truncated and usually slightly out with DAB lag. The bongs when available. Today presenters cheerfully getting it wrong. Maybe I don’t watch the right channels.
    HONOURABLE was a bit weird, though perhaps the admirable Harry might be demonstrating that it it still happens.
    CARIOLE new to me. Perhaps I should read Heyer after all.
  2. 28 minutes, with LOI and COD HONOURABLE. Didn’t really like TIME SIGNAL as I think of the pips as a radio phenomenon. Otherwise a straightforward enough solve. With our esteemed blogger, I’m also too fond of the history to go too far along the road with the FUNCTIONALISTS. On my screen, there are no posts up yet. Has war been declared? Regardless, thank you V and setter.
  3. 35 mins with a croissant and G&L marmalade (hoorah).
    LOI was Coup where I was slow remembering the crosswordland, three-letter publisher of choice.
    That clue reminded me of one I once entered for the ST Clue Writing comp.
    Offbeat opening chapter in a Russian novel (9)
    It was disallowed as C wasn’t thought to be an abbreviation for Chapter. I think we have had this debate before – and C is now used for chapter all the time.
    Thanks setter and V.

    BTW the winner of the ST comp that week was genius (Paul Taylor) written as a rhyming couplet:
    What could be so stress-free
    as an endless cruise at sea? (9)

    Edited at 2018-05-18 08:37 am (UTC)

  4. Very enoyable but there were a few unknowns that delayed me so I needed nearly 50 minutes to complete the grid.

    The fat friar came readily to mind because I’ve seen him in another puzzle within the past few days but can’t find the reference now. HONOURABLE was my LOI and required a bit of lateral thinking. Is a time signal an announcement?

    Edited at 2018-05-18 08:23 am (UTC)

  5. Thanks for the blog but surprised that you don’t mention your 99 errors on the monthly leader board! Yesterday I had two errors; today 24. Anyone know what’s going on?

    Midas

    1. Oh dear! I’m quite slapdash but I didn’t think I was that slapdash…
  6. 38:59 with a lot of the latter half spent on Honourable Ray. Both the these two were clever I thought and elusive.

    COD Honourable.

  7. 26:22. I was held up mostly by the words round the outside. I didn’t understand HONOURABLE at all, but couldn’t think of anything else to fit. I couldn’t parse DOCTORATES either, so thanks for that V. POETASTERS took a while to arrive from the murky depths of memory and COUP my LOI as I was looking to drop a C off the front of a word. COD to OTALGIA. I’m glad I’ve never suffered it, but I’m sure I’d grimace if I did.

    Edited at 2018-05-18 08:31 am (UTC)

  8. Like Olivia, I expected a B in there, or even a T on the end in addition. One of my pair of DNK’s, the other being FUNCTIONALIST. Both surfaces readily cracked though.

    FOI DEFLATE then reasonably steady progress, despite biffing DOCTORATES and OTALGIA (thanks Verlaine), to cross the line successfully in 12:23 with LOI OOLONG.

    COD ON THE SLY, though I did like HONOURABLE.

  9. I found this one very tricky, but evidently I was in a minority as The SNITCH only rates it moderate difficulty. I did nearly manage to finish but was unable to come up with COUP.

    I got POETASTER thanks to poetaste coming up on Countdown recently – it’s the unlikely sounding verb which means to write in the manner of a poetaster.

  10. 50 minutes for this puzzle which was fair for a Friday.

    FOI 15ac OOLONG but then I am part Chinese (after two blood transfusions)
    LOI 7dn OTALGIA which I may have (Jerome K Jerome)
    COD 6ac COUP (for the Oggsford man)
    WOD 9ac CARIOLE but I would have preferred Cabriolet.

    What is the momentous news in the offing!? Anyone?
    Club Monthly overhaul?

    1. Hopefully the momentous news is that we’ll be getting 6 Club-Monthly-strength puzzles a week from now on!
  11. One or two brief hold-ups to consider what might be going on with HONOURABLE and if there should be a B in the middle of CARIOLE, and also to see if NEC looked plausible for an exhibition centre. I liked the slightly offbeat definitions in a couple of places – nice to see something other than “cha” for tea and WELLINGTON as PM (he wasn’t a very good one but that’s another story) rather than the victor of Waterloo. 21.19

    P.S. The wild error count (I appear to have 74 for a period in which I’ve done 32 puzzles) continues for another day on the Club board. The problem must be more insoluble than was thought at first…

  12. I thought it was plausible that EMIT might be “issue for TV”, leaving the definition as announcement (on radio perhaps). Too fanciful?
    1. I think the word used for issuing i.e. sending by TV would ‘transmit’. Historically that’s accurate, hence TV transmitters, transmissions etc.
  13. 34 minutes, with DOCTORATES last in, which just goes to show how useful mine has been.

    Even if I were a FUNCTIONALIST, I would consider pretending not to be, as they have the dullest name of them all. Give me an anarcho-syndicalist any day.

  14. Mostly because of 1ac; I always get held up if I can’t get 1ac early. There’s some pretty er okayish clues here, but 14dn HONOURABLE is the shittest clue in a while. Or am I missing something?

    EDIT: did like 18ac ON THE SLY

    Edited at 2018-05-18 10:24 am (UTC)

  15. Pretty fast for a Friday, although I did what I could to add to the time by drawing a blank on PM somethingTON, and by trying to come up with the name of a philosopher beginning with F and longer than Wittgenstein. DNK CARIOLE, of course. If there’s a more frequently cited author than GREENE, it might be POE, who of course shows up here too.
  16. 00:00:00.00, time of times, but may have omitted to press start button. Still, swept along, probably on the 20 min. Liked the brooder/skipper pair. Looked up functionalist and concluded I’m a kind of malf. Maybe we all are, ants crawling over words.
  17. By far the greatest relative time was spent on my LOI at 24ac, so glad to come here and discover it wasn’t just me who took a while to spot that one. However, I must claim sole credit for the massive problem I made for for myself in the NW corner by carelessly biffing TEST SIGNAL, which in turn left me convinced that the poet was SITWELL, even though I couldn’t make the clue work for that answer, for obvious reasons; add the previously unknown CARIOLE, and that part of the puzzle proved testing. D’oh!
  18. Not fast on this one, done after 45 minutes, with CARIOLE a guess, and initially had TEST SIGNAL for 1a having biffed TEST once I had the SIGNAL bit. TIME SIGNAL doesn’t seem like an ‘announcement’ to me. I was probably thinking of the old TEST CARD.
    Then find I have ON THE FLY for 18a, not realising it was an anagram, so a disaaaster, darling.
    Hardest of the week for me.
  19. LOI COUP, like many others. Dnk CARIOLE. 31′ 15” thanks verlaine and setter.
  20. 33 min, but needed to look in Bradford for 9ac – also spent some minutes wondering whether 14dn might be COLOURABLE, involving something to do with colour-matching.
    Not happy about 1ac, as I don’t recall ever there being a TIME SIGNAL announced on TV, only the occasional news item about the radio one.
    POE seems to be the winner of the authors’ stakes, as the site search here gives 87 for him, but only 67 for GREENE. (Shakespeare is a non-runner, as although he’s referred to frequently his name only appears rarely in the puzzles.)
  21. The top left corner held me up for a while, particularly TIME SIGNAL – once that fell, despite the fact that I’m not really sure what one is, the rest seemed to snowball. I finished on COUP, though, having become convinced that I was looking for a publisher with its initial C removed (“wanting”). 11m 28s in all, with only a break of a few seconds to put in a tea order.
  22. Sailed through most of this, but was then left with 2d, 6a, 8d, 14d and 23a, which refused to come to heel. 2d was my LOI as I’d also biffed TEST SIGNAL. Once I’d revisited it, MARVELL came quickly to mind. I was stuck with FRY at 23a and it took a large mental leap to equate RAY with RE in the tonic solfa without a homophone indicator. HONOURABLE then became a probability. POETASTER eventually preceded COUP which I struggled to parse until I remembered the OUP as a publisher. Tough going. 55:31. Thanks setter and V.
  23. Okay sort of puzzle. Didn’t time it, as I was doing other stuff simultaneously. The surface reading of 24 was clunky, probably rendered so by the Byzantine wordplay. The surface of 3 reads oddly too (the pluperfect doesn’t really fit in), and a few of the others aren’t totally convincing either. That said, it’s a lot better than I could do 🙂 Great blog, V.
  24. 14:24, I made a pretty hard slog out of this one, though I had a chuckle at the second appearance of Friar Tuck in the week, as I will be playing the friar in a summer production of Robin Hood through July and August.
  25. Just shy of 15m here. The crossword club still isn’t working on my iPad, so no exact time. Probably a good thing not to risk adding to my 52 errors.
    I liked this one overall: it required close attention to wordplay in places. DOCTORATES in particular was the obvious answer, but I felt I had to unravel the wordplay to be sure, and it was fiendish.
    I didn’t think much of 1ac (what on earth is a TIME SIGNAL? How is it an announcement? Who is this Lang fellow?) and I thought 14dn (our blogger’s COD) very weak, to the point that I struggled to convince myself there wasn’t something very clever going on that I had missed. But lots to enjoy.
  26. Well, that’s three-quarters of an hour that the taxpayer paid for but didn’t receive. Either I wasn’t on wavelength, or this was tougher than they have been of late.

    The top-west corner held me up the longest, with CARIOLE an NHO, and TIME SIGNAL, MARVELL and GREENE all taking a while to click. HONOURABLE went in with a shrug, and I agree with those who feel it was not a great clue. Still, all’s well that etc.

  27. Sorry to post anonymously, but my log-in details aren’t recognised for some reason. DNF. ‘Time Signal’ is neither an announcement, nor is it on TV. Surely it’s ‘do-re-mi. . .’.? 14 d as a clue is just plain bad-and not just because I didn’t get it right! Sorry to be so grumpy (my user name is Mr Grumpy), but it’s becoming really frustrating. I’m now off to email The Times yet another complaint about the Polygon. Maybe I need to get out more. . .
    1. RAY is a valid alternative in the musial scale, though I have to admit it took me by surprise on this occasion.

      SOED has “honourable intentions colloq.: to marry the woman one is courting.”

      But I’m with you over TIME SIGNAL being wrong on two counts unless we are both missing something.

  28. Crept in again just under the 20 minute mark. Agree with all above that I have never seen or heard a TIME SIGNAL on TV but BONSAI made me smile. I recall a cartoon of a guy selling ‘The world’s largest bonsai’ but do people really grow them in gardens? Thanks for the blog V

    Edited at 2018-05-18 02:52 pm (UTC)

  29. Probably being stupid but could someone please explain why “ton” is “fashion”.
    Didn’t like “honourable” nor “ray” (re, surely), especially since in the same corner. Never heard of “poetastery” and maybe never will again in my remaining years.
    Friday toughie today.
    1. According to Wiki: “The ton” is a term commonly used to refer to Britain’s high society during the late Regency and … Fashion, etiquette, manners, social customs, and many other aspects of social life were all dictated by the ton.
    2. It means style or fashion (from French, I believe). It’s in Collins and probably the other sources.

      Ray’s also in Collins – as well as The Sound of Music.

    3. M’colleagues have already good explanations, but for me TON can be defined as ‘a word meaning fashion that you will only ever see in crosswords but it’s useful to setters so you might as well learn it’.
      1. Thank you Keriothe. I will try to remember it but it seems to be “in one eye, out the other” these days.
        1. I know what you mean. Mind you I reckon 90% of the things I do remember these days come from doing crosswords, so there’s always that.

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