Times 27133 – A Tribute to Dame Frances Margaret

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
This was the antithesis to Saturday’s magnificent beast. That’s not to say that it didn’t have merits of its own, but that they were not of the order of mind-bending intricacy displayed by that puzzle. A bit of a movie theme in this one – all referencing well known works of considerable merit in their own genres. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were not one or two PBs today. I snuck under 15 minutes – a feat almost as rare as the English top order scoring runs.

ACROSS

1 Cycle on the side of a drop and court disaster (4,3,1,4)
RIDE FOR A FALL – RIDE FOR (on the side of) A FALL; I’d never heard of this – only ‘head for a fall’
9 Very fine short name for a hedgehog? (5)
SONIC – SO NIC[e]; a sonic hedgehog (which I also hadn’t heard of) is a protein that is encoded by the SHH gene. Who said sciency types had no sense of humour?
10 Fully discuss party no longer in the game (6,3)
THRASH OUT – THRASH (party – ‘Roger’s having a thrash at his place’) OUT (no longer in the game – sadly, Manchester United until they, um, change direction)
11 Organ stop in list (8)
REGISTER – double definition; REGISTER is ‘any of the stops on an organ as classified in respect of its tonal quality’
12 Appear in an excited state after parade (4,2)
SHOW UP – UP after SHOW
13 Poisonous liquid in alcohol taken by him at the end (8)
METHANOL – [hi]M ETHANOL; I am told by the fount of all knowledge that ‘consuming ethanol alone can cause coma and death’, so both liquids can be fatal, though METHANOL clearly fataler
15 Watchword of guy painting in retirement (6)
MANTRA – MAN ART reversed
17 In goal blocking shot (6)
TRENDY – END in TRY
18 Female changed, then sat on the fence (8)
FALTERED – F ALTERED
20 Standards concerning rector (6)
PARSON – PARS ON
21 Rank reduced, so resign (4,4)
STEP DOWN – STEP (rank) DOWN (reduced); I think we need to get from RANK to STEP via a three-point turn through LEVEL (‘this is the final step in the career ladder’ – thanks to Collins synonym generator)
24 Musical passage in film (5,4)
ANNIE HALL – ANNIE (musical) HALL (passage) – my favourite Woody Allen: ‘The medium enters in as a condition of the art form itself’. Nice.
25 Fool about to produce gunpowder ingredient (5)
NITRE – NIT RE
26 Out of harm’s way, insane criminals (4-8)
SAFE-CRACKERS – SAFE (out of harm’s way) CRACKERS (insane)

DOWN

1 Stage right, Oscar to play guitar (7)
ROSTRUM – R O STRUM
2 Please understand term gent now misused when feeding dog (4,3,2,5)
DONT GET ME WRONG – anagram* of TERM GENT NOW in DOG
3 Concentrate following commander, American (5)
FOCUS – F OC (Officer Commanding: ‘the commander of a sub-unit or minor unit (smaller than battalion size), principally used in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth’) US
4 Betrayed the trust of lecturer after treat misinterpreted (6,2)
RATTED ON – TREAT* DON
5 Plant in bogland across river (4)
FERN – R in FEN
6 Fail to win compassion, become disillusioned (4,5)
LOSE HEART – LOSE HEART; compassion is one of my least favourite words in the English language owing to its tendency to be used as a purr word signifying in-groups (eg compassionate v Thatcherite)
7 What may be a comfort to one who’s just retired? (3-5,6)
HOT-WATER BOTTLE – nice cryptic definition; tip to novice solvers: see ‘retired’ think ‘bed-e-byes’
8 More work! (6)
UTOPIA – quirky definition, since Sir (for Prots) or Saint (for RCs) Thomas More’s best known (Latin) work was Utopia; his English-language A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, written at the end of his life, is something of a treat
14 Group of stars with capital attorney (9)
ANDROMEDA – AND (With) ROME DA
16 Leader of revolt having measure of power over revolutionary count (3,5)
WAT TYLER – WATT RELY (count, as in ‘Can I count on you?’)
17 Picture which involves work (3,3)
TOP HAT – OP in THAT; Top Hat is the best known Astaire/Rogers vehicle, with songs by Irving Berlin, some sharp humour and even sharper dance sequences
19 Housekeeper died: ravens flying about (7)
DANVERS – D RAVENS*; referencing the lady played by the Aussie Dame who wasn’t very nice to Olivia de Havilland’s kid sister
22 Fear of god? (5)
PANIC – tongue-in-cheek clue, requiring only a smidgen of Saturday’s antiquarian knowledge; in a different morphological universe, by analogy with Pyrrhic (relating to Pyrrhus), for example, Panic might mean relating to Pan (or ‘of Pan’)
23 Club‘s male champion (4)
MACE – M ACE

91 comments on “Times 27133 – A Tribute to Dame Frances Margaret”

  1. 12m today so a rare fast time by my lowly standards. Nothing tricksy here I thought. No hesitations over FALTERED or RIDE FOR A FALL. Excellent blog – thank you
  2. I started off thinking this one was tricky, but suddenly realised that I was thinking too hard, and the clues were more ‘undevious’ than I had thought. Rattled them in almost as fast as I could write, and finished in 12 minutes. I spent far too long (maybe 3 minutes) on Wat Tyler (never heard of him), convinced that ‘count’ was ‘tally’.
  3. Guessed Utopia but I didn’t lose heart, I didn’t panic nor faltered and thrashed out in just over 15mins (quick for an oldie like me). Right, off to bed with a HWB and some ethanol substitute. Thanks all
  4. I was a bit sluggish with this one, which I put down to my excessive intake of various brands of ethanol over the weekend. I still completed in 24:56, but this put me at position 104 on the leaderboard, so I was obviously well off the pace. UTOPIA was my LOI and I only saw what was going on when MANTRA went in. I think we’ve had a similar clue quite recently. The NW took much longer than it should’ve done, with mental blocks on SPIKE for the hedgehog and I couldn’t see OC for CO. An enjoyable puzzle, nevertheless. Thanks setter and U, especially for the diversion into proteins:-) Time for another coffee methinks once the machine has finished descaling….
  6. I also was not convinced that “faltered” sat with “sat on the fence”. I was working on “dithered” for quite a while until I figured it out.
    Did not know of Mrs Danvers but not to hard to guess.
    More work leading to Utopia was clever.
  7. 20:33. I think I would’ve gone faster had I been more wide awake but I felt a bit vacant today. I couldn’t find anywhere to start until 18ac so a bit of 22dn was starting to set in. A smooth solve in the end nonetheless. Quite a lot of GK: Sonic the hedgehog (I had a 16-bit Sega Mega drive – I believe there are now kettles with more computational power – and played my fair share of Sonic), Annie Hall, Utopia, Watt Tyler, Top Hat and Mrs Danvers, but fortunately all of it known to me. The expression at 1ac didn’t have that familiar ring to it so that was my LOI. Hesitated over thrash for party (if someone said: “Roger’s having a thrash at his place”, I’d suggest we should all jolly well wait until he’s finished before going anywhere near the place). Knew the list but not the organ stop. I’m on the fence as to whether or not faltered is a synonym for sat on the fence. COD 1dn.
  8. Very late to the fair so no one will see this after returning to a furnace-like apartment from a long holiday weekend. Even so I managed an unusual (for me) under 10. Self-congrats were short-lived when I saw Magoo had romped home in a super-SONIC 2.52. Wow. I haven’t opened Saturday’s yet but having read the comments here I will wait until (comparatively) fresh and cool in the morning.
  9. Have only just completed it after a long drive to Kilmartin on the west coast of Scotland I would send a travelogue over the next few days but we are moving back into the twentieth century tomorrow. Suffice it to say that the standard of Eastern European hotel staff is very high.
  10. Very easy (OK, for me that means around 30 minutes) but not very interesting. Too many movie titles with rather trite wordplay to clue them and strangely disappointing clues like the one for METHANOL, which by itself is also an alcohol. Somehow it looked like a puzzle from the early days of cryptic crosswords in the Times, just a bit unpolished.
  11. Thanks to the pointers to this from the Quick Cryptic team. I tried this and managed a pretty good effort – only needing a little help with Andromeda. So my first ever 15×15 solve. Maybe took about 45 minutes. Very pleasing.
    Cheers and regards to all.
    John George.
    1. Congrats, John George! Only sorry to see the heading on your message; why not come back and join in the fun?

      Edited at 2018-09-03 09:11 pm (UTC)

  13. I know I’m two days late so nobody’s ever going to read this in all probability, but as this is the first time I’ve ever managed to complete a 15×15 I couldn’t resist posting a comment. I don’t usually try the main puzzle as even the QC is still a challenge, but as there were some comments on the blog of that, suggesting this was on the easier side of things, I thought I’d give it a go. I had to come back to it a few times, but I finally made it. Didn’t know about Danvers or Top Hat or Ride For A Fall, but everything else was okay. It always surprises me to find that experienced solvers, ones who can polish off something like this in 10 minutes and obviously have amazing general knowledge, can have traversed the last quarter century without coming across a character as enduringly popular as Sonic the Hedgehog. I guess nobody can know everything, although I think some of you do come pretty close.

    Crispian

    2. you might be surprised at how many late readers there are of these things!
      well done, it does get easier with practise (and especially with help from this site)

      jb

  14. Originally, in September 2018, I solved this on paper in 33:20. Three years later, I completed it online in a PB for me 9:20 — first time I’ve broken 10 minutes.

    I can’t honestly say that I specifically remembered any of the answers from my first time round, but maybe they were lodged in the brain somewhere.

    I suspect it is simply a mark of improvement having been something of a Times novice back in 2018, to knowing many more of the tricks involved when completing in 2021.

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