Times 27381 – footwear fine, trousers needed redressing.

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Another fine crossword of medium difficulty, with a couple of somewhat obscure answers at 7d and 3d which were gettable from wordplay if you weren’t a topologist or a bullfight enthusiast. The rest was good fun and fair; I’m not quite convinced 17d works and I liked 11a for its ‘element of Labour’ idea. About 25 minutes all told, delayed for a while by my initial perfect but wrong answer at 27a q.v. below.

Across
1 Seaman entering boozer to see what’s afoot? (5)
SABOT – AB = seaman, inside SOT = boozer.
4 Craftsman penning unlimited poems in rocker (9)
SHOEMAKER – SHAKER = rocker, has (P) OEM (S) inserted.
9 Small case for diamonds? (5,4)
MINOR SUIT – Small = MINOR, case = SUIT as in lawsuit. Diamonds and clubs are the minor suits in Bridge, as opposed to spades and hearts being the majors, ranking and scoring more highly.
10 Lustre perceived when heroin’s injected (5)
SHEEN – SEEN has H inserted.
11 Police officer probing one element of Labour opposition (13)
CONTRADICTION – DI the Detective Inspector is inserted into CONTRACTION, “one element of labour”.
14 Party threatening to ditch leader (4)
RAVE – GRAVE loses its G.
15 Natural fibre, too much found in racket left on court (6,4)
COTTON WOOL – OTT = too much, goes inside CON = racket, then WOO = court, L for left.
18 Visual aids having setter long for correction? (10)
LORGNETTES – (SETTER LONG)*. Kind of specs with a handle instead of side pieces; derived from the French word lorgner which means to look sideways or squint at.
19 Pack animals to watch bears (4)
STOW – Hidden word in ANIMAL(S TO W)ATCH.
21 Dad recalled agent introducing one couple, fifty or so (13)
APPROXIMATELY – PA = Dad, recalled = AP: PROXY = agent; insert I (one), MATE (couple), L (fifty).
24 Senior retired Liberal in fashion again (5)
OLDER – Reverse REDO with L inserted.
25 Almost complete backing for exhibit in church showing conversions? (9)
CHANGEFUL – FUL(L) goes on the end of C (HANG) E where CE = church and HANG = exhibit.
27 During many deliveries, Dr West stripped off outer garb (9)
OVERDRESS – I went wrong here and it took me a while to correct when I saw 17d didn’t end in T: I had OVERTREWS being (WEST)* ‘doctored’ inside OVERS. Perfectly parsed. But then I corrected myself after 17d fell in, as it’s DR and (W) ES (T) inside OVERS; WEST is stripped of its outside letters.
28 Limit old women’s fund (5)
ENDOW – END = limit, O(ld), W(omen).

Down
1 House group D? (10)
SEMICIRCLE – house = SEMI, CIRCLE = group.
2 Exile‘s collar turned up (3)
BAN – collar = NAB, reverse it.
3 Spanish fighter quickly ran mounted troops (6)
TORERO – TORE = quickly ran, OR reversed.
4 Canvasses on display, reputable Society taking the lead (6,3)
SOUNDS OUT – SOUND = reputable, S(ociety), OUT = on display.
5 Matter bringing down temperature of the eye (5)
OPTIC – TOPIC (matter) has its T dropped down.
6 Campaigns fail, stopped by endless din from below (8)
MISSIONS – MISS = fail, has NOIS(E) reversed inserted.
7 Unorthodox vessel‘s link to betel nuts (5,6)
KLEIN BOTTLE – (LINK TO BETEL)*. I did remember this thing from maths days although I couldn’t have defined it exactly; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle will explain it. Once you sort out BOTTLE from the anagrist you can probably guess the KLEIN from the remaining letters.
8 Regular payment slashed (4)
RENT -Double definition.
12 Don’t stop English composer hiding for instance in Tyneside (5,3,3)
NEVER SAY DIE – SAY (for instance) inside E, VER DI inside N E = Tyneside.
13 Comprehensive strike has support of illegitimate offspring (4-2-4)
BLOW-BY-BLOW – strike is the first BLOW and a BY-BLOW is an old term for a bastard.
16 Her vital statistics initially disrupted play (3,6)
THE RIVALS – (HER VITAL S)*, S from statistics; play by Sheridan.
17 Dazzling feature of church in India (8)
INSPIRED – Well, a church can be SPIRED and IN can mean India but for me that’s not leading exactly to IN SPIRED, but either the clue doesn’t quite work or I’m missing something (as usual).
20 Departs, with inclination to wave (6)
DANGLE – D(eparts), ANGLE = inclination.
22 Auditor’s dealing with file at the appropriate time (2,3)
ON CUE – ON CUE sounds like ON QUEUE i.e. dealing with file.
23 Island shot guards Down Under (4)
GOZO – GO = shot, has OZ inserted. A neat little clue IMO.
26 Rage following promotion (3)
FAD – F = following, AD = promotion. RAGE = FAD as in ‘all the RAGE’.

50 comments on “Times 27381 – footwear fine, trousers needed redressing.”

  1. Seems that India can be abbreviated IND, which is how I took the clue.
    Don’t think I’ve ever heard that sense of BY BLOW before, but figured it out.
    Likewise, KLEIN BOTTLE, “Why ‘unorthodox’?” I thought, though somehow the term seemed one I’d heard somewhere…
    Glad GOZO exists!
    The clue for THE RIVALS seemed quite apt (though I don’t know how the play goes).
    SEMICIRCLE D is very cool!
  2. I was held up for a while by biffing CONTRADICTORY at 11A, having thought that it ended in TORY, being ‘Labour opposition’. If the setter intended that misdirection then I certainly fell for it. When I finally saw MISSIONS I realised my error finishing off with RENT as my LOI.

  3. Defeated by semi circle (where I went down the home___ route, having put habit for 1a) and changeful.

    Once I cheated for those 2, the rest followed including sabot.

    Cod contradiction.

    Edited at 2019-06-19 05:43 am (UTC)

  4. Around 18 minutes with an unnoticed typo. Misled again by a flying start then, like a cyclist getting half-way up a hill before realising they’re in the wrong gear, struggling to shift the old derailleur.

    The Klein Bottle animation on the Wiki page — Time evolution of a Klein figure in xyzt-space — is positively trippy, and quite enlightening for those of us not overly familiar with manifold orientation in Euclidean space R3 and R4. I like the paragraph about the Cheshire Cat, too.

    Some nice creative clues. I especially liked INSPIRED, which must surely be Ind.

  5. Coming home in almost exactly an hour I made rather slow progress on this one but was enjoying it enough not to be tempted at any stage to give up and resort to aids.

    The unknown KLEIN-BOTTLE has come up only once before in a 15×15 and that was before I started contributing to (let alone blogging for) TftT but it was easy enough to work out from anagrist once I had twigged that the second word was BOTTLE.

    I looked twice at Ind for India but it seemed a fair enough assumption. In addition to being an abbreviation, Collins advises that Ind is also a poetic name for India.

    THE RIVALS by Sheridan features Mrs Malaprop who was given to almost as many verbal gaffes as Dr Spooner but is not as useful to crossword setters as hers didn’t conform to a particular pattern.

    Edited at 2019-06-19 05:35 am (UTC)

  6. No time for this, as I had to stop early on to catch a train, only getting back to it over a sandwich hours later. I had the feeling that I’d seen KLEIN BOTTLE here before; anyway, as Jack says it’s easy enough after BOTTLE. Like pootle I started with CONTRADICTORY, but tried CONTRADICTION too, and finally saw how it worked. Loved the wordplay. LOI CHANGEFUL. COD to CONTRADICTION. IND is rather like ARABY; all too common once in verse.
  7. I didn’t know Klein Bottle or By-Blow. Nor did I parse Cotton Wool.

    COD: SEMICIRCLE.

  8. I was worried after 54 minutes that I’d put in the wrong answers at 3d, where it could have been TORERE (I don’t know much Spanish and it’s been a while since I’ve read Hemingway’s bullfighting stuff) and at 23d, where I couldn’t fathom the wordplay.

    As it turns out, I was right to have put in TORERO at 3d, but there was a good reason for my unfathomable wordplay for my TOGO at 23d. Should’ve used more of my last four minutes to think about it, even though I’ve never heard of GOZO. Curses!

      1. So I did! Mind you, it had three crossers back then, and this was probably *just* before I started being more organised about collecting words to revise. Also, I may have shot myself in the foot by the tactic of learning all the four-letter countries, but I think that mental list has come in handy more often than it’s hindered me!

        (Though, on reflection, I did actually know that Togo isn’t an island. Oops.)

        Edited at 2019-06-19 08:25 am (UTC)

  9. Knew TORERO only from Dylan’s ‘Romance in Durango’. Knew KLEIN BOTTLE from maths teaching. Knew GOZO as a small island because some people in the news a while ago came from there. Sheridan came up recently as an answer which helped with THE RIVALS. Used to play bridge, once came 116th in the BBL pairs, hence MINOR SUIT. Didn’t parse RAVE. All-in-all 18’33”.

    Thanks pip and setter.

  10. Enjoyed the Labour opposition. Never heard of the bottle and found CHANGEFUL a strange word. Thanks all.
  11. Another who knew TORERO courtesy of his Bobship. I’ve just acquired the 14 CD Rolling Thunder set, which should keep me quiet for today. 28 minutes with LOI CHANGEFUL, although I’d been thinking it might be that for a while. COD CONTRADICTION with SEMI-CIRCLE runner-up. I’d vaguely heard of a KLEIN BOTTLE and our star Maths pupil Sotira has shown how its orientation is manifold, I didn’t know the BY-BLOW that followed BLOW. I didn’t think you could have babies that way. Thank you Pip and setter.

    Edited at 2019-06-19 08:01 am (UTC)

    1. If only my maths teachers had talked less about standard deviations, more about Cheshire Cats, my life could have taken a very different path ….
      1. One which would have taken you back, upside-down, to where you started. Thinking about it, that’s what life is like.
  12. for this rather endearing puzzle.

    FOI 14ac RAVE

    LOI 20ac DANGLE or even WANGLE?

    COD 23dn Malta and GOZO – Lt.-Governor Sir Harry Luke once swam between two.

    WOD 7dn KLEIN BOTTLE

    MER at 1dn a ‘D’ isn’t quite a semi-circle, is it? It depends on the type face.

    1. My suspicion was that this was a snooker reference, and Chambers has:

      Anything shaped like the letter D, such as the semicircular marking on a snooker or billiard table

      1. That works – I’m snookered after all! Thanks Gmatt.

        Edited at 2019-06-19 09:15 am (UTC)

  13. Fascinating to find out what a KLEIN BOTTLE is. It rang a vague bell, but I had no idea what it actually was. SHOEMAKER followed in its footsteps. BAN was my FOI, but SABOT took a lot longer to surface, and finally gave me SEMICIRCLE, my LOI. CHANGEFUL is a word I haven’t encountered before. Didn’t know the By-Blow definition for wrong side of the blanket, but the expression was obvious enough. NEVER SAY DIE opened up the LHS nicely. An enjoyable puzzle. 31:14. Thanks setter and Pip.
  14. Steady solve of a fun puzzle with no unknowns and no queries. Never could quite get my mind around the mathematics of a Klein BOTTLE.
  16. 23 mins. Changeful? Okay, then…
    DNK by-blow. Put in lorgnettes after reading first two words of the clue. Semicircle was pretty good. Thanks pip.
  17. You can get mugs shaped like Klein bottles. Probably hard to clean!

    Another medium-hard difficulty puzzle today with a bunch of answers BIFD.

    Liked 10a as actually got that straight, without having to fudge about. Perhaps my FOI but it’s all a bit of a blur now. LOI was TORERO which was a DNK.

    Thanks for the exegesis and a challenging puzzle.

    3 month challenge now stands at 47/49.

    Tons of material here for my archives. By-blow was unknown, and many aliases/abbreviations like Society=S.

    WS

  18. 8:58.
    I didn’t know KLEIN BOTTLE and after reading a few definitions I still have absolutely no idea what one is. Easy enough to derive though.
    Likewise ‘by-blow’ was new to me, and like others I thought CHANGEFUL a bit of an odd word.
    1. Cheers k, I thought it was just me when I looked at the Wiki article on the Klein bottle.
  21. ….leading to NEVER SAY DIE (Black Sabbath) had me firmly back in the 70’s.

    I found this quite tough. NHO KLEIN BOTTLE, and thanks to Pip for unravelling CONTRADICTION, APPROXIMATELY, and BLOW-BY-BLOW.

    FOI SABOT
    LOI CHANGEFUL
    COD THE RIVALS (did anyone else think “Erica Roe” ?)
    TIME 16:57

  22. Steady 40 mins with biffs in all the obvious places. I thought that INSPIRED was spire inside ind for India. No idea if that’s a valid contraction or not. Spent far too long on NEVER SAY DIE. COD CONTRADICTION
  23. Herr Felix Klein he liked a stein, so asked the question “What’ll
    Ensure that beer is always here? I know – a cunning bottle
    I’ll make it intersect itself, so all its outside’s in it
    Then it will hold the liquid gold in volumes near infinite”
    [Chorus + um diddle etc.]

    My friend Jeremy wrote this, to the tune of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

  24. A few unknowns / unparsed, eg BY-BLOW, though with help from wordplay or def. I finished in 35 minutes, with SEMICIRCLE my last in.

    I found CHANGEFUL hard to parse, especially as it’s a word I haven’t come across much before. My picks were SABOT and the ‘one element of Labour’ wordplay.

    Thanks to setter and blogger

  25. I made things complicated for myself by slinging “retro” in at 24A. Memo to self, read the whole clue first you dope. I always thought BY-BLOW was rather a cruel way to refer to the poor little shavers. I seem to remember that sometime in the late 1990s Debrett and Burke’s Peerage decided to list the illegitimate offspring alongside the regular children which may have led to some interesting conversations in those circles. Oh, forgot – 24.24

    Edited at 2019-06-19 11:11 am (UTC)

  26. 15:47. My start was scattergun at best and it was only once I had a few useful checkers in place that I was able to biff a few and speed up towards the finish.

    For some reason I came across KLEIN BOTTLE fairly recently but I can’t remember why. Anyway, that helped but like most others I didn’t know BY-BLOW.

  27. 15:48. I think we’ve had D for semi-circle before. Never heard of BY-BLOW so biffed that one, and neglected to parse MISSIONS. DANGLE and CHANGEFUL my last 2 in. Nice puzzle. Thanks setter and Pip.
  28. Done in patches rather slowly but glad to get there. Klein bottle new to me and now that I’ve read about it newer still. A lot to like in this modest and gifted Times puzzle – if only its opinion articles had held to the standard.
  29. Steady progress until I reached the SE corner. Failed to parse COTTON WOOL but couldn’t think of anything else cottony with an O as second letter. Stabbed at BLOW BY BLOW not knowing the bastard def. CHANGEFUL had not the greatest clue…
  31. 17.51, though like Penfold, a bit scattergun. The 1d D was my last in, rather fun I thought, and Gothick Matt does well to remind us of misspent youth on the snooker table.
  32. 36:31. I found this a bit tricky. Overtrews was my first thought for 27ac too. I thought changeful was an odd word. Klein bottle appeared in jumbo 1352 blogged back in December 2018, I still struggled to remember it though. Funnily enough another recent oddity, nunatak, appeared in the same jumbo. Didn’t know the bastard in 13dn. COD to 4dn, canvasses on display was very compelling and needed some discipline to lift and separate.
  33. Does anyone know when the qualifying puzzles will be published this year? They used to be in May but I haven’t seen any yet. Thanks
  34. Thanks setter and pip
    Found this one a great deal earlier than the previous day’s puzzle, being able to finish in just over the half hour – good time for me. Had no issues with any of the ‘harder’ words in TORERO (with enough Spanish knowledge and clear word play), Klein bottle (vaguely remembered and easily enough constructed from the fodder after BOTTLE) and GOZO (a curious enough name to retain in geographical memory bank). However, did have to look up BY-BLOW to learn the alternative word for ‘bastard’.
    Did enjoy putting together the numerous charades throughout – sometimes with the definition first and sometimes building the answer and checking the definition.
    Finished in the SW corner with CHANGEFUL (a word little used down here, but clear enough), ON CUE (shouldn’t have lasted till second last) and DANGLE (which did make me pause with both the ‘wave’ and ‘inclination’ parts before writing it in).

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