Times 27393 – What’s up, Doc? I can see a planet or two.

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I’ll be interested to learn how others got on with this puzzle. I found it a game of two halves, as the cliché goes. I stared for a while at the early clues before finding a way in with 21a, 21d, 24a and in ten minutes had the entire bottom half completed, even to the point of having the Y checker ready for 12a, from 13d. Then I struggled. Suitable insects to solve 12a refused to fly by. STALEMATE wouldn’t fit 1d. A word for horse riding skill for 5d escaped me. I stalled, much like the middle of the England cricket team did, batting on Sunday last. Then some pennies dropped and I crawled to the end, the top half taking me perhaps twice as long as the lower part. 2d and 11a took a while to parse even though the definitions were clear.
Anyway, it’s a fine puzzle and we’ll probably find it was just me, everybody else did it in a normal fashion, top down, and had no goal-less period in the middle.

Next week, oliviarhinebeck will be your Wednesday correspondent, I’m off the grid. Toodle Pip!

Across
1 Go when penultimate lap ends in race (6)
DEPART – DART = race, has the ‘ends’ of penultimate, lap, i.e. E and P, inserted.
4 General tidying up (8)
SWEEPING – Double definition, sweeping as in ‘sweeping changes’.
10 Art house I gathered, OK (9)
AUTHORISE – (ART HOUSE I)*.
11 Bug I removed, originally in browser (5)
TAPIR – TAP = bug (as in phone), I R = I removed originally.
12 Bugs British ship, leading to fury (5-6)
BUNNY-BOILER – I’m not a movie buff, but I have seen Fatal Attraction. Nevertheless it took me an age to see what was going on here, and stop thinking about insects. BUGS gives us BUNNY, then B(ritish), OILER is a ship. Devious, or what.
14 Old music paper (3)
RAG – Double definition.
15 Man batting beyond fifty, bowler went over this player’s head? (7)
CHAPLIN – Once I’d thought, who wore a bowler hat, the clue untangled itself. a CHAP IN is a man batting, insert an L for fifty.
17 In middle of facelift, call for the hard stuff (6)
ENAMEL – (fac) EL (ift) has NAME inserted.
19 Nothing blocking vision through certain tubes (6)
VENOUS – I presume here VENUS is a heavenly vision, as in “Venus in blue jeans” perhaps. Then insert O for nothing.
21 I must leave notaries milling around politician (7)
SENATOR – (NOTAR ES)*.
23 Put away in suitcase, a tuxedo (3)
EAT – Hidden in SUITCAS(E A T)UXEDO.
24 Classic fare detected by sleuth (7,4)
SPOTTED DICK – SPOTTED = detected, DICK = sleuth. A traditional steamed sponge pud with currants making the spots. Why it’s dick, I don’t know.
26 Heavenly body starts off pretty luscious, until tragically old (5)
PLUTO – Initial letters of the 5 words after ‘starts off’.
27 Complain about nonsense to redhead (6-3)
CARROT-TOP – CARP = complain, has ROT and TO inside.
29 Where Somerset cathedral is filled with a thousand black holes, perhaps? (8)
INKWELLS – WELLS Cathedral is in Somerset, of course; so IN WELLS has K for a thousand inserted. I was going off piste thinking about how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall…
30 A wine after party enjoyed very much (6)
ADORED – A DO = a party, RED wine.

Down
1 No-win situation — second problem (8)
DRAWBACK – I was slow here, thinking no-win situation was the definition. But no, it’s not. DRAW is the no win situation, and to BACK is to second.
2 Attach nails to spike (5)
PITON – PIN = attach, ‘nails’ (i.e. goes around) TO.
3 Criminal losing case, the bounder (3)
ROO – CROOK loses its ‘case’ i.e. C and K.
5 Little rest astride horse, displaying riding skill (7)
WHEELIE – WEE = little, LIE = rest, insert H for horse, think bikes not horses.
6 Trash read in tenet, considered (11)
ENTERTAINED – (READ IN TENET)*. Considered, as in, entertained the idea of a drink before lunch.
7 Tense? There’s nothing wrong with me! (9)
IMPERFECT – I’M PERFECT !
8 Attachment to the house music genre (6)
GARAGE – Double definition, neat because HOUSE is also a music genre I believe.
9 Reject row about producer of litter (6)
DISOWN – SOW which produces a litter has DIN = row around it.
13 US river where chicken put to death (11)
YELLOWSTONE – YELLOW = chicken, scared; STONE = put to death. I’d heard of Yellowstone Park and Yellowstone Lake, probably from Yogi Bear, so a river seemed a reasonable bet. Apparently it’s a major tributary of the Missouri and 700 miles long.
16 Lost for words, as we customised vehicle (9)
AWESTRUCK – (AS WE)*, then TRUCK.
18 Holiday talked of, getting home slower? (5,3)
BRAKE PAD – BRAKE sounds like BREAK = holiday, then PAD = home.
20 Social Democrat in the end, unfortunately, resigned (7)
STOICAL – anagram of SOCIAL with T, the T from end of Democrat.
21 Mockery, flag supporting it (6)
SATIRE – SA, sex appeal, IT, then TIRE = flag.
22 Ancient sanctuary, peaceful initially in new capital city (6)
DELPHI – P = peaceful initially, inserted into DELHI. I went to Delphi in the 60s, it was magical then, I hope it’s not been over-touristified.
25 Scraping surface off when it’s icy, put underground (5)
INTER – WINTER has its W scraped off.
28 Occasional outswinging deliveries discombobulating openers (3)
ODD – openers of O utswinging D eliveries D iscombobulating.

48 comments on “Times 27393 – What’s up, Doc? I can see a planet or two.”

  1. A vision of Botticelli finally surfaced after five minutes of staring at 19ac, after solving several clues which seem to have escaped the QC.

    Rather liked WHEELIE and INKWELLS.

    I love the word BUNNY-BOILER, but Fatal Attraction, though exciting and gut-wrenching for some, is nowhere near as good as Play Misty for Me.

    Thanks pip and setter, 17’27”.

    Edited at 2019-07-03 06:07 am (UTC)

  2. Couldn’t get venous even with an alphabet trawl.
    Dnk piton.
    Cod enamel or wheelie.
  3. 18 minutes. LOI VENOUS which I don’t think I’d have got withour referencing the goddess in blue jeans recently. Mona Lisa in a pony tail indeed. Didn’t parse DEPART. Lots of fun clues in this with the memory of INKWELLS taking COD. Thank you Pip and setter.
  4. A puzzle of two halves for me too, although my dividing line was more of a diagonal SW to NE with answers to its right going in quite easily but then a lengthy standstill before making very slow progress on the other half. As the hour approached, with only 19ac outstanding and having been staring at it for more than 10 minutes I gave up on it and used a solver. And I was glad I did as I’d never have got it in a million years.TBH it seems a bit loose to me.

    Is one still allowed to say CARROT-TOP?

    Edited at 2019-07-03 05:38 am (UTC)

      2. The term ‘ranga’ (short for orang-utan) is used here and was most famously applied to our ex-PM Julia Gillard who apparently didn’t find the word offensive.

        I was spammed out when I tried to post the URL, but if you do a Google search on ‘ranga’ you should come up with a Fully (sic)-Crikey (yes, really!) link near the top of the first page. It explains the derivation and history of the term in more detail (with the tongue firmly in the cheek) and is well worth a look if you’re interested.

  5. Another DNF due to lack of vision. No complaints, except about my own dull-mindedness. Like flashman, I trawled the alphabet to no avail.
  6. Took me a while to find my FOI (which was RAG), so a feeling of existential dread had started to percolate. But there were some easy ones to come, such as PLUTO – and by the way, the official Scrabble list was updated on 1 July and now includes PLUTO as a verb meaning ‘to reduce in importance’. That’s pretty handy, as there were previously no words with DELOPTU or GILNOPTU.
  7. Having raced through this I expected the Snitch to tell me this was the easiest in some time so I was very surprised to see it rated Harder. I’ve no idea why this offering suited me so much.

    Incidentally, on a recent Saturday ipad edition every time I tried to input a particular answer the app crashed so I couldn’t verify my answers. I thus typed them into the iphone app which took me about 3 minutes. This gave me some perspective on those who manage solving times of 5 minutes or less. The mind boggles as to how little thinking time some people require!

  8. 40 mins before I cheated on Venous – with yoghurt, granola, etc.
    I’m another who had to invade from the south and am still MER’ing about Venus.
    Thanks setter and Pip.
  9. All done in 20 ish minutes and then the alphabet trawl for VENOUS which took a while given it starts with V. COD to BRAKEPAD. Thanks all.
  10. Another one who solved an enjoyable puzzle in two halves, north (hard) and south (easy), before staring at 19A trying to work out what was going on. Eventually looked up “tube” in Chambers Crossword Dictionary and saw “vein”! A bit of a loose clue me thinks judging by the trouble it’s causing. Well done Pip
  11. Another who found the top left most difficult, and also had to look up LOI, VENOUS, after staring at it in vain for 15 minutes or so. There was the dull thud of a sack of pennies dropping when I finally saw BUNNY for BUGS. DEPART took ages to see and finally opened up the corner. RAG was my FOI. Anyone else waste time wondering what WAKBELLS might be? A beast indeed! 79:20 and a cheat on 19a. Thanks setter and Pip.

    Edited at 2019-07-03 09:20 am (UTC)

  12. Hurrah! My brain is clearly starting to work again. 43 minutes, which is pretty good for me at the moment. FOI 1d DRAWBACK, LOI 4a SWEEPING, just after the penny dropped on 5d to give me the W. The biff-proofed ones (there are quite a few things that fit “browser” or “the hard stuff”!) slowed me down the most, and I was grateful of the easier ones to give me some toe-holds.

  13. Thanks, Pip. I eventually got BUNNY-BOILER but VENOUS stumped me.
    You are off grid next week. I hope that doesn’t mean more medical stuff.
    1. Hi Martin. Thankfully no, am hoping for a welcome respite if not a long term avoidance of medical stuff. We are on a short London visit to collect a car and mind g/children then back to pack for the real move to Rutland later in July. No more Carte Vitale. Hello NHS. Hope all is good in NZ.
      1. Very best of luck with the move. Is it a Brexit-related move?
        I’m slowly getting my life back together after Sue died last year and I’ve move into a lovely quirky cottage on the coast so, I’m progressing, thank you.
        Best wishes, Pip.
  14. 40 mins, so no speed records broken here. Nice chewy puzzle. Thanks pip.
  15. ….is one of the Chambers definitions of Venus, but it’s flagged as obsolete. I got it without too much over-thinking though.

    As my FOI betrays, I was another bottom-to-top merchant, although I foolishly halved my thousand to enter “indwells”, which had me baffled briefly before I twigged AWESTRUCK.

    Thanks for the parsing of DEPART Pip. I trust your departure is to somewhere wonderful.

    I alpha-trawled for a general at 4A once Pershing was discounted. The inevitable “duh” moment added a good minute to my time, and was followed by a bigger “duh” when my LOI fell – I don’t know why that one held me up.

    FOI SENATOR
    LOI DISOWN
    COD WHEELIE (it was “wheelie” clever)
    TIME 14:29

  16. 20:19. Very much a puzzle of two halves for me, but the second half was 1ac and 2dn and the first half was everything else. I’ve no idea why those two clues took me so long: they’re not particularly hard.
    I don’t think it slowed me down at all (my own denseness did that) but I don’t like the formulation ‘when penultimate lap ends in race’. It seems to me you’re either using abbreviated language (penultimate lap ends in race) or you’re not (when penultimate lap ends are in race). As the clue is written the word ‘when’ is left hanging: a conjunction with nothing to conjoin.
      1. Glad I’m not alone! I’m not sure you can fault it technically but it grates with me.
  17. I put this aside after 11 minutes, with 19a unentered as an alphabet trawl hadn’t enlightened me. VENOUS – tricky, but should have been doable.

    No particular troubles for the ones I could do, except that I had my fingers crossed for PITON.

  18. Well, forgot Bugs Bunny. Went for benny as what you’re infested with. No idea of the whole word though boiler clear enough. Otherwise creaked along slowly but successfully, through a mixture of the crass and the crafty.
  19. I had the same easy/hard split as others, and trouble with exactly the clues discussed above. But I tossed in the towel when it was clear that there were a half dozen or more I wasn’t going to figure out without a brain transplant.
  20. Lots to enjoy about this. I can’t claim it was my first in, but I had a moment of inspiration for VENOUS once I had the crossers. Must have been the memories of Shocking Blue – great stuff. My last in was SWEEPING, after also having tried to make ‘Pershing’ fit. Had to enter the unknown BUNNY-BOILER from the wordplay.

    WHEELIE (nice misdirection) and the defs for CHAPLIN, BRAKE PAD and INKWELLS were all good, but my pick was TAPIR. Brings a smile to the face even to think of the creature.

    Home in 61 minutes.

    Thanks to setter and blogger

  21. I’ve come in late (her indoors tidied up) and am only the 23rd contribution.

    19ac was my nemesis and after an hour I slung in ZEROES knowing it was incorrect.

    Held up in the NW Passage until I finally parsed 1ac DEPARTS after getting 1dn DRAWBACK assuming it began with an S!

    FOI 28dn ODD

    COD 15ac CHAPLIN

    WOD 13ac BUNNY BOILER

    A very tough one IMO, worthy of a Friday.

    Like Phil I would like to see the setters named but published the following day. Jack and Mr. Snitch could really do some stats then! Anonymous is dull fare.

  22. I got there in the end. Live everyobe else had a lot ore trouble in the top left. My downfall was putting DEADLOCK in for 1d once I had the initial D, although I couldn’t see how the wordplay worked. I was pretty sure I was correct since the next two clues that gave a checker gave the correct checker. LOI was WHEELIE having been misled into trying to trawl up names for horse things (luckily DRESSAGE had one too many latter).
  23. Definitely on the hard side, but really enjoyed it. RHS mostly OK, but the left took a while. Got venous without much trouble, unlike most others it seems.Didn’t make the connection to the 80s pop group, always wondered why they named themselves after the president of Fiji, Frank Bananarama. Really liked bunny-boiler, which was a “thing” back in the 1980s. And Chaplin, being so obvious yet so hard to get.
  24. Back from a few days without crossword access to a very entertaining offering. As seems common today, I needed to have a good think before VENOUS went in with fingers crossed, and a penny-drop moment for the WHEELIE. Solved while watching the cricket from Durham, and enjoyed 15ac as a cricket clue which turned out to be about something else instead.
  25. I did this under less than ideal conditions hanging about waiting to get mammogrammed (absolutely one of everyone’s least favourite things) and then waiting some more while the pix were scrutinized. At least they throw in a free massage while you sit about in your silly pink gown. I did wonder if it was just a case of fragmented concentration but then realized I was never going to get Glenn Close. I managed to see VENOUS but froze on WHEELIE. First DNF this year. See y’all next week. Happy Fourth to all who celebrate it.
  26. VENOUS last in, closely preceded by TAPIR (browser? Don’t get it) and DISOWN.

    I too found the bottom half easy, the NE more difficult and the NW really tough – BUNNY BOILER cleared up a lot once CHAPLIN had given me DRAWBACK.

  27. Had to give up on this – NHO 12ac and needed aids to get 4ac, 5dn & 19ac from checkers having gone down same blind alleys (military, horsey and 0s respectively) as others have mentioned.
  28. On the harder side I found. Got stuck with a few missing, but persisted, especially filling in the second part of BUNNY …. I ended up in the NE, LOI TAPIR, which was not a bug at all. Regards.
  29. Two lengthy alphabet trawls (DISOWN and, of course, VENOUS) showed that I didn’t have much idea of what was going on in either clue and pushed my time to 26 minutes. PITON with crossed fingers: I often have trouble when part of the wordplay is just the plain letters.
    But BUNNY_BOILER was fun, especially since bug was in the previous clue to disorient, and “I’m perfect” was a simple pleasure.
    We had two first letters of several words clues, a mite unusual I think
    Good entertaining blog, Pip: enjoy the rugrats.
  30. 15:47. I found this mostly very enjoyable and like others took a while to get VENOUS at the end. Alphabet trawl got me nowhere but a bit of thinking about tubes did the trick.

    PITON was biffed so thanks for the parsing.

  31. 68:27. Same game of two halves experience as others. No real problems in the bottom half but got stuck for ages on depart, piton, bunny-boiler and drawback in the top half.
  32. Today there’s a CNN headline about a woman who tortured her children and boiled their puppies…! But I’d never heard of a BUNNY-BOILER, and was not likely to have ever figured it out (even though I did catch a glimpse of that wascally wabbit).

    Bottom and east side, not so hard, but I was stumped on a few in the NW, and it was getting too hot in my un-air-conditioned apartment for me to stay awake… 

    “Venus” is “vision,” eh? Whatever you say…

    I did enjoy all the ones that I got!

    Edited at 2019-07-03 09:04 pm (UTC)

  33. Took this one at a leisurely pace and, bearing in mind other comments, was happy to complete without recourse to aids. My only query is whether ‘imperfect’ at 7d needs to be qualified.
  34. Too many distractions today and this puzzle was on the tougher side of the solving spectrum. Rabbit boiler I’d heard of but not bunny boiler. Had a lot of issues with CHAPLIN for some reason and various others which were not biffable even with various lights on.

    Many lessons to be learnt here, same as yesterday. For example I was groping for SEX (so to speak) for ‘it’ in 21d but DNK SA was sex appeal = it. Could have been there for N eternity waiting for non-existent inspiration to strike.

    58/60

    Thanks to all.
    WS

  35. Finally finished 1.5 days later – there’s perseverance – do I get the record?
    1. No, you don’t

      not that it’s taken 9 months – catching up on some missed puzzles as I seem to have a lot of time on my hands atm

  36. Happy to finish in 60mins! NHO bunny-boiler, and gazed forlornly at BUNNY -O- – – R for some time before the British oil-tanker appeared on the horizon, then did a wheelie, before sweating blood over VENOUS, which was last home by some distance. All the more annoying when we thought it’d be anatomical from the start( Looking for connections with bronchi, aorta, eustachian and even vena cava before the PDM)
    Very enjoyable workout. Thanks to setter and blogger.

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