Times 27469 – Not stuff you’d find Marvin, Borgnine and Bronson countenancing, methinks

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
With its weird exercise routine (‘a household phrase’ in the 1920s, as Pinter puts it) and its Irish lake isle, this is by no mean your average Monday offering, taking me in excess of 40 minutes. With its mixture of write-ins and clues needing thinking-out, not to mention its use of the odd non-mainstream definition, I thought this was an interesting puzzle. But what do the rest of you think? I shall read your opinions with interest and come back to award a prize to what I consider to be the outstanding contribution.

ACROSS

1 Took a risk — failed to catch cold (5)
DICED – C in DIED
4 Here no minister is found to support judges (9)
BACKBENCH – BACK BENCH; because the backbenches are filled with newbies, ne’er-do-wells, wannabes, those who threaten the PM through their egregious (archaic sense – just wanted to get the word in) intelligence, and those who refuse to take a three-line whip. I tip my cap to the last named.
9 Island where drink is on the house? (9)
INNISFREE – An isle in County Sligo memorialised by Yeats in a poem from his early period, when he was still relatively sane
10 Strength of over 50 per cent of oscillation (5)
SINEW – I am pretty darn proud to have worked this out, not being a sciency type; five eighths of SINE WAVE is SINEW. I’ll let the boffins argue over whether SINE WAVE can be one word and whether it matters at all to the clue whether it can be or not.
11 Broken son may receive sterling aid (6,7)
YEOMAN SERVICE – anagram* of SON MAY RECEIVE; not a phrase you hear every day, as Pinter might put it, but it has certainly worn better than DAILY DOZEN
14 Eggs left in the ground (4)
OVAL – OVA L
15 Be endlessly agitated by scratchy sort of blouse (3-7)
SEE-THROUGH – SEETH[e] (agitated) ROUGH (scratchy)
18 The school for chemists? (10)
ELEMENTARY – a whimsical cryptic definition, which boffins may chortle into their beards over
19 Wake up in prison (4)
STIR – double definition (DD)
21 Burn coal: aren’t changing to become this? (6-7)
CARBON-NEUTRAL – BURN COAL ARENT*
24 Dye used within borders of Indian city (5)
HENNA – [c]HENNA[i]; frankly, I can’t see the point of going to all the trouble of changing the name when the best known and arguably most widespread use of the word has been retained in Chicken Madras. One for the linguistic hygienists and hand-wringers to work on…
25 One cultivating wickedness speaking a tiny bit (9)
SCINTILLA – if you were a farmer who was also a bit of a wag, you might joke over the fence to your neighbouring landowner – as a change from moaning about this and that – that if you decided to grow vices instead of turnips and rape, you might by styled a ‘sin tiller’
27 Observes discussions producing capital projections (9)
EYESTALKS – EYES TALKS; the things that stick out of the front part (‘capital’ – geddit?) of slugs and snails, in pairs, with the bottom ones doing the sniffing and the upper ones doing the looking
28 Politicians on vacation leave such time for music (5)
DUPLE – DUP (from Nor’n Ir’n) L[eav]E; rhythm based on two beats to the bar

DOWN

1 Regular exercise, newspaper, then nap before noon (5,5)
DAILY DOZEN – DAILY DOZE N; ancient callisthenics
2 Holy figure I left in study (3)
CON – [i]CON
3 Period in which doctrine is cast down (6)
DISMAY – ISM in DAY
4 Basis for soup that may include eggs (5,4)
BIRDS NEST – another bit of whimsy from the setter
5 Red Queen’s disposition (5)
CHEER – CHE (red, as in Guevara) ER; as in ‘Be of good cheer, O fellow callisthenic practitioner!’
6 Finest engagement book, not the first one featuring animals (8)
BESTIARY – BEST [d]IARY; it seems to me that you need to perform a spot of callisthenics to get this to work, to allow ‘book’ to do a bit of double duty; alternatively, as pointed out below, one just extends the definition back one word to include ‘one’
7 Hurry up fielding strange question, giving illogical answer (3,8)
NON SEQUITUR – RUN reversed around QUESTION*
8 With solemn person, hard to cry (4)
HOWL – H OWL [solemn person]
12 Old knowledge I lost about gentle play of colours (11)
OPALESCENCE – PALE (gentle; ‘pale morning light’ perhaps?) in O (old) SC[i]ENCE
13 Sailor perhaps on this horse failing to get away (5,5)
SHORE LEAVE – HORSE* LEAVE
16 Drastic rules from receivers inhibiting Yankee (9)
TYRANNIES – Y in TRANNIES (transistors)
17 Abandon belief, holding religious teaching to be cowardly (8)
RECREANT – RE in RECANT
20 In luxurious hotel room, died in formal clothes (6)
SUITED – SUITE D
22 No-good lake bird (5)
OUSEL – O USE (‘good’, as in ‘You’re no use!’) L
23 Socks son pulled up, put into this? (4)
SHOE – S raised in HOSE (footwear worn by callisthenic pratictioners?)
26 Drink: get one round ahead (3)
LAP – DD; if you lap someone, you get one round of the circuit ahead of them; the sort of thing that might be said by a callisthenic practitioner

47 comments on “Times 27469 – Not stuff you’d find Marvin, Borgnine and Bronson countenancing, methinks”

  1. I biffed SINEW, twigged post-submission. Does it matter whether it’s one word or two? It’s 5/8 of the expression either way. I also biffed NON SEQUITUR, the def sticking out like a sore thumb, and there was a Q and stuff so I figured there was anagrist enough. Put in HENNA because it had to be, but Chennai escaped me. For me the best known use of ‘Madras’ is in ‘bleeding Madras’, one of the great sartorial mistakes of the previous century. Here’s Yeats in later life reading ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLlcvQg9i6c
  2. 35 mins for me. I think BESTIARY is fine if you move the “one” to make the definition “one featuring animals”. That leaves “engagement book not the first” for IARY, which is fine.

    BTW you have a minor typo of Chennae for Chennai.

  3. 11:49. Interesting puzzle, with a rather old-fashioned feel to it as ulaca notes. YEOMAN SERVICE is certainly not a phrase I hear every day, or indeed ever.
    Technically ‘book’ isn’t doing double duty in 6dn as vinyl and Paul have already pointed out, but it sort of is in that the definition only makes sense by reference to it. But we see this all the time in semi-&Lits.
  4. I was stuck on three or four answers in the NW and eventually looked up the island to help me on my way. I had got as far as INN IS but couldn’t think beyond that. Although I may have heard the name I didn’t really recognise it once found.

    RECREANT was new to me or forgotten. I had no idea what was going on in the parsing of SINEW and although I realised a place name needed to be topped-and-tailed to produce HENNA I wasn’t able to come up with it. I’m too old to be bothered learning new names for places that were called something else throughout my formative years and most of my life beyond that.

    A little research shows that RECREANT has come up a couple of times before but I think this is the first time with ‘cowardly’ as part of the definition.

    Edited at 2019-09-30 05:51 am (UTC)

    1. Oddly, Innisfree was my FOI, but only because I’d recently re-read the poem by Yeats:

      THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

      BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

      I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
      And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
      Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
      And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

      And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
      Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
      There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
      And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

      I will arise and go now, for always night and day
      I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
      While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
      I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

  5. 20:34 … I made this much harder by biffing SHORT LEASH at 13d, which left me baffled by 28a for a long time. I didn’t really understand EYESTALKS so thanks for that, u.

    I’m sure there were subtler things to appreciate in here but in my dozy Monday morning state the clue I enjoyed was ELEMENTARY. Just my level.

    Cheers, all.

  6. 50 mins and almost gave up after inventing Recreant and Eyestalks and Yeoman Service. Good grief.
    Thanks setter and U.
    1. I unspammed you Martin! Apparently if you are a blogger you get that privilege (and I’m only an occasional temp one). I owe you an email – later this week I hope.
      1. Thanks, Olivia. The previous day I had a message that there was some problem with my ISP which prevented me from signing in. All resolved now, I hope! Look forward to hearing from you.
        M
  8. …24 minutes, with LOI RECREANT. It took me a while to SEE-THROUGH the blouse. When I have to throw away some previously useful but irreparably broken piece of equipment, I’ll still say that it’s done x years YEOMAN SERVICE. I like the phrase. I also knew DAILY DOZEN well. But COD to SINEW. I spent too much time viewing sine waves in the Clarendon down a cathode ray oscillosope (cutting edge then) to miss out on that. You wouldn’t believe how far off sinusoidal the National Grid waveform is. I would usually have sinewave as two words though, but I have seen it often enough as one. As well as the Yeats poem, I could also hear Bing singing the Isle of Innisfree. Hell, I’m old. Thank you U and setter.

    Edited at 2019-09-30 08:20 am (UTC)

      1. Yep, it means singing through your nose, equivalent to an adenoidal voice but less pronounced.
  9. I agree this puzzle had a comforting old fashioned feel to it. Rather like one of the qualifying puzzles we ordinarily would have completed to secure a place in the Crossword Championship – only a bit harder.

    24 mins with one error. Non Sequitor. I’m happy enough with that time as I have not been doing the crossword much recently due to various time commitments. But I’ve just signed up for the morning session of the championship – so I’m back in training as of today.

    😀

  10. A peaceful, old fashioned puzzle that had a calming effect – rather like the beautiful Lake Innisfree in Sligo.
  11. ….to moan about two ins. No, not the Yeatsian INNISFREE, but the “in” at 14A which indicates “olva” or “ovla” to me, and should surely have been “on”, and the first word of 20A, which indicates “sudite” to me, and simply appears to be superfluous. It’s all very well being stylish in writing a clue – indeed it should be encouraged – but I didn’t really see how these two worked.

    Like Vinyl, I did this in fits and starts, being utterly becalmed for a good five minutes at one point in the proceedings. I’m grateful to Ulaca for parsing SINEW (NHO sinewave), CHEER, and the rather weak OUSEL.

    My LOI required a complicated alpha-trawl, not least because it could have been “ri” rather than “re”.

    Target missed, puzzle not greatly enjoyed.

    FOI OVAL (with a Gallic shrug)
    LOI RECREANT (with a sigh of relief)
    COD SEE-THROUGH (with a coarse chuckle)
    TIME 23:45 (I must improve before December !)

  12. I pushed this out to an hour and two minutes to get my last couple, the crossers of SEE-THROUGH and TYRANNIES.

    It turned out it was all for naught, though, as I’d taken a guess at “RECRIANT” for the unknown RECREANT. Well, it seemed like the setter was old enough to have done R.I. rather than R.E…

    NHO DAILY DOZEN, INNISFREE, YEOMAN SERVICE, and had a few problems elsewhere, too, though at least I parsed SINEW.

  13. My first thought about this was ‘hits’ rather than ‘hose’, which would have given me a word that appropriately describes a puzzle with some dodgy cryptics and some terms that Noah would have found antiquated.
    1. Some of us have been around since Adam was a lad, for whom antedeluvian means post-modern. I liked it, Mr Anon.
      1. You might be interested in the correspondence in today’s QC blog. Vinyl recently found himself obliged to delete some regrettable exchanges in a Quicky; he, or the individual bloggers, might want to consider taking similar measures against anonymous comments like the above.
        1. Probably such comments are best ignored. I just felt sorry for the setter, who’d produced a puzzle I’d enjoyed. Surely one of the joys of doing crosswords is the remembrance of things past?
  14. I had interruption during this, and still managed a decent 18.35. CHEER made me thing a bit, as “disposition” was a definition I hadn’t really thought of, despite being occasionally of good cheer. OUSEL was the only bird it could be, but the wordplay didn’t dawn easily.
    I’d use the word RECREANT if I were Boris taunting everyone else, except they wouldn’t get what I was saying. No change there.
    DUPLE vaguely from music, but I wouldn’t be confident of British/French/Italian pronunciation.
    A mildly weird puzzle.
  15. A rather more challenging offering than I was hoping for to get me back in the routine, but I cracked it eventually after several interruptions. Like Vinyl, I kept getting a few clues and then hitting the wall, before another inspiration got me going again. NON SEQUITUR was key to the NE, and SEE THROUGH finally allowed me to see TYRANNIES, my LOI. 47:51. Hard work! Thanks setter and U.
  16. 31′, glad to finish. Love the poem. Liked SCINTILLA, SHOE. Successfully parsed HENNA.

    One of my favourite pieces of cricket commentary: “the Oval square is a long oblong”.

    Thanks ulaca and setter.

  17. I also thought this was a little old-fashioned, but as I quickly recognised the likes of YEOMAN SERVICE and DAILY DOZEN, clearly I am sufficiently old for that not to be a problem. RECREANT was one of those words which I knew existed, but wouldn’t have been able to define without any context. Challenging for a Monday.
  18. I went through the top half quite speedily but then my mind wandered. If Yeats really planted 9 bean rows he must have had bushels of the things. I’ve just got 2 and I don’t want to look at another green bean until next year sometime. I spent time trying to squeeze a fence (for receiver) into 17d after forgetting that trannies can be radios rather than something else. Completely missed the parsing of HENNA and SINEW (thanks Ulaca). 20.26
  19. Dunno, I just thought this was an extremely tough crossword, and only bloody-minded obstinacy got me through it in an hour. I think 4ac should be two words, not one. As one word it’s an adjective, innit? I might be wrong. Thanks u.
  20. A far from usual Monday offering, with, as Ulaca says, many offbeat definitions. I biffed SINEW, but would never have parsed it, a “sine wave” being unknown to me. Many thanks to the blogger.
  22. Somewhat surprised to be here after being beaten up by the weekend puzzles. But I got into this quite quickly in the NW after OVAL FOI; and YEOMAN SERVICE is a term I remember, but don’t use frequently today.
    My hold-ups at the end were SEE THROUGH and finally after a long trawl DUPLE.
    Not all parsed but all correct in a bit over an hour.
    David
  23. Strangely, I have just today started listening ( I never read books) to a book called What the Wind Knows and lo and behold, chapter 2 starts with the Yeats poem.
    Back to the Xword, I had to assume it was HENNA nut no idea why, which left me floundering with an unknown word which I had to use checkers for, so a technical DNF. Not the quick Monday solve I was expecting!
  24. Definitely off the wavelength today (no pun intended), as I found all this slow-going. When I finally put in some of the longer answers, they all made sense and I wondered why I’d had trouble. In any case I still needed aids to help with BIRD’S NEST (I’d heard of it but couldn’t recall it), DIED for ‘failed’, and RECANT for ‘abandon belief’.

    A lot of the UK-centric stuff I recognized once I’d finally puzzled them out but was struck with the sense that they’d be easy write-ins, many of them, for y’all over there.

    Big thanks to ulaca for helping me understand some of the wordplay!

    Edited at 2019-09-30 03:17 pm (UTC)

  25. Aargh. Not an easy Monday at all, taking me much longer than usual, maybe 45 minutes. But I got through, and then find I have a stupid spelling error at OPALESCENSE. Dope. And I saw the ‘science’ art of the wordplay and still screwed it up. I couldn’t parse SINEW (NHO the sine wave, sorry) and OUSEL (0-use as no good passed me by), and didn’t know of DUPLE. Thanks Ulaca and setter. Regards.
  26. Even if ‘cheer’ somehow means disposition, it’s a bit archaic isn’t it? Birds nest isn’t the basis for soup. It’s. . .soup! Similarly the light in ‘pale morning light’ is simply ‘pale’, otherwise you’re just assigning a random definition to the word. It’s not an infeasible interpretation by any means, poetic almost, but it’s a bit of a leap. Turn it around-would you initially use ‘pale’ if you meant ‘gentle’? As an across clue, shouldn’t the ‘on’ in 28a mean it’s at the end of the answer and not at the front? It’s rather unfortunate that they’re promoting the championships with some quite esoteric daily offerings. Or perhaps that’s the intention-to discourage the casual solver from entering? Mr Grumpy
    1. The ‘on’ in 28a is nothing to do with position, it belongs with ‘vacation’ indicating to take the outside letters of ‘leave’.

      So Leave [on vacation] = L…E.

      No positional indicator is required for separate elements of a clue when, as here, they follow on in the same order.

      Edited at 2019-09-30 09:49 pm (UTC)

    2. Considering that birds nest soup is made by simmering bird’s nests, the clue doesn’t have a problem
  27. I struggled with this and came in at 56mins. Some commenters here enjoyed it, but I thought it too obtuse — or I was too obtuse. The ‘in’s in the SUITED clue just seem wrong; I really can’t accept ‘pale’ = ‘gentle’; the def for SEE-THROUGH is lame; and, once my irritation was in full spate, I balked at plural ‘socks’ being put in a single SHOE (despite the argument that it is the singular ‘hose’ which is placed in the shoe). Please accept my application to join the Grumpy Club.
    Best bit was your blog, ulaca — many thanks.
  28. Probably a flash in the pan rather than an indication I might get higher than the bottom quarter of the field in the December prelims (yes I’ll be in the morning session to allow me have a few beers in the George while others challenge for prizes), but I worked through this without mishap. I failed to parse several on first reading, but worked out all but HENNA and DISMAY before stopping the clock. Great blog as ever U – thanks for the elucidation. COD to NON SEQUITUR. 17:55
  29. I needed 1 hour and almost 2 mins for this and felt very far from the wavelength. Perhaps the see-through blouse sent my pulse racing and gave me a funny turn. Mind you, I could have sat here until Christmas and not twigged sine wave as the oscillation at 10ac. If I know Yeoman Service it’s only from previous puzzles. Took me ages to think of Chennai to justify henna. The daily dozen was unknown. I worked out recreant but wouldn’t have guessed that it meant cowardly. Howl was also frustratingly out of reach for some time. A tough grind for me.
  30. I am (if I am honest, which happens on occasion) glad that many of you found this one challenging. It took me 35 minutes, longer than my slow average. I just shrugged at YEOMAN SERVICE, but had no problems with DAILY DOZEN, in which I am a great believer. But who knew it could refer to exercise as well?

    DUPLE was an NHO, and I fondly imagine that it refers to German oompah music. RECREANT was another, and I did spend a while wondering whether “religious teaching” was RE or RI. (I shall always remember my secondary school RE teacher, Mr. Monk. He may have been a few fries short of a Happy Meal: at one point he told the class that God had sent him a new washing machine. He didn’t specify which brand it was, which would have been useful to know.)

    I agree with [pserve] that the “in”s in 20d were totally out of control. I would welcome him/her (him, judging by the photo) to the Grumpy Club, but it’s oversubscribed already and there aren’t enough biscuits to go around. The tranny in the SEE-THROUGH blouse accounted for my two last in.

  32. More like this, please. You get a chuckle from a flash of inspiration and a shared witticism. There is the feeling that the setter is egging you on, rather than throwing hurdles in your path.

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