Times 27559 – How about starting with a trilobite?

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Time: 21 minutes
Music: Mozart, Piano Sonatas, Eschenbach.

The easy Monday puzzle is back, and if I had correctly identified the literals of a few of the clues in the NW I would have had a very good time.  Unfortunately, I struggled a little at the end, after racing through most of the puzzle in about ten minutes.   ‘Cambrian’, ‘busking’, and ‘anagrams’ were the ones that gave trouble, but they fell quickly once I got the first one.

I had a little trouble working on a new computer, so I ended up typing in the across section twice.   It’s all good now….I hope!

Across
1 Eccentric chap, a Welshman (8)
CAMBRIAN – CAM + BRIAN.   Is Ian a Welshman?   No!
6 Stout Russian teacher originally in old college (6)
PORTLY – PO(R[ussian] T[eacher])LY
9 So hard entering union circles, ultimately! (4)
THUS – T(H)U + [circle]S.
10 Disparager’s bad name sons endure (10)
MUDSLINGER – MUD + S + LINGER.
11 Burrowing rodent in short programme, broadcast internally around India (7,3)
PRAIRIE DOG – PR(AIR(I)ED)OG, which most solvers will biff.
13 Stagger back, giving lecherous look (4)
LEER – REEL backwards, a chestnut.
14 Strike a pose and rise to speak, for example? (8)
ANAGRAMS – of which STRIKE A POSE and RISE TO SPEAK is indeed an example – a very cleverly hidden one.
16 Lively grammarian’s voice? (6)
ACTIVE – Double definition, a very simple one.
18 Like layer of skin partially under microscope (6)
DERMIC – Hidden in [un]DER MIC[roscope].
20 With misgivings, like one in a French cathedral city (8)
UNEASILY – UN E(AS I)LY. another one most solvers will biff.
22 Soldier captures leaders of old brigade in desert (4)
GOBI – G(O[ld] B[rigade])I.
24 Vehicle reversed by man wearing gem, not of the highest standard (10)
SUBOPTIMAL – BUS backwards + OP(TIM)AL.
26 Just cause, providing venue for outdoor entertainment (10)
FAIRGROUND – FAIR + GROUND.
28 A small number backing WWII alliance (4)
AXIS – A + SIX backwards.
29 Destructive lout beginning to lurk behind London museum (6)
VANDAL – V AND A + L[urk].
30 Representing Nepal, the largest living land animal (8)
ELEPHANT – anagram of NEPAL, THE.
Down
2 Notice from this source inspiring Queen’s devotion (9)
ADHERENCE – AD + H(ER)ENCE.
3 Transport chief performing in the street? (7)
BUSKING – BUS + KING.
4 Doctor in Iowa, one for feet (5)
IAMBI – IA (MB) I.
5 Be about to drop off teacher going north (3)
NOD – DON upside-down.
6 German count’s friend’s final resting place (9)
PALSGRAVE – PAL’S GRAVE,
7 Linger unhappily at stern of boat in lock (7)
RINGLET – anagram of LINGER + [boa]T.
8 Loyal subject, say, tucking into pork pie (5)
LIEGE – LI(E.G.)E, my FOI, one of the very easy clues.
12 Dry fellow rising to interrupt (7)
DISTURB –  BRUT SID upside down.
15 Lancaster ground inherited from one’s forebears (9)
ANCESTRAL – anagram of LANCASTER.
17 European bishop replaced by very unrefined individual (9)
VULGARIAN – (+V,-b)ulgarian, a very simple letter-substitution clue.
19 After a month in Paris, man claims right to be hotel manager (6,1)
MAITRE D – MAI + T(R)ED, where Ted is just an ordinary bloke this time.
21 Roll a companion leaves on plate? (7)
SPINACH – SPIN + A CH.
23 Japanese port’s extremely obvious alias (5)
OSAKA – O[bviou]S + AKA, a bit of an &lit, as the clue is indeed extremely obvious.
25 Cleric cut daughter going to centre (5)
PADRE – PARED with the D moved to the centre.
27 Ancient city on eastern river (3)
URE – UR + E, another very easy one.

69 comments on “Times 27559 – How about starting with a trilobite?”

  1. Could have been under 10′, but at 19d I flung in MOI, forgetting the S, and only after some time noting that, as well as the enumeration. 14ac was nice, although I think reversing the order of the two verb phrases might have given a somewhat more natural surface. V, you’ve got a typo: pose/post.

    Edited at 2020-01-13 05:48 am (UTC)

  2. Finished in about 50 mins, last few which took the longest were the vulgarian, uneasily, and active crossers.

    COD Anagrams.

  3. was my LOI and held me up for a while to turn this into 24 mins rather than a sub 20.

    FOI 27dn URN with the oldest city of all again

    COD 3dn BUSKING isn’t that Lord Ulaca’s title?

    WOD 17dn VULGARIAN any Limericks on this topic?

    I note that Kevinland is mentioned at 23dn

  4. 32 minutes, pushed over my target half-hour by ANAGRAMS which also took a while to parse after I stopped the clock, even though of course by then I knew what I was looking for.

    DK PALSGRAVE, but being aware of ‘Landgrave’ and ‘Margrave’ I just trusted the wordplay.

  5. That was easy. Some of the clues were almost excessively simple. For example, 23d didn’t really need “Japanese” in the clue, which made it a write-in. My first trip to Osaka was in 1983, when I realized what it must be like to be illiterate because in that era you never saw a word of english. Now you land on an artifical island, but not then. It was also the first time I had Japanese food, I’d never even had sushi since it didn’t really exist in the way it does today.
  6. ANAGRAMS tripped me up as they have in the past. In my early days in aviation there used to be an airline called Cambrian Airways, which was part of the old BEA (British European Airways). It was nominally a Welsh airline. I knew Margrave – the late John Peel’s autobiography was entitled “Margrave of the Marshes”- but not PALSGRAVE

    Edited at 2020-01-13 07:20 am (UTC)

  7. I spent about 5 minutes on my LOI, ANAGRAMS. Hats off to the setter for hiding that so well. COY (clue of the year) for me so far.
  8. My records tell me that this is a PB, and the first time I’ve ever come in under 20 minutes. Squeaking in at 19 doesn’t shave a lot off my previous best, but I’m happy nonetheless.

    FOI 5d NOD LOI 12d DISTURB which I had to come back to after I’d got some more crossers from the bottom half. My only question mark was the unknown German count, but the wordplay was fair. Surprised that I spotted 14 ANAGRAMS so quickly, as I usually take an age to come up with the goods on that kind of clue.

      1. Thanks, Horryd. I imagine that what’s next is a painful reminder that sometimes I don’t even manage to finish them in an hour, but we’ll see what tomorrow brings!
  9. 19’30”, which felt slow, with at least five minutes on ANAGRAMS, despite all the checkers, COD certainly. Dnk PALSGRAVE.

    Thanks vinyl and setter.

  10. …with a smile. 17 minutes with LOI ANAGRAMS, which has to be COD. Otherwise I found this straightforward. ANCESTRAL Lancaster’s castle has a very dark dungeon. The highlight of any visit is to be locked in there. Thank you V and setter.
    1. Agreed Bolton – of course, many would have been locked in together in the same pitch black cell for up to three months waiting for the next assizes. Appalling sanitary conditions of course… The castle (though not those particular cells) was used as a prison right up to 2011, and is still used today as a Crown Court.
  11. 9:40. A rare sub-10 minutes for me. I see I’m not the only one who finished with ANAGRAMS – it is indeed well hidden. Otherwise very Mondayish. I liked BUSKING best for the image it conjured up. Thanks Vinyl and setter.
  12. 13:31 … another one with 5 minutes on .N.G.A.S, convinced there was no word in English to fit. Grudging COD to that, though I liked the bus king, too
    1. I was similarly convinced there was no word that fitted. Curious with a word that’s so familiar to all of us.
      1. Maybe it was the pluralisation that made it so hard. Had it been .N.G.A. we’d all have bunged it in without a thought.
    2. From a previous blog: An eccentric or cam is ‘a slider or roller attached to a rotating shaft to give a particular type of reciprocating motion to a part in contact with its profile’.

      However on another occasion and in response to one of my blogs, contributor Keith Doyle wrote: I must take issue with CAM=ECCENTRIC, though this seems to have got itself firmly ensconced in crosswordland. Both convert rotary to linear motion, but a cam allows an arbitrary relationship, whereas an eccentric provides only a (roughly) sinusoidal motion.

      1. That might be Mr Doyle’s opinion but it is not that of Collins “eccentric: a device for converting rotary motion to reciprocating motion” or the ODO: “A disc or wheel mounted eccentrically on a revolving shaft in order to transform rotation into backward-and-forward motion, e.g. a cam… “
        1. Yes, it seems fine to me but as the comment was posted on my blog I had remembered there was some dissent in the ranks. As (almost) always I’d defer to dictionary definitions from the usual sources.
          1. As setters aren’t usually engineers, they have to rely on dictionaries, as they don’t know the details of the alternative ways to convert rotation to reciprocal motion.
            1. If I was a setter I think I might have ‘Alphanumeric Grid Engineer’ on my business cards
              1. I like that.
                My comment should have been more specific (by the way, my 45-year career in engineering was for the first half in hardware, then software finishing as C.Eng.).
  16. With respect, I think 27 across should be parsed as UR (the city) + E(astern).
    Like most others, I was delayed at the end by anagrams.
    Kind regards, Bob K.
  18. Aaaargh! DNF. I whizzed through most of this in just over five minutes but then I was left with 14ac. I couldn’t see a single bit of wordplay that corresponded to any of the checking letters, or an obvious English word that would fit, so I concluded it must be a word I didn’t know and gave up much more quickly than I should have done. With the benefit of hindsight an alphabet trawl would have yielded pretty quick results!
    One day I will learn not to be defeated by this trick, but that day is not today.
    COD 14ac, obviously.
    1. I only got it when I moved to double alphabet trawls. It was a relief to find I needed 2 As!
  19. Well off the pace today; 29 mins.
    Anagrams was clever, and held me up for 5 mins.
    Thanks v.
  20. Same experience with ANAGRAMS as LOI, though thankfully I saw it straight away. (Unlike yesterday’s LOI, which was another kick-yourself-job.)
  21. I found this tough. Got there in the end with LOI – ANAGRAMS of course. I didn’t know CAM = eccentric.

    I agree with Sotira, BUSKING was good but COD goes to the clever ANAGRAMS.

  22. Ah, yes. Lancaster City play at the wonderfully named Giant Axe, immediately adjacent to the railway station. If they continue as they are, they could be promoted to the same league as us next season, thus allowing a boozy away-day in one of my favourite towns for pubs. Unless, of course, we are also promoted. We were 18th in the league on Christmas Day, but a six game unbeaten run has us up to 6th.

    I digress (yet again). I made heavier weather of this than I should have done. Slow to start on the 7th clue I attempted, DNK PALSGRAVE, and was delayed by failing to spot SUBOPTIMAL, thus also holding back my LOI.

    FOI LEER
    LOI PADRE
    COD ANAGRAMS
    TIME 10:01

    Edited at 2020-01-13 11:06 am (UTC)

    1. Giant Axe is so named because the exterior wall of the sports club of which it was the centrepiece was shaped like a giant axe head – can’t quite see it myself….
  23. Yup, I joined the ANAGRAMS club. Also briefly held up by the LINGERing double exposure in the NE corner. I was told once that MUD meaning bad name had its origins in the doctor Samuel Mudd who was vilified for and indeed found guilty of conspiring with Abe Lincoln’s assassin. But apparently that’s not correct. 11.02
  24. I don’t often try the 15×15 but this was accessible and I managed it in under an hour (wry smile from the whizz kids). Some very good clues but the standout was ANAGRAMS. A good start to my week. John M.
  25. … which threw me completely on ‘liege’. Thus DNF.

    ‘Anagrams’ is so clever that in this puzzle it looks like it was set by somebody else. Did Friday’s setter drop it in perhaps?

  26. It will come as no surprise to anyone that I knocked off most of this in double-quick time (pausing only to work through PALSGRAVE, solved by fair wordplay and analogy with the other -graves already mentioned). And then I stared at 14ac in bafflement, struggling even to find a word which actually fitted (UNIGLASS? SNUGRATS?) before the penny dropped with a very satisfying noise.
  27. In the same boat as several others – 12m 47s for me, with about half that time spent on ANAGRAMS as the LOI.
  28. I read about Mudd in childhood in Richard Halliburton’s ‘Book of Marvels’, Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas being one of his marvels. I had thought, believing everything Halliburton said, that Mudd had simply set Booth’s leg, not knowing anything of the assassination; but you prompted me to look him up, and the story seems rather more complicated.
  30. Steady completion on the train until the last five. MUDSLINGER only went in once I’d decided that PALSGRAVE could be nothing else, having no idea what it was.

    These two together gave IAMBI and confirmed ACTIVE (no idea about a grammarian’s voice being THUS).

    Finally ANAGRAMS like several others

  31. First crossword in more than three weeks, so not surprised I didn’t find it quite as easy as some others did. Is there something funny about the mudslinger clue? A bad name (ie mud) being what disparagers always give, that part of the clue is not really cryptic.
  32. I have never finished one of these in under 20 minutes. Today, solving on paper, I had 29 clues done in 17-18 minutes. 5 minutes later I was still trying to get 14a.
    So like almost everyone else it seems, ANAGRAMS tripped me up at the end. I got it after a break- and I have seen this device before. COD to that; and a fun puzzle.
    David
  34. Gave up after 26 minutes with at least five spent trying to solve 14 across. Just did not get it! One to put in the memory locker for obscure clues.
  37. No time as I fell asleep contemplating why the answer was ANAGRAMS. Too befuddled when I woke up to work it out so came here, giving me that duh moment. Agree – a clue from another day in this puzzle.
  38. That was fun. PALSGRAVE I’d not heard of but the wordplay seemed locked in. DISTURB held me up for far too long. As with others ANAGRAMS was LOI but fortunately I wasn’t staring for too long.
  39. CAMBRIAN was my FOI, and I worked southwards from that. Surprisingly, ANAGRAMS didn’t detain me for too long, as a little bell tinkled somewhere in the recesses of what passes for my brain. I hadn’t heard of PALSGRAVE, but I had enough crossers to get GRAVE, and was aware of Falsgrave Road in Scarborough, which was enough for me to trust the wordplay, which was confirmed by PORTLY. My LOI was MUDSLINGER, where the separation of LINGER from Son tripped me up for quite some time. Nice puzzle. 17:28. Thanks setter and Vinyl.
  40. I’m in the same boat as most others here – we’re gonna need a bigger boat. LOI was ANAGRAMS. I would have been a good bit less than 20 minutes except for that one. Oh, and I didn’t know of a PALSGRAVE either, but assumed there was such a person. Regards.
  41. At first I thought this was boringly simple, but of course ANAGRAMS (almost everyone’s LOI) doubled my time to just under an hour before the penny finally dropped. I even went to the trouble of looking at the puzzle in the Times app on my phone to make sure the clue wasn’t a misprint in the crossword club. COD to ANAGRAMS, of course. And I thought I was getting good at this.
  42. Came to this following a tip-off in today’s QC blog. I can confirm that the level was just right for those of us trying to make the jump to the 15×15. Better still, I actually managed to work out 14ac, albeit only once I had all the crossers in place. Like Flashman, my last three were Uneasily, Active and Vulgarian, with Palsgrave an earlier unknown shot in the dark, simply based on the cryptic. Invariant

    Edited at 2020-01-13 07:16 pm (UTC)

  43. 18:59 I felt this puzzle was a missed opportunity for a quick time. The unknown Palsgrave was easily derived and pretty much everything went in on a first reading. It wasn’t until my last two, that i ground to a halt and hopes of a PB evaporated. Sadly the vulgar Bulgar took a long time to appear and anagrams had me baffled for ages. I liked cam Brian and the Bus King, perhaps they are one and the same?
  44. No time for this one, but I definitely struggled and probably went over 40min. VULGARIAN had me held up for quite a while, as did ANAGRAMS (d’oh!). PALSGRAVE was assembled without the benefit of a picture on the front of the box.
  45. Only started at 11 pm – like others pointed in this direction from helpful QC comments. And how good it was too!
    Probably about 90 minutes.
    I wish that I had spotted LOI Anagrams earlier because I have seen similar once before.
    Much to savour right now.
    NW corner trickiest but once I cracked Prairie Dog there was no stopping me. (Obsessed with Desert Rat for a while)
    Thanks all,
    John G
  46. I know nobody’s going to read this, but this is the quickest I’ve finished a 15×15 (yes, just a day late) so I thought I’d post a message. I haven’t got an exact time as I’ve done it in several short bursts. Didn’t know Palsgrave or eccentric. LOI, for which I seem to be in good company, was 14a.
  47. There are probably many of us in Oz who do the crossword a month late from the reprint in the ‘ Australian’ newspaper, but still enjoy the blog. This was a steady solve in 22mins, with hesitation over the never heard of and last in PALSGRAVE, but it parsed well so had to be. Don’t look up ‘prairie dog’ in the urban dictionary!

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