Times 27591 – nothing too fishy.

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Thanks Mr Editor for persuading the powers that be to add the info that this was one of the three TCC semi final puzzles from last December 7th.
I finished this in 19 minutes, surprised it wasn’t harder, being a semi-final puzzle. Parsing a few (6a, 15a, 20a), took a minute or two longer while writing the blog, but wouldn’t have been necessary on the day. If you didn’t know the word ALAR at 20a, you’d have to wing it.
I think I’d prefer to be called a 17a rather than a cruciverbalist. Or maybe both!

Across
1 Wild child is kid getting a cake (10)
RAGAMUFFIN – RAG (kid) A, MUFFIN.
6 Put out without a note as second-hand (4)
USED – DOUSED = put out, remove the DO (note).
10 Fish set before queen (7)
GROUPER – GROUP before ER. I once fed squirty cheese to an 8 foot Goliath grouper called (unimaginatively) Wanda, while reef diving in Grand Cayman. I’ve never been sure whether it shoud be pronounced GROOPER or GROWPER though.
11 Lay academic again cancels start of work (7)
PROFANE – PROF (academic) then ANEW loses the W.
12 Persistently asks for money — daft in Scots location (9)
DUNSINANE – DUNS means asks for payment, INANE means daft. Dunsinane is a real mountain and is a location in Macbeth. [Not Hamlet, I had a cigar moment earlier].
13 Shame piano’s fallen off platform (5)
ODIUM – PODIUM loses its P.
14 Block of limestone pavement, stone, cold for feet, initially (5)
CLINT – FLINT swaps its F for a C. Fine examples of such are to be found in the beautiful Burren in county Clare, worth a visit.
15 Cunningly hide a Saint getting out of strip (9)
DISSEMBLE – To strip is to DISASSEMBLE, lose the A S(aint) from within it.
17 Work hard on record that is broken by learner crossword fanatic? (9)
LOGOPHILE – LOG (record) OP (work) H (hard) I E (that is) insert L for learner.
20 In the wings before minute’s warning? (5)
ALARM – ALAR means with wings, pertaining to wings, M for minute.
21 French wetlands with no river to maintain (5)
ARGUE – The CAMARGUE our French marshland famous for red rice and horses, loses the River Cam.
23 Cutting back, setting cost for policeman? Not right (9)
COPPICING – COP PRICING loses its R.
25 Short time off to stay at home for painter (7)
HOLBEIN – HOLIDAY is shortened to HOL, then BE IN = stay at home. Choose a painter, Younger Hans or his Dad the Elder.
26 Cooking, unless entertaining a voluptuary (7)
SENSUAL – An anagram at last. (UNLESS A)*.
27 Crazy old king’s losing his head (4)
NUTS – KNUT’S = old king’s, loses its K.
28 Scots head key large mountain university in Europe (10)
HEIDELBERG – HEID = Scot dialect for head; E a key, L = large, BERG = mountain.

Down
1 Hard to falsify passport? (5)
RIGID – RIG (falsify) ID (passport).
2 Good making up numbers for basic training (9)
GROUNDING – G for good, ROUNDING up numbers.
3 Devil of a politician leading awful sheepish lot (14)
MEPHISTOPHELES – MEP a politician, (SHEEPISH LOT)*.
4 Conflict interrupting river crossing in advance (7)
FORWARD – WAR inside FORD.
5 Influence of one million crowd (7)
IMPRESS – 1, M, PRESS = crowd.
7 Police station is turned over (5)
STASI – STA abbr. for station, IS reversed. Nasty but effective old East German secret police.
8 Running mate made Republican top candidates (5,4)
DREAM TEAM – (MATE MADE R)*.
9 Two refusals before thinking it’s not working (14)
NONOPERATIONAL – NO, NOPE (2 refusals) RATIONAL = thinking.
14 PM to ring Kabul warlord perhaps forsaking force (9)
CALLAGHAN – CALL (ring) AFGHAN loses its F for force.
16 Leave university with debt halved — blessed state (9)
BEATITUDE – BEAT IT = leave, U, DE(bt).
18 Make madder and nettle perfume (7)
INCENSE – Triple definition.
19 In vulnerable situation, ox shifted with speed (7)
EXPOSED – (OX SPEED)*.
22 Soldier allowed padded clothing (5)
GILET – GI (soldier) LET (allowed).
24 Labour’s forced here to trail behind grand upper class (5)
GULAG – LAG (trail behind) after G, U (grand, upper class).

​

62 comments on “Times 27591 – nothing too fishy.”

  1. Guessed at HEID, squinted at MEP rather than just MP, and LOI, COPPICING, was strictly from wordplay. The yellow GILETs seen in marches thru-out France over the past year-plus aren’t reinforced at all, but then I remembered bullet-proof and life-saving vests…
  2. No time recorded as I was busy “supervising” the arrival and stowage of all my stuff from France. I’m now the proud owner of 87 boxes which contain…..??

    Pip, DUNSINANE is in Macbeth, not Hamlet. But I heard both GROOPER and GROWPER in my diving days.

    Thank for DISSEMBLED and USED.

    As for a word for crossword fanatic, I prefer my own neologism: crosswordiste.

  3. I didn’t find this that easy–well, I didn’t finish it, which suggests a degree of difficulty. No idea of the time. DNK, and didn’t get, CLINT. DNK, but didn’t need to know, HEID. I did get ARGUE, but didn’t know why, although CAMARGUE is vaguely familiar. Pip, I think you’ve got DUNSINANE (‘Macbeth’) switched with Elsinore (‘Hamlet’). COD to RIGID.
  4. Semi-final? Seemed quite easy even with a few never- or barely-heard-of words. Done, all parsed (with plausible guesses e.g. Camargue) except aBused, in just a little over average 20 mins without hurrying. As an Australian I pronounce GROPER exactly how I spell it. The dictionaries agree with me, but pronounce GROUPER grooper. I quite liked the piano falling off the podium.
    1. ODE says it derives from Portuguese *garoupa*, which would suggest that ‘groper’ [gropa] was intended; I pronounce it ‘grooper’ on the vanishingly rare occasions I pronounce it at all, and will probably go on doing so.
      1. Go for it! If I spelled it grouper that’s how I’d pronounce it. It’s only today, having looked in dictionaries, that I’ve confirmed they’re actually the same fish, previously I’d always had nagging doubts they were different species.
  5. Didnae ken HEID, but kenned the uni. And LOGOPHILE – a new word for me for us. Spiffing!
  6. 50 minutes. DNK the fish at 10ac. Failed to parse {cam}ARGUE, and misparsed 6ac thinking that if one were {ab}USED one might feel just a little ‘put out’ – the deletion being covered by [without] a = a and b = note.
  7. Had not seen this before as I didn’t make the semi final. Probably for the best.

    Didn’t know ALAR or CAMARGUE but the checkers alleviated any doubt.

  8. 41 minutes, and I was quite surprised to find that all my answers were correct. Got to rush off to my shiny new job now, so I’ll catch up on the comments here later…
      1. Thank you. It went well, though ironically I came close to dying of boredom during the mandatory Health & Safety training. I’ll be doing management information reporting for a law firm, which is exactly as thrilling as it sounds.
  9. 40 mins with yoghurt, granola, etc.
    Now I’ve been reminded of the forgotten Alar and been taught Clint.
    Hats off to those who tackled this under competition conditions,
    Thanks setter and Pip.
  10. Not exactly tackled under competition conditions – I had many interruptions from ‘er in the same room, but still managed to complete in 6 seconds over the 20 minutes, so I would have needed to do one of the others quicker.
    My last in was PROFANE, which looks like a three point turn in a Thesaurus: I get that lay means not in holy orders and that profane means not holy, but my mind puts the latter in a more pejorative frame, and I wouldn’t use one to replace the other. Granted Chambers gives “secular” for profane.
    Liked the rest of it, quite a lot.
    1. Profane is quite often used of bank holidays other than religious ones, so that meaning is then quite clear. Andyf
      1. I don’t have much of a problem with that, though I’m not sure Profane Holiday rings many bells. I don’t think I’d ever call a profane/secular/bank holiday a lay holiday though.
  11. 43 minutes. LOI CLINT, which I vaguely knew from the pavement at Malham and I assume is the genesis of Mr Eastwood’s name. It took me a while to twig that the Scottish location was from the Scottish play, and also to parse DISSEMBLE which didn’t feel quite right. I always think you have a good idea that somebody is dissembling, but then I guess you don’t realise when the more successful uses are happening. COD to HEIDELBERG, as we were there last year. I felt inspired to read some Hölderlin afterwards, which must have lost something in translation. I’m still far too slow to enter but this seemed on the easy side for a semi-final puzzle. Thank you Pip and setter.
  12. Learned DUNS, CLINT, MADDER and ALAR in the course of a tough but rewarding solve, finishing just shy of 50 minutes. COD to CALLAGHAN, who presided during a gentler and more entertaining pre-social media age of political debate, not least Healy’s famous description of Howe’s criticism as ‘like being savaged by a dead sheep’.

    Edited at 2020-02-19 09:14 am (UTC)

    1. Gentler and more entertaining perhaps, but no less incompetent. Callaghan has a claim to be the most useless PM in recent history, at least until Theresa
      1. I agree, for once, JW, Mr Wilson knew what he was doing, like Blair, leaving a successor who made him look good. I think Mrs May Comes a poor third to Callaghan and Brown, in the worst PM of recent years awards.
  13. Yes, easy .. wrote 1ac straight in and never looked back. Though failed to parse 6ac having bifd it..
    Knew clints from Malham Cove, which is on the Pennine Way.
    St David Attenborough pronounces it grooper, which is good enough for me. And the OED.
    Were the Stasi effective? I remember reading somewhere that they collected so much information they became unable to process it..
    1. I have to admit that the Stasi did a very thorough job in training up the hygienist at our local dentists.
  14. As I mistook BALDACHIN (where was BALDWIN after all that!?) for CALLAGHAN even though I knew CLINT (not personally). COPPICING further eluded me as I was thinking that the Fuzz was a SUPER. A bugger’s muddle in Lockdownland. I retired after 50 mins.

    FOI 7dn STASI more cops.

    (LOI) 15ac BEATITUDE beastly

    COD 28ac HEIDELBERG where I visited two years ago.

    WOD 12ac DUNSINANE

    Under competition conditions I would definitely finished well within the allotted time.

    Back in the day in HK/Macao we pronounced the lovely fish at 10 ac GAROUPER.

  15. Yup, Eastwood is the only one I know so I spent a chunk of time at the end fussing over 14a. In Macbeth he’s fooled by the witches’ prophecy that he will only be defeated when Birnam Forest comes to DUNSINANE, which he takes to mean never. Except that Macduff’s forces use tree branches from the forest as camo and then advance on Macbeth at Dunsinane. 20.28
    1. I can remember thinking, in childhood’s happy hours, “What the hell’s [I was a rather foul-mouthed child] the point of carrying a bunch of branches? How is this going to help defeat Macbeth?” Birnam Wood never came to Dunsinane, and for that matter Macduff was still born of a woman. If I were Macbeth, I’d have sued the witches for breach of prophecy.
        1. Not only did I not know it, I’m afraid I’d never heard of Johnny Dankworth (I think I sort of knew of Cleo Laine). Thanks!
      2. Well to shadow the numbers of our host and make discovery err in report of us, duh.
        Admittedly it isn’t entirely clear how accurate information on this point would have helped in Macbeth’s situation.
  16. Kent heid – nae sweat. 18 minutes dead, despite having two pens run out, and being side-tracked by a classy red herring at 25a. (Could see Holbein, but I was fixated on short time off being minus a T, so couldn’t parse for a while.)

    All in all, I thought this a masterly puzzle, with almost all surfaces being silky smooth, which for me is big thing. 25a, 3, 8 and 9d were particular stand-outs.

  17. very annoying to find a typo after doing so well!
    Held up at the end by CLINT (as above) and DUNSINANE (never heard of DUNS), but the greatest amount of time was spent putting the first one in. Eventually got going with BEATITUDE and rest surprisingly fell into place at a gallop.
    HOLBEIN was also a mystery only solved by coming here.
  18. Had all but CLINT and PROFANE in 16′, got there in the end. More used to PROFANE as a word meaning to insult something holy, but now remember the sacred/profane phrase.

    I remember Jim CALLAGHAN, he held the four great offices of state and was not particularly successful in any of them. He did, however, care about poor people.

    Think I might now put LOGOPHILE as part of my Twitter profile.

    25′, thanks Pip and setter.

    1. I saw Macbeth quite recently and there were quite a lot of GCSE students in the audience. Niamh Cusack gave a pretty credible rendering of that rather difficult speech and was rewarded with a fit of giggles.

      Edited at 2020-02-19 05:12 pm (UTC)

  19. ….I last saw this puzzle, but as I was one of the 32 all-corrects I must have finished it. I averaged about 16 minutes per puzzle as I vaguely recall.

    What I dimly remember is having a struggle to parse USED, not understanding “lay = PROFANE”, and not being familiar with CLINT.

    FOI GROUPER
    LOI LOGOPHILE
    COD BEATITUDE

  20. 5m 28s today but at the second time of asking. I remember very little of this from the competition day, other than the fact that I entered CLINT with fingers crossed, and was unaware of the parsing of ARGUE until today.

    I was slightly surprised to see the warlord reference in 14d on the day, and I still am, as it seems a bit of an unnecessary slight.

    I do agree that the semi-final puzzles were easier than I’d expected, probably because the hardest ones were being held back for the brand new three-person final.

  21. I did this in under ten which is rare for me, but wrecked it again with a typo. Can it be these competition ones are getting easier?
  22. I managed this in 33:15, but loused it up with a careless NUTT at 27a due to not reading the clue carefully, and confusion over the different spellings of Cnut, Knut Canute etc. I had a nagging doubt about it as I submitted, which was confirmed by the pink square. Drat! Biffed USED, but managed to parse everything else. An enjoyable puzzle. Thanks setter and Pip.
  23. Well the record shows that I also solved this correctly first time round, but if it weren’t for a nagging memory of discussing the word CLINT afterwards, I really wouldn’t have any memory of it. As previously discussed, this seems to happen a lot, and not just to me, so perhaps it isn’t the sign of a failing mind. Nice enough solve this time, anyway.
  24. Thanks for excellent blog.

    Re HOLBEIN, my guess is that the setter wanted one letter taken off HOLS.

    1. I interpreted this as pip did but I think you’re right, anon, since none of the usual dictionaries list ‘hol’ as an abbreviation but they all have hols as a word in itself.
      1. I’m sure that’s right. Although I can remember hol (singular) being used in the schoolboy slang of my youth it was always in the context of ‘a half-hol’, a special afternoon off being granted to mark some occasion or other. I’d bet it’s in ‘Bunter’ and ‘Jennings’ and other writings of that era now considered unfashionable, but it doesn’t seem to have made it to any dictionaries.
  25. Very satisfying. As a logophile(!) who completes the QC regularly but sometimes struggles to get going with the main crossword I am delighted to have finished this today – especially when I see that it was of competition standard.

    Think I must have been on the setter’s wavelength. My FOI was the big anagram at 3D which made for a good start. Dunsinane and Heidelberg came quite easily but admit to biffing some eg Alarm and Profane. Thought 14d and 21ac were neat clues.

    Thanks again to setter and blogger. The blog comments are hugely helpful to those of us who are still at the elementary stage.

  26. Thought I was going to tank on this one. Barely got one clue across but hit a vein in the down column with 3-9. Thereafter started to make sense. LOI was Clint, bit of a guess but checked out via iPad. COD was Callaghan for me, trying to think of a famous warlord rather than fiddling with Afghan took some time .

    In the end 21.58.

  27. 17:18 this time, not that I remembered any of it until I solved it again, and I never finished on the day. LOI the unknown CLINT which took me a good 2 minutes at the end.

    Edited at 2020-02-19 05:15 pm (UTC)

  29. Very slow start to this one, my FOI was Heidelberg! (well, I am Scottish), but I slowly picked it up backwards and finished just under the hour. LOI beatitude, COD argue, because it takes a good depth of GK and some lateral thinking to get under that nice surface.
  30. 21:01 so this was probably at the easier end of the spectrum for a champs puzzle. It took me a while to find somewhere to get started but I got a foothold and made steady progress. The long downs helped. I never worked out which note had been deleted from 6ac but it didn’t cause a problem. Had fingers crossed that duns meant asks for money. This meaning of clint was unfamiliar. Everything else parsed ok. I liked the cop pricing. Gilet always makes me think of Tim Sherwood. It was his signature attire in the Spurs dugout.
  31. Really enjoyed this one – a hint of serendipity about it somehow, a touch of the light fantastic. Didn’t parse used and had to assume clint (though I too have wonderful memories of the Burren). Interruptions but probably about half an hour. Profane from the Latin is away from the temple. MER at sta for station. jk
  32. 9:58. Definitely at the easy end for a championship puzzle: based on my experience about the same level as the first puzzle in the other heat.
    I had lunch today in a restaurant that had on the wall a large reproduction of Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding in the form of a jigsaw. This mostly prompted a conversation about how many pieces and how long it would take, but we did also talk about youngers and elders and HOLBEIN came up, so 25ac came readily to to mind. If you are in New York and get the opportunity, the Thomas More picture in the Frick Collection is really worth seeing.
    1. The entire Frick collection is worth seeing. There are also 3 Vermeers and unlike the Met you can see the paintings up close without setting off alarm bells or getting strong-armed by security. If you come let me know, you might even get lunch out of it – I live 10 minutes walk away!
      1. Indeed, it’s spectacular. That picture really sticks in my mind though as one of those very famous ones that no reproduction does justice to.
        1. There’s a “school of” full reproduction of that portrait in the rear (Benchers) entrance hall at Lincoln’s Inn. There’s also a much more interesting miniature copy that I’ve never seen – it’s by the younger Holbein and I imagine it’s held under lock and key. I haven’t been at the Inn in 5 years but things are probably much the same.

          Edited at 2020-02-20 12:31 am (UTC)

        2. And the best part at the Frick is that Thos. More is immediately facing the Holbein portrait of Thos. Cromwell. Four feet apart, still glaring at each other (and both still with their heads properly attached)

          Edited at 2020-02-20 01:38 am (UTC)

          1. Indeed. Not nearly as striking a picture IMO, although I know very little about such things so my O doesn’t count for much!
  33. I had a slow start and a slow finish, and the bit in the middle was a bit slow too. I’m pleading lack of both oxygen and alcohol as an excuse.

    If my O-level geology teacher is watching from the next world, I would like to thank him for CLINT. Excellent clues throughout, thought, especially CALLAGHAN and (in retrospect, since I didn’t get the parsing at the time) NONOPERATIONAL.

  34. No, I much prefer cruciverbalist to logophile. Though I do enjoy chopping wood. 25mins for this, but we find it necessary to parse fully along the way, which is why PRONATE failed to get a guernsey and why USED took longer than it might have.

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