Times 27601 – No ludicrous clues

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
With an old (and therefore not known to all), but brilliant, book fairly clued (i.e. not as an anagram), this setter shows how to handle such things in an equitable way. Well done, sir! Or madam! Or Ms!

Otherwise, this is a very pleasant offering of the type that we have grown accustomed to on the second day of the week in these parts.

While I have the floor, as it were, a tip of the hat to the much maligned Ed Woodward for the signing of the Portuguese star Bruno Fernandes. As a United fan, one has to go back to the likes of Eric Cantona for the last inspirational signing of a player just a fraction below the radar. And always fun to see a penalty taker who leaves the keeper flat on his back clawing at air in an area devoid of the ball.

While we are on a Mancunian theme, best of luck to Pep and the City boys in their quest for European Cup glory. Somehow, I cannot believe that this is the only club in Europe that is creative with its various budgets. We managed to get out of the dreadful EU. The goons at UEFA next? One can but hope.

ACROSS

1 Figure of speech used around university group (6)
TROUPE – U in TROPE
4 Airport said to allow Poles entry (8)
STANSTED – NS in STATED
10 A little ship going round, one holding mail items? (11)
PHILATELIST – anagram* of A LITTLE SHIP
11 Soldier gaining new spirit (3)
GIN – GI N
12 Company marks appointment that will stimulate growth (7)
COMPOST – CO M POST
14 It isn’t a newspaperman that’s corrupt (7)
TAINTED – if you were a Yorkshireman (and the likelihood would be that everyone knew if you were), you might say ”t aint ed, you know, ’tis Piers Morgan!’
15 Arbiter asking a criminal to agree on terms (6,1,7)
STRIKE A BARGAIN – ARBITER ASKING A*
17 Fish given to one with cat, perhaps an impish young one? (14)
WHIPPERSNAPPER – WHIPPER (a person with the cat o’ nine tails, AKA whip) SNAPPER (tasty fish)
21 Model set to portray one of Zeus’s lovers in play? (7)
DIORAMA – IO (one of Zeus’s playmates) in DRAMA
22 Rue land being redeveloped in Sussex town (7)
ARUNDEL – RUE LAND*; I once played cricket there for the Free Foresters, Great place to bowl – low bounce, lots of LBWs.
23 Before the Revolution devours it (3)
ERE – hidden in thE REvolution
24 Another like Eva and Juan possessing son like theirs (5,6)
THIRD PERSON – if, heaven help us, we had to be landed with another Argentinian leader without an especially democratic bent, we might be said to get a THIRD PERON; stick an S (son) in that to get the answer, as my friend Zed might say.
26 European window destroys Conservative peace (8)
EASEMENT – E [c]ASEMENT
27 Lack of foresight in my work leads to inadequate assessment (6)
MYOPIA – MY OP I[nadequate] A[ssessment]

DOWN

1 Like some players, strain on pitch (8)
TYPECAST – CAST (pitch; ‘let he who is without sin, cast the first stone’) on TYPE (strain, as in type of virus that induces panic)
2 Sash round one that can go either way (3)
OBI – O BI (straight and gay; sort of having your cake and eating it too)
3 Eat sparingly with a company in part of a muster? (7)
PEACOCK – A CO in PECK (eat sparingly); pride of lions, muster of peacocks
5 Book — avoiding parking — trips on electric cars — useful! (8,6)
TRISTRAM SHANDY – TRI[p]S TRAMS HANDY (useful)
6 What’s hard in writing down cipher (7)
NOTHING – H in NOTING
7 Not giving much out, like Spooner’s torch? (5-6)
TIGHT-LIPPED – light-tipped with the initial letters swapping
8 Strip, getting half nudged into river (6)
DENUDE – NUD[ged] in DEE (various rivers in the UK)
9 Cooking up eats with a grannie in her eighth decade? (14)
SEPTUAGENARIAN – UP EATS A GRANNIE*
13 Noble big cat has walk displacing start of lunch (11)
MARCHIONESS – MARCH in place of L[unch] in [l]IONESS
16 Drunken larks in a far country (3,5)
SRI LANKA – LARKS IN A
18 Vision of men abandoning parentless cat (7)
PHANTOM – [or]PHAN TOM
19 Get carving in a cathedral in grave style (7)
ACUTELY – CUT (carving) in A ELY (magnificent cathedral not far from Fenland Poly)
20 Stick plug at this point (6)
ADHERE – AD (plug as in advertisement) HERE
25 Turned irrational after small drink (3)
SIP – PI reversed after S[mall]

50 comments on “Times 27601 – No ludicrous clues”

  1. My hair-trigger keyboard hit C twice to give PEACOCC and two errors; not best pleased. I never did parse TRISTRAM SHANDY, just biffed from ‘useful’. (I do think the book should be well-enough known to allow an anagram clue.) 2d had to be OBI, but ‘go either way’ suggested palindromicity and gave me pause to consider OBO until I twigged.
  2. is well known enough in these parts to be avoided. The parsing was a doddle, but my time was a dawdle at 36 mins.

    FOI 11ac GIN

    LOI 26ac EASEMENT

    COD 10ac PHILATELIST

    WOD 17ac WHIPPERSNAPPER

    Being a United fan too – I was mortified by Everton’s goal last night – disaster! Thank the Lord for St. Bruno and St. VAR.

  3. I had the knowledge (except the Perons went over my head, I just biffed from “like theirs”). I don’t recall ever reading the book. I reversed engineered the muster thing, like a parliament of owls and such. I have never been convinced these collective nouns are not just some lexicographer taking the piss.
  4. 24 minutes. Straightforward. NHO ‘muster of peacocks’ but it seemed a reasonable assumption.
  5. Pretty straightforward fare for the Glasgow train. Pencilled in KIPPER as the fish for a while.

    Edited at 2020-03-02 06:43 am (UTC)

  6. On Saturday I received a cheque through the post for £20 from News International. This puzzled me, and I wondered if I was owed a refund on my subscription for some reason unknown to me. Turns out my name had been pulled out for a recent Mephisto, the first time I have had a win since switching to the club site last year. It seems a little strange that I had no notification of what I had won, but all the same I was happy with that.

    I found today’s offering quite unMondayish, finishing off with EASEMENT which took some time to fall. I was helped along the way with DIORAMA as it was the word for the clue writing competition in yesterday’s edition. I wonder if I could get away with submitting today’s clue?

    1. Congratulations. I saw my name on the winners page as a winner of the Mephisto about a year ago and eventually resorted to asking Mr. Biddlecombe whether I had a namesake in this town who had won or, if it was me, where my prize was. I too was slightly disconcerted just to get a cheque with no covering letter.
    2. I came home on Friday night to find a large cardboard box waiting for me in the hall. I hadn’t ordered anything from Amazon that week so what had been delivered to me by mistake? I opened the box and found inside three dictionaries and the Times Atlas of the World. So I checked the club site and discovered I had come out of the hat for last week’s Jumbo. No notification had I received. I actually prefer the new way of doing things – last time I won I got a letter congratulating me on being a ‘lucky’ winner which took away my sense of achievement and meant I couldn’t show the letter to my kids. So I showed them the prize pen and told them I’d just won the Times Crossword Competition. They were suitably impressed, I believe.

      BTW, in 1d I thought that in The Times B ‘on’ A meant that B followed A. Maybe not.

      1. The On rule only applies in Across clues. In Down clues ‘on’ just means ‘on top of’.

        Edited at 2020-03-02 09:32 am (UTC)

      2. I won Tim Moorey’s clue writing competition a few times. Cheques took ages to come through.
      3. I’ve won the Saturday 15×15 twice. The prize is somewhat underwhelming. Has anyone been to WHS recently? Deservedly voted worst retailer in UK for last two years. I did manage to buy a couple of A4 frames to display my ‘winner’ letters though.
    3. Congratulations. I have only ever won one prize, which was a fancy Cross pen which my wife promptly lost. I’m pretty sure it came with a covering letter. I feel I’m due another!

      Edited at 2020-03-02 11:48 am (UTC)

  7. 15:39. No difficulties once I had a few checkers in place apart from the spelling of SEPTUAGENARIAN. I’m not sure how I came up with a flower for the last 8 letters. LOI PHANTOM. I failed to parse THIRD PERSON and biffed the book too. COD to TAINTED.
  8. 25 minutes. LOI OBI, which I did know. The parsing took a while. I didn’t know the collective for PEACOCKs but managed to construct the bird with a couple of crossers. Nice to see Ron Knee (59) acknowledged at 7d. Next manager at one of the Manchester clubs, U? COD to THIRD PERSON. This was a bit harder than I thought at first. Thank you U and setter.

    Edited at 2020-03-02 08:29 am (UTC)

    1. Did Ron never get his knighthood or did he remain tight lipped? A decent book of collective nouns makes for good toilet reading – musters – murders and charms.

      Peacocks are also defined as an ‘ostentation’!

      How’s your budgie?

      1. There’s nothing on the internet to suggest that he ever was knighted. He sits with Jimmy Greaves (and indeed my avatar, who only got an OBE despite being the Lion of Vienna, scoring 30 goals in 32 matches for England, and a one-club man for 70 years) as inadequately honoured.
  9. 25 mins with yoghurt, granola, etc.
    No dramas.
    Nice to see Arundel (tomb) crossed with Larkin’ in Sri Lanka.
    Ta setter and U.
    1. Suspected you’d go there for a quote. Great poem by a great poet, though a flawed man.
  10. U, I thought this was a politics-free zone. I’m unbelievably peed off about having my freedom of movement removed, but until now have never mentioned it out of respect for the apolitical nature of TftT and its contributors. Let’s just talk about crosswords 🙂
    2. Hear hear. Watching this malevolent flaming clown car of an administration make an international pariah-cum-laughing stock of the country is bad enough in real life without having it infect this place.

      Edited at 2020-03-02 11:24 am (UTC)

    3. Sorry if I upset anyone. I shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

      Not to mention the number of digs at Donald Trump over the last few years….

      1. That’s different, U. Donald Trump is a BADDIE!

        Edited at 2020-03-02 12:32 pm (UTC)

      2. You upset me by reminding me, a Leeds fan, of Cantona, you absolute rotter.
        1. 1991 Sheffield Wednesday just two days! 0 games 0 goals.
          1992 Leeds United 28 games 9 goals.
          1992–1997 Manchester United 143 games 64 goals. The karate kick against Palace and the FA Cup winner against Liverpool were outstanding!

          “Cantona illuminated Old Trafford – the place was a frenzy every time he touched the ball.” Sir Alec.

  11. A nice puzzle in the Goldilocks zone, where there was a bit of biffing, but some bits had to be teased out with just enough thinking for a Monday morning.

    When it became clear that our co-habitation was going to be permanent, Mrs Topical and I had a clear out of the bookshelves to remove duplicates and other books which were no longer required; we discovered we both had a copy of Tristram Shandy, and neither of us had got past about page 50 despite several attempts.

    P.S. I also tend to think we should leave the more controversial topics out there in the real world. Here we can stick to safe subjects like the pronunciation of ‘r’ in homophones, Spoonerisms, and obscure foreign words clued as anagrams.

  12. On a historical note, the first trams were horse-drawn. (There’s an example in Glasgow’s Transport Museum.) Later trams, for example in Edinburgh, were hauled by a telpherage system, which was steam-powered. So a very slight eyebrow raise from me.

    Otherwise straightforward, though held up unnecessarily by a well-disguised anagram at 10a, and by wondering what the hell a ‘piacock’ was.

  13. 6:47. I found this easy apart from at the end, where I couldn’t work out how to PEACOCK meant to eat sparingly or how a PECK might be part of a muster (is it two bushels perhaps?) so in the end just bunged it in. Doh!
    ARUNDEL from Larkin. A wonderful poet.
  14. ….but got there in the end, so no blues.

    U : I trust your good wishes to City in Europe are offered in the hope of distracting them before their visit to Old Trafford on Sunday !

    FOI GIN
    LOI EASEMENT
    COD THIRD PERSON
    TIME 12:50

  15. To follow Myrtilus’s more highbrow reference to Larkin and Arundel, we also have the Perons, a PHANTOM and a cat. No major hold-ups here although ancient real property training meant it took a few beats before I could see EASEMENT as “peace”. 12.06
  16. 23.49. An entertaining puzzle , last one in was easement. Just about managed to recognise casement as the main reference. 9 down took a while getting octogenarian out of my brain but loved the anagram when I realised which words to use!
  17. All OK except my lack of understanding as to why ‘in grave style’ is equivalent to ‘acutely’. Help?
    1. You have a point Tringmardo. At time of solving I casually thought it was just a reference to French language accents (grave, acute, circumflex) but that’s not quite right because grave and acute are two different things. Now I’m thinking it’s a more general reference – if a crisis is grave it’s also acute.
  18. 11:18 with a bit of a delay on my last two, EASEMENT and PHILATELIST (I thought the anagram for the latter was jolly well disguised).

    I didn’t know that peacocks came in musters and I’m not really sure what “what’s” is doing at the start of 6d.

  19. Got quite a lot of this over lunch but came here before the final push as have other things to do.
    I visited Arundel cricket ground last summer -a delight if you are in the area.That came easily.
    I doubt I would have got EASEMENT and I showed my mastery of Spoonerisms by putting TIGHT FISTED at 7d. It fits the definition at least.
    I have already submitted a clue for DIORAMA. Strange it should come up today,as noted above.
    David
    1. Speaking of DIORAMA (for which my clue is all ready and waiting to go off to Peter B), I took the definition to be model set, not just model as underlined by our [insert own adjective here] blogger.
    2. TIGHT FISTED was my first thought, but I thought again when I couldn’t Spoonerise it.
  20. I wended my way merrily through this one and finished in 23:26. EASEMENT was my LOI, OBI was my first where I had the same thoughts as Kevin, until BI registered. Sadly at 3d I had become fixated on PICK as the answer to “eat sparingly” and shoved ACO inside it. I did wonder what a PIACOCK might be, but moved on and forgot to go back and rethink, due to being distracted by a WhatsApp message just as I was entering EASEMENT. The penny dropped as soon as I saw the pink square, of course. A murderer or a member of Parliament would’ve been no trouble, but I wasn’t familiar enough with a muster of Peacocks. Drat! Thanks setter and U.
    1. I sympathise with your PIACOCK as it’s just the sort of thing I normally come up with which is why I have errors in 1/3 crosswords on the leaderboard.
  21. not a good day for this beginner – only got 5 and a half before giving up and coming here. A lot of things I didn’t know like a muster of peacocks, io and even the word trope! Still I am learning daily and this places is inveluable. Still not sure why ‘of man abandoning’ removes the or from orphan. However all other explanations make sense. Thanks to all and so pleased to be able to log in!
    1. The clue is actually “men abandoning…” OR = other ranks = men. Jeffrey
  22. Late but happy to solve this in 27 mins
    While we’re on the football theme I support both Watford and Liverpool, so happy and sad….
  23. 21:45. I found this was one to switch the brain off, stick on the autopilot and cruise through to a smooth landing without paying much attention along the way. I didn’t trouble myself with the niceties of the parsings of whippersnapper, third person or Tristram Shandy. The little ship going round in 10ac was very good.

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