Times 27676 – where a factotum meets a teetotaller

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Time taken:  12:58, but with one very silly typo.

What a difference a day makes? Yesterday was a biff-fest that led to my fastest time ever, today was a day where many of the answers had to be pieced together from the wordplay, and there was misdirection and some clever hiding of the definition. I really enjoyed this puzzle (even though I got the dreaded pink square).

I hope everyone is keeping safe and sane.  We just entered “phase 2” here and I sat at an outside table at a brewery on Monday and had a beer from a tap for the first time in nearly three months! Wearing a mask of course.

Away we go…

Across
1 Buddy maybe sharing a lift in a sort of tunnel? (6)
CARPAL – the buddy sharing a lift could be a CAR PAL – an anatomical tunnel
4 Vehicles going head to head at game (8)
BACCARAT – CAB and CAR (vehicles), the first one reversed, then AT
10 Runs away at bedtime? (6,3)
LIGHTS OUT – double definition
11 Run across traveller (5)
ROVER – R(run), OVER(across)
12 Helpful-sounding woman (3)
ADA – sounds like AIDER(someone who helps)
13 Fortune-telling character, fantastic (11)
CHIROMANTIC – CHI(character), ROMANTIC(fantastic) – got this one from wordplay alone
14 Manager retains old craftsman (6)
COOPER – COPER(manager) containing O(old)
16 Box female soldiers, with police car outside (7)
PANDORA – OR(soliders) with PANDA(police car) surrounding – by far my favorite clue for the definition
19 Find a description of each other planet? (7)
UNEARTH – other planets would be UN-EARTH
20 Finish off better stand-up routine (6)
IMPROV – remove the last letter from IMPROVE(better). There’s a legion of actors that will tell you improv is not stand-up, but plenty of stand-ups don’t do rehearsed material and rely on audience cues.
22 Endlessly fooling around in fun, I admit (2,9)
AD INFINITUM – anagram of IN,FUN,I,ADMIT
25 Computer obsessive’s good to go — that’s scary! (3)
EEK – GEEK(computer obsessive) with the G(good) removed
26 One’s under canvas to relax at length (5)
EASEL – EASE(relax), L(length)
27 Very simply, the opposite of a surrender demand? (5,4)
HANDS DOWN – the surrender demand would be HANDS UP so this is the reverse. Silly me didn’t check properly and had HANDS SOWN
28 Top driver’s support to corporation (8)
TEETOTUM – TEE(driver’s support in golf), TO, TUM(corporation) – another one from the wordplay. A spinning top
29 Inducement to serve in unhappy ship (6)
BOUNTY – double definition, the second referring to a mutiny
Down
1 Wine collection merchant picked up (6)
CELLAR – sounds like SELLER(merchant)
2 Fix function for parent that’s boringly complicated (9)
RIGMAROLE – RIG(fix), and the function for a parent could be a MA ROLE
3 Room’s window having no frame (5)
ATTIC – LATTICE(window) missing the outer letters
5 Drippy work of war artist? (6,8)
ACTION PAINTING – a war artist could produce an ACTION PAINTING, but it is best known as the Jackson Pollock style
6 From rudely impatient indigenous people, pressure for start of entertainment (7,2)
CURTAIN UP – CURT(rudely impatient), AINU (indigneous people of Japan), P(pressure). A close second in favorite clue
7 Firmly fix hedge, trimming the top (5)
RIVET – a PRIVET hedge missing the start
8 Move round bed to corner a rat (8)
TURNCOAT – TURN(move round), COT(bed) containing A
9 Patronising houri, health not suffering (6-4-4)
HOLIER-THAN-THOU – anagram of HOURI,HEALTH,NOT
15 Extent of responsibility left one fool struggling (9)
PORTFOLIO – PORT(left) then an anagram of I(one),FOOL
17 Working at the double, circle in all directions unaided (2,4,3)
ON ONES OWN – ON and ON(double working) then O(circle) in the directions E,S,W,N
18 Call up to have a trial for City (8)
BUDAPEST – DUB(call, name), reversed, then A, PEST(trial, annoyance)
21 Hotel where there may be pie? But without fat (6)
SKINNY – INN(hotel) inside the pie in the SKY
23 Can woman be producing children? (5)
ISSUE – IS(can), SUE(woman)
24 Do wrong, offering paste, pocketing diamonds (5)
MISDO – MISO paste containing D(diamonds)

68 comments on “Times 27676 – where a factotum meets a teetotaller”

  1. Got the first two acrosses in, which doesn’t happen that often, but slowed down after that. LOI CHIROMANTIC; I couldn’t think of the word, getting stuck on ‘chiliastic’. DNK ACTION PAINTING, although when I got it Jackson Pollack immediately came to mind. Biffed ON ONES OWN and HOLIER-THAN-THOU (which doesn’t mean ‘patronizing’ to me, but). I still don’t get ISSUE; IS=can?
      1. I think rather, now that I’ve looked at the clue again, that it’s Can [unspecified] woman be? = IS SUE? I don’t see is equaling can.
      2. She’d love too if only she was allowed to travel to one and mix with more than a couple of people at one time 😉
  2. Got ’em all, but with the same qualms about IS SUE and, now that y’all mention it, HOLIER THAN THOU. Could also hardly believe “do” in the clue to MISDO. But this was more like it, and hope tomorrow’s is still harder. Never heard of the top!

    Edited at 2020-05-28 05:48 am (UTC)

  3. I was ready to kick myself for what I thought was probably a word I’d made up for my LOI, CHIROMANTIC so I was pleasantly surprised to find it was correct. The other answer of which I wasn’t completely confident was SKINNY which I’d been unable to parse and thought it was something about getting pie in New York (IN NY).

    My COD to UNEARTH which I thought a rather amusing pun.

  4. 43 minutes.

    Quite a few answers here were taken on trust because that’s where the wordplay led me.

    TEETOTUM – NHO and spent ages trying to think past ‘teeshirt’.

    LIGHTS OUT – never come across the ‘runs away’ meaning.

    CHIROMANTIC – knew the word ‘chiromancy’ but not what it meant, plus ‘romantic’ = ‘fantastic’?

    Not entirely sure of the equivalence of ‘patronising’ and HOLIER-THAN-THOU.

    CARPAL.

    MER at MISDO with ‘do’ in the clue.

    NHO the AINU in CURTAIN UP.

    Failed to see ACTION PAINTING as ‘drippy work’ but understand it now.

    Failed to parse SKINNY but now think it’s the best clue in the puzzle.

    Edited at 2020-05-28 05:22 am (UTC)

    1. As in Huckleberry Finn’s famous last words:
      But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.
        1. I parsed it as lights = runs (as in a light in a crossword grid being a run of squares) + out for away but that’s clearly nonsense and my Chambers app has light out = to decamp (informal) as the very last entry under light.
      2. Thanks for the reminder Kevin. Huck Finn is well worth the read, if only for the wonderful mangling of Shakespeare carried out by the 2 swindlers.
        1. Both “Huck” and “Tom Sawyer” are on my ever increasing list of books to read again.
  5. 14’29”, happy.

    Crossed fingers for CHIROMANTIC, and SKINNY not parsed. Knew BACCARAT from James Bond.

    I visited BUDAPEST in 1980. MISO is of the few things I really dislike.

    Thanks gl and setter.

  6. 18:30. LOI the unknown CHIROMANTIC with fingers crossed. NHO TEETOTUM, AINU or the style of painting either. That’s quite enough enlightenment for one puzzle, thank-you. Like Jackkt I had a MER at DO in the clue for MISDO and COD to SKINNY.
  7. Like others, NHO TEETOTUM, MER at ‘do’ in clue for MISDO, but a slightly below average time overall.

    COD: PANDORA ‘box female’ – ho ho.

    I see yesterday’s crossword ended with a SNITCH of 56, the second-easiest of the year after 2 January’s 53.

    Yesterday’s answer: the five words made of Roman numeral letters are civic, civil, livid, mimic and vivid. I don’t think there are any longer ones.

    Today’s question: what is the longest national capital with no repeated letters? (It’s not BUDAPEST)

    Edited at 2020-05-28 06:55 am (UTC)

    1. Bucharest?
      Singapore?
      Quezon City?
      กรุงเทพมหานครอมรรัตนโกสินทร์มหินทรายุธยามหาดิลกภพนพรัตน์ราชธานีบุรรมย์อุดมราชนิเวศน์มหาสถานอมรพิมานอวตารสถิตสักกะทัตติยะวิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์ (Bangkok… though I see it has some repeats)?
    2. Perhaps a Devon froggy prince could have proclaimed My Buckfastleigh pond the capital of his nation?
  8. 22 minutes. LOI BOUNTY. Some great clues and a couple of twitchy eyebrows. I liked UNEARTH, HANDS DOWN and COD SKINNY. For me though, HOLIER-THAN-THOU carries a priggish connotation. And the double doing of MISDO is a bit clumsy. But a nice puzzle. Thank you George and setter. Anybody else remember the Kenneth Williams sketch?
  9. 25 mins pre-brekker.
    Mostly I liked this. Very inventive. But slightly let down by Misdo and fantastic=romantic.
    Thanks setter and G.
  10. As others an enjoyable and reasonably testing solve with similar slight reservations over definitions and double “do”

    At school we had a game of desk cricket in which the “batsman” spun an eight-sided TEETOTUM which said how many runs he’d scored or “how-zat”. If “how-zat” the “bowler” then spun another eight-sided TEETOTUM which said “lbw” or “bowled” or “not out”

    1. Good grief, I remember that game! My version (a birthday present)looked like this, and after initial appointment that the tiny tin didn’t contain 22 tiny players, afforded much amusement. Hadn’t thought of it long since.
          1. On long boring drives we’d play car cricket. Every time we passed a car it was a run, or a 4 if they had a 4 as last digit of number plate, 6 if it was a 6. Every time a car passed us it was a wicket. My dad was a bit of a maniac driver at the best of times, but one time he really got into the spirit of it: a 3-hour drive Bairnsdale to Melbourne (single-lane each way, no centre divide) I think we made 9-200+.
  11. Marginally tougher than yesterday, with my last BOUNTY needing an alphabet trawl (twice) before the import of unhappy ship suddenly dawned.
    Evidently nobody here has read Through the Looking Glass, which is where I know the spinny thing from.
    SKINNY one of those clues that you biff from the presumed definition, but stick around long enough to see how it works. It brightened up my day.
    From some checkers, I essayed HUNKY DORY (a stretch for “easy”) at 27, but settled for the real, and much easier on the wordplay, answer.
    CURTAIN UP was such a biff, I was surprised to see AINU turning up in George’s fine analysis. I had no idea.
    1. That’s where I knew it from Z but I didn’t know exactly what it was.
  12. 21.43. FOI cellar, LOI easel. A really good puzzle I thought, my favourite clue being unearth which took me a while but was so obvious when it dawned. Misdo was a new one on me , similarly teetotum but the cluing was explicit, if you believed it. Other notables budapest, chiromantic ( after first putting in chiromancer) and pandora. The latter a very good clue but I struggled for a while with trying to get a two letter answer for female soldiers inside the car. Anyone else ?
  13. A poor performance. Should have been a good ten minutes less, but I got hopelessly lost on carpal and bounty. Got there in the end.
  14. I found that a bit of a struggle, though I’m not quite sure why. I have no problem with ISSUE, HOLIER-THAN-THOU for PATRONISING, or ROMANTIC for FANTASTIC. DNK TEETOTUM (or rather I knew it was a word but had no idea what it meant) or ACTION PAINTING, but they didn’t hold things up much. I don’t really like the UNEARTH – can you just stick UN in front of any proper noun to mean everything else in the group but that one? No doubt someone will give me an example. COD definitely SKINNY.
    1. > can you just stick UN in front of any proper noun to mean everything else in the group but that one?

      You can in a crossword clue if you stick a question mark at the end. Shades of Baldric’s “not a cat”.

      Happy unbirthday by the way.

  15. 17:13 so a tad slower than I probably should have been. I had no blinking idea what was going on with SKINNY so thanks for that George. I also had to trust that the AINU existed and that CHIROMANTIC was a word. I’d heard of a TEETOTUM but wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it was.

    Edited at 2020-05-28 08:45 am (UTC)

  16. Would have been a bit more than 24’10 had I remembered to go back to 1 ac. where had the crossers. Maybe a bit more than a bit more. Anyway an enjoyable workout nonetheless. I too recall desk cricket but not the way it was played. This corporation=tum thing is getting a bit Times-peculiar is it not? As with the grimly unaspirated East End. Perhaps the Times should start thinking about the onset of cruciverbal sclerosis?
  17. Quite a few unknowns for me too. TEETOTUM, AINU, ACTION PAINTING… However, the wordplay was clear enough, so I ploughed on. MISDO seemed very odd. That SE corner held me up at the end, as I didn’t see the parsing of SKINNY and it took me ages to see BOUNTY, which finally gave me the confidence to bung in 21d and 24d. 27:44. Thanks setter and George.
  18. Same reservations as others about one or two aspects of the puzzle. No problem with chiromantic, though hesitating with the equivalence of romantic and fantastic. Didn’t know teetotum, despite having read Through The Looking-Glass several times.
  19. DNF. I did most of this in under ten minutes but then ground to a halt:
    > Never heard of that meaning of LIGHTS OUT so was unsure.
    > I thought of Jackson Pollock but had no idea what the painting style was called and the reference to war wasn’t enough to get me to ACTION, particularly as I had doubts about the crossing T.
    > Never come across CHIROMANTIC and failed to execute the necessary three-point turn in a thesaurus to get ROMANTIC from ‘fantastic’.
    Bah humbug.
  20. No problems with this, 24 minutes. Knew about the AINU and the spinning top. Don’t ask me why I knew, no idea. Budapest is on my bucket list – postponed once already.
  21. ….I rounded the home bend to find that damned wall had been re-erected. I’m another who spent three minutes alpha-trawling for my LOI.

    Had no beef with HOLIER-THAN-THOU. Biffed CHIROMANCER but soon corrected it. MER at MISDO like everybody else. I thought ISSUE slightly odd, but it didn’t overly worry me.

    FOI BACCARAT
    LOI BOUNTY
    COD EASEL (also liked SKINNY)
    TIME 10:44

  23. I struggled a bit with this but came home eventually in 20.32.

    On another subject, I know Daviddivad1 had this happen but has anyone else received a message from “Firefox Monitor” inviting you to enter your email address so as to find out if your data was compromised in a Live Journal breach? It looks like phishing but it would be nice to know. Here’s the message:
    https://monitor.firefox.com/?breach=LiveJournal

    1. Firefox informed me yesterday that there was a breach–3 years ago!–and advised me to change my password. (One of the links that message provided was ‘why did it take so long to report?’, which I clicked on. Turns out it sometimes takes so long. Asked and answered.) Which I did, on my office laptop, and when I came home and tried to sign in, I was informed that my IP was temporarily banned, whatever that means. In the course of my attempt to find someone at LiveJournal to complain to, I got an odd message from something.rus asking for my data, which I promptly trashed. After an hour or so, somehow everything was working fine.
      1. Thanks Kevin. It did look kosher at first glance and then I thought maybe not. I’ll pass your comment on to Daviddivad.
      2. In another context I got a message from Live Journal saying my IP address was temporarily banned, only 2 days ago. It didn’t actually happen but I was concerned so I researched it and found that if it occurs it lasts only an hour maximum, but probably less.
    2. Some years ago I found and signed up to a website haveibeenpwned dot com which seems real. It told me a few days ago that livejournal had been compromised: known valid email addresses hacked, with their corresponding en clair livejournal passwords. First email I’ve received from haveibeenpwned ever.
      1. My Firefox warning cited haveibeenetc as the source of their information.
      2. If this is true, that passwords were stored without being hashed, then it is criminally negligent. I was taught in my computer science course in the early 1970s that you never store passwords like that, you always run them through what at that time was called a “one-way-code”. That’s a code like Hotel California where yoiu can check in but you can never leave. There is no way to get the password from the encoded value other than trying every possible password (known as “brute force”). If your first thought is that this wouldn’t work since there would be no way to check the password when you log in, you run the password typed through the same code to get a lot of random stuff. But it should be the same random stuff as when the password was created.

        In practice, computers are so fast that brute force is not that big of a deal with the type of code we used in the 1970s. It is one place in computing where you want the program to be provably inefficient. You don’t notice a 10-second delay on login, but it reduces the number of passwords that can be tried from billions per second to 10 per second. We also add “salt” to make it harder still.

  25. Had to grind this one out – nothing went in easily today.

    Desk cricket brought back some memories. We used to play it by rolling hexagonal pencils suitably inscribed – usually in Maths lessons……

    I am minded to support Joekobi with regard to updating some of the clueing – my own personal betes-noires are CHINA, TIN and RHINO – I doubt that anyone born after about 1960 would ever have heard any of these used in anger.

    Time: All correct in 51.40.

    Thank you to setter and blogger.

    Dave.

    1. I was born in 1959 and have never encountered any of those words used in those senses except in crosswords and old books. So I agree that they should be gently put to rest but folks on here won’t all be happy with replacing them with some up to date colloquialisms, innit?
  26. All done apart from two. For 13a had CHI …plus nearly all the checkers. Romantic did not occur to me as a synonym for Fantastic. I thought of Pollock for the drippy painter. His collaborator Arthur Painting fitted the squares. With hindsight, war =action. David
  27. As expressed by others already, this puzzle had various amusing elements, the odd eyebrow raise, and a new word learned in TEETOTUM, so a bit of everything today. Interesting (for some values of interesting) to discover from further research that it has nothing to do with teetotal, etymologically speaking.
  28. If it is say Mexico City (it isn’t, obviously) do the 4 letters of City count?
    Andyf
  29. Made things harder for myself by putting in LIGHTS OFF for 10a, which really hampered 5d until I realised (with A and F in the first word, I was thinking there was a war artist called Alfred something).

    Otherwise this was enjoyable – I had to trust that the Ainu are an indigenous people, and that a TEETOTUM is a kind of top, but the clues made it clear in both cases. CHIROMANTIC was a hopeful guess towards the end, as I wasn’t sure how romantic = fantastic.

    FOI Holier-than-thou
    LOI Bounty
    COD Skinny

  31. DNF
    Downsy (down sailing yacht??) instead of Bounty :))
    Thanks george.
  32. Just watching Peter Kay’s very funny series (missed it first time round), so CARPAL was obvious.
    A very slow start to this, but on resumption this afternoon it all fell into place in a rush. LOI SKINNY which had to biff too.
    Visited BUDAPEST in 1970, and was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. After that I managed to throw away my visa, and had difficulty getting into Austria because my hair was somewhat longer than my passport showed it to be. Saved by 2 very respectable Viennese ladies.
  33. Not sure why Runs Away = LIGHTS OUT

    NHO CHIROMANTIC

    Some of these clues just took a while to drop. I’ve decided I’m better off sitting at the kitchen table rather than while I’m out walking though I get fewer interruptions outside.

  34. But not a bad innings until I stuck in TARLATAN at 8dn – trty not to that gentle reader.

    We late forties chaps apparently had a lot more vocab in the fifties. TIN, CHINA even RHINO (Round the Horne (POLARI)) but not CHIROMANTIC!

    FOI 29ac BOUNTY

    COD 10ac LIGHTS OUT or alights away – Knight of the Burning Pestle etc

    WOD 2dn RIGAROLE brother to KEREFUFFLE. (Likkle Britain)

    TGIF!

    Edited at 2020-05-28 04:22 pm (UTC)

  35. The capital city of the oft-forgotten Central American city of Pangrama has 26 letters…
  36. Pleased to come in at under 6m on this one. A quirky puzzle, but my kind of quirky!
  37. I’ve always thought it was curtains up in the plural so have been wrong for many years!
  38. 29:42 a little over par but held up for a long time by skinny (very clever) and bounty. Dnk lights out could mean runs away. Was misled for ages by the box female definition despite the more obvious panda. Didn’t quite twig what was going on with unearth. Nho teetotum. Went to an abstract expressionism exhibition at the Royal Academy a couple of years ago, think I remembered the term action painting from that. I agree that misdo is a bit clumsy. I was thinking of romanticism as a movement for the equivalence between romantic and fantastic, Chambers does have fantastic as a definition of romantic. Actually, my first thought for the equivalence between romantic and fantastic was the Shaggy song Mr Boombastic where romantic does seem to mean fantastic and also boombastic……

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