Times 27699 – something fishy here; whose fault is it?

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Another pleasant Wednesday workout, plenty of anagrams and fairly easy clues and a sprinkling of trickier ones to keep me interested. I liked 14d best.

Across
1 Feast keeps old woman in compound (8)
DOPAMINE – DINE (feast) insert O (old) PAM (random woman). Dopamine is not an amine that makes you dopey; its name is a contraction of 3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine, a hormone and neurotransmitter essential to the functioning of your brain.
5 Flower pot almost useless (6)
CROCUS – CROC(K) – pot almost; US = useless, unserviceable.
10 This, under LA, SF and Santa A, in slippage? (3,7,5)
SAN ANDREAS FAULT – (UNDER LA SF SANTA A)* my FOI
11 Violin piece by leader in strong position (10)
BRIDGEHEAD – BRIDGE (violin piece), HEAD (leader).
13 Crone a non-starter in desire (4)
ITCH – WITCH doesn’t start.
15 Key often used by news boss went in (7)
ENTERED – ENTER (key often used) ED (news boss).
17 Endless respect little man gives senior officer (7)
ADMIRAL – ADMIR(E) = endless respect, AL a little chap.
18 Soldiers taking area in French town and city (7)
ORLEANS – OR (soldiers) LENS (a town near Calais) has A for area inserted.
19 Experiment involves cat finding fish (7)
TELEOST – TEST (experiment) has LEO (a cat) inserted. Teleosts include some 96% of all bony fish species, from the Greek teleios (complete) + osteon (bone). I had seen the word before and knew it was something to do with fish, but couldn’t have told you much more without Wiki’s help.
21 Work found regularly in two mills (4)
TOIL – Alternate letters of T w O m I l L s.
22 Warm house and outbuilding very good inside (10)
HOSPITABLE – HO (house) STABLE (outbuilding) insert PI (very good).
25 Medicinal plant cultivated in vigneron’s empire (7,8)
EVENING PRIMROSE – (VIGNERONS EMPIRE)*.
27 Stupid baronet plunged into river (6)
OBTUSE – BT (baronet) goes in the River Ouse.
28 Somewhere in France that’s cleaner — and very French! (8)
CHARTRES – CHAR as in charwoman, or charperson perhaps now, TRES très being French for very. Two days in a row, we’re in Chartres.

Down
1 Where white queen starts, black causes damage (7)
DISABLE – On a chess board, the white queen begins the game on the square conventionally labelled as D1; SABLE = black.
2 Immobilise leg (3)
PIN – double definition.
3 Executive rage — animal unleashed (10)
MANAGERIAL – (RAGE ANIMAL)*.
4 Player, reluctant, eviscerated in classical drama (5)
NORTH – Reluctant eviscerated = RT; insert into NOH = classic drama. Player as in bridge.
6 Extensive search through ignores luggage at first (4)
RIFE – RIFLE = search through, loses its L the initial letter of luggage.
7 Pounds raised in Ulster — British in search for weapon (7,4)
CLUSTER BOMB – Take Ulster, ‘raise’ the L to get LUSTER; add B for British; insert it all into COMB = search for.
8 Bag male brought into class after exam (7)
SATCHEL – SAT = exam, CL for class; insert HE for male. In the UK SAT stands for Standard Attainment Tests.
9 Fall that could lead to blindness (8)
CATARACT – double definition; a waterfall, and an eye problem.
12 Smart but impoverished count supplanting duke (11)
INTELLIGENT – Take INDIGENT (impoverished) and replace the D (duke) by TELL (count).
14 Grandfather is not such an insignificant person (5-5)
SMALL-TIMER – A grandfather clock is not a ‘small timer’, it’s a large one.
16 Drive away from one small lake in Kansas City (8)
DISLODGE – DODGE CITY is in Kansas; insert I S L (one small lake) into Dodge.
18 Busy hospital in Eton failed to operate (2,3,2)
ON THE GO – insert H into (ETON)* add GO = operate.
20 Greek hero puts article to varied uses (7)
THESEUS – THE (article) (USES)*.
23 Church under pressure to accommodate gold in hall (5)
PORCH – P (pressure) CH (church) insert OR (gold).
24 Light touch from one X represents (4)
KISS – double definition.
26 Rower in loud cry when losing lead (3)
OAR – ROAR loses its leading R.

​

47 comments on “Times 27699 – something fishy here; whose fault is it?”

  1. I solved most of the bottom half of this quickly but slowed down trying to get to grips with the top half, including SAN ANDREAS FAULT, the clue for which was rather contrived for my liking. I finished with the unknown TELEOST which looked a lot like a word I was going to regret making up but thankfully proved not to be so.
  2. Having lost access to the club on Firefox, I switched to Safari for the first time and did this in rather a bad mood. (The club’s customer service people have yet to respond, after sending me totally irrelevant advice about my iPad; I don’t have an iPad. They must have a menu of advices to choose from, and ‘Chloe’ pulled out the wrong one. But I digress.) Biffed several, including the FAULT (which does not, by the way, run under LA or SF). DNK the PRIMROSE. I wasted a lot of time persisting in looking for MA in 1ac. DNK SAT, and wondered if the UK had imported the US SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test), the bane of high school students.
    1. Kevin, not sure if this will help, but last year I found the club site would just not work on Safari (on my iPad) and had to switch to Chrome. It gave me access to the pages, but most of the content was not rendered. Eventually I found the same error on Chrome. I worked out that clearing the cookies in either browser and logging in again from scratch fixed it for me.
      1. I cleared the cookies, after which I got repeated 403 messages from the site.
        1. Unusually for me, I got a 403 message from Chrome but it loaded without problem in Firefox. Having completed the puzzle, I tried Chrome again and got straight back in but am none the wiser on what had gone wrong. Kind regards, Bob K
        2. I get the 403 message from time to time (it happened yesterday for instance) and generally speaking if I either close the tab and start again or (if that doesn’t work) enter the puzzle club through the main Times news site, the problem goes away.
          1. Same here, in general; not this time: it’s 403 after 403.
            And I still haven’t heard from Customer Service.
            1. It took them 5 days to respond when I had my Smartphone problem some months ago. But when they did, it resolved my issue.
              1. Here’s what I wrote them:
                1) While I was doing the QC, the letters stopped advancing; that is, typing simply replaced one letter with another. Moving the cursor to the next square eliminated the previous letter.
                2) Giving up on the QC, I tried to open the main puzzle; but the series of icons on the top was (is) skewed to the right, so that the ‘submit’ icon is below the others. (This has happened before.)
                Please advise; better yet, please correct the problems.

                And here’s their response:

                ? Click on editions from the bottom menu of the app

                ? Click edit at the bottom-right of the menu

                ? Click on the cover of the edition that you want to delete

                ? Click on the delete icon once you have selected the editions that you wish to delete

                I hope this helps free up the required space on your iPad.

                But at least I didn’t have to wait 5 days for it.

            2. The other thing that’s worked for me is the standard IT trick: turn everything off and turn it on again.
              There was a period a few weeks ago where none of this worked and I didn’t have access at all on my laptop for a few days. And then suddenly I did again.
  3. …With Kisses four.
    I remember reading that someone asked Keats why ‘four’ kisses; what was the symbolic significance? His reply was, “I wanted an even number so it was the same for each eye – and two seemed a bit mean.”
    30 mins with yoghurt, granola, etc.
    I wasn’t convinced by Hall=Porch, but no doubt one of the dictionaries has it as a 37th synonym.
    Thanks setter and Pip.
    1. I’ve trawled all the usual sources and a couple of thesauruses and can’t find any support for hall = porch. The nearest, perhaps, is in Chambers which has hall as ‘a lobby at the entrance of a house’ which might fit the sort of covered-in porch some people have added to avoid walking straight into a main room. Pretty tenuous, so I’d say you were absolutely right to question it.
      1. The Chambers 21st Century thesaurus, which is quite basic, lists it, as does the rather better-equipped Collins.

        I was a little surprised to see it queried, as our porch — a covered entrance, with the front door at the business end and room inside to hang coats and hats, which was not in fact a part of the original cottage — was always known as the hall. All of that may simply mean that we had no real idea what a porch is, or a hall.

  4. I liked this, generally pitched about the right level for me and with some clever clues though not quite sure about 10ac, my FOI, or about 25ac either.
    What SAT stands for seems to depend on who you ask .. “Statutory Assessment Test” appears most common.
    1. I thought Specific Achievement Test until today, but then I’ve never really had to worry about it being brought up on the 11+
  5. Another straightforward solve. Pleasant but not really taxing.

    What is the obsession with Chartres? I had to blog it once in a Mephisto and learned of the outstanding bravery of US Army Col Welborn Griffith who in 1944 saved the cathedral from being bombed. It’s worth a look in Wiki.

  6. Abandoned this one overnight with 4 clues unsolved, 3 in the NW corner plus the unknown fish middle-right. On resumption this morning I saw BRIDGEHEAD at once, and biffed DISABLE, then DOPAMINE followed from checkers and wordplay. Finally I managed to construct TELEOST from its component parts.

    Other than that I found this quite straightforward.

    I note we have CHARTRES again, having turned yesterday when I was on blogging duty.

  7. Oh dear. Ground to halt with the unknown compound and the even more unknown fish remaining. Made an educated guess at the compound once I’d persuaded MA to leave the room. Then, as the hour approached, I had to decide between TILTOMT and TELEOST for the fish. The latter seemed marginally the more plausible.
  8. 25 minutes, though I had some problems getting started. Eventually realising that 5a would end -US got me to FOI 8d SATCHEL and things began falling into place. Happily I didn’t need to know what “vigneron” meant, and managed to conjure up LOI 19a TELEOST with a similar feeling to Pootle.

    I might’ve been slower if I weren’t halfway through James Lee Burke’s The Neon Rain at the moment, which helpfully is set in New ORLEANS.

  9. My solve followed the same pattern as johninterred’s, albeit taking a while longer. I gave up my GENERAL when I could make nothing od 9d and 14d. MA had to be prised out of my POI, DOPAMINE, before I was able to complete 1d, my LOI, adding DI to my fur coat. SAN ANDREAS FAULT was my FOI and I found this a very enjoyable experience. 22:25. Thanks setter and Pip.
  10. Trouble today inventing TELEOST after trying every other cat I could think of, including the whippy one and the throw up one. Like others, I eventually got to DOPAMINE (which I do know, which makes me irrationally happy) by forgetting the old woman and picking the random O PAT out of thin air.

    Since almost anything could be a flower/river, I toyed with GRAS(s)US for a while (and why not?) but abandoned the probably beautiful/silvery invention once I had the C.

    The Chartres Tourist Board thanks you for your interest.

  11. Day 3 of this 5 day Test at Edgbaston (constituency) – and all deliveries have been dealt with safely. One googly, (a word that needs googling?), at 19 across, threatened to end my innings but the official review was NOT OUT.

    COD: DISABLE.

    1. Your new definition of googly? That should go straight to the glossary 😂 In fact I think I understand that rather more than the cricketing term.
  12. After a late start, not as sharp as others today, taking 40 minutes. LOI was the unknown TELEOST. I took a while with the random woman in DOPAMINE, and only then did I see DISABLE. COD to SMALL-TIMER. Thank you Pip and setter.
  13. Managed to get home in about 35 min. with interruptions. Didn’t know teleost yet may have clocked it somewhere. Didn’t know vigneron come to that. Enjoyable puzzle.
  14. 7m 13s – nothing too tricky today, although I didn’t know TELEOST or CATARACT as a waterfall. Took a while to persuade myself of the wordplay parts of SATCHEL and DOPAMINE, but then started biffing the likes of CLUSTER BOMB and SAN ANDREAS FAULT. Slowed a bit by biffing GENERAL rather than ADMIRAL when presented with the R?L ending.
  15. 25.11. LOI dopamine mainly because I was trying to fit in ma as old woman. The answer became clear when I wrote the letters down. Apart from that , reasonable progress but also held up by small timer, once that was in cataract,admiral and teleost soon followed.

    Very enjoyable midweeker.

  16. 7:40. Straightforward again. TELEOST rang a vague bell, fortunately, or I might have spent more time worrying that it doesn’t really look like a word. I didn’t know where the queen starts in chess but I didn’t really need to.
    Hall=porch seems dodgy to me.

    Edited at 2020-06-24 10:02 am (UTC)

  17. Yes I wondered about PORCH=hall. In the UK I think of it as a sort of protective covered entry by the front door. In the NE US it’s something else again. We’ve got one that’s covered but not screened that we decorate with climbing plants and use to sit out on the summer. A few miles South of here Eleanor Roosevelt had one for sleeping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_porch.

    Knowing nothing of chess I had to wait for the DOPAMINE before I could get 1d, otherwise straightforward. 19.04

  18. ….(though not in person). That song is from “Chess””, which he co-wrote with Bjorn and Benny from Abba. And that’s pretty well all I really know about chess, which has always struck me as profoundly boring. So “D1” was a biff.

    I was another to try “ma” or even “oma” before DOPAMINE hit me. I lived with a lady called Pam 20 years ago. Her bottle of vodka a day saw her off before she had the chance to grow old (I was long gone by then).

    My partner had an operation to remove her CATARACTs in 2018, but now her lenses have misted over and she needs corrective surgery. Of course, the pandemic has delayed that, and she’s been told to expect a date in late July. Every day it’s more and more like living with Mr.Magoo (no, not Mark Goodliffe !). She hasn’t started calling me Waldo…..

    NHO SMALL-TIMER but was happy to biff it with all checkers in place.

    How does one DISABLE a CLUSTER BOMB ? I might try listening to U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” later and see if it helps (it might at least wipe out my Barbara Dickson/Elaine Paige earworm).

    No brick wall today thank goodness.

    FOI SAN ANDREAS FAULT
    LOI DISLODGE
    COD INTELLIGENT
    TIME 8:26

  19. A similar experience to John D and John I – got stuck in the top left, even though I’d had DOPAMINE in mind, so to speak, for a bit. I don’t play chess so, although I realised what was required, I didn’t have the required knowledge. But it makes a nice change for Di to be clued as something other than a woman’s name. There must be even more of those than vessels!

    Otherwise, yesterday’s prediction for Wednesday didn’t quite come true. There were quite a lot of easy ones, and I did complete the grid, but will have to own up to a DNF (technical or otherwise) as I checked TELEOSTafter entering it, and looked up the white queen’s starting position. Oh, and I’ve just noticed – i put PEN instead of PIN – d’oh!

    I thought there were quite a lot of clues to enjoy, CROCUS and EVENING PRIMROSE in particular.

    FOI Itch
    LOI Dopamine
    COD San Andreas Fault – it may not be geographically correct but I liked it
    Time Not too sure – less than an hour – but a DNF anyway

    Thanks to the setter and to Pip

  20. Didn’t know TELEOST so constructed from components then hit submit and hope.

    Spent some time thinking the compound had MA in it, before the final checker (P) turned up.

  21. Didn’t know TELEOST. Would have said it meant ‘Far East’ if pressed. Actually, if pressed it’s probably called Gravadlax.
  22. 13:38. Held up in the end by DISABLE and DOPAMINE taking rather too long to think of the chess square in algebraic notation. I also wasted time with a biffed GENERAL at 17A. Serves me right. All good otherwise, knowing TELEOST and the geographical references, though I didn’t note any outstanding clues.
  23. A speedy (for me) sub 30m solve assisted perhaps by my understanding the chess reference straightaway and having cataracts for which I too am awaiting an op.

    I suffered a MER when reading Phil Jordans view that chess is profoundly boring. Myself. I love crossword solving but it doesn’t come close to the pleasure I get from following and playing chess.

  24. I did this in 2 halves. Usually when I get back to it the whole thing falls into place very quickly, but not today. Nothing to add to the previous comments, except to say that I fell into all the traps mentioned above, plus my biffing of GENERAL which left me trying out things like ANGLE TIMER which didn’t ring any bells, nor should it.
  25. LOI was the unknown fish, whose name I didn’t quite believe.
    I wasn’t too busy, just plumb forgot to go back and parse ON THE GO.
    This was the best this week, I think. A bit chewier than the last two.

    On the subject of CLUSTER BOMBs, I edited a story yesterday that pointed out that in the United States “in 2016…just 16 Democrats…join[ed] with 200 Republicans to defeat legislation that would have outlawed the export of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia. Cluster bombs are banned by over 100 countries because of their indiscriminate nature. Many also do not detonate and can pose a threat to civilians decades later.”
    What a world we live in.

    Edited at 2020-06-24 03:08 pm (UTC)

  26. Like many, put in TELEOST without a lot of conviction. I was OK on the d1 in chess, since although I don’t play, I do know how to, and I knew that e4 is the most common opening move, that we used to call P-K4. So the king starts on e1 and the queen must be on d1. I liked the anagram for the fault, but living nearby it was an instant write-in. All that 2020 seems to be lacking so far is an earthquake (well, there was one in Mexico yesterday but I was thinking of here).

    I wondered if there was some significance in both CHARTRES and ORLEANS appearing (they are in the same part of France) but apparently not.

  27. Is there a term for making up an obviously b*ll*cks word, such as TELEOST, and then finding out that it’s correct?
    1. We have momble for a word which apparently fits the wordplay but proves to be made up but I don’t think we have anything for one which proves to be true. Could be a chance to make your mark on the glossary.
  28. Straightforward solve. TELEOST was one of those scientific words I knew to exist, but without being able to give a definition in any meaningful way, so I might easily have been thinking of telameres or, indeed, something else altogether.
  29. Exactly 45 minutes (because as the timer approached that mark, I decided to stop worrying about whether I might be missing something about my LOI, TELEOST, and just submit). It was an unknown, but was not entirely implausible. Fortunately I did ponder a while and more importantly, proofread, during which I found two typos to correct. The next-to-LOI were DOPAMINE, once I realized the old woman was not going to be MA, and DISABLE. On that, I did understand what the white queen had to do with it, but while going through possibilities in my mind I imagined the stress on the wrong syllable and DÌS-able just didn’t ring any bells at all.

    CHARTRES, by the way, is not the only answer which recently has been coming up several days in a row, and I am really wondering why words are repeated so frequently. Is it the setter coming up with several definitions he just HAS to use because he finds them so wonderful, and so he runs them over several days? Or is one setter inspiring another (saying to himself, why, I could do better than that)?

    As for coming back to a puzzle after a pause and having everything just fall into place (jackkt’s comment), it happens to me all the time. The mind works in mysterious ways.

    Edited at 2020-06-24 06:13 pm (UTC)

  30. I was primed for 10A just before starting the puzzle by reading of the latest executive order from the White House, changing the name of the SAN ANDREAS FAULT to BARACK OBAMA’S FAULT.
  31. 48:22. I got bogged down in this one. My FOI was toil. That should’ve told me I was going to find this hard work. Just made heavier weather of a lot of this than I needed to. I liked working out that the white Queen was either on D1 or E1 (knew the position of rook, knight and bishop, didn’t know which way round the king and queen went). I googled teleost before submission.
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