Times Crossword 24358

Author   sabine_tkPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 7.20.

This seemed like a very straightforward puzzle and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some lightning fast times. It was also very straightforward to blog, the only holdup being the construction of 5 down, which took me a few minutes to figure out, though by having said that I’ve probably doomed myself to some careless slip-up elsewhere.
 

Across
1
   NAN,TES – “retired group” = SET reversed.
9
   MOORFOWL, sounding like “more foul”.
10
   S,C(HE,M)E
11
   CASSETTE – (test case)*
12
   CO(w)SHED
13
   MCCARTHY – MCC = Marylebone Cricket Club, and “banned entry to vulgar” is an instruction to remove the first letter from “earthy”, here meaning gross or unrefined. The reference is to the noted Communist witchhunter Joseph McCarthy.
17
   S(t)ACK – this and the previous clue contain no unchecked letters, which feels vaguely unsatisfactory, though unless this is one of the new grids it must have happened many times before.
19
   PRO, TRACT
20
   ROLL-ON – firstly in the sense of “Roll on 1 o’clock and the start of the Dodgers series against the Phillies”, and secondly, apparently, that of a type of corset that fits on by stretching, which sounds very, very unpleasant.
21
   I,L(LINO)IS
22
   V(EGG)IE
23
   V.IN,DAL,OO, with DAL being LAD backwards.
24
   LANDSEER, the English painter Sir Edwin.
25
   ROD,NEY, “longing to retire” being YEN backwards. My admittedly limited knowledge of naval history did not extend to Admiral George Brydges Rodney.
 
Down
2
   AROMA(n)TIC
3
   TIRESOME – a word which is made up from the four notes ti, re, so and me. I can almost hear seven Austrian children picking up the chorus even as I type.
4
   S(PORT,S)CAR
5
   G(OLD)EN RE,TRI,EVER – GENRE=kind, TRI(o) = “group nearly”, and EVER=always.
6
   REC,TORY – REC sounds like WRECK.
8
   S(HELD)UCK – I had heard of a sheldrake so was confident this must exist also.
14
   HEADLINER – (her in lead)*
15
   APPR,OVAL – APPR being alternate letters of “bagpiper”, and the Oval a London cricket ground, these days properly titled the Brit (Insurance) Oval.
16
   HO,OLIGAN – (in gaol)*
18
   CAM,I,SOLE. CAM being MAC reversed (coat taken up).
19
   PHONIES – (hips one)*

35 comments on “Times Crossword 24358”

  1. Straight in with a 404 error, but clearing cookies saved the day. 23 min after making a meal of the NW. COD? … um … Oh if I must: 7 dn PLETHORA.
  2. Not easy here either, about 35 minutes, held up by SHELDUCK, LANDSEER, and NANTES, where I was convinced the ‘old lady’ was to be ‘ma’, so I went through Manila, Tacoma, Madras, etc. quite fruitlessly. Thanks for the wordplay for GOLDEN RETRIEVER and MCCARTHY, Sabine, which I hadn’t understood. COD’s to SHELDUCK and RODNEY, which had very nice surfaces. Entertaining outing so thanks to the setter. Regards.
  3. 55mins here too, mostly spent in the NW corner, trying, like Kevin, for a MA opener on 1ac. I was so sure MCC couldn’t be a component of any word that my last in was MACARTHY (sic), which meant MACVARTHY had to be a cricket club somewhere. Thankyou Sabine for the elucidation. I agree VINDALOO & PLETHORA were great clues, but I’ll give my COD nod to LANDSEER, which raised a laugh. Maybe if I gave my brain a rest for a few days…

    I should mention TI-RE-SO-ME is my favourite chord (G6) in the key of C) and I have to admit playing it tiresomely in the only chord progression I know.

  4. 9:06 for this – NW corner was fairly slow. Sabine’s time should encourage her to make the trip to Cheltenham some day.

    This is far from a new grid – the big E in it is apparently a little signature from Edmund Akenhead, Times xwd ed 1965-83. It’s the only Times grid with any fully checked answers, so I guess it’s retained for sentimental reasons. The two medium-length answers in the middle (13, 19) are also very unusual in Times grids, though several Telegraph gird have them – a central square of 7-letter answers in the grid for Toughie 234 for example (just printed for my weekly go at the Toughies).

    Plenty of enjoyable clues, and some interesting pairs of words in the grid – “roll on Illinois” and “veggie vindaloo”, plus the vandalised cassette.

    Edited at 2009-10-16 07:01 am (UTC)

  5. Can someone help me with the wordplay for 24 ac? I was convinced it was aiming for “nest” in the middle of some sort of “crow/leer”, so couldn’t get beyond “linester”
  7. No trouble with this. Shelduck and Moorfowl seem to be birds that only exist for crossword purposes so they went straight in. Likewise with the retriever, a popular crossword dog, probably because it contains 15 letters. I liked Veggie, Vindaloo and Roll-on.

    I groaned at the prospect of having to go through all the combinations of tonic-sol-fa syllables to get Tiresome but I have to admit that the answer is a tour de force. Now I’m trying to think of other 8 or more letter words consisting only of notes.

    1. First 8-letter one I just found is SODOMITE, which the Times probably wouldn’t use …
      1. That was the first one I thought of too. The only others I can find, using the 2-letter notes or their anglicised variants are Mimetite and Sometime.
  8. Straightforward this, only a one-cup (about 15m) although 5 spent finishing the NW corner, aromatic and moorfowl last in.. no trouble with Rodney, who had no less than six ships named after him, including the HMS Rodney that helped to sink the Bismarck and took part in the Normandy invasion

    I am impressed that anyone thinks Joseph McCarthy worth the bother of defending; a vicious, vindictive, unpleasant rabble rouser of small intellect, however justified his motivation may have been. He caused America much damage and pain.

  9. A very straightforward 20 minutes with no real hold-ups or surprises. No unknown words and some like the birds and the dog written straight in.

    I’m not that au fait with McCarthy but had a feeling that anti-communism was a front used to cover a more personal agenda. How is he viewed today in the US?

    1. Hi Jimbo. I don’t speak for the whole country, but in the main, McCarthy is still widely viewed with contempt as an ambitious scare-mongerer, who ruined countless lives and reputations in pursuit of the spotlight. But while he probably was pursuing his own agenda, the ‘red scare’ he intensified was quite real.
  10. The clue refers to MCCARTHY as a “crusader”, which, from remembering that horrible man on TV, seems wrong and an insult to genuine crusaders. I prefer Sabine’s
    “witchhunter”, but even that seems far too mild. Joseph McCarthy was mad, if not just evil!
  11. Had the misfortune to see Sabine’s time before starting and was happy as I have a busy day ahead (Glyndebourne later for Falstaff). Then had wavelength problem (euphemism for denseness). Couldn’t see the biggy for love nor money and spent much fruitless time trying to find the See in “her in lead”. The vile senator first in but struggled with
    (e)arthy.
    Steady solve thereafter with doubts about roll-on (recall struggling with these in my youth – not mine I hasten to add – not to mention camisoles, and the birds did for me at the end. My ignorance of our feathered friends was highlighted the other day when a creature the like of which I have not seen since Jurassic Park landed atop a tree a few feet from me. Internet search later revealed it to be a heron which with neck and wings extended is an awesome sight, but not as awesome as Sabine’s 7:20.
    Bad COD to NANTES – I know a few 40 somethings who would be livid about this clue.
    COD to AROMATIC.
  12. Well, easy or not it’s certainly the most straightforward puzzle we’ve had on a Friday for months. It took me 25 minutes but it would have been 5 minutes less if I’d had the confidence to write in SHELDUCK at 8dn when I first thought of it. For some reason I thought it took a double L so I needed to understand the wordplay and convince myself it didn’t.

    After the event I took ages to spot the wordplay at 5dn because I was reading “ageing” as OLDEN leaving GRE_ to explain “kind”.

  13. Did most of the right side on first look but couldn’t break into the left hand side at all. Thanks for the explanations Sabine – it’s all so obvious now! I don’t think I’ve seen words with no unchecked letters before. Talk about gimmies! I knew Admiral Rodney from a local pub of the same name. As a curry eating hillwalker I liked the GUY ROPES and VINDALOO clues. On reading up about NANTES – which I didn’t know was a port – I see it’s at the centre of the earth’s land hemisphere.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_hemisphere

    Daniel

  14. 12 mins, held back by not getting 5D GOLDEN RETRIEVER until (almost) the end. I rather liked 24A LANDSEER. Not that it really matters, but I took 4D as a charade, with ‘outwardly damaged’ defining -SCAR. I’m also not sure if SCAR is meant to be an adjective, or whether ‘damaged?’ is meant to indicate something like ‘with a scar’.

    Tom B.

    1. I thought the container/sandwich interpretation was supported by “outwardly damaged” being “with a scar on the outside”. COED has a scar being a mark “on the skin or within body tissue”, which seems to prevent “outwardly damaged” simply meaning “with a scar”.
  15. Another 12 mins, which felt slow. Thanks mainly to an inexplicable mental block on MOORFOWL, having guessed MOOR but failed for some time to think of a four letter ending -O-L which sounded like NASTY! Also delayed by MCCARTHY, having quickly discarded the possibility of a word starting MCC. Not my finest hour.
  16. 11:46 .. last in NANTES. COD 12a COSHED.

    Mort Sahl on McCarthyism: “Every time the Russians threw an American in jail, the Un-American Activities Committee would retaliate by throwing an American in jail.”

  17. 10:17 — help up, for some stupid reason, by MOORFOWL (though it looks like I was not the only one with this problem, nor the only one for whom the NW corner was last to fall into place).

    COD has to be 13a, given that I am a member of MCC; I really should have solved this one more quickly, too.

  18. 54:50 – Slow, but at least I finished. Something I failed to do on all the others this week. Having said that, I made two mistakes so it probably shouldn’t count anyway.

    I’ve not heard of LANDSEER and went for LONGSEER instead, also I misspelt MCCARTHY as MACARTHY (no wonder I couldn’t parse it!)

    I liked the neat anagrams at 5a & 14. For COD I can’t decide between 22 & 23, so I’ll give it to Row 13!

  19. I was intrigued by VINDALOO being clued as “takeaway”. Does no-one sit down in a restaurant for a curry in England any more?

    …Robert

    1. … to show you this picture taken at Cheltenahm’s “Curry Corner”, the night before last year’s championship, including 3 Times setters, 3 of our bloggers and 1 commenter, including some bloke enjoying his last day as the champion. No actual curry visible alas – not even a pint of Kingfisher, which is quite a surprise!
  20. 14 minutes, which was 7 on the rest an an eternity on SHELDUCK. RODNEY as an admiral caught me once before, I liked 22 across.
  21. No time, done in several bites but did not feel slow. A four quarters feel, NE, SW, SE and finally NW. Amused by 3 pairs – birds, ladies’ garments and cricket references, 50’s feel (McCarthy and roll-ons) and favourite clue 24a. Don’t mind being an old lady but Granny please, not Nan.
  22. 7.40 No real hold-ups but a few went in on faith including SHELDUCK and ILLINOIS.Just the mention of Lino takes me back to childhood (like some smells ,a la Proust).Last in was HOOLIGAN which wasn’t obvious to me , for no good reason. LANDSEER raised a chortle.
    Nice to see the picture from Curry Corner last year. I must say I look better than I felt the next morning!
    Richard (second from left) is Fletcher who took part again this year. Out of picture would also have been John Henderson , another former champion and top setter
    1. Solvers in the Emerald Isle may have a different explanation for the wordplay in 8 down. A “shuck”, sometimes spelt sheugh or shough, is a colloquial term for a drain, often by a road or lane. It is usually full of mud and effluent, hence the phrase, “Look at the state of ye! You look like you just climbed out of the shuck!” Are there any Irish Setters at the Times?
      1. Not for a while. However, recently we have had a Golden Retriever, a Landseer and a Basenji. (ar ar)
      2. There’s one Irish setter at the Times – Brian Greer, former Times xwd editor, and back on the setting team since about two years ago.
    2. John was probably taking the picture! A few clicks on the left-pointing arrow will find you a picture of him preparing carefully for the next day’s solving.

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