Times Crossword 24513

Author   sabine_tkPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

I had all of this except 28A done in about 9 minutes, and proceeded to spend a further 6 minutes gazing at that one remaining unsolved clue, becoming more and more convinced it must be CARTEL (the initial C worked, and it was surprisingly hard to find other words that fit – looking at my notes, the only others I thought of were dactyl and pastel.) But I wasn’t convinced by the definition and didn’t have a clue about the Soviet group. However, I had a blog to write, and had reached a point where I just wasn’t getting any new ideas, so I gave up and looked up CARTEL to see if it was right. I don’t think I can therefore really claim a solving time; under contest conditions I’m sure I’d have thought about it some more and written out lists trying various letters in 3rd position.

Anyway – apart from this horrible blind spot I found it a pretty approachable puzzle, with 1A and 1D going in right away, a good few anagrams and some clever surface readings. I seemed to see references to politics, parties and debates all over the place – I think I’m suffering from early election TV burnout.

Across
1
   TI(MB)RE – I’ve become very wary of “doctor” lately, always half-suspecting it of being a verb, but here it is one of the stalwart trio of letter pairs DR, MO and MB (are there others?)
4
   C(RAB, ME)AT – BAR=pub sent back.
10
   CAN(CELL)ED
11
   ANON,A – being CANON with the heading removed, plus A. At least, I hope this is the answer – I couldn’t think of anything else that worked, and the website thinkbabynames.com does list Anona as a girl’s name, meaning “pineapple” – though rather discouragingly, the Office of National Statistics reports the total number of girls in England and Wales given this name in 2007 and 2008 combined as 0. (If you enjoy browsing lists like this, which I rather do, you can find them here.)
12
   THRASHED OUT – (he’s had tutor)*.
14
   ONE – sounds like “won”, and here meaning “joke”, in the sense of “Have you heard the one about the woman who went into a bar and asked for a double entendre?”1
17
   DISTIL, hidden in fielD IS TILled.
19
   OR,IE,NT. OR=gold, IE=that is, NT=scripture. A rather pleasing &lit referring to the gift of gold brought by one of the Three Kings.
21
   HELL,ENE – HELL is the very hot place, ENE is half of ENERGY, and the definition is just “Greek”.
23
   LEA – “metal detector” has to be split to give metal (LEAD) and “detector originally”, the letter D which must be removed.
26
   W,HEEL
27
   BRASSIER,E
29
   D(ETH,R)ONE – DONE=prepared, around ETH (“the”, scrambled, and R=run).
30
   C,ARTEL. I had never heard of an ARTEL, which is a Russian workers’ guild, nor did I know, other than very vaguely, what a cartel was, and would certainly never have defined it as a trust, which I knew only in the sense of an arrangement where an estate is managed for another person by a trustee. But a cartel is a consortium of companies formed to limit competition, and “trust” can mean this too, so there you are.
 
Down
1
   TAC,I,TURN – I had written in 1ac at a glance and from that it was easy to see that TAC(t) would be “no end of sensitivity”.
2
   MAN,OR – MAN=bloke, and the rest is FOR (in place of”) missing the F.
3
   R(O)E – RE=about (with reference to) and O=duck (zero runs in cricket). The definition is just “eggs”.
6
   BEAUTY SALON – (Esau notably)*. Esau was supposedly born very hairy and therefore named after the Hebrew for “hair”.
7
   E,CO,NOMISE, with NOMISE being an anagram of “monies”. Comforting to see the credit crunch has well and truly arrived in clueland.
8
   T,RAVEL
9
   C(LIEN)T, “lien” being a right in law, which makes this another very neatly worded clue.
13
   STONEWALLER, an anagram of (Senator well). I originally tried to complicate things here with the theory that S would stand for Senator (it doesn’t) and that the rest would be formed from synonyms of “well” and “able”.
16
   PARRAKEET (a park tree)*. I wasn’t familiar with this alternative spelling of “parakeet”, but it couldn’t be anything else.
18
   NEW,SREEL – NEW=just out, and SREEL is “leers”, reversed (revolutionary).
20
   TA,L,I,BAN – TA=(Territorial) army, L=left,I=one and BAN=outlaw. Definitely one where you need to double check the wordplay to be sure you have the right spelling.
21
   HOOKAH, sounding like “hooker”. Rugby is one of the few sports I don’t enjoy, but I’ve paid it enough attention to know that it has a hooker and a pack.
22
   F(LAW)ED – a Fed being here an FBI agent.
25
   ELECT – half of “electronic”, for which the E in e-mail stands.
28
   SKA – the initial letters of “standard keys always”.

1 The barman gave her one.

36 comments on “Times Crossword 24513”

  1. A rather sad 33 minutes, with much time spent looking at A?O?A (11ac) and E?E?? (25dn). Getting CARTEL (30ac) helped with the latter — though I have an idea that the ARTEL was pre-revolutionary so maybe not Soviet? Even then, it wasn’t obvious that the answer to 25 was ELECT and I only got it from remembering the elect/preterite distinction. “Half lost, the other half being…” seemed like overkill. And as for ANONA: whoever names their daughter after a pineapple has problems … mostly of an aesthetic nature!
  2. From here, 30 minutes, ending with DETHRONE, first entry TRAVEL. Thanks to Sabine for the wonderful blog. On the individual clues, I don’t know where to begin: the ONE:WON bit I don’t get at all. The ‘member of the pack’= HOOKAH is a stretch, at least to this American. No problem here with the ARTEL/Cartel thing. ANONA…never heard of her. The rest mostly OK. COD? Well, I suppose either TACITURN or the related STONEWALLER. Regards.
  3. The collocation of ‘pussy’ and ‘eaten’ means this setter was most definitely having fun. The SE corner did for me: didn’t know SKA, never heard of ‘artel’ (and I thought my C-RED-IT was rather good, even though I had somehow to persuade myself that ‘it’ meant group). I obviously had reds in my head, as I failed to get teh eminently gettable NEWSREEL because I used the two early crossing letters to construct REDS-. Missed the rugby reference in 21dn and ended up with nothing better than hoopoe. A fair old disaster all round.

    Re pussy, I once brought the house down when visiting my wife’s uncle in Guangdong Province by trying to say “I love eating crab” and ending up saying “I love eating pussy”. The pitfalls of a tonal language!

  4. Completed in 45 minutes, guessing Anona – a name which is evidently too self-effacing to survive in the Age of Celebrity – and getting stuck in the SE corner after justifying ELITE for 25dn on the basis of some over-engineered logic. The end of a very tough week for me in which I dispensed with the watch and used a calendar for two puzzles which actually took more than a day to finish.
  5. I tackled this around 1 am and completed about most of the NE and SW corners before hitting a wall after 20 minutes and giving up for the night. Started very slowly this morning and eventually resorted to aids to prevent going over the hour. I didn’t have th GK to work out CARTEL, didn’t know SKA, didn’t get the “joke” reference to justify ONE and didn’t think of ANONA even with all the checkers in place though I do know the name, as would any avid fan of BBC radio panel games in the 50s – 70s because of Anona Winn. It turns out she was Australian, which I never knew before today.

    Once again I’m very glad it wasn’t my Friday to write the blog.

  6. Like Jackkt, I had no trouble with this as I also remembered Anona Winn. However, I don’t get the connection between Anona and pineapple. Chambers gives anona as being (among other things) a custard apple. Pineapple is anana/ananas.
    Mike O
    Skiathos.
  7. 13:30 for this one, with similar slow moments to others, so apart from one bit of knowledge, Sabine was four or five minutes quicker than me.

    I remembered artel (from blocked puzzles and/or occasional goes at New York Times puzzles) fairly quickly, though I considered CREDIT first. Collins has a Soviet usage as well as a pre-revolutionary one. I’m too young to remember Anona Winn from the radio, and my theory that any first name used in Times puzzles had to be supported by the ‘Some First Names’ appendix in Chambers is now disproved – no Anona there. So given the pretty clear wordplay, some time (maybe a minute) was spent trying to fit clerics to ?AAO?, ?ABO?, … , ?AZO? and then ?A?OA, ?A?OB, … , ?A?OZ.

    1. I’d never heard of artel and went with CREDIT, on the grounds that Soviet had to mean “red” and I didn’t really get the rest of it.

      This explains why I couldn’t finish the grid before giving up and going to sleep.

  8. DNF.
    Raced through top half over a cup of tea (including ANONA as I was a radio baby). Struggled thereafter. As per yesterday solved TALIBAN and BRASSIERE during ablutions. Had HELLENA at 21ac (other than Hell no idea why) so never did get NEWSREEL. Had ELECT but confused by the clue. CARTEL just plain daft and no apologies for having failed with it. (Perhaps Americans were more exercised by all things Soviet?)
  9. It seems that Anona is one of many girl’s names in the Hannah (meaning ‘grace, favour’ in Hebrew) stable, along with (the scrumptious) Ana, Anna, Annika and Anaïs.

    Unlikely to have more than its form in common with pineapples, scaly custard apples or sweetsops, I would say.

  10. No trouble with this one done in a time very adjacent to Peter. Truly my cup runneth over.

    With age advantage I of course remember dear old Anona and wrote her straight in. Don’t get the pineapple comments. I’ve come across “artel” before and had to study the economics of cartels at one time so again no problem. I thought STONEWALLER was a good clue.

  11. Just to pick up on Sabine’s comment on trusts. In English and related judicial systems, a trust is an arrangement whereby a party (the settlor) gives property to a second party (the trustee) to hold for the benefit of a third party (the beneficiary). The trustee holds the legal title to the property, and the beneficiary has an equitable interest, being his right to enforce the terms of the trust against the trustee. The arrangement can take many more complicated forms such as unit trusts, but the fundamental principle is always the same.

    As the trustee is the owner of record, trusts may be used to hide the true owners or controllers of assets.

    As far as I can tell, in the US in the late C19, companies organised cartels for price-fixing by having some or all or their shares held in trusts, so that (opaquely) all were subject to common control. The use of “trust” to mean “cartel” appears to derive from this practice, although the cartel is not a trust in the more usual sense.

    The anti-monopoly laws in the US attacked the trust structure and are thus called “antitrust” laws. The UK equivalents are the Enterprise Act and the Competition Act (policed by the Office of Fair Trading), and in Australia the Trade Practices Act.

    As far as I am aware “trust” = “cartel” is confined to the US.

    (At least that’s my excuse for not twigging it when I was solving!)

    1. COED has “chiefly US” for antitrust, and “chiefly N Amer” for trust=cartel. I’m sure I came across “antitrust” somewhere in my dimly-remembered studies of Economics – though whether it was O Level, A Level or at the LSE I can’t say.
    2. Thanks for that refresher kurihan – very useful. It brings back memories of unintelligible text books that were guaranteed to send one straight off to sleep.
      1. Sorry for the rather tedious post. It’s just that I am interested in the origins of words, in particular when a word acquires a new and different meaning, and tend to be a bit obsessive in following these things up! I can quite understand that may not be shared by others!
  12. A DNF for me too, foiled by Anona. I toyed with Adora, also failing to figure in the the top 1000 since 1880 (if you believe Think Baby Names) reasoning Hador could hve been some middle Eastern cleric; but it turns out he’s a Tolkein character (and Cador & Mador are Arthurian, the former apparently linked to Cadbury via Cador’s fort). Also much troubled by the CARTEL/ELECT crossing which had me baffled. COD to the very clever ORIENT, which went right over my head at the time.

    I think we’ve had the wan/won debate before.

    1. ORIENT gave me pleasant pause today and a bit of distraction. Apart from the “We Three Kings” bearing gold from the east, there’s four rivers of Eden reference in Genesis 2: “the name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold”. I agree this was a special clue with lovely resonances.
  13. Old enough to remember ANONA Winn from Twenty Questions, which is why I’m still locked on 16 minutes, with the little grey cells refusing to make connections any faster. CARTEL was no problem, though (the wife did Commerce with Russian Studies). Red Dwarf aficionados surely have no trouble with Lister’s SKA.

    BRASSIERE was my clue of the day, perhaps confirming that while the setters may be innocent of anything sniggerworthy, there seems to be something of the school boy in the solvers. Maybe it’s because it’s supporting ALL ROUNDERS.

  14. The setter admits he is old enough to recall Anona Winn, but his wife tells him that she was at school with an Anona. The CRABMEAT clue was innocent; perhaps he’ll use ‘kitty’ next time.
  15. 24 minutes (again) which would have been tangibly less if I’d followed gut instinct with Anona and cartel, instead of pitifully sifting the possibilities. I remember the name Anona Wynn now it’s mentioned. No COD probably because floored by the thuddingly flat level of the Debate.
  16. 15:30 for this, held up for six of them by ANONA, CARTEL and, less accountably, ELECT. I had seen Artel before somewhere this year, so I was irritated not to pull it out of the memory, but finding the right wordplay for Anona, never having heard of the tropical plant, let alone the name, was some compensation.
  17. Put in all in about 30 minutes without full understanding of everything. Thanks for the notes on cartel and the D’oh moment on one. Isn’t ska spelt scat normally?
    1. Confusingly similar words, but different – ska is a type of music (a 1960s predecessor of reggae according to ODE), scat is improvised singing in jazz which goes back much further – wikipedia’s scat artice has an Al Jonson example from 1911.
  18. 18:46 .. Same sort of experience – 10 minutes for most of it, nearly as long again for a handful in the southeast.

    Anona’s a lovely name. It has the intriguing quality of being both uncommonly uncommon (thank you for the QI moment, Sabine) and suggestive of anonymity. I wonder if the derivation might actually be from the goddess Annona – “personification of plenty; the produce of the yearly harvest, etc.”.

    Thanks to the setter for an entertaining puzzle, and for popping in to reassure us that Times setters are still the sort of noble fellows who can type ‘pussy’ into Google and expect to find nothing but cats.

    1. Still chuckling over that third paragraph. I feel a little chastened but at the same time rather proud to have smoked a setter out.
  19. I had to come here to finish the SE. Missed Hookah, Brassiere, Newsreel, Cartel, Elect & Dethrone.

    Ahhh.

    Anona is a new name for me but got it from wordplay.

    1. I think the idea is that if ‘leers’ is revolutionary, you can see that as it doing some revolution, i.e. turning, producing SREEL as a result.
  21. I was walking in the Peak District today so this was a post-dinner rather than post-breakfast solve. My first in was Crabmeat, and it was also my favourite clue after my pub lunch in Buxton today. I found this the hardest of the week and finished after a struggle with the tenuously-clued newsreel, cartel and elect.

    It was the revenge of the silver solvers today since there was a clear split between the youngsters and people like me who immediately thought of Anona Winn.

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