Times Crossword 25,487 – abstinent edition

Author   JerryWPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: 22 minutes, so about average difficulty. It would have been a bit quicker but I couldn’t persuade firefox to print off the darn crossword, it kept freezing. I confess I didn’t greatly enjoy this crossword. Perhaps it was me, but I thought it lacked sparkle. One of us did, anyhow. COD to the elegant 24ac.

cd = cryptic definition, dd = double definition, rev = reversed, anagrams are *(–), homophones indicated in “”

ODO means the Oxford Dictionaries Online

Across
1 media – MEDI(N)A. And not Mecca..
4 relative – story = TALE rev., in split = RIVE
8 ships carpenter – a cd
10 carnivora – men = OR in CARNIVA(L)
11 depth – *(H DEPT)
12 anklet – cause resentment = (R)ANKLE + T
14 neap tide – *(TEEN PAID). Possibly the most obviously signalled anagram ever, but still not so easy to resolve. Tides move on a lunar cycle (and so spring tides have nothing at all to do with the season; it just means they go higher.) Neap tides occur at 1/4 and 3/4 moon, and are the lowest.
17 sanction – (WITNES)S + note = N in legal case = ACTION
18 statue – rubbish = TAT in girl = SUE. I’m not sure why a statue must necessarily be large, but certainly that is what a “statuesque” figure implies..
20 inset – fashionable group = IN SET.
22 impromptu – I’M PROMPT + U
24 pyramid selling – *(DARINGLY SIMPLE). A very neat anagram for a very nasty scam
25 analysis – unknown = Y + girl = LANA, both rev., + SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service
26 rider – invader = R(A)IDER
Down
1 musicianship – *(SIMIAN + HIS CUP). My first in and a big help to get going
2 drier – DRI(V)ER, a golfing club used to hit the ball long distances, unless I’m doing it
3 abstinent – can= TIN in not here = ABSENT
4 reason – RE + A + SON
5 lop-eared – ARE in bounded = LOPED
6 toned – weight = TON + chap = ED
7 viewpoint – opinion = VIEW on head = POINT
9 cheeseburger -*(SEE GRUB) in comfort = CHEER. A cheeseburger is food, of a sort
13 King’s Lynn – family = KIN + G + knowing = SLY + N(EW) + N(AME). I’ve been there, but sadly my only residual memory is of wading about half a mile out to sea from the beach and finding the water was still too shallow to swim in
15 potboiler – a lot at stake = POT + B(RITISH) OILER. A lot I suppose in the sense of an item, since a pot could be any amount, large or small
16 politics – *(SOLICIT + P)
19 opuses – O + P + USES. Strange clue. If the def. is “works,” what purpose is the “ways of providing” serving?
21 trail – R(IGHT) in follow = TAIL
23 pried – “PRIDE,” surely a cast-iron homophone

Author: JerryW

I love The Times crosswords..

35 comments on “Times Crossword 25,487 – abstinent edition”

  1. Only held up by mis-spelling Kings LynE — scribbled in on the basis of the K and the Y. Then stuck for an answer to 25ac.

    On the whole a rather dreary affair and, of special note, the barely cryptic def at 8ac.

    Re 15dn, I took “a lot at stake” to mean an amount as such (e.g., “take the lot” would apply to a minimum of three things, I guess) so not necessarily a large amount?

  2. All but three in 30 minutes but took a while to finish off 25ac and 19dn, and to realise I had written PRIDE at 23dn which scuppered my chances at 26ac until corrected. I’m always very nervous of grids with no 3 or 4 letter words.
  3. Indeed. The question (as I take it from the blog) is as to whether “a lot at stake” in the clue has to do with large or small amounts or neither. Maybe I misread. Wouldn’t be the first time!
    1. If you win a ‘pot’ of money you win a lot of the stuff, and money staked at poker is the pot. Seems pretty iron-clad to me for a crossword clue!
  4. Isn’t it POT in the sense of the sum of the bets in a game of poker, say?
  5. Just under for the hour for all bar 16dn, where I struggled mightily, never seeing the anagram, and ended up shoving in ‘policies’ as the best of a bad bunch. Apart from the rather weak SHIP’S CARPENTER, I enjoyed this puzzle, with ticks against MEDIA, DEPTH and, now, POLITICS.

    Our lop-eared lionhead rabbit ceased to be last year.

  6. I thought this was pretty straightforward but like Jerry I’m puzzled by OPUSES which was my last in.

    I assume “works” is the def, being “ways of providing employment” = USES, after O(ld) P(iano), but then what does “end of” signify? Does it mean that OP forms an end (viz the start) of the answer?

    Answers on a postcard please…

    1. Dear Dereklam,

      I read it as USES comes “after [the] end” of OP.
      Having a lovely time.
      Wish you were here.

      McT

      1. Thanks mctext. I guess I’ll just have to imagine the lovely picture of Southend beach on the other side!
        1. I was thinking more of Jerry’s description of King’s Lynn (whose only outstanding feature seems to be its apostrophe).
    2. I agree that it’s USES after OP, but still can’t see the relevance of “end of”.
  7. Undone by the weirdness of the clue at 19 down, where I invented that part of a piano’s works the DPOSTS, though I thought the numeration should have been kinder. So.. “Ways of providing employment” POSTS “after end of old” D = “piano pieces”. If only they existed, the clue would make much more sense.
    Annoyed by the paucity of cryptic content for the chippie, which I tried to complicate into a proper clue.
    Today’s favourite the tea-drinking chimp’s ability at 1d.
  8. Spasms with a Swiss carpenter made my effort a comic opera. I kind of knew the plural opuses but a classical education is still in denial. Ah well.
  9. 13:35, solved steadily without any great pauses for thought. Not exceptional, but solid and workmanlike, which is all I ask of a regular daily cryptic. To put it in chess terms, no !, but no ? either, which will do me.
  10. I agree with previous comments – a rather bland and easy affair. At 8A we have another non-cryptic clue – seems to be a bit of a trait. I thought both 24A and 16D very good clues.

    Kings Lynn has its own little niche in history. It was the first UK town to install CCTV in the town centre. Such is the way of things in the nether regions of Norfolk that all they caught were people urinating in the street on their way home from the pub.

    1. For King’s Lynn, that would have been the most exciting thing in quite some while…
  11. 24 mins but with NEEP TIDE because I didn’t look at the anagram fodder properly. That must be the tide on which they pipe the haggis on Burns Night.

    I seemed to take forever over my last two, ANALYSIS and OPUSES. I really should have got the former from the definition without having to wait until I finally remembered SIS as a spy organisation, and I thought the wordplay for the latter was incredibly clunky. As a few of you have commented, 8ac was barely cryptic.

  12. 16:14 on the club timer, with a long pause at the end before realising that REMARK for 4dn must be wrong. That allowed me to get the barely cryptic 8ac, but it still took me a while to put OR in the right place in 10ac.
    There is a company called Herbalife listed on the NYSE with a market capitalisation of $5bn. Some people say the whole thing is an illegal pyramid scheme. Some people say it isn’t.
    1. Pretty good clue that. I reckon Herbalife is suspect. Then there was our own Bernie “Made-off” of the Upper East Side. We would awaken to the sound of the news helicopters hovering over his apt. building while the trial was going on. Jerry wasn’t the only one having a Firefox glitch this morning so my 22.4 was on the slow side for an easyish puzzle.
      1. Either way it’s just amazing to me that the basic legality of such a large organisation, 30 years old and listed on the NYSE, can be in question. Of course this is terribly naive of me!
      2. Ah no, Olivia, Madoff was working a Ponzi Scheme. this is in fact even worse since it is a pure criminal fraud, just a type of theft really. Pyramid selling is different, but it is also fraudulent because it can only work by promising new recruits impossible benefits. There have been many classic pyramid selling schemes, Amway, a sinister company which somehow continues to prosper
        1. Thanks Jerry. I admit I thought the 2 schemes were much the same. We know (and dislike) someone who got taken to the cleaners by Madoff. In his divorce settlement with his ex-wife (who used to work with my husband) he had claimed and taken the couple’s Madoff account and was then stupid enough to try to get the NY courts to re-open the settlement so as to get more dough out of her to make up for it. He got roundly and embarrassingly rebuffed. It was all over the papers here last year.
  13. About 11 minutes to solve all except the “obvious, barely cryptic” 9ac. I had a total brainstorm and couldn’t see anything but ‘Swiss carpenter’, eventually convincing myself that it must be a specialist branch of carpentry (like French polishing) and, indeed, a type of cheese (‘on board’).

    Proof that no clue is fool-proof, but sometimes it takes a special kind of fool …

  14. A reasonably straightforward puzzle that didn’t give me any real problems, though I should have been quicker to get 25 (fixated on CIA for ‘spies’). I also briefly toyed with SWISS CARPENTER for 8. I thought the clue was the weakest in the puzzle. On the other hand, the clues for 16 and 24 were excellent.
  15. 6 minutes – I didn’t think of a Swiss carpenter but I did take longer than I ought to have done to spot the anagram in 16d.
  16. 13:20 and you can still see the W and S of Swiss under the H and P of ships. I also dabbled in Zabadak territory with dposts until I pronounced opuses correctly in my head and saw that it was a word I knew rather than the unfamiliar alternative that sort of rhymes with abuses.

    COD to the little Munich beer festival cameo at 10.

    I didn’t care much for 7 where the “opinion” used to give us “view” is too close to the eventual answer’s meaning for me.

    The SIS must be living up to their name as I’ve never heard of them.

  17. Didn’t time it but a pretty straightforward solve didn’t think it was as bad as the comments so far and I rather liked 19 down
  18. For what it’s worth, there are parts of Scotland where “tried” doesn’t rhyme with “tide”, and “spied’er” isn’t the same as “spider” (the vowel in the second case a bit shorter and starting higher). So maybe ‘cast-iron’ is a bit too confident.
  19. Just over the 30m mark but took too long to twig the wretched chippie! My COD to 16d for its precise brevity.
  20. I didn’t have much difficulty with this except my LOI, CARNIVORA, which stubbornly refused to come to mind. About 20 minutes or so. A workmanlike exercise, I thought. Regards.
  21. Jerry: Thank you for your well-considered comments on the General Club Forum today, in response to some rather flippant earlier remarks from me. I decided to respond here rather than use up oxygen on the Forum. I may have less tolerance than you for the Murdoch POV because I see it at work every day in NY on the WSJ editorial page (not as yet in the reportage) and all over the place in the NY Post. I do glance at the UK papers during the week but rarely get around to reading them in depth.

    On a broad level it’s so obvious that everything in the news world is up for grabs and I agree that Murdoch is right to seek for the best position for his enterprises. It’s to his credit that he really is at heart a newspaperman. But that’s where my approval stops.

    What got up my nose (and the noses of many others) was the unnecessarily stupid hardball stuff that came down from the executive suite and hit the Club like fall-out. You are right that the crosswords, among the rest of the items produced daily, have a cost and a value. Most of us realize that the L25 per annum price was literally a steal. Was there no one at NI that could figure out a way to raise it in a more seemly fashion?

    You are also right that once the other papers figure out a way to charge for their crosswords, they will. The NY Times did it and lost me. Their daily puzzles are not that good and I buy the paper anyway. The UK Times puzzles on the other hand are worth every penny.

    Edited at 2013-05-29 09:59 pm (UTC)

    1. Hi Olivia
      I agree with everything you say, and especially para 3. The management of Times crosswords, including the running of the Crossword club, crossword editing (the championship qualification fiasco, for example), website access policy and charging, and the development and maintenance of the website itself.. all these have been handled in desperately incompetent fashion lately. The only small voice of sanity seems to be Peter B, thank heavens for him. And on their day the crosswords themselves are still the absolute best in the world, which is why we put up with all this I think..

      No, the comments on the forum were just prompted by the thought that the general rubbishing (not meaning by you) of NI and Murdoch by many of those posting is probably getting a bit over the top. Despite his various unappealing traits, he has done more for UK media freedom than Desmond, Lebedev, Rothermere(s) etc.. I wouldn’t want to share a prison cell with any one of them, mind.. and I get most of my news from the BBC these days. I read The Times for almost forty years, when it was a newspaper of record, but gave up when it turned into a clone of the Sun.

      I do apologise for this sudden fit of seriousness. Normal jocularity will be resumed as soon as possible 🙂

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