Times Crossword 25,918 – Solid as a

Author   JerryWPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: 26 minutes for this, mainly because having made steady if unspectacular progress, I got quite stuck at the end, on 1ac, 7dn and 4dn. All perfectly good clues, just me being slow I guess. I enjoyed it though, nice crossword I thought, with some very neat clues as well as one or two that may provide discussion fodder

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

ODO means the Oxford Dictionaries Online

Across

1 pawn – dd – (chess) man, and “leave with uncle,” uncle being a slang term for a pawnbroker
3 get up steam – GET UP (dress style) + S(mall) + TEAM (outfit)
10 triplet – TRIP (journey) + LET (allowed), plus a neat definition
11 arousal – *(ALAS OUR)
12 appearance money – APPEARANCE (air, eg an air of innocence) + M(iles) + ONE + (fl)Y, and another neat definition
13 Larkin – ARK (sanctuary) in NIL rev.
14 goings-on – GOING (leaving) + SON (possible male heir)
17 Fine Gael – E(cstasy) in FINE GAL. Fine Gael is the Irish political party that isn’t Fianna Fáil
18 Attlee – (se)A + TT (dry, ie teetotal) + LEE (shelter). Attlee was a Labour party leader, from a time when they did not appear to come from the planet Mars. He was recently voted the greatest Prime Minister of the 20th century by a panel of academics. Hard to believe the general public would do the same, but still…
21 Rock of Gibraltar – *(GO BACK FOR R(ight) TRAIL).
23 alameda – hidden, rev. in promenADE MALAgans. A word known to me exclusively through crosswords. According to the OED: “In Spain, Latin America, and other areas of Spanish influence: a public walkway or promenade, shaded with trees.”
24 amusing – US (American) in A MING. I would use the word Ming only as an adjective, but apparently it does duty as a noun also
25 Maris Piper – I (one) in MARS (ruins) + PIP (stone) and ER (monarch, either Eddie or Liz.). Maris Piper is the most widely grown potato in Britain, not (needless to say) because of its flavour, but because it is a heavy cropper, stores well and is resistant to most common diseases
26 feud – sounds like “FEW’D”

Down

1 pitfall – FT (paper) + I rev., in PALL (smoke). Pall being another word I would use only as an adjective, (insert whichever part of speech pall as used in “a pall of smoke” is) but which apparently can mean actual smoke as well
2 whipper-in – HIPPER (more with it) in WIN (net)
4 extras – EX (lover of old) + ART rev., + S(ingular). Took too long over this thinking about Romeo, Leander and similar much older lovers than required
5 up-anchor – UP (in dock, ie in court) + A N(avy) + CHOR(e), a short task
6 storm in a teacup – *(IMPORTANT CAUSE), a very neat anagram and a fine clue
7 Essen – I think this is everyone’s favourite mythological monster NESSIE, rev. and with the I overlooked, ie removed. I’m not sure though how towers means “other way up”
8 Malayan – A(nswer) + LAY (was lying) in MAN (gent). Another clue that took time because I wasn’t sure about the def. here. “Eastern” seems insufficient, and “Eastern gent” is not only a DBE but makes the gent do double duty
9 floating voters – a cd. Though the answer to the question would seem to be “No.”
15 solitaire – *(OIL + A(ffair) + TRIES). Written in long before working out the anagrist
16 Benghazi – BEN (mountain) + HAZ(e) in G(rand) Island). Benghazi is an ancient city, a Mediterranean port, and second largest city of Libya.
17 firearm – EAR (attention) in FIRM (sure). The sort of clue I like, simple but elegant, with a perfect surface
19 enraged – RAGE (vogue) “in the END,” ie finally
20 ablaze – AB (able seaman, a salt) + LAZE (veg). Veg being yet another word I would only use as a noun, not as a verb, but as usual the setter is well ahead of me. From the OED: “To disengage mentally; to do nothing as a way of relaxing, to pass the time in (mindless) inactivity, esp. by watching television.”
22 chair – C (carbon) + HAIR (locks). To chair something is more to preside or adjudicate but can also mean to direct or lead

Author: JerryW

I love The Times crosswords..

38 comments on “Times Crossword 25,918 – Solid as a”

  1. Had to do this online as the printer ran out of toner. Darn nuisance. As a confirmed paper solver, this e-version stuff is bizarre. Managed to swap the I and T in PITFALL, leaving me with IRIPLET at 10ac. The actual time would have been better if I’d noticed the pause button was available while I was making coffee.

    But I expect I’d have enjoyed this sitting at leisure with a short black and a rollie. As Jerry says, a good solid puzzle. But I wriggled a bit in the SW where BENGHAZI just wouldn’t come to mind. And I had no chance with MARIS PIPER. The WA Potato Marketing Corp. is so strict on which varieties can be planted commercially that we only hear of two or three kinds … and MARIS PIPER isn’t one of them.

    Must dash now and get new toner. And lest I be accused of whipping up a 6dn.

    Edited at 2014-10-15 01:34 am (UTC)

    1. The pause button is not what it seems: recorded time marches on while the coffee brews. Otherwise you could hit the pause button while mulling over individual clues and notionally mix it with the neutrinos.
      2. OTOH, if you use the pause button, the time recorded in the top left-hand corner of your crossword screen will take cognizance of the elapsed time and give you what you want.

        When I use the pause button, I will ‘Submit without leaderboard’, so that when I come here and report a time, people will not say ‘Hmmph! He’s lopping 6 minutes off his time again’.

  2. I think the first definition at 1ac has to be “leave with uncle of old” i.e. it’s an old term, with “man” as the other. My original answer here was POPS and I assumed there was an S missing from the end of “leave”, POPS being another term for “pawns” or “leaves with uncle”, then “of old man” could have been POP’S.

    Quite hard work this, but very enjoyable. I had MARIS PIPER at the forefront of my mind following an incident in “The Apprentice” earlier in the evening.

    SOED offers “Tower (vb) raise or uplift”

    Edited at 2014-10-15 01:11 am (UTC)

  3. 28.16 in a wee small hours solve, with the top left, and SOLITAIRE (!) and ATTLEE accounting for much of the time. I technically gave up on ATTLEE and submitted the checkers to e-chambers, and only when I got no apposite result did I start taking the clue seriously. I had been working on S(ain)T for Clement as part of the wordplay, together with (se)A and some version of “dry” to give “sheltered”.
    My “old uncle” was initially EME, which did nothing for the clue. You can know too much stuff.
    Poor old Larkin: a fine poet but with only one line everyone can quote.
  4. Very proud of my effort at getting all but 25a, even if I was at it for 4 hours plus. A very enjoyable puzzle.

    Am I to assume that only one German city exists in the mind of the setter? Unless I’m wrong we’ve had it 3 times in the last month!

    Edited at 2014-10-15 04:59 am (UTC)

  5. Much harder today, had a few stabs at it over several hours. The Kimberley corner was the hardest (and also the best) but ultimately I failed with MARIS PITER.

    Excellent puzzle, thanks setter. And thanks Jerry for parsing ESSEN. Not that it mattered. This is crosswordland, where as Cozzielex says, Germany only has one city, most girls are called Di and flowers can be bankers.

  6. 50 minutes for this – very much, like Jerry, a stop-start experience, like a hybrid engine. I thought APPEARANCE MONEY was a terrific clue, getting which finally opened up the WHIPPER-IN and dear old LARKIN. Talking of whom, I wonder if he used the F word as a joke. If so, the joke, as Zed says, turned out to be on him in the end.

    Thanks to Jerry for the parsing of ESSEN and to Jack for the parsing of PAWN (couldn’t see what ‘old’ was doing) and also the elucidation on ‘tower’. Inspite of the latter, I’m still unconvinced that ‘uplift’ can be stretched to mean ‘lift up’ – this seems more of a verbal trick than a semantic equivalence.

  7. …flower in the summer (northern hemisphere), so keep a look out next year for BERLIN (7 July 2014), DRESDEN (17 July) and MUNICH (25 July).
  8. 27:16 … well, that let the steam out of my boiler.

    I had to recaffeinate half-way through to help lift the clouds over the Seattle region. WHIPPER-IN didn’t really seem right even after ruling out everything else I could come up with, but I went with the Sherlock Holmes principle and hit the submit button anyway. FINE GAEL took an age to click — Irish political parties, north or south, definitely not a strong point. And APPEARANCE MONEY escapes me every time it comes up in a crossword. Maybe just writing that sentence will help.

    I forgot to parse ENRAGED while solving but love it now I see how it works. COD

  9. . . . with many going in unparsed so that you jerry. PALL as an adjective though? Perhaps verb?
  11. About 35 minutes, in two stabs with a pause to take / make phone calls. The second period was spent on the NW corner, where eventually I put in WHIPPER-IN without any confidence, from wordplay alone, and abandoned POPS for PAWN; I do play chess but I can’t remember ‘man’ can be a chess piece every time it appears. Couldn’t parse PITFALL either; I knew of a PALL OF SMOKE but not that PALL could = SMOKE.
    The rest went in smoothly with FINE GAEL, ATTLEE and the ROCK my FOsI.

    Edited at 2014-10-15 08:51 am (UTC)

  13. 22 mins. I got through the bottom half of the puzzle quite quickly but the top caused me plenty of problems. It was only after I finally saw PAWN that I was able to get PITFALL. That led me to APPEARANCE MONEY and EXTRAS was my LOI. I’m still not convinced by the use of “towers” in 7dn.
  14. Just under three-quarters of an hour for this enjoyable puzzle. Held up only by a careless misplacing of the E in FINE GAEL and a reluctance to write in SOLITAIRE until I had parsed it satisfactorily.

    MARIS PIPERs were at one time the potato of choice for British fish & chip shops, they may well still be; they also make excellent roast potatoes, which always disappear rapidly at our family Christmas Dinners.

    Towers? I’m sure I’ve seen it used this way before in a Times puzzle, though it was a while ago. It seems all right to me in the sense of “to rise up”.

    ATTLEE struck me as a very decent man who had fought at Gallipoli and went on to serve his country in politics. What I find astonishing today is the thought of his wife, Violet, driving him around the country in their Morris Traveller from village hall to village hall during the 1955 General Election campaign. A different world indeed.

    Still in the 1950s, I shall be humming the Fred Astaire-Jack Buchanan-Nanette Fabray number TRIPLETs to myself for the rest of the day.

    1. Was it Attlee who Churchill described as “a modest little man with much to be modest about”? He was the first Prime Minister I ever remember. I learned to read in 1945, a year before he came to office, and was reading newspapers 2 years later.
      1. That barb is often attributed to Churchill, though I read that he had the greatest respect for Attlee. Though he resembled a Central Casting bank clerk, Attlee was a formidable politician, which explains why he managed to remain leader of the Labour Party for so long.
  15. 26 min : although I thought of WHIPPER-IN quite early, didn’t see how to parse it, so LOI were PAWN/PITFALL.
    As Royal Mail included Attlee among the four greatest 20th Century PMs on the first class stamps issued yesterday he was a write-in.
    1. Hmm, there are eight altogether, four 20th and four 19th century. They are said to be “among the most influential holders of the post,” the word “greatest” being carefully omitted. Still I was rather startled to find Harold Wilson one of them.
  16. ALAMEDA (there’s a city in Calif by that name) and SOLITAIRE went straight in and for a while I thought this was going to be a blessedly wavelengthy one (haven’t had one for a while) but came to a screeching halt with the potato. For some reason they’re not grown in the US. It was only after staring at King Edward for a while that I remembered people on an expat website asking for recommendations of substitutes for the MP for the Christmas roast. WHIPPER-IN I associate with huntin’ and parliament – though it’s amusing to think of MPs as stray dogs. 24.49
    2. I first came across WHIPPERS-IN in my distant student days at Cambridge. The King Street Run involved drinking 8 pints in 8 pubs in 2 hours ‘keeping it all in’. Challengers were each accompanied by an existing member of the Run, known as a whipper-in., to ensure compliance with the rules.
      1. Sadly I dont think there are 8 pubs on King Street any longer. The Cambridge Arms is a wine bar. I did have a nostalgic pint or two in The Champion though recently.
        1. There weren’t 40 years ago either. The Run ended up at The Zebra on Maid’s Causeway.
          Although the Secretary of the Run for a term, I never had a go at the Brewers Dozen, 13 pints in 10 pubs of choice,in 3 hours, ending up in the ultra-twee Blue Boar in Trinity Street, now also closed

          Edited at 2014-10-15 08:47 pm (UTC)

      2. Funny thing.. I helped to run the St Radegund for two years in the early ’70s and I don’t remember anything about a King St run.. mind you I can’t even remember now if it was even called the St Radegund in those distant days. I think it was. Pretty sure there weren’t 7 other pubs though!
        1. The Radegund (I don’t remember the St) was never part of the Run in those days. Part of my job as Sec was to clear the way with the pubs before the Run and sort out afterwards any breakages, damages etc. The Radegund never wanted to be involved, although I did have a (non-alcoholic) drink there with my Best Man before getting married over the road.
          You can see The King Street Run on google.
          PS Wasn’t it called something like The Chien Deux in 1971?

          Edited at 2014-10-15 10:56 pm (UTC)

  17. DNF today. Couldn’t break in to the NW corner and had Pawn, Pitfall, Whipper In and Larkin missing. Guessed 1ac might be Pawn but couldn’t justify it. Thanks Jerry for explaining that one, the others I missed and Enraged.
  18. 17:25 which looks pretty good judged against the times posted by Andy, Z and Sotira.

    I had 9 QMs next to clues where I just bunged answers in based on def, checkers and a vague sense that the wordplay was there or thereabouts and then checked the parsing post-solve.

    There were some very neat definitions on display here I thought.

    My initial attempts at the Clement clue revolved around Freud of that ilk.

  19. Sort of puzzle that lends itself to over-thinking, and the inevitable pall of smoke descends upon the solver.keep it simple and tower above these pitfalls.
  20. 23m. I enjoyed this one a lot: it required concentrated effort but everything was perfectly clear… eventually.
    One of the reasons the MARIS PIPER is so popular in Britain is that it is still the potato of choice for chips, as john_from_lancs suggests. I buy them for roasties if I can’t get King Edwards.
    Nice to see Larkin: a very fine poet indeed.
  21. Worked on it for an hour before throwing in the towel and resorting to aids for the last 3: WHIPPER IN, LARKIN and the MARIS PIPER. Having resorted to aids (Onelook) I absolve myself altogether because there’s no way I would have gotten them. I certainly never heard of the WHIPPER or the spud, and I may possibly should know of LARKIN, but alas, I don’t. So I am thoroughly stumped today. I’ll try again tomorrow, meanwhile, best to all.
  22. A very enjoyable 18 minutes. Several clues where you just knew that if you stared hard enough, the penny would drop, in a suitably rewarding fashion.

    P.S. Small typo for your attention if you think it matters, Jerry, the opposition to FG are Fianna Fáil rather than Fael.

    1. so they are.. I’ll correct it. No wonder they’re in opposition, with a word like fail in their title
  23. 14:28 for me – perhaps not too disastrous considering how tired I was feeling after a busy day.

    Despite my tiredness I found this puzzle a delight from start to finish. My compliments to the setter.

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