Times Cryptic 25644 One out of left field.

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Knowing I’m supposed to be able to explain all this definitely slowed me down, but I came through in 24.33, which I hope is going to look like a decent time. I think there’s some very tricky stuff in here, and I have learned about something which has a threaded shaft and cylindrical head with a hexagonal indentation for turning it which I would previously have called a thingy. 5d rubbed salt into the wounds of this Spurs supporter: our last encounter saw their goalkeeper make more saves than he’ll need to do for the rest of the season. Let’s see if I can compensate by getting this lot mostly right.

Across
1   PRIZE MONEY Not too bad to start with: it looks like there’s an anagram in there somewhere, and indeed it’s EMERY+ZIP
    ON, anagram indicator messed, definition purse, as in rewards for boxing matches
6   FIFE  Excellent gives you FINE, remove its N(ote) and replace with.F, musical notation for loud. It’s extra F because you’ve
    already got one: this time it doesn’t signify FF.
8   CAP SCREW Needs some serious, er. unscrewing. Its CREW for gang following CAPS for large case – what you get  when you
    hit the shift key, more often known as upper.
9   GUN DOG  Two G(ood)s enclose.UNDO, clued as “bring down”. I like the definition here
10 IONA The satellite is IO, then move back AN and you get the Hebridean island famous for Celtic Christianity, possibly the
    book of Kells and currently a centre for spiritual tranquillity. It’s a small Scottish Island, so qualifies as an inch.
11 IN ABSENTIA  Nice definition here: it’s what you are while away, not what you do.. T(ime) with 1 within an anagram of INN
    A BASE “rambling”,
12 KILOVOLTS “Agreat capacity to shock”. See gives you V(ide). Ladies is a LOO. Men’s skirts are KILTS, Nest them altogether
    Matrioshka style and voila.
14 MIDAS  Doe a deer, a female deer. MI comes before FA, Add it to D(istrict) A(ttourney)S and you have the mythical king
    with the golden touch.
17 RATTY  Not my favourite clue. A sort of double definition. Rats could be described as ratty, as can someone who has the
    hump (colloq)
19 LE BOURGET  Got the airfield (where the magnificent Lindbergh landed) long before I worked out why. The aeroplane’s
    wings are A and E. Switch the A in LABOUR (effort) for the E, add GET for land (fish, contract) and touchdown!.
22 GRANNY KNOT  It is characteristic of this knot that, unlike the similar reef, it won’t tighten under stress but slip. I don’t
    think I’d tie one in a lace – my mamma done taught me to tie a bow when I was yay high and could still reach my feet
    without effort.
23 MAYO Apropos of nothing much, my maternal surname. In this case its the short version of mayonnaise, MAY the girl having
    0 tacked on the  end
24 VERONA  Spring gives you VERNAL (as in equinox). Knock off the L at the end to shorten it and stick in another O for
    “round”, and behold the city famous for two gentleman.
25 TIME BOMB  Beat from (musical) time, BOMB from travel very fast -” I was belting/bombing down the A23 doing a ton”.
    Weapon is as good a definition as any.
26 ADIT  Another where the answer preceded by a space of time the explanation. An adit is especially a mine entrance or
    passage. The wordplay is ID (papers) within TA (thanks, I’m obliged) and the whole reversed.
27 OEDIPUS REX  One who killed his old man (and bedded his old woman): a complex of DOPE USER, 1 and X for “by” as in
    multiplication. Or 2X4

Down
1   PICKNICKER One who takes their tea and cakes out in the open so that they can be intermingled with wasps, sand and
    hailstones. A PIC(ture) is a still, NICKER is slang for a pound sterling, never with an S on the end. That’s something else.
    Misspelt.
2   IMPANEL Verb, to elevate someone to a judge. AN (article) into IMPEL (force).
3   MYRMIDON  Now pay attention. A Myrmidon is a hired thug: I last saw some watching Troilus and Cressida at the Globe
    accompanying Achilles. M(arried) then MID-ON  today’s cricket reference and a fielding position, hence Lord’s) goes below
    YR for younger. In the US, I guess it would be JR followed by Left Field, but that messes up the entire clue.
4   NEWCASTLE UNITED  The Toon Army/Barcodes, a Premier League Football team. Not as complicated as it looks.
    Fresh=NEW, move to protect man (chess)=CASTLE and one=UNITED. Simples.
5   YOGISM The Royal Marines in the Falklands in 1982 brought yomping to public notice. Once the helicopters on the Atlantic
    Conveyor were lost to exocets, the only way to get to Port Stanley was on foot across unforgiving moorland, carrying all
    their kit. Yomp “endless” gives you YOM, GI’S are taken on board, and you have an exercise system..
6   FINANCIER  A FANCIER could be seen as a follower of the Fancy, the racing of homing pigeons. Nothing to do with the
    Simpsons, or Greek poets. Insert IN (at home).
7   FLORIDA  State for definition (so many to choose from). Anagram of OF (boxe)R and LAID.
13 OUT-AND-OUT  Two definitions of OUT surround AND (in addition). Total is the one word definition, as in total warfare.
15 SET-TOP BOX  Characteristically gives you access to broadcast digital TV channels, but may these days do all sorts of
    exciting things. Group gives you SET, number one is TOP of the charts, hit is as in the ring to give you BOX
16 BOTTOM UP  A neat &lit where the definition also provides the anagram material.
18 AIRHEAD  Silly by definition. Song=AIR, gas=HE(lium),, commercial=AD, as received through your set-top box.
20 GLAMOUR Allure for definition, GLAR(e) briefly encloses MO for instant and U(niversal)
21 DYNAMO  Liked the definition (that sort of juice). DO (party) bags MANY (loads) backwards.
. .

34 comments on “Times Cryptic 25644 One out of left field.”

  1. I found this a bit of a grind (or perhaps a YOMP) and after the gimme at 1ac was never on the setter’s wavelength.

    To IMPANEL is to appoint a jury; from a legal point of view it seems odd to describe jurymen as “judges” but I suppose in a broad sense it’s OK.

    1. You’re quite right; I made the link to judges so easily I didn’t check. Quoting Magna Carta is always hazardous, but “No free man shall be captured, and or imprisoned… but by the lawful judgement of his peers… might be construed as to make jurors judges, but it might also be a bit sloppy.
      1. Nice reference to Magna Carta! And you’re right of course.

        What came first to my mind was ” “I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury” said cunning old Fury, I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death!”

  2. Another technical DNF because as the hour approached I decided that enough was enough and looked up 3d to complete the grid. It had been a hard slog from start to finish apart from 1ac which went in fairly easily.

    Didn’t know MYRMIDON or CAP SCREW and gave up trying to find the reasoning for LE BOURGET.

    My worst run of puzzles for some time continues.

    Edited at 2013-11-28 03:15 am (UTC)

  3. Beaten by 3d. I’m glad I didn’t spend more than 10 minutes working at MYRMIDON. I was never even close.

    Otherwise about 25 minutes of hard thinking and pennies slowly dropping. Very devilish stuff with CAP SCREW, KILLOWATTS and IN ABSENTIA all providing a sense of achievement, despite the DNF. You take your little victories where you can …


    1. Sadly, I actually had in ‘kilowatts’, so there was no way I was going to get MYRMIDON.
      1. I did have KILOVOLTS in the grid (mental slip in my comment) but it didn’t help with MYRMIDON, which I don’t recall having met before. The wordplay was fine but not that helpful if you didn’t know the word – as ulaca says below, it sounds such an unlikely word for ‘thug’. I also got ‘JR’ stuck in my head for ‘younger’, which was leading me to some plausible Polish place names but no plausible solutions.
  4. Some very cunningly concealed literals, so I was pleased to finish in 68 minutes, with SET-TOP BOX last in, unsurprisingly, as I don’t have one. Wanted to put ‘kilowatts’ and struggled with IN ABSENTIA until I saw the light. I also managed to buck the trend by struggling with 1ac, where I was trying to anagramise the wrong stuff (and ‘purse’ as literal was no gimme, despite years of listening to Harry Carpenter). COD to MYRMIDON for a) the smooth surface, b) the excellent sound of the word spoken aloud (they sound so harmless) and c) (Keriothesquely) the fact I knew it.

    I tip my hat to both setter and brainy blogger!

  5. Tough one. Well blogged Z. Never heard of MYRMIDON and didn’t realise that yr could be used for younger, so had to cheat on that one.

    As an aside, I note your reference to 2×4, same as the American usage. Is it just Australia that insists on 4×2 (usually pronounced “forbeetoo”)?

  6. … again, did this hidden under papers in a workshop (aka “Pain Clinic”). Most of the pain came from the crossword. And the clinicians had no answer for that.

    Had just finished Grand Final Puzzle No.2 and that has to be the all-time dog of a puzzle. So this wasn’t too bad by comparison.

    But I agree with Z8: a lot from the defs and then trying to prise the parsings out of them. LE BOURGET is a classic case in point. OK … Paris airfield (2,7) … but … ?

    Only got MYRMIDON because it was the name of a very useful 3rd party extension in Mac OS 9 and I remember looking up the word to see what it meant.

    The overlap between this and GF2 is “lace” — easier here (22ac) than there (8dn).

    My bet: Jack will get a doddle tomorrow.

    1. Well, I’ll vote for that after the week I’ve had so far!

      Edited at 2013-11-28 08:39 am (UTC)

  7. I found this difficult – I just never at any point connected with the setter. I slogged away using wordplay as much as possible (to derive the unknown MYRMIDON for example which I checked in the dictionary). One of the few from definition was LE BOURGET and I really struggled to parse that!

    I now feel exhausted rather than elated and hope I don’t get this setter when I’m writing the blog. Great job z8!

  8. 21m. I thought this was a super puzzle. Some particularly cunning definitions: “one sent to return game”, “while away”, “Homer enthusiast”. I didn’t know CAP SCREW or IMPANEL but I did know MYRMIDON.
    My initial effort for 6ac was FAFF: FAB with B replaced with FF. Fortunately I noticed that “its note” didn’t really work because A is also a note, so I tried to find something better. I didn’t know what a FIFE was but it sounds more like an instrument than a FAFF.
    The capital H in “Homer” seems a bit naughty but I think I’ve read here in the past that whilst uncapitalising proper nouns is a no-no, the opposite is allowed. I’m not sure why this should be but if that’s the rule it’s fine by me.
  9. A very similar experience to Tuesday’s. Took at least 5 minutes before I could enter anything at all, and then a trudge through to the end.
  10. My experience seems to have been much the same as most others.

    1A went almost straight in but thereafter it was a hell of a struggle. Thought I was all correct, but then found I had CAP ARROW at 8A instead of CAP SCREW. My erroneous alternative had the deceptive merit of fitting the cross-checkers and seeming to be a possible def of “bolt”, the usual term for an arrow fired by a crossbow. It couldn’t, of course, explain the “gang” bit of the clue. I should have checked in the dictionary whether such a thing as a “cap arrow” existed.

    I can’t say that I enjoyed this hugely, but it was undoubtedly a very clever puzzle. Super blogging job by Z8, to whom thanks for fully parsing FINANCIER and LE BOURGET.

  11. 35 mins and I’m another who found this a slog. My time would probably have been between 5-10 mins faster if I hadn’t inexplicably struggled to see 1ac. As it was the RHS went in a lot faster than the LHS.

    LE BOURGET went in from the definition. MYRMIDON was my LOI after I finally saw the wordplay for CAP SCREW. I’d rank this as a technically very good if difficult puzzle that was spoiled, for me at least, by a lack of humour.

  13. I gave up after 20 mins with 3d left which I was never going to get as I had WATTS rather than VOLTS.

    A strange mix of the ‘haven’t we had some of these clues together before’ and the ‘what the heck is the setter on about’.

  14. This was my first crossword in a week and I expected to be rusty but my time of 18:23 suggests that the time off the wagon rejuvenated my fluid intelligence.

    I pieced together myrmidon from wordplay thinking it was a new word to me but as I “did” Troilus and Cressida for English Lit A level I must have come across it before.

    This had the feel of a Dean Mayer puzzle and whilst his last couple of Sunday puzzles have caused me problems I can generally get on wavelength and spot his tricks.

    Anyway, I’m with Keriothe in finding this a super puzzle. Top bloggage by Z8 too.

  16. …wants to congratulate Zabadak for a really excellent blog.

    Sorry about the lack of humour: I decided to pack it all into 16dn today 🙂

    Re the granny knot, btw, despite the fact that I might well have been backed at good odds to fail to fasten my shoe laces with one once, I was thinking really only of laces generally as things you might want to use to tie something.

    There is, of course, more than one note in FINE, if you count F and E, but I suppose only one N=NOTE. So that clue was less than ideal.

    I think IMPANEL can, at a pinch, refer to the sort of jury you get on game shows, although in any cae a juror is also a “judge” in a general sense. I agree that capitalising Homer is dodgy, but defensible on the grounds that you can take words and phrases out of context in clues and there are situations where Homer the pigeon could be capitalised, whereas you’d never see the poet or the Simpson correctly with a lower case ‘H’

  17. Thanks, Z8, for helping with the trickier parsings.
    Finished in 82 minutes, so it felt worth sticking with it.
    Was I the only one to pencil in SWEET for “One coming before FA” ?
  18. Ouch! Gave up after an hour with MYRMIDON and KILOVOLTS missing. I had KILOWATTS, which didn’t help. I spent some time trying to justify MARTINET at 3d. I have actually heard of MYRMIDONS but couldn’t remember what they were, except that they were Greeks of some sort. Ann
  19. I found some clever clues, and always like finding interesting words like Granny Knot, Oedipus Rex, and Myrmidon in the grid. But a tough DNF, not knowing nicker (and would have spelt it picnic anyway), hump in that sense, yomp (for which I WOULD have used ‘hump’), cap screw, Le bourget, or vide.

    So overall a very tough slog for Thanksgiving, and many thanks to Z8 for the illumination. Now for some gridiron football.

      1. Ah. I am in the US, visiting my parents for Thanksgiving. A tradition on Thanksgiving weekend (other than a feast and then shopping) is American Football – it is the day or weekend upon which big rivalries, both college and professional, are often scheduled.

        In US sports-speak the football field is sometimes referred to as the gridiron, due to the rectlinear hash markings, and the game is sometimes called gridiron football. That doesn’t especially distinguish it from Canadian Football, and no one in the US would ever mistakenly assume Rugby Union or Rugby League, Aussie Rules, or Association Football but the sports writers still like including the adjective sometimes.

        So, I have taken my long walk, and am now planted in front of the televsion watching a game I don’t actually care that much about.

  20. 16:24 for me – again not a disaster, but this was very much my sort of puzzle and when I looked back over the clues afterwards I was disappointed that I hadn’t been a lot faster. (As I would have been in my heyday. Deep sigh!)

    The first two acrosses fell straight away so I switched to the downs, and drew a series of blanks. It was only after spending a stupid amount of time thinking that I really ought to be able to get a handle on at least some of these that I realised that PRIZE MONEY was a much more likely answer than MONEY PRIZE!

    It took me ages to recover from that setback, but I eventually finished at a reasonable pace. I don’t recall coming across CAP SCREW before, but everything else was familiar enough.

    PS (on edit): I should add that I thought this was a very fine puzzle, and I offer my compliments to the setter.

    Edited at 2013-11-28 11:00 pm (UTC)

  21. Excellent puzzle, with some fine, misleading, surfaces and cleverly concealed anagrams. Did this in dribs and drabs on various train, bus and tube journeys throughout the day, and finished the last five at 11pm after a three-hour snooze after supper – it’s been that sort of day. No exact timings, but total elapsed time perhaps an hour.

    Nice to have three classical allusions – almost like old Times – the evergreen OEDIPUS REX, King MIDAS, and Achilles and his MYRMIDONs. Over egging the pudding, I’d convinced myself that “IONE” was some Greek semi-divinity or other and that she was a satellite somewhere in our Solar System – parsed I(nch) and ONE – so one wrong at the end of the day!

    I commend Tom Lehrer’s take on the Oedipus legend, which you will easily find on YouTube.

    LOI ADIT (couldn’t see the “Ta”). Thank You, setter, for some lovely mind-bending today. More, please!

  22. Too late for most to see this comment, of course, but I felt I must congratulate z8b8d8k on a superb blog on a puzzle which I found much too tough! (I didn’t help my cause by writing in MONEY PRIZE rather than PRIZE MONEY.)
  23. -just to finish, unaided, after staring at a blank grid for 20 minutes. Finally got two before falling asleep.
    It didn’t look quite so daunting in the morning, and I even got MYRMIDON, having heard the word, without a clue what it meant.
    As an engineer, CAPSCREW and KILOVOLTS were right up my street – sorry DJ.

    Edited at 2013-11-29 09:36 am (UTC)

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