Times Cryptic 26948

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

33 minutes for this one with no major problems along the way. Having three cryptic definitions in the Down clues is a little unusual.

As usual definitions are underlined in bold italics, {deletions are in curly brackets} and [anagrinds, containment, reversal and other indicators in square ones]

Across
1 Old Roman watering-hole provides a mineral (8)
CINNABAR – CINNA (old Roman), BAR (watering-hole). Cinna was a Roman consul and father-in-law of Julius Caesar. I’m not sure if  ‘watering-hole’ for ‘bar’ has travelled far beyond these shores.
5 One dedicated old boy no longer with us (6)
OBLATE – OB (old boy), LATE (no longer with us). A person dedicated to monastic or religious life or work.
9 One may have champagne, say, to secure maiden coming round (9)
WINEGLASS – WIN (secure)+ LASS (maiden) containing [coming round] EG (say). I’m struggling with the syntax here as I can’t see how a wineglass can ‘have champagne’ although it could certainly ‘have champagne in it‘.
11 Matter is poisonous, quietly knocking out ten (5)
TOPIC – TO{x}IC (poisonous) becomes TOPIC with P (quietly) replacing [knocking out] x (ten)
12 With Republican, one celebrates revolts (7)
RISINGS – R (Republican), I (one), SINGS (celebrates)
13 Communist leader as one who joined spurious league? (7)
REDHEAD – RED (communist), HEAD (leader). I had no idea what this was about but it turns out to be a reference to a Sherlock Holmes story The Red-Headed League and it’s ‘spurious’ because the league was non-existent, I gather. It all seems rather obscure to me but I suppose them that knows it knows it and the answer was easy enough to spot.
14 The Leninist managed to capture city and country (13)
LIECHTENSTEIN – Anagram [managed] of THE LENINIST contains [to capture] EC (city – of London, postal district)
16 The enemy being forgotten about for ages? (4,3,2,4)
TIME OUT OF MIND – TIME  (the enemy), OUT OF MIND (forgotten). ‘Time’ as ‘the old enemy’ comes up quite regularly here.
20 Cats — those in need of medical treatment, it seems (7)
MOUSERS – Differently spaced this can be written as MO USERS (those in need of medical treatment) where MO stands for ‘Medical Officer’
21 Develop mentally, say, after good education initially (7)
GESTATE – G{ood} + E{ducation} [initially], STATE (say). Apart from its literal meaning, GESTATE can figuratively mean ‘to undergo elaboration and refinement before being made public’, so in that sense a thought or plan might be developing ‘mentally’.
23 People taking position about sex (5)
LAITY – LAY (position) containing [about] IT (sex). I assume ‘people’ is used here to define those who are not in the clergy or of a given profession, but I have to say I find it rather tenuous. Possibly the remainder of the clue is intended to be part of the definition, but I’d still find it a bit weak.
24 School punishment — what could make Eton end it? (9)
DETENTION – Anagram of [could make] ETON END IT. Staying behind after school.
25 Swift, see, crossing river to the west (6)
SPEEDY – SPY (see) containing [crossing] DEE (river) reversed [to the west]
26 No amateur baddy to hold off for a while (8)
PROROGUE – PRO (no amateur), ROGUE (baddy)
Down
1 No victory, with commander in retreat as timid type (6)
COWARD – DRAW (no victory) + OC (commander) reversed [in retreat]
2 Partners embracing single hour of prayer (5)
NONES – N+S (partners – bridge), containing [embracing] ONE (single). I can never remember all the hours of prayer but this one comes up often enough to be very familiar.
3 Forest not all green: no grass coming up (7)
ARGONNE – Hidden (not all) and reversed [coming up] in {gre}EN NO GRA{ss}. Unknown to me, but this is a forested region of France, apparantly.
4 Given a number in the theatre? (13)
ANAESTHETISED – Cryptic definition
6 Happens to take risk on fateful day (7)
BETIDES – BET (take risk), IDES (fateful day – Julius Caesar again). ‘Betide’ was an answer in a puzzle blogged last weekend and there was some controversy over its definition, but today’s is on safer ground.
7 Arrest happened originally outside front of restaurant (9)
APPREHEND – Anagram [originally] of HAPPENED containing [outside] R{estaurant} [front]
8 Disguising the dénouement to keep company enthralled (8)
ENCODING – ENDING (dénouement) containing [to keep…enthralled] CO (company)
10 There’s a way in which one becomes aggressive (6,7)
STREET FIGHTER – Cryptic definition
14 Car and cow collide finally (9)
LIMOUSINE – LIMOUSIN (cow), {collid}E (finally). Another region of France, this time with reference to the breed of cattle that’s named after it.
15 Good sort, this person’s high-class, with endless desire for encouragement (8)
STIMULUS – ST (good sort – saint), I’M (this person’s), U ( high-class), LUS{t} (desire) [endless]
17 Old desire restricting you, having limited vision (3-4)
ONE-EYED – O (old), NEED (desire) containing [restricting] YE (you)
18 More unstable, doing nothing almost, after hospital admission (7)
INSANER – INER{t} (doing nothing) [almost] containing [after…admission] SAN (hospital)
19 Session with some late arrivals? (6)
SEANCE – Cryptic definition
22 Getting rid of a whole lot of players no good (5)
AXING – A, XI (whole lot of players – sports team), NG (no good)

48 comments on “Times Cryptic 26948”

  1. The Red-Headed League was a scam designed to lure a red-headed shopkeeper out of his shop so that the criminals could burrow into the next-door bank from it. One of the few Holmes stories I recall. DNK the cow, but figured there must be such, given the clue. Did the same as Vinyl with GESTATE. I had the same feeling as Jack about LAITY (“He’s not a person, he’s a parson”?). Liked TOPIC.
  2. Best not to download an album from iTunes and then play it while trying to solve. 72m 15s for a fairly straightforward puzzle but also made longer by being unable to see the forest for the trees in 3d. Thanks,Jack for The Red-Headed League which I didn’t know.
  3. TIME OUT OF MIND (1997).

    Had this polished off before my homeward subway ride ended. Thought there was a problem with COWARD, because I figured “commander” must be CO, “Commanding Officer,” whereas it’s “Officer Commanding” over there. Is this inversion a trace de l’Invasion normande ?

    1. Just for the record, in a battalion/regiment, the Lt Col is the CO but the majors who run the companies/squadrons within that battalion/regiment are OCs. (I did 16 years!)
  4. 5 minutes dead for this one, to go with my 104 seconds for the QC (oh so nearly a personal best). Tuesdays are the new Mondays! Particularly enjoyed the the Doyle clue and Cinna (“tear him apart for his bad verses!”) as befits my past as a TLS blogger.
    1. I hope you used your 5 minutes dead to communicate á la 19d to some of us lesser mortals. I did feel the odd flash of inspiration, so maybe, just maybe…
  5. 10:45, with a bit of a pause over CINNABAR at the end. The mineral was very vaguely familiar but I had to come up with the Roman consul first and he didn’t spring to mind.
    I had no idea about the Sherlock Holmes thing. I would be annoyed if Conan Doyle were considered required knowledge for these things but in this case there was no need to have suffered through his nonsense to get to the answer [runs away].

    Edited at 2018-01-30 08:06 am (UTC)

    1. A couple of years ago, for reasons I no longer remember, I bought “The Annotated Sherlock Holmes”. The stories were OK–certainly not nonsense–but what impressed me was the annotation. Holmesians make trekkies, or the people who gather at Tolkien’s tomb and sing hymns in Elvish, look rational. They’ve got journals devoted to him, for God’s sake–Holmes, not CD, which would be bad enough. Scary.
      1. Pasted in from Wiki.I knew of this because I worked there at one time:

        When street numbers (in Baker Street) were reallocated in the 1930s, the block of odd numbers from 215 to 229 was assigned to an Art Deco building known as Abbey House, constructed in 1932 for the Abbey Road Building Society, which the society and its successor (which subsequently became Abbey National plc) occupied until 2002.

        Almost immediately, the building society started receiving correspondence from Sherlock Holmes fans all over the world, in such volumes that it appointed a permanent “secretary to Sherlock Holmes” to deal with it.

        Edited at 2018-01-30 08:49 am (UTC)

  6. 28 minutes with only ARGONNE unknown but fairly clued. ARDEN + NE(W) seemed an early possibility. Knew TIME OUT OF MIND from listening to Steely Dan while working in Riyadh in the very early eighties.
  7. Under (just) 16′, which makes this an easy one in my book, even if it didn’t really feel that way.
    Cryptic definitions are slippery things, aren’t they? I liked (smiled at) SEANCE, shrugged at ANAESTHETISED (ho hum) and thought what the heck on STREET FIGHTER, trying to make something more of it than a rather iffy reference. I’d be delighted if there was more to it.
    I’m of the opinion that “old Roman” marks a new refinement of the “insert random name” phenomenon. At least we had the “old” to narrow the field down to a few million, but are we really expected to say “ah, that must be Cinna” with nothing else to go on?
    Just as well ARGONNE was a reverse hidden, though I’m pretty sure I’ve driven through it. Not a French female isotope of the noble gas, then.
    Favourite of the day from a very mixed bag: MO USERS

    Edited at 2018-01-30 09:04 am (UTC)

  8. … not so tough as I first thought it was going to be. I too had trouble spelling the country. Was unfamiliar with Holmes’ REDHEAD, and the forest, but both were kindly clued.

    Liked the MO Users best.

  9. ‘I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from.’ Did this in 17 minutes today, and thorougly enjoyed it, pausing only to switch on the Dylan album on my iPod. Yep, I’m so old-fashioned I still use the iPod Classic I don’t know what I’ll do when it breaks. Stand in the doorway crying probably. I gather that ARGONNE Forest was a Great War battle, and not a team in Ligue 1. COD to TIME OUT OF MIND of course, with the ONE-EYED midget tellling me that something is happening but that I don’t know what it is. Thank you Jack and setter.
  10. This felt slow, but perhaps that’s because I’ve still got The Dreaded Lurgi, because actually it only took me 30m. Starting FOI 2d NONES I had most of the grid bar the NW corner and the IE of LIECHTENSTEIN done in 25 minutes.

    Five minutes more and I’d finally spotted the hidden at 3d and then finally dredged 1a CINNABAR up from somewhere. Not quite sure how I did that, as if you’d asked me before I started I doubt I’d have been able to tell you what it was, or who CINNA was, either. Still, sometimes just taking a punt on what sounds right pays off…

    No problems with the REDHEADed League, same MERs as others, including about the LAITY. Thanks for pointing out my biffed MO USER!

    Anyway. Off for more Lemsip. Haven’t found any JUJUBES yet, so I’m substituting Werther’s Originals.

    Edited at 2018-01-30 09:39 am (UTC)

  11. A look through the across clues yielded only one answer (21a) and I didn’t fare much better with the down clues. In my defence I was being subjected to the Teletubbies and other CBBC programmes at the same time. Limped home in a God knows what time.
  12. If it were Wednesday we could mention multiple bloggers coloured orange. As it is, really enjoyed being reminded to reread the stories. Plus of course, boltonwanderer has inspired me to listen to the album again (I have the lot….).

    Didn’t we have WINEGLASS with a similar construction very recently? – in fact I’m sure it mentioned champagne, since I think of champagne and wine as different…

    CODs to MOUSERS and of course REDHEAD. 19’, thanks jack and setter.

    1. That is information of strictly limited interest, so long as there is no name attached to it.. 😉
  14. Like others I found that crossing anaesthetised with Liechtenstein was a rather challenging spelling experience. I also found Argonne difficult to spot. With hiddens I find them either easy to spot or desperately hard, no middle ground. Fortunately I did know the Argonne, just down the road from the Ardennes, and the scene of major fighting in WW1.
  15. 14:24 … with the northwest causing some problems.

    Quite an unusual puzzle, though I did learn a few things post-solve. Of particular interest, a search to find out where on earth the Argonne forest was led me to the ultimately sad story of Henry Johnson, very belatedly honoured by Pres Obama in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Johnson_(World_War_I_soldier)

    I’ve never understood the phrase TIME OUT OF MIND and I still don’t, though it feels very profound

  16. 24 minutes, which was good enough to put me bottom of the Club leaderboard when I submitted.

    Ashamed to say it, but sometimes I just like any crossword I can finish in under half an hour…

    Edited at 2018-01-30 01:17 pm (UTC)

  17. I spent a very enjoyable 29 minutes on this, with no major hold-ups. I think REDHEAD would have slowed me down if I hadn’t read the Holmes story, but then again the clueing and crossers would have made the answer clear. Much the same can be said for PROROGUE and ARGONNE – I got both by slavish parsing, but then vaguely recognised the results.

    Verlaine’s five-minute solve reminds me just how little brain I have. It takes me at least that long to find a pen, arrange my drink on a coaster within easy reach, ponder the first clue, realize the pen is redundant as I’m on a laptop, and decide whether I’m going to start with the downs or the acrosses.

      2. I tend to try the first two or three across, and then the first couple down, particularly if I have a letter or two. Is that why I take so long? Probably not.
      3. In some guide to solving crosswords, but I can’t remember exactly where, the advice was given to start with the down clues because the setter, by the time he gets to composing them, will have run out of ideas and they will be easier.

        But of course I always start with the across clues anyway. Maybe that explains my times.

        1. I hadn’t heard that but it’s an interesting idea. I always think it’s harder to conceptualise possible words in down clues when you have checkers in place but perhaps that’s irrelevant at the start of the solve. I may have to try this strange ‘start with the downs’ idea
  18. A very pleasant solve, this, apart from the Minor Eyebrow Raise at LAITY. The only knowledge lacking was the ARGONNE, but the wordplay led to it pretty clearly, and, unlike some other unknowns we’ve had lately, it absolutely looks as if it ought to exist. To show how popular a phrase it is in music, I produced a third example, as TIME OUT OF MIND had me humming Warren Zevon’s splendidly melancholy Accidentally Like a Martyr, in which the words appear.
  19. 20’12. A little surprised to find ‘The Red-Headed League’ required knowledge though knew the story. Apropos the forgotten enemy, people may like to remember Yeats’ intriguing little poem ‘The Fish’. (On edit – it may be called ‘Braesal the Fisherman’ or something similar.)

    Although you hide in the ebb and flow
    Of the pale tide when the moon has set,
    The people of coming days will know
    About the casting out of my net,
    And how you have leaped times out of mind
    Over the little silver cords,
    And think that you were hard and unkind,
    And blame you with many bitter words.

    Edited at 2018-01-30 12:06 pm (UTC)

  20. A friend of my brother’s was going to write a book about his first year as a grad student at Harvard, to be titled “Fear Without Sex”.
  22. 16:09 with gallic shrugs aimed at the forest, the redheads and the TIME phrase which was far from familiar.
  23. As I worked my way through the clues with no answers springing to mind, I resorted to inserting likely end letters to a few clues and seeing if that helped. It did with STREET, and along with my FOI BETIDES, that gave me the RED____ of 13a. The rest of that came a bit later as the Sherlock story was lost in the mists of my brain. FIGHTERS came much later. The NW stayed stubbornly blank until the end, the A and S from 4d and 10d finally giving me WINEGLASS which broke the logjam. I wasn’t helped with 3d by originally thinking the mineral was CINNEBAR, but spotting the unknown forest finally put me right. I was surprised to come in at a reasonable 30:45 after the shaky start. An enjoyable puzzle. Thanks setter and Jack.
  25. 20 mins so perhaps could have been a bit faster with this quickie. Just coming to the end of Stephen Fry’s 61 hour audiobook so Sherlock is very much to the fore for me at the moment.
  26. Difficult to get started – although 8ac was FOI, no more acrosses till I got to the NE corner. Finished in NW after eventually seeing 3dn, so 1ac was LOI. Then was so glad to be within 40min, submitted without checking for typos, of which there were two – more haste, etc.
  27. 9 minutes, relieved to spell the L country right the first time, and wondering where RED-HEADED fit in.
  28. Much easier than yesterday’s, 36 minutes for me (that’s a good time, considering that I start with the across clues). No problems really. Didn’t know CINNA, but CINNABAR rang a bell, as did the REDHEADed league, even if I didn’t know the Sherlock Holmes reference.
  29. This was a post lunch solve after sharing a bottle based on the carignan grape ( another of today’s many unknowns for me). Do we have to learn grape varieties for crosswords?
    I solved this bottom up with the NW largely blank till the end (17d FOI).I seem to be getting better at a finding the answers without full parsing- Argonne ,Redhead etc.
    And Sotira reminds me what does Time out of mind mean? Dylan helped there. LOI Seance. David
  30. Today’s was an easier offering than yesterday’s, I thought. A bit under 15 minutes all told, CINNABAR first in despite the randomness of Mr. Cinna. The US based folks, at least those with historical knowledge, will recall the ARGONNE as part of the 1st US Army’s 1918 offensive (Meuse-Argonne) which was one of the Americans largest engagements, and fought as an independent unit. It’s emphasized in US accounts of that war. Of the rest, well, I’d forgotten the red-headed league til it was brought up in the blog, so thanks Jack for jogging the memory there. I liked the cryptic for ANAESTHETISED. Regards.
  31. Coming late to this in the day, straightforward job, 25 minutes. We drove through a few roundabouts a few years ago on our way from Greece back to IOM and belatedy realised we’d just passed through Liechtenstein, so if you haven’t been, don’t bother, unless you’re depositing a million or two.
    Time out of mind = never heard that, but probably have it regularly.
    COD CINNABAR for being mercurial.
  32. Not a quick time compared to others, but I claim distractions m’lud.
    Didn’t know the forest, so grateful for the gentle clue. Also had to correct the spelling of Liechenstein when it didn’t fit without the first ‘e’.
  33. 37:27 for me. Breezed through most of this in about 20mins (it helped that the two longish acrosses and the two longish downs were pretty easy to get) then got rather stuck in the NW for ages. Finally plucking the correct watering-hole from the list of inns, pubs, oases, spas, wells etc got me to the old Roman required and thus the mineral in 1ac. From that fell 1dn, 9 & 12ac and finally my LOI the hidden at 3dn. DNK or had forgotten the league but checkers were generous. Just back from the cinema where I saw The Death of Stalin (uproarious) so references to the Communist and the Leninist in 13 and 14ac felt very prescient. I’ll raise a 9ac to 10dn and many hours frittered away at university on the Sega mega drive as Chun-li, Ryu, M Bison, E Honda, Vega and the rest.
  34. 39:30 so within my target of 45 mins. LOI cinnabar which I stumbled into by inn for watering-hole coming to mind. I could not make head nor tail of c___abar but that didn’t detain me for long. Pleased to complete today after being defeated by Jujube and roulade yesterday. I have no recollection of ever coming across jujube before and I would have said the same for the musical meaning of roulade until I realised we had it only recently …
  35. Thanks for the blog Jack.

    I wondered if “people taking” in 23a meant “people taking communion”, ie laity. Not sure that works any better though?

    Limousine cars, by the way, also get their name from the French region. It originally meant a car with a full-length roof, named after the cloak worn by Limousin shepherds. If I remember rightly I read this on one of the exhibits at the Reims-Champagne Automobile Museum.

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