Times Cryptic 28388

87 comments on “Times Cryptic 28388”

1. My FOI, just randomly attacking the grid, was DRYDEN.
   LOI FUSELI (though I had heard of him).
   TOSCANINI was very easy. But we’re sure delving into the arts in this one.
   Glad to (quickly) remember IMPI and (much later) POTTO.

2. Definition no 4. of “car” in Chambers: Any railway carriage, wagon or truck (N American)

3. I always find it fascinating to see which clues different people scratch their heads over. For me, it was SERVE. I had no idea if the answer might be SURGE (‘lifting’) and the cryptic ‘porcelain dish up’. I couldn’t think of a letter to go in _EGRUS. I tried searching for NEGRUS, and let’s just say, don’t do what I did. Finally I worked at it the other way, and trawled the alphabet on the middle letter of _E_R_S. Certainly _ERR_S seemed appealing, but it didn’t make sense in the other direction. At this point I still assumed the definition was ‘lifting’ or ‘up’ (like ‘cheery’ or something like that). Finally when I got to _EVR_S my French detectors went off. SERVE sort of made sense, and SEVRES was, to my surprise, in the dictionary.

   Was this a truly enjoyable way to take an 18 minute solve to a 24 minute one? No. Perhaps I need to get back to solving the Mephisto. After graduate school, after graduate school.

   Thank you, jackkt, for clarifying the true definition of 24 down.

   Oh, and CHEYENNE is the spelling (of the tribe and the state capital), but I wonder if anyone hesitated over whether CHEYANNE or CHAYANNE might be an alternate spelling, since ANNE and ENNE aren’t really homophones?

   1. ENNE in CHEYENNE sounds exactly like ANNE.

      1. Huh. I’ve only heard it pronounced ‘enne’.

         1. Merriam-Webster does give that as a second option.
            \ shī-ˈan , -ˈen
            I had an unfortunate hitchhiking experience at the city limits of Cheyenne back in the early ’80s. I was in a great spot to thumb from when I was given a ride in a truck by two guys who were—as it gradually dawned on me—under the mistaken impression that I was female (one of the them had made room for me by moving into the sleeping space in the back of the cab…). After I disabused them of that notion, I was immediately set down in the most godforsaken stretch of highway…

            1. 😳

   2. Anyone who watched the TV series mentioned in my blog and heard the theme song would have been in no doubt. Click here to listen.

      1. White man appropriates the name of a subjugated people. So it goes.

         1. I don’t recall all the details now as it’s so long ago but there was a backstory that ‘Cheyenne’ had been raised at some point by the tribe after his parents had been killed by another tribe and for that reason he had an affinity with them, took the nickname and later in life had sympathy with their plight. Considering this was made in the 1950s it may have been the first TV Western not to portray ‘Indians’ as thorough-going ‘baddies’. Of course none of it would do now, but times were different then.

            1. Yes, well, that all makes sense. We know these somewhat-more-enlightened producers would still not have gone so far as to build a series around an actual red man… rather than a white man orphaned by murderous Native Americans, but nurtured for a time by others.

               Wikipedia says that the series’ first episode “reveals that [Cheyenne] Bodie’s parents were killed by Indians, tribe unknown. He was taken by Cheyenne Indians when he was an infant but left to be raised by a white family when he was 12.”

               Simply reversing the terms, let’s say a Cheyenne infant’s entire family is wiped out by American cavalry, and he is for a time cared for by other white folks—of some other “tribe,” in some sense (maybe simply civilians)—but eventually adopted by Native Americans. In the course of these events, he takes a non-Cheyenne name, and he thereafter maintains throughout his heroic life an empathetic attitude toward palefaces, despite the murder of his parents by whites.

               But would his empathy for whites extend to the US cavalry?

   3. I did the same thing with ‘surge’, only took more time than you to write it off. I alpha-trawled my way until I reached S and put in Sèvres, still not understanding how ‘lifting’ could be the definition!
      I’ve never heard ‘CheyENNE’, but then I seldom hear it. [æ] and [epsilon] (as in gat/get) can be hard to distinguish, and in some dialects the difference is neutralized: as in merry/marry/Mary in some dialects.

      1. I think it’s true that the instinct of a lot of people in the UK at that time the series started would have been to say Chay-enne (with a hard ‘ch’ as in ‘chair’) but those who actually watched it soon learned different. Those were in the days when we had only two TV channels so it had a massive audience.

4. 38 minutes. A few uncertainties in TIMOTHY (looked more likely than “timitey”), the just recalled POTTO and especially FUSELI. For no good reason this seemed a better bet than “Duseli”, with ‘Blend’ acting as an anagram indicator, but I wasn’t confident. Looking at the Wikipedia page, I’d have to say his paintings aren’t exactly my cup of tea.

   Helpful to have had GREENGAGE, both here and elsewhere, recently. I suppose there’s now a digital version of POSTCARD(s); thanks, but I’ll stick with the original.

   1. I have recently had to admit that my vague interest in historical local postcards has become A Thing and bought my first album to keep them in. I’m not sure if this will develop into a full-blown hobby, but it might. I doubt that anyone will be collecting random emoji-strewn texts back to loved ones accompanied by pictures snapped on an iPhone in a hundred years, but perhaps I’m just old and grumpy…

      1. Well I never – a POSTCARD collection. Look forward to seeing you on “Antiques Roadshow” in about ten years.

         I’m afraid there’s no “perhaps” about it for me. Guilty on both counts, M’lud.

         1. It seems unlikely I’ll make my fortune unless I manage to buy one where the eBay seller hasn’t noticed that it’s been stamped with a Penny Black or something!

            1. Matt, Penny Blacks and Tuppeny Blues were gone fifty years before the postcard was even invented! Even Penny Reds! Victor Meldrew FRPSL

      2. Ronnie Barker was a famous ‘naughty’ postcard collector. He had an enormous collection, particularly of the French variety. Ooh-la-la! I remember an afternoon’s browsing with him along the postcard stalls, spread out, on the Rive Gauche. We were working at the ‘Follies Bergeres’at the time.

         1. Well, if anything gets me into the same club as Ronnie Barker I’d be happy to do it. My postcards are all of the (very) local Bristol area, specialising in the Bristol International Exhibition of 1914; I doubt there were any saucy postcards made of that, unfortunately. I’ve seen a list of all the stalls and there wasn’t so much as a “What the Butler Saw” machine from what I can tell…

   2. I actually went with “Ludesi”, using the same thought process as you (and Google says there is an artist called Ludesi, although not really famous enough for a Times crossword!).
      So, DNF.

      1. Aha! So did I. Famous enough for me

      2. I believe I am not famous..not for Times for sure. Maybe I need to advertise myself more.

         1. Hello Fabio. Sorry I hadn’t heard of you – I hadn’t heard of Fuseli either! The crossword clue could equally have referred to you – anagram of L (lake) and USED plus I (one).
            Amazing that you found this blog – you’ll have to start doing the Times crossword now (and I’ll have to brush up on artists).
            All the best.

5. A nice quick 29 minutes for me, barely getting bogged down anywhere, though FUSELI took all the crossers and coming up with the moth of TIMOTHY took a while. Pretentiously enough I was skimming through the translation of Juvenal’s satires by “Mr. Dryden and several other eminent hands” last night, which helped.

   Along the way I missed quite a few obvious-in-hindsight parsings that I should have noticed, starting with “important” for STAPLE and including “what drawers make” for TIES. Luckily none of my glossings-over caused any problems.

6. 17:14. The second day in a row where I expected to see pink squares but none appeared. Phew! Today’s doubt was the unknown FUSELI. Having considered all other possible words that fitted _U_E, and found no others that meant mix I threw it in and hoped for the best. My main concern was that it sounded more like pasta than an artist.

   1. Washed down with a nice glass of tintoretto, perhaps?

      1. Or maybe a nice Bellini

         1. Or even ‘Jacob’s Well Robusti’, perhaps?

7. One wrong (FUSELI) in just under 30 minutes. like BletchlyReject, I saw “blend” as an anagram indicator but, unlike him, I went with it to get SUDELI. Never mind

   1. My variant was LUDESI

      1. Me too!

   2. I never got FUSELI. NHO, and there was no way of guessing which way round L, S and D went in the supposed anagram! I gave up at that point, since I also couldn’t unravel 15A. Disappointing, since most of the rest of it was manageable, if slow…

8. With blackest moss the flower-plots …
   (proper assonance)

   After 30 mins pre-brekker I bunged in LUDESI. This Fabio Ludesi the famous artist. Looked OK to me.
   Thanks setter and J.

   1. Yep. Pretty OK for me too.

9. 14:48 but 1 wrong. Like others I parsed 25A as an anagram of L USED + I and came to the same answer as Myrtillus. DNK the “softly-softly” primate.

10. Steady solve today, 14 mins.
    Shy Anne is a perfect homophone for Cheyenne, to me
    NHO Fuseli but bunged him in anyway. Sympathy for anyone who put Ludesi or Sudeli, which seem to parse just fine..

11. 26 minutes. Wasn’t confident with CHEYENNE given the pronunciation, but others have made clear that there’s no problem with that. Got POTTO, TIMOTHY and FUSELI from wordplay, like others took a while to figure out SERVE, and didn’t see how the ‘nation’ in INDIGNATION worked, so thanks for the explanation.

    FOI Aide
    LOI Cheyenne
    COD Spain

12. 44 mins. Struggled to get going, then got a head of steam up, but finally held up in the SW. LOI the unknown FUSELI from wp. Luckily I didn’t think of « blend » as an anagrind. Another NHO POTTO also worked out from wp.

    I liked OCTAVE and RISING DAMP, cue Leonard Rossiter/Rigsby.

    Thanks Jack and setter.

13. Pfft, a DNF for the first time in…well, I don’t know, but it feels like many years. Never heard of the artist, as it turns out, and couldn’t get a good enough steer on a coherent guess from the wordplay, so looked up the answer and didn’t submit. Oh well, I suppose I can’t blame the setter for my ignorance, so we shrug and move on. Disappointing, though.

14. ‘Ignorance is Bliss!’ Fuseli was Swiss, but spent most of his life in and around London. He was a ‘big cheese’ at the Royal Academy, where he taught Blake, Constable and Landseer the fundamentals of painting. He died at Putney Hill in 1825 after a long innings.

15. I struggled manfully through the North-West Passage in 45 minutes.

    FOI 11ac CALAMITOUS
    LOI 9ac ASSONANT
    COD 18ac RISING DAMP- fond memories of Leonard Rossiter (Mr. Rigsby), Miss Jones et al.
    WOD 28ac CHEYENNE – when the American Wild West was all the rage on TV. So entertaining! Now it’s old hat.

    Does anyone send postcards these days?

16. 16d. Curiously enough, where Real Madrid currently are is Glasgow, where they will face Celtic tonight. With a lot of luck and a following wind, maybe they’re losing in early autumn. (I was there, in The Jungle, in 1982, the only other time they’ve played us in Glasgow. We won 2-0.)

    1. In October 1984 I was at Park Head and saw Celtic beat Rapid Vienna 3-0 to ‘win the tie’ 4-3. But with five minutes to go the ref abandoned the match, after a bottle was thrown. Today VAR would show said bottle landed close to, but did not actually hit a Rapid player. He went down like a sack of spuds! A few weeks later the tie was ordered to be replayed at Old Trafford. . . . and Rapid Vienna won 1-0 to progress to the next round!

       1. From memory, Rapid made it to the final that year. What could have been!

    2. 1982 or 1980? Just been reading in the Guardian about 1979/80 when Celtic beat Real. Being the Guardian it’s probably a typo 😉
       Though I’m from southern parts, I went to Celtic Park once: 2003(?) when they didn’t beat Boavista in the UEFA cup semifinal, even after an obvious Portuguese handball in the penalty area was ignored by the ref. No bother; away win sealed the deal. Unfortunately they came up against an uncompromisingly dishonest team in the final. Still remember Vitor Baia catching the ball, pretending to be injured, and rolling up to near the halfway line – still clutching the ball – while feigning (very badly) imminent death. Just to waste a minute or two.

       1. It’s in my head as 82, but it may well have been 80. Either way, I remember almost nothing about the match!

          It wasn’t just Porto who were ‘dishonest.’ The ref was at it as well, throughout the match. Then in extra time, Larsson was scythed in two just outside the Porto penalty area: no foul. The ball came up the other end, and big Bobo Balde, who was probably not the brightest guy to ever play for Celtic, decided that he had carte blanche to do the same thing on a Porto player. The red card was immediate.

          1. Deco was in the Porto team, throwing himself to the ground at every opportunity. I quite liked him as a player (but not that game), can’t remember, was he at Chelsea staying on his feet when Carlo Ancelotti was manager? You know, playing like an actual soccer player rather than a diver?

17. Artists I know of, I’m sure,
    Are few and this ones obscure
    If it’s pronounced FUSELLI
    he’s not been on my telly
    And probably won’t be any more

18. 13:37. I thought I had started very quickly on this, but then I realised I had opened the Quick Cryptic by mistake. When I got to the right puzzle I found it tricky, and got particularly stuck on a few at the end:
    > POTTO and FUSELI, which I constructed from wordplay but was very unsure about so wasted time considering alternatives
    > CHEYENNE, where I was reasonably sure of the pronunciation but the wordplay is unhelpfully ambiguous so I dithered
    Got there eventually, but my fingers were crossed as I clicked submit.

19. One wrong in 17:04. Surge in place of Serve.

    I struggled with the same few as others. Dithered over the spelling of Cheyenne but went with what I thought I knew and was correct. Also Fuseli was an unknown so I was pleased to see no pink square there. Rhymes tempted me for a while but I wasn’t convinced and then Dryden saved me from error with his warning, “Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck”

    I didn’t knowingly know any Dryden until just now. I googled famous Dryden quotes and that one fitted my solving situation nicely. Some great other ones, some of which are familiar. I particularly liked, “Beware the fury of a patient man”.

    COD: DRYDEN.

20. NHO of the grass and went for MITE after 25 mins instead of MOTH. I found this hard to get started on and evidently even harder to finish.

21. 8m 44s, finishing on the unknown FUSELI after an alphabet trawl (1 in 676 chance, right?).

    SERVE looked right from the definition, but the porcelain was another unknown – as was POTTO.

    B&B was delightful, that’s my COD. NHS, on the other hand, certainly deserves that H’m.

    1. Re: H’m.

       I’m surprised that clue hasn’t been responsible for more comments. TBH I thought it was pretty feeble.

22. 37 minutes after a week off for son’s wedding in Italy and subsequent bout of covid. FOI rile: it felt appropriate and bunged in Fuseli still thinking along pasta lines.
    Foxwood

23. 33:10 but with LUDESI and TIMITEY. Bah! Thanks Jack.

24. Thought I’d finished in a really good time for me of 26.41, only to discover I’d carelessly put in CHEYANNE at 28ac. No excuse really as I was a childhood devotee of the exploits of Clint Walker.
    Childrens television programmes in those days were made up of 30 minute weekly episodes of many a western such as Cheyenne, The Range Rider, The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid, together with other such staples as William Tell, Ivanhoe (starring a very young Roger Moore) and of course Robin Hood. All were enjoyed and provide memories of a happy childhood for many of us I’m sure.

    1. Very much my era of children’s TV too, AndyPandy (your name was the first programme I ever saw btw!) , and I watched all the titles you mention. One correction though, Cheyenne was intended for adults and was shown in the early evenings. Also, unlike the other titles, with commercial breaks it filled an hour slot.

       1. AndyPandy was the first programme I watched too, hence the name chosen.
          Children of today would be aghast at how little choice there was on tv in those times. My earliest tv memories go back to the mid fifties when ‘childrens hour’ was just about all you got. For quite a few years the BBC (the only channel of course) had a weekly schedule that didn’t change. If memory serves me, it was Picture Book on Monday, AndyPandy on Tuesday, Bill and Ben (personal favourite!) on Wednesday, Rag Tag and Bobtail on Thursday and The Woodentops on Friday. I don’t think my grandchildren would be impressed!
          At least by the sixties, there was more on offer for children, such as the programmes mentioned above.

          1. Happy memories! I think the Watch with Mother programmes (shock horror these days at that title!) didn’t arrive all at once and perhaps Andy Pandy was on more than once a week in the early days. All this info is available online in back issues of Radio Times so I shall explore later or when I have more time.

             1. I’d be interested to know if my idea of a schedule of programmes is correct. I’m relying on a memory I have dredged up from over 65 years ago without researching it!

                1. Your schedule is exactly as I remember after all the programmes got going but I’ve confirmed that the different programmes were added gradually over a period of 5 years 1950-1955. The first two sections of this article about Watch With Mother on Wiki cover it in some detail.

                   1. Thank you for doing all that research Jack, it really takes me back reading about it. My memory of the scheduling (albeit as it ended up) was pretty good surprisingly.

                2. I think you are spot on – ‘Tales from the Riverbank’ may have been a bit later.

                   1. The ‘Show Cycles’ section of the linked Wiki article covers Tales of the Riverbank.

                3. As well as other informed answers, I can commend to you this very useful site, which allows you to look at the listing sections of Radio Times through history. I have regularly lost hours going down a rabbithole of programmes I watched in my younger days…

                   https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/issues

                   1. Yes, it’s a great resource. I was going to look there for info on Watch With Mother but found all I needed on Wiki. In addition I acquired from somewhere (downloaded from a site online perhaps) every copy of TV Times 1955-1966 so I have ITV covered as well as the BBC in that era. Of course I shall never get through it all.

25. Found this harder than yesterday, taking almost 40 minutes. My DULESI is another variant of the apparent anagram fodder in 25a. One of my gripes about the Times cryptic these days is the preponderance of surface decorators. I prefer purer clues. I don’t mind if the answer is a familiar word or name, but in the case of obscurities one has no way of knowing if one has the right answer. ‘Used’ is otiose. Out of the six anagram possibilities and the actual answer I wouldn’t know which to go for. Why has the setter opted for the obscure FUSELI rather than the more familiar plural, HUMERI? Not impressed.

    1. HUMERI is not exactly on the tip of most tongues either, is it?

       1. 🙂
          I would have gone for the much more reasonable QUEEAI.

          1. Or why not the well known SA antelope, OUREBI. I met one once! It’s on my list….

26. 48:13 but…

    …looked up FUSELI and POTTO – the second might be fair but the first was a bit too vague, I felt.

    Slowish with the rest – that’s two failures to hit my Snitch-based time target in a row so far this week – going for the hat trick tomorrow!

27. Share concerns about FUSELI- the anagram looked very tempting because it utilised the “USED” from the clue, went for LUDESI as did others. Managed to avoid TIMITEY despite not knowing why it was a grass- assumed some sort of CRS

28. Managed to miss a bullet on Fuseli, which sounds like an Italian name, not even considering the anagram. Knew the spelling & pronunciation of Cheyenne, though not the TV show. Heard of Sevres… another brand name? Or is it generic? So no real problems, but tricky enough to not be too quick. Particularly liked OCTAVE, and for all the wrong reasons: REBUTTAL. ~1980s Bart Simpson, in a debate, asked to present his rebuttal… dropped his daks and presented his butt.

    1. Sèvres is a suburb of Paris from where the porcelain originates.

29. 17’15”, after guessing FUSELI and POTTO. I realise that I have never actually uttered aloud the word CHEYENNE, but I am glad to know it’s a homonym of SHY-ANNE. I would not have so pronounced it, I feel.

30. 20ac Ties – I don’t get both both meanings. Can anyone enlighten this very ancient puzzler?g
    Later: just got it – what a dumbo!

    1. To tie is to draw things together so people drawing things together are drawers and ties are what they make. ‘Formal wear’ is self-explanatory I think.

       1. I thought a tie was a sporting synonym for a draw!.

    2. Hello D. People (eg. teams) who draw are tied. Ties are formal wear for men. Much less seen these days. On edit sorry Jack, just seen your comment. I saw « drawers » as people who tied in a match, say.

       1. Sorry Rosie, I didn’t see you there! Victor

       2. It’s open to interpretation, Rose, and I think both of ours are valid.

31. 15’04”

    5 minutes wasted after entering KEYPAD at 1 Across (Important = key, papers = pad, a keypad is used for security: must be right, right? Wrong!), grrrr!

    After finding nothing to fit 2, 3 and 4 Down, I had a rethink. The rest was straightforward, I thought. Potto was fairly clued for those who hadn’t heard of it, with CHEYENNE the only potential banana skin.

32. Forgot to post this morning. 30 minutes, no major problems. I also wondered why ‘little’ in the SHOW STOPPER clue. Was thinking how feeble the surface for FUSELI was until I realised that ‘lake’ is something to do with colours. My water colours had things like ‘carmine lake’, might not have been that but similar.

33. Delighted to discover others joined me in the Timitey and Duseli ambushes, but was able to escape and limp on to a pedestrian 1 hour and 30 minutes. I also struggled with toppo for a bit as I had it as tsito. Which turns out to be – in case of use in future puzzles:

    Tsito is a town in the Volta Region of Ghana.

    Tsito means ‘by water’ or ‘by the river’.

34. 32.57. I was a bit slow on the uptake today and struggled with this solve. I did know the artist, I went to an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2006 called Gothic Nightmares, Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination. Fuseli’s 1782 painting The Nightmare was the centrepiece, an unsettling image. I still have the exhibition catalogue. So no problems with that one. I really got hung up for a good long time though on postcard, the unknown potto and serve as my last few entries.

35. Searched through the grid for a foothold before (happily!) finding the easy anagram at 14a and the grammatical ASSONANT at 9a. Tended to biff quite a few thereafter but failed to equate DISCO with club, and eventually beaten down by FUSELI ( who I knew of but couldn’t see the wordplay ) and SERVE. No problem with CHEYENNE or DRYDEN however ( was a big fan of the big lunk Brodie in my teens! )

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