Times Cryptic No 26934 – Saturday, 13 January 2018. Double the fun!

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This puzzle may have set a record for the number of double definition clues – five out of 29. I found it relatively straightforward – 36 minutes on the timer. I put in 24ac on faith, and spent some time later parsing it for the blog – I found it hard to see, perhaps because the clue had some red herrings built in.

The puzzle also had several unknown answers, fortunately gettable from the wordplay, except perhaps for 10ac which was a bit of a stab in the dark.

My clue of the day is 25dn, for the clever historical reference. Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle.

Clues are in blue, with definitions underlined. Anagram indicators are in bold italics. Answers are in BOLD CAPS, followed by the wordplay. (ABC*) means ‘anagram of ABC’, deletions are in {curly brackets}.

Across
1 Stock colours (8)
STANDARD: double definition, as two-word clues often are.
6 Warm and moist — like some marine life? (6)
CLAMMY: another double definition, the second one a touch whimsical.
9 Evergreen power to fascinate (6)
PRIVET: P for power, then RIVET. Classified as a noxious weed in my part of the world.
10 Hydrogen expands in large flexible pipe (8)
NARGHILE: (H IN LARGE*). Another name for a hookah. A rather unfair anagram clue for an obscure foreign word. The position of the G seemed clear, but where to put the A and the I, or the E for that matter? Just a punt!
11 Thriving source of water (4)
WELL: and still another double definition.
12 Deep thought: odd state to beset one (10)
RUMINATION: RUM NATION, around I for one.
14 Shrub, one beyond blight — job to contain it? (8)
TAMARISK: MAR is blight, I is one. Put all of that in TASK, to get a shrub unknown to me, although it has come up before.
16 Peer in organ loft, but not very many times (4)
EARL: EAR is an organ, then take OFT (many times) out of LOFT. Nice clue, with the need to separate “organ” and “loft”.
18 Monkey lives around borders of Kenya, to the west (4)
SAKI: IS around K{eny}A, all written right to left. I didn’t know the monkey, but I did know there was a humourist who called himself SAKI, so I could guess where the name came from.
19 Syrup — huge number of lemmings initially stuck in it (8)
MOLASSES: O{f} L{emmings} in MASSES.
21 Poet who’s evidently been on the rack? (10)
LONGFELLOW: is this another tongue-in-cheek double definition?
22 In conversation, bound to be engrossed (4)
RAPT: sounds like WRAPPED.
24 Torch, a virtually full beam lit up (8)
FLAMBEAU: I found this tricky to parse, because there seemed to be so many options. Drop the L from FUL{L}, to give the anagram fodder – (FUL BEAM*).
26 Only rotten plays were written by him (6)
O’NEILL: ONE (only), ILL (rotten). Not an obvious clue till one sees the need to separate “only” from “rotten”.
27 Passage which crosses river, ending in Idaho (6)
THROAT: THAT (which), around R (river) and O (ending in “Idaho”).
28 Sweet tune recalled by one in French (5,3)
HONEY BUN: HONE (tune), YB (by “recalled”), UN (French for one).

Down
2 Trinity right within you (5)
THREE: R in THEE.
3 Introspection doing little to inspire government leader supporting church body (5-6)
NAVEL-GAZING: NAVE, followed by G inside LAZING.
4 A body builder’s out-of-this-world body (8)
ASTEROID: with different spacing, A STEROID.
5 Stop being a comedian? You can’t be serious! (4,4,2,5)
DON’T MAKE ME LAUGH: and another DD.
6 Cap of cerulean and gold on a crown (6)
CORONA: C for cerulean, OR for gold, ON, A.
7 A silencing word remains (3)
ASH: A, then SH.
8 People ecstatic at first about party removing a PM (9)
MELBOURNE: MEN, then E for ecstatic, all around the outside of LABOUR minus its A. The Prime Minister who gave his name to the capital of Victoria, Australia.
13 Ever maintaining rise during test, working on a plane, perhaps? (4,7)
TREE SURGERY: SURGE (rise) inside EER (ever), all inside TRY. A Russian doll! The definition is something you might do to a plane try tree for example.
15 Shiite leader always put on a ring, I see! (9)
AYATOLLAH: AY (always), A TOLL (ring), AH (I see!).
17 Nuclear accident in British base (8)
BLOWDOWN: B (British) LOWDOWN (base). Not a word I knew.
20 Failing to change sides (6)
DEFECT: and yet another DD.
23 After uprising, some mutual appreciation for island republic (5)
PALAU: backward hidden answer. Yet another word I didn’t know. My ignorance is clearly vast! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palau
25 Chairman, on agonising march, heads northward (3)
MAO: first letters of On Agonising March, read right to left.  A beautiful clue, since the Long March of the Red Army did head North and West! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March
 

27 comments on “Times Cryptic No 26934 – Saturday, 13 January 2018. Double the fun!”

  1. Straightforward but pleasant, with several words I thought twice about – defect and failing, clammy being warm in addition to just moist – before they went in. I agree that Narghile, especially as an anagram, is a reach, though I understand that smoking hookahs is newly popular with hipster millennials, so perhaps the solvers who were too young to know Potsdam earlier in the week will get their revenge by knowing this. Thanks, Brnchn (and you might have try instead of tree at 13d)

    Edited at 2018-01-20 12:33 am (UTC)

  2. which put me at 152 on the leaderboard, such is Saturday. (But there among the swarm of neutrinos I did spot Magoo at–wait for it–3:15, and mohn and verlaine not far behind. Scary.) NARGHILE is perhaps more Mephisto territory, but I knew the word, damn it, and couldn’t drag it up into consciousness for the longest time. Biffed 19ac and 3d, and 13d, which took another longest time to parse. It’s been suggested that SAKI the writer took his pen name from the monkey, although there’s no evidence. Definitely worth reading, although not the novels.
  3. Not that long a day’s journey into night at 32 minutes. 5d reminded me of Bob Monkhouse’s best joke: “People laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well they’re not laughing now.” We do have a TAMARISK, although I think it would prefer somewhere warmer. NARGHILE correctly guessed, perhaps from a vague memory. One of the advantages of the Saturday puzzle is the chance to do a spot of more leisurely research. I read ‘Vanity Fair’ many moons ago in one of those bursts of self improvement that do no good at all, and apparently it is mentioned there. I was actually expecting the memory to be from Sherlock Holmes, but I’ve found no report of a mention. This was quite a literary puzzle, with even FLAMBEAU sounding like a cross between Flaubert and Rimbaud. COD to TREE SURGERY, in ‘plane’ sight. MELBOURNE would have been a struggle before the recent ITV ‘Victoria’ series. Good puzzle and blog. Thank you B and setter.

    Edited at 2018-01-20 06:47 am (UTC)

    1. Never my favourite comedian, but I will concede he knew a heck of a lot of jokes. My favourite is:

      “When I die, I’d like to go peacefully in my sleep, like my father.. and not terrified and screaming in horror, like his passengers”

      1. Do you remember Ted Ray on Does the team think?, Jerry. He was brilliant at one ad-lib after another, as Monkhouse was. Lee Mack stands in that tradition today.
      2. Either he stole that from Jack Handey, or vice versa. Handey also said, “When I die, I want people to say of me, ‘That man owed me a lot of money.'”

        Edited at 2018-01-20 10:09 am (UTC)

        1. Quite likely Bob told it first as the older man, but they all will borrow a good gag. I’ve certainly known the sleeping driver one a long time. I’ve not heard the ‘death as debt avoidance’ joke from Jack Handey before though. Bob and his pal Denis Goodwin started out as scriptwriters and were even writing jokes for Bob Hope in the fifties.
      3. Surely “All my friends laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. They’re not laughing now.”
        1. I’ve googled it. One version is close to the way I remember it with “people laughed…” The other version is “They all laughed…” I think to work it has to be all his audience and not just his friends who are not laughing now.
          1. Yes, I think you’re probably right. I’m never very good at remembering quotes. Definitely a great joke in any case.
  4. Sadly, Paul, I am too young to remember Potsdam, yet too old to be a hipster millennial, so I failed on the unknown NARGHILE. Found this tough all round, with a few complete unknowns, like O’NEILL, BLOWDOWN and TAMARISK to go with the hookah. But at least I could work those out from the wordplay, eventually!

    Enjoyed 16a, 6a. Didn’t enjoy not finishing 😀

  5. Enjoyed this one. Fortunately knew narghile, since in Doha where my daughter lived you can’t move anywhere in the Souk without tripping over one..
  6. 22:43 Held up by the unknown NARGHILE, PALAU and O’NEILL (reminder to self, when there’s a name start O, don’t forget to think of O’something). 6a my favourite, but I liked 5d too.
  7. This one kept me busy for 45:36, with MELBOURNE LOI. Liked CLAMMY. Knew the monkey/writer from previous puzzles. NARGHILE was a guess at where the vowels went, and PALAU was also unknown, got from checkers and the hidden. O’Neill was one that had caught me before, so no trouble there. Nice puzzle. Thanks setter and Bruce.
    1. Well for what it’s worth I think this is a poor clue, even though I knew the word from somewhere (a past crossword no doubt).
  9. DNF. Found this tough, took ages, got fed up and frustrated and cheated to get the unknown or unrecollected narghile and the untwigged O’Neill.
  10. I got all the difficult ones and then bizarrely put DESERT at 20d. I think I was just desperate to finish by that point.
  11. Got to the hour and still had five clues unanswered. All mentioned above. I found this quite hard though I did like 5 dn. How does Magoo do it? Even if I knew all the answers beforehand, I don’t think I could write them down in around three minutes! Let alone work them out as well. Félicitations as we say here in France. Thank you B for the explanations and setter for a good challenge.
  12. I seem to be getting a bit better at these. I managed to fill all the squares and my guesses turned out to be correct. Narghile unknown but hard to arrange the letters otherwise. Flambeau looked and sounded right.
    I did have a problem with the prime minister which held me up. I pencilled in Macdonald which looked quite good for a while and had DO for party and MAD for ecstatic. Guessed O’Neill but could not parse it;I knew he wrote plays.
    LOI was Throat.
    An enjoyable test which I completed on the day allowing time for a crack at Sunday’s. David
  15. 13.46, but not feeling all that easy. For those of us fans of the Father Brown stories in the current BBC incarnation, FLAMBEAU is rather weirdly clued as it seems to have nothing to do with the good priest’s arch friend/foe.
    1. It’s a containment indicator. If it helps, imagine pushing the “H” into place in the collected letters of the anagram; they’d have to expand to make room for it.
  17. Finished this pleasant vocabulary-expanding puzzle, with SAKI, NARGHILE & BLOWDOWN. I agree that having an anagram for NARGHILE is most unfair: there are 6 orders for the 3 vowels and so it’s playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets. The setter is evidently missing a trick not considering what letters can be known from other clues. There must be a fun way to clue it as ARGH! in NILE. But the rest I did like: particularly that there was no actor in TREE SURGERY, and no “it” in SAKI. Thanks to setter, blogger and others.

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