Times Cryptic No 26950 Thursday, 1st February 2018 Don’t Panic.

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I sauntered through this in 21 minutes, not troubled too much by the golfing references which didn’t require me to know anything about golf, and relieved that the Latin references, of which there are several, didn’t require an in-depth classical education. I got the impression that there was a preponderance of clues requiring you to insert part A into part B, though I haven’t counted them up. The plant, the bird, the artist, the writer, the musician, the dog and the boat (one of which I have sailed on) shouldn’t cause any major head scratching or complaints about obscurity, though contestants on the majority of TV game shows might struggle.
Anyway, here, with a few embellishments, are the results of the United Kingdom jury (me) with clues, definitions and SOLUTIONS variously highlighted
.

ACROSS

1 Cool, informed female designer making comeback (9)
SANGFROID Cool as in “the Englishman with his usual bloody cold” Constructed from informed (verbal version): SANG, F(emale) and DIOR the designer reversed.
6 Backed commercial corporation in fact (5)
DATUM AD reversed and TUM for corporation in its stomach guise.
9 Head off lame evildoer’s first trespass (7)
IMPINGE Take the L from LIMPING, add E(vildoer)
10 Bird hit high in the air by large vessel (7)
SKYLARK If you hit the ball high, you SKY it. Add L(arge) and that frequently selected vessel, the ARK
11 Cut down on binding agent? (5)
GLUON I think this is an abbreviated GLU(m) for down plus ON. When solving I thought it might be a loose-ish &lit, with binding agent being GLUE, similarly cut, but I don’t think the syntax really works
12 A small amount of tin securing knight’s chain (9)
APENNINES A small amount is PENNIES, insert N for a (chess) knight. It’s a mountain sort of chain.
13 Some terrific screenwriters around in this genre (3-2)
SCI-FI Hidden and reversed in terrIFIC Screenwriters. Make up your own examples.
14 Witches on short mission to seal husband in cooking pot (5,4)
DUTCH OVEN  A pleasingly Grimm inspired clue: Mission provides DUTY (to be cut) and witches COVEN. Insert H(usband).
17 Esoteric worship suppressing New England possession (9)
OWNERSHIP I don’t recall seeing esoteric used as an anagram indicator before, but no quibble. WORSHIP therefore scrambled with N(ew) E(ngland) intruding.
18 Invited to accept golf club’s proof of membership? (5)
BADGE Golf is there to provide the (NATO) G, invited to provide the embracing BADE
19 Artistic Italian waterway and Latin quarter of Sorrento (9)
CANALETTO Waterway: CANAL, and (in Latin) ET, and a quarter of SorrenTO for the rest
22 Primrose’s cousin is over 40 and flipping sanctimonious (5)
OXLIP I’ll take the setter’s botany as accurate. O(ver) XL (40 in Latin)and PI (sanctimonious) reversed (flipping)
24 Broadcast a child-friendly Q&A about tanks (7)
AQUARIA Reverse (about) AIR (broadcast) A U (child friendly) Q & A without bothering with the &.
25 Craft fine cryptic clue, more or less (7)
FELUCCA F(ine) plus anagram (cryptic) of CLUE plus CA for more or less/ approximately.
26 Harry Basset, perhaps (5)
HOUND A friendly double definition. Nothing to do with liquorice allsorts.
27 He arranged some rags and boots with ends missing (9)
ELLINGTON He did indeed: here’s his speedy version of Scott Joplin’s Tiger Rag. The boots are there so you can take the W off the front end and the S off the back end.

DOWN

1 Cast? That’s supporting cast (5)
SLING another tidy double definition, with a neat use of two versions of “cast”
2 Marshal Pétain trapping peacekeepers before noon with sea power? (9)
NEPTUNIAN Marshal is the anagram indicator, not the rank. PETAIN rearranged, U(nited) N(ations) inserted, N(oon) to finish
3 Connoisseur seizing fashionable gnome (9)
FINANCIER IN (fashionable) inserted into FANCIER (as in pigeon, for example. The best known gnomes of this kind inhabit Zurich.
4 Busted a suspect with hand on drug? Could be this (4-3-4,4)
OPEN-AND-SHUT CASE I’ll call this an &lit. Busted invites you to anagram A SUSPECT and HAND ON and put E, the setter’s drug of convenient choice on the back end.
5 Worried about group of farmers splitting up communal resource in quantity (15)
DESSERTSPOONFUL Almost my last in and thrown in without parsing, but it’s STRESSED (worried) reversed (about) plus POOL (communal resource) and N(ational) F(armers) U(nion) “splitting” the latter.
6 You dated visiting lecturer, a Senior Fellow (5)
DOYEN Our setter kindly gives us a “dated” to indicated old style YE for you) and the lecture is a DON. Assemble.
7 US storyteller Remus, perhaps, penning author’s introduction (5)
TWAIN Of course, you are meant to think of Uncle Remus, but it’s Remus TWIN to Romulus with A(uthor) inserted
8 Brand awareness to convey coherent message (4,5)
MAKE SENSE Double definition, the first mildly cryptic.
13 One unlikely to win a race with dimwitted trainer (9)
SLOW COACH Another double definition, really.
15 Stumbling briefly, hooking drive, making bogey (9)
HOBGOBLIN No golf knowledge needed, though it looks like it. This is bogey as in bogeyman. Stumbling briefly gives HOBBLIN(g) and energy the GO for completion.
16 Vile edict is farcical to wit (9)
VIDE LICET More Latin, a contracted version of videre licet “it is pernmitted to see” but very much with the meaning of to wit. Here an anagram (farcical) of VILE EDICT, not all that difficult to spot.
20 Pacific nation’s gold in new version of rugby (5)
NAURU AU (gold) in N(ew) R(ugby) U(nion). It’s not exactly the world’s largest nation.
21 Ghastly covers of Lou Reed, including a single (5)
LURID L(o)U R(ee)D with an inserted 1 (single)
23 Climbing high mountain surrounded by prairie (5)
PLAIN For once, surrounded by doesn’t indicate an insertion, it just means IN, tagged on to a “climbing” ALP, a (relatively) high mountain

57 comments on “Times Cryptic No 26950 Thursday, 1st February 2018 Don’t Panic.”

  1. well that was dumb of me – got through all this in 11 minutes, and somehow managed to have VIDELICIT in there, despite having all the letters in front of me. Oh well, better luck next month.
  2. On the wavelength, as they say…This one seemed easy, with many answers seeming to enter my head as if by telepathic prompting and becoming parsed while writing them in. Still, with FELUCCA (I must’ve have seen that somewhere sometime!) and a few others, I guessed that some folks, and myself on another day, might not find it such a breeze. I had OPEN-AND-SHUT CASE as my second or third one in, but DESSERTSPOONFUL was last… and, yes, that’s really one word in Merriam-Webster. But is SLOWCOACH not really two words (as our blogger has it… as with VIDELICET)? LURID and Lou Reed go together quite well, though it’s a shame that he’s dead already and thus can appear here. I didn’t finish parsing GLUON or CANALETTO until I came back to this after doing the Quickie on my ride home, with time to spare.

    Edited at 2018-02-01 07:47 am (UTC)

    1. With this sense (American ‘slowpoke’, so the dictionary tells me), it needs to be one word.
      1. Thanks. That’s what I figured, but I didn’t bother looking it up. I was just reporting what ran thru my head when I read the blog, rhetorical questions really.
  3. Thank you,Z, particularly for GLUON. I once visited the museum at CERN but left none-the-wiser. All those quarks and neutrinos were a bit beyond me.
    Also I did myself no favours by thinkin that ‘group of farmers’ = NUF!
    65m 07s
  4. Biffed some–1ac from Dior, 24ac from ‘air’, 15d from H and O–then parsed; biffed 4d and 5d (LOI), and never parsed. DNK NFU, so just as well I biffed. Liked SKYLARK.

    Edited at 2018-02-01 05:45 am (UTC)

  5. ‘Tiger Rag’ has nothing to do with Scott Joplin. It’s usually credited to Nick La Rocca, one of the members of the Original Dixieland Jazz (or Jass) Band although other members of the band also contributed when it was first recorded in 1917. The lyric heard on some recordings was added later by Harry DaCosta. I much prefer the sedate and measured syncopations of Scott Joplin’s rags to the frantic shenanigans illustrated on Z8’s link.

    As to the puzzle, well everybody so far must be extremely brainy or I’m exceptionally dim this morning as I struggled to complete this and as 75 minutes approached I finally gave up the struggle and used aids to find GLUON. Other complete unknowns I managed to get from wordplay and checkers were FELUCCA, NAURU (Norro, anyone?), NEPTUNIAN and the DUTCH OVEN.

    Back to music, somebody mentioned Hoagy Carmichael here a few days ago and today we have the title of one of his most famous songs, SKYLARK, at 10ac. Here’s a link to it as performed in 1942 by Harry James and his Orchestra with vocal by Helen Forrest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPZmB_seJNU

    Edited at 2018-02-01 07:14 am (UTC)

      1. I see what you mean! I knew who wrote it it as it was a favourite of my father’s, also I studied and played Scott Joplin extensively at one time so from that angle too I knew it wasn’t by him.
    2. I remember a weightlifter from NAURU in the Olympics a while back.

      Edited at 2018-02-01 09:54 am (UTC)

      1. The people of Nauru are apparently among the most obese on the planet, so presumably the facility with weightlifting comes from the experience of carrying wives over thresholds.
    3. In Australia we all know NAURU now, as government policy for some years has been to hold asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat on NAURU, enforcing the commitment to not let them settle in Australia.

      Maybe a setter will give us MANUS ISLAND in future. A part of PNG, it’s the other place we’ve tried to offload asylum seekers in recent years. A couple of years ago the PNG Supreme Court has ruled that the detention centre there is illegal and it has now closed. Former detainees are, however, still on the island.

      An ongoing sad chapter in our history.

  6. Learn Latin was one of my New Year’s resolutions. Unfortunately this came too early in the year as I have not got around to doing that yet.
  7. A couple of unknowns (the boat and the gluey minuscule thing) and a couple of slow-to-gets (the ‘case’ and the ‘band awareness’). Me, I always use data with a singular verb, making the ugly ‘datum’ redundant. COD to SLOWCOACH, aptly enough.
  8. Got very bogged down in the NW corner, and only got unjammed when I eventually managed to work out it must be ROID at the end of 1ac (fashion is not a strong point with me), at which point everything fell into place except the parsing of GLUON, for which I had to come here (I, too, couldn’t quite work out exactly how glue was involved, for the good reason that apparently it isn’t). Now I come to think of it, my knowledge of sub-atomic particles isn’t that much greater than my awareness of fashion, but it certainly sounded like something sticky, so in it went.
  9. My random placing of Es and Is gave me VEDILICIT. With hindsight I suppose I knew the latin ‘vide’ so might have done better. As with Tim the NW corner caused me most trouble. I spent some time trying to parse IMPINGE thinking that IMP was the evildoer. Finally finished with GLUON then SLING.
    1. Count me in for another one misplacing Es and Is. I thought of VIDE but I also thought of LICIT; without knowing the word/phrase I had to guess one way or another and picked the wrong one. A shame, as I managed all the other unknowns (FELUCCA, CANALETTO, …) from wordplay, although my 71m time puts it well into the hard category for me.

      Thanks, Z, for the parsing.

  10. About 50 mins pre Austrian brecker.
    Pretty tough I thought.
    DNK Felucca. And struggled to parse the long down ones.
    To Munich today. All limbs intact.
    Thanks setter and Z.
  11. 23:35, but like pootle my guess at where to put the Es and Is proved wrong. A dreadful clue in a puzzle full of gratuitous obscurity. I can’t really complain though, because I failed to spot a typo when checking my answers so I’d have been DNF anyway. And perhaps I’m just grumpy because I’m struggling to shake the lurgi I’ve had since Saturday.

    Edited at 2018-02-01 09:05 am (UTC)

  12. I enjoyed this with some clever clues – Petain, Lou Reed, Remus etc. Only got GLUON from an alphabet trawl but fairly clued. COD to ELLINGTON.
  13. Curses! I was so worried about my unknown—but correct—VIDELICET that I managed to enter FALUCCA for the unknown boat, despite knowing exactly how the clue worked. I think I even had it correctly in the grid at one point, before a crisis of confidence had me backing out my guesses in the SE corner.

    So, about 57 minutes but with one letter wrong. Bah. Still, I was stuck for a long time, and in a way that made me think I’d never manage to fill the grid with anything, let alone the right letters. FOI 13a SCI-FI, LOI 5d DESSERTSPOONFUL, where I’m very glad I regularly pass the local NFU office on my way home from work.

    Bit of a change, doing this on the laptop rather than with pen and paper, but I and my cold are in a holiday cottage in sunny Dunster, sans printer. Off to look at the castle in a bit; hopefully it’ll come up in tomorrow’s puzzle…

  14. … held together by GLUONS of course. 48 minutes, finding this tricky with DESSERTSPOONFUL and DUTCH OVEN hard to crack. Managed the latter and eventually the former with a determination to fit the NFU in. Once I tried it in ‘pool’ it all fell into place. I had APENNINES as STANNONIC, meaning ‘of tin’ for quite a while, as I’d biffed MAKE CLEAR for MAKE SENSE. LOI PLAIN, needing the crossers, from penultimate COD ELLINGTON, brilliantly disguised. We had a lunchtime Jazz Club at school but, to the disgust of our hip, bearded music teacher, we preferred to listen to rock. Thank you Z and setter.
  15. As often happens on my blogging day, I make the mistaken assumption that “Stuff I Know” is “Stuff Any Fule Know”. GLUON (if you’ll pardon the expression) sticks in the mind because it does what the name physicists gave it suggests.

    On the left of this CANALETTO is what looks suspiciously like a FELUCCA, but with his unmistakebale obsession for painting the canals of Venice, I submit CANALETTO is one of the short canon of painters that really are in the general repository of knowledge.
    NAURU crops up here often enough (it’s even been in the Quickie) probably because not much else fits N?U?U. I’d have trouble placing it on a map, and it’s a near certain “pointless answer”, but even if you’ve not met it before, the wordplay is kind.
    I have no idea why I submitted both SLOWCOACH and VIDELICET at two words. Consider yourselves lucky that I didn’t go into full automatic and write SLOWCOACH as SLOBALOB.

  16. 29’, but would have been a lot quicker had I not written NEPTUNIAN as 3d – a disadvantage of pen and paper. OPEN AND SHUT CASE nearly LOI. COD APENNINES, thought it might be an obscure piece of armour. Thanks z and setter.
  17. 22.40 working quite hard throughout. I made little impression on the top half but then wrote the SW corner straight in to get going. I parsed GLUON correctly but submitted it with crossed fingers. Good fun.
  18. Twenty-seven minutes for this one, with the southleft quarter being the most resistant. My two NHOs were FELUCCA (which was a lucky coin-flip versus “fulecca”) and VIDELICET. I too was surprised that the latter was one word. No problem with GLUON, which is surely no more obscure on the geek scale than the Battle of Hastings is on the humanities scale.
  19. Around 24 minutes. I eschewed the leader board as I couldn’t decide if GLUON was a thing or a thing I’d made up, but like keriothe I turned out to have a typo elsewhere so all is well.

    I think that’s the third time this week that the northwest corner has been much tougher than the rest of the puzzle so maybe there’s something in this theory that setters do their most fiendish work at the outset.

    1. I, too, remember someone making the suggestion that the sensible way to attack a crossword is in reverse, on exactly these grounds; however, I think a setter may have then pointed out that for all we know, they also write their clues in reverse order. This demands scientific research (done by someone other than me).
  20. Strange potpourri of a puzzle with an eclectic set of ingredients

    Dreadful clue at 16D including anagram of a foreign phrase balanced by superb work at 4D and 19A. Knew the GLUON and have seen FELUCCA before so was able to derive from cryptic.

    Not a puzzle for beginners methinks. Well blogged z8

  21. 49 min 56 secs with one error. Gluen for Gluon. I have regressed this week – and the decline appears to be accelerating!
  23. I got stuck for minutes in the NW, where __U_N just wouldn’t turn into anything that made any sense. I’ve had great trouble with a very similar clue for SLING before, I think; this time, I couldn’t get the idea that it must be SHIED out of my head. Bah to early morning solves!
  24. Left side completed pretty quickly (GLUON a write-in) but little progress on right till after half an hour I resorted to anagram solver for 16dn., as with just the L I couldn’t make anything if it. Then was able to finish in 39 min, though didn’t parse 5dn and 14ac.
  25. Pleasant enough puzzle taking just over 20 mins. I spent a week or so on a felucca some 30 years ago moseying down the Nile from Aswan to Luxor. Annoyed once again that the iPad version of the crossword does not indicate hyphens, which would have made this much easier. Thanks setter and Z

    Edited at 2018-02-01 12:30 pm (UTC)

  26. My APPENINES caused much head-scratching for 5d – nothing made any sense at all. A DNF with a seemingly easily made error of VIDELICIT, which is again inexcusable since it was an anagram. Since I had to refer to helpers on a number of occasions, I don’t think I could reasonably have a claimed a completion anyway! COD DESSERTSPOONFUL once I had got it for befuddling me.
  27. We had this in a Saturday a few weeks ago and at the time it reminded me of a joke in a slim volume my father kept in the downstairs “gents” entitled “Fractured French”. It purported to be a phrasebook of translations of common French terms. “J’y suis j’y reste” was “I’m Swiss and I’ve come to stay”. It seemed funny then…. Except for GLUON I must have been on the wavelength for this. 16.28 P.S. A Washington friend of mine sent me a Spoonerism apropos of recent developments in the Trump/FBI feud: the thick plottens.
    1. How is that a spoonerism? The thought plickens? But a spoonerism is supposed to make two real words. And it’s only the first letters that are interchanged, unlike the French slang mode called “verlan,” in which any syllables of the words are fair game.
  28. 30:14 Pretty straightforward. Thanks to setter and z8.

    Edited at 2018-02-01 01:43 pm (UTC)

  29. That was indeed not a puzzle for beginners. I battled away for 55:45 before finally seeing the parsing for GLUON and SLING, my last 2 in. I’d suspected GLUON from early in the proceedings, but hadn’t been able to parse it as I failed to lift and separate the first 3 words of the clue. Prior to that a series of dead ends kept me with a lot of white squares. I have to confess to Googling VIDELECIT to see if it existed and then finding it was actually VIDELICET, but in the circumstances I’m not going to put on a celice. I had to do this in two sessions as my broadband died again after 23 minutes…. would you believe it has just gone off again…back to on the phone’s wifi hotspot…. hopefully….so the whole thing turned into a bit of a chore. Liked TWAIN. Thanks setter and Z.
  30. I guess I’m not a beginner, but this puzzle wasn’t kind to me either. Took an hour and had to look up my LOI, GLUON, which I didn’t know. Didn’t help that I had MAKE CLEAR for a long time, until DUTCH OVEN appeared. The whole NW corner held me up considerably longer than it should have, due to my being somewhat thick about most of it, and because NEPTUNIAN wasn’t high on my list of synonyms for ‘with sea power’, despite seeing the anagram. Oh well. Regards.
    1. I wouldn’t have thought that would work. I agree with Z’s parsing in his blog. It’s GLU(m) for down=sad with the m cut, then ON.
    2. Gluton is actually spelled gluten, if you’re parsing it the way I think you’re parsing it.
  32. 47:09 so relatively straightforward. I was a very poor maths / science student at school and take much more of an interest in it now. I know or recognise much of the vocab of quantum physics from popular science books and TV programmes (I enjoy the ride, just don’t ask me to explain any of it) so the only hold up with gluon was the actual parsing. I thought 17ac a bit weak – anagrist ending “ship” produces a word ending “ship” even if you did have to throw in an NE. Felucca known from previous puzzles. Didn’t fully parse 24ac, missed the child-friendly bit. Nauru another which for some reason I just happened to know. Biffed 5dn once a few checkers were in. Knew the shorter viz and what it stood for so no problems at 16dn, though helpful to have all the letters there for the spelling. So far, the only obscurity I’ve had to look up is john_dun’s reference to a celice, now I know and leave this blog, as ever, better educated than when I arrived.
  33. 50 minutes, with a number of delightful subtle clues (such as the one for SLING) and what particularly never ceases to fascinate me: the anagrammed words I don’t really know (FELUCCA and VIDELICET) where just the vaguest of feelings for the flavour of a language I have never learned, like Latin, can convince me of the correct order for the unchecked letters. DESSERTSPOONFUL was pretty impressive, too.

    Edited at 2018-02-01 08:48 pm (UTC)

  34. I eventually used electronic aids and decided that out of the few words that were on offer gluon seemed to be the most likely, so I looked it up and sure enough. But how to parse it? I decided that it was glu{g} on, which perhaps isn’t as good as what is presumably correct but is adequate I think. Down in the sense of drinking. I can’t see a mention of this possibility.
      1. Brilliant! If I’d thought of it, I would certainly have put it in: it’s much more amusing.
  35. Botheration again. Another one who cannot spell ‘videlicet’.
    Second day in a row with one error. Time would have been 27m 39s, but that’s irrelevant now.
  36. Gluin (short for gluing …) was my last one in after spending a long time on this puzzle. NHO gluon but sciency words are not my thing. Struggled in the NW. Having rejected fling I couldn’t call to mind sling though of course it went in immediately 1a fell. A bit too hard for me to really enjoy but thanks to setter and blogger

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