Times Cryptic No 26994 – Saturday, 24 March 2018. Are you sitting comfortably beslippered?

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This was probably middle of the road in difficulty – easier than last week, for sure. I did it on paper in about an hour. Only one obscure answer, with a clue that left the spelling of it a little obscure too! There was also an unfamiliar musician, but that clue made the answer clear.

It was hard to pick a clue of the day, but perhaps I’ll name 27 ac for the unusual reference to Wagner! Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle.

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

Across
1 Cleaner after food eats hot pot, well-cooked (10)
TOOTHPASTE: (EATS HOT POT*).

6 Swell time away from work (4)
TOFF: T for time, OFF being away from work.

9 Coarse show includes blue material ultimately (10)
INDELICATE: INDICATE (show), around {blu}E and {materia}L.

10 German banker rejected note after note (4)
ODER: See “German banker”, biff ODER! Here the notes are DO and RE, both reversed.

12 Brand-new opportunity in training (6-8)
GROUND-BREAKING: BREAK inside GROUNDING.

14 Effervescent-sounding old masseuse? (6)
PHYSIO: PHYSI sounds like “fizzy”, O for old.

15 Swimmer talked of money a great deal (8)
CACHALOT: CACH sounds like “cash”, then A LOT. As I mentioned in the intro, I did question whether the A in the answer might be an E, since CACHE also sounds like “cash”, depending how you pronounce it. In the setter’s defence, “a great deal” really should be A LOT, not just LOT. So, with that sorted, what does the word mean? Turns out it’s another name for a sperm whale.

17 Approves of prisoners getting executed inside (8)
CONDONES: CONS around DONE.

19 Item left inside car (6)
COUPLE: COUPÉ around L for left.

22 Mules are short animals found aboard sailing vessels (6,8)
CARPET SLIPPERS: the sailing vessels are CLIPPERS. Insert AR{e} and PETS. I’m not sure mules and carpet slippers are the same thing. Mules are backless, as I understand it, while carpet slippers need not be. Perhaps the clue deserved a “perhaps”.

24 Thirsty shortly before noon, wanting this? (4)
DRAM: DR{y} is thirsty, AM is before noon.

25 Thinking tumbledown cottage can accommodate one, plus four towards the back (10)
COGITATIVE: (COTTAGE*) including I for “one”, and IV for “four” in separate places.

26 Drink dispenser used regularly in the east (4)
TEAT: odd (“alternate”) letters of ThE eAsT.

27 Enduring endless sport and several operas (10)
WEATHERING: WEA{r} is to sport clothing for example, THE RING is a series of operas by Wagner.

Down
1 Cotton on back of carpet and rug (4)
TWIG: {carpe}T followed by WIG.

2 Young officer picked up wine in French airport (7)
ORDERLY: I’m not sure an orderly has to be young. In any case, the airport is ORLY, and the wine is RED (backwards).

3 Prince mostly rational, taking no dope or weed? (12)
HALLUCINOGEN: HAL is the prince (is there any other?), LUCI{d} is rational, then NO and GEN.

4 C & A situated in surprisingly dear shopping mall (6)
ARCADE: (DEAR*) around C and A.

5 University to put in pilot teaching session (8)
TUTORIAL: the pilot is a TRIAL. Insert U for university, and TO.

7 What should already have been paid in coppers (3,4)
OLD BILL: double definition, the first whimsical.

8 Meet old man carrying gold, say (10)
FOREGATHER: FATHER around OR and EG.

11 Snazzy dresser in a shop left a mess (7,5)
FASHION PLATE: (IN A SHOP LEFT A*).

13 One who is accepted as crazy? (5,5)
SPACE CADET: (ACCEPTED AS*). The whole clue serves as definition, the second part only as word-play.

16 A small house in dry coastal region (8)
SEASHORE: A S{mall} HO{use} in SERE.

18 In north country area, very blissful place (7)
NIRVANA: V for “very” inside N{orth} IRAN A{rea}.

20 Mushrooms raised in a single batch (7)
PORCINI: IN A CROP, all backwards.

21 First of batsmen caught by seven stone player (6)
VIBIST: B{atsmen} inside VII (seven) ST{one}. One who plays the vibraphone, as I now know.

23 Evidence of work done by British composer (4)
BERG: B{ritish} ERG. For any non-scientists, an ERG is a physical measure of a unit of work.
 

31 comments on “Times Cryptic No 26994 – Saturday, 24 March 2018. Are you sitting comfortably beslippered?”

  1. Here is Shanghai this crossword now comes on line at 7.00am. Clocks in China do not alter and there is only one time zone! So Mr. Meldrew gets to the puzzle an hour earlier than usual. With no Australian input anymore, I am often the first responder to Mr. Browndog’s precise, concise and helpful blog on a Saturday.

    FOI 7dn OLD BILL ‘should’ being the operative word!
    LOI 8dn FOREGATHER
    COD 6ac TOFF
    WOD 15ac CACHALOT

    Thanks for fully parsing 27ac WEATHERING (WEAR was a verb not a noun!)

    Time – I can’t remember, but about 30 mins.

    In answer to yesterday’s request from the QC – today’s main puzzle (27,000) is quite suitable for beginners – even though the first read through did not appear so.

    A happy Easter to one and all.

    Edited at 2018-03-31 01:50 am (UTC)

  2. Only CACHALOT and FASHION PLATE unknown. Thanks brnchn for parsing SEASHORE. I biffed it vaguely thinking that ‘dry’ was ‘sore’.
    I am sure that 21d does not refer to Australian cricketers?
  3. Oops, I had a much less imaginative homophone attempt than any thoughts of “cache”, getting only as far as “kashalot” for a shrug/google. It revealed a Soviet submarine, and there was indeed mention of sperm whales before too much of a scroll, which was more than adequate for me at the time.

    I also semi-biffed “physic” for the “old” masseuse before realising it didn’t make sense. One might think the correction should have been fairly seamless, but it ended up a right mess – a career in forgery does not beckon.

    Indeed – happy Easter all.

    1. Ah! That’s why I vaguely knew (a variation) of 15a! The tall ship Kaskelot often moors in Bristol, and on researching, yes, that would be the Danish variation of CACHALOT…
  4. Lost a bunch of time by not noticing that I’d typed in COGNTATIVE, making VIBIST even more difficult. (How could you not notice? you may ask; don’t.) Took some time to remember PHYSIO, too, although it shouldn’t have, given the wordplay. CACHALOT somehow rang a (tiny) bell, although I couldn’t have said what it meant.
  5. 34 minutes.

    VIBIST was a write-in this time, only because it came up once before and foxed me. Anyone familiar with ‘The Intro and the Outro’ by Bonzo Dog (Doo-Dah) Band will remember that it featured ‘A-dolf Hitler on vibes’.

    Never heard of FASHION PLATE.

  6. …am I. Still, 23 minutes so more NIRVANA than an Easter Saturday descent into hell. DNK FASHION PLATE. Nobody’s ever said it to me, despite my snazzy 22 across. I’ve heard SPACE CADET somewhere before but not in my life. I agonised between CACHALOT and CACHELOT and in the end went with the former as it fitted the cryptic better while thinking that it didn’t look right. I made COD CARPET SLIPPERS before finding out here that mules are backless. I usually batter the backs down in time anyway, so I’m sticking with it. On the easier side. Thank you B and setter.
  7. An hour ten here, apparently, though in my cloudy-headedness today I can’t remember too much of last week. (I have, of course, gone down with a cold that started virtually at the same hour I began this long weekend of freedom from work. Sigh.)

    FOI 1a TOOTHPASTE, LOI 3d HALLUCINOGEN for no great reason I can see now; I’m even starting to think immediately of “Hal” for “prince”, which is one I always used to miss. It helped that my carpet slippers are, in fact, mules, though I’d agree that’s a coincidence rather than a rule.

    WOD 13d SPACE CADET; I do love this modern update of “mooncalf”… Thanks to setter and Bruce.

  8. SPACE CADET qualifies as a proper &lit, I believe.
    Like several commentators here, I’ve never heard of FASHION PLATE, so thank you, setter, for giving us the anagrammatised letters to work it out.

    Agree that ‘mules’ is a dodgy definition of CARPET SLIPPERS: and I don’t think it could have been fixed with the simple addition of a ‘perhaps’: doesn’t the ‘perhaps’ have to apply to a *subset* of the superordinate term (so, “spaniel perhaps” = DOG, and “margarine perhaps” = SPREAD but “engineer perhaps” doesn’t define BRUNEL).

    [On edit] OK, OK – cancel that. Looking back at yesterday’s cryptic (Fri 30 March) I see a clue with “Spaniard perhaps” used to define DIEGO, so I am talking a whole load of old hogwash about subsets and superordinate terms!

    Anyway, 43 mins for this. Some good chewy bits in an enjoyable puzzle.

    Thanks, brnchn, for the clear explication.

    Edited at 2018-03-31 10:07 am (UTC)

    1. As I read it the words ‘one who is’ play no part in the wordplay so I would call this semi-&Lit rather than the full-fat variety.
      1. Ah, yes. I see. Good point. Whenever I see the trailing question mark on a clue I automatically look for an &lit but then I’m never quite sure about the precise specification for it to qualify.
    2. Not relevant to this puzzle, but the reason Diego is a “Spaniard perhaps” is presumably that he might also be Argentinian perhaps.
      1. OK – yes. So maybe my post about subsets and superordinates stands. When I was a kid my old dad often used to declare, sagely, that “all admirals are sailors, but not all sailors are admirals” (though the relevance of this gnomic utterance was usually lost on me at the time). The ‘Diego’ and ‘mules’ cases are different in kind: it’s possible — probable, indeed — that some Diegos are Spanish and some Spaniards are Diegos, just as some mules are probably carpet slippers and some carpet slippers are probably mules. There’s no clear propositional logic, here: just what crossword setters can get away with!

        Edited at 2018-04-01 10:18 am (UTC)

  9. 53:18 felt on the slow side. Unfortunately it took a while to stop thinking thing, thingummy, thingamajig for item at 19ac and for some reason I couldn’t remember the word porcini at 20dn. Other than that cachalot and fashion plate seemed vaguely familiar but were entered with fingers crossed.
  10. 34 min 22 secs with one letter wrong. I went for Cachelot instead of Cachalot. So obviously I didn’t know Cachalot. I also didn’t know fashion plate, sere and vibist.

    Happy Easter to all TFTTers.

  11. I first got familiar with the term sometime in the 80s when it was Valley Girl-speak for a complete ditz or airhead, rather than someone crazy. But I have a feeling it was around long before that. FASHION PLATE may be another Americanism. My late mother-in-law used it as a put-down for anyone my mother would have called “mutton dressed as lamb”. I think of mules as female footwear, often with heels, while anyone can wear carpet slippers. I don’t remember any hold-ups with this one. 19.34

    P.S. There had been some speculation that today’s number 27000 might herald something special but I gather that our NZ correspondent Martin received word on the Club Forum from David Parfitt that the next event to be marked will be the 90th anniversary of the cryptic. Having said that, yesterday’s offering was memorable.

    Edited at 2018-03-31 11:55 am (UTC)

    1. The term is familiar in the Antipodes too, although I suspect it’s (a) less derogatory here and (b) somewhat dated.
  12. I got most of this including the unknown Fashion Plate. I was defeated by Cachalot (I had noted Cashalot) but had never heard of this fish.
    Toothpaste refused to come out of the tube so I had a couple in the NW unsolved.
    At least I was not solving on a train going to see Preston North End lose- there was a break for internationals. The losing continued yesterday! David
  13. I raced through this in just over 15 minutes, trusting to the wordplay for CACHALOT, which I looked up afterwards. 27a my LOI after I got all the checkers once I remembered SERE for 16d from a recent Mephisto. WEATHERING was my favourite too. Thanks B and setter.
  14. I totally b*ggered this one up with RED BILL and GRAF(a German count), and for good measure, PHYSIC. It took 74:19 to make that mess too. I shall now slink off into obscurity here in rural Mull. Thanks setter and Bruce.
  15. 11:08. I went with CACHALOT in the end but CACHELOT fits the wordplay equally well. Not a great clue IMO.
    1. Hmm. Would you not accept the blogger’s point that

      “in the setter’s defence, ‘a great deal’ really should be A LOT, not just LOT”?

      Edited at 2018-04-01 10:25 am (UTC)

      1. Short answer: no.
        You can read the wordplay in two ways:
        1. [homophone of {word meaning ‘money’}], [synonym for ‘a great deal’]. Or [sounds like ‘cash’], [A LOT]
        2. [homophone of {word meaning ‘money’, synonym for ‘a great deal’}]. Or [sounds like ‘cash a lot’].
        1 points unambiguously to CACHALOT but 2 is a perfectly valid interpretation of the wordplay and can give either CACHALOT or CACHELOT, which I for one would pronounce identically (with the middle vowel a schwa in both cases).
        1. Hi Keriothe – I agree with all you say. But, on balance of probability, I think we could assume the setter didn’t mean realise he’d introduced an ambiguity and intended the clue to be read as per option 1.
          1. Well yes, because that’s how you spell it! It’s only ambiguous to those of us who don’t know how to.
            1. That’s exactly the point. Did the setter fail to see a technical ambiguity in a clue that otherwise would have specied how to spell the answer (even Homer nods), or did he/she unkindly give us a sounds-like clue for a very obscure word of uncertain derivation and spelling?
              1. Oh right, I see your point. I would assume it’s the former. It’s a pretty subtle ambiguity so would I think be very hard indeed to spot if you’re familiar with the word. It’s remarkable to me that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.
  16. I solve the paper version which appears in Hong Kong months later, so I could never compete with horryd up the road in Shanghai who tackles the electronic version.
    It takes me a bit less than an hour usually, but it’s normally in several goes because of interruptions. These are helpful because my mind is refreshed, in the sense of a computer screen.
    I rarely DNF these days, but I am often too busy to start, and I don’t always post here when I finish.
    This one was really excellent, so I had to post to say thanks to setter. There were numerous DNKs: CACHALOT, ODER, VIBIST and FASHION PLATE, but they were all solvable nonetheless because of the clarity of the clues. Although now I read about the “CACHELOT” victims I realize I was lucky this time.
    Thanks to blogger et Hal

    Edited at 2018-06-13 03:17 pm (UTC)

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