Times Cryptic No 27118 Thursday, 16 August 2018 “It’s not bragging if you can back it up.”

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I’m not currently solving at top speed, and this certainly chewed up a good 30 minutes, not helped by offering a (valid?) alternative at 1 across which created a need at 2 down for a physicist I didn’t know instead of the one I did.
An interesting grid, with 2 clues you didn’t need to solve, though being a slave to duty I did anyway. I still have one clue that I can’t quite see, and am inclined to think has a bit missing.
All I’ll say about the vocab is that there’s nothing I didn’t have in my collection. Clues, definitions and SOLUTIONS are all indicated below.

Across

1 Spurn hand from below? (4,2)
PASS UP Two definitions, either of which could have been, and were in my grid for a long time, GIVE UP
5 Start with a set of clubs, maybe, and something for putting on (4,4)
JUMP SUIT A slightly up-market onesie, I suppose. Start as in react in surprise gives JUMP, and in cards, a set of clubs is a SUIT
9 Row of onions, perhaps second chopped (8)
DOMESTIC Police slang for a disturbance in a home. DOMES are onions (or onion-shaped) on, say St Basil’s in Moscow, second is TICK, chop off the K
10 Proof, legally suspect, one left out (6)
GALLEY In printing, a first impression of typeset text. Anagram (suspect) of LEGALLY minus one L(eft)
11 Boxer’s ruin spooks opponent (8)
MARCIANO The original Rocky. Now then, I get ruin for MAR and CIA is given by spooks opponent (ie counterspies). But I can’t find the NO. Unless the spooks are the CIA and so their opponent is CIA NO, but I don’t really feel that. On reflection: I suppose a no is an opposing voter. Will that do?
12 Spectator possibly in front of goal a centre of attraction (6)
MAGNET The Spectator is a weekly MAGazine, once edited by BoJo, and in footie the goal can be referred to as the NET
13 Liverpool player tackled delivering cross? (3-5)
RED-FACED Liverpool FC traditionally play in an all-RED strip, and tackled gives FACED. Red-faced is probably more angry or cross rather than embarrassed these days with the rise of “gammon” as a term for easily angered older white men, typically Brexit supporters.
15 Leek is one token of Welsh nationhood, primarily (4)
TOWN First letters of Token Of Welsh Nationhood. My nomination for CoD
“I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day.”
“I wear it for a memorable honour; for I am Welsh, you know, good countryman”
17 Example of daily goodness (1,3)
I SAY The I, formerly little sister of the Independent, and strictly lower case is a daily paper. So example of daily is i, say.
19 Call on eg stews for protein (8)
COLLAGEN Anagram (stews) of CALL ON EG
20 Approval total? Hardly! (2,4)
NO DICE Or NOD (approval) and ICE (total, as in total with extreme prejudice, kill)
21 Sporting event that’s driving people mad initially cancelled for good (4,4)
ROAD RACE Driving people mad are in the grip of ROAD RAGE. Swap out the G(ood) for initially C(ancelled)
22 Backward lad is going to set about A levels (6)
LLANOS South American plains, very flat. Reverse SON’LL (lad will) around A. Timely clue, as A level results are out today.
23 Fat landlord finally getting rent (8)
DRIPPING As in bread and dripping, for us kids a real treat but for our impoverished parents a cheap option of cooking detritus as a spread. Yum. Last letter of landlorD with ripping for getting rent/torn
24 See you within days accumulate capital (8)
DAMASCUS OK, so here we have two homophone letters, C and U set within D(ays) and AMASS for accumulate
25 Come by on ramble bringing device (6)
GADGET Ramble: GAD (via wander about) and come by: GET

Down

2 Briefly declare a doctor in turn a physicist (8)
AVOGADRO known for his number (the number of atoms or molecules in one mole of a substance, equal to 6.023 × 1023 ) Briefly declare is AVO(w), the place  A D(octo)R inside GO for turn.
3 Fruit-bearer potentially upset girl scoffing sandwiches (4,4)
SEED CORN DEE is today’s random girl, reversed and sandwiched by SCORN for scoffing
4 Fancy a top-up? I’d originally taken scotch (3,4,2)
PUT PAID TO An anagram (fancy) of A TOP UP I’D plus the first letter of Taken
5 Mastercard this is not! (4,2,3,6)
JACK OF ALL TRADES The mot continues as …and master of none. A somewhat whimsical clue you can dig the answer out of.
6 Notice rat crossing river after climbing mountain (7)
PLACARD The climbing mountain is ALP reversed, plus CAD for rat surrounding R(iver)
7 EU slings out objectionable state (8)
UGLINESS Anagram (out) of EU SLINGS, a barely-veiled commentary on the no-deal solution
8 Tinkers with politician’s picture (3,5)
TOY STORY Picture as in film. Tinkers: TOYS, politician: TORY
14 Fancy cutting our tongue! Crazy! (9)
ENGRAVING Our tongue is ENG(lish) and crazy: RAVING
15 Shone on and off in match pack ultimately controlled (8)
TWINKLED Match gives TWIN, last letter of pacK, controlled: LED
16 Force within coil prime source of power (4,4)
WIND FARM F(orce) placed within coil: WIND and prime: ARM. If you prime a weapon, you arm it.
17 Bold time traveller stopping at home with the papers? (8)
INTREPID Traveller is REP (as in travelling salesman), with at home: IN and papers: ID the bits it stops.
18 Port in old heavyweight container, note (8)
ALICANTE Our second boxing superstar is, of course, ALI, container CAN, random note TE
19 Giant moan heard around docks (7)
CYCLOPS CY sounds like Sigh (moan) (no argument from me!) around is C, and docks: LOPS.

59 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27118 Thursday, 16 August 2018 “It’s not bragging if you can back it up.””

  1. I found the parsing generally obtuse.

    Did not parse 24ac DAMASCUS!

    Nor 21ac ROAD RAGE / ROAD RACE

    11ac MARCIANO I took NO to be the opponent (a No as opposed to a YES!)

    FOI 5dn JACK OF ALL TRADES

    LOI 3dn SEED CORN

    COD 8dn TOY STORY with 9ac DOMESTIC up there.

    WOD 11ac MARCIANO

    Edited at 2018-08-16 06:32 am (UTC)

  2. ….because I had to use aids to get LLANOS and CYCLOPS.
    Thank you, Z, for I SAY and DAMASCUS. In the end I biffed DAMASCUS but am not entirely happy at C U for ‘see you’ but I take it that is standard crossword shorthand, yes?
    We’ve had AVOGADRO very recently, I think.
    I liked SEED CORN but my COD was JACK OF ALL TRADES. I thought for a while that the solution would have some relation to ‘priceless’!

    Edited at 2018-08-16 04:19 am (UTC)

    1. I shared your unhappiness with DAMASCUS at 24ac. Shouldn’t the presence of a homophone be indicated somewhere in the clue?
      1. No, because it is textspeak, as in CU 2day .. oldies like us may still want to complain but it is in Collins
        1. Thanks for that enlightenment. Always useful for us oldies to be brought up to date!
  3. 22:46 … a very good workout, and I’m pleased to have found my way through the devious SON,A,’LL reversal and to have more or less remembered AVOGADRO (like MartinP I thought it cropped up very recently but a search doesn’t point to anything this year except a Jumbo).

    A lot of this looks even better looking back after solving it so a tip of the hat to the setter.

    COD to the ingenious DOMESTIC

    Edited at 2018-08-16 06:45 am (UTC)

    1. Your search came up blank, S, because it was in a Crossword That Cannot Be Talked About Yet ..
  4. Ref Martin above, I can’t remember what SWOL stands for but I expect it applies to me too as I used aids eventually to get LLANOS, the SEED bit of ‘seed-corn’ and CYCLOPS. Count me as another with GIVE UP at 1ac until forced to change it when I at last managed to remember AVOGADRO having been prompted by the wordplay. I failed fully to parse ROAD RACE and GADGET as they were amongst my last ones in and I had nearly lost the will to live by then.

    There seem to be a lot of ‘easily-angered older white men’ (and women) on both sides of the BREXIT debate so I’m not sure why the word ‘gammon’ would have been coined for those who voted Leave if that’s all it means, and I assume there’s something more to it.

    Edited at 2018-08-16 05:48 am (UTC)

    1. The impression I have is that there are a lot of easily angered folk around these days, never mind the old or the white … I am blaming social media, LJ excluded, obvs

      Edited at 2018-08-16 07:28 am (UTC)

  5. I forgot that I hadn’t solved 13ac when I submitted, but that was just as well as I couldn’t solve it. I didn’t understand 9ac, although I got the DOMES part. ‘levels’ struck me as a bit of a stretch for LLANOS. But an enjoyable puzzle.
  6. An excellent puzzle, I thought, despite my quibble over DAMASCUS (see above). Some very sneaky word-play — e.g. the SON’LL device at 22ac, which I took an age to work out. Like Vinyl, I too was taken in by the clever piece of deception at 21ac and spent some time trying to replace an “m” with a “g” in ROAD RACE.

    Thanks blogger and setter.

  7. 50 mins with yoghurt, home-made granola, etc.
    Found it a bit chewy.
    I was surprised to see ‘see you’ as I didn’t think the Times did this, unlike the crossword that must not be named (where the very recent Avogadro clue was very similar to todays).
    I spent a while trying to think of names of giants, including the cyclops (Polyphemus) – doh!
    Mostly I liked: ‘time traveller’, Toy Story and COD to the Welsh Leek.
    Thanks setter and Z.
  8. DNF. I’d have spelled him AVAGADRO, but that didn’t fit, so AVE(r)GADRO it was. Made domestic impossible even having considered onion domes.
    Also totally failed to pass ROAD RACE – which for me was clued by “driving people,” so I wondered what all the other words were doing, putting a G in place of an M? And no idea about i as a newspaper.
    On the plus side I saw all the rest, really liked the CIA spooks and was ok with the NO, liked fancy cutting not being lifted & separated, and was happy to get the vaguely-remembered llanos.
    Martin CU is standard text-speak, similar to e.g. IMO and LOL which have both also appeared before.
    Thanks setter for the workout and blogger for the elucidation.
  9. I’m glad to see the SNITCH rating this one as bordering on very hard as I certainly struggled. I did wonder if I’d made a mistake when a trawl of the alphabet gave me nothing for L_A_O_ but eventually I came up with LLANOS. LOI AVOGADRO which also caused me quite some trouble.
  10. I think this was an exemplary puzzle with clever surfaces and parsing. Thank you, setter.
  11. 38 minutes with LOI LLANOS, unparsed but known, not from an A level but O level Geography 1961, when South America was a focus. Handily, you could use a ruler to do a sketch map of Chile to a first approximation. Some good clues including DOMESTIC, JACK OF ALL TRADES and my favourite DAMASCUS. I feel over sixty years younger having seen the textspeak CU for ‘see you’. And back then in 1955, Dad got me up in the middle of the night to listen to the Marciano/Don Cockell fight. I suppose I must have asked. Enjoyed this. Thank you. Z and setter.

    Edited at 2018-08-16 12:28 pm (UTC)

  12. 42.30 with the last 5 or more spent getting out of Avegadro and ave(r), as with isla above. Really should have got the onions earlier. Quite a challenge.

    Edited at 2018-08-16 08:49 am (UTC)

  13. 29:51. I was surprised and pleased to finish this correctly as I didn’t know Llanos and I wasn’t convinced the “Son’ll” would be the “backward lad is going”. Happy with my time having seen the SNITCHOMETER.

    COD: Road Rage. I liked “initially cancelled fo good”. Clever.

  14. Was struggling with SW, 20′ on the rest, dnk LLANOS at all, so dnf in 35′. The physicist was in very quickly…. Thanks z and setter.
  15. Too many rather iffy/loose definitions for my liking, I’m afraid.

    And inappropriate, biased, political observations in a blog should be avoided.

      1. Why are anonymous comments best avoided? Sounds like censorship to me. Is the blogger’s ID anonymous or not?

        Get your head out of the clouds and accept reality.

        1. Since you ask, I dislike anonymous comments because they are cowardly. They are what small people do, who do not even have the courage to stand by their own views.
          All you have to do is give a name.
          1. I’m neither small or cowardly – nor do I accuse others of being so. If “anonymous” is any more anonymous than “z8b8d8k” then just call me “a7b7c7d”.

            Sorry for barging in to your obviously exclusive club.

            1. There’s quite a lot of difference between anonymous and pseudonymous: if you want to, you can check out some of my details (apart from my bankcard and pin number) by clicking on my “name”. The 8s are an accident of LJ registration.

              On reflection, I reject the notion that my comments were “inappropriate, biased, political observations” in the context, exploring current usages relating to red faces.

              However, I would be disappointed if you continued to regard this as an exclusive club. Joining it is easy and free, and in my experience, it’s the most civilised forum I’ve ever come across.

  16. MARCIANO and ALI in the same puzzle. Non pugilists may balk at that, I won’t. But I can do without CU, and I don’t consider TOY STORY a suitable answer for a Times puzzle.

    Got home in 16:28 but was uncomfortable almost throughout.

    FOI PASS UP (luckily, I didn’t see the alternative).

    Having failed to parse AVOGADRO, I’d put in an A instead of the first O (was going to have a beef about AVer – very silly), and that accounts for LOI DOMESTIC. Most couples don’t limit their arguments to the home unfortunately, and I’ve asked people to get out my cab after having a domestic I didn’t want to be part of on numerous occasions.

    Thanks to z8b8d8k for parsing LLANOS and CYCLOPS, both of which I biffed.

    I liked I SAY, and JACK OF ALL TRADES, but COD ROAD RACE.

    1. My younger children were of the right age for Toy Story series, Philip. I was expecting the usual sentimental stuff. I have to say that when Emily abandons Jessie at the dump I was genuinely moved, and the end to that tale was life-affirming in all the right ways. Definitely a cut above every other thing like that I’ve seen.
      1. a search reveals 19 previous mentions of llano, including 2 quick cryptics .. it is a bit of a chestnut hereabouts i would say!
        On edit .. sorry, I might have replied to the wrong post .. as you were 🙂

        Edited at 2018-08-16 03:32 pm (UTC)

    2. Very happy to see an alternative to ET, AI, Brief Encounter or other such chestnuts
      and yes, they were all excellent films; unusual with sequels
      Not everything has to be highbrow or old school (mind you, the original was 2 decades ago)
  17. About 39 mins and agree with those a bit unhappy about Damascus. Loved ‘domestic’ and many other smashing clues; but thought Avogadro was a chemist?
    1. Thought the same thing; but then, back in those days they were all ‘natural philosophers’.
  18. Challenging enough that I found myself thinking it was Friday already. A long time spent at the end, first on CYCLOPS (I spent ages trying to fit in COCYTUS, which I knew was something terrifying from classical literature, though I couldn’t remember exactly what – one of the rivers of Hades, as it turns out), and then LLANOS, which is known to me, but not to the extent that it leapt to mind without a lot of nudging and alphabet trawling.
  19. So that’s why the physicist was familiar (in the puzzle-to-be-named-later) My memory for recent stuff seems very porous lately. I don’t know much about the protein properties of COLLAGEN, having vaguely connected it with botox etc. Had to skip the top left corner for a while after misreading “spurn” as spum, an even more unwanted form of spam perhaps. Thanks for the parse on ROAD RACE and SEED CORN (I spent time looking for a fruit tree). Good one but rather a struggle. 25.04
    1. I have a theory that all possible crossword clues have already been written and published .. and by now, most of them are coming around for the fifth or sixth time, but it doesn’t matter! … because we forget them again in a week
  20. Thought ‘can’t be the same physicist again can it?’ Esp as I couldn’t initially parse it. But it was. The now standard mixture of very easy and very hard which left me with 4 clues that I couldn’t get. Mostly it was not reading the clue carefully enough that was the problem. Spent too long thinking that our tongue was English in 14d – well it is but not in this clue! Again DOMESTIC should have been a write in but took a while to realise that row was the literal. Clever crossword. Thanks to all
  21. Half an hour en route, without LLANOS. no idea about parsing I SAY, didn’t know I was a newspaper and thought the Independent was long deceased.
    Otherwise a really good puzzle. Well untangled, Zab
  22. 30:44 held up mostly by the SW corner, where CYCLOPS took a while to find, I was unsure of NO DICE and LLANOS had to come from the wordplay. I struggled to parse a couple (ROAD RAGE and MAGNET), so well done Z in enlightening us. Apart from the recent puzzle we can’t name, AVOGADRO cam up some time earlier too in a Jumbo I blogged in February. But I liked this a lot – COD to ALICANTE with ALI as the old heavyweight. Thanks Z and setter.
  23. I parsed it as MAR + CIA + NO (Doctor No – the opponent of our favourite spook) But your simpler explanation sounds more likely. This was a DNF for me because I had AVEGADRO for 1d. I was thinking AVER rather than AVOW for “declare”. That misspelling made 9a impossible so I gave up after 45 minutes. Ann

    Edited at 2018-08-16 02:31 pm (UTC)

  24. You have to hand it to the algorithms in this thing. I googled “jump suit” to be sure of what I was talking about, and am currently being deluged on LJ by rather fetching adverts, apparently designed to make Mrs Z suspicious.
    Perhaps I should subscribe before I innocently search for something producing more compromising material.
  25. Late on parade after a rare day of manual labour and by the time I got stuck on CYCLOPS and LLANOS I was too tired to care. I suspect I would need to be bright eyed and bushy tailed to appreciate this one; instead I am grumpy with a sore back.
    The use of grids with ‘freebie’ clues (ie all letters checked) came up in a QC last week. I really don’t like them.
  26. I failed, having to look up 9A and LLANOS. I too had misspelled the scientist as AVEGADRO, so DOMESTIC wasn’t really possible, and LLANOS simply eluded me altogether. “Levels” as the definition never suggested plains to me. So the setter got me there. Regards.
  27. A bit rocky today – biffed “I say” and “Llanos” without getting the wordplay until reading this blog. Also, did not know the proof meaning of “Galley”.
    I used to work in Sierra Leone where “I say” was called out to attract someone’s attention – much like we see Victorian gentlemen doing in historical dramas. So, not used in the sense of “My goodness!”
    Nice puzzle today.
  28. I found this tough and limped home in a little over an hour. A lot of clever stuff with the going particularly heavy in the bottom half.
  29. DNF. I thought ‘levels’ for LLANOS was iffy: they both mean ‘plain’ but are also both geographically specific. Somerset LLANOS?
    No doubt this is just sour grapes because I didn’t get it. Not shaping up to be a good week for me in the solving department.
    1. If you look up “LEVEL” in the dictionary tho it gives the general “flat piece of land” as one of the definitions, so the term is not just used for the “Somerset llanos” 🙂
  31. Another toughie according to the Snitch. Got through it okay, but kept falling asleep as worn out, so no idea of time. Domestic was good.
  32. We’re left almost completely clueless this morning. Is there an editor in the house?

    Edited at 2018-08-16 11:43 pm (UTC)

  33. After 40 minutes I’d solved all except L_A_O_. After 53 minutes I lost the will to live and looked it up. I started the puzzle Thursday morning but had to stop at 35% and resume after golf and lots of wine. Need to sleep now… zzzzzz. Thanks setter and z8.

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