Times Cryptic No 27166 Thursday, 11 October 2018 I is Adam

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I panicked a bit at the beginning of this one, not settling to proper solving for some considerable time, and coming home in 26 minutes, well down the early birds list. If I hadn’t left 9 across unparsed when pressing submit, I might rather more authentically claim I was being diligent in solving properly and not just guessing, but I was relieved when no pink squares showed up. I’ll avoid the risk of being seen as either condescending or pathetic by not saying whether this is hard or easy, but I will venture that this is a decent crossword, with the more arcane words fairly and helpfully clued, though I suppose if you’re really trying you could fluff the anagram at 10.
My conclusions are submitted with SOLUTIONS clues and definitions.

[(click to open)]

ACROSS
1 Platform favourite entertaining everyone (6)
PALLET It’s favourite PET enclosing everyone ALL. And yes, a pallet is a platform, so says Chambers (and if you think about it). Takes me right back to a (long forgotten) schoolboy piece I wrote about palletisation of bricks, when still relatively innovatory, with pictures culled from who knows where, of which I was particularly proud
5 Slur that brings two characters together (8)
LIGATURE Just about a double definition, a mark in music joining two notes  ͡   or two letters conflated to form one Œ – this one’s capital ligature OE.
9 Inadequate sign at entrance to dull entertainment zone (8) 
CLUBLAND The best I can do for this is CLUe as inadequate sign and BLAND for dull, with “at entrance to” as a verbose position indicator.
10 First of Tia Maria’s done for a divine drink! (6)
AMRITA So not nectar, that’s for the Olympian gods, but the Hindu version. Anagram (done) of T(ia) MARIA.
11 Don‘s conjecture (6)
ASSUME Double definition, don as in put clothes on.
12 Sort to confront Roman maybe (8)
TYPEFACE As exemplified by our own dear Times New Roman. TYPE from sort and FACE from confront
14 Childminder sent for pater when in difficulty (6-6)
FOSTER-PARENT Anagram (in difficulty) of SENT FOR PATER
17 Playing field has offensive smell coming back again (12)
RECRUDESCENT The REC is a playing ground, primarily where Bath RFC plays, (on edit, thanks Brnchn C) RUDE is offensive (see anon yesterday describing Pip) and SCENT smell.
20 Very elaborate punishments — a joke (8)
FINESPUN punishments: FINES, joke: PUN. Chambers defines as “finely spun out; over-subtle”. Ça va.
22 An expression of emotion when that lady’s in red (6)
CHERRY The expression of emotion is CRY, and that lady HER. In tells you where to put her.
23 Girl mostly difficult for boy to catch (6)
SHARON Our random name for today. Mostly difficult is HAR(d) “caught” by SON for boy.
25 Harmful substance to be limited? Europe’s prime task (8)
EMISSION Much research goes on into the limiting of noxious gases and such from our industries, lifestyles and cows. Europe’s prime is E, and task MISSION. A timely clue given the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
26 Riding attire splits audibly (8)
BREECHES Sounds very like the split version spelt with an A. US solvers might prefer  BRITCHES, but they don’t fit here.
27 Advanced travel needing gas (4,2)
GONE ON Travel GO and the gas NEON.
DOWN
2 Ace endowed with divine favour better than the rest (6)
ABLEST Ace is abbreviated to A, and BLEST, a variant on blessed, is tacked on.
3 Workers in party beneficial to Anglican church (6,5)
LABOUR FORCE The (political) party is LABOUR, beneficial to give FOR and the Anglican Church is the C (of) E
4 Bridged river to the north, having installed some lines? (9)
TRAVERSED The river you want is the DART, navigable as far as Totnes. In Devon, it goes roughly north-west. In the grid it goes north (it’s reversed) and the required lines to install are VERSE
5 Deficient character? Could include a daughter! (7)
LADETTE &lit, assuming a rather dismissive view of the genre. Deficient character gives you LETTER with that R dropped. A D(aughter) is included.
6 Express horror about king getting total possession (5)
GRASP Express horror GASP surrounds R for king
7 A “mini-mountain” of rubbish piled up (3)
TOR Further up the Dart from Totnes, loads of these on the Moor, Hey Tor being perhaps the most impressive, if indeed only a miniature mountain. Rubbish is ROT, which is “piled up” or reversed
8 Reluctant to talk when name is brought up in rift (8)
RETICENT I did try  taciturn, but it’s CITE for name reverses (brought up) in RENT for rift.
13 One exemplifies it formally (5,6)
FIRST PERSON A couple of days ago we had “formally, I triumphed in speech” to a background of protests about one and won not (necessarily) sounding alike. As a punishment, the setters’ union has us make do with a cryptic definition.
15 Priest initially getting to a particular clerical activity (9)
PREACHING The initial letter of Priest getting to: REACHING
16 Fairy nothing other than heartless, a mischievous little thing (8)
PERISHER PERI is the fairy, and SHEER can mean “nothing other than”, from which to excise the heart, or middle letter.
18 Perfect and totally dull — one bound for university! (7)
SINLESS A bit of a bear trap this. The way the clue works is that you take SUNLESS for totally dull, and bind (so to speak) I (one) in in place of U(niversity).
19 A funny person finishing early with extremely operatic piece? (6)
ARIOSO A funny person: RIOT without its last letter plus extremely: SO. An arioso is halfway between an aria and a recitative.
21 Quiet island in critically difficult time (5)
PINCH P is quiet (more music) and INCH an island, usually either Scots or Irish.
24 Whiskey or port? (3)
RYE What the good ol’ boys were drinking. Rye is one of the historic Cinque ports, now about two miles inland

56 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27166 Thursday, 11 October 2018 I is Adam”

  2. Pretty straightforward, although I didn’t know AMRITA, but then one didn’t really need to. 9ac took me a while, but I finally came up with the same parsing as Z’s. PERISHER parsed post submission. The same ligature mark (how did you produce it, Z?) is used to join two symbols like [gb] to indicate co-articulation, as in some African languages, where the two sounds are produced at the same time.
    1. I got the ͡ from the incredibly extensive character map where it is marked as a “combining double inverted breve”. It’s purpose appears to be precisely to join two symbols together, as for example g͡b and it gave me no end of trouble getting the spacing right to mimic the musical symbol.

      Edited at 2018-10-11 05:43 am (UTC)

  3. The unknown foreign word clued as an anagram got me – 50/50 chance and I wrongly guessed AMRATI. Otherwise an average 20 minutes for all but ABLEST and CLUBLAND, and a few more minutes to see those.
    Thank-you setter and restrained and modest blogger.
  5. My LOI was PERISHER, which I saw a lot earlier than I finally put it in; I am not going to be so rash as to claim that I’d never seen the word defined that way. Right before that was CLUBLAND, and before that SINLESS—a bit reminiscent of the clue for DOLEFUL yesterday, but with the not-strictly-necessary-for-the-wordplay “bound” throwing another curve.
  7. 50 minutes with many a problem along the way.

    Never heard of LIGATURE other than in its medical context. CLUBLAND went unparsed as ‘entrance to dull’ gave me the D leaving CLUBLAN unaccountably clued by ‘Inadequate sign’. For once I jumped the right way on an OFWCAA clue (obscure foreign word clued as anagram) – AMRITA, but the answer rang the very faintest of bells for some reason. DK RECRUDESCENT but arrived there via wordplay.

    Re the blog I’ve never seen Haytor spelt ‘Hey Tor’ nor as two separate words, but Wiki says they are alternatives. My only interest in the place is that I have a photo of myself standing at the top of it aged about 12, which would seem very unlikely to me now if I didn’t have the evidence. I can only conclude there was a back way to the summit that was undemanding as a climb.

    1. Did you call it a slur when studying music? I think that’s what I was told as a reluctant and inept learner of the violin.
    2. Mrs Z and I insanely did Haytor/Hey Tor with our 6 week old daughter in the January snow. Needless to say, there are helpful metal rods as steps/handrails banged into the rock on the “car park” side, making it infinitely easier than the alarming and tricky rock climb on the other side.
      I also once nearly mislaid a group of boys at the Tor when the Dartmoor fog descended, and I was unforgivably unprepared without compass, whistle and map. We lost the path, and ended up stumbling across the road some 800 yards from the car park.
  9. Except I didn’t predict RIO(t) and DNF’d on Arioso after 40 mins – with yoghurt, granola, etc.
    I had just got over my MER at ‘inadequate’ as a final letter removal indicator, when we got ‘deficient’ too.
    Thanks setter and Z.

    The only old joke that came to mind was prompted by pinch/sinless. A vicar has his bike pinched and decides to use his next sermon to spot the perpetrator. He uses the 10 commandments as his text and looks to see who in the congregation looks guilty when he gets to ‘Thou shalt not steal’.
    Did it work? I hear you ask.
    Sort of – when he got to ‘Adultery’ he remembered where he had left his bike.

  10. I couldn’t manage FINESPUN though with hindsight I probably should have done so. I wondered if LADETTE was inspired by Zoe Ball who was well known as one in the 90s but has recently matured into the Radio 2 breakfast presenter. DNK AMRITA though I thought it sounded like an Indian whisky, which I have since found is called Amrut. Very good by all accounts, though I’m yet to try it.
  11. ….and I wasn’t SINLESS, hence a DNF. I shall keep the time to myself.

    FOI PALLET

    Thanks to Z for parsing my biffs : AMRITA and ARIOSO.

    LOI the incorrect “sunless”.

    COD LADETTE

  12. Not too hard except i didn’t really understand the slur.. z’s explanation rings a faint bell but I’m in no way musical .. and i thought CLUBLAND rather a clunky clue.
    And “finespun” as a synonym for “very elaborate” was new to me.
  13. DNF in my hour. Tried to struggle on with the NW corner, but threw in the towel. Just didn’t have enough time left after a lot of tooth-pulling, like the unknown AMRITA, ARIOSO, RECRUDESCENT, FINESPUN and CLUBLAND. Just made me feel out of my depth this morning!
  14. Found this tough, finishing in 48 minutes. LIGATURE unknown in both senses, and biffed in from the unclued medical meaning as LOI. DNK ARIOSO either but that was capable of construction. Eventually. AMRITA vaguely known and crossers were helpful. COD to RECRUDESCENT. Liked TYPEFACE and FIRST PERSON too. The rec is at Carr Lane, Southport where Farnborough Road Primary School played their football matches in the fifties, Z. You mean there’s another one? Thank you both to you and setter.
  15. Just ahead of Z at 26.15.

    When RECRUDESCENT and AMRITA fell quickly, I got confident of a good time. Alas, it wasn’t to be as then got held up with the likes of CLUBLAND.

    As a foster carer (we aren’t “parents” any more) I do take slight offence at being called a childminder. I suppose in the strict sense we “mind” “children” but it just doesn’t feel right to me. A childminder would look after them for a couple of hours after school every now and then – we do everything for them 24/7 as long as they are with us.

    Edited at 2018-10-11 08:43 am (UTC)

    1. Well said Mike. My wife and I fostered teenagers for 20 years and “child minder” doesn’t begin to cut it

      I used to represent carers in our area at meetings with councillors, officers, etc. I remember one Christmas a councillor asking me how I was looking forward to a Christmas break away from the children. And he was responsible for our funding!!

      1. Wow.

        I would challenge anyone to justify looking after 3 girls (plus our own daughter) aged 3,5 and 8 for nearly a year, attending LAC reviews, school reviews, parents’ evenings, 3 separate school runs a day, making sure they still got to contact with mum and dad (separate contact – sometimes 4 times a week) as “child minding”.

        They left us in April, we’ve only just recovered.

        #rantover

        Edited at 2018-10-11 09:13 am (UTC)

        1. I’m impressed, and applaud your commintment. Still, I suppose the setter wasn’t to know that… technically, every parent is a childminder

          Edited at 2018-10-11 02:47 pm (UTC)

      2. How wonderful that you and your wife were able to render such a service to society. I had an aunt (quite recently deceased) who fostered several children over the years and eventually adopted one of them.
    2. I thought childminder for FOSTER PARENT was a bit questionable but I suppose in crosswordland definitions can be played with so a parent is in some sense a “childminder”, foster or otherwise. FWIW, I admire anyone who is willing to take someone into their care as you do.
      1. I would concur that childminding and foster caring are different. As in bogglingly so. But they are not unrelated, and perhaps the tenuous cryptic link we would not have quibbled about in a less contentious context is as acceptable as anything similar.

        (Takes cover.)

  16. Completed in 24′ but not submitted, because of AMRATI/AMRITA, which is just as well as I hadn’t got CHERRY. I’d be interested to know if crosswords are ‘road-tested’, as any small group could have foreseen the (often complained about) dilemma.
  17. Let’s say this wasn’t difficult and leave it at that

    Luckily knew AMRITA but like others I do object to foreign words clues as anagrams. Setter, if you cant think of a better clue construction choose a different word – aerate comes immediately to mind.

  18. All but one correct in 21:46. I couldn’t see Clubland – so bunged in flabbard.

    COD Recrudescent.

    1. Flabbard deserves to be a word. I see it meaning a fat dullard: “He’s a right flabbard”.
  19. 25:27. Hard work, this, but mostly fair.
    I thought the anagram for the obscure word was OK when I put it in but on reflection there’s no obvious reason not to put in AMRATI.
    ‘Bound’ in 18ac does nothing other than confuse matters which is not really cricket IMO. ‘At entrance to’ in 9ac does something similar.
    So a bit clunky in places but a good challenge nonetheless.
    1. It may seem wordy, and certainly is phrased that way also for the sake of the wordplay, but you need something to indicate that only the first letter of “dull” is wanted, and “the entrance to” fulfills that function well enough.
      BTW, I wonder what “(UTC)” means, when I access this comment all by itself on the page. “Oct. 11th, 2018 (UTC).”

      Edited at 2018-10-11 10:34 pm (UTC)

      1. Co-ordinated Universal Time. Fun fact: the abbreviation UTC was chosen as a compromise, being neither the English suggestion CUT nor the French preference TUC (Temps Universel Coordonné)!
  20. Twenty-eight minutes for this one. I didn’t know I knew AMRITA, but I must have known it because I was sure it wasn’t ‘amrati’ – has it cropped up here before? ARIOSO was an NHO, and it took me a while to get the parsing. Otherwise plain sailing. Very enjoyable puzzle – thanks to the setter and to our blogger.
  21. I think my verdict has to be “curate’s egg”: I tossed a coin for the AMRITA/AMRATI answer, and got it right, though purely through blind luck. I won’t criticise the use of “obscure” words, especially foreign ones, just because I don’t know them (as we all know, a word is obscure if you don’t happen to know it, entirely fair if you do; see also the widely accepted definition of “general” knowledge), but from the setter’s POV, I think it’s only fair that the wordplay used should give a solver better than 50% confidence that they’ve worked out the required unknown.

    Otherwise held up much more legitimately by CLUBLAND (anybody else think a PLYBOARD might be an inadequate sign?), and ARIOSO, which is a perfect example of a word which I didn’t think I knew, but was confident I’d correctly identified from the clue once I came up with it.

    1. Yep, I flirted with PLYBOARD. It would though have made more than an adequate sign for most of the clubs I’ve been forced to enter, never having gone to one voluntarily.
  22. Glad to finish even if in 46’40. Some difficult answers lying more or less in plain sight. A pity about the 14 spin-off – a technically OK clue with more than one insensitive suggestion to it – though sending for pater when in difficulty is doubly or trebly weird.
  23. There’s a coffee shop called Cafe Amrita on the Upper West Side but there’s nothing particularly divine (or even Indian) about its drinks. You say BREECHES and I say jodhpurs. Actually I would say “britches” to myself if reading one of Georgette Heyer’s descriptions of gent’s attire, and Trollope has a character called Neefit who makes the things and makes a big nuisance of himself. I took many minutes to get started with this one. I think of a PERISHER as a right little brat, not merely mischievous. There was one on the elevator the other day who punched all the buttons causing it to stop at every floor, making several people late for work/school on a wet Monday. 25.14

    Edited at 2018-10-11 11:00 am (UTC)

  24. 70 minutes for this, with about the last 10 spent on the guessed LIGATURE which I’d never heard of in anything other than a medical context. Managed to get the vowels in the right order for the two other unknowns ARIOSO and AMRITA.

    Worth doing for the hardly SINLESS LADETTE (probably called SHARON) alone.

    Thanks to setter and blogger

  25. Another toughie for me, taking 53:34 to cross the line. I started off quickly enough with PALLET and TOR, but then ground to a halt. After 15 minutes I had about another half dozen entries, and had to Save for Later in order to go to the Doc’s for my annual BP/Bloods check. Sure enough my systolic had risen, what with the unexpectedly stubborn puzzle and the rush to get to the surgery along with my usual “white coat syndrome.” It didn’t get any easier on my return, but I gradually dragged out the parsings, constructing the unknown FINESPUN and RECRUDESCENT from wordplay, and guessing the right way on AMRITA. I knew what the definition was getting at for 5a, but only knew slur as a musical tie and not the technical definition required, for which I needed the crossers. I spent some time flirting with KEYBOARD as an entertainment zone until I saw BLAND for dull. Some mental convolutions required to extract the definitions from the clues today, without a doubt! Thanks setter and Z.

    Edited at 2018-10-11 01:52 pm (UTC)

  26. Great blog, thanks. I somehow finished in just under an hour (ie just before I gave up) with no errors. I couldn’t parse 5a, 5d, 18d or 19d, where I assumed “extremely operatic” must refer to the final O.

    I very nearly put LINESPUN for 20a before the correct answer jumped out.

  27. Sending for pâté OTOH, and chocolate, what better way to alleviate the pressures of fostering.

    40 minutes for this tough nut. Couple of annoying things as blogged, but usual good quality Times fare. Some good ones elsewhere too, today, so not a bad day to have off.

  28. …2 hours I reckon. Lost count after the first 40 minutes. There were many long periods of staring even just eight answers in. Guessed AMRITA, thought something BOARD for 9a, though the scales eventually fell. ABLEST/ASSUME took a while. DNK RECRUDESCENT but had most of the checkers for it to appear correct. FINESPUN – thought of PUN but took ages to think of FINES. PINCH/BREECHES also took a while. Managed to parse SINLESS – first time I think I’ve managed to spot one of those substitutions early. I wouldn’t clue A RIO(T) as ‘A funny person’ – surely ‘really funny’ rather than just ‘funny’?
  30. (Apologies for my late arrival here.)
    Is no-one using this page to complain about the errant indefinite articles? see 16d ‘a mischievous little thing’=PERISHER, 10a ‘a divine drink’ = AMRITA and 20a ‘a joke’=PUN
    Maybe things have moved on, and now it’s anagrammatized obscure words and homophones that cause the blood to boil.
  31. 43:18, a bit chewy this one. Amrita and arioso both unknown but amrati didn’t feel right and once I saw riot I was pretty confident about arioso. A few other tricky ones too with clubland, recrudescent and finespun all taking their time.
  32. Failed for the third time this week- arioso would never ever have revealed itself and I couldn’t see 2d and 9a
    One other observation following yesterday’s uncalled for insult- I would be interested to know for how long people have been attempting the times crossword- I get the impression it may be many many years in some cases…

  33. 57 mins, which is good for me, but put in AMRATI at 10.ac. So one wrong, as yesterday when I wrote in INBRO DIG
    .

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