Times Cryptic No 27522 – Saturday, 30 November 2019. Playing with Fire.

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A straightforward Saturday puzzle. I didn’t need vinyl to hear the raw voice of Mick Jagger after I cracked 19dn. My clue of the day was 6dn. Well done them in the World Cup! Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle.

Clues are blue, with definitions underlined. (ABC*) means ‘anagram of ABC’. Deletions are in [square brackets].

Across
1 Synthesised obscure alien enzyme (12)
RIBONUCLEASE – (OBSCURE ALIEN*), ‘synthesised’. I was pleased to crack this long anagram without any crossing letters!
9 Sound of Monteverdi, perhaps, not 10CC? (5)
AUDIO – Monteverdi was a Claudio. Drop CL = 10cc = one centilitre.
10 Outlaw out of order? (5,4)
FRIAR TUCK – cryptic definition. He must have left his clerical order when he joined Robin Hood’s band, presumably.
11 Desirable belle’s wild about one soldier (8)
ELIGIBLE – ‘wild’ anagram of (BELLE I GI*).
12 One novel — about six as one’s aim (2,4)
IN VIEW – I (one), NEW (novel; not an anagram indicater this time!) about VI.
13 Test creator admitting to coaching (8)
TUTORING – TURING ‘admits’ TO. I’m not sure I rank the Turing Test as one of the great man’s best ideas, but perhaps it’s wrong to nit-pick 70 years later.
15 A poet penning round on a banker? (6)
ABOARD – A BARD ‘penning’ O. I was surprised that one could ‘board’ a banker, but boats that fished on the Bank of Newfoundland were apparently called ‘bankers’.
17 Beginning putting out day’s sunshade (6)
AWNING – drop D[ay] from Dawning.
18 Period silver, English, in chests under diamonds (4,4)
DARK AGES – AG (silver), E (English), all in ARKS after D[iamonds].
20 Something like cardinal, perhaps, to advance on church (6)
CERISE – CE (church), RISE (advance). My understanding of colours doesn’t extend to saying how cerise compares with cardinal red!
21 Was head returning from conscious state? (8)
DELAWARE – DEL (LED=‘was head’, ‘returning’), AWARE.
24 Bullfighter cuts a great deal, mostly where stock is kept (9)
STOREROOM – TORERO in SOM[e].
25 Author of The Railway Children losing time over another writer (5)
IBSEN – NESBIT loses T for time and turns over.
26 Vastly upset and soundly troubled (12)
STUPENDOUSLY – (UPSET SOUNDLY*), ‘troubled’.

Down
1 Tester’s torn, broken by time (7)
REAGENT – AGE in RENT.
2 Open-plan residence adapted to big modernist (3-7,4)
BED-SITTING ROOM – (TO BIG MODERNIST*), ‘adapted’. Chambers has it hyphenated as ‘bedsitting-room’.
3 One chap gets up, offering place for old woman (5)
NAOMI – I MAN ‘up’, containing O[ld].
4 What can secure clip joint (8)
CUFFLINK – CUFF (clip), JOINT (link). I thought this was some weird cryptic definition until I saw the parsing while writing this blog.
5 Long in the picture (4)
EPIC –answer hidden ‘in’ th(E PIC)ture.
6 Source book lacking over rugby player (9)
SPRINGBOK – SPRING, BO[o]K.
7 Source of tunes Barnum perhaps used with tumblers? (7,7)
MUSICAL GLASSES – MUSICAL (Barnum, perhaps), GLASSES. You play them by running a finger around the rim!
8 Like satay Queen’s left on one side? (6)
SKEWED – SKEW[er]ED. Dare I write ‘ER’ in lower case?
14 Concerned with new climb and gaining fresh energy (9)
RENASCENT – RE, N[ew], ASCENT.
16 A masculine home counties boy gone up north? (8)
DALESMAN – A M[asculine] S.E. LAD, all going ‘up’, followed by N for north. A rather quaint &lit. definition, I thought.
17 Damage following aircraftman’s approach (6)
ACCOST – A/C, COST.
19 NE types roaming here in London? (7)
STEPNEY – (NE TYPES*), ‘roaming’. Perhaps roaming because ‘she gets her kicks in Stepney, not in Knightsbridge any more’?
22 Friend from that time protecting me (5)
AMIGO – AGO ‘protecting’ MI (another spelling of the note ME).
23 Shut up shop (4)
COOP – double definition: chicken coop, or Co-op bookshop.

16 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27522 – Saturday, 30 November 2019. Playing with Fire.”

  1. Not that straightforward for me, but I got there in the end. DNK Barnum the musical, so I had some trouble with the clue, but ‘tumblers’ and checkers meant I didn’t have to. Can’t you also hit the glasses with a spoon? POI STUPENDOUSLY — I spent too much time taking ‘vastly’ as anagrist. LOI COOP. I’m glad to see Bruce’s comment on the Turing test, a pretty uninteresting idea. As opposed to the really big idea of the Turing machine. I liked CUFFLINK & FRIAR TUCK.
    I’d love to know what today’s puzzle is like, but the club site–surely the most error-plagued site I’ve ever dealt with–is not showing me the puzzles. (Yesterday I couldn’t type in anything on a puzzle, since I couldn’t get past the first square, the second letter replacing the first in the same square.)
  2. IBSEN seemed to be a gimme, and wouldn’t have been out of place in the Quick Cryptic. I thought AUDIO was brilliant. Excellent puzzle in general.
    (I think it’s more likely that the Co-op is the British supermarket rather than the Aussie bookshop though.)

    ~ Nila Palin

    1. …if you don’t know who wrote The Railway Children. I guessed its author was Ibotsen; though I now see the T and the O are in the wrong order. Also, she spells her name Ibbotson.
      1. Fair enough. I’m not particularly well-read, but to me The Railway Children is a staple part of British culture.
  3. Had to guess audio, ibsen and amigo. I reckon 9ac is an unsound clue. The unofficial rule seems to be that you can’t de-capitalise a word that requires a capital letter in a clue. Surely then you can’t capitalise a letter that is required to be lower-case? In 9ac all four letters in the statement “10cc = 1cl” MUST be lower-case!
    Didn’t know a banker was a boat. In horse-racing a banker is a certainty, and you should get aboard it, slang for betting on it. Though checking I see no dictionaries include that slang. So misparsed, but nevertheless solved. Nice puzzle, some neat surfaces – the chap who stood up offering his seat to an old lady was my COD, even not liking solutions being random names.
    1. I think 10CC is fine. The general rule is that deceptive ‘upcasing’ in a clue is acceptable, but ‘downcasing’ isn’t. Eg “Major” in a clue can indicate “MAIN” in the solution, but “major” in a clue cannot be “JOHN” in the solution.

      The weird thing is that the band is usually 10cc, not 10CC, so there seems to be no need for the upcasing anyway.

      ~ Nila Palin

      1. Interesting. My interpretation of the rule was different: that deceptive ‘wrong-casing’ was unacceptable, but deceptive ‘opposite-casing’ was acceptable. It seems I was wrong, and you’ve got the correct interpretation.
        BTW it took a while to twig John Major not Major John – I’m not British, so the Anglo-centric clues e.g. Railway Children are more difficult for me.
  4. Used aids for 1ac eventually even though I guessed RIBO- as the likely opening having come across ‘riboflavin’ at an early age on the back of breakfast cereal packets.

    ME for ‘mi’ in 22dn was a bit cheeky and caught me a little unawares. I don’t think we have notes of the tonic-sol-fa cluing each other very often; more usually we’d just get ‘note’.

    I had a query over the &lit definition at 16dn from sort of assuming that to be a DALESMAN one had to be born and bred in an oop-north dale, but Collins informs me that one only has to live there.

    Edited at 2019-12-07 06:06 am (UTC)

  5. I was halfway through this when my daughter appeared walking up the drive for a surprise visit, so my time is a guess of about half an hour. As a Physicist, RIBONUCLEASE was certainly an obscure alien enzyme to me, but they often seem to end with ‘ase’ and I once had my eye bombarded with riboflavin as a treatment, so I could construct it with NAOMI’s help. I didn’t know MONTEVERDI’s first name, but I thought straightaway of centilitre for 10cc and, once I’d half-remembered the words to the ear worm, concentrated and saw AUDIO. COD to FRIAR TUCK for its simplicity. Decent puzzle. Thank you B and setter.
  6. I got all of this eventually apart from the enzyme which was obscure and alien to me. I knew it was an anagram but I failed to put the letters in the right order.
    I too thought of The Rolling Stones when I got to Stepney and have played that track several times since. There’s quite a recent live version online so they obviously think the song is worthwhile.
    17d ACCOST also caused me problems and had not seen MI for ME before.
    David
  7. ….I was drawn to think of obscene Spoonerisms, but enough of that. I had to write out the anagrist for RIBONUCLEASE, had absolutely no idea what was going on with AUDIO, and failed to parse STOREROOM. Thanks to Bruce for the latter pair.

    The CO-OP (the retail arm of the Co-operative Wholesale Society) had a large store in Timperley, where I grew up. My Mum always pronounced it “Corparaytive”.

    FOI FRIAR TUCK
    LOI DELAWARE
    COD STUPENDOUSLY
    TIME 18:10

    1. My FOI was wrong which didn’t help the cause. 9AC had to be Godly – the sacred music of Monteverdi, not Kevin Godley of the group 10cc.
  8. I have a boxed set of Monterverdi’s Vespers on vinyl, so AUDIO didn’t take too long to suss. I knew Ribonucleic acid from RNA, the Di-Oxy version of which is DNA, so it didn’t take long to come up with the enzyme once I had a few checkers. MUSICAL GLASSES took a while before I realised we were looking at the rim tickling version. A straightforward offering otherwise. 26:15. Thanks setter and Bruce.
  9. 42 minutes for me, so on the easier side for a Saturday. Popped in 1d and 1a as my first two, which got me off to a good start, with 21 DELAWARE coming in last. COD 16d DALESMAN.

    Now I should probably get back to today’s offering…

  10. Thanks for the blog. I found this about average and finished in a little under 40 minutes. I’m not sure 18a really works as an across clue though.
  11. 47:49. I got held up at the end by not knowing or failing to recall that Barnum was a musical. I liked Friar Tuck, dark ages and storeroom.

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