Times Cryptic No 27648 – Saturday, 25 April 2020. Happiness is a crossword.

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This was a delightful exercise. The most notable feature was how often I saw a probable answer, but hesitated to write it in because I couldn’t see why … in most cases to eventually smile in delight when the penny dropped. The clues covered a lot of ground and many were original in construction. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did. My time wasn’t fast, but it was enjoyably spent. Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle.

Notes for newcomers: The Times offers prizes for Saturday Cryptic Crosswords. This blog is posted a week later, after the competition closes. So, please don’t comment here on the current Saturday Cryptic.

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

Across
1 Grounds for learning about member joining our side (6)
CAMPUS – CA (about), MP (member), US (our side).
5 Girl meeting Bond’s controller (8)
JOYSTICK – JOY | STICK. No, nothing to do with James of that name.
9 Quiet Spanish girl penning chapter in French viewing aid (5-3)
PINCE-NEZ – P (quiet), INEZ (Spanish girl) ‘penning’ C (chapter) and EN (in, in French) to give PIN(CEN)EZ.
10 Down, maybe, “early”? (6)
COUNTY – Down is the Irish county, of course. So, the first two words of the clue are a definition by example. The third word is a pun about the relative aristocratic qualities of counts (‘count-y’) and earls (‘earl-y’). I liked it!
11 Briefs a few of our best friends? (6)
BOXERS – a jocular double definition, referring to dogs as man’s best friends.
12 Gain somehow with toil? It provides no relief (8)
INTAGLIO – anagram (‘somehow’: GAIN TOIL*). Intaglio is sunken, as opposed to raised or in relief.
14 Nonstop events, including jolly, are enough for everyone (5-2-5)
MERRY-GO-ROUND – MERRY (jolly), GO ROUND (enough for all).
17 Astounding origami display? Or preparation for it? (12)
BLINDFOLDING – hmm. I’m not sure about this one. If ‘blind’ can mean ‘astounding’, then this is saying ‘amazing display; amazing that a blind person could make it’. That would all make sense, except that I can’t find ASTOUNDING=BLIND in the usual dictionaries. However, a BLINDER is an outstanding performance, and BLIND DRUNK is absolutely drunk. Perhaps that is near enough?
20 Miss chance? (4,4)
LADY LUCK – very cute cryptic definition. Let’s hear it from the chairman of the board: Luck, be a lady tonight!
22 Series from Dvorak centenary retrospective that runs in Germany (6)
NECKAR – ‘retrospective’ answer, hidden in ‘Dvorak centenary’. It’s a German river.
23 Part of engine’s tender carrying dope (3,3)
BIG END – BID carrying GEN.
25 Transformation of brand complete (8)
MAKEOVER – MAKE (brand), OVER (complete).
26 Crimson wrapping paper is essential (8)
REQUIRED – QUIRE of paper in RED.
27 Absentee who’d booked fare, returning without (2-4)
NO-SHOW – NOSH, W/O ‘returning’.

Down
2 I shift endlessly after seeing that writer (6)
ASIMOV – I MOV[e] after AS (seeing that).
3 I must stop little brother getting his regular reward? (6,5)
POCKET MONEY – ONE (I) ‘stopping’ POCKET (little) + MY (brother! as an exclamation).
4 Singular fairness transformed face (4,5)
SANS SERIF – anagram (‘transformed’: S FAIRNESS*), where S is for ‘singular’. The definition is of a type face.
5 Bird circling tailless female, soaring with ostentation (7)
JAZZILY – JAY ‘circling’ LIZZ[Y], ‘soaring’ (i.e. backwards, in this down clue).
6 Sail made from unknown German’s two pairs of braces (5)
YACHT – Y is the unknown. ‘Acht’ is German for 8 = 2 (two) x 2 (pairs) x 2 (braces)!
7 Tense mostly that’s familiar to students of Greek (3)
TAU – TAU[t] = tense. My first thought was PAS[t], as in ‘past tense’, but that led nowhere!
8 Dippy Croatian girl (8)
CATRIONA – anagram (‘dippy’: CROATIAN*). An unusual anagram indicator!
13 Stuff put out about European award (6,5)
GEORGE CROSS – GORGE | CROSS = ‘stuff’ | ‘put out’. Insert E for European.
15 Tears appearing when this paper is cut? (9)
ONIONSKIN – a humorous cryptic definition.
16 What can inconvenience slightly when cutting up sticks (4,4)
FLEA BITE – hmm, again. A biologist would say fleas and ticks are different things, but the only suggestion I have is that TICK (almost a flea) is ‘bitten by’ STICKS. Any better ideas? On edit: JerryWh has explained. It’s A BIT (slightly) in FLEE (up sticks). Thanks!
18 Dig barrier up furiously (4,3)
LIKE MAD – LIKE (dig), MAD=DAM (barrier) up.
19 Start practising regularly: need couple to lose weight (4,2)
TAKE TO – it would TAKE TWO to tango. Lose W for weight. On edit: it seems from various comments that I didn’t explain this well. It’s simply TAKE=need, TWO=couple. Delete W=weight. The definition is as in, “they took to playing golf/gardening/collecting stamps” or whatever.
21 Steer with this? Not right! (5)
UDDER – steer with a RUDDER, but a steer doesn’t have an [r]UDDER, right!?
24 Grounded winger regularly missed team bus (3)
EMU – every second letter of team bus.

58 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27648 – Saturday, 25 April 2020. Happiness is a crossword.”

  1. Yes, enjoyed this.
    In 16dn it is A BIT in FLEE (up sticks). So the def. Is “what can inconvenience”
    In 17ac i think it is just suggesting that doing origami while blindfolded would be astounding.

    Edited at 2020-05-01 11:13 pm (UTC)

    1. ….would certainly be an outstanding origami display, and blindfolding would be the preparation for it. A very clever clue.
    2. Isn’t “it” referring to sex? You might blindfold someone if you’re into that?
      1. Certainly not, the very idea .. no wonder you hide behind the cloak of anonymity. Go and have a cold shower, this very minute .. and then a lie down, perhaps

        Edited at 2020-05-02 02:15 pm (UTC)

  2. Good fun, and I forgot to parse PINCE-NEZ. Never met nor even heard of a girl named CATRIONA. For a former typographer, SANS SERIF took an unconscionably long time.
      1. Ah, thanks! I read Treasure Island and “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll…” many years ago—and I’ve been on the old R.L. Stevenson trail in Lozère, in the south of France, much more recently—but this is news to me!

        Edited at 2020-05-02 02:23 am (UTC)

        1. As a boy I was given a book entitled ‘Kidnapped & Catriona’ and always thought they were sequential – which they were not!
  3. ….(YACHT) to the ridiculous (COUNTY).

    I parsed FLEA BITE later, and needed a fellow crossword buff to unravel POCKET MONEY (5 shillings in 1958).

    Had I spotted the pangram, I’d have been looking for the missing X in my LOI, and not doing the alpha-trawl would have pared a couple of minutes off my time.

    FOI CAMPUS
    LOI BOXERS
    COD YACHT
    TIME 18:45

    1. This is the kind of clue that the puzzle creators for The Nation would slip in, from time to time. Despite my groans.
    2. I think the county clue has more to it than meets the eye… a county is what the lands attached to an earldom are called. And “county” is used as a descriptor for aristocratic families.. so there are three inherently possible interpretations there including the -y idea
      1. And of course an earl is the English equivalent to a Continental count.
        1. Yes, although possibly not in the eyes of some English earls 🙂

          Edited at 2020-05-02 02:31 pm (UTC)

  4. I added to my time by typing in CARTIONA and not noticing for quite a while. Also slowed down because I’ve always distinguished between boxer shorts and briefs, the latter having no legs; 11ac was my LOI. (I’d also thought that ‘up sticks’ meant to move, i.e. change abode.) Never did get POCKET MONEY. DNK BIG END. Bruce, shouldn’t 27ac have the underline extended to “who’d booked”? And at 2d, AS is ‘seeing that’.
  5. I liked Udder and Yacht. I’m Still not sure I see why Take To means start or to start practicing, and while I get the t(w)o (cute) I’m not getting the Take bit. Nice puzzle setter. Nice blog, brnchn, thx
    1. Chambers has:

      take to
      To make for, take oneself off to
      To adapt oneself to
      To become fond of, to begin to do regularly as a habit

      Definition 3 is the relevant one.

      1. Thanks B – and update in the blog noted and is helpful. I’m better with the definition now, although it’s still a little off center for me. When the qualifier ‘practice’ is included, I’d use take up in that sense long before I’d use take to.
        Regarding the cryptic, like Isla below I’m just not 100% sure I equate ‘take’ with ‘need’. “it takes x in order to y” isn’t exactly the same, but that’s the closest I can come
        Mostly, this is a case of an obvious answer, but with a part cute part fuzzy cryptic and a part fuzzy definition. That gave me pause to think, which is where I got into trouble.
  6. This puzzle rubbed me up the wrong way. Too many random girls – Joy, Lizzy, Catriona, Ines; the last one not only foreign but also spelt wrongly. Boxers are the opposite of briefs in the men’s underwear department. Not understanding take to: I can see the definition, and the W out of two, but not the wordplay for take – need?. Not convinced by the tango.
    Did like parts of it a lot: county, flea bite, udder, etc.
    1. Well, Catriona is hardly random, being the solution to the clue; and Inez and Ines are both common enough spellings, so that neither could be called wrong. Still, I take your point; actually, I was working with MAY for a while.
      1. It was just me being a bit annoyed, but I’d defend Ines. Do a google search of Spanish language sites in Spain on Inez and get: tourist spiels and maps of Inez, Kentucky and Inez, Texas; a cartoon notebook; a poetry(?) book; people searching for a translation; and a single person – the Dutchwoman from Amsterdam Inez Van Lamsweerde. Not one Spanish girl.
        The same search on Ines gives more than one Spanish girl.

        Edited at 2020-05-02 05:18 am (UTC)

        1. I have a mental file called “crosswords as a foreign language”, to hold words and meanings one meets in crosswords but never in real life.

          Amusingly, both Ines and her friend Inez have appeared before in Times puzzles, so both girls belong in that file. You might like to look back at Times Cryptic No 26946 – Saturday, 27 January 2018, to see your comments then on this very topic!

          1. I remember one puzzle with Inez, though I would have guessed last year not Jan 2018. That’s when I did the search first. 26946 it is – I made the same ungracious comment, and you made a similar gracious reply.
        2. According to Wikipedia Inez is ‘the English spelling of the Spanish and Portuguese name Inés/Inês’. The article has a long list of famous people called Inez, of whom not a single one is Spanish. So you may have a point!
    2. TAKE could be “need” (“This will take some doing…”), but I think here it might be “regularly need” (“Do you take any medication for that?”).
      “Start to practice” would be sufficient for the definition.

      Edited at 2020-05-02 02:22 am (UTC)

      1. As I noted above, Chambers has as its third definition of “take to“:
        To become fond of, to begin to do regularly as a habit

        That includes ‘regularly’ as a part of it.

        As for the wordplay, I don’t think you need ‘regularly’. It needs/takes two/a couple to tango, whether you do it regularly or just once. 🙂

        Edited at 2020-05-02 02:30 am (UTC)

        2. “Two” has nothing to do with the definition; it’s only part of the wordplay. However many it takes to tango has nothing to do with the definition.
    3. I tend to agree with you about briefs, but terms for underwear vary so much from place to place that I didn’t even think about it at the time!
    4. Fortunately, Google is not our Bible, nor is Wiki. Chambers (among a select group) is, and mine has in its appendix “some first names”, including “Ines, Inez (Sp): forms of Agnes”. Scripture has spoken!
    5. Collins: to require or need
      Lexico: to need or call for
      Chambers: to call for, necessitate
  7. …to be sung JAZZILY. 32 minutes with LOI TAKE TO, unsure about the first part of the definition. I’ve never heard of INTAGLIO but it looked right. Both a groan and COD to COUNTY. I took a while to come up with a satisfactory explanation for BLINDFOLDING, which was as others. I wasn’t always sure if the arbitrary female name signified more, but I always got lucky. Thank you Bruce and setter.

    Edited at 2020-05-02 06:36 am (UTC)

  8. “1h3. HARD” is scrawled at the top of my sheet from last week. I definitely found this enjoyable too, though, especially 21d UDDER and LOI 10a COUNTY.

    Quite a lot of question marks in the margin along the way, though, where my knowledge failed me (especially of German and Germany, it seems; I’ve never been, so haven’t felt the need to learn to count to eight or name its rivers…)

    FOI 1a CAMPUS, LOI 10a COUNTY, COD 21d, WOD INTAGLIO.

    1. Hilft es, dass der Neckar mit 384 Kilometern der achtlängste Fluss Deutschlands ist?

      Does it help that the Neckar is, at 384 kilometres, the eighth longest river in Germany?

      Edited at 2020-05-02 08:00 am (UTC)

  9. The clock says 38.06, so apparently I found this very slow going, but the cluing is good.
    I’m a sucker for UED clues, so I liked EARLY and won’t join in the dissenting chorus.
  10. I thought at first that solving this would be fairly quick but then 11ac, 17ac 3d and 19d held me up. Thank you Bruce for the explanations and thanks to Jerry for 16d.
    My other note to myself last week was that there were some unusual checking letters such as Z,Y U and K.
  11. Goodness, what a lot of discussion already! I haven’t read all the comments in detail so will refrain from commenting further in case I repeat or ignore what’s already been said.
  12. This was set by the character in ‘Through The Looking Glass’ who told Alice: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less”.
    1. “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

      “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

  13. I found this very difficult in places -and there were quite a few places: County, Flea Bite,Blindfolding, Intaglio and Boxers.
    Some of the explanations above illustrate why. Enjoyed the challenge.
    Have just heard Inez and Charlie Foxx on Sounds of the Sixties- Mockingbird. Not a quiet Spanish girl in this case.
    David
  14. 38:31. …which shows I found this hard work. I was stuck at the end for ages by FLEA BITE and TAKE TO. I didn’t help myself by spelling the girl’s name INES at first. I failed to parse POCKET MONEY and NO SHOW, so thanks for explaining those. I liked MERRY-GO-ROUND, BLINDFOLDING and UDDER best. Thanks Bruce and setter.
  15. MER. Never heard of it used as in intransitive verb, though it is in Chambers. And as a noun it doesn’t work that way. Snort.
    1. It’s also in Collins and Lexico. It’s probably most often seen as the gerund ‘yachting’.
    2. No reason both “sail” and “yacht” can’t be nouns. Chambers supports both.
      1. I think the noun sense of ‘sail’ doesn’t match any sense of ‘yacht’ though.
        1. Chambers (again) has:

          yacht /yot/
          noun
          Orig a light fast sailing-vessel
          A sailing, steam-powered, etc vessel elegantly fitted out for pleasure-trips or racing

          And

          sail1 /sāl/
          noun
          A sheet of canvas, framework of slats, or other structure, spread to catch the wind, so as to propel a ship, drive a windmill, etc
          A specified type of sail on a boat or ship (often shortened to s’l), as in foresail or fores’l
          Sails collectively
          A ship or ships
          A trip in a vessel (which may or may not have sails)
          An act or distance of sailing
          Any sail-like organ or object
          A wing, esp a hawk’s
          A submarine’s conning-tower

          “A ship or ships” seems an acceptable overlap with “ A sailing, steam-powered, etc vessel elegantly fitted out for pleasure-trips or racing”. As often with cryptics, they aren’t a perfect fit, but …

          1. I guess that’s my point. If someone used “sail” to mean ship or boat in the noun sense I’d understand, but I’d justifiably make rude fun of him or her once out of earshot. Regardless of what the sources say.

            1. Fair enough. It might be a struggle to come up with a sentence where the two words were sensibly interchangeable!
  16. I found this really hard going and after 68 minutes gave up and looked up several that I was stuck on. Thanks setter and Bruce.
  17. 20:43. I thought this was very good. TAKE TWO seems to have caused some scratching of heads but it’s demonstrably sound.
    The one perhaps questionable thing is briefs=BOXERS but to me ‘briefs’ is just a generic word for pants so it didn’t bother me. Based on my (admittedly limited) experience no-one wears the budgie-smuggler style any more so the distinction doesn’t really arise.
    I particularly liked the origami clue, UDDER and the the enjoyably groan-worthy COUNTY.
    NHO NECKAR.

    Edited at 2020-05-02 09:36 am (UTC)

  18. DNF this with a stupid typo at Uddrr. I found it very tough going and although I eventually finished (typo aside) with everything apart from yacht understood it took me a fat hour. The NE corner was intractable. ‘Including’ in 14ac had me looking to put ‘jolly’ inside something. Makeover, onionskin and take to were also troublesome. I did like blindfolding, lady luck and flea bite (not necessarily in that order).
  19. However, the Neckar may only be the eighth largest river but it is very beautiful esp. where it flows through Heidelberg. German Geography should be still be taught in American Schools, especially the rivers and the crossing thereof.

    Edited at 2020-05-03 04:37 pm (UTC)

  20. COD Count-y. Got LOI pocket money but had no idea how the parsing went. I was convinced that the little brother was MONk. Was also confused re blindfolding, Thanks for clearing them up,

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