Tines 24447 – Dejas Blue

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
This took me exactly an hour. I printed it off last night and then settled down to solve it which was probably not a wise decision. By the time I had finished I was wide awake and started watching TV and eventually got to bed very late. Inevitably I overslept this morning which is why I am now late on parade. Most of it flowed quite nicely but I was stuck for ages in the SE corner and possibly dozed off at one point, thus extending my solving time. King Ethelred turned up for my last blog and so did gismo (or one very recently). We had Everton earlier this week and their nickname “The Blues” I also blogged in the past couple of months.Off now to see if there’s any tennis on TV.

Across
1 C(hoose), A, PE T, OWN
5 PHYSIC(s)
10 CARBON FOOTPRINT
11 DRABBER – RE , B, BARD (rev)
12 E(VERT)ON – This wretched soccer team yet again! And the clue works perfectly well without yet another reference to their nickname The Blues.
13 KNEE-JERK
15 STAIR – Sounds like “Stare”
18 Omitted on purpose, please ask if baffled
20 H,AND,SOME 
23 LUGS,AIL – Another piece of a sailing ship’s rigging. I must sit down and learn them all one day.
25 M1,(a)NIMAL
26 IT’S A FREE COUNTRY – Anagram of “us yet for certain”
27 G,LOVER – Assuming I have the correct answer I can’t find “lover” defined as “amateur”, but if one does something for the love of it one doesn’t get paid so I suppose that would cover it.
28 CHILDREN – NERD (rev) with CHIL(l) at the front.
 
Down
1 CI(C,AD)A – CIA are alternate letters in China. AD= Anno Domini is crossword shorthand for “now” “these days” and others such. Cicadas are beetles that thrive especially in warm regions.
2 Omitted on purpose, please ask if baffled
3 TROUBLE – The reference here is to the witches in the Scottish play and the line “Bubble, bubble toil and trouble”
4 WA(FE)R – Happy memories of Mr Creosote in “The Meaning of Life” being persuaded by the Maitre d’ to eat “Just one leetle waffer-theen mint”
6 HAPLESS – L(eft) inside anagram of “shape” + (illnes)S
7 S(T)ILT – A stilt is a long-legged wading bird.
8 CA(TE)NARY – A new word to me. It’s defined as a curve formed by a chain hanging freely between two points on the same horizontal level. Fortunately the wordplay and checking letters made this easy to guess.
9 MOLES,KIN(g)
14 (b)ETHEL,RED – “Bethel” meaning a chapel has come up before but not for a while, I think.
16 ALMA MATER – AM,L,A (rev) followed by an anagram of “a term”. I like “wasted” as anagram indicator.
17 W,HELPING
19 SNAFFLE – Hidden
21 (con)SENSUAL
22 PLAY ON
24 GI’S,MO(ment)
25 MICA,H – Mica is defined as a “lustrous” rock. Adding the H gives us today’s book of the Bible.

28 comments on “Tines 24447 – Dejas Blue”

  1. I think someone is taking the Michael with Everton.
    Entered TOPSAIL early without reading clue properly (POT backwards – something puffed) so if SW corner wasn’t difficult enough with WHELPING and GLOVER it became impossible until invoking the “must be something wrong” rule.
    Don’t know how long I tried to turn pirate den into some sort of material, so it must get my COD.
  2. For me a very cruisy 22 min, making it the quickest for some time. The speed merchants should have a field day because many just leapt out and grabbed you without having to be justified. COD? 26 ac. Not that cerebral, but strangely satisfying. Who else got distracted by ?o?eskin?
  3. I wondered if GLOVER might also be a cricketing reference. A batsman repeatedly gloving the ball would make a lot of pairs.
  4. For some reason I made heavy weather of this. Well over an hour, although I was also watching TV some of the time. Funny EVERTON and ETHELRED coming up again so soon. The top right was where I got stuck for a time but looking at it now I’m not sure why, there’s nothing especially hard.
  5. 9:31 here. I think the reference to their usual strip colour makes the surface more interesting than just talking about green=VERT. (They are “The Blues” but so are others I suspect – “The Toffees” identifies them more uniquely. (“More unique, Peter?” – yes I know.)

    (Amateur = lover) can be understood from the etymology, if your Latin goes as far as “Amo, Amas, Anat” (Lesson 1 I think). For sailing/rigging terms, you could try a book by my probable distant relative Captain George Biddlecombe.

    1. Yes, that makes perfect sense of course and on referring to the usual dictionaries again with this in mind it seems to be covered if somewhat indirectly.

      But it’s still not a connection that I would have made. To my mind “amateur” either means “unpaid” or it carries derogatory connotations, not being quite up to standard and so on. I would never have thought of it as a synonym for “lover”. I wonder if it’s in any thesaurus as such.

      1. I think the best I can offer you is the point that “for love” = “for enjoyment rather than profit”.
        1. Would it be appropriate to try the substitution test here? If so, I can’t imagine an example that would work.
          1. Well you have to be a bit careful with the substitution test. No-one’s complaining about “Medicine once” as a def for physic, but I can’t think of a sentence where you can swap the two.

            Thinking of “lover” a bit further, phrases like “music lover” maybe suggest fans or spare-time practitioners rather than professionals (quietly ignoring the Ken Russell movie).

  6. Standard fare – 25 minutes to solve. I see we nearly have a scientific intersection in the NE corner with almost “physics” and a type of curve that might pass muster as a mathematical term.

    My apologies to non-sports folk and overseas solvers for not telling you last Tuesday that Everton play in blue when at home. It did not occur to me that you might need this piece of obscurity. I’m deeply puzzled by this obsession with football team colours and the city of Liverpool.

  7. 17:22 (I always think of 17:30 as a par score for me) .. only serious hold-up was with 8d CATENARY, where I hesitated over the choice of ‘ti’ or ‘te’ for the seventh note.

    The definition in 5a PHYSIC is I suppose intended as “Medicine once..” but I prefer to read it as a gripe that physics was “.. once a school subject”.

    Enjoyed both HANDSOME and GISMO.

  8. Just under 35 minutes with PHYSIC and CATENARY the last in. I haven’t come across the word CATENARY since the time I was learning to be a land surveyor in 1970. Steel tapes hanging in catenary between tripods; I think Young’s modulus of elasticity and temperature correction came into play as well.

    I enjoyed many of these clues. They read well and the wordplay was impressive.

    EVERTON went in easily as the horrors of EVERT three days ago came quickly back to mind.

    Particular favourites were CHILDREN and ALMA MATER

  9. 51:10 – I thought I was going to be on for a quick time when I raced through most of the top half in just under 10 minutes, but I ground to a halt in the bottom half and didn’t write in another answer for another 15 minutes.

    They eventually all came in a slow succession, and, by the time I got to the end, I was pleased to have finished within the hour without recourse to aids. I was held up for about 10 minutes before I realised I’d written GISMO at 25d instead of 24d. Doh!

    The only word I didn’t know was LUGSAIL, but I managed to get it from the wordplay. I only knew CATENARY because it cropped up in my first blog back in October.

    I was going to award my COD to 20a, but then I thought the wordplay looked familiar, and indeed it cropped up back in May last year in 24225 (Sat May 14), clued almost identically. So I shall withdraw it again on grounds of repetition!

  10. 30:08 (I always think of 20:00 as a par score for me).

    Most of the top half went in quite quickly but as has happened most days this week I hit a wall and stared at a blank bottom half for a while. Glover was last in as I wasn’t convinced by the lover/amateur link (I opted to do German rather than Latin at school, so when the school trips were organised while the Latin lot went to look at a Roman villa the rest of us had a trip to the Imperial War Museum).

    COD to lugsail

  11. Quite a challenge I thought with several clever clues. Particularly enjoyed 10 across CARBON FOOTPRINT 13 across KNEE-JERK. Eight or so clues incomplete after 90 minutes. Grappled fruitlessly with the north-east corner failing to remember that VERT = Green and the singing canary. I always spell GIZMO like this so no surprise there; and never come across either a LUGSAIL or WHELPING. Thought the link between definitions and answers at 1 down CICADA and 27 across GLOVER were rather tenuous as without the crossing letters the chances of finding the answer were extremely slim. Overall a very enjoyable puzzle
  12. Another very average performance from me, by which I don’t mean par. I got stuck here and there but mostly in the SW. I liked “black mark put down” for footprint when I finally got it, IT’S A FREE COUNTRY, CHILDREN, PERTAINED & even GISMO but COD to WHELPING.

    I’ve forgotten anything I might once have known about catenaries but if Wiki is correct in saying “Square wheels can roll perfectly smoothly if the road has evenly spaced bumps in the shape of a series of inverted catenary curves.” then the future of the planet seems assured.

  13. Couldn’t finish this in one sitting, had to put it down for a while and come back to finish. Seeing GISMO of all things got me going on the bottom half. Some interesting clues here, liked CARBON FOOTPRINT.
  14. I wasn’t comfortable with the apostrophe: the definition is Having babies, not Having babies’, and is it really OK to have a clue of the form [def]’s [wordplay]?
    1. I’m happy with the form “[def]’s [wordplay]” because you can interpret the ‘s as “is”. But this clue amounts to “[def]’ [wordplay]” which doesn’t make sense to me. The fact that the def happens to end in S makes the apostrophe less conspicuous, but it’s no better “Having litter’ portion ….” as far as I can see.
  15. This took just over half an hour and I did not enjoy it much, tedious that Everton is there again and it was just rather boring really. Whelping reminded me of offence caused when I described children (in the 70’s!) as “people-puppies” to an over-sensitive friend.
  16. The previous comment took the words from my mouth. The clue to 17d is to my mind unsound. Whelping is having a baby. ‘Having a baby’s’ is an acceptable definition because it can be read as ‘Having a baby is …’. Having babies’can only mean having something pertaining to babies. Having a babies’ is surely meaningless in the context of the clue. A rare slip for the Times? I’m sure PB will show me I’m wrong!
    1. Not sure that I can – I solved this from checking letters and def, so didn’t examine the wordplay in detail. The apostrophe certainly makes no sense to me in the cryptic reading, and rather limited sense in the surface reading – “babies’ portion” must be some kind of babies’ fondue pot shared by at least two babies, which seems unlikely. As Kevin says below, the best you can do is to ignore the punctuation, but in the modern-day Times I don’t think you should have to.
  17. No time to post due to a lengthy interruption, but I enjoyed this. Re: the baby’s/babies’ discussion: I think we’re supposed to ignore the punctuation, so that while it says “babies'”, we can read the definition as the straightforward ‘having babies’, which does equate to WHELPING, to me. Having some acquaintance with civil engineering, CATENARY was no problem as it is the common description of the arc of the cables on a suspension bridge.COD nominations to WHELPING and CHILDREN. Regards to all. I now doubt I shall ever forget EVERTON. Or ETHELRED.
  18. Not just one for the engineers. I can remember the time my old A-level maths teacher went off-topic and got us to derive the formula for the catenary from first principles.
    And I can still remember the formula 25 years later – that’s good teaching.

    26.10 I found this good bit more taxing than average without being able to work out why.

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