Times 27403 – Back to the Ormond Hotel!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Time: 75 minutes
Music: Art Farmer, Foolish Memories

As you can imagine, I was not exactly on the wavelength here.   In fact, when I finished, I was surprised I had only taken 75 minutes – it had seemed like I struggled forever.   In this sort of puzzle, if you can’t any crossing letters, you’ll have  a hard time biffing the answers and then working out the convoluted cryptics.   That’s my excuse, anyway.

One interesting point about this puzzle is that it is anchored, at 1 down and 25 down, with clues that play on a word which is actually two entirely differently words with separate etymologies and meanings: ‘host’ and ‘boss’.  With ‘host’, the Latin ‘hostis’ leads to the word that means an army or large group, while Middle French ‘hospites’ supplies the word that means an innkeeper or a TV personality.   Similary, the ‘boss’ who gives orders at work comes from the Middle Dutch ‘baes’, while the stud at the center of the shield comes from Middle English ‘boce’.    As is typical in languages, the commoner word tends to take over in ordinary speech.

Across
1 Piece of evidence vital, barrister reviewed case (8)
ABLATIVE – backwards hidden in [evidenc]E VITAL BA[rrister]
5 Briefly observe man in hat (6)
CLOCHE – CLOC[k] + HE.   My LOI, despite the running jokes from Ulysses..
10 Force contained, one calmer? (9)
METHADONE – MET + HAD + ONE, where Met refers to the police force, not the weathermen, or the opera house, or the museum.
11 Bombardment, after withdrawal of artillery, lighter perhaps? (5)
BARGE – BAR[ra]GE, where you need to consider the possible meanings of ‘lighter’.
12 Long throw has opener dismissed (4)
ITCH – [p]ITCH.   Pitching is more common than bowling in the US, so a write-in for me.
13 Undertake urban regeneration programme? Fraudulent practice (9)
MENDACITY – MEND A CITY, of course.
15 Packing case shortly, soldier heading for old South American city (10)
VALPARAISO – VAL(PARA)IS[e] + O.   I had a hard time parsing  this and then didn’t think it was correct, because Valparaiso is in Indiana, right?   I supposed there must be others, and besides the three in the US there seem to be four or five in South America.
17 Party hit (4)
BASH – Double defintion.
19 Between two rivers, what was that German region? (4)
RUHR – R(UH?)R. 
20 Marvel when one starts to hit problems in retirement, and soldiers on (10)
PHENOMENON – ONE + H[it] P[roblems} backwards + MEN ON.   Since this is just the passive participle of φαίνω, ‘appear’,  the sense of something unusual or spectacular was a later addition.
22 Container, and bags for pets (9)
CANOODLES – CAN + OODLES, with a surprise synonym for ‘bags’.
24 Curious leader in parliamentary seat (4)
RUMP – RUM + P[arliamentary].   No extra points if you immediately think of the Long Parliament.
26 Boarding towards rear of ship, look up (5)
ALOFT – A(LO)FT, where you must lift and separte ‘look up’.
27 Soothing heart of fellow, time one loosened bandages (9)
EMOLLIENT – anagram of TIME ONE around [fe]LL[ow]. 
28 Hat fitter making an adjustment (6)
TITFER – Anagram of FITTER, some CRS for you.
29 Within plant, circuits failed again (8)
RELAPSED – RE(LAPS)ED.
Down
1 Host, daft going topless (4)
ARMY – [b]ARMY.
2 Don’t take the washing in, have some fun! (3,2,3,4,3)
LET IT ALL HANG OUT – double definition, one jocular.
3 Having abandoned parking, chap later travelling on the tube? (8)
TRACHEAL – anagram of CHA[p] LATER.
4 Rev’s sound study, maybe, in support of vicar at first (5)
VROOM – V[icar] + ROOM.
6 African in old party, rather upstanding (6)
LIBYAN – LIB + NAY upside-down.   I wanted to put ‘Nubian’ but it didn’t parse.   IS the Liberal Party really obsolete?
7 Figures, perhaps, in red book (8,7)
CARDINAL NUMBERS – CARDINAL + NUMBERS, as in the book of the Bible.
8 All, for example, hairline fractures? (10)
EVERYTHING – E(VERY THIN)G.
9 Poet: meddlesome man finally getting up after mid-morning? (8)
TENNYSON – TEN  + NOSY + [ma]N pside-down.
14 Country squire originally wearing creamy-white jacket? (5,5)
IVORY COAST – IVORY COA(S[quire])T.
16 Rise in winners for Greek hero (8)
ACHILLES – AC(HILL)ES.   Yes, I wasted a lot of time with ‘tor’.
18 Requirement for the wet blanket (8)
UMBRELLA – double defintion, as in an umbrella policy.
21 Spirit one’s necked (6)
BOTTLE – double definition, scarcely cryptic.
23 Music centre: last of records on it (5)
SCORE – [record]S + CORE.
25 Boss is a virile chap (4)
STUD – double definition.

40 comments on “Times 27403 – Back to the Ormond Hotel!”

  1. In the UK the Liberal Party became the Liberal Democratic Party in the late 1980s.
  2. A Monday time, though it didn’t feel like a Monday puzzle. (Well, 17ac and 25d were QC-ish clues.) I biffed VALPARAISO from the O (the main one is in Chile, V; one would expect an Indiana city with a Spanish name to have been named after one in a Spanish-speaking country). Then the A at 16 let me tentatively biff ACHILLES, which I only parsed post-solve. Liked RELAPSED and EVERYTHING.
  3. As our esteemed blogger points out this is CRS (Cockney Rhyming Slang) for hat, from tit-for-tat. I think CRS would be a reasonable addition to The Glossary. Jerry?

    I found this quite hard (wavelength as per Lord Vinyl) and was near 90 minutes when I finally finished up in the stiff breezes of the NE.

    LOI being 5ac CLOCHE!

    FOI 19ac RUHR

    COD 18dn UMBRELLA (Chamberlain’s nickname in Germany)

    WOD 15ac VALPARAISO

    I am unsure about 13ac MENDACITY; it is hardly considered fraudulent in certain quarters.

    Edited at 2019-07-15 03:26 am (UTC)

  4. 12:59, although the crossword club doesn’t want me to submit for some reason.
    A bit tricky in parts, I thought. I had vaguely heard of the city but I had to construct it carefully. Nothing else caused major problems but there weren’t that many easily-biffable answers.
  5. Off to a flying start in the NW corner but soon slowed to a crawl and had several long breaks with nothing going in at all. Not helped by writing ACHILLES at 18dn instead of 16dn. Finsihed eventually in exactly 1 hour with VALPARAISO as my only unknown but constructed from wordplay with some confidence.

    Further to my earlier comment about the Liberal Party, I forgot to reiterate my aversion to the use of ‘old’ or some other word to indicate that a long-established name has changed, and even more so when it has happened comparatively recently.

    Edited at 2019-07-15 05:49 am (UTC)

  6. Around 17 minutes but … if I admit to misspelling Tennyson, will they take away my Eng.Lit. degree?

    Some quite chewy things in here. COD to ACHILLES (might have been a timely clue if new star Tsitsipas hadn’t bombed out of Wimbledon early on)

  7. On my longer wavelength today at 27.21 with PHENOMENON and EVERYTHING resisting to the end, partly because, with no idea what “hairline” was doing in the clue I tentatively inserted EVERYWHERE. I didn’t get round to parsing the other one, being too concerned with a rather high typo count as I checked the grid.
    I never gave it a thought before, but I assume VALPARAISO means paradise valley, which is a nice name for anywhere, but for me a South American city of uncertain location. Chile, apparently.
    ARMY, inevitably after yesterday, clued with barmy. I have enormous sympathy for the Kiwis, with the host nation apparently interpreting the rules as it went along to wrest the win from their deserving hands. Maybe one day England will win a World Cup without going into extra time: it’s really hard on the nerves.
  8. Enjoyed this. TRACHEAL, EVERYTHING, METHADONE, PHENOMENON, IVORY COAST etc.all beautifully clued. Thanks all.
  9. 30 mins with yoghurt, granola, blueberry compote, etc.
    Mostly I liked: hairline=very thin, and the long clues (but worth it), Phenomenon and COD to Barge.
    Thanks setter and Vinyl.
  10. Bleary eyed after staying up till the early hours to watch simultaneously the cricket World Cup final and the Wimbledon final. It will be a long time before such dramatic and skilful fare is served up again on a double bill.
  11. Once I had IVORY COAST and LET IT ALL HANG OUT, VALPARAISO was a write in(using wordplay for the spelling) as a friend often sings a song in which most of the lyrics consist of the word VALPARAISO. LIBYAN and then CLOCHE were my last 2 in, preceded by EVERYTHING, which I parsed just before hitting submit after a typo check. Nice puzzle. 27:08. Thanks setter and Vinyl.
  12. Someone up there, God or Devil, is a cricket fan. No human mind or random chain of events could have created that. Apologies to all Kiwis who will think it was Beelzebub at the wheel. I was surprised to go through this puzzle in 24 minutes, as it seemed quite hard. LOI was BOTTLE after I saw why it was the ALOFT I’d been itching to put in. My specialist South American country for O level Geography in 1961 was Chile, chosen because you can draw the sketch map with a ruler, and the only VALPARAISO I know is there. COD to TENNYSON. Williamson to the right of him, Guptill to the left of him, Boult in front of him, His but to do and win. Thank you V and setter.
  13. Thought I was simply off the pace posting 65 mins this morning (normally around 40 mins on Mondays), so mildly relieved to see it wasn’t just me.

    The only real unknown was VALPARAISO but it seemed like a reasonable guess. Surprised mainly that it took so long to spot UMBRELLA…

  14. Bowtie for 21dn… Thought it might be some kind of djinn. I kind of knew it was wrong, but hey ho. Spirit=bottle is a little bit of a stretch, I would say (mainly cos I didn’t see it). Thanks, v.
    1. I think it’s just a case of ‘he’s got a lot of bottle’.
  15. 24 minutes, jogged along. Stunning sports day yesterday – as if the country was hit by a meteor. Which reminds me (as it touches on meteoric impacts) – can highly recommend the new Lovelock book ‘Novacene’. Subtitled ‘The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence’ it forecasts we’ll be to what he calls cyborgs as plants are to us. So what crosswprds will they construct, eh, let alone solve in zero time?
    1. They still won’t beat Magoo – or Verlaine, the way he’s going.
  16. ….beach UMBRELLA while you’re watching TV.

    Hi-ho – there was definitely a silver lining when this one finally submitted. I parsed VALPARAISO and PHENOMENON post-solve.

    I was delayed briefly by 10A, where I tried to “force” contained. Was I alone I wonder ?

    FOI BARGE
    LOI CLOCHE
    COD LET IT ALL HANG OUT
    TIME 13:00

  17. I thought I was just having a sluggish Monday after getting all the way down to BASH before anything clicked. The pace picked up after that and I was happy to clock in at 17.48 after a near miss with ALOFT. I only saw it on proofing (after 3 ignominious typos in the last month). I’d convinced myself that “up” was the definition, as in what’s up?, and had entered “afoot”, not. Also I seem to be the only one so far who thought 8d was an anagram of eg hairline – again not.
    1. I tried that anagram too. It took a while to decide it was a blind alley.
  18. 20 seconds under the hour, which I am pleased with. I’ve never understood why 10 to 11am is described as mid morning, as it is patently late morning. Surely mid morning is 5.30 to 6.30. Cue calls of pedantry!
      1. 10 a.m. incontrovertibly arrives earlier than mid-morning, or else the whole dang shebang goes up in dust.
        1. Those calls happen at around 0530 here, and then I go back sleep (hopefully). Morning is that period between 0900-1200, hence “mid-morning” occurs around 1030. The REAL argument is : when does afternoon become evening, and then evening become night….
  19. Started quickly but then slowed – still, I felt more on the wavelength today until I hit the mysterious city at 15a. In the end I gave up, a little shy of 10 minutes, but I’d been trying to get case inside soldier, rather than the other way round.

    Still never heard of the city, though. At least it wasn’t an anagram.

  20. Apparently I did pretty well at 38 minutes, feeling mostly on the wavelength.

    Pleased with myself for being able to biff the Chilean VALPARAISO, as the last time it came up I’d never heard of it, leading to a DNF. This was probably around the time I started keeping my Big List of Crossword Words in earnest, and it’s nice to find my revision paying off.

    FOI 1a ABLATIVE, LOI 23d SCORE, just after 21d BOTTLE, proving yet again that I have real problems when I’m lacking the first letter of a word!

      1. ? But in that context it simply means ‘no’. A poor clue. Mr Grumpy
  22. Very enjoyable puzzle, a bit more chewy that your usual Monday job. The LHS flew in once we had 1a and the long 2d, then a steady but slower plod ending with CLOCHE which took a while to see. I knew where Valparaiso was, in Chile, it’s on my bucket list. 24 minutes. CoD to EVERYTHING.
  23. Wow – I guess I got lucky, my 8:52 is still in the top 15 on the club board. I knew VALPARAISO as a University in Indiana (in the town).
  24. Not too difficult, but not very biffable. Pennies had to drop, though most of them did so quite readily, I am glad to say. Nice stuff on a Monday when I need to lower my blood pressure after watching the cricket…
  25. 7’32
    Am surprised to see how long some others took. Guess I got lucky with some early biffs and seemed to be on wavelength therafter. (Indeed, just how lucky were England yesterday? Made for great spectacle but, in truth, wrong side won. Just like the tennis, perhaps?) Wasn’t entirely sure of all the wdps as I went along but at least I biffed the right answers… oh to be an Englander!
    1. Why remain anonymous when you were so surprised to see how slow we all were? Are you that stable genius Donald Trump!? Or Clever Dick perhaps? Or does modesty forbid?

      Edited at 2019-07-15 03:08 pm (UTC)

  26. Like others I was able to enter very few on the first pass of the across clues – 3 maybe so I was worried that this was going to be a stinker… but the down clues proved more tractable and I ended up with a pretty good time of 6 and a half minutes. LOI Libyan which isn’t the most African of African countries that spring to mind, so needed a few checkers.
  27. 28:01 a nice opener for the week, some stretching stuff but nothing too uncomfortable. Word play for Cloche was reverse engineered from hat. Didn’t parse 11ac. 15ac was a bit fiddly, luckily I knew the city from playing the PlayStation racing game Wipeout (not the Paul Daniels quiz) in my teens and early twenties. One of the race circuits is based there. I think that is an example of ninja-turtling, though basic geography may not be sufficiently highbrow to qualify it. I was another who had afoot at 26ac but changed it at the last minute to aloft. Entertaining fare.
  28. I was definitely not on wavelength for this, taking an unconscionable length of time.
  29. Thanks setter and vinyl
    Was only able to grab time in bits and pieces for this one and the solve was just a steady ‘chipping away at’ experience. Was able to complete the grid and see all of the parsing, so in that sense it was very satisfying.
    VALPARAISO was a known Sth American city – its one that sticks in one’s mind – well at least it has for me for over 40-50 years. It’s one of those places that makes me want to go there and see it. CLOCHE is another of those stick in your mind words – mine from reading the amusing Clochemerle by Gabriel Chevallier.
    Finished with ALOFT, TITFER (which hadn’t seen as a CRS meaning of hat before) and then back up to get TENNYSON as the last one in.

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