Times 27,599: Doctor Doctor

Author   verlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Yes, of course I’m upset that I didn’t get to blog yesterday’s brawny colossus, but this was a perfectly good middleweight puzzle, with a few chuckles to be had: I especially liked 21ac’s “fighter in his early years”. FOI 10ac, LOI 17ac I believe, all done and dusted in a little over half the time of yesterday’s. Thank you setter, you had a hard act to follow there. See you all again in March!

1 Roughly cutting round border (4)
ABUT – AB{o}UT [roughly], “cutting” O = round

4 A little extra, Spooner says to enliven partner? (10)
MAKEWEIGHT – Spoonerised WAKE MATE [enliven | partner]

9 Recordings heard, with illustrations worked in (10)
TAPESTRIED – or TAPES TRIED [recordings | heard]

10 Very smallest part of anatomy? (4)
ATOM – hidden in {an}ATOM{y}. FOI

11 British banker requiring separate note (6)
SEVERN – or SEVER N [separate | note]. The old “banker” = “thing with banks” = “river” gambit.

12 Bird‘s audibly wavering cry (5,3)
TAWNY OWL – dodgy homophone of TORN [wavering], + YOWL [cry]

14 Masses retiring, arriving at bar (4)
STOP – reversed POTS [masses]

15 Ruled reply, we hear, required for one taking set steps (4,6)
LINE DANCER – LINED [ruled] + homophone of ANSWER

17 Professed chief spotted scratching head (10)
MAINTAINED – MAIN [chief] + {s}TAINED [spotted, its head “scratched”]

20 Doctor taking in most of sick and faint (4)
MILD – M.D. taking in IL{l}

21 Fighter in his early years needing extra weapon (8)
CLAYMORE – CLAY [Fighter Cassius, who would in his later years be Muhammad Ali] + MORE [extra]

23 Protective gear from criminal haunts (6)
SUNHAT – (HAUNTS*)

24 Miserable medic particularly drained (4)
MOPY – M.O. P{articularl}Y

25 Athletes penalised for this most deceptive of skills (5,5)
FALSE START – or FALSEST ART

26 See English going in once play’s abandoned (4,4,2)
CLAP EYES ON – E going into (ONCE PLAY*)

27 Disturbances which parading soldiers are in? (4)
ROWS – double, non-homophonic, def

DOWN
2 Pioneer with coat pinching hat commonly leading to trouble (5,1,5)
BLAZE A TRAIL – BLAZER [coat] “pinching” ‘AT, + AIL [trouble]

3 Edging away, other troops leading at that point (9)
THEREUPON – {o}THE{r} + R.E. [troops] + UP ON [leading]

4 Graduate translated Latin used in morning service (7)
MATINAL – M.A. + (LATIN*)

5 Screwing up irks couple employed by Mme Defarge, say (8,7)
KNITTING NEEDLES – KNITTING [screwing up] + NEEDLES [irks], items indispensable to a tricoteuse…

6 I’m amazed journalist seizing papers is left alone (7)
WIDOWED – WOW ED [I’m amazed! | journalist] “seizing” ID [papers]

7 Make bug (3,2)
GET TO – double def; as in reach, and annoy

8 National Trust’s originator raised capital abroad (5)
TAMIL – T{rust} + reversed LIMA [capital of Peru]

13 Women’s shoe repair outlet scrap simple carrier (11)
WHEELBARROW – W HEEL-BAR ROW [women’s | shoe repair outlet | scrap]

16 Prospective MP needs one constituent in division (9)
NOMINATOR – is “the constituent in division” like a DENOMINATOR? Dunno really.

18 Head of Admiralty can navigate remotely (7)
ALOOFLY – A{dmiralty} + LOO FLY [can | navigate]

19 Rescind newly-issued notice (7)
DISCERN – (RESCIND*)

21 Stand-up artist perhaps of vast size hasn’t succeeded (5)
COMIC – CO{s}MIC [of vast size], minus S = succeeded

22 A Greek last seen in Sparta? (5)
ALPHA – also the last letter in Σπάρτα

60 comments on “Times 27,599: Doctor Doctor”

  1. After yesterday’s ordeal I was a very pleased to finish this in 39 minutes. My most satisfying achievement here was solving 5dn cold, with no checkers in place, despite not knowing who Mme Defarge was.
  2. 28:56. One of those that, in retrospect, I can’t see why I found so hard. At least I took less than half the time I took yesterday. Not knowing my Dickens I had no idea what 8D was about until I looked Mme Defarge post-solve. LOI BLAZE A TRAIL. COD to FALSE START.
  3. Not knowing the owl–not knowing the tit at first, as I had put in GET AT–not getting beyond HOWL, and not in the least prepared for this kind of homophony, I went to the dictionary. 5d was a gimme, but that’s because I knew who Mme. Defarge was (not that well; I was about to say Lafarge); Jack’s feat is most impressive. For some reason–stupidity, perhaps–I immediately thought of Cassius at 21ac, but not CLAY until I came back to it. Much as I liked yesterday’s, it was a relief to come a step down today. As I write this, the SNITCH is at 100, which means that everyone’s NITCH is the same as his WITCH.
  4. I also got KNITTING NEEDLES right away, without any crossers, but I knew the knitter, so that helped. I haven’t read much else of Dickens. I also got BLAZE A TRAIL right away. LOI MAKEWEIGHT, not a span of foonerisms.

    Edited at 2020-02-28 07:15 am (UTC)

  5. For those of you who lobbed in KNITTING NEEDLES at 5dn I too went straight in (via Madame Defarge’s good name) but with KNITTING CIRCLES – she had one with Madame Guillotine. CIRCLES became NEEDLES subsequently.

    Time 59 minutes as it was Friday.

    FOI 27ac ROWS

    LOI 18dn ALOOFLY

    COD 4ac MAKEWEIGHT even though not a fan of Dr. Spooner

    WOD 3dn THEREUPON not WHEREUPON

  6. 23 minutes here, taking a chance on blazing through this one before I headed out for work. My guess that the editor might give us a break after the last couple of days definitely paid off. Had a bit of trouble getting started, but eventually found a way in with 21d COMIC and worked my way around from there.

    I didn’t pause long enough to parse everything, especially the TAWNY OWL (raises eyebrow), but it was nice to feel like I was on a proper roll, rather than pulling teeth. Enjoyed the adjectival crossers of MATINAL and TAPESTRIED.

    Anyway, Greta Thunberg’s coming to Bristol today, and I imagine Extinction Rebellion will probably shut down the roads in celebration, plus it’s tipping it down, so I’d best get to work in time to have a proper British whinge with all the other commuters…

    1. Of course, the resulting traffic jams will do precisely sod all to save the environment. Has she swum here ? Two words : carbon footprint. She’s made her point, it’s time she stayed home and finished her education.
  7. If only.
    20 mins to romp through, enjoying it all, mostly Clay and Falsest Art.
    MER at quite why ‘screwing up’ would be knitting, or ‘navigate’ must be fly.
    Thanks setter and V.
  8. Yes, I too, breathed a sigh of relief after yesterday but for a while I thought it was going to be just as hard but then things started to fall into place.
    I did like the use of the adjectival form in TAPESTRIED and MATINAL. It would have been very tempting to put in TAPESTRIES, for example.
    Two questions though:
    FLY = Navigate?
    A TAMIL is a national? The Tamil Tigers thought they were entitled to a nation but the Sri Lankan government begged to differ.
    My COD to TAWNY OWL.
    1. I knew there was a reason for my undescended eyebrows, but I’d totally forgotten that ‘national’ had raised them. Of course the way setters here use ‘race’ and ‘nation’ may have given today’s setter reason to think it was OK; it’s not.
      1. In the same way that Scotland is a nation or Australia has First Nations. It just means “a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.” No requirement to currently hold territory or control a political state.

        I found that quite hard today and only a minute quicker than yesterday.

        COD 13dn

        1. As I just replied to Kevin, stavrolex’s comment reminded me of when I worked for an American cargo airline. My work occasionally took me to Travis AFB, California. The 3-letter code for Travis is SUU. Some of our people there had baseball caps with “SUU Nation” on them!
      3. Thanks, Kevin. Stavrolex makes a point, though. In my days working for Evergreen International airlines, a McMinnville,OR-based cargo airline, my work sometimes took me to Travis AFB in California. The 3-letter code for Travis was SUU. Evergreen people there had baseball caps with “SUU Nation” on them!
  9. Yesterday I hoisted the white flag and came here for quite a few of the answers.

    I didn’t know “Madame” so it was a while before I unravelled 5 down.

    COD: ALOOFLY.

    Edited at 2020-02-28 08:31 am (UTC)

  10. RAIN DANCER not needed here in Devon at the moment. Or in 17a I finally accepted.
    1. I originally entered “rain dancer” which to my mind fits the clue perfectly, if not the grid. KNITTING NEEDLES disespoused me of that one.
      1. With line dancing, everyone dances in unison, there are prescribed “set” steps. Rain dancing, I don’t know. That’s how I read the clue.
  11. 29 minutes on this very enjoyable puzzle. I must be a middleweight. But it was nice to finish with a smile on my face rather than the headache I had for the rest of the day yesterday. I didn’t reach Rob’s seniority, but I was once sixer of the Tawny six, so TAWNY OWL was a write-in. I love pushing a COD WHEELBARROW. It’s the only time in life you know where you are going and why.The compost heap. There were many other lovely clues, including MAKEWEIGHT and LINE DANCER, and of course the KNITTING NEEDLES. Thank you V and setter.

    Edited at 2020-02-28 11:32 am (UTC)

  12. What a relief after the last two days. Thought I’d completely lost it. Steady progress and finished in 22.40. LOI aloofly, but only after searching for meanings of can other than convenience. Lots of nice clues and a pleasing end to the week.
  13. 14:09. A fun puzzle. Like mrkgrnao I slowed myself down by putting in RAIN DANCER, which I think is at least as good an answer as the right one. I didn’t know who Mme Defarge was but didn’t really need to, with wordplay, checkers and knowing that tricoteuses were a thing.
    The homophone in 12ac is absolutely awful. Yellow card for the setter there I think.
    1. How so? Only the first bit is a homophone and I don’t pronounce TORN and TAWN- any differently from each other. I see below that even BW was happy and those lancastrians do funny things with words containing Rs
      1. See my reply to BW below (I was scrolling up on my phone so saw his comment first). However you read the clue the middle sound is missing: torn-yowl instead of tore-knee-yowl.
  14. This citizeness dropped a few stitches along the way and had to go back and pick them up so I limped home in 23.13. The one I couldn’t get on my needles was MILD because I couldn’t see that as “faint”.
  15. Torn yowl – yeah, whevs. Nice puzzle, though. 27 mins. Seems to be a fair bit of Spooner action at the minute. Thanks v and setter.
  16. A pleasant 28 minutes, with the knitting equipment first in, a MER at NOMINATOR for denominator, and the easy-once-seen ABUT my LOI.
    I didn’t find the homophone of my colleague the TAWNY OWL much of a hoot.
    1. I think that the only homophone was TORN/TAWN. YOWL is the noise a cat makes. I was happy with it.
        1. I don’t see how that comes into it.

          Part A: TAWN (sounds like TORN).

          Part B: YOWL (cry)

          Assemble parts A and B: TAWNYOWL

          1. You can look at it like that I guess but to my mind of you’re indicating part of a clue with a homophone you have to indicate all the sounds that aren’t indicated by the other bit. I suppose it’s not so much dodgy as incomplete.

            Edited at 2020-02-28 01:26 pm (UTC)

        2. Yep, I’m saying that the whole answer wasn’t intended to be a homophone, only the TORN/TAWN component. That does perhaps raise the question as to whether TAWN is a word and whether or not it needs to be.
          1. The problem as I see it is that from a homophony point of view TAWN doesn’t appear at all. There are three sounds in the answer – tore, knee, yowl – and if you’re constructing a homophone you can’t separate the N and the Y.
            1. “audibly wavering” = TAWN (no, it doesn’t have to be a word)
              +
              “cry” = YOWL
              I don’t see any indication that the whole thing is a homophone.
              1. I’m not saying the whole thing is a homophone. I’m saying that where a clue is a mixture of a homophone bit and a non-homophone bit, I want the homophone bit to include all the sounds that are not covered by the non-homophone bit.
                1. But the non-homophone bit, as such, doesn’t have to cover sounds at all; it only has to clue the spelling of the rest of the word.
                  1. No but the homophone bit does!
                    By using a partial homophone the setter has implicitly decided to break the answer into its phonetic parts. Once she’s done that I think she needs to account for all of them in the wordplay, even if not necessarily using a homophone for all of them.
                    I can see the point that you are others are making but to me there is something missing in this clue and I find it jarring.
                    1. It seems a bit underdefined to say you have to “account for all the [syllables]”, when part of the clue is spelling based instead of homophone-based. I think tawn + yowl is completely fine- how could you possibly account for a “nee” sound with a construction of this kind?
                    2. Perfectly easily. The missing sound is just ‘ee’, which you could indicate in any number of ways. ‘Audibly wavering English cry’, for instance.
                      Anyway, I suggest we just agree to disagree!
                    3. I asked my friendly neighbourhood Scot if TAWN and TORN could be deemed homophones and her reply was “the mere suggestion of it makes me feel sick”, which is a pretty good one!
  17. Nice puzzle. My only quibble was that both 13dn and 27ac had ROW in them, running into one another. This could easily have been avoided (nominated, down, for example). Not of the high standard of elegance of the rest of it.
  18. As others have noted, RAIN DANCER works just as well – an unfortunate coincidence? TAWNY OWL is a bit more than dodgy – more like diabolical.

    Main gripe is with 13d. While I really liked the HEEL BAR element, the surface I think doesn’t work: we’re meant to read ‘scrap’ as a verb, in which case it needs to be third person singular, to fit with ‘outlet’.

  19. 28 years teaching maths from primary to university, nho NOMINATOR, so seems a very clumsy clue, any other parsing possible?

    ATOTC by Dickens is one of his two historical novels, and they’re both very good. ALOOFLY LOI.

    COD to FALSE START, even though it was biffable.

    23’08”, thanks setter and verlaine (of whom I am only two seconds slower than on the QC).

    1. Nominator? Has someone confused or conflated numerator and denominator?
  20. ….and then made a transcription error when entering it, I came to this not in the best of moods. Threw in the towel after a 20 minute struggle left me struggling in vain for ALOOFLY.

    FOI TAPESTRIED
    LOI DNF
    COD BLAZE A TRAIL

  21. 14:29 with biffage applied to the pioneer, the barrow and the owl. An odd mix of the pedestrian interlaced with moments of excellence like tapestried and aloofly.

    BTW V, Clay became Muhammad (not Mohammed) Ali.

    Edited at 2020-02-28 01:19 pm (UTC)

    1. I mean you can transliterate that Arabic curlicue any way you like really, can’t you. But YES you’re right.
  22. 24.16 not too shabby. Spent too long thinking haunts was going to anagram into an obscure piece from a suit of armour used to protect the extremities. I liked tapestried, the falsest art and blaze a trail. Didn’t have the requisite maths knowledge to query nominator so just bunged it in. Also failed to fully parse wheelbarrow. I have seen Mme Defarge referenced in a previous clue (if not here then in another place) but didn’t remember her and so put knitting needles in from wp and checkers. A fun puzzle to canter through.
  23. An order of magnitude easier than yesterday’s offering which I did after a late night drive back from Carlisle, so a bit of a relief. The NW corner went in first, led by STOP, although I never did see the parsing for ABUT until coming here. Doh! KNITTING NEEDLES went in from checkers and a vague feeling that Mme D might have something to do with guillotines. The NE took longest, with the Spoonerism finally opening it up. TAMIL was LOI, once I managed to lift and separate correctly. Nice puzzle. Thanks setter and V.
  24. British banker is sadly not a very good description of the Severn right now as it seems to be spreading out wherever it wants.

  25. made a horlicks of this, mainly due to throwing in CAST EYES ON, and then only finding an ASPIS for the Greek clue going down. also nearly put GET GO, before deciding that the clue didn’t match. COD LINED ANSWER
  26. Got into this slowly, but after steadily accelerating, hit the buffers near the end because of a careless THEREFORE (even as I wrote it, I thought FORE wasn’t exactly right for “leading”, but put it in all the same. Note to self: something which “isn’t exactly right” can still, of course, be fairly precisely wrong). And once something is in, it’s much harder to unsee it, so I made STOP and MANTAINED much harder than they needed to be.
  27. Sorry to have missed commenting on yesterday’s incredible puzzle; too many work demands prevented me getting here, but it was not only difficult but brilliant. This far easier offering today was held up only due to the same RAIN DANCER entry as others that needed later correction, plus puzzlement at my LOI, the TAWNY OWL. I figured it ended in ‘howl’, never considered ‘yowl’, but I finally just shrugged/biffed in the answer since it’s a bird and it fit. Regards.
  28. I’ve been doing rather badly all week, and blame it on general under-the-weatherness. This one took me so long that I am ashamed to post a time for it, but I was glad to get there in the end. LINEDANCER made me smile (well, nearly). MATINAL was an NHO but clear enough. Phew.

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