When I solved it, the online version had botched enumerations (answerlengths in brackets) in most of the on-line down clues. The clue numbers are correct, and only 13D turned out to be a multi-word answer – (4,5).
Solving time: 10:20, probably worth 10:00 for the newspaper version
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | NUGATORY – “new”, T.A. rev. in GORY |
| 5 | A,M.B.,LED – a reminder that doctors are more often Bachelors of Medicine than DRs or GPs. |
| 9 | MACKINTOSH – (mink coat’s)*,H |
| 10 | GANG,LION – a “swelling” as it’s a cluster of nerve cells, often forming a swelling on a nerve fibre. Insect nervous systems often have several ganglia. |
| 11 | SUPPLY – two defs, one an adverb |
| 12 | TOLL – two defs, one a verb |
| 14 | KIDNAPPING – AND rev. in KIPPING |
| 17 | REMORTGAGE – (got a merger)* |
| 20 | SEA,R – nice use of burn = stream in surface reading |
| 23 | TUCSON = (no scut) rev. – a scut is a short tail, of a rabbit or similar |
| 24 | A,TOMB,OMB=mob* |
| 25 | DRAW A BLANK – 2 defs, one ref SCRABBLE® |
| 26 | (w)ILL |
| 27 | TRIP,LE |
| 28 | HEL(SINK)I(port) |
| Down | |
| 1 | N,AVI(G)ATOR |
| 2 | GRAP(h),NEL=Len rev. – an ‘anchor’ to provide purchase when climbing with a rope – illustrated here |
| 3 | TEMPLE – 2 def’s, plus a nod towards William Temple, who succeeded yesterday’s Cosmo Lang as Archbishop of Canterbury (or his father Frederick). Easy meat for me as the C of E grammar school I attended had houses named after Temple and his successor Fisher, who’s now due for tomorrow’s puzzle. |
| 4 | RECKONING – 2 defs |
| 5 | A(MNE=men*)SIA – a fugue is a loss of awareness of your identity, often associated with departure from your usual environment. And the completion of a three-clue stretch for the |
| 6 | BLOW PIPES, ref. the wooden folk flutes that Pan played. |
| 7 | EC(HEL)O,N – Hel is a Norse goddess who governs the underword of the same name. |
| 13 | LOOK SHARP – LO, shark* in Po rev. Or shark* in pool rev. as kurihan and linxit point out – probably the wordplay the setter intended, as “water => Po” is weak. |
| 15 | NIGHT,MARE – for US solvers puzzled by the surface, Black Horse is a fairly common pub name. |
| 16 | G(A,RIBALD)I – I thought of him as political but wiki has him down as military too. |
| 18 | ECU,ADOR(e) |
| 19 | TINWARE = (in water)* |
| 21 | EMOTION – TOME rev.,ION |
| 22 | S,MOKES – “weed” being tobacco (informal) |
I received a nice pro forma reply from the Times today in response to my informing them that they had somehow equated the Times Jumbo with the Times2 Jumbo in their archives. Their solution actually referred to the 404 problem I had yesterday but didn’t report. (Very prescient of them.) As I suspected, it appears you could indeed get redirected to the cached 404 upon retrying the site, even if the site is by then operational. On the plus side, my adblocker no longer seems to aggravate the site.
Mention of Araucaria reminds me-does anyone know if the 1 Across subscription crossword booklets are still being printed? Have not heard of them for years now.
Currently £28 a year for UK subscribers. For full details and a free sample issue write with a C5 (6.4″ x 9″) SAE for reply to:
1 Across
The Old Chapel
Middleton Tyas
RICHMOND
North Yorkshire DL10 6PP
United Kingdom
At 13dn I thought the “rising water” was POOL rev. It deprives “see” of much significance, but I thought PO = water was a bit loose.
A Mephisto puzzle recently had a whole clue missing whilst the instructions for submitting the puzzles were not updated for 8 consecutive weeks. On one occasion the wrong setter name was given.
The daily cryptic, instead of having a sensible mix of complexity has runs of easy puzzles and runs of hard puzzles. Today the clue lengths are all misplaced.
As to the website – it staggers from one cock-up to another.
But instead, it appears that every day someone has to do manual typing from a paper copy of the print version. Not surprisingly, they sometimes make mistakes – possibly because they only get this version with a few hours left before the on-line version needs to be ready.
The issue of easy and difficult runs of puzzles is a different one, as it’s something that the crossword editor could in principle do something about [he’s told me many times that he has very little control over the web site]. But we’ve seen many times from comments that one person’s easy puzzle is another person’s hard one. Accurate assessment of every puzzle’s difficulty would require test-solving by a group of solvers, after all the other editing. I honestly don’t believe that the smoothing-out of difficulty you might achieve would justify this effort. There are already steps in place to ensure that you don’t get the same setter or the same grid too often, and these help to smooth out difficulty over each month.
However, it still took quite a while to solve. I whipped through the right side easily enough, but was stumbled a bit on the right, taking entirely too long to come up with ‘ganglion’ and ‘grapnel’.
Last in: ‘Helsinki’.
I see now that I didn’t follow the wordplay in several clues. It’s hard to see ‘sleeping’ = ‘kipping’ when ‘napping’ is right out there. But as in golf, if the ball goes in hole it doesn’t matter what you thought you were trying to do!
I rather liked the anagrams in 9 and 17 and the clue for BLOWPIPES. I was less keen on ‘becomes’ as a link word in 20. Cryptically, river joining the ocean becomes burn, not the other way around.
25:56 for me with the bottom half proving more intractable than the top half. Didn’t fully understand the wordplay on ECHELON whilst solving. I thought for a long time that I was looking for the name of an international airport in 28 across. I had never heard of GRAPNEL, but it couldn’t really have been anything else.
So a big thank you to the bloggers and commenters on here who’ve got me from a point where I’d never solved the Times cryptic in under half an hour and usually failed miserably to solving it correctly nine times out of ten and generally in less than 25 minutes with a fastest time of 8:24.
Thanks also to real life mate 7dpenguin for persuading me to try the crossword every day and telling me about this site and to Peter for his impeccable moderation skills.
Quite apart from the site’s usefulness for improving one’s skills it’s a rich source of enjoyment in itself, with the likes of koro and the lovely Sotira always sure to raise a smile.
On the easy side, but some smart clues. I enjoyed Pan’s pipes and the foulmouthed Italian soldier (anyone else remember Alexis Sayle on revolutionary biscuits – “you’ve got your Garibaldi, your Bourbon and let’s not forget your Peak Frean’s Trotsky Assortment”?).
5d was familiar from American crime shows, wherein “fugue state” is sometimes offered as an alternative to the Twinkie Defence.
COD 16d GARIBALDI
I thought 13dn was loop reversed, the ingenious lo and po thing did not occur to me..
I find that yesterday and today I have not been able to use the traditional “back door method.” Is this url still working for anyone else? So hard sometimes to work out if it’s my browser, or the site itself..
The backdoor seems to be on the way out – it works for some old puzzles, but not for ones in the last 6 months or so (I’ve only tested a few puzzles). You can still save a URL that you can tweak in a similar way, but it will only work when you are logged in. Unless you’re using many URLs at a time, the Club’s lists of puzzles and search facility seem much more convenient than URL-hacking, but the URL details are given below.
In the long run, I think the removal of the back door is a GOOD THING, because if the back door isn’t available, customers who can’t get through the front one will be more likely to complain, and they’ll have more obligation to fix the access issues. Plus of course you now know that it’s worth paying the subs and people can’t freeload the puzzles.
Today’s puzzle is http://crosswordclub.timesonline.co.uk/crossword/print?type=1&number=24140. You can change ‘print’ to ‘play’ if you prefer to solve online (not available for Mephisto, Listener, or TLS Acrostic). The ‘type’ numbers available are 1=Times cryptic (weekday), 2=Times2 Concise, 3=Sat prize cryptic, 4=Jumbo cryptic, 11=Sunday Times cryptic, 12=ST Concise, 21=Club Monthly cryptic, 36=Bank hol. Jumbo, 38=T2 Jumbo, 39=TLS, 45=BH T2 Jumbo, 50=Mephisto, 51=Listener, 52=TLS Acrostic. As far as I know, you must now specify the puzzle number rather than the date, and as before, you have to know which of the numbers will work with each type.
The “back door” has saved my sanity on many occasions when all else failed. I should be really sorry to see it go. I don’t agree at all about there being any direct link between the volume of complaints and the efficacy of the website’s efforts…
The back door worked on Monday; it is only yesterday and today that I cannot make work.
It’s very hard to assess how big the log-in problems are at the moment – there are clearly people who can’t get in, but the ones who can’t will always say more than the ones who can, and not everyone says clearly what they’ve done to try to fix the problem. If it’s clear that the problems are still continuing in a few day’s time, I’ll try to find some way of assessing the size of the problem.
COD for me was 2 down.
Fran L-P
When I use IE 7:
I get and error message GIF89a? when asking for the interactive puzzle.
Prints on 1 page.
Will not remember password.
Quick
With Firefox:
Interactive OK.
Prints on 1 page.
Remembers password.
Slow.
This means that the print formatter is not throwing an extra page skip with IE, so if the puzzle will not print on one page, it must be a print overflow problem related to the different Header/Footer layouts. Presumably it could be fixed by changing some of the defaults for the printer type, of for the browser. I will have a quick dig around, but don’t hold your breath.
Anyone else have any suggestions
On the printing, I honestly doubt that you’ll get much improvement on the club’s recommendation which I’ve quoted already in comments on this page.
Lexmark X5470 no problem.
So please only start listing printers if you can show that the problem actually depends on your printer.
A bigger problem is that they have changed the ratio between the size of the grid and the size of the text, so the default seems to be a huge grid and tiny ariel text. However this too can be corrected, via tools/options/content. Here you can make it display the text in whatever font and font size you want. Having done this (forcing Tahoma 20pt works for me) you would think it would affect all other websites too but so far I haven’t noticed any difficulties. If there are, just check the box (in advanced settings) that allows sites to set their own font.
In summary, with Firefox at least the user can exert complete control over both grid and font size, with a bit of effort. I would expect the same to apply to IE7 which slavishly copies many of Firefox’s features…