24593

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Now bought on paper, and solved in 6:22.

Full report within the hour by early p.m. – forgotten appt – chip in now if you don’t have time to wait, as you would have done with the “placeholder” postings we often used 2-3 years ago.

Solved on real newsprint for a change, with the club site version out of action – though it may have been back in action as I walked out of the door. A puzzle to reinforce the belief (officially false) that Monday puzzles are easy. Last answers in were 3 and 5, but I think that reflects my solving method rather than difficulty – I often end up with a couple near the top to finish off.

Across
1 NICK – 2 def’s, with “appropriate” in it’s common Times xwd role as a verb
3 BRAN=food,DISHED=put on a plate – “food” = bran is a bit vague, but the rest is straightforward
10 MAN=chap,HANDLE=name
11 PARK=”leave in convenient place”,A – here’s the coat of the mods
12 NAN=Ann*,KEEN=anxious – as in “he was keen to get the blog up as quickly as possible”. Still in the rag trade, here’s the cloth
13 E(U.S.)TON – for overseas solvers, Euston is the terminus in London where you catch trains to Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, and Glasgow
15 TASMANIAN DEVILS = (Animals – deviants)* – it had to be an anagram, didn’t it – just a question of which animals
18 VAUGHAN = “metaphysical poet”,WILLIAM S = “husband of Anne H” (Hathaway/Shakespeare) – completed without full understanding as I didn’t know the poet and didn’t bother with the playwright – guessed that ‘composer’ was the def and found him from checking letters, probably looking no further than the V. Music: here’s a bunch of kids playing the Vaughan Williams I know best
21 TW(I,L)IT
23 HOUDINI=”a magician” (in a fairly broad sense) – (I,N.I.,DUO,H) all reversed – another where I didn’t worry about the full wordplay when solving
26 ED=Teddy,IF=provided,(essa)Y
27 HOOVER=president,DAM=mother – in the “controller of Colorado” def., we’re talking about the effect of the dam on the river rather than the state.
28 LO(GANBE=began*)RRY
29 MAIL = “male”
 
Down
1 N(O.M.,IN)ATIVE
2 CANON – 2 defs
4 REDE(N)SIGN
5 NIECE = “member of family” – N=knight replaces P=pawn, in PIECE=bishop perhaps – another solved without full wordplay understanding
6 IMPASS(iv)E
7 Today’s deliberate omission – ask if you can’t see (or hear) the answer
8 DRAW=drag – ward=charge, reversed
9 CAME=arrived,R.A.
14 ISOSEISMAL = (Aimless so I)* – wordplay was pretty obvious, but I had to invent the answer from remembering other iso___ words – this one links points where an earthquake was experienced with equal strength
16 SQUAW=wife (disctinctly un-PC),KING=ruler
17 NEIGHBOUR = (bore hung I)*
19 HALCYON = (any loch)*
20 LAUREL – companion of Oliver Hardy
22 T(E)-HEE
24 INDIA – which precedes Juliet in the radio alphabet
25 DEAL – 2 defs – strictly, deal is fir or pine wood as a building material, but “wood” suffices in most clues.

32 comments on “24593”

  1. I thought this looked like a quick one, but wombled through in a sleepy 19 minutes. I suppose LAUREL is a bloomer (it does have flowers, after all) but it wasn’t an immediate cognitive hit. I liked SQUAWKING – anther example of the U and Q rule – and made it CoD out of an otherwise uneventful bunch.

    Off topic: is there an error at 2D in yesterday’s ST? The anagrist just doesn’t work, and I can’t see an alternative reading. I appreciate the incivility of comment on a live crossword, but in the absence of any up to date bulletins on the site (up now, at least for me on Chrome) it would be nice to know.

  2. 12:08 here, and I was feeling pretty sleepy on the train this morning. Definitely on the easier end of the spectrum. Probably two minutes at the end battling with the anagram fodder “aimless so I”, even with all the checking letters in place. Nice to have a word for those little circles they draw on a map radiating away from the epicentre of an earthquake. I assume that’s what’s meant by “a shocking line”.
  3. I’m gritting my teeth. Emily’s got to be wrong. But what else can it be? I’ll soon find out. 21 minutes with a possible bloomer (no laurels). Can’t say I care greatly for the tee-hee variant: yes it’s in the dictionary, no one doesn’t see it around.
  4. 13 mins solving after waiting all day for the sod to arrive — normally 07:00 here. But I’ll wait for Koro (?) to report before commenting.
  6. Either of these:
    1 a tropical Asian and African kingfisher with brightly colored plumage. Genus Halcyon, family Alcedinidae: many species.
    2 a mythical bird said by ancient writers to breed in a nest floating at sea at the winter solstice, charming the wind and waves into calm.
  7. Sure: it’s the kingfisher genus, as well as being a word fore nostalgically remembered days of yore
  8. I found this moderately easy and had almost finished in about 20 minutes, then got stuck for ages on the ISOSEISMAL/MAIL pair in the SE. I can’t explain the latter (a very easy clue in retrospect), but the former is pretty tricky for an anagram. Eventually I wrote it all out and figured out that it probably began with “iso”, and the rest fell in quickly from there. This also – finally – gave me MAIL so I finished by kicking myself.
    Bit of a wobbly start to the week.
    1. Yes – i too spent relatively far too long on MAIL for no apparent reason. Not only that but I had both checkers and it was my last in. This is a pattern at the moment which I am concerned about – mental blocks on “easy” 4 letter words at the end of a puzzle. I had a similar one on the most recent qualifying grid which would have almost certainly made the difference between success and failure. Knowing this I actually gave up entirely, and when I picked it up again to throw away it was immediately apparent and went straight in.
  9. 32 minutes here having gone out and bought the paper, so quite quick for me. The only word I didn’t know was ISOSEISMAL. Wasted ages at the end trying to justify RED INDIAN at 4dn merely because it fitted; it seemed obvious that it bore no relation to the clue whatsoever.
  10. 21 mins. First in 12a, then bottom half after the long acs, quite slow. Top half in as fast as I could write after 1d and 6d. Mental note to complete knowledge of radio alphabet – I & J are ones I do remember. Admired anagrams.
  11. 19:53 .. forced to solve in the morning rather than my usual late night and proving that I need more than one cup of coffee before tackling a puzzle. I kept misreading clues (such as seeing ‘after’ for ‘alter’) which doesn’t help.

    COD RED ENSIGN

  12. Guessed HALCYON to be a bird and as above struggled with anag for ISOSEISMAL at least until I got MAIL, possibly the easiest clue but my second last in.
    Yes, I think (hope) 2d in ST puzzle was a clanger.
    Hope those touchy about homophones didn’t do the Rufus today while waiting for the Times Xword Club to show its face.
  13. Apologies for being off topic again, but does anyone know where I can obtain a template for creating crosswords in Word, or possibly Publisher. Times style for preference.
    I’ve done something that’s okay-ish using tables, but can’t help feeling someone out there has done it better. Ideally, I need to be able to enter words in the grid (otherwise a jpg would be the easy option) and my final preference would be free to download: I’m aware of some programmes that do it but they ain’t cheap – can’t help it if I am!
    1. Whether it suits depends on exactly what you want to do, but the free AcrossLite software publishes a plain text format – see http://www.litsoft.com/across/alite/man/AcrossTextFormat.pdf

      Using this template would allow you to create a file from which you can print the puzzle or solve it using the software, and to distribute it to anyone else with the same free software so that they can do the same. But it wouldn’t give you a Word/Publisher file you could send to someone editing a local magazine. If that’s what you need, canny use of Word tables is a good starting point, but you might want to grab a screen image of the word tables grid. I’ve used this method in the past for online puzzles.

  14. 10.06 Helped by seeing VAUGHAN WILLIAMS pretty quickly with 2 or 3 letters in and worked out ISOSEISMAL after getting the -S-S start. Only small hindrance was venturing SUBJECTIVE for 1d but the easy 10 soon put me right. All in all quite easy but some decent clues.
  15. An easy 15 minutes with no particular hesitations or deviations. Guessed the composer from just V… (7,8) – luckily as never heard of the poet (am I imagining things or is it quite a while since we had one of these strange people?). Thought “bringing” might be padding at 9D and the President has an unnecessary apostrophe at 27A. Nearly put “Paul” for 29A before I bothered to read the clue properly.
    1. I can’t see why the apostrophe is unnecessary: “Presidents” cannot possibly clue HOOVER, and I can’t see what the surface without the apostrophe would mean.
      1. The apostrophe is unnecessary in the sense that “president and mother” would work perhaps slightly better. I’m not a fan of “X’s Y” to indicate X beside Y. In real life “Dave’s coat” means neither “Dave is next to a coat” or “Dave has a coat”. Obviously as the clue is worded then the apostrophe IS necessary to make sense as a sentence.
        1. OK – if the origninal point had been “unnecessary use of {‘s} rather than {has}, I’d have understood.

          I can’t think of a “Dave has a coat” example either, but then I can’t think of a real life “flower” that’s a river either.

          1. Ah but “flower” is different, since it could be used in real life to mean something that flows, by analogy with lots of other examples. I also cannot think of a case outside crosswords where that has happened, but unlike the “Dave’s coat” example it is at least plausible.
            1. Some verbs take -er to produce a noun meaning “someone or something that ????s”, but some that logically could take -er never do.

              Some meanings of “has” are shortened to {‘s}, but some that logically could be thus shortened never are.

              So both are possible “by analogy with other examples”. There are more -er examples, but that’s just because the number of verbs greatly exceeds the number of meanings of “has”.

  16. This was very easy even for a Monday and even though the two long answers were almost my last in. I realised that I would need to use procrustean methods to fit Vincenzo Bellini into 18. I should have got the WilliamS part of the answer quite quickly since I am familiar with CaesarJ type wordplay to clue AntonyM, Also Tasmanian Devils crop up more often than you would expect, possibly because they are 15-letter animals.
  17. Haven’t commented since Thursday, as I have been combining work, golf and puzzles: hence, no times to report, but did complete each in bits and pieces. Yes is the answer to ST 2d.

    25 satisfactory minutes for this, no real hold-ups and another gentle Monday intro (regardless of what the Times says!). COD to RED ENSIGN as I too toyed with R.INDIAN!

  18. Diverted from my regular night before solving time by the unavailable puzzle, so I tackled this while driving to my office; that certainly adds to the solving time. And the driving time as well. Yes, fairly simple. COD to RED ENSIGN, and I also had never seen ISOSEISMAL before. Regards.
  19. Me again (apologies) am I right in assuming all answers here are a result of the times online – I do the paper version, which does coincide, but often find the Saturday version not here ?
    1. The puzzles in the paper and online are the same. All daily puzzles are blogged here on the same day. Saturdays and Sundays are blogged a week after publication (‘cos there’s prizes at stake). Hope that clears it up.
    2. What Sotira said, although there’s no blog up for last Saturday’s puzzle as the blogger has got water in his floppy drive or something. If you’re stuck just ask a question on the topic entitled “soggy penguin” and someone will give you an answer.

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