24645

32 comments on “24645”

1. …to get some of the more obscure ones. About 75 minutes, doing laundry in the middle.

   I found the SE hard and the NW not much better. I was most annoyed when I finally thought of ‘Malawi’, since I had been trying to think of a country starting in ‘ma’ and ending in ‘i’ about 60 minutes prior.

   I kept getting the answers without seeing the how the cryptics worked, as in ‘narked’ and ‘shelve’. I didn’t want to put them in until I figured them out, slowing the solve.

   Dave, welcome to the company of regularly scheduled bloggers. They gave you a tough one for your first Friday, but the Friday puzzle has always tended to be on the difficult side, despite the editor’s protestations of randomness.

2. Well, not quite a stinker yet, but the ante is being upped. Exactly the same problem with the 20, 23, 27 corner (including 19 to boot). That’s what held me up most, so 52 minutes.
3. Hi Dave, nice blog, and thanks for the early post. About 30 minutes for me, a relief after yesterday’s. My last entry was NARKED, since I think it’s fairly (if not completely) UK-centric, and thus doesn’t spring to mind. Other than that, my holdup was in the NW, where once I saw the clever IDIOCY, the rest (1A, 9A, 3D) fell into place. COD to the tricky SHELVE, which appears to be an &lit. Regards to all.
   1. Forget that last bit about SHELVE being an &lit, sorry, no it’s not. But it’s still my COD.
4. Excellent puzzle, which in turn enthralled and frustrated me for far too long. In the end, came up one short (BESTRIDE – which I should have got since I had parsed ‘best’) and also got one wrong (‘Panama’ for MALAWI – another I should have got). So much to like here, and educational too, as I finally learned that it’s ‘hair’s breadth’ and not ‘breath’. As with other phrases which are mainly used in speech – and which therefore one seldom sees in writing – this is an easy mistake to make. COD to NARKED, since it was a favourite word of Norman Stanley Fletcher in that fine, gloriously Anglocentric comedy Porridge.
5. 2 blogs in a week Dave. Wow!
   Much to do today hence 6am comment.
   Slowed, unaccountably as I look back, by SW corner, at least once I stopped pronouncing BESTRIDE as best ride.
   For this veteran of about 17 months this has been a confidence boosting couple of weeks except I recall last Saturday’s being rather tougher and the Saturday before getting one of those that had to be abandoned a few times before finishing (aided) around 4pm. So following PB’s suspicion that a pattern is emerging perhaps we are back to puzzles for the commute and then something for the weekend? Or maybe I am getting better at this? Some hope.
   COD to BESTRIDE for making the lift and separate of “life span” so difficult to see. Bravo setter , ditto Dave.
6. Very difficult for me after a reasonable start in the NE corner and two of the four long answers fell early. But then I found myself really struggling and feeling fortunate that it was not my Friday to blog (Well done, Dave!). I finished in 75 minutes with a couple of outright cheats (1a and 27ac) and also along the way as the clock entered the second hour I looked in the thesaurus a couple of times to kick-start my conked out brain

   I think my problem was that this is another of those puzzles that although thoroughly excellent lacks all the things make solving easier for me. There are no 3 or 4 letter words, very few answers with more than one word (I’m usually good at phrases or sayings) and virtually no GK required. Additionally there are lots of long clues where it was difficult to separate the defintions, the wordplay and the padding (very little of that as it turned out).

   I’m hoping this means we may now be due something a little easier on Saturday.

7. Another one where I sat for 5 minutes thinking I was never going to start and then finished in 35 minutes. It must take a while for the porridge to kick in (no, not the show, ulaca, the oatmeal). There were many clues I liked in this one, including LAUNDERED, WHODUNNIT, REACH, BASEBALL, MALAWI & SHOWDOWN but COD to RESTRAIN. A good Friday puzzle (no, not Good Friday…)
8. 10:53 for this one – NE corner seemed to be the hardest, with “artichoke” my only initial idea for a “bulbous” plant, but no wordplay to support it. 1D, 2 and the new word at 9 ended the puzzle.

   As jack says, difficulty was achieved by way of deceptive clues and a shortage of multi-word answers, rather than arcane knowledge – a great pattern for a championship puzzle, though I’m sure all of this year’s are written by now. I was delayed a bit at 21 by looking for “carelessly = (thin, yarn, d)*”, S,HI as an idea for the beginning of 16, and a reversal of something suggested by the “up” in 7D.

9. 25 minutes Underground, 5 minutes Overground on this one, solved in the unusual (and not very helpful) order NE, SW, SE, NW – definitely a game of four quarters. I think my difficulties were with definitions and cluing that little extra bit removed from straight connection: 7d, for example, prop=rest, water=rain, and even the definition. This is as far from a complaint as it can be: quite excellent cluing forcing new synapses to form in the crossword dictionary of the mind.
   Anyone else tempted by UKASE (have I/they spelt it wrong?) at 22 down?
   CoD to anything in the NW corner, with “wobbling hard” shading it if I have to pick one, for pure simplicity and “I’ll have to leave it until I get some crossing letters” impenetrability.
10. More difficult for me today, almost 30mins, starting in the SE and finishing in the NW with voidance & covert last in. Also was tempted by the nonexistent word PADIGRAM (it’s similar to a pentagram) for 8dn before getting crossers that ruled it out..
11. Welcome Dave and well done. A good standard puzzle with some excellent wordplay to get you started. 25 minutes for me but solved left to right, top to bottom with no major hold ups.

    At the risk of being repetitive if you find these clever wordplays difficult have a go at Mephisto, using the blogs that appear here to help you. The bar crosswords force you to analyse the clue, form a hypothesis as to structure and then synthesise the answer.

    1. Thanks Jimbo, Having done today’s last night for blogging purposes, I thought I’d take your advice and have a go at this week’s Mephisto. I got about halfway through during my lunch hour, and in the couple of hours since I’ve managed to finish it, albeit with online dictionary assistance.

       The vocab is definitely a big step up from the daily puzzle. A lot I’ve never heard before, and indeed some of the answers I’ve come up with I’ve not been able to find in any online dictionary. The wordplay seems to run on quite similar lines though.

       Not sure if I’m brave enough to tackle it every week, but certainly an interesting challenge for when I’m feeling clever.

       1. Apart from strictly observed Ximenean rules including the absence of cryptic defs (which don’t really work for words you don’t know yet), and a few changes like more compound anagrams (a rarity in daily puzzles), the wordplay techniques are identical.

          Under “Solving Tips” on the Memories page, you can find two Mephisto blogs for relatively easy puzzles, written with beginners in mind, and a link to a similar report on an Azed puzzle. If you print these puzzles from the archives, these reports should confirm what you’ve already learned and add some more tips.

12. I think I tend to have a slightly different hat on when doing Mephisto, even more with Listener. I expect those clues to more abstruse, and the vocab generally harder – I’m delighted when I can complete a Mephisto without aids (as last Sunday!) and positively staggered if I complete the Listener without aids (or at least, I think I will be!). On the Times, I felt that today’s was tending towards the more indirect, challenging set of clues than the normal run – all the better for it. Maybe it’s to do with wavelengths: my brain makes these connections between word, yours those. Certainly today I found for the most part solving sped up as I “tuned in”.
    1. In my long-ago regular Listener solving days (c. 1988-95), I can remember just one puzzle completed with no dictionary help – one with a theme based on Lear’s “Jumblies”, easily guessable as the grid was very obviously a sieve.
13. Like Dave Perry, I had three-quarters of this solved in twenty minutes, but then stopped suddenly in the SE corner. After pondering while brewing a pot of concentrated Twinings’ Breakfast Tea, I came back to the puzzle and managed to limp home, somewhat dispirited, in 57 minutes.
    Not really my sort of puzzle, this one. I guess that most people who contribute here have far more logical minds than I have. My sort of puzzle is probably rather an old fashioned one, involving double definitions, cryptic definitions and, dare I say, even direct quotations! Gestalt as against reductionist? That’s probably a bit pompous, but I think you see what I’m getting at.
    I have to admit to enjoying that puzzle from 1940, even though I only managed to get about half of it out.
    Jimbo’s advice is, if I may say so, very sound; and, bearing it in mind, I went back and broke up today’s clues as I used to do in clause-analysis exercises at school. (I wasn’t very good at those either!)
    Have to move with The Times, I suppose.
    1. Somewhere in my latest list of suggestions for the club site was the restoration of the “Vintage puzzles” feature, which gave us a monthly chance to solve (or not …) a puzzle from the archives.
14. 24:28 .. terrific puzzle.

    The REACH and SHELVE pair took me five minutes to see at the end.

    Loved WHODUNNIT, but COD to RESTRAIN for the misleading ‘water bottle’.

15. Pretty slow going here, with a bit of cheating on 18ac, 23ac, 20d to finish within my lunchtime. Initially surprised by HIT as a synonym for REACH, but after a bit of thought and a trip to the thesaurus it seems somewhat more reasonable! COD 15d.
16. Excellent if tricky puzzle. well blogged thank you!
    took around the 60 minute mark and like others stuck at the end in the South east corner
    took ages to see Malawi and reach was deceptively clued. Shelve i am still not sure about!
    1. It took me a while to parse it, but once I had it seemed robust enough. Case = SHELL, so ‘Case nearly’ = SHEL, ‘apart from marginal features’ = remove first & last letters, so ‘OVER apart from marginal features’ = VE. And ‘put aside’ seems a solid definition for Shelve.
17. 10:41, ending with an uneasy REACH (23ac) – I didn’t know “cast” could be used on its own to mean “thrown away“.  VOIDANCE (9ac) was new but intelligible, I couldn’t have told you what an AMARYLLIS (3dn) was, and I only know about SATRAPs (5ac) thanks to school Greek, but overall this didn’t have the general-knowledge aspect that tends to slow me down.  I found the SE corner hardest.

    Clues of the Day: 1ac (CHIVALRY), 2dn (IDIOCY), 7dn (RESTRAIN).

18. 36 min today, just about half of yesterday’s miserable time! Same stumbling blocks as others, although I completed SW before NE in the end. But ROCKY was actually my first one in – probably coming to mind more quickly because it (he?) was referred to in another clue earlier this week.
    1. oops, I meant SE before NW – don’t ever ask me to mapread for you 😉
19. 17 minutes. Like Dave and many others a lot of time spent on the SE corner. MALAWI was last as I was looking for a country ending MA.
    Liked the WHODUNNIT clue. Never got the wordplay for SHELVE which was hardest clue for me , so my hat is off to Dave and anybody else who actually worked it out.
20. A chewy puzzle and no mistake which I was delighted to solve in under 30 minutes (27:20). Last in was bestride.

    On reading the comments above I was delighted to discover that I ventured up the same 3 blind alleys as Peter.

    Highly commended rosettes to whodunnit for the definition and plain sailing for ‘in a bad way’, but like Koro and Sotira I have to give COD to restrain for its concisenessity and the brilliant use of the ‘lift and separate’ ploy.

21. Ground to a halt with much of SE/SW corners incomplete (despite using my recently gained knowledge from here: ‘I’ = current and ‘OR’ = other ranks/soldiers). A few hours diversion (work) and SW corner fell into place: finally admitted defeat and came here to resolve SE. Congratulations, Dave, on the blog: it almost looks easy when it’s so clearly explained!
22. About 3 hours, on and off for me, but I am working and watching the cricket. Felt like a 50 minute solve.

    This was very cleverly clued: the solutions were all fairly common words together with some “crossword words” (SATRAP, PARADIGM etc)reminiscent of a good Mephisto. Nicely done and very enjoyable.

    COD: SHELVE.

23. I failed to finish this on the tube and then got interrrupted a few times so no time but I’d guess about 45 minutes. So quite tricky for me but I solved steadily if slowly.
    Reflecting others’ comments, and very unusually for me, I didn’t circle a single clue because there was not a single thing in this I didn’t know. SATRAP only because it’s come up in one of these puzzles quite recently but still I don’t think this has ever happened to me before.
24. A really really satisfying puzzle for this relative novice.

    Struggled through in a couple of hours to finish unaided but a big sense of achievement at the end.

    Like so many, stuck for the last 20 mins or so with REACH, SHELVE, BESTRIDE.

    COD to 21 for the mulitple red herrings (‘unravelled’ and ‘finally’ both leading me down false paths before I eventually saw the anagram).

    1. I’m impressed that a relative novice managed to finish this unaided.  Well done!

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