24782 – More like DT

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Unaccountably this took me 40 minutes to solve and having now written the blog I am completely baffled as to why. Apart from 16ac which has relatively complicated wordplay and the answer is an unfamiliar derivative of a more familiar word, this is pretty basic stuff. There’s really nothing much to say about it so I’m afraid my blog is going to be pretty basic too. Maybe some contributors can liven things up a bit or we are in for a very dull day around here. Apologies for accidentally omitting 13dn; the answer’s now in the Comments section underneath the main blog.

Across
1 SCRATCH – Double definition. Scratch in golf is a handicap of zero apparently.
5 ALARMED – A,LA(R,ME)D
9 Deliberately omitted. Burnt cakes anyone?
10 CASE HISTORY – CASE,HIS,TORY
11 PRETORIA – Anagram of AIRPORT and E for energy.
12 IMOGEN – I,Married + anagram of GONE
15 DOHS – DO+SH reversed
16 CALUMNIATE – C(ALUMNI,AT)ollegE – By far the most complex clue today to a not very familiar word.
18 SPECIALIST – Anagram of PITIES CLASs
19 WIMP – Wings In Many Pubs
22 DETAIL – CElTs inside DAIL, the Irish parliament.
23 LIFE PEER – L,IF,EPEE,R
25 CONSTRAINED – CONS,TRAINED
27 AWE – RAg WeEk
28 RETIRED – RE(TIRE)D
29 RANGERS – RANGE,R,Semi-final
 
Down
1 SNAPPED – Double definition.
2 REFRESHMENT – RE,(FRESHMEN)T
3 TYCOON – Sounds like Thai + CO,ON
4 HOSPITABLE – HO,S(PI)TABLE
5 ACHE- AC(Head)E
6 ASSUMING – ASS,fUMING
7 MAO – Minutes Approved,Old
8 DOYENNE – DO(YE)NNE – reference to the poet John Donne 1572-1631.
14 QUESTIONER – QUE,STI(ONE)R
17 MINISTER – M,IN(IS)TER
18 SIDECAR – RACED,IS all reversed
20 PERSEUS – SUES,REP all reversed. It’s a constellation.
21 HELD ON – HELp,D ON
24 Deliberately omitted.
26 NUT – Double definition.

56 comments on “24782 – More like DT”

  1. 19 minutes here, held up by held on and dohs. Didn’t get to blog yesterday but done in by swear – as others had spear. This one a lot easier. Nothing particularly deft or amusing – a good homest morning greeting. I suppose there’s an intimacy in a good Times crossword of knowing the world of wrinkles, so to speak.
  2. Not quite one for filing in the /Nursery folder but certainly the easiest of the week: 17 minutes to get round all 31 holes. Very much a case of seeing defs in the clues and fitting answers into the crossers, with the parsing waiting for the luxury of the 32nd hole. (Coffee!) This is the kind of puzzle you want to solve in a public place if you like to show off!
  3. 44 minutes with one wrong, ‘dahl’ (‘produce’) for DOHS, which I shoved in, meant to come back and check, but failed to do. After the first three I looked at went in on first reading (the 1s and 9), I thought to myself, ‘This will have a sting in the tail’, and for me, at least, it did.

    I shudder every time I read of ‘soccer’ teams in a British publication. It’s football we gave the world.

  4. Easy one today, 14 mins or thereabouts.. but none the worse for that, good solid effort by the setter. I liked “college after vacation” = CE

  5. 26 minutes, with RANGERS being the last in. My heart sank when I realized that it was going to begin with an R, since the only soccer [there; I said it and I’m glad] team I could think of was Arsenal (I felt confident in excluding Manchester United). I also put in PERSEID for reasons not particularly clear to me, which added a few minutes to the time. I liked 16 and 10. Am I wrong in thinking that ‘by’ in 13 is there only to save the surface reading? Couldn’t one have had ‘Rainwater, e.g., damaged pottery’?
    1. We had READING football team recently, roughly the equivalent of the Detroit Lions in gridiron terms, I am told.
    1. Yes, you’re right about that and thanks for pointing it out. The answer’s GRANITEWARE (anagram of EG RAINWATER) if anyone wants to know. I’m not confident to edit in a whole new line now the blog is posted so I’m going to leave it out for fear of buggering up the whole thing and giving myself a stressful morning.
  7. 15 minutes, no wrecks and nobody drownded. RANGERS was the last in because I wanted to put the R(uns) at the beginning and couldn’t think why anger=field.

    I did find myself wondering whether CALUMNIATE and REFRESHMENT were chosen because of the unusually long filler words for (ex) students. The former makes it as my CoD, though not by any great margin.

    Off topic, I was delighted to hear from the BBC that seagulls take terns to keep a lookout when they sleep. I wonder whether they pay them?

  8. I plodded to the end of this one. I didn’t find it particularly easy but once I had finished it I couldn’t see what the difficulty was! But then I struggled with 1 across despite being a golfer and 24 down even though I play in one!
    Louise
  9. An easy end to the week that I worked steadily through in 20 minutes with no real hold-ups

    I would like a “possibly” at the end of 10A. Case histories occur in many walks of life and medical records are but an example. I liked the misleading use of “vacation” and “field” but also winced at “soccer”

    1. I understand that in certain circles it is considered that football is played with an oval ball and soccer with a round one, but what do I know? By reputation I have little knowledge of any sport other than lawn tennis so people can tell me almost anything on the subject and I’ll probably believe it.
  10. We may have given the world football, but like the game itself, “they” have picked it up and run off in a different direction. Talking of “picking it up”, in Australia there are 3 other codes of football so the term soccer does help to clarify which code you are talking about.
    Like yesterday(?) when the word “my” appeared in both clues and answers, I was amused to see that the names of both major Glasgow teams appeared today; Celtic in a clue and Rangers in an answer.
    Maybe the stars in Perseus were aligned in my favour today but if I can complete a puzzle correctly in under an hour, it must be an easy one.
  11. I struck lucky with an easy solve. Took my car in to be serviced this morning, sat in reception and rattled off the crossword in comfortably under half an hour. The service took considerably longer …
  12. Took a fair while as wasnt feeling that good. Agree with most of the above.
    Onwards and upwards or down and across
  13. The majority of the solving flowed quite well with only a couple holding me up. The only one I didn’t get was 15a which given the number of times I type D’Oh when the eureka moment strikes is unexcusable.
  14. 21:57 .. like jackkt, I found this strangely difficult.

    Last in: CALUMNIATE, also my COD for that ‘college after vacation’, as mentioned by others.

  15. 12 minutes. Nice to have a confidence booster after the strains of this week.
    Lots of post-solve unpicking of wordplay for answers bunged in on definition and crossers today.
  16. 14:02, but with my typical tpyographical clutter rendering DOHS as DOSH thus counting as two mistakes. Note to Tony S – this is the sort of typo that would be impossible to make on paper.

    CALUMNIATE from wordplay, I didn’t think the wordplay was that difficult (once you realise there’s options other than OB and GRAD for former student).

    1. I agree the wordplay was not all that difficult but compared with everything else on offer today it was by far the most complex made more so by the answer which I’m not sure I knew existed.
    2. I was pleased I checked my solution today as I found I’d typed in SEDECAR and was able to correct it before clicking on my stopwatch. I’d start taking those extra seconds if I were you.
      1. I got it right when solving, Tony (see puzzle blog above) but mistyped when responding to another poster under Comments.
        1. Oops! Sorry! I was trying to reply to glheard’s comment above and must have bungled it.

          (Hang on! It looks from the indentation as if my reply actually was to glheard’s comment. Did LiveJournal forward it to you?)

          1. Sorry for the misunderstanding. As I initiated the blog today I received notification of every posting.
  17. 29 minutes with one wrong. I had LEAD ON for HELD ON. Thought the truncated first word of support would be LEAN. But my defnition is slightly out and I originally planned to have another think about it, but forgot. I found this a bit boring – nothing to make me sit up or smile. But a comfortable solve nevertheless.
  18. Wholly concur with “Minor injury no handicap” as a better clue for 1ac. As a result of the existing clue, entered “stretch” as a minor muscle injury and something to surmount as in “that’s a bit of a stretch”.

    Obviously did not impact any other clues with those letters, but disappointed to come here and see that another parsing was appropriate.

  19. We’re always slow but usually accurate. One wrong today, darn it, 15 ac, Dahl, which we thought was dahl, backwards’lhad’ = loud, i.e. reverse of quiet.

    Have a good weekend all.

  20. Been following this excellent blog for some months, but always a month late (behind the Times?), when the crossword’s published in The Australian. Decided it was time to join the party, so signed up for the Crossword Club tonight. Just had the pleasure(?) of my first on-line submission. 54:39, but messed it up with Lead On instead of Held On. Still pretty good by my standards.
    Cheers, Galspray
    1. Welcome aboard. Good to have another Antipodean to help balance things up. Rule no 1: DON’T mention cricket.
      1. Thanks Ross. I was hoping enough time had passed since the tragedy whose name we dare not speak.
        1. What’s the problem? As an Englishman who lives in “Syderny”, I have no problem with the cricket being mentioned; that’s until we get bundled out of the World Cup, of course.
  22. Welcome galspray, hope you enjoy it here. About 30 minutes, ending with CALUMNIATE/ASSUMING. I agree with Jack re the COD, for the neat vacated college, plus fitting ‘alumni’ into the answer. Otherwise, not much else to add today. I note the cameo appearances of Donne, Chairman Mao, and I’ve learned that I didn’t know how to spell PRETORIA (i.e., it’s evidently not Praetoria.) Regards to everyone.
    2. You may have been influenced by the Praetorian Guard, or Michael (and I think there was another one) Praetorius, the composer of ‘Terpsichore’, among other greats.
      1. Kevin, To paraphrase Tony Blair, the 3 priorities of a Times Crossword solver are “Erudition, erudition and erudition”. I’m impressed with yours!
  23. If you play off scratch your handicap is 0. To refer to someone’s handicap at golf is to refer to the number off which they play, and that number may be 0.

    It seems to make perfectly good sense to call it soccer, so as to distinguish it from rugby football, just as in the US they call it soccer to distinguish it from American football.

    1. Thanks for this, Will.

      As mentioned above, my knowledge of sport is extremely limited so when I blogged the puzzle I looked up ‘scratch’ in the COED and found its definition re golf seemed to fit the clue perfectly and I quoted it by way of explanation. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one (apart from the setter) who found it technically correct.

      On the football thing I have been trying today to find out what this objection to the term ‘soccer’ is all about and failed to find anything of any substance though I understand there is some sort of emotional objection to its use with reference to ‘the beautiful game. Every source I have consulted says that it’s properly called Association Football otherwise known as ‘soccer’.

      1. Don’t diss ’emotional objections’! They are the stuff of life and of language, and just as present in the world of music as the world of sport, I would suggest. The fact is you would be pressed to find a single person among the millions of players, followers and supporters of the game in Britain (where The Times is published, and whose culture it reflects, no?) who uses the word ‘soccer’. The fact that Australians, Americans et al do is indisputable and entirely rational, but, in the context of the institution that is the Times crossword, rather beside the point.
          1. Just for the record I use the word ‘soccer’ (to distinguish the game from ‘rugger’, aka rugby football). I may not be typical but I am a true-born Brit!
            1. It’s certainly used, Tony – by schoolmasters of a certain vintage among others – but my point was that those involved in the game in Britain, whether as players, coaches or fans (i.e. those who go to games), would never use it.
        2. Not a single person? So we must assume that the setter is not one of the millions of players, followers and supporters but it doesn’t make his use of the word incorrect.

          I’m interested in your remark about the world of music but can’t think at the moment how the same thing applies there. As a musician of sorts I’d be interested to know what you have in mind?

          1. I suppose one example of the kind of thing I’m referring to (objections that are arguably as much emotional as strictly rational) would be the fact that most professional musicians won’t use the term ‘French horns’, calling them simply ‘horns’. This in spite of the fact that ‘French horn’ is very probably the most commonly used name for the instrument in the English speaking world. Not an exact analogy, but close enough for current purposes.
            1. Up to my late 20s I studied music including 3 years at one of the London colleges, took a degree in music and taught and played semi-professionally and I’ve never heard of anyone giving a damn what they are called. I don’t know why anyone would worry about it, nor the football / soccer thing. Why does it matter? I’m not trying to be argumentative, I just honestly don’t understand what the problem is.
  24. Not much to comment on today, as it was a fairly straightforward puzzle which I seem to have managed to complete correctly (unlike yesterday’s DNF), though taking all of 55 minutes and 1 second by the online clock. I guess I was held up by being rather dimwitted about the wordplay until I took some time to think things over.

    Last in was DOHS, preceded by CALUMNIATE, which is also my COD, I guess, if there is going to be one at all. Unlike previous puzzles this week, there were no clues I was surprised to be able to solve, even though some took a little while.

  25. 7:22 for my first clean sweep of the year (for the daily cryptic, that is, as I actually achieved a clean sweep with the Jumbo 904). I nearly failed at the first clue, as I’m with those who reckon 1ac would have been better as “Minor injury no handicap”, but I decided that the answer couldn’t really be anything but SCRATCH and was relieved when the crossing down clues confirmed it.
  26. The New York Post, where I do my Times puzzle (about two weeks late), often prints clues with *misprints,* and the heck of it is, the misprints are usually imperceptible errors in word division.

    In this puzzle, 15ac’s clue “Produce the reverse of quiet notes” became “Produce there verse of quiet notes.” For some reason, the error usually manages to be as sensible as the original.

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