Times 25178 – Trooble at t’mill

59 comments on “Times 25178 – Trooble at t’mill”

1. 34:28 .. must be tough – I can’t remember being top of the leader board (very temporarily, no doubt) before.

   Yep, glad the setter put a question mark after the singles’ bar. Apparently, it’s not always so. Or so I’m told.

   Last in the pair of PESACH / POOH-BAH, having originally gone for EA(S)TER at 5a.

   Have to admit I rather enjoyed POGOED, but I should probably say it quietly.

   Edited at 2012-06-01 02:31 am (UTC)

2. …this was one chewy puzzle. I enjoyed the clues you disliked, particularly the diabolical ‘pogoed’. You do remember the Ramones?

   I had an annoying wrong answer in ‘Easter’, i.e. ‘eater’ enclosing ‘s’, but it didn’t last long.

   I found the cryptics for ‘Darwinist’ and ‘obloquy’ particularly devious and enjoyable, but I was slowed to a crawl figuring them out. I put on the Mahler 7th for music, and had played all four sides and still wasn’t finished. I was beating my brain about the various meanings ‘Arab’ might have when the answer suddenly became obvious, and made it clear that my last in must be ‘priestly’.

3. Another EASTER here, and another who enjoyed the POGOED joke. A very tough puzzle, and I confess to resorting to external aids so that my time must be taken with a pailful of salt.
4. … but the hour was well gone by the time there was a letter in each square. Agree with Jack about the left/right separation. How rare is it to have one side done and the other a total blank? Last in: OBLOQUY. How difficult was that to clue?
5. Great puzzle, ‘though like others my time was off the scale, and I fell at my final fence, being unable to get NUNLIKE and inventing something before aids revealed all. Agree with McT about OBLOQUY – nice word too: without the wordplay I’d have spelled it ‘obliquy’.

   Put me in the pro-POGO camp too. ‘Goed’ reminded me of Chomsky’s universal grammar and the solution it offers to the poverty of the stimulus conundrum. If a child never hears ‘goed’ spoken by its interlocutors, how come it ends up saying it all the time for a time?

   (Note to others: read Chomsky’s linguistic stuff only in ‘translation’.)

   Edited at 2012-06-01 05:37 am (UTC)

   1. Maybe I’d have found it amusing on a non-blogging day when nearly half the puzzle hadn’t already given me so much grief. As mentioned above it didn’t help that I never heard of the dance (or the Ramones, Vinyl1 , if you’re still around) so I wasted a lot of time trying to find a fit for PO?O?D. Also I can’t say I recall ever hearing anyone saying ‘goed’ for ‘went’ which might say something about the cloistered environment in which I have lived my life.

      Edited at 2012-06-01 07:30 am (UTC)

      1. I’d never heard of the dance – the punk era passed me by – but the image of someone jumping around on, or as if on, a pogo stick leads nicely into the answer, and we’ve all – surely – had a go on a pogo stick at some time.

         A toughie to blog, for sure!

         1. Nope, never done that either!
         2. What are the chances that on this very day one of the contestants on ‘Countdown'(recorded some weeks ago) came up with ‘POGOES’? And it was the longest and only 6-letter word available from the 9-letter selection.
6. I can see (possibly) “you can’t beat the RUN (of the cards)” but I can’t see anything else.
   Please put me out of my misery.
   1. The definitions are 1) “As an ineligible candidate you can’t”, and 2) “beat it”.
7. Doh!
   Thankyou Jack.
   Mike O.
8. 50 minutes, so on the extreme end of tough for me. It (sort of) helped having all those Fs dotted around plus a couple of Qs, but FOUR O’CLOCK held me up for ever: at one stage I had pencilled in FREE FRENCH as at least being some sort of legion. It fell once I sorted out STABLEFUL (my Chambers doesn’t believe in it as a word). I look forward to the day when twenty three minutes past seven is clued, presumably in a Jumbo.
   POGOED made me smile, though not that much as I thought of it on reading the clue but didn’t believe it until the crossers were in place.
   OWED could also have been ONES or OVER, both justifiable on this setter’s deviousness, though neither as satisfying as the real answer. The uncertainty over the last letter made DARWINIST even harder to find. In utter desperation I had essayed RESTORIST, a fine illustration of the solver’s capacity to invent new (but possible) words when under pressure.
   Apart from the two mentioned above, the NW corner fell relatively easily for me, though I wondered until I wrote it in and twigged how LOST in LOCUST meant luck.
   Many fine clues, some verging on the brutal, FATHOMING, as relatively gettable and amusing, gets my CoD.
   1. I wondered about it too but it’s in COED.
9. The first thing that must be said here is well done Jack. A pig of a puzzle to blog with “can I finish this” nightmares recurring at regular intervals.

   This is the nearest I’ve come to not finishing a puzzle in over 30 years with 22D only solved by picking up Chambers and looking up PO.O to find the completely unknown to me dance and then sort of understanding the cringeworthy “goed”

   I’m not desparately keen on 11A either which I solved from checkers and definition “seat” before seeing the weaver to mechanic connection

   A lot of it is however simply very good. The lift and separate required at 8A RUN and 13D DARWINIST are brilliant. So thank you setter and go careful on that stick thing (whatever it is)

   1. Much relieved, Jimbo, that you and others found this as difficult as you did. There was a moment when I wondered whether I would get a single clue let alone finish, which I eventually did correctly, after a couple of hours and with the help of aids at the end. Some devilishly clever and deceptive stuff – TECHNIQUE, OBLOQUY, DARWINIST, STABLEFUL stood out for me. POGOED did make me smile when explained by Jack – brave man to take on this blog! – but can’t quite decide whether this clue is brilliant or dreadful.

      I think BOTTOM at 11 ac may be better than you suggest. If it were simply a question of being asked to accept that “mechanic” = “weaver”, I would agree with you, but in Waggledagger’s play Bottom and his mates are described by Puck as “rude mechanicals”.

      1. Thanks for the additional info. It’s the sort of literary reference that irritates me. The somewhat arrogant assumption by the setter that I should be aware of this quotation. Could the setter, I wonder, quote from the definitions that form the first part of Newton’s Principia?
         1. Hazarding a guess, I would say probably not! The long-standing literary bias in Times cryptic GK seems to be something we just have to live with.
         2. “Mechanical” for Bottom is a bit of a chestnut, surely? In the same vein I could argue that I shouldn’t be expected to know the ins and outs of Bridge!
            On the other hand I agree with you in principle: the chestnuts do seem to be overwhelmingly arty. Bring on the Principia I say!
   2. POGOED and BOTTOM were two of the (relatively) few I managed to get today!
10. Ref the blog: two straight definitions, surely?
    1. Depends how you define cryptic.
11. Failed to get owed and Darwinist, very annoying. A puzzle of a certain brilliance but some things are too much of a stretch. ‘Outstanding’ in 12 is hardly warranted I’d have thought and is there merely to tip us into ‘oner’. ‘Paid’ in 25 appears otiose. ‘Ob’ in 18 is iffy and seems to draw on Old Boy for the ‘he’ in a sort of fake hybrid. I guess I can take the idea behind pogoed but let’s hope it’s very very strictly rationed. Incidentally ulaca I don’t see why a small child’s ability to extrapolate a past tense “rule” from the avalanche of verbal usage it learns to find its way about every day, means its brain is hardwired in some special linguistic way. It surely learns in a similar way in non-verbal areas too.
    On second thoughts ‘ob’ is probably Old Boy who’s passed on to a post-school stage; a touch of another curious mix in any case, but OK this way round.

    Edited at 2012-06-01 10:07 am (UTC)

    1. Our minds often seem to work in different ways, joe, so maybe I am misunderstanding you again, but surely ‘outstanding’ is the definition so it’s not there merely for the purpose you suggest?

       OB is short for the Latin ‘obiit’ meaning he (or she) died and I have amended the blog entry to make this clearer. Old boy doesn’t come into it.

       Edited at 2012-06-01 10:45 am (UTC)

       1. No, jack, I was an absolute idiot on ‘outstanding’. I realised soon after and almost restarted a driving journey to re-edit. As for ob, yes it means he or she (or it) died, and I supposed is used as such; I was getting pernickety about the “he” I guess. I still think the old boy line is as good or better. Do you have a comment on my query as to ‘paid’? It may well also be a result of post-solve mental clutter.
          1. Well ‘player paid’ is PRO as opposed to an unpaid amateur.
             1. So there you are. Can’t see a thing today – the classic goof-off. Will endeavour to keep foot from mouth for a time. Thanks for the answers.
12. The Chomsky reference is interesting. Our son used to say “goed” for “went”. Surely the reason is that he’s applying the rule of adding -ed that he’s heard elsewhere? Which is fascinating if you think about it.
    1. Absolutely, hence C’s belief that first language acquisition is, to an exent, anyway, ‘hard-wired’.

       Cue story about parents worried about their kid’s insistence on saying ungrammatical things. While parents spend a lot of time needlessly correcting their child’s solecisms, which will come out in the wash, they might be better served picking up on the truth-value of their utterances. Thus, instead of “No, Phoebe, you WENT to the moon”, “No, Phoebe, you NEVER goed there”.

       1. Oh, ulaca. A fairy just died. Let Phoebe dream….

          (or is it a dream? Perhaps she and her friend with the light in his finger goed there together….)

13. “bridgE” surely??
    1. I’ll give you that one!
14. Too tough for me; too many blanks to enumerate. I record my admiration for those of you who solved it and my thanks to jackkt for the blog!
15. 28 minutes of hard thinking. Once more the leader board has an odd look to it this morning! I’m in the camp who didn’t have a problem with POGOED (he whispered), but this may be because I’m weird and spotted it at first pass without any checkers. Unlike a lot of the other clues.

    FOUR O’CLOCK took a long time, and raises the perennial argument about whether it’s fair or unfair to enumerate apostrophised words as if the apostrophe doesn’t exist; still, at least the policy is consistent.

    Good work by setter and blogger both (when someone else gets a puzzle like this you feel you’ve dodged a bullet).

16. Yes, well done Jack; of all the short straws you’ve pulled this one has to be the shortest, surely. I worry about the hours you keep also; it’s fine for us in Australia posting at 3 AM, but that’s real time for you.

    As for the puzzle, a mere 80 minute stroll through the lawyer cane for me, dodging the Gympie as I went, wondering if I would ever get out alive. No quibbles from me; even POGOED is forgiven. Hats off to the setter, obviously at the top of their game. Too many fine clues to nominate a COD – oh, well, if I must – FIREPROOF ahead of DARWINIST, QUID PRO QUO and OFF THE CUFF, with NUNLIKE, RUN & OYSTER a short half-head back.

    1. Thanks, koro. At least I’d completed half the puzzle under the illusion it was an easy one before the full horror hit home. My worst ever to blog was the one by the setter who obviously had an in-depth religious education who seemed to assume solvers would have this in common with him.
17. I thought I was taking for ever on this puzzle but I feel better now I see that other people found it tricky. It fell slowly but steadily and I managed to finish without aids in 46 very enjoyable minutes. I’m away on a choir trip to foreign parts (Holland & Belgium) tonight so will be off the grid for a week unless the hotel has printing facilities – which I doubt. Sure to suffer withdrawal symptoms.
18. I’m still curious about this answer. There’s nothing special about this time, and nothing even vaguely indicated that would make it specific. Even though it’s fairly clued (in a stretched understanding of “fair” – flock=legion takes a leap of faith) it opens something of a can of worms. My “twenty three minutes past seven” was only slightly facetious, but why not “six chickens” or “nine cards”, “three weeks” or “two fifteen”?
    1. I agree with you. I’ve been expecting somebody more learned that I to tell us that it comes from some obscure piece of literature.
    2. My theory is that the setter had ‘officer commanding us’ – which is pretty good – and then worked from there; the dodgy legion came next, after which he played his get out of jail free card by specifying the indefinite ‘a time’. The quirky enumeration was then just the icing on the cake.

       Rather like the clue myself…

19. After a few minutes it was clear to me that this was a difficult puzzle. I don’t think it would have been out of place at the Championship. My first attempt yielded six answers and a walk round site at lunchtime yielded 16 more but that’s as far as I got. Charioteer came to mind readily because I was at the Colosseum in Rome two weeks ago. The entire NW corner defeated me except for Owed and Locust (beautiful definition!) until I resorted to aids. My admiration to anybody who completed this one unassisted. Very well blogged Jackkt.
20. Such a relief to find that others found this difficult verging on impossible. I seriously thought I had lost the ability to solve cryptic crosswords. Looked at it for ages and then gave up, following my rule that if I have looked at a puzzle on and off over several hours and still can’t get anywhere, it goes in the bin. It is after all only a crossword and there’ll be another along tomorrow.
21. Before coming here, I thought it was just my thick head after a session at the Watermill (highly recommended – the beer, not the thick head) that caused me to struggle with this puzzle. It didn’t help that I was among those who confidently wrote in EASTER. (That surely should count as a true double, shouldn’t it?)

    Still, mustn’t grumble: what was that quote from Enoch Powell about sailors complaining about the sea? And with hindsight, as always, I can’t see why it took me so long.

    Congratulations to Jackkt on sorting out a real stinker.

    1. I seem to have got off quite lightly today: I finished this in 35 minutes, although I did find it tough. I was on a two-and-a-half hour flight so when I realised it was a bit of a stinker I thought “oh good”, and settled into it. This probably put me in the right frame of mind. I’ll have to try bluffing myself into the same attitude on the daily commute.
       I enjoyed POGOED. I thought FOUR O’CLOCK was a bit of a stretch but it felt sort of in the spirit of a fine and devious puzzle.
       My first in was BOTTOM, and my last PRIESTLEY. So this puzzle demonstrates my literary knowledge and ignorance at the same time.
       1. P.S. I’m not sure why this appears as a reply john_from_lancs’ post!
22. Managed about half before giving up. Not sure if I would ever have finished it, even taking all day…

    Too many unknowns (POOH-BAH, OBLOQUY, PESACH) and too much fiendish wordplay (all over the place). Hmph. Not a good start to our Jubilee Weekend!

23. Sorry to be late. I could say that I just finished this, which took me all day, but really, about 45-50 minutes last night, plus 5 more when I returned after checking that POGOED really exists, to see the truth and change my incorrect FATLOVING to FATHOMING. Devilish puzzle. Thanks to Jack, for the one thing I didn’t see, the ob, although I’ll further confess that I had to take the BOTTOM character as ‘mechanical’ on faith alone. Beyond that, I think this setter has outdone himself. Very wonderful puzzle. (Slight quibble: I agree that FOUR OCLOCK as ‘a time’ is bad precedent.) Regards to all.
24. Of course I found this unbelievably difficult but very good in parts. Some quibbles though: what is ‘among’ doing in 1ac? It seems to me to play no part and to be positively misleading. Does ‘0 wed’ really mean ‘not wed’ or something like that? I can’t see that it does. And is a locust really a cousin of a cricket? Seems very odd.
25. Sorry, ignore all that rubbish about 0 wed. Of course it means nobody is wed. No doubt my other quibbles can as easily be answered.
    1. Yes, both your other queries were matters I had intended to mention when writing the blog but when it came to it I had spent so long solving the puzzle I decided to go for a briefer analysis of the clues than I would normally give.

       The IN in FINALIST at 1ac is clued by ‘popular’ and there is no enclosure to be indicated so ‘among’ appears to be redundant but I now think it’s probably simply being used to mean ‘with’ or ‘along with’ as a link to the next part of the answer.

       Locusts and crickets are both insects of the order orthoptera. Chambers and Collins have ‘cousin’ as ‘something kindred or related to another’ so I guess that covers it just about. But my initial reaction was the same as yours on this one.

       Edited at 2012-06-01 10:05 pm (UTC)

26. 29:28 for me – very relieved to squeeze in under the half-hour.

    The double entendre at 5ac cost me a considerable amount of time – I was another who bunged in EASTER with complete confidence. I don’t think it would appear in a Championship puzzle as I suspect Peter Biddlecombe would pick it up at the testing stage. (I wonder if it was intentional.)

    Apart from that, I thought this was a very fine puzzle. I wasn’t entirely convinced that CART OFF was a proper answer, but I see that Chambers gives it a mention, so no complaints.

27. This may be a minor epiphany. I had absolutely no time to even open the paper until the tube home from the pub. Six pints of beer or so, and lots of drunk revellers mouthing off at 10:30 in the evening and the whole lot fell into place from Old Street to Stockwell, so I suspect about 15 minutes. Much of this was the old fashioned checkers vs definition punting, aided by the loose mindedness of alcohol and lack of fear, and the subsequent understanding of the wordplay took a few minutes more, but….nonetheless, having read through the comments on here, I suspect this will be a long term plan (the drinking that is). Either that or it was just a lucky streak. I will probably go with the luck idea as drinking at 8am just for a good time (xwd time that is) has limited potential.
28. Mostly solved in about 15 minutes, but the top left corner totally did for me today. I had confidently (but why?) put in FOOLPROOF at 1dn, so 8ac had to be OUT (a bit odd but I managed to justify it). This left me with just 2dn to get. About half an hour later, after I’d put the puzzle away, NUNLIKE popped into my head, but I still didn’t question 1dn, so changed 8ac to OWN, which has no justification at all.

    On the other hand, I loved the rest of it and thought POGOED was brilliant! Luckily I knew PESACH and that went straight (although I already had POOH-BAH by then).

    1. I did have ‘foolproof’ for two minutes, then saw it didn’t really fit the cryptic at all.
29. I thought this was a lovely puzzle. Though I did put I several answers from definition, working out the wordplay afterwards.

    Didn’t get PRIESTLY, POGOED, or HEADLONG, and I put CARD OFF instead of CART OFF (‘right to do’ giving the middle RDO), not understanding the definition one bit, and assuming I was missing something. BOTTOM was a total guess; I assumed Shakespeare had something to do with it, but I’ve never read A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

    Why is it that on words like PESACH, I think of every word (in this case fruit) before the intended one? Let us celebrate APPSLE, or GRASPE, or LEMSON!

30. How about {f}east? Eating game.
    1. I don’t think it can stretch to that.
31. All in, all right, except that I went for GOGOED. Ironically, I should have opted for a more general officer than a general officer.

    PESACH my first in. Don’t worry. It didn’t help all that much!

32. Having read all the comments, I feel much better about my DNF. I did the puzzle in 3 sessions before and after picking my car up from its service, and would hazard a guess at around 2 hours altogether. However I didn’t get PESACH, despite having all the checkers, and although I was on the right lines, couldn’t make the jump from STALLS to STABLE for where Arab horses live, and confused it with a Bazaar to make up STALLSFUL. Obvious once you’ve seen the answer though. Thanks to Jack for a slog of a blog. There were a couple of others I didn’t fully parse, but on the whole glad to get as far as I did.

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