Times 25100

35 comments on “Times 25100”

1. Don’t have my completed puzzle here. But I enjoyed a lot of the clue constructions in this puzzle.

   Only parsing I failed on was 27ac (HEADSTRONG) and still don’t quite understand “trails”=ADS.

   And another triumph of time travel today. The blog is marked 3rd March. Will 2nd March be forever lost?

   1. Trail is an alternative to trailer (as on the telly).
      1. Oh, I didn’t know that. Never heard it used. Excuse general ignorance.
2. This one gave me the run-around, with the SE proving a particular handful, my last two alone (16 and 27) requiring 20 of my 90 minutes. Lots of excellent stuff, I thought, but all entirely fair. Unknowns/unfamiliars included OM for the mumbo-jumbo and MARASCHINO. Particularly liked the long, single-word items, especially 5, 15 and 18, with my COD going to APOSTOLIC.

   Edited at 2012-03-02 04:11 am (UTC)

3. 31:01; after a first pass that turned up not a single solution, I was ready to log off, but then a couple of clues clicked. But I think it took me 5+ minutes to get my LOIs, 27ac and 16d. As always, doing this online meant throwing in solutions without knowing how they worked (at least a half-dozen), or without realizing that they didn’t (BEDRIDDEN –‘ill’?–at 22ac); and I never did figure out CROISSANT & HEADSTRONG, so thanks Dave & Ulaca.
   1. I was toying with ‘benighted’ at 15dn – for no particularly good reason, on reflection. It was that kind of puzzle.
4. Like kevingregg I took a while to get going on this, but eventually I spotted an easy one at 4dn and things improved gradually so that I completed the grid in 50 minutes.

   I needed all the wordplay to sort out 6dn and, like dave, I had not heard of this previously. I wasted a lot of time here thinking it must start with CONTRA despite that being an unlikely prefix to a word meaning ‘association’.

   I also didn’t know OM.

   I was delayed most in the SE where I became fixated on BEDRIDDEN for 22ac and actually wrote it in although I could only fit it to the first word in the clue. This gave me problems with 16dn.

   I have learnt that ONSIDE meaning ‘in agreement’ is one word, not two. I had thought that only applied to its meaning in soccer.

   1. This is one of the ones I figured out post-solve. Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ, which I had vaguely recalled (from where?) as Om padmi yatta yatta. I had also thought that it was the same as the ‘Aum’ (pronounced [o:mu]) of Aum Shinrikyo オウム真理教, the terrorist cult of the 1995 sarin gas attack in Tokyo, but evidently ‘aum’ is Sanskrit for ‘universe’; or so says Wikipedia.

      I’m glad I wasn’t alone in going for BEDRIDDEN.

5. I was pleased to finish all correct in 36.18 today with one or two on a best fit basis. I couldn’t see SAKE as benefit my LOI and I couldn’t parse 3 ac either so thanks for the blog as ever. My COD to CROISSANT as it had me trying lots of different anagram material before it clicked.
6. The easiest one of the week for me, finishing well under 30 minutes after a slowish start in the NW. Helped by getting all the long ones almost at first sight, then slowed by having to work out the wordplay. Nice puzzle. COD to BADMINTON over CROISSANT.
7. I thought this was pretty smooth at around 18 minutes, including an interrupted start. The long ones were my way in, though CONFRATERNITY bucked that trend. It looks like a word made up for crosswords, but I gather is mostly a Catholic thing. The cryptic bits helped with the spelling somewhat on MISC. and PERM.
   CoD to CROISSANT, again at least in part for helping with the spelling, and for providing the best headscratch of the day trying to work out how bunk=COT got into it.
   Wiki tells me om is “written universally” as ॐ. Do we get extra points for fitting that in?
8. I liked this puzzle, very much my type of clues that needed good analysis before logical synthesis. 20 minutes to solve.

   I’ll be interested to hear if George knew OM from AZED/Mephisto land which is where I think I got it from when reverse engineering the cryptic from a fairly obvious definition.

   Not completely comfortable with ADS=trails. I thought ADS were “advertisements” which could be “trailers” amongst many other things.

   1. I thought the same but Chambers has “a television or cinema trailer” for “trail”.
9. 21m. I really enjoyed this. As Jimbo says, the clues need good analysis and frequently my first thesis proved wrong. For instance, like others I tried to fit COT into 12ac, and then also CANT. The clues for MARASCHINO, BLACKCURRANT and CONFRATERNITY are intricate things employing various devices and providing blind alleys for the unwary.
   Fortunately I got onto the setter’s wavelength so was sufficiently wary to take BEDRIDDEN out again after bunging it in.
   Great stuff.
   It’s always funny to see “bid” defined as “offer”. In my world they are opposites.
10. 
    Not my day. 23/28 – missing the risk, the organ part, the association, the beef and the disappointment. Twenty minutes for the rest.
11. 14 mins for me again today. i must really be in that mythical ‘zone’. I was held up longest by 6d – never heard of it but the wordplay was fairly clear.
12. 18:19 .. NAMASTE last week, OM today… do we have a New Age setter?

    Main problems with this came from throwing in ADORE, assuming there to be a Scottish town of Dore, which made ABYSMAL and CROISSANT distinctly hard to get.

    PERMEABILITY is presumably in the Uxbridge as ‘quality of hair required for professional football’.

    Sorry to have missed yesterday’s blog. Anyone do a Sandwich Five-O joke?

    1. This setter clearly has Catholic roots, with APOSTOLIC and CONFRATERNITY in close proximity. Mind you, there’s a DEMON lurking in the lower regions.
    2. The closest in my “New” Uxbridge is PERMUTATION, the theory of how hairdos evolved.
       1. Not forgetting PERMAFROST, which happens as a result of those chilly Boxing Day fixtures!
13. 19:16 so not too taxing. There were a few that I threw in on def and checkers (abysmal, blackcurrant and headstrong among them) but then paused to check the wordplay for fear of messing up.

    COD to keyboard for making think we were in biological territory beggining with I.

14. 52 mins – it always feels good on those rare occasions where I post a lower time than the blogger.
    Very fair, but the absence of multi-word solutions did make it difficult to get started.
    LOI was PASTRAMI, where I nearly gave up and put in CASTRATI as the only word that would fit the checkers.
15. Defeated by PASTRAMI and PITY. Found it on the tough side. Couldn’t parse CROISSANT, as I convinced myself that bunk=cot, and couldn’t move on from there.

16. 13a Not that it makes any difference to the answer, but the chemical symbol for radium isn’t R, it’s Ra.
    1. Well spotted. I never checked before I wrote the blog. There is no element with the chemical symbol of just R. I have amended the blog accordingly.
17. Jai Guru Deva. OM
    Nothing’s gonna change my world

    Ee, lad! Takes me back. Psychedelia, joss sticks, big hair, absurd trousers…….

    (About 25 minutes for this enjoyable puzzle)

18. That was annoying, I thought of STARCH but didn’t put it down because I didn’t associate it with the word formality…

    My best of a frustrating week with 19/28 clues solved, I wonder when I will complete a whole one!

    1. I would have thought you had your best chance with Tuesdays, but you are getting warm. Keep reading the blog and it will all start to sink in.
       1. I didn’t really get on with Tuesday’s for some reason
19. I found this quite straightforward (not easy, just straightforward), though I had a slow start. I did take my usual hour but apart from ALLOA there were no answers I felt uncomfortable with and nothing needing an educated guess. I’m a bit surprised that so many people had longish times. But it was an eminently fair puzzle with some involved clues and quite enjoyable after the frustration of many DNFs in the recent past.
20. 11:23 for me, with the last two or three minutes spent on PASTRAMI and PITY. Like others, I hadn’t come across “trails” = ADS before, but there it is in Chambers (2011). Nice puzzle.
21. I’ve had a busy day and am late coming to this blog, although I did the puzzle this morning. Some interruptions but completed in 32 minutes. An enjoyable solve. I spent ages trying to justify the R in CROISSANT before I realised that it was C+ROT and not COT with R in it! I knew CONFRATERNITY as the name of a fan group (The Confraternity of Francis and Nicolo) devoted to the work of the late Dorothy Dunnett, IMO the best historical novelist of our time.(Georgette Heyer is equally good but so different that one cannot compare them) Apologies for this paean. I sometimes get carried away by my enthusiasms!
22. I was suprised, having started this one just before midnight, to find that I had completed it by 00:35, so I’ve beaten my best time twice in one week! I got CONFRATERNITY AND APOSTOLIC almost straight away. Must be ‘cos I’m left footed:-)Had to think for a while to parse 3ac, 18ac and 12ac where I also was working on COT for bunk rather than ROT. I wasn’t convinced by ADS for trail, but am pleased to see that it has been validated by Chambers.
    1. Sorry that was me, I didn’t realise I wasn’t signed in
23. OM and AUM are alternative transliterations of the Sanskrit ॐ

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