Times 24904 – It’s all about Aus?

31 comments on “Times 24904 – It’s all about Aus?”

1. When I got back from a golfing weekend, I printed out Sunday’s and today’s, and did Sunday’s thinking it was today’s. I noticed my mistake just as I was about to go to bed, but fortunately today’s was quite easy, and I whipped through it in 22 minutes.

   I wasn’t sure of a couple of the cryptics, and had to use the alphabet to get ‘crisp’, but many of the answers just came to me from the literals.

   The ‘complete defeat’ meaning of ‘whitewash’ is UK-only, and I never heard of it. Fortunately, the anagram pointed directly to it.

   1. The US Oxford has:

      def 2: a victory in a game in which the loser scores no points.

2. Easiest Monday for ages: so 16 minutes with only the wild dog outwith my Kenneth. All this helped by three lots of 9-letter and two lots of 11-letter anagrams: though WHITEWASH was nicely hidden.

   COD to 20ac for the completely true proposition on the surface and the “without” = “outside” move which makes you (me) wrongly assume it’s going to be a deletion.

   Note to Koro: you may not know this, but our sometime mutual employer has its PhD theses bound in South Australia.

3. About 25 minutes to get through, and I’m surprised to be all correct. Didn’t know DHOLE, didn’t understand BILLY, didn’t see the quadruple def’s at 1D. No problem with the WHITEWASH. No intention to disagree with vinyl, but I remember it as a common euphemism for a US baseball shutout, as in “Phils whitewash Mets”, probably one of the versions I heard the most. As a NY Mets fan it’s not a fun phrase to hear. Maybe vinyl’s a Yankee fan – they don’t hear it as often. Regards to all.,
4. About 25 minutes to get through, and I’m surprised to be all correct. Didn’t know DHOLE, didn’t understand BILLY, didn’t see the quadruple def’s at 1D. No problem with the WHITEWASH. No intention to disagree with vinyl, but I remember it as a common euphemism for a US baseball shutout, as in “Phils whitewash Mets”, probably one of the versions I heard the most. As a NY Mets fan it’s not a fun phrase to hear. Maybe vinyl’s a Yankee fan – they don’t hear it as often. Regards to all.
   1. … “shutout”: there’s an almost exact equivalent of which I’ve never heard. With a word like that, you don’t need “whitewash”. NOAD has the following; compare with “whitewash” in the earlier post:

      a competition or game in which the losing side fails to score.

      Thanks for improving my vocab.

      1. No problem, and sorry about the double posting. I was doing it from a blackberry for the 1st time, and obviously, I screwed it up.
5. I’m glad mctext and Young Kevin (trust me, you’re younger) got in before me, since I would have said as did vinyl about ‘whitewash’; I was sure I’d learned its ‘defeat’ meaning from these puzzles.Somehow DHOLE rings a bell, but in fact I thought of ‘dhome’ and found the right spelling when looking it up. Anyway, 23 minutes, with all the slow stuff on the lefthand side.
6. Like old kevin (apologies) I was also looking up ‘dhome’ when Google helpfully converted it into the right answer for me. 32 minutes, and I’m claiming an all-correct.

   Thanks to koro for the Tour de France link. I’m glad of today’s rest day after too many gruelling 1.30am finishes here in Sydney.

7. In personal best territory this morning but alas committed to DHOME before dictionary revealed the error.
8. Also around 35 minutes. Also didn’t know DHOLE and considered ‘dhome’. Raced through most of it and then got bogged down in the SW quarter.
9. Too excited by a rare sub-twenty (17 since you ask)to look again at diode…could only think of that and drove. So a dnf. Bill = will? Oh, Will. Takes me time. Can’t help feeling that dhole’s just a bit too rarefied…but the way in’s there I guess. COD 1 dn, 20 and 24.
10. Was heading for one of my best, but held up by carelessly entering LEA, which held up INTERVIEW, which held up PSHAW, which held up CRISP.
    None of which mattered because I never would have got DHOLE anyway. Given the obscurity of the answer, I think the wordplay is too ambiguous (its earth = HOLE?) for this to be considered a fair clue.
    Or am I missing something?
    1. Agree it’s loose. Just “earth” may have been better (as in underground lair, the sense intended here); sans “its”. Not sure whether this goes beyond badgers and foxes but??

       On edit: it would seems as if does!
       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhole#Denning_behaviour

       So scrap all that. The clue is fair if (doubly?) obscure.

       Edited at 2011-07-18 08:57 am (UTC)

       1. Good research McText. But I would arue that this only serves to make the clue legitimate, not fair. I mean if you’ve never heard of the word “dhole”, you’re unlikely to have a detailed knowledge of a dhole’s denning (can’t believe that’s a word) behaviour.
11. 14 minutes, but would not have been under competition conditions, as my alphabet soup strainer left me with DHOME not DHOLE – and I also sketched in DIODE because a) it’s vaguely electrical and b) its got the letters of died in it. A wild dog’s earth is its home, after all, and earth’s my home too, come to that. If you don’t know the word, there’s no way to be sure you’ve guessed correctly, and it’s a jamais couchée avec for me. Not even vague echoes.
    I liked 20, especially because it’s so easy to confuse which can(n)on is which. I’m afraid I assumed the one that fitted was the right answer without wholly unravelling the clue.
    CoD to INTERVIEW for pure, job-hunting-weary cynicism, but ANDROMEDA ran it close.
12. First guess at 11ac (DHOLE) proved to be correct; next in line was ‘dhome’. LUM was also new to me (19dn) but caused no problems. Briefly held up by 18dn: initially rejected WIDGEON as a ‘wide’ is not a good ball – then I read the clue again! Overall a gentle, sub-30 minute, start to the week.

    Thanks for the blog, koro. Links were enjoyable: in the light of recent events, DISH THE DIRT and NOTORIETY might equally have qualified as evidence of an Autralian theme.

    1. Poor Rupert is looking a bit like a man whose WIDGEON is cooked with nothing or no-one left to save his BACON. But will the politicians maintain their nerve? Departing governments in Australia have learnt by bitter experience the truth of the expression de murdochs nil nisi bonum.
13. Raced through most of this, but left 11ac blank as had not come across this word, and my alphabet-running didn’t deliver (like the idea of your alphabet soup strainer, z8b8d8k!). Didn’t know LUM, and also got 20ac without completely understanding WP. Otherwise, all pretty straightforward.
14. 11 minutes, so pretty straightforward here.
    I do think DHOLE is unfair, for the reasons discussed. I considered DHOME but put DHOLE in quite confidently, so it must have been ringing a bell somewhere. Without that I don’t see how you can be sure. Generally with these unknown words I find that, when in doubt, it is better to trust the wordplay than my sense of what looks like a real word. I got SJAMBOK wrong by failing observe this rule last week, for which I can only blame myself. However with today’s obscurity this doesn’t work.
15. 13 minutes for me – my only hold up being the wild dog, which I am sure I have heard of before in a cryptic crossword, but had to check that my memory was working correctly.
16. Chambers dictionary – wild – sub def “wild dog” – any wild species of the dog genus or family, as the dhole, the dingo, etc – another Aus flavour ?
    1. I must admit, dingo was my first thought, but I couldn’t justify the IN GO part at that early stage. Mind you, if I’d had BILLY then, it might have gone straight in.
17. I was surprised at the comments about DHOLE. I would have thought that a lot of people here would have read “The Jungle Book”. I’ve just looked for my Kipling but I must have given it away. I seem to remember that in one of the stories in the “Second Jungle Book” Mowgli’s wolf tribe is attacked by a pack of dholes. Anyway I’ve known the word since I read the book as a child. It was my second in after LEI. On the other hand, I had problems working out the cryptic of WIDGEON, not having cricket terms in my GK. Apart from that a slowish steady solve. 33 minutes
    1. Well remembered. I had a vague recollection that I’d come across DHOLE somewhere in Kipling, but couldn’t place it. The story is Red Dog, which is made available by Project Gutenberg.
18. 10:33 in the end, but that included two or three minuites running through the alphabet to get CRISP. Apart from that the rest went in at express pace, and for a while I was thinking about a very rare sub-7 minute solve.
19. Same as many others. Mostly easy but had to guess at DHOLE and check the dictionary before entering in the grid – not a good clue.

    LUM occurs in the Scots saying “lang may your lum reek” meaning “long may your chinmey smoke” = have a long life.

    1. Thanks. I was wondering how on earth I knew the word and that’s where I’ve heard it.
20. My only failure on a 20 minute solve so the rest fairly straightforward. Was I the only one to notice a number of anagrams at the start of the downs where the answers went straight in from the literals?

    Just looked back – can’t type Billy!

21. A sluggish 8:10 for me – I found it hard to get on the setter’s wavelength, and was put off by some of the extraneous words, like “joining” in 21dn. I wasn’t convinced of BOUND = “bob” in 1dn either, but perhaps there’s a dictionary definition somewhere that will justify it (or maybe I’m missing something obvious?).

    No problem with DHOLE, though – as falooker says, you’ll find it in Kipling. And it comes up periodically in Times crosswords, e.g. Jumbo 701 (28 May 2007): “Wild dog departs to burrow (5)”.

22. I’m surprised you hadn’t seen ‘dhole’ in barred cryptics.

    I have no idea where I dredged it up from, but managed to put it in after a few minutes thought.

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