Times 24254

54 comments on “Times 24254”

1. Good to see him (Ken) making an appearance at 9ac. Chambers fans will like such things given that it’s the nearest thing to a Scots dictionary we have. (The history of the Chambers brothers) is very interesting, BTW).
   Is the single ellipsis at 20dn a singularity?
   Spent about 45 mins on this one, including a spell when I had an urge to wash my Scrabble® tiles. They had a good work-out yesterday on the anagrams and the sheep manure didn’t help. (Good enough for Araucaria, good enough for me!)
   It would have been quicker but for the two 20s. After getting the solution to 20ac, I felt ashamed as a fan of the Groo comics.
   John Lennon once described his partnership with McC [Happy 67th Birthday to him] as “The Rogers and Hammersmith of Liverpool”. That’s the only way I got 12dn.
   Sorry to be so loquacious.
   1. Yes, I wonder whether the reason that there’s an ellipsis in 20dn (FRAGILE) but not in 22dn (AGILE) is that the former requires the latter but not vice versa.  If so, it’s a neat idea, but it leaves 22dn looking a bit ugly, as if the first letter was left in lower case by mistake.
      1. As stated above, the ellipsis was left out of the online version by mistake.
         1. Sorry, I hadn’t spotted that.  Thanks.
2. An equation emerges. My time = Peter’s time x 10.

   Guesses: PUNCH LINE (the line bit and the clever def.)
   HUNTRESS
   COD

   Look-up: GO as a board game

   CODs: JIVE and TEA DANCE – that is if you enjoy having your fingernails extracted.

   Learning points for new solvers:
   1. WHO may be which for people
   2. ‘D = would
   3. CORE (not always RAM)
   4. Don’t panic

3. I didn’t find this quite as difficult as Peter did. I was quickly on the setter’s wavelength and whilst appreciating the cleverness of much of it I was never held up. 25 minutes to solve.

   I think Peter that Punch was regarded as satirical in its heyday whilst never matching Private Eye in today’s terms. I thought that a good clue as well as CORTÈGE (even heathens can appreciate skill) , WARHOL, and JIVE (where “Nancy” was immediately the place=French for me. I only saw the Dickens connection after solving the clue).

   The silly repeated references back to 13A irritated me just as they do in The Guardian

4. Guessed CORTEGE, but can’t see relevance of COMPUTER MEMORY, where I expected RAM to have significance
   1. See italicised addition to my analysis. If you do anything IT-related for a living, you must be under 40!
      1. The first machine I worked on (ICL1301) actually had tiny metallic core rings that flipped “on” and “off”. Despite the enormous “No Smoking on Pain of Death” signs everywhere the resident engineer used to breath pipe tobacco smoke all over them as he tested/serviced them much to the amusement of the programmers like me and the horror of the bosses.
      2. Yeah, guys who still call it core probably have a yellow System 360 reference card somewhere in their possession, perhaps with a flow chart template.
         1. I never used a computer with magnetic core, but do remember “core dump” as an expression, and have seen one or two in the dim & distant past, though any analysis was at the crudest possible level, as the languages I used weren’t supposed to be able to make the computer crash. I have a punched card from a university econometrics project still in use as a bookmark, but my best relic is probably a Sharp APL Pocket Reference booklet from 1984. (I’ve sadly lost the really minimal APL reference which was the size of a credit card).
            1. Yes, the term would be much more familiar if you had programmed in 360 assembly language. Those programs almost always produced a core dump the first time your ran them.

               Then you would get out your yellow card, locate the offending instruction in the dump, and use the values in the registers to see what data areas that instruction was pointing to.

            2. I have fond memories of manually punching cards to replace erroneous ones, sticking the amended pack with an instruction sheet into a plastic bag and putting the bag in the office’s out tray. We were guaranteed 2 working day’s turn-round. To do the equivalent these days might take 5 or 10 seconds.

               Of course paper tape was much less user-friendly than punched cards. Happy days.

               Steve W

5. It’s interesting to me that Peter describes this one as tough and the past two puzzles were generally perceived as being easy, because, give or take a minute, they all took me half an hour. Today’s clue construction may generally have been more complex but once again I was able to solve many of them by spotting the correct definitions which in some cases were well-hidden, and not always bothering too much about the wordplay.

   “Nancy” indicating a French word came up quite recently and caught me out on that occasion, but not today.

   Like Peter my last in was FIXATE having spent some time wonderate whether there might be such a word as ZITATE.

   I know I’m wrong to do so, but I always cringe at “composer” = “lyricist”.

   It’s a long time since I nominated a COD but I can’t let 23ac pass without mentioning its excellence.

   1. Maybe the explanation for the differences in comparative timing (for you and Jimbo) is that the “inherent” difficulty of the clues is similar, but Monday and Tuesday used more of the tricks that I’ve seen before and learned near-Pavlovian responses to, so more of their answers were immediate write-ins.

      “composer” = “lyricist”: the clue (assuming its 12D) had “song-writer” which for me covers either or both.

      Edited at 2009-06-17 07:54 am (UTC)

      1. Oh, so it did! Please ignore. That’s the trouble with fitting in a few moments of pleasure whilst working. I should have double checked before posting.
   2. I can’t delete from work for some reason:

      Like Peter my last in was FIXATE having spent some time wonderING whether there might be such a word as ZITATE.

6. Thought I was going so well, inside 15m and only two to get – fixate eventually dawned with wordplay arriving later, cortege came with no inkling about computer reference in wordplay till blog, thank you for all the detail. 25 minutes. Agree about irritating “13”s, liked Nancy but is she the only girl so used for her capital asset?
   1. I can’t think of any other girls used in the same way as Nancy in cryptic clues. Adelaide and Victoria (British Columbia) could be used, but neither really works – the first because Adelaide as a name is vanishingly rare these days, and the second because Canadian has no different words or distinguishing features known to enough Brits (I can only think of alleged excessive use of “eh”.)

      I’m now waiting for the embarrassingly obvious other cities with female names.

      Edited at 2009-06-17 12:08 pm (UTC)

      1. I suspect there are two elements of bias here – one is that French is the “expected second language” of Times cryptic solvers, so there maybe an expectation that Florence into Italian vocabulary or Fatima into Portuguese may be considered too unfair. The other being that, since English derived with a large dose of French input the easy recognition of such names makes the surface smoother – that is to say the use of eg. Ekaterina(??guess) to denote a Polish/Russian stolen word may be deemed far too clumsy.
         1. Florence for a bit of gentle Italian seems perfectly fair. Despite “Our Lady of Fatima”, I’d say Fatima was a bit obscure. The well-known Russian town based on Ekaterina is Ekaterinburg, but I don’t know enough about Slavic town naming to say whether that would always apply – the Soviet era came up with Gorky (Nizhni Novgorod) which was just Maxim G’s surname.
            1. … and of course Ekaterinburg (currently the venue for the dictators’ conference that is the SCO – political rant quickly made) used to be Sverdlovsk.
               In fact I learn from wikipedia that Sverdlovsk still appears on railway timetables. Confusing indeed.
               (I once spent ages trying to find an address in Kiev not realising that the street name had changed from the old Soviet “Red Army Street”, except that the old street names were still used on the maps. Anyway, end of digression.
               I was going to say I’m sure I’ve used Lorraine as an alternative to Nancy before now
7. Insufficient manure as yet!
   1. No sheeps’ but much bulls’.
8. My time was reasonable at around 25m but I gave up with two unsolved, cortege and fixate. Partly a mood thing – in some frames of mind if I’m left with a couple of difficult ones at the end I’ll persevere, in others I throw in the towel fairly quickly. Reasonably sure with a few more minutes I’d have got fixate, not sure I’d have twigged cortege where none of my thoughts were even close to the solution. bc
9. 15 mins or so with 3 left – FRAY, FIXATE and CORTEGE. Solved in that order for a time of 20:07. Might have been quicker but I wasn’t 100% convinced of FIXATE, so spent a bit of time trawling the alphabet for alternatives before putting it in.
10. Peter, you missed your chance for a good headline!

    I did most of this in about 20 minutes, but still had two left after 45. ‘Cortege’ and ‘fixate’ were very difficult for me, and took another 15 minutes. I had concluded that ‘computer memory’ must equal ‘core’, but still couldn’t see it.

    I also had the wrong end of the stick in 14, thinking ‘Nancy’ was the definition and ‘dance’ the anagram indicator, but eventually I saw that it was otherwise.

    I also backed into ‘bulk’ from ‘mass’, being curiously unable to think of ‘scowl’ for a long time.

11. I echo several previous points that this was ‘generally’ of a similar standard to the previous two days, not vastly worse, although what made it that much harder were one or two nasty points – CORTEGE sitting for a while unsolved.

    2 and 3 down did not help that I confidently put in “CHANGE” for 1A first up and took ages to realise this was foolhardy.

    Peter, I note you see 11A as a CD, but whilst I cannot quite see the HEEL to LISTING connection, surely it is more than a coincidence that WHO USE is word played by “which people employ”

    1. 11A is not a CD but a container – see italicised addition to the blog coming up in a minute.
       1. In my original comment at crack of dawn I listed among a number of learning points for new solvers (me) that the phrase “which people” could be translated to “who” ie humanising the word which. (A grammarian could put this better). Thus my explanation for wheelhouse was heel (list) contained by who (which people), use (employ). Have I overcomplicated it in which case I should remove it from my learning points?
          1. No you haven’t – I just failed to notice which clue your point related to. Whether you read the container as “who (which people), use (employ)” or “who use (which people employ)” is irrelevant – both make sense.
12. Gave up with 25A FIXATE unsolved. Some very tough clues, I thought, eg 17D BOARD GAME. ‘Homeric character’ for TAU is a bit of a stretch in 16D, but the wordplay gave it away.

    Tom B.

    1. Well, technically speaking, the digamma is the only Greek character that is uniquely Homeric. But in these matters, setters seldom have to knowledge to get technical.
       1. What I meant was, as Homer’s generally (discuss…) held to be an oral bard, he (they?) would have been analphabetic.

          Tom B.

          1. Homer uses oral-formulaic techniques, but in my opinion the poems are too well-structured, and the text too subtle, to have been created without writing.

             One amusing thing I noted when reading The Odyssey during the summer after my junior year, is that when Homer uses an obscure word in the text, he repeats it about 100 lines later, almost as if he is trying to teach you vocabulary. This sort of thing does not happen in the Iliad, but I only managed to cover about 8 or 9 books of that poem before school started again.

13. Guess what? I’m 52 and work in IT. I have NEVER heard this phrase before. It hasn’t appeared in a Times crossword either….
    1. According to the Wikipedia article, magnetic core memory was superseded by RAM in the early 1970s.

       It’s not in the Concise Oxford, and the definition in the Shorter doesn’t explicitly fit that in the clue: “Each of an array of small magnetic units in a computer whose magnetization is reversed by passing a current through a nearby wire”.  But Collins gives “a ferrite ring formerly used in a computer memory to store one bit of information”, and thus (more fully core store) “an obsolete type of computer memory made up of a matrix of cores”.  Likewise, Chambers gives “(also magnetic core) a small ferromagnetic ring which, either charged or uncharged by electric current, can thus assume two states corresponding to the binary digits 0 and 1 (comput)”, and thus “a computer memory made up of a series of three rings (also core store, core memory).”

       1. “core” in COED doesn’t list the right meaning, but “core dump” is only about two inches away, and indicates this meaning clearly.

          This doesn’t mean I’m encouraging anyone to write clues relying on information in a “nearby” def., just that someone looking up “core” might notice the core dump def.

14. I can’t share your enthusiasm for 3dn.

    It is ‘get’ that becomes inverted, not ‘gets’, so shouldn’t ‘figures’ be ‘figure’ (thus making the surface reading invalid)?

    Paul S.

    1. I dont think the figures applies to the word play – just the definition. The def is “processing figures” and word play is “to become”=get inverted inside CORE.
       1. Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks, and apologies to the setter.

          Paul S.

15. A tougher puzzle than the last couple of days (45 minutes with interruptions) I agree that there were many excellent clues with very deceptive surfaces. Last to go in was CORTEGE. I thought of the answer much earlier but didn’t see the cryptic definition or the wordplay (I was looking for the more usual RAM or RAM). I finally entered it for want of anything better and pondered the wordplay on the drive home, the penny dropping while waiting at some red lights. Many of the clues are so good that it’s difficult to pick ones that stood out, but 3, 14 and 17 all come high on the list for clever deception, especially the definition in 17, and I liked the surface of 12. Hats off to the setter. One of the best puzzles for some time.
16. 29:29.  I didn’t get to bed after a post-exams dinner last night and still haven’t had a coffee, so this was a far from frantic solve and I was pleased to finish within half an hour.  I was left with the NW corner again; last in was a guess at SPECIE (1ac), which I had repeatedly dismissed as being neither singular nor plural, and which turns out to be elliptical for in specie, “in [some given] form”.  FIXATE (25ac) unsuccessfully suggested itself several times before I hit on the sense in which “spot” means FIX.  Likewise with the wonderful definition of CORTEGE (3dn) as “processing figures”, though I also didn’t know the old computing sense of CORE.

    To return to the subject of &lits, I wondered whether the nice clue for WHEELHOUSE (11ac) could have been turned into one (“What people employ to restrict ship’s listing?”), but concluded that the definition would be too weak.

    Clues of the Day: 1ac (SPECIE), 2dn (PUNCH LINE), 5dn (HINDU).

17. A tough one for me, mainly due to SPECIE (one person’s old chestnut is another’s raw peanut), CORTEGE and FIXATE, which took as long as the rest of the puzzle. I think my list of memorable clues tallies with Peter’s, except I’d add COD. Well done that setter.
18. 26 minutes with one mistake – could not see FIXATE at all and ended up coining the 1 million and first word in our language – PIPATE. Also took a while to get CORTEGE. Liked the cluing definition of 17 (Go for one). Also Nancy’s first person at 14 foxed me for a moment until I remembered a similar ruse – Nice policeman (Gendarme) – encountered before. Same setter?
    The ….. device (?) used between 20 and 22 is familiar but I don’t recall the wordplay for the first being included in the second clue before
    1. This trick with “Nice” is pretty routine – it even gets use in NYT non-cryptic puzzles, where I’m pretty sure “Nice cake” has been used for GATEAU at the tough end of the week. Nancy is less common, but I’m sure it’s been used by several setters. I wouldn’t draw any conclusion about the setter’s identity from a point like this – they seem to borrow ideas from each other pretty shamelessly (if there’s any need for shame).
19. Took me about 40 minutes last night to solve all but CORTEGE, which I figured out when taking another look at it this morning. ‘Processing figures’ is a great deceptive definition, especially in a clue mentioning computing. I have a vague recollection of the term ‘core memory’, though I’ve never worked in IT, and couldn’t tell you what it meant. Many other very well constructed clues as well. My COD is SPECIE; it may be a chestnut but I haven’t seen it before, so it gets my vote. I also really enjoyed NOWHERE NEAR, WARHOL and HAMMERSTEIN. Regards.
20. “Core” is still used as a word in programming since memory can mean so many different things. For example, current Linux distributions will dump “core” when a program misbehaves, although these days this is turned off by default. For example see here for the page about it http://linux.die.net/man/5/core

    In about 1975 I remember the second megabyte of memory being added to the IBM370 that ran the Cambridge University computer service for the whole university. It was very advanced, since it was semiconductor memory not traditional ferrite core memory. Amazing, in a way, that about 100 people could simultaneously be using a computer with only 2 megabytes of memory.

    1. My memory is in 1980, when the company at which I was a junior programmer upgraded their IBM 370-168 from 8 to 16 megs of real memory. The entire night’s batch production ran in two hours, and the operations night shift didn’t know what to do – they had no more jobs to run.
21. I resorted to aids for the last half-dozen but pleased to get that far and finish at all, if Peter reckons it was quite tough. It seems I’m having a good week!
22. 34 min here, but more than half of that at the end on two crossing pairs: CORTEGE/JIVE and BOARDGAME/DIETER.

    Spent many happy years wallowing in core dumps from 360s, yellow/green cards, flow charts and punch cards. Favourite book? “Supervisor and I/O macros”. Most treasured discovery: The CE area at the top of the supervisor, and the raft of transient engineer’s debugging/patching/tracing utilities which went with it. Never did own up to “liberating” the IBM engineer’s little box of tricks.

23. I still can’t see how LINE = cover on the inside. I’m sure it must be simple but….
    1. Line here is the verb :To insert a lining (into a box, a jacket … whatever) = “cover on the inside”.
    2. Goodness – overnight the penny finally dropped! Doh!

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