Quick Cryptic No 228 by Teazel

16 comments on “Quick Cryptic No 228 by Teazel”

1. This took me over an hour to complete. Found 2 and 3 down especially difficult. Hope yesterdays unpleasantness was a one off, this is no forum for trolls.
   1. Agreed. As for 2 and 3 down I’ve come to really enjoy having the mind hold onto something (e.g. DI) whilst playing mental gymnastics with something else (red rose) and then joing up all the bits. Doesn’t always work, mind.
2. Hard work but got there in the end. I couldn’t understand 23ac as I am not a golfer.I found the NW corner hard work and ended up starting in the SE corner. COD was 15d, very neat. Thanks for the blog.
3. 13 minutes, so my run of missed (10 minute) targets continues. It’s been several says now since I achieved it.

   SPLURGE is a glorious word!

4. Quite a tricky puzzle today. Couldn’t understand what cask has to do with golf?
   1. Not quite sure if you’re referring to the answer or the wordplay.
      I agree the surface is not obvious – ‘what one may put towards a cask’.
      As for the answer, that’s pretty plain – two definitions
      1. What one may be putting towards = pin on a golfing green.
      2. A cask = pin.
5. Like others, found this pleasant, but couldn’t complete NW corner which seemed harder than the rest. 13A was COD.
6. A tricky Quickie today, which took me longer than the main-paper cryptic.

   Edited at 2015-01-22 06:16 pm (UTC)

7. A typical Teazel QC. If you find hin/her easy, I suggest you are more than ready for the 15×15. I certainly don’t. 😒 Invariant.
8. Definitely tricky for me & a DNF to boot too.. (13ac) Felt a bit like a Dean Mayer type of puzzle (if it’s permitted to wildly speculate). Thanks to blogger and setter.
9. Not wishing to be a contrarian, but I found this one much easier than a lot of the QCs. I then moved onto today’s bigger sibling which I found an absolutely impenetrable snorter whereas others found it easier than usual – yet I tackled Monday’s 15×15 reasonably efficiently whilst others were commenting on it’s significant degree of difficulty!

   Maybe it’s all simply down to that mysterious – and oft referred to – wavelength thing. But that sounds a bit too much like “black magic” to be a satisfactory explanation. Trying to rationalise it a bit more, I think we all have our own body of stuff (words, concepts, images, jokes etc.) that – whether we like it or not – hangs around on the “front shelf” of our minds, with a load of other stuff that is on the back shelves (or has never been there at all!) If it’s on the front shelf, it mysteriously surfaces quite quickly when triggered by a clue.

   What is on each person’s “front shelf” will vary wildly depending on interests, experiences, things they have found amusing etc. If there is a serendipitous fit between any given puzzle and your front shelf gear then bingo! Otherwise, you need to graft hard and rely on cryptic solving technique (which we are all learning here courtesy of the great assistance from the senior pros).

   So, I was lucky today in that
   – I always think of Lancs as “the red rose county” due to a passionate interest in English county cricket where that phrase was always being bandied about by journos and commentators whenever Lancs played. As a result, 3dn was a pretty much immediate write in for me
   – I used to spend a lot of time with a German girl who spoke excellent English but, when animated in conversation and coming to a point where a native English speaker might say “etc. etc. etc.”, would instead say “und und und” very vigorously. It was charming and amusing, and the image of her has always stayed (whether I like it or not!) on my front shelf. So when I see Germasn in a clue (or even when I read “German” anywhere) I have a momentary flash (so to speak) of her.

   And so on. I’ve rambled enough…

   Thanks to Teazel for a most enjoyable and witty offering, and to Chris for the last minute blog!

   Edited at 2015-01-22 09:23 pm (UTC)

   1. Any comment with the term serendipitous (my favourite word) in it is worthy of at least a reply. I met once with the great, and I mean REALLY great Tony Sever. He does the 15×15 every day in 7 minutes or so. It turns out he does every cryptic each day in a similar time. He puts this down to having started at the age of 7 or so (hope I’m not misquoting here – and I’m presuming years not months!). It does seem that one builds up a body of knowledge (front or back) of all things cryptic and GK. So he has all the abbreviations, previous clue types and devices and a huge GK base at his fingertips. I hold my hat with ‘bewildered awe’. But, anyway, thanks for the comment Nick. Us (or should that be we?) mere mortals will continue to hack away with spade or shovel yet still enjoy the battle.
   2. On the whole I agree with you. Each crossword may or may not contain clues that chime with personal experience / knowledge. However the problem I have is that my last 3 DNFs have all been by Teazel.
      Taking one clue from today’s as an example, if my GK was good enough for me to have known that a pin was half a firkin, I would have already moved over to the main puzzles.
      I was under the impression that the QCs were there to help novices like me get to grips with a fascinating pastime, not as light relief for people who are already experts.
      I fully appreciate that a range of difficulty is beneficial to the learning process, it’s just that Teazel seems to be slightly missing the point of a QC.
      Finally, given yesterday’s exchange, can I stress that this is just my personal opinion and that I do not wish to offend anyone, least of all Teazel. Invariant
      1. Your PIN example is another classic instance of the point I was trying to articulate – what is obscure to one is obvious to another, and vice versa – and it’s generally a question of serendipity in terms of prior experiences / interests etc.

         PIN was easy for me simply because (and this is a serious confession now!) I spent a part of my youth hanging around with a beery bunch of folk singers who specialised in old English drinking songs. Pins, firkins etc. featured heavily.
         By contrast, a recent Times weekend cryptic required the solver to know that Elvis Presley was known as “the King’. I did not know this: however, when I mentioned this to some friends who were staying with us at the time they were stunned at this lack of “GK” on my part – “everyone knows that”, they chorused.

         All of which just goes to show that being a setter and getting the appropriate level of GK right must be jolly difficult. That said, most weeks a few words appear in the main cryptics that I think just about everyone would agree are seriously obscure (a recent EIGHTVO springs to mind). Whilst they are fair game for the main cryptic (aimed at experienced solvers who can generally work out unknown words from the surrounding wordplay and crosscheckers), I think most people would agree that such rampant obscurities have no place in the QC. But, where the line is drawn is much harder to define.

   3. I suspect that the really good solvers have done so many puzzles over the years that there are few words that they haven’t already encountered several times before, so any intersection with their own personal interests is less of a boon than it is for less experienced solvers, hence perhaps the greater consistency in terms of solving times. But certainly you’ll regularly see in the comments (more so for the main cryptic than the Quicky) people saying “Help up by blah-blah because I’ve never heard of it” and other people, for the exact same word, saying “Blah-blah went in straight away from the definition and enumeration”, so if your own interests happen to be aligned with those of the average Times setter then you will have some kind of an advantage. Hence be grateful if you like classical music, literature, and cricket, and curse if you like trance, science fiction, and basketball.

10. Yes, thanks Chris.

    Ploughed through what I found a tricky offering. LOI was BELEAGUERED which I had to work around for ages. I think I’m slowing down with the week!

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