Saturday Times 25813 (14th June) – much 11ac here!

31 comments on “Saturday Times 25813 (14th June) – much 11ac here!”

1. A beast indeed – but an enjoyable challenge which took me 31:55 to finish. I have written on the piece of paper that this was probably the first time the ‘ordinary’ crossword took more time than the Jumbo.
2. 62 mins for this one. I found it extremely tricky and I don’t remember it being a lot of fun. TRENDED was my LOI unparsed because “using” confused the hell out of me, and I’m pleased to see it wasn’t just me. I also entered VOICED and CHARWOMAN from the definition alone so thanks for the parsing of those two. As far as the brackets in the clue for 24dn are concerned, I’m of the opinion that the clue wouldn’t work without them.
3. Is the Crossword Club down or is it just me? It won’t load at all so I have no recollection of how this puzzle went for me (other than badly, I think).
   1. Site’s down for me too, now, which is a pity, because when it was up I made a frightfully witty comment on the bizarre grammar that attended today’s vintage crossword. Ah well!
      1. Ah, always the way. A variation on ‘carriage humour’.

         I sort of wish you hadn’t given the answer to a clue in today’s (below) as I haven’t been able to access it yet!

         1. Sorry about that! Can you sort of try not to read it?
            1. I sort of did but it kinda didn’t work. Not to worry. By the time I get round to it I’ll have forgotten, especially given the speed of our new BT Broadband connection, finally installed 2 days ago after a 4 week wait (it works in bits per minute). Now we have to wait another 2 weeks before they send a different engineer to hook us up to the fibre optic cable which they weren’t sure was on our street. I did call them and point out that there was a ruddy great pink box at the end of the street with “Fibre Optic is HERE!’ plastered all over it, but they wouldn’t believe me because it wasn’t on the database. Sorry, off-topic, but I needed to tell someone.
      2. Me too!
4. Very enjoyable but tough, as I recall. 30-something minutes (can’t check at the moment because the Club site appears to be down, probably under the strain of not actually hosting the replacement 3rd qualifying puzzle). Oddly, today’s vintage (not a prize crossie so I think safe to comment) includes STRIP CLUBS as a pre-echo of 12 in this one.
   Lots of solve first, work it out later stuff, but I did like the Conference opening and got the wordplay in time to inform the solution.

   Edited at 2014-06-21 08:43 am (UTC)

   1. I think I must have done a different vintage to yours!
      1. Likewise!
         1. Suffering extreme embarrassment here, for reasons which I cannot fully divulge involving prize crosswords. I think I’ll go and have a little lie down now.
5. I wasted far too much of last weekend on this puzzle so I’m not planning to go through it all again now, but suffice it to say that I still don’t see the the purpose of, or the need for, brackets in 24dn.
   1. There are two definitions: ‘what makes you greener’ and ‘what makes you think the grass might be greener’. The words in brackets are optional.
      1. Yes, I got that, but to my mind it reads far better without brackets and without making such a big thing of the second way in.
         1. Without brackets there would only be one definition, which would rather defeat the whole object of the clue.
            1. Unless I’ve been missing something all these years, punctuation is not there to make sense of wordplay is it? Leaving aside ‘?’ for DBEs etc and the occasional clue where the name of the punctuation mark itself comes into it.

               But maybe I have a blind spot over this clue given my initial conviction there was a misprint (passim).

               Edited at 2014-06-21 12:46 pm (UTC)

               1. I don’t think there is really any wordplay in this clue: it’s just an unusual (and in my view very clever) double definition. I really can’t see the problem.
6. It took me more than one session and I stopped counting the time once it went over 30mins. So far as I am concerned the longer it took the better, just more happiness from a superb crossword. Lots of lovely clues, but 5ac did make me chuckle.

   I didn’t understand 21dn and with the benefit of Andy’s erudite explanation, still don’t. That whole area, a bit of a blind spot for me. Also in 4dn it’s the second row of every keyboard I’ve ever used, though I see where the setter is coming from.

   Best of the year so far, maybe, though I vaguely remember saying that at least once before.

7. I can’t get onto the club site either, so I don’t know how long this took me, but it was a long time. I thought it was a superb puzzle, one of the best for a while. Loads of ‘eureka!’ moments (like a penny-drop moment only more so): singers singeing (and not singing), for instance, or the ‘key series from top row’, or the ‘decoration to be sent by jet’, or ‘overheard start of Conference address’… I could go on.
   Thanks setter.
8. I had to give up on this after over an hour: it turned out that I’d convinced myself that 1dn just had to be SUMP (STUMP – T), which made it impossible to get 9ac. 🙁
   Thanks for explanations, as several had to go in without parsing.
   I haven’t been able to get into the club site at all yet today – the usual link just gave a blank frame.
9. The Clubsite seems to come and go this morning. I have accessed it earlier today but cannot now.

   I thought that this was a proper Saturday puzzle, hard enough to be interesting but not so hard to be boring. Thank you, Setter.

10. Would echo Andy B here – tough and not much fun. LOI by some distance was BOX-KITE, which perhaps indicates just how far off the wavelength I was.
11. 2’49” (hours and minutes) – I’m not proud. Still, a lot quicker than reading Tom Jones, which is turning out to be a cracking experience notwithstanding. I thought 15 a particularly fine reverse hidden.

    Jerry, try saying lack, vac, back and tack with your middle finger on your throat and you will feel the vocal folds vibrating for the first three, but not for the last – until you move from the initial consonant to the vowel (which as always is voiced) – especially if you spin out the initial consonant. Then, try saying ‘da’ and ‘ta’ in turn with said finger in place, to see how the voiced consonant differs from the unvoiced one made with the same mouth set-up. (Works for other pairs, including b/p and v/f, as well.)

    Edited at 2014-06-21 12:25 pm (UTC)

    1. Or to put it another way, just try to say ‘v’ without your vocal chords: it’s impossible.
12. I started this at breakfast time on Saturday and finished at tea time on Sunday (obviously doing other stuff in between but even so).

    I still couldn’t see how trended and charwoman worked so thanks for those Andy.

13. Struggled with this all afternoon while watching the rugby (Wales v Springboks). Got there in the end – which is more than Wales did. Now off to drown sorrows. Some answers went in by guesswork only. Ann
14. Phew. Absolutely ages, although I was listening to the cricket at the same time, so that is some excuse but not much. A couple I didn’t understand: why does turned = trended (27ac)? I can see no connection at all. And why does the setter bother with all that stuff about the prop when the letters of prop are also in the top row?
    1. The first definition of ‘trend’ in Chambers is ‘to turn, wind’.
       ERTY is a series on the top row (at least the top row of letters). The letters of PROP are there but not in the right order.
15. …but I really enjoyed the challenge. There is nothing like solving a really hard puzzle, and understanding how all the cryptics work.
16. I got nowhere when I first tackled this puzzle, but slowly hacked away at it until completion, and managed to parse almost everything. I now have a backlog of other puzzles to catch up on, so I hope they are less demanding but equally satisfying.

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