Times 24,070

Author   richardvgPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 27:18 (with two wrong)

Just as well the District Line was slightly slow this morning, or I would not have finished this before reaching work. And I might well have one wrong, as I am still not convinced by BLUE for 25D. (Actually I find I have two wrong – thanks to those who pointed it out. I have now corrected below: 25D which is BLOW rather than BLUE; and 28A which is WEST rather than EAST SUSSEX.)

The top, and especially top left was my main problem. Although I put in ROMP straight away, I had a (foolish) nagging doubt that the answer might be PROM, which helped to slow me up on 1D and 2D. As well as those, 3 and 12 across and 4 and 9 down took ages.

If difficult it was very good. The surfaces are excellent, and the approaches are interesting and varied. Going through marking up the clues to include in the analysis I found I had ticked every single one. So I have decided not to list the cryptic definitions at 1D and 18A.

Across

1 ROMP, being PROM with the P moved to the end
3 AFTERDECKS – saw that it was DECKS quickly, but after needed the crossing F
10 ADHER(EN)CE, that is v(EN)t in REACHED* – it took me far too long to lift and separate “Sticking plaster”
11 VOCAL – reversed hidden
12 IS TH(M)US – for too long I was determined that only an N could fill I_T…
13 YE + OMAN
15 GET SOMEONE’S GOAT – (AMONGST GEESE TOO)*
21 T(RAJ)AN – the “off” is one of those unnecessary words to improve the surface. I am not sure it is entirely harmless here
23 FIVE-BAR, ie V(ide) in (A BRIEF)*
26 LE(I)T + H
27 SQUARE + CUT – clever to clue SQUARE by an example that looks like a newspaper
28 WEST’S U.S. SEX – ho-ho (corrected from EAST SUSSEX. Either works, but only one fits with the right answer to 25D.)
29 DO SH!

Down

2 MY HAT – took too long to see that the split before the two defs is just before the last word
4 FIN((s)ISTER)E
5 EL(E.G.)Y
6 DEVIO(U)S, ie U(rban) in VIDEOS*
7 COCK (A HO)OP
8 S(on) + ILK – held up by the cryptic definition and inability to think of a three-lettered word meaning “kind”
9 C+RAMBO – I put this in as a guess, and only as I typed it now saw how it works
14 A TA + STRETCH
16 TA(FF)R + AILS
17 NOSE-FLUTE – (STONE FUEL)*
19 ST JOHN’S – capital of Newfoundland and Labrador apparently
20 REV ‘ERE
22 N(EST)S
24 BUC + K.O., BUC being CUB(rev)
25 BLOW – two meanings (corrected from: ‘BLUE – it means “squander”, but I can’t see anything else’)

31 comments on “Times 24,070”

  1. I may as well start…

    For me this was the hardest for a while. Lots of tricky clues and plenty of smiles, and I especially liked 3, 26, 28 (shades of Bill Clinton) and 16.

    Unusual to see “SOMEONE’S” in 15 rather than the usual “ONE’S”.

    Just a couple of queries: I haven’t worked out the full analysis of REVERE at 20, and in 24 all the dictionaries I have checked give BUCKO as nautical slang, no reference to the Irish (although the answer was clear enough) – have I missed something?

    50 mins all up – which makes it good value for money (like my golf – more strokes means more fun).

    1. 20d REVERE = REV (Vicar)+ (H)ERE. Apparently in the East End of London they drop their aitches! Also from the East End is 29a DOSH. Is this word used outside the UK?
      1. Of course – thanks. The plethora of E’s distracted me from seeing East End as a “drop the H” indicator.
    2. Both Collins and COED have Irish or chiefly so. I did think briefly of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses.
  2. I think 25 is BLOW, which is a way of “using” a Pan-pipe. Then 28 must be WEST SUSSEX; hmm, the clue can definitely lead to EAST SUSSEX as well, can’t it?
    Dafydd.
  5. Please explain the wordplay and def. for this answer
    (e.g New York Times hack is shot (6-3)
    Barbara
  6. 23:51 here (with 2 mistakes). I finished three-quarters of this in about 10 minutes, but was completely stuck for ages on the top left corner, finally opening it up with READING AGE. Unfortunately I fell into the same trap as Richard, putting in BLUE and EAST SUSSEX. If I didn’t do so many barred puzzles I wouldn’t even have known that BLUE can mean waste! I still think 28A is COD, even though I got it wrong.
    1. Odd isn’t it. BLUED has come up a couple of times recently. I’m just reading “The Good Soldier” and came across “He didn’t know how much money he had, as he put it, ‘blued’ at the tables.” It’s curious to find a word you know only in the abstract, as it were, used in context.
      1. And I’ve just learned that The Good Soldier, which I’d never heard of, and The Good Soldier Švejk which I read (at least in part) a long time ago, are both about soldiers in the same war.

        I’ve had that “new word learned in xwds suddenly appears in real life” experience several times.

          1. And for BUCKO (in its nautical context) you have to look no further than “Old Possum” – in “Growltiger’s Last Stand” there is:

            “His bucko mate, GRUMBUSKIN, long since had disappeared,
            For to the Bell at Hampton he had gone to wet his beard;”

            It makes you wonder why Eliot bothered to write “The Waste Land” at all.

  8. I found this tough, and it took over an hour. I put in EAST SUSSEX, then was torn between BLUE and FLUE. Checking Chambers I found 2 meanings of FLUE, one of which is ‘light fluff, such as collects in unswept places’. That was good enough for me even if it’s wrong, though I should have reviewed 28 first. I think the ambiguity of 28 is a touch unfair. I thought 5 and 10 were particularly good, especially the misleading use of ‘plaster’ as an anagram indicator.
  9. There was too much guesswork involved in this for my taste. The ones I worked out but didn’t know were FINISTERE (I know the old shipping area which is spelt differently, but not this version), TRAJAN, ST JOHN’S (there are loads of them but presumably only one fits the definition), CRAMBO, BUCKO.

    I messed up on ROMP, putting RAMP in desperation, and at 29 I didn’t spot the wordplay so was torn betweeen DOSH and MOTH which might have fitted if the purse’s owner happened to be miserly.

    So about 45 minutes for most of it plus another 10 to finish it off with the aid of the internet on arrival at work.

  10. I’ll call my time 16 minutes – I was called for treatment after 11 minutes, realised why BLOW was better than my jotted guesses BLUE or FLUE during the treatment, and then spent another 3:40 finishing the puzzle.

    Struggled with 3A in the same way as Richard, and wonder how much time anyone seeing post=AFTER would have saved by way of making FINISTERE much easier to pick out from the other 94 départements de France.

    FLUE = fluff is appealing at 25D for those who know about it, but if it was the answer the clue would surely drop the “Use” and just be “Pipe for waste”. As far as I know, you can rely on the Times setters only using surplus words, like “off” in 21A, when they make a noticeable improvement to the surface meaning.

    1. Have you made the same mistake as The Times did some months ago, that although the mainland and Corsican departments are listed from 01 to 95 there are 96 of them in all? The quirk is that Corsica is now two departments 2A and 2B where it was 20, which no longer exists.

      Harry Shipley

    2. Yes, I had them on my Lancia Delta HF; in Martini colours. Added 5mph to your top speed, guaranteed!

      Harry Shipley

    3. ‘Rephrase 20ac as: “Vicar attending East End…” ?’

      No: you need the “in” really. I don’t think “attending East End” is a very fair way of indicating what is meant in the cryptic reading: it’s too elliptical.

  11. 36 minutes – I found this one a real slog, DOSH is used in Australia but I don’t think I’ve heard it in the US. Had to get a lot from wordplay alone – FINISTERE, CRAMBO, FIVE BAR, BUCKO, TAFFRAILS.
  12. For anyone who hasn’t heard of go-faster stripes Chambers (natch!) provides a gem of a definition: n pl (inf; facetious) matching horizontal stripes painted along the sides of a car for sporty effect, which unaccountably give (esp young male) drivers of cars bearing them a sense of superior power and road skill. Priceless!
    1. Priceless but wrong! – the stripes usually go from front to back on the bonnet, roof and boot, either in the middle or off-centre, as pics on Google images will confirm.
  13. Found this to be hard going, and took 54 min with copious use of internet tools. In retrospect all fair and above board apart from crambo (should something that trivial have a name?) and the east/west dilemma (I feel a clue should be self contained or at least give a nod to any other clue which contributes to the answer)
    1. From reading Regency and Victorian novels you would think wealthy young people at that time spent half their waking hours playing “dumb crambo” (when they weren’t out walking or playing the pianoforte). I have always assumed it was a game akin to charades.

      I agree on the east/west point.

  14. Seeing GO-FASTER STRIPES in the Times Crossword has made my day (most of which, incidentally, has been spent coaching my colleagues to solve the Telegraph cryptic). A very enjoyable 10:40, with DOSH the last to fall.
  15. 11 mins and no real problems, but was worried about FINISTERE, which I also thought was a shipping area with two Rs.
  16. I must get some of these for my crossword-solving biro?

    Despite taking considerably longer than our esteemed blogmeister and most of the other contributors I did at least opt for the correct part of Sussex at 28a after using my pipe to BLOW at 25d.

    There are just the 2 omissions:

    15a What you get for speeding (but not corporal punishment!) (2-6,7)
    GO-FASTER STRIPES. I’m not sure I follow this clue fully? Is there a connection between CORPORAL and STRIPES? Do only SERGEANTS and above have stripes or something like that?

    1d Measure of progress with one’s first work, perhaps, in years (7,3)
    READING AGE

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