Times 24,075

35 comments on “Times 24,075”

1. Some pre-blog comments. 40 mins. I found this quite taxing and a good fair challenge.

   The only thing that puzzled me was the homophone at 11A where I had to consult the dictionary to find “eagre” being another word for a tidal bore.

   Who was it who recently came up with the unforgettable “Roger the Hated”? I am waiting with bated breath for their take on 21A!

   1. What would one do with grafted leather?
      1. I was thinking more along the lines of EDFART THE LARGE
         1. Have you not heard of the ‘flared hat egret’ with its prominent lower-cranial plumage?
         2. Legree the Fated, of course.
            1. Too many “e”s? ELGARR THE DAFTE perhaps?

               Who was it who failed to get HEROD THE GREAT a while back, because they couldn’t see past ROGER THE HATED? I thought that was brilliant.

2. A slower start for me today but suddenly it came together and I finished in 27 minutes, my fastest for a while. I knew Eagre = Bore as it came up in a puzzle I blogged a few months ago and new words met in such circumstances tend to stick.

   I had one guess ELOHIM which I took from the wordplay.

   A rather good and entertaining puzzle, I thought.

3. 6:08 when done a part of prelim 2 a few days after the championship.

   I suspect 21A’s anagram is too obvious for anyone to have found amusing alternatives while solving (prove me wrong …)

   Lots of nice images in surface readings here, such as 1A, 26, 6 (maybe nice is the wrong word here), 15.

4. I suppose you could slightly alter kurihan’s effort above, to make more royal, to “farted the regal”
5. 11 mins, at least a minute lost because, annoyingly, I couldn’t remember the Latin name for busy Lizzie. 1A is very nice, reminded me of the ‘mist rolling in’ in Paul McCartney’s ‘Mull of Kintyre’.

   Tom B.

6. We seem now to be in a run of pleasant, amusing but hardly taxing puzzles. 25 minutes for this one. When is another Anax offering due?

   A couple of small queries. The use of “downstairs” at 2D (we live in a bungalow)? The rather obscure homophone at 11A – surely some other type of clue would have been better?

   I have a number of ticks against clues and particularly liked 4A, 10A and 7D. The use of “house” at 25A may cause overseas folk some problems.

   1. Hi Jim – there are more puzzles in the pipeline but no dates yet. I’d guess we have a bit of a wait until the next one though as I had a Saturday puzzle recently.
   2. keep ’em coming like this,very entertaining ! took about 45 mins with 2 x teas and a mince pie during.
      And ALWAYS with-out the help of reference books,much more challenging ! Ta-Ta
   3. Now dorsetjimbo, have you finished last Saturday’s? That one seemed quite formidable to me. My time was 3 days – the first day yielded only 5 answers.

      I’m waiting to see how the blogger did.

      1. I agree a good puzzle that took me about 40 minutes. I thought at the time it might possibly have been an Anax offering and his comments suggest that indeed that might be so.
7. An easy puzzle (20 minutes for me), but with some nice clues. I was particularly taken by 1d. I found the SW corner the trickiest, with LOTTO, FACE-LIFT and TURMOIL going in last.
8. again, I’d forgotten that Wednesdays are the prelim puzzles (ome nore to go?)… 11 minutes, PARK, IMPATIENS, GREASER and ELOHIM from wordplay (add to my list of shortcomings religious terms). Lots of longish to long anagrams in this one and Duenna/Chaperone combination seems to be on the rise, are setters needing protection these days?
9. Curious to see how the non-Brit solvers go on HOUSE – in the US I’ve only ever seen BINGO and LOTTERY used, so it’s not only an answer but a definition that might be unfamiliar. LOTTO is used a lot in Australia, but HOUSE isn’t (I learned it from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”) Wordplay is pretty easy…
   1. I pencilled in ‘PLUS+H’ initially but wasn’t confident of plush=significant, or of leaving ‘towards’ as a filler.

      Finally with L-T– I shoved lotto in, wondering about the conection between lotto and house.

      1. When playing Lotto or Bingo, “house” is what you shout when all your numbers are covered.
         Susie
   2. Put in ‘lotto’ from the cryptic. The equivalency is somewhere deep in the back of the mind, but I didn’t worry too much about it.
10. 17:38, should have been quicker but masthead and mainstream took longer than they should. I considered M_STHEA_ several times before seeing a word in there.

    Got Elohim from wordplay and given the first three crossing letters of 18 impatiens just came to me – I must have absorbed it by osmosis while being dragged around a garden centre.

    20a and 6 look like efforts from “Clues in Blue” based around a nautical theme.

    Q-0, E-7, D-5.5, COD 20

11. Dear Aunt Agony,
    I’m really worried. I came on here to post a really impressive time of 5:26 only to find out that I’d solved it in the champs about 5 weeks ago. Not a single clue rang any bells while solving and, having had another look, I still don’t recognise any! Can anyone confirm that I was actually there? Either the nervousness of being in the champs has played tricks on my mind or I’m getting worryingly senior. Please advise
    1. BOOM! BOOM!

       Lemonentry, my dear Watson. In the time since the Times Crossword Championship, which you have banished to the rear of your psyche (where it is making a disconcerting and unflattering lump), you have solved 28 Times crosswords (including two repeats), 5 Saturdays, 5 Jumbos, 5 Sunday Times, 33 Guardians, 5 Private Eyes, 5 Everymans, 5 Azeds, 5 Listeners and The Junior Teen Challenge Puzzle in Teen Beat.

       So after 95 new crosswords, one you’ve already solved could slip the sharpest of minds. Or, in this case, yours.

       Dr. Basil A. Brush
       Practicing Physchologist
       Once I become professional I’ll learn how to spell it.

       1. Is this a cruciverbalist’s variation on The 12 Days of Christmas?
          Susie
    2. Dear Penguin

       The symptoms you describe are quite normal in a person of your age and will get worse as time goes by.

       You should only start to worry if you start to imagine you are something other than yourself – a human being for example.

       Uncle Agony

12. I can’t say that I found this “very easy” (nmacsweeney’s verdict), but, as jimbo says, another amusing, clever and not too taxing puzzle in much the same vein (if not quite as straightforward) as Monday’s and Tuesday’s. 35 mins for me. I wonder if anyone else wasted time, as I did, at 1dn trying to concoct an answer from an anagram of LIMBS and JOINT that had something to do with carpentry? The clue neatly inverted the normal rule of thumb: look for the more unlikely definitions of words rather than the most literal and obvious ones. More clever deception at 13dn, where, as noted above, the answer is the opposite of what is implied by the entertaining surface reading. I happened to have heard of EAGRE, so that homophone didn’t bother me. I’d not heard of ELOHIM, but it was reasonably guessable from the wordplay and crosschecking letters. All in all, most enjoyable. A stinker tomorrow?

    Michael H

13. Two mistakes in 28 minutes. (I rarely time myself since calendars tend to be of more use than a stopwatch.)

    Eagerly recognising EAGRE as a bore from a recent puzzle, I lept into action and wrote it in without considering which eagre/eager _should_ have been the answer. That of course made 8 impossible. What do they say about a little knowledge?

    28 caused me headaches, since my familiarity of it was in the plural.

    Two questions:
    1) why the ? at the end of 13?
    2) Does 5D work? Surely oppressed = overburdened = overladen but not merely laden.

    1. Chambers gives oppress=to load with heavy burdens, not to overburden – so I think LADEN is OK

       The ? in 13D serves no purpose that I can see.

       1. Thanks Jimbo.
14. Is not the purpose of the ? in 13dn to signal that the answer may contradict what the surface reading seems to imply?

    Michael H

15. Regards all. About 15 minutes, not counting interruption. I have never heard of the tidal bore ‘eagre’. But, as an American, my logic went like this: ‘bore speaking’ probably means ‘sounds like auger’, and somewhere over there in England they pronounce ‘auger’ like ‘eager’, so I put ‘eager’ in, and continued blithely along. I also got ‘lotto’ from the wordplay, and don’t understand ‘house’. We have a public lottery in NY called Lotto, but I’ve never seen ‘house’ used for any game of chance, except for references to ‘the house’ as the one you’re betting against. I looked up ‘lotto’ in the on-line British slang dictionary I consult, but it’s not there. Well, I guess my guesses were lucky today. See you tomorrow.
    1. Kevin, did you ever do many American puzzles, such as the NY Times? ‘Eagre’ is all over them, because they need the vowels. ‘Tidal bore’ is the usually non-cryptic definition.
16. I think HOUSE (or HOUSEY-HOUSEY), BINGO, and LOTTO are pretty interchangeable – you called ‘house’ if you won, tho I guess more familiar to an earlier generation.

    In Ireland the National Lottery chose LOTTO as the title of their main game – pick 6 from a large number (which has steadily increased over the years) – and it’s still known as that.

17. This was fun – and not too difficult.

    Mungo Park makes another appearance at 8d. The young Scotsman who became an explorer to get away from the teasing from his schoolmates.

    I have learned a new word for BORE at 11a. I thought that the answer EAGER was a really awful homophone of AUGER!! I was anticipating a backlash from the AAHB (Anti Awful Homophone Brigade) but all I got was an insight into the depth of my own ignorance.

    Remember that IMPATIENS is NOT a virtue.

    There are 6 “easies” left out of the blog:

    12a Explore senses changing with frequency to make clear personal feelings (7,7)
    EXPRESS ONESELF. Anagram of (explore senses f)

    21a One who was crowned and strangely glad thereafter (6,3,5)
    ALFRED THE GREAT. Or one of his forebears ELARED THE GREFT? See above.

    27a Stand in front of lobby doors perhaps for renovation (4-4)
    FACE LIFT. Depends which hotel you’re in.

    2d Stay downstairs late and suddenly become alert (3,2)
    SIT UP. How bungalow dwellers solved this is beyond me.

    3d Bring about pain that is very internalised (7)
    ACH I.E. V E

    15d I omit clip when cycling – unwise (9)
    IMPOLITIC. A strangely accurate description of Boris Johnson’s career so far?

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