Times 24123 – eternal torment, multilation and a squishy bug

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 13 minutes – I didn’t get any until the long anagram at 12 across and then things fell into place pretty nicely. A good crossword for wordplay, not many hidden words or direct anagrams. I liked some of the more visceral elements.

Across
1 ARGO: R in AGO – though I expect many will see a 4-letter legendary ship and jot it in
3 BRITISHISM: (THIS,IS)* in BRIM, since a panama is a type of hat
10 IN A WORD: cute – I had IN A for a while before the checking letters confirmed the last WORD
11 TORMENT: MEN in TORT (a lovely word for wrongdoing)
14 SANCERRE: C,ERR in SANE. I had some for the first time at a tasting last year, yum
17 WAR PAINT: (PAIR)* in WANT – nice definition
18 DEA(d),FEN: another well-concealed definition
21 COCHINEAL INSECT: (CATHOLIC,INCENSE)* – my new word for the day, gotten from the wordplay. Apparently you smush them to get carmine
24 PANTHER: H in PANTHER
25 MUTILATION: IL(l) IN MUTATION, &lit
26 B(o)R(d)E(l)L(o): Jacques Brel, responsible for the abomination “Seasons in the Sun” and several French songs
 
Down
1 ARISTOS: SOT,SIR,A all reversed, and A=are=unit of measurement pops up again
2 GIANT STAR: GI and ANTS on TAR
4 RODE,N(udis)T: and traversing is probably the best thing to do with the nudist’s extremities
5 TUTORIAL: (OUT)* in TRIAL which for me is a new wordplay for a common word
6 SPRING CLEANING: S, then RING in PC, then LEANING
8 MATISSE: another long reversal, this time ES (from chESty), SIT, AM
15 RE,FRESHER: First year University students are called FRESHERS or FROSH in Australia, and FRESHMEN in the US
16 UNDERLIT: DE,R,L in UNIT – struggled with the wordplay momentarily
17 WYCH ELM: anagram of HEW,MY,L(ila)C, new word for me, but with only one vowel, not too difficult to work out
20 ALEPPO: PP in A, LEO – “another one” referring to another ancient city following on from 19 down
22 CLEF,T: apparently more attractive in chins than in palates

43 comments on “Times 24123 – eternal torment, multilation and a squishy bug”

  1. Not much to add to George’s comments really. 25mins here, which means not very hard. The run continues…

    Some good clues, as George says, but some of the definitions were a bit obvious (13ac, 21ac, 2dn, 6dn in particular) which was a pity because the anagram at 21ac is very nice.

  2. What with rodents, fens and Britishisms I thought a tribute to Evelyn Waugh was appropriate, apropos of the new “Brideshead Revisited” and the old one just finished being rescreened in Oz. The never before seen footage included an interview with him. Turns out he was a curmudgeonly arriviste, or at least pretended to be so. No doubt many of you know this already, but at this remove I prefer to keep my childhood heroes on their pedestals.

    30 mins for me today, which is my asymptote. An even keeled and enjoyable puzzle after yesterday’s peaks and troughs. Since Jacques is already going on (and on) in the background I won’t. (Is it coincidence that Jacques and mutilation occur together in the final line?).

  3. Eager to finish in reasonable time I moved to OneLook for the insect and the Syrian town with a mind block on ARISTOS (the mag) probably because of my distaste for the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The American writer Lance Mannion puts it best:

    “Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. A bible dictated by a weak, sullen, and envious god to be read by the vain, mean, selfish, and rapacious. Anyone who tells you that this is their favorite novel and the book that had the most profound impact on their thinking is consumed by vanity and self-love and is pretty much masturbating in the mirror in front of you…or they are lying in order to get admitted to the country club.”

    Even with that a most enjoyable puzzle here in Toronto on a very cold night.

  4. 9:04 but room for improvement – the COCHINEAL part of 21 needed two goes, and 9 and 20 also took too long (I guessed at ??PP?? until the insect was complete).

    I wonder how long the Times setters are allowed between appearances of “play (5,10)”. Are there any other possibilities for the answer?

    Edited at 2009-01-15 08:33 am (UTC)

    1. OK, I’ll bite. Fatal Attraction, information on which can be found here. A classic of its time, whenever that may have been.
  5. Yet another easy one finished long before I was off the train.

    Nice to see a reference to Jacques Brel. To be fair to him Seasons In The Sun was a not very good adaptation of his song Le Moribond, made by Rod McKuen and later with an additional verse by Terry Jacks. It worked much better when JB performed the original French lyric

    Does anyone know why some of the messages in yesterday’s thread are hidden so that I need to click “expand” in order to read them. I have had this before but not for a long time. It makes the thread very difficult to read. Is there any way of expanding the whole thread rather than clicking each hidden message?

    1. Hidden messages: It seems to happen when we get up to around 50 comments. I don’t know of an “expand all” option. I’ll check the various options for the site to see if we have any choice about it.
    2. I found Le Moribond on Youtube, and it’s far better than Seasons in the Sun (also there with Jacks in a comedy 70s footballer perm. Listening to some Russian songs on a couple of holidays, I found that Mary Hopkin’s “Those were the days” uses a Russky folk song tune. And those aged about 40-plus should be able to recognise the English version of this splendidly misogynistic number (My Russian isn’t that good – “more info” includes a translation). As I know, the original words are completely replaced in the versions we know.

      1. That cabaret performance by JB of Le Moribond is excellent. Thanks also for the link to Stienka Razin and the rather good video clip that someone has put together. The only popular English version I know of this song is The Carnival Is Over, written for The Seekers by Tom Springfield. Have there been any others?
        2. I apologise unreservedly to all fans of JB. The translation from the French to English and back clearly left something behind. As for pinching foreign tunes, this Christy Moore effort has a familiar ring.
  6. I’m starting to suspect that this crossword is being dumbed down. Some of these clues are laughable for The Times (23A and 24A for example to cite but two of many). OK we must have the occasional easy one but surely the editor should ensure a proper mix not day after day of 15 to 20 minute pap. When the difficult one eventually arrives we’ll all be out of practice!
    1. The trouble with “15 to 20 minute pap” as a complaint is that some of the easy clues are good clues – like 11’s “Punish chaps engaged in wrongdoing”, where chaps=MEN and wrongdoing=TORT are both trivial for old hands, but the surface reading is completely convincing. 10 and 7 are other easy ones with good surface readings.

      But then 17D, which at least leads to a novel answer, is “Roughly hew my hollow lilac tree”, which advertises the anag fodder to old hands by using arbitrary content (Why lilac?, Why hollow?). The “English seabird” and “hot leopard” in 23/24 have the same effect. And in 13, planet and vessel don’t really fit well when you stop to think. I’d like to see fewer clues with weak surfaces, but I know from occasional setting attempts how hard that is, and overall the Times surface meanings are very good.

      21’s surface isn’t terribly convincing either, but the insect was a more interesting answer for me than the play.

      1. You’ve put it all far more eloquently than I and I agree with what you’ve said. All I would add is a note on definitions that are too obvious, of which there are quite a lot in this puzzle. 1A, 10A, 12A linked to a 5,10 structure, 13A – I don’t need to go on. Yet the compiler can obviously do better because the use of “put on a brave face” at 17A is good. Do we know, are setters given instruction as to degree of difficulty in the puzzles they create? It did cross my mind that “childs play” as the opening answer on Tuesday 24121 was a cry of protest!
        1. I know little about exactly what goes on between the editor and setters, but I doubt that setters are given a level of expected difficulty, collectively or individually. The editor must know their styles very well and it’s up to him to maintain a team who produce puzzles with a sensible range of difficulty. I can imagine that a setter who has his puzzles test-solved before sending them in might have an expected range of timings for the test solver, and tweak things a bit if a puzzle fell outside the range. Or I guess a setter might look here to see what we make of his puzzles – I know from comments in e-mails like “you always find mine easy” that a few do. But that’s about it.

          Any changes in Times xwd difficulty that I’m confident have actually taken place have been associated with changes of editorial policy. In this respect, current xwd ed Richard Browne allows some things that his predecessors Brian Greer (1995-2000) and Mike Laws (2000-02) did not allow, and I believe this makes the puzzles of his era a bit more difficult on average.

          Assessing the difficulty of puzzles, especially for quick solvers, is really difficult. I’m assured that last year’s championship final puzzles were definitely not intended to be as easy as they turned out to be. And that’s even though the team of setters includes one former champion and other former finalists who could have been used as test solvers.

  7. 12 mins, got a bit stuck at the end in the SW corner. I thought the pair at 19D and 20D were the best part.

    Tom B.

  8. I agree that it was generally an easy puzzle, with several answers coming quickly from the definition alone (e.g. 6). TITUS ANDRONICUS leapt out at me from the anagram fodder, but for some inexplicable reason I entered it as TITAN ANDRONICUS, making 9 impossible to get until I checked my grid carefully. What should have been a 20 to 25 minute solve turned into 30. Probably the two best clues out of a mixed bunch were 17 and 21
  9. I agree that this was pretty easy, in a run of easyish puzzles,though I didn’t find it quite as much of a doddle as Jimbo. I whizzed through most of it in 15 mins – well, that’s whizzing for me – but then got a little bogged down in the SW corner, with 20dn and 25ac holding me up, and taking longer than I should have done to spot that “Catholic incense” was anagram fodder at 21ac (very nice clue, by the way). But, as Jimbo says, some clues were absurdly easy, in which category I would add 1ac to his 23ac and 24ac. How many times has boat/ship etc = argo featured in recent puzzles? Quite a lot, it seems to me.

    Michael H

  10. 12:41 .. Pretty straightforward puzzle. It has indeed been an unusually easy week so far. I hope jimbo’s wrong about dumbing down. We’d have to start a Campaign for Real Crosswords or something.

    SANCERRE, BRITISHISM and the crushed bugs were all good efforts. Wandering around cochineal related things, I found an online supplier of cochineal insects – $225 / pound, if anyone fancies crushing their own. Apparently that’s about 70,000 insects.

    Q-0, E-5, D-4 .. COD 14a SANCERRE (clever use of ‘slip in’)

  11. 16:10 – easier than average but with a handful of very nice clues to lift the experience. I liked “panama’s border, say” for brim and the def for war paint, and loved the surface at 8d.

    Wych elm was new but easy enough to work out as was Aleppo.

    Q-0, E-6.5, D-4.5

    Oh, if you look carefully at 1 down you’ll see Sotira standing on her head boxing a cardinal.

  12. 12:30. I enjoyed this one. I know there were some really easy ones, but I thought the anagram at 21a was ace, “brave face” for WAR PAINT made me smile, 3a was pretty clever and I thought 25a was a cracker (my last one in and a big a-ha when I realised what was going on). Never heard of ALEPPO but I knew it had to be right. I’m just happy to have finished one after my rubbish performance so far this week
  13. 40 minutes, which isn’t far above average for me, but felt a lot harder than that! A lot of this fell into place without any problems, but the SW corner caused me no end of grief. Notably, 21ac, 22d, and 25ac. The anagram in 21ac was especially well hidden, and it took most of the checking letters for me to spot it. I’ve never heard of 20d until now, but the wordplay led me safely into port. The most entertaining one we’ve had this week, I thought. COD 21ac, if only for the headache it gave me.
  14. Finished this one in under two hours, thanks to a bit of competition (a colleague at work saw me doing it yesterday and we ended up racing each other today).

    I enjoyed this one a lot. COCHINEAL INSECT was first to be solved, ILEAC was last in. The last three letters of 3A BRITISHISM held me up for a while. Got 20D ALEPPO because it fitted the clue, but didn’t know why until I saw the above (very quiet = pianissimo = PP, of course).

    My COD? 19D (NATAL + UR) made me smile, as did 13A SATURN (SAT + URN), so I’d probably pick one of those.

    Michael.

  15. my first proper attempt at doing this, about 90 minutes and i was a couple off finishing but a friendly colleague has helped out. great to be able to check my answers here though.
    1. Welcome, ksikthii. My first real attempt at the Times took about a week, so you’re already doing well. I’m sure there’s nothing portentious in your joining on a day of ‘ETERNAL TORMENT’.
  16. 9.56 – so under 10 minutes for 3rd time this week which indicates an easyish week so far.Couldn’t work out 3 until saw the blog. Panama’s border,say=Brim – brilliant I thought. Agreed some easy ones – as to dumbing down? I don’t know.Setters and styles obviously change but I can remember some absolute stinkers (a compliment) last year.
    JohnPMarshall
  17. Even I finished this within 30 mins, so it must have been easy. I remember colouring white cake icing with red cochineal to write Merry Christmas on the cake many years ago.
  18. Completed the Times Crossword for first time today. Took ages (2 hrs off and on)and a few books. Started to read Tim Moorey’s book on the Times Crossword last week.It’s obviously helped a great deal as has this site.
    17ac my favourite. Learned a few words today – Sancerre, Aleppo amongst others.
    Fran L-P
    1. Hello Fran L-P and well done on your first completed puzzle. 2 hours is very good (mine took far longer) and if you use this site you will be amazed at how quickly you improve.
  19. I would endorse Peter B’s defence of this puzzle against the charge of dumbing down. There were some very easy clues, but there were also some delightful surface readings. For example, 12ac, which I forgot to commend earlier, may not have been the most challenging of anagrams, but “Tudors in Tunics” could hardly be bettered as a pocket description of the Waggledagger’s Roman plays.

    Michael H

  20. Why ‘once’? So far as I know Natal is still the name. And what else can ‘once’ refer to?
  21. Kurorareka, I’ve read biographies of Waugh, (his life also been extensively covered in TV arts documentaries) and sad to say he was a thoroughly dislikeable man, snobbish, vain and nasty (not least to his own family). He’s also among my very favourite writers. bc
    1. Next thing you’ll be telling me is that Aldous Huxley was a womanising dope fiend who drove his wife to suicide (puts fingers in ears and goes la-la-la or since we’re blogging, should that be PFIEAGL3)
      1. Sorry, that should be suicide attempt (and I’m relying on a failing memory there). koro
  22. Welcome to the newcomers. My first completed puzzle took far longer than yours, like all day long, and came only after many times failing to complete it at all; you’re way ahead of the game. Today’s was relatively easy, but with some very clever offerings such as ‘brim’, the combination of the 2 old cities, and my COD, 17. I needed about 25 minutes. Regards to all, see you tomorrow.
  23. My first successful attempt took several hours. It was within my first few attempts at The Times, but I’d been semi-regularly doing The Scotsman’s (significantly easier) cryptic for at least a few months, perhaps longer. bc
  24. The Times crossword is always challenging for the likes of me, but I did manage to finish this one, albeit without fully understanding 25ac until coming here, and I only needed reference for the last half dozen or so. I’m not therefore too surprised that those of greater experience found it to be another easy one.

    It’s interesting that George got going with 12ac, because my experience was rather the opposite. I noticed it was an anagram quickly, but it didn’t help: with the consonants eventually fixed by the down clues, I found myself with a load of odd vowels to scatter in the gaps and thus concluded that this was a Latin phrase I didn’t know!

    In 21ac, I realised straight away that COCHINEAL was a red dye produced by crushing insects and yet the phrase COCHINEAL INSECT was unfamiliar and took a bit of time to find, mostly from the word play. Similarly at 2d, I realised quickly that the second word was STAR, but it took quite a while to hit upon GIANT from the word play. While ‘giant’ is obviously an appropriate word to describe a star, I was unfamiliar with the complete phrase.

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