Times 24,133 Thomas the Chough Chough

31 comments on “Times 24,133 Thomas the Chough Chough”

1. Didn’t much care for this, trivial general knowledge not being a strong suit. All the same, relatively straightforward apart from the north east corner, which took longer. As a Scot I often find myself objecting to RP homophones, but I don’t know of any other way of pronouncing “chough” – my problem was rather that I didn’t know it was a crow, didn’t know “amice”, and although I’ve heard of Cade, he was too deep in the memory banks for easy retrieval.bc
2. I finished in 13:05, and then took a couple of minutes to work out the justifications for SOPWITH and ACADEMIC. I also felt slightly uncertain about 2D (PHI), just because “fie” is a rather archaic expression of distaste, but it seems to be right.
3. 40 minutes with a couple of guesses from wordplay ( MARLINSPIKE, CHOUGH)and a couple not fully thought through as I has no references to hand (ACADEMIC and CHANCE = fall out?). CORDIALNESS is an ugly word which I’m not sure I have met before, having always used “cordiality”.
4. 14 mins, but with one mistake (DISINFORMATION at 17A). I didn’t know ‘amice’, and 4A and 7D took by far the longest. 25D is commendably zeitgeisty, given the FSA’s recent lifting of the ban on shorting banks’ shares.

   Tom B.

5. 7:26 but another taker for DISINFORMATION. The possibility that the girl’s a “dish” is probably too feeble for a genuine alternative answer.
   1. Surely the misinterpretation would have been:

      Di’s in formation

      That’s what I thought, Di being a popular short version.

      1. At 17A I considered both MIS and DIS and decided MIS was stronger as MIS(s) fits exactly “girl shortly” provided you accept miss=girl.

         I also considered both PHI and PSI at 2D, thought both pretty weak but decided to leave it out on the grounds there were only two possibilities and one more or less picked which ever one annoyed you least.

      2. My train of thought too, but should have thought harder & seen that there’s no explantion for the S. “Girl’s shortly ….” would have made it work.
6. I thought that 2d was PSI (“sigh”). Is this not apposite?

   I also wondered whether 8d could be PUFFIN, but opted correctly in the event.

   JamesM

   1. Yes. I thought of PSI as the only other letter that would fit, but dismissed it because I pronounce the initial P. But as it can be pronounced without the P, it looks like an entirely reasonable answer. Possibly better, given the archaicness of “fie”.
7. Noon GMT: The new-look Crossword Club is now up and running.
8. I also had DISINFORMATION. About 35 minutes to finish, taking a long time to see CRANNY. I’m sure the clue for ACADEMIC was used very recently in a Times Jumbo.
9. I breezed through most of it in the time it takes Wilhelm Kempff to play the Schubert Impromptus, Op 142, but was left with 3 unsolved. Another 45 minutes, and I put in ‘chough’ – had to look it up. I gave up and went to bed, but after five minutes I jumped up, put in ‘abiding’, and saw that the last one must be ‘Deeside’.

   The only other thing I found at all difficult was ‘ossicles’ – couldn’t find an ‘M’ to remove.

10. Another one for Di’s in formation. Didn’t think twice about it, to my chagrin. A puzzle in two halves for me. Raced through the left and hit the wall in the right. Even trawled my brain for another Babylonian city without success. Couldn’t think of Cade and my ecclesiastical garment knowledge is woefully lacking. Finally twigged to don.

    We do have choughs in Australia, or at least we did. A threatened species apparently. Nothing like a crow. The bird most Australians recognize as a crow is actually a raven.

    1. Cade is stock issue, better add him to your word-hoard.
       1. Yeah, I knew who I should have been thinking of, I just couldn’t get his name to my frontal cortex, even though he was in a Sunday or a Jumbo not long ago.

          And speaking of words that crop up often, I’ve done a tally on all answers from 2008 in the Times daily and Saturday. Four words cropped up 5 times each as themselves: ROD, TIE, TEA & TOPIC. Since Tea also occurred in TEA GARDEN (twice), TEA PARTY, TEA LEAF, TEA SERVICE, TEA TRAY, TEACUP, TEAPOY and GREEN TEA, I declare it to be the winner. Longest time between cuppas was 97 crosswords. Shortest time from tea leaf to tea was 1 crossword. Who cares how you spell espresso?! Altogether now, “Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah Rosie Lea!”

          If you want to know how the favourites fared, let me know. (ERATO faltered in the back straight, unless you include her twin brother ERATUM in her count).

          1. If you’re confident of your counts, I’d be interested in a list of the entries used say three times or more (I’m guessing that “two or more” would be a prohibitively long longer list). If you send me an e-mail or a LiveJournal private message, I’ll put up the results or a summary.

             Edited at 2009-01-27 05:12 pm (UTC)

    2. Wikipedia on chough and ‘white-winged chough’ explains the difference between Aussie and other choughs.
11. 18:30 with DISINFORMATION probably wrong – I too thought it was DIS[-h] but can see that MIS works far better. After a quick start I slowed down to a crawl, having most problems with the Geordies. MARLINSPIKE was the best arrangement of the given letters I could come up with and was pleased to see it was correct.
12. Never heard of CHOUGH, and couldn’t get it from chehchkhihng letters, so reached for Bradford’s after 38 minutes.

    Wish me luck, off to the post office to hopefully finally complete my war with amazon UK – there had better be a new Chambers, Tim Moorey’s book on the crossword, and the Listener compilation in that box…

13. I took an age over this – maybe an hour (with interruptions) – with the vast majority of that stuck in the NE corner. I could see don = ACADEMIC, but for the life of me couldn’t work the wordplay, so left it hanging. A steam train goes Choo Choo as far as I’m concerned, so I was stuck on the crow. Add to that my blindspot as regards northern geography (or any geography, come to think of it), and a stubborn refusal to get 14ac for a long time, and you’ve got a long drawn out process. The rest I thought was fairly straightforward, and the whole lot enjoyable.
14. I didn’t time this one but it felt like 15 minutes or so. And I’m another who barrelled headlong into the DIS- bear trap at 17a. A cunning ruse by the setter with ‘Girl shortly’ triggering the involuntary “Ah, yes, that’ll be Di” in so many old hands. I wonder how many scalps that clue would have taken in a Cheltenham puzzle.

    Otherwise, a bit so-so.

15. The really tricky aspect of 17A, for me, is that I would use ‘disinformation’ to indicate an intent to mislead, whereas ‘misinformation’ would be neutral as to intent; so I could say ‘deliberate misinformation’ without tautology. To that extent, at least for me, ‘dissembling’ suggests dis- before it suggests misinformation. Does anyone else make this distinction?

    Tom B.

    1. I can’t claim to have thought of this distinction, but Collins, Chambers and Concise Oxford all agree with you.
    2. As Peter says the dictionaries agree with you so it becomes a question of what do you mean by dissemble? As I posted earlier in the end I decided the clue wording should be the final decider as to the answer that I posted. However, I’m going to look at the solution tomorrow and post the answer that appears (also the PHI,PSI puzzler)
16. I too went for DISINFORMATION. So what follows is to some degree special pleading. So be it! I agree with Tom B that “disinformation” is better than “misinformation” as a definition of “dissembling”. The wordplay for “mis-info…”, I concede, is not quite as concise as for “dis-info …”, but can be perfectly well defended, it seems to me, if DIS is taken as short for “Diana is” – “is lined up” being an acceptable description of “in formation”. In competition conditions, at least worth an appeal to the judges to allow both answers, I would have thought. I think you have donned the dunce’s hat prematurely, Peter.

    Michael H

17. I went for PHI at 3dn on the ground that it sounds like “fie”, which, albeit archaic, is an interjection expression disapprobation or disgust. PSI/sigh works from the point of view of sound, but not otherwise. A sigh is a noise expressing yearning, sadness, relief and other emotions of that type, but not disgust. So, I submit, there is only one possible answer here. But perhaps I shall be proved wrong tomorrow.

    Michael H

18. Apologies. In my previous comment on 17ac, I should have course have written that the “wordplay for DIS- etc, I concede, is not quite as concise as for MIS-etc” – in other words, the other way about.

    Michael H

19. Another senior moment! In my first comment on DIS v. MIS, I should rather have written that “is in formation” is an acceptable description of “lined up”. I’ll shut up now.

    Michael H

20. if I failed to fess up to entering ‘DIS-‘ at 17. I thought of both, and went with ‘DIS-‘ because I think it means ‘dissembling’. So, I agree with Michael, including the admission that the wordplay for ‘MIS-‘ works more cleanly. At 2 I went with PSI. I had thought my real problem was the NE corner, which took ages, and where I finally had to look up the crow/CHOUGH. US train noise is ‘choo choo’, and I’d never heard of the bird. Regards all.
21. From the solution the next day PHI and MIS were the correct answers

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