Times 24,139 – Never Mind the Ballcocks

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Rather worryingly, this is the sort of time by which I would normally hope to have finished the actual solving and be blogging the result, but as yet I can’t even access today’s puzzle. Whether this is a problem that stems from me or the site, I cannot say. Is anyone else having trouble with the online version?

By way of explanation, for a while now I’ve been without unrestricted internet access at work – sites such as the Crossword Club are hard to justify as necessary for work purposes – so it’s been easier to do a midnight solve as soon as the new day officially arrives, with the bonus that it’s posted at the earliest possible opportunity. (This is also why I haven’t been too vocal in commenting on other puzzles, as on days when I’m not blogging I generally leave the crossword till I get home in the evening, which can mean I don’t finish it till seven or eight o’clock; and thanks to the diligence of all concerned in raising and answering questions, I rarely have anything new or illuminating to offer at that rather late stage in the proceedings).

In the event that I don’t manage to access the online puzzle before breakfast I’ll adopt the old-fashioned method of calling at the newsagent and buying a paper – I’ll try to post at the earliest opportunity after that, but please feel free to comment / ask questions as appropriate before then.

Final edit: I finally managed to log in successfully about a minute before I needed to leave the house; clearly the revamp of the site didn’t go down well with my system, which is a familiar story to those of us who have experience of the Crossword Club. Rather than raise my blood pressure getting annoyed, I shall shrug and move on…

In the meantime, I liked this puzzle but sadly don’t have the leisure to expand beyond giving solutions (and I imagine anything which gave particular problems is already well-aired in comments). Solving time about 20 minutes (clues) and 13 hours (IT).

1 BALLCOCKS
6 MOTTO
9 SUTRA
10 STEELYARD
11 TONNEAU
12 NOTELET
13 PASSIVE SMOKING
17 INTELLIGENTSIA
21 OMINOUS
23 SOLDIER
25 MANZANITA
26 ELFIN
27 SEEDY
28 GREAT DANE

1 BUS STOPS
2 LET ON
3 CEASEFIRE
4 COSTUME
5 STERNUM
6 MULCT
7 TRAMLINES
8 ON DUTY
14 SENTIENCE
15 KINDLIEST
16 LAWRENCE
18 LASTING
19 GESTATE
20 COSMOS
22 OVARY
24 INFRA

40 comments on “Times 24,139 – Never Mind the Ballcocks”

  1. I had no problem accessing the crossword at 4.05 California time, just after midnight in the UK. The backdoor no longer seems to work though. It is necessary to log in and click on “print” on the new landing page.
  2. …and on the actual crossword, I think it definitely qualifies as obscure that we are meant to know that the archbishop of Canterbury in 1930 had Cosmo as a first name, unless I’m missing something.
  3. Guessed MANNANITA before going to the dictionary to check. Still trying to figure out the wordplay to 9 and 20.
    1. 9ac is SU(T)RA – a SURA is a chapter of the Koran. I assume the “to absorb” is just the container indicator.

      I’m not sure about 20ac either. The nearest I can get is O (ring) with MINUS (disadvantage) carrying O (“it” being another ring), but I haven’t convinced myself.

      As for 20dn….

      Did any other Monty Python fans immediately think “whippet” at 28ac?

      1. Kurihan, best to you. I think George’s query was about 20D, while you explain 21A the same way I would.

        George, Paul’s comment above re the obscure identity of Archbishop of Canterbury, from the earlier 20th century (i.e. Cosmo Lang, who I had to look up) explains 20D.

          1. Thanks for the explanation of 9 – I wasn’t sure if Paul was being facetious in the original placeholder about the archbishop, I got it from the definition.
  4. I can’t access it either. The front door was closed to me already because my sub has run out and their payment system is broken, they are not taking phone calls and now the back door is closed. If this was a deliberate action then all I can say is their efforts yesterday would have been better directed to fixing their subscription problems. Off to the Guardian for my morning fix. May post here later if I can dig my car out of the snow and get to a shop.
  5. Tough for me, about an hour and needed the references for the last several, such as Mr. Lang, Mr. Otto, MULCT, and to me a steelyard is a place where US people make steel. I still don’t understand the wordplay for 16, where I entered LAWRENCE, so any help appreciated. I hadn’t known Mr. K. at 28 was a Dane til today. I’ll stop confessing all my shortcomings at this point; you get my drift I’m sure. Anyone posting a fast time today deserves a medal. Regards to everyone.
    1. This link brings up this message:

      “Your session has expired or you have tried to access a page that is not currently available. Please login again or use the ‘Contact Us’ functionality to report the problem.”

  7. I saw no wordplay on Lawrence…I think its a double historical reference…1) novelist DH and 2) to Saint Lawrence the martyred Roman who met a horrible death as he was held over a fire.

    Oxy Moran

  8. Firm’s swindle undermines US City… my answer is Lasting

    ie Sting under LA.

    If I’m correct can someone explain the use of possessive in the definition ie Firm’S. Are we expected to ignore the “‘s”

    Oxy Moron

  9. I got a 404 on trying to log on some time after midnight your time. Went to another computer and got straight in. Back to the first and got a 404. Very confusing. Thought afterwards the second 404 might have been the first stored in cache, but what kind of system does this? Even more confused.

    As for the crossword, less said the better. Stuck in all aforementioned places. Eventually got all bar MANZANITA (I put an S) but my comprehension was low. So, to BUSS is to kiss, hmmm. Should thank the setter for today’s lesson.

  10. Got my first 404 for weeks today! Tried several times but still no joy. No doubt it’ll return eventually but as usual without a word of explanation. Must be the snow….
  11. what a cracker of a puzzle…For 20D didnt realise that Cosmo Lang was archbishop but having all the checking letters it had to be Cosmos i thought!…as for Mulct and Sura with a t in it…i had my vocabulary enhanced. Liked 23 across and also didnt undestand Lawrence at 16D..but do now…Several oddly clued words with letters to ignore…anyway delighted to have finished as at first read through found no clues that gave ready answers!
    well done to the setter,,,Isnt 25 across Manzanita not manzaninna as noted above?
  12. 11:34, one crass mistake – putting LAURENCE at 16D. I don’t think Laurence (Sterne) is controversial enough! St Lawrence is worth remembering for xwds as his roasting was on a gridiron.

    Manzanita was a new word but managed to guess the Z.

    Cosmo Lang seems to be the oldest “recent” Archbishop of Canterbury that we’re expected to remember. Best excuse for keeping him is that for Archbishop (4), he and William LAUD give you a choice to ponder rather than an automatic write-in.

    Edited at 2009-02-03 09:06 am (UTC)

  13. Managed to get out and buy a paper. There appears to be an unnecessary word in 1D which messes up the surface reading. The printed clue is: Where folk queue in street to be get kiss – excellent! Is it the same on-line?

    I found this very difficult and I must have taken at least 5 minutes before I wrote in my first answer at 12 having read through all the clues several times.

    After that I made reasonable progress in the top half with only 9A in some doubt – SUTRA or SUTTA, as I didn’t get the “Sura” reference. The SE corner eventually fell into place but I gave up with 20 and 21 unsolved and MANNANITA guessed wrongly at 25. So at least an hour with two unsolved, one wrong and one in doubt.

    1. I too found this difficult with too many obscurities. Around 45 mins, with a handful of guesses all of which turned out to be right except mannanita. bc
  14. I had no problems getting the crossword. Jack, the e-version also has the strange wording at 1D where I knew “buss” and that got me started because it gave me BALLCOCKS then about 40 minutes to solve.

    Cosmo Lang has appeared before but if you’ve never heard of him it’s a tough one and the reference to St Lawrence without a wordplay method of solving also makes for difficulty. I guessed GREAT DANE and am not convinced, having now looked him up that Mr K fits the description (he was new to me). I was pleased at 9A to see the use of other religions beside the overworked Christian references.

    Whilst there are some nice clues, I liked 17A and 23A for example, I feel this level of obscurity in one puzzle is unnecessary.

    1. Thanks, Jimbo. I managaed to speak to someone at the Times today and they have given me free access for a week by which time they hope to have their subscription system sorted out so hopefully that’s the end of my moaning at least for a while! Now I’m left with a newspaper I don’t have time to read properly.
  15. I can’t access today’s puzzle either – same error message as Jack got, and a “crossword can’t be found” when I tried the other type of backdoor. And my subscription automatically renewed itself a couple of months ago too.

    As Jimbo correctly points out, BALLCOCKS.

  16. Gave up at 36 minutes with mulct, cosmos and ominous missing.

    Life’s too short to waste time on this sort of rubbish I’m afraid.

    “in street to be get kiss”. Huh?

    10ac hard, then ‘ard. Sloppy

    What’s the yes and no bit in 11ac?

    The only bright spot was 25 ac remining me of “What do you call a woman who takes good care of her bottom? – Anita Harris”

    Q-loads, E-1, D-9 COD gestate

    1. I have some sympathy with your POV, penfold, but I was irritable before I started the puzzle this morning. I have the impression the setter tried to do something a bit different and it didn’t quite pay off.
      1. I think I was irritable as well – I normally access via the back door and print from there. Going through the login process meant I had to print on two pages which rankled.
    2. The “yes and no” refers to two uses of “ill suited”. One in the sense of an anagrind=yes and one in the sense that E was highly intelligent so “ill suited” =no in that sense.
      1. Thanks Jimbo. I figured it was meant to work something like that but I can’t see that ill-suited works as an anagrind.
  17. 5 clues left at 30 minutes, 4 of which lead to words that I haven’t yet managed to bring in to my everyday conversations – STEELYARD, MULCT, MANZANITA and SUTRA.

    However I should have perhaps got MULCT and MANZANITA from the word play (I had MANS….. in mind for some time). I have come across SUTRA in a Listener or similar type of crossword but it obviously hasn’t registered. The use of STEELYARD as a balance is a new one on me.

    TRAMLINES is defined in Collins as ‘a set of guiding principles’, presumably made rigid by the physical nature of the tramlines on the ground.

  18. Unfinished, with MULCT, COSMOS and MANZANITA all beyond my ken.

    I’m always in two minds about puzzles like this. I used to share student digs with a chap who could barely tie his own shoelaces but who would have given me the above three answers off the top of his head, along with a lecture on the background of each that would have gone on until someone told him to stop. Last I heard he was working at a Baltic university, studying some aspect of iconic art so obscure they’d created a department just for him, gawd bless him (or maybe they were studying him; I’m not sure). People like that need crosswords, too.

    On the other hand, this left me feeling a bit thick.

  19. My first thought at 16D was the psychologist R. D. Lang, but it seems the correct spelling is Laing(?).
    Most familiar example of 9A is probably the Kama Sutra, though not perhaps the first scripture that comes to mind. I didn’t see the hidden reverse in 6D at all.
  20. I thought this was an outstanding crossword–very tricky but witty. A pity that The Times doesn’t name the setters of each crossword.

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