Times 24,145 Sweeney Todd Finds God

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 25 minutes

Another reasonably straightforward puzzle of I guess average difficulty. A certain London-centric flavour laced with Christian religious references. Other than that, no obscurities, one or two minor quibbles, a couple of nice clues.

Across
1 DISH – nice hidden word (foo)DIS H(orrible);
3 SWEARWORDS – S(WEAR)WORDS; sport=WEAR;
9 AVOIDED – take “avowed” and replace “w”=wife by “id”=I had;
11 SETTLER – SETT(L)ER; L=Libra=£;
12 GODFATHER – two meanings; 1=sponsor; 2=Christian dogma;
13 OBESE – O-BESE(t);
14 TOWER,HAMLETS – TOWER(HAMLET)S; what used to be the East End embracing the old docklands and the Isle of Dogs;
18 SCOTLAND,YARD – (can star oddly)*; headquarters of The Sweeney;
21 IMAGO – I-M-AGO; M=minute; the final stage of an insect’s development;
22 PASTURAGE – PAST-UR(A)GE; over=PAST; recommend=URGE; area=A;
24 GABRIEL – GA(BRIE)L; LAG=convict reversed; more Christian dogma. I would prefer “believed by some to be in heaven”;
25 OUTLINE – (luton+ie)*; that’s=ie;
26 DEROGATORY – DEROG-A-TORY; badly wounded=GORED reversed; TORY=member of the Conservative Party rather than a politician;
 
Down
1 DRAUGHTY – DR(AUGHT)Y; thirsty=DRY; anything=AUGHT; reference draught beer; DRAUGHTY (drafty in the US)=cold? – a superfluous addition to the clue;
2 SLOW,DOWN – S-LOW-DOWN; succeeded=S;
4 WIDTH – WI(D)TH; my mother worked in a haberdashery and talked about “widths of cloth”;
5 AUSTRALIA – A-US-(TRAIL with “I” to the end)-A(ppalachian); our thoughts are with Victorians as those terrible fires rage;
6 WITHOUT,A,DOUBT – WITHOUT-A-DO-(but)*;
8 SORBET – S(ORB)ET;
15 AUTOPILOT – AUOT-PILOT; car=AUTO; driver=PILOT;
16 PALATINE – PAL-A-TINE;
17 IDLENESS – I+(endless)*; to loaf is to idle;
19 RINGED – (c)RINGED;
20 BARBER – BAR(B)ER; Sweeney Todd himself, the demon of Fleet Street;

34 comments on “Times 24,145 Sweeney Todd Finds God”

  1. 11:05 for this one. Slightly delayed by having put AUTOMATIC at 15D. Gabriel saved the day. Also struggled a bit to see PASTURAGE, my last entry, from checking letters.

    Maybe worth mentioning that “Sweeney (Todd)” is Cockney rhyming slang for the Flying Squad.

    ‘cold’ may not be necessary at 1D, but it’s no more superfluous than “like a beer” – “Thirsty, drinking anything like a beer” and “Thirsty, drinking anything cold” would both be fair clues. As indeed would changing the order to get “Thirsty, drinking anything cold, like a beer”. An embarrassment of riches!

    1. Where’s all this talk of the Sweeney coming from? Has the clue been changed online? It currently reads “Detectives can star, oddly, in remake (8,4)”.
      1. No clues have changed! Jimbo made the Scotland Yard / Sweeney Todd connection from this clue and BARBER at 20D. I just added a bit more.
      2. It was not my intention to confuse you my old china (plate) and if I did apologies for my jaffa (cake). Strictly speaking SCOTLAND YARD is (a) a building on Broadway off Victoria Street and (b) properly now called New Scotland Yard. “Detectives” is a bit of a loose scooby (doo). However, the most famous detectives housed in Scotland Yard were The Flying Squad, known throughout London as The Sweeney (Todd).
        1. I’m reluctant to set up a special thread for error-reporting, for several reasons. The most important is that there is already a mechanism for reporting errors – sending e-mails to the appropriate e-mail addresses at the Times. If those messages don’t get adequate responses, we’re entitled to complain, but I don’t honestly think that setting up a different place where some people report their problems will get the problems dealt with more effectively.

          The other problem with this kind of thread is that as it gets older, people will forget that it’s there. I say this fairly confidently because if you look at the timesxwdclub tag, you’ll find a thread of this kind which I created less than two weeks ago.

  2. About 20 minutes for me – fastest for a long while, with the only delay caused by entering BARBED for no apparent reason at 20.
  3. 36 minutes here and at times it felt like a bit of a slog. I took a while to get a proper foothold as my early answers were scattered all over the place and I’m never at ease solving in this fashion, preferring to complete each quarter in turn if possible. Evidence of a tidy mind or a rather worring pyschological flaw depending ones POV.

    The good news is that club subscription system is now functioning correctly and at last I am fully paid up for another year.

  4. Not much to add to Jimbo’s blog. Another gentle one – about 24 mins here.

    On 1dn, I think Peter’s last suggestion changing the order is best but keeping the ? at the end, as “like a beer” is the joke part of the double def.

    7dn reminded me of “And Now All This” – the follow up to “1066 and All That”; in the Geography section the reader can, in case of panic, turn to the “relief map” which is a blank page except for an arrow pointing north.

  5. 15 mins, of which about 3 at the end to get BARBER. 6D reads very nicely, it’s my COD.

    Tom B.

  6. About 45 mins at a slow jog. Liked 17 & 15. Dish was so well hidden that I didn’t see it. Thought I had to remove letters from something horrible. Fiendish? Horseradish?
  7. About 20 minutes for me, the last 7 or 8 spent puzzling over 17D. I missed the possibility of an anagram, and decided that it had to be one of IDLENESS, EDGELESS or ADHERERS. In the end I plumped for the right one as nothing in the clue suggested a lack or a plural, but with no understanding of how it was supposed to work. Duh!
  8. A twenty-minuter today, but I found less to admire compared to yesterday’s. Most of the clues were perfectly OK but nothing really grabbed me. I’m afraid I don’t think the pun in 17d works very well, depending as it does on a non-existent nounal usage of ‘loaf’. That’s not uncommon in crossword clues, but usually there’s something to indicate the seter is taking liberties. I suppose it’s a question of personal taste; this particular loaf was not to my taste. Secondly, more critically, the plural ‘invade’ after a singular B in 20 strikes me as sloppy.
  9. 19:12 .. I thoroughly enjoyed this one. The quibbles above are largely fair, but I didn’t notice them while solving. Ignorance is bliss.

    COD 8d SORBET

  10. I must have been on the setter’s wavelength here, 13 minutes while watching the cricket (at last Australia are starting to come together). Gave me time to do the Independent last night as well which has an almost New York Times theme that some may enjoy. TOWER HAMLETS last in from wordplay (though I think it’s been in a puzzle before). I also fell for GODPARENT and AUTOMATIC (AUSTRALIA saved me from the first, GABRIEL for the latter).
  11. 26 minutes, nothing out of the ordinary except that I printed the puzzle off from firefox and had to colour in 25 of the black squares for myself. If I wanted to do that I’d try the Sunday Express skelington puzzle thanks very much.

    Belated “big” birthday greetings to 7dpenguin for Sunday. As I’m typing this he’s probably planning his first SAGA coach holiday.

  12. Just over 20 minutes but got one wrong (PASTURAGE) so it counts as a failure. I didn’t get to grips with the clue and just came up with a word that fitted P_S_U_A_E and hoped for the best. Not a clever strategy.

    Fairly steady solve on everything up to that point. I tried looking for something in the odd letters at 18 across before realising my mistake.

  13. Strange how these seem to come in pairs. Very like yesterday’s for me, superficially straightforward yet quite a few answers took longer to come than I would have expected. Also both days left struggling with a short clue at the end – yesterday wane, today spoor. I know The Haywain (the painting) well but didn’t make the connection to “cart” yesterday. Spoor I’ve always mistakenly believed to be an alternate spelling of “spore” – I didn’t know it meant “scent”. bc
  14. I’ve been meaning to ask for clarification on this for ages: how exactly does pound(s)=’L’? I always thought the abbrev. for pound(s)=libra(e) was lb?
    1. L = pound = 100p
      Lb = pound = 16oz.

      The L comes from the old monetary system LSD, which stands for librae, solidi, denarii, or pounds shillings and pence.

  16. “Part of London” – fine, I know what to look for. But – surely the natural reading of Towers (i.e. looms) over village would give one Towers Hamlet. There is no natural way of arriving at Tower Hamlets is there? Especially with Village in the singular. Or leap to point out that I’ve got it wrong.
  17. To angryvocab.

    Pre-decimal sterling was expressed as pounds, shillings and pence, abbreviated to £sd, the £ being short for libra, the s for solidus and the d for denarius.

  18. I wasn’t on the setter’s beam today, and took about 45 minutes with this, which is longer than usual. My last 2 were the crossing SPOOR/PASTURAGE. I didn’t know SPOOR was a scent, but the wordplay should have gotten me there far earlier. I needed the crossing ‘S’ for PASTURAGE. I really liked DRAUGHTY after finally realizing I needed to convert to UK spelling. I thought the added ‘cold’ was a double def. (yes, Jimbo, US ‘drafty’=’cold’), and I was amused to see it. But upon reading some of the comments I think the def. is ‘cold’, and the ‘like a beer’ is a punning modifier of ‘cold’. On it’s own, DRAUGHTY does not mean ‘like a beer’ in any dictionary, or in common usage, does it?
    I’ll stop being nitpicky now, and I still like the clue. Regards to all.
    1. DRAUGHTY = “like a beer” by crossword logic, as DRAUGHT is a kind of beer (or a way of storing/serving it). Same idea as ‘flower=river’ or ‘wicked = equipped with a wick’, neither of which is in the dictionary either.
  19. I’m biased as a churchgoer, but I don’t think there’s significant harm done by following a convention that pretends this is a Christian country. Insisting on def’s like “believed by some to be in heaven” risks replacing a lively surface with a turgid one. The important thing is that both ‘God the Father = part of the Trinity’ and ‘Gabriel = angel’ in this puzzle are the sort of dogma that agnostics or atheists might well know about. By contrast, today’s Guardian required you to remember a location mentioned (as far as I can tell) precisely once in the entire Bible, as part of the wordplay for a fabric I’d not heard of before.
    1. It’s not just one kind of dogma, either – last week we had something like “what Pan did” for BLOWPIPES, and we get underworld or ‘underworld god’ for HEL or DIS, without a qualifying “for some”.
  20. F***! The Kent corner bamboozled me; thought pasturage particularly difficult even with the czechers.
  21. Encouraged by completing the top half with relatively little problem, I proceeded to grind to a complete halt, mainly due to having AUTOMATIC at 15dn. Unlike some others, GABRIEL did not come to my aid — perhaps I need a bit more of that Christian dogma that everyone’s talking about!
  22. 19 pleasant minutes. As a totally non-religious person I have no objection to the use of widely known religious references of the the sort you would bump into in general literature. Indeed I don’t see how it is possible to understand, or fully function in, human society without some knowledge of the major religions.

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