Times 24160

40 comments on “Times 24160”

1. 11:00 for this one. Last few in were 7A/8/10 in the Geordie corner. I didn’t know about the Whitehall warriors from the song – just worked from Whitehall = the govt./Civil Service, and then MOD.

   PIGEON PAIR felt new but knowing other stuff like Golem and the opera probably helped.

   1. Being a devout prommer, I too got Golem, having seen John Casken’s opera. Being in the music mafia helped there. CAPO was the last one in for me too; so we need to train for other mafias! We might then be forewarned of the Whitehall warriors too; I’ve never heard of them.
      I took 40 minutes or so. Liked JET LAG a lot, but GREASY surely is a state a spoon gets into rather than a sort of spoon. Mostly a neat set of clues needing a fair amount of lateral thinking.
      Dafydd
      1. A “greasy spoon” is slang for a grubby cafe. Like you I don’t really like this clue because either as you say its the state a spoon gets into or there should be some reference to the wad and char factory if that’s what the setter means.
         1. Yes indeed. I did check to see whether SPOON on its own meant a caff, but I couldn’t find anything. I suppose if two lovers have been eating butter, then they might have a greasy spoon, if we accept the word as a noun!
      2. I hope I didn’t suggest that one needed to know the term “Whitehall warriors” or the old song in order to solve the clue. As Peter has demonstrated it works perfectly on its own terms, but I couldn’t resist referring to the old song as I know it well. Sadly it’s long-forgotten but it has some relevance to modern times, I think. I have posted the whole lyric in my own live journal, if anyone’s interested.
         1. Oh yes, I got it from the clue; the disadvantage was that I took longer to solve it, the advantage was that I learned something. On balance then, a good thing!

            Oh, that lovers/butter comment was from me; I’d forgotten to log in.

2. Not sure about time as I did it in three bites, but probably about 45 mins all up. Pretty tricky I thought, with some very deceptive wordplay.

   7ac and 8dn were the last two in, and took about 10mins.

   At 23ac I wondered vaguely if “ammoniac” might be one of those “humour” words like “bilious” and “phlegmatic”, but decided to wait for the checking letters! Had to guess 21dn. I liked 14ac.

3. WHAT sort of sisters are these?
   1. “weird sisters” – the witches in Macbeth, thus described a few times in the text. Weird acts as an anagram indicator in “answer wordplay” to get you the “resists” in the clue.
      1. I could have guessed weird but didn’t chance it. Pity I’ve never ‘done’ Macbeth. I’m not happy with 7a – where does CAP come in?
         1. Took me a while – to cap something is to better it as in “I have a story that will cap that one!”
            1. Of course, but it did not occur to me at the time.
               CAPO has appeared in the Times in the past year, now I come to think of it.
4. Two children girl and boy – what we have.
5. Took me a long time but i loved this crossword
   Some clever wordplay and required a lot of knowledge
   THought 1 across was the clue of the day although i liked the sweet down clue too
   top marks
   Loved it!
6. I struggled with this one, never really gelling with the setter and so it was a bit of a slog for me too. About 40 minutes to solve. I took more time than I should with both 20A and 26A because I thought they were hyphenated (Chambers agrees with me so presumably one of the others has them as single words). I knew CAPO but not GOLEM and had vague memories of PIGEON PAIR so it must have occurred before in some crossword somewhere.
   1. 
      Jimbo, I commented on the annoying absence of hyphens in a recent blog so I decided not to mention it this time. But since you have raised the subject, I thought exactly as you about both these clues.

      For the record:

      Chambers hyphenates both.

      COED has Postmodern and doesn’t list Flea-bite/Fleabite at all but has Flea-bitten.

      Collins hyphenates neither but puts one in Flea-bitten.

      I note that none of them offers Fleabitten though I don’t understand what logic makes it invalid if Fleabite isn’t.

      I suppose the only solution is to expect anything, though personally I think it was easier when people stuck to the rules. But then I’m old and past it, apparently!

      PS: My Google Spell Check agrees with all the dictionaries as the only word it queried above was Fleabitten.

      1. Jack – for what it’s worth the OED has only flea-bite and flea-bitten (not the unhyphenated versions). I know it’s not a reference dictionary for this puzzle, but I think it carries some weight!
7. Count me another fan of this one, even though I struggled in places. I liked the sisters and the postmodern civil servants, but have to go for 17 as COD, closely followed PREFAB, which I eventually got. Last one in was CAPO. I believe the musical reference “Da Capo al fine” is loosely translated as “Al Capone’s finished”.
8. Chambers has “weird sisters” also meaning the Fates or Norns, whose role and number closely matches the witches. For one version of the Norns, cue Anna Russell, capering through Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in seven minutes, with some of her best lines.

   Greasy as “type of spoon” from “greasy spoon” was good enough for me – but so would be “type of sister” for SOB, STEP, WEIRD or TWISTED, as well synonyms like NUN or NURSE. As long as the word or phrase concerned is well-known enough, this seems the same kind of “crossword logic” as flower=river.

   Hyphens: Dictionaries (and common usage) are so inconsistent that for solving purposes I’d hardly ever rely on one being present or absent (ditto the space in “flea bite”, which a Google search for fleabite suggests is actually much more common than the one-word or hyphenated versions). The wiki article includes much common sense about hyphens. My guess for flea-bitten is that the hyphen is there because “fleabitten” might be read as the past of the verb to “fleabite”. The hyphen prevents you from incorrectly inferring that such a verb exists. I think the same applies to “moth-eaten” and “man-eater”, which I’d expect to be remain hyphenated. I guess the rule with words like “fleabite” is that they stay hyphenated (or two words) until some point where they’re familiar enough to be recognised as one word, without any confusion about possible meaning, as in re-cover and recover (In this connection, the OED’s citations for hyphenated “flea-bite” are all at least a hundred years old. They also have “‘Tis but a Fleabite to their wealthy stockes.” from 1630, and “The fleabitten horse prooveth alwaies good in travell.” from 1577 – I guess fleabitten went the same way as prooveth, alwaies and travell).

   1. Except that “greasy” isn’t a type of spoon. It has nothing to do with spoons. A greasy spoon is a type of cafe not a type of spoon.

      As to hyphens all we want is consistency. I’d be happy if they adopted the bar crossword technique of not indicating hyphens or even the lengths of separate words, as long as they stuck to it.

      1. Hyphen consistency: as far as I can tell they consistently give the same hyphenation as one of their two standard dictionaries – COED and Collins. I don’t know what gets done when these two disagree, though my instinct would be to follow Oxford, who I reckon are best at getting things right. This may lead to differences of hyphenation that seem inconsistent, but that’s a problem with the English language rather than the crossword.
   2. I agree with your comments Peter.

      Actually the OED has “Flea-bite, v. trans, to cover with bites of fleas” ! I guess it is a back-formation, but it would seem to be of pretty limited use, as the only possible subject for the verb is fleas. I don’t think I shall be using it any time soon.

9. ….and found about half of the clues rather difficult. I solved maybe half rather quickly, and then got bogged down for quite a while.

   In the US we say ‘home stretch’, not ‘home straight’, but that one at least was rather obvious.

   My COD: the witches.

10. I felt very comfortable with this for most of the way, filling the bulk of the grid in 20 minutes, but much of the Kent area eluded me for a while (WHISTLER, VOLATILE, GOLEM, POST-MODERN, GREASY), as did CAPO and PREFAB. It took another 20 minutes to get these 7 answers. I didn’t understand the clues to 23 and 26. Thanks for the explanations above.
11. 22:41 .. pretty tough, and stretching the knowledge base in places. WHISTLER made me laugh.

    I once got landed teaching business English to a bunch of German executives for six months. After a few weeks of near terminal boredom, I reinvented the course as “Godfather English”. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard an overweight accountant from Geislingen saying “Tell Mikey it was only business”. It was great fun, but they did all get a little carried away with our extended role playing game Capo dei capi. Terrific for negotiating skills, but if you’ve ever done business in Germany, and been surprised to hear a plastics manufacturer suggesting that either your brains or your signature were going to end up on the contract, it’s probably my fault. Sorry.

    I’m afraid I knew the Golem legend not from an opera but from a John Connolly thriller.

    PREFAB, like yesterday’s aria, featured in a Saturday puzzle last autumn (24048) – defined as “before cracking”.

    COD 18d WHISTLER – simple once you saw it, but funny.

12. A quite gruelling, and interrupted, 45 minutes. I thought 14ac was very good, but a lot of the wordplay in some felt over-obscure. eg. 4d / 23ac. I kicked myself when I saw pigeon = homer. The southern half especially gave me lots of grief.
13. 45 minutes – a bit of struggle throughout although all the clues were fair, and , in some cases, excellent. I liked WHISTLER, WEIRD SISTERS and FLEABITE. Operas are not my strong point, so I needed a little bit of help at the end.
14. I was a bit groggy this morning when I first looked at this (just started commuting to London every day from Coventry and I’m not used to getting up that early), but even so I was a bit concerned when the first one I got was 25A. Gradually struggled to about half of it in 15 mins, then everything clicked into place for a 20-minute finishing time. I guessed a few from wordplay, a few others from definition, then figured them all out later. For example, CAPO was the second last to go in although I thought of the answer on the first run through but couldn’t justify it. Last was WEIMAR, again from the definition but needed a run through the alphabet to get it (actually two runs, as the first time I was only thinking of ?EAM?R or ?EMM?R).
15. 25 minutes, yes, agreed on the slog, last two in were PIGEON PAIR and CAPO, with an appropriate head-smacking moment since I recently decided to get with 2002 and start watching “The Sopranos”. It didn’t help that I didn’t know how to spell WEIMAR despite cottoning on to the answer quickly.
    1. If you know how Weimar sounds, you can spell it using an easy rule. German letter sequences -ie- and -ei- sound like the English name of the second letter – E=”ee” or I=”eye”. Now you can fill in Siegfried, Heisenberg and many others with no hesitation.
16. Agreed, a very tough go when I did this last night, needing an hour and help at the end with the opera name. Nevertheless, I thought this puzzle as a whole was very clever and entertaining, especially WHISTLER, PREFAB and the SISTERS. PIGEON PAIR and the robot are new to me. From my point of view, the setter gets plaudits for this one. Regards, have a great weekend.
17. I had “finished-except-half-a-clue” in about nine minutes, and I never did think of PIGEON for “homer” (although I gave up trying after five minutes or so). It’s not a phrase I remember coming across before.

    I’m not sure what sort of “average” you’d get from analysing my solving times. Most days I don’t actually finish; when I do, I’m usually in under fifteen minutes. When I don’t, I’m usually “finished-bar-one-or-two” in under fifteen minutes, then hopelessly stuck. And some days, I barely even get half way.

18. I had trouble with this, eventually getting it electronically. But I didn’t feel guilty afterwards, since I’d never heard the term, and the clue is in my opinion, but not that of the Times crossword editor, unsound: definition by example for ‘pigeon’. I’m surprised DorsetJimbo didn’t mention this — I know he’s against d by e.
    1. I’m still with you Wil but if I mention it every time they do it the objection loses impact. Some are much worse than others but like you I would prefer Homer, perhaps, …. or some such indication.
19. I never did work out the wordplay for CAPO, NADIR or WEIMAR, so thanks for the explanations. I also missed UP in 15d, presumably from “there” = up in court. Finally, how does “journey” or “having journey” in 25A = TO?
    1. Hi, Anon,

       I had my own doubts about this one and was going to mention it when writing the blog. I think “South to West” as defined by “journey between two points” or possibly “having journey between two points” (of the compass) leaves something to be desired but it’s all that I can see on offer and it more or less works. Perhaps others can nail it more precisely?

       1. Thanks, that does make it clearer, and of course I overlooked the question mark, which makes a difference.
       2. I think you have to take “having” as a def/wordplay link, which is not one of my favourites, and then “journey between two points?” seems OK as wordplay in combination with the very clear def.

          Edited at 2009-02-28 11:26 am (UTC)

          1. Agreed. I decided whilst blogging that it was good enough so I omitted the comment I had been going to make. It was only seeing anon’s posting that reminded me that I wasn’t 100% happy with it at the time and I thought I’d let him know that he wasn’t alone.
20. A touch of dodginess in this one with, for instance:

    definition by example at 1a Homer = Pigeon and

    Greasy = type of spoon at 21a. As Jimbo points out A Greasy Spoon is a type of café but “sort of spoon” should not be used as a literal for GREASY.

    Having said that, I don’t mind this sort of thing if I can still solve the puzzle and this was the case here.

    There are 5 omitted “easies”:

    13a Add detail too thickly, so unbalance one’s account (8)
    OVERDRAW

    14a Perhaps resists witches (5,7)
    WEIRD SISTERS. Resists is an anagram of SISTERS – the anagram indicator WEIRD is in the answer. Shakespeare’s witches in the Scottish play.

    3d Organ: what Cockney does with it (3)
    (H) ‘EAR. Some ‘erefordians too I expect.

    19d Most colourful but subtle arrangement (6)
    BLUEST. Anagram of SUBTLE.

    24d Be likely to drop name, a short one (3)
    TE (N) D. As Dougal would say – Right ye are Ted.

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