Times 24174

37 comments on “Times 24174”

1. Very easy – a personal best opportunity for some, including foggyweb I’m fairly sure. Only possibly tricky bits seem to be role/capacity=HAT, Frodo’s pony, xwd favourites abalone and inamorata if not seen before, and maybe identifying the Feast of Stephen (as in Good King Wenceslas) with Boxing Day. Stopped the clock at 4:39.
2. 19 minutes here, which is about as good as I get. I was able to work through it completing each quarter in turn, the last to fall being the SW, 18 and 13 being the last in. I have read Lord of the Rings but I needed the checking letters to remember Strider.

   I didn’t know, but guessed correctly, that MAHATMA = adept, nor that there is a plant named THRIFT.

   Could we have a rest from references to LEAR please? It’s becoming a bit monotonous. Edward last Thursday and today, and King last Friday.

3. 
   There’ll be a few today, I think. 11 mins here.

   By the way, is your “old lady” your wife or your mother, or either?

   I haven’t read LOTR for ages, but I thought Frodo’s pony was Bill.

   1. You are right, he did have one called Bill, but he also rode Strider at one stage of the story. It’s many years since I read it so I forget the detail.
4. 35 mins for me, which may be the slowest time today, by the looks of things. Got held up by the plants and the sage, not helped by quickly penning UNDER WORLD at 13 without taking much notice of the clue. Must have been thinking about my own destiny. Didn’t know NAPPED = head, but the answer was obvious. I thought I would have met all slang words for head by now, if not in crosswords then at least in The Goons. I liked 3 but COD 14.
   1. I thought as I was doing this that it could have been tailor made to arouse Jimbo’s wrath. Very easy indeed. Didn’t time myself which is probably just as well as a bout of word-bindness prevented me from seeing “thrifty” for just long enough to rule out the PB that this puzzle should have made possible. Around 15 mins. bc
5. I agree, very easy. Stopped the clock at 7 minutes myself, and thought Peter might go under 5 minutes today. I simply can’t write that fast and still be legible, especially on a train where the paper’s shaking all the time!
6. So Mahatma means ROLE? Or is it that MAHATMA was a role in a film?

   I’m confused.

   I still can’t believe you can fill in a grid in under 5 mins….

   1. Mahatma is adept. Mama is old lady. Hat is role, as in ‘I’ll answer that with my libertarian hat on’.
7. I never heard of ‘thrift’ the plant, couldn’t remember Frodo’s pony, but that didn’t stop me. I still take 30 minutes, but no real difficulty.

   Looking through the clues, I don’t see any that I particularly like. Usually, even in easy puzzles, there is at least one that is witty, but not here.

   1. The plant depicted on the “tail” of the old 12-sided threepenny bit was thrift.

      Bracoman

8. 6:46 .. Into the Fastskin LZR Solvesuit for another PB. First time plumbing the heady depths of the sub-seven.

   One Across Rock .. Artificial Dory, reclusive older brother of 70s Belgian popster Plastic Bertrand.

   1. Eleven Across Rock.

      Ah yes, Inamorata. The heady days of early 1980s Brit Funk. Several members of Shakatak (all of them, in fact) left to form the startlingly similar Inamorata. And still nobody listened.

      Altogether now… “Down on the street, dow-own…”

9. I also romped through most of this in 12 minutes, but there was another 3 minutes of head-scratching and scrutiny as I looked at M_H_T_A and wondered if I had any of the crossing answers wrong. Eventually I slung in MAHATMA without understanding the definition. STRIDER was also a guess, but that one didn’t slow me down.
10. 8 minutes, so I’m with the easy crowd too, I think 8 is about my best. I got 18 from the wordplay and wondered about it, Aragon wasn’t a horse or a bet, was he?
11. As Penfold predicted on Friday (!), I smashed my then PB of 25 minutes to get down to 16 minutes today, and that while juggling with my lunch simultaneously. This is probably the easiest Times I’ve seen to date, so no doubt we’ve got a right one coming sometime this week… COD 10ac.
12. I always thought Mahatma was Gandhi’s first name but now I know that he was Mohandas Karamchand. No wonder everyone called him Mahatma.
    I was slightly slowed down by trying to convince myself that a smart conservative was a Fact Tory but otherwise quite straightforward with plenty of crossword fodder. I have only ever come across Abalone and Inamorata in crosswords, estates for cars crops up regularly and Edward Lear makes his second appearance in a week.
    1. The humble abalone (or ormer if you’re from the Channel Isles) is considered a delicacy around the world; so much so that many fisheries have collapsed. It is reputed to taste like chicken (if you like your chicken salty). In Perth, West Australia, the season lasts 6 hours (that’s for the year), and you don’t want to be strolling along the beach when the starting whistle blows. See this article.
13. 10 minutes here slowed briefly by putting enamorata at 11 and minimas at 19 but corrected these howlers thanks to easy crossing clues.

    I agree with vinyl1 that there were no witty clues to lift this puzzle.

    Er. That is all.

14. Nothing to add really. Too easy even as an encouragement to new solvers. Under 10 minutes – about as quick as I can write the answers in these days. Has it stirred my wrath – no but if tomorrow is as easy I might get restless!
    1. I reckon you need a few puzzles like this to counterbalance the stinkers. The fact that some of today’s posters have admitted to taking 20+ mins for an alleged doddle shows it was a fair challenge for the inexperienced. I’ve been dabbling in crypitc crosswords for about 40 years and still can’t breeze through them like some of you lot!
       1. On counterbalancing the stinkers, with you 100%. I think the puzzles are about 2 minutes slower for me on average now than they were about 10 years ago – and I’d only blame about 30 seconds of that on being older (my health issues from last year don’t seem relevant at present – I had a near-PB on the Times2 Race the Clock last week, and that’s a much more nervy solve than the Times cryptic as you get to see times every day from very quick solvers who seem too polite to post their Biddlecombe-beating cryptic times very often).

          This is partly due to xwd ed Richard Browne relaxing some of the clue-writing rules, but much more, I think, because the current setters are making the wordplays harder than they used to be. It may also be down to efforts to avoid repetitions like today’s Lear. Great fun for the “wolves” but potentially dispiriting for new solvers, esp. those who haven’t found us yet. This is not criticism of Richard or his predecessors – satisfying the full range of solvers has always been close to impossible.

          Edited at 2009-03-16 05:59 pm (UTC)

          1. Thirded: the occasional puzzle that old hands find very easy is essential to encourage beginners, and anyway there are plenty of things in this puzzle that many new solvers would find far from easy, e.g. ‘plant’ = THRIFT, ‘head’ = NAPPER, ‘fish’ = DORY and especially the clue to 19ac (MAHATMA) which nearly, but thankfully not quite, cost me a new PB.
15. Very easy, as all have said. 15 mins for me, a PB. I predicted a sub 5-minute time for Peter B, and am glad to see he lived up to expectations. I had virtually all done after 10 mins, but accountably spent 3 mins on THRIFTY at 13ac, my last to go in, despite having all the checking letters. Infuriating!
16. Napper=head was new to me but the wordplay was obvious enough. I didn’t time myself but was nowhere near a PB on this, possibly because I just didn’t go for a quick solve.

    The “encouragement” comment by anonymous makes an excellent point; it doesn’t matter how easy a puzzle appears to us, erm, old hands. To some solvers the Times puzzle is going to be a new adventure, so we need the occasional gentle offering to build confidence.

    Aside: I’ve been extremely grateful for Pete’s postings re my UKPuzzle collections. Just to let you know there’s a new one posted today:

    http://www.ukpuzzle.com/PuzzleCollection005.pdf

    Page 4 has a fairly challenging cryptic.

17. Same experience as most of you, very easily done. Wrote in most answers on the first read-through. I think it was about 15 minutes, so not a PB, which for me is around 10 minutes. Held up just a tad by the 4D/14A plants, but not for very long. Regards all. I may try one of Anax’s puzzles today, if I have some time, since this was not much of a challenge.
18. I don’t time myself but this was only a one-coffee puzzle, well under 10 minutes all in.

    I see some criticisms above, but I don’t agree with it; I am perfectly happy with a wide range of difficulty and don’t see any real benefit from striving for uniformity, so long as a reasonable overall average is maintained…

    1. Another vote here for the occasional “easy” puzzle. I was a bit dispirited how easy so many posters thought last Friday’s was, as it took me 40 minutes and I had to read about 10 clues before solving one. So today’s is the first one I’ve found really easy for a week or two.
19. 8 mins for me, not a PB but a nice tonic at the start of the week. I have absolutely nothing against occasional easier puzzles like this. HAT = role held me up for longest.

    Tom B.

    1. I too am happy with the occasional easy one. I’ve been getting better since finding this site, but ones that are too difficult still outweigh the ones that are too easy by a fairly big multiple. bc
20. Hi all. 16 min, with 4 trying to justify hat. Still don’t like it, but that’s probably pique. Am all for the occasional doddle, if only to beget the fear of nemesis.
21. I had no trouble with Hat = Role but, since several other people did, I checked with Chambers and was surprised that it was not explicitly defined as such. All you get is the phrases: wear several hats, wear another hat, etc to act in several capacities, another capacity etc.
    1. Collins (one of the two “official” dictionaries for the Times, with the Concise Oxford) has “informal: a role or capacity” as a def. for ‘hat’. The Concise Oxford doesn’t seem to mention it at all.
22. a real breeZe
23. I must say I have greatly benefited from this crossword being easier than most. As a novice, I say with some pride, ease notwithstanding, that this is the first cryptic crossword I have ever completed. This certainly encourages me to keep working away at it all…
    Dee
    1. Well done – keep a copy! I’ve no idea how long it took you to get this far (and you don’t have to say), but my challenge to you is to next solve one that takes me more than 6 minutes, then 8, and so on (maybe ignoring the ones where a careless wrong answer or transcription error holds me up).
24. Yes – an easy one alright but I still had two sets of ??s next to 19a MAHATMA and 18d STRIDER.

    In 19a, a double MA appears to be clued as old lady’s. Is the greengrocer’s apostrophe allowed as evasive tactics in crossword clues?

    For 18d I was aware that Aragorn’s nickname was STRIDER so assumed that Frodo had named his pony after him.

    There are 6 omissions from the blog:

    10a A Greek starter (5)
    ALPHA. Easier to spell than Taramasalata.

    15a Arousing intense feeling in English grounds (7)
    E MOTIVE. Even at Edgar Street perhaps?

    17a Cars in residential areas (7)
    ESTATES. Easy in any crossword anywhere.

    7d A fraction to one side (5)
    A PART

    8d But not the sort of music you’d associate with steel or brass bands? (5,5)
    HEAVY METAL. Not so much heavy metal involved with steel or brass. Nor would you get much Heavy Metal from Sotira’s Artificial Dory I suspect.

    16d Lacking information during the night? (2,3,4)
    IN THE DARK. Darned internet connections down again!

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