Times 24,175 Top of the morning to ya..

27 comments on “Times 24,175 Top of the morning to ya..”

1. Bejazus, that’s well blogged Sotira. Best wishes for the day to all from this Irish-American. I can’t explain 11 very well either, but I toss out the old movie Paths to Glory, wherein the attack on the Ant Hill could be seen as the last in a series of disastrous assaults. That’s the movie where French soldiers picked by lot are to be shot to encourage the others. An unhappy thought on such a glorious day, and probably a bit too obscure to explain the wordplay anyway. Regards all.
2. 13 minutes, rather fun, last two in were my lucky guesses of BALLYMENA and ANT HILL. Sadly, I have to travel a lot today so won’t be celebrating, I’ll just have to hit it extra hard on Canada Day or Australia Day.
3. 10:55, so should be tough enough for Jimbo after yesterday. Near miss guessing on 14D where I had ‘s(p)oles’? and ‘hic’ jotted by the clue – not quite the right structure and not quite the right Latin.

   11A: I think “that’s left by building workers” has to be the def. Then my best shot is that “the last” is n’th, which goes inside “a series of disasters” = A ILL. “last in a series of disasters” = “n’th ill” looks more convincing, but then I can’t see how to get the initial A.

   Last solved were: 11 and 8, then 10, 2, 1D, 1A.

   Applause for 9 which looks like an “anagram of the month” contender. But a quibblet over “to” as a wordplay/def link in 28 – it doesn’t work for me.

   Edited at 2009-03-17 07:54 am (UTC)

4. Missed out on SATE and BALLYMENA but otherwise enjoyed this one. ANT HILL was tricky to decipher. Perhaps it’s just ‘The last in a series of disasters’ = ‘A nth ill’. Hats off to anyone who managed to solve it without the checked letters.
5. 40 minutes which included 10 when having completed the RH side from 4 and 18 down onwards, and having put PARAMEDIC at 17, I just stared blankly at the page without solving anything. Part of this time was wasted trying to make an anagram of “millions gifted” at 3d.

   Still, I got there in the end and without aids, so it wasn’t too bad a day for me.

6. Thanks for the explanation of ANT HILLL (which is ANT-HILL in Chambers and ANTHILL in COED by the way, and therefore probably ANT HILL in Collins, which I don’t have).

   I found the bottom half relatively straightforward but spent most of the time up north, especially in the Lake District. Getting 3dn was the key to finishing.

   Kids in Australia use UNCO in a rather unkind sense (meaning “awkward”) about other kids (or their own parents of course) but I think it is from UNCO-ordinated rather than the Scottish word

   1. I always thought UNCO was an obscure Scottish expression, reserved for use in crosswords, and NEVER heard in real life. I’ve never come across it, other than in cryptic crosswords…..
7. About 30 mins, quite a bit of which trying to unscramble ANT HILL. I think the ‘to’ link in 3D jars more than the one in 28A, where there is at least a verb of motion as anagrind. 9D is my COD, I would rather 1D had been clued differently.

   Tom B.

   1. Around 25 mins, a good time for me judging by comments others have made about level of difficulty. A curious mixture of the straightforward and the quirky, but one of those where a higher than average number of answers seemed easily guessable even where not fully understood. Some nice clues, I thought, already identified by other posters.

      Incidentally, is it true that the Gymnopedies are (still) better known in the orchestrated version? That surprises me if so. bc

8. Embarrassing. 48 min with much cheating. Not helped by quickly solving 20 Ac. Discharge about to be reversed is obviously “re” and “pus” flipped to give “super” = capital. What else could it be?
   1. Don’t know why, but it always seems to be ‘matter’ that clues PUS in puzzles that have it. May be excluded from the Times on taste grounds (despite 1D).
9. An excellent puzzle, about 30 minutes to solve with the top proving harder than the bottom.

   I can’t get 11A to work either. I have a quibble over nth=last because I think the nth term in a series is the generic term. In many series there is no last term (1,2,3,….n,(n+1),….). It only becomes the last term if one sums the series from say terms 1 to n. And I can’t explain the leading “a”.

   That apart, and the points about “to” made above, I thought it was all very good. Thanks and congratulations to the setter and don’t drink too much water from the Liffey tonight.

   1. I guess it depends on your discipline. Use of n as the generic indicator is common in sequences and series but in statistics, say, n is usually reserved for sample size, so summing over i (or j or k …) from 1 to n is the norm. Since there’s only one last term, you’d usually expect to hear “the nth” rather than “a nth” (or “an nth”?). Here am I discussing this as if I had a clue, whereas (see entry below), that is clearly not the case.
   2. For “nth”, COED has both “Mathematics denoting an unspecified member of a series […]” and “denoting the last or latest item or instance in a long series”, plus the phrase “to the nth degree” = “to the utmost”.
10. Another for the red faced brigade. At least it goes with the green hair. Put LOT FILL in at 11, thinking it was some UK equivalent of builder’s fill, and your lot could be a string of disasters, the last of which would fill it. OK, so I admit it doesn’t work at all, but it fitted in nicely with my misspelling of ALLADIN (A tot cold be a lad – what’s wrong with that?). All my own work though and finished within the hour, including clearing a blocked rain head. Some great anagrams here, I thought; particularly 9, but also 17 & 28. COD has to be 23 though doesn’t it. (Didn’t even notice the “to’s” so I guess they don’t overly trouble me.)
11. A mini-stinker,and condign punishment, no doubt, for so many of us having dismissed yestdy’s puzzle as a doddle. About 60 mins for me. My reading of ANT HILL at 11ac was the same as that of the Sage of Biddlecombe – i.e. NTH = “the last” inside A and ILL (= “series of disasters”). It seems to be the only way it can be made to work at all, but I still find it quibble-worthy. ILL can of course mean “misfortune” in a general sense, but in context the plural ILLS would seem to be required to make the wordplay rock solid. That said, there were a lot of ingenious clues – e.g 1ac: good surface reading and deceptive off-beat definition, and my last to go in.
12. 32 minutes so assuming a linear relationship between difficulty and solving speed this was more than three times as difficult as yesterday’s. I had to look on t’internet for a list of ancient civilisations to get Sumer and to check tacet

    I had more question marks for clues I didn’t quite get (7) than ticks for really good clues (5) but with hindisght most of the former were down to me being thick (what happened to the “i” in commie in 12, how does oats mean to crop in 21 and how is a din a short queue in 5?).

    Q-1, E-7, D-8, COD – I’m with koro here on boomerang but also liked decagon, metropolis, archangel and what Bertie would call an s in a teacup. Nothing springs to mind for 1 across rock but I’m sure there’s a Frank Zappa song called “I’ll buy that lying latecomer an uncompromising chowder”.

    1. I think it was on “Boomerang Flab” which also featured Australian pianist Allan Zavod in a tribute to Fats Waller.
13. Back to normal service today! 56 minutes, with most of that trying to untangle the LHS.

    3d caused me the most grief there – UNCO for strange was obscure to say the least, and the definition was very nicely hidden (to me at least).

    11ac I can’t make head nor tail of, beyond the fairly apparent definition and answer.

    COD 17ac.

14. An entertaining 49 minutes for me. I found this a firm but fair puzzle and I did not even mind the plethora of classical allusions since I got them all. Apart from Theseus, Remus and his reversal and Sophocles and the odd bits of Latin we also had Laconic whose derivation comes from the succinct Spartans of Laconia.
    Last in was the hidden word. I hate it when that happens.
15. 28:42. A very enjoyable puzzle. The variously described uses of ‘to’ weren’t apparent to me. If the definition fits and 95% of the wordplay works – that’s good enough for me.

    The wordplay was very helpful on the historical and classical allusions. I knew of REMUS so assumed SUMER was right. I got the long anagram at 9d quickly which helped and then progressed fairly steadily from bottom to top finishing with LATECOMER. I read 11ac as A NTH ILL.

    I enjoyed the clues to BOOMERANG, SYNDICATE and INCUR.

16. 15 mins for me. I wasted some time trying to make 3D an angram of “millions gifted”, but apart from that it was fairly steady progress. I put in TACET from the wordplay without knowing the definition, and put in ANTHILL once I had the A without bothering to figure out the wordplay. My COD is 9D, great anagram. Also liked 1D, 3D (when I got it) and 23A.
17. Rather than A-ILL with the unexplained A, might it be AIL-L where L is left. AIL can be a noun meaning trouble, affliction, illness similarly to ill as a noun. This means left is shared with the definition. My problem is more that disasters implies ILLS or AILS so where is the missing S?
18. Perhaps
    “last in a series” = NTH
    “last in a series of disasters” = AIL/ILL, a singular event.
    Thus “last” is shared as well as “left”
    1. I don’t think this works any better than our other imperfect explanations. The noun meaning of AIL is only in Chambers, which is not a primary reference for the Times puzzle. Sharing/”double duty” seems to be permitted just occasionally, but I doubt it would be used twice in a clue.
       1. Another day without newspaper for me, I’m afraid, so I don’t have the clue verbatim, but from the above I gather the wordplay was “Last in a series of disasters”.

          An anonymous poster above seems to have got it exactly right. If we just read it as a sentence rather than try to break it into components, it seems fine to me to equate “the last in a series of disasters” as “a nth ill”. I’d even go as far as saying it’s a very clever bit of observation by the setter.

19. The disaster left by the building workers that is – although I may have done this on a Friday arvo?

    No question marks next to anything today. I didn’t understand 11a but “left by building workers” was pretty much a “SHOO-IN” – that was in todays (11/4/2019) puzzle.

    There are 6 “easies” left out:

    6a Fine political party that’s often fought (4)
    F LAB. Origin of the top 10 hit “I fought the flab and the flab won” by the aptly named Bobby Fuller Four.

    17a Epic drama involved emergency worker (9)
    PARAMEDIC. Anagram of the first two words.

    26a Style of art in which silver’s applied to new figure (7)
    DEC AG O N

    4d Hero’s academic works captivated university (7)
    THESE U S

    18d Disaster as class make up for time lost in discussion (7)
    DEBA (T)=> CL E

    22d In a series of races champion has no part to play (5)
    T ACE T

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