Times 24187 – A Low Blow?

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Twenty minutes, with the longer answers giving most trouble for some reason. Q0-E6-D6

Across
1 SAGA – Francoise Sagan without the ‘n’.
9 ROTTWEILER – ROTTER around Kurt WEIL.
10 ODER – gOoDyEaRs.
11 UTMOST – U(pse)T + M.O.S + T(reated); second day in a row for the Medical Officer.
14 ALOE – ALONE without workma(N).
15 CARTOONIST – CART + 0 + ON + IT round S(outh) refers to David Low. Now, you remember that discussion of Definition by Example we had yesterday…
17 MARSHALSEA – =”Ma shall see”; now-vanished London prison, most famously the setting for Little Dorrit, Dickens’ father having been sent there for failure to repay his debts.
21 BONDMAID – not knowing the word, I began by looking for a proper name, but it’s a general reference (with a nice surface).
24 GOTH – GOT H(usband) refers to this youth subculture, m’lud.
26 SLEEPYHEAD – (PEEL’S)rev + Y (algebraic unknown) + HEAD.
27 LEEK – because it’s “KEEL over” (this would work even better if it was a down clue, I suppose, but there’s no such expression as “keel round”, and you can’t have everything.
 
Down
2 AMONTILLADO – A MON(day) TILL A DO gives the sherry.
4 SCEPTIC – STIC(k) around CEP. Mmmm…porcini.
5 HALL OF RESIDENCE – at first I was looking for parts of speech, before spotting that a simple removal of the comma revealed that it was students we were after.
6 OTRANTO – O(ld) T(estament) RAN TO; I guess you either know or don’t know that the Old Testament contains 39 books.
7 AUDIO – CLAUDIO minus CL(an) = one definition of sound. The Lord in question features in Much Ado About Nothing.
16 NOCTURNAL – TURN inside NO CAL(ifornia).
18 ANATOMY – A TOM inside A N(ew) Y(ork).
19 ALARMED – double def., though as a little quibblette, is it the handle which is alarmed? After all, the Health & Safety signs always say “This door is alarmed” (allowing you to say “How do you think I feel?” to it), not “This door handle is alarmed”…
21 BOGUS – (GO in SUB) reversed.
23 NITRE – NIT on R(oyal) E(ngineers) – nits being the eggs of lice. My head’s itching psychosomatically now.

50 comments on “Times 24187 – A Low Blow?”

  1. 31 min. Was sailing through, but the wind dropped off. Had to go to Onelook for Marshalsea, though I think it may have appeared before. Bit of a grin for keel over. Liked 15 ac and 16 dn. Did NOT like 19 dn. My old granddad’s cup of tea perhaps: weak and sloppy.
  2. 25 mins today.

    15 was last in through wordplay – I’m sure I should have heard of David Low (but I haven’t) and don’t like this D by E. I am sure there will be much comment.

    At 6 I had heard of “The Castle of Otranto”, so it wasn’t hard to guess that the 39 books were the OT.

    I was held up by 2 wrong turns – “toss” at 20 (as in tossing a coin), and “Beth” at 24 (“black perhaps” being a possible bet at roulette). I wasn’t convinced by either though.

    As a general comment – and to give Jimbo’s hobby-horse a bit of a canter – all the references in both yesterday’s puzzle and today’s were historical or literary. I would really like the balance to be redressed with some clues requiring an equivalent knowledge of science and science history. It happens only too rarely.

    1. Well said kurihan and let’s keep on saying it. The Times may have moved a bit from the 1930s but not enough by a long chalk. Some setter’s ignorance of science and over reliance upon arcane literature is something that should concern them.
      1. Here’s what a crossword full of obscure scientific references might look like (if it was written by a non-Ximenean amateur with no editorial constraints). Watch out for the indirect anagrams. Answers here when you tire of it.
        1. Definitely not what we are after, kororareka. Balance is all we seek. I don’t know if you saw the analysis that I did in 2008 of the topics that appear in Times clues. If not, science and technology comes in last well behind geography, literature, etc. (Note, 3 months into 2009 and still no mention of Darwin!)
        2. I saw that crossword in passing in the latest SAM but didn’t bother to look at it closely. It is truly awful, not necessarily because of its subject matter but because half the clues don’t work. Challenge for the day – can anyone explain 11ac and 24ac? (I can’t.)
          1. OK, I’m always up for a challenge. 24ac: “Perhaps fruit from tree” indicates an indirect anagram of LIME (what else could it be?); “in” is IN; “6-down” is an insect (as in six feet on the ground), so that is the ANT. Put it all together and you get Sylvester’s ELIMINANT, an entity involving determinants of matrices which tells you when two quadratic equations have a root in common; useful in gyroscopy, amongst other things apparently.

            As for 11ac, I gave up trying to see how that worked, but since face now has to be saved, I’ll have another look. (P.S. I quite liked the 6-down.)

          2. And some time later. 11ac: the “term for amplitude modulation in analysis” tells you to replace AM in EXAMINATION with TERM to get EXTERMINATION. This means the definition must be “Result of two colours juxtaposed with charm” (I’m presuming there is a definition here and this is not a second chunk of wordplay indicating another indirect anagram). My only thought is that the charm refers to the charm quark, which may have disastrous consequences if placed in the same neighbourhood as an anti-charm quark, both particles having different colours (obviously). Anybody from CERN listening?

            You’ll have to write a letter to the editor for the correct interpretation. It might divert them from their main topic of correspondence; the correct spelling of mediaeval.

            1. I couldn’t argue with any of that. You’ve obviously been putting in the hours today! The reference to “fruit from tree in 6-down” gave me “fig” – I think “6-down = ant” is pretty outrageous!

              Actually I thought 6dn was an awful clue – terrible surface.

              Gavin Brown by the way is VC of Sydney and prof of maths (well, well) which also explains 1ac, which is understandable but just doesn’t work as a cryptic clue.

              1. Agreed he shouldn’t give up his day job… wait a minute… he has! VC at Sydney no longer.
  3. 10:58 – the top half went in without too much trouble, but changed into low gear for my last 7 – 26, 18, 25, 14, 19, 17, 21. So only the Marshalsea caused me trouble from the GK division. I’m sure it’s been used before to fit ?A?S?A?S?A. Unblanced general knowledge? Well, the literature ranged from Shakespeare to Sagan, and there’s music (Weill) and geography (Oder, Otranto) in there too. There’s also a sniff of science at 22.

    I guess 3D is an old-fashioned kind of irregular &lit.

    1. If “nitre” (potassium nitrate) is a sniff of science then so is “salt” (sodium chloride), “rust” (iron oxide), and so on. I guess it depends what you mean by “sniff”
      1. It’s (nitre=gunpowder ingredient) that’s the sniff – I can just imagine a reverse version of Jimbo on the other side of the arts/science divide asking why he should be expected to know a historic name for an ingredient of gunpowder.
  4. This is the first puzzle for ages I have felt like throwing in the bin before completing it eventually with the aid of a solver. Too much specialist knowledge required that I didn’t have.
  5. About 22 mins. I don’t like D by E, and I think it’s unfair to use it where the D may be obscure (as Low was to me). 21A and 3D were straightforward to solve, but are less so to parse. I don’t think there’s a term for clues like 3D as yet, but there have been a few examples in the Times.

    Tom B.

  6. Almost twenty minutes for me, and I had an error at that – having never heard of David Low, I ended up with CARTOONISH (low = slapstick = Tom-and-Jerry type humour, by tenuous link), even though I couldn’t really make the wordplay work. I just couldn’t think of anything any better; as my father always says when plucking random words to try, a word that fits is a lot more likely to be right than a word that doesn’t fit.

    I wasn’t here for the great D-by-E war to which peter B referred, but I thought they were supposed to give some indication (“Low, say..” or “perhaps…” or something) – it never occurred to me that we might be looking for a type of which a chap called Low is a leading example. I couldn’t call this unfair, but (from my somewhat limited experience*) it’s what I’d expect to find in the tougher puzzles like Mephisto/Listener, rather than here.

    *I started taking the Times in 1999. It was well into 2001 before I so much as solved a single clue. It was well into 2000 before I could even understand any of the clues while looking at the answers the following day!

    1. I also have just remembered (I’ve slept since then) that I wasted a whole bunch of time looking for an anagram of “A Moor oddly” as some kind of ORNAMENTAL lamp – even though I already had a crossing N. I must’ve been more sleepy than I thought when I took this one to bed!
    2. The D by E debate is in a poll here, set up when we also had “clue of the week” polls here. Livejournal polls never close so you can still vote, or even add something to the comments if anyone can find anything new to say.
  7. Another in yesterday’s mould, where I had to rely on the wordplay to cover my lack of knowledge at e.g. 1, 2, 15, 17, 21ac & 23. Still, it was not without enjoyment. I liked 9, 13, 23, 24, 36 & 27 but COD goes to 11 for its 4 anagrinds in a row following 2 character selectors; an clue consisting entirely of subterfuge words.

    MARSHALSEA rang a bell for me (in that I knew the prison being referred to but couldn’t remember its name) and indeed it appeared on May 14 last year (#23913) – clued in partial homophone MARTIAL + SEA(l) with same crossing letters. Well recalled Peter!

    As for Low, I didn’t know him, but I would have seen many examples of his work; his Billy Hughes (former Oz PM and mate of Lloyd George whose role at Versailles was less than laudable) caricatures in particular. Like all good things to come out of NZ, it appears Australia lays claim to him.

  8. I must defend my compatriot, Sir David Low (15 ac). No ordinary definition by example, but the quintessential political cartoonist. Shakespeare was a DBE of a playwright?
    1. No doubt an excellent cartoonist, but maybe not the first on many people’s lips when you mention the word “cartoonist”. In crossword cluing terms, IMO, this particular DBE was exceptionally unfair, or perhaps more accurately unsatisfactory. I suspect the setter thought about a “perhaps” but realised it couldn’t be stuck in at the front of the clue but stuck doggedly to the idea.
      To me, it jars.
  9. I breezed through this is 10:44, one of the very rare occasions that I beat Pete. I found that lack of knowledge didn’t really slow me down at all. For example, I didn’t know that there was a young Lord Claudio in a Shakespeare play, but the wordplay meant it was likely. Similarly, although I’ve heard of Francoise Sagan, I couldn’t have named any of her books, but it seemed likely. The same with 15A, I saw the wordplay leading to CARTOONIST and just assumed there must be one called Low.

  10. The sort of puzzle I was brought up on, a nice 12-minute no-hassle job tho’ I seldom check times. But I am OLD, so the general knowledge bits were second nature today.
  11. 14:20.  Like Ross, I found the wind dropped off – I must have spent the last couple of minutes trying (with eventual success) to conjure up MARSHALSEA, which I hadn’t heard of.  And that was after staring at ..A.MED for a good while before getting ALARMED, too.  I was convinced that BON..A.D was going to be an &lit. (e.g. BONJEAND), and so was disappointed when BONDMAID turned out to be the only possibility.  I didn’t spot that LEEK was ‘keel over’, and thought the reference must be to its behaviour in a pan.

    Apart from MARSHALSEA and CARTOONIST (a Low blow indeed!), I found like linxit that lack of knowledge didn’t hold me up.  I didn’t know Françoise Sagan, even though she was born in Cajarc where I went on holiday last summer, but it was bound to be SAGA or EPIC.  Likewise (mutatis mutandis) for Kurt Weill, Claudio, and the fact that the Old Testament contains 39 books.

    Tom B: there is a term for clues like 3dn: ‘botched &lit.’.  (I think ‘irregular’ is too kind, Peter.)

    Clues of the day: SAGA, HALL OF RESIDENCE, RESUSCITATE.

    1. Mark, that was my reaction when I first came across one of these clues, in which the whole clue provides the definition but only part of it the wordplay. But there have been a few of them, which leads me to suppose that they’re approved by the editor as a new (to me, at least) type of clue. In which case, like them or not, I suppose we should come up with a convenient label.

      Tom B.

      1. Alright – without wishing to condone the practice, how about ‘partial &lit.’?
        1. As good a name as we’ll probably get, though I suspect that like “semi-&lit” I’d have to dig out a crib to remember exactly what it means. Added in pencil to p.69 of my copy of Manley.
          1. I’m not sure if this clue needs re-defining. For me, “bookshop signing” is quite a clever use of words for the def, a signing being a person who is booked to appear (think soccer, where a signing is a player signed to a team). Read in that way, the def stands up on its own pretty well (the question mark serves its purpose nicely), the clue becomes a straightforward anagrind + fodder + def and the apparent &Lit becomes a red herring.
            1. Can’t quite buy it – if an author signs in the football sense, they do so with a publisher rather than a bookshop.
              1. Insofar as it’s relevant, I will just add the for the monthly clue competition, “partial &lit” clues get marked down as not really acceptable by Times rules. It may be that a slightly-iffy clue will get by if the rest of the grid is okay; it may be that this one slipped the editor’s sight; or maybe the clue competition is just more stringent than everyday setting purposes.
                1. I believe the clue comp is more stringent – I’m pretty sure unindicated def. by example is always marked down. I can’t remember for sure, but I think the clue comp rules state at least some of the “local rules” that don’t always apply in Times puzzles.

                  The current editor seems happy to break the strict rules from time to time for the sake of good surface meanings.

  12. For me this was a breeze. Not a single brain-sprainer. And yet tomorrow, when everyone else says “It’s a piece of cake”, I’ll have struggled. It all depends on your own knowledge profile….. mine just happened to fit today’s puzzle….
  13. I finished this in 20 minutes before rushing off to the dentist. Started with a groan at 1A (more obscure literature) did 2D then got irritated by 3D (obvious but awful clue), 7D obvious answer and “claudio” sounds Waggledagger, and so it went on through “Low” to that well known sniff of science “nitre” better known as saltpetre. Not a puzzle to remember.
    1. 1950s succèss de scandale Bonjour Tristesse is a bit of a second-hand/charity bookshop classic, but according to Amazon UK, its most popular edition currently outsells the most popular edition of Nicholas Nickleby. But you can prove anything with statistics.
      1. I would have thought the late astronomer, author and broadcaster Carl Sagan was equally well-known, so we could have had ‘Long story astronomer left unfinished’.

        Tom B.

  14. Like a few others I sailed through most of this in 15 minutes, but the last seven were tricky. MARSHALSEA eventually dawned, as did the significance of ‘Low’ in 15 (where the question mark is at the wrong end of the clue). I entered BONDMAID with no confidence, so was gratified to find it was right. 6 and 12 both took a while. By the end the time had stretch to almost half an hour. 19 down was awful, I agree, and it’s quite hard to justify ‘for’ in the container indication of 4 down. 1 was an easy start for me, but I did wonder how many would remember Francoise Sagan.
  15. After complaining about this last week, I find we have our fourth dog in three weeks. Are they called setters because they are all dog-lovers?

    This was very difficult and finished with none of the satisfaction of, say, last Friday’s difficult puzzle.

    Being a bit of a lefty, I had no trouble with Low but I’m still with Ximines on this and think that the clue should have started with a perhaps.

    I did not like Alarmed and Bondmaid. Have I missed something or is Bondmaid just a feeble cryptic definition?

    Last in was Marshalsea, dredged from the depths of my memory because it occurred in a crossword last year.

    On a general point is there any etiquette forbidding referring to an answer directly rather than as 21A or 19? It is not mentioned in “about this blog”. Most people coyly refer to the clue by its number, quite often getting it wrong, which means you have to look back to the crossword to find what they are talking about. Since the answers are at the top of the page anyway, why not refer to them specifically?

    1. Etiquette?: No, I think people are just trying to save time typing – which does backfire when the no. is wrong.
      1. Thanks, Peter, that never occured to me as an explanation. Having a reasonable typing speed, I find it quicker to type a word than to go back to the crossword and decipher a number that I have usually written over. So I can continue to refer to answers directly without risk of offending anybody.
    2. A very good point. It’s tedious and time-consuming to convert clue numbers back into answers every time.

      Paul S.

  16. Found this very difficult – 50 minutes, with 16d / 20ac wrong. (To be fair, I guessed at both). 15ac also strikes me as being a tad dodgy – while the answer looked extremely likely, without a fair definition entering it was a complete guess. I blame that for my fumbling with the two mistakes above! 😉 My initial stab at OSIRIS for 23ac probably didn’t help much either.

    COD 21ac.

  17. I think the reference at 9 should be to Kurt Weill, not Weil, hence the homophone indicator. It’s one of those names that is misspelt so often that, if you Google Weil, it takes you straight to Weill.
  18. After a run of having/not having the paper to hand I felt a bit out of practice; very happy, then, to have come in at just under 10 minutes.

    There were some sticky moments. For SCHOOLMATE I wasted time looking for something far more involved, ANUBIS found me exploring too many alternatives, OTRANTO was a guess with wordplay unravelled afterwards, and I have no idea why ANATOMY took so long.

    Against the flow I’d highlight 3D AUTHORESS as a rather tasty piece of clue-writing. Its suggestion of an attempted semi-&lit is rather deceptive.

    The sole quibble is 15A CARTOONIST – def by example – although it didn’t hold me up.

    Q-1 E-7 D-6 COD 3D AUTHORESS

  19. Regards all. About 30 minutes, so to me the difficulty is just above average. That despite not knowing a lot of things here: Ms. Sagan, Claudio, Mr. Low, Marshalsea, Anubis, eyrie (which we usually spell as ‘aerie’). But the wordplay got me there in each case, eventually, so I find it all fair. I googled up Marshalsea and Low afterwards, just to make sure. Anax’s parsing of 3D would make that appear very clever, but I can’t comment since that sense of ‘signing’ isn’t commonly used over here; if ‘signing’ can refer to ‘the person signing’ in the UK, then it works nicely. See you tomorrow.
  20. Even those of us who are Americans and are old enough remember Low’s famous cartoon after the fall of France with Britain defiantly shaking her fist at the sky. The caption as I recal was “Very well then. Alone!”
    Didn’t Little Dorrit grow up in Marshalsea?
  21. Greatly encouraged by Heyesey “I started taking the Times in 1999. It was well into 2001 before I so much as solved a single clue. It was well into 2000 before I could even understand any of the clues while looking at the answers the following day!”
    I’ve never heard of that Francoise Sagan , Kurt Weil and David Low and Marshalsea and Bondmaid are new to me. I know the old hands will say the clues were very gettable from the wordplay but us novices need every crutch!
  22. Got a decent amount of the puzzle in immediately and then was permastuck. Read Sagan for French class, but no idea who David Low or Kurt Weill is, that porcini=cep, or what Amontillado is (can`t say I`ve touched a drop of it outside of cooking). As for Marshalsea, the only famous British prison I know of is The Tower of London 🙂

    I don`t think it was a difficult puzzle per se–just not geared towards my specific store of trivia.

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