Times 24188 – if in doubt, think cricket!

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 10:38

Held up for a while at the end by 29, where was looking for ‘construction kit’ wordplay rather than a second def., and 5A which I’ve only just understood after much fruitless research about Thomas Hobbes and even Calvin and Hobbes.

Across
1 D(OLD=familiar)RUMS
5 HOBBES = “Hobbs” – Jack Hobbs, England test opener of the early 20th century, esp. in partnership with Herbert Sutcliffe. A long time ago, but he is one of the greats – “the only English cricketer and the only opening batsman to be selected as one of the five Wisden Cricketers of the (20th) Century” (Wikipedia)
9 GAB = rev. of (old) bag
10 CORKSCREWED – just a cryptic def., I think, with “twister” intended to mean “deceiver” in the surface meaning.
12 ILL-NATURED = (a duller nit)*
15 HAG(G.I.)S – “doughboy” for a US infantryman apparently goes all the way back to WWI.
16 NOSE=”knows”,GAY=pink. {“makes out” = knows} seemed a bit weak but the first words for know in COED are “be aware of”, which I guess is close enough to “make out” = discern.
18 MO(LIE)RE – more=again seemed iffy but is backed up by a COED def for more. Molière was a French dramatist – I think his Tartuffe still comes up in the grid, and we might get references to his Misanthrope or Malade Imaginaire
20 TREAT,Y – charade &lit.
23 R(O)AN
24 CARRYING ON – 2 defs
26 PASS THE BUCK – seems to just be a CD punning on plough = to fail an exam (dated Brit. colloq.) and dandy = buck. Not entirely sure where the “Oxford” fits in – “plough” is not Oxford jargon like “mods”
27 TUT(u)
28 RE,(k)NOWN
29 THE DERBY – def and cryptic def. – if a derby is a match between teams from the same town or nearby towns (Brit colloq., usu. football), then “the derby” transcends other such encounters
 
Down
1 DOGGIE = pet. DO=party,I in egg rev.
2 LOB,ELIA=essayist – old xwd favourite, nom de plume for Charles Lamb
3 RECTANGLES = (gents, Clare)*
4 MARQUIS DE SADE = (sad mad esquire)*. Not much of a def. here – surely there must be some cheeky possibilities. If you’re going to have him in the grid, you may as well get your money’s worth!
6 OKRA – hidden word. Same stuff as “ladies fingers” and bhindi.
7 BOW(L)ING
8 SIDE,WAYS=”weighs” – {side = area region} is another “seems slightly vague but turns out to be OK” indication (side = “a part or region near the edge and away form the middle” – COED). When puzzled about 5A, I did wonder whether there was another ??D?WAYS word to fit. [Edited as I seem responsible for the confusion identified by Lennyco]
11 SEEING THROUGH = (thug he ignores)*
14 A STE(RISK)ED – charger = horse
17 IMP-ROPER
19 LIA(r),IS,ON=possible
21 TIG(H,T)ER
22 S(NOT=ton rev.)TY – “ton=(people of) fashion” is an old xwd standby – check your dictionary under “ton” if it’s new to you. As a def for snotty, watch out for “midshipman”, to go with jolly = a Royal Marine
25 S TO W = “veering through 90 degrees”

46 comments on “Times 24188 – if in doubt, think cricket!”

  1. Romped through this in less than ten minutes, just after midnight last night.. quite straightforward
    1. So sad to rush your pleasures – I don’t deliberately try to solve fast, just enjoy the process though sometimes it does not last long enough! Was brought up to believe any (rare) under-10 puzzle was too easy in the first place.
  2. It may concern Peter that I agree with everything he has said in his excellent blog. About 25 minutes to solve.

    All my sort of half queries are mentioned. I don’t really understand CORKSCREWED but it couldn’t be anything else, “Oxford” looks like padding at 26A and where is the real definition of MARQUIS DE SADE?

    Age can be an advantage. My first cricket bat was “a Hobbs” and I used to oil it reverently. Is just “opener” as a definition really fair, I wonder?

    1. I took this as a “sad, mad” person who had a rank higher than an esquire. Sad, for his sexual obsession, and mad because he was incarcerated in lunatic asylums for many years.

      Harry Shipley

      1. Interesting idea Harry. If you’re right it sort of fits the general slightly indisciplined approach of this setter.
        1. I think you’re probably right, Harry. As Peter says in the blog, there isn’t much of a definition in the clue otherwise – and the M. de S. was certainly sad, mad (and dangerous to know, biblically). In which case, the clue is another example of a ‘partial &lit.’

          Tom B.

  3. Somewhere around fifteen minutes for me – it took quite some time to get going, but once my brain switched on it wasn’t all that hard. I’m enough of a cricket fan to outweigh the fact that Hobbs predates me by some eighty years.

    Tom’s right in that a corkscrew is pulled up in a straight line; the way I looked at it is that the corkscrew itself is a twisted shape, whether you look at it top-to-bottom or vice versa. It didn’t strike me as all that good a clue. I haven’t come across “doughboy” before but it was an easy win from crossing letters.

    I make that six of the last seven puzzles that I’ve completed inside fifteen minutes; to prevent me from getting too arrogant, the archive puzzle I printed out last night defeated me before I’d even got half way. *sigh!*

  4. 30 mins for me with DOGGIE & LOBELIA last in, thanks to carelessly putting BAG at 9 (No quibbles there; it’s obviously clued the other way round.) Pleased to see I’m not alone in not fully appreciating CORKSCREWED. The MARQUIS is a great anagram and the only clue which caused a wry grin, so I’ll give it COD, wasted opportunity or not.

    Pleased to see Haggis Nosegay, former lead singer of the Doldrums, and anti-hero of all goths over the age of 45, get a mention. Last heard on Singers of Renown on the ABC, with his death metal version of the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor.

  5. 28 mins here. I think everything’s been said. HOBBES was last in. At one stage when I only had the B I was wondering if there was a philosopher called GAMBIT that I’d never heard of.

    I quite liked the homonym indicators in 5 and 16 ( they were both new to me at least) but I think 13, 17 and 27 were all old chestnuts.

  6. 15 minutes for me this morning. I got off to a slow start, with only one of the acrosses going in on the first look through. Raced through it once I had a few of the downs in though, then got stuck in the top right. I wasn’t entirely convinced by SIDEWAYS, thought HOBBES might be the philosopher but took a while to see why (even though I am a big cricket fan), and the self-kickingly last to go in was OKRA. Duh!
    1. Average-ish 25 mins or so, mainly straightforward, although Hobbes was last in without understanding the wordplay. I’ve vaguely heard of the cricketer but as a Scot my mind doesn’t turn to cricket without a lot of prompting. bc
  7. 13 mins, last in were HOBBES and SIDEWAYS. 1A would be my COD, just ahead of 13A. I find 10A a bit vague – isn’t the point of a corkscrew that it’s twisted down but pulled straight up/out?

    Tom B.

  8. About 30 minutes except the top RH where I was held up for a while and resigned myself to not getting HOBBES. It was that or FORBES or something else I didn’t really know. I might have known “opener” would be a cricket reference having already been caught out (geddit!) at 7 where I had decided on BLOWING before solving CORKSCREW. Some uncertainty over SIDEWAYS at 8 didn’t help matters. Very short of time for comment today otherwise I might expand on my quibbles about this puzzle, so you have been spared!
  9. Another day another doggie. After yesterday’s discussion on D by E, I was surprised that it was not defined as Rottweiler.

    Otherwise a fast (for me) 22 minutes. A very fair set of clues, with Peter comprehensively covering all of the minor quibbles. I suppose the fact that it was very fair also made it fairly boring.

    I think the “in stew” part of “pods in stew” for okra is a bit superfluous. Perhaps it is padding to improve the surface gloss. Maybe the setter had in mind that okra is another name for the stew better known as gumbo. This was immortalised in Hank Williams’s song Jambalaya, a rich source of unusual words for crossword setters.

    1. I doubt that the setter made the mistake I nearly made – thinking that gumbo is okra itself. According to Wikipeda’s okra article, okra is “widely used in a thick stew” in various Eastern Med countries, as well as being included in gumbo. So although the prime motivation is undoubtedly “surface gloss”, I think it’s accurate enough to be acceptable.
  10. All you need to know is HOBBES’s LEVIATHAN. LEVIATHAN sometimes gets a mention in crosswords….
  11. 10:23, with the last two minutes spent on the north-east corner.

    It would have helped if SIDE (8dn) had been clued more precisely.  “Opener” for HOBBS (5ac), who retired 75 years ago, isn’t really cricket.  I didn’t like the clue for CORKSCREWED any more than others did, but I think the point is that a corkscrew appears to go up or down depending on which way you turn it.  Like linxit, I had to kick myself over OKRA.

    Not much was new to me this time – only “doughboy” for GI (15ac) and DERBY (29ac) as a general term for a local match.

    I think PASS (26ac) was clued with a definition by example: “Don’t plough Oxford [for example]”.  I can’t accept Peter’s rationale for cluing KNOWS with “makes out” (16ac); could this be knowledge in the biblical sense?  And it’s lame to clue TREATY using “deal” for TREAT (20ac), given the obvious relationship between the two.

    Clues of the Day: 1ac (DOLDRUMS) and 25dn (STOW).  I also liked the three clues identified by kurihan as old chestnuts: 13ac (VIEW), 27ac (TUT), 17dn (IMPROPER).

    1. To “plough Oxford” for “fail Oxford exams” seems an unlikely expression – it would surely be “plough at/in Oxford”, so I don’t think that’s what’s meant.
      I also think that if the main sense of a word (“pass” in this case) is there, adding something like “at Oxford” to “Don’t plough” is a far more forgiveable form of D by E than “Oxford => UNIVERSITY”, even for those who won’t buy the latter.

      “Know in the biblical sense”: seems no better – one may have “known her (or him) in the biblical sense”, but one doesn’t “make her/him out”, so it would plough the old subsitution test.

      TREAT/TREATY: rock solid point – I’ve been moaning about this kind of stuff when moonlighting on Big Dave’s Telegraph blog, so I should have picked it up here.

      Good clue = old chestnut: “if you’re going to steal, steal class” – I’m sure someone famous said that, though Google doesn’t confirm it.

      Edited at 2009-04-01 12:15 pm (UTC)

  13. I found this very easy, at 20 minutes, with only a few I didn’t understand the wordplay on (5, 18, 26, 25), though luckily the checking letters / definitions were enough to help me through.

    5 seemed to me to be overly obscure – a philosopher we might not have heard of, combined with a cricketer we almost certainly haven’t – if it hadn’t been for Calvin and Hobbes, I would’ve been completely stuck!

    COD – I’ve a soft spot for 4d.

    1. Things have calmed down at work now so I’ll allow myself one little gripe. I’d heard of Hobbs vaguely but we were required think of him by knowing his customary batting position! One step too far in the field of arcane knowledge for me.
  14. Despite several clues that I didn’t fully understand (notably 5, 15 -‘doughboy’ – and 29) I finished this in the unusually quick time (for me) of 15 minutes. Getting CORKSCREWED from the C and first R helped to get all the crossing answers fairly quickly.
    I don’t really see a problem with the clue as a cryptic definition. To ‘corkscrew’ is to move in a spiral fashion (in any direction).
  15. Several people have mentioned “area” in the clue for 8 down. In the printed version, the clue is: “Region has influence, it’s said, that’s indirect (8). Is the online version different? Of course, substituting Region for Area does not make it any better as a clue but might suggest that the crossword editor was not happy with it.
    1. It’s “Region” in both. I’m sure the xwd ed doesn’t release the puzzle to either the paper or the website until he’s finished editing it.
  16. 17:20. I dunno, this all seemed a bit… well… you know… loose.

    Corkscrew, pass and side were particularly unsatisfactory as has been said. Elia and ton were new to me and I fell foul of 5a plumping for Forbes as a likely contender with “for” satisfying the “as” bit and bes being… well, yes. Hum.

    Q-2, E-4, D-5, COD improper. After Monday’s a-ha punk side project it was surprising to see another today – the bass player out of Sad Cafe having achieved a distinct lack of commercial success with The Snotty Doldrums.

  17. I solved this in naughty breaks during rehearsal last night and managed to scrape through in three quick sessions. I’m on the side of most of the commenters, but for some reason HOBBES came quickly (thinking of the philosopher first).
  18. I got Hobbes straight from the philosopher and didn’t get the cricket reference at all. I marked it to come back and rethink about but I never did.

    Presumably none of you claiming never to have heard of Hobbes have either listened to Monty Python Australian philosophers (where he crops up in a list of philosophers who, after Hobbes, turn out to be cricketers instead) nor Slumdog Millionaire where he is the answer to one of the questions.

  19. I went through this in 15 minutes, so on the easier side for me. I got HOBBES, PASS THE BUCK, SNOTTY and STOW from definition alone, not seeing the wordplay til reading Peter’s explanations here. The wordplay for the first three of these I would never have known, so I’m happy the definitions were clear. STOW is very clever, should have seen the wordplay myself. I agree with many of the quibbles noted, but the one I had the most trouble swallowing is ‘deceiver is possible’ = ‘liar is on’, which I thought quite weak. I waited to get all the checking letters before entering the answer. Regards all.
    1. “on” for possible is commonplace in many sports – snooker springs to my mind first, where a shot is on if it’s physically possible to make said shot.
  20. Jack Hobbs scored more first-class runs – 61,237 – and centuries – 197 – than any other cricketer. These figures are the subject of dispute among cricket statisticians, but are those printed in Wisden. (Or they used to be, anyway).

    I don’t think that Thomas Hobbes scored any centuries, although I believe he was fairly close to reaching the age of 100.

    Steve W

  22. Not too hard, 27 mins. Favourite clue: IMPROPER. Got HOBBES right as the philosopher but did not understand the rest of the clue till I came here.
  23. Relating to a discussion yesterday, something I meant to ask at the time but forgot: why is it felt by most of the people who refer to a clue that we are somehow blessed with a razor-sharp memory and are quite capable, when seeing a reference to ’17’, of knowing that it is in fact 17dn and not 17ac? I am not so blessed, and often in such circumstances have to waste time looking at both sets of clues before finding the right one.

    Today: 5ac’s reference to Jack Hobbs seems to me perfectly fair: the definition is ‘Philosopher’ and the rest relies on knowledge that really is I should have thought pretty mainstream: Jack Hobbs was one of the all-time greats and it is fairly well-known that he was an opener. 16ac is I’m sure a near-the-knuckle biblical reference: ‘knows gay’ comes from ‘makes out pink’. We refer to ‘the East Side’ when we are referring to a region of New York, so in 8dn ‘side’ = ‘region’ seems OK to me.

    1. I doubt anyone types eg.’17’ on the assumption that you can figure out for yourself whether it’s across or down; more likely they have forgotten that both are present. I always find it easier to type the answer out instead of looking back to remember to which clue it WAS the answer.

      I don’t have a problem with “make out” for “know” in a knowledge sense; if you can make out the answer to a question or riddle, then you know what it is.

    2. Of course everything seems easy if one happens to get the reference and know the answer.

      As someone with no more than a passing interest in cricket, why I should be expected to know the batting position of a player who retired more than a decade before I was even born (and that itself was over 60 years ago)is beyond me. But at least I recognised his name when I saw it. I’ve never heard of the one with the E.

      But I would not go so far as to say the clue was unfair, just a little unkind.

  24. 23 min. Don’t know where the time went. COD: Toss up between Moliere and the Imp Roper.
  25. I managed most of this before finishing off with a solver, which is quite good going for me. That’s not to say I fully understood all the clues, but I’m encouraged to see that many of my points of confusion are widely shared!
  26. For some reason I thought only one homophone was allowed per Times crossword – obviously not, given “in conversation” at 5a and “In the auditorium” at 16a. Having said that, “In the auditorium” doesn’t work for me.
    R. Saunders
    1. The only Times xwd limits I know about are: no more than one pure (i.e. not reversed) hidden word, and a max for the number of full anagrams. From memory I believe this was stated as five in the submitted puzzle, allowing a limit of six in the published puzzle when the editor doesn’t like a clue and wants to make a quick replacement. I’d be surprised to find more than one “first letters of words” clue in the same puzzle, but I’ve not heard about an explicit rule.
  27. This was the first instance ever – that I have noticed – where my Penultimate and Last (POI and LOI) entry have been crossers of my First and Second (FOI and SOI) entries. In this case F was OKRA at 6d and S was 13a Struggle with wife’s way of thinking (4) = VIE W – today’s solitary blog omission. My last two were HOBBES at 5a and SIDEWAYS at 8d. I missed the “sounds like” at 5a – I knew Jack Hobbs was a very good England opener but I did not know the author of Leviathan. Thanks to the University of TftT I do now. Region = Side at 8d totally beat me even though the answer had to be SIDEWAYS – or SIDE WEIGHS. Thanks for the education PB and the TftT crew.

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