Times 24229 the chicken returned and became a double-crosser!

38 comments on “Times 24229 the chicken returned and became a double-crosser!”

1. As per yesterday (very late evening, so no blog) hit the wall at 100 mph with fatal consequence. Yesterday it was House of Keys which no amount of cheating could decipher, and today it was TORII and SUCROSE but easy enough to guess. And no, I didn’t “ged” MIDDLEMEN but got the answer.
2. About 50 mins for me, after early rapid progress, with PERSEPOLIS last in, having gone through every polis I knew. PER SE catches me out every time. I was also slow on ERASMUS (another cliche) and getting SUCRE to work, even though it was my first thought on seeing South American money beside sugar. DIRIGISTE was the main hold-up, a new word for me, as was TORII (new, not a hold-up). That and somebody looking over my shoulder and saying I know what 1ac is and laughing. Anyway, I finally got the joke, having valiantly tried to put FLAP in there somewhere. COD PERSEPOLIS.
3. No time, but nothing too hard. TORII is easy for an ex-Japan resident! The left-hand side did hold me up a bit though, as it took too long to see the chicken joke and the Armenian traders.

   We used to have sumac tree outside out front door – filthy thing which I managed to break by swinging on it when I was about 7. The pairing with 1dn is nice.

   Overall I thought it was a good fun puzzle with some interesting words

4. After 30 minutes I was left only with _E_S_POLIS at 28 but I abandoned it until I had access to aids because I knew I didn’t know the word – I may have met it but had completely forgotten it – and couldn’t work out the first part of the wordplay. I didn’t know TORII either but the wordplay was clear enough for a guess at it.
5. Some difficult vocabulary here, particularly Torii, which was easy to deduce but I still didn’t believe it. I put in Erasmus and Sucrose without understanding them, thanks to Jimbo for the explanation. Last in was Alter – I think the wordplay “… dropping page on saint” for removing PS is somewhat clumsy. “… dropping the afterthought” may be better.

   I mainly know Sumac as the surname of Yma Sumac the Peruvian singer with the extraordinary vocal range. There was a rumour that she was an Incan princess. Another, more malicious rumour was that she was born in Brooklyn and had reversed her real name, Amy Camus. I wonder if the setter was aware of this in linking the clue with 1D.

6. 11:45, though it felt longer.  Last in were DIRIGISTE (17ac), MIDDLEMEN (14dn), and finally SUCROSE (18dn).  I was thrown by the use of “carries round” to mean “has on the outside”, which strikes me as dubious.

   Several things I didn’t know here: TORII (13ac), GENEVIEVE (15ac), DIRIGISTE (17ac), the once and future SUCRE (18dn), and SUMAC (22dn).

   Clue of the Day: 8dn (MACHINERY).

7. 15 mins, last in was SUCROSE. I hadn’t seen MATTINS spelt like that. COD 14A, ME-TOO. A joke my 6-year-old son told me recently: ‘Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.’

   Tom B.

8. 30 minutes for me, no real problems. The key is to understand and trust the cryptic, even if you have never heard of the word – in go ‘torii’ and ‘Genevieve’. Can’t understand the cryptic? Take the literal – in go ‘sucrose’ and ‘middleman’.

   That’s a great anagram for ‘editorial’ we’ve got here….I hope it is not an editorial comment.

   Solving the clue for ‘memento’ is very difficult if you believe that ‘English’ refers to the first ‘E’. That one took me quite a while.

   As for the jokey chickens, they were so obvious that they were among the last to go in., along with the rest of the NW corner. There’s nothing really hard up there, it just didn’t strike me like the right side did.

9. After completing my first yesterday I thought I was going to bag my second. But sadly not.

   Wrong answers for 7d and 28ac messed me up.

   15ac was a complete guess (but correct) at a film name. Actually I think this clue is a bit unfair considering the film is not exactly recent, nor as far as I am aware popularly known.

   26ac was a sort of guess in that I couldn’t work out where the second t in matins came from.

   Still learnt a few new words and facts and that is part of the fun

   W

   1. The film was very popular but is very UK-centric and probably now regarded as being as veteran as the cars that star in it, so I know what you mean.

      Mattins is an obscure alternate spelling of the more usual matins. It is in Chambers.

      1. This variant spelling is also given in Collins and the Concise Oxford.
10. 8:55 – The Camus/Sumac reversal is an old chestnut (ho ho), so guessed at it just from ‘Author’ plus a reversal in 1D and went straight to 22 to check. Didn’t know the gateway so waited to the end just in case an alternative came to mind. Didn’t see PER SE in 28 so wrote in the POLIS and waited for checking letters. Knew the word dirigiste but had never quite picked up the exact meaning which now seems obvious.

    The ending of Genevieve is here. Nostalgic stuff for anyone alive at the time or (in my case) a decade or so afterwards, doubly so if they lived close to the Brighton Road in their youth and saw the old cars go by each November. It just makes the BFI’s top 100 20th-century films list (No. 86). I’m sure you can catch the whole thing on TV some day.

11. I thought this was one of the hardest I’ve ever seen and was certainly my worst performance in living memory. After half an hour (my lunchtime limit) I’d completed all the right side but only had LASER and SUMAC in the left. Not seeing the chicken joke was a bit of a hindrance. I think Jimbo’s just showing off if he thinks there’s nothing difficult today!
    1. No, it’s not! I thought it was pretty hard too, particularly after yesterday. After starring at it for hours, I resorted to online help with only about half a dozen solved. At least I was then able to piece it together before coming here.

12. 42 minutes, so I struggled a bit, mostly on the LHS. I was left with question marks against quite a few, which were mostly cleared up by a swift visit here.

    I’m still unclear, though, what the ‘on’ is doing in 7d, apart from making the surface reading better, and messing up the cryptic reading?

    COD 1ac, with 1d neck and neck.

    1. 7d & “on”. Two choices: The one that makes most sense to me is “on = attached to” as in “puppet on a string”. But if you’re happy to think of the PSALTER as being written downwards (being part of the wordplay to a down clue), then on = “on top of” works too. I’m never quite convinced that the downness of down clues needs to be carried as far as some setters take it – when we get something like “written up in” for a down reverse hidden, I think it’s going too far – the letters involved are not “written up” at all – they’re right there in black and white, written leftwards. Thinking of PSALTER as written downwards is about as far as this idea can be taken for me.
       1. I suppose it does sort of work (he says very grudgingly…)

          Cheers!

       2. I prefer to read it in the second way you mention (P on [top of] S in PSALTER written downwards).  Definitely agree about hidden words in down clues, though.
13. 39 mins with 1 mistake. I read upset in 1dn as indicating an anagram rather than a reversal and couldn’t decide between CAMUS and CUMAS. I went for the latter since it sounded more plausible (probably because of Alexandre Dumas).

    A few new words for me – CAMUS, SUMAC & TORII. Also mattins with 2 ts. I knew the word DIRIGISTE but hadn’t a clue what it meant. I was familiar with Persepolis, probably from too many hours spent playing Sid Meier’s Civilization! I didn’t understand 14dn until I came here.

    SUCROSE/COACHLOAD were the last ones in. No clues particularly stood out, but 1ac made me chuckle, and went straight in, so I give that COD.

    1. Snap!  I forgot to say that PERSEPOLIS was very familiar from Civ.  It’s a remarkably educational game.
    2. Good to see there are other Civ fans using this blog!
14. 25:13, but a long pause after 15 minutes with a number of holes in the right hand side. Having METROPOLIS in 28a for a while didn’t help. Looking for the wrong kind of doctor (GP, Dr, MO etc) in 17a didn’t help either. Eventually ERASMUS and ALTER cracked it and I got going again.

    I thought WARM was rather a weak word for ‘enthusiastic’ but I note that Chambers has that definition. I felt that 26a had to be MATTING but had never come across the double ‘TT’ usage for the Church service before.

    Like yesterday this was a puzzle where I got a lot more of the Downs on first run through than I did the Acrosses. Only got LASER on the first scan of the Acrosses.

    No clue really stood out for me, although I had a wry smile at DISCERN, having come across a few odd scientists in my time.

15. I took rather a long time (about 50 minutes) and was defeated in the end by 28 until I consulted a reference. I also entered METROPOLIS to begin with, which delayed getting ERASMUS. Delays elsewhere were caused by reluctance on my part to enter answers that I didn’t know (e.g. TORII) or understand from the wordplay (SUCROSE).

    I did “ged” MIDDLEMEN, but I didn’t much care for it. Armenia has MEN in the middle, but it doesn’t have MIDDLE MEN.
    The use of ‘doctor’ for RIG was clever, and made that clue hard to solve – my mind was locked on the usual MB, MO, or DR.

16. 14:11 .. all the more esoteric vocab was fairly fresh in my mind for various reasons, otherwise I’m sure I would have struggled. COD 28a PERSEPOLIS is really neat.
17. 25 minutes so marginally harder than average in my book. Persepolis and sucrose last in, the latter because I was looking to put the sailor outside the currency and took too long to explore other options.

18. I’m one of those who found this very difficult, needing all of an hour. Like others, the right side went in with less trouble, (incl TORII and GENEVIEVE from wordplay alone)and I struggled with the left. This was due to the long 9D being so easy. One of my real problems was not getting the jokey chicken reference until nearly the very end, wasting much time trying to anagramize ‘chickens do’ into what checking letters I had. My last entries were SUCROSE/COACHLOAD. COD: NECK, clever. Regards to all.
19. Got this slowly and steadily. Hesitated with TORII as it sounds plural. Is it toree-ee, or tory-eye?

    Having looked at this blog earlier for yesterday’s comments I accidentally read today’s headline which helped with 1ac!

    The existence of DEGAS and CAMUS prompts me to ask if one pronounces the final S for either of them. I think one does for the first but not the second.

    According to my (Greek) wife, it was ERASMUS who got us lot in the West pronouncing ancient Greek wrongly (whereas in Greece they pronounce it more like modern Greek). I am not convinced that they are right!

    1. Degas & Camus: both S’s are silent. The old-style Collins which included entries for famous people also told you how to pronounce them. My guess is that any final S after a vowel in a French surname is silent – that should be enough of a challenge for someone to prove me wrong …
       1. Robert Pires of Arsenal and France fame I am sure pronounces the S….
       2. Paul Dukas
       3. I don’t have any examples to prove you wrong, Peter, but I should imagine that there are some surnames where a final S after a vowel is pronounced. After all, in ‘tennis’, ‘autobus’ and ‘plus’ (as in ‘en plus’) the final S is pronounced.
       4. Alexandre Dumas comes to mind.
       5. I’ll buy Pires, though with a note that the surname is arguably Portuguese rather than French. But Collins has silent S for Dukas and Dumas.
          1. You’re right about Collins, Peter, but Collins is probably wrong. Since we are not talking Times Crossword here, you cannot claim it as the ultimate authority. This is what the BBC pronunciation unit has to say on the subject: “The other name that causes much frustration among our Radio 3 listeners, Dukas, is in fact pronounced due-KASS, and not due-KAA. This pronunciation was passed on to the pronunciation unit in 1955 by a friend of the Dukas family, who assured us that this was the composer’s own pronunciation.”

             1. I found about three other reference books all giving the -KAA version, but then found this site which shows that a couple of people the other side of the channel know about the -KASS version.
20. did not finish due to shortage of time. chine meaning ridge and torii were new to me.
21. 25 min here, which is a relief after not finding any answers on first reading until hitting on 21 ac, LASER.
    Last in 28 ac PERSEPOLIS, and went online after staring at ?E?S?POLIS for ages. I MUST have come across this before, but a complete absence of bell ringing. TORII new, but comprehensively clued. COD: 7 dn ALTER – great surface.
22. I got CHINE from “chine of beef” < spine, hence ridge (of the back). Incidentally, several of the Chines in Dorset refer to the other meaning (a fissure or ravine: quite the reverse of a ridge).

    I got SUCROSE from the chemical term despite not knowing the S American currency. Funnily enough, there’s an anagram of Crusoe + S in there, & old Robinson did start off as a sailor.

    Not being an “ex-Japan resident” I had to guess TORII; but as an ex-Iran resident I didn’t find PERSEPOLIS too hard: nevertheless it’s my COD.

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