Times 24,249

32 comments on “Times 24,249”

1. A cracking good crossword. I stalled twice and had to go for online help, but finally finished in 47 min. My first restart answer was 6d TRIGONOMETRIC. I had clambered all over this without the answer gelling. I thought yep, a METRIC = a “term that’s constant”, now all I need is an anagram of “to origin”. It just wouldn’t come. The next was 3 ac. Basset horn popped out of nowhere while gazing at ?????t ?o?n, but I thought I might be imagining things or confusing with basset hound, since I couldn’t grasp the word play. On seeing BASSET HORN in print after doing a pattern match, it suddenly clicked.

   COD for me 7 dn OCELOT. It reads beautifully: Images of a cat queuing up for a chicken hunting licence. I wonder if dear old SPIKE MILLIGAN will make it across the ditch?

2. About 45 minutes this morning after a late start owing to a wonderful bottle of Barking Owl Cab-Sav-Merlot last night. Great to see Spike getting a guernsey — about time! And a most fitting clue.
   Agree with Jack’s quibble about “tortoiseshell”, but it’s probably OK as there’s unlikely to be anything else that it could refer to. Wondering, too, whether “it’s sharp” (at 3ac) is fair for “thorn”. Also, it’s a least a bit odd (at 14ac) that you have to put “paces” inside “station” to get “space station”. My COD is 18, “fireside chat”. Really liked the “reside” + “cha” (cuppa?) inside “fit”.
3. Another struggle for me. I wondered after five minutes whether I would ever get started but eventually I spotted STUD FARM at 17 and I was off. Progress after that was very slow but steady and I never felt completely stuck until after 55 minutes I had only 10, 20 and 26 left to solve. These took me another 15 minutes. As with yesterday’s puzzle I solved more clues from their definition than from wordplay. I think we needed “perhaps” after “tortoiseshell” in 2dn.
4. I daresay many will have found this to be not much of a challenge (for me the usual 90 minutes with a painfully slow start) but for some reason I found this as aesthetically pleasing as any puzzle so far encountered. There was nothing bitty about it, it all seemed to flow so beautifully. And I didn’t have to confirm a single answer. My respects to the setter for a quite brilliant puzzle.
   (I suspect a wordcount of the clues would reveal this to be below average, no doubt PB will know, and perhaps this is a measure of quality?)
   1. I don’t know an average word count. I like clues to be short if poss, but don’t worry about it as much as some – I know of one setter for another paper who restricts himself rigidly to a maxumum of 8 words.
      1. …and, of course, whatever the current average might be it changes slightly every time a puzzle is published.

         It’s also worth bearing in mind that some setters go all out to write short clues, while others relish the construction of mini-sagas. And that’s great – there are camps of solvers who enjoy short clues and dislike long ones, and vice versa.

         Just for the sake of doing the exercise I exported the clues from five puzzles I’ve set recently and the word count was a shade over 6 for each clue. Totally unscientific but, I imagine, probably not too far off the mark.

         Pete – that’ll be Roger then? It was certainly his advice to me in my Birmingham Post days.

         1. The word count was an AVERAGE of 6, I should point out.
         2. Not Roger no, though just possibly someone else who got advice from him.
         3. The statistician puts his hat on (has to hold it up as it keeps falling over his eyes) and says: By the law of large numbers (weak or strong), the average word count probably (in the technical sense of the word) doesn’t budge in anything before the 5th decimal place from day to day, presuming we’re talking about the average for puzzles so far this century, say (although this year wouldn’t be much different). Averages are vey difficult things to shift, which is why slight changes in them is evidence of substantial (notice I didn’t say significant – the statistician’s little joke – pauses for applause – not a sausage) change in the daily figures.
5. well i was delighted to finish this in under an hour. quite a challenge i think. agree with previous contributors who see aesthetic pleasure in a number of clues. thought it tough but fair and as an Eager solver i can aver to that fact..COD for me was a close call between Vinegar and Firseide chat with scarlatti and ocelot a short neck behind.
   Congrats to the setter…delightful!
6. 13:35, with 1A/D the last two entered – it’s continuing to be a pretty tough week. Lots of ingenious clues and good surfaces. Glad to see that COED now has “email” so we no longer have to have the giveaway (1-4) for this word.
7. Another slow starter and finisher; about 55mins. Completed RHS and then couldn’t get any purchase on the left. Last in DART. I too liked OCELOT and SPIKE, TREASURER and BEAVER but COD for SWEAR WORD for its “something offensive”. As for tortoiseshell, I thought 2d must be CARAPACCIO except he didn’t fit in the space provided and his existence is alleged at best.
8. Glorious mix of vocab and gk. Tortoiseshell could be a butterfly though not here clearly. Inside the half hour and enjoyed it a lot. Liked ocelot best.
9. 13:05, with RAINCOAT (2dn) and DART (1ac) the last in.  I didn’t know BASSET HORN (3ad), and wasn’t helped by the sloppy indication of THORN by “it’s sharp”.  COCHINEAL (12ac) is making itself known to me thanks to crosswords, but still feels unfamiliar; likewise CHINE.  Otherwise, the difficulty lay entirely in the clues.

   I found this a nice challenging puzzle, marred by the “definition” by example in 2dn (“tortoiseshell” for CAT).  Instead of banging on about that, though, I’d like to question the not uncommon use of “describing” as a container indication.  While I can think of an absurd two-step justification – “describe = write about = write around” – I suspect the underlying thought is meant to be geometrical.  But to “describe” a geometrical figure is to trace it out: concretely, this means drawing it (e.g. with a compass); abstractly, an object may be said to “describe” a certain figure under a given transformation (e.g. a point rotated about another point describes a circle).  Neither of these corresponds to the cruciverbal use, which may have stemmed from a very loose thought about outlines.  Whatever its history, it now enjoys a status like that of “without“: utterly bewildering to novices, the luckiest of whom are fobbed off with a pseudo-explanation and soon forget that it was ever a problem, and the unluckiest of whom end up thinking that crosswords are (to borrow a phrase from my mother) “for people with twisted minds”.  I therefore move to drop it.

   Niggles: 6ac (TRIGONOMETRIC) has a dubious definition and an implausible surface reading, and in 8dn “psychopath” is a bit strong for NUTTER.

   Clues of the Day: the cheeky 24ac (VINEGAR), the surreal 7dn (OCELOT), and the topical 15dn (TREASURER).

10. …after an hour of struggling before getting the last two: ‘dart’ and ‘raincoat’. I had wasted a lot of time trying to put the ‘r’ next to the wrong ‘a’.

    Once again, one wrong – ‘item’ instead of ‘atom’. I didn’t think it was right, but didn’t go back.

    My quibble is with ‘Scarlatti’. Using ‘scorer’ implies orchestral music, while Scarlatti was mainly a keyboard composer.

    My COD: ‘fireside chat’. I had thought of ‘fit’ as an enclosing word, and still couldn’t get it.

    1. There was more than one Scarlatti and whilst it’s true Domenico wrote a lot of keyboard music he also wrote operas as did his father, Alessandro.
11. 15:31 .. Very enjoyable puzzle with a high smile count. Last in, and the main delays, were the two clues on the bottom line – the small but deadly wrestler Rip ‘Snorter’ Atom.

    A random Milliganism: “I thought I’d begin by reading a sonnet by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.”

12. 20 minutes, and I echo the above comments, I thought this was very good!

    Oli

13. Toughish, but at least I finished without errors, unlike yesterday. The odd question mark, answered above; I didn’t know ‘chine’ was a ridge, for instance. My main hold-up was entering HOOLIGAN for the second word of 10 from _ _ _ L _ G _ N in the grid. SCARLATTI led to FIRESIDE, then the discovery of my error. A rather slow 45 minutes in all. A nice bunch of clues on the whole, but I think ‘perhaps’ is a weak anagram indicator (26) and agree with Roger Phillips when he comments on it adversely in The Times Clue competition.
14. Just over 9 minutes, although I’m not bragging.

    After seeing just OZONE and ATOM on first pass I expected a hard slog, but several helpful Down clues got the ballpoint rolling. ATM=notes distributor, by the way, is brilliant, and the clue should have been more troublesome, but “Basic unit” made me think of ATOM immediately and “packing O” confirmed it, allowing me to place the answer and retrosolve the wordplay for ATM. The clue wording isn’t especially smooth but that def makes it my COD.

    For 19D I’ve always had inner grumbles about BE=LIVE but its long-standing place in crosswords rarely gets picked up on, so live and let live I say (or exist and let exist, for the pedants).

    Other noteworthy clues were BASSET HORN, FIRESIDE CHAT, RIPSNORTER, DOWNCAST, OCELOT and TREASURER.

    Q-0 E-7 D-5 COD 27A ATOM

    1. I thought that those in the UK referred to them as a ‘CashPoint’, and that ‘ATM’ was strictly US – or is that no longer the case?

       You Brits are going to be calling your mobiles ‘cell phones’ if this keeps up.

15. Regards to all. Certainly less trouble than yesterday’s, this took me about 40 minutes. It should have been somewhat quicker, as I was watching a baseball game while solving. I did the bottom half first, since my first pass yielded almost nothing up top. My last two were the crossing TRIGONOMETRIC and ALIMENT. On the long one, I didn’t know whether the anagram was to include “to” or “ie” (for ‘that’s), so I needed all the checkers. The ‘given time for afters’ device in the wordplay for ALIMENT threw me also, I thought it was directing something more complex than ‘put a “T” at the end’. I also liked TREASURER and OCELOT, and I’ll add a nomination for WHITSUN for the smooth, concise surface. Best to all.
16. Count me in – a really good puzzle that I thoroughly enjoyed doing sitting in the sun after an excellent round of golf. About 30 minutes to solve.

    I have to agree with a couple of the quibbles: no “perhaps” in 2D RAINCOAT; “measured by degrees” is a bit odd for TRIGONOMETRIC. Other than that good stuff and thanks to the setter.

17. Very good challenge, fun time, I was already in a good mood (Canadian rye helped) and scraped it all together in 22 minutes. BASSET HORN, ALIMENT and COCHINEAL from wordplay, SPIKE MILLIGAN from definition (this still cracks me up).
18. For all the statisticians out there I can confirm that having one eye has a serious effect on times. I have spent this entire week struggling even to finish expecting to read groans about difficulty, but when I eventually twig or give up it seems these are relatively straightforward puzzles. Maybe it is the mindset or the painkillers but I really am off the wavelength!
19. It’s interesting to learn how many solvers were helped by their alcoholic refreshments in solving this. I’ve found it a tough week in more ways than one, and I think this is the first I’ve finished, Absolut Rasberry being my inspiration. It took me longer than an hour, though. (How much longer, I’m not saying.)
20. For the benefit of your American cousins, who is Spike Milligan?
    1. A comedian, probably best-known as a member of the Goons, but his various Q-something TV shows had lots of memorable stuff – I remember the “value of the English ‘Get Out’ from this one”. He used some racial humour which would be very unfashionable these days, but seemed to dish out the insults fairly evenly – he was Anglo-Irish and mocked both of those. Also converted his memories of WWII into books conveying the absurdity of war.

    2. Where to start? Poet, actor, comedian, goon, zany personality. Wikipedia of course has an article. But it fails to mention that he was the setter of a crossword for idiots.

21. Phew! That’s the first one I’ve finished for a while, albeit with a bit of online help.

    I agree with earlier comments about 6d: TRIGONOMETRIC doesn’t in any sense mean “measured by degrees”. Also, is NUTTER just a double def that’s really essentially the same def repeated, or am I missing something?

    Generally, a good puzzle though, and at a good level for the likes of me.

    1. Just for the record, since it’s way past everyone’s bedtime, NUTTER is institution(N) + UTTER (= total). (the clue being “Ending in institution, total psycopath”). Utter is one of those words which has divers devious applications, e.g. say, complete, state, etc. and usually manages to fool me every time.
       1. OK, I get it now. I thought there must be a bit more to it than I was seeing!

          Thanks for responding at such a late stage — I seem to find that by the time I’ve done the puzzle it’s rather late, or in some cases several days later!

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