Times 24256 – Not A Stinker

40 comments on “Times 24256 – Not A Stinker”

1. 6:20 here, held up (sorry Barry) at the end by 21 and 22 – 21 is annoyingly an indirect version of those “city girls” like Nancy and Florence who I remembered badly in comments a day or two ago. And 22 must count as “solved without wordplay” as I thought of homer=home run, which goes by air and implies a round trip of the bases (I’m sure the pigeon was meant though). My delay on this one was partly from wanting it to be RIMER=old poet.

   Other wordplay not quite seen when solving: the SPRING in 26, and some of the puns in 5D, which for me is just a cryptic definition – I can’t see the proper wordplay to make it an &lit.

   John Cage was definitely a bone thrown to the “musical mafia”. The only other composer’s signature I knew was DSCH for Schostakovich, which uses two German note names. The BACH article you linked has other examples. As the clue has two definitions as well, I hope no-one will complain about the “four notes” this time.

   Edited at 2009-06-19 07:12 am (UTC)

2. I also thought it might be a quick one for a friday, but did all but three in 15 mins and then another 15 for the 9a/4d pair and the extremely annoying 21a. I cant for the life of me see why it was so difficult to get, but certain combinations of checking letters seem to ring alarm bells which in turn put off sensible thought.

   May I suggest that 13 is actually a triple definition since C,A,G, and E are the four notes at the end and a cage is also “an arrangement of bars”

   1. 13: Two defs plus wordplay rather than a triple def. “With four notes” isn’t a definition of Cage or cage.
      1. good point – it was the tripartite aspect badly worded.
3. Thought I had a quick one, all but the wretched Sophia in under 10 minutes. Ran down the eastern half easily, a little slower to the west. No excuse really after my query re Nancy! 15 in all.
4. I think the fifth standard fare puzzle in a row and just under 25 minutes to solve. Would have been quicker but stupidly wrote COURT MARSHALLED into 5D which slowed down 18A (luckily that was an anagram or I might have been really struggling). No real quibbles or highlights.
   1. ….careless writing in ‘holy word’ because I didn’t bother working out the anagram after the first 5 letters. That made ‘court martialled’ quite difficult for a while
5. I wonder if many other composers could be similarly referenced

   Danish composer Niels GADE is the only other well-known composer, but there’s also Amy BEACH and Keiko ABE.

   1. Using TEA on a list of 704 composers also turns up Johannes FEDÉ if you don’t mind ignoring the acute.
      1. I saw Gade on the list in the wikipedia BACH article, but “well-known” seems pretty optimistic! When someone says that a composer’s name appearing as an answer is obscure, my favourite response is to point them to something by that composer which everyone knows. So Waldteufel isn’t completely obscure because everyone’s heard the Skaters’ Waltz. For Gade, you can’t do the same thing, or quote something he’s noted for (like harpsichord music for (D.) Scarlatti), so he’s obscure! Ditto for Fedé.
         1. I can’t claim to have heard of Gade, Beach, Abe, or Fedé – the only reason I’ve heard of John Cage is because of his party trick.  I’m sure there are some well-known composers who aren’t famous enough for a philistine like me to have heard of them, though.
6. 10:22, with the last minute and a half spent on SOPHIA (21ac) – capitals aren’t my forte, and I was working my way across Europe when the girl suggested herself quite independently.

   Clues of the Day: 13ac (CAGE), 18ac (HOLY WRIT), 28ac (ANDEAN).

7. Big sigh of relief from Jack. Why don’t you try getting a move from the Friday shift? Still deadly slow for me though, but am at least finishing these things now.
   Delighted to put a big CD next to COURT MARTIALLED following Peter’s explanations of yesterday. Like Jack, wanted THICKNUT and still don’t really see SET for group of students? Also struggling with POLE for bar in what for me was last in APOLOGISE after figuring out CAGE by writing down all the notes and shuffling. (note to me: get Scrabble).
   Maybe delayed this morning by new house guest, a German friend’s cat, who Lennyco might be interested to know translates (the friend, not the cat)anticlockwise as “im umgedrehten uhrzeigerinn” but for some reason isn’t sure. Had Ira Gershwin been French or German he might have called the whole thing off.
   1. I love the toughies really, but it’s nice to have an easier one occasionally and my last two before today I found pretty difficult.
8. Liked this one a lot. Pity it only took about 15 minutes. Got held up for some strange reason on 27ac. Maybe I have a blindness for the word “fray” which stumped me in 24254. The anagram at 18ac, though, was priceless. If there are annals for anagram clues, this one should be listed.
9. Just had a call from a friend in California. She told me that no-one would use the word “broad” these days and that, in fact, most Americans wouldn’t know the word. Anyone know the etymology?
   1. broad etymology: the same as other meanings, according to Websters 3rd New International (1961). That gives two meanings: woman (unspecified) and prostitute. This seems to make its use much the same as “tart” in the UK – not always specifically a prostitute, but never respectful. “Tart” seems to still be current, but I can imagine “broad” now only being encountered in old books or movies.
      1. My preferred translation would be “bint”.  According to the Urban Dictionary, “broad” is used in this way by Italian Americans on the east coast between Philadelphia and New York.  Obviously that’s not a reliable reference work, but it gives a rough guide to current usage, and such a localized theory would explain why mctext’s Californian friend doesn’t hear the word.  (For those who aren’t easily offended, here’s the link.)
         1. Thanks for the refs. Guess I must be insufficiently broad minded. Is there a word for those jokes that begin “She was only the butcher’s daughter …”?
      2. So how come woman = broad? Those dear to me happen to be rather narrow (in the nicest possible sense).
         1. Broad in the hips for child-bearing I think is where it comes from.
10. Again, I got most of it in 20 minutes, and got stuck on the rest. Like most, the SW corner was the last in. While I got ‘apologise’ early on, I could not see ‘Broadway’ and ‘Homer’ for the longest time. I did think of the ‘fray’ from last week, but even so took a while to see ‘defrayed’.

    I did not find many of the clues particularly witty, maybe ‘camisole’ rises to that level, and I found ‘Sophia’ most annoying….because I couldn’t get it.

11. 35mins. Held up trying to find the wordplay in 5d and by SOPHIA. I spent some time trying to work writ into 27ac, 7d and wherever else court was mentioned, and suddenly it pops up in 18ac. I liked HOLY WRIT, TREACHERY, HERESY but COD to CAGE, who was fond of saying “Happy new ears” to anyone who would listen. His famously maligned piece 4’33” consists of a pianist sitting at a piano in silence for 4’33”; the point being that the piano was set up on a street in NY and you were supposed to listen to the music the world was making. Librarians have trouble tracking down the score of this piece.

    As for why H is B natural in Germany (significantly once part of the Holy Roman Empire), it’s by Papal decree. The Pope (which one I don’t know but somebody else will tell me) banned the note B from the scale, because the difficulty in singing the tritone F to (our) B obviously was the devil’s work. Fortunately German musicians discovered a work around.

    1. I’m very sceptical about the Pope story. It seems like a garbled version of the note from Conrad Cork in this Guardian Notes and Queries item. Having sung plainchant (where B flat is the only flat or sharp you ever see), and remembering bits of O-level music, his explanation makes sense to me.

       Edited at 2009-06-19 11:48 am (UTC)

       1. As if I could ever be accused of playing loose with the facts! I thought the Papal reference was in Grove’s, but I don’t have a copy handy. The nearest I can get on the web is from Music, History & Ideas by Leichtentritt, which indicates the Popes were active in the field, without specifically mentioning the case in point. Maybe I should have prefaced my story with “allegedly”
          1. That reference is just about the broader perpetual issue of what sort of music is suitable for a church service.

             A Google search for [“papal decree” tritone] tracked down this article, which mentions a 1324 decree against music using harmony in thirds (a new idea then). It found abstracts of other articles but nothing better in the first page or two of results. [Deconfusion edit for those not into music terms: despite the “three” connotations in both,thirds are not tritones.]

             Edited at 2009-06-19 02:05 pm (UTC)

             1. That would be John XXII, from my period!  Here’s a relevant paragraph from a 1938 book on Music, History and Ideas:

                As early as 1324 Pope Johannes XXII sent forth from Avignon a famous decree against figurated music in the Church, anticipating the charges brought against contrapuntal music at the Council of Trent more than two hundred years later, in the time of Palestrina.  Pope Johannes attacks the abuse of polyphony in church music, aiming mainly at the artificial motets of the ars antiqua.  Composers, writes the Pope, “cut the melody into pieces with hoquet (an effect of sobbing, sighing), enervate it by descant and tripla (counterpoints), and sometimes even add secular motets.  Thus they show a lack of respect for the basis of church music, are ignorant of its laws, do not know the church modes, and do not distinguish them from each other, but rather confuse them…  Thus their tones run about restlessly, intoxicate the ear without calming it, falsify expression, and disturb the worship of the congregation instead of awakening it; they favor lasciviousness instead of dispelling it.”

                1. Presumably he would have approved of John Cage’s 4’33” though. The quote you give is precisely the one I referenced, although curiously the appropriate page (66!) doesn’t appear until you scroll up and then down again. (My paranoia levels are rising.)

                   It still doesn’t explain the difference in notation though, which others say stems from the first days of the printing press; small h approximated the natural sign, small b the flat (which seems a bit facile to me). The Germans (and Scandinavians) may simply have kept an older (Papal approved?) notation when the new tempered scales were introduced and sharps & flats became one (in sound but not in notation) in no small part due to Bach himself (who would have been more than happy to keep the H). I’ll hand it over to the musicologists, should any be still listening.

12. I loved this. There were so many elegant surfaces, notwithstanding the fact that most of the clues were easy to moderate. I’m glad I gave myself an extra second to ponder the wordplay after I pencilled in Moderate and changed it to Moderato. The wretched Sophia was last in for me too. I was on the verge of writing in Anthea and changing Apologise to Apolngise.

    I have not come across the piano version mentioned by Koro but John Cage’s most famous work the three movement 4’33” of silence was televised from the Proms a couple of years ago in an orchestral version. It was an excellent performance but, from memory, perhaps a little too slow in the moderato section, the whole thing coming in at about 4 minutes 35 seconds. I have only heard it once on the radio. Django Bates requested it on Michael Berkeley’s Private Passions programme. He particularly wanted the version by Frank Zappa. Berkeley concurred but explained that, regretfully, he could only play a two minute excerpt from the piece. Any more and the transmitters would have automatically shut down.

13. This would be a good one to get people started on, 7 minutes here, able to fill in all of the down answers without heistation. Of all things, my last in were HOLY WRIT and FOREGROUND (though I suspected the ROUND part in a first reading). That would be a PB for me, but not a PB (Peter Beater).
14. Educational jargon, probably not used at your S London comprehensive. I’m pretty sure my Grammar School in Croydon split a year of 60-odd into three maths sets by ability level for some years. If your school believed in mixed ability teaching, this wouldn’t have happened.
    1. I would have been unaware at the time but I suppose in those very early days of the Comprehensive ideal the aspiration at least would have been for “mixed ability teaching”. Unfortunately the term was more applicable to the staff than the students.
       Possibly the only element of education we share is that I too suffered the distraction of a Parisian lady who taught “French Oral”, a title which still causes palpitations, but the only word I carry with me from those days is decollete.
15. 6.53. Quick end to the week.I suppose I would have been COURT MARTIALLED if I’d made Jimbo’s MARSHALL error! I had IVES in my mind for a minute for 13 due to modern composer and IV=four – but I don’t even know if he’s modern? Didn’t know FOREGROUND could be a verb , sounds like one of these horrible modern usages but no doubt somebody will tell me Shakespeare used it!
16. I take comfort from the fact that others were slow to see 21. It was last in and added 5 minutes to my solving time (35 in all). Not a tough puzzle overall, but it took me a while to get 5, the clue to which I think is rather weak, unless I’ve missed something. I assume a defendant can be acquitted in a court-martial, in which case there’s no sentence. I liked ‘digitally enhanced” as the definition in 16 and the indirect pigeon reference in 22.
17. 8:41 today, much better than the last two days.

    I agree with the surfaces being very good, of course when the clues are easier one has less time to appreciate them!

    Ugh at ‘FOREGROUND’ being a verb – as a friend once remarked, there is hardly a noun that hasn’t been verbed these days.

    I quite often get thrown by clues such as 15 where the wordplay is ‘a [letters] in [letters]’ and it turns out to be ‘a’ then the first set of letters in the second, rather than the ‘a’ being on the inside too. I must train myself to stop being fooled by those.

18. Again interrupted so no accurate time, but on the faster side and I had no real hold ups except CAGE, my last entry. Not being of the ‘musical mafia’, I had to sort out the various possibilities and only hit on CAGE, as a guess, from ‘arrangement of bars’. On the other hand, SOPHIA went in easily, and FOREGROUND went in on the first pass despite never having seen the verb form. The wordplay seemed incontrovertible. I agree that HOLY WRIT is a wonderful anagram clue, my COD. Regards for the weekend.
19. 10:45, slowed down for a minute or so at the end before putting in CAGE. My first thought was BACH (I knew H was a note in German), but I didn’t put it in as he’s not modern, then the E confirmed it wasn’t him.
    Now I’ve just noticed I put in MODERATE for 6D. Without analysing the wordplay, I think my logic went “way=MODE, the way runs are scored at the Oval could be (run) RATE, steadily scored=MODERATE. That’s what happens when you rush.
20. Just logged on to find that the Saturday Times is a reprint of 24,247. Ruined my breakfast!
    1. For folks in the UK, I don’t know yet whether the dead tree version is correct. Later: it is

       I’ve e-mailed the appropriate people and will put up an announcement as and when it’s corrected. In the meantime, I’d suggest trying the Jumbo puzzle or plucking something from the archives – possibly with the help of our Memories list of good puzzles.

       Edited at 2009-06-20 08:57 am (UTC)

21. Usually don’t finish, but this was easy… except 21 AC, which defeated me. On first read of the across clues with no downward checking letters, quickly though of and quickly rejected Sofia. The Italian background defeated me – Sofia the name is spelt with an F, not PH.

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