Times 24260

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 7:16

A puzzle that seemed to go well for me – there are a few strange words which might hold people up. Only 4D was entered without wordplay understanding.

Across
1 V(ALL)ET,T.A.=Territoral Army (not terriers/volunteers for once). It’s the capital of Malta.
5 GOBLIN = ” gobblin’ “
8 PRO(m) – prom is short for “promenade concert”.
9 PRE-=in adfvance of,FERMENT=unrest
11 A,U(TUM)N – two standard tricks combined. I don’t think I’ve seen this used for this word before though.
12 SEEK=”Sikh”
14 BITTERNESS – which could be interpreted as a female bittern
17 RATTLE(H.E.,A)D – a rattlehead is a light-minded person full of idle talk (Collins) – also -brain, -pate. A new word for me which I saw from wordplay, wrote in, briefly worried about and then kept a careful eye on. H.E.=”His/Her Excellency” is the ambassador.
23 SATI(R)E – we had John Cage last Friday – Satie, with his “furniture music” and the notorious “Vexations”, was possibly the John Cage of his day in the notoriety stakes.
24 ANODYNES = (Yes and no)*. This is the original meaning of anodyne – the bland/inoffensive meaning came later
25 IN AUG.= “during summer”,URALS = mountains. Speeches made at inaugurations, esp. by US presidents.
26 SPA(t)
27 R.(EVER)E.
28 EDEN=Prime Minister,TATE= Henry Tate, sugar merchant and gallery founder.
 
Down
1 VAPORISER = (river, soap)*
2 LO(OK)SE,E
3 E,M.P.,IRE
4 T(HERE)WIT,H
5 GAR(B)AGE – the accommodation here not being for people
6 BEESTINGS = bee stings – beestings = the first milk from a cow or goat after giving birth. One of those “not sure what it means but I know it’s a word” memories from barred-grid puzzles
7 I’S,TH(M)US
13 KITTIWAKE – Spoonerism of “witty cake” = amusing waffle – I don’t know whether an unindicated def. by example has been used in “Spoonerism fodder” before.
15 TRAIN BAND – a 16th-18th century company of English militia. The clue refers to the song “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” by Irving Berlin, but it’s a bit loose – the sheet music has no mention of Alexander training the band – he could have made it “the bestest band what am” just by signing up the best players.
16 SHIPSHAPE – a tramp or tramp steamer being a merchant ship (one which goes wherever its hirers desire rather than plying a fixed route).
18 A,V(A,R)ICE – setter getting full values from his A’s here
19 EPERGNE = (pea-green – a)* – watchers of “Antiques Roadshow” and the like may recall that an epergne is an ornamental centrepiece for a dining table or a stand with holders for fruit, sweetmeats etc.
21 A,M(NES = rev. of S.E.N.)IA – I’m sure we’ve noted before that you can no longer become a State-Enrolled Nurse, so this abbreviation will have to be binned someday.
22 EDIS=side rev.,ON=broadcasting – “side” is arrogance.

26 comments on “Times 24260”

  1. Thought this was going to be a quick one – did 1a,5a,1d as the paper came out of the printer, and proceded to do the top half and SE corner at first read, leaving only the SW after about 6 minutes. Then came the grinding halt.

    Took far too long to get SEEK, at which point KITTIWAKE was obvious, spent too long looking for the EER in 27A (why complicate matters?). Had to look up CUPIDITY to check as didnt know the exact meaning. Didnt know RATTLEHEAD or TRAINBAND even having guessed them, so was less than confident, and couldnt even get the anagram of PEGREEN with the possible E start, and the later G and E, so that was going to hurt.

    finally limped in after about 20 mins in what can only be described as “shoe-horning” the last answers in and hoping for the best.

  2. on second thoughts, I think the puzzle was generally harder than I first thought, as I hadnt truly picked up a lot of the word play on the quick stuff, and may just have been very lucky with checkers and stuff.

    Beestings, Shipshape, Amnesia, Edison were all on checking letters not full understanding, and even Edentate was not a word known to me (although it had to be)

  3. Deeply suspect early submission from yours truly. Understood all the wordplay and only 2 confirmation lookups ie EPERGNE and TWIT for tease, so why so difficult and why so quick to resort to aids?

    General notes:
    TUM seems now to have registered.
    Interesting to see TATE as benefactor rather than gallery.
    Jim’s parsing tip revealed for me AUTUMN.
    Might be familiar to experienced solvers but I purred with pleasure at “estate accommodation” for GAR(B)AGE. Written next to answer “Sublime”.

  4. I found this quite easy (20 minutes) but I think that’s because most of the complexity in this puzzle comes from obscure meanings of familiar words (BEESTINGS and ANONDYNES) and obscure words (TRAINBAND and EPERGNE) which experienced solvers will probably have met before.

    I’ve come up with an alternative parsing for 6D BEE(STING)S where STING=defraud=milk and BEES=workers. I solved it as Peter did but that construction occurred to me after the event.

    I don’t like the use of “estate” without “perhaps” in 5D GARAGE and wonder why the setter who is happy with that uses “sloth for example” at 28A EDENTATE. I also agree that “what Alexander used to do” is a bit thin. Don’t professional musicians rehearse rather than train?

  5. 15:03 in the end, but after 5 mins I only had 4 left in the SW corner and thought I was on for a very fast time. Completely ground to a halt with TRAINBAND, INAUGURALS, AVARICE and SATIRE missing. Finally realised I was looking for speeches rather than a mountain range and was able to progress.
  6. At 17 min, this was the easiest for some time. RATTLEHEAD and TRAINBAND were new, but being generously signalled and cross-clued, they fell easily.
  7. Just under the hour for the first time this week. Similar experience to Jackkt, except my halt came after the about 5 mins with three done. Also with Jimbo on the sting=milk route to the correct answer at 6, and reasonable assuredness of my guesses at EPERGNE, TRAINBAND and RATTLE-HEAD. I thought the latter was PUZZLE-HEAD for a moment, but knew the setter couldn’t be that cruel. Another good workout from the setter.

    Satie’s ally in the “furniture music” fiasco was Milhaud, who retells the incident in his autobiography of one concert where he & Satie tried to restrain the audience from re-entering the concert hall at interval because the band had struck up what was supposed to be background music.

  8. Didn’t time myself on this one but I’m guessing around 10 minutes.

    Straightforward fare but, after a run of quite/very challenging puzzles, this will come as a relief to less experienced solvers who want to understand wordplay techniques without having to first prise them out of wickedly secluded hiding places.

    I agree with BC that for aficionados this puzzle may feel a little pedestrian, but I don’t think it’s below standard in terms of accuracy and fairness. It’s just (comparartively) easy with no unnecessary deviousness. There was even the dead giveaway at 8 & 9, the latter rather helpfully starting its clue with “Pro…”, answering its predecessor.

    Nothing stood out as spectacular although 18D AVARICE is a good lesson in “finds the bits and put them together”.

    Q-0 E-5 D-5

    PS: As an extremely late afterthought, I finally got back into the Crossword Club (after rediscovering an old email with the necessary details). I must say the new layout – both print and interactive – is excellent. Once the bad boy of online crosswords, it’s now far better presented than those of the opposition.

  9. 17:08, with question marks all over the place, and the last few minutes spent staring at T.A.N.A.D (15dn).  I didn’t know VALLETTA (1ac), RATTLE-HEAD (17ac), SATIE (23ac), BEESTINGS (9dn), KITTIWAKE (13dn), Alexander’s Ragtime Band, TRAINBAND (15dn), or SIDE meaning arrogance (22dn), and EPERGNE (19dn) must have come from a part of the brain that stores words without knowing what they mean.

    I think 15dn is too obscure for a daily puzzle – not because of the answer or because of the reference in the clue, but because of the combination of the two.  I don’t agree with bc that 17ac is wilfully obscure, though, as you can get the answer from the (reasonably straightforward) wordplay.

    Clue of the Day: 13dn (KITTIWAKE), which incidentally does have an example indicator (“say”).

  10. If the gk cap fits, speed improves – 15 minutes for this one. I wonder when bitter acquired the meaning of sharp, as now I hear people discussing salads describing endive (decidedly bitter but not acid) as sharp. Which leaves them short of a word to describe sorrel, acidly sharp but not bitter. In taste terms, sharp and bitter are generally quite distinct (though some foods may have both qualities), but evidently not in xwords. But I did like the pun.
  11. I got off to a quick start but ground to a halt after 10 minutes with only about a third completed. I then stared at it for 15 minutes without solving a thing more and decided to take a break. This did the trick and after that I worked steadily through the remainder. My total solving time was 45 minutes.

    TRAINBAND, RATTLEHEAD and EPERGNE were look-ups worked out from wordplay, though I think I have met the last one before.

    I don’t have any problems with Alexander training his band. The lyric refers to him as the “leader of the band” which in the US means he’s the conductor, so he would rehearse them, and Collins has “rehearse” = “train or drill”.

  12. Didn’t find this odd mixture of the very straightforward (empire, reserved) and wilful obscurity (rattlehead, trainband) very enjoyable, but got there in around 25 mins, trainband being a hopeful punt. Oddly dissatisfying and felt below the standard The Times usually so impressively and consistently delivers. bc
  13. Unfinished, running aground in two spots after 15 minutes. I had ‘kittywake’ – if you didn’t happen to know the spelling you were somewhat stuffed here – and that left me with a confounding Y in 23a.

    Failed also to get TRAINBAND – being a solver of twenty odd years experience doesn’t help much if you can barely remember whether you solved a puzzle yesterday, let alone what was in it. Naturally, I agree with Mark’s assessment of this one.

    Not my favourite crossword of late.

  14. I began by thinking this was going to be a quick solve with several easy clues entered in the first couple of minutes, but some oddities slowed me down, and carelessness led me to enter SIKH not SEEK, though I did spot that reasonably quickly. 35 minutes in all, with guesses at RATTLEHEAD and TRAINBAND. I thought it was a nice puzzle.
  15. About 20 mins, the last few of which stuck on TRAINBAND. I agree with Mark and others – the combination of vague clue and obscure word were too much. I thought it referred to Alexander the Great until I read this blog.

    ‘Unexpectedly’ seems surplus to requirements in 1d; not quite sure about the apostrophe in “workers'” in 6d, and not sure ‘summer’ is sufficient for ‘aug’ in 25a, but ‘waffle’, ‘estate’ and ‘tramp’ good misleading examples of what they stood for.

  16. Nice and easy…. apart from the SW corner! KITTIWAKE came easily , RATTLEHEAD less so , TRAINBAND was my last entry – never heard of the word but made the ragtime band connection. So left with one missing. Could not for the life of me see a word to fit in I-A-G–A-S probably because I was only considering consonants for letter 4.Of course , this is a poor excuse as if I had even cottoned on to half the wordplay – URALS = mountains, then I would have been there. 9/10 to the setter , 3/10 to me
  17. Agree with pretty much all that’s been said about this puzzle, A generally enjoyable workout. I’m with those who found the “What Alexander used to do” reference at 15dn a trifle thin. But was TRAINBAND really so obscure? I can’t believe there are many of us, at any rate of a certain age, who left the schoolroom with out having been made at least once to recite William Cowper’s poem about John Gilpin, which begins:

    John Gilpin was a citizen
    Of credit and renown,
    A trainband captain eke was he
    Of famous London town.

  18. Did anyone else mess up as I did by, firstly, putting in TECHNIQUE?!

    Carole H,Fermo, Italy

  20. i thought that this was a tough challenge given the relative obscurity of the words. we have had Edentate some time recently perhaps in the jumbo…but had forgotten… didnt know original meaning of anodynes but what else could it be?
    Took a long time for some reason to see Goblin but that really helped NE corner…i had not heard of rattle head but like peter write it in cautiously and waited…nor trainband which was my last in!
    anticipating a shocker tomorrow!
  21. I got through in 20 minutes, and thought most of it on the ‘not too hard’ side. I got TRAINBAND by reliance on the Alexander reference, certainly didn’t know the word, and got EPERGNE from the wordplay/checking letters only. I didn’t know the milk/BEESTINGS connection either, but what else could it be? My quibble is with BITTERNESS. It could be a female marsh bird if you were to make up a word for a female marsh bird. However, it is not. A non-existent word should have been flagged by the setter with more than a question mark, I think. I hope I’m not being too pedantic with that. COD: LOOK SEE, nice surface there. Regards to all.
    1. But surely “female marsh bird?” is the wordplay in the clue, and a certain amount of inventive thinking is to be expected and is permissible, and the definition and solution are straightforward enough?
      1. Perhaps if I had found it straightforward enough I wouldn’t have gotten cranky! It held me up for a while.
    2. I’m with Jack – if the clue had only mentioned the female bird, we’d be back in the bad old days of the Times crossword circa 1940, with “wordplay only” clues permitted. But we’ve got a perfectly OK plain def too.

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