Times 24278

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 25:05

This felt like the toughest puzzle for a few weeks – maybe since a very tough Saturday puzzle. Only 7 clues fell at all easily – 9, 10, 11, 4, 5, 8, 13. The rest were a real battle with a few long pauses while no apparent progress was made. Well done to anyone who fails to notice the difficulty and solves this in something close to their average time. There are lots of fiendishly constructed clues here. Two of the best bits of deception come at the end – 20 and 24 down, both assisted by strong surface readings.

Across
1 BUM=unexpectedly duff (duff=of poor quality),PINTO=horse of a particular coat colour
9 U=accepted,X=kiss,OR,IOU’S
10 DISMOUNT = (to nudism)* – “Desert Arab, perhaps” = “depart from horse”
11 TICK=second,OVER=finished
12 TEAR(JERK)ER – tearer=one rushing, outside jerk=idiot. The cryptic reading’s “moving picture” is one causing strong emotions.
14 BRAN(d) – bran has husks so is “husky”, brand=type, D=sled ultimately, pull=remove something from
15 CYGNETS = “signets” – a signet being a small and hence “baby” seal
17 BAD NEWS = (bend, saw)*. Bad news travels fast, they say.
21 NO=refusal,OK (verb)=”to allow”. And a nook is a “small secure zone”.
22 NIP AND TUCK – close (of a sporting contest), and cosmetic surgery to remove excess flesh/fat.
23 AFTERS=sweet=dessert,UN=”Nancy’s an”. The cryptic reading of “Browning” is with lower case B.
25 S(LOPE)O,FF – had the SO,FF part immediately but the right stride took a long time to find (a fair description of the whole puzzle)
26 K,AM(I,K)AZE
27 AIRSPEED = “what Wellington could get up to” – this kind of Wellington, though I suppose you could also justify the answer by thinking of welly wanging
 
Down
2 UNI=college,QU=queen,ELY=see – “standing so alone” is a devious def.
3 PUMP=interrogate=question,IRON=”very determined”. “Work out” is the def.
5 OUT-TAKE – two defs, one by way of “take prisoners”
6 FORCER=”one who’s obliging”,T(A)IN
7 CON=study,V,ER(G)E
8 G(S=succeeded)T.,RINGS
13 EAT ONE’S HAT – hidden in “reprobate atones, hating”
15 CAN BANKS – BAN=bar in CANKS=snack*. I made heavy weather of this by seeing BANKS as the second word and then guessing at C(bar synonym)ANKS when it’s actually CAN(bar synonym)KS. Also had to stop myself anagramming BAR to get “car banks”, which would be very large bins.
16 GOOD=fine,TIME=custodial sentence. Sympathy to those like me who initially went for GOOD LIFE. If other letters had been checked in the second word, we’d be having one of those discussions about alternative answers. “HIGH LIFE” was also tempting initially, but didn’t feel quite good enough to ink in, fortunately.
18 NOT A PEEP – 2 defs. “Not a peep out of you!” is a (Brit?) colloquial version of “children should be seen and not heard”.
19 W=women,Y(CLIFF)E – John Wycliffe was a Bible translator and an early holder of the kind of views that led to the Reformation.
20 OPEN SEA = “waves at large” – (ape nose)*
24 POUR = “pore” = tiny hole. “bucket” = pour (as of rain)

46 comments on “Times 24278”

  1. Well, no. It’s POUR: bucket = bucket down = pour [with rain]. And this was my last one in also.
    I had this done in about 45 mins (give or take a half-hour or so chopping wood — it’s freezing down here). The SW was stuffed by (1) writing in CAB RANKS (anag of SNACK, inc anag of BAR), then wondering what kind of bins they might be.

    (Diversion: remembered the clue “Was promoted like flying taxis (4,4,3,5)”)

    And by (2) writing in GOOD LIFE for 16dn. “Life” seemed much more of candidate for “custodial sentence”. Bugger!
    Last note: is this a record for the number of split (multiple word) clues in a Times daily puzzle?

    1. I thought “LIFE” fitted better with the plural “hedonistic experiences” of the clue, and “TIME” would have been better clued in the singular. Fortunately I had checking letters so wasn’t faced with a choice.
      1. Until reading Mark’s comment below I had overlooked the hyphen when considering the options. This makes a difference and he’s quite right of course. I think I mentioned the pangram.
  2. Huge rush this morning but finished with no errors in about 90 minutes, with 2 at least where didn’t follow wordplay until coming here.
    Just time to rave about some brilliant surfaces, off the top of my head: moving picture, Wellington, bucket and my COD Desert Arab.
    Marvellous stuff and cheers to setter.
  3. Heading out towards the hour mark on this, nothing was easy (although i thought 20 & 24 were nowhere near as bad as others). Spent about half the time stuck in the NW corner, esp since the minute I had the N_O at the end of 1 I inexplicably thought that the horse was TONTO (!!) and the def was —T,ONTO. It was only when 3D finally twigged that the whole thing fell into place.

    Havent checked, but I guess this was a pangram, which also helped in getting 2D – the last one – since it almost guaranteed the middle letters as QU. (I know the clue should have given it away, but somehow it didnt as I failed to “LIFT AND SEPARATE” queens college as been oft warned on here)

  4. My run of long solves continues, this one taking just under an hour with two errors (at 18 and 24) and one unsolved (at 27) as a result of those errors. At 18 I unaccountably wrote NOT A PEEK ignoring the fact that whilst it fits the second part of the clue it doesn’t fit with the first. At 24 I opted for PORE and I’m still not sure that it doesn’t work just as well as POUR though no doubt the experts will be able to explain why it should clearly be one rather than the other. That left me with A_E_K_E_ at 27 and I briefly wondered if KNEE or its reverse might account for “what Wellington might have got up to”! In desperation I tried applying the pangram technique to cracking it but unfortunately all the letters of the alphabet had already been accounted for elsewhere, so once again the on-line solver came to my rescue on arrival at the office .
    1. 24D: I sympathise with confusion between PORE and POUR, but if you read “to be in” as a rather flowery def/wordplay link, you’ve got (tiny hole, said) = (bucket), and POUR is then the only choice.
  5. I agree with the above. The answer MUST be PORE, not POUR. What’s with the IN ?

    Not happy with 16d…. could easily have been Good LIFE

    And what’s a CAN BANK?

    1. A can bank is a tin can equivalent of a bottle bank – presumably in a more up-to-date Collins than I have, as not in COED.
  6. A jolly good workout for the grey matter – 33m and thought it would be more, rh half fell into place fairly well, first in 9a & 20d, but slow to see so much in the lh half I have to admire the skill of the setter. Left hand half finished with the 15’s, agree 10a vg, also smiled at 1a.
  7. 16:20, with one mistake: CAN BARKS for the unknown but guessable CAN BANKS (15dn).  My only other unknown was NIP AND TUCK meaning “neck and neck” (22ac); PINTO (1ac) is slowly becoming familiar, and Wellington bombers (27ac AIRSPEED) are just about on my radar.

    This was a great challenge with some wonderful clues, and it is indeed a pangram (well spotted fmks).  It’s a shame, then, that 24ac is obviously at best ambiguous.  (The PORE reading, “Tiny hole [that is] said to be in bucket“, is more natural; and the link phrase on the POUR reading, “to be in”, is at best clumsy.)  16dn (GOOD-TIME) isn’t ambiguous, though: GOOD-LIFE isn’t even a word, let alone one meaning “after hedonistic experiences”.

    Clues of the Day: 1ac (BUMP INTO), 10ac (DISMOUNT), 14ac (BRAN), 17ac (BAD NEWS), 23ac (AFTERSUN), 18dn (NOT A PEEP), 20dn (OPEN SEA).

    1. Whoops – I meant to refer to fathippy2’s post, but, as Jack says, he had already mentioned it.  The only fixed point here is that I hadn’t spotted it myself.
    1. It’s a 1950s thing that survives only in crosswords.  There’s some detail here, but basically the reference is to linguistic habits that were taken to distinguish the upper classes (U) from lower beings (non-U).  It crops up reasonably often, so watch out for it.
      1. “only in crosswords”: not quite true. Here it is being used last month in a national newspaper.
        1. Fair enough, though it would be perverse to ignore the fact that that was in a gossip diary in the Telegraph – they certainly know their audience!  Insofar as “U” does survive, it’s surely as a knowing cultural reference, rather than as a bona fide classificatory term.
  10. Thanks to Peter B for excellent blog of a fiendishly challenging puzzle. I still don’t fully get 23ac: I understand all the wordplay but what an earth is an AFTERSUN? Seems to be a non-word.
    1. Thanks. I am clearly not up to speed on the latest beach kit! There is no mention of the word in my Chambers, but it does appear in the COED, I now see, though only as an adjective, whereas the clue requires a noun. However, no doubt the trusty Collins, which sometimes seems to have been compiled for the sole purpose of vindicating the more outlandish clues of Times setters, will provide the necessary cover. No matter. An excellent puzzle, as everyone else says.
      1. I would have preferred it hyphenated – I shall have to look along the shelves now to see what the bottles say! I refuse to buy anothe dic. having invested in Chambers and continue to be amused by the endless stream of oddities reported from Collins.
      2. “Aftersun” is indeed in Collins. I have the latest but one edition.

        Also “aftersun lotion”.

  12. 45:10 .. with ten minutes sorting out the pore/pour issue, and then, at last, AIRSPEED. If the 7.40 from Esher was on time, there may have been a few frustrated commuters stepping off at Waterloo this morning. A good challenge if you weren’t in a hurry.
  13. Yes, a leisurely 65 mins from me. A tour de forcer from the setter; well done. Still grinning at BUMP PINTO.
  14. Just over 35 minutes after a slow start. Got right through to 24 down before I solved a single clue. The SE corner then fell fairly quickly.

    The last two in were UNIQUELY and TEAR-JERKER.

    I didn’t spot the pangram – I rarely do.

    Excellent surfaces in almost every clue, except 16d GOOD-TIME, which I thought was very contrived.

    15a had to be CYGNETS, but I hadn’t come across ‘signets’ as small seals before.

    My CODs were DISMOUNT, SLOPE OFF, EAT ONES HAT (I thought this was a hidden phrase, but it took me ages to find it) and WYCLIFFE.

  15. Wow, this was an absolute nightmare for me, i got “bump into” early, but after that i could only get parts of the clues, and the grid refused to open up for me.

    I can at least say i managed to learn something from this!! Although i can’t remember the last time i only managed 2 full clues lol!

    1. 17 minutes for me, with two mistakes. I decided “Refusal to allow through small secure zone” had to be BLOC, with “small” indicating that “BLOCK”, refusal to allow through, should lose its K. I quite liked bloc as a secure zone, too, as a nice Communist throwback.

      All of which led naturally to CAB RANKS, which was a meaning of bins I hadn’t come across. Empties was an unusual anagrind to turn “bar” into “abr” or “bra”, but there were plenty of other obscurities in the puzzle, so why not?

      1. I think the point at which you should have questioned your answers was “small” as a subtraction indicator. Times clues normally use an indicator for this purpose which really implies a reduction in size/length. Something or someone small may be small because of a reduction in size, or may just always been small.

        (Stands by for “but they used ‘small’ last Thursday”.)

        1. Difficult for me, and left with a couple unsolved after 30mins + (aftersun and pour). In addition to quibbles already made, in my part of the world pour and pore are NOT homonyms: for me “pour” sounds like “poor”, not “pore”. The clue was difficult enough without this added insensitivity. bc
          1. I think I pronounce “pour”, “poor” and “pore” the same way – not to mention “paw”!  Do you pronounce “pour” and “poor” with two syllables, and “pore” (and “paw”) with just one?
            1. Mark I’m a Scot and I pronounce “poor” and “pour” with the same “oo” sound (as in Bruce or good) and pore with an “oh” sound (as in bore or four). bc
  16. A couple of hours for me, but while doing other things like watching the tour de France and making dinner. I came to a grinding halt in the middle with about 8 left and then they suddenly started to fall. I’d made the mistake of penciling in SPACE OFF instead of SLOPE OFF. I’d not heard the phrase but it seemed plausible and fitted the cryptic. POUR was the last one in for me too, once I finally clicked and thought of Wellington as a plane rather than a duke or a boot and got AIRSPEED. It felt like a real achievement to finish correctly.
  17. I ask again:

    > Is this a record for the number of split (multiple word) clues in a Times daily puzzle?

    Who’s keeping a record?
    Peter?

    1. I honestly don’t know. I don’t keep records of points like this.
    2. Sorry for the late reply, but I thought your first question was rhetorical and then I needed it to be warm enough to take my shoes off so I could count beyond ten. The answer to your question is yes, as far as calender year 2009 is concerned. The previous record was 13 (out of 28 clues) which were split (either by a space or a hyphen), which has occurred twice this year, and then there was a 13/29 and a 12/28 before a 13/32. So 15/28 is going to take some beating.

      As far as this being unusually high, the distribution of the proportion of multi-word answers per crossword is skewed to the right (see figure 1)and this one doesn’t appear out of the ordinary. Interestngly, the distribution appears bimodal. Do the setters fall into two camps as to whether or not they like including multi-word answers? A prima facie case would seem to exist.

      Looking at the number of multi-word answers rather than the proportion, one might expect a Poisson distribution if these occurred simply at random (as a rough approximation). This working hypothesis isn’t supported by the data however (p<0.05), again with the bimodality suggesting possibly a mixture of Poisson distributions.

  18. Got there in the end after many attempts, and shameless cheating. Last in BRAN and the duo that I had never heard of CAN BANKS and AFTERSUN. Fortunately I have been around long enough to know that Nancy (or nice) can signal a bit of frogginess. Am in two minds as to whether this is a brilliant puzzle, of an absolute dog. I guess it is down to frame of mind. COD for me the BUM PINTO. If this has never been used before, then is should go straight into the Hall of Fame.
    1. Thought I recognised it, although the similarity is a bit blurry. My Imperator puzzle 002 had this at 13A:

      Meet tramp on horse (4,4)

      Same make-up, different wording.

  19. Can anyone tell me why ‘wife’ is in 9A? It seems redundant. I’ve never heard of can banks, only bottle banks, and I thought aftersun was to relieve burning, not to help your tan. It used to be, but perhaps things have changed.

    I thought it would be a walkover after I got ‘bump into’ (which made me laugh), but didn’t finish all.

    1. Wife is in 9A because “uxorious” means “showing great/excessive fondness for one’s wife”. So it’s precise rather than redundant. I solved it on the wrong idea that it meant “relating to a loving wife”.

      Here is a picture of the kind of can bank that you might find with the bottle and paper banks in a UK car park.

    2. As far as I know, you’re right about what AFTERSUN does, but I think the point is that people use it as an aid to tanning – they stay in the sun longer than would otherwise be sensible, then use aftersun to stop their newly-brown skin falling off.  (I speak as someone who views sunbathing with bemusement, so I may have got the wrong end of the stick.)
  20. Thanks. I should have checked in the dictionary – thought it just meant ‘loving’. I suppose I’ve never lived in a big enough town to see a can bank. Hope I never do!
  21. Excellent puzzle, solving time 42 mins. Esp liked DISMOUNT, GOOD-TIME, EAT ONE’S HAT, KAMIKAZE, BAD NEWS and indeed many more.
  22. This was tricky, took me almost all of lunchtime (didn’t have a watch with me) and there wasn’t ever a rush of answers like usual. On a first read-through the only across answer I had was NOOK. Many had to be pieced together from wordplay (UXORIOUS, AFTERSUN were the two words totally from wordplay, but many more were not realised until after all the wordplay was there). Well done setter, that was a challenge!
  23. Sorry for the late entry, and I agree, hard as nails. About an hour, and I had to go to aids after that to get WYCLIFFE, of whom I hadn’t heard before. The whole SE area held me up a long time. A lot of very good stuff here, including the misleading Wellington reference, the aid to Browning, Desert Arab, the bum pinto, etc. Quite a workout. Regards.

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