Times 24,285

Author   richardvgPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 7:52

Very quick on the top half, this morning. And only slightly slowed in the lower half.

Excellent clues today, I thought. I started listing a couple with amazingly natural surfaces (1, 9, 11…), and then realised there were only a few clues that didn’t have great surfaces. (And nice to see the clues for SIGHT-READ (4) and MILLSTONE (13) getting another outing.) Impossible to choose a favourite. The &lit clue for GANDHI at 22 is very good, but I am always a sucker for a long hidden, and ARMAGNAC at 24 across made me laugh.

Nothing too obscure, though having toured Cathar country a couple of years ago helped on 1D. I am even willing to forgive what I take to be a rugby reference at 14A. I haven’t worked out how 8 (TAR) breaks down, but I am sure it can’t be anything else. And I know someone will enlighten me soon.

Across

1 COURTESY – (YOURS ETC)*
5 H(UM)OUR
8 TAR – apart from the definition (“Sailor”), I don’t know why (Thanks to mctext for pointing me to the other meaning of “pay” – to smear (a boat) with tar.)
9 SEGREGATES – (EASTER EGGS)* – The first time I have seen this anagram. I will never look at an Easter egg in the same way again
10 A LIEN ATE
11 A SH(R)AM
12 STEM – two definitions, with a misleading “in” between them
14 WELL-HEELED – meaning “rich”. I imagine the rest is a rugby reference
17 SCALED DOWN – the definition being “like a model”
20 SPAR – I think this is just a cryptic definition, and not very cryptic, unless I am missing something (As indeed I was. Thanks to the comment below pointing out that this is a double definition, as the Concise OED gives “(informal) a close friend” as a meaning of spar)
23 LESS ON – I like “practical” for ON
24 ARMAGNAC – hidden
25 SCORE BOARD – Works best if you imagine an implied “and” between “many” and “directors”
26 COO – ie CO2 = C + O + O
27 CAR + (s)EEN
28 SEMINARY – (IN M YEARS)* – a very slightly indirect anagram, with M = 1,000. And a gratuitous “totally” that does improve the surface.

Down

1 CATHARS + IS – The Cathars are the same unfortunate lot as the Albigensians
2 UK RAIN + E – “this country” being UK rather than the country clued
3 TISANE – (TEA’S IN)*
4 SIGHT-READ – cryptic definition
7 UP + STATE – naturally I took the “say” as telling me I should think of a 5-lettered horse, before working out that this time it meant STATE
13 MILL’S TONE
15 LOWER CASE
16 DI + RECTORY, DI being (I’D)(rev)
19 DU(NGEO)N – NGEO being (GONE)*, and this “in” being one of those tricky ones that tells you the last item should be inserted in the one before it. (All wrong. Thanks to jackkt for pointing out that it is simply DUN + GEON = (GONE)*, with no insertion involved.)
21 PAN ACE + A
22 G AND H(umane) I(ndian) – brilliant &lit

54 comments on “Times 24,285”

  1. Won’t leave a time for this one. Just got back from a Times-less holiday and was (like Robbie Fowler in Perth last week) a bit out of form. Got banjaxed by inserting MADISON at 18. Well … it is a London club and “Madison” is sometimes used for the Ave.

    Really liked the two main anags — such is my wont. And the double duty of “leader of Indians” was nice. Not sure where I’ve heard “pay” as a TAR-sealing verb before (8); but I have. CAREEN was pretty good too. A maritime theme perhaps? Coo!

  2. Is this perhaps SPAR(row)from the Cockney saying “me old sparrer” meaning a friend? I can’t find the reference at this moment.
      1. It looks promising. It’s got all the bits for SPAR, ROW and SPARROW. But I can’t get the grammar of the clue to work yet.
  3. 35 minutes. The top half went in easily, the SE with a little more thought but I lost a lot of time in the SW with LESSON and CHELSEA being the last two in with two mighty Dohs!

    I read 19dn simply as DUN + (GONE)and assumed “in” was just a link word rather than instruction to insert.

    I’m much happier with the puzzles this week so far, not that they have all been particularly easy, just more suitable for the daily commute and there have been some smashing clues.

    1. DUN + (GONE)* of course. I wish I could delete edit and re-post from this computer but it won’t let me for some reason.
      1. Yes, of course. I think I had decided that (GONE)* was going to be an insert in a prisony word, and kept wanting it to be an insert when the clue worked the other way round.
  4. 10:12 for this good puzzle. Should have been quicker, but had two problems – first, PINNED-DOWN at 17A, thinking of model = pin-up, and mounted=pinned from collections of insects. It took 1D to save me from this and complete the SW corner. Second problem was not understanding the wordplay in 28, and trying other letters to fit ?E?I?A?Y, just in case there was another establishment to fit.

    At 8A, the missing point is that “pay” can mean “apply tar to a ship”. 14A must be Rugby – we’ve had the hooker “heeling” the ball in some previous puzzle.

    Thanks to all charity donors for your generosity in response to yesterday’s plea.

  5. 7:52? This can’t just be experience, it must have something to do with superior brain power.
    2 hours for me this morning with much of that time spent working out the wordplay (unsuccessfully with SPAR and SEMINARY) and then basking in the pleasure. Some wonderful stuff here so again thanks to the setter. (Trouble for us newcomers is that a string of “difficult” puzzles takes up rather too much of our time). Crazily for a rugby fan I read heel as an instruction to dogs (pack).
    Does UPSTATE and CHELSEA make this UScentric?
    COD = COO (just for its charm).
  6. Up – on a horse. A game of two halves, I won the first half romping in the top left as fast as I could read and write. The setter won the second half, leaving me with 22m and 17, 18, 19 last in almost together as the barin cam back on form in the closing seconds.
  7. Another game of two halves; left then right, presumably as different hemispheres engaged, for a 40mins all up. Still wondering why SPAR? Ticked COURTESY and GANDHI, but good clueing all round. In crosswords as in life SIGHT-READ was my nemesis although SEMINARY last in.
  8. Did this last night, and finished it in less than an hour, exceptional for me. Usually I do the x-word in the morning and I always struggle.
    There was one I wasn’t sure about and still don’t understand – 7d, what has state got to do with horses?
    Isabel
  9. 22 min, which for me is quite quick. Spent some time trying to make sense of 20 ac. Probably SPAR? but cannot justify it apart from the friendly combat allusion.
    1. Despite the suggestion of SPAR(row) above, all I can see here is a definition, and not even a cryptic one. For “spar”, Chambers has: “to dispute, argue”, and for “sparring partner” – “a friend with whom one enjoys lively arguments”. But I hope to be shown that I am missing something.
  10. Well I am glad that some people found it easy, but for me I just couldn’t break into it.

    Then after giving up I was kicking myself when reading the answers here.

    Hopefully just a bad day, and not a sign of things to come.

    I think that some kudos to the setter should be given for the 8 letter hidden word, Gandhi was good too.

    Well heeled be must related to the pack’s effort at scrum time in rugby, where the hooker heels the ball back. However, I have been to many games and never heard a fan use the term.

    W

  11. Still no handle on why some puzzles seem so much easier than others for me, and not to the majority of others. This one was about a 15 minute jaunt, whereas I was still carrying around yesterdays at 7pm and probably racked up at least an hour and a half in total before slight cheating to finish the last couple.

    I appreciate there were a lot more unknown words yesterday, but judging from the general commentary, it was comparable to tuesday or today. times also seemed to reflect that. I had for a while thought that certain days could be lucky or wave-lengthy, but there is too much repetition for this. I feel as if there are eg. ten key skills and I have cunningly overlooked two of them!

  13. COED has “a close friend” (inf) , and “engage in an argument without marked hostility” both under SPAR(2), so it’s a simple double def.

  14. Easy, for me, at 25 mins. As others have said, apart from those puzzles that everyone finds fiendish, it is not always easy to pinpoint what makes one easier than another. In this case, I knew the one piece of GK that helped with CATHARSIS at 1dn, and all the anagrams came quickly. Loved GANDHI at 22dn. Many other good clues. TAR and SPAR were guesses(but relatively easy ones)for me, since I knew neither the nautical meaning of “pay” nor the more unsual meaning of “spar” here alluded to (tks for the explanations, chaps). A run of fairly straightforward puzzles so far this week. A stinker tomorrow?
  15. With 7 minutes on the clock I found myself bogged down by 20, 28 and 16 in the SE corner. OK, didn’t know the alternative def for SPAR but huge self-kickers for not spotting the other two.

    A very enjoyable puzzle with some cracking wordplay. GANDHI is excellent but my COD has to 1A COURTESY; haven’t seen that ‘gram before but, even if it isn’t original, it deserves another showing. Beauty.

    Q-0 E-8 D-7 COD 1A COURTESY

    PS: Pete, there’s a good case for bumping your charity posting to the top of the page for a while – very worthy cause and it would be a shame to see it vanish from view.

  16. 11:13 for me. I was off to a very quick start today for a change, but got bogged down by my own hubris. Thinking I was going to finish in a very fast time, I suddenly found I’d lost the muse and struggled with the last half dozen clues.
  17. Would probably have finished this in under an hour, but for the fact that I invented the word UPSHIRE for 7 (meaning out in the shires), which prevented me from getting 11.

    It took me ages to spot the hidden word at 24, so COD for that.

  18. 14:37 .. As Richard says, a lot of really nice surfaces. Very deceptive in places. COO is rather clever.

    I think ‘dun’ is a C14th variant of ‘donne’ – dead, esp. from plague, as in Chaucer:

    With autum’s lese nere at his dore,
    The swineherd y began a-feelyn poore.
    Withyn a week of his fevere’s run
    His clogges he’d popped and that was hyme dun.

  19. i found this dramatically easier than last two days. can someone explain how dun=plague? thx
  20. 5.42 Just about as quick as it gets for me. Only difficulties was hazarding GAS at 26 before I got the C. Thought this was a good original clue (or maybe I just haven’t come across it before). I just put CAREEN in without any conviction or thought so a bit of a cheat. If it had been a competition I would have spent another few minutes trying to work out all possibilities (with the same guess at the end of the day).My brain had careen filed under carouse which shows that a limited understanding of the English langauage is not necessarily a bar to quick solving
  21. Just thinking about “OO” standing for “O2” (26) and whether that’s fair. Then I remembered Duchamp’s “LHOOQ” where the double “O” is to be read as “O deux”, so as to get his take on the Mona Lisa.

  22. mctext – Que?

    I read 7D as ‘in the state of being up’, i.e. on horseback, but it works either way. I found this quite easy – I think it all depends on your state of mind at the time, and it always helps me if I can get 1 across.

  23. I’ve been trying to get started with these puzzles and literally find it impossible. If I sit down with the answers I can work the method out for about 80% of the clues, but for the life of me, I can’t get the answers on my own.

    Any hints on where to get started? Also apologies if this is not the right place to post.

    Thanks,

    Ravinder.

    1. I was in your position when I started doing the Times in April. Now I generally finish between 1 to 2 hours. I knew some of the tricks when I started, there aren’t many and can be picked-up from various internet guides. There is a splendidly succinct one on
      http://www.guardian.co.uk/crossword/howto/rules.

      The more advanced the crossword the better concealed are the tricks. But the best advice by far is to keep reading this blog which increases learning exponentially. I have found that the experts on the blog are always willing to help and encourage new solvers. Good luck.

      1. I don’t know if there’s a freely available guide specific to The Times crossword (a puzzle which has some fundamental differences to those in other papers) but if you don’t mind spending a little bit of money Tim Moorey’s “How To Master The Times Crossword” is an excellent place to learn pretty much all you need to know. It has probably the friendliest guide to individual clue types and a generous number of fully-explained sample crosswords.

        It’s available via Amazon (current UK price around £9) –

        http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Master-Times-Crossword-Demystified/dp/0007277849/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248374970&sr=8-1

        Sorry about the long link name!

        1. Thanks to all for the replies. I didn’t want to divert the comments from the excellent blog post.

          I actually have Tim Morrey’s book and have been going through it. It’s extremely well written, but there is a lot to learn and remember.

          I’ve also read some of the guides that I’ve found on the internet.

          I’m going to keep following this blog and see where I get too.

          Thanks for being so welcoming.

    2. Moderator please delete this and the previous post.

      I don’t think that this is the right place to post this question.

      sorry,

      Ravinder.

      1. It’s perfectly fine to ask – I’ll reply after I’ve had my supper!
      2. Thinking back to my own early days, I’d say that:

        • You should always remember that every clue must contain some kind of definition in the answer, and that many of these definitions will be the first or last one or two words in the clue – these four possibilities probably account for over 75% of the clues in the majority of the Times puzzles. One of my early methods was just finding possible answers to possible defs that matched the answer length and matched intersecting possible answers. Horribly crude, but I gradually started to understand the wordplay for some of these.

        • Anagram clues and one or two other clue types (hidden words, initial/last letters, maybe double definitions) can be quite easy to spot.

        • Don’t neglect non-cryptic puzzles – the Times Two puzzle is written by a Ties cryptic setter, so will teach you some of the vocabulary you need.

        • Be patient and keep on practicing – depending on previous experience and time available, it may take a year or more to be completing puzzles regularly.

        Edited at 2009-07-23 08:01 pm (UTC)

        1. The only thing I would add to what others have said is that the Times is a very good puzzle, and you should stick with it, because you will get there. But part of its being good is that the setters are very clever at hiding the structure of the clues. If you look at less good crosswords, you will find that it is often much easier to see quickly how the clues work.

          So if you want to get some encouragement by solving a few more clues, try looking at a tabloid puzzle occasionally. The Sun has a pretty straightforward cryptic, with the advantage that you can click to get non-cryptic clues to the same answers if you are stuck. Moving up a bit, the Telegraph puzzle is probably the easiest of the broadsheets, or the Guardian early in the week – it gets a bit interesting later in the week. The Guardian crosswords are free, and the site also has the Observer Everyman, which is probably even more straightforward than the Telegraph.

        2. PB is too modest. Go to Memories on this site, click on Solving Tips, then on Bonus: How to Analyse Clues, where PB supplies a brilliantly concise guide for beginners.
          1. Although I’d encourage beginners to analyse clues, it seems that anon. is getting on OK with that part but struggling to make progress with the actual solving. If I’ve done a set of solving tips here, I’ve forgotten about it. There are some tips in my YAGCC pages, but I think Tim Moorey has most of them in his book.
            1. Thanks for all the comments. I’m going to spend a week or two and go through a puzzle or two a day and work with the solution and if I get really stuck this blog and and see if I can get my mind into the right way of thinking.

              There’s a lot of vocabulary that I need to learn. Also, I’ll try to do a Times Concise, every now and again too.

  24. About 20 minutes for me, not hard, but enjoyable. My hold ups were also with SPAR, didn’t know the ‘friend’ meaning, and CATHARSIS, since I wasn’t familiar with the CATHARS. I agree there are many fine surfaces today, especially COURTESY and COO, my COD choices. I am surprised, like vinyl, that UPSTATE as ‘away from the city’ is widespread; I thought it parochial to not just the US, but NY in particular, so I learned something today. CHELSEA is less friendly to the Americans, since you have to know (or guess) that it’s a London club of some kind. I guessed. First entry UKRAINE, last entry SIGHT-READ; due to my limited musical knowledge, that required a tour of the alphabet after all the checking letters were available. Regards to all.
    1. Chelsea in this clue refers to the soccer club, naaaahmean innit? Hopefully it’s not too obscure – Chelsea are a Premiership team which has for the past few years ranked alongside Manchester United in terms of national/international success. In much the same way as Macclesfield Town haven’t.
      1. I imagine anyone stuck solving this as I was – it was my last in and didn’t come to me until all the checkers were in place – would have considered the answer being a place-name common both to Manhattan and to London, leaving the “club” reference aside for a moment or two. This may well lead one to the correct answer even without knowledge of the football club as Chelsea in London is famous for a number of other things that may be well known throughout the world such as the flower show, pensioners, the Royal Hospital, buns, bridge, barracks etc.
  25. I had hell with “spar” until I came here: its other meaning isn’t listed in my old Collins dic, and I failed to check it in the OED. I spent fruitless time trying to do something with “as” and “friend”, and found out that “as” was a Roman coin, which was no help at all. I did happen to know “pay”, which is not so much “smearing the ship with tar” as caulking its seams with pitch or tar.

  26. I do respect that not all answers will be posted on this site (however, frustrating that may be to a dolt like me), but I’d love it if people would explain the answers they do put down a tad more thoroughly than this. I have no idea why ‘Dun’ relates to plague, and would enjoy finding out why.
    May I say, petebiddlecombe, that I truly enjoy reading the answers and descriptions you give, because they are so informative and educational. Being the severe clot I am, it is so nice to be educated and not come away from a times crossword thinking ‘well that’s another load of elitist rubbish I’ve no chance of getting involved in’.
    I guess I’m just making petebiddlecombe’s ego bigger here, but when it comes to finding out what an answer is and why, you are usually the most informative, coherent, fun and unassuming.
    Without wanting everyone to change their style of explanation too much, I feel a lot could be learnt from you as to how to make the Times crossword more accessible – I’m sure everyone would agree that sharing such wealth in knowledge is as much a virtue as a privilige.
    I’ll often have the right answer, but would like to know that I have and why, rather than just ‘cryptic definition’ written in.

    If someone could point the way to ‘Dun’ for plague, and why ‘UP+STATE’ works, I’d be grateful.

    BTW, the cutest clues I found today were for COO (CO2) and GANDHI (for the fact that the clueword was intrinsic to the clue – very Corsaire)

    As an aside, did anyone notice that the T2 polygon for Tuesday the 22nd July was very misleading in its presentation, and appeared to spell out ‘Butt Sex’?

    1. Up = “riding on horse”, state = “say”, definition = away from large cities.

      Dun was suggested earlier above as in plagued by debt collectors.

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