Times 24288

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 16 minutes

Music: Schubert, Drei Klavierstucke, Wilhelm Kempff

Far from difficult, perhaps due to some clues and answers that have appeared recently in other Times puzzles. The editors should encourage the setters to come up with some new words, even in these straightforward Monday puzzles.

This was another one where I didn’t need to use some of the wordplay as I solved. In a really challenging puzzle, such as we were honoured with on Saturday in Times 24287, you’ll need every bit of every clue to finish the puzzle. But that is not the case in this sort of puzzle, which is more of a speed contest for most of the members of this blog.

Across
1 BELT AND BRACES. This is almost a straight defintion, so I was wondering if I wasn’t missing something as I put it in.
9 BILLBOARDS, a cryptic defintion that gave me a surprising amount of difficulty. I wanted to put in ‘road’ or ‘broad’ in there somewhere.
10 MACARONI, M(A CAR)(ON)I. This is a dandy who has recently paid a visit to at least one other Times puzzle.
11 SNAPPY, S(NAP)PY. Seeing ‘agent’ and the crossing ‘p’ may bring ‘rep’ to mind, but the ‘p’ is in the wrong place. ‘Nap’ = ‘down’ in the sense of fine feathers.
13 PRAIRIE DOG, with a very lame cryptic that I didn’t even notice as I did the puzzle.
16 ARNE, from [M}ARNE. Surely there are more composers than this that setters could use. What about Bax or Bridge, Lalo or Lully?
18 LINEBACKER, LINE + BACKER, ridiculously easy for me as an American, maybe less so for those in the UK.
22 LONG SHOT, where an outsider is a horse considered very unlikely to win. ‘Shot’ is used in its meaning of ‘photograph’, which is equivalent to ‘picture’.
24 THE THIN MAN, THE T(H)IN MAN. I just realized that Oz is The Wizard of Oz, another cryptic I didn’t see while solving to post a time.
27 RUN OUT OF STEAM, anagram of TO OUR FANS + TEAM. Oops, make that RAN OUT OF STEAM. Sorry about that, I should at least pay more attention to the tense of the literal.
 
Down
1 BEAR A GRUDGE, BEAR + anagram of A RUGGED. Another entered without the cryptic.
2 LIBRA, L + 1 BRA. Hint for beginners: if it’s not ‘bra’, it’s probably ‘tee’.
3 AMBROSIAL, A MB + anagram of SAILOR. A bit more challenging, but ‘A + MB’ is quite popular near the beginning of words
5 REBUS, RE + BUS, where ‘bus’ is slang for an old and well-loved car. Another word seen in the recent past.
6 CHARABANC, CH(ARAB)ANC[Y]. Entered with the vague idea that ‘H’ was the horse, but now I see it’s ‘Arab’ in the equine sense. It is the only 9-letter coach ending in ‘C’, so the solution was not in doubt.
7 SAD, S + AD, rather similar to the one we just had the other Saturday.
12 PANDEMONIUM, DEMON inside anagram of UP MAN.
14 ISLINGTON I + SLING + TON. A bit tricky, you might think ‘mixed’ is an anagram indicator, but it turns out that ‘mixed drink’ = ‘sling’, as in a Singapore Sling.
15 GO BANANAS, where the cryptic uses ‘crack’ in the sense of ‘attempt’ But most solvers won’t need the cryptic given the literal and (2,7).
19 NELUMBO, ON around B MULE, all backwards. Yes, it’s time to use the cryptic, unless you are an aquatic gardener. I am certainly not, but what else could it be?
23 SHADE, SH(AD)E. The most popular novel among setters; I wonder if any of them have ever read it?
26 HUR, HUR[T]. I was seeking a poetic foot for a while, but found the solution was much more straightforward.

39 comments on “Times 24288”

  1. 8:11 .. Yep, very straightforward stuff. I was rather hoping we’d seen the last of ‘bra’ = ‘supporter’ but alas not. I’ll be surprised if no one breaks 6 minutes for this, at the very least.
      1. I was making a point not about feminism but about tired old jokes, a point you have elegantly, if unwittingly, underlined. Thank you.
  2. 11 min, although I had to look up NELUMBO. I don’t think PB’s clock will tick for long!
  3. Sorry to say about 30 minutes for me, so I’m on the slower team. First in LIBRA, last NELUMBO, whatever that is. Agree it wasn’t too difficult, but I took some time working out all the wordplay and enjoyed it nonetheless. Tried GO BERSERK first, then GO BONKERS, before finding GO BANANAS after solving the crossing clues. No real COD for me, sorry. Not a complaint though, I enjoyed it. Regards all.
  4. 25 minutes, although I felt I dallied on some of the more obvious ones. As for She, it appears on Wiki’s dubious and surely incomplete list of best selling books of all time, which somewhat vindicates the setter, although I’m wondering why we never see The Very Hungry Caterpillar (apart from its length).
      1. It’s certainly a chestnut, but I think kororareka’s comment was addressing the Q if whether it’s a justifiable chestnut. I think it is, more so than composer=Arne.
    2. Ah, but that’s the wonderful think about Wikipedia.. all you have to do is find an authoritative statement of how many it has sold, and then you can add it yourself 😉
  5. 12 mins for me, almost a PB. I wasn’t entirely sure about NELUMBO and it took a moment to get SNAPPY, my last one in.
  6. Think Vinyl1 means 24287 which I only finished after a bit of “surfing”.

    Yes, I seem to have an hour on my hands this morning but I do think that newcomers need a bit of encouragement after the last couple of weeks.

    Back to Mephisto.

  7. 20 minutes with the last 5 spent on 18ac which I never heard of. Once I spotted BACKER it was just a matter of working through the options with L?N? before eventually coming up with something that fitted the wordplay and sounded plausible. I also didn’t know NELUMBO but I guessed it from the wordplay.

    When I realised I might be in for a PB I didn’t hang around to work out each clue fully but I enjoyed doing this later so I wouldn’t knock the puzzle.

  8. 4:51 with one mistake – a quick time was on when all but 6 of the top-half downs followed an immediate 1A – I shouldn’t have dismissed CHANC(y) as “impossible” quite so quickly. Bottom half wasn’t quite as fast – nelumbo shade and pandemonium took a couple of looks.

    As identified by McText’s comment below, I had a careless wrong answer at 27. One of the hazards of hasty solving which I usually manage to avoid.

    A very easy Times puzzle but the surfaces are good, “headless” and “losing foot” make a nice pair in the last two downs, and I+SLING+TON wasn’t the corny “I throw my weight around”.

    Back to Mephisto indeed – a good chewy one when I looked late last night.

    Edited at 2009-07-27 10:19 am (UTC)

  9. Agree this was easy, no real hold ups and a fast (for me ) time of under 15 mins. I agree that newcomers need to be encouraged, so I’m happy with the odd very easy one. bc
  10. Peter: 4:51 !! My God !!
    I came home late and needed to finish by 6:00pm to get the repeat of last night’s Tour. So I’m guessing 17 mins. As ever, I dislike “cryptic defs” which simply aren’t cryptic and barely acceptable if they’re very clever and have an &lit-ish flavour about them. So 9ac rated zero for me.

    One question: in 27, is the lit “became weary” or just “weary”? Given the answer, I’d have expected “become weary” in the clue.

      1. If read as a pure cryptic def., yes – but there’s also AU = “to the Parisian”, about=surrounding DIE=depart.

        So although it’s easy to solve, there’s more to it.

        1. Thanks Peter. I didn’t see that at all. If I had the avatar picture, I’d include the famous dunce’s hat too! Maybe I should work on it.

    2. The definition in 27 is “became weary”. vinyl1 and I have both made the same careless mistake and put RUN OUT OF STEAM instead of the correct RAN OUT OF STEAM, for which the clue makes perfect sense.

      Edited at 2009-07-27 10:20 am (UTC)

  12. Was just about to celebrate my own PB of approx 8 1/2 mins when the whole subplot of RUN/RAN appeared. It is so easy when trying to be quick to not check anagrams or to miss subtle tense differences, so I am not surprised that this got a few people.

    Quick question – in competitions, do mistakes count for a certain time penalty like in show jumping, or is it quite simply that if you are not right, you are out? The former seems midly more fair, esp in a scenario such as the one today, but then again, the point is to complete correctly.

    1. In the Times Championship, you are not eliminated if you make a mistake, but you are ranked behind all the people who completed the puzzles inside the time limit without a mistake, regardless of relative speed – the time taken is only used to rank people with an equal number of mistakes. It’s a harsh system but a fair one.

      In the current format of the competition, used for the last three years, no-one has yet qualified for the final with any mistakes in the preliminary round, and at least half the contestants in the Grand Final (24 people) have been all-correct each time. In the past, there were occasional qualifiers for the final with a single mistake in a really tough regional final – maybe one regional final in every ten.

      1. Thanks Peter. I wondered what the rules were in the event of a mistake. Somewhere under 20 minutes for me with the exception of NELUMBO. Then, seeing the reference here to the tense in 27 across, it dawned on me that while solving it flashed by that there was only one ‘U’ in the anagram but that I had ignored the thought.

        There’s a piece called Crosswords and Consciousness some may find interesting.

        http://www.uncarved.org/OOO/xwords.html

  13. 18mins, a personal best I think. At least for a solve without mistakes. It makes a refreshing change for me to post a quicker time than some of the regular contributors like kororareka & jackkt.

    Most went in on the first attempt. Probably only about 7 or 8 that I had to go back to. The last 2 or 3 minutes were spent trying to come up with 13 having convinced myself that it was going to begin with an A.

  14. A very gentle start to the week, coming in at a shade over 5 minutes (online I hasten to add – which doubtless saves a minute or two).

    The three opening answers, each with two Bs, made me wonder if something unusual was going on but turned out to be just a quirk of the fill. After solving I even looked at the W/E columns for a message – nada, unless the arrangement “by the armpits” means anything.

    No clues really stood out, but overall a good workout, a mix of give-aways and a few testers.

  15. A personal best at 14 minutes (despite a brief hold-up because I entered GO BESERK initially for 15), therefore very easy indeed. Didn’t understand 27 because my copy had “To cur fans…”. Perhaps my printer’s running short of ink, but O’s elsewhere are fine.

    I must say, I’m getting pretty tired of ‘novel’ for SHE. How many solvers have read it, let alone the setters? I suspect rather fewer than those who occasionally listen to Thomas Arne.

  16. Having got 1ac and all the 7 downs depending from it instantly, I thought this was going to be a three or four minute solve, but the bottom half did take somewhat longer. Still only a 1-coffee crossword though.

    However, I am not complaining. We do need some easy ones from time to time to encourage the newbies, and to let us oldies pretend we are PB for a day. And I tend to look on the likes of blue=sad and bra=supporter as old friends, as much as cliches. 🙂

  17. A 15 minute jog round the block with lots of old friends making their regular appearance and no real originality to brighten the day. But, as others have said, we must have these puzzles to encourage new solvers so no complaints.

    Agreed Mephisto is a bit tougher this week. I wonder who’s doing the blog…..?

  18. about 30 mins, no mistakes and no aids, probably about as quick as i get at the moment. makes up for saturday where i am still struggling to finish. only nelumbo was new to me having come across macaroni somewhere quite recently.
  19. Pretty much everything worth saying about this puzzle has already been said. 20 mins for me, so very easy, as some of the superfast times recorded by the premier league performers confirm. Some clues – e.g. 1ac – only marginally cryptic, if at all. The one or two bits of obscure GK required – such as NELUMBO – were eminently guessable from the wordplay. MACARONI seems to be appearing almost every week. Still, a relief to have a gentle Monday work-out after what, I thought (and some others seem to agree), was a bit of a mini-stinker on Saturday. I completed it in fits and starts over a morning and afternoon at Lord’s watching Hampshire thrash Sussex in the Friends Provident Cricket Final. At one point Sussex wickets were falling a lot faster than I was solving clues.
  20. I thought this was just about the easiest Times crossword I had ever come across, and completed it in about 15 minutes. How amazing to find that my “betters” hadn’t walked through this in a matter of a few minutes. It just goes to show the difference, if you are in tune with the setter. Regrettably, for me, this happy state of affairs is all too rare. I shall have to remember this momentous achievement on the frequent occasions when I grovel for hours and still end up with 2 or 3 clues to complete.
  21. Didn’t time myself, but pretty straightforward, except NELUMBO which I got from wordplay. Relieved to have not fallen into the RUN OUT OF STEAM trap, did a double take when I saw it given that way in the blog.
  22. Done during 12m journey (1a, 1d, rapid scatter-gun & final nelumbo of which I must find picture) with accompanying conversation with grandchildren – who will be why I shall not join you again for some time. Thank you for all the fun and support, I will be back after our September holiday, pencil sharpened but wits addled by, I hope, sun.
    1. Before you go

      http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://toptropicals.com/pics/garden/m1/raznozw/nelumbo_MrsPerry3319.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.toptropicals.com/cgi-bin/garden_catalog/cat.cgi%3Fnumber%3D5%26find%3DNelumbonaceae%26imagesonly%3D1&usg=__LyW2ZO5nFbOm4A6Q4n8kxJfCzjk=&h=480&w=480&sz=33&hl=en&start=1&sig2=InOVikfmthSTsEcoP2kyYg&um=1&tbnid=oPNu894ykTaABM:&tbnh=129&tbnw=129&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dnelumbo%26hl%3Den%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:*%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1&ei=H_9tSu25LpaytgP8s7XKDg

  23. Some of us need these occasionally! Gives beginners a chance!
    Still, completed my 3rd AZED today. I seem to find AZED’s puzzles more amenable than The Times’s. Is this normal?
  24. 4:36, equalling my PB.  Had all but two in about 3:50, but took (comparatively) ages to get PRAIRIE DOG, and had to prise the unknown NELUMBO from the wordplay.

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