Times 24,321

54 comments on “Times 24,321”

1. 14 minutes this morning. (Just starting to get the hang of the online “play” thing — but still prefer to work on a printout.) So nothing too difficult here, especially with the two 13-letterers being quite simple. Toss up as to COD: WILLPOWER for a great surface; and GO THROUGH for the alternative split (GOTH ROUGH); the latter showing just how perplexing English pronunciation can be. Shades of GBS and his rater fishy claims aboutGHOTI perhaps?
2. 9:44 – minor trouble from initially putting ELDER BROTHERS, but then saw LUNATIONS from NATIONS, and put HER in the right place in 19D. Recognised PERM, which was Molotov for a while.
3. This was another of those puzzles in which I read through all the clues and nothing leapt out at me.

   My first word in after 6 minutes was SERENGETI at 12ac. After that I made steady progress and completed the top half before hitting another brick wall as I tried to get started in the lower part.

   My downfall there was guessing ELDER BROTHERS at 17ac which led to me becoming well and truly stuck in the SE corner until I realised something must be seriously wrong. I finished eventually in 55 minutes.

   Other guesses were DUTCH WIFE at 14ac, although I have a very vague memory of meeting this before, and LUNATIONS at 15dn. Last in was ANGERS at 20dn.

   “From” in 28ac suggested the answer would be EPHESIAN until I realised it wouldn’t fit the grid.

   I’m ashamed to admit that although I am of Russian descent I have never heard of PERM the city referred to in 5ac, so with the P in place I wasted time trying to make something out of Pinsk. But actually my knowledge of slightly less well-known Russian towns and cities owes more to Tom Lehrer’s lyric “Lobachevsky” than it does to my ancestry though unfortunately this didn’t help me today:

   I have a friend in Minsk,
   Who has a friend in Pinsk,
   Whose friend in Omsk
   Has friend in Tomsk
   With friend in Akmolinsk.
   His friend in Alexandrovsk
   Has friend in Petropavlovsk,
   Whose friend somehow
   Is solving now
   The problem in Dnepropetrovsk.

4. finished today without aids which was pleasing as i think this as difficult as i can do clean. interestingly ‘serengeti’ was clued as an anagram of green site in the guardian yesterday. i think i was lucky with dutch wife as i guessed it from ‘my old dutch’ which refers to wife, though it would appear prima facie to have nothing to do with it.
   1. Dutch wife: 抱き枕?
      Pardon my lingusitics.
      1. Apart from a possibly relevant memory of “Dutch studies” being a Japanese description of scientific subjects during a period of Japanese isolation, my Japanese isn’t up to scratch for this – any chance of a translation?
         1. Daki-makura – a pillow to hold
            1. Ta so much.
5. Richard,
   Really appreciate your “placeholder” tactic and the evenetual blog.
   Possible title: “A Hoik (Hawick) to the Boundary with Willowpower”?
   1. Thanks. The gap can leave some early comments looking a bit odd later in the day, as they explain or question things that are in the blog. And the timestamp on the blog post remains at the placeholder time. I suppose I could include a timestamp of my own in the blog?
6. I wondered if the crossing of ASPIRIN with the WILLOW of WILLPOWER was just coincidence or deliberate (aspirin – acetylsalicylic acid – derived originally from the bark of the willow tree (Salix)
7. About half an hour today, most of which was spent in the SE corner. Started smoothly enough, with HAWKSMOOR first to go in. I had ELDER BR?TH??? for ages, as I thought of both alternatives, but couldn’t get any of the checkers. Eventually got EPHESUS and worked up from there, finishing with a very tentative DUTCH WIFE, which I’d never heard of.
8. Finished, somehow, eventually, sans aids, but with no less than 8 guessed: PER(die)M,ANGERS,GILT(edged),LUNATIONS,TRUMP,DUTCH WIFE,REREDOS,GUNPOWDER PLOT. Something unsatisfying about this method.
   Head hurts but at least now all I have to do is solve MCTEXT’S riddles.

   I reiterate my plea for more contributions from beginners and/or fellow strugglers. It’s lonely at the bottom.

   1. Snookered myself in the SE having put in BROTHERS at 17ac and R(H)EIMS at 20dn.
      I’m finding that there are so many words I don’t know that making assumptions like PERM must be a city or that REREDOS must be a screen is becoming second nature, although I suspect this could lead to some serious errors.
      1. There will always be words you don’t know, so your assumptions about PERM and REREDOS are a good sign, as long as they’re based on sound wordplay. Irregular plurals (BRETHREN) are something to watch out for. The fact that Rheims can also be spelled Reims and hence have H = hot added without a meaning change is one of those unfortunate tempting red herrings that crop up from time to time. With a bit more experience 26A would probably have saved you from this, though he same experience would possibly tell you that they’d probably handle R(H)EIMS a bit differently.
9. I found this quite tricky. I only knew Hawksmoor, Perm and Gunpowder = tea from previous Times crosswords. I did not know Gilt = sow but got it from the definition. Likewise, I did not know Elder Brethren and Lunations but got them from the wordplay.
   I did know Dutch Wife but, I’m afraid, only in a much ruder meaning.

   I take Richard’s point about the link words coming first in 28 and 15D but I am not happy with it as they direct you to get the wordplay from the definition rather than the other way round.

   Beginners’ corner: I know lots of people read this blog who are even less experienced than me so let me pass on a tip that will be familiar to old hands. You can sometimes restart a stalled crossword by just entering one or two conjectural letters. Today I guessed that 3 must be a drug, so it was likely to end in IN. The checking N gave me Gunpowder Plot and, from then on, it was plain sailing.

10. I’m always slightly irked by Dutch, as in wife, because, it’s root is from Cockney rhyming slang, ‘DUCHESS OF FYFE’ so therefore no ‘T’
    1. However it is quite commonplace to add a letter when shortening something to make it scan better. My worst example of this is that Middlesbrough is always shortened to “Boro” which does not help in the slightest with spelling the full word correctly.
    2. if you look up ‘my old dutch’ in phrases.org.uk, you will find that although dutch is slang it is not originally rhyming slang.
11. after a brief respite, it is back to plodding time. Whilst there were some new words, nothing seemed too hard here and yet it still took the best part of 45 minutes slow graft. Did it a corner at a time, and whilst SERENGETI was the first in, did SW first, then NW, then NE and finally SE. Also had BROTHERS for a bit, hence a bit of a delay, and my last was LUNATIONS.

    rather nonplussed by this one.

12. Oh, dear. Another failure. 20 minutes left me with ANGERS unsolved. I even briefly considered the verb, but so pitiful is my French geography that it didn’t register as a place name. I blame my psychopathic French mistress whose lessons were a litany of Geneva violations. Her sneering “Bonjour, mes enfants” still turns up in my nightmares.

    Interesting instruction in the unchecked downs to “oil loom”, as well as the phonetic threat to “entoom u”, which is the sort of thing my French teacher came out with.

13. Catastrophe for me, falling into all aforementioned holes and then some, but chiefly in the SE and mostly due to the brothers, rather than the brethren. Also spent time trying to make EPHESIAN fit, without success. I can see how “in months (there is) etc” works but “from …” seems indefensible to me. Angered at not getting Angers, having seen it before. It was my last in. Dutch wife is relatively well known in Australia, through proximity with Indonesia.
14. ….and I had ‘elder brethren’, too.

    I was able to do most of the bottom fairly quickly, but in the top I had a hard time getting started. I finally saw ‘Hawksmoor’ and ‘Serengeti’, and that busted it open.

    But after 60 minutes, I still had 15, 20, and 24. I thought of ‘Angers’ after a while, but ‘lunations’ was really tough. My problem was that I thought that ‘countries’ = UN, i.e. the second and third letters, which makes nonsense of the rest of the cryptic. I finally saw that ‘countries’ = nations, but I could not explain the ‘lu’ until I read the blog. ‘Futon’ was not fun, either.

    Total time 80 minutes.

15. Repeat my comments from Monday, 15 minutes, but I didn’t feel like I was the target audience for this crossword, with a lot of semi-guesswork.

    Solved from wordplay alone: HOWICK, HAWKSMOOR, ELDER BRETHREN (my last in), DUTCH WIFE. Solved from definition without getting wordplay: WILLPOWER, GUNPOWDER PLOT.

16. Could not see IN USE to save my life. Like richardvg also did not think of ‘cast’ in past tense…..
17. 21 solved clues today. I have embarked on a crusade to learn how to solve the Times crossword. Thanks to all who post here for your explanations and guidance which is helping me to improve daily.

    I must admit to enjoying minor truiumphs when I realise I have quickly solved a clue that a regular poster has struggled with.

    1. If you solved 21 clues in this monster, you are a very promising beginner indeed!

       Welcome to the blog.

    2. Another to tell you that 21 of this lot is good work. No sin in enjoying those minor triumphs!
18. 31 minutes. Most enjoyable, and delighted to see my favoutite artist for the first time I can remember.

    Add me to the list of those who struggled with the SE corner – I didn’t actually write brothers in but was trying to proceed with 15 and 19 on the basis that it was correct.

    Gilt, Perm and the aforementioned elders all new to me, while Hawksmoor was one I didn’t know I knew.

    I was left slightly disappointed that hogwash and feng shui didn’t intersect given the close relationship between the two.

    1. Big Magritte fan here too – there was a Listener early this year that had a Magritte theme.
       1. George, I left you a comment on Jessica Delfino on the blog for 24319.
          1. Ta – I didn’t do Monday’s crossword until Tuesday, so I didn’t go through the comments. Hope it was worth the stagger.
    2. You’d be familiar with Tom Stoppard’s early work After Magritte then?
       1. No, but I’m familiar with Paul Simon’s work Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War
          1. Strange I’d never heard of that one; but it does come from a period I refer to as the lost years (mine not his). I read that Apple studios was named after him, Paul being a big fan, but you probably knew that. Why am I always the last to know these things?
19. I thought this a good puzzle with a lot of interesting clues and a number of answers that had to be derived from wordplay (like DUTCH WIFE for example). 35 minutes to solve.

    ANGERS was my last in, fooled by my own inability to visualise it as an English word. I had relatives who lived there and used to visit regularly for boules and other diversions and so pronounce it as the French do. Had a moment of anger when the centime dropped!

20. I see I wasn’t the only one to be held up by a wrong entry; but mine was EYEWASH for 1A. Very nearly fits, I think.

    Harry Shipley

    1. I had EYEWASH briefly, but then got HAWICK and happily changed it, as I wasn’t too happy with it. It would only have worked as a pretty poor clue if there had been some sort of homophone indicator in there for “I wash”.
21. Took me about 25 minutes to get all but LUNATIONS and DUTCH WIFE, then another 10 on those. Finally saw ‘nations’ and got 15D, but the other was a guess from checking letters alone. Again a puzzle where there was a lot I didn’t know, but the wordplay led to the answer. My knowledge shortcomings include: the aforementioned DUTCH WIFE and LUNATIONS, gilt=sow, HAWICK, gunpowder=a type of tea, Perm, willow=bat, HAWKSMOOR, although I faintly remember this last one appearing here before. But a lot of good stuff here too, including FENG SHUI, IN USE, FUTON. Regards.
22. AndrewK:

    Barry, I am a beginner (10 months) and have been struggling these last 2 weeks- many unfinished puzzles. I have found my niche doing AZEDs at the weekend instead! I hope to progress to completeing ‘The Times’ more often in the future, but I don’t think LUNATIONS and REREDOS even feature in my mental vocabulary!

    This puzzle was designed originally to keep a commuter amused for a 30-40minute journey. I wonder how many filled it in successfully today?

    One wonders whether the success and speed of the ‘Galacticos’ on this blog has spurred on the setters to make the puzzles so fiendishly difficult.

    I’m hoping regular AZED solving will eventually help with ‘The Times’. I believe Pete had success with AZED first.

    1. The setters and editor claim to set their puzzles without worrying about how fast the experts solve them. The 30-40 minute train journey and “reasonably well-educated/well-read commuter” are still supposed to be the target market, though I’m not sure the target is always hit. But levels of difficulty wobble up and down so much that its very hard to discern any deliberate policy.

       And yes, I did well with Azed before the Times, so it should help in the long run.

       Edited at 2009-09-03 04:48 pm (UTC)

    2. Interesting.
       Coming up to 6 months veteran, too short a time to be a good judge, and there is no evidence at all from the regulars on this site (if anything the opposite) but with the odd exception the puzzles from the last 2 weeks have been the most consistently difficult since I began, and I get the feeling of going backwards. No doubt paranoia but it did cross my mind that as the championship draws closer this might be designed to deter dilettantes from entering.
       I think Peter would recommend you keep going with the Times but if you are a commuter I don’t blame you for giving it a miss. Have visions of some suit on the 8:47 shouting out “Of course! Dutch Wife”.
       1. Apologies. That was me.
    3. I couldn’t agree more with AndrewK’s comment above. What a pity that an extensive reliance on the obscure and arcane is so often assumed to be an adequate substitute for the ability to write subtle and ingenious clues using more commonplace language. It is useful to compare today’s puzzle with 24312 from last week, where the “fiendishness” was generally down to the originality and ingenuity of the wordplay, rather than the setter’s ability to trawl through a dictionary searching for words that most English speakers are unlikely to have ever come across.

       SD

23. Andrew K

    Barry- I have also started looking at The Spectator puzzle. Another tough barred puzzle. Maybe thumbing through Chambers is more my thing than a daily puzzle, but I’ll persist with The Times as well, as I’ve paid for a year’s membership of the club!

24. Ouch. Not much change from an hour. Was heading for a quick solve, then crashed and burned in the Home Counties. Some nice clues, and some too damned clever by half! COD: GO THROUGH, for the sheer linguistic double take involved.
25. Just another word of encouragement to beginners: You are far from alone.

    I’ve been doing cryptics infrequently (i.e., badly, incompletely) for years. I picked up The Times today for the first time in ages and found it heavy going. I sat in a coffee shop and thought I was making some progress (because, in my head, I had half-solved a lot of the clues, knowing at least what some of the elements “in” the answers would be). Then I looked at it through fresh eyes and realised I only had 7 actual confirmed answers in the grid and nearly an hour had gone by!

    But they were in all parts of the grid, so when things picked up I filled in corners quite quickly. I had the same pattern of solving as everyone else, I think – the bottom half came much more slowly. And I ended up quitting when four answers short
    GO THROUGH… annoying, I just couldn’t see it;
    FUTON … ditto;
    ANGERS… never heard of the place;
    DUTCH WIFE… never heard of “Dutch” for wife, or of a “Dutch Wife”, so I was pretty screwed there.

    Never underestimate the power of having a good Collins dictionary at your side. I guessed, checked and confirmed a number of answers that way today (HAWKSMOOR, GILT [of Gilt edged], PERM, ELDER BRETHREN, LUNATIONS). And those after lots of checking whether or not there was an architect called MORKOSHAW, a word LUNATIOUS meaning “in months” etc etc etc

    😉

    Kieron

    1. I guess I’m the only one who solved the bottom, mostly, and then got stuck on the top.

       But I’ve noticed I do that a lot. Parts that are easier for UK solvers are sometimes tougher for Americans, and vice-versa.

26. Another good rule of thumb, I find, is to fixate, even if just for a small amount of time, on any wording or terminology that seems just a TEENSY bit awry.

    This was how I got IN USE. Who on earth says “trades unions” these days, rather than “trade unions”? I figured that that archaism had to have been used for a reason – i.e., that that “s” had to be there for a reason – and it was. The “hidden” answer isn’t there without it.

    Likewise 25A: First glance at the length of the clue told me that there was no way a 5-letter-word answer could come out of abbreviations and synonyms for that many words. “Unpalatable” was a particular alarm bell. It was a short step from there to realising how the clue worked.

    Oh, plus I put in a couple on the basis of half the clue + checking letters, but still don’t quite understand them (please help, experts):

    CLEAR: “Get net”?? Why? Is this some financial pun?

    TRUMP: In what way is it a “reliable type”? I only know it as a winning card. That seems a stretch?

    Kieron

    1. This is a bit of a stretch but the fourth definition of trump in Chambers is “a good trusty person (inf)”. Quite often in solving crosswords you find that the definition that you are looking for is the fourth definition. Unless you are doing the Mephisto when it may be the tenth definition.
       1. And clear is also easy to justify. It means “to make a profit of” (as in “we cleared £Xk last year”), which means to get net of costs.
    2. ‘Trump’ as a slang term for a reliable person is middle-class British talk from the 20s and 30s. Same era as ‘brick’, which had pretty much the same meaning.

       Fortunately, I was quite an Anglophile as a child and youth – I don’t have time to read that sort of thing nowadays.

    3. Further to Lenny’s comment, the required meaning of TRUMP is in both Collins and OCD (the official references for the Times cryptic) at number 3, so there’s really no stretch at all.

       My advice to beginners is not to get too fixated on solving times as it will spoil your enjoyment. I’m one of the slowest of the regulars here and nearly always the slowest among the bloggers, but what the hell if one’s having fun?

27. I’m feeling fairly smug about my 7:54, but this was very much my sort of puzzle, and one which I’d have done in a really fast time in my heyday.

    Also I’d played myself in by the time I did it (as usual I was doing the week’s puzzles in a batch), and since Friday’s puzzle took me 16:04 and Saturday’s a horrendous 21:59, you can see that stamina isn’t my strong point. However, I did Monday’s to Thursday’s in 31:16, with 8:07 for Wednesday’s the slowest time, so I might get away with it in a three-puzzle contest :-).

Comments are closed.