Times 24361 Easy-Peasy

31 comments on “Times 24361 Easy-Peasy”

1. About 25 minutes here with some post-solve work on IDLEST (my Latin again) and GREETINGS CARD which I suspect will be regarded as brilliant or awful depending on one’s mood, but on the basis that it lends the puzzle some distinction it gets my COD. I also liked RADIO.
   I agree Jimbo that curtains seems redundant. Incidentally, I kind of used your “method” to parse GREETING CARD.
   1. Barry, have you been put on steroids over the summer, or are you just a poster boy for the rewards of practice?  I know this was a straightforward puzzle, but 25 minutes is a good time all the same, and you don’t seem to have batted an eyelid – what’s your PB these days?
      1. Welcome back Mark. My goodness! Is that the sound of the trembling knees of slipshod setters?

         Due to the increasingly generous NICE guidelines to those charged with the nation’s health, pharmacists scatter when they see me coming, but I don’t think steroids are yet part of the cocktail.

         I reckon I’ve done a couple of sub-30 mins in the 6 months of my doing these things but probably from the Sunday version, but as a contributor pointed out yesterday, speed will never be my thing. That I figured out GREETINGS CARD today, albeit post-solve, is progress and largely due to the generosity of people in this community.

         The last time I recall a similarly protracted discussion of Os was in the great Two Ronnies sketch (Got any Os?), so I see you’ve hit the ground running.

2. 5:55 – a straightforward puzzle – minor delay at top left where the double defs seemed to gather together. 14A put in from def. and checkers only – saw {“Hi’s” + heart, possibly = card} post-solve.

   On the redundant “curtains” at 10, think carefully about what you’re complaining about, and what clue you think is better. If definitions are to be reduced to a 100% bullet-proof minimum, that’s a step towards making this puzzle even easier than it is already, because the range of allowable definitions for each answer is small. No, rep is not always curtain material, but as the COED def mentions “curtains and upholstery”, extending the def from “material” to “material for curtains” seems perfectly reasonable as a way of introducing at least the possibility that the clue is something other than a double def, and two possible interpretations if it is a double def – {material = curtains in theatre} and {material for curtains = theatre}. (Never mind the meaninglessness of “material in theatre”).

3. 13 mins, last in 3D HEADPIECE. In 14A, ‘His’ is meant to be the plural of the greeting ‘Hi’. Not sure I’ve seen ‘oval’ for O before (22D).

   Tom B.

4. Is it just me, or is this one of the easiest Times Cryptics ever?

   Several clues, notably 17ac “Abbreviations” were barely cryptic at all. I didn’t dare write the word in until I had some crossing letters, thinking I must have missed something…

5. Yes, easy to solve it may be but I had to come here to understand 14A … and now I see the light, what a fantastic clue! Wish I had thought of it first.
6. With the house to myself and the whole day ahead of me I was looking forward to something challenging. Now I shall have to get on with the housework. This appears to me to be the easiest crossword in the year or so that I have been doing the Times puzzle. Greetings Card is clever, I had to come here to get the explanation, but one clue does not a crossword make.
7. 6:59, in a slightly distracting environment.  Inexplicable hold-ups at 5ac (LYRICAL), 3dn (HEADPIECE), and – worst of all given that I lived in Balham for a year – 2dn (TOOTING).  The only tricky thing was the clever plural “His” in 14ac (GREETINGS CARD), which I did manage to parse correctly while solving.

   I’m with those who find the “for curtains” in 10ac (REP) overspecific – as, presumably, is the setter, given the otherwise avoidable use of “perhaps” to qualify “deal” in 11ac (CHIPPY), “possibly” to qualify “heart” in 14ac, “for example” to qualify “Cav and Pag” in 17ac (ABBREVIATIONS), and “say” to qualify “temple” in 3dn.

   But that’s my only niggle – “oval” is surely a better description of the letter O than the more usual “circle” – and, since I’m giving crossword classes with a friend again this term, I’m grateful for a nice clear puzzle for beginners.

   For those who, like me, are ignorant of all things operatic, “Cav” and “Pag” are short for two operas, Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, often (and it seems famously) performed together.

   PS.  Sorry for disappearing.  I had a rotten summer, and am now trying to make more time for things I enjoy doing, so I should be back here more often.

   1. Welcome back Mark, good to hear from you again.

      An oval is an ellipse which might do for a numeric zero which is taller than it is wide but an alpha O is a perfect circle. It has no great effect on the puzzle but I fear it’s not really accurate. Have a look at your keyboard.

      1. Well, it is clearly an ellipse on my keyboard.. and in your post, too :-O
      2. Welcome back from me too, Mark. I was wondering where you’d got to. On things circular, in my experience it’s become a well-established cryptic convention that the letter O can be indicated (albeit not always strictly accurately) by “circle”, “zero” or “oval” (not to speak of “ring”).
         1. Thanks, guys.  On my keyboard the “O” is slightly but definitely oval – if I rotate it 90°, it looks squashed – and the same goes for the “O” in the newspaper version of the crossword.  But most of my own handwritten versions of “O” in the grid look like they’re meant to be circular.  (I’m not conscious of an intention either way.)  I guess this means there’s enough flexibility in the written language for either “oval” or “circle” to be used without fear of inaccuracy.

            Besides the ones that Mike mentions, you sometimes see “ball”.  I think this is OK on the grounds that “O” could be seen as a 2-D representation of a 3-D object.  I wonder whether anyone has ever tried using the more specific “football”, “tennis ball”, “squash ball”, etc. for this purpose.  (Rugby balls are definitely the wrong shape!)

            1. I think eggs and ducks have featured too.
      3. On my keyboard too it’s clearly an oval.
   2. Welcome back – just before I disappear for a while. I’ll look forward to reading some interesting comments about the puzzles when I catch up with them.
8. 20 mins for me, so easy-peasy, as Jimbo says, indeed one of the easiest and peasiest for quite a while. The definitions were fairly obvious even when the wordplay was quite complex – e.g. GREETINGS CARD at 12ac where, like others, I didn’t spot “his” as the plural of Hi! until coming here. I’d also forgotten the rhyming slang meaning of “half-inch”, and assumed it must be some weight-lifting term!

   I’d expect to see some parsec times from the speedsters for this puzzle, and am quite surprised that Peter B, though lightning fast by most standards, didn’t break the 5-min barrier.

9. 19 mins. Very straightforward with no hold-ups. I hadn’t come across REP being a material before, but it was easily deduced.

   Like several others, I didn’t understand 14 before coming here, but now that I do, I quite like it. I’m sure I’ve come across that disguised use of ‘his’ before, but it never occurred to me this time. I also liked the ‘not quite so long’ for ADIO in 6.

10. 8:16 .. Nice, lively easier puzzle. 14a GREETINGS CARD is, as others have said, terrific.

    The ‘o’ on my keyboard is a sort of fat rectangle with rounded corners, like a Thornton’s chocolate truffle.

11. 20 minutes with only hold-ups at 15dn in the SE and everywhere in the NW excpte for HIJACK and TO DO.

    I’ve no objection to having and easyish one occasionally. It helps boost the confidence.

12. I have not read Lord of the Rings for many years, but I recall a scene where Gandalf is trying to open a gate, and offers up every esoteric wizardly spell he knows, and still it won’t open. Eventually he just says ‘open’, and it opens.

    That is the kind of problem I have with clues like 17. I finally ended up stuck in the NW corner, where I understood ‘deal’ = wood, suspected ‘chippy’, but had never heard of either definition, so only penciled it in.

    OK, let’s have a hard one – I’m ready!

    1. The sign above the gate, in Elvish, is “Speak friend and enter”. Gandalf says the (Elvish) word “friend” to crack it.
13. 9 minutes, went through it without thinking of a lot of the wordplay (when I see a few cryptic definitions, that’s easier to do). Held up a little by misspelling JEOPARDISED (switched the O and A).
14. I also found it easy (20 minutes), though I didn’t understand 14 until coming here. I cannot find any dictionary confirmation that ‘Headpiece’ is the temple, so I’m puzzled by 3 also. Is it just an imagined definition on the setter’s part?
    The clues to 23 and 25 have appeared very recently (possibly in the Jumbo) so these struck me as a bit stale.
    1. Artful definitions like HEAD PIECE ( a piece of the head) are the stock in trade of the cryptic setter. In fact this particular one requires very little lateral thinking.
       1. I’m afraid I wouldn’t call that particular example artful at all.
          1. Artful or not, is it really that difficult to see “head piece” working the same way as “body part” (also absent from both COED and Collins, as it happens)?
15. I too was looking for more than was there at many clues, except at 14, which was a total mystery until I came here. The NW wasn’t so easy for me. I’d never met CHIPPY in the irritable sense (my Collins says it is Canadian); TOOTING wasn’t very familiar and HEADPIECE remains a bit of a mystery (I thought it was a cryptic reference to a barrister’s wig, which are frequently moth-eaten on tellie). COD has to be GREETINGS CARD.
16. Lovely – granddaughter by my side we did a blog-as-you-go from top to bottom having immediately homed in on along easy clue and sketched in abbreviations. She liked hijack and slender, I noted the DDs, it took about 20 minutes with only a slight pause to get a map to show where in Alabama Mobile is found.
17. A very leisurely 15 min. Wasted ages after confidently entering LAST SECOND in 5 dn. Otherwise a misplaced Monday crozzy. COD? possibly GREETING CARD, but I rather like the well observed HOTSHOT.
18. Hi’s = greetings I would never have seen and is brilliant. Never having heard of the very obscure REP, the curtains led me to enter RIP – a different kind of Curtains – not that I could particularly justify the theatrical connection.

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