Times 24362 – Peaking for Snowdon

29 comments on “Times 24362 – Peaking for Snowdon”

1. what a difficult puzzle to blog. I think 22 down is Tails as it heds or tails a possible fall of the pound and the last letter or tail of bull and bear is an s. thats my theory anyway…off the scale for me in terms of solving time. Rather stumped by Albany for a long time and heresy and acne…Only got 12 across by getting Elijah at 20 down. Tricky puzzle but enjoyable!
2. My sympathies Uncle Yap.
   2 hours with aids and left with T?I?S.

   Can’t find a pound coin to see what’s on it.

   1. TAILS: you spin the coin and get …? and the animals have tails at the back. So double (partly cryptic?) definition.

      1. I was being flippant (geddit?).

         The coin flip had occurred to me, but wondered if some significance to pound as opposed to any other coin, and the plural beasts just seemed too weak. The search for a pound coin to see if there were animals other than lions and dragons was just to illustrate the desperate lengths solvers sometimes go to to justify an answer.

3. Yukky clue for HERESY. “Stick head” means S is the first letter, surely, followed by a three letter word meaning “down a bit”.
   1. “Stick’s head” or “head of stick” would be “s”, but not “stick head”, at least not in my understanding of the Times standing orders.
   2. No it’s “STICK (with the) HEAD DOWN A BIT” or “STICK (comma understood) HEAD DOWN A BIT”. Seems fair enough to me, if slightly elliptic.
      I rather enjoyed the clue to HERESY, and especially that for TAILS (my COD).
      Not keen on LEAVES as a def for ENDIVE, tho’ not sure why.
4. Well, I don’t like taking comfort from the travails of others, but my 35 min with one final assist doesn’t seem quite so awful now. The HERESY/ACNE cross resisted for some time, but it was the the salad (ENDIVE) which I had to bow to. Annoying, because it is not that difficult in hindsight. I am not too sure about TAILS. The flip of a coin, and the trailing end of various animals somehow seems unduly weak. Given the overall deviousness of the setter, I smell a rat (but not the tail end I hasten to add). COD? Oh what the hell: POPPY.
5. Yes this one had a sting in its tail. I merrily wrote in the answers in the NW and SE south of SLEEVE NUT but then came to grinding halt. I overcame mild resistance in the SW eventually but the NE was like a battle of attrition, gradually picking off the answers one by one extremely slowly. Nearly an hour all told I think which was disappointing as I had completed over half within 15 minutes. However I was at least pleased to get through it all without resorting to aids.
6. Well over an hour. Came well and truly to a standstill in the NE, where I eventually opted for the NUS and got ARCANUS and DASHEDEST, with Das & Des being the ladies in question. “I couldn’t believe I’d live to see the day when language such as d–n appeared in the Times” (signed Mrs Trellis, North Wales).

   Too many cracking clues to single out any one in particular. Well done, that setter.

7. At 19D its SNOW(E)D-ON where E=English

   What a strange puzzle. The bulk of it is really quite straightforward. Not as easy as yesterday but not hard. Then there are a handful of clues that really give problems. I found the NE corner OK but came unstuck in the SE where POPPY, ACNE and HERESY all held me up after pondering for ages how TAILS was correct. I think that a very good clue in deed. 30 minutes to solve.

8. I made steady progress through this. Fortunately, there was a lot I had seen before that helped with the more obscure stuff. I have never heard of a sleeve nut so, for a long time I was trying to fit Snug the joiner into the charade to go with Albany and Cinna, today’s other two Shakespeareans.

   There was a long pause at the end before I got tails, which I am sure is the right answer. The falling pound, bulls and bears are a rather clumsy attempt to give the clue a stock market surface.

9. 18:59 .. Solving late last night I was too tired to dwell on TAILS, even though it felt unsatisfactory. It still does, unless we’re collectively missing something. All very allusory. I’ll look forward to Mark’s forensic analysis, if he’s around today.

   Some really good stuff, otherwise. ALBANY, BUDGETARY, SNOWDON and TRICKED all worth a mention, but POPPY is a wee cracker.

10. But at least I understood all the answers, ending up with ‘acne’ and ‘tails’.

    There is nothing wrong with the ‘tails’ clue – the misdirection is to make you think an ‘l’ is dropped down in some word meaning ‘bears’, giving you ‘bulls’. The real answer is much simpler.

    ‘Endives’ is also tricky, because most solvers will think that two bridge players enter a word meaning ‘water’, giving some ‘leaves’

    Fortunately, the only knowledge was ‘Cinna’ and ‘Albany’, otherwise it might have been really tough.

11. Much the same experience as everyone else so far. Finished most of the puzzle within 20 mins over breakfast, but was then thwarted by the remaining three or four unsolved clues. Was able to complete only by abandoning puzzle and returning two hours later (not allowed, I fear, under Cheltenham rules). ACNE, HERESY and TAILS were the last to fall, in that order. I initially shared the dissatisfaction of some others with TAILS, but on reflection, and after reading vinyl’s defence above, I agree that it’s a clever clue, which tricks us into looking for something more complicated when the obvious and simplest answer is staring us in the face. I thought HERESY was very neat, and don’t understand why anonymous found it “yukky”. SNOWDON, TRICKED, POPPY and PEDOMETER were also excellent.
    1. I’m not the setter of this clue but speaking AS a setter I’d hazard a guess that it’s very rare for setters to attempt to mislead by suggesting wordplay that doesn’t exist. I’d be prepared to bet that this was simply an attempt at a double cryptic definition – and a very successful one too IMO. There is so much artful misdirection in a typical Times clue – here there is bags of it before one even considers the poosiblility of a wordplay bluff.
       1. Take your point. Perhaps vinyl and I were looking for complication where there wasn’t any. As you say there’s plenty of misdirection here anyway, and the financial market allusions of the surface reading were very nice.
12. A large batch of indirect or cryptic definitions made this a tricky puzzle. I was slow to get started and slow to finish. I didn’t time myself precisely but close to an hour. DRYAD was my first solve, but then I stupidly entered it in 16’s light, something that I’m doing rather regularly these days.
    However, it was a very satisfying puzzle to solve. I was grateful for 20, which I got early on, because that gave me the answer to 13, giving me useful letters in a hitherto rather empty area.
    I didn’t see anything wrong with the clue for HERESY, and HERE for “Let me show you” jumped at me immediately. The only clue I had reservations about was the one for TAILS (my penultimate entry). The wordplay sort of works, but only sort of, I feel; however the definition was inspired. The rest of the clues were mostly excellent in my view.
13. After just over an hour, I had all but 1a done, and resorted to aids for it. I saw ALBINO and couldn’t get past it. I’m also not very up on my world religions and had to look HAJ up to get PILGRIMAGE.

    The NW corner was my main stumbling block. 1d & 2d wouldn’t come to me. I couldn’t untangle the anagram at 10 for ages. Also 9 & 15a took ages as well.

14. Did this in two sessions last night, scribbling in a few answers at a time during a rehearsal and then a late-night session of head (but not acne) scratching to get the last few – ALBANY being the final entry. Rather enjoyed this, clever wordplay and deceptive surfaces.
15. 31:03 for me, a real struggle all the way through this morning. I blame tiredness though – I was up at 4:45, over an hour earlier than usual.

    I think the point about the TAILS clue is just that the surface reading is about the finance markets, where bears and bulls are also found.

16. 50 minutes and last in endive with aids. Blogging with granddaughter excuse for slow finish but really enjoyed the “aha” of 16a, 26a and 24d. Four lots of drink allusions noticed.
17. 12:30, with the last 2½ minutes on 9dn (ENDIVE) – I was one of vinyl1’s “most solvers”.  My only unknowns were SLEEVE NUT (19ac) and CINNA (7dn), but NEMO (3dn) and ALBANY (1ac) were unfamiliar and I’d forgotten ALB.

    I also found this a struggle, and not always in a good way.  Three definitions seem dubious: “rain down” for TEEM (12ac), “Painful” for GRIM (13ac), and “In private” for APART (1dn).  I don’t see why 4ac (ADVANCED) uses the past-tensed “held”.  The “about” in 28ac (RESIDENT) does unforgivable double duty, RESENT being a transitive verb.  Conversely, unless I’m missing something, “As” in 24dn (POPPY) is redundant; and the initial link word “In” in 10ac (ABDOMEN) is at odds with the link made in the definition itself.  From my point of view, it doesn’t help that several clues (e.g. 27ac “Lawman tucks into a chop and a drink” = ALCOPOP) place the setter on the “wrong” side of a grammatical divide that Roger Phillips describes here.

    Clues of the Day: 11ac (ARCANUM), 9dn (ENDIVE), 15dn (PEDOMETER), and 25dn (ACNE), with a nod to “binder” for CEMENT in 15ac (PLACEMENT).

    1. Your comments make me much happier about the difficulty I had explaining some of the wordplays to granddaughter – the past tense in 4a is only there to confuse, I think it offers a misdirection (held to be difficult). I found myself saying that setters can take a certain view of a word’s meaning that differs from the normal!
18. There is one major objection to 22d that I don’t think anyone has mentioned yet. If you google “Do bears have tails?” you get 336000 hits. The consensus seems to be that they have rudimentary tails rather like the coccyx in human beings. In which case “the back of bears – bulls too” is a somewhat tenuous definition of “tails”.
    1. I’m so glad you raised that – we had grave doubts about tails on bears, and teddies definitely do not have one…
19. I think the reason why this seemed so strange is that there are hardly any anagrams: 10ac and 21ac are complete anagrams, but I could find no others and none of the usual little bits of anagrams in the wordplay.
20. I amd still looking for something additional at 22 dn. If the pound would be expected to rise in a bear market, then that would be it, and the clue would be brilliant. Calling all financial gurus.
21. Solved on the day on the plane to New York, taking 14:30 – and that’s all I can remember. And thanks to Uncle Yap for the generous praise.

    Edited at 2009-11-12 03:14 pm (UTC)

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