Times 24402 – When the going gets tough…

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 55mins

An ecclesiastical garment, a church cranny, a book of the bible, a plant and the odd city or two; what more could one wish for on a Monday morning? Being unable to make a start in the NW, I moved to the SE and made fairly steady progress northwards, where my bête noire awaited. The NW took about as long as the rest of the puzzle combined. When the three letter clues aren’t gifts, you know the going will indeed be tough, or to fit in with the today’s horse theme, heavy. I spite of all that, I thoroughly enjoyed myself; the more so when completion seemed a possibility.

Across
1 RACE[COURSE]S, my last in. Even though “races” came to mind early, I went down too many false paths and gave myself a thorough haranguing when the penny dropped. The none too subtle hint at 8d should have alerted me but I fell for the setter’s double bluff.
7 DOG, a double definition with pike and full twist (see 12ac). Curtail can be broken down into cur and tail, a noun and a verb, both of which have the meaning dog.
9 GERMAN + DER for this plant. Der is German for “the”, hence the “appropriate article”.
10 ASSAI(l), meaning “very” in musical terminology, as in allegro assai.
11 HOLST + E.R. One of our favourite composers makes a guest appearance.
12 D[Russian]IVING = DRIVING or dynamic.
13 R for run + I + SKY = RISKY
15 IN + CLEMENT. I knew remembering “The fire is in”, meaning it’s burning as opposed to “out”, would come in handy one day. And we had Clement last week. There were many Pope Clements but the most famous/notorious is arguably this Medici one.
17 “sum wear” = SOMEWHERE or perhaps it’s here.
19 Catholic + O.T.T. for over the top + A = COTTA, an ecclesiastical garment in short surplice.
20 CARD + I[F for fine]F = CARDIFF. I wanted diamond to be “roc” (sounds like rock), ice and d, but it wasn’t.
22 (PLAYER)* around F for female = PALFREY, a horse that ambles. Not something I knew, but it sounded right.
24 I’ve deliberately left this one out, if that’s OK. Ask if you still haven’t got it.
25 (TAPAS INTO)* = ANTIPASTO, which would be very familiar to frequenters of Italian restaurants.
27 DID. M = D+D in Rome once. Makes more sense than my first attempt of AIM.
28 WORKAHOLISM, a cryptic definition.

Down
1 RIG, a double definition which held me up inordinately.
2 CARROLL. Lewis Carroll, the humourist in question, has two r’s and two l’s.
3 CHA[NT]RY, a small chapel for minor services, nowadays mostly within the church. I tried shy and wary for far too long, without success.
4 UNDER LINE. My favourite clue. Sleeper being a railway sleeper.
5 SH[R]ED for tear in the rent sense. Another one I couldn’t see for ages.
6 STAB[I]LE. The sculptor Alexander Calder produced not only his famous mobiles but also stabiles. Unlike last week, I plumped for “stable” straight away, possibly prompted by 8d.
7 Explanation on request
8 GOING + STEADY. I couldn’t find a youtube clip of Memo to My Son sung by Randy Newman himself (which features the line “when the going gets tough”), but here’s Randy with Linda Rondstadt(!) singing a “going steady” song, perhaps the finest ever written.
11 HAR[P + (CHOIRS)*]D = HARPSICHORD. “Having difficulty” = hard in the adjectival phrase sense. “Without” as a containment indicator is either loved or loathed.
14 S[A MARK]AND, being a very ancient and famous Asian city located on the silk route. I’m not sure how “setting” works in the wordplay. Does it belong with “inside” with “after” understood after “Novelist” (another of our favourites, George Sand, by the way) or is it “setting”=”fixing” the “a” in the novelist first, and then the “book” is inside that lot? Discuss.
16 I’ll leave this reasonably straightforward anagram for the forum to dissect.
18 WHIP + SAW for a narrow two-person crosscut saw, used by cross dressers and familiar to stock marketeers. Hands up those who put hacksaw, forgetting what they had learnt in metalwork classes; that a hacksaw only cuts on the forward stroke, unless you’ve put the blade in the wrong way round (a flogging offense in my metalwork class).
19 C[(PLAYS)*]O = CALYPSO
21 F[L for pound]AIR
23 KashmiRIS HIndu, a Vedic poet-sage well known in crossword circles both in the subcontinent, the UK and farther afield.
26 Ask the forum if you can’t see it.

34 comments on “Times 24402 – When the going gets tough…”

  1. Not sure why Samarkand should raise a question. It is, as you parse it, “novelist” (Sand) with “a book” (a mark) inside it. I can’t see the need, or logical possibility, of “after” being understood after “novelist”. Or perhaps the point is just too subtle for me. 51 very laboured minutes – a tough Monday
  2. 35 minutes for this one. I also got my first foothold in the SE corner. Having failed to solve three of the 3-letter words I spotted OHM at 26dn and worked my way up from there. The remainder of the lower half went in very easily apart from SAMARKAND and COTTA which put up a bit of resistance – at 14dn I thought I was looking for a novelist rather than a city, but eventually the penny dropped. This was all done in 10 minutes but after that I slowed right down and took ages to see 6 and 12, the 1s and 5 and 9.

    PALFREY as a horse suitable for a lady turned up on Eggheads last week so was fresh in my mind although I did know it from Chaucer anyway.

  3. as previous bloggers say a laboured start to the week. Some clues went in like a hot knife through butter but some were very tough. Am i alone in finding 1 down and 1 across and 6 down very tough. I hadnt heard of stabile as a sculpture but i have now
    well blogged K!
  4. Needed Koro for explanations for CAROL and the IN part of INCLEMENT, although I now recall an earlier discussion on this. Noted WORKAHOLISM as a CD with not much C.
    As mentioned last week I am need of a dictionary or two as appears to be this setter who has clearly eaten his. (Same could be said of Sunday’s). Didn’t know:-
    COTTA, PALFREY, ASSAI, STABILE, CHANTRY, GERMANDER but all guessed.
    Example of how to make hard work of it. COTTA – even though I thought of OTT immediately for some reason discarded it when I saw “Put over” as a possible indicator to reverse the “primary” letters of “the top on Catholic” ie. COTT, then A from “a priestly garment”. Imagine how stupid I felt when I read the blog.
    Not sure if best but most interesting clue of the day has to be DOG.
  5. The grammar of the cryptic reading here would then be “Novelist, setting a book inside (gives) city” or as I crudely attempted to explain “Novelist (after) setting a book inside (gives) city”. This seemed a little clunky to me, which generally means I haven’t understood something. If “setting” is interpreted as a containment indicator, then “novelist” can be it’s subject. I’m not sure where that leaves us, since “book inside” would still require a comma before it, but at least we would have a new candidate for a containment indicator, viz “setting”, in it’s own right. Now that I’ve said that, I agree that I’m not sure why I raised the issue.
  6. One word to check in dic. (18d) and some familiar old friends learnt from previous puzzles – rishi, stabile, palfrey, chantry, not to mention clement. Got 1d first, then anagrams and bottom half, really no trouble, wish I had timed it properly but inside 15m. Last in shred & dog, enjoyed the horse connections – rig is another.
  7. 7:48 – nicely done puzzle. If 25A is a new idea, it’s a very good one, and 7A’s double dog seemed new too. Also enjoyed 4D a lot though wonder how US solvers will get on with it – there, a railway sleeper is a “railroad tie”.
    1. This (displaced) US solver got it; it came to mind easily enough that I wonder if ‘sleeper’ isn’t also used in the US as well as ‘tie’. What I couldn’t figure out on the other hand was why the ‘in’ of ‘inclement’; I wasn’t about to go to my Shorter OED sv ‘in’, so I’m even more grateful than usual for the explanation.
  8. As for others, most of this went in quite quickly leaving DOG, STABILE and SAMARKAND to be solved using checking letters. My last in was DOG and I don’t recall seeing the “cur-tail” device being used before. About 25 minutes overall.

    I can’t see much cryptic about WORKAHOLISM which is rather disappointing for an interesting word.

  9. For the third time in four days I had trouble with the plant. Once again parsing technique can only get you so far. Germander, Germandie and Germandas all sound equally plausible for someone who has only recently discovered that cotoneaster is not pronounced cotton easter. Anyway, I got there in the end with my religious knowledge coming good for a change. I wore a cotta when I was an altar boy. I’m not sure if it is a priestly garment though. I got chantry because I used to live near a Chantry Road although I can’t remember a chapel there. Mark in Samarkand also came easily because, for crossword purposes, I have recently made an effort to remember the names of all the books in the bible. But I’m not sure if I am keen on the idea of learning gardening catalogues off by heart
  10. I found this tricky for Monday, as did some others, it seems. The bottom half was reasonably straightforward, though I wasn’t familiar with ‘workaholism’, only the adjective, ‘workaholic’. The NW corner gave me trouble, especially 1a and 9. Once I’d decided the foreigner was German not Greek I got 9, whereupon crossing entries fell into place. 40 minutes.

    I agree that 4 is a nice clue; in fact I thought the clues in general were a good set.

  11. 13.20 Yes Koro , my hand is up. hacksaw went in as soon as I saw the saw….then Caracas was the obvious capital. Took a minute or two to rectify this.
    However, last pair in were RACECOURSES and SHRED.
    A good challenge for a Monday. 1a, 4 and 20 were among the good clues.
    1. I have to confess we were of a mind on hacksaw. Having done some research (i.e. read wikipedia) in the interim, I now find that putting a hacksaw blade in backwards may actually be better; just like those very expensive Japanese woodworking saws you can buy that cut on the back stroke. All that body weight behind the forward push only serves to distort the hacksaw frame and thereby loosen the tension on the blade, apparently. So there’s another lie “Bulldog” Harrison told us, not that anyone would have been prepared to argue the point at the time. He reputedly had a collection of fingers that schoolboys had lost over the years ignoring his advice. In summary, a hacksaw can cut both ways and we are vindicated.
    1. Indisputably it is. The point was precisely how it got inside George Sand, which troubled me at the time.
  13. 16 minutes, thought I was in for a slog but put it turns out my guesses were confirmed. There was a lot in here that I couldn’t sort out from both halves… GERMANDER, CHANTRY, STABILE, PALFREY, WHIP SAW from wordplay, INCLEMENT from definition.
  14. Did anyone else but me have the website print out puzzle 24139 from last February? I logged in and printed off what I thought was today’s puzzle shortly after 7PM eastern US time, so shortly after 12AM GMT. I didn’t check the puzzle # on top, just started in on it a while later and soon came to the thought that it was all vaguely familiar. Then, I came to the clue for 20D in that grid: Lang’s orderly system (6). This is a repeat! I then realized the header for the puzzle said #24139 with the date Feb. 3 ’09. I returned to the Crossword Club log in and started over, and got today’s actual puzzle. So about 25 minutes for 24139, and another 35 minutes for the real one. I had to check on GERMANDER and PALFREY after the fact, but the rest I knew. I will now always check the # and date on the puzzle before beginning. Regards all.
    1. That’s bizarre. Fortunately, I logged in about 10 past 12AM GMT and got the correct one, otherwise today’s blog might have been a very strange one indeed. Thanks for the tip. There must be brief period around midnight when anything is possible. The Times Crossword Club meets Cinderella.
    2. Kevin, the site was down again for quite a long time today from about 9.15am UK time so perhaps they had gremlins.
      1. Yes, very bizarre. But no real harm done beyond some extra stretching of my brain, which can use the exercise.
  15. I’m clearly missing some subtle nuance re 7A. How is the blogger’s reference to a pike and 12A of relevance here?
    1. It is of precisely zero relevance. I was using a diving (12ac) metaphor to indicate added complexity to the standard double definition. The fish in question could do the dive better than the guy on youtube.
  16. Does anyone know why there are so many plant names, many of them obscure, in The Times crossword?

    As recently as Thursday we had CATTLEYA.

    Paul S.

    1. You’re not the only one to notice the plants. There are lots like shepherd’s purse and love-in-idleness with quaint names that lend themselves to clues, and there are plenty of less quaint names too. Whether they’re actually more common than composers or other common material is very hard to say, and they are one thing that doesn’t count as “arts & lit bias”.
  17. A rather laboured 33 min, particularly in the NE. Held up for ages with last in COTTA, and eventually had to go for assistance. Religious arcana makes me grumpy assai. Other than that, an enjoyable, if somewhat taxing workout to start the week.
    1. I am not a computer expert but speaking from experience you might be accessing the website by a URL stored in Favourites or by clicking on a URL that appears in drop down as you type a few letters.

      Because that one has a particular number at the end, I think you are getting the same page every time.

      If you remove the number and use URL in a suitable format, you are likely to reach the front page where you might probably have to select a particular crossword.

      This might obviate the need to use the Calendar to select the date.

      Whether this will save any clicks I am not sure.

      Rishi

  19. Thanks cgrishi, but I go through the log in page each day – the log in is stored as a favorite. After the password entry, I get to Today’s Puzzles, always on the current day. It was from that page yesterday that when I clicked ‘print’ for the cryptic that the old puzzle came out. It’s the only time something like this has occurred.

Comments are closed.