Times 24404

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 7:23

A fairly straightforward puzzle – minor delays for me from marking 20 in the grid as a (6,8) rather than (8,6) until the placing of ‘a sure’ fixed this, and with 1A and 9 as detailed below. Unusually for me, I think I understood every word play in full while solving.

Across
1 OUT OF = “no longer stocking”, PLACE = “plaice” = “fish that sounds” – I saw the first half but then thought of “water” and couldn’t make it fit, so wrote in OUT OF and confirmed it from the downs, leaving the rest for checker help
6 CH(e)AP
10 CUR = dog, RY. = railway = track
11 C’EST LA VIE – (castle I’ve)*
12 REIN = check, FOR, CEMENTS = mortars (verb or noun)
14 ARTISTE – hidden, with “A far too much for B” indicating that you only need some of A – not sure I’ve seen this one before, but if it’s a new idea I think we might see it again – hidden word indicators are in fairly short supply
15 W=wife,HITMAN=hired assassin – Walt is the poet
17 SURCOAT = (US actor)* – vaguely remembered after (a) “must be anag” and (b) “coat’s in there”
19 WA(V,ERE)R – V = sign of victory. Sharp-eyed Barry has found the bit of wordplay I didn’t really understand while solving. It appears that “joining” is being used as a container indicator – “(V,ERE) joining WAR(=battle)” gives WA(VERE)R. I think there are two ways of justifying this and it seems 50/50 as to which the setter intended. If you reading “joining” as “becoming a member of”, it’s a rather fiendish container indicator – join a club and you’re in that club. Alternatively, the phrase “join battle” could be seen as “enter into war”. Take your pick ….
20 TRE(A, SURE, ISLA)ND – the specific Scottish girl I remembered was Isla St Clair
23 ELI’S = priest’s, A, BET=stake, H(eretics) – I hope not too many wrote EliZabeth in the hope that there was a priest called Eliza. (Eli = priest) is one of the oldest crossword clichés going.
24 AUDI(t),O
25 HIGH – 2 defs – trip = high from drug culture
26 NEEDLES = provokes, SLY = drunken tinker – from Taming of the Shrew
 
Down
1 ORCA – the island is Minorca, without 30 seconds = half of “minute”
2 TOR(MEN)TOR
3 F,LYING=”telling story”,SCOTSMAN = newspaper
4 L(ACT=routine)OSE – (fail = lose) is maybe not as precise as we expect from the Times, but “milky sweetener” is pretty much a giveaway from lact- and -ose, even of you don’t know the word
5 CA=(Chartered) accountant,SH(C)OW – a “cash cow” is a business or investment providing a steady profit – possibly in contrast to riskier or newer opportunities
7 HAVE = obtain,N=new – you can recycle most of the comment from 5D with (have = obtain) and “form of shelter”
8 P(HE(A)S)ANTRY – a “Russian doll” double container
9 OLYMPIC VILLAGE – cryptic def with gold as in medals, and “shortly coming to the East End” relating to the 2012 Olympics. This was my last in and kept me busy for a while – having seen VILLAGE from the V, ?L?M?I? was much less helpful – I got it from C as a possible last letter after my likely candidates for a first letter (BCFGPS) took me nowhere
13 FALSE TEETH – another CD, also solved from checking letters with the second word probably seen first
16 (The one I think you can solve and explain unaided)
18 TER(m) = expression, RENÉ = “Descartes for one” – (terrene = earthly) is another easily invented word if you haven’t seen it before
19 W(EIGH(t))ED.
21 EYING – YIN = “a principle of the Chinese” in “e.g.” = say.
22 TONY = award, and transatlantic travellers might go “to N.Y.”

28 comments on “Times 24404”

  1. Terrene got from wordplay. Didn’t know the drunken tinker and couldn’t satisfy myself over WAVERER (joining as a container indicator?)
    Nice, precise puzzle. COD OLYMPIC VILLAGE.
    Thanks Peter for the TV programme tip. Enjoyed enormously. Setters look like normal people.
  2. 11:18 here, another fairly straightforward solve. I also had OUT OF on its own – in fact that was the first thing I wrote in and PLACE was the last, as LACTOSE was second last. I had ELIZABETH at first then changed the Z to S when I read the clue properly.
  3. 28 minutes today. I fancied this was quite easy so I expect we shall see some under 5 minute performances.

    Less than familiar words today were SURCOAT, though it has come up here before, TERRENE and PHEASANTRY but these were easily solved from the wordplay. As was TREASURE ISLAND which was just as well because of the lack of a proper definition, “work” being insufficient in my view. We had another example of this only last week.

  4. Another very straightforward solve in 20 minutes. No hold ups or queries. As Peter says all very understandable. I liked TREASURE ISLAND and pleased to see the setter at least has heard of Descartes.

    If you fancy trying your hand at something a little harder the Crossword Club has just posted the December competition puzzle which Jerry will be blogging in January. Why not give it a go?

  5. Easyish one again today, c15 mins, though none the worse for that.
    Re 19ac I am in the joining = “entering into” as in “joining battle” camp.
    I do see “work” as a sufficient indicator of a book, even though today it took me some time to spot it. I prefer to cut the setter what slack I can, it must be hard trying to be original every time..
    I second Jimbo’s recommendation of trying the Club Monthly competition (for those who are Crossword Club members); this month’s is a good one I think. ‘Nuff said..
    I note that Wikipedia describes Descartes as “Philosopher, mathematician..” which evidently makes him more generally acceptable than, say, Pascal who is a “Mathematician, physicist & philosopher..” – here must be where the boundary lies 🙂
    1. I think the boundary is just between the handy letters in René and the far less useful ones in Blaise. A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that Magritte is the only other reasonable possibility for René … Educational and mathematical he might be, but in xwd terms Descartes is a dead giveaway unless he implies something other than RENE.

      Similar views to Jerry on “work” for slightly different reasons – the fact that the combination of (8,6) and the ease of spotting an external TREND or internal ASURE makes the right “work” easy to find.

      1. Yes, there’s no doubt that it’s easy enough to solve from the wordplay but I find this sort of clue very unsatisfying and leaves me thinking “so what?”.

        I guess what I have in mind is that if the surface reading of the clue bore some relevance to the title, the subject matter of the book or its author and particulary if a touch of humour were involved then the loose defintion “work” would be fine, but as it is it falls rather flat in my opinion.

        But then I don’t write crossword clues and as Jerry has rightly pointed out it must be difficult to be original all the time, so maybe I’m expecting too much.

        1. The commonly stated objective of the surface meaning is to have as little as possible to do with the answer to the clue! This doesn’t always happen and there are plenty of clues that relate to the answer more than this intention implies, but this one’s “Edinburgh office staff” surface did a pretty good job of hiding the answer for a while (though my slip-up in marking the grid helped).
  6. 22 minutes for me – but one wrong. I’m afraid I went Z for S in Elisabeth.

    I knew Eli was a priest and I did not contrive a female priest called Eliza.

    But I was quite happy to accept that “zabet” is a stake – presuming this to be a special wooden stick used for the purpose of anchoring a tethered mountain goat in some exotic Eastern country.

    I don’t suppose anyone can confirm this definition of zabet?

    1. It seems that zabet is nothing but a surname and a Brazilian biscuit brand, but if you’ve been doing barred-grid puzzles you might just have misremembered zabeta – a “stated tariff” in Arabic. Exotic stuff like this as a wordplay component normally belongs to barred-grid puzzles and the Times club monthly special, not the Times daily puzzle.

      As an example, take ZAKAT – an payment made under Islamic law and used for charitable purposes. It’s in the Concise Oxford so fair game for a Times setter one day (and you read it here first), but if used, I’m sure we’d get something clearer than “payment”. (It’s not in Bradford (7th ed) under “payment”, so presumably hasn’t been used by any of the puzzles which underpin the book – I’m sure these include the Times.)

  7. A rather embarrassing 45 minutes. My existence today is obviously tenuous, because I clearly wasn’t thinking at 18d; it took me about 10 minutes going through the alphabet before TERRENE struck a chord and even then I wondered if we were supposed to know where Descartes was born. I put it down to those deceitful demons of his. Apart from that I got stuck on all the long ones except the gift at 12ac. I liked EYING but COD to the WAVERER.
  8. 17 minutes and never felt I was getting to grips with this, which must be a setter / solver wavelength thing. Thought OLYMPIC VILLAGE was excellent, and wasn’t anywhere near it until the V went in as the final checker, and the scales fell from my eyes.
  9. This was a solve of two halves for me. Top half dealt with in ten minutes, then double that time to complete the bottom half. I see I, too, have made a silly error, putting Z for S in ELIZABETH.
  10. An easyish one, as all have said. I briefly toyed with SHIT as the answer to 6ac, but, even if that had fitted the checking letters, I guess it might have been a tad too demotic even for the more “with-it” modern Times. I was reassured to see that Peter B and some others were held up by OLYMPIC VILLAGE, which was also my last in. On reflection, it was difficult to see why it took so long for the penny to drop, since the clue was almost a non-cryptic definitional phrase. Sometimes obviousness is the best disguise. An excellent clue. I spent an absurd amount of time trying to make ALEMBIC work as the first part of the solution, on the basis that this was the sort of kit that alchemists might have used in their attempts to convent base metals into gold! At 19ac I assumed, like Barry, that “joining” had to be the container indicator, but, also like him, was unsure quite how it was supposed to work. I think Peter B’s suggestion that “joining battle”, in the sense of “enter into war”, is much the most likely container indicator intended by the setter. Ingenious, but a bit of a stretch.
  11. A tad under 20 minutes with the wurzel (or today, wursel) corner falling last. I saw olympic village with just the l and m in place but needed more checkers for false teeth.

    Following Dave Perry’s observations yesterday I’m pretty sure I only know Descartes’ first name thanks to Monty Python.

    I’m not sure that “American” was needed in 25.

    No COD but an enjoyable puzzle.

  12. About 22 mins, delayed by 18D TERRENE. I thought 9D OLYMPIC VILLAGE was very good – too good for me for a while. I don’t think ‘pursues’ really works in 3D – I’m not sure ‘pursues’ used this way even works in across clues.

    Tom B.

  13. Excellent puzzle, I thought, with more clues marked than usual, 28 mins. Re some points raised above, I think ‘work’ is fine as a definition and would also allow eg a musical work as well as a written one to give variety.
    The ‘American’ in 25 was what gave me the answer (my last entry) but I’m not saying there are not high schools elsewhere.
    COD CASH COW – Also esp liked CEST LA VIE, ARTISTE, TREASURE ISLAND, FLYING SCOTSMAN, FALSE TEETH, WEIGHED. Among those some very seamless joins between definition and wordplay and good misleading context. Thanks to the setter.
  14. No problems today. This would have been a record time if I had been doing it from the comfort of my own armchair. Unfortunately I was in the quiet carriage on the Marylebone to Birmingham line so, naturally, the racket affected my concentration.
  15. Gave up after an hour (that’s all I allow myself) and guessed the last 3 as 20 treasure talent 18 turrene and 19 watched.
  16. About 35 minutes for me, but when done I felt it should have been half that. My mind got stuck on the ideas that 1A needed to be OUT OF WHACK, and that 19D needed to be WATCHED. This held up a whole lot before things fell into place. Last entry: LACTOSE. COD: WHITMAN, I liked that. I didn’t mind the ‘work’ for the book title, although I was held up on it for a while due to screwing up 19D. Regards everyone.
  17. Needed all the checking letters to get OLYMPIC VILLAGE, but the rest of it fell pretty readily. Was doing it while sneaking breaks in between proctoring an exam so didn’t get a time, but I suspect it was on my quicker side.

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