Times 24414 – Season’s Greetings from Augusta

30 comments on “Times 24414 – Season’s Greetings from Augusta”

1. Koro: Sounds like you’re enjoying yourself. I’d take the WA birdlife over the London cryptic any day. As you my well know …
   … Oh yeh … the puzzle. Quite a lot of fun here and a few stretches of the GK: York=EBOR, fish=TETRA, conference=INDABA. Had to check out all of these and was interested to find that the latter is a Zulu word. I wonder how many of these there are in English and whether we can expect any more.
   So slowed down by those to just under the half hour. Too many goodies here to single out a COD.
2. This took a while to get into but went smoothly once I got going.

   19dn was not a problem – having raised 3 children I think I know the Just-So Stories by heart, including this:

   “That made the Three very angry (with the world so new-and-all), and they held a palaver, and an indaba, and a punchayet, and a pow-wow on the edge of the Desert; and the Camel came chewing on milkweed most ‘scruciating idle, and laughed at them. Then he said ‘Humph!’ and went away again.”

   (How the Camel got his Hump)

   Kurihan

3. Just what I need to read surrounded by snow and ice on a freezing morning, Koro! But seriously, I hope you are enjoying yourself.

   I finished in 45 minutes with one cheat on the last clue. Having worked out IN?A?A at 19d I used a thesaurus to come up with a three-letter word meaning “expert” as an alternative to “ace” which wouldn’t fit. Also I forgot to go back and work out why 17ac is THE BORROWERS. I knew EBOR=York so I would probably have got there eventually.

   Other tricky ones were: RAT-TAT – I’ve met the stick before but couldn’t bring it to mind, EDWARD THOMAS – not sure I’ve ever heard of him, TETRA meaning “fish” may be new to me, and I didn’t know “comms” as a word in its own right. Before I had checking letters at 11 I thought I was looking for an actual Carthagian and the only name I could remember was Dido so I wasted a lot of time trying to fit her in somehow.

   Not the easiest start to the week.

4. Finished this (2 hours at least) with no errors but with loads of guesswork that turned out correct, so something of an empty feeling.
   Guesses at RAT-TAT, PUNIER, ISLAND, INDABA and the TETRA part of TETRAD.
   Oh! And with Mary Norton and Edward Thomas, bring back football team strips is what I say.
   1. The baseball howler clearly shows the setter is no sportsman. Children’s books and minor poets, however, probably come to mind without effort.
      1. I think “howler” is a bit harsh – this meaning is listed in dictionaries, both British and American.
         1. It may be listed in dictionaries, but I have listened to thousands of hours of baseball broadcasts, and when they say the ball has rolled all the way to the backstop, that means that the catcher failed to catch it.
         2. Just for once an unfamiliar sporting term did not delay me even for a moment.

            At school, as somebody who loathed sports (which unfortunately were compulsory) and was completely useless at all of them I was required to field at “longstop” during the cricket season, presumably on the assumption that I might do less harm there than anywhere else on the pitch. The wordplay and checking letters gave me “backstop” which I assumed is roughly the equivalent position in baseball. Whether or not my reasoning was correct it led me to right answer and COED and Chambers confirm the validity of the clue.

            1. Back in similar days, we called the wicket keeper the “backstop”. The longstop was required because in schoolyard games, gloves were unnecessary frippery and the backstop would frequently miss any ball which beat the bat, either through lack of skill or purposefully, because it hurt too much to catch it.
5. 8:14 – quite tricky for a supposedly easy Monday puzzle. Edward Thoas wasn’t exactly on the tip of my tongue, but from a look at the titles on wikipedia, I suspect he was in a book of WW1 poems which I dimly remember from school. The Borrowers were easier – possibly read voluntarily. Tetra=fish was news to me too, so this was last in after I’d persuaded all the crossing downs to fit.

   Something has happened to several of the links – if one fails, you can probably see the right link hidden inside stuff that looks like another link, in the URL text box.

   1. Sorry about those troublesome links. I think I’ve fixed them now, although there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with them. That’s what comes of attempting to write HTML script in Word.
   2. ‘tetra’ came easily, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen the fish, because it’s in the NY Times puzzle every other Thursday, or so it seems. There is no doubt a bunch of such: ‘etui’ comes to mind, as well as ‘aril’ and ‘anil’ and ‘ari’, although they seem finally to have thinned out, and ‘Ott’ and ‘Orr’…
6. I seem to have found this easier than most. I got through it very quickly with only a slight pause at the end while I dredged Indaba from my memory. There are a couple of dozen Zulu words in Chambers. Nearly all end in a vowel so they tend to be over-represented in crosswords, such as our old friend the impala.

   Edward Thomas is probably best remembered for just one poem, Adlestrop. It describes his train halting there on an idyllic summer day. The railway station is long gone but the villagers have done the next best thing and erected a plaque to Thomas on the bus shelter.

   I hope Koro never becomes a setter. I would hate to have to untangle the wordplay for all those birds.

7. …had to guess at ‘indaba’, using the cryptic to construct it, and was very pleased to find it correct.

   While dictionaries have ‘backstop’ as another word for catcher, in baseball the word ‘backstop’ more usually refers to a feature of the field: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backstop

   I did get stuck for a while because I put in ‘Rupert Brooke’ as a wild guess for the war poet, then had to erase him because of ‘trenchant’. I did think of ‘The Borrowers’ immediately, but hesitated to put it in because I never saw the cryptic.

8. I found this 35 minutes of quite hard work. Like others I had to derive a number of answers from wordplay and hope they were correct. “Ebor” for York is knowledge picked up from doing crosswords and the only way I solved THE (unknown to me) BORROWERS using checking letters (the B of ELBOW being very helpful). I also have never heard of the almost mandatory poet but the anagram was easy enough.

   The campaign for scientific names may be bearing fruit! Mephisto 2572 had the mathematician Maria Agnesi and now PASTEUR. Truly my cup runneth over.

9. Decidedly trickier than normal for Monday, but a good puzzle with some nice clues. My brain was certainly a bit addled, so several answers took longer than they should have and it was ages before I saw PASTEUR. To my shame I didn’t see 14 for some time, missing the anagrind in ‘Marshall’; as I initially saw ‘war’ as part of the definition I should have got it that way, since I’m familiar enough with EDWARD THOMAS as a war poet. INDABA was a guess, but it sounded vaguely familiar.
   I think about 40 minutes in all, but it may have been 45.

   Clues I particularly liked were 11a, 3d, 16d, 18d. Less keen on 22. In answer to koroareka’s question, I think the question mark does save it, but the clue seems driven by the desire to use ‘cock-a-hoop’, resulting a rather lame surface. I prefer rules to be stretched only when the surface justifies it.

10. I did all but Indaba in 31 minutes. A hard word to derive from the clue I thought; although dab is fair enough for expert, I guess. I went for Incata.

    I got 1 across wrong. I put in Tat-Tat, (thinking rat a tat tat) and deceived myself that tattan was cane material, when of course it’s rattan.

    I liked suitable for children to denote U. I haven’t seen this before.

    From last week’s puzzle, John Carew, the Aston Villa striker known to have visited a lap dancing club, scored the winner on Saturday at Villa Park. Villa now 4th in the league.

11. 12.10 Steady progress with a bit of hesitation before getting the right anagrind for 14. I like 20 although I didn’t see the wordplay until I came here.
    Last in were TETRAD (unknown fish) and INDABA (eventually trawled up from the furthest depths of my ever shallower memory).
    I am jealous of Koro , all I can see at the moment are some miserable looking pigeons and starlings through the steadily falling snow.
12. This was no bargain. I don’t have a time to post due to starting and stopping several times, but certainly far longer than usual. Unknowns today: dab and INDABA, EDWARD THOMAS (though not too difficult), THE BORROWERS and ‘ebor’, and Rum as an island. I did know of ‘tetra’ as a fish, though. Tough Monday fare, and the only one that caused amusement was TOP DRAWER, so that’s my COD. First entry: PUNIER, last: THE BORROWERS. Regards. Enjoy your trip, Koro.
    1. Hi Kevin. You’ll know Skye and Rum is nearby. Watch out for Eigg (obvious homophone), also part of the group, that crops up occasionally.
       1. Not to forget Muck!
       2. Thank you Jimbo. You now have me wondering what you call the inhabitants of Rum and Eigg. Eggnoggers?
          1. Don’t know about Eigg, but Rúm has no pub!
             Cue Slim Dusty….
13. About 30 mins, but quite a bit of that was staring at what I supposed must be INDABA at the end without believing it could be a word. I’m surprised that MS=motor ship (10A) is allowed as an abbreviation in the Times – it’s new to me; 10A MODEMS would however be my COD. I’m not going to moan about the snow here, as Kevin seems to have had an order of magnitude more of it in NY.

    Tom B.

    1. Throguh some meteorological quirk, at my home in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City, my snowfall total was: 0.0″. Feel free to complain, Tom.
14. Never knew about tetra being a fish but it had to be tetrad.
    I couldn’t figure out the Brown ale wordplay, kep thinking part of head was (c)rown and had to find how bale came in.
    Indaba was a new word.
    COD – The Borrowers, even though I couldn’t figure out the wordplay until I read this!
15. In 60 odd years of attention to baseball I’ve never heard the catcher referred to as a backstop.
16. I think I may have heard, in the dim past, the word ‘backstop’ used as a sarcastic reference to an inept catcher; but I think one would look in vain for any mention of, say, Posada, as the Yankees’ backstop. Finally a baseball reference, and this is what we get.
17. Egg on the face yet again: I checked with my brother, who unlike me lives in the US and is au courant with baseball matters (we’re both Giants fans, for our sins), and he informs me that he has frequently heard ‘backstop’ used to refer to the catcher, and without any hint of sarcasm.
18. In my experience, ‘backstop’ for catcher is seen in print more often than heard. Sportswriters often avoid too frequent repitition by using unofficial but understandable synonyms;’hurler’ for pitcher is a common baseball example. John

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