Times 24,420 Pall’s Balistic Missal in Salem

28 comments on “Times 24,420 Pall’s Balistic Missal in Salem”

1. I think sample has to be seen as a noun. A sample = a taster.

   Paul S.

   1. Thanks Paul.
2. Agree with comment above re 20dn. I thought this crossword moderately hard, it took me c25mins, but once again I printed it off after midnight last night and things look different at 00:30am 🙂

   Nice to see the return of the dodgy homophone (15ac)..

   This morning I can’t get into the crossword site (9.30am)

3. Steady, unaided solve, all understood but for R?C? at 1dn. Arrived at RACK through google search on “before the clouds”, a word unknown to me and I suspect others, and difficult to see how wordplay is much help – I surmised TRACK to be the course in question – but was looking to include the “e” from evident. Although gettable, I had similar doubts about the clue for YOBBERY which seems incomplete in the way that the similarly clued LITERAL isn’t.
   COD to TROUT. Now there’s a fishy phrase.
4. I started off at a rate of knots in the NW and then progressively slowed to a dead stop in the SE, for no reason that immediately suggests itself, apart from too many false preconceptions which I steadfastly refused to discard. MISSAL was outrageous, but endearingly so, and STARTLING a nice subversion of the dominant paradigm. COD to OPTIONAL EXTRA
5. I started well in the NE, or so I thought, but later found that CUT OUT was wrong at 5dn. Having realised my mistake and worked out the second word of 11ac as FATIGUE I then bunged in BATTLE as the first word and led myself up another blind alley in the NW. With all that eventually resolved I ventured into the virgin territory to the south and fought tooth and nail for every answer coming in finally at 1 hour dead. I was not overjoyed then to find the consensus so far appears to be that it is an easy puzzle.

   I cannot for the life of me see that 27 works and actually wondered if there is a misprint in the on-line clue.

   1. If I wasn’t doing my best to appear to be the even handed, kind to setters, blogger I just might be ranting about this clue. It’s a classic example of surface reading taking precedence over clue construction – but I can’t say that today, can I?
      1. I have no qualms about it if I read “initially” as referring to “theft” rather than to “year”. But I must wonder what the setter had in mind.
6. I thought this was a tad more challenging than Jimbo’s “straightforward” verdict, but admittedly only a tad. Some nice clues – PAUL, TROUT, JUMP JOCKEY (as opposed to the “word jockeys” that are the other type of competitor we see once a year at Cheltenham) and CUT OFF were among those that tickled my fancy.

   Am I right in thinking that the general objection to 27ac is that a strict parsing of the clue as constructed ought to yield the (nonsense) answer YROBBERY, since the substitution of Y for R is not explicitly indicated? If so, I can’t get too worked up over this. It seems to me that the substitution is adequately implied, and the clue doesn’t seem to have caused any of us huge difficulty. But perhaps I’m missing something.

   1. Yes, you’re on the right lines. We can argue about how well the substitution is indicated but agree that it causes no real problems. But when does pragmatism yield to principle – discuss!!
   2. I’m not sure what strict parsing of the clue leads to but I AM sure that it doesn’t lead to the correct answer. Isn’t that enough? Once we accept that answers are easily guessable despite incorrect parsing then we open the floodgates, so to speak. I expect better of the Times.

      I’m also not keen on 11ac where the answer could equally be COMBAT or BATTLE FATIGUE and only the checking letters make the difference. A good clue would make it one or the other.

   3. I seem to be on the nit-picking end of the solver spectrum, but I’m less willing than some to go along with the wording of the clue. Would ‘A year for theft initially, and …’ not have been possible? (Granted, that invites a Y/T exchange, but at least it’s a letter-for-letter exchange.)
      1. That would make more sense. I still wonder if the original was a misprint.
7. I was annoyed with myself for taking so long to get the Paul/consortia intersection. Criminal is such a commonplace anagram indicator these days that I should have spotted it sooner.

   I finished with 1D and my best guess was Race. I take it that the correct answer is rack(6) in Chambers. Even the barred crosswords would have indicated that we were looking for a Shakespearean word.

   I agree with the complaints about 27. The lack of a Y for R indication marks a new development in setter deviousness.

   1. I knew it was an anagram, but even so the tendency is to stick the ‘s’ at the end, and play with the remaining letters. Not so!
8. There is also a technical objection to uneasily, although, again, it can be defended on the grounds that it did not cause anyone much trouble. We are required to identify a Shakespeare quotation and then paraphrase it since the word required does not exist in the quotation.
9. My two guesses of ‘race’ and ‘Pangiton’ turned out to be wrong.

   A most curious puzzle, I filled in six answers in the first two minutes, and then got thoroughly stuck for the longest time. The bottom was a bit tricky, but it shouldn’t have been that hard, especially when I saw the two longest ones right away.

   The ‘Cheltenham competitor’ clue is brilliantly designed to make hard-core solvers think of the wrong thing. I did not in fact know what else they do at Cheltenham besides solve cryptics, so I had to work it out from the wordplay.

   Could someone further expound on how ‘line’ is achieved in 8 down? Of course, it’s not really necessary to understand that once you have ‘dotted’.

   1. “The ‘Cheltenham competitor’ clue is brilliantly designed to make hard-core solvers think of the wrong thing. I did not in fact know what else they do at Cheltenham besides solve cryptics, so I had to work it out from the wordplay.”

      Oh dear, this finally proves that I could never be a contender in the Times competition. I solved this clue sixth from last so I had given it a lot of thought yet the only Cheltenham reference that occurred to me was the race meeting and the Gold Cup race in particular. Crosswords never crossed my mind even for a moment!

      1. Just remembered I did also flirt briefly with Cheltenham Ladies College.

         But perhaps I should rephrase that…

   2. To drop someone a line is to write them a short letter.
      1. Arrh, how obvious!

         And here I was wasting my time removing the last letter from words meaning ‘tenant’.

10. I tried to make a meal out of this, but 18 minutes later the dust has settled and I agree with Jimbo’s answers.

    Had question marks next to PAUL and RACK. Needed the wordplay to get JUMP JOCKEY, LIMGOES, SALEABLE. Didn’t see the wordplay for DOTTED LINE

11. 25:50 .. so, not so easy for this solver. I have a blind spot with check=ch, which stopped me getting PATCHY, which stopped me getting CONSORTIA, which…. it took a while to sort out. I also spent quite a while on 27 thinking “that can’t be right”. Guess it is. Ish.

    One Across Rock… Australian soap actress belly-dancing burlesque troupe Rameses Treat.

    1. >Rameses Treat

       Ha ha. It took me about 18 hours to get that one. I just thought you couldn’t spell trout.

12. Not so easy here, about an hour. I also was handicapped by not knowing what happens at Cheltenham besides crossword competitions, and having not heard of PAIGNTON. On the latter I had ???G?T?N and was sure the answer had to be Brighton, and I took a long time to believe that the ‘example’ in 16D was a ‘pattern’, which to me is not very precise. I finally entered PATERNAL and guessed at the spelling of PAIGNTON from the anagram, and had to confirm it afterwards via google. No problem with the homophone from this side of the ocean. Regards all.
13. I thought ‘has become’ was rather clunky. Or does it have some significance that has passed me by?
    1. No, it’s clunky and surely points more towards “palled” than “pall”
14. Not easy for me either – 13:08 though this was evening rather than morning solving.

    I don’t mind 27, but was less happy with 24. For me “become boring” must be the indication for “pall”, which is perfectly OK, but this leaves “has” as a wordplay/def link. I can see this working in some cases like “has A and B” for a charade, but it doesn’t seem to fit for a sounds-like. Using good old apostrophe-s in “Letter writer’s become ….” seems to fix it by allowing “has” for the surface and “is” for the cryptic reading.

    Similarly tickled by Cheltenham in 12 but namesake Terry, who was a 13, ensured that I knew the other Cheltenham contest.

    1A: always Rameses for me, but probably down to whatever book I was reading when I first came across him.

    Edited at 2009-12-31 10:09 am (UTC)

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