Times 24457

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 7:24

I’m away for most of the day so this is posted early and I won’t see comments for about 18 hours. Wondering what Jimbo will think of this one, as the religion and science material seems to be equal – two answers and one wordplay element each.

Across
1 P(REP=cloth)ares
9 UNDERARM – CD and plain def
10 ACROSTIC = Socratic*
11 CAR = R.A.C. rev., C = maximum speed (speed of light), RASH
12 SAINT-SAENS = (a nastiness)* – I suspect the setter wanted to include a reference to his Danse Macabre.
14 (g)ROSS – ROSS is another thane, in the Scottish play
15 B,LADDER=run
17 MIS(FIT=attack)S
21 C,OIL
22 SEXAGESIMA – reversal of (deep breath) AMIS = Kingsley, e.g. = say, AXES
23 A,D(V)ANCE,(organised)D – we’ve had “Paul Jones” as a dance fairly recently I think
25 APPLET,ON – Appleton is a physicist with an atmospheric layer named after him – remembered courtesy of a University Challenge question the other night.
26 A,BER(DEE)N – it’s perhaps a bit unfortunate that one R. Dee is the one that Aberdeen appears to be named after (Aber = “mouth of” in Scots and Welsh place names) – though there’s a Don there too, so maybe the name “Aberdeen” comes from a mixture of the two.
27 T,ROTTING
 
Down
2 ROCK(F)ALL – Rockall is a shipping forecast area as well as a lump of rock claimed by the UK.
3 PROF,ANED=dean*
4 (w)RITE
5 SUCCEED = “suck,seed”
6 A,DD=Doctor (of Divinity),(p)RESSING
7 M(A,CAR,ON)1
8 E,MPHASIS=mishaps*
13 SEER,SUCKER – this cloth
15 BAC(k),CARAT
18 F.(I,SHIES)T.
19 TOMB,ROW,N – here’s the literary reference
20 OXIDANT = “occident”

41 comments on “Times 24457”

  1. I think 7.24 is a storming time for this one, which probably took me twice as long (the SEXAGESIMA/OXIDANT intersection delaying me the most). RUTH came to mind for 4d as the supposed ‘book for service’ before rethinking the parsing.
  2. Yes, an amazing time Peter. Especially considering I spent a full 30 minutes longer! This included, though, several trips to the kitchen to make coffee while contemplating 14ac. I suppose a capital-T would have given it away, but the lower-case set me off trying to think of a general synonym: which is made more difficult by the English and Scots meanings of “thane”. Don’t expect me at Cheltenham any time soon.

    Liked 15ac best of all since it reminded me of my favourite cartoon, from Punch. In the foreground behind a hedge are three horrific-looking warthogs. A way down the road is a happy little jester skipping towards them with a balloon on a stick. Head warthog: “Here comes the bastard now and, what’s more, he’s got our Mildred’s bladder”.

  3. 20 min here, so the third easy one in a row. Physics and chemistry to offset the religion, but hasn’t Appleton had quite a few outings in recent year, considering that he is hardly the first (or even twenty first) physicist to come to mind. Had most trouble with the four western eight letter downs for some reason, and these were last in (2 dn a toughie for colonials). COD has to be (reluctantly) SEXAGESIMA.
  4. My lack of Shakespearean knowledge did for me – my failure to get ROSS led to KALAHARI being my best stab for 7dn, for no particualar reason than that it fitted. A shade under an hour.
  5. About 20 minutes here, last in were ROCKFALL and the crossing SAINT-SAENS, revealing my woeful lack of composer knowledge. The Irish band called the Wolfe Tones, who appear over here every year around St. Patrick’s Day, have a song demanding that the Brits keep their hands off Rockall, which was the only way I had heard of the apparently dismal rock in the ocean, and also makes apparent the other claimant to the place. I’ll nominate for COD the only one that made me smile: SUCCEED. Regards.
  6. A full 50 minutes for me, which is doubly disappointing because I had it all but finished after 20. But those tricky last few clues, which hold up the speedsters by a minute or so, can keep me occupied for what seems like hours. And on occasions it is hours.

    Got there in the end with a lucky guess at ROSS (must remember that use of executed – fools me every time) and after suffering a complete mental breakdown over A DIM VIEW, my last in. Can’t believe how long I looked at V_E_ before the penny dropped. I shall spend the afternoon standing in the corner.

  7. 9:53 .. my first sub-ten in quite a while, and it felt slow, so this seems to be one of those puzzles that produces every reaction from ‘easy’ to ‘hard’ and everything in between. I noticed the upping of the science quotient which is almost becoming a trend – Jimbocracy at work.
  8. About 40 minutes (with a raging sinus headache) the last 15 trying to figure
    out ROSS and COIL and my brain still can’t connect. Someone please enlighten me.
    1. Having looked carefully above, I now see C-OIL and ROSS “the other thane” in
      The Scottish Play.
  9. I think that peter’s time is excellent – well done. this took me 70 minutes but i was delighted to finish! Oxidant was a clever clue but the reversal of Amis eg axes was superb! COD for me goes to Tom Brown…

    when i looked back at this prepares or my not knowing that rep was a material held me back on NW. individually the clues are good but all told its s super puzzle.

    congrats to the setter and to PB

    H

  10. Pretty straightforward. Didn’t know the other thane but it had to be (G)ROSS. Never heard of SEXAGESIMA which took some mental gymnastics at the end once checkers in (although oddly, sussed the AMIS reversal as soon as TOM BROWN went in)
  11. All but five clues solved in 27 minutes but the last few 7,14,16,21 and 25 put up some resistance. Four of them came within the next 7 minutes and then I bunged in AMPLERON (without much hope) at 25 rather than waste any more time trying to think of a scientist I probably never heard of. As it happens I do know the name and should have got it by thinking of APPLET instead of hoping there might be a type of computer program called a SAMPLER here shortened to AMPLER.
  12. About 40 minutes, despite penning suckerseer and Tom Jones (well he must have gone to school at some point). Strange reading about seersucker as a fabric to wear; I’ve only ever seen it in tablecloths, where its irregular weave makes it difficult to set anything down on. Thanks to Peter for providing that list of Scottish islands a week or two ago. Luckily I started memorising from the bottom up in order of size, so Rockall came swiftly to mind. Much to like about this but COD to SEXAGESIMA for its unlikeliness (particularly when suckerseer briefly made it look like it began E?X)
  13. 15 minutes for another largely straightforward puzzle (if I say stroll in the park I’ll have that society after me)

    Darwin would have approved of the science/religion mixture and I’m just pleased to see the scientific quota slowly rising. I’d heard of the Sunday before (from crosswords) but needed the wordplay and checkers to sort out the spelling. I also got APPLETON from the recent Uni Challenge although the wordplay is easy.

    I think 8D is a very poor clue.

  14. The first clue to catch my eye was 10ac, and for a moment I thought it looked rather promising – then the answer and the truth dawned. This was another rather plain offering – it’s odd that this week is (so far) so different from last.

    If I were due to blog on Friday I’d be starting to get worried…

  15. Nothing special about this but it was made more difficult by the irritating grid with the eight double unchecked answers. Like Vinyl, I was held up getting Appleton because I had difficulty accepting Oxidant as a homophone of Occident and thought that there must be a variant oxident spelling. I was stuck on 7 and 26 but I went away and came back again and got Aberdeen and Macaroni without even looking at the clues.

    I used to complain that macaroni is not a course it is a dish. Pasta is a course. I suppose I have seen it so many times that I have got used to it. Chambers and Collins back me up on this but, unfortunately, COED muddies the waters by defining a course as a dish.

    1. Replying after a late review of comments on this one: one or two folk at the Big Dave Telegraph blog grumble about double unches too. For the grids used at the Times and most of those used at the DT, I don’t understand the complaint. The requirement for half the letters to be checked is still observed, and the Times has a rule that the double unch cannot be at the beginning/end of the word. The effect is that all the words with double unches in Times grids have both the first and last letters checked. For me, this more than compensates for any difficulty added by the double unch.
  16. 52 mins minus 25, which came to me quickly after a break of half an hour or so. Didn’t do too badly for most of it but slowed to a crawl in the Home Counties and eventually to a stop as I hung on hoping to finish in one go.

    12 was gorgeous I thought but COD to 14 for me which was LOL funny.

    Regards to all.

  17. A slow time, 40 minutes. I found the bottom half far harder than the top half, which I finished fairly quickly. Delays were caused by trying to re-arrange S+PROGRAM into a physicist, 22, which is only very faintly familiar, and wondering what a Paul Jones was. Geography being my weakest subject, I went through GENEVA and BASLE before hitting on BERN for 26. By contrast, I know Macbeth so well that any reference to it comes very quickly. After I dismissed (0)BESE (G)ROSS was the next thought.
  18. Agreed – another straightforward one. That said, it still too me not much less than an hour (for no very good reason). Not so much a stroll in the park, Jimbo, as a steady uphill plod against a stiffish breeze. I stand in awe of bothe Peter B’s 7.24 mins and Sotira’s sub-10 mins efforts. I’m with Jimbo in finding the wordplay in 8 dn (EMPHASIS)feeble, and with Lennyco in not liking the MACARONI/course equation, albeit that the dictionaries seem to validate it. But there was some entertaining and enjoyable stuff elsewhere – e.g. SUCCEED, SEERSUCKER and FISHIEST. I was pleased to get SEXAGESIMA from non-def wordplay alone, but still felt the need to check in the dictionary that the word actually existed. Were we all watching University Challenge the other night? I too recalled APPLETON as the answer to one of the questions there (as unknown to any of the contestants as it was to me).
  19. Just like dyste, once it couldn’t be “Bese of Skye” it had to be Ross from somewhere.. I put it in on trust.

    Overall 16m so a quickish time for me and nice to see the dodgy homophone quotient and token scientist rations are being kept to. Is there a rule I wonder, as there is for hidden clues? “Each grid must contain no more than 1 homophone, preferably dodgy, and a token scientific reference or two”

  20. 46 minutes. As is so often the way, I started at a canter, before slowing to a crawl. Last one in was 1a, not having come across REP = material before. Also, didn’t fully understand 14 before coming here, but suspected a Macbeth reference.
  21. 24 minutes so I found this just on the harder side of average. I tend to benchmark myself against Sotira, usually trailing her by a few minutes but occasionally going faster, so 9:53 is immense.

    I slowed myself by failing to lift and separate ‘capital city’ at 26 and, conversely, by erroneously lifting and separating ‘bag – it blows up’ at 15.

    22 is a very good spot by the setter but I felt a bit cheated by “done to a turn” as the reversicator.

  22. Romped through and came to a screeching halt on 22. Got as far as SEXAGE and couldn’t figure out the rest of it, threw in SEXAGESAME and had a peek here.
  23. ….. and trundling along at the rear of the field in 90 minutes. For me a very enjoyable puzzle. Never heard of REP = cloth before. Enjoyed the simplicity of MISFITS, the complexity of SEXAGESIMA and the smile factor of OXIDANT.
  24. A reasonable time, but one wrong answer so the time is irrelevant.

    I find that it’s always the four letter words that cause the most trouble. ROSS was the cultprit today, although I should have worked out the wordplay. I got fixed on ‘top’ for execute.

    I thought the clue for SEXAGESIMA was wonderful.

    Good to see another Scottish river that isn’t the Clyde.

  25. Not timed but inside 30m, I was not really trying to be quick and clever today so read and solved rather randomly. Fave clue “sexy” Gesima (as we always called “her”) and I also liked the anagrams and the fabrics. I had seersucker frocks when a child, they were non-iron before treated fabric made that property commonplace.
  26. 13:27 for me, quite a slow start (first one I got was EMPHASIS) but eventually I managed to speed up a bit once a few checkers were in. Another nod to SEXAGESIMA for COD. After finishing this I did this week’s Jumbo – not giving too much away I hope to mention that it included a 14-letter “hidden letters” clue, which must be close to a record!
    1. A few months ago Paul in the Guardian crafted a hidden letters clue for Michel Platini, which is 13, but in one of the clue writing contests hosted by Anax I managed to create one for Spanish Omelette, so that’s 15 letters albeit 2 words.
      1. I think all the DIY COW contributors remember exactly what they were doing when they first read the famous omelette clue; an astonishing feat of hiding letters that most of us thought at the time would never be emulated, until… this happened.
  27. Managed all but Appleton in just over 20 mins. Couldn’t get Appleton because a) never heard of him b) spelt Oxidant wrong – Oxident.

    Off to Villa Park now to see how we cope against Man Utd.

  28. Andrewjkitch (Andrew)

    After my success yesterday, I had a miserable failure here, but busy at work, and ‘her in doors’ wold like us to watch a film this evening- plus, have to prepare a clue for the AZED comp.

    Looking forward to tomorrow’s and Friday’s puzzles (Saturday is a crossword day of rest for me).

  29. A couple of people have said they don’t like this. It would be interesting to know why: it seems perfectly OK to me, rather a nice idea. The anagram is well indicated, in my opinion. Is it the italicisation of ‘under’?
    1. The italicisation didn’t appear in the online version. It makes much more sense of the surface.

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