Times 24459 – In the wee small hours…

52 comments on “Times 24459 – In the wee small hours…”

1. Zipped through in 14 minutes. Two factors in this: (1) getting the 15-letter answer right away; (2) being forced to wait until post-coffee for the puzzle to arrive. Must try the latter as a régime in the future.

   Agree that the SW was the most difficult, especially FORELAND which I didn’t know as a head/cape but only in its geological sense.

   And as to the guitar — yep it’s a leftie Telecaster, custom built for me around a right-handed Tele Deluxe neck (the one with the Strat-type headstock). Active EMGs and a few other mods; known to friends as “The Sh*tocaster”.

2. Took me nearly twice jackkt’s time to solve with FORELAND also last in. I assume – never having had to wear one – that “rug” can be used as a verb.
   1. Actually, I think it’s RAGGED: double def where “put on carpet” is the “rebuked severely” meaning of “ragged”.
      Any thoughts jackkt?
      1. RAGGED I considered, and now acknowledge to be odds on favourite. I know rag in its tease/scold sense but not in a sternly rebuke sense. RUGGED did give me parsing problems as, besides manufacturing a literal meaning, i.e. wig, I had to manufacture a repeat of carpet = RUG in the cyptic, then add GED (“and torn”, i.e. A deleted from AGED). Anyone still with me?!

         Incidentally, I had difficulty with rugged denoting torn, but also with ragged denoting old.

         1. Mac OED:

            rag 2
            verb ( ragged |ragd|, ragging ) [ trans. ]
            1 make fun of (someone) in a loud, boisterous manner.
            2 rebuke severely.

            …

            ragged |ˈragid| |ˈrøgəd| |ˈragɪd|
            adjective
            1 (of cloth or clothes) old and torn.

            1. I consider myself well and truly … ragged.
         2. Thanks, Ulaca, you’ve reminded me of the mistaken logic that got me to RUGGED early this morning.
3. I’m also with RAGGED
4. Like everyone else I finished up (after 35 minutes) at 18ac. But unlike everyone else I became fixated on looking for a place in Africa, first trying out TOPELAND without much conviction, and then HOPELAND, which is marginally less implausible.

   I rather liked GOSPEL, taking a long time to see what the quartet referred to, although I fully expect to be told that this is one of the oldest chestnuts in the crossword forest.

5. About 20-25 minutes for me; I don’t time carefully, as everyone’s probably noted by now. I ended with RAGGED, which I think is what’s meant at 12, but it obviously had me confused til the end. My read was the double def.: ‘rebuked’ as noted above, plus ‘old and torn’. FORELAND was my penultimate entry, where I was throughout looking for an African place name, not a ‘head’. Unlike Jack, I started in the SW and proceeded counterclockwise from there. I liked much of this, esp. GUESTIMATE and BOUNDARY, and I thought the simple BACK was the smoothest surface. Regards everyone.
6. At 25 minutes, I thought this was a fairly easy canter, but I had RUGGED, so the setter is a deserved winner on countback. I must say I wasn’t happy with rugged, but I would have been less so with ragged, not knowing it could mean rebuke. Not a particularly auspicious week for me. I would say roll on Monday, but it’s my turn to blog.
7. 5:42 and managed to choose RAGGED, though more by luck than judgement. BACK-SEAT DRIVER(S) probably counts as part of the group that also contains MIDDLE OF THE ROAD and ON TOP OF THE WORLD – phrases with positional descriptions which offer lots of clue-writing opportunities but are very easy to spot from word-lengths and a few checkers. 14D’s wordplay is also a well-worn path – any sight of defender and game should make it an instant write-in for championship contenders. I usually spell 26’s guesstimate as I’ve just done, but see that COED has both versions. For 4D’s noun version of “stupid”, you need Collins.
   1. But for once it’s not Collins being perverse. “Stupid” in this sense is in Chambers and the SOED which says it’s from the 18th century.
8. Ditto most others. SW corner hard work despite the almost too easy LAMA & WILD but got there eventually. Went for RAGGED as less improbable than RUGGED but was severely tempted by the RUG. Couldn’t figure out INITIATE and agree with Jack there seems something missing in RECHERCHE. (I contented myself that European was just that it is a French word, but really haven’t a clue.
   1. Jack has the right parsing, and I don’t think he’s saying anything is missing. They key is probably some brackets: Obscure = (European, ((revolutionary repeatedly) holding monarch)), after monarch
9. SW corner did for me. just couldnt see apologist or Gospel and Foreland! is Wilde (oscar) always the answer for irish author…seems to be!

   well done setter

10. Cruised through most of this with a bit of a hiccup with RAGGED, then got becalmed (Americas cup style – too calm, too rough, to windy. Who needs a billionaires p***ing contest. These are supposed to be ocean going yachts for god’s sake) with the FORELAND DAYLIGHT crossing pair. I had SUNLIGHT in early which did not help one little bit. Finally got there in 25 minutes. A nice tidy puzzle. No COD, but no complaints.
11. Sadly this run of tofu-like puzzles continues. They meet a need but hardly set the juices running. 15 minutes for this one with the old hat APOLOGIST opening up the SW corner plus “city lost”, “platforms”
    and “dawns on us” solved straight from those phrases. GOSPEL last in.
    1. Jimbo, Having had the misfortune to attempt the DT Wednesday puzzle in the pub last night I consider us very lucky to have such high quality crossword puzzles each day in the Times even if occasionally we get a ruin of easier ones. I think maybe you’re just too good at them! I solved the DT in barely 5 minutes and it was so boring with very little variety of clue construction. I would have no interest in repeating that experience daily.
       1. I completely agree with you Jack. I started on the DT aged 12 and moved away from it onto the Times aged 15. I’ve visited it occasionally over the years in waiting rooms or discarded papers on trains and my experience has always been the same as you describe.

          By and large the Times has maintained a high standard over those 52 years, improving considerably by adopting Ximenean rules and dropping direct literary quotes for example. However I would like to see more effort on two fronts, neither of which will be news to you. I think the setters are still too classics minded and I don’t think the editor does enough to vary the standard and style of the puzzle on a day to day basis.

          1. Id be concerned that a move away from being classics minded (if the setters really are) might lead not to more science (which I know you would like), but to more contemporary popular “culture” at which point the Times crossword and I would probably part company.

             I don’t think it was fair for me to describe this week’s puzzles as “a ruin of easier ones” in my previous message!

          2. From a crossword purists point of view you are obviously right to say that dropping direct literary quotes is an improvement, but I miss them. When I started on the Times crossword as a teenager in the early 1960s I usually failed to know the quotation and had to look it up in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. I thereby discovered some great pieces of literature for the first time, such as Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Milton’s Lycidas (via “amaryllis”). Today’s teenagers do not have this opportunity (and they are unlikely to encounter Ozymandias and Lycidas in most schools).
             1. I’m always puzzled by the notion of being introduced to great literature by one-line quotes. I don’t remember being inspired to read anything by the quote clues, and as for today’s teenagers, they can type “Milton Lycidas” into Google and have the full text there to read in seconds – more “opportunity” than any of their forebears!
                1. I have found the ODQ to be a great slack moment filler, and it has certainly led me to reading poetry which I never would have otherwise have read. Have never chased up prose though.
          3. Do we know the age of the youngest setter? Should there be a competition for a new setter under the age of 25? 30?
12. 10:33 here. Nothing to add to comments already made, other than that I also considered RUGGED before putting in RAGGED as the better fit.
13. 14:10 .. nowt to add, except a question.

    22d – I saw it quickly, but I can’t quite make sense of the wordplay. What’s “cut down” doing there? Can someone parse this for me?

    1. op + aid both reversed I think
       1. “erected” seems to do the reversal. So what’s being “cut down”?
          1. Maybe ‘opus’ is cut down to ‘op’?
             1. Ah. THat explains it. I’ve beome so used to ‘op’ for ‘work’ I had forgotten it was an abbreviation!
14. As a relative newbie to the Times Crossword I found this puzzle very enjoyable. Cantered in with a steady solve at 75 minutes; although couldn’t see further than TOPELAND. Not being an old hand so to speak I found several clues to be cleverly constructed including BOUNDARY, GUESTIMATE, ATLANTIS, APOLOGIST and REPAIRMEN. Talking of guesstimates I was wondering if anybody knew how many people do the Times crossword each day?
    1. I guess we have two significant numbers for which stated figures exist: the circulation of the Times – 600,000 in round numbers (details here) and the number who send in the Saturday puzzle (the number I recall for this is 5,000 – given in the early days of the online club, so I believe this is the number of postal entries). That 5,000 is about 1% of the circulation. My guess is that something like 1 on 5 solvers bother to send in the completed puzzle, which would give us 25-30,000 solvers, or 5% of the readership. You could probably choose any number from about 1 in 3 to 1 in 20 for the key ratio – I think I’m being conservative.

       These days you could add the club membership if it was ever publicly stated. My guess, from the fact that one of the five or six prizes each week is reserved for club members, is that they get 1000 club entries for the Saturday contest. Using a lower proportion of 1 in 2 as their entries are free, that probably adds another 2000.

       One other point: when the first Times Crossword Championship was held back in 1970, reputedly 20,000 people sent in one of the initial qualifying puzzles. Supposing that 1 in 3 solvers entered, that would give you 60,000 regular solvers.

       Edited at 2010-02-12 03:01 pm (UTC)

15. A puzzle of two halves, then two quarters. The right hand half went in very quickly. The NW corner was not too bad, but like everyone else I struggled with the SW corner, finsihing in just over the half hour.

    Despite what the dictionaries say, I take issue with precision equalling accuracy. Too often in my life I have seen people scaling measurements off maps and plans surveyed at one scale and then quoting the result to a precision that can’t possibly be sustained by the original survey.

    I liked the clues for APOLOGIST and ANIMUS.

    1. I had a mind to comment on this myself. I stress to my students that accuracy is about the trueness of your aim i.e. on average, are you aiming at the target or are you biased (i.e. aiming somewhere else) and precision is about how consistent your aim is (i.e. what variability is evident about the average). We all strive to be MVUE’s (Minimum variance unbiased estimators) in life but most fall short of the mark. Given a choice, though, it’s better to be precise than accurate, since bias can more easily be corrected.
       1. As the two of you seem to have different meanings of “precision” in mind, I think you’ve shown why the setters are best off following the dictionary!
          1. For crossword purposes, the dictionary is probably the best arbiter in these matters. But I did think Duncan and I were speaking of the same thing, Duncan in relation to the practice of quoting estimates to more decimal places than is ccnsistent with the measurement error. (I had to laugh when I saw the above Wiki article has an escape route to The Cure’s song Accuracy from their Three Imaginary Boys album. We cater for all tastes here.)
             1. Mrs B agreed with you about the precision/accuracy difference. But the key thing for xwd purposes is that in at least some context, precise and accurate are synonyms. That’s all that’s required. A dramatic illustration of this principle is “best” and “worst”. Most of the time these mean opposite things, but both can mean “defeat” (vb.). It’s therefore OK for xwd purposes to use “best” to clue worst” and vice versa.
                1. I think this is one reason why science clues are so difficult to carry off; crosswords take delight in the ambiguity of the language whereas the language of science is so, er, exact…, um, specific…, no, there’s a word for it…

16. …so that was obvious enough. My problem was having ‘sunlight’. But I suspected ‘eland’ for a while before seeing that led to ‘daylight’. The only likely possibility then seemed to be ‘foreland’, a word not in my vocabulary.

    The rest of the puzzle took about 25 minutes, not too difficult. ‘Recherche’ and ‘denarius’ are not something you get every day, but I agree the puzzle was a bit lacking in the eclat department. As usual, I had the most trouble with the answers that are not blogged because they are obvious.

17. I eventually went for RAGGED, but didn’t know why, so thanks for the explanation. But not only is ‘ragged’ for rebuke unfamiliar to me, so is ‘put on carpet’ – is that the origin of the better-known ‘carpeting’?
    1. Without bothering to check a dictionary, I’m sure it is.
18. The problem corner for me was the NE. After 30 minutes I was left with 5a, 6, 8, 10, 12 and, on the other side, 18. Once I’d sorted out how to arrange the 2 CHE’s, I got 8 and then the rest slowly fell into place. I was tempted by RUGGED, but the definition required RAGGED so went with that. I finally turned to 18 and thought the game in Africa looked like ELAND, so home and dry, but taking 45 minutes.

    I liked the “Trout quintet” collocation, initially wondering what ‘quintet’ was doing there, then it clicked. Lots of good clues with pleasing surfaces.

19. A very good week for me with times of between 36 and 45 minutes except for Thursday – 66 minutes. I usually have to resort to aids to get the last few answers. However, no aids used this week and only four errors in total. I presume we will get back to the harder puzzles next week.
20. It’s all pretty much been said – a relatively straighforward, and not especially imaginative puzzle, but perfectly enjoyable all the same. That said, Peter B’s 5.25 mins is superlatively good. Like most others, I hummed and hawed over 12 ac, eventually plumping for RAGGED on the same reasoning as Mctext’s. I’ve never before encountered the “to rebuke severely” sense of “to rag”. This appears to be one of those irritating dictionary definitions which have hardly ever been or are no longer used in real-life speech. Technically, the setter gets away with it, but there is always something unsatisfactory about clues that rely on such definitions for their deceptive element.
21. I note that this was jackkt’s last in as well. I also put ‘rugged’ in for 12 having considered and rejected ‘ragged’ but without being totally happy.

    Still not too bad especially as I was on the Victoria Line which does bump about a fair bit. Good quick service that…

    Regards to all.

22. Apart from the tricky SW corner I also struggled with BIG TOP, which looks almost like a straight definition to me.
23. 11 mins. Lucky to put in RAGGED without noticing the possibility of RUGGED and to see -ELAND quickly.

    Tom B.

24. Agree ss in 26 more usual. No prob with ragged but spent last several minutes of just under 20 finding recherche to be just that. With a nice long down rh side went first, glad I remembered It.
25. If you see the right kind of “ring” first time, it is a straight def. But with several meanings to choose from, it should take you a few goes to find the right one, even if you guess that it’s as simple as it turns out to be.
26. This was my last in, too. Someone said that they were looking for a place in Africa. It seems that this is one thing you can be sure about in The Times crossword: a place in Africa is never clued as ‘in Africa’ (although it is in some inferior places).

    So it was easy enough, really: it had to be ‘game in Africa’.

27. So how are we going to get them all to come here, Peter?

    I know, that would make the threads very long…..

Comments are closed.