Times 24500 – Smooth as Silk

33 comments on “Times 24500 – Smooth as Silk”

1. …and even after I got ‘sea lord’ and ‘wear’, my last in, I had to think about them for a bit before I saw how the clues worked.I

   I was not helped by carelessly putting ‘break into tears’ instead of ‘burst into tears’, either. While I agree the surface is smooth, I would prefer something less unpleasant.

   I also wasted about ten minutes trying to put ‘BR’ inside a word meaning struggle, before regrouping and trying another tack. Bingo!

   Overall, this was a superb puzzle that repays careful study. There are quite a few clever variations on the usual tricks that will mislead even experienced solvers. I understood all the cryptics except for ‘blurb’, but some of them were not easy to unravel.

   As for the vinyl age, it is still going on – it is the CD that is dying out, while the LP pressing plants are stretched to capacity.

2. 28m … again! What’s going on?
   Agreed, Uncle Y, there are some tremendous clue surfaces here. The hair-splitters will be hard pressed to find anything much amiss today. COD to BLURB: the tidiest of the lot.
3. 24:30 with one sloppy mistake – PLATE at 23dn (which I can easily defend as an alternative answer as long as I largely ignore the clue). Definitions leapt out in many cases, obviating the need to unpick what seemed to me some rather ponderous cryptics. I may be swimming against the tide, but I quite enjoy clues with a degree of surrealism in the surface readings; they often provide the best “eureka” moments and there were not many of either in this puzzle.
4. Regards Uncle Yap. Very nicely blogged, and I agree and similarly solved all these clues except SEA LORD, which I entered from the def. alone, without understanding the cryptic. Thanks for the explanantion there. I also didn’t know the river in 24D, but guessed WEAR as the best def. of ‘display’. COD for me is GREENGAGE, closely followed by LIBRARIAN. About 30 minutes all told, last in: the guess at WEAR, just after LIBRARIAN upon correcting my original ‘That’s that’ to THAT’S FLAT at 4A. Best to everyone.
5. Enough said, end of discussion, it’s final, end of.
   1. Thanks – must confess, I’ve never heard of the usage, though.
6. McT? vinyl, perhaps?

   1. We’ll have to put it down as an unintended April Fool’s …
7. 70 minutes with the Tyne and Wear corner tripping me up. The damage was done by my failing, like McT, to see that 7dn was an anagram, and, unlike McT, continuing to fail to see it. Without 7 correct, I put THATS THAT for 4ac, which I actually like better, even if I can’t work in the boring part.

   It must be because I got up in the middle of the night to watch Barcelona give an away lesson to Arsenal, but could someone help me with the first part of the dd in 4ac? In other words, why “end of story”?

   1. ….including watching the Barcelona/Arsenal match. Finally had to Google
      ‘that’s flat’ having ‘that’s that’ which is more common here in the North American
      colonies. Must now add WEAR to my list of rivers. Had to look that up too. Great fun though. Did this WHILE watching the match….er….sort of.
      1. For football fans, the five big rivers in England would be Thames (Fulham), Mersey (Liverpool/Everton), Tyne (Newcastle), Wear (Sunderland) and Tees (Middlesbrough). Shrewsbury fans would include Severn, although I believe the club no longer play at the wonderfully named Gay Meadow, which, like Craven Cottage, used to employ a bloke in a row-boat to retrieve balls from the river.
8. Not easy for this apprentice. Seemed to have to put my brain into a different gear to solve some of this but on looking back it all seems so straightforward. For once completed with full understanding in what was a hugely satisfying experience. BLURB my COD if forced to choose. Thanks setter.
9. 40 minutes for this one, which quite surprised me as I think I must have been through all the clues twice before eventually spotting my first answer, AMBLE at 10ac.

   After that it fell steadily into place but apart from the SW corner it didn’t really flow and I had gaps for a long time throughout the rest of the grid.

   Many answers went in from definition alone and on completion of the grid I had about eight clues to revisit and think about the wordplay. My one error in working these out was at 17ac where I missed “tiddly” and decided that “half-drunk” was referring to the expression “TIRED and emotional” said to have been coined by Private Eye in the 1960s to describe the frequently publicly inebriated Cabinet Minister George Brown.

   Like others I went for THAT’S THAT at 4ac and only spotted the error when 7dn proved impossible to solve if starting with H?B. I’m not sure I know THAT’S FLAT but it’s in Brewer’s so must be well-established.

   I wondered about “safe place”/FORT at 15dn probably having watched too many Westerns in my childhood where forts were regularly attacked and burned to the ground by the injuns with many of the occupants killed in the process. But it’s a minor quibble and probably not justified in an excellent and entertaining puzzle.

   Typing this in the “Leave a comment” box using my new computer I no longer get red wavy lines underneath misspelt words. Does anyone know how to turn this option on please? I’m using Windows 7 and Firefox if that’s relevant. My other machine has XP.

   1. One way of spell checking in Firefox seems to be to enable Google Toolbar, which provides the service for free.
10. 13 minutes. Must be something amiss this morning (a head full of cold, perhaps), but for me the two 4’s summed up my experience of this puzzle. FORTUNATE went in without complete understanding, and I did try BREAK… and POSSE to begin with on the first two down. COD 3 SISTERS (nice construction there, I thought), with a side order of LEARNED, which is probably an old chestnut, but it did make me smile.
11. 10:25 – delayed by “that’s flat” which I only really know from xwds but should remember by now, and a speedster’s cock-up – putting the answer to 13D into the slot for 15D, taking all nine letters to see that FIRST NIGHT wasn’t going to fit. Soon fixed but made the grid look messy. Also wasted time by guessing SON as the child in 1D, and then trying to make the middle word ONE’S, though not tempted to write in BURSTS ONE’S RAINS.
12. 14:15, littered with bad decisions. Was trying to fit 26ac into 27ac, and convinced myself 1dn was (5,4,6). Unaccountably wasted a couple of minutes on 9ac, too. More haste, less speed, I guess. But a fine puzzle.
13. I always enjoy this blogger’s page. It is so thorough. There is, however, one slight error at 8d. Chekov’s play is entitled ‘Three Sisters’, there’s no ‘The’. I believe he wanted to be general not specific in the implications of the play. I’ve seen this mistake clued before.PS
    1. Well if you want to be pedantic, the real name of Chekhov’s play is Три сeстры. Wikipedia confirms my vague memory that Russian has no definite or indefinite articles. So the play that we always call The Cherry Orchard is Вишнëвый сад, which could equally well mean “A Cherry Orchard” or just “Cherry Orchard”.

       “Three Sisters” or “The Three Sisters” seems a toss-up – ODQ and Chambers Biographical Dictionary make the same “mistake” as the crossword, and the Oxford Companion to Eng Lit gives your preferred version. I found at least one copy on the web with “Three Sisters” on the cover and “The Three Sisters” on the printed pages.

       1. That, surely, is the point, Peter: that Russian has no definite or indefinite articles. But English does. So it is very much up to the idomatic taste/whim of the translator whether or not to include them in English. To insist, on principle, that they can never be used in English translation simply because they don’t exist in Russian would be absurd. As absurd, in fact, as it would be to complain that translations of English into French assign grammatical genders to objects and persons that have none in English because English, unlike French, has largely dispensed with genders. Like you, Ive never seen The Cherry Orchard in English without its accompanying definite article, but I’ve often seen Three Sisters. The inclusion of “the” in the former and its ommission in the latter sounds top me right, but I would be hard put to say why exactly (cf Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in A Boat).
          1. If it’s the translator’s choice, all a crossword can do is reflect the choices that have been made. As The Cherry Orchard always has the article, I’d count “Cherry Orchard” as a defective answer to a “play” def. From the available evidence, I’d accept both “Three Sisters” and “The Three Sisters”, as both have been used.
             1. I wouldn’t disagree with any of that. There is pretty much universal agreement on The Cherry Orchard as against Cherry Orchard, perhaps because it is one particular orchard that is being talked about. In my experience Three Sisters is more common than The Three Sisters – perhaps because it is a play as much about sisterhood in general as about three specific sisters – but I’ve certainly also come across the variant that includes the definite article, which is undoubtedly a perfectly accurate rendering of the play title in English.
14. Lots of excellent and tricky stuff, with many elegant surface readings, as Uncle Yap says. Close to 45 mins for me. Anything under 12 mins for this puzzle strikes me as superlatively good. Like several others above, I initially had THAT’S THAT at 4 ac. I don’t think there’s much doubt that THAT’S THAT is a far more common expression, in the sense intended, than THAT’S FLAT (I’m reminded of the closing words of Tony Blair’s farewell speech as PM to Parliament: ” … that is that, the end”). But it clearly couldn’t explain the “boring” bit of the clue. I was left mildly irritated by SEA LORD, my last in, where “one in a marine environment” seemed to me an unreasonably loose, if strictly not inaccurate, definition for SEAL that could cover millions of other sea creatures not to mention some human beings who spend much of their time at sea. Still, that’s a minor quibble about an excellent puzzle.
15. 51 minutes. That’s three out of three finished unaided in under an hour this week (I got that wretched canary all day yesterday so couldn’t attempt it), which is pretty good for me.

    I was delayed somewhat by carelessly putting THAT’S THAT at 4a, therefore leavigng myself staring at an unusual set of checking letters for 7. I eventually spotted the mistake and 7 duly followed.

    It also made a nice change to get to the end with no unknown words, and all wordplay understood.

    COD to the excellent &lit at 1a.

16. 9:30. I wonder what Jimbo will make of all this soul-searching over The(?)3 sisters when we could all be discussing the Large Hadron Collider (will be looking out for that one).
    I only came across THATS FLAT as a phrase in a Times XWD a year or two(?) ago and have seen it here a few times since (same setter?), otherwise I think it is a phrase I would have gone through life without knowing – That’s that -yes.
    A lot to like in this puzzle 1, 25 and 26…. and 8 of course!
    By the way for those who don’t know the River Wear – it is pronounced as in beer (or weir if you like)
17. 25 minutes for a very pleasing puzzle that combines difficulty and elegance. Luckily “To the or not to the” passed right over my head (ignorance is surely bliss) and I deliberately didn’t fill in “that” or “flat” until I had LIBRARIAN. No quibbles, excellent puzzle.
18. Sign me up for those that had THAT’S THAT and stared for ages trying to make something out of H?BRA?I?N such as HUBRATION, HYBRAZION or HXBRAQIJN. Scribbled out the H and saw it.
19. Never heard of “that’s flat,” so had to check this blog to finish the puzzle. LIBRARIAN clue was my fave today.
20. I probably did not appreciate this as much as most other solvers as I did it in odd moments during the day while sitting in waiting rooms, usually to the accompaniment of daytime television. Like many others, I finished with librarian after initially making the wrong guess at 4A.

    I don’t think anyone has mentioned the &Lit qualities of Sea Lord. Surely the setter had Sir Joseph Porter KCB (First Lord of the Admiralty) in mind: “Stick close to your desks and never go to sea, And you all may be rulers of the Queen’s Navee!”

21. Excellent crossword but nobody seems to have mentioned that in 6dn No=0. What is the justification for this? It seems very unsatisfactory: no is not the same as nothing.
    1. “no = 0” is a fairly standard trick. I think it can be explained as a two-step process – 0 = zero = “not any (informal)”, which makes “zero talent” the same as “no talent”. Arguably as wrong as “student” cluing L, but for some reason it doesn’t irritate me in the same way.
22. Did most of this today, as started late last night after long trip to Cornwall. Fell flat with ‘ThAT’S FLAT’ and NW corner. But pleased to make progress one what experienced hands regarded as tough. Loved GReEnGAGE
    andrewk
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