Times 24506 – online difficulty added

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 12 minutes, but should have been under 10 easily. I did this from the print version, and 1 down was listed as (5,5). An answer to the cryptic definition came readily, but it was (6,4) and I waited until I had the rest of the checking letters before putting it in (my last entry). No idea if the print version is correct. I’m also a bit iffy on the enumeration at 7 down, which was a word I didn’t know but guessed from the wordplay, then find in Chambers that it is two words. Apart from that, I breezed pretty quickly through it with some pauses for smiles. There’s a few colloquial shortenings here, possibly narrowing down the setter a bit, but I’m usually way off when I guess at setters.

Looks like I’m wrong on one here, messed up on 7 down

Across
1 BOBBLE: Double definition – I knew the “irregular bounce” definition, but looked this up in Chambers afterwards to verify that it is a woolly ball for trimming clothes
4 COMPOSED: double definition, one referring to music
10 OUTSPOKEN: (UK,SPOT,ON)* around E
11 RURAL: Rugby Union is the game, then RA(i)L
12 Deliberately omitted – anagram away
14 MEANS: E in MAN’S
16 VEGETABLE: double definition, one derogatory
18 REINFORCE: R.E. ahead of IN FORCE
20 PIXIE: PIX are the snaps, then I(dl)E
21 A,HEAD OF THE GAME
25 ELIOT: TOILE(d) reversed
26 GLISSANDI: (SLIDING,AS)*, musical term
27 FIGURINE: G.I. about UR, all in FINE, nice wordplay
28 PEG LEG: E.G. after P, then LEG(section, as in of a journey)
 
Down
1 BLOOD YMARY: if you believe the enumeration.
2 BOTHA: T(oug)H in BOA. I did a double take, as I didn’t realise Pik Botha had passed.
3 LAP,TOPS: for what turned out to be a pretty straightforward charade, this held me up a bit
5 OUNCE: O for hole (don’t recall seeing that before), then UNC(l)E
6 PERIDOT: DIRE in TOP, all reversed
7 SPRING(well),BOX(fight): another enumeration issue, shouldn’t this be (6,3)? It is two words in Chambers (I don’t have Collins) Cancel that, as pointed out, STRONG,BOX is better and one word
8 Daliberately omitted
9 Even more deliberately omitted
13 REFEREEING: RE(on) then E in FREEING
15 ALIGHTING: A LING around (f)IGHTING
17 GREAT TIT: (TARGET)*, IT
19 FLATTER: double definition
20 PRESSIE: PIE around (d)RESS
22 ORGAN: OR(gold) then NAG reversed
23 ANNAL: sounds like some contraction of ANNA WILL
24 BEEF: B, then FEE reversed

45 comments on “Times 24506 – online difficulty added”

  1. Hi George, thanks for the early blog. I agree that 1D should be (6,4).

    I also think 7D should be STRONGBOX.
    Tough for me altogether, screwed up in part by 1D, about 45 minutes. Otherwise I agree with everything George has here. Didn’t know PRESSIE before today.

    Regards to all.

  2. Agree with you all about 6,4 not 5,5-this held me up a bit but still for me went straight through after hesitatn start in 35 minutes. some good clues like Pixie and Ounce. enjoyable!
  3. If only that corner from Ribery had bobbled before Robben smashed it past Van Der Sar … a word for ever associated with Trevor Brooking.

    54 minutes for me, so it must be pretty easy. Held up only briefly by the mis-numeration at 1dn. PERIDOT unknown but eminently gettable, and thanks to George for unravelling PIXIE. Last in GREAT TIT, a fitting reminder of what a tit I still am when it comes to recognising anagrams.

    Am I the only person who thought that a PC was used only for the thing that sits on your desk, and not a superordinate term for any, well, personal computer? (Seems obvious now!)

  5. About 20 minutes over a hasty breakfast, then about another 10 during a stop on the road. The Times owes me a new liquid paper pen: started writing BLOODY MARY, looked at the enumeration, took it out again. Also not helped by writing “… the ball” in 21ac.
    Pressie, “middle class” and “twee”? I still have a floppy vinyl Beatles Christmas record where the word’s used many a time — and that’s before they became middle class and twee.
      1. Au contraire, the term was in common use in everyday Scouse. May still be for all I know.
  6. Slow start and finish (21, ridiculously; couldn’t get ahead for a bit). 27 min. Print version also has the oddly balanced murderous drink; my daughter’s favourite. She’ll probably start ordering like that if I show her the clue. COD 3 – unexpected and a little sly. Hmmm…
  7. 7:43 for this one, kicked off by the easy anagram at 12A. This meant 1D was next to look at – BLOODY MARY was in my brain before “(5,5)” and an alternative seemed very unlikely. But initially written next to the grid squares, just in case.

    Seeing “glissando” in today’s puzzle was a bit ironic. I nearly said yesterday that the comedy bottom F at the end of the Policemens’ song from Pirates was as original an idea as the comedy trombone glissando. No prizes for guessing my voice/instrument.

  8. Only convinced of enumeration error once MEANS was solved, so BLOODY MARY last in. Pretty straightforward and my first completely unaided for a little while. COD to GLISSANDI simply for the aptness of the anagrist.
  9. I struggled a bit to get going on this one but completed the RH side in about 25 minutes. On the LH side I had DIAMOND and AHEAD but everything else west of SKYDIVER ORGAN was a blank and I came to a standstill.

    As did the train I was travelling on which finally gave up the ghost at Berkhamsted station and was taken out of service leaving several hundred passengers to fight for a place on the next arrival. Quite why an 8-car train has to be taken completely out of service because one of the doors in one of the cars has broken is beyond me but no doubt it’s beyond the wit of man to devise a contingency plan that would allow one car to be isolated so that the train could complete its journey without putting passengers in danger.

    But anyway, back to the puzzle. After all this disruption I couldn’t get my concentration back and I failed to complete it without resort to aids on arrival at work. I can’t help feeling that if 1dn had been enumerated correctly things might have turned out differently as BLOODY MARY would have gone in on my first reading of the clue. It builds great confidence to get started straight away in the top LH corner.

    On Ulaca’s point about about PCs and laptops, I thought this too.

    2. PC / laptop: this is one of those category issues that bedevil advancing technology. Is a PC a computer? Of course it is. But you can imagine a conversation back in the 1980s like this:

      A: Did those results come from the computer?
      B: No, I worked them out on my PC with Lotus 123.

      Now that a PC (rather than loads of kit in a sealed room) is the first thing you think of when someone says “computer”, this sounds absurd. If you take a dictionary definition of “personal computer”, which doesn’t mention a particular set-up or location, saying that a laptop is not a PC is equally absurd.

      Question: is an iPod/MP3 player a “personal stereo”?

      1. My point was simpler: it’s not a Mac — at least in Win-users’-speak. They seem to have arrogated the term “PC” unto themselves. I’m frequently told, on arrival in strange lecture theatres: “Oh you have a Mac; we were expecting you’d bring a PC”. It’s no good saying “It is one”.

          1. Point duly conceded; though I suspect the ads are something of a rearguard action. A bit like the manufacturer of a (superior?) toilet finding the dominant contender is calling itself (or its users are calling it) the WC!

  10. Undone by SPRINGBOX, one of those plausible words you assume exist even though you haven’t heard it before. B…/Y annoyed by 1d, which, being the dutiful solver who believes The Times never gets it wrong (except when contracted out on the website) I eventually checked with Chambers so as to find the incredibly fiendish right answer as opposed to the elephant trap of the wrong one. Everything else in 12 minutes.
    I liked OUTSPOKEN today.
  11. I was probably more cautious than everyone else today over 1D since, on Monday’s 1D I made my own erroneous enumeration of vide supra. Otherwise this was an enjoyable puzzle of moderate difficulty. There were several DBE’s, all impeccably clued, such as “Squash for one…” and “Perhaps heart…”.

    I liked the DD of flatter. I was not so keen on the DD of composed. This seemed to me to be what Uncle Yap calls a DUD, a duplicate definition.

    1. The DUD issue was recently discussed at rec.puzzles.crosswords – for me, this clue is OK because “collected = composed” is by way of collected=calm, as in “cool, calm and collected”. You could solve the clue by assuming that (composed = arranged) is the same as (collected = gathered), but that doesn’t really work. If it did, there would very likely be other words that were equally good answers, but once you see the right meaning, I don’t think there are.
  12. 8:20 after wasting a bit of time on the 1dn error, and had to sort out the wordplay for 7d afterwards. Took me too long to see REFEREEING, as well. 19dn raised a smile
  13. I found this one slow going and was very pleased to eventually solve 27 of the 30 without aids. All my gaps were in the NE corner where I was missing COMPOSED, OUNCE and PERIDOT. Thanks for the detailed blog George and for explaining RURAL. So obvious now – I was thinking the word should end IL after a three-letter “game” rather than RU followed by a three-letter word formed by taking the ‘I’ out of a word meaning ‘bar’. RU or GO seem to be the setters’ favourite games.

    I thought the clue for FLATTER was terrific.

    I read Moby Dick last Christmas. Back then whales were thought to be fish. The name of Ishmael’s shipmate Queequeg would be a challenge for setters and solvers alike!

  14. undone by putting in bail at 24d on first reading and never reconsidering it. i too pumped for springbox. cod 8d.
  15. Just under 45 minutes, but that includes a break in the middle to change a bandage. First in were 10, 2, 9 & 12. Last in were 7, 20 & 28. Couldn’t get JET LAG out of my head for 28, even though it had no connection to the clue whatsoever.

    Definitely thrown off by the misnumeration at 1d. I thought of BLOODY MARY almost straight away, but dismissed it just as quickly.

    Quite nice just to finish one, after abysmal failures for the last two days.

  16. I found this the easiest of the week, finishing in 23 minutes. It would have been a little quicker if I’d immediately entered BLOODY MARY, which was the first drink that came to mind for 1d, but as it didn’t fit the word lengths given, I wasted time trying to think of something else.
    I didn’t understand the first definition of 16 until I consulted a dictionary post-solve.
  17. 14:55, peridot from wordplay, peg leg mostly from def.

    George, rather than being a woolly ball for trimming clothes in my mind a bobble is either the ball on top of an unfashionable woolly hat or one of the tiny balls that develop on the surface of a cheap jumper over time, requiring the use of one of these:
    Ronco eat your heart out

    Right, I’m off to pour myself a large tequil asunrise.

  18. Do you get that hunted feeling? No you are far too sensible and affluent. Surprised to see nobody went with ASSORTED for 4A; still seems plausible. With several other erroneous guesses leading nowhere the final result is regret for a miserable 40 minutes. Won’t be long now before i jack it in altogether.
  19. Forty minutes sounds quite good to me, who frequently gives up after an hour and a half or more without finishing. Today was an example of that, but oddly enough the one I couldn’t get was ALIGHTING. I probably would have got it eventually, but was losing the will to live…
  20. This is the sort of puzzle I liked when I was commuting some decades ago. Nothing very difficult or obscure and a good steady solve, top to bottom, left to right in 20 minutes.

    I spent the morning watching my puts bobble across greens that are still a bit rough so got 1A immediately. 10A and 12A went in quickly so 1D had to be BLOODY MARY. My days of thinking they don’t make mistakes are long gone – the quality control on these puzzles is poor

  21. 12:40 and probably only lost a minute on the 5,5 split and lost a bit more by writing WORLD AT HIS FEET for 21 at first ??!! I didn’t get wordplay to PIXIE – question on this – does wings off idle not imply DL , whilst wings of idle would imply IE ?
    1. I assume we’re supposed to treat off as a synonym for from as in “Guttenplan off University Challenge”. Not elegant usage but common enough.
  22. I hadn’t thought of that, wings OF idle would have been better, but might have messed up the surface.
  23. Andrew K
    managed to complete with the help of a crossword dictionary. REFEREEING last one in. Now I need some inspiration for my AZED competition clue!
    By the way, I liked FIGURINE.
  24. I found this the easist one this week, finishing in 30 minutes. Only clue whose wordplay escaped me was OUNCE. Thanks to Coronation Street on the CBC I had heard PRESSIE before.
  25. 40 mins for me. Fell into the springbox trap but realized later and fixed it. Put bloody mary in without too much hesitation, what else could it be. Last one is was refereeing since I, too, had put ball instead of game so it was only when I couldn’t fit anything else that I reconsidered and fixed it.
  26. Dalighted to see I was actually faster than some of the regulars at just under 28 minutes. Liked 22d despite its apparent illogicality.
  27. I see at the time of writing, the online version still has (5,5). IS there an incredibly fiendish answer as opposed to the elephant trap of the right one? I have Catholic friends who would object most strongly to Mary being identified as the “killing queen”, but of course BLOODY ELIZABETH fits even less well!
  28. BLOND SMURF
    BLONDis a variety of beer
    A SMURF attack is a denial of service assault designed to kill off a target IT network
    BLOND SMURF is of course the first and greatest of the female Smurfs, Smurfette. Here is a genuine quote from th interweb on Smurfette ( people really care about these things): “She’s like the queen bee, she has all the men working for her… Boy I wish I was Smurfette.”
    So it is 5,5 after all (have mercy, this took quite a while to put together. Don’t tell me it’s not in Chambers: even smurf isn’t.

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