Times 24542 – confucius say man who get 14 in his 1 is going to shine his 20s

36 comments on “Times 24542 – confucius say man who get 14 in his 1 is going to shine his 20s”

1. Hi George. Nicely blogged. I was on the setter’s wavelength today, going top to bottom, left to right in about 12 minutes. Last in TURN ON THE HEAT/STRESSED OUT together. COD to COUCH POTATO for the fun clue. Not much else to say after yesterday’s challenge, but no complaints; nice puzzle. Regards.
   1. Thanks – I expect 12 minutes will look really good. Now watch me be proven wrong!
2. An unstressed out 18 min, so on the easy side without being silly. Good for a brain recovering from yesterday’s taxing callisthenics. COD to ODESSA.
3. Well, Confucius as always knew what he was talking about. Threw in ‘nut cracker’ at the end to keep what I see as “my” time – 24 minutes – and it hurts!!
4. 18 minutes, with quite a lot of them trying to work out what was cryptic about 18a: I could not get deep and snow separated in my mind, so I guess it goes down as a cunning misdirection. It was some time after finishing that I had the d’oh! moment, never anywhere near as nice as the penny dropping variety.
   No great clues today, but I liked the anagram for SECULARISM. And untz (etc), George, is a perfect onomatopoeia that I shall use from now on.
   1. 24 across in fact.
5. Much gentler today but stuck in AVON for AVOW – was hoping it was an archaic version of AVER. Got ODESSA without understanding. Don’t think I have yet come across this type of clue (worrying). No COD (couch potato neat but a bit too obvious to be nominated. Bad COD however to STRESSED OUT.
   1. I’m not sure exactly what you’re counting as new for you about the clue for ODESSA. The mechanics of the wordplay is just a combination of a reversal and a specific subtraction. If you were to divide “compound clues” into all possible pairs of techniques, you might not have seen this pair before, but I don’t think that level of detail is helpful.
6. 8:45 here, with a strong suspicion that over at Goodliffe Towers, 7 minutes was beaten. Other quick solvers who got 1A on first look may well beat my time too.

   This isn’t a complaint, but this puzzle had enough relatively easy material to allow an untroubled solution. Here (as accurately as I can remember) are the things I latched onto in the clues that I solved on first look. They’re in the order in which I’d have looked at them, so that you can tell what checking letters I had. Some are familiar wordplay elements, others are just things I thought of quickly.

   8 Magistrate = JP, then J(ER)P and J(AH)P don’t make words
   2 tuber = POTATO
   3 state’s ending = E, most likely to be at the end of the answer
   10 woman=SHE, brogue=SHOE
   13 Home Office = H.O., employ=USE
   14 French writer = Sand
   16 fine=F
   17 end of greY
   18 Why “Mars” rather than another God? – this identifies the likely anag fodder
   12 The ‘d in “tutoresses’d”, plus (8,3)
   20 ‘double’ as indication of word-repetition, shock=some hair
   21 “thought vacant”, and an initial doctor had to be MO
   22 corrosion=rust, “that place”=there
   23 drug=E
   26 Virginia=VA
   5 ‘brother who never speaks’
   6 clubs a man = C,HE
   15 mountain skyline = RIDGE
   25 melting pot = anag wordplay

   I hope there are no takers for the former county of AVON as a “state”. “No VA” was my first thought for “without Virginia” but I decided that a mistake on that scale was impossible.

7. 40 minutes, which is not too bad for me these days. Either the puzzles are getting harder or I’m getting worse at cracking them. Today was a steady 30 minute solve until I was left with 1ac and 1dn(first words), 2dn and 8ac which delayed me for a further 10.

   The journal response times are back to normal at the office today.

   1. I had the same issue yesterday, using Chrome. It seemed to be something to do with the adverts and Shockwave crashing.
      1. Thanks. I’m on IE at work and when I got home yesterday and found everything was ok I was using my default browser which is Firefox. I should have thought to test IE at home in order to compare like with like.
8. This only required one cup of coffee but it was nevertheless enjoyable. I liked the hidden word at 3 and the cheeky 3-letter anagram at 25, neither of which I got at first glance. I did not get the wordplay for Odessa but it was the only Ukranian port that I knew.
9. A minor , or (s)light correction to 1ac it should be (hot cry’s)* about clings
   WF
10. Loved the title George. Very witty!

    Raced through this one in 15 minutes which is as quick as it gets for me. Guessed 1A CYCLING SHORTS immediately from the definition/enumeration and then understood the wordplay. The only hiccup was putting HARPI for HARPO then realising the mistake when I?E?S? had to be ODESSA. Lots of answers were entered based on definitions only (SHOE TREE, ODESSA, YAWN, LOW-PITCHED, IGNORAMUS, SANDPAPER, CATCH IT and SUE).

    A memory for previous answers helped today. For instance I’d have struggled to get SANDPAPER from S?N?P???? not recalling the French author but remembered SANDPAPER has come up recently defined I think as ‘smooth’ or ‘smoother’. COLERIDGE was an answer in a recent Sunday Times puzzle.

11. A very easy puzzle with a lot of standard stuff. Less than 20 minutes to solve. I commend Peter’s list to new solvers (and it’s not exhaustive – Ukranian port; fine=f, furrow=rut; end of grey=y, beard=awn; and so on). A good one for new learners although they should be warned that not many puzzles contain the rather weak anagram structure at 12D STRESSED,OUT.
    1. It wasn’t intended to be exhaustive – just to show as accurately as possible what I thought of quickly. So no port for me – I thought of Yalta and Kherson, knowing too much from a holiday including a Dnieper/Black Sea cruise, though we also stopped at Odessa. I also thought first of ‘deceased’ for “became late”, which didn’t help. beard=AWN should probably have been on my list (the F and Y were there, though possibly hidden by my solving order).
       1. Me too – fortunately I thought I’d wait for a checking letter or two before inventing the port of Esaece. It seemed no less probable than Fata Morgana…
12. Not much to say really.

    The only mildly interesting thing I learned was that the expression “turn on the heat” does not derive, as I thought, from heat as pressure (“If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen”) but (at least according to the OED) from US slang “heat” (or “heater”) as a gun (“He ain’t packing heat”), and therefore means “to turn a gun on someone”.

    1. Mmmm. The online (big) OED is a bit more ambivalent:
       b. slang (orig. U.S.), in various interconnected senses, notably (a) a gun (? as an instrument of ‘heat’); also heater; (b) in phr. to turn on (or give) the heat, to use a gun, hence fig., to turn the heat on (someone), to apply pressure on; (c) involvement with or pursuit by the police; a police officer, the police.
13. A very pleasant puzzle indeed, I thought — though it took me longer to finish than many here, in fact, just over 30m; possibly due to a late night. Talking of “late” … I rather liked “became late” for PASSED ON. It interests me that, in some dialects, but not all, “late” can mean “dead” in a rather straightforward way and as a kind of euphemism. A few years ago, one of the men installing my solar HWS informed me, quite casually, that my cat was “late”. “Late for what?” I wondered until he pointed to her rigid body in the wood box!
    1. Oh and a slight correction: “Mars”, not “Mans” in 18ac.
    2. I wonder if the use of late like this is another debt to the (late) great Douglas Adams?
       Slartibartfast: Come. Come now or you will be late.
       Arthur: Late? What for?
       Slartibartfast: What is your name, human?
       Arthur: Dent. Arthur Dent.
       Slartibartfast: Late as in the late Dentarthurdent. Its a sort of threat, you see. Ive never been terribly good at them myself but Im told they can be terribly effective.
       1. I think Times and other crossword setters were probably doing cheesy puns on “late” long before HitchHiker.
14. Great blog.
    I found this about as easy as it gets. It took me 19 minutes but 7 of those were spent staring at 24. I didn’t split “deep snow” either and without that I couldn’t get a handle on how the clue worked.
    ODESSA was my COD.

15. 16m helped by finding the clues sort of familiar in structure so I got pretty well all the wordplay as I went, for a wonder. 12 and 18 quickly useful. Smirk at 1d, rather liked 24 & 13.
16. I did it all backwards, getting the hard ones first, then the easy ones. Must be hyped up from yesterday.
17. CYCLING SHORTS reminds me of ‘trouser clips’ that my dad and older brothers used for cycling in the 1950s when I was wearing only shorts and no full-length trousers.
    Those were the days when the cycle chain did not have ‘full mudguard’ (which came later).
    Cyclists who did not use these clips had grease stains and rents on the ends of their trousers.
    Now if I go to a hardware shop and ask for ‘trouser clips’, the shopkeeper is sure to ask ‘what’s that?’.
18. Liked your proverb ,George ,and I am sure you could have use NUT CRACKER if, as I first thought, that was the answer to 9.
    Across clues were definitely harder. I was down to 22 before getting first entry , then got the majority of the down answers on first sight working up the way.
    Have seen the “brother who never speaks” device a few times now but HARPO will always raise a smile.
    9:25 solving time.
    Back to George’s proverb – it would be “interesting” to see the shortest story that could be concocted using the entries from any given days answers – the mind boggles!!!
19. would suggest the first of the double def means deep, not simply low as quoted. also turn up the heat would have been the more usual expression?
    1. Apologies for causing confusion – this is a revision of the “no subject” message of mine which was above.

       I don’t understand: George said: ‘LOW PITCHED: double definition, with the first being simply “DEEP” ‘. The first def. of the two is deep, meaning low-pitched, as George says. I cannot see where George or any one else says that the first def. means “low”.

       (If you thought the LOW of ‘LOW PITCHED’ was the first def, then you’re using a non-standard meaning of “double definition”. This normally means two adjacent defs in the clue, for the whole of the answer.)

       Collins only has “turn on the heat” under “heat”, COED as far as I can tell as no “turn ?? the heat” expression. The Oxford Dictionary of English includes “turned up the heat” as an example of the relevant meaning of heat. (And of course, “turn up” does not mean “become hostile” or “become hostile to”).

       1. I had “LOW” in there as a typo/brain flatulence and modified it during the day.
20. 8:57 here, taking an age to unravel the anagram in 18ac and, as is my usual failing, the well-hidden IGNORAMUS.
21. Like Anon above I initially entered TURN UP THE HEAT at 24ac on the basis that it seemed the more usual expression, but, as you say Peter, it quickly became apparent that TURN UP could not be made to mean “become hostile [to]”, quite apart from the fact that it did not dovetail with the clearly correct MOTTO at 21dn. As all have said, an easy puzzle (about 30 mins for me – your sub-nine minuter is spectacularly good, though) after yesterday’s tough challenge, but with lots to enjoy. I thought the wordplay involved in ODESSA very ingenious, and COUCH POTATO was an excellent joke, even if the mention of “tuber” slight gave the game away.
22. The true indicator of an easy puzzle?

    I managed to complete it (the second such occurance in my life, to date).

    My only complete guess was that ‘secularism’ was a real word.

    Thank God, it was……

    1. Well, keep reading this blog, and you will start to step up a little. Peter gives good advice, and if you follow it you will improve.

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