Times 24,570 – a game of two halves

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
21 minutes, and not entirely satisfactory from my perspective, I’m afraid: I don’t mind a straightforward puzzle (as long as it doesn’t contain too many chestnuts), and I like a three-pipe puzzle that requires lots of thought and occasional inspiration; but what I don’t much enjoy is a puzzle which combines elements of both, so that I find myself putting in half the answers without even finishing reading the clues, then having to adjust to the last half dozen, which turn out to be of an extra level of difficulty, and had to be parsed with great care.

This may just be me, of course: as always, we shall see soon enough.

Across
1 HYDRO – lengtHY DROughts.
4 PEDICURES – ED in PIC(t)URES; one of the last to go in, as I unpicked the many possible ways to read this surface.
9 SAGACIOUS – [C(lubs) IOU] in SAGAS.
10 VESTA – VESTA(l), originally meaning ‘of Vesta’, the goddess of the hearth, and then extending to the virgins who served at her temple, and who were, by definition, on the pure side. I think both Vesta and Ceres are regularly clued as asteroids, though I can’t think of any others that would be specifically named.
11 PRATIE – P(iano) RAT + I.E., meaning potato in particular or food in general; most of my family is Irish, so perhaps it’s regional, or a failure of memory, but I’ve no recollection of hearing this word before. It certainly strikes me as a level of vocabulary out of keeping with the rest of the puzzle.
12 CORRIDOR – cryptic reference to C P Snow’s The Corridors of Power.
14 PRIVATEERING – R(hode) I(sland) VAT in PEERING.
17 GLOCKENSPIEL – LOCK in (SLEEPING)*; the use of “the kitchen” to describe the percussion section of the orchestra came up in another puzzle I blogged not long ago; if you haven’t seen it before, it’s not the sort of thing I think you’d guess easily.
20 LATTERLY – (s)LATTER(n) + L(opsidedl)Y.
21 ORDAIN – double def.; when someone becomes a priest, it always seems to be said that they are ordained (not frocked), though when they misbehave they are de-frocked (not de-ordained). Both seem equally correct, and freely interchangeable, at least in theory.
23 ROMEO – ME in ‘ROO.
24 TRENCHANT – TRENCH + ANT.
25 CONUNDRUM – NUN in COD + RUM.
26 SKEIN – SEINE minus the E(ast), and with a K(ilo) inserted.
 
Down
1 HOSEPIPE – E PIP in HOSE(a); “star” and “pip” are synonyms when they are insignia on an officer’s uniform; Hosea is one of the more obscure books of the Bible, though I imagine all are considered fair game from a setter’s point of view.
2 DOGMATIC – (MACIDGOT)*.
3 ONCE IN A BLUE MOON – (CANOEIN)* + BLUE MO + ON; that last “on” = “occuring” is an example of how tightly plotted some of these clues were.
4 POOP – requiring the synonym which is also a palindrome.
5 DISCOURSER – DISCO + (RUSE)* + R(epublican).
6 COVER ONES TRACKS – CRACKS around [OVER O(ld) NEST].
7 RESIDE – RE: SIDE. Lots of ways to parse the surface; again, it only became clear when I realised it was “live”, and not “live on”, because the “on” was the “RE”, and the “half of butchered carcass” was all part of the same definition.
8 STARRY – RR. in STAY; obviously “guy” would have done just as well as “example of guy”, but that wouldn’t have allowed the possibly misleading “shining example”. A ‘lift and separate’ is then required, but it’s a rather forced example.
13 PERCOLATOR =”PERK A LATER”; who would like to be first to point out that an A can’t be used to represent an O in a homophone? I don’t think it’s going to stop anyone spotting the correct answer, of course.
15 VICARAGE – A RAG in VICE.
16 PLANKTON – T(rust) in PLANK + ON. Just as a pig becomes pork once it’s butchered, fir or pine becomes “deal” once it’s sawn into planks.
18 CLERIC – C(ho)LERIC minus the HO.
19 STAMEN – (MEAT)* in SN; Sn = Stannum, from the Latin, in the naming of this element.
22 SEAM – SEA (i.e. ‘main’) + M(otorway).

44 comments on “Times 24,570 – a game of two halves”

  1. Having got through this unaided I guess it was a good bit easier than of late for the experts but still a bit of a dull slog for us dilettantes. The difficulty level is beginning to look like policy, perhaps to dissuade pointless competition entries? Only completed after changing VIRGI to VESTA. Mystified by OLATOR in the coffee machine and didn’t understand RESIDE. I liked frock as a verb for ORDAIN but not much else.
  2. 26 minutes. C.P.Snow, eh? There’s a name from the past; remember “The Two Cultures” and F.R. Leavis’s vicious attack on Snow’s novels?
    As for my efforts, wasted far too much time trying to PAPER OVER CRACKS!
  3. I found this very tricky. I had particular problems with pedicures, where I was looking for a haircut and glockenspiel, where the relevant meaning of kitchen needed a long cooking time. I finished with the, in retrospect, rather obvious ordain where the non-negative version of frock caught me out.

    I gave a lot of thought to the dodgy homophone percolator before I decided that it had to be. I thought perhaps there was a rare alternative spelling, percalater rather like the caiman clue last week.

    Tim does not say which part of Ireland his family come from but my grandparents lived in Cork and they always ate praties, usually with crubeens which, to my childhood ear, were Crewe beans.

    1. County Clare on my father’s side, and County Dublin on my mother’s. Perhaps it’s a generational thing (though I don’t remember any grandparents from either side using the word, and there was certainly no shortage of potatoes on their tables). Or I simply don’t remember it…either way, the setter and the editor clearly think it’s fair game, which is what matters!
  4. For the first time I did a Times cryptic on the same day as its day of publication, thanks to the free trial available of the revamped website. Thanks also to PB for the info he provided in RPC.

    The solving time must have been one hour. I completed the crossword; the slots in the last two columns at the right half were the last to fall. I didn’t fully understand 11ac PRATIE and 1d HOSEPIPE and 7d RESIDE. I had to come to the blog for that.

    The clues are technically perfect but that’s all. Few of them are high in entertainment value. Honestly, I didn’t enjoy this as much as many of the crosswords from some eight years ago that I do regularly now as they are reproduced in an Indian paper. This is not a reflection on the setter: I suppose that it all depends upon the words that go into the grid. Does a very entertaining puzzle mean that the setter chose and wrote most of the clues before he put the words in the grid?

    1. Look forward to about 2013! Then your puzzles will start overlapping with the coverage on my old solo version of this blog and you’ll be able to see what we said 8 years ago.

      Although I know at least some setters jot down ideas for future clues before building grids that use them, I think an entertaining puzzle mostly means a puzzle written by an entertaining setter. I’m sure you’ll see one before the free trial ends.

  5. This took far too long, over an hour, and I’m not sure that the effort was worth it. I see trouble brewing over PERCOLATOR.
  6. > who would like to be first to point out that an A can’t be used to represent an O in a homophone?
    In all the dialects I speak, from Scouse to Strine, they’re reduced to schwa in both contexts.
    Twice Tim’s time exactly here (42m), with serious problems where ORDAIN, … TRACKS and SKEIN overlapped. Could be an effect of celebrating Portugal’s 7-0 win. (I have money on them.)
    COD to GLOCKENSPIEL — we need more clues and answers like this. You’ll always find me in the kitchen at parties!

  7. The solving bit of the brain worked well, 1a and the two long downs straight in, then 14 and 17, and down into the bottom part, finishing with NE corner. The analysing bit was several clues behind, and kept interrupting the solving brain with bits of wordplay. The solution was in by 20 m, the analysis followed in dribs and drabs and thank you, blogger, for 3, 6, 15 which slow old analysis brain had not got round to yet!
  8. 14:26, with the last 4 minutes on 10ac (VESTA), 7dn (RESIDE) and finally 12ac (CORRIDOR).  Unknowns: VESTA, C. P. Snow’s The CORRIDORs of Power, the kitchen as the percussion section (17ac GLOCKENSPIEL), and SKEIN as a flock of geese in flight (26ac).

    Nice blog, Tim.  I liked this puzzle for its precise clueing, my only quibble being the use of the past tense in 11ac (“provided”) and 2dn (“was”).  I’m happy with the homophone in 13dn (“perk a later” for PERCOLATOR), as in both cases the second syllable is likely to come out as a schwa [as I see mctext has just pointed out].

    Clues of the Day: 14ac (PRIVATEERING), 16dn (PLANKTON), and the straightforward but satisfying 22dn (SEAM).

    1. I’m not troubled by the occasional clue in the past or future tense. We accept a convention whereby the setter is “me” and the solver is “you” because the setter wrote the clues. We could follow the same kind of logic and insist that because the clues were written months ago, instructions about making anagrams, reversals and so on must all be in the future tense. But that would impose ludicrous constraints on the surface meaning so we don’t. And my pragmatic side says: how often do people get the wrong answer because a clue uses something like a past tense angram indication?
      1. Thanks for your thoughts, Peter.  I can think of two ways of explaining my preference.  The first is that I think of narrative clues (or, as here, mishmashes involving narration) as describing matters that are time-independent in the way that mathematics is time-independent; it wouldn’t be wrong to say “Triangles had three sides”, but, absent any obvious motivation, the choice of the past tense would sound strange, because in English we default to the present tense for such matters.  The second is that I think of narrative clues as being analogous to descriptions of paintings, e.g. “They’re kissing, but it’s clear from her expression that her mind is elsewhere”; here, again, it would sound strange to choose the past tense without any obvious motivation.

        But I should stress that I did bill this as a quibble rather than an outright complaint, and you are of course right about its irrelevance from a pragmatic point of view.  I think I should file it under Aesthetic Preferences.

    2. My reading is that in the surface of 11ac ‘that’s provided’ is a contraction for ‘that has provided’. In 2dn, doesn’t the surface need past tense ‘was’ after pluperfect ‘I’d got’?
      1. The clue in the online version was indeed
        2. Forcibly asserted mac I’d got was defective (8)
        1. Ah, I was wasn’t forcibly asserting sufficiently – although in the interrogative form, my comment was meant to carry the force of a statement!
      2. Surface readings are irrelevant to cryptic grammar, being merely epiphenomenal, but I now see that “provided” in 11ac can be read as an adjective applying to “that’s” (IE) rather than as a link word, so that part of my quibble was indeed misdirected.
  9. 25 minutes for this curate’s egg.

    My Irish relatives came from Waterford and I spent many an absorbing hour with them learning Irish history without ever coming across PRATIE. I knew the C P Snow only because it has appeared before and my daughter is a professional singer so knew of the kitchen (which also appears in these puzzles reasonably often)

    My last in was PERCOLATOR simply because the answer couldn’t be anything else and “perc” does sound like “perk”. The rest of the clue isn’t worth commenting on.

  10. Agree with Mark & mctext about the homophone (who actually says “perk-oh-late-or”?), and vinyl1 about those corridors.

    Solved in 7:59, with short ponder at the end on 11, checking for other ?A? animals in case my vague pratie=tatie idea was wrong. Similar dim memories may have helped with 10A, though my mental list of asteroids only has Ceres.

  11. Not sure which ones you found most difficult, Tim, but for me it was the NE corner. I had the rest of it completed in about 30 minutes but took another 25 to sort out 4ac, 10ac,12ac, 5dn, 7dn and 8dn.

    Unfortunately I didn’t get the CP Snow reference however I had an advantage at 11ac because I knew the song The Garden Where The Praties Grow.

    I didn’t understand CLERIC before coming here and I agree with your remarks about 13dn.

    1. Snap. NE corner felt, for me, almost as if it should have been in a different (and overall rather tougher) puzzle, and took as long as the other three quarters put together.
  12. Another difficult one, and for me in the same category as Friday’s, i.e. it made me grumpy. After about 45 minutes I had five unsolved, mostly in the NE, so as the blog wasn’t up I resorted to aids to finish in about an hour. The key to unlocking it was VESTA, which was too obscure to get without crossing letters I didn’t have (I would have guessed VIRGI). CORRIDOR is a cryptic definition requiring knowledge of an obscure novel so we’re back to Sisyphus and Scrooge. I struggle to see C.P. Snow in the same category as either Greek mythology or Dickens.
    That said I can’t see in retrospect why I didn’t get RESIDE and STARRY more quickly, and the one I didn’t have outside the NE was ORDAIN, for which there is also no excuse other than that it’s a good clue. I also liked PEDICURES.
    I never understood 1dn or 17ac. Even after a (brief, admittedly) Google search I couldn’t find a link between “kitchen” and GLOCKENSPIEL, and I didn’t know either Hosea or pip in this sense so I was never going to get that one. Thankfully the answer was obvious in both cases.
    I have no problem with the homophone at 13dn. In normal speech very few people would pronounce “percolator” in such a way as to distinguish the O from an A.
  13. Two hours for this deceptive fellow, which lured you in only to entrap you and suck your cerebral juices. Last in GLOCKENSPIEL, despite twigging the anagram of ‘sleeping’ immediately. Not knowing the slang term for percussion, took this, with the aid of Wikipedia, to be an unusually oblique reference to Vaughan-Williams’ ‘March Past of the Kitchen Utensils’ from his orchestral suite version of incidental music written for Aristophanes’ Wasps – scored for glockenspiel among other things. The other 12-letter across at 14 also proved very resistant, although with less reason on retrospect.

    Got VESTA and PRATIE from the wordplay and RESIDE from the definition (had the RE- without the penny dropping that ‘side’ is a butcher’s term for half a carcass). Resorted to aids only to check SKEIN – knowing that 16 ended in ‘n’ (rather than in ‘s’) gave me PLANKTON.

    Of a fine bunch, COD to POOP, which I derived not from the palindrome but from op = ‘operational’ = ‘going’ reversed (‘up’) and then in standard order for a down clue (‘down’). Also enjoyed the ecclesiastical clues, especially ORDAIN.

  14. 22 minutes of which almost half taken up by the NE corner. Well deceived by the short clips in 4 and CP Snow had to be dragged from the very far reaches of the memory.DISCOURSER also took ages to work out. I didn’t know the Kitchen reference in 17 so was left wondering what kind of cooking utensil it was going to be until I came here!
    Apart from all that – agree with Tim – pretty standard fare
  15. I got off to a quick start, since there were a number of giveaways, but then slowed to a steady amble, taking 35 minutes to solve it. Much of the NE and 5, 13 and 17 eluded me for quite a while. Once I recalled the particular meaning of ‘kitchen’ that seems to be used with increasing frequency, I got 17, which led on to the rest.
  16. Can’t give a precise time due to an interruption during which I forget to stop the clock, but around 25 minutes. Agree that this was uneven, with NE hardest for me too.

    Guesses for corridor, vesta and pratie (am I the only one here (with the probable exception of cgrishi) who hasn’t got an Irish grandparent or four?) Cleric from def & checkers alone.

    With the ending C?S I briefly considered three ring circus for 6, on the basis that the circus was always a refuge for runaways.

    2. Yes, there are a lot of them around. Those who know my surname might be surprised that I had an Irish grandmother on my father’s side. I never knew her though, so my knowledge of praties didn’t come from that source.
  17. 19:10 .. Like Penfold I have to declare a pitiable lack of Irish grandparents, for which reason I put PRATIE then changed it to PRAMIE then changed it back again and ended up with a T and an M squeezed into the light (coalition solving again). But if you’d pushed me I’d have plumped for PRATIE.

    I’m with Tim on disliking this mixture of near extremes – some clues solved at a glance, others requiring the engagement of mental four-wheel drive. But some nice individual clues.

  18. Held up by a few, 43 minutes, couldn’t stop thinking of ‘The Masters’ for Snow and some strange head of college. A fine novel sadly out of fashion. I like these parson’s-egg grids, the sudden blasters of a good time. OK with the percolater – it’s not the letter, it’s the sound.
    1. I was wondering to myself how in vogue Snow is these days. I certainly read lots of him when I was a younger man, but only because the books were in the house (my father’s copies, presumably); I don’t recall anyone who taught me English ever recommending them. Anyway, that meant I also considered Masters, not to mention Strangers and Brothers…
      1. There was a great C.P.Snow/F.R.Leavis debate of a kind, made much of by the press, when I was in the 6th form at school. Snow was for arts people knowing the second(?) law of thermodynamics and a balanced knowledge spread and Leavis simply sneered at him and said he couldn’t be considered a real novelist at all. Leavis was certainly the better writer (sticking to criticism). I fancy Snow may have made the better Times solver.
  19. I was not on the setters wavelength and this was another one that I had to sleep on before finishing. Didn’t understand CORRIDOR but put it in from checking letters (wasn’t C.P. Snow a fast bowler from the early 70s?)
    1. I think you may be remembering John Snow, who apparently had some poetry published (but no novels) – a couple of examples are quoted in a review here.
  20. About 30 minutes here. The list of things I didn’t know reads remarkably like Mark’s: C.P. Snow title, SKEIN as geese, VESTA, and GLOCKENSPIEL in the kitchen. I also had 4 Irish grandparents so PRATIE wasn’t hard to see. I have no problem with the homophone schwa sound either. I also don’t have a problem with the varying difficulty of wordplay. My problems here were not in the NE, but really in the SE where my last three entries were the clever ORDAIN, PLANKTON, and finally a guess at SKEIN. Regards to all.
  21. This clue is a lot harder if you get C.P. Snow confused with P.C. Wren and try to fit in something to do with Beau Geste. D’oh!

    Paul S.

  22. Don’t normally post anything when i get in this late, however just want to add my tuppence on the CORRIDOR answer which threw me completely. Assuming never having heard of CPSnow (which I clearly hadnt!) there is little in the way of wordplay to fall back on. This happens rarely as it is really only cryptic defs, but I would consider it unfair. I would hope that vocabulary aside, there should not be an emphasis on straight general knowledge to prosper in a times xwd. I suspect that it would be largely frowned upon that you might only solve a clue by knowing the right back for England in 1966, or who played bass guitar for the SeX Pistols, so relying solely on the knowledge that CP Snow wrote “Corridors of Power” surely falls in that category.

    I will get down from my high horse now……..

    1. I’d say what’s more important is that there’s a reference to a powerful passage and that the reader will know the phrase ‘corridor(s) of power’. Snow then is some literary person who coined or used it. Still not easy, I know.
  23. prátaí is the irish word for potates. “irish”- .ie is used for Irish web-sites- maybe that’s it?
  24. Another NE corner fail. Missed Corridor Starry and Reside as I still had Virgi lightly penned in although I was suspecting it was a duffer.
    I must agree with the ‘game of two halves’ sentiments.

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