Times – 24591 – Pangram

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
This very tricky puzzle gave me endless problems in the solving as I fell for every misdirection. I think my brain is a bit addled this morning. In many cases I came up with the right answer from the definition alone but I couldn’t even begin to understand the wordplay so the answer didn’t go in until most of the checking letters were in place and left few or no alternatives. If it hadn’t been my day to blog I might have been a little more cavalier about these and bunged them in hoping for the best. A long solve (90 minutes),a difficult blog and an appointment coming up shortly means I haven’t had time to check everything as thoroughly as I would normally so please forgive any typos and I will correct them later.

Across
1 TARMAC – T(ARM)ACt – ‘Runway’ as the definition is confirmed in the COED. 
5 PAN PIPES – PAN(PIP)ES – ‘Spot’ is PIP here, as on playing cards. This one caused me a lot of trouble at 8dn because I originally entered PAN PIPER on the misguided assumption that it’s the player who makes the notes rather than the instrument.
9 ON THE RUN – This is an anagram of ‘hunter’ following ‘no’ reversed. Is there something odd about a clue where the definition (in this case ‘exercising’) is also the anagram indicator?
12 AMULET – A,MULE,T – A charm used to ward off evil. The two crosses must be ‘mule’ and ‘t’ , the second I guess as in T-junction but I imagine there may be a  more exact reference that hasn’t yet come to mind..
11 HAIRBALL – H(enry),BRIAn (rev),A,L,L – I wondered about the legitimacy of H short for Henry but I gather it can be a unit in physics so that’s okay. Long-haired cat owners will know all about hairballs.
12 ALIGNS – mALIGNS
13 JUNKYARD – ‘One on horse’ = JUNKY followed ‘ARD for ‘iron’ if one is a stereotypical cockney. ‘Horse’ is slang for ‘heroin. ‘Iron’ in rhyming slang means something quite different so until I solved it I wondered where this clue was going. I’m not quite sure what the definition is here but I imagine it’s a reference to the days of the Steptoes and Hercules, their horse.
15 Deliberately omitted. If you’re stuck try reading the clue backwards.
17 HYDE – Sounds like ‘hide’. The doctor in question is Jekyll.
19 BY CHOICE – BY(CH(O)IC)E – Our cricket reference for today BYE = extra.
20 ZEBRAS – ZE(B)Ro,AS
21 OFF-WHITE – OFF(WHIT)Er
22 PRIVET – PR,1,VET – PR= Proportional Representation.Privet is a popular type of garden hedge.
23 OPAQUEST – O,PA,QUEST
24 NIGHT OUT – (thug into)* – Amended on edit. Thanks, Linxit.
25 EXETER – EXE(cu)TER – Looking for a see beginning with E misled me to Ely for a while.
 
Down
2 ANNUALLY – ANN,U,ALLY
3 MAHARAJA – AJAR,Applaud,HAM all reversed. ‘Ajar’ for ‘to’ had me foxed but if one thinks of pulling a door to and leaving it ajar it makes sense.
4 CERTAINTY – Obviously an anagram of (in tray etc) but the definition caught me out and I spent ages looking for the name of a river.
5 PENALTY SHOOT-OUT – PENALTY, SHOO, TOUT
6 PIMPLED – PIMP,LED – LED as in Light Emitting Diode, hence ‘glower’.
7 POLYGAMY – POLY,GAMY – Having many wives, so ‘union building’.
8 SET ASIDE – SE(Time)A,SIDE
14 REINFLATE – REIN,FLAT,onE
15 MARZIPAN – M,AR(ZIP)AN – Aran being a type of knitwear. I don’t know that it’s specifically a coat. 
16 RAMBLING – fieldeR,AMBLING
17 HEN-HOUSE – HE,N (House)O USE. Battery houses are where chickens are reared in unspeakable conditions.
18 DISTASTE – (Its ads)* followed by ET (rev)
19 Deliberately omitted. Please ask if baffled.

40 comments on “Times – 24591 – Pangram”

  1. Agreed, very difficult but great fun to solve. 30:09 for me. 24 is (thug into)*, only typo I could see.
  2. 33 minutes here, so I think it’s a toughie. Actually, I thought there were rather too many clues where the answer came in a kind of panicked guess followed by a scrambled working out of why. For me, MARZIPAN, ZEBRAS, JUNKYARD, ALIGN and BY CHOICE were in that category, the wordplay so obscured (or devilishly cunning, if you prefer) as to be no help at all in the solving. I ended up looking for the least likely bit of the clue to be a definition and hoping for inspiration. So I haven’t really decided whether this is fiendishly clever, or a step too far in obscurity. Maybe I was just being too easily fooled. CoD to HYDE, the only one to make me smile (even BRAVEST didn’t do that!)
    Impressive blog, by the way: congrats on working them all out.
  3. Having convinced myself that at last my parsing was improving (can’t do much about limited vocabulary and general knowledge) the last 3 days have dented my confidence. Very tough again today with assistance needed to finish. Particular problems AJAR = to, PAN-PIPES not being plural and HYDE just too deceptive.
    Also managed to invent a new adjective for stripy animals, ZEBRAN, ie. Tailless ZERO (ZER) & AND (AN) around B for BLACK, ie. like certain quadrupeds; then moving on without seeing the obvious.
    Still, if these things were easy there would be no point.
    1. I started of with ??B?AN from checkers and “and tailless”, and also reached ZEBRAN, but decided it was just a bit too odd as a word, and that “tailless” couldn’t quite apply to the necessary words.
      1. I too went with ZEBRAN, although having ZER as the duck (I think this comes from too much exposure to primitive programming languages as a youth, where ZERO always seemed contracted – I guess to avoid the 0/O confusion). This then scanned much better with only AN(D) tailless, and the meaning being “like…”.

        I guess the main flaw in that one was the lack of existence of the word!

  4. 24:44 – one of those puzzles where I think “I’m glad this can’t be used in the championship!”.

    Fooled by both to=AJAR (which I shoud have seen) and “one on horse”, so wasted a few minutes pondering other kinds of yard and seeking MAH????A princes. In the end I trusted MAHARAJAH as an old favourite answer and the hint of Steptoe in 13. When the NE corner eventually fell and I checked that my answers made sense, I spotted the pangram with the J and decided that was confirmation. I think it will be fairly quiet here for a while though – well done to Jack for fighting through it all in time for an early report. Minor tweak: “Jekyll” at 17.

    Clues I wouldn’t mind seeing again: there’s some ghastly pun on medical preservatives and disease treatment leading to “for mal de Hyde”.

    1. Thanks, PB, I’ve amended it, but it wasn’t a slip of the finger. Earlier I went to check the spelling at Wikipedia and typed in Jeckyll only for it to come up on the suggestions list so I assumed it was correct. But going back just now and clicking on the suggestion it redirects to the Jekyll page.
  5. Thought I was doing not too badly on a tricky number when came to a shuddering halt in NE. Left with 7 and 12 jumped ship eventually with blames and palimony – at least the despairing leap had a certain style about it! Rather a splendid crossword in a quiet way.
  6. I think that neatly illustrates what I mean: I didn’t get to=ajar until I after I had surmised MAHARAJA – you really had to go looking for it rather than being even deviously guided by it. But as Barry says, if these things were easy…
  7. I think the idea is that ‘woolly’=ARAN, and MARZIPAN is a coat(ing) for a cake, which in turn is coated with icing.
  8. 40 minutes here, nearly as long as it took me to do last Sunday’s Mephisto! I couldn’t get onto the setter’s wavelength at all and like others did a lot of reverse engineering from guessed solution to untangling the intricate wordplay.

    Looking back on it now it all seems fair and I can’t quite see why I struggled so much – always a sign of a good puzzle, so well done setter.

    1. It is “see”. One meaning of “see” is “the place in which a cathedral church stands, identified as the seat of authority of a bishop or archbishop”. So the crossword cliché version of this is {see = ELY}, but other cathedral cities get their turn from time to time – “See Union leader (7)” is a possible clue for LINCOLN, for example.
  11. Over the hour for this one. A true challenge, worthy of the effort. I too hesitated over the MAHARAJA, but eventually saw the “to”. JUNKYARD on the other hand was a complete mystery. I hoped it was just a straight cryptic in the end, but knew it couldn’t be. ON THE RUN was good but COD to AMULET, no… BRAVEST, no… AMULET.
  12. I would have given up on this very early on if I was not aiming for my 20th correct solution on the trot. After a break to clean up a hairball from the bedroom carpet, I resumed to get junkyard which gave me the breakthrough to finish with the well-known River Certainty which runs through the Plain of Stupidity. Many clues were brilliant. I loved the clue to Hyde. Others, such as that for Junkyard probably overstepped the boundary into obscurity in attempting to maintain the &Lit.

    All this was in vain though because I also coined the adjective Zebran, missing the obvious, so 19 it is.

    I double-checked my dictionary and ajar means open and to means closed. I don’t think anyone has given a satisfactory explanation of this yet.

      1. Thanks to Jack and Joekobi for those explanations, which I imagine was what the setter must have had in mind. The example under Jack’s definition is: “He pulled the door to behind him”, which, to me, means “He closed the door behind him”. I think I would say “He left the door open” or “He closed the door to”, probably to avoid ambiguity. It may just be one of those words that can be used in two opposite senses.
        1. “opposite” seems an overstatement. My guess is that “to” covers door/doorway angle range of about 0-10 degrees, and “ajar” something like 5-20 degrees. As these share common ground, “to” and “ajar” can mean the same. This may seem a bit approximate for the Times crossword, but I don’t think it’s any worse than something like {men = OR} where both “men” and “or” can mean several other things.
          1. All I can say is: if, as a kid, I’d left the door ajar when told to pull it “to” (“Were you born in a ******* pub?”), I wouldn’t be here to write this reply!
  13. 41:51 .. one of those that makes one feel pretty pleased with oneself for finishing at all (okay, that’s a royal ‘one’).

    Last in ZEBRAS – add me to the list of those who spent a good while considering ZEBRAN (and even ZEBRAL) as an adjective but who couldn’t quite bring themselves to write it in. Just as well.

  14. Pity I wasn’t timing, I found this one right up my alley and solved it in a few quick breaks during rehearsal last night. A few leaps of faith, mostly in the wordplay department – didn’t see the wordplay for MAHARAJA, JUNKYARD, BY CHOICE, or MARZIPAN (except the ZIP bit).
  15. 24 minutes but one mistake.Had ZEBRAN despite seeing that the wordplay was dodgy as I couldn’t see past “like” being part of the definition – hence an adjective needed. Though POLYGAMY and JUNKYARD were excellent although I think it was a good puzzle all round
  16. 32:10, last in aligns. I couldn’t see anything to fit ?l?g?s despite believing I had to knock the front off a word meaning “runs down” and was starting to doubt that polygamy was right.

    I didn’t read 3 properly and thought ajar could mean rising. The wordplay of 4 others also eluded me until coming here.

    I’m looking forward to seeing the Tarmac Zebras at this year’s Leeds Festival.

  17. I nearly always get caught out on this where it has been discussed at length in the first post, but having not seen it on two flick throughs – can anyone clarify the word play for AMULET. It was my last in and a definition only guess from checkers, but still cant see the logic.

    Otherwise a struggle, with at least 10 mins spent looking at 7,10, and 12. That after entering 20 wrong forever early on, so actually DNF. Was hoping to use the pangram aid to give a letter for 7,10 and 12, but it was already a full house so no help. Had ALLOWS pencilled in for “arranges” in a loose fashion with SHALLOWS being some kind of ex-lake that had been “run down”! Never thought it right though. Finally dredged up POLY for old college and scraped the others in for about 40 mins in total.

    1. A = a
      Pair of crosses: MULE (a cross-bred animal and note also from from Chambers online: 5 especially as adj a hybrid, such as a cross between a canary and another finch (a mule canary).) and T (for which I can’t offer anything better than Jack’s suggestion).
      1. Small improvement on the T: there’s such a thing as a “tau cross”, listed in COED and Collins, shaped like the Greek (capital) letter tau, which of course looks just like our T. Those with a copy of Brewer can see it among the illustrated types of cross.
        1. Permission to call it a duff clue ?!

          Whilst the tau cross is perhaps a little more reasonable than a T junction (where nothing actually “crosses” anything else), it is probably too big a leap to take tau in greek, ‘translate’ it into T and then use it to represent cross as a single letter.

          Perhaps it was just a reference to a lower case t which can be written as a standard cross shape – however this also seems flaky.

          1. I think the lower-case t in the plainest possible script is probably the intention.
  18. A stinker for me – done in several longish sessions. NE corner last in with aids (shame on me!) so actually a great puzzle.
  19. Regards to all. I think this was the toughest puzzle this year. About 2 hours all told, left side in first, then SE, then finally the NE section. I won’t really catalogue all the things I didn’t understand, but many went in without full understanding ( MAHARAJA, BY CHOICE, JUNKYARD, AMULET). Last entry was POLYGAMY, hoping ‘gamy’ could mean ‘high’ in some sense. Alas, I went with ZEBRAN, however, so despite the fact that I resisted resorting to aids, not all correct. Well done setter, but don’t make this a habit, please. Best to everyone.
  20. Thanks you all for your comments and explanations, and especially for massaging my ego in rating this a a tough one. As a beginner, and having tried several puzzles in other organs, thought I’d have a go at this one, the only Times I’ve bought in about six months. Did they see me coming?

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