Times 24602… no, just talking

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : Well after 20 minutes I have a complete grid, but I’m not 100% satisfied with it. This is one I wish I had swapped weeks with, because I’m sure my Thursday sharer (hi uncle Y) would have a lot of nice things to say. But I’m not a big fan of cryptic definitions, and there’s a few in here – just looky those question marks at the end of clues! However it’s nice to see that the setter threw a bone to my brother and the new addition to the Heard family last night (welcome to the world, Noah – in a few years your bad uncle George will be buying you puzzle books). Enough of me, here we go (and it’s a tough one to decide what to leave out).

Across
1 STAIRCASE: there’s one of those cryptic definitions to start with
9 NEARING: I don’t have a dictionary on me but I think this is a double definition
10 SAMBUCA: uncle SAM, then A,CUB reversed
11 let’s skip this one today
12 EGG-BEATER: double definition, the other being a helicopter
13 AWNINGS: N in A,WINGS – loved this clue, the definition “they cover something” is well hidden
15 TURIN: I in TURN
17 BADGE(red): you may or may not need no stinkin’ ones
19 PIECE: sounds like PEACE, man
18 S(incerit)Y,NOD
20 CENTAUR: cryptic def #2
23 OBFUSCATE: (OF,CASE,BUT), great surface, great word
25 MILNE: N in MILE – referred to as AA in a crossword recently
27 deliberately omitted
28 NOMADIC: anagram of COMEDIAN without the E
29 ESCALATOR: cryptic def #3
 
Down
1 SYSTEM: nice device – take all those pesky A’s out of SAYS TEAM
2 ARMAGEDDON: got this from definition originally, it’s AGED DON under ARM
3 ROULETTE: LET in ROUTE – the main danger is you lose your chips
4 APART: PA in ART
5 ENDURANCE: double def, as in you can demonstrate ENDURANCE
6 MAROON: double definition
7 VIDE: anagram of (DIVE)
8 AGONISED: AGO, then 1’S in NED (Kelly, Australian Bushranger)
14 NONCHALANT: N, ON, then LA in CHANT
16 REPRODUCE: I think this just creeps in as a double definition
17 BE,COMING: glad I had BADGE sorted out quickly, I had originally written INCOMING
18 SEASHELL: Arthur ASHE in SELL
21 AGENDA: GEN in ADA
22 REDEAR: At least I think so – isn’t the burning in your ear two words and the wordplay RE(on),DEAR(high). Or am I missing something? mctext suggests METEOR and another cryptic definition which sounds plausible
24 FRANC(k): nice clue that works, as Cesar Franck was a French composer
26 (c)LIMB

55 comments on “Times 24602… no, just talking”

  1. George, I’m afraid 22dn is probably METEOR; yet another cd; of which, I agree, there are too many.
    41 mins here; spending far too long on the aforesaid and the double defs. Don’t like the def for 8dn either. It only works if you read: “In the past … suffering”; so either double duty or wrong part of speech.
      2. I had REEFER for 22D – which I think is a valid cryptic interpretation, but probably a bit too ‘druggy’ for the times.

        As for your ROULETTE observation. “The main danger is you lose your chips”; not if one’s playing the Russian version!

  2. I too have METEOR. Thought this a well below standard puzzle with only 1dn making me smile. My compliments for the blog.
  3. I came here to read comments to yesterday’s blog and was pleasantly surprised to see today’s blog already up in the wee hours of Blighty. Well done, glheard, you must have literally burnt the midnight oil.

    Altho’ I quite like cd’s (they are the only clues that you can say aloud at a party and everyone can participate) today’s aren’t that hot, or at least, not to the standard of Mr Roger Squires aka Rufus and Dante.

    My COD is SEASHELL followed by ROULETTE, which only shows my partiality for indirect definitions.

    1. not a midnight oil effort – I’m on the East Coast of the US (usually in North Carolina, but this weekend I’m in Washington DC), so the crossword appears around 7pm. If I’m still sober, I’m good to go.

      This does mean that right around now I’ll be passing out and won’t be checking comments for a couple of hours.

  4. I thought this was rather poor with far too many (bad) cryptic definitions. I was ready to throw in the towel halfway through out of boredom. Let’s just say that others may like it.
  5. A similar experience to you all. A cryptic definition is only half a clue unless it’s a good one; ESCALATOR & CENTAUR pass my rigorous standards but the others seem to allow for too many interpretations. I was in the METEOR camp at 22, but REEFER is better, albeit probably not the intended answer. I second SEASHELL for COD but also liked George’s fancied runners OBFUSCATE and AWNINGS.
      1. It’s one of his best, but I always thought it was a song about Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow. You’d know more about that than I, though.
  6. Found this very tough, not helped by putting ‘tombuca’ for SAMBUCA, not being a spirits/liqueur drinker. (F&B’s always the round I slip out to the Gents at the pub quiz.) Managed to invent a new coin & composer combo at 24dn [‘Isaac(s)’] after putting ‘shipshape’ in at 23 ac in desperation. That sort of day.

    BTW, George, you haven’t covered 19 ac, ‘though it may be another of your planned omissions.

    1. ooops – it wasn’t, that was just one that feel through the cracks, I’ll add it in
  7. Can anyone please explain NEARING REPRODUCE and ENDURANCE? I can’t see them as double definitions, and wonder if there is some subtelty I am missing.
    1. I’d be interested to hear an explanantion of those ones too. 9ac is a clue for CLOSING as I see it, but I can’t find any dictionary evidence for near=close in any sense other than “close by” as opposed to shut. And isn’t 5d just “one has to demonstrate ENDURANCE in order to stay”?
    2. I took ‘nearing’ to be a simple definition (picking up on flight path in the previous clue) meaning ‘approaching’, with ‘near’ being used as a verb.

      At 16dn, is ‘succeed’ doing service as ‘reproduce’ used in an intransitive sense to mean to ‘turn out (well) when copied’ (thanks to Chambers online for this one)?

      1. Yes, that was my take on nearing. I can’t see it as a d.d. As for succeed, I’m not overly convinced by the paranthetical “well”, since Chambers in hardcopy includes “,badly, etc” in the same parentheses, but I guess that’s why George said it just creeps in.
  8. 14:39 for this – of the ones I counted as CDs, I thought 1A, 29, 5, 16 and 22 were OK, less keen on the others. But I was more troubled by 17D, where I can’t see how “be coming” is better than just “coming” for “Soon to appear”, or where else “be” can come from. With INCOMING and UPCOMING as plausible alternatives from the def, I thought a bit more clarity was in order.
    1. Surely the def was “suitably elegant”, for which BECOMING is fine. I don’t see how INCOMING or UPCOMING would fit. 22:03 here, held up by LANDING for 9A, but very slow to get going with it anyway (although METEOR was one of my first in without any checkers).
      1. I’m happy with “suitably elegant” meaning “becoming”, but the question then is what “soon to appear” is doing in the clue. If “suitably elegant” is one def, it must either be another def or wordplay, and I can’t make sense of it as either of these.
    2. I wondered about this too, having thought of ‘upcoming’ initially. Is the problem partially overcome if the phrase is taken verbally (as as an infinitive, i.e. ‘to soon appear’ = ‘to be coming’) rather than adjectivally?

      Regarding linxit’s comment, I took this to be a dd.

      1. I don’t think they’d expect people to form an infinitive in this way. The infinitive of “get over”, for instance, is “to get over”. I can’t imagine anyone reading the phrase “get to over” as meaning the same thing.
          1. Maybe so – but I remain unconvinced that “soon to appear” would be understood (or intended by the setter) as an infinitive meaning the same as “to appear soon”.
            1. I’m sorry, that was a minor quibble. I should have made it clear that I agree with you on the becoming = soon to appear solution.
  9. An hour over three sessions, two of them on the move, wasn’t enough to complete this puzzle. I arrived at work with 19, 20 and 23 across and 16, 18 and 22 down still missing. I used a solver to find CENTAUR, REPRODUCE and METEOR and was then able to polish off the others. It’s interesting that Chambers Word Wizard doesn’t offer METEOR as a suggestion for ?E?E?R.

    I originally thought COSSACK at 20 and when that was proved wrong by some checkers going in I thought CONTACT but couldn’t justify it with ‘Arab’. This clue was particularly galling because for a brief moment earlier I had tried to think the word for a half-man half-horse but it didn’t come immediately to mind and I forgot to pursue it.

    I had some quibbles most of which have already been mentioned. I also wondered about the ‘a’ in 22dn and surely an ESCALATOR is most definitely not taken at a standstill?

    Apart from CENTAUR and REPRODUCE I completed the LH in the first 20 minutes but the NE proved difficult and the SE mostly beat me in the time available.

  10. struggled on this, so consequently didnt like it, though i thought others may have been ok and not gripe so much so I was pleased that it seemed to offend most.

    The struggle was entirely down to the off-centre cds and dds, where I felt like I was missing something. Quite like the suggestion above of LANDING for 9A (apart from the checkers!!) as it actually gives some cryptic element to the clue – given it follows on from STAIRCASE. Otherwise I cant see that it is a cryptic clue at all.

    On a similar point, REEFER surely does not fit with the Es in the wrong place. I eventually got METEOR, but it was last in with about 2-3 mins gazing at it.

    A grumpy 45 mins in total

  11. Congratulations glh. Feel as if I’ve been in labour myself with this thing. Got completely screwed up in NE owing to landing myself with ‘landing’ for 9 and taking forever to get out of it. Don’t undertsand the connection between 4 and 5, unless with the queasy link of demonstrating an art. 8 seems OK – maybe Kelly has agonised, and an agonised or suffering expression say, with some double-duty stuff going on. 16 is surely just a surface reading , the trick being to avoid misdirection. 17 an ordinary OK dd. 22 surely can only be meteor given the collective unconscious of setters. Anyhow a catastrophe timewise – 58 min. – but made it in the end. Liked several of the clues esp. 20.
    1. The trouble with 8d is that it would not have spoilt the suface at all if it had been SUFFERED, so this is just sloppy. You can understand where the mismatch enables more subterfuge and misleading, however this adds nothing (but a moan).
  12. Agonised is OK: Chambers gives it as an adjective suffering or expressing anguish Took me too long (50 min) but I actually enjoyed this puzzle; it had an old-fashioned feel to it, reminding me of those puzzles from the 40s and 50s you sometimes see reprinted.
    1. So: “suffering [anguish] or expressing anguish” — is that how you read Chambers? Or is “suffering” OK on its own (with “expressing anguish” as the second possibility)? I suspect the former; and even that’s, um, dicky. Commutation test: how can the word “suffering” (alone) be used in the place of “agonised”?
      1. Clearly I am taking both sides of the same argument here, but how about (adjectivally) –

        He wore an agonised expression / He wore a suffering expression

        I have an urge to stick “long” in front of suffering, but I guess it works on its own.

        On this basis, I may have to retract my previous comment.

        1. Not convinced. Unless it’s some kind of dialect. You get that with Chambers — which is why I love it!
      2. Yes, there is an ambiguity in the Chambers definition, isn’t there? So, let’s get the Shorter Oxford off the shelf.

        This gives agonized (Oxford spelling!) as an adjective meaning subjected to or expressing agony. So, “an agonized cry”; but could we say “a suffering cry”? I would normally say “a cry of suffering”, but the Shorter Oxford also gives suffering as an adjective meaning That suffers, or is characterized by the suffering of, pain, affliction or distress, and illustrates with a line from Shakespeare Gentle maid Haue of my suffering youth some feeling pitty (sic). He could, presumably, have written my agonized youth.

        So, after all that, I still think the clue is OK; though I did agonise about it!

  14. 19 minutes, and nothing much to add. Disliked both pairs of follow-on clues, as neither showed connections in the answers, and without that, neither of the second clues were particularly cryptic. For me, the problem with cd’s (at least in this puzzle) is that you have to get checking letters before you know which of several possible answers is right: METEOR and NEARING are prime examples. That might be OK for an advert for a computer game masquerading as a quick crossword (readers of Metro will know whereof I speak) but surely not here.
    Never mind: some decent clues as well, of which I nominate SYSTEM for its neat device as CoD. Liked ARMAGEDDON, too, though some of my millenialist friends would see it as the final victory over the forces of darkness, and only a disaster if you’re on the wrong side.
  15. There were too many cd’s, where I had the answer early on but I wasn’t certain they were right until I had confirming letters. Since 1ac and 9 were linked I entered LANDING for 9, which meant I was unable to finish the puzzle since I couldn’t get 5 and 6.

    I think “soon to appear” for BE COMING is problematic in all sorts of ways.

    Definitely not my favourite puzzle of the week

    1. It’s not the two words ‘be coming’, I’d have thought, but the one, that does mean ‘soon to be in existence’. The more immediately attractive sense in ‘coming’ is a blind alley, isn’t it?
      1. I agree about the one word, though not the meaning – “becoming angry” is equivalent to “soon to be angry”, so “soon to be” can indicate “becoming”, but I can’t really buy “become” = “exist soon”.
      2. In general ‘becoming’ indicates a progression, which ‘soon to appear’ does not. “It’s becoming hotter” does not mean “It’s soon to appear hotter”. There are contexts in which the notion of progression is less relevant or not relevant at all (“She’s becoming a mother”) though even then I don’t particularly like “soon to appear“.

        I still stand by my view that the clue is problematic, and I don’t think we can be certain that the setter had “becoming” rather than “be coming” in mind.

  16. 21:11 .. Last in CENTAUR

    Thinks I liked about this puzzle:

    SYSTEM
    OBFUSCATE
    SAMBUCA
    AWNINGS
    CENTAUR
    The linking of the first and last across clues – STAIRCASE / ESCALATOR

    I thought today’s comments needed a Piers Morgan to balance all the Simon Cowells (good grief, did I just compare myself with Piers Morgan?).

  17. 20 minutes after golf. Thought a lot of it nowhere near up to scratch for a Times daily.
  18. Well, I finally got through one this week, in about 20 minutes, but, like others, I found the abundance of cd’s to be a bit much, and the overall quality somewhat lower than usual. I did, though, get a kick out of NONCHALANT. Sotira, you’re far more clever than Piers, don’t sell yourself short. Regards to all, including the setter, since I was having a bad week until now. And well done, George.
  19. Yes, I did think of BEACON, but AVERAGE was clearly correct so that thought went nowhere! Also thought that this was an indifferent slog which I was attempting between working and viewing the Test Match.

    Hence, no time, no COD and very little patience left!

    (Also, in view of the content of most of the above comments, wouldn’t mind hearing what the setter may have to say).

    1. Not as accurately as I would expect from a Times crossword, unless I’m missing something. In the phrase “Peter was becoming angry” you can replace “becoming” with “soon to appear”, and the meaning stays the same. I can’t think of a similar “be coming”/”soon to appear” replacement where the phrase or sentence retains meaning and doesn’t turn into ungrammatical nonsense.
      1. To repeat something I said above in a reply to Joekobi, “becoming” generally indicates progression (which “soon to appear” does not). If X is becoming angry he/she is showing some signs of anger now. If the world is becoming warmer, it’s showing some signs of increased temperature now, not in some undefined future.
        1. If you accept that there is a progression from “calm” to “angry” rather than an instant swtich from one to the other, there must be some point where someone becoming angry is soon to be (or appear) angry.

          We can’t be 100% certain that the setter means “becoming” rather than “be coming”, but to me the grammatical mismatch of “be coming” and “soon to be” still seems like the kind of linguistic nonsense I wouldn’t expect in a Times crossword.

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