Times 24,612 Trivial Pursuits

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 10 minutes

A very easy puzzle that requires a fair smattering of general knowledge but nothing really obscure. No real talking points other than perhaps at 1D where I’m not certain about “fatty food”.

Across
1 CALL,IN – C-ALL-IN; contact the heavy brigade;
4 ENDURING – END-U-RING;
9 ROBOTIC – ROB-OTIC; reference Dr Who’s enduring enemy; exterminate! exterminate!;
11 GUMSHOE – GUMS-HO-(win)E; Sam Spade is the original hard boiled private eye created by Hammett but most associated with Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon – great stuff;
12 USAGE – (pila)U-SAGE;
13 MAELSTROM – (molar stem)*; powerful whirlpool such as Corryvreekan off Isle of Jura in Scotland;
14 CONFIDANTE – CON-F-I-DANTE;
16 COUP – COUP(le);
19 EMMA – (pip)-EMMA is military talk for pm=the afternoon; the book is by Jane Austen;
20 HIGHLANDER – (her lad nigh)*; speed bonny boat like a bird on the wing….;
22 PASTERNAK – PAST-(earn)*-K; Boris 1890-1960, creator of Dr Zhivago;
23 POWER – two meanings 1=mathematical term for power (as raise to the power ten) 2=shock and awe;
25 NOURISH – NO(URI)SH; URI is from (c)U(r)R(y) I(s);
26 SPINNEY – SP-INNE(r)-Y;
27 CALLIOPE – C-ALL-I(OP)E; the Muse of heroic poetry;
28 CEREAL – C(ERE)AL;
 
Down
1 CARBUNCLE – CARB-UNCLE; I thought carbohydrates were starch and sugar rather than fat?;
2 deliberately omitted but the clue is worth looking into;
3 IN,THE,AIR – two meanings;
5 NO,GREAT,SHAKES – a “shake” is a milky drink – groan;
6 UTMOST – (stout + m)*;
7 ISHERWOOD – IS-HER-WOOD; a WOOD is a golf club; Christopher Isherwood 1904-1986;
8 GLEAM – G(L)E(A)M;
10 COMPANIONSHIP – COMPANION-SHIP; Compass Rose perhaps;
15 NUMBSKULL – N-(bums)*-(bloc)K-ULL;
17 PORTRAYAL – PORT ROYAL with “A” for “O”; Port Royal was destroyed by earthquake in 1692;
18 SAPPHIRE – S(APP)HIRE;
21 GEMINI – (imagine without “a”)*; sign of the zodiac;
22 PANIC – PAN-IC; blogger’s feeling when the solution is elusive – not today, however;
24 WINCE – WIN-CE;

56 comments on “Times 24,612 Trivial Pursuits”

  1. Would have been celebrating a record time today if only I could remember that ‘sign’ points to the zodiac. So 27 minutes in the end, very fast for me. Stand by for some lightning quick finishes by the experts.
  2. I couldn’t believe that I just sat down and polished this off in less than ten minutes … one of those rare days when my time is not three times Peter B’s time ; unless, of course, he does today’s in less than three minutes 🙂
  3. Absolutely blitheringly coruscatingly foully furious with myself. After over forty years of solving Times crosswords – not every day I may add – I find I’ve finished in 8 minutes and can’t bear to check a doubtful one in the hope of breaking personal record by a fifth. So leave In the mix… It may have taken over the two minutes to correct, but I should at least have glanced at it. There it is. Another forty years…
  4. 18 minutes. Not seen pip emma for a while; ack pip and toc used to be regular visitors.
  5. 25 minutes, so, on the basis that PB is 6-8 times faster than me, I’d predict 3-5 minutes from the maestro. Last in SAPPHIRE, mostly because I was looking for a county rather than a stone. COMPANIONSHIP rather weak. COD to NUMBSKULL, as I like the word.
  6. 23 mins — also stumped by EMMA at 19ac. But I was expecting a serious anti-lit/hums grump from you, Jimbo. Still … good to find you in a pleasant mood. Must be good weather and golf?
  7. I finished the bulk of this in 20 minutes but needed another 20 to find the missing words in the lower half.17 and 26 were the sticking points in the SE and 14, 15 and 19 in the SW.

    15 was not helped by reading the second word of clue as ‘b u r n s’ instead of ‘b u m s’.

    1. Forgot to say I am amazed I’ve managed to live as long as I have without meeting pip emma until this morning. Never heard of it, nor ack emma below.

      I have heard of ack ack guns though which I guess stands for Anti Aircaft.

  8. 17D here almost replicating 16D in todays Grauniad. A coincidence to spend the rest of the pondering upon.
  9. 35 minutes again; held up by CARBUNCLE/EMMA (I agree carbs aren’t fat, although what’s high sugar without high fat?) and SAPPHIRE/CEREAL. Otherwise straightforward. The setters seem to have raised their own bar lately by making their hidden word clues &lit or semi-&lit. You’ve got to admire that; so COD to LIBYA
  10. I agree this was very easy – 11 minutes.
    However I didn’t get 19ac until coming here so thanks for that.
    I also agree on carbs. Surely this is just wrong?
  11. 8:15 here, and would have been considerably quicker if I hadn’t stuck CALL UP in at 1ac, which left me with UP THE ?I? for 3dn. Having exhausted the alphabet I had another look at 1ac and saw the mistake.

    I also thought “fatty food” was just plain wrong for CARB in 1dn, and having just read the Wikipedia article I’m convinced it is! Obviously neither the setter nor the editor are foodies.

  12. Timing mistake of some kind here – I think I misred the starting time by 5 minutes and my real time was 5:20. Might have broken 5 if I’d written CONFIDANTE correctly the first time, or if not slightly befuddled after a crack of dawn dental appointment.

    With Jim on carbs – informal usage seems to be just as accurate as “carbohydrate”. Hence 1D not solved on first look.

        1. Memorising the whole of “Signalese” (the WW1 predecessor of the current “radio alphabet”) is wasted effort – only the parts of it that contribute to dictionary entries are used in crosswords. Apart from any that happen to match the current one or appear in the dictionary for other reasons, that means A=ack,M=emma,P=pip,T=toc are all you need.
    2. Or have a go at last Sunday’s Mephisto – if they ever get around to posting it to the club site
  14. I put in 1 down just thinking I’d misremembered about carbohydrates and they were fats really. Odd after my missus tried the Atkins no-carb diet when it was fashionable, which allowed pork scratchings but not bread.
    I preferred the answer METALIC to the Dalek question before I realised it wasn’t spelt like that: it’s surely a better solution otherwise because of “Steal in the ears” – or am I missing something?
    I thought this was a mix of quite good and fairly poor: the two long ones being amongst the latter.
    CoD to the pre-NATO EMMA. 11 minutes to solve despite dodgy spelling and a bouncy Central Line making most entries unreadable.
    1. I’m not sure if you’ve misunderstood 9A so, in case you have, it’s steal=ROB; in the ears=OTIC; then the definition
      1. Thanks for that: you’re quite right that I put in ROBOTIC without understanding, and didn’t go back to check. I reckon the clue might do for METALLIC given the right number of letters, as I think of Dalek voices being more that than robotic.
  15. Long time since contributed but had to moan about carbs (starchy relative – I had some – would have done in clue). 8m.
  16. With almost everyone here, fairly straightforward.
    Does anyone know why the mephisto hasn’t appeared? I have asked, but no reply.
    1. No idea. I’ve chased them every day but they don’t respond – normal level of service!!
  17. Yes, easy.. 12 mins today. Agree about carbs.. “fattening” instead of fatty I would have accepted, I’m with Atkins on this. A pedant might want to debate robotic too I suppose, since the Daleks were/are not actually robots.
    1. However, the Dalek’s voice is definitely robotic-sounding. I don’t think any pedant would dispute that.
      1. Not being pedantic, I won’t argue 🙂

        Incidentally, I got the following reply to my email to The Times this morning, regarding the missing Mephisto:

        “Dear Jerry
        Thank you for your email.
        We do apologise for this, and are working to resolve the problem now
        Kind regards
        Phil Kelly
        The Crossword Club”

  18. To Jim: I think you mean ‘pursuits’ in the heading – either that, or there’s another bit of crosswordese for me to learn.
      1. I don’t know what your original heading was, Jimbo, but Trivial Pursuits is not the name of the game, — it’s often mistakenly called this, but the second word is in the singular.
  19. 13 min, so just about as easy as it can get for this ancient solver (although I am a whole day younger than the speed merchant blogger).
    1. Many happy returns for a couple of weeks ago – not too happy with the “ancient” though.
  20. The online version of today’s puzzle has now been amended so that 1D’s “fatty food” is replaced by “starchy food”.
    1. Is this the first time a puzzle has been altered after publication for something other a typo? If so, it sets an interesting precedent.
      1. In the very first puzzle that I blogged they managed to print a different clue in the on-line version to that which appeared in the printed paper – they subsequently altered the on-line version.
      2. I believe similar corrections have been made to the versions of Times puzzles printed in book collections. But I can’t remember whether the online version has previously been corrected on the day of publication – I think one or two slower-paced changes have been made.
  21. A very quick for me 40 minutes, which would have been quicker if I hadn’t taken the time to remind myself along the way exactly what 7d and 22ac had written.

    Didn’t really understand 19ac or 23ac until I read the blog, but they were so obvious they didn’t hold me up.

  22. I found this rather too easy. If I can solve a puzzle in 17 minutes, as with this, it doesn’t offer much of a challenge, though I didn’t understand the clue for Emma at all. It didn’t really hold me up because there are few four-letter novels beginning with E.
  24. Straightforward fare today with a lot of answers entered at first sight. I’m sure I’ve seen PANIC somewhere before. One glaring error at the end though – I didn’t know the “rock” meaning of CARBUNCLE and in my haste to finish bunged in CORPUSCLE. The words “carbs” and “carbo-loading” are common among my lunchtime running circle.

    Jimbo – I didn’t understand EMMA or the Sam Spade bit of GUMSHOE before coming here so thanks for explaining those two. I thought the best clue in this puzzle was the one your missed out (LIBYA)!

    SPINNEY today reminded me we had DELL yesterday (PIRANDELLO).

  25. 10 August will go down as my PB day: 13 minutes! In forty years of solving The Times crossword, I have never beaten this!

    No problems with any solution: COD: LIBYA.

  26. 6.30. Looking at the completed grid one might think it would have been more difficult but a lot of the cluing was very solver-friendly.
    I would have been a little bit quicker if my first entry had been CALL IN instead of CALL UP , didn’t need to change this until my last in , 3d.
    New knowledge was the old Jamaican capital.
  27. Came late to the puzzle today and missed the “fatty” debate on-line as it had already been amended. However, is it a new thing that there are now “Reveal”, “Check”, “Revert” and “Solution” options on the on-line puzzle?
  28. Hello to all. Yes, an easier offering, about 12 minutes, held up at the end only by EMMA, which I entered from the def. alone, having no idea of the military slang. But with the 2 checking letters in place, what else could it be? SPINNEY also looked weird to the eye, but as vinyl said, the wordplay meant it really couldn’t be anything else either. Regards, and I’ll try to remember the ‘ack’ and ‘pip’ thing.
  29. Didn’t get to try this until after lunch today but pretty much blazed through it – SPINNEY from wordplay and EMMA from definition. Also, as previously mentioned, smiled at the almost identical clueing of PORTRAYAL in the G-paper today, I did that one at a bar last night during breaks in a trivia night that I flopped at.
  30. I did the online version very late so I was confused by the “fatty” food comments since by then it had already been corrected to “starchy”.

    19 mins for me.

  31. Probably a little known fact here: `pasternak’ is the Russian word for `turnip’.

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