Times 24614: a walk in the Jurassic park

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 34 minutes! Didn’t notice how much time had gone by, and maybe the problem was I’d only had two beers but I found this one an almighty struggle. A lot of small phrases that were tough to piece together and some pretty intricate wordplay and one very crafty definition meant that this one didn’t come in bursts, it was occasional trickles to get to the finish. Hopefully some of the wordplays will come to me as I write up the blog, because there’s still a bit of head-scratching going on here. Postscript: they did. I’m not likely to be able to answer questions as it’s getting late here on the East coast of the US, but there’s plenty of commenters who will be happy to chime in with help, so away we go!

Across
1 AGAR: A,RAG reversed
4 HIGH,TA,I L,IT: is this primarily an American expression?
9 TWO-YEAR-OLD: TOLD(ordered) around (ROW)* containing YE(you),A. Wordplay worked out for the blog, got this from the definition
10 MYNA: anagram of N,Y,A,M coming from the end letters (wings) of NIGHTLY ALARM
11 OTELLO: TELL(count) in O,O (perfectly rounded characters)
12 FOOTS,LOG: another expression I remember hearing in the US but not in Australia or the UK
14 B,AWL: the AWL is the boring article
15 FAHRENHEIT: sounds like HEIGHT(peak) after A,HR in FEN – definition is just SCALE
17 NAME THE DAY: MET and then HEAD* (since 4 down is HEAD OFF) in NAY
20 NAIN: both words have NA IN them – got this from wordplay
21 EGG S,LICE: this one too from wordplay
23 tough to find one to leave out in the acrosses, this will have to be it
24 BAIT: I in BAT (be in – like in cricket or baseball) would you believe this was my last entry!
25 THE YEAR DOT: (TODAY,THERE)*
26 DIMETRODON: anyone care to check Collins? I can find it online but not in Chambers. DI, TROD ON around ME
27 ELLA: reversed alternate letters in ALL CLUES
 
Down
2 GO WITH A BANG: BANG(report) should GO WITH A(article)
3 ROYAL BLUE: (BALLY)* in ROUE
4 HE,A,D OFF: DOFF being the counterpair of DON
5 GO OFF THE DEEP END: GO OFF (leave) then PEN in THE DEED
6 TAD,POLE: the POLES being the extreme positions
7 LOYAL: last letters in FAIL TO PAY EXTRA WILL
8 and let’s omit this one from the downs
13 OPINION POLL: O,PI(sanctimonious),NI(IN reversed),ON, then sounds like POLE
16 HANDS FREE: double def
18 HOISTER: IS in HOTEL with the L changed to R
19 YOU’RE ON: YOUR, EON
21 EMBED: definition is PLANT INSIDE and the wordplay is to take the last half of septEMBER and change the R to a D (DAUGHTER FINALLY)
22 GRIMM: GRIM with another M, as in the brothers that collected stories (yarns)

57 comments on “Times 24614: a walk in the Jurassic park”

  1. Over the hour here and not understanding MYNA or ELLA. The latter not helped by thinking “opinion pole”? Also had to consult Luke to find NAIN.
  2. I finished it in about an hour (with considerable aid) but didn’t enjoy it much. It would seem the clue for HOISTER should read “One who puts up …” rather than “One who’s put up …”. Is HOISTER really used in the sense of the clue?
      1. mctext: “I read it as:
        One who’s put [something] up. E.g., a flag.”

        I might say that, but **only** in an attempt to justify the clue (which I’m not inclined to do). I can’t imagine using “put” intransitively and I’m still hoping hoping to find someone defining “hoister” as something which is hoisted.

    2. As McT says, it needs to be read as the present perfect. I too was nearly tripped up by this, considering ‘hoistee’ until I got the dinosaur.
      1. It’s not a dinosaur. Rather a pelycosaur from the Permian period. George’s title is misleading.
  3. I’m not sure if George meant this, but I parsed this as ‘match’ = GO WITH, ‘report’ = BANG, ‘include article’ = [insert] A
  4. It took a while but I finally staggered over the line, appropriately enough, in a time that would befit a marathon, with the dinosaur last in from the wordplay (I might have got there sooner had I thought of the old DI chestnut for female in addition to various other things). So many good clues, but my favourite was OPINION POLL. Also like NAIN, which I was onto at once, knowing that Cana wasn’t correct but was in the right vicinity. As one of the three people who Jesus brought back to life from the dead, I was reminded of CS Lewis’s comment on the most famous of them:

    ‘Ought one to honour Lazarus rather than Stephen as the first martyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again is rather hard.’

    1. “As one of the three people who Jesus brought back to life from the dead, I was reminded…”

      Are you sure you meant to say that?

      1. Ha! I must fall back on notional agreement triumphing over grammatical for all but the most resistant reader.
  5. About 20mins here, so average.. harder than some recent offerings, but not particularly difficult. i don’t have a problem with hoister. Last in was dimetrodon, not having heard of it before, as hadn’t Mr Chambers.
  6. Well, this was a disaster for me timewise (70 minutes) but a triumph in that I got there, which actually is what it’s all about. Held up for ever by nain, until looked at the clue in the simplest way possible. Somehow got on the wrong side of this setter early on but enjoyed the tussle. COD 19.
  7. Alas, beaten by DIMETRODON. Vinyl will say this is unforgivable as it is something of a dinosaur. Otherwise finished in about my average time. That I sussed NAIN and MYNAH immediately (after OTELLO of course) hinted that we were in for some tricksy clueing today which was an advantage to know from the outset. As George, had trouble with the phrases which either come immediately or tortuosly.
  8. Similar position to yesterday. stuck in HANDS DROP for 16 without thinking and then spent 5+ mins playing around with P_L_ for the girl. It was only when no permutations seemed to work that I twigged that I had made a mistake, and almost instantaneously realised it should have been HANDS FREE.

    Other than that debacle this was probably exactly what you want from a crossword. Nothing was a gimme, so it was a steady procession from start to end, but likewise nothing was an absolute nightmare.

  9. 11:12 here – last in were 17, 19 and, inevitably, 26.

    DIMETRODON is in the Concise Oxford.

    Some time wasted at 18 looking for the right synonym of ‘hotel’ …

      1. True – but it is in their online version of ODE here. I guess it will make the OED next time they revise the letter D.
      2. A full-text search does find it, under “Pelycosaur.” But it has no entry of its own..
  10. 44 minutes, so only a few minutes more than the past couple of days but it seemed a lot harder whilst solving and I struggled for several minutes at the outset to find a clue I could answer.

    Last in was the dinosaur, and no, George, it’s not in Collins. I haven’t checked the Oxfords.

    NAIN was the other one that gave trouble at the end and I must admit it only came to me as a possibility having thought of ‘home’ = IN which as things turned out was not the case. Still it got me there. I didn’t fully understand this answer until I looked it up, and having found it was a biblical reference I remember learning about the widow of Nain many years ago.

    Two anagram clues struck me as rather unusual: 10ac where the anagrist consists of unadjacentletters selected from other words and 17dn where the grist and the grind are contained in the answer to another clue.

  11. I liked this one a lot. 44 mins so no breeze for me today but some cunning and satisfying clues. Thanks to the compiler.
  12. A womble of a puzzle: Underground AND Overground and the last two, DIMETRODON and ELLA after that, so about 30 minutes total. I don’t like “female” as an indicator of DI, even if others think of it as chestnut-flavoured. For a relatively unknown word, D_M_ suggests DAME more readily, though fortunately that just looks wrong, and leaves the “me” in the clue redundant – clearly not the sort of thing this setter would do. Remarkably devious clues all round and a real, sweaty challenge, evidenced by unconnected, patchy solving.
    CoD (because I like this kind of clue) to NAIN, for which I’m glad of a theological background.
  14. 34 min, but with assistance for DIMETRADON. Had the ??metrodon, but I guess just did not want DI to appear again. Can she please be consigned to keeping Tiepolo company out there in limbo. ELLA in without being understood until a third or fourth revisit. Least favourite was NAIN, as with any religion based exotica. Not helped by trying to justify Peter Pan’s NANA for too long. A real chalk and cheese puzzle.
  15. Well, after 50 minutes and my lunchtime spent, I’ve only got 6 entered, with one of those wrong (21d). At this point I’d hope to only have 6 left to enter!

    Of these, not happy with two. Isn’t the utensil in 21ac an EGG SLICER??? And where’s the instruction in 21d to lose the R from EMBER???

    Will try to finish more of this later tonight. At the moment I’m not hopeful!

    1. Got there in the end, after an hour with much assistance, and still with loads not understood! Very devious clueing, which only the blog has made clear.
  16. 20:47 .. I don’t think any of us can compete with ulaca’s achievements today as revealed in the lovely exchange of comments above.

    Quite tricky, but my main hold-up came from writing in OPINION POLE, which is presumably what makes politician stick.

    My use of the term FISH SLICE always stymies my Canadian other half. According to Wikipedia, it makes me very much ‘above stairs’:

    “In British English, fish slice is a serving implement for fish, originally made of silver, now available in many other materials… The term is also used for a cooking implement. The different usages appear to be due to British social class, where the term fish slice was used for the silver serving implement only in the upper classes (who would not traditionally have had any word for any cooking implement, that being an activity performed by classes further down the social scale)”

    2. It has to look like this though.

      I don’t know why there used to be so many shibboleths relating to eating fish in England. Some folks were very sniffy about fish-knives: in Gosford Park they used two forks; and whoever the gastronomic equivalent of pedants were ate fish with a fork and a bit of bread, so I’m told. I still eat mine out of the newspaper.

  17. I found this a real struggle – 40 minutes to finish. However I was very unsure about three answers, with good reason in two cases as it turned out.
    I had desperately put in HAIL for 14ac (I’m still not sure how “bawl” means “greet”, loudly or otherwise, but I’ve no excuse for my answer) and had DAMITRODON for 26ac with DAM being the female and I for “me”. Yes, weak I know.
    The other one I didn’t understand was LOYAL, so thanks for the elucidation.
    Funnily enough in spare moments I’ve been going through the puzzles I missed when on holiday and picked up another really difficult one yesterday evening (24600 I think) so my brain’s a bit frazzled.
    1. Greet is Scots for cry, notably in “the bairn’s greeting” so pretty well matches the clue.
      I quite like the idea of a Damitrodon: close cousin of the Dyouthinkisaurus and the Diplomadon.
  18. A lesson in clue writing, I thought, which I struggled through in over an hour, off and on. Last in was the fossil, mostly because I wrote out –ME-TRODON next to the puzzle, thinking this would help. So I was looking for a three letter female for more time than I care to say. Also stuggled with BAIT & EMBED, the latter of which I couldn’t parse for the life of me. MYNA stares over the precipice of an indirect anagram, thumbing its nose. COD to NAME THE DAY among a host of inventive clues.
  19. … that someone was on here yesterday asking about the widow’s mite – a biblical reference, and today we have the widow of nain, another biblical thing.

    Whilst on the subject I wonder how many islamic or buddhist analogies creep into the clueing – is this fair ??

    To be honest, I would suggest that all religious reference be removed from this as surely it requires knowledge specific to a certain belief alone, which you could argue “does not exist” to a non-believer.

    1. The pair of widows did seem a strange coincidence.

      I’m not sure that “knowledge specific to a certain belief” is necessarily any worse than knowledge specific to people interested in poetry, cricket, astronomy, etc. etc.

      Christianity gets the lion’s share of religious references in the Times crossword, but that seems fair to me because it’s still the religion most woven into the culture of English-speaking nations.

      On the two widows, I think “widow’s mite” as a tiny contribution is nearly as familiar as something like “prodigal son” – you can find both in ODE. Knowing that another widow came from a place called Nain seems rather more specialised.

    2. I for one think it would be a great shame to remove these references. As a non-believer myself I am perfectly happy with the idea that a certain knowledge of scripture is something you need to acquire if you want to solve these things. I’m all for moving with the times but let’s not deprive ourselves entirely of the pleasure of (to reference john_from_lancs’ comments yesterday) rummaging in the mental lumber.
  20. I thought that this was a super crossword, very cleverly and ingeniously clued. Took me 40 most enjoyable minutes to complete.

    Had to think hard to get NAIN, never heard of DIMETRODON and struggled with ROYAL BLUE (inexcusably!).

    COD to OPINION POLL (sounding!). Brilliant!

  21. Didn’t enjoy this one bit. I usually have recourse to this site to check an answer once or twice a week. Four clues in the same puzzle indicates to me that the compiler is weighting the odds in his/her favour in a bid to put one over on the solver ! (I did get them all right though !)
  22. Great puzzle that took me almost an hour, but I enjoyed it most of the way, ending at AGAR/GO WITH A BANG. A lot of words and idiom I’m not familiar with, such as GO WITH A BANG (we go off with a bang in this sense, but more typically go out with a bang, which doesn’t always result in a great success), FOOTSLOG, NAME THE DAY, NAIN, BAWL as ‘greet’, ‘rag’ as a charity event (right?), THE YEAR DOT, the EGG SLICE, and of course the ENORMOUS OLD CREATURE. I agree that I think of HIGHTAIL IT as an Americanism, so thanks for that. Wordplay eventually got me all the above, so it led clearly to the answers, once I eventually understood it, that is. Very deceptive and tricky, but very good. Thanks to the setter, to George for the blog on a challenging day, and regards to all. Could be a lot of COD’s here, but OPINION POLL and GRIMM stood out for me. Best.
  23. It was good to hear that some of the experts struggled with some clues. We managed only three – Myna, Grimm, and royal blue. THe word play was unusual and the meanings e.g. Bawl for loudly greet, somewhat odd. Perhaps the problem was to get a start. Still no idea about 23a.
    Perhaps the Chinon wine has impaired what little intelect we have left.
    Mike & Fay
  24. Well, I finished it, though it took me a long time and several putting downs and coming back laters. Somewhat at a disadvantage being American (THE YEAR DOT?) and more at a disadvantage being Jewish: I got NAIN from the wordplay but had to look on the internet, after not finding it in three dictionaries, to catch the reference to the widow. Also problems with the wordplay on 1, 10 and especially 27 but worked it out at the end. COD to 18; I liked the “changed hands”, but I’m also wondering about the object of “put”.
    1. Don’t understand why you need to worry about the object to “put (up)”. PUT UP = HOIST; someone who’s “put up” is someone who’s “HOISTED” therefore a HOISTER unless I am missing something. In fact if there WAS an object the clue would surely be be wrong as it would be defining something that doesn’t exist in the answer. You’d only expect an object in a def for an intransitive verb (odd as that might sound).
      1. Yes, but as mentioned in other comments PUT UP in the sense of HOIST is transitive; you can’t just HOIST, but you must hoist something, even though you can be just a HOISTER. The same complaint was made in vefatica’s comment.
  25. After reading Peter’s warning last week, I ordered the paperback edition of the Chambers Crossword Manual from Amazon Germany and today the hardback edition arrived (but I paid the paperback price). Amazon UK is only offering the hardback edition, as is the publisher — the paperback seems to have disappeared. Amazon Germany has a few hardbacks left, or did earlier today.
  26. On the chewy side today. I was so disconcerted by the complicated clueing to ELLA that having put her in I then confusedly changed her to EULA…
  27. The blogger’s answer is missing a containment indicator surely, which the very precise setting would not allow…

    Blogged as TOLD rounds(=contains) ROW* containing YE A. Does the “about” in the clue signal containment of YE A? Or is it the anagrist for ROW*? It can’t be both.

    I parsed it as T…OLD rounds {With OAR (verb equivalent for ROW) containing YE} and the a part of the definition, “a small one”.
    How do I do the strikeout for the ith in With?

    Does that make sense? Is anyone ever going to read this? Or care, if they do?

    Cheers from Oz, Rob

    1. Rob, I think they left a month ago. Just us Oz-solvers here now. But yeah, I like your explanation better.

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