Times 24632 – No Sweat

38 comments on “Times 24632 – No Sweat”

1. Not as easy as yesterday’s: 19 minutes. Had no idea about the plant, the church ornament or the Japanese immigrant. But, as Uncle Yap says, quite visible from the wordplay. I wonder whether anyone ever used the word “upbraider” — but I don’t want to appear to be one!
   1. According to the Big Oxford, it was used by no less than Jonson and Smollett. No more upbraiderliness for me.
2. …but the way to put ‘o’, ‘a’, and ‘e’ into ‘potentilla’ is not so obvious, and if you don’t know the word, it’s really just a plausible guess. I had ‘petantillo’, close but no cigar.

   I didn’t really think that ‘foreign legion’ and ‘dental surgeon’ were that obvious, either, thanks to the crafty literals. So merely being able to write in 2/3 of the answers in 10 minutes does not really count for much.

   I would rather have a puzzle of even difficulty, easy or hard, rather than all this jumping around. Are the setters aware of the effect they are creating?

   1. I also found the legion and surgeon relatively hard, needing a good selection of checkers for both though the surgeon went in first.

      Arguments for mixed difficulty:

      • it’s one way of achieving a moderate overall difficulty level – an easy clue to just one of those two long answers could have meant a time around 6 minutes instead of 8 for me, and some people grumbling that there was no challenge
      • the other side of the same coin – if the hard clues only come along when there are other hard clues to match, you end up with puzzles where the beginners make no progress at all
3. 22 was unknown to me but I got the wordplay and then asked Mr. Brin. A good word to learn!
4. 38 mins for me with two wrong: ‘issue’ for ISSEI – close, but failed to spot the function of ‘united’ – which led to me having to change my plant of choice, ‘potentilla’, for ‘patintello’, which always sounded more like an Italian playwright. The long crossers, 10 and 21, from the definition. TACK meaning food was new to me, as was THROW, in what I’m taking to be a glorified ‘dust sheet’ meaning. Ditto SPOTTED DOG, as a (PC?!) alternative to ‘dick’. COD to COTTAGE for the crafty misdirection.
5. Well, after having a tougher time with ones that seemed easy to most, today I’m with Uncle Yap in the ‘no sweat’ camp. Flowed without any real holdups in about 15 minutes, mostly top to bottom, left to right, ending with BRIGAND. Only a bit of difficulty needing most of the crossers for FOREIGN LEGION, not at first separating Army from Officer. Ulaca, I think the THROW cover for furniture is not a dust sheet, but a knitted blanket usually draped over a sofa or chair, which we over here call a THROW (oddly enough) or an ‘Afghan’. I also agree with vinyl that arranging POTENTILLA correctly was a matter of trying to create the most plausible looking combination, if you didn’t know the word. I didn’t, but luckily put them in the right order. Regards to everyone.
   1. Thanks, Kevin. Sometimes I am too lazy – and too old-fashioned – to Google.
   2. Good luck with this hurricane Kevin. I hope you manage to keep well out of its path.
6. Huge trouble getting on to the Crossword Club site today. Failed with Safari and Firefox, got there eventually with IE.

   And after all that, this was another fairly gentle 40-minute puzzle. Surprises me that so many people are unfamiliar with POTENTILLA when nobody batted an eyelid about DIATONIC SCALE on Monday. Must mean that there are more musicians than gardeners among us.

   The discussion about THROWs reminds me of those embroidered pieces of cloth that old ladies were fond of putting on the backs of chairs. They were called antimacassars, a word I haven’t heard for a long time.

   1. Well, that’s two things I’ve learned today. Antimacassar was a word that I have been content too long not to bother to know what it means. I think perhaps I didn’t want to break the spell. The associations it used to conjure up of monkeys, slippers or dissidents, depending on how the mood found me, alas! shall be conjured up no longer.
7. Interesting Vinyl point. Frustrating experience over last few days seeing grids completed in reasonable times but with 2 or 3 teasingly unsolved. Today I eventually threw “talent I lop” in the air which luckily came down POTENTILLA thus presenting the key for solving ISSEI from WP. Earlier got RETABLE from wordplay and entered FOREIGN LEGION without fully understanding of WP.
8. I thought this was set to be another super-quickie, having got 1ac and dn at first glance and the whole top half in a couple of minutes, but the bottom half took much longer with a couple, like potentilla, that took time to sort out so only 17m overall or about average.
9. 8:00 for this one – forgot to note the last answers but think the SE corner was probably the one – thought first of “great uncle” at 13 and only started to consider “great anything else” when the checkers forced me to. Written without full wordplay understanding: 21, 4, 10, 13.

   ISSEI and the other -sei words known from barred-grid puzzles where they are often used to fill an awkward corner of a grid.

10. 35 minutes with several from wordplay only as I didn’t know the words: RETABLE, ISSEI, POTENTILLA (same problem as others with placement of the unchecked letters until I thought how many plants end with A) and NUBIA (or so I thought until I remembered the Nubian slaves in Aida). Also not sure I knew TACK as food but it’s probably my memory that’s at fault.

    I was planning to get sniffy about bars and staves not being the same thing because I was thinking in the context of musical notation. Tunnel vision, I suppose. I’m glad I saw the more obvious explanation before sounding off!

    We must be due a stinker tomorrow.

11. 31 minutes. Should have seen the false trail of canine and dog a bit sooner; one up to the setter, so to speak. My potentillas are blooming; one of the few plants in my garden that survives the hard frosts and the predations of rabbits and slugs.
12. Around 90 minutes for this beginner and third puzzle completed since Saturday. Fooled by canine not being a dog although saw the anagram. Needed help with 11a 26a and 20d as never heard the words before but saw how clues all worked. COD for me 9a as my four year old was drawing genies in bottles when I got it.
13. Was unable to access the Crossword with Firefox. Not sure why this is but not for the first time. Used IE instead.
    1. I have also had experiences where changing browser fixed the problem (I use Firefox most of the time but have 3 others available as alternatives).

       I suspect this is not the fault of Firefox or any other browser, but the effect of one or both of: a problem being fixed at their end while we’re changing browsers, or the apparently buggy storage and use of cookies – when you switch to your reserve broswer the set of cookies must be different and will usually be smaller.

    2. In Firefox, right-click & view page info/security/cookies & delete the lot of them. (you might have to log in again. Also you will lose any “saved” puzzles) – this has always worked for me. However it is irritating to have to do it.
14. 16 minutes, with ISSEI well known from Mephisto and others as a word with an I at both ends – there aren’t many. Most resistance from LEFTIST, BOTANICAL and the hardy plant, which in the end was a random injection of filler letters from the anagrist. I took refuge in the idea that flowers either have a name or a recognisable word in their make up, getting what turned out to be the right answer that way.
    Cod (but not by much) to COTTAGE for a good surface and a novel way of bringing three common suspects together.
    1. Along with “lots of plant names end in a”, the point about names or words is well worth remembering for times when you don’t know the name – it turns out that the “potent” in potentilla is the familiar word.
15. 11:18 here, a pretty easy week so far. I didn’t know RETABLE but it was gettable from the wordplay once a couple of crossing letters were in place. I’m not much of a gardener but I knew POTENTILLA from somewhere. ISSEI was familiar from barred puzzles.
16. Rather enjoyed this one. Learning new words without having to refer to references is a sign of a Xword that’s compiled fairly. Kaosan Rd bar, 30 easily dstracted minutes.
17. I found this pretty easy, a 20-minute solve. ISSEI is very familiar to solvers of barred cryptics, I used to have some POTENTILLAS in the garden, though RETABLE was unfamiliar.
    I very much liked the canine theme in the clue to 10 down.
    Writing this away from my PC and cannot remember my P/W
    dyste
18. Another easyish one, the difficulty level perhaps a notch or two higher than yesterday’s. If not quite “no sweat” for me then only a light one, somewhere between 25 and 30 mins. Would have been quite a bit quicker if I hadn’t initially stuck in NISEI (instead of ISSEI, not a term previously known to me) at 22dn, which complicated the search for a solution to 21ac, an ingenious clue worthy of a CoD nomination.
19. Fairly straightforward, solved in 54 minutes (long for most, but very good for me — I can’t even read the puzzle in Peter’s solving time). The only problem was POTENTILLA, for which I had PETONTILLA (POTENTILLA seeming too obvious to be correct) until I asked my gardening wife for help. I usually try to understand the wordplay before accepting a solution, but fortunately forgot to do so with FOREIGN LEGION, as I’m not sure I would have worked it out by myself. The I in FOREIGN led me to correct my original NISEI to ISSEI; then the wordplay for that fit too.
20. 40 minutes here, with at least 10 of those pondering the NE corner. I couldn’t work out whether 8d was GALE or GAEL, which together with the unfamiliar 11ac and 7d where I’d got DISUSED stuck in my head, left me a bit stuck. In retrospect, should have been a lot quicker.

    I managed to read 15ac completely wrong, working on the theory that the definition was ‘who makes unwelcome charge’, but got the answer all the same, if without the wordplay, which I’d made a note to look at again later.

    COD 25ac.

21. 32 minutes after watching Mr Marr interview Mr Blair so early in the morning….enjoyable…ratehr drab i thought!
    No clue of the day!
22. Had most of this done in about 10 minutes but then took an eternity for the last handful at the bottom. Total time 31:15. The killers were the legion, the plant, leftist and 10d, which turned out not to be Barbara Woodhouse’s forerunner, Duncan Surtees.
23. 12 minutes. Very pleased with this time because it was full of unfamiliar terms (SPOTTED DOG, RETABLE, SWEAT, NUBIA, POTENTILLA, TACK, ISSEI) and I somehow wrote GIVE TTHE WORKS for 12ac which slowed me down on 10dn until I saw the mistake.
    I was fully prepared to have a little moan about the mild unfairness of POTENTILLA because of the number of possible answers but quite by chance I put the letters in the right order so I’ve decided it was quite fair after all.
24. 6.25 No problems. I knew POTENTILLA and ISSEI which helped, but needed all the checkers to get the canine expert , which was a nice definition.Last in was BRIGAND where I was almost thrown by taking installation as the insertion indicator.
25. 26 minutes here, a couple of unfamiliar words lessening the breeziness and having to be sweated out. Rather liked a certain fluency in this one. Staves for bars nice.
26. Another stroll in the park after golf – 15 leisurely minutes with no hold ups or questions. As others have said ISSEI is an old friend from bar crosswords and POTENTILLA are a beautiful family of flowering shrubs that grow well down here in God’s own little acre.
27. Zap, zoom, pow! 10 minutes, would have been quicker if I hadn’t made regular pauses to swill from my pint. Some answers like DENTAL SURGEON and PENTHOUSE probably could have gone in from without even looking at the clue, there were some rather generous checking letters today.
28. I’m beginning to suspect most of you lot don’t know what an ASTER looks like!
29. I wouldn'[t know my aster from my elbow, but managed to dredge potentilla up from somewhere after thinking about it for what seemed like an eternity. Defeated only by Issei, which I had never heard of and couldn’t work out. Gradese
30. If you wonder where all the little strawberry plants in your garden have come from, someone is growing potentilla nearby! You will end up with nice flowers, but no fruit I am afraid. 16 min here but with 1 error. I thought POWS< but wrote SWAP. Must have been solidly clued, as many went in as obvious, but without analysis.

Comments are closed.