Times 24644 – Tarzan, the Apeman

54 comments on “Times 24644 – Tarzan, the Apeman”

1. Well blogged. I thought this was a good testing puzzle and I took a while after finishing to unravel all the wordplay.

   The only one I failed with was GAZETTE and I still don’t see it. I saw GATE for “opening” but I can’t find ZET for the letter Z. The OED has only ZED (UK) and ZEE (US). And what about “film” in the clue?

2. With only one in (24ac) on the first pass, I was sure this was the much dreaded stinker, but ever so slowly it started to give, and then only six left after 22 min. In rushing, I had gone for GENERATION GAP at 14ac and the “obvious” avian, PTARMIGAN at 7dn. Having squared away that little mess I was mightily relieved to clock off at 29 min. I feel this was very much a wavelength one. Those who go with their gut insticts will do well. The more methodical may struggle. To be looked back over and savoured. Thank you setter.
3. Now I do! Z is the variable and ET is the film.
4. Could not get ‘Belisha beacon’, ‘tight-head prop’, and ‘snooker’ without aids. I had heard of Hore-Belisha, too, which was doubly annoying. Maybe the US solvers should study up on Rugby.
5. Challenging is an apt description; even though I finished in just under the half hour it felt like a hard slog. I liked ENNUI, TIGHT-HEAD PROP & ANTITOXIN but COD to APOPLEXY.

   Is there a typo in the clue to 6? Shouldn’t “cover” be “covers”?

   1. I think I’d favour “covering”.
6. Maybe not a stinker, but definitely one to sort the wheat from the chaff. And down here among the chaff, I struggled from beginning to end. Worst of all, I stared blankly for an age at –Z-T-E even though I spent years working at a GAZETTE writing SPLASHes (which also held me up for far too long). To cap it off I now find that my variation on azure, AZHURE, doesn’t exist.

   Congrats to the setter, though, a very cunning puzzle. MY COD to the well-disguised rugby player.

7. Apologies for sounding off last night about the BB. Good blog thank you. found this challenging but got home unaided which i was pleased about. Took ages to see/figure that antitoxin was the answer to & donw as couldnt really understand how the 3 letter word coiuld begin with X in the crossing clue. but once i had that the puzzle slowly began to fall into place
   I too rather like tight head prop but my clue of the day goes to the cunning 22 down.
   we love you PB!
   1. Thanks – I must add another reason to the list of “why you shouldn’t rush into replies to grumpy messages”.
8. 10:13 for this one – a slow start, partly caused by a stupid mistake – somehow writing GREAT AME at 1A – if you try to read and ponder other clues while writing answers, it’s easy to do this kind of thing. Then no acrosses until 24, and mild panic setting in. Finding PROP=forward in 10D was the breakthrough moment – the loose-head and tight-head props really ought to appear in xwds as often as cricket’s “silly point” and “short leg” (and others). Resisted the temptation to fling in “GAP” at the end of 14, and got the right word by deleting ‘generation’ from the fodder and then finding that the remaining ER + X = vote could give me a word of sorts.

   I though Belisha Beacons had to be on the way out, but as there’s now a solar-powered one, I guess not.

   1. I’m after some garden lights – anyone know where these solar powered ones are installed ?
      1. I don’t think the people who make the Belisha Beacons do domestic garden lamps, but a Google search for “solar-powered garden lamps UK” or similar should find you some choices to ponder.
9. Being a solver in not much of a hurry (and of limited gk and vocab) my preference is to check answers got from wordplay as I go eg ABSCISSA and GAMETE. Having come up with GENERATION REX from the anagrist, on checking COED I stumbled across GENERATION XER, so I put this solve down as unaided but for one accidental cheat. (Had I put in REX I might still be doing this). Didn’t think much of the rugby player clue but otherwise good stuff, doable for triers.
10. Count me among the chaff on this one. Started brightly but then faded like a belisha beacon they’ve blacked out outside a hospital. I’m not usually among the homophone police, but I don’t like ‘shore’ for ‘sure’. (I put ‘ashure’, which I’m delighted to find is a near-eastern desert.) One of those puzzles where you’re onto what it’s not, but not what it is. Thus, I knew it wasn’t ‘generation gap’, got the anagram fodder (minus x) and still it wasn’t enough. Found the NE hardest, not least because I also struggled to get SPLASH. And had ‘antivenom’ for a while inseatd of the correct answer. One of those days. Good puzzle, though, and a particularly helpful blog today.
    1. Count me as another homophone fan who nonetheless was quietly appalled by SHORE for SURE. I think SURE is one of those words we should leave well away from homophone attempts.
       This puzzle struck me as everything the Times crossword is supposed not normally to be, with tortured surfaces and bitty wordplay. Nonetheless it was a most interesting and demanding challenge and certainly worh its place.
11. 19 minutes today, with TREASON going in without understanding. Made a right horlicks of the SW, making the vain assumption that the x-co-ordinate was the baseline, a combination of poor maths, hopeful leaping and a conviction that the rest of the clue could lump it. When I twigged, and despite the helpful cluing, I had four goes at spelling ABSCISSA, convincing myself, among other things, that it ended -OR.
    I got TIGHT HEAD PROP, not least having spent too much miserable school time with my head wedged between his and the hooker’s buttocks.
    I particularly liked 7 and 26 today.
12. 14:13 here. This puzzle gre on me after a while with it, but at first look a lot of the clues seemed to be unnecessarily wordy. When the X of ANTITOXIN went in my first thought was an enumeration error in 14ac (which wouldn’t be all that surprising lately), but then after a couple more crossing letters I saw it was OK. TREASON and APOPLEXY went in without understanding the wordplay. COD to DROPPER.
13. Felt a complete twit putting in Generation Xer from the anagram and wondering what on earth ‘generation zer’ was supposed to be. D’oh! 14 mins overall.
14. 19 minutes. I thought this was going to be dead easy when the first two across clues went in on first glance, but I was soon slowed down by the interesting and challenging (if not fiendish) clues. I thoroughly enjoyed it: like another one this week it was pitched at a perfect difficulty level for me and whilst I got held up in a few places it was never for long. Either my brain is on far better form today or this is 93.5FM and yesterday’s was 198LW.
    I too put in ANTIVENOM but fortunately it didn’t feel quite right so I ignored the N when solving GENERATION XER, which was one of the clues I particularly liked along with the light, the trashy literature, the rugger player and the x-axis.
    I do think there is legitimate fodder for the homophone police in shore/sure. Personally I’m perfectly happy with it but will acknowledge that I am something of a libertarian on this front.
    And it did occur to me while solving that this was quite UK-centric.
    Still, thanks to the setter for a lively and entertaining one.

15. Surprised to complete this correctly before coming here for rescue. Saved by Google on 15dn: not sure whether ‘bac’ could refer to a French degree as well as school exam; tried ‘abacissa’ and Google came up with ‘abscissa’. Similarly needed confirmation that ‘Generation Xer’ was not just a wild fantasy: but (some) definitions are distinctly at odds with the idea of ‘apathetic youth’.
16. Took me an hour, I’m ashamed to say; just couldn’t get on to the setter’s wavelength. Must be something to do with his/her pronunciation of sure: (“My deahh, are you quait shore that Binky is seeing that dreadful gairl…….?”)
    Eventually managed to get a toehold, with ABSCISSA being first in; A-level Physics was some use after all!
    1. If you live in the south-east corner of the UK, you don’t need posh people for “sure” and “shore” (and also “shaw”) to sound the same.
17. 26:17 .. which felt quite respectable for this, but apparently not.

    Ingenious clueing, but some pretty tortured surfaces (about which you either care or don’t give a stuff). 6d is a masterpiece of manglement. I’m not surprised the editor missed the apparent gaff with ‘cover’ – the syntax would give Chomsky a headache.

    Still, I must admit that before I started haunting this site I would have struggled with this type of puzzle and I do find a certain satisfaction in being able to get through them now.

    COD to APOPLEXY which, despite a complete absence of evidence, I’m going to assume is a mischievous and timely Papal pun.

18. … long time parsing? As Uncle Yap said, not quite the expected stinker, but enough complexity to stir my feeble brain. I read “cover” in 6ac as an imperative: though how that’s supposed to help with the prior Antipodean destruction, I have no idea.
    And … a little while ago “Mental Health America” had a Stigma Watch program where several clues like 9ac were dobbed in as stigmatising the mentally ill. Let’s hope that nonsense has stopped!
    1. Forgot: 48 minutes.
19. Busy morning so as I wasn’t quite able to complete it in the hour available and I had to revisit it just now to polish off the SE corner where CLOSE-UP, DROPPER, PRETTY and APOPLEXY had baffled me earlier. In the first session I resorted to aids for two, ABSCISSA where I had worked out ?B?CISSA but just didn’t know the word, and for the middle bit in TIGHT-HEAD PROP. I knew it was a Rugby reference and was quite pleased to get TIGHT and PROP. This is about as difficult as I want on weekday.
20. 60 mins start to finish, but with a break of about 10 mins near the end.

    A good challenging crossword pitched at the perfect standard for me, i.e. requiring plenty of thought but able to complete within an hour without recourse to aids.

    Ran through the LHS in quickfire fashion, but then slowed markedly in the SE corner, and stopped altogether in the NE. Stared at it for about 20 minutes, before putting it to one side and coming back to it 10 minutes later. At which point the remaining 6 or 7 clues fell in a flurry.

21. ‘About’ 25 minutes (timing error of the human kind) so edging towards tricky. I though abscissa was going to defeat me until I started to look beyond A BA for the degree and then the wordplay formed itself into something plausible.

    I’m still not 100% sure on the WP for palazzo. What’s the ‘is’ doing there? If it’s doing what I think it must be I’m not happy with ‘to’ meaning next to. Autralian’s would have worked by dint of the old has/is ploy.

    At 14 I looked at the fodder and little else, hurriedly wrote in GENERATION and was somewhat taken aback to find I had 3 boxes left in which to put the X.

    I think I’ll give COD to dropper for the clever use of defaced.

22. 16mins here so better (for me) than yesterday. some beautiful surfaces here, 10dn is brilliant!
    I laughed out loud at shore as a homophone for sure and await Jimbo’s comments with eager anticipation.. I’m sure they are doing it deliberately to wind him up 🙂 – hopefully “abscissa” will compensate to some degree
    1. Can someone who doesn’t pronounce them the same please enlighten me? Perfect homophone to me.
       1. ‘Appen this might ‘elp.
       2. Just tried Chambers for a bit of Scots rather than Southern/RP influence (Oxford has both the same, and “shaw” too). There:
          sure = shoor – the oo being as in “fool, sou, boor, tour” in the pronunciation guide
          shore = shōre or shöre (o-macron, o-umlaut) – vowels as in “bone, road, foe” (and more); and “haul, lawn, fall” (and more)

          Their second “shore” matches mine and Oxford’s, so the difference is the vowel in “sure”

23. 17:25 Like rosselliot my first answer was 24 so by this time I was settling in for the long haul. However getting the long 4 and 10 helped.Perplexed for a while by GENERATION REX until I got the X from 7. My first thought on 35 was AZURE until I checked the number of letters. As Lord Gnome might say ‘shurely shome mistake?’ – or from Airplane ‘Surely you can’t be serious’ – all together now…. ‘yes I am serious…. and don’t call me Shirley!’
24. 13:53, finishing with the unknown BELISHA BEACON (16ac).  Other unknowns were GENERATION XER (14ac), TIGHT-HEAD PROP (10dn), and somehow Oliver GOLDSMITH (14dn).

    Yes, 6dn (PALAZZO) is a right mess.  The most charitable explanation I can see for the rogue “is” is that it was a careless expansion of “‘s” as a contraction for “has”; as Peter says, “covering” would have done the job that “cover” fails to do; and the surface reading is awful.

    Clue of the Day: 2dn (ENNUI), with a special mention to “defaced” as a decapitation indicator in 21ac (DROPPER).

25. Oh dear – 70 min for this one, and I still had to cheat on GOLDSMITH, as I was totally fixated that “his output” meant the word was going to end in ISH. ABSCISSA was fine even for a non-scientist, and after I got as far as TIGHT the rest of 10d had me baffled for a long time, slowing down that whole corner until I got there. And I’ve only just figured out the syntax of the wordplay for APOPLEXY, even with Uncle’s kind assistance. Definitely not my wavelength, I’m afraid!
26. In phonetics, “sure” can be /ʃʊə/ or /ʃo:/ in versions of RP. Being Scottish, I’ve often been cross about homophones; as a linguistics teacher, I’ve learned to understand them

    cheers

    Joe Casey

27. sorry, should have put /ʃɔ:/ (which is the one that sounds like “shaw”). Couldn’t find the symbol at first.

    Joe Casey

28. For the Americans at least, this was certainly the difficult offering we’ve been awaiting. I was completely bulldozed, so surrendered and resorted to aids after 70 minutes or so to discover the unknown BELISHA BEACON and the TIGHT-HEAD PROP. Having to work through the rest with those two long answers missing was difficult, although enjoyable due to the clever wordplay. I applaud GOLDSMITH and PRIDE as standouts. Vinyl, I have decided to remain blissfully ignorant of rugby (and cricket) terms, and will take my chances with the puzzle, knowing I’ll get my comeuppance from time to time. Regards to all, including any former tight-head props. And the setter as well, nice puzzle.
29. By the way, over here ‘sure’ rhymes with ‘pure. ‘Shore’ rhymes with ‘more’.
30. This shore was a bit harder than of late and a run of easy puzzles leaves one a bit mentally flabby as well. Great fun, much appreciated and about 25 minutes after a slightly extended stop in the 19th hole. I had to read 6D about 6 times to make any sense of it all but twigged ABSCISSA straight away. Thank you setter, I’m off for a stroll on the sure now.

Comments are closed.