Times 24687 – Still No Stinker!

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

I thought I was heading for a sub 30 minute solve which would be quite good for me but I got a bit tied up in the NW with 9, 2, 4 and 11, and then  in the NE with 7ac, 8 and 13 and eventually finished on 40 minutes.

This was quite lively and entertaining a puzzle but I expect to hear that it was too easy for some after a week of relatively easy puzzles and possibly the subject of the Times cryptic being dumbed down will be raised again.

I don’t think there’s much if any special knowledge required today. The physicist is one that surely everyone knows of but possibly the two literary references may delay those who aren’t familiar with them, though both the answers should be solvable by other means. Knowing the  type of coal needed at 7ac is possibly as hard as things get.

On edit later: I forgot to mention that no aids were required. I’ve had some problems avoiding them completely this week despite the puzzles being generally much easier than usual.

Across
1 SHOWJUMPER – ‘Sport’ = SHOW followed by ‘top’ = JUMPER as in the item of clothing. ‘s stands for ‘has’ here.
7 SACK – SlACK – In these days of central heating I’m not sure how many will be familiar with slack as a type of coal. My childhood home was originally heated entirely by open fires and I remember one could order bags of ‘nutty slack’, an inferior and therefore cheaper alternative to the best quality stuff.
9 TUTORIAL – Out* inside TRIAL. This one delayed me longer than necessary as I was trying to make the examination ‘oral’.
10 PRIMAL – P(RIM)AL
11 SEAWAY – Scrambled Egg, AWAY
13 MASON BEE – (Obese man)*.  Unaccountably my last in. This is a type of bee that leads a solitary life and uses sand to build its nest.
14 CONSTRUCTION – CONS,T’RUCTION – Another one that delayed me as I couldn’t see the definition. It seems to be simply ‘mill’ as a type of building. I was looking for something more complicated than that.The definition by example is clearly signposted so allowable.
17 PIGS MIGHT FLY – PIG,S(ucceeded), MIGHT, FLY – Napoleon was the pig in Orwell’s Animal Farm.
20 REDACTOR – RED,ACTOR
21 Deliberately omitted
22 BIKINI – Beachwear Items, KIN,I(sland)
23 OLD TIMER – (Rime told)*
25 PLAN – PLANt
26 GAINSAYERS – GAIN,SAYERS – a reference to Dorothy L Sayers (1893-1957) probably best remembered for her detective fiction featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.
 
Down
2 HOUSETOP – HO(USE)T,OP
3 Deliberately omitted 
4 UNITY – UN the French for ‘a’ then cITY
5 POLEMIC – POLE,MIC(rophone)
6 RIPOSTING – 1, bloggeR both reversed then POSTING
7 SPINNING TOP – S(PINNING)TOP
8 CHASER – CHA for ‘tea’ then SERvice
12 WESTPHALIAN – (Taiwan helps)* – of a region of Germany
15 RIGHTWING – RIGHT,WIN,pollinG
16 ALL-CLEAR – It was indeed
18 MARCONI – CRAM reversed, ON, then I for current
19 MENIAL – ME(NIne)AL
21 INDUS – wIND(burUndi)S
24 ICY – 1,C(elsius),januarY – I’m probably being picky to point out  that 1C is hardly ‘very’ cold and not even cold enough for ice to form.

59 comments on “Times 24687 – Still No Stinker!”

  1. 41 minutes with a few (7 ac, and 15, 18 and 24 dn) going in without full wordplay understanding and one wrong (‘reposting’ for RIPOSTING – d’oh!). Hadn’t heard of MASON BEE, but not difficult to guess, as this is the type of thing bees are good at. Thought the misdirection in 9 was clever – the conjunction of ‘class’ and ‘examination’ had this solver too working around ‘oral’ rather than ‘trial’ for the latter. Last in REDACTOR and CONSTRUCTION, both of which I found a bit contrived.
  2. One of those that looks very easy in retrospect. Only MASON BEE needing wordplay. No doubt my satisfaction will be attenuated by dismissive comments from the experts. In fact all but a couple required at least some thought so I think a good puzzle for newer solvers to measure progress. COD to the neatly concealed WOO, my first in. Now there’s a contradiction.
  3. Slow to get any speed up on this. Finished in 35 unfortunately with Claret not Chaser. (If only.)Enjoyable puzzle.
  6. Minor quibble with the blog: 12D is “of European region” rather than the region itself.

    9:01 here, so not notably hard but not a doddle either. Also held up in the NW corner, where 1A was needed to help get 2, 4, 9 and 11 in some order. Prediction: if someone reports a time around 6 minutes, they’ll have solved 1A on first look.

    The finer points of domestic coal probably are for senior solvers only. Helped a bit here by my father-in-law’s use of “nutty slack” to describe any foodstuff that comes in bits, including pretty much any breakfast cereal. Also at 14 by my father’s phrases like “There’ll be ructions if that room isn’t tidy when I come home”.

  7. Found this straightforward enough, with a couple of uncertainties at INDUS and CHASER which the blog has cleared up. Find myself firmly in the age category of solvers for whom nutty slack brings back childhood memories. 35 minutes.
  8. Couldn’t get CHASER for some reason. Looks so obvious in retrospect. The question mark did for me I think. The rest took me 18 minutes so easy-to-average.
    When I was a kid there was chocolate bar we used to call “nutty slack” for some reason I can’t now remember.
  9. About average level of difficulty I thought, 25 minutes to solve as I needed checkers to see SHOWJUMPER. Some of the misdirection is very good as at 11A SEAWAY for example where the “eggs” curry ones reading of “main”

    I wonder when slack disappeared. My job was to stand next to the horse-drawn delivery cart and count the sacks as the coal-man transferred their content into the coal bin at the side of the house. I then reported all clear to father before the bill was paid (in cash of course, you had to be posh to have a bank account)

  10. I struggled quite a bit with this, taking over an hour, and I needed aids to get 14ac at the very end. A hasty CLARET for 8d also blotted my copybook… COD 21ac, with 21d a close runner-up.
  11. 23 minutes. An enjoyable puzzle, designed for us OLD TIMERs, I think, with ALL CLEAR, SPINNING TOP and memories of banking up the coal fire with slack before going to bed. (I was at school with a lad called Brian Slack who inevitably became “Nutty”.) PIGS MIGHT FLY was very good: which farmyard animal tomorrow, I wonder?
  12. Almost managed my first without-aids completion in a fortnight, but SACK and CHASER stumped me. Have any solvers under 40 years of age heard of slack coal?

    Took a long time to get going today. Only solved two of the downs and two of the acrosses on first look. Got SHOWJUMPER without any checkers though!

    The SER(VICE) wordplay was new to me – not seen that before.

    INDUS brought back fond memories of trekking in the Karakoram in 1997 near Nanga Parbat and Rakaposhi.

    I think 1C would be very cold for some of our overseas solvers… Aussies?

    1. > Have any solvers under 40 years of age heard of slack coal?
      Yes – for once ignorance of archaic/arcane vocabulary wasn’t my undoing!
    2. Actually I think it was usually referred to as coal slack, rather than slack coal. There seems to be an etymological link with “slag”, which (again for oldies) always reminds me painfully of the Aberfan disaster.
  13. Finished the whole thing in well under an hour without any recourse to aids, and only a couple of mistakes: put in CONSTRICTION without fully understanding the wordplay (t’mill?), and scribbled in CLARET as my last one in. Progress indeed…
  14. A pleasant 16 minuter, so just about average for me. I thought CHASER was a proper heffalump trap, and left it until last when I could spend time sorting it out properly.
    Is there a version of SLACK that isn’t nutty?
    I liked the PIGS clue, but gave CoD to SEAWAY for a brilliant misdirection.
    1. I think if slack is not nutty it has no significant lumps in it so it’s little more than just coal dust.

      A quick Google reveals that the popularity of nutty slack in my childhood days was that it was off the ration.

      1. Now there’s a memory jogger, Jack. On ration until well into the 1950s as I recall. During the war all the metal railings outside houses were removed and melted down. After the war all the wooden fences disappeared – burned in fireplaces, especially during the winter of 1947 – my first year at a very cold school
  15. Jackkt is correct that slack without an adjective is just coal dust. A shovel of dampened slack put on the coal fire overnight would damp it down ready for reviving in the morning as I remember from my boyhood in Ireland. Seamus Heaney has a very evocative account of the process in his latest collection “Human Chain”. The poem is called “Slack”.
    JFR
  16. A slow time in state of reduced mental acuity. WOO was my first in too, but I thought it was Warrant Officer and Officer. Underlined “guarded” in red. It was pretty much downhill from there. I’ve never heard of slack; we tended to use coke at our house, before it became fashionable. I don’t get the “no further questions” bit of ALL CLEAR. What am I missing? And yes 1C is very cold for Perth, although it did reach 0C this year once or twice. Fortunately, it never gets colder than that here; I don’t think our thermometers could cope. I thought it might be 0K, though (that’s K for Kelvin). COD to SHOWJUMPER for its neatness.
      1. A belated thanks to you both. I was somehow confusing the issue with a clear round in showjumping (echoes of 1ac) and couldn’t get my head round the questions part of it. Maybe I should have tried my new found trick of going to sleep and having a think about it on awakening.
  17. 13 minutes – SACK and CHASER last in, count me in as the over-40s who have not heard of SLACK, but the combination of those last two answers made it likely.

    I hadn’t heard of MASON BEE, but there are carpenter bees, so I guess it stands to reason there would be mason, gaffer, plumber and actuarial bees

  18. 46:32 with 1 mistake. All but 5 (2/4/9/11/14) inside 20 minutes, but then ran into a mental brick wall. 14 came first (i’d miscounted the letters and was considering words like instruction,destruction,restriction,etc.) The last four fell in a rush after a caffeine hit to wake my brain up a bit.

    Unfortunately I’d pencilled in CLARET earlier, and forgotten to revisit it before submission.

    I hadn’t heard of a MASON BEE, but it seemed the only possibility. I’m not sure where I dredged WESTPHALIAN up from.

  19. 26:15 .. by gum, lads, I feel like we should have t’largo from t’New World playing wi’a proper brass band today, wi’all these tales from t’coal cellar. Champion.

    Not unusually, I cost myself 10 minutes or so sorting out a carelessly entered wrong answer. I’d confidently put UNION at 4d which left me thinking 11a was some Oriental dish I’d never heard of .. _E_W_N (embarrassing confession of the week – I was thinking the town in 4d was Lyon.. with an ‘i’).

    1. As a born and bred Yorkshireman, I’ve never been all that happy about the ‘t’ going in front of the noun in written versions of the dialect. I think it much more accurately reflects local speech patterns if you put the ‘t’ at the end of the preposition: in front of’t noun, rather than in front of t’noun, if you see what I mean.
      1. Your version would be more accurate but would still suffer from another problem – the fact that there’s no official way to indicate a glottal stop in English spelling. Written representations of accents seem to just find one or two conspicuous features and indicate them accurately enough to make (e.g.) a written Northern accent different to written Cockney.
      2. I was once told that t’ was an indication to press the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth and quickly nod your head without making a sound. So, “trouble at t’mill” becomes “trouble at (press tongue against the roof of mouth and nod silently) mill.” But what do I know? I’m a Staffordshire man living in Lancashire!
      1. That’s the one. And directed, I believe, by Ridley Scott, he of Blade Runner and Alien.
  20. 28 min, unaided, but with one error: not knowing either my physics or my physicists from my elbow, I invented someone called MERTONI (ITEM rev, ON, and R for resistance). Durr.

    I certainly remember both slack (the horrible dusty stuff that was left at the bottom of the coal bin after you’d burnt all the good bits), and nutty slack. These days the latter seems to be “A delicious dark mild with hints of liquorice and a smooth malty taste” – mmmm.

    1. I think that’s actually Nutty Black – apologies in advance for the age check if you follow the link – now you have to “prove” your age to read about beer, never mind drinking it. Deliberately bought and consumed on recent holiday with party including aforementioned father-in-law, but he didn’t notice the bottle in the holiday cottage kitchen.
      1. That sounds good too, but the one I meant is definitely called Nutty Slack, from Prospect Brewery of Wigan (sorry, don’t know how to put a hyperlink in these posts…)
  21. 45 minutes, par for the course, although I too had REPOSTING at 6dn. I think if the Championship depended on it I might lodge an appeal.

    I was about to complain that there was no wordplay for RIGHT in 15dn, but I’ve just spotted it, so to speak. All the same, it’s not very elegantly constructed.

    1. Unless I’m missing something, your appeal would fail.
      Although the wordplay is there for REPOSTING, the def. is not – to riposte is clearly to give a (quick) reply. To repost is to send something again, not necessarily in reply and not necessarily quickly.
      2. Whilst I agree with your logic on this particular case, do the rules differentiate between a “plausible” solution and the best solution. Clearly this appeal is by no means the best solution, but the point is that it just about works as a solution albeit of low quality. When it comes to excess words or bad surfaces we see these from time to time in correct or unique solutions, so to disallow an appeal on the same grounds could be seen as unreasonable.

        Would it be wrong to ask “does this interpretation work at all” rather than “does this interpretation work elegantly” – ie in this case REPOSTING as “giving quick reply” is almost definition by example, in that doing it quickly is a particular subset of doing it at all. We see plenty of that going on elsewhere.

        On a totally different topic, I thought that 14A was a great clue as it worked in the well known catchphrase “trouble at t’mill”. I was surprised that no-one had posted a link to wherever it came from, until I looked on google and couldnt find it. Am I going mad? The best I could find was the opening line of one of the spanish inquisition sketches of Monty Python, but I am sure it had more prominence than that one line. Did anyone think similarly?

        1. There are no rules except “the referee’s decision is final”, the referee in the Times championship being the crossword editor or another Times crossword setter if the editor is unavailable.

          I can only recall hearing about one successful appeal in the 18 Times championships I’ve competed in (roughly 130 puzzles or 3900 clues), though there might have been one or two others that I didn’t know about or forgot. For the one I (dimly) remember, the official answer was pretty clearly what they expected, but the alternative was much more than “plausible”. As far as I recall, it made as much sense as you would expect a Times clue of that era (1989) to make.

          Because reposting is both not necessarily “quick” and not necessarily “replying”, I’m certain that this solution would not be accepted. If you can find a Times clue definition that’s doubly vague in this way, I’d be very surprised.

          Trouble at t’mill: I think it’s much older older too, though the oldest OED citation only beats Python by a few years:

          trouble at (the or t’) mill: an industrial dispute, as at a Midlands or North Country textile mill; also transf. and fig., alluding to any disagreement or problem at work, home, etc.

          1967 ‘J. WINTON’ H.M.S.Leviathan xx. 333 He replaced the receiver, and assumed a passable Yorkshire accent. ‘Ah’m sorry, lass, but there’s trouble down at t’mill… It looks as if we’ve got to go to sea in a hurry.’

  22. 6:15, with 1A solved on second look, after solving 3D. I still needed to leave 2 and 4 until the end (along with 11 and 14), but the rest flowed fairly easily.

    1. My guess is that the issue at hand here was the great smog of 1952/53 that killed so many and was caused by a combination of difficult weather conditions and the burning of coal by local power stations like Battersea. I lived in Brixton and remember going to collect my younger brother from a neighbour’s house. I had to walk with one foot in the road, one on the kerb to avoid getting lost (virtually no parked cars back then). I literally could not see my hand if I put my arm out straight in front of me. It all led eventually to the Clean Air Act
  23. could someone please explain how current = i in 18dn ? sorry if this should be obvious, but i am a beginner.
        1. i think i need to buy a crossword dictionary to stop annoying more experienced solvers!
          1. A few polite questions are no problem. But you don’t need a crossword dictionary as such. If you look up “I” in the Concise Oxford (or any other good English dictionary) the “electric current” meaning is explained. The Oxford link in “Free online editions of UK dictionaries” over to the right takes you to a copy of the next size up in Oxford Dictionaries.
  24. whizzed through all bar 2 in 30 minutes and then had mental blank about mason bee where i was confused by the “squashed” and was very annoyed with mysefl when i finally saw it. thought of Slack less l to give sack straight off but didnt have the confidence to put it in. when i saw that you took the vice out of service to had to tea = cha i knew i was home and dry but my time had crept up to 50 minutes shame on me!
    nice puzzle i thought!
  25. Apologies for exceeding my quota for today, but I could not resist drawing your attention to this from Hansard 30 November 1953:
    Mr Marcus Lipton (Lambeth Brixton) asked the Minister of Fuel and Power how much nutty slack had been sold to the public.
    Mr Geoffrey Lloyd (Birmingham King’s Norton) About 490,000 tons.
    There followed quite a heated exchange (so to speak) about the comparative merits of nutty slack as against smokeless fuel. Clearly slack was not so nutty a topic sixty years ago, and its description in the House as “this wretched smoke-producing stuff” might go some way to answering Jimbo’s question about why slack disappeared. This was the time of the Great Smog and the subsequent Clean Air Acts.
    (Just messed up my 2.20 post by trying to add something that Jimbo has anticipated!)
  26. About 25 minutes, ending with CHASER/SACK. Hadn’t heard of ‘slack’ coal before, or the MASON BEE. I also thought SEAWAY was excellent. Not much more to say; seems of average difficulty to me. Best regards to everyone.
  27. Well, I completed this one (in contrast to yesterday’s, still unfinished) and after perhaps 80-90 minutes had only 1ac left to do. I had made this entry difficult for myself by first confidently entering SHOWSTOPPER until I saw it wouldn’t fit, then convincing myself the top would be UPPER (which fortunately put the U in the right place to fit 4 dn). Only after dinner did the penny drop.

    I enjoyed the discussion of old times and coal above. I am also an old-timer, but in America we had central heating — the first time I saw a piece of coal was when I came across the pond at age 24 and visited my aunt in London. Apart from that, and considering all of the obscure references to literature and pop culture of the past, I wonder how anyone much younger than me manages to do these puzzles.

  28. Is there any way of expanding out all hidden comments with a single action? Also, if Live Journal decides a second page is required, why does it not then expand these, and move the page break back?

    Oh, and about 30 min, but with a revisit to change the niggling CLARET to CHASER. COD: SEAWAY.

    1. I don’t think there’s a way of expanding as you suggest.

      My experience is that this nonsense usually starts when the 50th posting goes up but today messages were being hidden when we were still in the low 40s although the second page did not appear until 50. I imagine it varies depending on whether people post via “Leave a comment” just beneath the blog or use “Reply” beneath individual postings. Whatever the cause I wish LJ would sort it out.

      1. I haven’t done the donkey work to (dis)prove it, but wonder if compression is influenced by the total length of the page or the comments. If people like me kept it short, maybe all the comments would be visible without expansion.
  29. And another thing: even when I close the ad that turns up as I first open the page, it doesn’t seem to turn off the excruciating dialogue that goes with it. Any suggestions (apart from the obvious one of turning the sound off)?
  30. A ghastly 15:54 for me, the last five or six minutes spent on CHASER which I’d wanted to be CLARET or C?ALE?. A bit of a TEA+SER!

    I hadn’t really thought about it before, but (as another born and bred Yorkshireman, though long exiled in the soft south) I’m inclined to agree with richnorth on’t positioning of ‘t’ between preposition and noun.

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