Times 24722 – is he Angela’s husband?

43 comments on “Times 24722 – is he Angela’s husband?”

1. ….in ‘sure, any blogger’, what blogger comes to mind? Yes, that’s really how I got it, since I had checked the calendar to see whose turn it was tonight.

   I, too wasted a long time with the non-existent anagram in 12, as well as not seeing the obvious one above it for the longest time. I got ‘analecta’ almost immediately, but was stuck until nearly the end on the other homonym groaner.

   My time was a dreadful hour and 20 minutes, during which I listened to two different recordings of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’.

2. A similarly woeful 1hr +, fooled by the non-anagram at 12ac (well, it does contain LIGHT) and not knowing Lansbury — though our East Ender will, no doubt, have chucked it straight in. Scribblings all over the page and most struggle in the SE. COD to 20dn (once I’d got it).

   So a dismal start to what may well be a dismal day — just watching Ponting limp back to the sheds.

3. Ditto all the above – there are some clever traps here that I suspect most people will fall into (and fittingly SUSPECT was my last in, because I’ve never heard of a USP before). 3 and 12 were my favourites from a testing bunch of clues.

   36:08 today. I’m not sure what’s happened but my times have suddenly improved. There’s hope for us all…

4. Needed aids to finish this one: 1ac and 1dn, the first part of 12 and also 13dn, where I failed to spot the anagram. COD to 12 for the misdirection and cunning.
5. Over the hour here too at 1:10. Some really good clues I thought; LEOTARD, REVERSING LIGHT and MAIDEN VOYAGE simultaneously contributing to and compensating for the grotty time.
6. Grandfather apparently.
7. Once again I got off to a very quick start with the whole of the NE including REVERSING LIGHT and OLD MAN’S BEARD going in at a glance and one or two other answers scattered throughout the grid.

   But then I ground to a halt and got completely bogged down trying to work out the remaining anagrams. Wasted ages on 22ac thinking the surname was ROSEBERY or ROSEBURY and trying to think what the good Lord’s first name might have been – surely nothing that could be made out of the remaining letters whichever way he might have spelt his surname? Eventually I spotted GEORGE in “blogger” and dredged up the second name from somehere at the back of my mind

   I couldn’t find a word from “permeating” at 13dn until I arrived at the office and cheated but I was more successful with SACERDOTAL at 27ac after much wrangling.

   I never heard of ANALECTA and at 25ac I toyed with INSULATING for far too long before rejecting it.

   MAIDEN VOYAGE came very late and for AKIN I needed to cheat again having completely run out of time.

   I think 24ac is a great clue.

8. Didnt find this easy and it took 90 minutes and then i wasnt sure of Sacerdotal…
   thought the non anagram at 12 across was fiendish but clever and alos thought that asemblage wasnt too easy either.not sure why you need Sealing in 1 down either…wouldnt it still be akin if you deleted that word…or am i missing somehting
   Clever puzzle and well blogged thank you
9. Echo the superfluity of “sealing” which held me up no end. I hate it when the whole thing goes in smoothly bar a four letter word with two checkers. It is most frustrating. For ages I was scrolling through “building sealants” like cement or putty looking for the four letter middle, and whilst AKIN had sprung to mind earlier, I was not confident enough to bung it in regardless.

   Also didnt know the word MARIST, but it seemed clear, plus for me it could easily have been ANELECTA, but thankfully I picked the right fifty fifty.

   One interesting comment I have noticed on getting more experience at these puzzles, is the marked shift from getting the definition and then realising how the word play works, to piecing together the wordplay and only then noticing the answer staring you in the face. LEOTARD was a prime example – a year ago I would have been listing garments beginning with L until I stumbled upon something that worked, but the LARD part came immediately and then I worked down the body from EYE to ARM to LEG to TOE and even on toe, I still hadnt twigged the whole word and was pleasantly surprised when it shone through.

   That may sound like an obvious thing to point out, but I remember comments a while back suggesting this shift and it didnt seem clear how to put this into practice, or to “switch it on”. I guess it only comes with repeated attempts (and failures)!

   1. I think the “shift” is the point when you know you can do these things, when the first thing you look at is the structure not the surface. In my case, I’m sure it comes from prolonged exposure, though in teaching others, you can certainly start them down the road. Plays havoc with everyday life, I find, with the brain eventually hardwired to spot unlikely connections that aren’t really there. Welcome to the asylum!
   2. Yes, welcome to the lunatic asylum. Unless your partner is also into crosswords beware demonstrating your new found view of the world at the breakfast table! This does mean that you can now contemplate doing the bar crosswords where the derivation of unknown words from tricky wordplay is very much the order of the day.
      1. how long does it take to get to that stage? i have recently started solving and still do it by trying to deconstruct the clue into definition and wordplay and then solving from the definition with the wordplay as justification. of course, i nearly always come unstuck if the definition is even slightly cryptic (suspect, maiden voyage). to be honest the ‘professional’ way would not have helped me a whole lot today as i did not know some of the intermediate words (mage, marist). by the way, should i be looking forward to getting to the stage or will i turn into the nam woh stalk ni saran mag?
         1. Gosh, how long is a piece of string? Others may be better placed than I to help you with this (happened to me circa 50 years ago). You can’t rush it and it won’t happen all at once but if you keep battling on it will come I promise. I guess it’s a bit like the day you realise that to speak French or German you have to think in the foreign language not keep thinking in English and then translating. Don’t give up and keep using the blog – it will help you.
10. About 45 minutes: but without conviction that I’d got it right. I was hoping to find some rationale here for ‘sealing’ in 1dn but clearly this has troubled others as well. Made the right 50-50 guess for unknown ANALECTA. Needed all checking letters in place to abandon my search for anagram of Arbroath gillie: definitely my COD.
11. Really enjoyed this one over 17 minutes, with some excellent clues. I figured “sealing” in 1d was there just for the surface, which, though it makes some sense without the word, is better with it. It was still my last in, and I only got it by writing down _a_i_ _
    Serious groan at ANALECTA (serves us Brits right for our non rhotic pronunciation).
    Like others I got George before his surname – great anagram, as are several others, including 12ac which isn’t.
    Favourite for the day was AHAB – such a neat clue it must have been done before – but the parrot sketch was also a happy diversion.
    Cheers all.
12. An average puzzle for me with the main difficulty the obscure SACERDOTAL and the awful ANALECTA intersection (both words checked in C before entering in the grid). 25 minutes to solve.

    I don’t understand why solvers are seeing an anagram at 12A – where is the anagram indication? It’s surely a rather easy clue if one just follows the instruction “carried by”

    I’m saddened but not surprised that one of the great fighters for reform for the poor GEORGE LANSBURY is not remembered. Amongst other things he led the London East End borough of Poplar council tax revolt that ended up with council meetings being held in Brixton Prison!

    1. Fair enough re 12ac, but if “can knock” can be an angrist at 22, then “carried by” isn’t that far off the mark. Or am I being too picky?
       1. Well “knock” has the connotation of “knock into shape” whereas “carried by”, particularly in a cryptic crossword, suggests “is contained by”
    2. As I did not know ANALECTA – and still do not think it is close enough to a homophone for “an elector” I guessed at ANELECTA. On the right lines, but still a frustrating clue.
       1. Couldn’t agree more – a real stinker in my view. That’s why I used the dictionary and I see no alternative to that other than making a wild guess – and that isn’t supposed to be the way of things.
       2. The only chance that old tortoises like me have of beating speed merchants like you, Simon, is that we can bung words like ANALECTA straight in without a second thought 🙂
    3. Well, he was a very serious and devoted Christian! This seems to have motivated much of his zeal for reform.
13. 25 minutes here, at least 10 of which were spent on 1D at the end! I parsed the clue correctly too (a word for close formed by taking the first and last letters of a word for building), but I was thinking of the verb “to close” and the noun “building”. In the end the penny dropped on my second trawl through the alphabet.

    Other than that, an enjoyable solve. I was pleased with myself for spotting the trick in 12A straight away, and also for quicky spotting GEORGE in the anagram fodder for 22, so he didn’t hold me up for long even though I’d never heard of him.

14. I bought the wrong vowel again! I don’t recall meeting anelecta (sic) before, but no doubt I have. I didn’t have a clue how SUSPECT worked, but now that you mention it, George, I think we’ve seen USP before. I was working on a SPEC=marketing point hypothesis before I gave up, having spent long enough on the whole thing. I also liked REVERSING LIGHT & MAIDEN VOYAGE, and agree with jackkt that AHAB is good, but COD to LEOTARD.
15. As other have said, a reasonably straightforward solve overall, delayed by spots of difficulty/obscurity. Last in was REVERSING LIGHT. I too was for a long while convinced this must be an anagram, having correctly guessed that LIGHT formed the second part of the solution and that all the letters for same were to be found in “Arbroath gillie”. When the penny finally dropped, I though it was a clever clue and worthy of a COD nomination. ANALECTA was OK by me, Jimbo, but then I have a weakness for awful puns. I agree that it’s sad George Lansbury isn’t better remembered, but the fact is he isn’t, and this must have been a very obscure reference for non-Brits in particular.

    AKIN at 1dn was my second to last entry. I may just be having a senior moment, but what exactly is the role of “sealing” in the clue. It seems like redundant padding to me.

16. 36 minutes. Thought 12 very clever, having been inveigled into looking for the anagram. (Won’t “carried by” do as an anagram indicator? It’s as credible as some I’ve seen.) Liked the definition in 3 “journey after cracking bubbly”. Don’t remember 24 being done before, but it surely must have been. The exclamation mark in 2 sent me looking for some awful pun, but then I realized it was just a piece of punctuation, as in “Fancy that!”
17. George Lansbury has been the victim of selective amnesia, the Labour Party would like to forget that it was led by an absolute pacifist committed to disarmament at a time when Hitler and Mussolini were in power. Good intentions very nearly paved our way to Hell. Strangely pleasing to see him reappear amongst the Times Crossword detritus.
18. ALECTA/ELECTOR. A soundalike that doesn’t from both ends – Is this a record? I don’t really mind soundalikes that don’t where the answer is obvious, but this was a word that nobody seems to have heard of and there were THREE (not two) possibilites. I plumped for an-I-lecta. Other than that I quite enjoyed myself but didn’t have my timer going.
19. 13:48 online – first solve sitting at my new work desk, so allow 30 secs or so for a different browser and keyboard …

    1D and 26 last in after a bit of tetragrammaphobia

20. 25:29 .. solved while listening to the pleasing sound of Australian wickets tumbling, which didn’t help the concentration.

    Somehow, ‘source of illumination’ doesn’t seem quite right as a definition for something designed to be seen rather than to light the way. I wouldn’t describe a traffic light as a source of illumination (expect perhaps for late night drunken students slumped below and attempting to identify the right change for the bus while the light’s on green). But I guess it’s technically okay.

    ANALECTA? Soundalike? Blimey! ‘Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance.’

    I liked AHAB and LOCUST – both very neat and satisfying.

    1. I certainly appreciate the light put out by my reversing light when negotiating my driveway in pitch darkness as I leave for work these mornings. Indeed I am annoyed that my current car has only one such instead of the two that were standard for a long time.
       1. Point taken.
21. 21 mins, the right half went in quickly and the left less so. COD to 4D LOCUST. I struggled with 13D IMPREGNATE and am still not sure that it works; what exactly is the definition?

    Tom B.

    1. from ODonline: “impregnate – soak or saturate (something) with a substance”
       1. So: the whole clue constitutes wordplay, but the single word ‘soak’ is the definition? One of those new-fangled clue types that Mark Thakkar coined a term for. I was trying to construe it as an &lit, but couldn’t really see it working unless ‘be’ does double duty.

          Tom B.

22. Way over an hour for this. I did the left hand side in super-quick time but spent far too long trying to make an anagram out of 12a. Got GEORGE LANSBURY straight away. I remember when he was the famous one and Angela was simply his granddaughter. One mistake as well – I had ANELECTOR at 16d. Maybe I should have used a dictionary but I always think that spoils the fun.
23. Same story as many others, an hour due to being befuddled by 12A which I didn’t get until last, right after SUSPECT. Sorry, but I’m not familiar with Mr. LANSBURY, got him from the anagram only. AHAB is very clever, but I was misled into entering HOOK to begin with and had to correct that. This was easy to those who knew Mr. L and saw the trick in 12, but I’m not in that company, so it took a while, but after completing I think it a good puzzle overall. Regards.
24. Yesterday was my fastest solve ever and today was probably the slowest, with two wrong and one answer missing altogether! Not on my wavelength at all.
    Louise
25. Jekyll and Hyde puzzles; easy, impossible, easy, really hard. DNF, since I couldn’t get ‘reversing’. Ironically enough, I spotted the reversed ‘light’ early on. Never heard of USP (aside from US Pharmacopeia), or George Lansbury, but finally guessed ‘George’ and the rest fell into place. On the other hand, ‘sacerdotal’ was an easy one; would that there had been more.
26. Time out of mind, but glad finally to pick the thing up again and suddenly see Locust and then Reversing light (sweet clue). Thought a lot about Arbroath today. Welcome to the asylum indeed!
27. you mean there’s no such thing as BOREALIAR LIGHT?
    Gradese
28. How strange, since many people thought this was difficult — I found it OK, though not easy. After one hour I had to stop to go to my saxophone lesson, with everything filled in but REVERSING LIGHT (at that time I was thinking about a hypothetical PETERSON’S LIGHT, though I had seen the LIGHT sitting there backwards in Arbroath gillie) and AKIN. The penny dropped on REVERSING LIGHT as I was driving to the lesson, and AKIN took about two or three minutes when I returned to the puzzle after coming home, walking to the shops, and shovelling the copious snow which is falling. I assumed there might be a sealant called CAKING or LAKING or whatever, but you don’t have to understand the wordplay to get the answer here.

    12 ac is my COD, but I also thought SPAR particularly appropriate. I suppose I could agree with the general comments about ANALECTA, but strangely enough I knew this word because I am translating a book about our Chinese Garden from German into English, and there are references in it to the Analecta of Confucius (Lunyu in Chinese in case you’re interested — that’s what’s referred to in the German text).

29. Surely “building” = “making”, and if you take the “sealing ends” off, you get “akin” = “close”?

    Maybe the “sealing” is superfluous … is that akin to the point people are making?

    Happy at 50 to 55 minutes. Didn’t Watson just play a stunner? Is Johnson’s foot the only way he can take a wicket?

Comments are closed.