Times 24768 — Feelthy pictures?

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 38 minutes.

The right-hand side went in quite quickly; the left a bit longer, pondering 3dn which didn’t give us a lot to go on. I was sure it was going to be MOTH … something; but it was one of the others. No real complaints; but no great delights either.

 

 

Across
 1 CLEMATIS. CLEAT (in the nautical sense) and IS including M (for mark).
 6 COMICS. COSMIC with its S moved to the end.
 9 DAMSEL. Rev of LES and MAD; then two defs, the first being the damselfly (cf dragonfly).
10 REVERE,NT. The American hero who had a band called The Raiders; then your standard books.
11 BETA. Sounds like BEATER.
12 SACRAMENT,O. Capital of California. Lots of US State capitals are relatively obscure places now but used to be important when the railway was king.
14 HARD CORE. I see two defs here (a noun and an adjective) with an implied comma before ‘of’; and a question-mark by way of apology for the looseness of it all.
16 I shall restrain myself from including this one.
18 MAGE. IMAGE minus the I.
19 I[’]M,PAIRED.
21 GOOD FOR YOU. GO (turn), then an anagram of ‘your food’. ‘Yes, I’d like my steak cooked nicely too’.
22 HOP,E. E being the last letter of ‘place’.
24 DI(ASP)ORA. The snake in the RADIO-(ana)gram.
26 T(R)OUGH.
27 STA(YE)R. The def is the being who’s in for it.
28 ST,RIDING. (We)ST for the first part. Yorkshire is broken into (Th)ridings, thirds. The def is a climb in the Lake District, Striding Edge. Never game to tackle it when on sojourns from Lancaster, early 70s.
Down
 2 (P)LEASE.
 3 MUSTARDSEED. Here you need to know your MSND (vide Peaseblossom et al) and your Kingdom of Heaven from three of the books in 10ac — Matthew 13:31–32; Mark 4:30–32; Luke 13:18–19. John didn’t cut the mustard. Edit: But see ulaca’s more likely NT source. Where’s PB when you need him?
 4 TALK SHOW. A cryptic def. NB the archaic meaning of ‘converse’ as ‘conversation’.
 5 STRICKEN IN YEARS. NINE reversed inside TRICKY (delicate); all this inside SEARS (burns).
 6 CAV,EAT. Cav and Pag reprised here.
 7 Mark this one off as an omission too.
 8 CON,STANCE. Cf Bodensee.
13 ENGLISH BOND. Anagram of ‘his long bend’. More toolic knowledge required; cf yesterday’s JOINTER. “A bond used in brickwork consisting of alternate courses of stretchers and headers”.
15 AN,ATOM,IST (of Melancholy).
17 S,P(L)UTTER. The putter is the small stick used by people with strange pastimes, and too much time on their hands, to get a little white ball into a hole on a patch of lawn.
20 CO,LOUR. Commanding Officer.
23 PAGAN. Light inclusive.
25 SHY. Two defs; the first by reference to horses and such like.

 

60 comments on “Times 24768 — Feelthy pictures?”

  1. 37 min in my 3rd and final attempt online. Again lost everything halfway through, and had to restart. Anyone else have problems with what seems to be a delayed key-bounce, where you want to enter an across, and it flips to down or vice versa. Ended up writing half of a long down across four other correct answers without noticing, so 5 wrong! Possibly a latency problem given the physical distance between NZ and Blighty, particulary with satellite hops.
  2. My hard work over the past couple of days obviously paid off, as I managed to lop a full ten minutes off my time, finishing in an hour and 36 minutes. Last in MAGE (pesky 4-letter words). Slowed myself on 6 and 10, where I thought of ‘threat’ and ‘revering’ at first, and at 15, where I couldn’t get beyond the two Richard Burtons.

    A minor quibble – ‘marriage’ rather than wedding is the sacrament (I’m taking ‘perhaps’ to be an indication of definition by example rather than an acknowledgement of the looseness of the clue). I wasn’t enamoured of the BETA clue either. COD to TALK SHOW.

    Although spectacular Striding Edge is the more famous of the approaches to Helvellyn from the east, it is said that more accidents occur on its northern counterpart, Swirral Edge, as walkers lose concentration on their descent. A magnificent walk in all seasons.

  3. 32 minutes but went for ‘talk shop’ as a possible programme title. Didn’t like it for ‘converse’ but like the usage as it is less; hopelessly out-of-date as noun for conversation. Iffiness elsewhere: the esoteric ‘striding’, hope=desire, maybe Cav… On the other hand rather liked 5.
        1. I read 4dn as TALK SHOW containing SHOW TALK, thus having no need for archaic ‘converse’
          1. My justification was the phrase “All talk and no show” which establishes “show” as the converse of “talk” and, incidentally, describes many of these programmes in a nutshell.
  4. Another good day for bad guesses: I thought of ‘movie’ –> ‘move’ for 18, guessing that ‘wizard’ was yet one more cricket or soccer term I didn’t know; I thought ‘little piece’ in 15d was ‘op’, and of course couldn’t remember the right Burton; I tried to make a word out of ‘as I have a’, thinking ‘spoiled’ was an anagram indicator. 51 slow and often irritating minutes, showing once again that being obtuse doesn’t really help much.
  5. Another trickyish one. 30 minutes.
    Another unknown building term, some unfamiliar geography and I never understood what “faith” was doing in 3dn.
    However the thing that really slowed me down was my complete inability to see STRICKEN IN YEARS, which was one of my last in.
    1. Not the only one. ‘Advanced in years’ has such a powerful pull and, if you’re stuck in ovine mode, you’ll be looking for a word ending in ‘-ed’.
      1. Isn’t that caprine? I somehow saw ‘stricken in years’, which had an Old Testamenty flavor to it, but gave up trying to figure out how it worked. Thanks to mctext for that one, as well as for explaining what ‘fly’ was doing in 9ac.
        1. Good spot, Kevin. Does that make me sub-caprine?

          I blame Cantonese, which makes no distinction between the two woolly beasts.

      2. Different versions of Joshua 13:1. The King James has ‘stricken in years’. Some newer versions have ‘advanced’. Others just ‘old’. Take your pick. I’ll have the AV.

        Edited at 2011-02-09 09:03 am (UTC)

    3. Pursuing the biblical theme – this comes in the NT and has to do with grains of mustard moving mountains. I too didn’t know the building term or geog. reference and while I got I couldn’t parse 5d. Slowish one but at least no silly mistakes.
  6. This would have been my nightmare puzzle if I were on blogging duty as I managed only one three-letter answer (MAR) on my first two readings through all the clues.

    When I ran out of time on the commute the RH was complete but I still had lots of gaps on the LH and I cheated to get MUSTARDSEED, ANATOMIST, DIASPORA and MAGE. BETA, DAMSEL and SHY then went in when I had all their checkers.

    I’m afraid this puzzle exposed far too many gaps in my GK. I don’t think there have ever been so many in one puzzle before. Amongst these were ENGLISH BOND, DAMSEL (fly), BURTON (someone I’ve never heard of clued as an anatomist not because he was one but because he wrote a book with “anatomy” in the title which I’ve also never heard of), DIASPORA, STRIDING (as a place in the Lake District) and MUSTARDSEED (as a particle of faith, though I should have got it from the MSND reference).

    Writing CHAT SHOW at 4dn didn’t help either.

    That’s three DNFs without cheating for me so far this week and I’m blogging on Friday!

  7. Being somewhat 23D, I have no idea how you get from the gospels to MUSTARDSEED.

    And as for STRICKEN IN YEARS, I’ve never heard the phrase.

    Mike O.

    1. Actually, the reference is to Matt 17:20 (also in Luke 17), where Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” (NIV)
      1. Ta for that more likely passage. But Jeez, this is getting like an argument with young boys in white shirts who call themselves ‘Elder’ and knock on your door when least needed. Not that they ever are.
  8. I struggled with this. Never seemed to be on the same wavelength as the setter and had not heard of STRIDING EDGE. Well over an hour.
  9. Found this quite hard…and not very well clued some of it to be honest…i can see Mustardseed but think its a lame clue…Stricken in Years had me stumped for a long time but enjoyed Clematis and Cosmic becoming comics…Failed to get Hard Core…cant think why though!
  10. Check the cited bits of the synoptics. E.g.:

    Matthew: Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field …

    1. Thanks mctext.
      I read a lot of fiction books but I gave up reading the bible when I was old enough to say no to my parents with regard to church attendance. My father was a sidesman and my mother played the organ!
      Mike O
  11. 23 minutes, with Burton’s anatomy lesson confusing me and STRICKEN/SACRAMENTO crossing being the last in. It never helps much when you can’t put the long one in early.

    Perhaps the setter had half an eye on the KJV anniversary this year: this was definitely one where familiarity with the 1611 text was useful. Maybe the days when the Bible and Shakespeare were automatic choices are gone. What common repositories can be assumed, then?
    Burton I knew as Richard the actor or the “explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat” (thanks, Wiki). Lots of -ists to chose from, but apparently neither dissected bodies or, as it turns out, melancholy. Robert Burton’s work is somewhere in a dusty corner my repository, but only as a quaint title.

    I thought DAMSEL was rather oversupplied with cryptics, generous but confusing.

    Striding Edge I remember from CCF days, seeing it after what seemed to me to be a long march up Helvellyn and thinking a) that looks a bit dodgy and b) I’ve walked far enough already. I declined the option to stride, or even stroll round it. Maybe one day I’ll have a go.

    Cod to BETA, with a side order of TALK SHOW

  12. I think this is the setter that feels he/she has to include a fair portion of Christian religion and assumes we all share the same enthusiasm – wrong! The clue to 3D MUSTARDSEED is frankly ridiculous. Strange then that the incorrect “wedding” should be used at 12A simply to improve the surface reading.

    20 minutes with the long 5D proving to be very illusive and my last in. With IN YEARS guessed from checkers eventually saw through the wordplay to arrive at an unknown phrase. Surmised it probably had a biblical connatation. A little surprised by the ignorance of Burton’s Anatomy.

    1. Jim,
      Anyone (including some on this blog) who knows me knows I’m the anti-theist from Hell. But at our age, it must be impossible not to know some details of what tzaneria calls ’a lot of fiction books’. And, as z8b8d8k asks: ’What common repositories can be assumed, then?’ So: as far as crosswords are concerned, these things aren’t christist by strict creed. Just the stuff we grew up with. Even the great Darwin had only one formal qualification: in Theology.
      1. Like others I suspect, I sat through tedious sermons as a kid without any real idea of what it was supposed to mean, and endured scripture classes at school. I think it’s reasonable to assume a knowledge of the principal characters and events of the bible, but both 3dn and 5dn involve detailed textual references which are likely to be known only by enthusiasts.
    2. Yes, Jim, I think I had one of this setter’s puzzles to blog about 3 months after I started and that really was the puzzle from hell – which is a bit ironic!
  13. I found the whole thing a bit of a struggle and failed on ANATOMIST, HARD CORE, MUSTARDSEED and STRICKEN IN YEARS. I vaguely associated STRIDING wih the Lake District but couldn’t remember exactly why.

    Not my sort of thing at all, I can occasionally get bible references but these were way beyond my ken.

  14. About an hour. Some very taxing clues, I thought, and also had trouble finding the right Burton. (Tried to make something like arabist or anthropologist or eroticist. Even considered “gone for a Burton” and Burton-on-Trent.) I thought there might be complaints from those who pronounce BETA as bayta. Particularly liked the “being in for the long run” but the style of clue that is 5 down I consider a bit tedious; dare I say that MUSTARDSEED is more to my taste? (Dives for cover.)
    1. Or, in my case, a Hartleys (or six) — which you must know? That’s why I took a good look at Striding Edge and stayed in the pub!
      1. And an excellent drink it was too in those days. Regrettably, Hartleys is no longer brewed in Ulverston, having been taken over by Robinson’s of Stockport; but should you ever have cause to visit the English Lakes again, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Hawkshead brewery in Staveley.
        1. Hmm, not sure I share your enthusiasm, John. Hartleys used to be my local brew, and it was always a rather unreliable pint. Although perhaps that was the publican’s fault rather than the brewer’s.
  15. Decided to persevere today but, even after resorting to cheats, could not crack MUSTARDSEED (gospel/MSDN allusions beyond me), ANATOMIST (stuck, wrongly, with Richard Burton) and HARD CORE (still can’t see what’s ‘irreducible’ or ‘minimum’ about this: my misadventures with Google searches suggests there’s no bottom to this ‘filth’; similarly ‘hard core’ as a construction base may have a maximum but not a minimum?).

    I’ve a lot of sympathy with criticisms above; but many thanks, mctext, for yet another fine blog.

    2. The nuclear force exhibits a “hard core” to the nucleus of atoms. It pulls like fury once you get close enough to the nucleus, but repels like fury once you get to the “hard core”.

      This would appear to be the irreducible “size” of a proton or neutron, or collection thereof. Yang-Low seems to ring a bell.

  16. …in that I finished nearly all of it, but needed the blog for explanations. Got stuck in bottom left, so another DNF for me today. Thanks for clear blog, McT!
  17. 28ac reads like the title of a chapter from my (yet-unpublished) autobiography, and I’m probably one of the few who got it on first reading. But things went badly wrong after that. I was roundly defeated by the biblical clues and suffered the indignity of a DNF.

    STRICKEN IN YEARS was gettable from the wordplay, just about, but I agree with the other complainants about MUSTARDSEED. I think we should send it off to the TLS where it belongs.

  18. We managed close to a PB of about 40 mins, despite atheism and serious dental treatment to one of us. COD to beta – shades of Eddie and Will Grundy.
  19. 35:55, tricky and mostly rather unsatisfying.

    Sat sitting as I am in West Yorkshire I spotted
    we)ST RIDING straight away but didn’t put it in as I’m not familiar with the Lake District bit. I blame Rory McGrath.

    My father was a quantity surveyor and gave me valuable instruction in the difference between English Bond and Flemish Bond when I was building stuff with Lego (TM).

  20. Got there in the end, 24 minutes with one text message barrage interruption. This was tricky and not really up my alley, a bit cryptic definitiony/religious overtonesy for my liking. But you can’t win them all (hey, I’m up tomorrow, so maybe I’ll win that one).
  21. 28:39 .. different one, for sure. Only real quibble is with the ‘wedding’, which does seem plain wrong.

    I made life much more difficult for myself by putting in BARE BONE as the irreducible minimum, thus making the already tricky 3d impossible for a while.

    I quite like an occasional puzzle from the rectory hearth. The intellects I most admire, believers or not, are nearly all well-versed in sacred texts among much else (I’m thinking of people like the great Paddy Leigh Fermor who will, I believe, be ninety-six this week, just by the by).

  22. I had a lot of trouble with this one, finally struggling in at 54 minutes. Had heard of Anatomy of Melancholy but didn’t connect it with a Burton. Had the initiaL “A” and the final “ist” so spent ages trying to fit in a version of “arabist”. Eventually the cryptic gave the answer which I still didn’t understand till coming here. Had never heard of STRIDING in the Lake District but bunged it in from the cryptic. A hard slog. Many thanks to mctext for this blog.
  23. Perhaps there’ll be a few more of these arcana in the year ahead: this is the 400th anniversary of the 1611 Authorised Version, which is, after all, as celebrated a piece of the canon of English literature as it’s possible to be.
    For interest, I also note that the AV is the authority for “stricken in years” – it doesn’t appear in (my edition of) Chambers and I couldn’t see it in Collins on line. Mustard seed isn’t in there either, as one word or two. AV has “grain of mustard seed” in the most appropriate passage.
    What is the authority these days?
  24. because i have yet to finish a wednesday puzzle. did think of the right burton in 15dn, but just did not make the connection. as for 3dn, i like a few others did not get the biblical reference but in fairness to the setter, maybe i should just have got it from the shakespearean reference. however, i just could not look beyond meson for tiny particle, thinking that the setters had finally listened to the our whinges about a lack of scientific content in the puzzles, and having gone down that dead end, just could not get out again.
  25. I think a point is being overlooked when complaining about, or justifying, references to the King James Bible, or to Shakespeare in these puzzles: the influence they have had on the language we use. (We’re into these things because of our interest in language, no?) ‘the skin of one’s teeth’, ‘apple of one’s eye’, ‘one fell swoop’, ‘protest too much’, and on and on.(Check out David Crystal, ‘Begat’, for the KJ and modern English.) When the setters start requiring us to recognize ‘true presence’ or ‘work of supererogation’, or to remember the name of Shylock’s servant, I may whinge a bit; but not about mustardseed.
  26. Ouch. I tried for an hour last night, and slowly finished the last 5 on the left this morning, those being ANATOMIST, MAGE, BETA, HARD CORE and MUSTARDSEED, in that order. Don’t know of this Burton, thought the first word of 14a was to be ‘last’, MUSTARDSEED was a flat guess from the checking letters only. STRIDING and STRICKEN… from wordplay only. The overall time was probably 2 hours. While many here apparently didn’t like this puzzle, me included because it took me too long, and I understand the marriage/wedding quibble, I actually laughed out loud when I saw SACRAMENTO. So thanks for that, setter. Regards to all.
    1. Apart from a permutation in the order of the last 5 that was precisely my solve. Did you also wonder for ages why BUCHARESTO might be the answer at 12ac, on the assumption that TALK BACK was a contender at 4d?

      On another topic, since Striding Edge is presumably sic, I thought convention would require a capital E for Edge in the clue.

      1. >…
        >On another topic, since Striding Edge is presumably sic,
        >I thought convention would require a capital E for Edge in the clue.

        Interesting point. IMO it’s acceptable because the word “edge” can be used without a capital E to mean a ridge. I can see that purists could argue that “Striding” shouldn’t properly be separated from its “Edge”, but in casual conversation one might talk of tackling Helvellyn “going up Striding and down Swirral” (or vice versa), so I think we should give the setter the benefit of the doubt.

  27. 9:14 for me. No complaints whatsoever, as there was nothing unfamiliar in there. I was slow to get LEASE and DAMSEL, but that was entirely down to my own doziness.
  28. 2 hours, a hard solve for me, hard core last in, once mustardseed revealed herself.

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