Times 24776 – Why couldn’t I have been blogging yesterday’s?

48 comments on “Times 24776 – Why couldn’t I have been blogging yesterday’s?”

1. Ecstatic to finish this correctly in just 5 Biddlecombes and get my name on the front page of the leaderboard, albeit in the early hours of Friday morning UK time.

   The beauty of this puzzle was that very little could go in without at least partial wordplay understanding. COD to the very creative COMMANDO, where the use of the word to stand for a unit, and hence soldiers (plural), made the clue even cleverer. Last in SWEAR IN, another fine clue, as they all were.

   I wonder if anyone else invented a Russian hero called ‘Ins’ to keep ‘Lev’ company at 23 ac, or ever – squirms in embarrassment – had ‘glover’ at 27 for George Foreman?

2. 37:25 .. just brilliant. I’m filled with admiration, especially for the ridiculous and wonderful COMMANDO.

   Last in: SWEAR IN

   Dave – I hereby dub thee a Knight of the Order of the Short Straw. Well done, sir.

3. I was baffled for a while by 20ac, Dave, but the second part of the clue refers to letting game hang for too long, ie go off.
4. At 43 minutes, this took me twice as long as any of this week’s others, and I’m surprised I finished so fast. CODs all the hell over the place, but 8 takes the cake (or biscuit, if you will). Just a wonderful puzzle, worth all the effort; now I’m going to have a drink. Dave, you deserve one, nay, two; o-tsukaresama （お疲れさま）, as we say in Japan.
5. Queen Sotira has spoken! And Thou art indeed so dubbed, Sir Dave.

   Took me 52 minutes to see through this one but, as they say, it’s a fine line between pleasure and pain. The hardest Friday since Sabine gave up the gig. My COD goes to 14ac for sheer creativity.

   Edited at 2011-02-18 04:33 am (UTC)

6. Phew, when you get a crossword with GNOMIC SHADDOCK across the top, you know it’s going to be tough. And when there’s no mention of a fish in the shaddock clue, you know it’s going to be extra tough.

   Finished in the same time as our trusty blogger with COMMANDO, an obvious contender for COD, although the anagram at 1ac was very neatly concealed.

7. MIT is, of course, a university not a college; was anyone bothered by the clue? In the US, e.g. ‘college student’ could refer to someone at Harvard or at Podunk Community College; but I had imagined that in the UK the distinction is clearer.
   1. Yes, this bothered me. A ‘college student’ means an undergrad, but you may be attending either a standalone college that offers only the BA/BS, or a university that grants all degrees. However, that doesn’t mean you can call Harvard or MIT a college.
   2. “College” is perfectly OK to define a university, and certainly OK for MIT, though arguable it’s a bit vague.
8. I’m probably in a minority of one, but frankly I hated this. Loose definitions (sin=error, air=gas, what flies=bat, cup-tie=replay, college=MIT), a penchant for taking second and third dictionary meanings (prostration=exhaustion, dan=person) and the ridiculous COMMANDO. Absolutely not my tasse de the.
   1. I thought most of those definitions were tough but fair, with the possible exception of college=MIT. ‘Dan’ isn’t just ‘person’, it’s ‘person who throws’ referring the the martial arts classification, as in ‘black belt, 5th dan’
      1. “Dan” in Japanese means a step, hence a grade in karate. I was referring to the odd extended usage here in which it refers to a person.
         1. I agree totally with Essex Man on the number of dodgy definitions today. I can’t find any reference to “gnomic” meaning difficult to understand – gnomes/aphorisms are usually clear and concise statements of principle. Even allowing for artistic licence the “Pegasus” definition is particularly poor – I’m no astronomer but I’m quite certain constellations are not atmospheric phenomena and the one time you can’t see them is when it’s cloudy!
            1. If you are thinking of the constellation I think you’ve missed the point but you may well be right about ‘gnomic’.
               1. I once had a bit of writing criticised by a tutor as ‘gnomic’. And he didn’t mean ‘clever’.
               2. COD defines GNOMIC as “enigmatic, ambiguous”. And Pegasus, of course, is the winged horse after whom the constellation is named, not the constellation itself
            2. The online Macmillan dictionary defines Gnomic with –
               ‘A gnomic remark is short and clever but difficult to understand’

               As for pegasus, as the word ‘mount’ suggests, it’s the winged horse of Greek myth that’s being referred to, not the constellation.

            3. The subject of the ‘Pegasus’ clue is the actual flying horse, not the constellation. He needs the air to achieve lift!
         2. My dictionary (an electronic Japanese-English, E-J job, the only dictionary I have here) gives 2 meanings for (English) ‘dan’: the skill level in martial arts, etc., but also someone who has achieved a dan (yuudansha 有段者).
9. All credit to Dave for his valiant efforts. If it had been my turn this Friday you’d have been lucky to see the blog before mid-morning.

   As so often on Thursdays (the end of my working week and good political debate on TV starting at 22:35) I was very late to bed having just printed the puzzle but nevertheless I decided to make a start on it. But 30 minutes later I had only GIOVANNI and CRAVEN to show for it so I gave up. Things weren’t much better after a night’s sleep (and it would have been a sleepless night if it had been my blogging day, I can tell you!) but somehow after about 75 minutes I managed to complete the grid albeit with occasional use of aids (in desperation towards the end)and two wrong answers as it now turns out.

   The first wrong was COMMANDS for COMMANDO which annoys me because I had spotted ‘work’= DO but I was determined to have a plural completely overlooking the fact that the singular can mean the plural in this case, as I well knew if I’d stopped to think about it.

   The other wrong ‘un was DON for DAN on the assumption that a don presumably has to be an expert on something or other but I had no justification for ‘throws and falls’. I’ve never heard of DAN in the required sense.

   I was also annoyed by forgetting MIT yet again, though I did manage to solve the clue without fully understanding how it worked.

   My last in was VET which was so easy it should have gone in early on and the checking letter V in 23ac would have prevented me wondering if Tolstoy had a leading character called TNEMAL.

   I agree it was a very clever puzzle but I’m afraid my heart sinks whenever I see a mass of very long clues as it’s so hard to work out what’s the definition and what’s the wordplay. But of course that’s the skill in it. Just such a shame I had to fall back to earth with such a bump after yesterday’s puzzle had started to rebuild a little of the confidence I have lost over recent weeks.

   1. Curiously, ‘vet’ was my first in – after staring at a blank grid for 10 minutes!
10. after four relatively simple ones hear is the beast of the week…but i agree with both Man with a van and others in both ways..frsutrated by loose or arcane definitions and equally some beautiful clues…Commando is almost my clue of the year so far as is Shaddock and even Role Play…i got one wrong with Ironware instead of freontage and with that it took between 60minutes and 90 or so in differnt goes…I was annoyed that it took me so long to say Gnomic!
    Well done Dave as blogger and well done setter…a toughie!
11. At last a very much welcomed testing puzzle that I had to work at instead of strolling through. 25 minutes of very enjoyable mental wrestling.

    There are two signs of a difficult puzzle for me. Solving intermittant clues and having to go back to fill in the gaps and lots of parsing notes scrawled around the clues. I ended up with both. I think experience helps with this puzzle because many of the clever devices (like the use of the comma) have been seen before. A SHADDOCK by the way is a sort of orange.

    Well done Dave and thank you setter

12. Yesterday, a near personal best of 9 mins 50 seconds.
    Today, first answer in after 8 mins. Six answers in after 30 mins. By then I had lost the will to live and gave up.

    By the way, does anybody have any memories relating to my plea at: http://community.livejournal.com/times_xwd_times/670767.html?thread=10661679#t10661679

    Mike, Skiathos

13. 40 minutes, so by some distance the toughest of the year so far for me.
    Like most, I had around 5 and a half answers in my usual time for completing the grid, and only really started motoring when I twigged that GIOVANNI was an anagram. “Motoring” is of course a relative term – I only rarely got out of second gear and entered two clues in close proximity.

    Is this hard work and masochism, or a brilliant and satisfying challenge? Essex man is right that there’s a lot in here that probably can’t be solved by sticking the words into electronic Chambers (I didn’t do that, of course, though I was tempted). Whether that makes it a divine fruit or a tough skinned not quite orange probably depends on what you think a SHADDOCK is.

    I kind of liked this – not many smiles (except for the audacity of COMMANDO, which must have been part of a Listener themed puzzle at some stage) and two clues where I didn’t quite get the wordplay – OVERHANG and MINESWEEPER, where I thought the “minor school” might be a wee Perse with the s missing and the last e gratuitously discarded. Jim describes it as mental wrestling, which I think is a decent epithet. Not quite pain, but not quite pleasure either.

    CoD (from many possibilities) to COMMANDO.

14. Can someone please explain the opening “In” in 20ac and 18dn. It seems redundant and just there to mislead in both cases.
    1. I think the initial “in” in 20ac is there to indicate the definition. Imagine quotation marks around project.
       At 18,I’m inclined to agree that it serves no purpose except to smooth the surface: the clue just can’t start “Extremely pure air”. Perhaps it was a trap for unwary misspellers, inviting PEGUSAS.
    2. In is often used as a link word between wordplay and definition, in the sense “in this construction, witness definition” or “in this definition see the wordplay components”. The slight variation from the norm here is its use at the beginning of the clue.

       What would be an alternative in these clues?

       1. an alternative, of course, would be to try a completely different idea! That said, I don’t think the “in” is a problem here.
15. Commiserations, Dave, it was indeed difficult. I limped home in 55 minutes, still puzzling over OVERHANG. Wonderful misdirection in most of the clues; well done setter. COD to PEGASUS for its “mount in the clouds” over the otherwise clear winner COMMANDO. Can’t get the song out of my head now.
16. After yesterday’s criticism by anonymous for not correcting an error (which I actually had as soon as it was pointed out by mctext), I felt horrible but after nearly 30 minutes of staring at a 3/4 empty grid this morning, I felt relieved that by comparison, today’s blog would have been tougher. Well done, Dave, for an excellent blog about a really difficult puzzle. I do not envy you any bit.

    8D was my COD … what cheek to use a punctuation mark as part of the fodder … sheer brilliance.

    1. Some rude remark from an anonymous person really should not worry you. As many people yesterday said, everyone should be grateful for the effort the bloggers make.
       1. Here Here!

          This was a very difficult puzzle, which we finished in 68 mins using some aids. However we only understood a number of answers from Sir Dave’s excellent blog. COD to dan.

          Nice to see our near-namesake making an appearance.

17. 38 minutes. After a run of gentle ones… a monster! Bad luck Dave, but very well done.
    There was definitely a hint of the grind about this one but for me there was plenty to enjoy. Pleasure mixed with pain for sure, but when the penny dropped I found myself admiring the setter far more often than cursing him/her. Some super devious definitions (“mount in the clouds”, “in the main, clearer”), uncommon if not necessarily unknown vocabulary, well-hidden anagrams (DAN, GNOMIC) and cunning wordplay.
    I wasted quite a lot of time on 19dn, having seen that the answer was DEBATE but trying somehow to fit in a homophone for “bait” (flies to cast in river). I wonder if this was deliberate.
    COD by a country mile to the very cunning COMMANDO.
    Thanks setter.
18. one of the hardest in a long time. Eminently fair nonetheless so mustn’t grumble. I liked DE(BAT)E in particular.
19. As a sub-2 years solver, so I suppose relative to many on this site a beginner, I foolishly said to a friend just yesterday that I no longer reach a point where I feel totally defeated. Sure as eggs is eggs that conceit would be shattered by the very next offering. But lo and behold after 2 hours I had a completed grid albeit with a little help with PEGASUS and CHARLATAN and am thrilled to bits. Well done Dave. I expect you now feel there is nothing beyond you.
    Failed to parse OVERHANG, worried about the plural COMMANDO (saw the comma quickly enough) and still don’t understand why DD (Doctor of Divinity) is divine? SHADDOCK of course was a guess.
    Oh and PS. Delighted to come here after such a struggle not to find comments about how easy it was.
    1. ODE has:
       dated a cleric or theologian
20. … but massively enjoyed this one nonetheless! First in (and quite quickly, too!) GIOVANNI, and then I progressed very slowly, but feeling oh, so clever, when I worked out wordplays as I went along. Lots of PDMs (is that an accepted TLA?), such as at 3dn and 18dn. Also liked DAN (having accompanied my sons to their Tae Kwondo lessons for several years, I liked this definition). The ones that finally beat me were the three in the bottom left. Had not heard of the Tolstoy character or the old folk, but feel I should have got VET.

    Fantastic puzzle to finish the week on, any many thanks to both setter and blogger, who have both greatly enhanced my Friday!

21. Felt very pleased to finish this in about 45 min, although I had to look up LEVIN – shame on me! Definitely a Friday puzzle.
22. 18.29 online Like Janie my first answer was GIOVANNI and was getting worried that I would have a complete blank on first readings. Final answer was SWEAR IN. Smiled at COMMANDO. The use of punctuations mark always gets me. Pleased to finish in a time of 1.5 magoos (or 1.2 pbs). I’m in the camp of those who enjoyed this one and had no real problem with definitions and wordplay although I admit I’m not much of an analyst. Enjoyable end to the week – well done Dave, I’m sure that deep down you really enjoyed getting this one rather than one of the previous four
23. Calling a clergyman ‘a divine’ is common 18th century usage.
24. This does include 8 hours of sleeping and 2 hours of watching golf on TV. All correct, at least, although I didn’t understand ‘overhang’ either, thought you had to take ‘r’ out of something.

    It is most important in a puzzle like this not to put any wrong answers in. Ideas like ‘turning point’ ‘gaffer’, and ‘imitation’ seemed possible, but I refrained from putting them in because I could not make them fit the clue.

    My parsing of ‘frontage’ was actually wrong, but at least the answer was correct.

25. Off to a slow start and then spent the day seeing people about a complicated matter of two remortgages and agonising over the odd clue. Naturally complementary activities and glad to get both sorted though still to see the confirming blog on the less important. This was a first-class puzzle and I congratulate the setter and Sir Dave.
26. I didn’t see GNOMIC straight away so had to start this from the bottom, which always slows me up. For me it was a slow and steady, but ultimately satisfying, slog. Didn’t need aids – I remembered my Tolstoy and also knew that a SHADDOCK was a fruit. I put COMMANDO in because nothing else fitted but didn’t get the cryptic until coming here. Great clue! Completed in 49 minutes.
27. One reason this puzzle is so difficult is that in several cases the wordplay has been massaged for the sake of the surface to a possibly excessive degree: examples are 1ac, 9ac, 11ac, 17ac and 7 down. And the “having” in 13dn jars. Not really unfair I guess though, and certainly an entertaining challenge. The comma thing has been done a few times now, but always catches me out!
28. Yes, another overnighter. I put it aside last night with the NE missing, and finished in the AM albeit with DON instead of DAN. But with this challenge of a puzzle, I don’t mind the mistake. Same comments as most others, same choices for COD’s, and same mixture of admiration and empathy for the newly installed Sir Dave. Setter: very clever, very devilish (but I don’t think the average UK commuter could solve this on a bus ride, no.) Regards to everyone.
29. Wow that was tricky, I think it’s all been said – I was relieved to see that I had a correct grid.
    1. 15:43 for me – not too surprising as we were due for a tough one. Having said that, I struggled with the top half but found the bottom half pretty easy.

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