Times 24862 – Heads or Tails?

29 comments on “Times 24862 – Heads or Tails?”

1. Easier than any last week I thought. 13’ all up. The obvious anagrams and the four body parts helped a great deal. Of the former: the fodder for 14dn also yields the botanical term NOTORHIZAL. Let’s hope we don’t encounter that in these parts.
2. Maybe I’m just grumpy because it’s a cold, wet grey day, but I found this mostly trite with some poor clues (19,24,1,2,3,14) and a couple of obscurities which stood out (to borrow from Raymond Chandler) like a kangaroo in a dinner jacket. Not one for the scrap book. Apologies to the setter.
3. I started like a Welshman on hwyl (pronounced to ryhme with ‘oil’ by at least some Welshmen) and finished like Sancho Panza on his donkey. I have recently read ‘Jarvis’s’ translation of Don Quixote, which is highly recommended (the book rather than that particular translation), so ROSINANTE held no terrors. TORMENTIL – an unfortunate name for a herbal remedy – from the wordplay, ABET from the definition (thanks to Koro for the explanation).

   SHOULDER ARMS gave me most problems, since my knowledge of such commands comes from the movies, and I only ever hear the RSM(?) screaming ‘Present … arms!’ The phrase itself I know well, but only from cricket, where it means to leave a delivery only with a flourish of the bat held aloft. 53 minutes.

4. 18′, one of my fastest; but 2 wrong, my worst in a couple of years, so maybe I should have slowed down and read the clues. Then maybe I wouldn’t have thrown in ‘odium’ so fast. On the other hand, I did spend time on 1d, and got nowhere; in desperation I thought it might be ‘Aceh’, a hidden, as a place that needed help (I said ‘in desperation’, didn’t I?).I’m with Essex Man, even though it’s hot and sunny here; a lot of blah clues. And HWYL? Give me a break.
5. Ouch! Pretty confident that my desperate stab at ROSINANTE was wrong but carelessly failed to update ‘odium’ to OPIUM and did not bother to check that my provisional ‘amen’ (1 dn) was consistent with wordplay. HWYL, however, gave me no problem. Thanks, kororareka, for an enjoyable blog which properly put me in my place. Thinking this was easy made me much too slapdash.
6. All but five answers went in under 25 minutes but then I lost the plot. Apart from ABET which took ages to see and then I couldn’t explain it, all my problems were in the NE where my knowledge of Welsh and of the fictional horse let me down. I had BASE at 10ac for ages and then DOING WRONG for WRONG-DOING at 7.

   An encouraging start given my recent form but gradually depression started to set in as I realised that my run of bad solves on weekdays continues unabated.

7. TORMENTIL from wordplay. Last in HWYL required a leap of faith and a dictionary for confirmation. At least the dictionary only appeard post-solve unlike yesterday which found Mr Moorey stuck in Mephisto mode.
   1. Thank goodness I took my daughter’s advice and swirched off the laptop and concentrated on her hero Djokovic v Gasquet last night. Resuming this lunchtime to polish off the remaining clues, I hit a brick wall and was most grateful to the online cruciverbalist outlaws for a fistful of answers. Even then, I still managed to submit with the loo clue wrong.
8. 15 minutes, so sort of easy. Indeed, many clues very easy, especially those requiring kindergarten grade anatomy. But 1d and 13d held me up, the latter because I didn’t split the padding and the horse, and thought it was an unknown (to me) term for some sort of caparison. A-E- refused to let me think of letters other than ones beginning with A, and since it wasn’t ALEF I was also tempted by AMEN, chucking out all the clue except ending.
   HWYL, as well as being a decent scrabble score, is best experienced at welsh rugby grounds or really good chapels.
   CoD to OPIUM, also candidate for scribo of the day (like typo only using less technology)
9. Found this mostly easy, with a guess at HWYL and a stretch for TORMENTIL. I had heard of a stirrup cup but always assumed it was some fiddly bit of horse saddlery, so I couldn’t fully parse the clue. 21 minutes.
10. Whizzed through this after doing Sunday’s Mephisto. 10 minutes including HWYL which could hardly be clued any easier folks! Why do they publish easy puzzles on a bank holiday when people can devote more time than usual to solving them?
11. I was vaguely expecting something more challenging on a bank holiday Monday. This was relatively easy – 21 minutes is a good time for me. I was greatly helped by seeing HWYL straight away. It helps to be in the land of song and rugby. (We’re in some kind of important football match this pm at Wembley and the whole town is awash with HWYL. I never thought I’d see a rugby town go crazy over the other game!)
12. I object to ‘hwyl’, and I’m dismayed that not all others do. I expect the answers to be English; I’m broad-minded about imports, provided they’re anglicised and/or well-used by ordinary folk, but this is ridiculous. What next? Hungarian? Georgian?
    1. I suppose the fact that it is included in at least one English dictionary is sufficient. Chambers considers it an English word of Welsh origin, though I don’t know whether there are foreign words listed in Chambers that wouldn’t be considered fair game in a Times crossword.
    2. I have some sympathy with your POV but the convention is that if it’s in one of the source dictionaries, Collins or COD then it’s fair game. It’s certainly in Collins. I can’t be bothered to go downstairs and check COD at the moment.
    3. I agree with you that this word is very obscure for a daily Times. However as Jimbo points out it’s very easily clued. With _W_L and “to start” just after a group of words starting with the right letters the setter is giving you a straightforward alternative “in” to the clue.
       I’d feel differently if I hadn’t got it, of course. ROSINANTE? Disgraceful!
13. Complete disaster here. I put in ODIUM without thinking and was completely defeated by ROSINANTE. “Roan” just didn’t occur to me so in the end I just bunged in RESONANCE as the only word that could possibly fit.
    1. Oh, 16 minutes, by the way. Of which half spent staring at R_S_N_N_E. So for me, very easy apart from the impossible bit. And the stupid mistake.
       Sigh.
14. Yeah, very much a crossword of two halves (half very easy, half – for me at least – very difficult). I was not helped by putting DOING WRONG, and never thought to question it, so left several blanks in the NE. Oooh, didn’t get ABET either (but did get OPIUM!).

15. Found most of this fine but didn’t know Don Quixote’s horse or Hwyl. Also in OED “wrongdoing” is not hyphenated.Do the various dictionaries differ? By the by, have had to re-enlist on LJ as it told me I was deleted and purged!
16. Thought this was one of the easiest puzzles in many a day. No problem at all with ‘hwyl’ – it’s in Chambers and Collins, and is standard fare for Scrabble players. Might have expected something a bit more challenging (ie time-consuming) for a bank holiday.
17. …and thank Koro for filling in – sorry you didn’t get a better puzzle, mate.

    I managed to print this out at my brother’s house and solved it in about 45 minutes this afternoon. I had not heard of ‘hwyl’ or ‘tormentil’, but they go in easily enough from the cryptic. My big mistake was carelessly writing ‘tiny’ instead of ‘tidy’, which held me up for a long time with ‘endangered’. Last in was ‘abet’, which I was sure had something to do with ‘alphabet’, but I couldn’t say what.

    This is the last stop with computers, I’ll be back for the June 6 blog. We’ll see what sort of puzzle I get; I agree this one could have used some work. BTW, it is really surprising that ‘hwyl’ does not appear in American puzzles, where it might be most useful.

18. Easy? Well, 90% of it was, but the other 10%? My last four in, none of which I had ever heard of, were HWYL, TORMENTIL, STIRRUP CUP (all of these from word play) and RESONANCE, which I had heard of, but which of course was wrong — I was sure no other word could fit the crossing letters, imagined that RESONANCE was both the name of a famous racehorse and the name of a famous body of water, and there it was. OPIUM I rather liked, but as for the rest … And WRONG DOING could also be DOING WRONG; at least the G’s don’t help to tell them apart.
    1. I noted that a couple of people put in DOING WRONG, but there’s a big difference between that and WRONGDOING (or WRONG-DOING): the latter is a lexical item, i.e. something you’d expect to find in a dictionary, while the former is simply a phrase, like ‘eating spinach’ or ‘paying taxes’, and as such not appropriate for a crossword entry. Similarly, ‘bluebird’ is OK, ‘blue bird’ NG, etc.
       1. Of course you are right. In my comment, I also overlooked the hyphen which was indicated in the puzzle; DOING-WRONG is not a word or a phrase, for that matter.
       2. Yes, I completely agree with you. I know that I’m guilty of not totally parsing the clues on occasion, just bunging them in if they appear to fit part of the clue. I guess so often I DON’T get one or other part, that often I give up trying to work it all out!
19. I have found the last few Xwds impossible suddenly I find I am not senile after all : but is there not a happy medium
20. 6:03 for me – I should have been faster but couldn’t seem to get my brain into gear. I’d expect the fast brigade to break 4 minutes.
21. Doing this 8 years after the rest of you, from the Times cryptic crossword book 19. Couldn’t parse ABET , so it was a pleasant surprise to find the blog. Thank you blogger! HWYL was the last one in , a NHO, entered thanks to generous clueing. 24 mins in total.

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