Times 24894: Two for Tea

55 comments on “Times 24894: Two for Tea”

1. 46′ here, the last 10 exactly (or should I say, ‘precisely’?) devoted to 1d/15ac. I knew that ‘hot spur’ meant pretty much nothing, but it took me forever (actually, 45 minutes plus a bit) to figure it out. I knew nothing of Tim the speaking clock — thanks to Ulaca for the link which reminded me of POPCORN, the way (back when phones had dials) to get the time in San Francisco — and simply took TIM to be a wimpy hidden in ‘time’. It would have been nice if TIM were Tiny Tim, since 14d recalls Mr. Turveydrop in ‘Bleak House’.CODs to 8d and 22ac.
2. I enjoyed this a lot more than anybody else so far – it kept me happily entertained for 35 minutes. Lots of exclamation marks in the margin, particularly among the down clues, but my COD was the CHA RIOT. I hope it doesn’t turn out to be an old chest nut.

   TIM the talking clock only occurred to me 5 minutes after I’d finished. I’d gone for the hidden word as well, and didn’t pause for thought when it was confirmed by 28ac. Very odd. My last in, rather unusually, was 1ac.

   1. When I was at school forty years ago, one of the masters told us that his favourite Times crossword clue was “Vehicle used at the Boston Tea Party?”

      But I suppose a chestnut can be reused every half-century or so.

3. 48 minutes, with the last 8 spent on the omitted 15ac, so I still don’t know if I got home safely. I took TIM to refer to Tiny Tim (Timothy Cratchit) in A Christmas Carol. Quite a few of these went in from the definition alone, so not as enjoyable as some recent offerings.

   Incidentally, TIM the speaking clock is still alive and very much kicking, apparently racking up more than 70 million calls a year. TIM made a recent guest appearance in The Office, when David Brent, instructed to sack a member of his staff, dials the speaking clock instead and proceeds to have quite the cionversation with it until his boss activates the speaker phone.

4. I forgot to say that a bunch of colonists–smugglers among them, no doubt–sneaking onto a ship and dumping its cargo in the bay doesn’t sound like much of a riot to me.
   1. It’s obviously a reference to the Massachusetts branch of the TPM. They’re a riot! Well they make me laugh anyway. Mad hatters the lot of ’em.
      1. Yeah, a laff riot. Unfortunately, unlike Screaming Lord Sutch, say, they have real influence on the majority party of the lower house of the US Congress. Not a lot of laughs anywhere in the world if the US debt limit isn’t raised this month.
5. Couldn’t parse HOT SPOT. The only Percys I know are Grainger, Thrower (where I come from a telephone is a percy) and of course that which too often these days has to be pointed at the porcelain. Something slightly odd about the style today which might just excuse TIM. Otherwise I really enjoyed this with my COD by a distance to CHARIOT.
6. Now imagine being a fly on the wall while they were in private conversation!
7. 28m. I rather think Tim is just a rather feeble hidden word as there would be several neater ways of clueing this if it were really referring to the speaking clock; otherwise some enjoyable fare today. Liked the use of Spooner as anagram fodder – very devious!
   1. That’s possible. But my understanding is that hidden answers (aka the light inclusive) have to be concealed between more than one word or else buried inside a complex word (including hyphenated ones). Just taking the first three letters doesn’t seem right and doesn’t account for “Our” in any way at all. In fact, it leaves it out of the possible inclusion fodder: and that’s against all things (even vaguely) Ximenean.
      Whatever … we’re specifically expected not to think of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child_of_Our_Time

      Edited at 2011-07-06 07:29 am (UTC)

      1. Now I have a new rule name: the embargo on superfluous inclusion fodder (ESIF).
      2. Personally I have no difficulty not thinking of the Tippett which only gets space on my shelves to stop poor old Vaughan Williams from falling over.
         Would you care to expatiate on the Grainger/Thrower conversation? On second thoughts…
8. All present and correct in pretty quick time…

   Wasn’t acquainted with either Mr Hotspur, or Ms C-B, but cryptic quite straightforward. Missed HATTER ref in 18ac, and regarding TIM, I just assumed it was a badly hidden word. Maybe it’s a bit loose, but I quite liked the ‘another answer + IDLY’ ref in 28ac. LOI=DONKEY WORK, as I’d misread the clue, and was looking for an expression along the lines of ‘grand oeuvre’.

   COD: CHARIOT, it made me smile.

   1. Now that I look back, we were expected to supply (or work on) a few names: Tim, Ivy, Percy, Will. Have I missed any?
      1. Yup, Beth
         1. Rats!
9. 50 minutes including time lost in the SW because of a wrong answer at 18dn – my first in – where I put CLIPPER. I was a little unsure of this but when it gave me a C as the first letter of 18ac and I spotted CHATTERBOX I thought it must be correct.

   A work doesn’t have to be a piece of music so we have a DBE at 4dn.

   All round a good testing puzzle though. I knew it was not going to be easy-peasy because I needed checking letters before I could solve any of the 3-letter answers.

10. … so could someone tell me the answer to 15ac?
    1. So, find someone you don’t like and call TIM on their phone while they’re on holiday for a week!
    2. THIN(g)
       1. Thanks, Jack. I need that dunce’s cap avatar. I didn’t change ‘hotspur’ to HOT SPOT, despite jotting that down in the margin, and was left with a word beginning with ‘r’.
11. What a very polite group of people you all are. 26D is rubbish! The only way you can be sure of the answer is via 28A which is itself close to being rubbish!

    My knowledge of religious myth is not strong but don’t the specific star-led guys need a capital – Magi? Well done Jack for drawing attention to the DBE

    All very easy in 15 minutes with nothing particularly interesting along the way.

    1. No more than “wizards” or “astrologers” -occupation not nationality.
       1. I knew I’d seen it somewhere. My knowledge of Chambers far outweighs my knowledge of religious text. The august tome espouses under magus/magi: with capital – the Three Wise Men from the East…..
          1. At least it wasn’t kings, with or without a capital! I concede Chambers’ prescription. For what it’s worth, the 1611 AV has Wise men, exactly as written.
    2. This is the first time I’ve been formally accused of politeness. My Mother would be so happy!
       If you’re DBE hunting: Ms Compton-Burnett is only one example of the many Ivys in this world.

       Also: we should distinguish between DBE-as-such — where the whole def. (or literal, as Vinyl prefers) is “by example” and DBE-in-part — where part of the wordplay is “by example”.
       The penalties for the offences to setters (in each case) need to be reconsidered.

       Or else: maybe the blogger is supposed to leave criticism to the pack?

       1. Yes, as the blogger you can influence the pack so need to be somewhat restrained. As you will have noticed I’m very good at following my own advice.
    3. Jim, your understanding of The Magi accords with my own and is supported in both Chambers and the SOED. The source dictionaries for the Times (COED and Collins) don’t list the biblical reference at all so their spelling without the capital cannot be taken to justify the omission in the puzzle.
12. No time today, with solving interrupted by a request to install an XP-run network printer on a W7 computer. And I still didn’t get HUSBAND without all the crossing letters. Being a bit techy, I was fooled into looking for a computer connection as the answer.
    Some good stuff here, including CHARIOT, my CoD (though “transport”?) and the Spooner clue that (slightly disappointingly for me) wasn’t. It was nice to see the quintessential old city tURning up again.
    Add me to those who though TIM was both “hidden” and feeble, and the crossing TIMIDLY as a makeweight clue thrown in without much thought (sorry, setter!). There WERE lots of names, weren’t there?
    1. Not as good as yesterday’s.
       I’m sorry I didn’t respond to you , r2d2, I only looked this morning. Yes, the Times is a learning experience, I just find Archbishops and Bridge terminology a yawn. Who am I to moan? I’m agnostic and I like backgammon, I’m sure you’re all asleep already.

       P.S. Really, you didn’t have to go to your grammatical aids to chasten me. It was cod-AV English.

       1. I agree one hundred percent on bridge, and utterly refuse to play. But if I wanted a crossword which avoided broad general knowledge, I’d probably be taking The Sun.
          PS – I found this this looking for something else – the original 1611 AV version. I suspect, given the quixotic spelling, cod AV English is next to impossible!
          Welcome to the board, by the way – do you have an identity?
13. So: no nasties from you about the {w}EDGE comment?
    1. It is never my policy to persecute the afflicted
14. DONKEY WORK (my last in) indeed! A real hotchpotch, with my overall sympathies in line with jimbo. There were too many answers (obvious from definition) I could not really reconcile with the wordplay: thanks, mctext, for an excellent attempt at making sense of it all. Still can’t see where all the bits of DONKEY WORK come into play: ‘musical piece’ seems irrelevant. But I did enjoy CHARIOT.
    1. Doh! ‘Musical piece’ = work.
15. Yes, an odd puzzle that mixed the excellent, the obvious, and the downright silly. TIM certainly fell into the last category. Like some others, I too assumed it was an unconvincing “hidden” word. The Speaking Clock explanation seems a tad more plausible, but hardly any less weak. Tim might well be a child’s name, but it was an adult who provided the voice of the clock, presumably, so the clue required a question-mark at least, I would have thought. That said, and at the risk of being thought excessively polite by Jimbo, there were some amusingly inventive clues/solutions – CHARIOT and STARTLED being the best. And the use of “Spooner” as anagram fodder at 11 ac was a cleverly misleading variation on an old theme.
    1. “Tim might well be a child’s name, but it was an adult who provided the voice of the clock, presumably, so the clue required a question-mark at least”

       And I think TIM is voiced by a female. It certainly was whenever I used it long ago.

       1. I’m sure you are right, now I think about it. Yet further grounds for disliking this thoroughly feeble clue. Interestingly, like Vinyl1 below, I too toyed with TAD instead of TIM for a while, but couldn’t for the life of me see how “tad” could be a child of this or indeed any other time
          1. Well, Tad is a valid boy’s name; it’s a diminutive form of Thaddeus. I also considered it here but rejected it as the T wouldn’t be accounted for unless ‘time’ did double duty: ‘Time’ = T and “Our time” = AD.
             1. Good point on Tad. I must admit Thaddeus was not a name that occurred to me. My attempted cryptic justification for TAD went more or less along the lines you suggest – i.e. T[ime] AD (our time) as opposed to T[ime] BC (not our time). That would just about have worked, it seems to me, had the answer been TAD.
16. ….because I was sure ‘Child of our Time’ was ‘tad’, i.e. T[ime]A.D. Too clever by half, I suppose. The rest was rather straightforward, although I was as usual quite slow. I also had ‘hot spur’ instead of ‘hot spot’ for a long time before I read the clue carefully.

    At least I put in ‘Livy’ as an obvious giveaway, my first in.

17. 33 minutes and just wasn’t on the wavelength today. Seems I’m in good company. I got the wifeless golf club ok but just couldn’t see the final line. Didn’t help myself by carelessly putting master work in 4d and tepidly in 28a thus entailing a lot of re-write. Liked the non-Spoonerism Spooner though. Thanks Mctext. Must have missed Carry on Abroad and will have to see if I can find it anywhere.
18. 41 minutes. I don’t mind clues that bend the rules a little, in fact I welcome them. But 26d and 28a were just rubbish.
19. 18 minutes. A curious puzzle. There was some very good stuff in here: I liked the misdirections highlighted by mctext, for instance. There’s some looseness though (“Boston” and “musical” look superfluous, for instance) and 28/26 is very un-Timesish. Like others I assumed TIM was just a poor hidden, and I don’t like it much more now that I know the correct interpretation.
    1. I think Boston is worth its place in the clue – it’s needed to justify the RIOT.
       1. Ah, I think I see now. I had parsed the clue as cha = tea, riot = party (or “occasion of boisterous merriment”, to use Collins’ charming definition), with “Boston” just there for the surface. But I suppose the Boston Tea Party was a cha riot and that’s all there is to it.
20. I got held up in the sw because I couldn’t believe that TIM was the answer. I started to wonder about the name of the Tippet child. But I remembered he was foreign and probably, if he had been named in the work, would have had a foreignish name. So TIM it had to be. I remembered the Speaking Clock but the clue was still very feeble. Enjoyed the fun of CHARIOT and STARTLED.Crawled home in 43 minutes.
21. I took 35 minutes to complete, but was very distracted by some vocal locals. I hope I’d have been a little quicker with some peace and quiet. I made a meal of 1ac, toying for far to long with tentative variants of HASSAN or other middle-eastern names.

    I agree with the criticisms of of 26ac. If it’s hidden then ‘Our’ is superfluous; if it refers to the speaking clock it’s poor because TIM is given in the clue, in ‘time’.

22. Well, since Jimbo has urged us to be impolite, I’ll try my hand. I know nothing of the speaking clock, and went with the not well hidden idea, and I never understood TIMIDLY at all (last entry). Together, they are pretty poor. The cricket-based clues also go over my head most every time, today included. But, we don’t get clues we all agree are badly subpar very often, and, to me, the CHA RIOT made up for it. Time: about 35 minutes. Regards.
23. I’m afraid I’m with Jimbo on thinking this one was not a stellar puzzle, I went to bed not filling in 26 or 28 thinking “no way there’d be two CHAs and two TIMs in the one puzzle, especially so close to each other”. This morning I gave up and bunged them in and here we are.
    1. And two STARs.
       1. Those two cha’s are at two tea parties. Has this one slipped over from the Grauniad, perhaps?
24. 11:33 for me, the last few minutes spent pondering 26dn and 28ac. I thought of TIM straight away as a possibility, but it seemed too weak so I wasted time trying to justify TOT and wondering (following the same line of reasoning as vinyl1) if the answer might conceivably be TAD. Tippett’s A Child of Our Time is one of my least favourite sings, which added to the general unsatisfactoriness of the clue.

    1. The arrangement of “Steal Away” is very effective though – the solo soprano is lovely. But I’m with you on the main body of the work. I found it a deadly depressing experience.

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