Times 24942

55 comments on “Times 24942”

1. 24 minutes, with some time wasted trying to choose between REPINES and ‘repents’; lamenting and repenting are hardly the same, of course, but that was the first word to come to mind, and it took me some time to get rid of it. I wondered about SPECTRE, too, and could only come up with the fact that one can spell it two ways: -RE or -ER (a l’americaine). I don’t suppose anyone else remembers Max Shulman, the American comic novelist, who once wrote of a fellow whose name, oddly enough, was Oddly Enough; no, didn’t think so.
2. I was irritated with myself at first, but now I think I’m rather pleased that 23d was my LOI, after running through the alphabet (‘that’s short’=IES? TIEST?…..).
3. i think 18d is that a spe tre is a ghost you can see and it is an anagram of
4. ….this time.

   I believe ‘spectre’ is an implied hidden word in ‘respect respect’, which is two respects.

   I got a bit stuck by carelessly putting ‘King’s Lyme’ instead of ‘King’s Lynn’, so it took a while to straighten that and get ‘minibuses’. I never really saw how ‘cayenne’ worked, was looking for some sort of percussion player.

   1. The sceptre is yours – or scepter, as you prefer.
5. 45 minutes, so not without some difficulty.

   I was thinking of Charles Kingsley (perhaps most famous for Water-babies) at 17ac. I too don’t fully understand 18dn.

   I predict rumblings in Dorset area over the DBE at 27ac and I would share those misgivings.

   1. Did anyone else find the puzzle wouldn’t print to one page today without first resizing?
      1. Yep, first time in ages that my settings in Camino (one of the best Mac browsers) didn’t make the single page.

         I shall recycle tomorrow.

         1. The lack of long clues in today’s grid means it has 32 clues, which I think is the upper limit for Times grids. In any case, that number of clues would push the printed version to a second page. I’d have thought they would have adjusted their online font size quanta so that the first option was a bit bigger than infinitessimal, or the second a bit smaller than gargantuan.

            On numbers of clues, I think it’s high time we started giving our times on a per clue basis, to adjust for grid differences, maybe having first trimmed the outliers (i.e. the odd clue which takes inordinately longer than all the others, such as some SUBFUSC or other).

      2. In my case, for the last couple of weeks it’s been taking two sheets instead of one to print. The only way to avoid that is to choose the first of the four font sizes, which is very small indeed. How do you resize? In your printer settings?
         1. The following works with Internet Explorer, and probably with most other browsers.
            Once you have the grid on the screen, right-click on a blank area and select “print preview”. Then go to “shrink to fit” and select 90%. The bottom of the screen should say “Page 1 of 1”.
            Then use the print icon at the left of the toolbar to print from within this window.
            Unfortunately, this doesn’t give you an opportunity to print the grid in grey,
         2. In Firefox, with any webpage open, I click File on the Menu bar then Page SetUp and reset Scale %. Normally I have this on 90% but I reduced it to 85% to accommodate this puzzle. I also have things set up to view everything before printing to prevent errors.
            1. Thanks for that, jackkt. Worked a treat today.
   2. I’m not always sure if I’m on the right track objection-wise with these things, as it’s not something that bothers me overmuch, but if your concern is with ‘sit’ being denoted by ‘instruction to boxer’ – on the grounds that ‘sit’ isn’t only something a boxer does on a stool – isn’t this objection mitigated by the & littish nature of the clue? I rather liked it.
      1. It’s an instruction to a dog of which ‘boxer’ is only one example.
         1. I interpreted ‘boxer’ as referring to a pugilist, the Barbara Woodhouse style instruction never occurring to me. The presence of ‘second’ prompts this alternative interpretation for those who were brought up on the likes of Sportsnight with Coleman, when bouts were were punctuated by cries of “Seconds aways, Round Two!”
            1. I agree the boxing reference is there but I’d have said only in the surface reading. S(econd) is surely part of the wordplay not the definition? And why would a second need to instruct a boxer to sit anyway? It’s what boxers do between rounds.
               1. You have a point – ‘second’ would have to be doing double duty in an &littish context, as already noted, but after a few years in the ring, well, you know, they may need the odd reminder!
         2. If the clue said “instruction to dog” it would still be a DBE because a dog is only one category of things that can be told to sit!
            1. Are we at cross purposes? I wasn’t suggesting it as an alternative clue. I was explaining my thought process to ulaca who at that point hadn’t seen the dog meaning.
               1. No, I think I understood the point you were making to ulaca.
                  My point is that, whilst “instruction to boxer” is a DBE, so is “instruction to dog”, strictly speaking, but I don’t think anyone would object to it (I may be wrong here). Where you draw the line just depends how strict you want to be.
                  Personally I don’t have a problem with use of “boxer” here because it contributes to the surface and conceals the definition, which makes the DBE forgivable. The addition of “perhaps” would signal the definition rather glaringly and spoil the clue for me.
6. Still in a subfuscian glow from yesterday, I also finished this in 37 minutes, but with question marks against 14 and 24, where I’d stuck ‘concordat’ and ‘audit’. After returning from a meeting, I took another look at these two and finally saw the light.

   Enjoyable puzzle, with some innovative wordplay at 19ac (I hadn’t seen CORFU clued this way), 10 and 11. USHER from ‘escort’ only, until my post-solve cogitations drew ‘House of Usher’ up from the depths. COWHIDE was last in, mainly because I’d been looking for something meaning ‘put in fear’, such as ‘terrify’. Kingley’s didactic and at times dyspeptic Water Babies features one of literature’s most cumbersome characters, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid.

7. 21:15 and especially liked ‘Corfu’ for the misleading degrees. Didn’t think much of ‘boo’ …in short report. Enjoyable puzzle overall though.
8. Yet another taking 37 minutes. Thanks for the blog, mctext, and thanks to vinyl for unravelling SPECTRE. COD to CONSONANT (maybe this reflects my pleasure at cracking this fairly quickly – it’s the sort of clue which often gives me trouble).
9. Baffled by vinyl1 finding this more difficult than yesterday’s for which I have invented a new word meaning profoundly opaque, SUBFUSC. Blog a bit late for me to comment but actually finished that puzzle correctly without aids, simply because aids were no help whatsoever.
   A breeze today by comparison with COD to the brilliant SPECTRE (thanks vinyl1) causing me to erase my complaints about that clue from my original comment. SIT is sweet and would have been spoiled by avoiding the DBE.
   1. Oh, I think ‘Instruction to boxer, perhaps, from second exactly what’s needed’ would be so much better …..
      1. Spot on. Here’s an example where the awful DBE actually detracts from the surface reading of the clue.
         1. I just don’t see this as a DBE, and certainly not an awful one. Does the word “dog” have to be in the clue in order to justify the canine command “sit”? The surface reads perfectly well to deflect attention away from the mutt in the middle, but also parses perfectly well to give the definition and wordplay.
            This isn’t meant to be a red rag to a Devon Ruby (closest I could get to Dorset) but I do think to describe this as a DBE is a genuine category error.
            1. Hear, hear!
            2. I don’t mean to add more fuel to the fire, but I was attempting to be ironic!
               1. Ah, irony! I geddit! (tee-hee)
   2. In yesterday’s puzzle, I could often write in the answers directly from the literals, without analyzing the clues too much. I put in ‘anchorman’, ’empiric’, ‘erodent’, ‘planetary’, and ‘Dantean’ that way.

      In this puzzle, you do have to figure out how each clue works.

10. 38 minutes. An excellent and inventive puzzle. COD to SPECTRE.
11. 12 minutes.
    Quite a lot bunged in from definition today, and several I didn’t understand even going back after solving. So thanks to mctext and vinyl1 for explaining BOO, KINGS LYNN, SPECTRE and USHER.
    There was some quite neat stuff in here: the K and N device, C or F, COS/SIN, ODDLY ENOUGH… but COD to EUROSCEPTIC.
12. 18 minutes, marred by much carelessness (why I initially put consonEnt and OMnibus I’ll never know). There seemed to be a veritable herd of heard letters in this one.
    I don’t think 27 presents much of a problem. The pugilistic surface is fine, and you might as well say “sit” to a boxer as any other dog – it doesn’t need a for example. What might you say to a labrador?
    Curiously, my 17 novelist was K Amis – is there any particular reason why (particularly unusual) first names can’t be used? If you google Kingsley novelist, his is the first on the list. Odd to have a clue where precise identity doesn’t matter.
    CoD would go to SPECTRE if I had seen it – a brilliant and possibly even novel device.
13. I found this relatively easy – about 20 minutes allowing for an interruption to dispose of a spider in the bathroom as wife hid in bedroom

    I thought it a rather run of the mill affair with the spectre device probably the cleverest clue. Agree 28A is a good anagram but hardly difficult.

14. I found this the easiest of the week by far, finishing in a leisurely 20 minutes. Like someone else, I hovered briefly between REPENTS and REPINES, but it wasn’t hard to decide which on the basis of both definition and wordplay.

    18dn is unusual. I don’t think I’ve come across an indirect/implied hidden word before (which it clearly is). 7ac suffers from the intrusion of ‘in’ (“reduced volume in short report”)following the earlier ‘of’). I think the setter’s strived too hard for the multiple wordplay.

15. That should have been ‘strove’, not ‘strived’. Too much Shakespeare in me.
    1. Hmm, but what’s the perfect tense, has strived or has striven? There doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer. There’s a vast site called verbix.com that lists striven as (E) and strived as (U), but I haven’t been able to find what the abbreviations stand for.
    2. Forgot I had an apostrophe S at the end of ‘setter’, so ‘strove’ is definitely out too. P.P. is ‘striven’.
       1. You and I seem to be the only people interested in this, dyste, but after a night’s sleep it’s obvious that E = English and U = US.
16. 30:38 – I just slipped over the half-hour revisiting 3d which I had entered hurriedly as REPENTS, but was never happy with. A minute or so well spent!
    A little easier, and considerably more enjoyable than yesterday’s offering. There were several clues I liked – ODDLY ENOUGH, CAYENNE, and SPECTRE all spring to mind, but there were others as well.
17. 42 minutes, but I’m another repenter. I even came up with a fanciful justification for it. Good job I didn’t spend any more time on it though. REPINES is a word that had passed me by until today and the cryptic wasn’t much help – to me anyway.
18. 18:09 but undone by repines. I wasn’t happy with repents but didn’t know repines so had nowhere else to go.

    COD to Corfu.

    1. Long time no hear – how are thing up North?
       1. Not so bad thanks Jimbo.

          Had a health scare with one of the kids earlier in the year and got out of the habit of posting on here. Things getting back to normal now though.

          I’m trying to build up a head of steam for October’s visit to that London for the championships.

19. REPINES appears quite a lot in the immortal works of Georgette Heyer. You gentlemen need to brush up on your regency romances! 25 minutes with no serious hold-ups, although I didn’t understand SPECTRE until coming here.
    1. A fellow Georgette fan! Her depiction of Waterloo in An Infamous Army is superb – much better than Thackeray. Familiarity with the vocab in the Heyer oeuvre is often quite helpful in cryptics as I’m sure you too have found.
       1. I’ve found her to be invaluable for arcane items of dress (fichu, pelisse), types of carriages (phaeton, curricle) and fabrics (bombazine. dimity) She’s much plagiarised but no-one can match her wit! Great comfort reading. Btw, agree re “Infamous Army”
    2. Never read any Heyer (and not sure I’d own up to it if I had!), but ‘repine’ also pops up a fair bit in Jane Austen.
20. I thought this was a very good puzzle, with a bunch of inventive clues, including SPECTRE, CONSONANT, COS and ODDLY ENOUGH. Very nicely done, setter, nothing subfusc today. My last entry was CONSONANT, after about 40 minutes enjoyable work. Regards to all.
21. 7:57 for me. SPECTRE went straight in as the answer to an old chestnut, but since no-one else seems to have come across this clue before, I suppose it must be a very old chestnut!
22. Why does point=E? Also what does the EW refer to in 22 across?
23. E(ast) is one of the four compass points, and in similar vein, Bridge players are designated by which point of the compass they sit on. So Bridge partners (in this case “partners in play”) sitting opposite each other can be either NS or WE, either order. “Opponents” can clue, for example, NE or WS.
    1. Thanks

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