Times 25003 – Old Man With Fatigue

39 comments on “Times 25003 – Old Man With Fatigue”

1. Every so often we get a crossword which I find myself in a minority of one in disliking intensely. I suspect that this is one such. While others may admire the clever wordplay, I find that in most cases it is so obscure as to be irrelevant in solving, thus denying one that “Aha!” moment when working through the wordplay reveals the answer.

   As for the bible books, angels and the Christian heretics, enough already!

   1. I can’t say it irritated me in the same way but I did put in a lot of answers from definition alone and work the wordplay out later, which is not my favourite way of doing it.
      1. I suppose “dislike intensely” is a bit of an exaggeration. Let’s just say I didn’t find it much fun.
2. My new iPod has a stopwatch. So I can now record the seconds. Great eh?

   Didn’t understand PARENTAGE until UY explained it. Many thanks.

   Otherwise, a straightforward puzzle until I got to the SW. OHIO and LAND held me up a bit.

   COD to GRACE DARLING. A superb clue.

   Edited at 2011-11-10 02:33 am (UTC)

3. You forgot to pinch the ‘B’ishop in 3 down
   1. Now done. Ooops! Thanks
      1. And it’s 8dn; not 3dn.
4. …and as noted, many clues with the wordplay not worth deciphering. I nearly put ‘The Hesperion’ instead of ‘art historian’, but has to erase it when I discovered what 100 was.

   I was a bit surprised by ’embonpoint’, but that’s what the anagram clearly points to once you get a couple of crossers.

5. Uncle Y, you have a typo at 15ac; it should be ‘Ins A RENT in PAGE’.
6. I lost track of my solving time. I had all but about four answers within 30 minutes or so but I then got stuck and was unable to finish without using aids for 9ac and 8dn. Having solved these it turned out that the source of my problems was incorrect answers, at 2dn and 10ac. At 2 I had plumped for DEAL although I was not quite happy with either definition but it fitted, sort of. The error at 10 was due to haste and carelessness, going for SCAR when a few seconds of extra thought would have revealed this had to be wrong.

   EMBONPOINT was unknown to me. I may have been aware of the word but if so, I suspect I assumed it was some form needlework.

   Where is the insertion indicator in 18ac?

   1. Good question. Also what’s the definition in 8dn? Isn’t EMBONPOINT a condition rather than a body (or body part)?
      1. SOED has this which I think covers it: Plumpness; the plump or fleshy part of a person’s body.
         1. Fair enough. Not in Chambers, COED or OED. Why be so obscure with a word like that?
7. 16m but help! on 18ac. Don’t understand how the O gets in dim. Am I missing something?
8. Oooh…that’s two finished correctly in a row, quickish time (if I don’t finish it relatively quickly, I resort to aids, not one to persevere too much, me)! Must be a first for me…or at least I think so… 2dn (omitted) was my last in, with a ? Is it DATE? why is that ‘see’?

   Others with ?s: IDIOM (how does the O get there?); OHIO (forgot IO, the moon); METHUSELAH (got the rev of HALE, but couldn’t work out the other bits).

9. Oh I get it…to ‘date’ someone, is to see them. That it?
   1. Yup!
10. 14 minutes for this, which according to my calculations is just over 11 minutes when hangover-adjusted.
    All quite straightforward, but like tringmardo and Janie I don’t understand how the O gets in. Am I just being an idiom?
11. 18 (and a bit) minutes. I think I see what Essex man is getting at (especially if religion bete noir sensors are running hot) – I kind of enjoyed this one as an intellectual challenge, but thought it was clever rather than subtle – no chuckles, with a heavy reliance on Thesaurus cluing such as Janey’s see=date.
    My step-father-in-law used to use EMBONPOINT as a virtual synonym for a large bosom, so I was quite surprised on post solve research to discover that it was less specific both about body part and gender. This was also a bit of a disappointment, as I thought I had detected a touch of humour in the implied notion of female bishops.
    Should arian, useful as it is, be dumped in the bin that contains She, Al and the others as overused?
    No CoD today – nothing stood out as having that sort of spark to it. Great blog, Uncle Yap!
    1. The definition in ODE is “the plump or fleshy part of a person’s body, in particular a woman’s bosom”, so no need to be disappointed!
12. Only took me 10 minutes so must have been on the straightforward side for a Times. I didn’t find much to grumble about either.
13. I found this a bit of a slog, clocking in at 31:26, albeit with a couple of self-inflicted interruptions.

    Part of the struggle was due (like others) to failing to see how the O got into DIM. To be honest I’m not 100% happy with O for opposition leader either. Leader of opposition would be fine.

    I’m also with Jack in vaguely knowing the word embonpoint but thinking it was craft- or possibly linguistics-related.

    I enjoyed the clue for nudist camp when the penny dropped. I thought I was after the name of some mythologcal book that a divine power consults on letting the dead pass into wherever.

    Thanks to yfy for explaining the old man and the boat.

14. A workaday 33 minutes. I agree the insertion indicator’s missing in 18, unless ‘particular’ is too particular for my liking. Embonpoint is as far as I know used in literature exclusively for the bosom (so there’s a sly surface there). Haven’t seen mockumentary before – what a word. Painful to write it. Hey crypticsue, ten minutes is going some.
15. Cheers! I didn’t see that one. In that case, it gets my CoD for its sly dig at the men only fantasists of the CofE. Geraldine Grainger (she of the best embonpoint in Dibley) for Canterbury!
16. 12 minutes, so obviously on the right wavelength from the off, but like everyone else unable to parse 18 across. Suspect a word or two has gone missing in the editing process.
17. 40 minutes for all bar 5 in the NW, then another 22 for those. Last in and COD to DATE, of which I have had a few in the last 10 days.
18. Didn’t get much time last night but ripped through about half of it last night and polished the rest off over coffee. Not on the setter’s wavelength today, METHUSELAH, ART HISTORIAN, GRACE DARLING and AGE BRACKET went in with a shrug – I’d heard of the first. EMBONPOINT from wordplay.

    Rather liked NUDIST CAMP, though I wonder if it’s a case of trying to conceal the definition so well that it sticks out like a sore thumb (as we know, the only thing that sticks out in nudist camps, apart from the odd (or even) embonpoint).

19. About 30 minutes, ending with GRACE DARLING who I didn’t know of. Not much to say, except COD to ORDINATION for making us lift and separate Christian Dior. Regards.
20. Coming as I do from a long line of formidable Yorkshire women with plenty of embonpoint, I do like the idea that it is a “condition.” “Poor Aunt Gertude, she’s suffering rather from the embonpoint…” – and what nit said “Not in Chambers, COED or OED” .. when it is all of them?

    Also, Uncle Yap, you are a fine, upstanding gentleman and do not need any sort of “faith” to keep you so. Stop looking for it, and trust in yourself and not in the various organised religions we can do so well without

    1. What I said, Jerry, was that the definitions of EMBONPOINT in COED, Chambers and OED do not define it as a “body part” merely as an adjective (“plump”) or a condition (“plumpness”).
       Given that (as evidenced by comments on this blog) the word itself is not widely known, I questioned the need to add an extra level of obscurity in the definition.

       Regards, Nit.

       1. That was a different post. The one I looked at just said it wasn’t in the dictionary – I quoted the entire sentence. Part of the problem of your posting anonymously, I guess… I failed to connect the two. But having said that, I do also disagree with the basic idea here.. embonpoint doesn’t mean fat, it means fat chested.. the Oxford dictionary online says “the plump or fleshy part of a person’s body, in particular a woman’s bosom” .. so the part part is entirely valid and the ODI at least does indeed define it as a body part
          1. I took Anonymous to be saying that the “body part” definition of EMBONPOINT isn’t “in Chambers, COED or OED” – which is certainly true of the editions I have access to (admittedly out of date for Chambers (2003), and the COED (1976 – so still the COD), but bang up to date for the (online) OED).

             Your statement that “embonpoint doesn’t mean fat” simply doesn’t stand up, assuming you’re prepared to equate “fat” with “stout” or “plump”.

          2. Jerry, the following is the entire definition from the online OED (which I think is generally regarded as having a certain authority). Nothing about chests here. I suspect that the use in respect of bosoms is a jocular sense which is recorded in the less prescriptive dictionaries like the ODE.

             A. n. Plumpness, well-nourished appearance of body: in complimentary or euphemistic sense.
             B. adj. (predicative) Plump, well-nourished-looking.

             Regards, Nit.

21. Uncle Yap, for something not overtly evangelical, but thought provoking and well written, you could try CS Lewis’s ‘The Great Divorce’. Chritians of all shades, as well as atheists and agnostics, tend to enjoy this short tale of souls on a day trip from Hell to (the outskirts of) Heaven.
22. 10:47 for me. Like others, I don’t understand how O gets inside DIM in 18ac. And although I’m familiar with EMBONPOINT meaning “plump” or “plumpness”, I haven’t come across it meaning a body part before.
23. Being familiar with the decolletage definition of EMBONPOINT, this was my FOI with SCAB but I then stared at an otherwise empty grid for about an hour before turning the distracting TV off. I then clicked with NUDIST CAMP and METHUSALA and gradually filled the grid. I too struggled with 18a, coming up with DUMBO even though it was a particular word rather than a phrase for Thick Headed. Eventually the crossing letters led me to IDIOM although I still can’t see how the O goes in either.
    I finished up with one wrong by missing the obvious in 17a and going for the more obscure KINGO (end of fightING in KO) giving the not so well known Japanese Architect:-)
    Thanks to Uncle Y for the parsing of 12a. I missed the prominent TOR and assumed that the heretic was an ARTORIAN not having heard of ARIAN.
    I started doing the Times crossword in February this year when my son-in-law left a copy lying round our holiday cottage in Suffolk where the family took me for my 60th birthday. That first one took 2 days for me to solve 90% of the answers, but I have solved a couple recently in under an hour.
    I’ve been lurking since then and have found this blog a massive help in understanding clues. Thanks to all for that.
    John D.
    1. Welcome to the world of the visible, John, and congratulations on pretty rapid development.
       It’s free to register on this site, incidentally, though they seem to make it difficult for you to pick a name, hence my odd alphanumeric monicker.
       I don’t think there’s anyone on here who doesn’t benefit from the sharing of ideas and observations, so please feel free. And to everyone else, my apologies if any of that seems presumptuous.
       1. Hi Zabadak, thanks for the kind welcome. I’ve been out playing golf today and didn’t manage to get a paper so I’ve missed Friday’s puzzle. Will get stuck into tomorrow’s though and when my head clears I’ll see about registering for the site. (the golf soc at my local get stuck into the occasional refreshing beverage after the golf:-))
          Cheers John
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