Times 25,067 No – Not Swing Or Spin

26 comments on “Times 25,067 No – Not Swing Or Spin”

1. Another excellent puzzle that seemed similar in many ways to yesterday’s and I wondered if by chance it was from the same setter. It took me 40 minutes.

   I liked 1ac but I may be biased as I have been a subscriber to the said magazine since its inception. Lots of other really good clues too and few if any chestnuts.

   Jim, 18dn should be C,ROQUE(for)T.

   SPATHE was new to me and I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t know (or had forgotten) the correct spelling of GUTTURAL but fortunately the wordplay was clear so I didn’t get it wrong.

   Edited at 2012-01-24 08:59 am (UTC)

   1. Thanks Jack, now corrected
2. 
   An almost identical experience to yesterday’s puzzle for me today…all wordplay (almost) correctly worked out, but one unknown bit of vocab that went in on a wing and a prayer (SPATHE, sounded better than ‘spatue’).

   I did get EAT, but misunderstood the wordplay (sort of thought that when ‘tea’ arrived, it would be time to EAT!).

   I realised it may be a pangram, so was on the look out for an F and a Q in the bottom left corner (my last). Would have taken longer without this hint!

   COD: CAMOUFLAGE

3. Looks like there will be a lot of satisfied solvers today! About 30 minutes but missed the fact that it was a pangram (one of those things I never look for). Helped by the recent report that, apparently, Scots consider TAM O’SHANTER to be Burns’s best poem.

   Thanks for the blog, jimbo. I share your sentiments about ties. CROQUET does not have to be posh, however, and, played under our local rules which allowed you to drive your opponents’ balls into the midst of a skein of anitsocial geese, can be quite exhilarating.

   Edited at 2012-01-24 09:16 am (UTC)

4. I enjoyed the steady solve (31:55) but the enjoyment was marred by two things.
   1. All the blocked out squares appeared with the red x indicating inability to acquire the graphic. This is an old problem which had been fixed but has now reverted with the transfer to the new server.
   2. For the third day in a row, printing has extended to a second page. The grid and the clue font are both larger than what I call normal.
   Mike.
   1. I print it from Google Chrome (because the Times has not yet fixed the problem with logging on with firefox) and for me it prints on one page always, please try it.

      First time for 3 days I finished, about 40 minutes not including break for dinner, CoD sirocco, easy once you think of wind as in windy.

      Edited at 2012-01-24 08:05 pm (UTC)

   2. I use Firefox and have not had either a printing or a red x problem.
      For the printing problem go to print preview and set it to 90%.
      For the red x problem google “java update” and do what the java website says
      1. To: PipKirby & jerrywh

         I have no intention of disturbing my otherwise very happy XP setup which has been known to run without restarting Windows for 3 months at a time. Therefore I will not be installing either Chrome or Firefox which seems to behave differently for each of you.

         Checking back, the “Red Cross” problem occurred late 2010 and it was only two months later when the problem magically and mysteriously went away and never reappeared until the day after the server move.

         As to the printing spilling over onto a second page, I have crosswords from last week in front of me which show both the grid and the font to be smaller than for the last three days. I do not play around with print sizing. Nothing else I print varies in size from day to day. Why should I have to f**t about with %age settings for the one website which I pay for?

         As a test, I’ve just printed Cryptics 25064 (from last week) and 25067 (today’s). Today’s grid is around 15% larger in each dimension than last week’s. There has to be something inconsistent at The Times’s end.

         Mike,
         Skiathos

         1. You’re welcome..
5. Good chewy stuff over 20 minutes today. TAM O’ SHANTER went in instantly, despite the hyphens in the numeration, having turned up in Another Crossword very recently. I would have preferred, like Jim, astronomers at 6d.
   A minor quibble: I took “blind” to be “hide” rather than “hidden”. This setter, with SCHERZANDO, gets his grammar spot on.
   Would have had trouble spelling GUTTURAL without the wordplay – it still looks wrong.
   CoD to CROQUET for its stunning use of a cheese that isn’t brie or edam. WEIGHTLESS, with this setter’s (and yesterday’s?) penchant for cunningly taking bits out of words, a close second.
6. 48 minutes with SOLDIER – that staple of the cruciverbal breakfast – last in, as the Oldie magazine has evaded my notice these last 20 years. I was a bit surprised that CAMOUFLAGE was defined as ‘blind’as it’s not in Chambers or ODE. [Post-blog-view note*: I can’t see how ‘camouflage’, which is a noun or a verb (present tense/infinitive), can mean ‘hidden from view’.]

   I was stumped as to how one could derive ‘brothers’ from TU, so thanks to the ‘croquet virgin’ for that. Like him, I was unconvinced that weightless and floating were the same thing, rather than one being an effect of the other.

   * like Valerie Singleton, I write many of my comments upon solving the puzzle and only bring them out later.

   1. I think that in this instance, BLIND is “the screen behind which hunters hide” (N.Am. Chambers) which can then be equated to CAMOUFLAGE.
      Mike
      1. Sounds very plausible.
7. 18 minutes here, so no problems but quite a few things in here struck me as a little bit unusual:
   > SR for “sister”
   > “Ribbing” for “welt”
   > “Ruinous” for RAMSHACKLE
   > “Mountain range” for URAL, not URALS
   > “Blind” for CAMOUFLAGE (where incidentally I read it like z8b8d8k)
   Nothing wrong with any of this of course, but it made for a slightly off-piste feel in an otherwise straightforward puzzle.
   Like Janie I was glad it wasn’t SPATUE. Could have been.
8. 33 minutes with one wrong. Such is the level of my familiarity with all things related to suits, that I put TOE CLIP at 26ac. I thought at the time it was a bit strange, but then, there were other oddities (see keriothe’s comprehensive list). There was a time when I myself never left home without a decent pair of toe clps, the cause of many an embarrassing cycling related moment.

   Underarm bowling persisted in Australia into the 1980’s, as many will no doubt recall. For those who don’t, there’s this infamous example.

   1. The clip highlighted by Kororareka is well worth watching, particularly if you’re a bit bemused by all this cricket talk. Thanks koro.
9. 20 minutes for me – held up by SPATHE.
10. …as the first run-through left me with not a single answer. This is definitely a puzzle where it might take a while to get started.

    I did not find any clue very obscure, the the cumulative effect of so many quite difficult clues was a very slow solve. Fortunately, a few can be seen from the literal first and dissected later. I put in ‘Iolanthe’, ‘ramshackle’, ‘sirocco’, and ‘scherzando’ that way. I would have done the same for ‘camouflage’, but had no idea how to spell it, so was forced to resort to the cryptic.

    My last in was ‘soldier’, once again from the literal.

    It is curious we should have ‘sirocco’ again so soon, after it came up in a puzzle I blogged the Monday after Thanksgiving. Perhaps we can add it to ‘etagere’ and ‘Tiepolo’?

11. I got through this in 15 minutes. LOI: SPATHE, an unknown, as was AGARIC. Not much else to say today. Regards.
12. We had telex recently. I used to send a lot of them until the fax machine arrived mid-eighties. Do they still exist? Can’t see that anyone would need them these days.
13. Tired today and ran into road blocks for 43 minutes, ending up with a toe clip. Looked for a mitt to go with the newt but no such Republican luck.
14. About 36 mins while waiting to be assigned to a jury. Got held up for a few minutes at the end with 1a. I think I have heard of the Oldie from a previous puzzle, but it didn’t jump to mind. Nor did this meaning of soldier, although it should have done as it cropped up in the Jumbo I blogged only last week.
    I enjoyed it and found it fairly straightforward. Not quite as easy as Sunday’s which I rattled off immediately afterwards, but certainly enjoyable.
15. Is a newt an animal? In the widest sense yes I suppose so, but not in the usual sense it seems to me.
    1. Animal, vegetable or mineral? Animal, I’d say!
16. 12:07 here, for another very fine puzzle. Feeling horribly tired after a busy day, I came perilously close to finishing with TOE CLIP, but corrected it on my final check through. (Phew!)
17. This puzzle contains all of the alphabet. As a beginner, I wonder whether this is unusual?

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