Times 25,109

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Time-wise, a pacy and enjoyable 13 minutes, but even as I was solving it, it occurred to me that this might well turn out to be a “wavelength puzzle”: it certainly had a very individual style, which might not be to every taste. I also noted as I blogged that it was refreshingly short on overused devices. We shall see if I was right about the former soon enough…

Across
1 ANAESTHETISED – (ASTAINEDSHEET)*.
8 STOP – (POTS)rev. and a typically nice surface.
9 TOLERATION – TO LIBERATION! minus 1 Bishop.
10 ASTATINE – IN inside A STATE; the definition is the easily overlooked “At”, the chemical symbol for Astatine. This is the one which particularly made me think that if you’re not in tune with the setter, you might struggle even to work out what it is you’re looking for – a sort of Rumsfeldian “unknown unknown” if you like.
11 SPRUCE – synonym for “neat” and the most common sort of Christmas tree, in my part of the world anyway. Hands up if you joined me in starting out by looking for an item associated with cattle; and kudos to the setter for not providing one.
13 IMPRECATED – IMP + RECANTED without the Name.
16 CITY – Course Is Theatreland Yes. Another clue which offered lots of places to start from, just to work out which bit was definition and which was wordplay.
17 STOW – holidayS TO Wales.
18 STREAMLINE – STREAM(group of pupils) + LINE(queue).
20 ASKING – AS KING.
22 BALL GAME =”BAWL” + GAME; it’s always struck me as odd that “game” can have such totally different meanings: even if you only take the adjectival sense, you have a) plucky and b) crippled, as here.
24 COVER NOTES – (VOTERSONCE)*; the policies in question being insurance policies, of course.
26 THUS – THE without English + US.
27 DISTRICT NURSE – assuming I read this right as DISTRICT (“area”, first) + NURSE (“tender”, i.e. one who tends), is the “dealt with” just padding for the sake of the surface?
 
Down
1 ANTISEMITES – ANT + IS + Eastern MITES.
2 ALPHA – LP in “AHA!”. Shades of Alan Partridge.
3 SET PIECES – double / cryptic def. i.e. the chess men are pieces in a set; the well-practised moves might be artistic or sporting.
4 HOLIEST – I.E. in HOLST.
5 TARTS – THE ARTS minus HE(=man).
6 SATIRICAL – (RACIALIST)*. I didn’t help myself by writing in SARCASTIC without thinking hard enough, and having to correct later on.
7 DUO – DUMB + 0.
12 CAT AND MOUSE – cryptic def.: the “Cat and Mouse” act was the attempt of the government of the time to deal with the suffragette movement.
14 ROWDINESS – DINES in ROWS.
15 DEADLY SIN – (YIELDSAND)*.
19 ROBOTIC – ROBERT + OTIC.
21 GONER – ONE in GR.; I don’t think I’ve come across the abbrev. GR. before in crosswords, though it seems hard to credit; more likely I’ve just never had to make a note of it for blogging purposes (it’s used on racecards, form books etc. to denote a grey horse).
23 GATOR – GAT + O.R.
25 ODD – double def.; I think I had this sense of “one” quite recently, where one must imagine dividing an uneven number of things until there is the “odd” “one” left.

61 comments on “Times 25,109”

  1. I enjoyed this and managed all bar the chemical element in 45 minutes or so. Another 10 minutes on that, during which I pretty much narrowed down the literal to ‘at’ but couldn’t quite convert. So a Dubyaesque ‘known unknown’ for me.
    1. I read “dealt” in the cards sense. Another contributor to the slightly 25dn feel.
      1. If you regard “dealt” as “disposed/organised”, that makes a bit more sense. If it’s “medically trained person dealt with”, the last two words are simply superfluous to my eye, though that doesn’t mean they aren’t allowed to be there. Possibly it’s just a bit of slightly clumsy wordplay; this happens, and is also allowed.
      2. The solution requires the first letter or “west end” of several of words and not just one and would therefore need to read “West Ends” to work, but that of course wouldn’t work either for a different reason.
        1. Exactly my point, Mike. I was going to put the S in ‘Ends’ in bold to draw attention to it but forgot. And then the S would make nonsense of the surface reading so I feel the setter should have gone back to the drawing board on this one.
  3. 30 minutes for all but 10ac where after a further 10 minutes I reached for the dictionary knowing roughly what I was looking for AS?A?INE and found it immediately. I suppose that’s technically a cheat.

    I didn’t recognise the element even when I found it. I usually rely on the Tom Lehrer song for the less common ones but astatine gets buried in the middle of a line towards the end of the first verse and has not registered as securely in my brain as some of the others. For anyone interested the sequence is “Lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium”.

    Mostly a very good puzzle but 16ac doesn’t work as the answer consists of West Ends, 22 is a DBE unredeemed by any indication of the fact and 24 seems very clumsy to me despite the answer being obvious.

    Edited at 2012-03-13 11:14 am (UTC)

  4. Finished this pretty quickly, spending some time at the end working out the cryptic for 10ac, and guessing (correctly – yippee!) that there was an element AT called ASTATINE

    Didn’t know of the Act, or that GAME=crippled or that GR was an abbreviation for ‘grey’, but they didn’t hold me up too much. Not as much as CITY, which took ages, and was my second LOI.

    Thanks for unravelling the queries, Tim, and for pointing out that the policies were of course of the insurance type.

      1. Can’t remember when I realised they were different, but for quite some time I used to assume that the “game” I’d seen written down in that context was the same as the “gammy” I heard people using in reference to their bad leg, but pronounced differently so you didn’t confuse it with the more usual sorts of “game”. Online dictionary suggests they both come from the same Irish root, though my OED determinedly says of gammy “orig. unknown”.
        1. Online Chambers says: “game2 adj, old use lame. See also gammy.”

          My iPod Chambers app makes it clear it’s pronounced game but like you for ages I thought it was spelled game and pronunced gammy.

  5. 17 minutes here, so not difficult but an odd feel somehow.
    I don’t really understand 3dn. How can “men on chess board” be a clue for SET PIECES? I read it as “made” meaning SET somehow, but I don’t know how.
    The clue for ODD is a bit, well, odd as well. I struggle to see “odd” and “one” as synonymous.
    And I fear it’s all going to kick off over the blatant DBE in 22ac.
    I was also puzzled by “act” in 12dn, but in that case it was pure ignorance. That particular piece of ignorance has been rectified, so this crossword has done its job for the day, for which I thank the setter and the blogger.

    Edited at 2012-03-13 11:15 am (UTC)

    1. Somewhere in the house I have what I would call a “chess set”, i.e. a board, and a box with the pieces in it, so I didn’t have a problem making the leap to referring to the pieces as “set pieces”. I can see that this might not be a universal leap, though (and indeed when I look at the box, it doesn’t even describe itself as a “set”).
      1. Yes, after posting I went to the gym and this explanation popped into my mind. Physical exercise is perhaps good for the brain, but I don’t do enough to constitute a statistically significant sample.
        This is a bit oblique, because you could arguably define a teacup, say, or a croquet mallet in the same way. Of course it’s made less oblique by the chess meaning of “piece”, which I think is what prevented me from seeing it. I thought “pieces” was “men on a chess board” and I had to get “set” from the rest of the clue somehow.
    2. “The clue for ODD is a bit, well, odd as well. I struggle to see “odd” and “one” as synonymous”.

      I think that bit of the clue is ‘one is’ (odd as in an odd number) rather than simply ‘one’.

      Edited at 2012-03-13 11:47 am (UTC)

      1. I started off thinking that way, indeed I wrote the clue up using that as the secondary definition, but I just kept thinking “One is” as a definition of “odd” is a bit weak, to the point where I thought it must be wrong and reconsidered…
        1. I see it as a description or a DBE perhaps which at least is redeemed by a question mark.
  7. This took me 31 minutes, way over average, so clearly a wavelength thing. I was in trouble from the off, picking the wrong anagram indicator and trying to work something meaning “laundered” out of the anagrist. Downhill from there.
    I think I counted three unindicated DBEs, but my mental notebook is missing a few pages and I can only cite ONE and BALL GAME, but I don’t really mind them that much.
    SET PIECES I took to be another DBE signalled by the ? for once.
    ASTATINE was last in, a brilliant clue if you know your periodic table, and quite good if you don’t, I suppose. I liked TARTS more – my CoD.
  8. This is indeed a very strange puzzle with lots of things which don’t quite seem right.

    I hoped that 11A referred to tinkerbell; agree with Jack 16A should be “ends”; 22A is awful DBE; also agree 27A has padding to improve surface reading; don’t understand 3D; thought the act at 12D very obscure and had to verify it using wiki.

    Not difficult – 15 minutes to solve – but for me not up to the usual high standard

    1. I agree 3dn is weak but I suppose the idea is: SET PIECES are “well-practised moves” (of the kind professional footballers try to execute when taking penalties or corners, for example) and could also be “men on chess board” in the sense of “pieces” in a [chess] “set”. So a sort of double def – but certainly not the best I’ve ever seen.
  9. So .. the easier puzzle Jerry asked for in the last post yesterday.
    Agree with Jim’s comments: and nearly spat my Weeties out at 22ac: not just for the DBE but for “cricket” as BALL GAME. Yes, it is. But the connotations of that other bat-on-ball game are in evidence here.
    The only really good clue was the hidden “At” at 10ac.
  10. 13 minutes late last night so I was on the wavelength, though SPRUCE had a big question mark next to it, so relieved to see I was on the right path there. I did like the clue for ASTATINE a lot, but maybe it’s that doctorate in Chemistry coming through.
  11. I enjoyed this one. I knew ASTATINE, but not ASTATE which slowed me down a little. I had no problem with the definition for ODD of ‘One is’ as one is unarguably odd. It didn’t really seem like a DBE to me at the time, although I can see now why others might see it that way. 22, on the other hand, was a blatant and unashamed DBE which I wasn’t keen on. All it really needed was a question mark at the end of the clue. But overall, I found it good fun.
      1. Ah yes, of course it is. I probably would have realized that, but I looked up ASTATE and found it actually was a Chaucerian word for estate and thought no further.
  12. Galloped through this (finished in 22)until brought up short by the tree. Very glad to see it puzzled George too when everyone else found it obvious apparently. My US mother-in-law handed down a sort of tube thing with an onion dome shape on top that slides over the top of the tree. My US son-in-law is a bit more traditional with a battery-operated twinkling star – although it is the Star Wars Death Star. An angel perhaps, but I never thought of a fairy.
  13. I was just happy to finish it reasonably quickly in 35 minutes. Held up by TARTS/SPRUCE and yes, Tim, my hand is up. Can I admit to not being perturbed by innocent DBE’s? Probably not. COD to ASTATINE. Re odd: the oddest prime is two because it isn’t odd. Sorry. We mathematicians don’t have much of a life.

  14. Not as difficult as I first feared. Got only one of the downs on first look through (Gator). Toyed for a while with Mini Hitlers as a possibility for 1D.

    Blundered with Tolerating at 10A not Toleration and so didn’t get Duo … nor City. Took an age and most of the checkers to get Anaesthetised. I was looking for a synonym for Laundering not Put out!!

    COD to Astatine. That’s the PhD chemist in me too George. Reminded me of Nobelium that I didn’t get ages ago when clued as “No”

  15. I am not sure how to ask a question on a forum on this site, so please excuse my question which is unrelated to this xword.

    I just found the Times Club and realised how cheap it is at 50p a week. Can somebody please confirm, or not, that the crossword would be available from any computer when one is travelling abroad ie interenet cafes.

    Thank you
    Brian

      1. How do they prevent a user from passing on his name and password to other people?

        Brian

      2. Definition by Example, as demonstrated here in 22 across. A lot of people really hate it, at least when it is unindicated by use of the word “say”, or a “?”. Their argument, and it’s a valid one, is that if this was the concise crossword, there’s no way you’d be allowed to have “Cricket” as a clue for “ball game”, it would have to be “Cricket, for example”. Others argue that there are no iron-clad laws in crosswords, and as long as you can get the answer from the clue somehow, there’s no problem. The debate continues…
  16. Can I echo the query as to what a DBE is? 22A seemed fine to me, but I am obviously a numpty for not seeing the transgression.

    Thanks.

  17. 13 minutes for me. Several clues that needed careful consideration to confirm the definition versus the wordplay. Second appearance of GATOR today, the first being in the Telegraphie Toughie. Wonder if it is setters’ word of the week?
    1. Another 13 minute completion. Today’s and yesterday’s puzzles were much easier than some of the recent ones.

      ‘At’ for astatine jumped out very early on – nice! Might be worth solvers checking which chemical element symbols are the same as two-letter words which could be dropped into clues.

  18. 17:32 which must be pretty close to my standard time so for Tim’s purposes I’m part of the “on wavelength” set.

    I thought 3d was a pretty good clue. In the unlikely event that I wanted to play chess with someone I’d ask if they had a “chess set” so the little towers, prawns, horsies and whatnot inside the box (or hinged marquetried board) are very much “set pieces”.

    Astatine was one of my last in but once I’d pieced together the wordplay elements all that was left for the definition was “At” and the penny dropped.

    I didn’t know the Act so thanks to Tim for that.

    1. I agree – can’t see any problem with this clue. By coincidence I was in the Chess (& Bridge) shop at 44 Baker Street today, where you’ll find plenty of chess sets.
  19. I’ve no problem with a DBE if one can readily associate the specific example with the general. For example “Tom” to define “cat” even though it’s really the same illogicality. Whereas “cricket” to define “ball game” is barmy, and so unneccessary when a simple “for example” would cost nothing.
  20. I agree with Jimbo and others that that this was a strange puzzle. Mostly fairly easy but I’d never heard of ASTATINE, my LOI, or its abbreviation At and had to resort to aids to finish. I too found the clues for DISTRICT NURSE and COVER NOTES clumsy. CITY doesn’t work, for the reasons stated earlier in these comments, and the reference to the CAT AND MOUSE [Act] is absurdly obscure.
    1. I’m not shy of complaining about obscurity from time to time, but here you don’t need to know the act in question to get the answer. Given C_T/_N_/M_U_E and “animals” in the clue it can’t really be anything else.
      1. Fair point. I agree that the answer couldn’t have been much else once the checkers were in place, but without knowledge of this obscure bit of legislation it was difficult to make sense of the cryptic parsing, which always leaves one feeling a tad dissatisfied. Admittedly, “obscure” tends to be what you don’t know and not what others don’t know. On reflection, I’m prepared to downgrade my complaint to a quibble!
        1. Personally I find this sort of clue very satisfying. The knack of putting an answer in confidently when you don’t have all the elements is something that comes with practice. It’s also critical in being able to solve these things consistently – or at least it is if you don’t know as much as I don’t know!
          1. True. Its nice to have more than one way into the solution. With the ostensibly, and in general actually, much easier Concise, you can find yourself stumped if you don’t have one piece of arcane GK.
        2. And incidentally I do think “obscure” is a bit harsh for this piece of legislation because I think it’s a fairly prominent aspect of the history of the sufragette movement. Like jackkt I’d forgotten it but I’m pretty sure I was taught it at school because I remember the poster (see Tim’s link). Hard to forget!
      2. I didn’t know the act either (or more likely I did at one time but have forgotten it over the years) but my main problem trying to justify CAT AND MOUSE was thinking that the CAT/ACT anagram might have some relevance.
  21. Thanks for the blog. I had all the correct answers except 1D, 10A, and 13A. Putting in DEPRECATED for 13A (tried to justify with devil=ace reversed, but it was all tenuous), meant that ANTI-SEMITES didn’t come to mind, but it is so obvious now. When will I finish a Times crossword?!

    Edited at 2012-03-13 02:33 pm (UTC)

    1. Keep at it … I still only finish a couple / week, but oh, the joy! when I do!
  22. I liked this puzzle, 22 mins, I was once a proper chemist so Astatine was fast in, didn’t understand ‘cat and mouse’ but put it in anyway, thanks for the explanations.
  23. 47.06 with a guess at ASTATINE from cryptic knowing neither word nor symbol. Had but 4 left after 20 minutes but really slow struggle to get STOP and then realised I’d misspelt 1ac which meant 3 down seemed to have an E at the start! So that was why I struggled to get SET PIECES. And so I must learn to check the obvious things first!
  24. 9:54 for me, after another of my slow starts – though I decided to follow my new policy of moving more quickly through the clues after the across clue(s) for the top row, and think it may well have paid off.

    As usual I take a more relaxed view of clueing (and of DBE in particular), and have no complaints, even though I wasted some time searching for a 7-letter word meaning “dealt” or “dealt with” which would follow the letter A to give the first word of 27ac.

  25. Although I agree with some of the criticism above, I really enjoyed this puzzle (despite its taking over an hour to solve). COD is certainly ASTATINE, which I had filled in from wordplay before realizing that it is a chemical element and what it has to do with (the first word of) the clue. There were many clues I found partial solutions to (ANTI-???????, ?????? SIN) before understanding how the rest worked.
    1. Definition by example: a full answer already appears further up this thread.

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