Times 25120 – Less on in Geography

56 comments on “Times 25120 – Less on in Geography”

1. …due primarily to putting in ‘aisle’ instead of ‘alley’ without really thinking. My other problem was never having heard of ‘Broadstairs’, but I thought of it eventually. I took ‘broad’ to mean ‘rough’ in the sense of approximate.

   In the US, a yellow dog is chiefly used in the phrase ‘yellow dog Democrat’, a voter who will vote for any candidate the party nominates. I have not heard any other use, and cannot find anything on Google.

   1. I did this one in around 30 minutes which I took to mean it was very easy, but still a record for me. Knocked it off over a pot of tea and a couple of slices of toast this morning. Whoo hoo!
2. Aaargh… 8:12.. but blown with another BUNYON. Silly girl.
3. I took this to be a charade of ‘no difficulty’ = NOTHING (as in, there’s nothing to it) + ‘not so much’ = LESS, with the definition ‘at least’.
4. Very easy, but I still managed to get one wrong, with ‘bunyon’ instead of BUNION. Then again, I’ve never had one and haven’t knowingly come across it in my reading for many years.

   No problem with Broadstairs (Ted Heath’s old stomping ground – we were in the area last summer watching Tom Watson). Last in CHARABANC, where I was looking for a detergent. ALLEY and STUN have both cropped up recently. COD to REARRANGE too.

5. 12:04, a PB for me, about which I was feeling quite chuffed until I went to the leaderboard to find that I was 3d in a list of three. I wondered about ‘former’, too, but jackkt, on the club blog, informs me that the word now (in the UK, anyway) is ‘claimant’. In the US, it’s still ‘plaintiff’, except before the US Supreme Court, where it’s ‘petitioner’ (vs. ‘respondent’). There were quite a few clues with lovely surfaces, which makes it more surprising that it was such an easy puzzle.
   1. Hi Kevin. I’m not a lawyer, so I can surely be wrong, but I believe (at least in NY courts) the Petitioner is the party who appeals to a higher court from the decision of a lower court. The other party is called the Respondent. The Petitioner may have been either the plaintiff or the defendant. At least I think so, but, as I say, I’m not a lawyer.
      1. I’m sure you’re right, although I’m no lawyer either; my guess now is that petitioner/respondent are the terms in general use for all appellate courts in the States. Anyway, I’m willing to bet a small sum that ‘plaintiff’ is still in common use in civil cases in the US.
         1. How many Kevins are there? – I’ve been wondering since Sotira’s survey. As a recovering lawyer (US and UK) I can say you are both pretty much right but I was surprised to learn that “plaintiff” appears to have been retired in the UK. What’s next, wigs? Pay no attention to this, I’m bored with my pic and am trying out some other options while I have an internet connection and some time on my hands.
            1. Well, my guess is two. Kevin from NY is from NY (duh), I’m from San Francisco and now Japan. Fortunately for both of us, the use of ‘Kevin’ as a less than flattering noun has not, so far as I know, spread to the New World. As for what’s next, haven’t they already restricted the protection traditionally afforded by the ban on double jeopardy in the UK?

               Edited at 2012-03-26 08:56 pm (UTC)

               1. Olivia, I’m the Kevin who lives near you in the Hudson Valley, and clearly kevingregg is a totally separate (and faraway) Kevin. But I don’t recall any other Kevins appearing here regularly.
                  1. Thanks Kevins. I think I’ve got that straight now.
                     1. On the other hand, Olivia, have you ever seen the two of us in the same place?
6. C’était du gâteau, n’est-ce pas?
   Only prob was not knowing the “auger”=MISER thing and, with the vagueness at 12dn (as Mr K. says, hardly a clue), even the middle-S wasn’t certain.
   1. When solving I parsed this as:

      NO (no) + THING (difficulty, as in a problem, making a thing out of something) + LESS (not so much), with “at least” as the literal.

      That’s what koro said isn’t it? Anyway it makes perfect sense to me.

      1. Jack, I agree your version is close but it doesn’t seem to be such a good fit. If you make a thing of something, it’s more a matter of exaggerating its importance. OTOH, ODE has as a gloss for ‘there is nothing to it’, ‘there is no difficulty involved’. I also think reformulating ‘no difficulty’ as ‘nothing’ rather than merely lifting out ‘no’ for NO is more elegant and therefore more likely.
         1. “Making a thing out of” was my own spin on it trying to illustrate the point but I can see now that I may have muddied the waters. However Chambers has “thing” = “problem” which in my mind = “difficulty” and that’s what clinches it for me. Examples such as “no” = “no” turn up most days so I don’t think we can rely on setters always to use the most elegant options available.

            Edited at 2012-03-26 08:00 am (UTC)

            1. It seems that both are fine!

               Wonder what the setter had in mind

               1. Perhaps both. Without wishing to make a great thing out of it and or wishing to suggest that this discussion has nothing to it, the debate has provided an interesting digression into how to make something out of nothing. Maybe what the setter intended!
                  1. I’d always rather assumed that the whole point of this forum was to discuss the finer details of clue writing and solving, and if, as it appears with 12dn, there are two ways of interpreting the same clue to arrive at the correct answer then it’s surely perfectly understandable that contributors would compare notes? It might be considered splitting hairs but that’s what we do here.
                     1. There’s no difficulty in equating “difficulty” with “thing,” as in the idiom: “I’d love to come to dinner, but the thing is, I have a prior engagement”; “He’s a cad, I know; but the thing of it is, I love him.”
7. 17 minutes, which is about as good as things get for me however I certainly might have achieved 15 minutes today had I not lost time along the way stupidly writing in the game of BATBALL at 9ac and as a result finding myself in difficulty solving 1dn.

   It was fortunate that the name of religious author referred to at 6dn was needed to solve a clue over the weekend and ALLEY/marble came up last week.

   I didn’t know MISER/auger but I think I have met it before, nor YELLOW DOG, nor that ‘plaintiff’ is no longer in use in UK law, according to Collins.

   Expect howls of anguish later from the ENGINEER/mechanic purists. I’m keeping out of that one this time!

   Edited at 2012-03-26 04:50 am (UTC)

8. In 23989, the vehicle for the charabanc clue was almost identical, ‘Daily, standing at a stop, caught bus’.
9. A very easy (and, perhaps for that reason, enjoyable) Monday morning solve – held up by initially misspelling AUTOMATON as ‘automoton’ and hence not being able to parse the clue!
10. Yahoo! Best ever time at 7:20. This seemed to be an absolute doddle. It can only be downhill from here on in….
11. 11 minutes, with time used up on MISER as the definition was unknown.
    For the achievement, merely a matter of patience on my part, of reaching 60, I have been awarded the opportunity to drive a steam locomotive (a proper, rake-of-coaches-pulling big one). I believe that there may be a touch of the mechanical about it, but I will most certainly be an ENGINEER for the day, and a grumpy old man’s figo to anyone who suggests otherwise.
    In a puzzle set mostly on the nursery slopes, “former” in 19 was misleading not only for those of us who can’t keep up any more with passing legal fashion, but also because at this level it’s an automatic EX-.
    Not far from here, BROADLEY COMMON gives rise to many a ribald pun, with roughly and its equivalents part of the fun. Once I’d rid myself of the new musical expression BEHOP, BROADSTAIRS presented no problem.
    CoD (though it may be an oldie, I can’t remember) to REARRANGE

    Edited at 2012-03-26 09:08 am (UTC)

12. Oops…after speeding through it, I came to a complete standstill in the SW corner. I dismissed MISER (the cryptic couldn’t be THAT easy, could it? and I’d not heard of the literal, and it would give a funny letter to end 18dn), which meant that I had a blank too at 18dn.

    Doh!

13. 8m here, so yes this was easy. Nothing wrong with it though, rather like the last easy one.
    I don’t think I’ve come across the phrase YELLOW DOG before, and I certainly haven’t come across this meaning of “miser”. And like others I had no idea PLAINTIFFs weren’t called that any more.
    And when I saw 17dn I thought “there’ll be trouble”.
14. 5:20, and one of those which is about as easy as they come, while not being an insult to the solver’s intelligence (which is possibly a trickier achievement for a setter than creating a really obscure one which takes everyone ten times as long). Nice puzzle, even taken at high speed.
15. I found this easy as well.. c12mins
    Put me in the thing = problem camp; Koro had it right originally. But that’s the thing, isn’t it, paying too much attention to the comments again 🙂
16. My fastest time for quite a long while. Would have been faster if I hadn’t been trying to eat my lunch at the same time! Was held up for a few minutes at the end by 6a/6d/7 and 4 (my LOI).
    1a & 1d both went straight in, and the rest of the NW corner followed with hardly a pause (except 4) so I thought I might be on for a fast time.
17. 13ac reminded me of Louis Armstrong’s wonderful recording of W C Handy’s “Yellow Dog Blues”.

    The story of the name of the song is here:

    http://www.earlyblues.com/Yellow%20Dog.htm

18. I should have timed this one because it felt like a PB. First in Alley then Yellow Dog and from thereon working with checking letters I filled in more or less every clue at first read through. My only hold up was in the Cornwall corner where I got stuck on Miser (deducing it finally from the wordplay) and then had to scroll through the alphabet to get the second letter of A?R?N?M.

    Enjoyed the smooth surface readings of many of the clues with “Live dance music” and “Marble passageway” the pick of them.

    Thanks koro for explaining who Jonson was and that fires can be in aswell as out.

19. Five minutes for me – my quickest or equal quickest ever time for the Times. Very enjoyable. I could see the Bunyan trap and so waited until I had 13a before writing anything in. Perfect crossword for a sunny day when one ought to be outside doing other things.
20. I agree this was easy, too easy really for the Times, and, in my humble opinion, that made it a pretty poor puzzle. I was not helped to feel any more charitable by the combination of ignorance and laziness exhibited by the setter with the engineer/mechanic gaffe.
    1. As mentioned above I have no intention of getting involved again in this particular debate about word usage but your comments about the setter are uncalled for. He/she is perfectly entitled to rely on any definitions or usage listed in the standard dictionaries. Whether or not your argument is valid then by all means express your POV here and complain to the dictionary publishers if you wish to take it further but please don’t resort to insulting the setter. Especially anonymously.

       Edited at 2012-03-26 01:21 pm (UTC)

    2. I make the case here for Times crosswords to range from the very easy (like today’s) to the quite difficult (like the Saturday before last’s). The pleasure experienced by those who achieved PBs with today’s puzzle (which I share vicariously – the days of my own PBs being some way back in the past) is ample justification for the former.
21. Someone has to say it, and who better than a C Eng – engineers design things (cars, bridges, chemical plants, computers), whereas mechanics are technicians who assemble/repair things (cars, TV sets, computers). There – got it off my chest; feel better now.
22. Someone has to say it, and who better than an English graduate?

    From Collins:
    Engineer³: a mechanic; one who repairs or services machines

    From ODE:
    Engineer ¹: a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or structures
    Mechanic ¹: a skilled worker who repairs and maintains vehicle engines and other machinery

    I’m afraid the language has commandeered the word for your profession and applied it to boiler repair men. I can understand why you don’t like it but this is not the same thing as saying it ain’t so.

    1. In the US, an engineer is also the person who drives a train; ‘locomotive’ actually triggered a knee-jerk reaction in me, and I only figured out why 17d was ENGINEER after putting it in.
23. After a really splendid morning engineering my way around the golf course accompanied by a retired software engineer it was a pleasure to finish this about as quickly as I could read the clues and write in the answers.

    If you haven’t seen “auger” before remember it because it crops up like clockwork (as an engineer might say)

24. 10 minutes while chewing lunchtime sandwich, possibly a PB. Enjoyable puzzle, my CoD is Broadstairs, I was thinking of recent Ryanair experiences until the other meanings of flight were twigged and indigestion was avoided.
    Well put, jackkt.
    Could we ask the webmaster software engineer to ban Anon posts as they are usually negative or inaccurate if not plain rude?
    In France my car is serviced by a ‘technicien’ which sounds, and is, more expensive than a mechanic.
    1. Better still, the car might be designed by an Ingenieur..

       I don’t like anon posts much either but it is not true that they are “usually negative or inaccurate” (see below for example!)
       Quite often they are either signed (as that one is) or from regulars having trouble signing in etc..

25. An enjoyable unaided solve (rare for me as only been doing cryptics just over 3 years) for me on my 50th birthday. Also had an introductory flying lesson at White Waltham flying Club, so perfect.
    Regards
    Andrew Kitching
26. Closest I’ve ever come today, 31/32, with a blank where BROADSTAIRS should have been, stairs just didn’t come to mind. Most of the clues went in quite quickly though.

    Edited at 2012-03-26 04:48 pm (UTC)

    1. Most encouraging. Flight = stairs is one of those reflexes that come with practice. You’re very close.
27. 19.26 so on the easy side for me. Held up for 3 minutes by having NOTHING ELSE (Eric Morecombe’s right notes and not necessarily right order came to mind!!). Only put right when I really looked at 25a and 28a.I had a slight reservation with REARRANGE which seems to be a verb as the literal for the apparent noun ANAGRAM. Easily get table from the cryptic however. An enjoyable solve overall for me.
28. Pretty simple, around 10 minutes, ending with BROADSTAIRS, which I was unfamiliar with. My only hold up was entering AGATE instead of ALLEY on the first read, since I think AGATE as marble is as much of a US crossword cliche as ‘former’ meaning ‘ex-‘ is here. But that was quickly corrected when I reached the pretty obvious (to me) YELLOW DOG. No other problems except needing the cryptic to get MISER. Regards.
29. 17 minutes but with a slip, Catalania. And that was after working out the ‘con’. Is a yellow dog an American cad or somesuch? Seems a stretch. Otherwise easy but still testing, as has been said. I generally do these now after work and it tells.
    1. The origin of yellow dog is from yellow dog contracts, according to Chambers and other sources (like that given by essex_man) in which workers had to promise not to join a union for the duration of the contract. In Oz we’d call them scabs; you might call them blacklegs or strike breakers, but in general it has come to mean a despicable person, according to Chambers. I’m reminded of Stephen’s friend in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist who only swore in shades of yellow.
       1. Many thanks. ‘Scab’ is also a (somewhat unpleasant) UK term for strike-breaker. I note your ‘according to Chambers’; fair enough, but I still wonder if yellow dog’s ever been much in usage in the general ‘scum’ sense.

          Edited at 2012-03-26 06:44 pm (UTC)

30. At 16 minutes this is as easy as it gets for me. I seem to remember that Monday’s puzzle used to be always a bit easier than the rest of the week’s. The cryptic plus the checkers gave MISER easily enough but I’d never before heard of that definition. It’s interesting that we tend to complain when a puzzle isn’t very challenging but there must be plenty of novice solvers who are encouraged by the occasional easy offering. I remember that this was the case when I was struggling with the Times crossword in the early 60s. In those days I was delighted if I actually finished one and would probably have given up had I felt my efforts were always doomed to failure!
31. I rarely finish the Times – so was quite overjoyed and felt compelled to come here and share my joy in getting through the puzzle in 31:13, according to the Times online edition. The fastest time for me by a long way, in no small part due to spending time here and learning the nuances..’twas probably one of the easier Times puzzles I have ever seen, but at the same time, the setter turned the trick of keeping things interesting.

    Edited at 2012-03-26 07:01 pm (UTC)

    1. Congratulations! Hope you will drop in more regularly in future.
    2. Yes, well done and please contribute more often – always good to hear from folk who are using this site to improve their solving
32. 5:55 for me – slowed by dithering over BEBOP, AUTOMATON and NOTHING LESS (without any good reason other than obtuseness).

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