Times 25,141 – Lager & Cider, Ouch!

30 comments on “Times 25,141 – Lager & Cider, Ouch!”

1. …and I unfortunately had ‘congress’ instead of ‘centrism’, which I freely admit makes no sense.

   Sacramento is too far inland to be called a ‘port’, although you could probably get a reasonable-sized boat there by river and canal. The other places named ‘Sacramento’ aren’t ports either.

2. 33:40 .. I found finishing this one off incredibly difficult. PATHNAME, CATCH, COTTONS, SNAKEBITE and CENTRISM all taking a long time to work out the hard way.

   I also raised an eyebrow at SACRAMENTO as a port, though there does appear to be a working port of just that name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Sacramento

   My times would probably be faster these days if I hadn’t downed a few glasses of SNAKEBITE in my West Country youth (some of them with added blackcurrent! – the alcopop of it’s day).

   1. known as ‘diesel’ when I had occasion to serve it in the Baron of Beef

      JB

3. One of those puzzles that lulls you (me?) into a false sense of security, with the top left corner a piece of cake and the rest a bit of a problem, give or take one or two (28ac for example).

   While we’re in the top left, I wonder how those from Yorkshire react these days to being called tykes (11ac) — it’s in Chambers — when it otherwise means a child, an unpleasant person or a mongrel and derives from the Old Norse tík, meaning “bitch”. Still a bit of Viking left over in Yorks dialect even today it seems.

   COD to 5dn: CENTRISM for the well-disguised anagram.

4. 1. I suspect 23ac, CATCH, is a triple def. “She caught her head on the door”-type of catch.
   2. A more pleasant possibility for 16dn would have been BEESTINGS. Believe me, they can poison you. I copped one from a wild hive in my garden yesterday evening.
   3. My French anagram app tells me that SACRAMENTO (18ac) also resolves to ESTRAMAÇON (a sword or a fencing move, in English via W. Scott no less) and RACONTÂMES, CRANOTÂMES and ROMANÇÂTES. (Club Monthly fans please note.)
   4. I need to find better things to do with my time.
5. Put in SPEAKER for 6D thinking it could be a CD because of the QM and then was bull-headed for a long time contriving reasons to not write in ESSENTIAL for the crossing 10 Ac. Finally had to give but ended up with a DNF with 4 unsolved. Liked the way PRONOUNCE foxed me till the end and is my CoD after seeing it parsed by yfyap.
6. If that journalist who looks a bit like Coco the Clown says you need to put in 10,000 hours to become a genius at something, I notched up another one and three quarters today, but am still muddling around in the middle, bunging in ‘centrist’ and opting after an irrational amount of time for ‘snakewine’.

   CATCH -actually a triple definition – is clever but my COD to OUT OF SORTS.

7. Only 6 minutes short of an hour for me on this one with most time spent on the LH side and the NW in particular causing me problems. This was mainly due to having no idea of the correct spelling of TAE KWON DO. My version included ‘I’ as the checker in 2dn a plant I didn’t know anyway or had completely forgotten. I may have met GODOWN before but for today’s purposes it might as well have been unknown. For no obvious reasons CATCH and COTTONS gave me grief in the SW.

   There was a lot of very easy stuff here too.

   Edited at 2012-04-19 05:50 am (UTC)

8. I think that makes me chuffed to get this one in 24, apart from the 1’s struggling all the way so it felt like the big hand may have gone all the way round and I didn’t notice.
   Principle time wasters: trying to work an anagram of egg tofu into 14; not thinking of SACRAMENTO as a port and fluffing the anagram; thinking 11 was in English; only putting in PATHNAME when nothing else would fit; wanting 23a to be CHART for hit song, missing the point of the whole clue; irrelevantly musing over whether someone who was RANDY would care if no bed was available; not getting the function of “perhaps” in 24d; going through the alphabet for SNAKEBITE, last in.
   And another thing: probably a misconception, but this particular grid seemed like 4 quarters with tenuous connections.
   Great surfaces throughout, even SOLTI, with lots of mini stories to sidetrack even the most seasoned traveller. CoD to one of them, the rotting PRIVY.

   Edited at 2012-04-19 08:45 am (UTC)

9. 27m for this. I was feeling particularly groggy this morning and made very heavy weather of it. Lots of clues where ignorance or denseness made for a struggle:
   > I didn’t know a GODOWN was a warehouse
   > I didn’t know a “tyke” was a Yorkshireman (is this offensive?), and I must have forgotten that DO means “ditto” about five times now
   > I didn’t understand CATCH, thinking “how is a catch a hit song?” As others have pointed out it’s a triple definition of course
   > At 16dn I was looking for the name of a poison ending MINE for ages
   So by the time it came to 19dn, my last in, I was too worn down by the struggle to get over my idée fixe that “a great deal” was “lots” and bunged in CUTLOTS. It looks just about feasible… as long as you don’t think about it too much.
10. Enjoyed this puzzle – just what I needed after getting rained on on the golf course. 25 minutes and a bit of a fight at times.

    Got SACRAMENTO from the anagram and not being able to remember if its on the coast or not. SNAKEBITE the drink is truely awful both to taste and for what it does to people. I associate TYKE with a badly behaved child and am not at all sure how Yorkshire folk would react to being addressed thus.

    1. Given that it’s the official name for fans of Barnsley FC I doubt that they are too sensitive about the term and may well be proud of it. Knowing that Sacramento Ca was well inland I had always assumed the Sacramento mentioned in the shanty was elsewhere – It turns out to be a river port.
11. 28 minutes with one wrong. There’s a martial arts studio in Hyde Park NY which I frequently drive past and it misspells KWON as KWAN, which I never realized until now. I did know godown from NY Times puzzles but didn’t grasp the prison reference until looking at the blog (thanks). I am not having a good crossword week and another 6 letter g—-n word has crossed my mind.
12. Well, this took me far longer than usual. Like Keriothe, I also tried to find a poison ending in “mine”.

    Tyke is an interesting word. It seems to have begun life meaning “dog, especially a mongrel” before being applied to “a low-bred, lazy, mean, surly or ill-mannered fellow”, and thence to a Yorkshireman! As with the term “Old Contemptible”, what was originally intended as an insult was seized and worn with pride.

    Privy always conjures up childhood memories of hurrying to the end of the garden on winter nights, clutching a hurricane lantern, and also this remarkably prescient sketch from a very young David Frost.

13. 33 minutes; very much a sting in the left buttock type of crossword. Some great clues here, even the easy ones were good, like PALLY which gets my COD over CENTRISM. As for ports, I haven’t a clue and usually translate this as “a city somewhere, more often than not, not in the UK”.
14. One wrong today – a wild guess at Cotlots for Cottons. That and Catch were my last two. Randy made me grin. Godown from wordplay.

    Our house, built in 1963, had an outside privy/toilet when we bought it in 2008. It was attached to the back of the garage but separate from the house and if it was raining you’d have got wet walking from one to the other. It got demolished when we extended at the back.

15. Took forever, and still ended up with errors, but at least they are some of the errors others have had, too: congress, tae kwan do, stateside (because it fit).

    I too wondered whether a RANDY person necessarily was eager for a bed.Unknowns PATHNAME (in the file context) and GODOWN from wordplay.

    Edited at 2012-04-19 02:44 pm (UTC)

    1. That’s a good point you and z8 make. A bit like saying somebody who is hungry wants a table. I didn’t really read the clue properly when solving but now that I do I see the possible slight flaw.
    2. Well, more on randy, really. I think this is a particularly fine clue, where you are misdirected to think of a word meaning tired. ‘Eager to get into bed’ as a tongue in cheek way of describing someone who is sexually aroused seems right, um, on the spot.
16. No time for reasoned comments – just remembered I’m supposed to be at the opera which starts in 45 minutes. (WNO “Beatrice and Benedict”). I loved this puzzle. Held up a bit by the martial art and by the unknown PATHNAME but finished in 31 enjoyable minutes.
17. About 25 minutes for everything but SNAKEBITE, which I got after putting the puzzle down and coming back later. I too enjoyed RANDY, but took too much time over the crossing CATCH and COTTONS. I’ll join the general harumphing over the fact that SACRAMENTO is not really a port. A glance at Sotira’s link shows that what used to be known as the ‘Port of Sacramento’ is not even in Sacramento, but in the neighboring West Sacramento, CA. But we all apparently solved it anyway. Regards.
18. A halting 39 minutes, by the looks of it not as bad as it might have been. This had edge: I liked it.
19. I found this ferociously difficult (especially the bottom half) for all the reasons which have been commented upon. So, particular thanks, yfyap, for an excellent blog which clearly identified all the things I had missed, misunderstood etc.
20. 11:29 for me, which is a little slow as this was very much my sort of puzzle, but perhaps excusable given how tired I was feeling after a truly exhausting day. LOI was CENTRISM, which I rashly assumed was going to start with CON and then wasted time trying to justify CONGRESS.

    (I’m another Yorkshireman not too worried about being referred to as a “tyke” – particularly as it doesn’t happen very often.)

    Edited at 2012-04-19 10:10 pm (UTC)

21. Quick note from a Yorkshireman – the term “Tyke” is rarely used
    these days, in my experience. The only regular occurrence seems
    to be among cricket writers in reference to Yorkshire CCC.
    We tend not to worry too much about it – just as, I suppose, Irish people
    put up with “Mick” or Scottish people put up with “Jock”.
    Regards,
    DavidS.
22. Quick note from a Yorkshireman – In my experience the term “Tyke” is rarely used these days, the only regular occurrence seeming to be among cricket writers, probably because it is much shorter than ” Yorkshire CCC “. Up here in God’s own country we tend to have more important things to worry about – e.g. When will the water run out? Is William Hague really the Mekon from Dan Dare?

    Regional nicknames – e.g. Taff, Mick,Jock – have always been mildly insulting and would, these days, probably be regarded as non-PC. It would, I think, be a brave person who promoted their reinstatement to regular use.

    Regards,

    DavidS.

23. Sorry about the double post – first one didn’t seem to go on the iphone so I re-posted at greater length on the PC.

    Feel free to make ribald comments about Tykes/technology/stupidity,etc.

    DavidS.

24. Got VERBENA wrong (put VERTEGA thinking about Teg’s Nose in Macclesfield despite having just returned from Scotland) after struggling for the best part of 2 hours. However got the rest right despite not knowing GODOWN was an eastern warehouse.There were a lot of well hidden clues; it took me a while to cotton on to CENTRISM:-) Unusually I filled in half of the puzzle fairly quickly and then ground to a halt, rather than staring at a blank grid for ages.
25. It is somewhat disconcerting when driving through the flat central valley of California to come across a large ship on the horizon. I think Lodi is now a much bigger inland port than Sacramento, and right by the freeway making the unexpected ships even more surprising. But San Francisco to Sacramento was the route that much of the mining equipment took in 1849 during the gold rush.
26. Taken on and off all day today to solve
    Thought I was doing well with AERATOR straight in for 2d (always start with the downs) and it went downhill from there
    Still managed to complete it (eventually) before gingerly picking up Friday’s and rattling through in less than the half hour
    Swings and magical traffic islands…

    JB

Comments are closed.