Times 25160

41 comments on “Times 25160”

1. …’cosmos’. Some very tricky stuff, particularly the ‘stopcock’/’soap bubble’/’chimney’/’busby’ corner.
2. I made very slow progress on this one and spent most of the time working around the edges being unable to get any of the long answers to open up the middle of the grid.

   Last in were COSMOS and SOAP. Inexplicably I started with TOWARDS at 6dn then graduated to INWARDS and eventually ONWARDS when I had almost given up hope of ever solving 5ac. Students of UK history may know of the South Sea Bubble to help with the second word in 1dn but I had to work some way through the alphabet before hitting on SOAP as the first word. I was completely thrown by the technicolour reference.

   After completing the grid in 70 minutes I took ages to unravel the wordplay in some of the clues, in particular 12ac where I was convinced that “not very far into book” was cluing “IN CH(apter) I” which then left the final N unaccounted for and B from book doing double duty.

   At 19ac I’m not sure how “mask face” works as an instruction to remove the F from FUR. I can’t find ‘F’ anywhere as an abbreviation for ‘face’ so I imagine ‘face’ has to refer to the first letter of the word.

   There’s really good stuff here and I breathed a sigh of relief about 30 minutes into it with little progress made that it was not my Friday to write the blog.

   Edited at 2012-05-11 01:42 am (UTC)

   1. Jack, when solving I thought you would get 1D from the West Ham anthem – I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air!
      1. This is soccer, right? I wouldn’t know about that but I do know the song. Jimmy Edwards used to play it in an unlikely arrangement on his trombone.

         There’s also a connection with Pear’s soap who used the Millais painting ‘Bubbles’ in their advertising. There was a time when a print of this used to appear at the front of Pears’ Cyclopaedia, a reference book much thumbed through when I was learning to solve crosswords, but that practice stopped sometime back in the 60s I think.
         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubbles_%28painting%29

3. I congratulate anyone who can finish this without aids. I came up two short – COSMOS and LORGNETTE (had ‘rote’ for learning which scuppered me) – after a long struggle. My experience at 6 reflected Jack’s exactly, but sadly this did not enable me to get the answer to 5, as I had been lulled towards a literal of ‘not everything’. The penny has only just dropped on the ‘technicolour’ bubble. COD to BRAINCHILDREN, despite being a word no one outside crosswordland would ever use; maybe because of that. Some interesting enclosure words today, notably ‘lagging’ and ‘bottles’. Thanks to blogger and setter.

   Edited at 2012-05-11 04:21 am (UTC)

4. I may be older than the average (dob 1931) but I thought that everybody had heard of the South Sea Bubble. Gets a mention in Brewer’s
   1. It’s possibly a bit UK-history-centric and probably not even taught here these days at a general level. Many contributors to the blog are overseas.
   2. Know the SSB, but not Brewer’s. On the other hand, I’m astonished when others don’t know the stuff I know!!
   3. P is the lead(ing letter) in the word ‘pencil’, not an abbreviation.

      Edited at 2012-05-11 07:18 am (UTC)

5. 25 minutes for an excellent puzzle – very enjoyable. Lots of twists and turns and neat trickery. Thank you setter.

   You don’t have to go back to the South Seas for “bubble” as fraudulent scheme. All Ponzi scams are “bubbles” and of course artificially over inflated prices are also referred to as “bubbles”

6. I’m surprised no-one has yet objected to ‘cotton-picking’ as ‘damned’. Though the racial slur existed side by side with the fact it was very hard work, the slur doesn’t disappear because of its alternative. ‘Your cotton-picking hands…’ etc. This is unbelievably negligent.
   48 minutes for a tough and otherwise enjoyable grid.
   1. I’m afraid I just thought of Deputy Dawg, which being from my youth never occurred to me as racist. I suppose it was (sigh).
   2. Although ‘cotton-picking’ clearly has its etymological roots in the slavery of the American South, I don’t think it’s generally seen as a racist term these days, is it? I’m sure many people use it in a fairly light-hearted manner without considering its history. Surely Elmer Fudd wasn’t being racist towards Bugs Bunny all those times he called him a cotton-pickin’ wabbit, was he?
      1. A cartoon’s one thing, though the term certainly shouldn’t have been used in it. The offence in a Times forum, and now, is the more. It’s not a matter of being politically correct, it’s a matter of thinking of the fury of someone whose ancestors may have been abused in that way. I’d be interested in a word from the setter.
         1. I’d be interested in a word from someone whose ancestors may have been abused as you describe.
7. 35 minutes for this one, so a tad harder than yesterday’s, and felt like it. This time the short ones were the most straightforward, but that didn’t help much because they were so much in the minority.
   Expecting to need to be rather erudite created problems: looking for some arcane attribute of Hemingway kept me well away form the fact that he was just another AMERICAN, and trying to recall another term for doggy paddle effectively hid SWAM.
   Are CHIMNEYs stacked, or was this some kind of definition by association?
   CoD split between COSMOS for that cute “is not” device, and TOMBSTONE for being a rather good &lit, once I’d worked out where all its bits fitted together.
8. 26 minutes here, which felt quite quick for a very tricky puzzle.
   I was a bit puzzled by COSMOS because in the scientific sense “osmosis” is not absorption, but according to Chambers it can mean this figuratively.
   Similarly I was puzzled by 1dn because a bubble is not necessarily fraudulent, and the examples most familiar to me (dot-com, credit, tulips) were not. More to do with the madness of crowds.
   I must be being a bit dense this morning because I don’t understand “technicolour” at all. Can someone explain?
   1. I believe it refers to the optical effect whereby a soap bubble displays various colours when exposed to light. Otherwise, the wrong penny has dropped.
      1. Thanks. I struggle to see how that equates to “technicolour” but perhaps I’m just being too literal.
         1. I think as a combination of ‘vivid’ and ‘multicoloured’ it works pretty well.
            1. I suspect I am just being too literal. To me “technicolour” means something more specific than just “colourful”, or even “vivid and multicoloured”. But I suppose if a yawn can be technicolour, why not a bubble?
   2. BUBBLE is now used to describe a market with over-inflated prices which is, as you say, not necessarily fraudulent. However the 18C meaning (as in the South Sea Bubble) is specifically fraudulent. OED gives it as a verb meaning to cheat, delude or fool, with the noun having a corresponding meaning.

      Essex Man

      1. Yes, Chambers has the same thing: new to me.
         The modern meaning hasn’t made it into Chambers at all, which strikes me as very strange given the prominence of the dot-com bubble.
         The ODO on the other hand doesn’t have the “fraudulent” sense. It has “a significant, usually rapid, increase in asset prices that is soon followed by a collapse in prices and typically arises from speculation or enthusiasm rather than intrinsic increases in value”.
         The South Sea Bubble was both, of course.
9. For me, the fourth toughie in a row – slow plodding progress from start to finish. Came up one short (Cosmos) and made two mistakes (Inwards not Onwards and a daft Reprogress not Retrogress). Of several clues to savour I particularly liked Busby, American and best of all the wonderful Skye. That put in mind the local saying:

   “If you can’t see Skye, it’s raining
   If you can see Skye, it’s about to rain”

   I spent a sun-drenched week there in 1994 camping in Glen Brittle and climbing and walking in the Black Cuillins. Happy days!

   I’m on holiday from tomorrow for two weeks, back on 28 May. Won’t have internet access so am taking Times Crosswords Book 13 with me so that I get my daily fix!

10. Frustrating, hair-tearing 83 minutes, last in being brainchildren-only because nothing else would fit. is not a words with which I am familiar. Then I fear I was brain dead this morning. Well done blogger. For me your time was impressive.

    Enigma

11. I would still be staring at 5ac if I hadn’t come here, particularly as I was another who started (6dn) with TOWARDS (but never moved on). Thanks, Dave, for the blog, in particular the explanation of RETROGRESS. Excellent challenge; lots of COD contenders but my vote would go to BRAINCHILDREN.
12. That was a struggle from OLE to COSMOS. A definite three session crossword. I also fell for the INWARDS trap, putting a large question mark next to it, but it was my DIS rather than ABS TRACTION which caused the greater delay. Well done the setter and Dave, for the blog, which sorted out my manifold misconceptions. COD to GRAPHITE from a large selection of possibles.
13. Yep, I found this one tricky, too, and finished with a gap at 5ac (despite having ONWARDS).

    Also, I got two wrong: ‘reprogress’ (not sure this is an actual word, come to think of it…), and ‘busty’ (BUS + iT + trY), obviously makes no sense whatsoever, now!

    Thanks, Dave, for explaining AMOUR, and BRAINCHILDREN. By the time that one went in, I had lost the will to parse!

    COD: SKI RUN for the clever ‘drink warm bottles’.

    Looks like the sun has (eventually) come out here in LN5 (UK), let’s hope it’s here to stay for a bit…

14. Well, pretty well everyone is giving the ‘cotton-picking’ issue a wide berth, or doesn’t see it as an issue at all. But it surely is. To equate the word with ‘damned’ is to take it back immediately to its racist origin, a tone of vicious contempt (‘damned hands’, ‘cotton-picking hands’); thus virtually bypassing the comparatively innocent cartoon use where everything is on too childish a level to be damned. Not that the cartoon use is entirely innocent in itself; but referring to that evades the issue. Anyhow I’ve said my bit and I’m done.
    1. Well for what it’s worth I think you’re right, but I assume the setter wasn’t aware of the racist (or perhaps classist) origin of the phrase. I certainly wasn’t. I’d guess most people will associate the phrase more with Bugs Bunny than anything else.
       I’m sure there must be lots of phrases like this, where a questionable origin has been largely forgotten. This one, for example.
       1. I’m a great devotee of the show “Veronica Mars” and recognise this phrase as the title of an episode. I never knew what it referred to so thank you for the link!
       2. Seems the etymology is entirely innocent. Time to get off that high horse perhaps.

          http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/cotton_picking/

          1. Or perhaps not:
             http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/cotton-picking.html
15. For various reasons, I had to do this on and off throughout the afternoon with lots of time in between sessions of muttering at the clues. I quite enjoyed the whole process although like quite a few others, I did wonder at the cotton picking.
16. Top-notch puzzle. Finished correctly but only by resorting to aids at the end. So many good clues, it’s almost invidious to pick out any particular ones for praise, but SKI RUN, BRAINCHILDREN and AMOUR were all excellent (“mask face” in the clue for the latter was a most inventive and unusual way of indicating that the first letter of a word should be deleted or hidden). TOMBSTONE was my COD, one of the best &lits in a long while.

    The fuss over “cotton-picking” seems to me ridiculously over-sensitive. Whatever the etymological origins of this term, it is undoubtedly now widely used as a light-hearted, mildly pejorative adjective, roughly synonomous with “damned”, in such phrases as “just a cotton-picking minute” etc., without any racist slur intended. I find it hard to believe, as suggested above, that any present-day descendant of slaves who worked in the cotton fields would be consumed with “fury” on hearing the word. But perhaps one such will take up Jack’s invitation and let us know.

17. I timed myself for the first time today — a terrible day to start.

    I got all but 8 clues in maybe 90 minutes, mostly the NW was missing. Finally AMERICAN came to me as a guess out of the blue, and I managed a few more until SOAP BUBBLE, COSMOS, and ONWARDS were left. At the 2.5 hour mark I decided it was time to consult the blog.

    I couldn’t decide between INWARDS and ONWARDS, and I thought, jeez, if ONWARDS could be right, maybe UPWARDS could be too.

    I struggled with a lot of pieces of clues today. I would get part of the clue and half the wordplay but be unable to finish it off.

    I couldn’t get over the idea that 12a was GRANDCHILDREN somehow, and that ‘original ideas’ might be RD or RANDD, and that ‘not very far in book’ was going to be P I or CH I.

    I like the idea of timing myself. It’ll help to quantify my progress as a solver.

18. No time to post due to interruptions, but not quick by any means. About an hour altogether as a reasonable guess, beginning with OLE and ending with COSMOS. On the latter, I think most of this crowd would have gotten it quickly if the clue had read ‘not is’ as opposed to ‘is not’, which, to quibble a tad, isn’t really a direction to drop ‘is’. As for COTTON-PICKING, over here it is still (rarely) used jocularly among friends in the way used in the puzzle, yes. But I doubt I’ll see it in print anywhere over here, even in a crossword puzzle. It raised my eyebrows when I solved it. But this is the LT, not the NYT, so only the UK folk can judge the level of inappropriateness, I think.
19. Not feeling well today. Sneezing and coughing for Britain. Maybe that’s why I didn’t get far with this puzzle when I started it this am. Abandoned after 32 minutes but resumed in late afternoon. Final time 45 minutes. I think that on a healthier day I would have enjoyed this tremendously. Even in my febrile state it was pretty good. Praise to setter and blogger.
20. Well, I had some trouble with both yesterday’s and todays crosswords.. too difficult for me to finish off in one sitting and then pecking away at a clue here and there when time permitted. I did finish them both but heaven knows what the times were.
    I liked both of them, but especially today’s which I thought a class production.
21. 16:37 for me, having great difficulty finding the setter’s wavelength. I was so exhausted by the end, that I too bunged in INWARDS instead of ONWARDS despite having seen the clue many times before.
22. I thought I was struggling, having taken 75 minutes to finish this one with the wordplay understood, but having looked at all the comments, I feel much better. I also had INWARDS for a short while and DISTRACTION instead of ABSTRACTION, but soon saw the error of my ways . COSMOS was LOI. Had no trouble with LORGNETTE or SOAP BUBBLE, but BRAINCHILDREN held me up for ages. A most enjoyable puzzle. Thanks to Dave for the Blog. I must admit GRAPHITE jumped out at me so quickly that I didn’t put it in until I’d spent some time trying to get an alternate answer from the wordplay. Good clue though. COD for me was TOMBSTONE.

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