Times 25183 – careful which button you press

Solving time : Didn’t record a time, I was working on this during breaks in the pub quiz tonight, but I can add in an extra half hour or so as I started typing this blog, and then in trying to add some HTML markups, I seem to have deleted it. It may have gone into the submit queue, in which case I’m sorry if there’s two blogs and one is incomplete.

Back to the drawing board – there’s a few things I’m not sure I understand, but they could be just cryptic definitions, which I’m not great at spotting

Away we go (again)

Across
1 HARDBACK: cryptic definition based on a hardback having rigid covers
5 CHUBBY: C(100) then HUBBY
9 LOVE SONG: (GO,NOVELS)*
10 BIG BEN: GB in BIEN
12 SECOND INNINGS: cryptic definition based on cricket and someone who has lived a long time
15 EM,MET: the EM coming from pavEMent
16 ELECTORAL: (RELOCATE)*,L(50)
17 LOUISIANA: OUI,SIAN in LA
19 FRANC: RAN in Liverpool F.C.
20 SOME LIKE IT HOT: one of those fun clues where you work backwards from the answer, which can be read as cryptic wordplay for KEITH
22 COUP(stroke of genius),ON(covering)
23 our across omission
25 ORKNEY: OR, then N in KEY(island)
26 HEAR HEAR: A,RHEA in HER
 
Down
1 HELLS BELLS: double definition, one cryptic
2 REV: VER(y) reversefd
3 BASINET: new word for me – A, SIN in BET
4 CONSIDERABLE: double def
6 HAIRNET: (THE,RAIN)*
7 BABY’S(invention’s) BREATH(instant)
8 our down omission
11 UNREMARKABLE: (A,REAL,NUMBER) with K(1000) inside
13 COME UNSTUCK: double def
14 FLYCATCHER: got this from the “bird” definition – not sure I quite see the connection with gawper
18 SOMEONE: ME in SOON, E(uropean)
19 FRITTER: double def
21 ECHO: double def – the other being from the legend of ECHO and NARCISSUS
24 UTE: hidden in compUTErised

50 comments on “Times 25183 – careful which button you press”

  1. Couldn’t fathom ECHO and COUPON. The implied inclusive at 20ac had me stumped for a fair while too. Is this a record for the number of question-marks in one puzzle? Eleven at the end of the clues and a few others around the joint.
  2. 51 minutes after having all bar half a dozen on the right and the devilish pair in the SW polished off in 20 minutes. In the end, the only educated guess was BABY’S BREATH for the bouquet padding I’ve always known as gyp. Not sure what ‘genius’ is doing in 22 besides generating confusion.

    I was fortunate there that I had eventually considered ON for covering. This kind of thing is one of the advances I have made over the past year or two since starting to take crosswords seriously. If I may add to what Jerry said yesterday about using aids, I’m not sure that everyone (certainly not me) is of the temperament to set these things aside across several days. I prefer to get them done and dusted. For this personality type, recourse to aids in the early days of serious solving is quite reasonable and even helpful, as you can have a look at half a dozen or so other words with the same pattern which might crop up later. It’s not a mere cop-out, in other words! A little extra milk is necessary for some of us (especially the non-Bletchley types) before we are ready for a steady diet of meat.

    Went through Otto, Cato, Dido, Dodo, hero, Nero and Iago before getting ECHO, but my COD still goes to CHUBBY. Thanks to the setter and to George for the wordplay for 19 & 20ac and 7dn.

    Edited at 2012-06-07 05:11 am (UTC)

    1. “Not sure what ‘genius’ is doing in 22 besides generating confusion.”

      I would have been confused if ‘of genius’ had not been part of the clue; partly because it suggested the non-political sense of ‘coup’ that I don’t usually think of (at that point I had the U), and because ‘Stroke covering slip’ would have stopped me in my tracks.

      1. I take your point, Kevin. Chambers online has ‘a successful move; a masterstroke’, while my thinking is more in line with Oxford online, which has ‘an instance of successfully achieving something difficult’. Genius still seems a little excessive. How about ‘Masterstroke covering slip’?
        1. That would do it. Although the word ‘masterstroke’ is indelibly associated in my mind with ‘Matcham’s Masterstroke’, the short story Leopold Bloom reads in the privy.
          1. You become the first become I’ve come across to have read Ulysses.

            ‘Though, on reflection, I’m sure Jimbo must have…

            1. As a youngster I read Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses courtesy of an old fashioned aunt. Does that count?
  3. 43 minutes with the last 13 spent on 21 and 22 although once COUPON had gone in ECHO followed immediately.

    It had seemed to me that there was quite as lot of strange cluing going on here but on reflection I don’t think that’s so. I found ‘academic’ distracting in 1ac but then no doubt that’s its purpose and we have ‘perhaps’ in mitigation.

    I never heard of BABY’S BREATH and struggled to justify the wordplay but having done so each element of it is perfectly fair.

    I know about the cricket aspect of 12ac , the follow-on and all that, but I’m less clear on the second part of the clue. There is an expression ‘a good innings’ referring to living a long life but I’m not sure how SECOND fits in with this idea.

    I thought ‘Gawper’ at 14dn referred to an old saying ‘Don’t gawp or you’ll catch flies’ or something to that effect but it seems that gawping / holding one’s mouth open for no particular reason can be termed ‘fly-catching’ and there’s no other particular phrase or saying that’s in common usage.

    Edited at 2012-06-07 05:40 am (UTC)

  4. By my standards, this didn’t take me long (sub 30 minutes). But I suspect I initially matched mctext’s eleven question marks: i.e. clues where I was confident I had the right answers but couldn’t fully reconcile these with the wordplay. It has taken some time to appreciate their subtlety. COD: SOME LIKE IT HOT.
  5. 14 minutes, with I think 21d my LOI. COD to 22ac. I got 20ac from a couple of checkers plus the enumeration, and didn’t figure it out until I’d submitted. Unlike jackkt, I had heard of BABY’S BREATH, one of the few plants I know the name of, but felt qualms about the baby=invention part. But wotthehell. It now occurs to me to think that the story of Echo is a myth not a legend; but, as I may have pointed out already, wotthehell.

    Edited at 2012-06-07 07:57 am (UTC)

  6. 19 minutes on paper and by analogue watch.
    Last entries COUPON and ECHO. I do not think I would have got ECHO with just the O; the static from “hero” provided too much interference. and it’s not exactly a legendary name.
    SOME LIKE IT HOT and its clue was the centrepiece for Listener 3955, one of the most memorable ones which played with no less than 21 film titles. Now there’s legendary!
    BASINET is misfiled in my synaptic dictionary as small piece of furniture used for washing, so the clue made no sense. Must rewire.
    SECOND INNINGS is weird – afterlife, perhaps? Second childhood? BABY’s BREATH is a plant unknown to the common man that I represent, needing all the checkers to hazard a guess.
    HELLS BELLS recalled early fun with calculators: it’s what you got when you added 57734 to 4. It gets my CoD for “ring of fire” alone.

    Edited at 2012-06-07 09:15 am (UTC)

  7. Not my sort of puzzle. My printout of the puzzle is covered in “?” and “!” meaning I was not greatly amused by each of the marked clues.

    Some I still don’t understand, such as 12A – it’s just rubbish as far as I’m concerned. 14D isn’t much better. 20 minutes to solve but all in all 23A

  8. 45 minutes in similar style to yesterday, completing the LHS reasonably quickly only to come to halt on the RHS. YANK was my LOI, which says a lot about my state of solving mind today. I should have taken Jerry’s advice and set it aside. Just one clue, FRANC, reopened the floodgates and I finished with a flourish. SOME LIKE IT HOT made up for any inconsistencies elsewhere.
  9. I’d not heard of BABY’S BREATH either, so it went in from the checkers, as cryptic was unsatisfactory.
    20ac – the film that I found immediately was The King and I (the King I)*, so I needed several checkers before getting the solution.
    LOI was COUPON, having entered ERGO (OGRE rev.) at 21dn in spite of there being no plausible definition.
  10. 24m, with about half of that pondering COUPON/ORKNEY/ECHO. Like others puzzled by SECOND INNINGS.
  11. Double definition, isn’t it what’ follows on’ in cricket, and also an unexpected burst of good quality life after one has had what one could normally expect, such as three score years and ten?
    1. The phrase SECOND INNINGS doesn’t appear in either Chambers or Collins so immediately we’re into dodgy territory.

      The “clue” says: What may be following on after a good long life?

      I think it’s cricket teams that “follow on” after a poor first innings performance so the first definition is loose to say the least.

      I’m nearly 70 and I’ve never come across the second definition. If somebody suggested to me that I was about to enter my “second innings” I’d think they were barmy. And why “good”?

      1. I thought (perhaps mistakenly) that I had encountered ‘second innings’ as a reference to a reinvigorated, and possibly changed, stage of life after completing one’s main career. I can’t, however, quote any references. Maybe members of the U3A (University of the Third Age) could offer some help.

        I interpreted ‘good’ in the sense in which it is used in the phrase ‘a good while’ (i.e. ‘extended’ – which, admittedly, is much the same as ‘long’).

        1. No need to find another meaning for ‘second innings’. If we accept that innings=life, your second innings may follow-on after a good life=innings by the other team. Clunky, but unimpeachable logic.
          1. Maybe so, but there’s not many around here that have been able to follow it which might suggest it’s not as straightforward as you think.
            1. Perhaps for once my ignorance of cricket was an advantage: I had a couple of checkers that suggested INNINGS, and could think of nothing but SECOND for the first word (with S_C). Didn’t occur to me to try to parse a cricket clue.
    2. The cricket one is not in doubt but the second meaning is rather puzzling. Is there actually an expression to that effect? I can’t find it documented anywhere. ‘A good innings’ yes. I’m sure we all understand what was meant but it seems a bit loose and unclear.

  12. Took Jerry’s advice of yesterday, and came back to finish with COUPON swiftly followed by ECHO.

    Unknowns today: EMMET and BASINET, but both easily gettable.

    With the film at 20ac, is it just that KEITH appears in the title? What about the other 8 letters? Anything interesting about them? Am I missing something?

    Re Jerry’s comments of yesterday regarding Xword technique: I very rarely use ‘aids’ these days, preferring to do what I can, and then come to this site to check the rest. If I do particularly badly, I don’t usually post anything. Maybe because I completely finish (relatively) few, the idea of keeping them piling up for days until I finish them seems just wrong! Like Ulaca, I like to get them ‘done and dusted’. Also, there are times when I check the answer on here and think there’s no way I’d have got that! Happily that happens less than it did a year or so ago…

  13. I seem to be going against the flow as I enjoyed this and it only took me 9 minutes to finish it off. Interestsingly I blogged a puzzle on Saturday where KEITH was hidden in exactly the same way, and COUPON was in another crossword I tested recently. Almost makes you wonder if either of the amateur setters involved had progressed to setting Times crosswords!

    Didn’t your mother tell you that if you continued to gawp you were bound to catch a fly? 😀

  14. All set to beat my personal best time until I came to 21 + 22. Foiled again. Maybe next time . . .
  15. Everything went in rapidly till COUPON and ECHO; so decided to put the paper to one side and come back later. That did the trick: the genius bit had thrown me off the scent.

    Share others’ puzzlement about SECOND INNINGS. I can only think that it has to do with what is said by hearty, somewhat insensitive types at funerals:

    “How old was your father? Ninety six? Well, he had a good innings, didn’t he?”

    I seem to be attending a lot of funerals these days.

    1. ‘second innings’ simply has its cricket meaning. It may be a follow-on if the others had a good long life=innings first. Rather a boring clue then.
      1. Likewise finished in 25 minutes but puzzled by some of the answers, am still puzzled after reading all these erudite comments, by ‘second innings’. CoD Hells Bells, or chubby hubby which is an affectionate insult I receive regularly.
  16. Not good today, although 22/28 is still probably good enough in this day and age for a grade A.
    Didn’t get Echo and Coupon and didn’t know the plant, the bird, the money or the food. I couldn’t think what Liverpool could possibly mean nor what Keith had to do with SLIT so thanks George for explaining those.

    I’m embarrassed to say I had thought “hear hear” was spelt “here here,” for which the cryptic made no sense.

    Thought Chubby was a splendid clue. I don’t remember seeing Ton = C before.

  17. Didnt like this clue much, but assumed that you get a second innings (life) in heaven if you have led a good first one…?
  18. In cricket mad India, it seems that “second innings” is common enough in relation to retirement homes and activities. Check, for example, http://www.thesecondinnings.com/
    Doesn’t really help this crossword, as it’s not specifically after a “good” life. I think friend anon has the most probable reading as a supposed afterlife rewarding good conduct in this one, but I’m not aware of any evidence for this use of the phrase.

    Edited at 2012-06-07 04:17 pm (UTC)

  19. An odd puzzle. Some ridiculously easy clues – e.g. YANK – some very good ones – e.g. SOME LIKE IT HOT- and some just plain unsatisfying – e.g. SECOND INNINGS, which seems to have had us all scratching our heads. This latter actually occurred to me almost immediately as the solution to 12 ac given the checking letters I had, but I hesitated to put it in because it seemed so lame. I’m with those who see it as an attempt at a jokey reference to the after-life (hence the ? at the end of the clue) – i.e. after a long life in this world, often referred to as “a good innings”, you may perhaps enjoy a “second innings” in the next. The trouble with the cricketing analogy is that, as Jimbo points out, a follow-on – where one side is made to bat again immediately after completing its first innings – can only be enforced when that side has had a very poor (not a good) first innings and failed by a large margin to come anywhere near the other side’s first innings score.
  20. I got everything but COUPON and ECHO in 15 minutes. Then needed another 15 minutes. ECHO came first, but the COUPON remained elusive until I resorted to the mental alphabetic search. Even then, ‘slip’=COUPON did not cause the ‘d’oh’ moment, more like ‘is that really it?’. And in a sign of my continuing education in UK-isms, I immediately got the cricket reference for SECOND INNINGS. I certainly didn’t know the other meaning used here, like many other commenters. Enjoyed SOME LIKE IT HOT. Regards.
  21. Finished in 30 minutes – a good time for me! LOI as with many – coupon.More like a Monday puzzle. Peace and quiet with non-stop rain in Belfast all day
  22. A bit late coming here today, partly through having taken my own advice re 22ac and 21dn.
    I think if you compare the clues today with the ones I blogged yesterday, you can see just how good yesterdays were!
  23. Completed all bar 21d 22ac and 7d in an hour and then took another 30 minutes for those 3 clues. LOI 7d which I’d never heard of. I was confident about the BABY’S but BREATH was an act of faith which turned out to be correct. Phew! Like ulaca I considered ON as covering which helped me get the answer COUPON which then gave me ECHO for which I’d been considering the return of Zoro, Offa and Otto. I did chuckle when I saw HELLS BELLS. Very pleased to finish with all correct.

    Edited at 2012-06-07 10:41 pm (UTC)

  24. Late as well, catching up on Tuesday and Wednesday’s puzzles.

    Like many others, COUPON and ECHO eluded me, and I had question marks everywhere, so thanks to the blogger and commenters!

    I chuckled at HARDBACK and CONSIDERABLE, and enjoyed the puzzle as a whole, finding it much easier going than the last two days.

  25. Oh, and I should mention, I am one of the unfortunates who saw ‘covering’ = ON, but still managed to not get the answer, not being able to see either ‘stroke of genius’ = COUP or ‘slip’ = COUPON.
  26. 20:08 for me, with probably around a third of that spent on COUPON and ECHO, and a couple more minutes spent agonising over 7dn, where I felt the need to check for other possible answers even though BABY’S BREATH sounded vaguely familiar.
  27. if u stand gawping at something with yr mouth hanging open in wonder you could be asked what are you doing catching flies?

    not common but one has seen the expression

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