Times 25184

Author   daveperryPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 61:57

I probably should have been quicker as, looking at it now, there doesn’t seem to be anything to tricky here. But, as is usually the case when I have to solve late at night for blogging purposes, I was too tired to give it my full attention.

Some good enjoyable stuff here. I liked 5d the best, for entertainment purposes, and 13 was clever. I thought we might be heading for a pangram, but no W or X.

cd = cryptic def., dd = double def., rev = reversal, homophones are written in quotes, anagrams as (–)*, and removals like this

Across
1 S(L)OUGH – One of my last in, from the definition alone. I’m not familiar with ‘SOUGH’ meaning a sighing sound made by the wind, but I think I have come across it before. Well disguised definition ‘shed covering’
5 PRO(CL + AId)M
9 GOSSAMER = GOER about MASS rev
10 ZIPPER – dd, the second of which is ‘pulled closer’ where closer should be read as an agent noun rather than an adjective. My LOI.
11 T(HER)ANKS
12 PATINA = (PAINT)* about A
13 APIARIST = A DIARIST (Pepys) or A PIANIST (Paderewski) each with one letter changed
15 BEAM – dd
17 BECK – dd
19 ODE TO JOY = “OWED TO JOY” – Originally a poem by Friedrich Schiller, but most people know it set to music as part of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Try this interesting interpretation
20 FRIDAY – cd – a reference to Man Friday who Robinson Crusoe rescues from cannibals on the island upon which he is marooned.
21 HO(USE + TO)P – a reference to ‘proclaiming from the rooftops’
22 GAELIC = LEA in CIG all rev
23 NAN + B + READ – another well-disguised definition
24 TITANESS = (NASTIEST)*
25 DR(E)AM + breakfasT
Down
2 LO(OK + HE)RE
3 UPSTREAM = (PUTS)* + REAM
4 HUMANKIND = HUM + (KIN in A + N + Day)
5 PORK SCRATCHINGS = (HOG CRISPS CAN’T + RisK)*
6 C(LIP)ART
7 APPL(IQ + Unusual)E
8 MUR(MAN’S)K
14 SOJOURNED = (Rehearse + ONE’S JUDO)*
15 BUNFIGHT = (FUN)* in BIGHT – I only know bight from the Heligoland Bight which forms part of the North Sea, and features in the Diplomacy board game.
16 A + CC + I + DENT
17 BY GEORGE – dd
18 CO + C(OP)ALM
19 innOVATION

42 comments on “Times 25184”

  1. But at least I finished today; though NIPPER was tempting at 10ac.

    Some wonderfully hidden defs here; including said ZIPPER. But COD has to go to 5dn.

  3. Rattled through most in 15 minutes but was totally bamboozled by APPLIQUE. After a couple of revisits I had to admit defeat on that one. I wouldn’t have got it in a week of trying as I was quite certain that the ‘measure of brightness’ was some unit of luminosity beyond my ken. There’s irony.

    Terrific puzzle, though. Fun clues all over the place but I did get a kick out of the ODE TO JOY.

  4. Resorted to aids after an hour and a half with APPLIQUE missing in the NE (I tried so hard to think of other shades than lime but failed miserably, while I was racking my physics knowledge for a measure of brightness…W for watt?) and ‘Fingal’ for FRIDAY in the SW meaning I was stymied for ACCIDENT. Very nice puzzle, though, with my COD going to ZIPPER for the concise clueing, just ahead of the pub snack.
      1. Sadly not, Jimbo. Never heard of that (as a scientific term) until today. Pretty proud to guess correctly that watt was represented by W!
    2. I struggled with APPLIQUE for ages. It was my LOI I was trying to use SAGE LIME LUX LUMEN, but it was only when I finally got ZIPPER that APPLE came to mind. Good clueing all through. I spent half an hour just on those two clues and finished the rest in a bit over an hour.
  5. 59 minutes but with one wrong at 1ac where I went for CLOUGH with murmur = COUGH, which sort of works I think. Unfortunately I didn’t know murmur = SOUGH and although I knew there was a word for a shed skin I couldn’t remember what it was and CLOUGH seemed a better candidate than anything else when I ran through the alphabet.

    As with coupon/Echo yesterday I ended up with two intersecting missing answers ZIPPER and APPLIQUE and seemed to spend for ever trying to work them out. Like Dave, I’d had my eye on a possible pangram from early in the proceedings and it’s a shame I had given up on the idea by this stage as between them these answers would have accounted for both Z and Q, two of the four letters missing and I may have thought of them sooner. My quest was not helped by considering ‘lm’ short for ‘lumen’ as the measure of brightness and like others seeing only ‘lime’ as the shade of green.

    First in was PORK SCRATCHINGS which went in immediately on the strength of the enumeration and the first two words of the clue.

    13ac was brilliant!

    Edited at 2012-06-08 03:45 am (UTC)

  6. CLOUGH seemed as likely as SLOUGH, and COUGH seemed much more likely than the unheard-of SOUGH, so I came a cropper on the first letter of the puzzle. Aside from that, all accounted for in 33 minutes. Seemed like a fun puzzle, as fun as it can be while stricken with what my wife calls “man-flu”.
  7. Exactly half-an-hour’s steady solve. Was on the setter’s wavelength, probably because of the rather old-fashioned terms such as BUNFIGHT (a favourite of my grandmother’s) and PORK SCRATCHINGS (more or less all you could get by way of pub food in the days of mild ale at 1s 8d a pint).

    Slight delay as I tried to fit in “cd” as a possible measure of brightness, but no trouble with bight: as any regular listener to the shipping forecast will intone, “Dogger, Fisher, German Bight.”

    An excellent start to the day. (Sets off with spring in step.)

  8. Enjoyed this and didn’t find it difficult bar one or two.. zipper last in. Agree that 13ac is a brilliant clue, clear cod for me. 23ac also v good..
  9. 27 minutes on this one that managed the tricky combination of being clever and not annoying. Add me to the list of those who had to work hard over the ZIPPER/APPLIQUE pairing. ZIPPER was the last in and took time primarily because I started at the wrong end of the alphabet. I too tried NIPPER for a while, but couldn’t get that to account for “pulled”. What a fine concealed definition! Equally fine the “measure of brightness” in the wordplay for APPLIQUE. Got to be CoD.
    I thought the layout more or less dictated the pattern of solving, NW to SE around the trunk of 5d, then picking up the NE and SW pieces. Just as well 5d was, if not a gimme, one of the easier clues.
    I did wonder whether PATINA=gloss was right – I usually think of it as a dulling of the surface by use/grime/oxidation, much loved by antique collectors.
    Congratulations to setter and to Dave for the blog.

    Edited at 2012-06-08 08:37 am (UTC)

  10. Not as much trouble as some others, probably because I spotted “shed covering” and knew SLOUGH straight off.

    Some excellent definitions here with “pulled closer” surely the best – also my last in with a real “Doh!” moment as I saw closer=something which closes.

    A question for old hands. My memory isn’t what it once was. Do you recall seeing ODE TO JOY before in the Times Daily?

    1. http://www.google.co.uk/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=ode+to+joy+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ftimes-xwd-times.livejournal.com%2F&btnG=Google+Search#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=%22ode+to+joy%22+site:http%3A%2F%2Ftimes-xwd-times.livejournal.com%2F&oq=%22ode+to+joy%22+site:http%3A%2F%2Ftimes-xwd-times.livejournal.com%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=serp.12…20424.25762.0.27743.2.2.0.0.0.0.135.241.0j2.2.0…0.0.4VnqL58j3ps&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=f4d6def3eef04394&biw=1280&bih=709
        1. The link finds nothing for dailies but Jumbo 804 from 14 Mar 2009 has it: 42d. Anthem said to be due to delight (3,2,3)
    2. I think the last time ODE TO JOY appeared in the daily cryptic was in No. 23,094 (29 Sept. 2005), with the clue “Poem inverting couplets from Young, Jonson, Tennyson and Donne (3,2,3)”.

      (I should perhaps add that I rely on grep rather than my own memory!)

  11. Technical DNF as I couldn’t decide between CLOUGH and SLOUGH and looked it up. In competition conditions I think I’d have picked CLOUGH. Bit Mephistoish that one.
    Super puzzle other than that.
  12. 33 minutes, so not so difficult for me, unusually, and a bit of a confidence booster after a bad week. COD to ZIPPER amongst some pretty clever stuff.
  13. A good challenge with the ZIPPER/APPLIQUE intersection a real twist in the tail. These two took me as long to resolve (with two or three breaks) as the rest of the puzzle put together. For some reason I knew I could get there in the end: so thanks, setter, for a demanding but fair test. COD: definitely APPLIQUE.
  14. Never heard of ‘sough’ but had to be slough from ‘shed covering’.
    Cracking crossword Gromit.
  15. Excellent puzzle. As for quite a few other solvers, APPLIQUE and ZIPPER were my LOIs, in that order. ZIPPER my COD for its brilliantly deceptive definition.
  16. Just under 30 minutes for me. Some great stuff in there, including my favourite 13a.
  17. 11:53, with one mistake: MURDANSK as a 50-50 guess for the unknown MURMANSK (8dn) – annoying, as I’d written it as -MAN- before changing my mind, but there it is.  Other unknowns were Paderewski (13ac APIARIST) and COCO PALM (18dn); SOUGH (1ac SLOUGH) and APPLIQUÉ (7dn) were unfamiliar; and I was nonplussed by “wave” for BECK (17ac).  Agreed, this was a nice puzzle.

    Clue of the Day: 10ac (ZIPPER).


  18. Another puzzle with one last one missing. So convinced was I that it was a word I didn’t know, after alphabet-running several times, I had a gap at FRIDAY, and of course kicked myself coming here. Great (concise) clue.

    All others went in ok. ZIPPER was one of my first in, but still took me till nearly the end to get APPLIQUE, as I, like others, was playing around with lumens and limes.

    Didn’t know Paderewski, but did know Pepys, and that was enough. Also, didn’t know SOUGH, but did know SLOUGH. Again, that was enough.

    Best wishes to all for the weekend.

  19. 22:59, with any gaps in knowledge successfully filled in from the wordplay. LOI was FRIDAY (in the context of a very inventive puzzle, my reaction after some minutes of working it out was “oh, is that all it is?”, which just goes to show that if you’re attuned to a tough puzzle, you can overthink a clue and thus miss the comparatively obvious).
  20. Finally managed to complete a puzzle, in 37.35 today, after a run of DNF. I really enjoyed this one and thought some of the clues excellent with my COD to 10ac. The last 10 minutes spent on 7 & 8 down with APPLIQUÉ a shot in the dark around apple/green. Many thanks for informative blog and to Jimbo for saving my head hurting in trying to dredge up LU and lumen which of course even if I had remembered them would have simply held me up for longer. Well done, setter – and a mention in des patches for 23a which when it fell made me smile!
  21. Remembering Monday and Tuesday’s marathons, steadily improved my times (no pun intended) the rest of the week. Toughies for me today were ‘Murmansk’ and inexplicably ‘Titaness’. Agree 13 ac was clever but it did not hold me up for long. ‘Pork Scratchings’ was a brilliant anagram, probably the key clue. Any other solver take issue with ‘Housetop’ meaning rooftop? Proclaim from a housetop?

    Enigma

    1. As is often the case with this kind of phrase, it’s from the King James Bible, in this instance Matthew 10:27. As Richard Dawkins notes: “You can’t appreciate English literature unless you are to some extent at least steeped in the King James Bible.” That goes for solving the Times crossword, too. “A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.”
  22. I’ve been away so this is my first puzzle of the week. And what a great one! One of my all time favourites. So many lovely clues I don’t know where to start so will assume that it’s all been already said. I must have been on the wavelength as well because I finished it in exactly 30 minutes which seems about par for the course.
  23. This took about 35 minutes, ending with SLOUGH, from the well disguised definition only. I’m not familiar at all with ‘sough’. My COD goes to ZIPPER. The clue for 13 is interesting, but, I thought, there was too much going on in one clue. I didn’t know whether I should be starting with a diarist, a pianist, an essayist, or what, so I eventually put it in just from the buzzing in the definition. APPLIQUE is also quite good, and I also tried to fit the lumen in there, not knowing it has an abbreviation. Nice puzzle. Some tough blogging work today, so thanks to Dave, and regards to all.
  24. 26/29 today with Slough, Friday and Gaelic missing. Really should have got the latter. Look Here and Ovation entered from defs only – thanks Dave for explaining the wordplay. Liked the Zipper def and IQ for “measure of brightness.”
  25. 10:07 for me. A wholly delightful puzzle – I raise my hat to the setter. COD to 13ac (APIARIST), one of many first-rate clues.
  26. I went offline at 30′, after staring at the NE for 5, trying to get 6d, 7d, and 10ac. Later, they came to me, so 39′ in all. Totally misled by ‘brightness’ in 7d, trying to get ‘lumen’ and ‘lime’ in there somehow. Never heard of CLIP ART or PORK SCRATCHINGS, which I had to get from the dictionary sv PORKSCR (d’oh!). I was also rather dense with ZIPPER; I twigged to the ‘closer’ early on, yet still couldn’t parse the clue until the end. Very enjoyable puzzle. COD to APPLIQUE.
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