Times 25206: “I am a doughnut” (JFK); “I am an Eccles cake” (McT)

34 comments on “Times 25206: “I am a doughnut” (JFK); “I am an Eccles cake” (McT)”

1. ….so maybe we should overlook my time, two hours, and my understanding of some of the clues, nugatory.

   I do like puzzles like this, and I don’t give up easily. I did have ‘put to stud’ for a long time, slowing me up a bit.

   Tricky clues understood completely: ‘anno domini’, ‘law lord’, ‘age-old’, ‘carport’, ‘Lesotho’, ‘Edwin’. Tricky clues not very well understood: ‘edit’, ‘globetrot’, ‘prohibited’. All the rest were not very tricky, of course.

   You were worried about the run of easy puzzles, right?

   Edited at 2012-07-04 01:58 am (UTC)

   1. Indeed I was; and I was not disappointed in my prediction!
2. I started well then slowed then came to a complete standstill and eventually dug myself out of a hole to complete the grid without aids in 61 minutes.

   15 and 18 really don’t seem quite right to me but they were not hard clues to crack.

   With only the middle checker in place I wrote in GROOM at 23 which seems every bit as good as the actual answer but gave me considerable grief before I decided it had to be wrong.

   Never heard of SNOW PEA which according to my dictionary is American for ‘mangetout’.

   Edited at 2012-07-04 02:21 am (UTC)

3. This felt like last Saturday’s setter. So many clever clues and with several where you have to take letters away. I was going to give COD to AGE OLD (oh, that sort of or) but after reading mctext’s blog, it has to go to EDIT (Oh, that sort of Morse!)
4. Although I finished, it wasn’t within the time limit; only mananging to avoid the sag wagon by pretending to be a spectator on my way home from the race. I started well with COGS and LEAVE at 3d, and then nothing for half an hour or so until I corrected the latter to CLEFT and got going again, or as going as flat tyres, multiple crashes, chain derailment and gear problems allowed. A clear win to the setter, I heard reported on race radio, and congratulations to whoever they may be. COD to EDIT amongst a host of pre-race favourites.

   I took the second half of 18 to refer to the instrument, recorded in Chambers and more elaborately in thefreedictionary.com as Two flat pieces of wood held between the fingers and struck together rhythmically; Collins adds as for scaring birds, which tallies with my experience.

   1. I’m not sure if your suggestion quite works: ‘clapper’ (sing.) seems to be the name for the two pieces of wood (whether fastened or not) leaving ‘them’ difficult to parse, and I can’t see a literal for such an instrument in the clue!
5. Took a long time over this, finally getting home with the EDWIN/ANNO DOMINI cross. Started in a blaze of glory by putting ‘tidy sum’ in very confidently at 1ac. Almost parses perfectly, apart from the difficulty of squeezing ‘sum’ out of ‘earner’.

   Agreed with others that SELDOM is pretty weak. LAW LORD was clever.

   I took 18dn to be pretty much an &lit, where ‘them’ refers back to ‘hand[s]’.

6. Am I the only one that thought 10ac had to be ‘grave’? Probably, as my wine knowledge is somewhat limited, and I was convinced that the wine was ‘grave’ (rather than ‘graves’, as I’ve now found). Anyway, this of course led to a DNF in the top right, with blanks at 6, 7 and 8 dn. Oh, and at SELDOM, which I had thought about, but couldn’t justify.

   Using Vinyl’s list of ‘tricky clues’:

   “Tricky clues understood completely: ‘carport’, ‘Lesotho’, ‘prohibited’. Tricky clues not very well understood: ‘edit’, ‘globetrot’, ‘age-old’. All the rest were not very tricky, of course.”

   Or in my case, were left blank.

7. Couldn’t understand some of these even after reading the excellent explanations given by mctext. I was convinced 3dn was leave and that was the start of my woes. Maybe one day I’ll get this sort of puzzle!
   1. As every regular on this site always says, just keep plugging away and improvement will surely come. And, as you can see, even Koro had LEAVE; and for very good reason. As you can also see, no one so far thought this was easy at all.

      Hope all is well in sunny Sheffield!

8. 23m. Tricky puzzle this. I thought it was very good: the setter seems to be stretching a little bit at times but there were lots of enjoyable penny-dropping moments. I loved “chubby little boy’s promise”, for instance, and unlike others I thought “as regular’s missing” rather clever.
   I didn’t have a clue about Copenhagen, or where on earth the DIT in 24dn came from (I thought they were dots), or that meaning of ANNO DOMINI, so thanks to mctext for clearing all that up.
   I was a bit puzzled by SNOW PEA because I don’t think of them as a pulse. But I suppose they are.
   1. The printed dots and dashes are pronounced “dit” and “dah”.
   2. Copenhagen a bit of a crossword standard. Also Magnolia (Washington) and Marengo (Napoleon)
      1. Thanks for those, Jimbo. I wasted a lot of time thinking ‘Dane’ or ‘peeing child fountain’! And we’ve just had ‘Napoleon’ as the type of a petty dictator.
         1. The peeing child fountain is in Brussels. The famous statue in Copenhagen is the little mermaid.
            1. Thanks. I’m dead ignorant without Google!
      2. Thanks – duly filed for future reference!
9. On the day they announce the discovery of the Higgs Boson a puzzle to match. Thank you setter and very well done McT – a bit of a trial to blog with so few clues worked from cryptic to answer and most guessed against definition and then revese engineered. My piece of paper is covered in attempts to break down potential answers. 25 minutes of real enjoyment.

10. Another of those weeks where the Tuesday blogger feels he’s dodged Wednesday’s bullet 🙂

    Just shy of 30 minutes enjoyable wrestling with this, and had to come here to find out exactly how I’d successfully solved them all (as an example, I could see 24dn clearly had to be EDIT, but my line of thought involved the policeman Morse being a D.I., after which I couldn’t see who the ‘T’ might be who held the equivalent rank. And then it occurred to me that Morse was a D.C.I. anyway; and then I stopped worrying about it).

    In short, nice work by setter and blogger.

11. I’m stumped by the wordplay for ‘seldom’.
    Other than that it’s an anagram of ‘models’, I don’t see how the remainder is the defintion.
    Please explain.
    Barbara
    1. A regular (someone who frequents a place) is SELDOM missing.
12. 19:10, ending with WAR-HORSE (4d).  Unknown: fine (22a BRANDY GLASSES), SNOW PEA (2d), Copenhagen (4d), DIET SHEET (6d), ANNO DOMINI meaning age (8d), dit (24d EDIT).  Unfamiliar: Athlone (19a BIATHLON).  Held up for a while by assuming that 8d would end in DAMAGE and that 19a would therefore end in -ING.

    I suspect ulaca is right about the intended parsing of 18d (CLAPPER), though the absence of wordplay makes it a cryptic definition rather than an &lit.

    Clue of the Day: 11a (PUT TO THE SWORD).

13. 35 minutes, but then I’m still struggling rather. Very enjoyable stuff with a lot of revelatory parsing once the definition guess had gone in. The brilliantly simple EDIT (has it been used before?) as my pick of the day.
14. Marathon struggle. Fully appreciated the cleverness of some of the clues but am still baffled by Putto’s word despite having answered the clue. Eventually. How does this phrase translate to promise? Name of Wellington’s horse is arcane despite passing a statue of the Duke astride the beast on Hyde Park Corner every day. Thanks to the blogger for making sense, well, with one exception, of the solutions. And admiration unbound for his and other solvers’ times.

    Enigma

    1. It translates to “chubby little boy’s promise”, not just “promise”.
       From Chambers:
       Putto: “a plump, naked, very young boy…”
       Word: “one’s solemn promise”.
15. I can’t really see it either. I’m a regular at my local pub but this doesn’t equate with seldom not being there.

    Edited at 2012-07-04 01:23 pm (UTC)

    1. I don’t think “seldom not being there” and “seldom missing” are quite the same thing. I am a regular at an entirely pointless meeting at 8.30am on Monday mornings. For the vast majority of my time I’m not at this meeting, but I’m seldom missing.
       More’s the pity.
16. I’ve not seen EDIT clued that way so far as I can remember. My father was an RAF wireless operator in WW2 and afterwards, from time to time, he would tune into the morse on the radio and practice taking down the dits and the dahs – so concept was not new to me
17. I thought I’d never finish this. Started at a gallop with the NW completed in a few minutes. Then came to a grinding halt. A strugle to finish in 1hour and 14minutes. A lot of these answers went in by definition alone and involved much backward working out of the cryptics. This was a bit too complicated for my poor brain and not as enjoyable as usual. Nevertheless, I was very pleased to be able to finish it correctly. Ann
18. Disappointing DNF after 60 minutes with lots of blanks and no ideas. Thanks for excellent blog. I’m a long way from this sort of standard and knowledge – not so famous horses, morse code and Puttos don’t really feature in my world. Mind I struggled with clues which didn’t need random information such as AGEOLD! Sigh! Now where is that sudoku?
19. Got round to this late after a long day and catching the latter part of the Murray match and gave up on the last quarter (SW). One gets to a point where a simple progression doesn’t emerge: thus I thought of undiced but not ja. I saw clapper but couldn’t justify it and failed to try it out provisionally, which might have got me there. A fine puzzle.
20. Been pleased with myself all week with only one or two left out, then suddenly, only two put in despite spending hours over it!! Annoying!
    Only managed 1 & 2 down – Idiot!!

    Sorry for the rant – Roger

21. Overall a wonderfully inventive puzzle with some highly ingenious wordplay – of which LAW LORD, ANNO DOMINI, EDWIN, OUT TO STUD and PUT TO THE SWORD were outstanding examples. The only blemish, as some others have already said, was 15 ac. I saw the anagram, and the indicator, early on and thought the answer was likely to be SELDOM but didn’t enter it for a long while because I couldn’t see how the def could be made to work satisfactorily (and still don’t despite the various brave attempts at explanation above). Always a sign of a weak clue IMHO. This was a case where tricky clueing went over the edge into nonsense.
22. 19:50 for me – slow, but fortunately not a complete disaster. An absolutely cracking puzzle – my compliments to the setter.

    Since I had to come here to find out how 24dn worked (thanks, mctext) – I got bogged down with DI for Morse – I’m going to make that my COD.

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