Times 25,297 – It’s Not Cricket

35 comments on “Times 25,297 – It’s Not Cricket”

1. My parsing goes: {S}toat; when you cut this up, you get “to a T” = EXACTLY.
2. Lots of straightforward stuff in the bottom half; not so above the line. Had no idea that hangers were swords and (shame on me!) only just dragged up Keir Hardie from memory.

   15ac was an interesting mode of clueing: two defs (“reproduce” + “in several ways”) with each meaning having a different stress — multiPLY and MULTiply (not to mention different pronunciations). [[Uncle Yap: Blog may need adjustment along these lines?]]

   The Stoat clue fooled me (parsing-wise) at first because, like UY, I saw the reversed AXE and wondered about the rest. A fine example of the red herring. LOI was TOSS (4dn), as ever with bloody cryptic defs. But I have to say that this wasn’t the worst I’ve seen.

   STRAW POLL: has this ever been clued using “guy’s head”?

   NOMAD: the adjectival usage was new to me — in Chambers but.

   Lastly, not too fond of “like” (1ac) in both the clue and the answer.

   Edited at 2012-10-18 04:00 am (UTC)

3. Most of this very quickly, then stuck on four, one of which was last in TOSS (which made me feel a bit of a tosser) and one of which was ‘montagut’ (ditto, really – I don’t even wear their stuff). 45 minutes.

   Thanks to McT for the parsing of EXACTLY, which I wouldn’t have got in a month of Sundays.

4. 15:21, the last two minutes spent agonizing over TOSS; I only got it when I came here and saw that Uncle Yap wasn’t going to help me out. Comforting to see Ulaca and Mctext had similar trouble. Totally at sea with the stoat; bless you, Mctext for explaining that. I knew HANGER from ‘Gulliver’s Travels’–he has one and uses it against giant wasps when in Brobdingnag. I didn’t know the word, of course, when reading it as a child, and somehow it stuck. 12ac was my 2d to LOI; I was misled into taking ‘extremely robust’ as R,T. SUNUP (& ‘sundown’) is, for me, not hyphenated. And I have never heard the verb ‘multiply’ and the adverb ‘multiply’ stressed differently; the only difference for me is the pronunciation of the final vowel–is this yet another US/UK difference I didn’t know about?
   1. The New Oxford American gives the following pronunciations and stresses:

      |ˈməltəˌplī| and
      |ˈməltəplē|

      So I was, indeed, wrong. A hard and soft stress in the first and just an initial hard in the second. Apologies for my shonky notation!

      “… each with its own stress” still works but!

      Edited at 2012-10-18 06:49 am (UTC)

5. I still don’t “get” TOSS.
   1. Raise a bit of money (flip a coin) before opening ball (of the cricket match).
      1. Thank you mctext – cricket is also something I don’t “get”. However, did understand the coin flipping bit.
6. 27 minutes which would normally merit a jump for joy but happiness cannot not be unconfined when there were three clues that I was unable to parse and it’s my turn to blog next. This has dented my confidence somewhat.

   I had no understanding of the soccer part of 1ac. I assumed a reference to terminology I simply don’t know but couldn’t work out what I needed to look up in order to discover what I was missing. The stress and the stoat references in 15 and 8 were completely lost on me.

   When I started I thought it was going to be hard to get through the grid but it proved not to be so, and I was very pleased about that until I found myself stumped by these other matters.

   Another solver here with TOSS as LOI.

   27ac is FOR,T,NIGH (close),T

   Edited in: Forgot to say earlier that “sun-up” is not in any of the usual sources, only SUNUP is listed.

   Edited at 2012-10-18 08:05 am (UTC)

7. Nicely blogged Uncle Yap – I enjoyed your Hardie and Siege of Malta embellishments.

   Quick for me today at approx 20 minutes with FOI Malta and LOI Toss. Liked Straw Poll in particular. Exactly, Multiply and Hangers-On entered from definitions and checkers without full understanding of wordplay.

   Sunup enumerated (5) not (3-2) seems okay to me – witness sunset, sunrise and sundown.

8. 15 and a bit minutes, with stressing over MULTIPLY, EXACTLY, and TOSS, left ’til last.
   I think the problem with EXACTLY is that, with the rest of the crossword being a bit of a breeze, I wasn’t expecting anything quite that devious, and was trying to remember all the words for stoat that might help explain the part of the clue that wasn’t AXE backwards. With “times by” in, there was no option for the answer, but McT deserves solver of the month award for unscrewing the inscrutable. Has to be CoD for bafflement alone; nothing else in this grid was remotely as testing.
9. 20m for this: 10 minutes for all but MULTIPLY, MONTAGUE and EXACTLY, and another 10 for those. On the face of it my time is reasonably encouraging for Saturday (at least compared to my recent efforts), but in the febrile atmosphere of Thomas More Square these three clues would have had me in a blind panic. MONTAGUE was the only one of the three I understood, so thanks to Uncle Yap and mctext for the explanations. The clue for MULTIPLY strikes me as borderline: the stresses for these two words are different, but quite subtly so, at least when I say them. I’d prefer to see more distinction between the two for a device that is almost too clever for its own good. Almost.
   I don’t always like cryptic definitions but TOSS makes a good case for their continued inclusion.
   “Hangers” the only unknown today.
   1. “Reproduce in several ways” (alone) may well have done as a double def.; except for the proximity of the meanings. And then the double-def. police would be on the setter’s trail. So “each with its own stress”, it seems to me, is a disguised help to the solver that merely appears to over-complicate the surface.

      Stress:
      Yes it’s subtle, but no one would mistake “fatherly” for “Father Lee”, which is about the same difference in terms of stress alone.

      I’m backing the setter on this one!

      Edited at 2012-10-18 08:47 am (UTC)

      1. When I say them, the distinction in stress between these two meanings of “multiply” is less pronounced than fatherly/Father Lee, and in some cases (depending on where you put the word meaning “in several ways” in the sentence) almost identical. At least I think so: I’m not sure I’ve ever said “multiply” in this sense before in my life.
         Anyhoo, all I can say is that my reaction when I found out how this one worked was less positive than when I found out how 8dn worked. A matter of taste.
         Enough of that. I’ll go forth and multiply.
         1. I shall now do the same. In several ways!
10. The same experience as most others. A 15 minute stroll in the park except for TOSS and the parsing of EXACTLY. 20 minutes once that was sorted out.

    I thought 1A rather weak – solved immediately from “not cricket” and quickly confirmed by 1D and 2D – also don’t like the repetition of like.

11. I had one mistake, but I’m claiming it as MONRAGUE is clearly a typo! TOSS was my LOI, and I probably would have been under the half-hour had it not been for that one. I didn’t understand EXACTLY until I came here, so thanks to mctext for that.
    I’m not sure what all this discussion about how to pronounce MULTIPLY is in aid of. I read it as MULTI-PLY, like many others, and am confident that that’s what the setter intended. Actually, no, I take that back. I’ve just twigged as to what mctext means, and now I completely agree with him (and others).
    Thanks to Yap for some other helpful explanations – hanger for sword, Hardie who I didn’t know and the wordplay for 10a which I’d entirely missed.

    Edited at 2012-10-18 12:07 pm (UTC)

12. 14 mins for me with TOSS being literally the last penny to drop.
13. A pleasant 18 minutes but I failed to make sense of 8d. Like others, I spent ages trying to work out what CTLY had to do with a beheaded stoat. During my childhood a large sepia portrait of James Kier Hardie took pride of place over the family mantelpiece. Until I was old enough to read the name underneath I thought he was my grandfather!
    1. Sounds very House of the Seven Gables!
       1. Unfortunately not! I come from a family of coal miners and JKH was a their great hero even though he had the disadvantage of being a Scotsman rather than a Welshman!
14. Our lunch-time duo thought that today’s crossword was a cracker – full of wit.
    We thought that MULTIPLY contained a reference to wood (3-ply, 5-ply etc) where the strength derives from each ply having a differently oriented stress to its neighbour(s).
    Ciao
    Peter Pond
15. A breezy 11:43 so I don’t seem to be tapering ahead of Saturday.

    Hangers was my only unknown. Last two in were exactly and multiply and I’m most grateful to McText for the explanations. Like Zabadak I’d “figured out” the obvious AXE reversed bit and gave up trying to squeeze a stoat, as it were, into ?YLTC. Funnily enough the TOAT/TO-A-T connection had flitted across my mind but was so fixated by the axe that I didn’t consider the whole clue in that context.

    As for multiply/multiply the only difference when I say them is the final vowel sound. I don’t know what the correct pronounciationalistical notations are but they rhyme with tie and tee resepctively.

    I first came across Keir Hardie in the excellent ertstwhile comedy Brass, in which one of the characters owned Keir’s cap.

16. Romped along, slow for the last few, 20 minutes, and then DNF as failed to get TOSS – not even the LOI as many others found today. Toyed with all sorts of other ideas and went through the list of possibles but still missed it. Pity really as it’s easy and a clever little clue. Well done, setter.
17. An unusually good CD (although that doesn’t in my opinion justify them), which defeated me. I had TESS, thinking it was ({a}sset)rev. and that a tess was something I’d never heard of, some kind of ball.
18. I had TESS. The cryptic definition, which was good for its type, defeated me. It seemed to be ({a}sset)rev., and a tess a type of ball that I didn’t know but was keen to find out about.
19. 2hrs but DNF! – Montague and Multiply held me up. Thanks to both Uncle Yap and McText for parsing 1ac and 8dn for me – had guessed them but could not make real sense of them. Answered 27ac by using getting close as NIGH followed by T(ime) but otherwise was rather pleased I managed to parse the rest. LOI was Toss until the sports theme suddenly hit me! Good puzzle and good blog. Thanks

    Edited at 2012-10-18 05:51 pm (UTC)

    1. You parsed this correctly so “but otherwise” doesn’t come into play.
       1. Thanks for the thumbs up Jackkt. Perhaps I am able to complete more often. Must try harder!!
20. 11:58 for me, having never really found the setter’s wavelength.

    I normally manage to finish within twice Magoo’s time, but failed miserably today against his scary 4:44. Not a good omen for Saturday!

    Update
    I’ve just correctly solved No. 25,290 (which I’d missed when I was in hospital) and find that Magoo got it wrong!!! (Feeling slightly better 🙂

    Edited at 2012-10-18 09:39 pm (UTC)

21. This clue has generated much discussion.

    I think the difficulty is that the setter has conflated stress with juncture. In my (fairly standard I think) UK English pronunciation, there is no difference in stress between the two words but a difference in juncture – multi ply and multip ly. A bit like, but less obvious than, nitrate and night rate or white shoes and why choose. I think that the difference in diacritics in the NOAD definitions as posted above by mctext may give an indication of this although I’m unfamiliar with that work’s diacritical system for pronunciation.

    Perhaps the clue might have been “Reproduce in several ways, each at a different juncture”?

    Ian
    +++

22. 8:44.  Thought I might as well do another puzzle in my lunch break today, what with the championships being tomorrow.  The fact that Magoo polished this one off in 4:44 doesn’t scare me at all – if anything, it would be disconcerting not to be thoroughly trounced by il maestro di color che risolvono.
23. 24 min and 03 secs.

    Like others I dithered over Toss, didn’t see how Exactly worked and wasn’t keen on repetition of like in 1 across.

24. Many thanks for explaining how this solution was derived. I solved the puzzle but the reasoning behind this solution eluded me.
    More recently I have enjoyed solving the Championship Final puzzles though, sadly, not in Championship times.
25. Hello. And Bye.

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