Times 25327 – blogging under pressure

52 comments on “Times 25327 – blogging under pressure”

1. 5ac: I think the idea is that Dalziel is pronounced Dee-Ell with “dictated” indicating “sounds like”.

   Once again I’m glad to have been spared the panic that would have set in if it had been my day for blogging as I went a full 5 minutes without coming close to solving a single clue. But on the second pass I spotted TINWARE and things slowly fell into place from thereon and I finished in 45 minutes.

   I thought I was going to need aids to get the meaty strips as I was convinced the word had to start with ‘L’, but then I realised I could insert L alongside TON and the solution suddenly jumped out at me.

   I thought “groups with drinks bar” for AA was brilliant.

   A thoroughly enjoyable solve once I got started.

   Edited at 2012-11-22 01:39 am (UTC)

2. I think the idea here is that a drive (unlike, say, a cut or a pull which are played with a cross bat) is played with a straight bat. Otherwise, no accounting for other types of drives, that is, the off, on and cover drives.
   1. Can’t see how a cut is played with a cross bat, unless there’s a reverse cut; and I sincerely hope there is not! (The reverse sweep is bad enough.) Took it that the cricket (not golf George!) ref. is to all drives (cover, off etc.) which are simply hit as hard and straight as possible in the designated direction.
      1. This should help http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batting_(cricket)#Horizontal_Bat_Shots. I thought of your explanation, McT, but it doesn’t account for the fact that one type of drive is distinguished by being called the ‘straight drive’.
         1. Great food for thought. Listening to the Aust-SA Test match as I write. The commentator just said “Clarke drives it straight through the covers”. By no means a straight drive, then. But a very straight cover drive. And I seriously suspect that the general straightness of all drive shots is what the setter had in mind, as opposed to the tendency of cuts, pulls, hooks and sweeps to have a curved trajectory — like George’s golfing drives perhaps?

            Edited at 2012-11-22 03:52 am (UTC)

            1. If your interpretation is correct, it’s a DBE and would need at least a question mark.

               Incidentally, ‘straight’ in ‘straight through the covers’ I’d take to mean ‘directly/without a hold-up’ (or indeed without a touch from the fielders), as in ‘we went directly through customs’, where the routing, usually maze-like in my experience, is irrelevant. Frequently a batsman will play a drive with considerable curve on it, but the commentator would still talk of it going straight through the covers.

               1. Maybe it’s nothing to do with cricket. Hammers and nails perhaps?
                  1. Perhaps, but are hard and straight entailed in the defintion of drive? Seems a bit of a stretch.
                     1. Golf, anyone?
                        1. Similar problem for me, inasmuch as the idea of ‘straight’ isn’t entailed in the golfing meaning of ‘drive’.
                           1. Australia just went into the sheds at 482/5. In celebration, I’m reclueing 23ac as “Owzat! Owzat!”
3. Had to winkle a good deal of these out with a small sharp knife, especially on the RH side. No real gimmes to get us started. With Jack, started with TINWARE.

   On that matter: we had CHINAWARE on Tuesday. And while shopping on Monday, I noticed that a certain posh pots & crocks company now call their wine glasses STEMWARE. Watch out for that one soon!

   If 20dn is supposed to be &lit, I wonder if we are supposed to read the surface as a reference to tea or to domestic servants. Either way, it’s not particularly appealing, is it?

   1. Not my cup of char at all.
4. A similar experience to Jack, but with a slow finish as well as a slow start. This was caused by our across omission (ROME; in case anyone else was similarly flummoxed, it’s a reference to ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’), which I thought was a very good clue, especially for those with Biblical knowledge, as Pauline epistolar familiarity proved no help at all.

   A couple of queries. Is ‘leading light’ (i.e. ‘lantern’) at 7dn referring to this type of beacon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_lights , or is there something I’m missing?

   At 8ac, ‘assimilate’ appears to being used intransitively, which is okay by Collins (‘intr. to become absorbed, incorporated, or learned and understood’), only I can’t think of a sentence where this would occur. Also, would ‘has’ rather than ‘have’ not improve the surface, as in ‘Girl held back in thinking machines, not before time, has to be thoroughly understood’?

   1. Read the surface as follows:
      “Girl held back in thinking [that] machines … have to be throughly understood”.
      Hence it’s the machines that have to be understood; but on the surface only.
      1. Plumb LBW on this one… Thanks.
      2. Is it possible that the “have” is part of the def? Then: if I assimilate something, I have it to be (=as) thoroughly understood.
         Bit of a stretch, I know. But it may be the only way to shoehorn this one.

         Edited at 2012-11-22 08:06 am (UTC)

   2. I justified it by thinking of the light in a lighthouse which is known as the lantern.
5. About 25′, plus 5 more to decide that I wasn’t going to get 18ac; and by God, I didn’t. As happens to me all too often, I got one idea in my head (position=place), and that blocked anything else–a sort of Gresham’s Law for cryptics. 13ac took a long time, until suddenly BILTONG popped into my mind; if you had asked me earlier what ‘biltong’ means, you would have got one of my patented blank stares, but I must have known the word once. It was thanks to someone on this blog (Sotira? Ingrate that I am, I can’t remember) that I read some Dalziel mysteries, hence knew the DL part of TIDDLY; getting the rest was harder, as I didn’t know ‘tidy’ or ‘tiddly’. Lots of wonderful clues, but I agree with Jack on AA.

   Edited at 2012-11-22 04:03 am (UTC)

6. Excellent puzzle – 25 minutes to finish with the tricky PLAYERS my last in. I agree the “drive” is from cricket rather than golf, which also fits the context of the rest of the wordplay rather better than golf. I knew the DL for Dalziel from a TV cop show!
   1. Me too. Dalziel and Pascoe, based on the novels by Reginald Hill that kevingregg mentions. Such an affectation, I thought, for such a rough and down-to-earth bloke who was often found deriding the middle-class mores of his offsider. Accordingly, I insisted on pronouncing it the way it’s spelled.
      1. I mispronounced it in conversation through pure ignorance and was corrected – which is probably why I remember it. As I recall the show itself was all a bit silly with the lead character completely unfit to do the job he was paid for. The sort of rubbish one watches because it has no serious competition other than doing something entirely different.
         1. The Reginald Hill books are a lot better than the TV series which I found disappointing. Dalziel is, both literally and figuratively, more fleshed out in the books. It makes an interesting contrast with “Morse” where, in my opinion, the TV series was much better than the books. Hill is really an excellent writer and the series just didn’t do him justice. Pity. Ann
            1. I do agree with you Ann about the Morse books. I found the TV series compulsive viewing, with John Thaw and Kevin Wheatley outstanding performers. My daughter gave me a set of the books one Christmas and I only managed to read a couple of them – both awful!
            2. Amen to all that. And RIP to Reginald Hill who died this year. Quite a loss. On Beulah Height is about as good as the modern novel gets, genre or no genre.
               1. Providing you can follow the map!
7. DNF after 50 minutes on a train with 18a, 13a and 18d proving uncrackable but now I see them I can only wonder why so thanks for the blog and explanations. I needed them for 8a and 14d as well. I thought 15a was an excellent clue among some other enjoyable fare. So hats off to setter again from me.
8. Sneaked in just under 30 minutes, with much head scratching over ROME. Ulaca is dead right about too much biblical knowledge: way too much time thinking about what I know about the Ephesians and their habits. Even the rules “if you can’t see any cryptic constructions, it’s probably a hidden” and “we haven’t had a hidden yet, and this is the last clue” didn’t help.
   Apart from that, TINWARE, where others seem to have started, was a very late entry. Too many bits to the clue, including a possible first entry for AL as “the Arabian”. It’s going to happen.
   The pronunciation of Dalziel I got from the irascible Tam, sometime MP for West Lothian who branded Tony Blair a war criminal. Pity he doesn’t actually spell it that way.
   Since so many of these clues demanded hard work, I’m afraid I didn’t worry about what sort of DRIVE it was. Bung it in, move on. In this company, it’s a gimme.
   Had PLAYERS waiting for entry as I couldn’t unravel the cryptic, and only put it in once PRESELL, a really ugly (hyphenated?) word only marketing could produce, went in. Worked it out then.
   The BEARCAT I’d more happily identify see as an aeroplane, and entered it on assumption. I suppose since there’s a great panda, there has to be a lesser one, but I only knew the red.
   Good stuff all round, CoD to the irrelevant Greeks at 22.
   1. Technically it’s DBE. There are bearcats that are not pandas. In particular, the binturong.
      1. Curiously, I had originally entered BINTONG at 13ac (corrected by checking the cryptics), and on looking up bearcat was struck by the close coincidence. Wiki says the red panda/lesser panda is also known as the cat-bear (that way round) so perhaps everyone’s getting confused.
9. Just for once I didn’t much like this; I thought it convoluted, and with some very inelegant surfaces – look at 8ac or 26 or 18dn for example – and one or two poor ones, eg 20dn
10. The fifth gear in manual cars used to be called the overdrive, I believe
11. DNF today… again! Two missing this time: Flight Recorder and Sortie. Should have got the former but couldn’t think of any sensible words to fit F?I?H?. Thanks for explaining Sortie, George.

    Liked AA = “group with drinks bar” at 15 across.

12. I really enjoyed this one, which had plenty of cryptic meat to tuck into, and some lovely surfaces. BEARCAT I thought particularly excellent, but among quite a few.

    OVERDRIVE is probably ‘six’ balls’ plus the verb to hit hard and straight, which is in my Collins pretty much verbatim, and the ‘have’ ASSIMILATE might be taking the plural – you know, A+B+C ‘have’ something, so cryptically it’s looks okay to me.

    Thanks to setter for a good run out (38 mins today) and to Mr Heard for his fine blog.

    Chris Gregory.

    1. The relevant Collins entry reads, ‘to hit (a ball) very hard and straight, as (in cricket) with the bat swinging more or less vertically’, which to my mind at any rate rather hedges its bets: ‘more or less vertically’ means with a straight bat, while ‘straight’ would appear to mean ‘down the ground past the stumps’, which does not accord with the cover drive and the extra cover drive, and to a lesser extent with the off drive and the on drive.

       Most of my drives ended up over gully, but that’s beside the point – no pun intended…

       1. Also on yesterday’s commentary: “Clarke drives without any power to mid-on”. A drive neither hard nor straight.
13. Judging from the above comments this is a Marmite of a puzzle. I’m firmly in the camp of those who didn’t like it. The surfaces were often lacking the elegance I’ve come to expect from recent crosswords. I found it a struggle but an unrewarding one. 55 minutes – but I had to look up BEARCAT which I’d never heard of. So technically a DNF. Ann
    1. I’m agreeing with you on everything today, Ann (come to think of it, I usually do. Great minds ..).

       I solved 2d and 3d and thought “uh oh”, then struggled throughout. Got there in about 22 minutes but had a -dance in my CORRESPONDENCE (always been ‘one of those words’ for me) and ended up typing ‘present’ at 18d, mucking up the previously correct ALL THERE which, by the end of this one, I wasn’t.

       1. Do you remember the days of the “co-respondant” – the guy who was paid to provide evidence in divorce cases? That’s how I always remember whether it’s a or e. I remember that the letter writer is the other one…
          1. I’ve only encountered the term in books, but thank you for the tip. It might help. Oh, for the days when a divorce case required ‘evidence’ …
14. 15 minutes, quite a lot of which was spent on the bottom half of this puzzle, with both Tippex and overwriting! I would venture to suggest that there are more bearcats found in cryptic crosswords than in the wild, very similar to that perishing crossword cat, the ounce.

    Agree that the books of Dalziel and Pascoe are better than the TV, as are the Inspector Lynley mysteries and the Rebus books too.

15. I’m in the “liked it very much” camp despite normally being a fan of shiny surface readings and agreeing that some of these were clunky. The enjoyment came from having to suck my pen quite hard to get just about every clue.

    28:32 for the record, with players LOI on a wing and a p, so thanks to George for unravelling that one.

    I can’t quite see how “all there” works as the “shot” seems to refer to the Liberal rather than the leather. The alternative parsing would be to put L in leather and then jumble the whole lot which seems a bit odd. All a bit “a for ‘orses”. I didn’t know the tense so amorist went in with only partial understanding.

    1. Think of it as L coated by leather all mixed up, which on edit is what you say!

       Edited at 2012-11-22 01:55 pm (UTC)

16. Took a while to get going but once I did I liked it. 32 minutes. I’m another one who fell for the Ephesians for quite some time. As for DL, I had the Jimbo experience of being corrected many years ago – it’s silly, why does one always feel embarrassed? I’ve lived so long with a baseball nut that the first thing that comes to mind is “disabled list”. And I always think of “tiddly” as “tight” and it’s a word I don’t much like.
    Happy turkey day to George, Kevin, Vinyl et al.

17. I liked this (and I like Marmite), plodded steadily along, finished in 35 minutes with LOI AMORIST and was a little surprised to find it was all correct. my CoD would be MAFIOSO for the nice surface reading.
    Well blogged from Texas.
18. A very nice puzzle for me too, I was impressed by a good many of these clues, including the BEARCAT – one of some several nicely-concealed definitions.

    Speaking of which, re ALL THERE (‘Leather-clad Liberal shot right in the head’, I think it was), whatever happens with the anagram, the Liberal L must be ‘clad’ by the other letters after some re-ordering. Since the answer would be one rearrangement that fits the bill, I really can’t see a problem.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

    1. >L must be ‘clad’ by the other letters after some re-ordering

       Not according to the cryptic reading. That suggests re-ordering after cladding which struck me as odd.

19. Hello there Penfold 61, and of course you’re right, as I now see.

    I suppose, then, we can have any ‘cladding’ of the ‘Liberal L’ from L(L)EATHER all the way to LEATHE(L)R before then applying the anagrind: am I right in thinking that this too fails to offend the general run of cryptic fairness? It seems okay to me.

    1. Hi Monstair, apologies for the late reply.

       In the final analysis I don’t think the clue is unfair but the wording did cause me to hesitate before writing ALL THERE in as I wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing anything. I think the setter took that particular convoluted route in order to make the surface work.

20. 25 minutes. I’m very firmly in the pro camp on this one: I loved it. I never notice surface readings when I’m solving, whether good or bad, so they have almost no bearing on my enjoyment. However I love it when you have to tease out wordplay carefully, so that each clue is hard won and almost nothing goes in without full understanding. This was one of those.
21. I should really have left this puzzle until tomorrow as I’d had one hell of a day and was feeling washed out. In fact I made quite good progress early on, but then tiredness overcame me and I must have spent the final 10 minutes or so out of my 24:08 on SORTIE – not helped by my complete inability to think of (and so eliminate) HERMES (with his winged sandals).

    I’m afraid I’m in the “didn’t really enjoy it all that much” camp: too much convoluted wordplay.

22. dT42bu Major thanks for the blog.Really thank you! Cool.

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