Times 25,349

19:01 on the Club timer. My initial reaction: after yesterday’s almost non-existent challenge, something much more substantial and challenging. I shall wait to see if other people had a similar experience of what seems to me a classical grid, with everything in alternate rows and columns, i.e. some quite gettable long clues giving a good start, a handful of other very straightforward solutions, but after that, plenty of thinking required to fill in various corners. All in all, an enjoyable puzzle.

Across
1 WING CHAIR – WING(=annex) + [I in CHAR].
6 CHARM – C + HARM.
9 PUT ONES FOOT DOWN – double/metaphorical def.
10 ROUTER – Reboot + OUTER.
11 ASBESTOS – [BEST(=worst – isn’t English wonderful?),0] in ASS.
13 BEHIND BARS – double/metaphorical def.
14 DOPE – i.e. DO some P.E.
16 CHOP – CHOP=reduce drastically; twice, i.e. CHOP CHOP=hurry up.
17 VIDEO NASTY – Dracula in (SAYIVENOT)*. This answer took me back to my youth at the dawn of the domestic VHS, when a moral panic swept the land inspired by a number of violent films released on video without proper certification. Looking at the list of titles, I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen any of them, then or since, which I like to attribute to my good taste in cinema rather than any squeamishness.
19 STOPOVER – (POTS)rev. + OVER(=on)
20 SHINTO – HINT in SO.
23 AS KEEN AS MUSTARD – (SENSEDKAMASUTRA)*. Nice anagram.
24 HATCH – not sure I’ve seen this before; we often have double definitions, and occasional triple definitions, but this is a quintuple definition! First ever?
25 ENDLESSLY – HERo MANy becomes HER MAN without the ends.
 
Down
1 WIPER – WIG (presumably?) + PER(=for every).
2 NOT MUCH TO LOOK AT – cryptic def.
3 CANTEENS – TEEN in CANS(studio slang for headphones).
4 ALSO – reversed hidden in nO SLAves.
5 ROOD SCREEN – (ONERECORDS)*.
6 CUTTER – double def.
7 A MONTH OF SUNDAYS – (NOT)* in (HAYDNSFAMOUS)*. Another nice bit of anagramming.
8 MONASTERY – OppositioN in MASTERY.
12 OBLITERATE – OB(old boy) + LITERATE.
13 BACKSLASH – BACK(=”second”) + SLASH(“very much lower” as a verb, as one might do with prices in a sale, say). How familiar you are with the backslash symbol (it’s over there, just to the left of your Z) may well depend on how deeply you’ve probed into the file directories in your computer in the past…
15 UNCHASTE – Horse in (NUTCASE)*.
18 JOSEPH – EP in JOSH.
21 ODDLY – tOlDaDeLaY.
22 AMID – A.M.(morning) I.D.(papers).

25 comments on “Times 25,349”

  1. Agreed that this is helped by the relatively easy 15s. What held this simple dope up at the end was the very simple DO,PE (14ac). I was convinced that the hyphen was a red herring. Some puzzles are like that eh?

    Had both 9ac and 13ac as straight double defs. Nothing cryptic about any of the four defs??

    Wondered about JOSH as a noun (18dn) but the various Oxfords support it.

    A fair bit of chopping, cutting and slashing in this puzzle. Perhaps trying to encourage Sri Lanka to get their 393 before the close of the final day? (Currently 3/144 at lunch.)

    1. Yes, I meant to write metaphorical rather than cryptic for those ones, but sometimes you get used to writing certain phrases and they come out automatically. In the mannner of Sangakkara I have reviewed it 🙂
  2. Exactly 30 minutes for this one, so an improvement on yesterday’s disaster (for me alone, apparently).

    I also went for WIg at 1dn which I think must be right. I wondered about “house” = MONASTERY at 8dn but Chambers supports it.

    24 is brilliant but I had only spotted four definitions before reading the blog and I wasn’t familiar with “hatch” (as opposed to “hatchback”) for the car.

    A lively and thoroughly enjoyable puzzle helped by the long multi-word answers.

    1. If you cross a Mitsubishi with a Quasimodo, you get the Hatchback of Notre Dame.

      More seriously, fans of Top Gear will have heard constant (nay, tedious) references to “hot hatches”. They once described my old 3-door RAV-4 as “a cross between a hot hatch and a tractor”.

      Edited at 2012-12-18 03:46 am (UTC)

      1. My reading: one’s morning papers are one’s A.M. I.D., that is to say “surround by” is definition, “papers one takes up” is I.D. and “in the morning” is A.M. If you regard ID as the sort of papers one carries, one must pick them up first, so one’s AM ID is what one takes up in the morning. Seems fine to me.
  3. Anyone care to have a crack at explaining “one takes up in the morning” so that it makes sense to a simple dope? Does it just mean that one [the solver] must take/place AM (“in the morning”) above (up) the ID?

    Edited at 2012-12-18 04:24 am (UTC)

  4. HATCH and CHOP were my last ones in. HATCH was surprisingly hard to get until I had the checkers. If I knew it was 5 definitions it is obvious but I was trying to justify all sorts of other types of wordplay.

    But it seems an exact clue to me:
    OPENING like a hatch in a ship
    CAR hot hatch
    CONTRIVE hatch a plan
    EMERGE like chicks
    SHADE hatch like hatching, stripey lines

    No time, (well several hours on the club timer) since I started it early and then came back to it hours later. I’m in Asia so the crossword appears at breakfast but unfortunately I have to do some work too!

  5. 43 minutes. Since I can’t allow my times are falling I’m delighted to see everyone else speeding up at a rate of knots. You weren’t alone on a slow shuffle yesterday jackkt. I like the way 25 works: got it eventually but failed to see it at all.

    Edited at 2012-12-18 09:14 am (UTC)

  6. 18:30 on the club timer. I enjoyed this.
    I didn’t understand HATCH, so thanks for clearing that one up Tim. I didn’t understand AMID either, and still don’t.

    Edited at 2012-12-18 09:56 am (UTC)

  7. 23 minutes but with interruptions. DOPE was last in – one of those nasty ?vowel?E clues that could be any of hundreds of answers, clever once you stumble on it. ENDLESSLY was also too clever for me today, so sadly in with a shrug and all the setter’s craft lost.
    My CHAIR was EASY to start with, again with a shrug (annex??), and I wasted time trying to get chill into it somewhere. WIPER cracked it, but that to was accompanied by a shrug, as I ran out of patience trying to think of WI?=rebuke. I suppose it has to be wig.
    Good puzzle, even if the long ones didn’t challenge much, but the best clues not fully understood.
  8. I agree with Tim, a well crafted puzzle with a balanced mix of easy, standard and difficult clues and some interesting words as answers. 25A is very clever.

    Multiple definition clues appear in Mephisto land from time to time. The larger the number of definitions the more one needs checkers to solve the clue. Here, at 24A I needed all three H-T-H to see “opening” as a definition for HATCH, then “shade” at the other end of the clue, then a full understanding.

  9. First time I’ve tackled this online and found it hard without scribbling anagram rings. I also didn’t realise there was a timer so I need to take lunch off 1hour 30 mins. Didn’t know Shinto but worked it out. Thoroughly satisfying crossword and I’m sure I’ll get used to screen input.
  10. Got myself in a right muddle by putting in backspace for 13D, assuming the ellipses were indicating a link to OBLITERATE, then putting in ENTRY for 24A on the weak grounds that it was an “Opening”. Fortunately JOSEPH then showed up to put a stop to that madness.
    1. I also went with BACKSPACE and ENTRY and stared for ages at -O-E-Y for 18 dn, before time to do other things arrived and I had to read the blog to learn I’d gone wrong. Otherwise a fine puzzle with nothing unreasonable.
  11. Could someone let me know how much subscription to the crossword club is please? I believe this will be a deal less than the £4 per week for the digital subscription. Also – any ideas when it will next be open to new subscriptions? Thanks.
    1. Chris, I must say that until you asked the question, I hadn’t realised there was a moratorium on new members at the moment. I can only assume this is due to the future changes to the site which Peter Biddlecombe (originator of this site and now Sunday Times crossword ed.) has referred to obliquely in the online forum. If you’re lucky, he will spot your question, and is certainly the most likely person in these parts to be able to give you an informed answer.

      As to the price, if it remains at the same level as my current subscription, it will be £24.99 per year.

  12. 45 minutes (I’m always pleased with anything under an hour) and today I had everything right. Not a very hard puzzle, but with many witty clues (ENDLESSLY, which I caught right away, is perhaps the best, but DOPE, which was my last one in, is quite good too) and far more interesting than yesterday’s. My only complaint: perhaps a wee bit too many anagrams.
  13. Daily=CHAR(woman). From Oxford Dictionary Online:

    2 (also daily help) British, dated a woman who is employed to clean someone else’s house each day.

    1. Thank you, topicaltim. I didn’t connect daily with char (though I did spend some useless calories trying to fit CHAR into 1D), though now it makes perfect sense. More English slang learned; a successful day.

      Thoughtful in London

  14. About 25 minutes, ending ironically with ENDLESSLY. I had stupidly parsed ODDLY correctly, but entered ODDER instead, which held me up down there. I hadn’t figured out the ‘shade’ meaning of HATCH til seeing it here, so thanks for that. I also had NOT MUCH TO TALK OF, which needed to be corrected before the SW would work. But compared to yesterday’s, a good work out. Regards.
  15. A rather late comment I’m afraid, as LiveJournal was off the air when I tried yesterday.

    12:38 for me. The mixture of clues I found quite easy and clues I made heavy weather of was very similar to Monday’s puzzle, but this one took me well over twice as long. I made particularly heavy weather of 13dn, convinced that the answer was going to be some piece of hardware, with BACKPLATE the obvious candidate (which I kept going back to despite continued failure to justify it).

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