Times 25,368 – Supporter of Women

29 comments on “Times 25,368 – Supporter of Women”

1. Well, fancy that – pants and bra in the same puzzle. What next, I wonder? Good, solid puzzle – my last in and COD going to WASH, ‘though the lift and separate at 2 (rare blood group) was very fine.

   Never heard of Rothko but the French phrase dredged up from somewhere. 39 minutes.

   Edited at 2013-01-10 02:21 am (UTC)

   1. Hey Ulaca – are you going to reveal which twitterism was yourn? (Sotira’s survey.)
      1. Oh, the CS Lewis one. Very predictable, I’m afraid…Only just read this, hence the late reply.
2. This is getting silly! Pants for the third time in quick succession, and BRA thrown in for good measure. What is it with these setters and underwear?

   Anyway, I struggled with this one and only just came home under the hour. Didn’t know ROTHKO, CERULEAN or CORDON SANITAIRE. Vaguely knew of the sorceress but wasted for ever trying to make her C(l)IQUE.

   Edited at 2013-01-10 02:26 am (UTC)

3. ….because it managed to incorporate both of Sotira’s least favorite garments. I guess we’ll have to beg them to bring back Beerbohm Tree and Tiepolo!

   I did get stuck about halfway through, so I took a shower, came back, and found that the wrong ideas had been washed out of my head. As usual, I ended up wondering why such obvious answers took so long to see.

   1. Well, that is 3 pants in 5 days … what I wouldn’t give for a Tiepolo right now!
4. I really did enjoy most of this but made an idiotic mistake at 11a. I pencilled in ‘carte’, knowing it wasn’t right, then forgot to go back to it. CIRCE definitely within my ken but not at the moment I needed it. 19:50 with the mistake.

   Liked a lot of clues, underwear apart. COD POTBOILER

   Edited at 2013-01-10 03:04 am (UTC)

5. 23:54, with I think 12ac LOI. I thought the definitions in 11ac and 24ac were so non-cryptically clear that I actually suspected trickery; I started by taking ‘prayer leader’ to indicate P, rather than indicating prayer leader. It probably is time to drop the pants, or at least call a moratorium.
6. Bit of light relief; with MUSCLE the last one in. Liked 13ac best.

   What do you get if you cross a crustacean with a novelist? P.G. Woodlouse.

7. Easy enough puzzle of average difficulty. I’ll join the chorus against “pants” and “bra” – both are now well past their sell by date

   We have an example of a CORDON SANITAIRE in the UK Uncle Yap as shown by the treatment by other parties of the British National Party (BNP). Even when their candidates are elected no other party will have anything to do with them, and will certainly not enter in coallition to form a majority in a hung council.

   1. And UKIP screens all potential members to ensure they have not previously been members of the BNP.
8. This struck me as harder than average over 26 minutes, so perhaps I just wasn’t on form, or (I’d like to think more likely) there were plenty of well hidden definitions, disguised wordplays and devices, even if some of them are (under)wearing thin. I really wanted “pants” to mean trousers today, and I do rather think that pants=rot is a thesaurus step too far.
   Like Uncle Yap, I could forgive the brassiere given the clean formation of the clue, and it was the only one to evince a chuckle – my CoD with apologies to those who groaned at the cliché!
   And I’ve learned today that a woodlouse is a crustacean – still don’t fancy them in a thermidor or cocktail. Do they turn red when boiled?
9. 16 minutes but felt tougher. If puzzles weren’t prepared well in advance, it really would seem that the editor was trying to send a message that he’s the boss round here and he’ll include as much damned underwear in his crosswords as he likes. Apart from that, enjoyably testing puzzle.
   1. That thought had actually crossed my mind. They do read the blogs.

      Edited at 2013-01-10 12:56 pm (UTC)

10. For me, these puzzles have got slightly easier each day since Monday. FOI Pick-me-up (I always get a lift when I get 1ac at first glance!) and LOI Cordon Sanitaire. Guessed Circe from the checkers and wordplay – mythology isn’t my strong suit.

    Didn’t understand Muscle until reading your blog Uncle Yap and realising that “Catch” in the clue is a homophone indicator.

    Mark Rothko has been in the news recently because last October a man defaced his “Black on Maroon” painting at London’s Tate Modern Gallery.

    1. …and no one noticed for a fortnight.
       1. …and some thought it was improved.
11. I’ve been struggling all week, and this was no exception, the main problem being 2,12, and 15. ROTHKO was well-known, and got CIRCE from the definition alone, so initial progress was quite fast.

    Some interesting features to this puzzle: the unusual homophone indicator in 5, the very nice surface and wordplay in 27 (COD in my view).

    Initially I thought the cryptic syntax of 13 rather clunky since I took ‘established’ to be EST, though perhaps that’s not a standard Times abbreviation. Thanks to the blog for putting me right on that one.

12. 19m. Like Tim this felt a lot harder than it was to me. Probably because there was nothing I didn’t know so the difficulty was all in the clues. I didn’t benefit from the kind of education that results in solving CIRCLE by immediate word-association but it was in there somewhere. From this crossword no doubt.
    I have always very much liked Rothko’s paintings, but I’ve absolutely no idea why. He was in the press quite a lot last year too, when one of them sold for $75m.
13. 21 mins but with 4 (four! Count ’em!) utterly wrong.

    Like Sotira I went for CARTE at 11 but unlike Sotira I didn’t know it wasn’t right until coming here.

    At 2d I demonstrated my ignorance of both chemistry and medical practice by using CONDITIONS + RARE + B for the blood group to get that well-known disinfecting compound CARBON SINOTRIDE, clearly a devastating combination of carbon dioxide and tin.

    Next, and worst of all (given my proximity to the murky world of corporate finance and the total lack of wordplay justification), I made 7d CORPORATE LADDER and finally, again with little justification, I put AMASSERS instead SMASHERS at 9.

    Good grief.

    A good puzzle for all that though.

    1. I was hoping someone else plumped for B not A as the blood group!

       CARBON SONITRIDE was my version, which exists (almost) as CARBON SUBNITRIDE (SO’ being some kind of old corruption of SUB perchance?)

14. About 40 minutes, so not that easy for me. Enjoyed the neat double definitions and chuckled at 14; that was worthy of Frankie Howerd.

    I too have been expecting a double bluff with these pants. There are lots of ambiguous words they could be linked with (bloomers, drawers, combinations, boxers, briefs…) and I’m sure there must have been an underwear-themed clue for Long John Silver at some time.

    I have just been listening to someone on the radio who said that in the 1970s, Alan Greenspan used the figures for the sales of men’s underpants as an indicator of the state of the American economy.

15. Thank you for the blog, very informative and enjoyable as always. Enjoyed this one, though I too think bra and pants have had their day; surely these extremely clever setters can come up with something better?

    SP in Nairobi

16. Thank you for your blog. I believe there is a small typo on 13 across. The conclusion of lady is Y. Just read the results of the survey (which I’m sorry to have missed) which firstly is very interesting in terms of times to complete – it seems I’m not the slowest – just maybe one of the slowest who posts occasionally. Secondly, a setter made a comment to rightly put us all in our place – surely a setter’s raison d’être? So if the rest of the solving World like washing lines of underwear who are we to reason why?
17. Really enjoyed this puzzle, some great clues, and finished correct in 25 minutes without aids, thanks to blogger for explaining ‘Weigh’ / way = respect, I was unable to see the parsing.
18. I’d like to think if I thanked the recent setters profusely for their new favourite synonym, or ninnynym, they might forget about it. But no-one’s that important. A pretty good puzzle apart from the surely too well defined 11. No time recorded as called away and forgot to reset watch on return but probably over the half-hour. Liked rust bucket.
19. About 30 minutes, LOI being ROTHKO, but most of the pondering occurred over the 2 short ones at BOLT and WASH. They needed the alphabetical treatment, and I’m gratified that I lit on the right ones after much mental exercise. Everything else was relatively familiar, even CIRCE (mythology not being a strong suit for me either) but her name’s certainly recognizable, if not all her actions. Although nobody’s mentioned it, I thought EVERYTHING was the most clever item today, after being puzzled about how to fill in a 10 letter answer with 9 letters of anagrist. Nice one. Thanks Uncle Yap, and best to all.
20. 9:57 for me. Very much my sort of puzzle with lots of delightful clues, though I take joekobi’s point about 11ac being too well defined – so well that I wondered for a moment whether it could be a bluff.
21. DNF. 18 our of 30 done in 30 mins.

    Very annoyed not to have seen Cerulean. We decided on my son’s name, Laurence, partly because it’s a great name and partly because it’s a great anagram.

    Anyone know a better first name anagram?

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