Times 25371 – May the Fours Be With You

42 comments on “Times 25371 – May the Fours Be With You”

1. …and was glad not to be the blogger this week and have the added pressure in solving. I did manage to get ‘schipperke’ from the cryptic, but I was still quite stuck in the SE for a while. ‘Rhebok’, indeed. Now ‘stannic’, that I knew.

   I would watch out for ‘rumba’ and ‘samba’ being clued as computer applications. Rumba is a mainframe terminal emulator, and Samba is a Linux file server.

2. Had to struggle with the barge watchdog at 4ac. And needed all the checking letters to do so. Some of the four-letter answers were also a bit tricky, esp. HAND and PSST, my last two in. Thought the clue for NOGGIN was pretty good. Has it ever been clued as “Two drinks or three”?

   Anyone else a bit disturbed by the part-of-speech in 18dn? Probably just me because in the two possible sentences “X is ______”, the “is” is not the same usage. The stricter equivalent would be “being loutish”. But I’ve ridden that hobbyhorse before to no avail.

   1. While I agree to some extent, both the SOED and Roget show loutish as an adjective, the SOED showing loutishness as the appropriate noun, despite their authority I have no problem in regarding “behaving antisocially” as loutish.
      1. Don’t you thnk that “loutish” describes someone’s habitual demeanour or disposition while “behaving antisocially” describes their behaviour on a particular occasion? It would be no contradiction to say “John was behaving antisocially at the party but I wouldn’t call him loutish”.
         1. If you substitute in your example it seems to work ok. ‘John was loutish’ or ‘John was behaving antisocially’? Always assuming you accept they are synonymous terms of course. But I did also pause over it at the time.
            1. Hmmm. The first example could mean that he is now dead but had a loutish disposition; the second can’t mean that. There would be no doubt about “John was being loutish”. But I’m starting to come around.

               I do tend to get antsy when the commutation test involves two sentences using the copula. It’s so semantically slippery. Remember Anax’s argument (ST 4515) that “a doormat” = TIMID on the basis of the test “He is timid” and “He is a doormat”. I still don’t buy that on similar grounds.

               More importantly though: how’s that Contreras of yours?

               Edited at 2013-01-14 10:17 am (UTC)

               1. Sent you some details on Sotira’s twitterisimus page.
3. So that’s how INORDINATE works! I put it in then took it out because I couldn’t justify it, and then put it back in when I had more checkers. DNK 4ac, 9ac,11ac (chez moi, the noggin is one’s head, and a snifter is a balloon glass), the Wallace reference, or of course the spelling of reebok, which I suspect no one has seen except the setter and those of us who felt required to check our dictionaries. 15ac slowed me down, since I would write it as 2 words. Although mctext’s point about LOUTISH occurred to me–at least, I stopped for a second before entering it–it didn’t bother me at the time. Liked PSST.

   Edited at 2013-01-14 05:57 am (UTC)

4. Exactly 60 minutes, but the roundness of the figure is not by chance, it’s because after 58 minutes with only the 4s outstanding for the previous quarter-of-an-hour I reached for a trusty dictionary and looked them up; I never heard of either of them.

   Also didn’t know RHEBOK but it was pretty obvious what was going on there so I wrote it in with some confidence.

   I enjoyed the belated Christmas reference at 26ac and PSST.

   I never read THE FOUR JUST MEN but like, I suspect, many of my generation I know the title well from the 1959 TV series starring Dan Dailey, Richard Conte, Jack Hawkins and Vittorio De Sica.

   Edited at 2013-01-14 07:12 am (UTC)

   1. Four Just Men – they don’t make ’em like that anymore
5. About an hour. Never heard of SCHIPPERKE and put it in without much confidence. Never heard of THORN-APPLE but it couldn’t be much else. And knew nothing of the Wallace men but JUST at least seemed plausible. Slightly surprised to be all correct.
6. 28.43 and so I found this relatively straightforward. I had come across the dog before but STANNIC was new to me. I couldn’t work out how 25a worked at all so thanks for the explanation. I did smile at 26a so that gets my COD vote.
7. 50 minutes after interminable hold-ups near the end. Happy kept me from chipper for too long. Life-saving enterprise? COD abode, so simple yet my last in.
   1. I almost put in my first guess, ADOBE, because that so nearly worked.
      1. I entertained adobe for a time. Then I went through Contintental men’s names to put after ‘A’…
8. 34 minutes,with yay many spent on that wretched mutt, trying to force some sense out of the cryptic. Which word did you take letters regularly from? Was the obvious EIGHT wrong so that KoReAn could fit? Cheerful – happy, perhaps? An unknown dog can be any combination of letters: consider schnauzer, vizsla, shih zu, the last once memorably defined by Sandi Toksvig as “one without penguins”. K and E are regular by the book, and is there an association that the pup in the hands of a Korean might be less cheerful once it lands in the pot?
   I put SCHIPPERKE in eventually, and was slightly surprised to find it correct. Likewise RHEBOK, especially as it turned up (spelt better) in another grid very recently. Though the cryptic is precise and you can’t put the H in anywhere else, it’s a bit of a heffalump trap. THORNAPPLE also unknown, but two recognisable words from the anagram made it simple enough.
   STANNIC from the Cornish parliament and Sn it might as well be the proper adjective.
   All in all, a fine crossword – favourites included GUIDELINES (had to write out the cryptic bits until the penny dropped), SLEIGH BELL, UMPTEENTH for the slick anagram, FORESHORTEN for the highly misleading “not at first” and PSST just for not having any vowels.
   1. Beware, there is also “stannous”, though it describes a different kind of tin. Maybe if Salman Rushdie had been a chemist, he could have written “The Stannic Versus the Stannous”?

      Edited at 2013-01-14 10:12 am (UTC)

      1. If only.
9. A breezy 14:28, but as that included several answers going in with variable levels of understanding, I thank ulaca for enlightening me this unexpectedly snowy morning. Having toyed with BELL and HORN on the assumption that 20ac was a rather weak cryptic def., I realised it was the solver who was being weak, and it was actually rather a good clue when the penny dropped.
10. 25 minutes after squeezing in 9 holes before it started to rain – again! Could do without snow.

    Like others didn’t know the dog and had to guess. Knew STANNIC (and as McText says watch out for stannous). For many years laboured under the mistaken belief that in the hymn “Jerusalem” they sang of “dark stannic hills”.

    Don’t like “one from cuba” which suggests probably cigars – why not “steps taken to show resistance to university business degree”. Liked PSST

11. Finished in 35 minutes after using crosswordsolver.org to find the dog. Mrs K knows all about dogs but even she had never heard of this one. As noted above, did not know RHEBOK as alternative spelling but the H had to go in somewhere. Stannic does mean ‘relating to tin’ generally, from the Latin, and more specifically when in oxidation state +4 whereas stannous is less generic in meaning and relates to +2 state. Since you asked.
12. I took an hour over this. Stuck for ages on 4ac, even after I thought of ‘chipper’ for cheerful. Fooled by Dancer in 26 for some time and deceptive wordplay in several others, though I knew all the words apart from the dog and the unusual spelling of the antelope.

    Loved the clues to 20 and 8. I’m less keen on “Korean regularly” for KE since one cannot determine regularity on the strength of 2 letters, since there is only one gap. Normally I overlook that when it’s every other letter in a four-letter word, commonly used, but when it’s just two letters taken from a five-letter word, far less common in The Times, it seems less satisfactory.

13. Beaten by the Belgian beast.

    Loved NOGGIN and PSST.

14. No hold-ups today – & the dog was in my I-Spy book of Dogs, >60 years ago, such a fun name among all the boring ones, no wonder I remembered it.
    1. Hello fellow Redskin! Fancy recalling Big Chief I-Spy in the News Chronicle. The only one I remember was to do with railways and since we never went on a train we were reduced to walking the railway lines looking for signals and goodness knows what else. Crazy days!
       1. How! I actually collected fine set of feathers, & it was a great hobby for a London brat. Odhu ntingo!
       2. Oh, yes. I loved all that!
15. DNF today with the dog, clown, coastguard and Sleigh Bell missing. Misspelled Strudel as Strudle so despite thinking of Dancer as Santa’s reindeer couldn’t guess Bell as the second word.

    COD to Eight because of the amusing “several in a row” defintion.

16. 24.14 on the club timer, with about five at the end on ABODE/SLEIGH BELL before the pennies dropped in succession.
    Like others I didn’t know the dog, or indeed the apple, the antelope (spelled like that), STANNIC, the requisite meaning of BOOM, or the Wallace book. Or indeed Wallace, come to that. Oh, and I think I knew there was a place called Louth, but not where it is. It’s a miracle I finished really.
    FYI, ulaca, the bloke who isn’t Martin Clunes in Men Behaving Badly is called Bob the Builder.
    1. As an expat parent with a child to feed videos to, I managed somehow to avoid BtB. I paid for this neglect, though, by being forced to watch hours of Barney the Dinosaur. I still have nightmares of Baby Bop and her confounded ‘blankie’.
       1. I feel your pain. Lazy Town is my current tormentor. I can’t express how awful it is.
          1. I don’t dislike Lazytown (for the grandchildren, in my case). It is something of a technical tour-de-force. And Sportacus is gruesome but Robbie Rotten has real talent imho.
             The perpetrators of bob the builder on the other hand should be arrested, for giving an entire generation of children an utterly wrong idea about how builders go about things, which only bitter experience will corrrect
             1. Robbie Rotten is without a doubt the best thing in it. Sportacus is loathsome. My six-year-old son had a Lazy Town themed birthday party recently and he was in no doubt that he wanted to be Robbie. I like to think this is not entirely because of my attempts to subvert the show’s attempts at indoctrination.
    2. Louth is also a town in Lincolnshire which has a very nice hotel and golf course where my buddies and I go annually for a golfing weekend. Roll on August:-)
17. 14 minutes – had to get the dog and RHEBOK from wordplay, LOUTISH from definition.
    1. Same problems here but it took me a lot longer than 14 minutes to sort out! I spent ages juggling with the doggy letters. Got the BOK bit of 23a but was very doubtful because I’ve never seen that spelling. I despaired of finding the part of Ireland at 18d. Then eventually remembered the famous(?) limerick:

       There was a young woman from Louth
       Who returned from a trip to the South
       Her father said, “Nelly,
       There’s more in your belly,
       Than ever went in through your mouth!”

       So not all our GK comes from a classical education! Ann

18. Rats. Beaten by the dog, and couldn’t unravel the wordplay, thinking that ‘happy’ was in there somewhere. So I needed the aids. Beyond that, everything else went in slowish fashion due to gaps in knowledge re: Wallace and his men, COASTGUARD as one word(?), the bloke in 22, the weird spelling of RHEBOK, NOGGIN as ‘snifter’. COD to INORDINATE for the tricky wordplay. Regards.
19. 7:08 here for a nice straightforward start to the week. No real problem with the dog – I bunged it in once I had a couple of crossing letters, and then checked that it really did match the wordplay. Old hands may have recognised it from No. 23,597 (10 May 2007) where it appeared as the answer to “He picks out clothing for every dog (10)”.
20. Me too!
21. What is “bra” (apart from the obvious meaning) that is used in some of ulaca’s comments on Times 25371?
    1. See recent puzzles: in the last week or so, the words “bra” and “pants” have cropped up in the crossword with far more frequency than would appear normal.
22. DNF in 30 mins. 6 clues not solved.

    Edited at 2013-01-15 10:34 pm (UTC)

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