Times 25,372

28:08 on the Club timer. Sometimes you find yourself absolutely in tune with a puzzle, and can hardly write the answers in fast enough; other times you realise you’re just not on the setter’s wavelength, and everything’s a struggle. Today was one of the latter, ending with me staring blankly at the 4dn / 10ac interchange for what seemed like a very long time. Even allowing for the tendency to take longer over blog puzzles, the net result is that I felt vaguely unsatisfied, but as always I can’t put my finger precisely on why one crossword should click when another one simply doesn’t.

On reflection after blogging, this doesn’t seem like anything really out of the ordinary: no gimme, but not a real monster either. Was it more tricky than I first thought, or was I just making heavy weather of an averagely difficult challenge? As always, I await the judgement of others…

Across
1 SUPPLIANT – SUP(=drink) + [1 in PLAN] +Time.
6 PETRI – PETRIfying. Creator of the eponymous dish, in which I vaguely recall attempting to cultivate microscopic life as part of O-level biology.
9 GROAT – Old in GRATE.
10 RINGTONES – (STORINGNEW)*. As I’ve hinted above, this took a lot of unravelling, and I wasn’t entirely convinced by the definition (though I am more so now, see first comment below). Maybe I was just annoyed at not spotting it earlier, having first pondered CONSTANTS and taken some time to get it out of my mind.
11 YOU NEVER CAN TELL – (EVENTUALLYONCERevisions)*. One of Shaw’s.
13 PLEASING – PLEA(=prayer) + SING(=hymn).
14 SAMPLE – PLatoon in SAME.
16 TRAVEL – Venezuelan in (LATER)*.
18 FORGET IT – FORGE(=fabricate) TIT. i.e. the canonical epistle from St Paul to Titus
21 NOTWITHSTANDING – WITHSTAND in NOTING.
23 INDECORUM – COR in (NUDEIM)*.
25 ACTON – (NOT CA.)rev. The statesman is now most famous for his often-quoted (or misquoted, or vaguely papraphrased) epigram “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
26 SCOLD – Son + COLD.
27 BARTENDER – [A RT.] in BENDER &lit.
 
Down
1 SAGGY – G.G. in SAY.
2 PROTUBERANT – PRO(=expert) + TUBE(transport system) RANT(tirade).
3 LATHERSBLATHERS without the British.
4 ADRIENNE – [DR. I.E.] in (Queen) ANNE. As with 10ac, I probably feel annoyed by my long stare, but I think I’ve previously put it on record that I don’t really like definitions along the line of “Girl’s name”.
5 TENACE – 10+ACE; in card games, a tenace is a pair of high cards which aren’t sequential, such as Ace, Queen, or, as here, King, Jack.
6 PETUNIA – [TUN,1] in PEA.
7 TON – TO North, as well as the noteworthy 100mph barrier. For those unfamiliar with London rail termini, they were originally built by the regional companies which preceded the post-war national network, so have always served a particular geographical area of the country; trains from King’s Cross head north, to “arrive into” such “station stops” as Leeds, York, Newcastle and Edinburgh (grrr). By the same token, watch out in future for TOE (Liverpool Street) or TOW (Paddington).
8 INSOLVENT – Very in INSOLENT.
12 EXPATRIATED – Rex in EXPATIATED.
13 PUT ON AIRS – cryptic def. where AIRS=what DJs these days might call “banging tunes”.
15 MORTIMER – Married O.R.(=men) TIMER(=watch). John Mortimer, as well as being a practising barrister, wrote a number of plays, most notably those featuring Rumpole of the Bailey.
17 EVINCED – VIN in E.C., + ED.
19 GUNWALE – U(=”classy”) in (WANGLE)*.
20 CHERUBHERE in CHUB.
22 GONERGrOwNwEaRy.
24 DZO – ariDZOne. Tibetan pack animal which will be familiar to anyone who knows the Scrabble words which are handy for disposing of an unwanted Z in your rack.

26 comments on “Times 25,372”

  1. If you think “numbers” as in pieces of music does that help?

    Edited at 2013-01-15 01:58 am (UTC)

    1. Thank you, it does. As suspected, clearly unable to see the wood for the trees after staring too long at the same clue…
    2. I came to the same conclusion as you, and commented as much in a response to barracuda on the TCC Forum before I read your comment. (I wasn’t trying to steal your thunder. Honest!)

      Edited at 2013-01-15 11:01 pm (UTC)

  2. Glad I wasn’t alone in finding this tricky although with a solving time like yours under 30 minutes I’d have counted that as fairly easy. I took 52 minutes.

    I think part of the problem was having so many vague definitions (Female, Flower, Scientist, English statesman) that force one to unravel the wordplay. I might have said the same about ‘Play’ at 11ac except that was my second answer to go in and I spotted it from only the Y checker and the enumeration.

    Didn’t know DZO nor its (apparently) more usual spelling ZO.

    Edited at 2013-01-15 02:11 am (UTC)

  3. Medium difficult puzzle for me and it took a lot of time to get started. Not helped by scribbling PLEASANT in at 13ac and wondering “hymn=SANT?” So maybe, on reflection, it was more stupidity on my part than difficulty on the puzzle’s.

    Prefer Chuck Berry’s version of 11ac.

    And clear COD to RINGTONES. “Mobile” marking the anagram was brilliant.

  4. 22:39 .. definitely needed the lateral thinking cap on for this one. Very enjoyable challenge, though I expect in another mood I’d have hated it.

    TENACE, TON and DZO all hit-and-hopes for me.

  5. 50 minutes for a most enjoyable puzzle, right up my street. Didn’t know TENACE, which helped slow me in the NE, along with my mis-remembered French fast train service (first TRV then TRG – at least there’s a king in the latter somewhere), which should actually be TGV, but shouldn’t actually be that, of course. I also managed to invent Lacon for the statesman on first read through. Fortunately, the wordplay stopped me entering grote for the coin. I thought ADRIENNE was so tightly clued as to mitigate any qualms about its vagueness.

    COD to TON. Would ‘trains from Euston’ be TOH, I wonder?

  6. 25′ online, leaving most of the top half empty. Sotira’s three finger-crossers were mine as well, although DZO simply had to be, and TON easily won out over its competitors. Racked my brains to think of scientists beside Fermi, even coming up with Volti for a moment. DNK TENACE. COD to 11ac.
  7. 20 minutes, and I quite liked this one – few (if any) gimmes, and some good disguises. RINGTONES was my CoD (once unravelled) for the seamless but misleading “mobile phone numbers”.
    PUT ON AIRS took longest, partly because I didn’t detach the “be” properly, so was looking for the sartorial kind of DJ.
    The flower and the scientist were tricky. Too many flowers end -ia, and not enough scientists end -i (Fermi was also my first guess).
    Since I now play more Words with Friends than Scrabble, it was nice to revisit DZO, which the former doesn’t allow. Zo doesn’t work either.
    Good to have a queen that wasn’t ER.

    Edited at 2013-01-15 09:39 am (UTC)

  8. Thought I was doing better than usual with this one – until I got to the end and found I had 2 wrong. Had pleasant for PLEASING, due to the checkers and not reading the entire clue (that NY resolution didn’t last long …), and had put Alton for ACTON though I hadn’t heard of either and thought it might be a weak Los Angeles reference.

    DZO (and its many variants) is essential Scrabble knowledge.

  9. After 4 minutes of getting nowhere I managed to get 1d and from then on was ‘steady away’, coming in at 31.55 which makes it an easier one for me. I’m sure it helped that the Shaw play and Mortimer were straightforward for me and I knew DZO from Scrabble as suggested. I did pause over TON and liked the idea in the end – TOP for St Pancreas is another to add to the list perhaps. I hesitated also over RINGTONES but once I’d worked out the wordplay I thought it was quite excellent and gets my COD vote as well.
    The reference to John Mortimer reminds me of seeing Sir Derek Jacobi a few years back in A Voyage Round My Father, a most enjoyable performance and worth mentioning here as Sir Derek is very keen on cryptic crosswords too.
  10. I enjoyed this puzzle because one has to use the cryptics to derive the answer – ADRIENNE is a perfect example – rather than using a definition to reverse engineer the cryptic. 25 pleasant minutes.

    TENACE is a gift to bridge players who are used to calculating the odds of finessing through one. Good to see PETRI who I don’t recall appearing before. Thought RINGTONES was very good – lift and separate folks!!!

    1. PETRI, or at least his dish, has come up here more than once before, most recently last September. I only know because it has caught me out in the past but today it was a gift once I had the ‘I’ checker in place.
  11. A slow but steady solve, finishing in 50 minutes. I thought it was going to be far easier because I looked at the two give-aways at 22 and 24 first since they were on the back of my printed copy and I wanted to get them out of the way. After that it was uphill most of the way.

    I now see I got one wrong, having entered ALTON instead of ACTON for 25 (NOT LA<).

    Nice clues, particularly in the definition, proud, in 2, and the container element, berths.

  12. I struggled too at 32 minutes.

    Tenace rang a vague bell and a little Googlage showns it coming up in 23907 in March 2008.

    What made it a tricky puzzle for me was the setter’s care in making the precise wordplay far from easy to spot.

    F’rinstance, at 19 I wanted to put “classy” inside a part of a boat to get “craftily wangle”, at 8 I wanted to put “very rude” around “exhibiting”, at 25 I wanted to put E for english, then reverse a statesman to get somewhere oher than at California and at 6d it looked like you started with the large container and just put the I in the green.

  13. Couldn’t get GUNWALE or FORGET IT for some reason. In the former case I thought of FINAGLE and then couldn’t get out of my head the idea that I was looking for a word meaning “craftily wangle”.
    Ah well, there’s always tomorrow.
  14. Found this one a struggle – 24 minutes. FORGET IT and NOTWITHSTANDING in without understanding complete wordplay. TON with a shrug and a question mark, but last in was GUNWALE which began life as FINAGLE and kept me from getting the bottom right for a while.
  15. Two wrong guesses today – Put On Hits for Put On Airs and Alton for Acton. Got the GBS play and Tenace from wordplay.

    Thought Bartender was a fantastic clue.

  16. About 25 minutes, ending with the PETRI/TON crossing. Like Sotira, TON, DZO and TENACE went in more on a wing and a prayer than true conviction. I also didn’t understand the epistle reference in 18, though I did see the ‘forge’=’fabricate’, so it went in with a shrug. RINGTONES is very good. Regards to all.
  17. 43 minutes after a long stare at the end at 18 and 19. The epistle reference is arcane. A decent work-out.
  18. A disappointing 10:19 here for a puzzle that I really ought to have sizzled through as it was right up my street. But I was feeling tired when I started it – and felt very old and tired by the end of it.

    But that’s my fault, and I raise my hat to the setter for producing a puzzle so full of goodies (even though some of the clues – to TENACE, INSOLVENT and EXPATRIATED, for example – had a decidedly familiar ring about them). I particularly liked the clues to RINGTONES and MORTIMER.

    On reflection, I’m being very unfair about the clue to INSOLVENT. V in INSOLENT has been used many times, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done anything like as cleverly. In fact I’m going to choose that as my COD.

    Edited at 2013-01-15 10:56 pm (UTC)

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