Times 25375 – An Eastern European feel

47 comments on “Times 25375 – An Eastern European feel”

1. The report would have differed very little if it had been my Friday on duty as we seem to have had very much the same experience.

   I can’t offer anything more to explain what’s going on at 12ac. I may pick it apart later but I’ll wait a while to see what others come up with.

   I took 77 minutes but resorted to aids for four of the six clues still outstanding once the hour had passed.

   I also didn’t know ‘levant’ in this sense. Sir Stanley Matthews was never commonly referred to as ‘Stan’ so I rather resent that trick quite apart from it being a DBE, and for those who speak the Queen’s English the manager at the Ritz would also need to dispose of an ‘N’!

   You may gather I’m feeling a bit ratty about this one but I really didn’t enjoy it much. I hope we can soon return to having some shorter clues as what with today and yesterday I seem to be getting through printer ink at a faster rate than usual.

   Edited at 2013-01-18 08:05 am (UTC)

2. I reckon it’s been an especially fine week of varied and high-class offerings. Having said that, I found this very challenging, finishing (with LITRE of all things) after 95 minutes.

   As for the quibbles, I think Stan is fine for Matthews, but I too don’t have a clue how 12 works, if there is indeed more to it than meets the eye. The people who get me – especially on the BBC – are those who say ‘An hotel’ with the ‘h’ aspirated. Ignorami (sic)!

   Thanks to Dave for the parsing of the embers clue. When he’s no longer with us perhaps the former Middx off-spinner will enter Crosswordland land after this wise.

   1. “When he’s no longer with us perhaps the former Middx off-spinner will enter Crosswordland land after this wise.”

      Eh?
      Rob in OZ

      1. John Emburey was affectionately known as Embers by the Test Match Special team.
3. 25m. I thought there was some good stuff in here, but I got badly stuck at the end on the intersecting ROCKINGHAM (never heard of him), ABSCOND (didn’t know this meaning of “levant”) and DICTATION SPEED, a phrase I’ve never heard and a clue I don’t understand either.

   Edited at 2013-01-18 09:25 am (UTC)

4. I agree it’s been a very fine week, and I liked this one too over the 23 minutes solving time – apart from 12, which is just weird. I think it’s just a (not very sound) CD, but toyed for a while with how RIGA (which is, after all, one down) might contribute.
   Enough of that. 20 is a cracker of a back formation clue, and SLIDE RULE, a sublime mix of the digital and analogue ages with that “log on” bit. Callow youths will have trouble with that one – isn’t there an apocryphal story of the younger student wondering where you plugged it in?
   Someone here will know. Was Sir Stanley EVER known as Stan?
   1. A quick Google on “Stan Mathews” supports my view as it only finds him as “Stanley Matthews”. The Stans it finds are nothing to do with him.
   2. From memory of the man – no he was never known as Stan, always Stanley
5. I think 12 across is just a cryptic definition, stretched to absurd lengths to make the surface read as if it is all about the Listener crossword. I needed all the checking letters to solve it. Not a good clue. Liked the rest of this one, though.
6. A curate’s egg puzzle that overall I didn’t enjoy.

   Got 1A immediately and then realised setter had used 10 words to clue BLAH – from that point I was feeling less than charitable

   12A is just a mystery – no idea what it’s all about. At 17A I’d question “causing” – “the damage” is slang for “the cost”. I’m with Jack at 19A – it’s “an hotelier”. The LEVANT usage is very obscure and I used a dictionary to check the meaning.

   The saddest thing is that other parts of it are very good but once a puzzle starts to irritate (like using Stan) I find it hard to lose that feeling

   1. I’m not sure that it matters whether it’s ‘a hotelier’ or ‘an hotelier’. The ‘A’ and ‘manager at the Ritz’ can be treated as separate entities in the clue. At least that’s how I read it.
      1. I agree with you, but in any event I don’t think there is anything wrong with “a hotelier”. In my experience almost no-one says “an hotel” (whether pronounced “an ‘otel” or not) any more. I certainly don’t, and I wouldn’t write it either.
         1. Well that’s thrown me. I’ve got to ask my boss’s PA to book me a room in that London for Monday night and now I have no idea how to phrase the question.
            1. Obvious, surely? Just say “please book me a room at the Ritz”.
   2. Interesting this “a hotelier” versus “an hotelier” thing. The use of “an” seems to go back to the days when “hotel” was pronounced with a silent H (along with some other words beginning with that letter such as “humble”). This pronunciation is now very old-fashioned. Almost everyone now sounds the H in “hotel” and by extension in “hotelier”, and so both words should correctly be preceded by “a” and not “an” as the setter’s clue implies and as Professor Burchfield notes in his latest edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Unless of course you are one of those who still pronounce “hotel” as “otel”. The prof also notes the continuing widespread use of “an” before a number of other words where the initial H is sounded – e.g. “habitual”, “historian”, “horrific” and “horrendous” – where grammatical logic would require them to be preceded by “a”. Perhaps we just have to accept that this is one of those not uncommon areas of English usage that are still in a state of flux.
7. With “dun” yesterday and “levant” (decamp while welshing on ones gambling debts) today we seem to be in Georgette Heyer territory which is ok with me. I’m glad I wasn’t alone not twigging Matthews. On reflection I agree with Jimbo about the Harvard clue although it made me laugh at the time (husband is a Yale man). And if you’ve ever sat through a commencement speech “blah” is more like blah blah blah. 27 minutes and I actually quite enjoyed it.
8. Dear me! A bit desperate for a Friday, wasn’t it? Took me nearly an hour. Some admirable clues, though; particularly liked SLIDE RULE and BLACK HOLE, but took a while to get INSTANTER: a bit devious, that.

   Quite a 1950s feel to the puzzle, with Stanley Matthews, slide rule and Rockingham. (Hoots Mon!)

9. This takes me back to English classes, where the teacher would read a passage at dictation speed, and give marks for how well we’d managed to get it down. (Some deducted for bad writing, more for spelling mistakes)
   1. While I used to trundle a slide-rule across my desk in Maths lessons.
10. how does this work when ‘begin’ clues you to LAH but surely not to itself?
    1. look to “just with commencement” rather than “begin”
11. …after a couple of hours. I had ‘instantly’ for a long time, with ‘intl’ as the abbreviation, but no explanation for the ‘y’.

    I had at least heard of levant in the sense required, and ‘bole’. I was thinking ‘Black Hills’ for a while, then ‘Black Hulls’. My other problem was a wrong spelling in ‘false pretenses’, which held me up on ‘chute’ for quite a bit. And for a long time, I was thinking the logs were on some sort of ‘fire’, only to see the obvious at last – obvious to us from the older generation, anyway. I had a very fancy slide rule when I was 12, good for all sort of things.

    The cryptic definition didn’t bother me, all’s fair…

12. 20:29 .. as others say, a mixed and sometimes frustrating bag.

    I’ve just spent some time après solve trying to untangle 12a. I keep feeling that a homophone of ‘diktat’ and the phrase ‘one on speed’ must be involved, but that’s as far as I can get.

    I rather liked CHUTE.

13. A worrisome development has appeared on the Club Forum. One of the first-rate regular solvers (Lickert) reports that she rang up to renew and was told that the best deal was a L4 weekly package. Originally that was what I was offered for online renewal last October but when I rang I was told the L25 annual was available and they put it through for me manually (they always have to do that in my case for some reason). For those who don’t wish to subscribe to the main paper this is a very nasty surprise if true.

    P.S. The site is mondo slow this morning – I hope that’s not just me.

    1. I’m afraid I can top you – I’ve just been charged four times for a renewal. Thus far three unanswered emails to Times support and one angry call from my bank wondering why someone is charging my card over and over. Wheeee
       1. In my experience they never reply to emails. You have to call them. Not ideal in your case, obviously, but probably better than being charged four times!
14. 20:41 and enjoyable on the whole but like others I’m completely baffled by 12 and didn’t know the required meaning of Levant.
    1. Same for me, half an hour with ABSCOND put in as the only word that fits but had no idea why. Otherwise I really enjoyed it and I only hear “otel” pronounced by my local French chaps and on old episodes of ‘Ello ‘Ello.
15. At last, all correct after near misses all week! Dictation Speed and LOI Abscond held me up for quite a while at the end, and Leant On caused as much delay as yesterday’s Leave Go. Guessed Abscond from the checking letters.

    Thought the Sir Stanley Matthews + Internazionale clue was very neat, even if he wasn’t called Stan! Liked the slide rule clue; I saw one once but am too young to have used one.

16. Done in two sessions (chocolate cake had to come out of oven) but a total of 13 minutes. Agree with Penfold that it was on the whole agreeable with quite an old-fashioned feel, what with Stanley and the good old slide rule. I too have no idea about the dictation speed.
17. Wow… 31 minutes with last in the ABSCOND/DICTATION SPEED crossing. I had a mighty struggle with this one with answers falling one at a time after a read-through of a couple, rather than getting a few in a row, or some together in a block. Very sparse grid that eventually joined together. ROCKINGHAM and ABSCOND, from wordplay DICTATION SPEED a bit of a guess.
18. I’m with those who liked this puzzle. I thought BLACK HOLES, CHUTE, HEREDITARY, SLIDE RULE and HALF-REMEMBERED were very good, and (sorry Jimbo) I even liked BLAH. I agree that 12ac is not a great clue. As far as I can see, it is just what it appears to be, a somewhat clumsy cryptic def. The idea seems to be that if you had someone listening to you, and if you spoke at dictation speed, the listener might be able take down what you were saying. If so, pretty feeble. At any rate, no one seems yet to have come up with an alternative explanation for this clue.
19. 41 minutes. Taking 12 as merely a literal with crossword red herrings I don’t mind it; the elusive meaning of ‘get one down’ comes into its own and there’s the pleasure of a certain accuracy and wit by decoy, the trace of Times authentic other brands clutch and grasp at but rarely hold for long. Neither do I feel Stan is out of order for the great one. It might seem a little more incongruous for Gibbons the stamp dealers but still a legit. abbrev. I’d have thought. 20 my favourite for the straight-faced definition.
20. to see what Tony Sever says about this.
    This felt like one of those “setter trying too hard” puzzles. The wording of several of the clues seemed to veer on the unfair.
21. Just over the hour but 12a left unfinished despite having all the correct checkers in. I found this a slow struggle with too wordy clues and not particularly witty – I didn’t see any connection in the two parts of CHUTE clue for example. I still don’t see how 12 works as a definition even though I can see the misdirection into the Listener crossword. For me ‘just get one down’ is random: any other number would work equally badly. Otherwise I found lots to enjoy and scored a great own goal by putting PEST at 25a! Who needs devious setters?
    1. Jump out of a burning building? Get down the words one’s dictating?
       1. Both are plausible of course but neither are convincing me.
22. Finished all correctly and without aids eventually, but surely I can’t be the only one to have E+ASTERN at 5dn for quite some time? I was so convinced it was right, that all cross clues took an age to get.

    Haven’t posted for a little while, but I do still check in regularly to read the comments!

    1. Funnily enough I didn’t consider Eastern, despite this being one of my last in, perhaps because I’m such a geographical pedant and the Levant is merely East Mediterranean rather than East per se!

       Nice to have you back commenting.

       Edited at 2013-01-19 03:55 am (UTC)

    2. Me too!
23. First one I’ve finished for quite a while. Took most of the day mind you.
    Some were guesses, which turned out to be correct. Thanks to all for the blog and comments.

    I had a circular slide rule when I was at school…

24. 13:33 for me. I never really found the setter’s wavelength while solving, but looking back over the puzzle afterwards I’m not sure why as the clues weren’t particularly convoluted – just cleverly worded. Almost all of them seemed perfectly fair, and indeed I thought a good number of them were very fine indeed with first-rate surface readings.

    The one clue I wasn’t too keen on was 11ac (INSTANTER) since, as others have said, the great man was always Stanley rather than Stan. However, I did assume straight away that STAN was what the setter had in mind, and it was only because I wanted the answer to be INSTANTLY that I failed to solve it first time through.

    But that’s my only real objection. As a veteran Listener solver, I actually rather like 12ac, though I can see that as a cryptic definition it’s teetering on the edge. And I’ve absolutely no objection to 6ac (BLAH) or 19ac (ATELIER – fine if you just take A and (HO)TELIER separately).

    Hard to choose a COD, but I think I’ll go for 24ac (CHUTE).

25. …with the last 9 clues done in the last 9 minutes, after a 6′ pause to stare at the puzzle in mounting despair. I don’t see the problem with 12ac, which seemed straightforward enough to me: if the dictator spoke any faster, the listener might not be able to get it all down. And since I’d never heard of Matthews, ‘Stan’ didn’t bother me in the least. DNK ROCKINGHAM, either; I’ve always associated the war with Lord North (my dictionary says Rockingham was PM in 1765-66 [too early] & 1782). For me, BLAH is boring not pretentious.
    1. Chambers has “pretentious nonsense” for ‘blah’
       1. I should have made clear that I’m an American; the ‘pretentious nonsense’ meaning, I gather(ed), is UK.
26. I left the puzzle with five clues unsolved (and one wrong) and went back to it today, Saturday. I finally saw DICTATION SPEED fitting the grid and realized it was a slightly obscure CD.
    In the end I had to use aids to sort out the mess created by INSTANTLY for 11. I couldn’t justify INTLY, but couldn’t see an alternative.

    Incidentally, I had no hesitation in entering STAN for ‘Matthews’. Perhaps it could do with a ‘briefly’ in the light of some people’s researches above, but it’s no worse than ‘Bill’ for Shakespeare or ‘Ed’ for Spenser in the Listener crossword.

    I found it a tough puzzle, and perhaps a bit frustrating because of the time it took me, but there’s really nothing wrong with any of the clues (including the apparently controversial 19a), and many of them are very clever. Levant as a definer was particularly inspired.

27. There was, it seems, at least one place where Sir Stanley was just Stan.

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