Times 25377 – Resisting to the end

52 comments on “Times 25377 – Resisting to the end”

1. No real problems except for the 1dn/11ac intersection. I can see “latter” as “recent” but not quite “modern”; and “frame” for “easel” (while perfectly fair) always gets past me.

   3dn: since playing for time and batting defensively are close enough, perhaps there could have been a simplifed &lit here with the final def. dropped?

   Two light-inclusives (13ac and 2dn) and the barely cryptic 22dn suggest a touch of desperation?

   Slight typo at 28ac: “bottleS”, with the S from “goeS”.
   And at 1ac: the fodder is “fees concern reps”.

   Edited at 2013-01-21 03:40 am (UTC)

   1. Sloppy blogging now corrected.
   2. Indeed. Isn’t there an explicit rule in the Times limiting these to one per puzzle?
2. The “desperate” cluing at 22 nearly found at least one solver out, as he knew not that the Greek character omega was the symbol for Ohm. I needed the second flower to sort this out – and eliminate alpha, gamma, delta, theta and kappa – but fell at my final hurdle of the first flower, where I went for a figurative one (‘Thames’), sharing McT’s difficulty with frame/easel, if not, sadly, his facility for resolution of the same.

   31 minutes, with the West causing all the trouble. Had ‘duckling’ for a while until SLAVISH resolved that. SLAVISH and ENVELOPE were the standouts for me.

   1. Joined you in the Thames, as it were. Hadn’t heard of TEASEL for flower or HAME for head; guessed the second as rude yokel dialect from somewhere far from big London. Like McT and ulaca, EASEL went straight over my HAME.
      Rob
3. 24′, but with 11ac wrong. I don’t think I knew TEASEL, and with the checkers in, I went for ‘Thames’, desperately hoping that ‘Titian’s frame’ was T,S and that ‘hame’ meant ‘head’ maybe in the Highlands. Liked ENVELOPE, SLAVISH, IRATE, & OVERSTATE.
   1. Hames or hame is a type of yolk, so I went with Thames
4. I too ended up with “THAMES” for 11ac, never really thought of it as a flower, just a burr.
   1. I could see your point re the burr. So I looked it up. This from NOAD:

      a tall prickly Eurasian plant with spiny purple flowerheads. Genus Dipsacus, family Dipsacaceae: several species, including fuller’s teasel.
      • a large, dried, spiny head from such a plant, or a device serving as a substitute for one of these, used in the textile industry to raise a nap on woven cloth.
      verb [ trans.] [often as n.] (teaseling) chiefly archaic: raise a nap on (cloth) with or as if with teasels.
      ORIGIN Old English tǣsl, tǣsel; related to tease.

      Makes the “Flower head” bit quite neat eh?

      Edited at 2013-01-21 06:29 am (UTC)

5. 20 minutes for all but 17dn which I stared at for another 10 then looked it up. I simply couldn’t see past ANTELOPE which had to be wrong. I knew the printing term EN but not its meaning as a type of dash (-) with ’em dash’ as the longer version (—).

   I’d have bet a fortune (if I had one!) on there being a Teasel, possibly Mistress Teasel, in a play by Sheridan or Congreve or a contemporary of one or the other, but if there is, Google doesn’t appear to know of it.

   Strictly speaking ‘claret’ is slang rather than CRS for blood.

   Edited at 2013-01-21 06:40 am (UTC)

   1. In order of length, the printer’s dashes are: hyphen, en, em.
      1. Thanks, I hadn’t realised the difference between hyphen and en. I wonder if applications such as Word cater for this.
         1. Well, on the Mac it’s the ordinary hyphen, Option-hyphen and Shift-Option-hyphen, in all applications. Don’t know about the Windows world, but the second two may be some ghastly Alt+number-pad combination. It beats me why they don’t assign Alt+letter keys to the usual symbols.
   2. There are Sir Peter and Lady Teazle in ‘School for Scandal’.

      Edited at 2013-01-21 07:25 am (UTC)

      1. Thanks, Kevin. I thought I was going potty but you’ve put my mind at rest at least on this point.

         Mct, the only way I know to do the em dash in Word is to type two hyphens joining the adjacent words with no spaces in between and when you move the cursor on the two hyphens miraculously combine. If you then want to put in spaces you can go back and insert them without the em dash reverting to two hyphens.

         Edited at 2013-01-21 07:35 am (UTC)

         1. Same in Word for Mac if you’ve chosen that in the substitution table. Easier just to hit Shift-Option-hyphen thus: —
6. Just under 10m for this, but put me in the THAMES club. I didn’t even think about it very much. I wonder if I’d ever have got TEASEL: I’ve never heard of it.
   My solving of ASPHODEL was the exact opposite of yours, vinyl1. I worked carefully from the wordplay to construct a word I’m sure I’ve come across before but would not be confident spelling unaided. And don’t ask me to identify one.
7. An easy puzzle with a handful of rather weak clues and one clever one at 17D. The esoteric stuff about hyphen, en and em is more interesting.
8. I knew this as a purple flower, as there was some in my granny’s garden, but the dried seed-head is seen more often – nowadays to provide contrast in flower arrangements.
9. If only I’d assumed that the flower was just a flower, this would have been a gentle, 13 minute start to the week. If only…
   Favourite clue of the day was for WASTEBIN. How true, how true.
   Claret for blood I think comes from the “Boys’ Own” style of writing, and would most often be associated with a good straight right to the nose.
10. 19 minutes and another duckling here for a while. No trouble with the claret thanks to the ever-reliable Georgette Heyer (punch-up as in draw his cork or his claret). I know Jerry is another fan. Don’t be fooled by the stupid covers, you could always use a plain brown wrapper.
11. A very gentle start to the week – only five minutes for me – we have lots of teasels in the field margins round our way so I knew it as a flower as well as the dried seed head.
12. Anther day, another ANTELOPE.
13. ASPHODEL has cropped up twice in the last few months in the Gu@rdian, and my eye was also caught by it when I was recently looking up the etymology of aspidistra, as they’re only a few entries apart in Chambers. Thus primed, it was the first thing in my mind when needing an 8-letter flower beginning with A.

    I knew of TEASEL as my mother used to do flower-arranging. However I’m pretty sure that if Thames had come to mind first I’d have whacked that in instead.

14. Back to a normal Monday? 19 minutes. I found this pretty easy, much of the time entering answers from the definition and/or the letters already in place. I was held up slightly at the end by 11 and 17. However, I see I have 11 wrong, though I think I can just about justify my answer of THAMES. I knew HAMES to be the curved bars of a draught horse’s harness, so could arguably be described as a frame, though I acknowledge TEASEL is a better answer.

    I thought 7 was weak, but liked the deceptive ‘see’ in 17. 26 also fooled me – the answer was obvious but I thought it had something to do with a(p)t rather than (p)irate. I’m Not sure whether “it’s X to tear out page” quite means “it’s X tearing out page,” but that’s a minor query.

15. An easyish start to the week with a puzzle perhaps over-reliant on inclusives and anagrams. About 30 mins for me. But there was some ingenious wordplay – ASPHODEL, OVERSTATE, SLAVISH and ENVELOPE. My only quibble with the last is the “en” = “dash” def, which seems to me a bit loose. An “en” – equal to half an “em” – is normally defined as “a unit of measurement … approximately the average width of typeset characters” and is used to gauge the total amount of space a piece of text will occupy. No mention of dashes – though I accept that some dashes would be of that width.

    I too at first had THAMES at 11 ac, on the assumption that a river rather than a plant was required, all the more plausibly because it meshed with the checking letters, and “Titian’s frame” could be taken as indicating that the first and last letters would respectively be T and S. That, of course, left the difficulty of how to account for HAME and eventually I came up with the right answer.

    1. For the em dash, en dash, and hyphen, see Alec’s comment above.

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

16. A very Mondayish puzzle, with a Mondayish time of 8:16.

    I also teetered on the edge of the precipice at 11 across. The snap reaction to T_A_E_ and “flower” was THAMES, but as I checked again at the end, even though it parsed OK, I became less and less convinced that an obscure meaning of “HAME” would have been an integral part of this puzzle and thought again.

    Long way to the next championship, but a salutary reminder that x+1 minutes all correct, with a proper check of one’s answers, is preferable to x minutes with an avoidable error…

17. A pleasant solve on a snowy train journey down to London this morning. No hold ups, unlike for the train – speed restrictions meant we were 22 minutes late into Euston. Made the Thames mistake like several others.

    I count two hidden answers today (Extra at 2D and Rascal at 13A ) but thought the house rule was that there shouldn’t be more than one?

18. Apologies for having obviously dropped the ball somewhere. Is there a general repository for the collection of nominees for great puzzles and clues for the centenary year? Before it fades from memory I’d like to bank this Saturday’s #25376 and its clue #25a (coat applied to make batting more effective). Prize puzzle so no blog just yet.
    1. Best recollection is that suggestions are going to be collected monthly, though I also keep thinking I should be writing something down, as there is no way I’ll remember all the good clues / puzzles otherwise.
       1. Right – I’ll just note it in diary. Short term memory awful these days.
          1. See linxit’s post on the subject:

             http://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/924409.html

             1. Bookmarked. Thanks Sotira.
    2. Ha, check out 12 down in Sunday’s. Not only a masterpiece, but a slapdown to the blogging community.
       1. Since the setter is well-known in these parts I thought to myself it must surely be more than sheer chance (after I’d stopped laughing, of course). I was / am hoping he might reveal if this was yet another coincidence, or a brilliant riposte to recent blog discussion, though I guess we might have to wait till the prize deadline is passed and the blog is published for an official comment…
19. DNF today after a flying start with only 5 clues left in SW after 16m. Sadly after 36m the same 5 were still laughing at me so the towel went into the ring to avoid further claret being spilt. Thanks for blog which explained the inexplicable – I would not have got the EN reference but now at least forewarned. I’m not sure I’ve come across SP for special either. Finally I would not have thought of that meaning for PIRATE. My one reservation was SLAVISH for laborious but it is a minor doubt. All in all hats off to the setter – ( is that an en or an em?) again!
    1. I thought the same but “laborious” is the 7th (!) definition of “slavish” in Chambers.
20. Mais une autre antelope.
    Maybe there should be a daily prize for the most willful alternative entry…
    Regards.
21. I also left antelope in, forgetting to go back and check it after being lost for several minutes over slavish. Thought I was on for a clear sub-twenty but not this time. My mother took the name Asphodel for the last thirty years or so of her life. Good to meet her in the odd clue.
22. 9 minutes, no real hang-ups and everything made sense, though I was torn between HARD SELL and HARD LINE for a moment, thankfully 8 down resolved that.
23. …had errors. I did consider ‘Thames’, but it just doesn’t fit the cryptic. ‘Titian’s frame’ would more likely be T-N rather than T-S, and there is no way ‘hame’ can be twisted to mean ‘frame’.

    As for those who had ‘antelope’, I’d like to hear the explanation of how it has any point of contact with the clue. Except for ‘elope’, I don’t see it.

    1. It’s easy, if you’ve never heard of TEASEL and never heard of HAME (def: head, in rude yokel dialect far from big London) then it comes down to luck whether you see EASEL first, or whether you see THAMES first.
       Needless to say I chose wrongly; EASEL went straight over my HAME.
       Rob
24. Dashed through in 15 minutes, but I fell for THAMES, having never heard of TEASEL. But I did get ENVELOPE. Small victory.
25. Re blog, 23ac is not M[uddl]E + PUSS backwards it’s M[or]E + PUSS backwards, muddle being the definition.
26. Yet another Thames here, sigh; I hate getting clues wrong. I do think it works perfectly though, if only “hame” had the required meaning, which of course, it turns out, it does not. C’est la vie.
    No other problems except 18dn/26ac took longer than they should have.
    I agree that both Saturday and (especially) Sunday’s crosswords were first rate. I don’t think the use of pants is relevant to our recent discussions about the word.. lead times too long, and it’s being used in a different sense anyway. But it is one of a number of extremely elegant clues. Wonderful surface readings, wonderfully concise cluing..
27. Managed all but one clue in 30 mins. Envelope defeated me.
28. 8:09 for me, slowing badly after a reasonably brisk start. I too was briefly tempted by THAMES, but ruled it out quite quickly; however, I still spent far too long trying to think of a flower (either botanical or fluvial) fitting T‑A‑EN.
29. Day late and a dollar short but I can’t see EN in “short dash”. No doubt a d’oh moment.
30. We were vouchsafed a good limerick last week (the young lady from Louth). Here’s another one.

    When Titian was mixing rose madder
    His model reclined on a ladder
    Her position to Titian
    Suggested coition,
    So he leapt up the ladder and ‘ad her.

    Geoffrey

31. …’claret’ is CRS for blood

    What is the rhyming expression please?

32. Hello. And Bye.

Comments are closed.