Times 25440 – Mamma Mia!

45 comments on “Times 25440 – Mamma Mia!”

1. I couldn’t explain the ‘sledge’ part of ‘sledgehammer’, or any part of ‘sixtieth’, and had some doubts about ‘bookish’. I also had to deduce that there must be a musical called ‘Mamma Mia’ in order to get my last answer.

   However, I did understand 21 down.

   Total time was about 90 minutes or so.

   Edited at 2013-04-04 01:47 am (UTC)

2. 9ac I think is O(ld), VERSE (lines) then ER (‘wERe’ unlimited, i.e. topped and tailed).

   Actually I found most of this quite easy to solve (if not to explain) until I got stuck at 34 minutes with 1ac and 4dn missing. I wasn’t able to solve either of these without resorting to aids and I was discouraged by the fact that neither answer was offered up by the first solver I tried. I think FLASH MOB has come up before and I am certainly aware of the phenomenon, but I’m not sure I have met MCGUFFIN, which btw can also be spelt ‘MacGuffin’. My difficulties finishing off were not helped by spotting that we needed only a J and a Q for a pangram and trying to fit these letters in. Some very nice clues here but I don’t think much of the first half of the one to BUZZER (edit:objection withdrawn following comment from Anon below), nor the wordplay at 25ac.

   Edited at 2013-04-04 07:34 am (UTC)

3. … and thank you!

   Reverse IL (the Italian) + VEIN = tenor (roughly).

4. Sorry to be later than usual, especially when a space was reserved by my learnèd colleague — but I had to see a man about a duck. Still, agree with said colleague that this is a reverse-engineering-type puzzle with nobs on.

   Only got SLEDGEHAMMER by virtue of my alter ego. (Don’t ask.) And, with Jack, thought IAIN was shockingly clued. But there is a lot of fun in this one. No luck at all though with CARE OF and MCGUFFIN right at the end.

   As for SIX,TIETH, the less said the better. Maybe just that TIETH is King-James-style for TIES (couples), rather than TIED as blogged. Still … much respect to UY for this explanation.

   Edited at 2013-04-04 04:32 am (UTC)

5. Similar experience and comments to Jack (25ac is especially weak), although I must say that overall I really enjoyed this puzzle. 1ac was last to fall (‘letter’ always does for me) and gets my COD, though I also liked the clue for EXPOSING.

   Two of Hitchcock’s best known McGuffins are the uranium or whatever it might be in the wine bottles in Claude Raine’s cellar in Notorious and the microfilm in the statuette in North by Northwest. In each instance, the container is shattered to reveal its contents, but in each case the content of the contents is of no importance.

   Regarding bees and their upward mobility, here is what the Straight Dope has to say:

   ‘Bees can fly much higher than they do, so we don’t really know the upper limit. If we go by the altitude at which bees occur, they get into the Himalayas, so we can say that some species will fly in areas that are thousands of feet above mean sea level. If there’s anything that seems to be a limiting factor, it’s temperature. Bees have very high body temperatures (a honeybee drone, for example, has a thoracic temperature of about 125 degrees F while flying), and they can’t sustain themselves long if the temperature is low, as it would be at extremely high altitudes.’

   So, it would seem that, while the jury is out, the setter is innocent of just winging it.

   1. Who mentioned bees? To BUZZ (vt) is to fly low over something or someone in a plane.
      1. So it is. And a very good day to you too, Anonymous.
6. The thing here, which I don’t think has been said, is that the setter is playing with the idiom ‘to crack a nut with a sledgehammer’.
7. 32 min for this challenging puzzle which I really rather liked, though was lucky to put in Iain and McGuffin without understanding the justification.
8. Found this one quite tough. Hadn’t heard of McGuffin and was initially tempted by McMuffin until I realised that I couldn’t get the definition to tally with McDonald’s finest. Spent the last couple of minutes mulling over IAIN – I hadn’t come across this meaning of bootless before. I’m also not sure that I’ve seen that device (i.e. remove a pair of letters from somewhere) used before in the Times – I was busy searching for a word meaning bootless that somehow combined IAIN with IPR or APR or some such.
9. The “transport” bit put me in mind of the chap who thought Avis Van Rental was a Dutch painter.
   1. … and I suppose McText is what one sms when dining in the hamburger joint … Good one, mctext 🙂
   2. And there was me thinking she was the daughter of Hertz van Rental, the well-known Dutch physicist.

      Jim

10. An excellent puzzle with mainly 25A as a detraction – very poor clue IMHO – with 14A not far behind. I’m also not convinced that MBE is “a gift from Palace”

    I think most people start their solving experience by reverse engineering most of the clues which is why they struggle when definitions are well hidden. We surely all do it to some extent no matter how long we’ve been playing the game. And I agree that this puzzle contains several that it is wise to solve that way but I don’t see that as a negative.

    MCGUFFIN has appeared twice recently in Mephisto 2725 blogged 25th November 2012 and Mephisto 2738 blogged 17th Feb 2013

    1. I wondered that too, but I suppose such distinctions are “in the Queen’s gift”.
       I think we can be a hard to please bunch, complaining when it’s too easy and when, as here, it’s a real mental workout.
       1. I rather like tricky well hidden but accurate definitions but this for me is none of those things

          I don’t know a lot about the honours system but I believe that (a) it is an accolade for some level of achievement – ie it has been earned not received as a gift (b) the decision to award is taken by civil servants and politicians not HM (c) HM is acting as a figure head when she (or another member of the family) presents the award and is not part of the decision making process

          1. Come on, Jimbo, you are being excessively pernickety. My old Mum, now dead, God bless her, got an OBE and I still have the certificate signed by Her Maj and stating that the honour had been granted “by the Sovereign’s command”. Of course, we all know that the recipients of these honours (most of them deserving some perhaps less so) are in reality chosen by a bunch of civil servants, but technically it is indeed the Queen who gives them.
    2. Of course it is Jim. Where would you go to collect yours?
11. 36 minutes, so agreeing with the apparent consensus that this was a bit tricky, with a lot of clues solved by guessing then bashing the wordplay into shape with the noble sledgehammer.
    IAIN from the Scottish (pretentious?) spelling version of my own given name, combined with “Doth not Brutus bootless kneel” – the other JC – which is weirdly embedded in my memory and won’t go away.
    Three each of XYZ suggested an extremely ambitious triple pangram, and probably slowed my solving of the last few. Improbably, TIMBERED and MAMMALIA were my last in, possibly because by that time the mental gymnastics required for unbending some wordplay made the relatively easy clues look suspiciously harder than they were. For much the same reason, LANDLORD looked as if it might as well have been the answer, and for some time confounded the western approaches.
    Not many smiles around, though DRUNK… managed to lighten the mood and was possibly the easiest of the bunch.
    I didn’t find the ellipsis at the end of 13 helpful. Should I have done?
    1. Lots of double letters too: EE, FF, MM, NN, OO, SS, ZZ, and in the unchecked columns: AA, II, RR and XX.
12. Failure here after a galloping start, finally careering off-course at McGuffin, tyranny, timbered and mammalia. Excellent puzzle however apart from the “pair” in 25. I have no problem with the old-fashioned couples as tieth, surely what’s meant; a device that comes up now and again that here makes for a nice surface. Whereas the licence taken for the surface in Iain doesn’t really work. While the setter gets away with the almost painfully deliberate “early”, all imho of course. An interesting set of clues. Meanwhile I have to learn to give it a break when the mind-freeze descends, as it seems to do more than it used to, near the end.
13. Thanks yfyap for a great blog filling in the gaps in my understanding of the wordplay (notably MAMMALIA, MCGUFFIN and IAIN).
14. …especially MCGUFFIN, FLASH MOB and MAMMALIA. Would have been 17:29 but for a hasty OVERHEAR – in other words, DNF.
15. Didn’t quite make my half-hour target by about a minute. I enjoyed the puzzle, though admit to “reverse-engineering” a couple of clues. (Luckily, there were not enough letters for what first came to mind in 11.)

    Spent quite a few minutes trying to justify IAIN; took a while to realize that N and V were just a pair of letters.

    Chuckled at “old fashioned couples” and “overseas strip”, though I was slow to see “Mamma Mia”; I thought the musical was something to do with Mame. (Rita Hayworth’s Gilda must have had a lasting effect on an impressionable young lad.)

    A stimulating start to the day.

16. 11:19 on the club timer, so another one where I seem to have been on the wavelength. However I spoiled it for myself by typing MAGUFFIN, in spite of seeing that “host” was MC. Grr.
    BRADSHAW was rather less obscurely clued than the last time it came up, but I remembered it from that occasion so it went straight in from the definition. It’s nice to see that and FLASH MOB in the same puzzle.
    Thanks for the blog, Uncle Yap, particularly for explaining SIXTIETH.
17. Whatever the constitutional niceties, surely honours are given by (hence gifts from) the Palace.

    I liked that IAIN made a showing as ‘Scottish boy’ for once, since the (standard?) ‘Scottish boy = IAN’ trope seems to miss the fact that there’s a specifically Scottish spelling of the name.

    However, it seems unlikely to me that a FLASH MOB would be gathered primarily by phone, rather than by any of various internet-based methods.

    1. What do you think phones are for? You don’t imagine that people still talk on them do you?
       😉
18. 19 minutes but there were a number I could not see wordplay for – IAIN, SIXTIETH. WESSEX and BRADSHAW from wordplay
19. 30 long minutes, quite a lot of it spent staring blankly at the piece of paper, until I said to a colleague how I couldn’t get on with it all, and suddenly things fell into place. Never heard of a MCGUFFIN but the wordplay was clear.
20. 58m here so I found it tough but gettable apart from 25a for which I plumped for IVAN having got the cryptic ‘in vain’ and then removing one of the pair of ‘in’ to get to that well known scot Ivan the McTerrible! I did enjoy the overall challenge however and never seemed to come to a complete halt. I took SLEDGE to be harangue in the oz cricket sense and this clue gets my COD vote.
21. Well, I thought this a BRILLIANT crossword, Witty in the extreme. Would say more but I’m not-talking on my phone today…
22. 15:26 and I only just avoided the Maguffin trap that accounted for Keriothe. Last October EMCEE was one of the clues that did for me in the champs so having actually written MAGUFFIN my MC radar was quick to spot the error and I changed the A to the required C.

    I agree that tieth is just an old verbal variant of couples.

    I had no idea how Iain worked at all.

    COD to Wessex.

    Enjoyable work-out and I’m not averse to plenty of reverse-engineering.

23. 23:59 .. terrific puzzle, just a bit marred for me by IAIN with its unaccountably vague wordplay. I spent ages looking for a better explanation before just throwing it in.

    Interesting that after our discussion t’other day on -ize -ise endings, the spelling of ‘Serializes’ rather signposted an anagram.

    COD .. true to my love of corn, the ‘early’ case of drunkenness made me giggle and gets my vote. I quite liked the ‘-TIETH’ device, too.

24. Such a witty crossword, this. 1ac, 10ac, 11ac, 19dn and others absolutely top-notch. And some of the usual complaints, best forgotten I think. Have another look at the surface and wordplay in 19dn instead.
    Well done, setter.
25. 70 mins, and tripped up by MAGUFFIN despite seeing the MC.
    11ac reminds me of the story of the barrister who said in court, “The defendant was as drunk as a judge”. The judge intervened to say, “Surely the expression is ‘as sober as a judge’. Don’t you mean ‘as drunk as a lord’?” The barrister replied, “Yes, my Lord”.
26. This was a terrific puzzle, I thought. The only blemish IMHO, as many others have also said, was the ridiculously vague wordplay for IAIN. I can’t see why SIXTIETH has aroused so much grumbling. Seems perfectly OK to me. I loved some of the longer clues/solutions – DRUNK AS A LORD, SLEDGEHAMMER and EXTRAVAGANZA. BOOKISH and WESSEX were also very neat. Thank you setter and blogger.
27. Watched the film Hitchcock on a transatlantic flight last week, so M Guffin was fresh in my mind. Solved it all eventually, but I’m in a different (for that read slower) league than all of you. Still, keep on trying…
    1. don’t worry; having only just finished this one (with quite a long break, admittedly), I’m well down there with Fort William and Hinckley

       like most others I loved the wit that was manifest in so many of these clues; it’s just that IAIN – far too vague

       JB

28. 
    Was determined to give it a good go today, after a couple of DNFs earlier this week, and I managed all but one letter: mcduffin.

    A couple went in on def alone (IAIN, SIXTIETH), so thanks for the explanations. Hadn’t thought of the buzz=fly low (planes) definition, either.

    Had mathilda at 20ac for a while, which helped get TIMBERED. But not SLEDGEHAMMER.

29. About 45 minutes, but I confess to not understanding the wordplay at all for MAMMALIA, the ‘sledge’ in SLEDGEHAMEMR, SIXTIETH, and IAIN. My LOI, on the other hand, MCGUFFIN, was from wordplay only. Very tricky but very clever today, with many, perhaps most, of the surfaces being very smooth. Thanks setter and UY, and regards to all.
30. Liked this one, about 35 minutes, had to look up MCMUFFIN and wasn’t sure how IAIN worked but got it done. Couldn’t be bothered to parse EXTRAVAGANZA so thanks for the blog. Jimbo an MBE is within the gift of HM, I don’t see what your beef is here. Hope your golf course is drier than ours.
31. Took a long time to get going with this. In the end I had one missing (Iain) and a wrong guess of McDuffin for McGuffin.
    Some lovely words today (Flash Mob, Sixtieth, Extravaganza, Laissez-Faire) and a remarkable number of X’s and Z’s.
32. 10:51 for me. A delight from start to finish, including 25ac, to which I’ve no objection whatsoever. One of the best puzzles of the year so far. I raise my hat to the setter.
33. The circuits on my computer got fried on Tuesday morning and this is my maiden voyage on the new machine. I’ve just celebrated by belatedly tackling today’s puzzle. I thought I was getting a bit rusty when I found myself struggling but I don’t feel so bad about it now I realise that I wasn’t the only one having problems. I finished OK in 47 minutes. I liked most of these clues – especially GAZA for the “overseas strip” and SLEDGEHAMMER as the “OTT version of a nutcracker”. “Taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut” is a phrase rarely used today and it was nice to see it here. FLASHMOB was my 1st one in. I came across the phenomenon years ago when a friend of mine sang the lead tenor in a BBC Flashmob production set on Paddington Station. You’ll find it by googling “Flashmob – the Opera” Great fun – Commuters in a sing-along-a-Nessun-Dorma! Ann
34. MAGUFFIN as the alternate spelling seems easy to justify – the host at home is often a mother, hence MA/IN. Not the greatest of clues, as the definition seems to overlap with the wordplay anyway. And then using Alfred two clues later…very cheeky.

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