Times 25,444

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Ouch. Clocked in at 22:59, and really had to work hard at wrestling this one into submission, especially in the bottom half, with 19ac last in, on wordplay only. A wavelength thing, or a puzzle which challenged everyone? We shall see…

Across
1 BANTAMWEIGHT – BAN(=suspension), [Marks in AWE] in TIGHT(=drunk); the boxing weight division between flyweight and featherweight.
8 ANIMISM – AN(article), Singular in I’M x2.
9 IN SHORT – IN SHORTS.
11 RETREAD – double def., the first one being a reconditioned tyre.
12 GORILLA – GO(=travel) RILL(=water) A.
13 FLEET – Large in FEET.
14 LIVERYMAN – LIVER(=organ) + (MANY)*.
16 HANDS DOWN – double def.
19 SWEEP – WE in SEPTEMBER.
21 DUCHAMP – CHA in DUMP; artist possibly most famous for his “Fountain”.
23 RESPECT – PECtoral in REST.
24 GRENADA – [RE:North in GAD] + A.
25 BRIGADE – RIG in BAD + terriblE.
26 DRY-STONE WALL – (WORLD’SNEATLY)*.
 
Down
1 BRISTLE – BRISTOL + E.
2 NAIVEST – New, A1, VEST.
3 ARMADILLO – ARM, [ILL in ADO].
4 WRING – Right in WING.
5 INSURERversioN in 1, SURER.
6 HOODLUM – HOOD(=cowl), LUM(=chimney); the latter being familiar from the Hogmanay expression “Lang may yer lum reek”.
7 HAIR OF THE DOG – (HERGOODFAITH)*.
10 TRAINSPOTTER i.e. TRAINS POTTER. The rise of Harry Potter has meant the disappearance of snooker players as a crossword chestnut.
15 VENERABLE – (REVEALBEN)*; the Venomous Bede, as I always think of him, thanks to Sellar & Yeatman.
17 NUCLEARU.C.L. in NEAR.
18 SEA BASS – [EAch Breakfast in SAS] + Seconds.
19 SESTINA – STINK in SEA; had this been the alternative form “sextain” I would have found it more accessible, from the obvious similarity to “quatrain”. As it was, I needed all the checkers before making an educated guess.
20 EYEBALL – double def.; the orbit is the cavity in the skull in which the eyeball sits. Nice misleading surface, for astronomers, at any rate.
22 PLATO – (O.T., ALP)rev.

43 comments on “Times 25,444”


  1. Not too bad at all today, and managed it in good time (for me), so maybe a ‘wavelength thing’…

    Couldn’t work out RETREAD, so thanks for the heads up on the reconditioned tyre def, or INSURER, but it had to be that.

    Hadn’t come across DUCHAMP or SESTINA (also my last in) before, but worked them out. LUM is one of those words I’ve only ever seen in crossword land.

  2. 25 minutes, so yes, on the tricky side. But also one of those where a brief interruption while struggling with 1ac and the NE corner caused everything to fall rapidly into place.
    GRANADA was technically last in, though already lightly traced on definition. The wordplay needed a serious wrestle.
    TRAINSPOTTER is one of those rare things, an instant chestnut, and just for the fun of it, my CoD.
    BRISTLE was rather clever: even if Bristol as a major port has moved downstream to Avonmouth, it certainly sends nothing out east!
  3. A steady 40 mins solve for me (which equates to an 8-10 mins solver for the likes of Tone Sever – all things are a relative!). So, yes, I think wavelengths may have played a part and I happened to be on this one. Mind you, I went through all the across clues without getting a single one until SWEEP at 19 ac, but thereafter I made steady progress, filling in the bottom half of the puzzle first and working upwards. I liked TRAINSPOTTER and the inventive wordplay of BANTAMWEIGHT.
  4. A couple of “senior moments” such as trying to fit the answer for 7 into the light for 10 (convinced that one of the drinks was tea) and scribbling CRUSH instead of WRING (why did I do that?) turned a straightforward puzzle into a three-quarters-of-an-hour job; my own fault entirely.

    Ah! DUCHAMP; the first conceptual artist, wasn’t he? He exhibited his Fountain in 1917 and the Art World has been taking the p*** ever since.

  5. 20.57 though I didn’t parse retread and Grenada. Managed to get away from atheism as a religious belief which in a sense it is. Enjoyed in retrospect ‘gad’ even if as a somewhat hasty-footed kind of wandering. Also 26, for the clue and the reminder, to an urbanite, of an unsynthetic making.

    Edited at 2013-04-09 09:41 am (UTC)

    1. It seems a little harsh to classify someone who does not believe in gods as having a religious belief. Does one such therefore likely have homeopathic and astrological beliefs, as well?
  6. With this grid the difficulty of the puzzle swings to some extent on 1A. Too easy and one is off to a galloping start. I had to get the key down clues first but once B-N-A was in place the answer became obvious if not the parsing – which I didn’t get until after finishing in 20 minutes. Helped by 7D and 10D being rather easy. An enjoyable puzzle.
  7. A couple of minutes over the half-hour for this one with its major hold-up at 19dn, a word I didn’t know or had forgotten.
  8. Found this to be mainly a lot of write-ins – even the long anagrams resolved themselves without my usual recourse to pencil and paper. Didn’t know of DUCHAMP but the wordplay was clear enough.
  9. Not too hard then … but with Jim on the fact that much hangs on 1ac (and the easier 7dn). That leaves most of the trouble in the SE corner with, as Tim notes, the trickier SESTINA in particular. Enjoyed “parcelled out” as the indicator at 26ac.
  10. 38 minutes, with not much to add to everyone else.

    I slept better last night in case anyone was wondering.

  11. Another fairly straightforward solve in 26 minutes for me, despite the unfamiliarity of SESTINA, which I suppose I ought to have known. A few needed careful study of the wordplay after initial entry. I was never sure of GRENADA until the end, when I worked it out fully.

    I’m not keen on ‘very’ to indicate a superlative (2). ‘Most’ can mean ‘very’ when it’s used in a non-superlative sense (the lawn was most green), but the semantic difference between ‘most green’ and ‘greenest’ is significant.

    An enjoyable puzzle and apart from that quibble I liked a number of clues.

    1. I’m not very keen on that ‘very’ for ‘-est’ device, either, to say very little.
    2. Surely it would be fairer to say that the semantic difference between “most green” and “greenest” can be significant.. because on the other hand, they can be used interchangeably.. which is all that matters?

      Edited at 2013-04-09 02:07 pm (UTC)

      1. I used ‘is’ in the context of the non-superlative use of most, but I take your point that there are other contexts where there isn’t a significant difference, so ‘can be’ would have been more accurate.
        However, that doesn’t alter my point about the clue, where the answer with its -est ending is unquestionably a superlative, which is not accurately, or even roughly indicated by ‘very’.
        1. I get you now – apologies for ever doubting! Regarding your point about ‘most’ meaning ‘very’, while of course agreeing, I would say, though, that since colour adjectives are not straightforwardly gradable, a more apposite example would be ‘The recruit was most green’, where green is used figuratively, rather than ‘The lawn was most green’, for which I struggle to think of a context where someone would actually say it. That said, ‘The lawn was very green’ is certainly possible, perhaps indicating that most does not occupy all the semantic spaces taken by very.
      2. I struggled to understand this before realising – I think – that dyste meant to write ‘semantic difference between “very green” (as in the clue as the literal) and “greenest”‘.

        Ulaca (thinking pretty good today)

        1. Ah, good point; I just responded to the comment. But I think though more awkward, it still works; Eg “It is the naivest thing, to rely on a comment being accurate” or “It is very green, to rely on a comment being accurate”
          1. You’ve kind of highlighted my personal beef with the device: that integral definite article which isn’t accounted for in clues like today’s 2d. It doesn’t feel like real equivalence.
  12. 15 minutes with the NW corner falling last. SESTINA was dragged from the deep recesses of my brain – must have been in another puzzle a long time ago.
  13. A steady all-correct solve today. Enjoyed this one – much more thought required than yesterday. FOI Wring, LOI Sestina. Enjoyed HOTD, D-SW and the Harry Potter reference. Didn’t understand Grenada or Retread so thanks Tim for explaining those.
  14. One or two trickier entries, but all in all straightforward for me. I think I marginally prefer BANTAMWEIGHT to some of the other good clues in a solid Times set, and 27 minutes was my score. Or seven minutes over the score, if that makes sense.

    Thank you for a nice blog, and for a nice puzzle too.

    Chris.

  15. I enjoyed this quite a lot. I don’t really like the boy wizard over snooker either but suppose it’s a sign of the times.
    About half an hour I guess – but the dog put me off.

    P.S. I’m new here. Probably won’t write a lot…

  16. Straightforward 24 mins, but with some time spent wondering about Grenada. I tend to think of gad as equivalent to flit, ie more energetic than a mere wander, but I’m not complaining, no doubt lazy gadding is possible..
  17. 18m, which is a bit quicker than average, so this seems to have been a bit easier than it felt for me.
    I never understood GRENADA, my last in. It turns out “gad” doesn’t mean quite what I thought it meant, so I was never going to see it for “wander”.
    Like Tim, I know “lum” from the expression “lang may yer lum reek”. Unlike Tim I only know the expression from this forum, where it is quoted every time the word “lum” comes up in the crossword.
    Didn’t know SESTINA.
  18. Only in a sense, at a stretch, in a nerdish literal-minded let-me-out-of-the-prison-of-this-clue way.
  19. Just over the hour, foiled by SESTINA. I put in SESTIRA, knowing it had to be wrong, but STIR seemed to relate to fuss.

    I cannot resist quoting Pam Ayres

    I am a dry stone waller
    All day I dry stone wall
    Of all appalling callings
    Dry stone walling’s worst of all.

    Edited at 2013-04-09 02:35 pm (UTC)

    1. I was immediately put in mind of the definition from The Meaning of Liff:

      SKELLOW (adj.)
      Descriptive of the satisfaction experienced when looking at a really good dry-stone wall.

      Possibly not if you’ve been the one building it all day, though.

      Edited at 2013-04-09 02:45 pm (UTC)

      1. I recently did a bit of research into the costs of getting a dry stone wall built as I fancied having a decorative bit in my garden what with it being in Yorkshire and everything.

        I came across a forum / messageboard for dry stone wallers and there was one chap who lowers his fee for walls in places where the view is nice, as he’s more keen to get the commission.

        That rather gave the impression that dry stone walling is far from an appalling calling.

  20. I found this one hard to get into, needing 35 minutes or so, ending with SESTINA, where I wracked my brain to figure out the wordplay. BANTAMWEIGHT is a good clue, COD for me, but it took a while to unravel because the checking letters didn’t all show up early. NAIVEST needed some time to surface, since I think of ‘singlet’ more as an infant’s garment than a vest. Another hold up was due to my faulty memory of DUCHAMP, thinking he spelled it ‘Duchamps’. Welcome to Anonymous above, and the earlier newcomer. Regards to all.
  21. I find the fact that you guys can solve these things completely in 15-30 minutes utterly astonishing. I’ve been doing these now for about ten months, regularly for about four, starting with the Everyman, and if I get 5-10 on a Times crossword I feel like Aristotle.

    Really enjoyed this one, was quite disciplined in not resorting to this blog too quickly! It’s really great for new solvers, so thank you muchly

    1. You’re very welcome, anon. I think everyone here can remember being on the same learning curve, even if it’s more decades ago than we might care to remember…
    2. You have to remember that some of us started solving crosswords very young and have put in a lot of hours since. For instance I started on non-cryptics when I was about 5 and cryptics when I was 6 or 7. And even though I didn’t start solving the Times crossword regularly until I was 18, I’ve been doing it now for over 50 years.
  22. 35 minutes, all except for SESTINA which needed some research as I’d never heard of it and couldn’t be sure RESPECT was correct. Got a Duchamp repro in my study. FoI 7 dn Cod Mr Potter.
  23. 8:55 for me (so melrosemike is pretty much spot on). Apart from failing to get BANTAMWEIGHT first time through, I made short work of the top half, but then slowed badly on the bottom half for no good reason.

    I finished up with SESTINA, which I bunged in and then wasted time trying to work out how on earth “fuss” = STING, before light eventually dawned.

    I was slow to get DUCHAMP as well – I’m still debating whether to go to this show at the Barbican Art Gallery.

  24. Jimbo mentioned getting 1A as being helpful. But this is an altogether a lovely grid with far more first letters than usual available as the solving opens up.
    Geoffrey

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