Times 25475 – another Thursday Tough one!

Solving time : I started on this one and then a call and a few texts, so I wasn’t completely engaged in it, putting in the last entry at 26:33 on the club timer. I found this a tricky one, and there were several that went in on wordplay alone (including the unlikely-looking 13 down).

A couple of very well concealed or crafty definitions this time around – let’s just say whatever I don’t include in the wordplay is the definition.

Away we go…

Across
1 SCISSOR: (CROSS,IS)* with CARVED as the anagrindicator
5 BEN,ARES: One that went in from wordplay, it’s in India
9 GUNPOWDER: GUN(shoot),POW(enemy captured),DER(“the” German) – that’s quite the charade!
10 IRKED: add the S and H and you would get SHIRKED
11 ARRAS: hidden reversed
12 OPPRESSED: P and PRESS in OED
14 ASIAN ELEPHANTS: (PALESTINE,HAS,AN)*
17 OLIVER(musical),C(chapter),ROM(memory),WELL(not bad)
21 ENTER INTO: (RETENTION)*
23 SUM,ER
24 OINKS: or 0 INK ‘S
25 ASTRODOME: TROD in A,SOME – my brother lives not too far from this – it’s abandoned now
26 SCRUNCH: C(hemistry),RUN in SCH
27 CANONRY: ANON(soon) in CRY(prayer) – cloth being the churchpeople in this case
 
Down
1 SIGN,AL(ly): I think we’ve seen it as an adjective for “remarkable” before
2 IGNORES: SIGNORE with the S moved to the bottom
3 SNOWSCAPE: this is a tricky clue – SNOW is cocaine, then E missing from ESCAPE – and the cards would be Christmas Cards (at least in the northern hemisphere)
4 RADIO BEACON: anagram of DO,AEROBIC with A inside, N
5 BAR: alternating letters in BiAfRa – sovereign being the coin in this case.
6 NOISE: 1 in NOSE(snitch)
7 RAKE,SIN
8 SIDE(arrrogance),DISH(ruin)
13 PAEDODONTIC: (POINT,ODD,ACE) and the first set is one of teeth – needed all the checking letters to sort out the anagram
15 HOWLS DOWN: H(air) then OWL’S DOWN
16 NOSE JOBS: Cryptic definition… though TONE ROWS (with bridges being musical bridges) may also be justified
18 INTONER: one of the best hidden definition clues I’ve seen in a long time – hidden in appoINT ONE Reverend
19 LAMPOON: (v)AMP in LOON
20 GREENY: (ENERGY)*, since jade is a green-ish colour
22 RISEN: more tricky wordplay – I put it in from definition – S(team) in RIEN(ORIENT missing the outside letters)
25 AS,H

62 comments on “Times 25475 – another Thursday Tough one!”

  1. Excellent, if difficlut, puzzle, where I was left scratching my head on my last one in NOSE JOBS, which just about gets my COD ahead of GUNPOWDER. The only clue I thought too contrived was IRKED, which doesn’t quite seem to work, even with an exclamation mark. (Perhaps that is a sign on its own.)
    1. IRKED was OK by me. I have to admit that I didn’t solve it first time through, but I knew exactly what I was looking for as I’ve almost certainly come across something similar in the past.
  2. Bloomin’ ‘eck, the week’s getting tougher. Hate to think what’s up tomorrow.

    All sorts of tricks in this one, including a notable example of the def being central to the clue in 10ac — which doesn’t quite work for me. But then non-terminal* defs never quite do.

    * Terminus ad quem OR terminus a quo.

    The anagram at 13ac had it written all over it. But … what the hell was the word and what the def? Once I had it worked out (ditto for RISEN) I had to utter the possibly-intentional NINA at row #4 of the unches.

    My suspicion is that it is intentional because it’s repeated (backwards) in row #14.

    Our setter obviously scored the door prize at his/her local apiarists’ meeting!

    [Occurs to me that, homophonically, the first could read: FOR (4) + NINA; and the second (backwards again): FOR (4) ONE (1) + NINA.]

    Edited at 2014-03-27 07:13 am (UTC)

    1. I’d have been even more impressed by the NINAs (great spot, by the way) if the second one had read T N O D I W O N!

      Edited at 2014-03-27 09:37 am (UTC)

  3. If anyone’s seeking a rather easier challenge, Shed’s puzzle in the Guardian is very good and generally very “Timesesque”.
  4. Bloomin’ ‘eck? More like bluddy ‘ell!

    I was already running low on gas by the time I tackled this one having taken 45 minutes to get it to print off when it inexplicably failed after Print Preview. The job sat at the head of the queue, jamming it up, and refused all attempts to cancel it in the normal way when commanded to do so. In the end I took advice on-line and eventually cleared it by delving deep into system files, deleting things there and rebooting the computer twice.

    Having eventually got round to solving I thought I would never get started, let alone finished, but I did complete it eventually after 90 long minutes of continuous struggle.

    I appear to have lived my life to date without ever meeting BAR meaning a pound sovereign coin, though the expression ‘half-a-bar’ rings the faintest of bells.

    In my book ‘muffle’ is to do with making less noise whereas ‘howling down’ involves making more, so that clue doesn’t work for me. The second word was obvious but I sweated blood over the first.

    DK the PAEDO-word and the somewhat unfamiliar BENARES, SUNER and CANONRY didn’t help matters.

    All I needed was for this to have been my blogging day and my worst crossword nightmare would have been realised.

    Edited at 2014-03-27 08:04 am (UTC)

    1. No wonder I struggled then!

      Five went in immediately and I was initially hopeful of a finish. Hah! No chance.

      Like janie_l_b, I got BAR and ARRAS from wp but had never heard of either.

      Thanks for the excellent blog glheard. I wouldn’t have understood quite a few of them without your explanations.

      I’m off to the Guardian to lick my wounds. Thanks ulaca.


  5. Too tricky for me, but managed all (in shocking time) except the unknown INTONER and OINKS, the latter of which was impossible, as I had ‘bone mass’ at 16dn, which I thought worked pretty well as a cryptic…

    Knew it was going to be tough when I didn’t know if 5dn was going to be the unknown BAR or ifa until I had a checker or two.

    SUMER and ARRAS from wp, both unknown.

    Had I not been familiar with the Indian town, I may well have scored my first momble: beneros!

    1. Janie, my solve was spoiled by the momble Beneros.

      Incidentally, you seem to be getting much better at this lark very quickly.

  6. The most enjoyable puzzle for some time for me, full of crafty definitions and other deceptions. LOI was intoner, without spotting the container. Pondering the SW corner took me to 32 mins.
    1. It’s a testament to the challening nature of the puzzle and to the excellence of the clue that the setter can give us the ostensibly helpful word “house” and still have us stumbling around as if in the dark.
      1. I was thrown by having had the reversed hidden ARRIS at 11ac. I was under the impression we only had one hidden answer per Times Cryptic so I wasn’t expecting another. Maybe reversed hidden doesn’t count in the same way.
  7. 35 minutes, so a resounding “glad it’s not my turn this week”. One of those where coming back to clues after a break helped, only today I was not assisted in the endeavour by my personal interrupter. Each of the four corners needed such treatment, and NOSE JOB was my last in once I stopped myself obsessing with teeth.
    Not sure muffle works as a def in 15: that would be like saying you quieten the sound of your exhaust (parlez vous Mercan?) by playing drum ‘n’ bass music really loud outside my front door. I can tell you form experience it doesn’t work.
    No other complaints, really, though. I may have invented a memory today of BAR for pound, BENARES was in the deeper recesses though I couldn’t point to it on a map. LAMPOON was slow because I was convinced eccentric was CAM, as it always is when it isn’t card. For me, jade is just GREEN – and I wish I hadn’t just looked up GREENY as it might also provide an ancillary clue to NOSE JOBS.
    Anyone else get 4d before 1d?
    Quality fare throughout, IRKED gets my CoD for being clever.

    Edited at 2014-03-27 09:38 am (UTC)

    1. Agreed on MUFFLES – DROWNS would have been OK. You saved me the trouble of posting (is this paradoxical?)
      And I believe ‘a bar’ in the City is a million
  8. 37m. I didn’t enjoy this at all. In fact I thought it was pretty awful: difficult in all the wrong ways, with too much use of obscurity (bar, snow) left-field definitions (prayer = cry, rake = lech), downright wrong definitions (HOWLS DOWN = ‘muffles’) and one non-word (GREENY).
    At the end I was left with BEN_R_S. If you haven’t heard of the city there’s nothing to stop you putting in BENEROS. If I wanted a general knowledge test I’d join a quiz team, but I prefer cryptic crosswords.
    There was some good stuff of course – I particularly liked the CD at 16dn, for instance – but all in all I wish I hadn’t bothered.
    1. I have a lot of sympathy with your comments but GREENY is a word. It means “a green tinge” – like Jade in fact. It’s also old slang for a £1 note!
      1. I did actually look it up in Chambers before making my comment, but I stand by it. The suffix -y or -ish (or indeed -like) can be added to a whole host of words to denote that they are a bit that way (a recent very successful pop song was very widely described as ‘a bit rapey’, for instance) but I don’t really regard them as words in their own right, whatever the dictionaries say. We had a similar debate recently about something like ‘four-foot’.
          1. And of course, now that I think of it, RAISINY in the championship final a couple of years ago.
    2. How do you define general knowledge? Every week there seem to be references to cricket, bridge, golf, billiards, composers, or obscure slang (‘bar’).
      1. Tricky question! My point is that this clue relies on the knowledge, so that if you don’t possess the knowledge there’s no way to solve it. I don’t mind obscurities: in fact I rather like them because solving the clue from the wordplay alone is quite satisfying but I hate it when that is impossible.
  9. Keriothe has articulated most of my thoughts.

    I particularly object to BANARES which simply isn’t well known enough to be clued in such a manner as to not rule out the equally likely BENEROS. I used Google to sort that out.

    To his list I would add “on the cards” for SNOWSCAPE – it’s too far removed. I used a dictionary to get the completely unknown 13D – thank goodness the anagram fodder was obvious! I recall BAR from my youth – but it’s really rather obscure

    1. Jimbo, It’s BENARES, not Banares, the old British Raj (and for some time afterwards) name for what the Indians themselves now call VARANASI. It’s surely among the best known of all Indian cities, both as the location for Hindu religious ceremonies/rituals on the Ganges and for its famous brassware.

      There were some slightly off-piste definitions, I agree, but for me the only wholly unacceptable one was “muffles” for HOWLS DOWN, which is plain inaccurate. Otherwise a good tough puzzle.

      1. Well known to me too Mike but I think dj and keriothe are right to say that it should have an unambiguous cryptic. On entering ‘howls down’ I too thought that drowns out is not the same as damps down but have just found that Collins defines muffle (inter alia) as ‘to prevent the expression of something by someone’, which seems pretty close to me.
        1. I take your point on BENARES. As far as “muffle” is concerned, the Collins definition (though I guess I have to concede that it gives the setter cover) only confirms me in my view that dictionaries are not always reliable guides on how English is spoken in the real world! For myself, I cannot easily imagine any context in which I might use “howl down” where I would regard “muffle” as an acceptable synonym/alternative. For example: “When Mrs Thatcher tried to speak she was howled down by a mob of angry poll tax protesters” – “When Mrs Thatcher tried to speak she was muffled by a a mob etc …”. I don’t think so. “When Mrs Thatcher tried to speak, some wag turned down the microphone so that her voice was muffled”. Possibly.
          1. Yes, the need to hunt down definitions in dictionaries is best left to various weekend offerings.
            malcj
  10. Got about half of it (after two hours slogging) then ground to complete halt.

    An object lesson in the magnitude of the gulf between the Quickie and the “real thing”. Same rules, same tricks, same conventions – but somehow leagues apart: it’s the difference between village green cricket and an Ashes test. You score a quick ton every time you go to the crease in the former, but struggle to even lay bat on ball in the latter.

    Ah well, keep plugging away…

    Thanks very much to glheard for shedding light into all the dark corners of this puzzle.

    Edited at 2014-03-27 11:04 am (UTC)

    1. Lovely cricket analogy. I know it’ll be a long time before I even attempt to move from the nursery to the Nursery end!
  11. 34min: the unknown 13dn was clear from the etymology (it’s useful to know something about the classical roots of scientific terms),
    I agree the definition of 15dn is simply wrong.
  12. A few quibbles but generally an OK puzzle.

    I knew about Benares because of the mathematical story of The Tower of Bramah (or sometimes Hanoi) as below

    “In the great temple of Benares, beneath the dome that marks the centre of the world, rests a brass plate in which are fixed three diamond needles, each a cubit high and as thick as the body of a bee. On one of these needles, at the creation, God placed 64 discs of pure gold, the largest resting on the brass plate, and the others getting smaller up to the top one.

    This is the Tower of Bramah. Day and night unceasingly the priests transfer the discs from one diamond needle to another according to the fixed and immutable laws of Bramah, which require that the priest on duty must not move more than one disc at a time and that he must place this disc on a needle so that there is no smaller disc below it.

    When the 64 discs have thus been transferred from the needle on which at the creation God placed them to one of the other needles, tower, temple, and Brahmins alike will crumble into dust and with a thunderclap the world will vanish.”

    No panic. Transferring discs at one a second day and night will take some 600 billion years to do this.

    1. Those of a certain age may remember the first Doctor Who doing this in 1966, where the world of the Toymaker was destroyed on the last move. Luckily the Doctor and his assistant made it to the Tardis in time.
  13. Besides howls down for muffles, I don’t think there’s much support for most of the quibbles. Greeny (clued by the informal ‘jade perhaps rather’ to match the target word) is in Oxford, as is snow meaning cocaine – a piece of drug jargon that even I’ve heard of. Cry for prayer is quite common in poetry – as in the Psalm, ‘hear my prayer and let my cry come unto thee’. Lecher for rake seems fine to me, even if I’d rather be called a rake. Bar is so easy that it’s a nice way to pick up new vocab, and, as for Benares, I would be interested to know how many people – like me, being unfamiliar at best with the correct answer – opted for Beneros. Ares, after all, is in the ‘pantheon’, while Eros, as we all know, is the fellow in Piccadilly Circus…
    1. I don’t dispute that all these words are in the dictionaries, but then all the words in a Mephisto are in Chambers.
    2. Well, all those who dont know it was meant to be his twin brother Anteros. There, I fell for it!

      Edited at 2014-03-27 12:29 pm (UTC)

  14. Didn’t enjoy this for similar reasons to keriothe, although BENARES not a problem having been there, but it’s much(?) better known as Varanasi. Would have gone with HOWLS DOWN even though it didn’t really fit with muffles, but unfortunately an AWK flew into my mind so HAWKS DOWN went in instead and my momble count rose to 1.
    1. I was also tempted by AWK but a failed recent attempt to play this in Words With Friends reminded me that the bird is AUK, with AWK only existing as a Unix utility.
      1. Yes – UNIX crops up significantly more often in my life than birds! For some reason, this then dragged up a childhood memory of misspelling Derbyshire as Darbishire in a geography test because I’d been reading a load of the Jennings books.
  15. I don’t think that there’s anything Mephistoish about these words, besides ‘bar’. But then, as I said, it’s clued in a most unMephistoish way, so that almost anyone with a modicum of experience of cryptic crosswords will get it. New word for the day….
    1. I think ‘snow’ is obscure, even though I happened to know it. And when combined with the obliqueness of the definition I think it makes for a clue that is hard in the wrong way.
      I think ‘lecher’ is wrong for ‘rake’. Chambers defines ‘rake’ as ‘a debauched or dissolute person, esp a man of fashion’. That’s what I think a rake is, and to me a lecher is something quite different. Chambers goes on to define the verb ‘to rake’ as ‘to make a practice of lechery’, but this kind of justification by Chambers is archetypally Mephistoish in my book. Same goes for cry/prayer, especially in the context of an unusual word like CANONRY.
      Of course there’s nothing technically wrong with any of this, I just don’t like it.
  16. Stopwatch didn’t turn on properly but I would guesstimate about 25 minutes, finishing with trying to fit the letters I had left into the 13d anagram.

    We have forms here printed on green paper so known as a ‘greeny’ so no problems with that one. OINK (singular and plural) seems to be the setters’ current word of the month.

  17. DNF, unable to see NOSE JOBS or OINKS.

    I was almost mombled by BENEROS, but then remembered BENARES as the name of an Indian restaurant. That’s twice Indian restaurants have aided me recently, having had NAMASTE a couple of weeks ago.

  18. I thought this very difficult – for all the reasons already given. ARRAS was FOI as I’ve been listening to the excellent production of Hamlet on Radio Four every day this week, in which Polonius hides behind one with rather disastrous consequences. Thanks for explaining RISEN – it had to be that, but I completely failed to work out how it worked (seems obvious once you know!).
    1. I knew ARRAS from Borachio hiding behind one in Much Ado About Nothing so evidently it’s a popular Shakespearean theme!

      Edited at 2014-03-27 01:46 pm (UTC)

  19. Didn’t like this one- I echo Keriothe’s comments. I also thought astrodome was a bit obscure for non-americans, 6 or 7 obscure words is far too much. Risen and snowscape are too complex to be enjoyable, but I did like the excellent concealment of intoner.
  20. I liked it, in spite of taking me a long time to DNF. I’m with the anti GREENY crowd, though I guess I would accept it if clued as slang for the currency. All my other quibbles for today have been adequately aired above.
  21. Took 90 mins to do the top half and then got clobbered by the bottom half and reached for the white flag. Can’t say I enjoyed the experience and agree with many of you that this is less than fair as a crossword, e.g. 17ac, does “well” really mean “not bad”?

    Benares must be one of very few cities in the world with three officially recognised names, the others are Varanasi and Kashi; Varanasi, as indicated by someone here, being the most commonly used. I agree that it is rather an obscure place and the setter should at least have indicated it was Indian.

    Ah well, let’s see what tomorrow brings.

    Nairobi Wallah

    1. I think the idea is that if someone is asked how they are and they reply “Not bad”, it pretty much equates to “Well”.
      1. Hi Ulaca,

        Thanks for yours, not sure I can agree with it entirely. I think that “Not bad” is the answer we give when all is not well and we don’t want to lie, and “Well” is the answer we give when all is indeed well. That, at any rate, is how I answer.

        Nairobi Wallah

  22. I read it more literally – not bad = (is) not ill. If you are not bad you’re well. That ‘not bad’ also means ‘fair to middling’ is surely a deliberate misdirection.
  23. Okay, got it, not bad = not ill = well. Yes, I can see it works, just. Thanks

    Nairobi Wallah

  24. You’re too honest! For most people, ‘Not bad’ and ‘Well’ in response to a casual ‘How are you?’ are mere niceties (and thus pretty much synonymous).
  25. Sorry I didn’t explain very well! What I was getting at is that NOT BAD can mean the opposite of bad – ie good, legal, hale, fit, etc – or ‘fair to middling’ – OK, average etc. Glad it made some sense anyway!
  26. I can appreciate that this was a chewy crossword. Unfortunately, it was too indigestible for me. I gave up after an hour with a couple of answers missing and more than a few entered from definition only. I didn’t enjoy this at all, which is unusual for me. I often enjoy crosswords that I am unable to finish but this was a depressing slog. Resorted to aids to get it finished. Ann
  27. I certainly picked the wrong puzzle to attempt in the early evening after an extremely tiring and stressful day. After 40 mins I resorted to aids to get my last two, PAEDODONTIC (so tired by then that I didn’t see the anagram fodder) and NOSE JOBS (very unhelpful checkers for a CD), because I need to go and do other things. I echo Keriothe’s sentiments about the puzzle, and I’m not sure I would have felt any better about it had I attempted it during mid-morning, which has been my usual time for quite a while.
  28. Attempted this on three tube rides across London today, so about 90 minutes to do 25 solutions out of 30. Tried to finish at home, but gave up as a bad job, and even thought ENTER INTO must be wrong. Toyed with RISEN, but couldn’t parse, so it didn’t go in. PAEDODONTIC, OINKS, INTONER and NOSE JOBS just defeated me.

    Agree with mctext’s opening statement and keriothe’s first para. HOWLS DOWN is just wrong.

    Funnily, had no problem with BENARES – I remember playing an Indian peasant starving on the banks of the Ganges in a dreadfully socially-conscious (and dreadful) improvised playlet during my student days … So the late 60s were useful for something after all …

  29. About 45 minutes for a puzzle that was not easy. I thought NOSE JOBS was clever. As an American, ASTRODOME was a write-in, and I just assumed that HOWLS DOWN was a UK-ism. I ended with the very tricky CANONRY/GREENY pair, thinking that upon coming here I’d find that the GREENY was another British marble. And yes, I got RADIO BEACON before SIGNAL. Regards.
  30. 27:06 for me, with the last 7 minutes or so spent on PAEDODONTIC and GREENY – particularly the latter (I keep forgetting that “wasted” can herald an anagram).

    No complaints though. BENARES was an easy win for me: but then you’d have to be extraordinarily ignorant not to have heard of it if you were my age, and (as a comparative oldie) I feel I need something to balance the new stuff that comes up now and then. (I remember in a Championship final, back in the 1970s or early 1980s, having to choose between NARES and NEROS for the name of a matinee idol. Luckily I picked the right one, but the old hands were all quite familiar with him.)

    One of the definitions of “muffle” in my 1986 Collins is “to prevent (the expression of something) by (someone)” which I think covers HOWLS DOWN quite nicely.

    All in all, an interesting and enjoyable puzzle.

  31. First one to beat me for about 6 weeks. Beneros here as well. I had some of the same concerns going through this as others (e.g. howls down) but very few of the quibbles, if any, marred the solving experience and I thought 3dn was just fine. I didn’t like 16 – that’s barely a clue, but thought 24 was brilliant. No point complaining about Benares as GK – most clues in every puzzle have some GK knowledge requirement; just because you don’t know it isn’t a reason to complain.
  32. Happy to complete this difficult challenge successfully, even if slowly.
    I’m glad that others found the Guardian puzzle a relief today: not me, I got two wrong in that one.
    Good night all.

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