Times 25477

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
This one took me over the hour for the third consecutive day. I was tired after a long evening at the theatre which didn’t help. Live Journal is playing up again so I’m going to write a bare-bones blog in the hope of being able to post it. If successful I may come back later in the day and add to it. There’s still a problem adding and viewing comments so I may be in for a lonely day here.

* = anagram


Across
1 PILGRIM – LIP reversed, GRIM. A reference to Bunyan’s ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’.
5 PASTEUR – PAST,EU,R. The scientist Louis Pasteur.
9 WOW FACTOR – WOW, F,ACTOR
10 ALARM – A,L,ARM
11 ABSOLUTE PITCH – Often known as perfect pitch, it’s the ability to recognise or produce a note without reference to another source.
13 VISIGOTH – VISI(GO)T,H
15 NORDIC – NOR,DICe. Didn’t know or had forgotten that bones can be dice.
17 RIBALD – Royal Institute of British Architects,L,Drawing
19 CLERICAL – Office work is termed ‘clerical’ separately from the meanings associated with church.
22 THERMONUCLEAR – (REMOTE LAUNCH)* + waR
25 WEIRD – I inside DREW reversed
26 UNCERTAIN – (TUNA NICER)*
27 ROYALTY – YALTa inside ROY. It was a conference at the end of WWII.
28 PAYSLIP – YAP reversed, SLIP

Down
1 PAWL – PAW,L (as opposed to R for right). Didn’t know this word for a lever.
2 LOW MASS – Cryptic definition.
3 REAMS – Sounds like ‘Reims’ the famous cathedral.
4 MUTILATE – I,L inside MUTATE
5 PIRATE – I inside PRATE
6 SHAMPOOER – S, then OO (glasses) inside HAMPER
7 EXACTED – ETC, AXE all reversed, Damage
8 RAMSHACKLE – RAM,SHACKLE
12 IVORY TOWER
14 GOLD MEDAL – hoG,OLD, then Died inside MEAL
16 BLACKCAP – A bird and the item that used to be worn by judges as they pronounced the death penalty.
18 BREVITY – BR, lEVITY with reference to the saying that it is “the soul of wit”. Said by Polonius in Hamlet, apparently.
20 CURTAIL – L replaces the N of ‘curtain’.
21 INJURY – IN,JURY
23 EARLY – EARL-Y
24 SNAP – As in brandy snap, the sickly Christmas ‘treat’.

44 comments on “Times 25477”

  1. Left at the end with the 10ac and 7dn pair. Tried like mad to get ABEAM into the former because I couldn’t see the def! Still not sure why “acoustic effect” is WOW at 9ac. And … can we do without “glasses” = OO (6dn)?

    LJ is only just back up and working properly where I am. That’s over 24 hours of dodgy or nil service.

    1. I know ‘wow’ from the phrase ‘wow and flutter’ – some kind of amplified distortion is about as technical as I get on that.

      Edited at 2013-05-17 01:51 am (UTC)

      2. Wow is an effect you can make on an electric guitar with a ‘wow pedal’ – listen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLb7SwnLhLI

        It’s also a slow, regular fluctuation in pitch which can occur e.g. on an old low grade 33 rpm record player when the speed is not constant. As opposed to flutter which is a rapid variation.

        1. I grew up with a hi-fi buff father, which I know is where I got ‘wow and flutter’ from. Never knew what it meant. I just thought it sounded funny (as, of course, did woofers and tweeters).
        2. And not so low-grade ones too! In 1977, when the average weekly wage was about £70, I paid £121 for the best turntable I could afford, and another £22 for the cartridge; the whole system came to £327.

          I was listening to a disc recently when my son, who is blessed with perfect pitch (though he reckons it can sometimes be a curse) and works in a recording studio, gave me his assessment. It was, he said, still a very good system BUT ….. and here he pointed out the slight variations in pitch that my ear is not sensitive enough to detect.

          I quoted Charles Ives’s father: “Don’t listen to the noise, you’ll miss the music’; a point of view to which my son, uneasy as he is about singers who use pitch-correction software, was most sympathetic.

        3. Well fancy that. I’ve never in my life heard a wah-wah pedal called a wow pedal. And I’ve got one. It’s not as good as my old one, which was nicked from the Old Fire Station in Oxford after a gig in 1994.
          1. After some research:
            In the hi-fi world, wow is:
            “slow pitch fluctuation in sound reproduction, perceptible in long notes”.
            In the guitar world, WoW is a brand of wah-wah, inter alia.
            I have a wah effect on my bank of Boss pedals too, but don’t recognise the brand Pip mentions. (It sounds like a herd of buffalo breaking wind.)

            Edited at 2013-05-18 06:09 am (UTC)

  2. 20:27 … on the right wavelength for what felt like another quite tricky puzzle. Top-left was easy enough but the rest all challenging, especially that top-right corner.

    LOI .. SHAMPOOER .. COD .. THERMONUCLEAR for the surface.

  3. 73 minutes for my favourite puzzle of the week, which managed to combine the quirkiness of a 60s puzzle with the tightness of the modern version. Held up here and there (eg putting ‘air kiss’ at 2 and ‘curtain’ at 20) but not for too long. Like Sotira, the NE was the last to fall. Many fine clues, but ‘pilgrim’ just ahead of ‘alarm’ and ‘Nordic’ for me.
  4. Unusually for me I solved this anti-clockwise from NW through SW, SE and finally NE where all the real trouble lies

    At 5A I failed for ages to lift and separate King and Louis but should have realised that no number like XV on the end was a strong indication.

    Didn’t like CLERICAL much but thoroughly enjoyed the rest for a 25 minute solve

  5. Another treat with which to end the week; spent a very enjoyable 40 minutes on this challenging puzzle.

    Thanks to boyhood days spent with a Meccano set, I know about a ratchet and PAWL.

    I confess to knowing nothing about the VISIGOTHs, apart from what I gleaned from Sellar and Yeatman: the Roman Empire was overrun by waves not only of Ostrogoths, Vizigoths and even Goths, but also of Vandals (who destroyed works of art) and Huns (who destroyed everything and everybody, including Goths, Ostrogoths, Vizigoths and even Vandals).

    1. I confess to knowing nothing about the VISIGOTHs, apart from what I gleaned from Sellar and Yeatman

      —for me, if it’s not in Asterix, I don’t know it.

      1. Asterix and the Goths,I think:
        Legionary 1: Look! Visigoths!
        Legionary 2: Visi Goths? Why the past tense?
  6. 30 minutes, still (I hope) running slow. Worked from the bottom up because CURTAIL was my first in, and stared at a blank top half for ages, partly because I tried to make 15 the clue for VISIGOTH.
    I liked IVORY TOWER, but two clues stood out for their excellent and apposite surfaces: THERMONUCLEAR and PILGRIM, the latter because it’s a practically perfect rendition of the first chapter of Bunyan’s opus. My CoD.
  7. 30 minutes but with a shaky ‘pawn’ as simply didn’t know ‘pawl’, and though one can occasionally intuit unknowns from the surface, not this time. Found the bottom half far easier than the top. First in ‘equal’ for ‘early’ which held things up. Have joined a poker-playing group and find the tendency to jump in on a hunch keeps wrecking an otherwise fairly sound strategy. Maybe the pastimes can help each other and save me time and money.
  9. 25m for this. It felt like a bit of a slog. Lots of unknowns, and I was unsure about PAWL. The wordplay was clear but it just didn’t look like a word.
    Still, nothing like yesterday’s, which took me nearly an hour and a half: the hardest I can remember. Sometimes you’re on the wavelength: yesterday I seem to have been on a different planet. And in the end it was a DNF, because I’ve never heard of Dr Kildare. Made me feel like a complete beginner.
  10. I loved this crossword. I struggled with almost every clue. Each time I was left thinking “This must be something obscure or impossible to parse”. Then time and again the answer surfaced and the fog cleared. Very clever to create such hard misleading clues but with such clear correct answers (one found). This is probably my favourite puzzle of the last few months that I have spent doing the Times – and I am very proud of my 43 minutes. – Napasai (By the way – can someone tell me how to get an identity on this rather than being anonymous?)
    1. Use the “create an account” shortcut at the top left – it’s free to become a member.
  11. I can’t understand why the answer to 10 ac is ‘ALARM’. I dismissed alarm early in my struggle with this as being the wwrong tense. Surely to be correct, the clue should read ‘worry’ not ‘worrIED’?
    1. I think it’s defined by the “one” in the first part of the clue – expand the crosswordese to “You might be worried if one rings” and it works fine.

      Edited at 2013-05-17 09:24 am (UTC)

  12. Too hard for me today. Five missing (Pawl, Wow Factor, Pirate, Pasteur and Nordic). Thought Ivory Tower/Tooth-puller and Thermonuclear were superb.
  13. Again a struggle for me – only managed to finish NE corner by using aid for suggestions of words to fit checkers. LOI was 19ac, as couldn’t see a valid definition, so thanks to z8b8d8k for explanation.
  14. Brevity my wit would not allow with this tough puzzle, but while I would not eulogize as newbie Napasai (welcome!), I thought this pretty good.

    PILGRIM gets the trip, just, for me, but some other very good clues.

    70 minutes!

    Chris G.

  16. Not as hard as yesterday’s puzzle (which seriously made me wish I hadn’t listened to Thomas99 and co last October!). This one took about 20 minutes with several loud clanging pennies dropping.
  17. I took ages to get anywhere with this, but suddenly made progress in the bottom half, and moved up. The NE corner was the last to be filled, at the end of an hour.
    I missed an opportunity with 1a, thinking immediately of “Pilgrim’s Progress”, but turned my mind to thinking of the pilgrim’s name, which eluded me for a while, and when eventually I thought of Christian I had enough letters to confirm PILGRIM.
    Didn’t like 10 and 19 particularly, and I thought glasses for OO had died a natural and unmourned death.
    Trickiest clue for me was 15.
    1. The use of “OO” to mean spectacles is bad enough in an across clue but would seem entirely without justification in the context of a down clue (unless of course I am missing something).

      SD

      1. Dangerous! We’ll have the down version clued by “red and amber” or some such. Let’s not give our setters too many free ideas
  18. 24 mins. As quite a few of you have said, it was an excellent puzzle.

    At 20dn I fell into the curtain trap initially with a hasty entry, but then I read the clue properly when I couldn’t make 28ac work.

    At 6dn I didn’t mind ‘OO’ for glasses because it’s crosswordland and I’ve seen it enough times.

    The EXACTED/ALARM crossers took me a while to solve, and I was held up at the end by the IVORY TOWER/WEIRD crossers. Without the W from weird I was fixated on the second word of 12dn being TUTOR and 25ac possibly being THIRD as a loosely clued odd ordinal, but obviously being unable to parse the latter. When the penny dropped I could have kicked myself.

    Finally, I have no problems with the REAMS homophone. However, I went to Reims a few years ago to visit the cathedral and I was surprised to hear the locals pronounce it differently. If memory serves they make it sound something like a nasal ‘Rans’.

  19. Agree this puzzle had many eureka! moments. Agree, also, setters should refrain from expecting solvers to know that OO are glasses. ‘Ivory tower’ for me was indicative of the wit and class of this puzzle.

    Enigma

    1. It’s a cricket reference. two ducks, pair of specs.. you won’t get cricket out of the times crossword
  20. 56.34 but sharing Joekobi’s incorrect PAWN guess for 1d. Lots to enjoy despite the difficulties and I always felt I’d finish eventually. My COD to the witty IVORY TOWER but 5a had me wandering down lots of wrong turnings as well. Hats off to setter today. And special thanks to blogger.
  21. I only had a limited time this morning to spend on the crossword. I had to abandon it after 50 minutes with SHAMPOOER still left, in spite of having all the crossing letters. A peculiar word. But a very enjoyable and satisfying puzzle. Ann
  22. Very nice puzzle, about 40 minutes, ending with LOW MASS. Except for PAWL, which I entered in some doubt and had to look up afterwards. Not a pretty word. COD to NORDIC. Regards, and thanks to the setter.
  23. 16 and a bit minutes for another really good challenge. Circumstances allowed me to revisit my far-off youth by solving this one in the back bar of the King’s Arms in Oxford, with an old friend, a paper each, and a pint in front of me (if I was allowed to choose such things I imagine this would probably be my Desert Island Discs solving environment).

    Said friend is a speaker of various languages, including French, and was very sniffy about 3dn, his version of it being pretty much exactly as Andy describes. Luckily, my French is not advanced enough to cause me annoyance.

  24. 12:39 for me. This now seems a bit slow as with hindsight the clues all look quite straightforward (particularly the ones I made heavy weather of!), but I think tiredness was beginning to set in.

    Some splendid clues: I particularly liked 12dn (IVORY TOWER), which I suspect I must have seen before, but at any rate had forgotten about. All in all, most enjoyable.

    I’m finding this quite a tricky week. So far the 1963 puzzle has been much the easiest – though I’m not sure everyone would agree.

  25. Another puzzle I thoroughly enjoyed. Until I put some checking letters in, I really hoped that.5a could be ‘swinger’ in tribute to the cartoon film of ‘The Jungle Book’ and the super song performed, I think, by Louis Prima. Perhaps another time.
  26. Hello,
    Sorry for coming to this so late after the puzzle, but I don’t understand why 5d doesn’t require double usage of the “one.” Is “pirate” an adjective meaning “operating illegally”?
    Thank you
    1. It is. For example a pirate radio station is one that is operating illegally.

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