Times 25602 – make sure you’re not filled up

Solving time : 17:27, though with one mistake. I went through the complete grid a couple of times looking for the mistake and it took me a while to find it, I had completely misparsed 6 down. I bet I’m not the only one caught by this, which may be the natural sequel to the IDOLS/ICONS kerfluffle I hit last time I blogged a daily puzzle.

Quite a bit of tricky stuff besides, and I had written in quite a few entries from definition alone, but going back through the wordplays for the blog everything seems to be in order.

so here we go…

Across
1 BEMUSES: BEM(British Empire Medal) then the ends of thE setterS with US inside
5 OFFERED: anagram of FEED FOR (Bull is the anagram indicator)
9 UPS: P(rosperity) in US
10 LIVE-IN LOVER: 1,VEIN(mood) in LL (middle of feLLow), then OVER(left)
11 FOODLESS: OODLES in F’S
12 SEABED: DEBATES reversed without the T
15 R,ASH
16 ROADRUNNER: BROAD without the first letter then RUNNER(shoot)
19 SNUB: N in SUB
22 THEBAN: BA in THEN
23 C,IN,EASTE(r)
25 BASMATI RICE: anagram of (ARAB,SEMITIC)
27 (p)LOT
28 EMENDED: MEN in two ED’s
29 GRANTEE: or GRAN TEE
 
Down
1 BLUFFER: double definition
2 MISCONSTRUE: CON(study) in MISS, TRUE
3 SO,LELY
4 SEVASTOPOL: A STOP in LOVES(digs) reversed
5 0,BIT
6 FOLDED UP: OLD in FED UP (and not FILLED UP as I wrote in)
7 REV: double definition
8 DE,RIDER
13 BANANA SPLIT: BANANAS, then PL,IT
14 IDEALISING: I DEAL,I SING
17 LEGAL AID: DIAL A GEL all reversed
18 HA,TABLE
20 BREATHE: very tricky wordplay – B(book), RE(about) then EH(what)TA(some soldiers) reversed
21 GEN,ERA
24 FIND: hidden
26 SEE(d)

47 comments on “Times 25602 – make sure you’re not filled up”

  1. A strange solve going from bottom to top. And surprised to find two cross-references. Also noted the rather odd use of F&S from “female’s” at 11ac; the protracted linkword (to get to) in 21ac; and the expectation that (given the word order) your granny might stand on a tee (26ac)! Somehow unTimesish. Are we going Guardianwards?

    Thanks for the parsing of BREATHE George. Had me wondering.

    14dn was a good laugh though, and 8dn brought to mind the bit of (utterly inaccurate) doggerel that goes:

    D’ya wanna know the creeda
    Jacques Derrida?
    Der ain’t no writer
    And der ain’t no reader eider.

    Edited at 2013-10-10 04:00 am (UTC)

    1. The great thing about the deconstructionists is that you can ignore everything the say – on their own say-so.
      1. I don’t know if I had his permission but I chose to ignore everything Derrida wrote on the basis that I didn’t understand a word of it.
        1. Wow! You read everything Derrida wrote?! I can only claim about 50%. But then we were friends of a sort.

          Ulaca must at least have read a bit from among all “the deconstructionists” (rather than just JD) that says “ignore us” (or words to that effect), or so he claims, and he obviously didn’t ignore that bit.

          1. Actually, I was thinking of Roger Scruton, who argues that if no text really says anything, you can pretty much dismiss the text that tells you that as well.
  2. 23 minutes, with too many going in from the literals to be as satisfying as recent puzzles. Held up a bit by failing to spot the anagram at 25 and failing to spot the hidden at 24 – my last in.

    After a progressive easing in level of difficulty since Saturday’s stinker, I wonder what tomorrow holds.

    Edited at 2013-10-10 02:35 am (UTC)


  3. Took about an hour for this one, finishing with SEVASTOPOL from wp.

    Couldn’t parse BREATHE or BEMUSES (not heard of BEM), so thanks for explaining those two. All others ok. HATABLE looks odd; ‘hateful’ looks better so went in for a while with a ?.

    COD to IDEALISING

  4. 25:09… a steady solve which, like McT’s, went bottom up.

    All present and correct so the Wile E Coyote pic is just in honour of that pesky ROADRUNNER.

    COD .. FOODLESS

    That’s, jackkt, for your tireless work fighting the invasion of the spambots.

  5. A thoroughly enjoyable steady solve with some tricky wordplay that had to wait until the grid was complete. I forgot to note my finishing time but I think it took me around 40 minutes with the perfectly straightforward 5ac as my last one in following a revelatory “Doh!” moment.

    4dn would have been spelt “Sebastopol” in my day but fortunately I already had the V-checker in place before I got to it.

    I seem to be working overtime deleting spam at the moment. One enterprising pest yesterday managed to bypass the “suspicious comment” safety net and tacked the same rubbish onto every blog this month to date.

  6. 18 minutes, feeling slightly unsatisfied at not posting a faster time. The hold-ups were illogical:
    SEABED where I was thrown by not having an S at the end for a word meaning “argues”
    LEGAL AID where I got as far as DIAL A ?E? backwards but couldn’t get past DEB: I needed the cross-reference to force the penny into the slot
    IDEALISING LOI and CoD: I just didn’t get the significance of “claims”. I wondered if the clue concept came from the setter’s personal experience of long hours in the chancel, and whether he had his Tex Ritter defence worked out. Incidentally, finding that link also led me to some delicious parodies – worth a look.
  7. Like jacktt I was saved from Sebastopol by the earlier V and I quite liked this one. I usually solve on iPad but filling in on hard copy reminds me how much easier anagrams are if you can write them down.
    Dogless bigtone53. I really must get to the bottom of working this iPhone
  8. 19m. Average sort of time for an average sort of puzzle, I thought. For the avoidance of doubt this is high praise.
    No unknowns today other than BEM, which I sort of knew but not well enough to put the (fairly obvious) answer in without checkers.
    Does 11ac work? The s in “female’s” seems to be doing double duty as the S in the answer and the shortened “has” in “has got”. Wouldn’t “females have got” be better?
    14dn made me chuckle. The people on the train (about nine of whom were within six inches of me) must have thought me a bit soft.
    1. Not sure: a) past tense ‘got’ seems fine as an insertion indicator; b) Fs as an abbreviation for ‘females’ seems a bit of a stretch.

      Not sure, OTOH, that it’s much of a clue, TBH.

  9. 27 mins and I didn’t find this as straightforward as some of you did, probably because I didn’t see a lot of the definitions quickly.

    I was held up at the end by the crossing FOLDED UP, ROADRUNNER and IDEALISING, my LOI. I also didn’t parse BEMUSES and BREATHE so thanks for that, and thanks to Sotira for the Wile E Coyote picture. Meep meep!

  10. Enjoyed this. It’s true, as one or two others have said, that tricky wordplay is sometimes wasted because the literal is too obvious (e.g. CINEASTE). But some good stuff. I can’t see anything wrong with 11ac (FOODLESS), which I liked. I’ve never before used or met HATABLE, which looks distinctly odd, but the dictionaries give it as an alternative spelling to “hateable”). I was also among those who entered SEBASTOPOL initially, which didn’t help.
  11. 29/32 today with Roadrunner and Idealising missing and a wrong Fallen In at 6dn (no, I couldn’t make the answer fit the wordplay!).
    Thought 18ac Horsewoman was a wonderful clue – and George has missed it out from his write up!!
    The NW corner held me up longest.
  12. 13:34 – took an age to spot that 5a was an anagram and then work out what 6d was. Quite a bit to enjoy in this one.
  13. 9:29 today. Again solved in the newspaper as the Crossword Club Customer services have not responded to my email from yesterday and I am still locked out.

      1. Access restored – seems to have been due to a confusion with changing email addresses and I actually fixed it myself. I will save the fight with Customer Services for another day.
  14. 13:11 so I’m delighted to have gone faster than keriothe, Z8 and Sue although it’s probably just a sign that I’ve peaked too early.

    All done at a steady pace with care taken over 6 where I was tempted by filled up but could’nt quite justify either WP or def.

    Thankfully Sebastopol hadn’t occured to me before I had the V.

    Nice puzzle all told.

  15. yet again brain (finally) successfully got there, then fingers screwed me!

    ref 20D,
    The word was obviously breathe, but I parsed it a completely different way.
    Remembering the old Cagney gangster films, where the gang members – aka soldiers – would be told to “turn up the heat”, i.e. go and use their “heaters” (guns) to shoot someone/something. I rationalised it as an anagram (indicated by ‘about’) of ‘heater’ after the B for book.

    ref the beaut at 14D and z8b8d8k asking the relevance of ‘claims’, it was a (highly successful!) dirty trick by the setter to make me spend ages trying to work out an anagram of ‘claims made’ as soon as I’d got ?d?a???i?? in – e.g. idealacism?????? Kicked myself when I twigged 29A

    1. That would then be an indirect anagram which you’re not going to get in a Times puzzle (at least I certainly hope not).
      1. ta muchly for your response,
        DNK the expression “indirect anagram”.
        Perhaps overly much “lateral thinking” from my many years in mainframe operating system support.
        Just have to hope that when the setters read the blog, as we know they do after the brou ha ha over “cotton picking”, that I’ve not invoked a whirlwind!
        regards, Keef
        1. You could do worse than acquaint yourself with Ximenes Crossword Rules. If you Google that phrase you’ll find them.
          1. Ta muchly for the tip ,
            have had a quick look, and will delve deeper for further edification, because Wiki has in its entry for Ximenes:-

            A good cryptic clue contains three elements:
            * a precise definition
            * a fair subsidiary indication
            * nothing else

            which to my way of thinking means the setters ain’t playing by them rules!!!

            e.g. the ones that had nearly everyone bogged down in yesterday’s SE

            NO-ONE = no precise definition
            BEST ain’t precisely PERFECT (best of a bad bunch = took the lowest acceptable)
            DIVERT ain’t precisely DELIGHT (AMUSE perhaps)

            But, having said that, I do honestly thank you for taking the time to point me to a lesson I obviously need to take on board.

  16. Good testing puzzle after being wind battered through 18 difficult holes. No hold ups, just a steady workman like 25 minute solve. Agreed, with trickier definitions this would have been a bit of a beast.

    As others have said, your heading is wrong George – it’s puzzle 25,602

  17. 42.05, found it tricky. 10’s an unlovely term. 14 a gem. Liked the Derrida lowdown mct. Worth a host of theses.
  18. 20 minutes of steady solving, bottom up like others, didn’t bother to parse BREATHE otherwise happy with them all, and have learnt some more about LELY.
  19. You say something is “left over,” you never say it is just “over” to mean “remaining.”
    Is this a cricket reference again?
    1. Allow me to disagree. I seem to remember from early arithmetic lessons we’d say “five into thirty-two is six and two over” meaning two left. By the way, not totally happy with “bull” as an anagrind.
      1. Well, OK. I did find it defined as REMAINING in the huge dictionary on a stand here in the copy department at The Nation—tho’ you wouldn’t want to replace “over” with “left” in the example given (“That didn’t leave me much over”). The closest sense in the smaller desktop dictionary is that of being in excess. I shouldn’t complain, because I got all the answers and the only (other) thing I had left for the blog to parse for me was “BEM.”
        I agree that “bull” seems a little dodgy.
        I had to join the club here, finally, after the NY Post stopped running the puzzle. (I would never buy the idiotic rag, so had to hope a colleague would or I’d find it in the subway.)
    2. Apparently you do (although I don’t either). Chambers has “left remaining” as a definition for “over”. Collins has “remaining”.
        1. No, I would never say that. I’d say “there were two left over”.
          Actually I’d say “we ate all the cakes. Me? No, I just had one”.
  20. Nice one today, after the grim grind of yesterday, where nothing seemed to flow or parse easily – or maybe I was just tired. I liked the preponderance of tricksy or “lateral” clues over the purely mechanical, and very few were immediately obvious. Well done, setter!

  21. Another late solving session, and another failure to finish within my target half hour, but at least I got it all correct and without aids, though I was also unable to parse ‘breathe’, so thanks for that.
    Very pleased that bigtone has got his dog back, I missed it: presume he/she is microchipped and could be tracked on the iPhone!
    George Clements
  22. re parsing Breathe

    As a tyro, so grateful for all the pointers you are kindly passing my way, I’m not going to say anything, other than – be warned…

    The Setter appears to have (indirectly) entered the debate……

    Times Concise 6218 today (my warm-up before tackling the Cryptic)

    2D source of warmth, gun (6) check chars h?a?e?

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