Times 25613: First Prelim, Puzzle 1

49 comments on “Times 25613: First Prelim, Puzzle 1”

1. Well, I made a hash of that – 20:48 with a baffling BALOGNA, despite parsing it while solving. A failing grade, I fear. Mind you, I felt nervous while solving it so heaven knows what I’d be like if I was at the actual Championship (which I do hope to be, one of these days, if only briefly).
2. …with witty wordplay, in contrast to yesterday’s. I didn’t understand all of it, but it was witty! The clues for ‘muscleman’, ‘simulacra’ and ‘abdominal’ are really excellent.

   I, too, was a little bewildered by ‘rap’ = ‘crack’, but the answer is obvious enough.

   1. I think the setter may be thinking of physical ‘blows’, as ‘He gave me a crack/rap on the head’, even if I’d much prefer a rap!
3. 45 minutes confirming that there’d never be any point in me trying to enter the competition, but I knew that anyway!

   Didn’t know SIMULACRA, TREEN or TELLURIUM, so had to rely on wordplay to get those.

   At 11ac I took ‘changed reading’ as the definition.

   Edited at 2013-10-23 12:52 am (UTC)

   1. Yeh I took this as the def. too. But I still don’t understand why ‘reading’ specifically.
      1. Perhaps an allusion to Secretary Clinton’s policy towards Russia, or that sort of thing?
         1. Now I think about it, maybe “reading” isn’t part of the def. Maybe RESET could just be called a reading of “English during break”.

            Long shot but; and I still haven’t convinced myself, if only because an expression such as “reading of” could be superadded to just about any clue!

            Edited at 2013-10-23 04:30 am (UTC)

         2. “Perhaps an allusion to Secretary Clinton’s policy towards Russia, or that sort of thing?”

            Given that there is no reference in the clue to “hopeless naivety” then perhaps not 🙂

   2. I thought the definition was “changed reading of” – a reference to say the clocks this coming weekend
4. I took 11 to refer to resetting the reading to zero on a gas meter, for example.
   1. There’s also this kind of resetting to zero:

      • Electronics cause (a binary device) to enter the state representing the numeral 0.
      (ODO)

      But I doubt that’s intended.

      Edited at 2013-10-23 05:33 am (UTC)

5. 56 minutes, so plenty of time to finish the other two…Good to see ‘my’ dog pop up again at 5d (McT, you seem to have unwanted hieroglyphics there, unless you’re introducing some 1a). Thought 17a was rather clever with both translated and read in the clue – I was looking for an anagram of reprint + ET at one point. Only unknown was TREEn, but I wanted to put ‘short head’ at 3d – a sad commentary on my fondness for the sport of kings.
   1. The caret (which I hope it’s showing as) is to mark the insertion point; like I go on to say.
      1. I see – I’m clearly better at parsing clues…
   2. It is!
      1. …and even more clearly better at parsing clues than reporting the results of said parsing!

         (I was initially looking at an anagram of ‘alien read’. Honest, ref!)

6. Maybe I should hop the pond next year – 12 minutes with no big holdups last in muscleman not quite parsing the wordplay. Very fun puzzle loved the clue for bologna among many others
7. Ulaca,

   That’s how I interpreted it at the time.

8. A high quality puzzle that I really enjoyed solving but would not want to attempt under exam conditions. Feet up and a large black coffee are essentials as far as I’m concerned. 25 minutes to solve with the top proving harder than the bottom.

   10A is interesting because “figure” in 7 letters almost certainly ending “us” can’t be much apart from RHOMBUS so at home I can pencil it in lightly and test the checkers without solving the difficult cryptic. Would I dare do that in a competition? Probably not!

9. I found this the easiest of the three on the day although I don’t think everyone felt the same.

   After a slow start which induced momentary panic I reckon I got through this in 12 or 13 minutes with just rapport missing. I marked a big cross next to it and moved on. when I came back to it about 35 minutes later rapport went straight in. Like Ulaca (again) I took rap and crack to mean biff or sock, as in Batman or Robin punching a henchman.

10. On the day I certainly didn’t find this straightforward, though I can’t give a time (I followed a policy of doing as much as I reasonably could on each puzzle, then leaving gaps and getting stuck into the next, before returning to mop up what was left).

    I had trouble with the NW corner, and if I hadn’t, I might have realised earlier that the first word in 4 down was only a partial anagram (same happened with 5 down). I think the BOLOGNA / MILK STOUT crossover was my last gap, though on reflection it’s hard to see exactly why.

    1. I did the same as you on the day, working from puzzle to puzzle until I finished, finding the middle puzzle the most straightforward and just managing to sort out the NW corner of puzzle 3 with 4 minutes to spare!
11. When walking the attached dog in the woods, I usually whittle away on some twig or another and as a result, I have a largish collection of wooden knives, forks and butter-spreaders. Never knew these were Treen.
    1. Now we know why the dog has that ball in his mouth, so he won’t run off with your whittlings.
12. Took a long time to get going with this one and my first dozen of so entries were all in the right hand side.
    Airedale Terrier and Spinnaker went in from definitions. Couldn’t fully parse either so thanks mctext for the explanations.
    One error – a guess at Mild Stout for Milk Stout.
    Liked Sober and the hidden Uttermost.
    FOI Scram, LOI Rapport.
13. ..will not be used as dailies as they’ve already appeared in Monday’s paper. I believe they will be posted on the Crossword Club Web Site (as well as presumably still being available on the main website – I’ve found Puzzle One, and presumably the others are there somewhere too)

    Edited at 2013-10-23 09:43 am (UTC)

14. 19 mins, which is about the same time as I took to solve GFP1 on Monday. However, as I commented on Monday GFP2 and GFP3 were completely different kettles of fish as far as I was concerned, and although I finished all three without aids my times for the other two puzzles were off the charts. Very humbling.

    Back to this puzzle, there were some good misdirections that I fell for before I got my head around the clues. As has already been mentioned, the partial anagrams in 4dn and 5dn were deceptive, and at 14ac I originally thought “have an effect” was the definition with the anagram fodder being “u+i+*element”. SIMULACRA was my LOI.

15. 18 minutes, without realising this was a competition puzzle until I finally cracked SIMULACRA. I thought this was on a par with the 3rd puzzle in the second set, though on the day I think that one took about 25 minutes.
    The NW was clearly designed to disconcert competitors, as it was by a distance the most forbidding section. Much of the rest went in breezily, though not necessarily properly parsed. SPINNAKER, for example, when the first word in the clue is “Sail” and you have the S and a decent number of letters to follow: that’s a gimme in anyone’s book.
16. A very good puzzle. My experience was much the same as mctext’s (including toying with ABERDEEN TERRIER), though I entered my last two, MUSCLEMAN and RHOMBUS, without fully understanding the clues. I also entered SPNNAKER without full understanding, as I saw ‘wind’ as indicating SPIN, so couldn’t work out where NAKE came from.
    45 minutes.
    1. About 11 or 12 minutes for this on the day. Mild panic briefly set in when I glanced at the clock and saw 17 minutes had passed, because it had felt a lot quicker than that – then I remembered we didn’t actually start until 11:06:30…

       A lot of it in without full parsing, but there weren’t any answers I thought were a bit iffy at the time. Got away with it anyway.

       1. Similar time for me on the day. A good confidence boost to get one out of the way without any questionable answers to require further consideration later.
          1. Nice to meet you on Saturday. The final seems to have been a bit tough!
             1. Likewise. Looks like your time was quick enough to qualify but for those couple of mistakes, so better luck next year.
                1. According to the results table I made three mistakes. I can’t identify the error in the third puzzle but it was the last one I finished and I forgot to check my answers. Not that it made any difference.
17. There are two or three really nice clues in this toughish puzzle, but as one who’ll never get anywhere near the solver-gurus, I have a question: do our esteemed super-sleuths ever really ‘see’ the surface in a clue? Or are they trained so as to go directly to the working parts without such hindrance? After all, it’s only (usually) a ruse.

    Replies please to Mr Jealous.

    1. Hello Mr Jealous. I’m no super-sleuth but I long ago trained myself to ignore the surface reading. I’m looking to form a hypothesis of how the clue is constructed so what is definition, is it an anagram, A inside B and so on. Only when that approach fails do I start looking at things like cryptic definitions where surface reading counts.
    2. Still checking, a month later?
       Not a speed demon – 35 min for this – but I always ensure I read the surface and parse the clue, because for me that’s where the enjoyment of the crossword is: The brilliant surfaces disguising brilliant wordplay; and the time be damned.
       Rob
18. I had the customary panic-ridden start on the day. Couldn’t get anything at all (across or down) until TREEN, and even then I wasn’t convinced it was a real word. My last one in was SCRAM which I couldn’t parse at all and was worried that SCRUM wasn’t a bad fit for “crowd”. Why do some of the easier clues give you the most stress?

    As with others, I flitted from puzzle to puzzle so have no idea how long this one took. All I know, and I’m not showing off or anything, honest, but the whole lot took around 45 minutes, which was good enough to finish in 11th place, thereby winning a place in the final for the first (and possibly last) time ever.

    Mr Jealous – no, I don’t even notice the surface when solving but I often go back after the event to see what was going on. Sometimes I don’t even properly parse the answer – an idea of the answer, a couple of checkers and a bit of wordplay are sometimes enough, although this approach could reasonably be considered a little dangerous and error-prone.

19. A delightful crossword, with flashes of wit, tricky but not over-elaborated constructions, glossy surfaces, no loose ends, and neat misdirections.

    I stared at this for ages, effectively blocked by the two long ones, except that 4dn had to be something-S’KETCH. Then HERETICAL fell and the rest succumbed SE, SW, NE and finally NW. RHOMBUS was so neat, it had me muttering the word and grinning like a maniac, no doubt giving the good commuting folk at Clapham Junction a bit of a turn.

    COD toss-up between the aforementioned RHOMBUS (for making me laugh) and the doggy at 5dn (for making me think). LOI SOBER.

20. About 20 minutes, ending with TREEN, for this entertaining puzzle. I’ve actually never heard nor seen the word TREEN, as far as I can remember, and I had the same reaction to it as 7dpenguin above. The wordplay was so clear, though, that I put it in and then looked it up. The wordplay also gave me SIMULACRA and TELLURIUM, both words I have seen but certainly don’t encounter more than once every few years, I’d guess. Regards.
21. I didn’t notice that this was a Preliminary Round championship puzzle until I came to the blog. (The tiny print in the newspaper edition was too small for my ageing eyes). Therefore, I’m not surprised that I found it tricky, and did not parse all the solutions. The clues ranged from dead easy, like 13a, to real challenges. I was also tempted by ‘scrum’ at 6a but, for once, pondered a little longer and then understood the clue. I knew ‘treen’ from too much exposure to the Antiques Roadshow.
    George Clements
22. This is the one puzzle of the three I managed to complete without any errors. I did it in about 15 minutes, and managed to finish it before moving on to the second except for RHOMBUS, which seemed like the obvious answer but I couldn’t see how it worked. I left it blank and came back at the end, at which point it seemed obvious.
    1. Snap. Sorry I didn’t meet you.
       1. How kind: likewise.
          I haven’t been able to make it to the pub on any of my three championships so far: leaving my wife with four kids for the time it takes me to fail to solve the puzzles seems enough of a liberty, so I scoot off. I’ve met a few people but I’m not quite brazen enough to wander up to a (potentially) complete stranger and say “you have a beard and are carrying a copy of the Times, are you Tim?” Perhaps we should all wear carnations.
          In any event I scuppered any chance of meeting people this year by getting caught in dreadful traffic and almost missing it altogether. And then parking in a car park with a two hour time limit.
23. Last night we saw an episode of Inspector Morse (“Absolute Conviction”) in which
    Morse works out an anagram as part of his investigation. It’s a sidebar in his musings and not part of the puzzle. He works out the name HAROLD MANNERS from the name ROLAND SHERMAN. Now the puzzle title is:

    THE TIMES CROSSWORD PUZZLE NO 18,661 (sic)

    I’ve tried to find it in the archives with no luck. Being in the movie business myself
    methinks the art department had a hand in creating this prop. Any thoughts on this bit of cryptic lore?
    We thought we’d seen all the episodes several times over. Original air date April 2, 1992. Oh yes, about 40 minutes on the qualifier.

    1. At a rough guess (my maths isn’t up to it) that would be somewhere around 1990, and the online archives only appear to go back to 2003. But no doubt there’s a hard copy in the vaults of The Times so you would probably need a kindly editor to dispatch a minion to the catacombs ‘neath Murdoch Towers…

       There’s some Morse crossword lore here: http://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2012/aug/09/top-10-crosswords-fiction-inspector-morse

24. Thanks for the info and the link to some great stuff. Lovely if somebody could find it so we could give it a try. Perhaps Peter could jump in here.
    1. Sotira’s sums sound right. I dohave access to a Times digital archive, but it’s something you’d have to pay for, so I can’t put up the puzzle. If there’s some particular aspect of the puzzle that matters (Rolandand Sherman as answers, for instance, I’m happy to look it up and see if they were in the real puzzle, though my guess is that anything like that would have been rigged up).
       1. Thanks, Peter. Solving the puzzle isn’t important considering all the others available for download. I did point out that the anagram is not part of the puzzle
          rather it’s his working out of a suspect’s name the letters of which had been scrambled into another name. Morse just happened to be working it out on his puzzle.
          I took a still photo of it and would happy to send it along to your other email
          address if it’s not a bother and you’re curious enough. Same goes for you, sotira.
          The more I look at it the more I think it was an art department fudge.

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