Times 25728

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Some of this was straightforward and I thought for a while I might be in for an easy ride, but several clues put up quite a lot of resistance and time gradually slipped away from me. In the end I finished with everything parsed in 60 minutes give or take a couple. I note that 3 hours after publication there are only 7 entries on the leader board and 3 of these are over the half-hour, which suggests it’s not exactly a doddle that I made heavy weather of. There are some good surfaces and an even mix of clues I had to solve from wordplay and others where I spotted the answer from the definition and then had to reverse-engineer to understand how they worked. Only Z is needed to complete the pangram so your task this morning is to find a home for it somewhere in the grid…

Note added 09:13: All the while I was editing this in LJ the webpage tab in Firefox showed it continually loading, and now whenever I view the blog to read comments I am getting the same. Am I alone in in this?

* = anagram
“xxx” = sounds like

Across

1 GO DOWNHILL – GO (energy), DOWN (drink, as in ‘down a pint’), H (husband), ILL (having complaint)
6 OFFS – The first letters of Orange Falling From September. I’m not sure I have met ‘off’ as a verb meaning ‘leave’ before, but COED has it.
9 FOUR OCLOCK – OUR OC (officer commanding us) inside FLOCK (Suffolks perhaps, Suffolk being a breed of sheep). Some solvers may have expected to see an apostrophe here but there seems to be a convention not to include it in the enumeration as it would make the answer too obvious.
10 AREA – Hidden
12 PARADE-GROUND – AD (plug) inside PARE (clip), GROUND (earth)
15 OLIVE DRAB – 0 LIVED (there were no survivors), BAR (except for) reversed. US solvers may have an advantage here.
17 SHARP – In music sharps may be considered the opposite of flats
18 IN-LAW – IN (home), LAW (rule)
19 CRESCENDO – (CONCEDES R)* – another music reference
20 MAN IN THE MOON – A NINTH (a fraction) inside MEMO (jogger, as in something that jogs the memory), ON (leg, in cricket)
24 ALLYrALLY (recover)
25 FRAUD SQUAD – FRAU (German woman), DS (detective – sergeant), QUAD (yard)
26 PAYS – PlAYS (drama)
27 TEXT EDITOR – EX TED (former fifties youth) inside TITO (communist dictator, of Yugoslavia), R (resistance)

Down

1 GIFT – GIF (image PC may have – Graphic Interchange Format), T (time)
2 DRUBpaD, RUB (polish)
3 WHO DARES WINS – (WISE WORDS AN Heroism)*, the motto of the SAS
4 HILDAcHILD (little one), A
5 LOCKERBIE – LOCK (embrace), then BI (British Isles) inside ERE (before)
7 FORMULA ONE – (MORE OF AN UnhelpfuL)*, GP = Grand Prix here.
8 STAND UP FOR – STAND (where spectators are), UP FOR (keen to have a go)
11 CRISSCROSSED – C (cape), then SCISSORS* inside RED (brightly coloured). Collins omits the hyphen I would have expected to see; Chambers has without as an alternative.
13 SODIUM LAMP – ODIUM (hatred) inside SLAM (verse competition), P (quiet). The poetry contest is a new one on me.
14 WILLY-NILLY – WILL (boy), then NIL+L (nothing + left) inside YY (two years)
16 RACEHORSE – RACE (people), “hoarse” (sounding rough). Great definition here – ‘hope for better’!
21 MOULT – Alternate letters of aMmO bUlLeTs
22 JUST – S (spades) inside JUT (stick). I’d have thought ‘jut’ meant ‘stick out’ rather than simply ‘stick’.
23 ODER – “odour”. The German river

70 comments on “Times 25728”

  1. Now reading Jack’s comments, I’m delighted to have beeen under the 30. Some good clues here, especially that for IN-LAW which I thought had a great surface. Ditto 25ac.

    The only place I could put a Z is in 26ac, if PHYZ is a word. Is it?

  2. I enjoyed this one a lot, both clues and vocabulary. I’m getting faster on the easy ones, but the harder ones are still holding their own — today’s held for almost 2 hours and I still needed the blog to parse one or two. (Thx, and a hat tip, Jackkt. Nice blog today, and I agree re jut.) I had particular difficulties on the several where the definition indicated plural but the answer was singular or vice versa, but was pleased to know (finaly) Teddy Boys. COD to 7d.

    Now that we’ve had a week with a range of difficulties, my vote is definitely for the harder offerings.

    1. Maybe what’s happening here is: if you can “stick out”, you can also “jut out”, making the two equivalent in this respect.
      1. I figured it was another example of “Crosswords-is-Crosswords”: even if the definition wasn’t exact, it was close enough not to matter.

        And, completely off topic, is your photo reverse printed, or is that really left-handed?

        1. It’s really left-handed. At least the body is. I had it made to go with a right-handed ‘72 Tele Deluxe neck I rather liked. (See pic.)

          Edited at 2014-03-07 04:01 am (UTC)

  3. 38 minutes. Needed the wordplay for both SODIUM LAMP and TEXT EDITOR, which were both only vaguely familiar. Well, I’ve heard of the latter, but wouldn’t know what it was even if I used it every day – which I may. I’d never heard of the Eurovision-style poetry contest. Sort of wish it had stayed that way…

    Edited at 2014-03-07 04:15 am (UTC)

  4. About 45min here, at least 15 of which were spent on GIFT and FOUR O’CLOCK.

    I have never heard of GIF (I have since read the Wiki entry but am still none the wiser) which made 1dn tricky.

    At 9ac I was fooled by the enumeration of O’CLOCK, as I have been many times before – I always forget that one!

    Edited at 2014-03-07 05:42 am (UTC)

  5. 50 minutes but having carelessly invented a ‘PODIUM LAMP’.

    I thought this a good puzzle, with clever anagrams for WHO DARES WINS and CRISSCROSSED and some nicely hidden definitions, e.g. ‘champion’ and ‘hope for better’.

  6. 21 minutes with several enjoyable moments as noted by others. I liked the satellite image (cue to be told it’s not original). Expecting murmurs of approval from Dorset. – they are not that rare after all.

  7. Felt so happy to have it all completed correctly and unaided (in about 90 minutes on and off) …or so I thought until coming here (bit of a pattern here, what with MORECAMBE the other day…). Today my OE was at 13dn where I too had podium lamp (which, according to t’internet, does exist as a thing).

    Thought it a great puzzle, creative and sneaky (loved all the misdirections), and probably just about the right difficulty for me. Thanks both to setter, and Jack for working out the parsings that I failed to see.

    1. I’m very aware of sodium lamps as it’s my council’s policy to replace them when they need repair with another type that emits a bright white light instead of the cosy orange of the old ones. I’ve no objection to this on busy main roads but in sleepy backwaters like the close where I live it’s now like walking onto the floodlit pitch at Wembley Stadium whenever I set foot outside my front door at night time. Totally OTT.
      1. Don’t get me started on those car headlights designed to save you money on LASIK surgery…
      2. Your lucky to have any lights. Our Council turned ours off some time ago as part of cost cutting.
  8. 28m, with at least ten at the end on GIFT and FOUR O’CLOCK. The latter is a downright evil clue, but in a good way. I thought the former rather unfair, because I’m struggling to see how “bent” and GIFT are synonymous. No doubt I’m missing something obvious.
    As Jack says, there’s a good mix in here of “spot the definition” clues and others where you have to construct the answer from wordplay. I only got FOUR O’CLOCK when I eventually figured out that “officer commanding us” was OUROC, for instance.
      1. I don’t think it means quite the same thing, but as both Collins and OED disagree with me I’ll admit defeat!
      1. Fair enough. I only looked in Chambers, which doesn’t support this meaning so I didn’t look further.
        1. My Chambers has ‘natural inclination of the mind’ which I think is nearly there but not quite cut and dried like COED.
          1. Yes, I have the same Chambers! “Natural inclination of mind” is exactly what I think “bent” means. I think a GIFT is something very different.
  9. The Z could go in at 2D – DRUZ, an (as per Chambers) alternative spelling of Druze, the Syrian people who only ever seem to crop up in the news in combination with “militia”.
    1. But then you lose the J – I guess you could try P-JAM to replace it, but that would be a stretch.
      1. I think you’re looking at the wrong clue. You lose a B with mohn2’s adjustment, but there’s another one.
        DRUZ seems a tad obscure to me. I’d change 8dn to STOOD UP FOR and 10ac to ORZO.
          1. Fair point! It’s a permanent feature of my storecupboard, but then I am a bit of a food ponce. Incidentally it was only the spelling of DRUZ that I thought a bit obscure, not the people themselves.
        1. You’re right – I was doing it from memory. I had the PJs wrong too.
  10. Undone by an idiotic typo which invalidated two answers, but otherwise completed in 27 and a bit minutes. Oh, the horrible sinking feeling of not seeing the orange bar where you expect it to be!
    Tough going, agonising over JUST and entering it with a defiant “I can sort of justify it”. The girl was my LOI, (Helga? Hilma? Hylda? Hella?) eventually twigging just after deciding Hilda would have to do how the clue worked. Girl’s name clues eh? Ban ’em? Who’s with me?
    Lots of good stuff here.
    SODIUM LAMP went in (eventually) ignoring the verse bit, as slam=competition was in my sphere of knowledge. Having wised up, I hope never to attend such a competition, an ambition which I think I can easily fulfil.
    FOUR O’CLOCK is apparently not just an arbitrary time, which looks to me like a setter’s cheat, but also a flower, which looks to me like something I wouldn’t know without looking it up.
    CoD to CRESCENDO for unaccustomed accuracy. For everyone else (especially sports commentators): it doesn’t mean the peak of noise. It might not even get there.

    Edited at 2014-03-07 10:08 am (UTC)

  11. A few seconds under 15 mins so I must have been on the setters wavelength, and I thought it was a very enjoyable puzzle. I saw GO DOWNHILL straight away, the checkers from it led me to GIFT and DRUB, and the new checkers then led me to FOUR O’CLOCK, after which the rest of the puzzle just flowed. Funnily enough SHARP was my LOI, an answer that should have been a write-in, but I needed the last checker from CRISSCROSSED before I saw it, and my excuse is that I was expecting something much more devious.

    I thought the clue for MAN IN THE MOON was excellent, as were those for FRAUD SQUAD and TEXT EDITOR.

    Edited at 2014-03-07 03:06 pm (UTC)

  12. So, after dabbling around at the very easy end of the spectrum, a fully fledged Times crossword.

    First class stuff throughout with crafty definitions, clever synonyms and much misdirection. A puzzle worthy of the brand

    Good to see IT usage like GIF appearing. Like others SLAM as poetry was new to me. In a very good collection I thought the anagram at 3D, the misdirection at 8D, and my personal appearance at 27A made these stand out clues.

    Hope I’ve said enough today

    1. And ‘ted’ not even defined as delinquent – definitely your day, Jim. Of course, you can never say too much, but what about a time?
      1. Having retrieved the crossword from the recycling bin and deciphered my scrawled clock readings it comes in at just under 25 minutes
  13. 44 min : finished in NW quadrant, with HILDA LOI, having spent several minutes trying to make something of HELGA. Apart from JUT as above, wasn’t happy about ’embrace’ for ‘lock’ in 5dn, though it’s in Chambers.
    I hadn’t heard of that sort of SLAM either, but the lamps are only too familiar, being right outside my bedroom.
    1. This may be one of those where phrasal proximity prompts the mind better than direct equivalence. “Locked in an embrace” is something of a cliché in popular fiction, and I think that’s how my mind went from one to another at the time. Like that, not strictly Ximenean, of course.
  14. … looks like there’ll be a new puzzle in the Times from Monday, called the Quick Cryptic (perhaps like the Guardian’s Quiptic?) There’s a thread in the General forum on the Crossword Club site. Apologies if everyone already knew this and/or doesn’t care.
    1. Thanks, I didn’t know (still on crosswords so not off topic in my book). I hope this will not be used as an excuse to make the normal Times puzzle hard every day. I like the present variety.
      1. Interesting comment by RR that inevitably, there will be occasions when the Quick Cryptic will be harder than the main Cryptic. I wonder why?
        1. I see that there is a question on the Crossword Club site on whether the new daily Quick Cryptic will be blogged here. Given that the stated intention is to give newcomers to cryptics a lead-in, I would have thought that blogging can only assist them.

          Back in the day, my work colleague and I had to finish the Cryptic (separately) before starting work. Then came sudoku. And killer sudoku, Tredoku and various other things. It ended up being a miracle that anything got done.

  15. Crept in just under the half-hour, with another 15 minutes or so enjoyably parsing the ones that I scribbled in from the definitions. Crosswords like this explain why we do them, so well done setter. So much more fun than the two helpings of gruel earlier in the week.

    Edited at 2014-03-07 11:51 am (UTC)

  16. 45 minutes. A very good puzzle, I thought (I particularly liked 16, 20 and 26). 9 and 16 were my last solves; I was completely misled by “hope for better”.
  17. Around 45 for me too, and a good old Times nut to crack. Re the new puzzle, it sounds like fun. Maybe Times Lite for newbs and very busy people?

    Cheers
    Chris.

  18. Stopwatch on phone not co-operating but I think I spent about 15 enjoyable minutes on this nice crossword.
  19. 18:36 .. top-notch puzzle. Tip of the hat to the setter.

    I liked almost everything in this, but RACEHORSE most of all. Great def.

  20. Well that was rather splendid wasn’t it? 17:30 for me. Like Andy B I got a bit of a leg up by being able to make a start in the NW for a change (GIFT was actually my first in) but had to come back to that area later, finishing, as others did, with Hilda.

    I raised an eyebrow at lock for embrace and like it or not for willy-nilly but otherwise all seemed on the level. The wordplay for a couple (he who dares wins Rodney and crisscrossed) passed me by at the time as they were pretty obvious from def and checkers but overall this was a challenging but fun solve. My favourite clues were man in the moon and moult for the marvellous definitions. Like others I didn’t know what slam had to do with verse.

    Like Ulaca I was expecting Jimbo to be hanging out the flags on account of ted not being alluded to as some kind of yob.

    1. GIFT was my first in, too. It was definitely easier if, like most of the world, you pronounce GIF ‘wrong’. As I recall, the inventor of the GIF rather huffily declared last year that it’s pronounced ‘jif’, giving weight to the notion that inventors are terrible at naming their own creations.
      1. He sounds like a bit of a jit.

        Incidentally, Jack, re LJ I’m not getting the issue you describe but the site isn’t loading properly for me at the moment. I just get rather untidy text, no background, links in the worng places and the only graphics are avatars. It’s a bit pants.

      2. And just when I’d got used to Jif becoming Cif, too (other kitchen cleaning products are available).
  21. After 30 minutes wrestling with this magnificent beast I had three answers entered and was reaching for the white flag. But managed to get on to the setter’s wavelength and finished it in just over 90 minutes. Great fun, a fine crossword, loved the mis-directions, especially “Hope for the better.”

    Happy week-end everyone.

    Nairobi Wallah

  22. similar story to Tuesday for me, wasn’t on the wavelength and really found it hard, but the clueing is excellent. Can’t believe I got done in by the o’clock enumeration- have vowed never to be caught by that again. I also didn’t like the bent/gift and stick/jut synonyms- this crossword is too clever to need obscure/tenuous definitions.
  23. Nothing uniquely insightful to add, just wanted to add my applause to the setter for a really top class puzzle. At the end of an odd week (containing both the easiest puzzle I’ve seen for years, and the most difficult), this was spot on in all respects. Clocked about 15 minutes, but would have been happy tackling this for much longer.
  24. Agree that this was a crossword worthy of the name. Started reasonably well, then got stuck on my last three in the NW, including FOUR O’CLOCK, my COD, and HILDA, where I simply couldn’t see the headless child. Put this down, then came back to it – over the hour mark for me today!

    Excellent surfaces on FORMULA ONE and PAYS. Enjoyed DRUB, once I’d extricated it. TEXT EDITOR one of those intricately-put-together solutions I don’t particularly enjoy, but it was good of its kind. And liked the clever punning surface of FRAUD SQUAD. As with many others, I hadn’t heard of a “slam” in a poetry context, but clue solvable, if unparsed, without that knowledge.

    Well done, setter! More, please.

  25. Very nice puzzle, especially RACEHORSE. About 40 minutes overall, held up by FOUR OCLOCK and the SE corner, with JUST my LOI. I don’t recall TITO having appeared before, he being well down on the setters’ list of favorite Communists, apparently. So welcome (or welcome back) to him, and regards to all.
  26. Like others, thoroughly enjoyed this. Sodium lamps remind me of growing up in London where they made the red buses look green at night – now replaced by something whiter as mentioned above.
  27. I came to this late in the day so all has been said, a fair and interesting puzzle which took me 25 minutes with HELGA instead of HILDA so one wrong.
  28. Totally agree with everything said.
    Nice puzzle, clever clues, enjoyable to do, great satisfaction when completed. Who could ask for more?
  29. DNF after 60min – defeated by FOUR OCLOCK. It’s not that I object to the lack of an apostrophe, but “four o’clock” is not, in my view, a crossword answer. Why not, for example, have “seven apples” as an answer, or “three gallons”? Or is there some peculiar significance to “four o’clock” that makes it noteworthy?

    Lack of the checking C in FOUR OCLOCK was one of the reasons I didn’t get LOCKERBIE, though I should have – it’s one of the few (two, at last count) Scottish towns I can bring to mind. Come to think of it, most of the foreign towns I’ve heard of are usually suffixed with “disaster”. I blame my geography teacher.

    I’m also not convinced by “WILLY NILLY” (although the answer was obvious enough) – is the literal meant to be “like it or not”? Am I missing something obvious?

    I liked 7d, with its misdirection of “GP”. I spent a while trying to recall if “formula man” was a term for a doctor. I’ve heard my colleagues called many things, but not that. Only twigged after the checking “N”. 17ac was also nicely done, I thought, as was 20ac.

    All in all, this was an enjoyable hour which I would otherwise have wasted on patients.

      1. Well, there you go, learn something new every day. I’d only ever heard it used as meaning “at random”.

        Maybe it’s time I tried learning two new things every day.

        1. “Whether desired or not” is the original (and very old) meaning of the term, I believe. The “at random” one is relatively recent. See Hamlet:

          Give me leave. Here lies the water; good: here stands the man; good; if the man go to this water, and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes.

    1. Chambers has FOUR O’CLOCK as a specific entry, in this case a flower. Though of course that’s not what was clued.
  30. 18:01 for me, with far too much time wasted agonising over SODIUM LAMP (“slam” as a verse competition being unknown to me) and JUST (nervous about both “this very minute” and “stick”). All perfectly fair though, but leaving me feeling a bit old. Another very fine puzzle.

    I note that the OED includes the verse competition under the card-games-related definitions of “slam”, whereas Chambers includes it under the bang-related definitions.

    1. Cheer up – you’re only as old as the times you post! I didn’t pick this crossword up until yesterday afternoon. Didn’t really notice the time as the puzzle was so enjoyable (with the exception that I share the nervousness you mention).
  31. hi – i’m not following you LJ at all usually.. 😉
    but i googled for “livejournal page keeps loading” and landed here. so yes, everywhere on LJ, the tabs (only FFox, not IE seems) keep loading, no clue why, since they had this service disruption about 1 week ago ~ but i’ve been able to modify entries and css without any problems. ^^

    Edited at 2014-03-12 12:41 pm (UTC)

  32. Just noticed my last comment came up anonymous. I thought since this was my first comment I’d better let you know who I am.
    1. Hi, Scott, and welcome to Times for the Times. I’d guess that since you have been working on a old puzzle (published in the UK on 7th March 2014) you may have accessed it in an overseas publication (NY Times perhaps) where it was syndicated at a later date.

      Unfortunately there’s very little activity here on old puzzles as we tend to discuss what’s current and then move on usually within 24 hours except for competition puzzles where there is an embargo on discussion until solutions have been published a week later.

      The Times is available by subscription on-line but unfortunately these days it’s quite an expensive business to sign up for it, however access to it would enable you to tackle the puzzle regularly, join in the latest discussions here and hopefully improve your solving skills. There is also now a Quick Cryptic puzzle each day Monday – Friday which is also blogged and discussed on this site. It’s less demanding than the main cryptic but very enjoyable in its own right and can serve as a useful stepping-stone for less practised solvers.

      Best regards

      Edited at 2014-04-13 04:24 am (UTC)

      1. Thank you for taking the time to welcome me to the site and also for your advice, I will certainly look into the suggestions you made. I, for a very long time, have continually tried to improve my solving abilities and have been fairly successful in that I find the average cryptic a bit too easy. In saying that, I have to admit that The Times is in a completely different field of play and believe me when I say that although a bit frustrating they are a breath of fresh air.

        Sincerely, Scott.

  33. I’m ashamed to say that after about an hour of mind numbing cluelessness and two handfuls of my own hair I excused myself from this crossword puzzle with a confused whimper. It seems the more of these bad boys I attempt the worse I get at them. I think I have to concede, I’m out of my league amongst you guys. I can’t wait to start the next one lol.

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