Times 25,737 – More Science Than Arts!

I enjoyed this puzzle, even down to deriving from wordplay a couple of unknown words. 25 minutes to solve.

There is a wide range of GK today with the sound effects possibly being unknown to many – makes a welcome change from obscure literature – and the tree may not be on everybody’s radar. There’s only one really weak offering and that’s the cryptic definition. I can’t say that this type of clue is improving under the new editor – if anything the reverse is coming to pass

Across
1 FADDIST – F(ADD-IS)T; FT=Financial Times; people with hula hoops in my youth;
5 DEODAR – DE(DO reversed)AR; make=DO; Himalayan cedar much favoured by Indian poets – you knew that, surely!;
8 ADULATORY – A-DUL(l)-A-TORY; OTT hero worship, hence “full of puff”;
9 TIMED – DEMIT reversed; time is “the enemy”;
11 BALLY – B-ALLY; B=book; blooming=mild expletive=BALLY;
12 STONECROP – OR=Ordinary Ranks surrounds NEC inside STOP; Russian dolls clue; NEC=National Exhibition Centre;
13 REDOLENT – RE(DO)LENT; something that brings back memories – booze?;
15 SORREL – SOR(R)E-L; copper-red shade of chestnut horse;
17 ALLOTS – (b)ALLOTS;
19 MAN-EATER – MANE-A-TER(ror); loveless woman;
22 TITCHIEST – T(ITCH-I)EST; current Speaker of the House who may know all about 19A;
23 STIFF – two meanings, the second slang for a corpse;
24 DRUID – D(RUI(n))D; Stonehenge and all that;
25 DESUETUDE – D(E-SUET)UDE; E from (th)E; a legal term for inactivity apparently;
26 TENNER – sounds like Pavarotti; a ten pound note;
27 SOLVENT – SOLVE-NT; solvent abuse is for example glue sniffing;
 
Down
1 FLABBERGASTED – (badger+tb+as+felt-t)*; reaction to first telephone link from UK to Europe 18th March 1890;
2 DOUBLED – DOUBLE-D as in (we)DD(ing);
3 ITALY – hidden (m)I(s)T-(v)A(l)L(e)Y; Naples, where Vesuvius erupted 18th March 1944;
4 THOUSAND – THOU-SAND; 1,000 is 10 cubed;
5 DAYTON – DAY-TON; technological centre in Ohio;
6 ON,THE,NOSE – two obvious meanings;
7 ADMIRER – AD-MIRE-R(otating);
10 DOPPLER,EFFECT – (old pet creep)* surrounds FF; apparent lowering of a sound as a moving object like a train approaches and then passes a stationary listner, named after man who explained the effect – Christian Doppler in 1842;
14 LATCHED,ON – LAT(CH)E-DON; CH=Companion of Honour; what Rudolf Diesel did – he was born 18th March 1858;
16 BAPTISTS – what can one say?;
18 LETTUCE – LE(TT-UC)E; UC from (m)UC(h); what some 1A eat to excess in fad diets;
20 TRIBUTE – TRI(BUT)E(s); today to the Tolpuddle Martyrs sentenced in Dorchester 18th March 1834;
21 FENDER – F-ENDER; F=following;
23 SWELL – S(un)-WELL; US reaction to founding of American Express 18th March 1850;

45 comments on “Times 25,737 – More Science Than Arts!”

  1. Two x BALLY on the same day! See 11ac in the Quickie.

    I think 16dn is BAPTISTS, btw.

    I found this tough but chipped away at it and nearly solved and parsed within the hour. But at 50 minutes with DES?E?UDE worked out at 25ac I gave up and resorted to aids as I knew I didn’t know the word. I was trying for a word meaning ‘fat’ to fit S?E? but ‘suet’ never occurred to me.

    I gather you care much for 16dn, Jim, and I tend to agree with you as there’s no alternative way into it.

    Edited at 2014-03-18 08:23 am (UTC)

      1. You’re welcome. Unfortunately I can’t now correct my last sentence which omits the word “didn’t”.
        1. Sorry – I also can’t correct my comment to add that I think cryptic definitions need to be very good or simply not appear. Most are weak and this one is weaker than most!
      1. 4’15” would be a decent time today! But of course you’ve got a head start….
        1. Indeed. I could have done two of yesterday’s in the time it took me to do today’s. As it turned out knowing ‘bally’ would be in there didn’t help at all, because I only noticed it after I’d got that answer.
            1. I just about remember Ian Wallace from My Music. The lyrics include the phrase ‘you can dig him in the lunch if he resists’. Is that Cockney Rhyming Slang? A new one on me.
              1. Not CRS as far as I know,just descriptive slang like “punch him in the bread-basket”.
  2. 16down. I had baptists as well. “They may be” leads me to think it is referring to people,not an act.
  3. 55 minutes, but my tree was ‘deotar’, which just about works if you read the clue as a command, so I don’t feel too bad about things. Thanks for explaining DOUBLED. I had never heard of DEMIT – in fact, I was wondering where the D came from. Liked ADULATORY best.
    1. I nearly put in DEOTAR, but something made me pause. I suspect I must have come across it before.
  4. 15m for this. I didn’t know the tree, but it was gettable from wordplay. Ditto the plant. I knew the word DESUETUDE from French. It struck me as a very difficult word to get from wordplay.
    1. I think Mephisto solving helps. With checkers in place D?S?E?U?E and a clue hypothesis of (th)E+fat surrounded by man one can immediately try DES?E?U?E which likely gives S?E? as fat so SUET. That than leaves DU?E as man so DUDE more likely than DUKE. Then out with the dictionary!
      1. There’s no doubt that Mephisto solving helps, but I think getting both SUET for “fat” and DUDE for “man” is a tall order. Particularly as there’s an E in there to give you the last bit of “the”, but in the wrong place. Fortunately for me I didn’t have to bother with all that!
  5. Found some of this hard going with a few obvious answers (24ac, 26ac, etc) to help get things going. Left at the end with the DAYTON / DEODAR pair. The latter was very hard to see without knowing the tree and BAOBAB was always lingering in memory. Mind you … the FENDER (ironic?) wasn’t obvious either. Ditto for STONECROP. I hope NEC never turns up again.

    The CD at 16dn should have been, in Jimbo-speak, “kicked into the long grass”.


  6. Oh dear… I hesitated between DEODAR and deotar, and ended up putting neither in as they both seemed so unlikely…

    Also had problems in the SE: put in surge at 23dn, which made DESUETUDE and SOLVENT ungettable. I did think that surge may be wrong,and wondered if a pike was some sort of water feature, but had a mental block preventing me from getting the (now obvious) answer.

    Couldn’t parse DOUBLED, dnk STONECROP, DAYTON, so thanks for those.

  7. An odd experience for me, this puzzle.

    The LH side fell very quickly, but I then got bogged down on the RH side before finally limping over the finishing line in just over an hour. On this occasion I happened to know “desuetude” (meaning “inactive” in the sense of having “fallen into disuse”) and the other potential obscurities, which is always a help. Thanks to Jimbo for parsing STONECROP.

    Overall, an excellent puzzle (I particularly liked TIMED), but I agree that BAPTISTS is feeble.

  8. Thank you very much Jim. I wouldn’t have understood the wordplay for some of these without coming here. Thank you for DEMIT, TON, CH and ENDER; all new to me.

    I got almost nowhere today. I kept getting sucked into the surface meaning and probably should have come back to it later. I console myself with the fact that I had correctly discriminated the definition from wordplay in quite a few even if I hadn’t solved them. I think doing the quickie regularly must be helping.

    I thought THOUSAND was superb. It appealed to the mathematician in me.

    1. Ian, there’s nothing mysterious about ender. It’s one of those words that sort of has to be in the dictionary* (like rager and pampager in a recent puzzle) that’s rooted in another word but that nobody ever uses.

      It just means someone or something that brings something to an end (to a close).

      * it isn’t in my iPod Chambers.

      1. Thanks. I had simply not come across it in that sense before.

        Not in my COD either (unless implicit in one of their senses) but is in the on-line Collins. Only other use of it I’ve come across is East Ender which of course is a different sense entirely.

        I might have had more of a chance if I were able to stop thinking of the proximity sense of closer 😀

        Anyone willing to share any mental tricks to avoid getting sucked into the surface meaning of a clue word intended by the setter?

        1. For me, smooth surface readings are essential for a good crossword, but from a solving point of view I think the key is to ignore the surface and simply look at the clue as a set of words that, in most cases, represent a definition and some wordplay. There are obviously a lot of words that have 2 or more completely different meanings, in trickier cases as different parts of speech too, but some appear more often than others – a good example is shock, as seen in yesterday’s Quick Cryptic, which usually crops up with a surface meaning of surprise(d) or appal(led), but a cryptic reading of hair. It’s not natural to look at a particular word within a sentence and ignore the context of the other words, but that’s what you need to do for parsing (like with many crossword things, experience is key).

          Also, once you’ve got a few answers in the puzzle you’ll have an idea of how crafty the setter is, which can give you an indication of just how misleading the remaining surfaces are likely to be. Dean Mayer, one of the Sunday Times trio (and in the Indy today under his Anax byline), is a master of this, so when I’m solving his puzzles I pretty much know from the off that little will be as it seems.

          The particular case of ENDER, though, is a bit special because, like penfold says, it’s not a word that anyone would use. Must admit I didn’t solve the clue by making the link between closer and ENDER – from checkers and other bits of the wordplay, I figured it must be FE__ER and FENDER then came to mind.

  9. 22 minutes, meeting more success early on and working back to the top, which often takes more time.
    BAPTISTS are in my personal heritage, so it was an instant fill for me, and in response to Jim’s “what can one say?” – in my experience “rather too much”. I agree there’s no way into it if you don’t know, and FANTASTS might even be an alternative filling of the chequers. CACTUSES probably isn’t. To anyone in the circle, “totally immersed” is a key part of the shared language, but wouldn’t have anything like the same resonance for anyone else.
    I was hoping 1ac would have something to do with hawks (“hobby”) and was slightly disappointed when it didn’t. STONECROP I thought was a bird, which shows I’ve forgotten what I learned last time it was in in 25176.
    DEODAR dragged from memory my LOI.
    Thanks for the excellent dateline stuff, Jim.
  10. Odd puzzle. It seemed like a Monday puzzle which had strayed into Tuesday, at least until I started on the RHS, which was trickier. FOI Italy, LOI FENDER. Surface on TITCHIEST quite nice, but nothing really notable. Definition of DOPPLER EFFECT a tad desperate, I thought. Under 20 minutes, which fitted my morning commute into Earls Court quite nicely.
  11. I thought I was in for a quick solve, getting several in the NW immediately, but it spun out to 35 minutes in the end. Like some others I wasn’t keen on the clue for 16. My first thought was BAPTISTS, but I was so unconvinced that I didn’t enter it until the A and T were confirmed.
  12. Lots of words unknown to me today. Some due to poor crossword vocabulary (stonecrop, demit, and like Janie I had deotar), some due to not knowing the slang (bally, titchy).

    Out of curiosity, Jimbo, in your GK totals do you count plants in a separate horticulture category, or as part of botany do they fall under science?

  13. Bad day at the office for me, giving up after 30 mins with the tree, the city, the religious plungers and the suet-holding dude all missing.

    I thought some of the padding was misleading like parking in 12 and something little in 24.

  14. That’s two dnfs in a row for me. Yesterday was a beast and this one had obscure vocabulary. Stuck in disrepute at 25ac as that was the only word I knew with those checkers, knew it couldn’t be right.

    Deodar took me ages and it shouldn’t have: my grandfather was named after the tree!!

    As a Baptist I agree 16d is weak as water, but the Times still comes up with the goods now and again. Last Saturday’s was simply delicious, loved every minute of it.

    Nairobi Wallah

  15. 15:55 with tippex, writing over and not much fun – tending towards the curate’s egg side of crossword solving entertainment.
  16. 21 mins but with “Deotar” at 5ac until I checked my Chambers post-solve and realised immediately what the answer should have been and how it worked. I wasn’t completely sold on “make cut” as an insertion indicator so I should have given it a little more thought. DESUETUDE came up a couple of times in a novel I was reading last week so it was relatively fresh in my memory. I didn’t enjoy this puzzle as much as Jimbo appears to have done.

    Off to do the QC now, and I know what at least one of the answers is going to be ………..

  17. Struggled successfully with most of the puzzle but failed on ‘deodar’, which was unknown to me. I think, like Andy, that it would be difficult to derive the solution from the wordplay without knowing the defined solution. No complaints though, just one up to the setter.
  18. Crept in in just under 30 mins of not much fun. I am sure that DEODAR has come up before but BAPTISTS was very weak. Hum Ho!
    1. desuetude belongs in the mephisto really- I spent half an hour looking at it- guessed the suet bit, but dude as man defeated me. Not a fair clue in my book.
  19. No time to report, solving while on a train on my tiny i-phone screen, with no way to enter any answers (if there is a way, or an app, I don’t know it), so keeping track of checkers in my head. Not recommended at all. When I arrived home I printed it, filled it in, and was missing only 3, but in the end I looked up the tree, so a DNF. If I had guessed it would have been DEOTAR anyway. I did know DESUETUDE, though. Over here ‘dude’ for any male, and sometimes females, is so commonplace as to be almost unavoidable. I didn’t find a problem with BAPTISTS, but I guess they’re commonplace over here too, so it was a write in. Regards to all.
  20. 40m DNF with the usual suspects at 25a, 5a and 10d the main stumbling blocks. Thanks for the blog, Jim and the detailed explanation for 25a. I don’t think I would have got there however long I had looked at it. I suppose I’m surprised to come across words completely new to me in a daily cryptic – must get over that false assumption! I also raised an eyebrow at solve/ explain in 27a as I couldn’t think of a plausible substitution sentence. ‘Explain the crossword’ or ‘solve yourself boy’ didn’t work for me.

    Edited at 2014-03-18 09:10 pm (UTC)

  21. Realised from blog that I can’t spell this and always assumed it began dis…Fortunately the word has fallen into desuetude
  22. 14:18 for me – exactly the same as yesterday. I was heading for a reasonable enough time (nicely under 10 minutes, anyway), but then had another of my brainstorms and got completely stuck on SWELL and SOLVENT, both of which look obvious with hindsight.

    Nice puzzle. And I’ve absolutely no objection to 16dn.

  23. You know, it’s strange how the brain works. Sometimes I can stare at a clue for ages and not get it. Then I go away, have a cup of tea, come back to the puzzle with fresh eyes and still not get it.

    I’m one of today’s DNFs. I felt lazy giving up on this one, but having seen the answers there’s no way I’d have got DEODAR, which I’d never heard of and which I’d have guessed was a character from Star Wars. And DESUETUDE – no chance; it’s one of those words that probably failed to make the shortlist when my memory was discarding unneeded and obscure items. But enough of my blaterations.

    I’m still puzzled by DAYTON. Most Ohioans probably are too, but specifically I don’t see how “ton”=”fashion”.

    Nice to see DOPPLER EFFECT making an appearance. There’s a limerick about Herr Doppler, which I would tell you if (a) it weren’t obscene and (b) I could remember it. The analogue of the Doppler effect for light is redshift, and the redshift of distant galaxies is how Edwin Hubble deduced that the universe is expanding which, extrapolating backwards, leads to the Big Bang.

    Enjoyed FLABBERGASTED, and fascinated to note from our blogger’s comment that we now have a telephone link to Europe. It must be very reassuring for them. Appreciated BALLY too – it’s one of those words that cannot be used convincingly by anyone without five generations of English blood in their veins.

    No particularly entertaining injuries today – the general public seem to lose interest around the mid-week lull. We did, however, have one surprising non-injury. A builder had fallen about 25ft onto the pavement, and his only problem was a cracked mobile phone. Don’t try this at home.

    1. From Shorter Oxford:

      ton M18.
      [ORIGIN French from Latin tonus tone noun.]

      1 The fashion, the vogue; fashionableness, style. M18.

      2 Fashionable people collectively; the fashionable world. Treated as sing. or pl. M18.

      It’s worth remembering as it comes up a lot.

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