Times 25,821 – Boring

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
The first puzzle I had printed was a Saturday Jumbo in the then London Evening News. I think it was harder than this offering. Even on blogging day I raced through in well under 15 minutes. Rather than look for clue of the day I suggest we nominate simplest of the day for which I offer 20A.

Across
1 FLYCATCHER – FLY-CATCHER; a bird;
6 GASP – G(AS)P; yawn would be more appropriate;
10 JEANS – JEAN’S;
11 REPROBATE – RE-PROBATE;
12 ARMCHAIR,CRITIC – weak cryptic definition;
14 COUPLET – C(O)UPLET; O from O(vid);
15 ROSEATE – RO(SEAT)E; the roseate tern is a bird;
17 ORDERLY – and another weak cryptic definition;
19 PROSAIC – PRO-S(A)IC;
20 PINS,AND,NEEDLES – could this have been any easier?
23 INVENTIVE – IN-VENT-I’VE; what this puzzle isn’t;
24 NEEDY – NE(E-D)Y;
25 ELLA – EL-LA;
26 CHESTERTON – (nother sect)*;
 
Down
1 FIJI – IF reversed-J-I;
2 YEAR-ROUND – YE-(A-R)-ROUND;
3 ALSACE,LORRAINE – AL’S-ACE-LORRAINE; we even have AL=gangster from the chestnut cupboard;
4 CURRANT – sounds like “current”;
5 EMPEROR – RO(REP)ME reversed; reminds me, Henry VIII’s coronation was today in 1509;
7 ADAPT – AD-APT;
8 PRESCIENCE – PRES(C-I)ENCE;
9 CORRESPONDENCE – two obvious meanings;
13 ACCOMPLICE – ALICE surrounds (CC-O-MP);
16 ABASEMENT – A-BASE-MEN-T;
18 YIDDISH – DIY reversed-DISH; Oy Vey!
19 PEEPERS – Jeepers Creepers;
21 NAVAL – sounds like “navel”;
22 CYAN – hidden (fan)CY-A-N(ice);

75 comments on “Times 25,821 – Boring”

  1. I agree Jim, and if I could type faster or more accurately I’d have been under 10 rather than 10.29 for this one. I suppose carelessness might account for getting the wrong half of the soaundalikes CURRANT and NAVAL, but otherwise I can’rt see any traps for the unwary. ACCOMPLICE and ABASEMENT, both matrioshka clues, gave a little pause for thought.
    I’ll try it out on my young apprentice, see what she makes of it.
  2. Yes quick (25 mins), yes easy, but still a couple of dnks: the ROSEATE tern, for one, and the French soldier another.

    Tying in with yesterday’s discussion on girls’ names, I’d give SOD to ELLA.

  3. Over an hour, but I had a feeling I wasn’t performing up to scratch. Confirmed by the comments above.

    Will try harder tomorrow.

  4. Pretty much like yesterday … just wrote ’em in. Until I got to PEEPERS which was LOI and caused a slight pause for thought. But overall it all felt pretty 19ac.

    Thanks to Jack for posting the Quick. Much nicer format than the standard online site. Someone at the Times really ought to look at the Groan’s print versions. Always grey; always fit on one page.

  5. Yes, it was mostly easy, but I’ve spent almost as long looking for my one error as I did solving the puzzle. And I still can’t spot it.

    I found the ROSEATE / ABASEMENT pair distinctly tricky.

      1. No, I’m okay on that one. I’ve checked it so many times I can’t see straight. I’ll have to wait for the solution thingy that highlights one’s errors.
  6. Maybe this is doing double duty as today’s Quickie which seems to have completely vanished as far as the Times crossword site is concerned.

    At 16 minutes with all completed bar 19dn I thought I was headed for a PB but then I came unstuck. Firstly I had to rethink i.e. fully parse, 23ac where I had INVENTION and having corrected that I plumped for PEEWEES at 19dn with some uncertainty. Justifiably as things turned out after reading Jim’s correct answer. Having said that I’m not sure I ever associated ‘peep’ with the sound of a bird, only ‘cheep’. Apparently ‘peeper’ actually was a proper word for a small chicken or pigeon.

    Edited at 2014-06-24 06:49 am (UTC)

  7. + a typo on the club site. I had ‘doublet’ for a while and was given some pause by the couple Z mentions, so can’t in all honesty join in the clue-bashing fun. Not that I’m saying I won’t enjoy it from the sidelines where I must sit on the bench with Slippy G.
  8. Oh, I meant to say, having laboured over the roseate TERN clue, that I recently came across something in my National Trust Guide to the Birds of the Coast that I’ll take with me and treasure. It’s probably common knowledge to those solvers with an ornithological bent but was new to me. Apparently, among wordy birders, the readily confused Common Tern and Arctic Tern are sometimes generically referred to as Comic Terns. Isn’t that brilliant?
    1. Sotira given your ornithological interests you should study the wind farm they are proposing to build off the Jurassic Coast (called Navitus Bay) and its associated motorway-wide trench starting from Barton and going 25 miles inland to join the National Grid. Its likely effect upon bird life and all other aspects of life down here will I suspect appal you. You might decide to join the anti movement.
      1. I’ll read up on it, Jimbo. We have one of the blasted things not far from here. I’m not a fan.
  9. I agree with everyone, including Sotira, as I was slowed down at ROSEATE/ABASEMENT. Whether 20ac is the simplest clue–I’d go for 3d, where ‘gangster’ and enumeration are enough–it’s ugly; the surface is virtually meaningless.Ah, well, tomorrow is another day, and who knows? maybe we’ll even have a Quickie.
  10. 12 mins with the SE taking the most time, and ROSEATE my LOI after ABASEMENT. Not a lot to add, other than to repeat my whinge from last week about the font now being used for the clues in the paper. I’m pretty sure it is taking me longer to read them than it used to.
    1. Don’t forget that (in firefox at least) you can force the page to display in whatever font you want. There are add-ons that will do it on a page by page basis, or if (as I do) you like a particular font then tools/content/fonts/advanced will make it use those fonts on every page
  11. I enjoy the blogs and I enjoy wrestling most days with the cryptic; on a good day, I’ll get about 75% and grind to a halt with a few words previously unheard-of. It is fun, just occasionally, to have one which I can finish – not in 10 or 15 minutes, but just finish. And every time that happens, my pleasure is promptly punctured by the blogger’s snide remarks. And it always seems to be you, Jim. I also live in the area affected by the land aspects of the wind farm and can’t see too much wrong with an environmentally friendly alternative energy project making some contribution towards tackling the global warming problem which caused so much flooding and unhappiness in this part of the world this January. How unsurprising that you add NIMBY-ism to your superciliousness.
    1. I guess it depends what you mean by environmentally friendly.

      UNESCO has made it quite clear that if the wind-farm is built off the Dorset coast then its world heritage status will be removed. UNESCO has done this elsewhere for similar reasons and there is no reason to believe that they are anything but serious.

      The massive cutting that will carry cables from landfall at Barton to the Grid will be a huge scar on our landscape. It will house 18 cables in 6 parallel trenches. It will generate its own electro-magnetic field around itself.

      Thousands of trees will be felled and no trees can be replanted on the cutting. The cables will go through, over or under: 4 International Conservation Sites (ICS); 6 Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI); The New Forest National Park; the rivers Avon and Moors; local roads and footpaths.

      1. By environmentally friendly, I mean a project for generating energy without burning hydrocarbons for the benefit of future generations, albeit at some cost to ourselves. Essential if our grandchildren are to survive
    2. Top stuff – but why not add a handle of some sort so you seem more than a fly-by poster?
      1. Ulaca – happy to. It has taken a while to come up with a sufficiently high-brow handle, but there you go! Together with an appropriately low-brow user pic.

        Edited at 2014-06-24 09:50 am (UTC)

        1. Welcome!! I agree I sometimes find that a little disheartening, especially on the quickie, but I console myself that most of them don’ t speak Russian or French as well as I do!!
        2. Ah, you’ve won over all the cynophilists already. We used to have a lop-eared lion-headed rabbit, which bears at least partial resemblance to your fine fellow.
        3. For a long time I solved about 75% of each puzzle but through perseverance and the aid of this blog I now finish more than I don’t. I’m still not particularly quick – today I got stuck in the SW corner for what seemed like forever. Though I couldn’t say how long I took as it was in stints, it must have been the best part of an hour.

          So welcome aboard and remember that being able to make any sort of headway with this crossword elevates you above most mere mortals!

  12. Finished in 33 same as ulaca :)!! Mind you ulaca did not have a long haired, bearded Z8 sat on the end of the bed answering questions. I used a stream of consciousness/dialogue approach, so Z8 didn’t initiate anything – just responded.

    9 dn was my LOI and YIDDISH my COD a no- brainer for anyone who knows either my ancestry or my football allegiance.

    My father spoke fluent Yiddish along with Hungarian, Slovak, Hebrew, German and English. Comes from being born in Eperes in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1902 and waking up one morning in 1919 to find that you now lived in Presov, in Slovakia without any recourse to removal vans!

    1. The move from Eperes to Presov provides as fine an example of Grimm’s Law as you could wish to find!

      So it’s smart aleckism on both sides of the family…-:)

  13. 8m, so certainly easy-peasy but they do very occasionally come even easier. The bottom half was a bit harder than the top, largely because of the matryoshki.
    I’m not sure if I knew that terns can be ROSEATE or not. It rings a vague bell.
  14. 17.24. I always have to do an extra run-through for invisible typos on these ones – been caught flat-footed too often.

    On another subject – does anyone actually know what is expected to happen with the crosswords and/or the Club after June 30th? From time to time here and on the Forum I see references to some sort of major upheaval coming down the pike, but nothing definite. If the weekly travails of the Quickie are anything to go by things look anything but “roseate”.

    1. >…
      >On another subject – does anyone actually know what is expected
      >to happen with the crosswords and/or the Club after June 30th?

      As I understand it, Olivia, this is when those who are not renewing their subscriptions are finally going to be locked out. I’ve probably benefitted from this more than most, as my subscription theoretically expired on 2 July last year. Since then, I’ve resisted any attempts to persuade me to log in, in case failure would somehow mark my card (I didn’t feel the Quick Cryptic was worth the risk). However, I expect it’ll be forced on me next Tuesday, when (if my hunch is right) they plan to switch over to new software which includes that currently used for the Quick Cryptic. Past experience suggests that I’ll be well out of it.

  15. Nowt wrong wi’ a straightforward puzzle every now and then and I liked many of these clues, for example, I thought ADAPT was neat, as was PROSAIC.

    My experience this morning was similar to Jack’s in that I rattled through it until my last two, 13 and 14, then had a fixation that 14 was an unknown type of boat, a SQUALOT.

    Assuming I’ve parsed the clue correctly, “deficient” doesn’t seem to me a very good anagram indicator in 26; wouldn’t it have been better to miss out “not”?
    “From” could have then indicated the anagram of “another sect”, deficient in “a”.

    “Canny” (in the clue to 1 across) is one of those words I have to be careful with: as you move round the country, it changes meaning from “tight with money” to “decent and good-hearted” to “astute” to “artful and possibly devious”.

    Anyway, I’m off to paddle down river in my squalot.

    1. I think the idea here is to read it, a la Borat, as ‘from another sect – NOT!’, where ‘not’ is the anagram indicator – with an ‘a’ lacking from the anagram fodder.
      1. Thank you, Ulaca. My son lent me the DVD of Borat some time ago with instructions to watch it only if his mother was out of the house. I’ve not yet got round to doing so.
      2. I dimly recall the “… not!” thing being popularised by “Wayne’s World” in the early nineties.
        1. ODE has this:

          informal, humorous Following and emphatically negating a statement: ‘that sounds like quality entertainment—not’
          [late 19th century: popularized by the film Wayne’s World (1992)]

          Which I think is totally excellent.

          1. Ha ha – so it’s nearly old enough that Babraham Lincoln would have understood it.
  16. The easiest for some time. I raced through twelve of the first fifteen clues in six minutes, but then was slowed down by some trickier ones in the lower half. Could there be an easier clue than 20A? Yes. I usually get cryptic clues to multi-word answers pretty quickly, but a careless entry of 3d gave me R_D as the middle word. Took me ages to spot that, pushing my time to 20 minutes. Like some others, 19d gave me pause for thought. PEEPERS occurred to me long before I was convinced it was the right answer
    Difficult to single out the easiest clue. I’d say any of the following would be candidates: 6, 10,24 (unless NEY doesn’t immediately spring to mind) 1, 2,7.
  17. Easy-peasy it may have been (5:11) but lots to enjoy. Our setters must be sitting on their feet a lot lately as PINS AND NEEDLES appeared in the Sunday Telegraph this week too.

    Now back to the one cryptic I am struggling with today (and no I am not going to admit which one!)

    1. >Now back to the one cryptic I am struggling with today (and no I am not going to admit which one!)

      The Sun?

      1. I presume from your comment that that was the cryptic that gave you the most problems today 😉 It certainly wasn’t the one I was referring to.
  18. Anonymous criticism of other posters, especially where so righteous, is very troll-like if not actual trolling, so I was very pleased to see that ‘anonymous’ is in real life, er, someone called ‘paludicolo’. And I can’t see for the life of me why Jimbo shouldn’t call it as he sees it. Good on yer, indeed.

    I too thought it very easy, apart from the two clues mentioned, which were strangely difficult by comparison.

    Still fun though, and this has enabled me to be very proud of my solving time. On this one occasion.

    Cheers all,
    Chris G.

  19. 9:25 with a bit of unravelling required at the end to correct invention to inventive and then work out what 19d was.

    I spent more time looking up matryoshka and Grimm’s law than doing the puzzle. Matryoshka turns out to be a word I didn’t know for an object I’m familiar with, and as for Grimm’s law… well, I’ve heard the name Grimm and I know what a law is, but having read the Wiki entry I still have no idea what Grimm’s law is.

    1. Sorry about that. Ignore all the learned stuff – Grimm’s Law essentially means that you can switch and move letters around to get from a word in one language to a word with the same meaning in another, eg ‘pater’ > ‘father’. Seems to me that’s what’s going on with munk1puzl’s example.
  20. Can someone please enlighten me as to what PEEPERS has to do with the sound of young birds.
      1. Hmm. I didn’t think that works, because in this context a PEEPER is a young bird, and Chambers doesn’t support ‘peep’ as a sound made by a young bird. ODE does though: ‘a feeble, high-pitched sound made by a young bird or mammal’.
        Having said that I find the idea that one would need dictionary support for the notion that ‘peep’ sounds like a young bird utterly absurd!
        1. My 2006 Chambers does support “peep” in the context required, defining it as “to cheep like a chicken”.
          1. Thanks all. I’ve honestly never heard of ‘peep’ as a bird sound. Cheep maybe, but not peep.
            1. Same goes for me, pootle. Incidentally I got the answer to this clue wrong and it wasn’t on a slip of the pen or finger so I can’t agree with those who found the puzzle too easy.
          2. But a chicken is not (necessarily) a young bird. I think this just highlights absurdity I mentioned before!
  21. And Collins says ‘(esp. of small birds) to utter shrill small noises’. At last I know what my father meant when he said ‘and I don’t want to hear a peep out of you ..”.
  22. I still believe that it is fair crossword game if one of the regular dictionaries gives the required definition, even if the others don’t or even if professionals (usually doctors) disagree.
      1. . . . or accountants. Dont get me going on what an audit actually is or what tax avoidance isn’t.
        1. I don’t think you can quite match the vehemence of the reaction when the setters use ‘engineer’ as a synonym for ‘mechanic’!
          1. Of course an engineer isn’t the same as a mechanic – a mechanic has a useful trade, an engineer shovels coal into a steam train’s boiler.
            Dr. Ing. Roberto Molino
  23. Agreed, easy, under 15 minutes, LOI was ARMCHAIR ….. Not much more to say, only that my quickest write-in was JEANS. There were several others, too. As I said, not much more to say. Regards.
  24. Ripped through this with ROSEATE the only one where I needed the wordplay. Nothing wrong with it at all I thought though, a good one for beginners.
  25. A good time for me, but a perfectly fair puzzle, and I do not begrudge beginners and improvers a more straightforward puzzle from time to time. Personally, I would rather see the ‘novice slopes’ reserved for the Quick Cryptic, but perhaps that is also patronising: I certainly don’t mean it to be and I always try to be supportive and encouraging to people I meet who are new to cryptics. After many years, I am no expert, and continue to learn all the time, so I recognise that, in crossword terms, ‘easy’ is a comparative term, and hubris one day is often succeeded by humiliation the next.
  26. A sluggish 7:58 for me, switching between acrosses and downs at exactly the wrong times. A pleasant, Mondayish sort of puzzle.

    I’ve almost certainly said this before, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the occasional easy crossword. I know we now have the Quick Cryptic, but there’s no harm in encouraging those who are in the process of graduating to the real thing. We were all beginners once.

  27. I raced through this one in a mere 50 minutes. Grr.

    I could not for the life of me see “COUPLET” (and didn’t at that stage have ACCOMPLICE). I was convinced that the “lines Ovid originally” was LLO, and that I was looking for a “vessel”. Got there eventually, though. Was going to kick myself, but decided to take it out on the customers instead.

    Regarding Bigtone’s comment on doctors disagreeing – it’s part of the NHS’s emphasis on Patient Choice*. Plus, if two doctors agree then at least one of them is redundant.

    (*this is actually medical shorthand for “be patient; you’ve got no choice.”)

    1. And the excellent thing about doctors disagreeing is we can choose whichever diagnosis sounds better. Or cheaper.

      Talking of which, I have a Navajo friend in Arizona who has just discovered (at rather a significant moment) that his Native American healthcare plan pays for diagnosis of anything but treatment of nothing. Possibly the definition of worse than useless.

  28. After yesterday’s kerfuffle, I’m surprised no one is joining me in thinking the girl is ELLI, the li being in caLIfornia. Editor?
    I agree with most of the above, but can’t give 20 the easy pass- where I came from being on PINS AND NEEDLES meant being antsy, so it took some crossers to fall into place
  29. We bears of very little brain who struggle daily with the Times crossword can do without the smug comments from the likes of dorsetdumbo. Yes, this puzzle was easier than most but he should have the good grace to keep his condescending comments to himself.
    1. Rest assured anon that I shall continue to completely ignore opinions from bears of little brain
  30. A day late again—I think the International Date Line must have been relocated to run through Hill Towers—but I managed to solve the crossword for a second successive day! Raced (well, I say raced but everything is relative) through most of it until the final five, which proved to be a stumbling block; perseverance pays!

    FOI – Fiji; LOI – Abasement

    Martin Hill

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