Times 25872

44 comments on “Times 25872”

1. I have to admit that I gave in after all the crossers didn’t help my tired brain get to contraindicate, and I had to check artic. Otherwise, a steady hour fifteen after a slow start. I found many of the clues well done. Thanks for a good blog.
2. …finishing with ABIDE after the unknown (but clearly parsed) PARTERRE fell. We had SANDWICH COURSE the other day (maybe in the Guardian). The AMMAN clue seemed rather obscure for an English puzzle, and the ‘corrupt’ somewhat redundant, given the state of your average US political party.
3. 28 minutes for all but AMMAN until I eventually looked it up. Couldn’t bring the city to mind and had never heard of Tammany.

   The crossing of two unknowns in PARTERRE and TESTUDO could have caused problems as well, but it was just a matter of trusting the wordplay.

4. I’m with galspray on Tammany; completely unknown. But A•M•N was obvious from the def. So struggled a bit this morning and went off to do the Groan from yesterday (26,344) — which, BTW, has a couple of very neat anagrams. It also has SANDWICH COURSE, clued as “How workers may study an example of sporting links”. This rather throws the two different styles into relief.

   Good to see the curlies in use again Jack.

   Edited at 2014-08-22 05:55 am (UTC)

   1. Yes, I think I shall stick with them in future as I can type them as I go instead of having to strike through deletions once I’ve pasted into LJ.
5. 23.50 today, and beginning to wonder how I’m going to get three of these done in an hour. A much more technical challenge than yesterday’s, elegance often sacrificed to wordplay. I mean, what’s the story in “Cooperative somewhere along the line turning to AI for beef”? Where else would you read “Pluto’s sphere underwent outer space spinning”?
   Having said that, the wordplay did at least work and often had to be trusted for getting more obscure words or blurry definitions. My last one in was CONTRAINDICATE, and that was a matter of fitting the jigsaw pieces together rather than having a flash of inspiration with all the checkers in. PARTERRE likewise: I’m not sufficiently boned up on landscape gardening to make the definition link.
   Thanks for untangling {T}AMMAN{Y} for me (probably should read “us”, I think): linking it to Hall made it ring a faint bell, but that one went is as the only Arab capital that fit the checkers. I think the curly brackets work, but I’ll have to up the zooming on my screen to really tell.
   I think there’s more than one tortoise that bears the name TESTUDO. Genus naming, something else the Romans have done for us.
6. A steady 35 minutes, which given that the Quickie took me 25 minutes says something, though I’m not sure what.
   Tammany completely unknown – still one lives and learns. My classics education came in useful for 6d and I was able to dredge up Parterre from somewhere.
   12a I found a less than satisfying clue, but 16a was neat.
   “Blight” meaning wreck was a bit odd, it’s not in Chambers, only as something that destroys. Perhaps it’s in the OED?
   1. I never even thought about it whilst solving and blogging, but Collins and COED between them have: spoil, harm, destroy. Collins Thesaurus has ‘wreck’.

7. Like others, spent time at the end wondering how to square the obvious answer AMMAN with wordplay that presumably involved removing the ends of some word ?AMMAN?, which looked sufficiently unlikely that I began to think I might have misread the clue entirely. Was another beneficiary of having seen SANDWICH COURSE in the Graun yesterday, especially as it had generated a discussion on 225 about whether it was study for workers or work for studiers.
8. . . . perhaps my one allowed failure to meet the Jimbo criterion (as if!).
   Like z8, Tammany Hall rang a bell but no context came to mind but AMMAN it had to be anyway. Eventually got BIGHT from the Shipping Forecast after trying to shoehorn BAY in somehow.
   Thanks jackkt for the blog

   Edited at 2014-08-22 08:06 am (UTC)

9. 23.38. Agree with z8 about 10’s iffy surface. But 25’s looks OK in a zany way. Generally neat clueing.
10. 12.20 so marginally quicker than yesterday for another enjoyable puzzle that felt different from yesterday’s; I think Z8’s description sums it up. One of those days when the easier clues provided very helpful checkers for the rest. I think lander is OK Jack – the term has enjoyed wide use for things we plonk down on other worlds of which Mars is but one, hence the ‘potential’ I guess.
    1. Not sure how that came to be anonymous.
    2. Thanks. I have amended my comment.
11. Struggled today with Pictorial, Testudo and Precipice missing and an error with Iron not Chip which prevented me getting Hades and Patience. Also went for Effect not Affect.
    Hope for better tomorrow…
12. No real stumbling blocks for me in this one – I had most of the puzzle filled in in the (very short) space of time between Norwood Junction and Crystal Palace, and filled in the rest quite easily, despite some hindrance from a one-year old with different ideas about what pen-strokes I should be making, during my other daughter’s swim class. Closest I came to slipping up was the fact that my FOI, at 28A, was ASSERT. Oops.

    As a classicist I did enjoy what seemed to be an above-averagely classical flavour to this puzzles – Hades, Thebes and Thermopylae, testudo, concordat, and as a New Yorker by accident of birth I was not unacquainted with Tammany. I also noticed SANDWICH COURSE popping up twice this week – crossword clues really are like buses, aren’t they?

13. 17 mins, with the last couple of them trying and failing to parse AMMAN (the answer was obvious enough), and then unravelling the wordplay for CONTRAINDICATE. I’ve read enough American historical novels with “Tammany” used rather than the more usual “Tammany Hall” that I really should have seen it. Although I enjoyed this puzzle I thought the Guardian clue for SANDWICH COURSE (as mentioned by mctext) which I solved yesterday was better.
14. 
    45 mins and two blanks: ABIDE and PRECIPICE, both of which I should have got. Same as others re AMMAN (i.e. didn’t know the US Party, but knew the town).

    BIGHT from the shipping forecast, and CONTRAINDICATE from medicine packets. Glad I opted for I rather than A in CHIP (but nearly didn’t).

    dnk the opera, but it was the only word that worked.

15. ..in about 22 minutes, quite good for me. The whole bottom went in almost at once, but I struggled a bit with the top, finally entering ‘Amman’ from the definition alone.

    I had started but not finished Nutmeg’s offering, so I actually got a boost there from this puzzle, rather than the other way around. A curious coincidence, unless the editors are in league.

16. 13:25 for this very enjoyable puzzle. I have trained myself to ignore surface readings so effectively that when elegance is sacrificed to wordplay I don’t even notice.
    I got PARTERRE from the wordplay, since I don’t really know what one is and I’ve never come across the phrase ‘knot garden’ in any context. I’ve also never come across SANDWICH COURSE or TAMMANY, but it was all clear, even if AMMAN was a bit of a leap of faith.
    I think I knew CONTRAINDICATION because it’s used as a matter of course on medicine packaging in France, whereas in this country they just say ‘don’t take this medicine if…’ I’ll take the knowledge wherever I can get it!
    1. Beaten by AMMAN, for which I had AMMON. Never heard of Tammany.

       After putting it in, I Googled AMMON and found a region and a people (also known, interestingly, as “Ammonites”), so I thought I’d been lucky but… no. Ah well – lose some, draw some.

       1. Ah, there you are!
          1. Indeed I am. Apologies for absence etc – am on a sort of medical busman’s holiday.

             Nice to see CONTRAINDICATE. It crops up a lot, usually in the phrase “Contraindicated in retrospect”. SEVER is also very popular.

             Incidentally, I wasn’t sure about the literal for “FACE-SAVING” – “which spendthrift can never do”. I thought a spendthrift was someone who was miserly and hoarded their money – or have I misinterpreted?

             1. Afraid you misinterpret (though you are not alone, I only know this because I did the same thing for many years). It still really looks as if it ought to mean thrifty, though.
                1. It does doesn’t it? The Chambers definition is perhaps helpful here: ‘someone who spends the savings of a thrift’. So it sort of means ‘savings-blower’.
             2. You have. A spendthrift is the opposite of this: ‘a person who spends money in an extravagant, irresponsible way’ in ODO.
17. I found this the easiest of the week, finishing in 26 minutes. I thought TAMMANY pretty obscure, but as I happened to know it, AMMAN was my second entry. I hung back on FLASHY since FLY = CARRIAGE was an unknown definition for me, and I didn’t fully understand the wordplay to 25 before coming here.
    A nice end to a week that’s had quite few obscurities.
18. No Friday horrors here, in fact a very pleasing and mostly straightforward puzzle. Like most people, I couldn’t give a convincing explanation of what Tammany (Hall) is, though it’s clearly infiltrated my brain over the years as “one of those things which happens in American politics” (see also: pork barrel, gerrymandering, logrolling…hmmm, why is it only bad things, I wonder?)
19. Somewhere around the hour mark for me today and with TESTUSO rather than TESTUDO. Despite having one wrong I was pleased just to finish as with half an hour gone I was still staring at a lot of blanks.

    Count me as another who spotted that the Guardian and Times setters have been in cahoots again.

20. Just over 9 mins – with the reason for AMMAN lurking somewhere in the back of my brain.

    With regard to yesterday’s discussion on speed solving – I don’t set out to be speedy, it either happens or it doesn’t (and at last year’s Championship, it didn’t but I did get the 3 done in just under the hour!) – I have been solving cryptic crosswords for 45 years and seem to have evolved into a sort of ‘automatic pilot’ thing where I solve the clues at the front of the brain, while another part quietly works out the ‘why’. It probably helps that I am a fast reader. I work my way down the Across clues and then down the Downs, more often than not not looking at the checking letters, just ‘can I get the solution from the clue’ and then I work my way back through looking at the letters I have, and filling in the rest as the pennies drop.

21. 40m DNF as didn’t get CONTRAetc after looking at it for a good 5mins. A even when I came back 30mins later still no joy! Good blog and thanks for all the speeding up tips yesterday; it will be helpful eventually.
    1. I’m far from a speed merchant; I’m mostly happy just to finish. But for what it’s worth here’s my two penneth on my solving technique (apologies to those for whom this is like teaching your grandma to suck eggs):

       1. Three letter answers always seem easiest so I start with these if there are any.

       2. Next I look at multi word answers as these seem next easiest IMHO.

       3. I progress with any clues where I have some of the letters in the answer in place.

       4. When I’ve exhausted the above I scan the clues quickly looking for anything that jumps out.

       5. If I’m confident of the tense of an answer but don’t yet have the answer I stick in an -ED, -ING or -S to help with crossing answers.

       1. Much the same here although I’d add four-letter to your first point. As the blogger on duty today I was wary from the very first moment of a grid that had no 3s and only two 4s.
    2. I think it’s a good idea to look at any clue where another answer gives you the first letter. It’s demonstrably easier to call words to mind when you have the just first letter than when you have just one of the others, so you have an improved chance with these clues.
       Having said that I rarely actually do this. I do sometimes look at the downs if I solve the first across clue(s) straight off but normally I just go through in order.
22. Found this an enyoyable arm wrestle and finished in just under 28 minutes. Some good clues, I thought, and not much pressure on GK – only Tammany and Testudo on the rare side. Agree with Z8 about the clumsiness of some of the surfaces – nearer to sandpaper than smooth.
    1. But this is crosswordland, where sandpaper and smooth can mean the same thing!
23. Relatively easy one, even after 18 holes and a drag round Tesco. Had heard of Tammanay Hall but couldn’t bring it to mind – definition plus checkers made it obvious. Agree about some of the surface readings – real train wrecks.

    Good luck on Tuesdays Jack

24. Following my question from yesterday, thanks for all the solving tips. Just out of curiosity, I would like to ask people here how and why they first got into solving cryptic crosswords? I started doing them when I read a few years ago that they reduced the risk of dementia, and slowed age-related decline. The number of extremely clever older people here obviously proves the second point.
    1. I started with the Telegraph cryptic years (decades) ago, probably because I couldn’t handle the Times which my father always did. Still found it a steep learning curve to migrate to the Times, and for a long time I was happy if I got 1/4 of the way through it.

       I’d like to put myself forward as a counterexample of crosswords preventing mental decline. I’m pretty sure I’ve lost 40% of my brain cells, and the other 70% are struggling to keep up.

       If you’re worried about dementia, my advice is to drink lots of red wine. It works wonders for worry.

    2. I started at a boarding prepschool where one of the masters did the Telegraph. A number of us used to talk it through with him at breakfast and later. Later, I worked there as a gap year thing and the as yet unfinished crossword would be discussed in the pub with another during prep. I think that at Uni, The Times was free (or very cheap) to students (we are talking early 70s) and that obviously made me switch and I have been there ever since, regardless of how far downhill the rest of the paper has gone since then.

       Great to hear from the good Doctor that I am on the right track or something.

       Edited at 2014-08-22 06:21 pm (UTC)

25. About 30 minutes, trusting the wordplay for PARTERRE and TESTUDO, otherwise not at the front of my brain. Fully aware of Tammany (Hall), but surprised to find it here in a UK puzzle. I’m another aided by the earlier Guardian inclusion of the otherwise unknown SANDWICH COURSE. Held up briefly by spelling NONPAREIL incorrectly, which slightly delayed the crossing answer (I don’t have the puzzle in front of me, but whatever it was needed the ‘e’, not the ‘i’). Thanks for the blog Jack. Agree with those pointing out the less elegant surfaces compared with yesterday’s. Not a complaint, since yesterday’s was particularly outstanding in that regard. And regards.
26. Whizzed through this in 20 minutes, parsing / knowing all except the 2dn political party, after a long drive to and from the Gers, even longer lunch and a large whisky to ease the toothache. There’s a lesson there somewhere.
27. 8:28 for me. I should really have been faster, but in view of 11ac, I felt it would be just too galling if I made a mistake somewhere, so checked my answers even more carefully than usual.

    I suppose I’m the only person who thought of TAMMANY straight away when I read 2dn, but then (without any checked letters in place) failed to derive AMMAN from it. (Doh!)

    A most enjoyable puzzle, with first-rate surface readings. My compliments to the setter.

28. Ah ha! Triumph of the frivolous over the knowledgeable. Anyone, like me, familiar with the Broadway musical ‘Fiorello’ would have had no difficulty with the reference to Tammany Hall.

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