Times 25973 – greetings from Sydney

48 comments on “Times 25973 – greetings from Sydney”

1. 
   Very quick one for me today, with all bar two going in in 20mins. However the last two took some time: UNBOSOM because I was convinced it was spelled with a double s, and then LUMMOX because I couldn’t parse it. Thanks for that!

   Also didn’t see the mooing Guernsey, and dnk KILOTON.

2. Welcome back, sir. LUMMOX also my last in and today’s best clue I thought. This was an enjoyable solve – just the right balance of some interesting words and fair clueing.
3. I was doing quite nicely but got bogged down in the NE corner with the unknown MALAYALAM, also FLUMMOX, UNBOSOM (wasted time on DE-) and, of all things, MOUSSE which only occurred to me once I had all the checkers in place.

   I missed the ‘up’ reference in 11ac which in my view changes it from a poor clue to a rather good one. I hope you are right about tears being shed, but I thought 13ac was a more mundane reference to soaps usually going out pre the 9:00 watershed.

   Edited at 2014-12-18 01:42 am (UTC)

4. …since the clue seems defective. To get a word meaning ‘oaf’, you remove the first letter of “floor”…..from what? Where is the indication of ‘flummox’?

   Other than that, it was pretty plain sailing, although I progressed a bit slowly. Fortunately, we have already had ‘Malayalam’, otherwise I would have desperately wanted to put in ‘Malaysian’, which is not even a language.

   Defining a LEMMING as a ‘sheep’ was very nice, thank you.

5. 34 minutes, with same hold-ups as others. To my fellow Monday man, at one remove one must remove the first letter of a word meaning ‘floor’, i.e. [f]LUMMOX.
   1. Aha!
6. Liked the long jumper; had trouble seeing bottle bank for some reason. Thanks for the blog.

   Edited at 2014-12-18 02:15 am (UTC)

7. Stop-and-go progress on this one, with I think SPIN my LOI. I guessed MALAYALAM from the final M–couldn’t think of any other such language–but was rather surprised that it was the solution, as I would have thought it a rather little-known language. I didn’t get PANTRY or LUMMOX, though I knew they had to be, until I printed my copy out and looked, when they both struck me; I was thinking ‘Pop’=PA, which won’t work, of course. COD to LUMMOX.
   1. You don’t seem to have found ‘Malayalam’ worth remarking on in your comment on puzzle 25039.

      Yeah, I know, everybody hates it when this happens!

      1. It was a much better known language back then.
         1. Nice riposte Kevin, or should that be re-post?
   2. Not by the 33 million who speak it.
8. Isn’t UNBOSOM just a single def re-stated, rather than a double def? Not that it matters much.

   PLAYA was a guess. SOAP was bewildering.

   Thanks setter and blogger (George, you have DISK instead of DISC).

   1. I took the second definition as a reference to a physical action.
9. … spent on SOAP. The “watershed” meaning must have cropped up prior to my leaving the UK in 1975. Kept trying to make SWAB work.

   Welcome back to these fair shores George.

10. 18 minutes dead, which makes George’s time look pretty good on a day where there aren’t many sub tens.
    I think SOAP is easier than something involving tears. The watershed is surely just the time before 9 in the evening when programmes with “adult” content can’t be shown: soaps certainly fit into that category. The big ones, Corrie, Eastenders, the Archers et al are all aired before that time.
    LOI LUMMOX: distracting of the setter to indicate the first letter of floor, this flummoxing me for some little while. It’s a fair cop.
    Liked the sheep and the long jumper: in the Grauniad they might have been cross referenced for a Christmas cracker.
    On edit. Jack: I read carefully through the entries to make sure nobody else had made the watershed point. Are you using invisible type? Mea culpa!

    Edited at 2014-12-18 08:36 am (UTC)

    1. Don’t worry about it, Z, as I’m pleased to have someone confirm my take on it. I don’t watch any of the TV soaps now but I understand there is some public concern these days about the adult nature of many story lines in ‘stenders and even some in Corrie too.

       Edited at 2014-12-18 08:52 am (UTC)

11. 20:10 … spent quite a while wondering about ‘swab’ for 13a but failed to invent an explanation so had to convince myself that a SOAP could be described as a “pre-watershed programme”. My own definition of a soap might be a bit off — I always regarded shows like This Life as soaps, and that was destinctly post-watershed.

    Nice vocab. I do like to see things like LUMMOX and GORBLIMEY in a crossword. Words for people who love words.

12. A mixture of the easy and the odd. 20 minutes to solve.

    I think 13A is very strange. First define a SOAP and I’m with sotira much of the tripe that is broadcast after 9.00pm qualifies IMHO. Is a LEMMING a sheep?

    Enjoyed GORBLIMEY and LUMMOX

    1. I think so, in the sense of an unthinking follower. The meanings are subtly different but close enough for me at least.
       1. Will no-one stand up for the poor misunderstood lemming? Its reputation is completely undeserved and is the result of a FRAUD by the Disney corporation. Read the Wiki article (under “misconceptions”) carefully.. they threw them to their deaths.
          1. Yes, I was aware that this was a myth, but when has a lack of authenticity stopped anything passing into the language? I’m not sure owls are particularly wise either. Swings and roundabouts…
13. A bit of a struggle today probably resulting from pre-festive season festivities, so rumbled in in about 70 minutes. Nice puzzle though, and all fairly fair. I found the north to be the most trouble, not made any easier by putting ELIMINATE in for 2d, on the basis that a mite might be a member of a colony, and I was convinced that 1 would start with RE something, but eventually had to rethink it when I couldn’t explain the eli.

    I went with the pre-9:00pm watershed definition, but still had SOAP as my LOI.

14. 11:39. I know some people don’t like the term ‘wavelength’, so let’s just say I felt I was swimming with the current with this one. Like jackkt I missed the meaning of ‘up’ in 11ac, so thanks for that. I didn’t know PLAYA but I remembered MALAYALAM from the last time it came up.
    I loved the definition of LEMMING as ‘sheep’.
    Overall a very enjoyable puzzle I thought.

    Edited at 2014-12-18 10:43 am (UTC)

15. 24.25 with the last 5 on spin/playa. Don’t think 13 quite works. Good to see gorblimey not the pulled punch of cor… 16 neat.
16. Fairly easy 30 minutes of solving. NE was my slowest area; all the rest was done in about 20 minutes. I agree the definition for 13 was unconvincing. A neat anagram at 17. It’s probably been used before but I don’t recall it.
17. 21 min. with no real problems
    MALAYALAM – isn’t that the longest palindromic word?
18. Apropos of nothing, there was some discussion a while back about whether the puzzles have got harder under the new editor. It seems we’ve had a relatively easy run over the last couple of months, which suggests not. Or is it just me?
    1. No, it’s not just you. Recent puzzles have been easier than those of a short while back – but it has been like that for a long while now with runs of easy or hard puzzles

       There are those of us who claim to remember when Monday was easy and Friday was hard with graduated puzzles inbetween. But each time we say that we are told by worthy members of the crossword establishment that we are talking rubbish

       1. Yes I agree I think it’s probably just random variation.
          On the other hand whether or not it is done deliberately, Monday puzzles are in my experience the easiest of the week by a meaningful margin. I’m slightly ashamed to say that I can support this assertion with hard data.
          1. Ah but would they still be easier if you didn’t know they were Monday puzzles? Or is it your subconscious solving programme that finds them easier because it is a Monday?
             1. Actually this is the first time I have looked at the data in this way. I was confidently expecting to see no meaningful difference between Mondays and other days, but that is not what I found.
                As I said before, I’m slightly ashamed even to have the data. For an English graduate I’m a a terrible geek.
             2. Doing the Sunday Times crosswords in The Australian we don’t get setter’s name alongside. The crosswords all seem much of a muchness – a wider range of difficulty and more UK-centric than the dailies; but with a slightly inferior quality to the dailies, in general. IMHO.
                Then I read the blog and there is a marked and I suspect unjustified paean of praise whenever Anax is setter, and a wailing and gnashing of teeth at the poor quality of the offering when he isn’t. For me they’re all similar – I suspect the bloggers are at least partly influenced by seeing the setter’s name.
                Rob
       2. The previous editor, a fine gent called John Grimshaw, told me he found he was completely unable to predict whether a crossword would be judged easy or hard, and thus never tried to arrange easy Mondays etc. He could have been fibbing, I suppose..
19. A few seconds under 14 mins. Like joekobi my last two in were SPIN and PLAYA. I didn’t have a problem with SOAP and it was my FOI. As far as the difficulty level of the puzzles under the new editor is concerned, they do seem to have got easier after a few months of what seemed like harder ones, but maybe we’re all just getting used to his style. I certainly look for more CDs than I used to.
20. The bottom seemed a lot easier than the top – perhaps that was just me? – finished in 12:15.

21. Just a reminder that the Christmas Turkey blog will be here on Saturday.

    The puzzle has been solved (we think) by more than 700 people in the few days since it was published, which seems like pretty good going for an am-dram production.

22. W/L alert: 9:53. I thought this was rather fun, especially the jumper and the exploding Scotsman.

    Didn’t know playa in the desert sense but I’ve got sand in me bits on enough Spanish beaches to take a punt. If a boo can mean a shocker it’s not a meaning I’m familiar with. Chambers doesn’t support it.

    1. I think Chambers sort of does if one invokes the verbal noun rule, whereby something said to shock becomes shocker. C itself (online) has: “a sound expressing disapproval, or made when trying to frighten or surprise someone”.
       1. Thanks U, that makes sense. I’d been thinking of a shocker in the sense of something rubbish that one might boo.

          “How was this year’s Royal Variety Performance your majesty?”. “Oh, it was a shocker, I couldn’t wait to get back to the palace and take my bloody tiara off”.

23. Around the 35m mark with PLAYA, LUMMOX and UNBOSOM all in on a wing and prayer so thanks for the blog which explained them, though given the blogger’s solving speed I am surprised the parsing even registered! Lots of good clues – my pick of the bunch was 9a so thanks to the setter.
24. 24 minutes. No problem with BOO as something you say when you jump out and shock people. However, I’ve never heard of PLAYA in this meaning. I just thought it was a beach. (Talking of beaches and quite irrelevant… I’ve just popped into my local to use their cashpoint and ended up giving an interview for Australian TV! I had to pull a pint on the self-service wall – the first such in Wales. Fame at last! [Not counting being on an Eggheads repeat a fortnight ago])
25. Late in the day, after wet golf and Xmas lunch… expecting a toughie, was agreeably surprised to romp along and enjoy this until I came to the last three – I ventured UNBOSOM was a word, had to check out the end of the language, but never heard of the LUMMOX; it must be a Northern dialect thing, or north of Winchester anyway. I see the UD says it derives from Scottish dialect, so it’s still making its way south.

    1. Well, at least you can still play. I cleaned my clubs and put them away on Nov 22; the next day a foot of snow fell.
26. About 20 minutes, ending with PLAYA. No real problems, although I did look up UNBOSOM afterwards to ensure it exists. COD to LUMMOX. Regards.
27. Another pleasant treeware solve today, sitting in the car outside Miss BT’s Bristol uni house while waiting for her to pack up and come home. Obviously as her father, I am not allowed in to help although I believe that on a previous occasion her mother has managed to gain access by an open window. Never saw LUMMOX although I wrote it in so thanks George.

    Edited at 2014-12-18 07:05 pm (UTC)

28. 10:53 for me in a solve very similar to Andy Borrows’s: FOI SOAP and L2I SPIN and PLAYA. Nice puzzle.
29. Forgot to say, George. Merry Christmas to you, too. Enjoy your return to the motherland.

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