Times 26260 – a puzzle for after the championship, maybe?

53 comments on “Times 26260 – a puzzle for after the championship, maybe?”

1. Bit harder today I thought. Held up for ages on the DOOFUS / OKING intersection, liked both of them when the penny dropped. Also enjoyed the “enemy within”.

   Thanks setter and George.

   (PS George, V comes before W, not after it, but you probably already knew that).

   1. whoops, ta
2. Which means pretty difficult. Like Galspray, had trouble in the NE. Finally saw DOOFUS but not sure about OKING. Looked wrong somehow. Thanks to George for the parsing of DITHER which I just couldn’t see. Missed the lift-and-separate in “flag waver”.

   Lots of excellent surface readings made for an enjoyable solve … in the end.

3. There seems to be a particular setter whose puzzles, as far as I am concerned, might just as well be in Linear B. Like this one. Not a fan.

   Dereklam

   1. I think this one escaped from the Mephisto drawer when RR wasn’t looking.
      1. I can usually make a reasonable fist of a Mephisto. I won’t even begin to list the things I don’t get about this one.

         Dereklam

4. Around 90 minutes of hell here and I was unable to finish without resort to aids for the unknown AZERI. It didn’t help having my FOI as {g}ROUT at 2dn throughout almost the entire solve despite strong doubts that the definition of ‘grout’ could stretch to ‘polish’. I had no idea how THRUM related to anything in the clue by way of definition and am not at all keen on DUMB clued as ‘disdainful comment’.
   1. DUMB is just that, as, according to the setter/editor’s logic, any word with a negative denotation or connotation can now be used as the solution to any type of phrase such as ‘disdainful comment’.
      1. Perhaps if said in a stupid way, “strike dumb” could be a disdainful comment on said industrial action? I’ll go now and celebrate what the Groan tells me is World Toilet Day. Or is it the other way around?
         1. Yep, I think you’ve nailed it McT. So the setter’s off the hook, and we await Ulaca’s apology!

            And Jack, ROUT was my FOI also, with exactly the same misgivings you had as to how grout could mean polish.

            Edited at 2015-11-19 05:14 am (UTC)

            1. Actually, I thought that was a pretty impressive rant. Have saved it on the hard drive for next time…
         2. I see what you mean – thanks for the expansion.
5. 
   OKING or OKAYING? Martin van Buren has much to answer for.

   DOOFUS more American english – from pre-The Simpsons period –

   awesome (Jennifer Aniston)!

   Azeri – techically zero cipher is not really a cipher at all!

   Blogger sir, do you have a slightly less smug photo, to be used for

   over your sub-ten minute finishes?

   DNF or wish to – terribly oblique and thus rather dreary.

   Whatever!

   horryd Shanghai

   1. Ummm, you’re welcome?
   2. ZERO and CIPHER are direct (if obscure) synonyms aren’t they?
6. Went offline at 25′, took this to lunch, and was about to give 23d up as hopeless when it finally came to me just before submitting; as always happens when I do an alphabet run, I miss a letter or two. Got DOOFUS and MIRROR early on, then brought up short by STRIKE WHA’? DNK VICTORY ROLLS or LAP JOINT(ED). Stuck on ‘Hindi’ for a long time, but did twig finally; it helped that I knew of the language. COD a tossup between TROJAN and DITHER.
7. 25m. I thought this was mostly a great puzzle. There are lots of clues with far from obvious answers that reward engagement with the wordplay and a bit of effort.
   I was left at the end with STRIKE D_M_ and _A_ JOINTED. The required answers seemed clear but I was very unsure about ‘disdainful comment’ for DUMB and whether lap-dancing could possibly be lap-dancing without the dancing. In each case I couldn’t think of anything better so in it went: not the most satisfying way to finish. I suppose mctext’s explanation of 8dn must be right but I think it needs a question mark.

   Edited at 2015-11-19 07:52 am (UTC)

8. 27 min .. It took me more than 5 minutes to solve a clue but I don’t know if that was me or the puzzle. In the end my biggest problem was the NW, where I engaged in a lot of not seeing woods for trees. Last in COLLAPSE. Sigh™ ….
9. Thought this was a great puzzle, but tricky. Finished in about 40mins or so, but with confident ‘rib jointed’ and a blank at the unknown AZERI. dnk (or, more likely, forgotten) about cipher=zero, and I spent some time trying to fit cod(e) in.

   Also, wasted time with SAFE breaking, and extracted (for ATTRACTED) until the penny dropped with STOCKING MASK.

   COLLAPSE went in with totally incorrect, and somewhat bizarre, justification, which I won’t go into…

   Thanks for sorting it all out, but could anyone explain ‘court’ in 27ac? I am missing something obvious?

   1. Court means to ask for something in the sense of setting out to achieve it e.g.courting disaster, popularity etc

      Edited at 2015-11-19 10:13 am (UTC)

   2. I have heard of belly dancing but rib dancing? Presumably for Size 0 models.
      1. *like*
10. Thanks, Jack! Yes, I see that now…
11. Pretty impressive time George and I see you’re atop the kosher club board. I felt a right doofus on this and I had 0-ring until the last minute (thinking well it’s a valuable piece or something). Are we going to see you on December 5th? 27.22
12. 52mins. I found this very tricky. DNK DOOFUS or OKING (or that meaning of THRUM)and I took an age to see TROJAN and DITHER in the opposite corner. AZERI too had me stumped for ages. It didn’t help that I put SAFE-BREAKING in for 4d at first.
13. George, thanks for the blog. I too wondered about choice of words and GO TO DEAN appearing within?
14. Impressive time for this, George – I managed double and a bit at 24.17, and so nearly had FAN JOINTED, which sounded plausible enough, if only for constructing crypts.
    Despite Jack’s helpful gloss, ASK FOR IT doesn’t quite work for me as “causing court problems” – wouldn’t that be “asking for it”?.
    It also didn’t help that I auto read the first word in 11 as Celebrity, and wondered what other than rolls one such might perform, since it could not be rolls. Get me out of here!
    OKING is an awful word, except when I need it in word games. I take it it’s meant to be pronounced okaying. THRUM went in without understanding, just on the wordplay.
    Glad it wasn’t my turn, George. The possibilities for ending up looking like a DOOFUS were legion.
    1. I think the definition is ‘court problems’, and ‘causing’ is part of the wordplay, akin to ‘giving’.

       1. Do I feel a doof….

15. 40 min, with progress particularly slow on RH side – took far too long to see hidden at 16. Agree calling 11dn a turn isn’t quite right, as direction of travel is unchanged. Also finding JQZ led me to wasting some time looking for an X to complete the pangram.
16. An excellent puzzle. Is there any significance in the fact that the grid contains three “king”s and a rook (nina)?

    Midas

17. Slightly off-piste … does anyone here solve the Telegraph online? I do, and have been mildly peeved that for three or four weeks the Leaderboard there seems to have been stuck, Groundhog Day style. It’s possibly just my computer, but I’ve tried it in a couple of browsers with the same result.

    For at least a couple of years I’ve had an informal rivalry with a few people on there (I have no idea if they are aware of this rivalry!) and I rather miss it.

    I wrote to the Telegraph customer service people a week or so ago and they didn’t bother replying. And I don’t like to post the question on Big Dave’s blog where timing puzzles seems to be rather frowned upon. Anyone know what’s up?

    1. Had you posted your query on my blog there is a chance that the Telegraph Crossword Editor might have read it. I will forward your query to him, but I hope you will appreciate that the Leaderboard is a feature of the Telegraph site that I wouldn’t miss if it was removed tomorrow. Most of those at the top of the board seem to have found a way of cheating, thus rendering the whole exercise a waste of time and space.
       1. Hi Dave. Thank you. And yes, I absolutely appreciate your position. We time obsessives are wretched creatures. And you’re right, of course, about the cheats — there is just the same problem on the Times leader board. But the names of the ones who record the same, improbable time every day, regardless of the difficulty of the puzzle, do become so familiar after a while that one just filters them out.

          Thanks again. Much appreciated.

    2. I have contacted the said site and was told that they were aware of a problem ( !!! ) but couldn’t say when the site would be functioning normally. p.s. That was over a week ago! But the site has been useless for leaderboards and personal scores for several months.
       1. Thank you, Barracuda. I had a further communication from Big Dave and I gather that the message from Telegraph Towers is “We’re working on it”, though it seems that the projected finish date for the works is “When it’s done”.
18. Anonymous from Shanghai echoes my sentiments. DNF and couldn’t be bothered to once I checked in a dictionary whether OKING was a word, then checked to see if ‘thrum’ had a meaning other than ‘to drum’ and finally used an aid to get all possible words to fit _ O _ F _ S, the only one I recognised being LOOFAS. I left 1a and 1d empty and got on with something more rewarding.
    Some of the clues were very good, but there were just too many oddities and difficult bits of wordplay to make it an enjoyable daily puzzle for me. I fared better with this week’s Listener. Still, it’s given others pleasure, so I’m not complaining.
    1. If that is not complaining, I can’t wait for when you do. ..
       Jerryw
19. Went astray because had “ORBIT” for 6d.
    Orbit is ‘passing round”
    Or (gold) is valuable.
    Bit = piece.
20. 13 and a half minutes for what *I* thought was a mostly fair and good puzzle – of course I went “off by one” in classic Verlaine style, opting for FAN- instead of LAP-JOINTED. I didn’t actually think of LAP, but I feel like if I had, I’d still have gone for FAN as a more likely-sounding unknown carpentry term. Ho hum!

    Edited at 2015-11-19 02:23 pm (UTC)

21. I thought 6d was O-RING, a rubber seal that passes around things. If OKING is a contraction of OKAYING then for me it is one of those words that only appear in printed form in crosswords. Much the same as DOOFUS. I found the whole thing a struggle and drew no satisfaction from finishing it.
22. This took me 40 minutes and I got satisfaction from finishing. But I agree that OKING is, if anything, an odd word-form derived from OKAYING. LOI was MIRROR, and COD to COLLAPSE for the ‘founder’ misdirection, which I thought quite nice. Regards.
23. I had Strike Down for 8d. Down/Shock? And Throw for 19a. Something a loom finally leaves? Bugger.
24. 34 mins but with two wrong. I was really off this setter’s wavelength and because of that I didn’t enjoy it much at all, but that may also have been because I did the puzzle after a particularly frustrating day at work. I made the same error as Verlaine with “fan-jointed” because it sounded more likely than the correct LAP-JOINTED, even though I have no idea if a club where fan-dancing was performed was ever known as a fan joint. I also crashed and burned with OKING because I went through the alphabet without stopping on K, and eventually settled on the admittedly very unlikely “oming”, but to be honest by that time I was past caring. Even if I had considered the K the penny may not have dropped because although I find ok/okay interchangeable I would always write okaying.
25. Why pose a puzzle like this?

    What grates is the imprecision and obscurity:
    to founder is a state that precede, but is not, a collapse,
    a draft is not yet a plan,
    being unemployed does not make you a jobseeker,
    duane?,
    the tip of something is the very end of it (rather than 75% of it),
    waves make surf but they are not surf,
    an incident room may well be precipitated by some emergency, but it will often continue to function long after the emergency has receded

    As a newcomer to the cryptic, I have enjoyed the challenge so far. But one more wasted effort like this, and I’ll be throwing in the towel.

    1. Has Hedgehoggy found his/her way onto this site? I sincerely hope not.
26. Phew. About 40 minutes, and much confusion and non-parsing. LOI was OKING, after I’d decided that “oring” (a Boolean operation, alongside “anding”, “nanding” “noring” and “exoring”) and “oming” (a nonexistent word, at least outside of cockney housing agencies) didn’t fit.

    AZERI was unknown, and I spent a while trying to convince myself that Acodi was a language. Nor did I know THRUM in that sense.

27. Toyed with this for half an hour late in the day after a long headache-inducing afternoon meeting. Couldn’t get more than 80% done. Now I see the blog I feel less pathetic, not impressed with this puzzle at all, due to some vague or erroneous defs (as noted above) and several unknown words – DOOFUS, OKING, CIPHER for zero, and AZERI as a language, although I find it is that as well as a native of Azerbaijan. Maybe at 9 a.m. I’d have made more sense of it and enjoyed it.
28. One wrong, which is very annoying, but at least I feel in good company, being with Verlaine in opting for ‘fan jointed’ at 13d. The pity is that I actually know what a carpentry lap joint is, but I didn’t think long enough to consider the options.
    I confidently entered ‘mirror’ at 10a, then deleted it when the solution to 6d was ‘obviously’ ‘orbit’, as parsed by a previous contributor. I sorted that out when ‘stocking mask’ at 12a finally fell. I entered ‘oking’ with a rueful sigh, and re-entered ‘mirror’.
    Regarding ‘mirror’, I think it’s a bit naughty as it relates to something visual, while ‘parrot’ is, surely auditory?
    Enough quibbles: my own fault that I ended with one error yet again.
29. 23:17 for me. This was an interesting and enjoyable puzzle, but my mind seemed to be otherwise occupied, leading me to bung in SAFE-BREAKING and EXTRACTED!In contrast with sotira, I managed to fill in the NW corner without difficulty, but struggled with the NE.
30. 24 across: The Trojan horse was not full of Trojans: it was full of Greeks. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
31. Only completed in 9 minutes………+ three days!
32. Still can’t see how “disdainful comment” can be “dumb” and 52 bloggers and 4 dictionaries offer no clue.
    Help?
    Rob

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