Times 26284 – I dreamed I was eating a giant 1AC and then I woke up choking on my pillow

47 comments on “Times 26284 – I dreamed I was eating a giant 1AC and then I woke up choking on my pillow”

1. ….no particular difficulties. I was amused by the surfaces of 6 and 19 down, which lead me to suspect the setter is opposed to the government, no matter who is in power. I thought the banana regulations were bad enough….
2. Pretty straightforward, with no awkward pauses that I recall, although I did try to work FATS into 3d for a bit. Didn’t know about TIN, and sort of thought tin=money=bread=loaf and biffed. BIFD EAR, decided, like George, that it was b-less BEAR. I didn’t see any problem with CASPIAN; if the Caribbean, the Adriatic, why not the Caspian?
   1. There are about 10 mystified contributions below regarding GLHeard’s comment about 11 across.

      Surely, he just meant that perhaps the clue could still work as “Snake one in container for liquid”.
      LIQUID is the definition. After all, seas are liquid!
      One word saved and a trickier clue!
      Sorry for the lateness of my comment, but The Australian is a bit behind the Times!

      Edited at 2016-01-19 01:54 am (UTC)

3. 25 minutes for this excellent puzzle on the easier side of things but none the less enjoyable for that. I agree with Kevin regarding CASPIAN and if it offends a rule favoured by some purists it’s not one that I’m aware of.

   3dn was my last one in and as a fan of Fats Waller (and stride piano players in general) I found it hard to get him out of my thoughts. It was a real ‘doh’ moment when I arrived at HADRIAN via wordplay and spotted the possibility of ‘wall-er’.

   Following completion I needed to check ROUT could mean ‘noisy rabble’.

   Edited at 2015-12-17 04:41 am (UTC)

   1. I’m building a small length of dry stone wall in my garden and the associated reference books etc use the word waller a lot as in “An experienced waller will be able to construct x metres of wall in an hour” or “many novice wallers forget to do such-and-such” so the required meaning wasn’t too far from the front of my mind.
4. 21 minutes, but with a typo. For some reason the pie tax put me in mind of the Carry On films, which I’ve been watching and (in far fewer instances than I had imagined) re-watching recently. I must have subliminally reckoned that if I had seen one I had seen them all.

   Obviously didn’t get enough when they came out.

   Edited at 2015-12-17 08:36 am (UTC)

   1. I wonder if the setter is a Leeds fan. There’s a bit of a “pie tax” hoo-ha going on at the moment with ticket prices in the South Stand being inflated to include a “free” voucher for a pie and a drink. Pies were thrown onto the pitch in protest at the last home game.
      1. I don’t know what it is about the NE – well, Leeds is east of the Pennines: the combined burden that must be carried by Leeds, Sunderland and Newcastle fans does not bear thinking about.
5. 9:20 … fun, and a good “gateway crossword”, I would think.

   I stopped trying to decide if CHEERLEADER ‘works’ because the surface is so good. Last in AGENT, which also has a very nice clue.

   1. I took it to be a double cryptic definition: one referring to the blonde with her pom-poms, the other to the person leading the ‘Hip hip hooray/hurrah’ cheer.
6. Really enjoyable solve today but don’t understand 2dn ie how ‘rout’ = noisy rabble?
   1. SOED: A disorderly or tumultuous crowd of people.

      And all the usual sources have something similar. Chambers actually mentions ‘rabble’ in the definition.

      Edited at 2015-12-17 08:44 am (UTC)

   2. Chambers seems to cover it with “tumultuous crowd” and several other derivatives. I thought it was just a bit cheesy getting us to add an S to the noun version to supply the verb version of essentially the same word.
7. A nice easy one after yesterday’s stinker.
8. 12.55 with the usual check for fat finger artefacts and an indecent amount of time spent on my LOI, AGENT. Not as biffable as many of the other clues, probably because vehicle=agent is not an immediate association.
   Thanks to George for pointing out the hip, hip thing. I was otherwise driven insane by the pelvic thrust.
   What’s the issue with Caspian? There must be a purist out there somewhere who can explain.
9. Thanks both for the defn. Perhaps I should have looked it up myself!
10. Yes, easier than yesterday but so much more fun to solve – really enjoyable puzzle.

    I’ve no problem with CASPIAN and like Jack couldn’t get past Fats Waller at 3D. Now have “My very good friend the milkman says” going round and round in my head!

    Enjoyed the exciting hips – but not too much, have to be careful at my age

11. Less than 1.5 Magoos, so well and truly punching above my weight. A timely confidence-booster.

    Thanks setter and George.

12. 12:20…. a gentle stroll this one after yesterday’s stiff climb. 1a (my COD) went straight in with a grin as I remembered my Dad’s story about going to a hotel in Slough for a job interview. He couldn’t remember the name of the interviewer so just said to the hotel receptionist “I’m here to meet the man from Mars”. Yes Mars bars were made in Slough in those days. I had doubts about ‘rout’ in 2d, and the transport in 26d, so thanks for the illumination. Like Jimbo I didn’t see any problem with Sea snake at 11a and enjoyed 28a.
13. Yesterday was my worst result of the year and today was the quickest.
    I assumed immediately that “sweet product from Slough” was Mars …. so Marshmallow jumped straight out at me. Bit of luck.
    A happy christmas to everyone. I will be back in January.
14. 18m. I seem to have found this much harder than everyone else. I enjoyed it but I really struggled in places. I will blame the hangover I am nursing this morning after a particularly thorough lunch yesterday. It’s that time of year.

    Edited at 2015-12-17 11:18 am (UTC)

15. 27:36. I felt like I should have been quicker, several times getting an answer and wondering how I didn’t spot it earlier. I’ll put it down to the train being unusually noisy this morning.
16. 34 minutes. Like one or two others I felt I should have been quicker, since it wasn’t a hard puzzle. I agree with z8 that 2dn is a pretty ropy clue, but 3dn made up for it.
17. 13:05, surprised to see two “hiddens”.

    Thanks for fully explaining EAR (I thought I was truncating something like lear) and AGENT, where I thought “age” accounted for “earlier” rather than “to get on”.

    I’m another who didn’t know that nounal meaning of ROUT.

    George, I’m disappointed at the lack of a link to something from Monty Python in the explanation for LARCH.

18. In 11a I assumed that Sea was the definition, and container for liquid was CAN, with ASP and I in it from ‘snake’ and ‘one’ respectively, so I don’t understand the confusion for purists and the question posed by the blogger. Unless, of course, the purists see the Caspian as a lake because it is land-locked. However, it has always been the Caspian Sea to me.

    I took about 28 minutes for this enjoyable puzzle.

19. Pleasant steady solve in 20 minutes, no queries today. Caspian Sea seemed good to me. Liked the WALLER definition for the Roman chap.
20. 
    Slightly held up as I biffed 17ac CAN-OPENER but arrived safely in 22min.

    I thought 3dn HADRIAN was somewhat tortured – my LOI.

    28ac CHEERLEADER COD

    horryd Shanghai

21. Delighted to have actually finished today, in 41:07.

    At 30 minutes I had everything but the ROUTS/HADRIAN/CASPIAN/THUNDERER crossing. I couldn’t get past the thought that “top tip from Roach piano” was AI+R+P and that the answer was HAIRPIN somehow. Moreover I was trying to get “sea snake one” to be EEL+I and wondering if there were some other sea snakes I didn’t know about.

    Fortunately I decided to re-parse 11A and everything quickly fell into place.

    Earlier in the week I made very quick progress on most of the puzzle but got stuck about 3/4ths of the way through. Today everything seemed quite obvious and I made steady but slow progress. I’m happy to have finished today but I do want to learn to “unstick” myself.

    1. Oh, and thanks to glheard for giving me the missing first letter to 26D!
    2. You are obviously making good progress, and fast completion times are nowhere near as important as enjoying the puzzles. After lots of years of tackling crosswords, I achieved my fastest time ever for a Times puzzle this year, so either the crosswords are getting easier or I am still capable of improvement, even at my advanced age. Keep at it, practice will bring speed (if you want it to).
    3. I suspect that the best solvers are quick to discard ideas that don’t work out, and try something else.

       My problem is that sometimes I discard an idea, only to find out much later that it was correct.

22. 13 mins of pleasurable solving. ANNULMENT was my LOI after GALLANT, although I confess I didn’t parse HADRIAN until after I’d finished. I didn’t have a problem with the clue for CASPIAN at all.
23. About 20 minutes, but should have been quicker, since it wasn’t very difficult. The only harder item was HADRIAN as the ‘waller’, which I thought quite clever when I saw it. LOI was, for some reason I can’t explain, DEMONSTRATE. Regards.
24. A shatteringly fast (for me) 23 minutes, with no major holdups. Regarding the possibility that “purists see the Caspian as a lake because it is land-locked” – surely all seas are, topologically, land-locked?

    I put my fast time down to the residual impact of last night’s Christmas party. I generally find that the answers are more forthcoming if my brain is taken out of the equation.

    Quite an enjoyable one, I thought.

25. I liked this puzzle very much, which is just as well because today’s Grauniad had me chewing the carpet.
    Having lived in Northumberland for 35 years, I have grown to love the beautiful countryside around Hadrian”s Wall, and the staggering achievement of its construction never fails to inspire a sense of awe for me.
26. . . . So a bit different from yesterday. The Roman Waller was a no-brainer (ie nothing else jumped immediately into my mind).

    Not sure about Thud’s comment that all seas are topologically landlocked. Happy to defer to greater mathematical brains, though.

    On edit – perhaps Thud is correct. Imagine an island on a globe otherwise covered by sea. Every edge of the sea is next to land and topologically, it is identical to the reverse, namely a world covered with land apart from a lake. That would do it.

    Edited at 2015-12-17 10:41 pm (UTC)

    1. I think I’m with you on the topology; I’d be open to discussion as to whether all land is topologically sea-locked.
       1. The obvious first discussion point would be a band of land around the equator, but this is equivalent to the Antarctic with a lake in the middle, so not there yet. I am going to bed!

          on edit while cleaning teeth – Unless the globe is all land, any sea/lake/loch/mere or fen would sea lock the rest of the land. No?

          Edited at 2015-12-17 11:09 pm (UTC)

          1. I think the difference between an ocean and a sea is that seas are partially land-locked, but lie between land and the ocean. When we talk about the seven seas these days, we are really referring to the seven oceans (Arctic, N Atlantic, S Atlantic, Indian, N Pacific, S Pacific and Southern or Antarctic, which are all really one big connected ocean. Historically, there were other sets of seven seas that really were seas or gulfs or bays, but most seas are partially bounded by an ocean, which isn’t always the case (Caspian, Dead, etc. which are land-locked, but salt water, so not strictly speaking lakes). Of course, other opinions are always available.
             1. Thanks for this Rotter. I have learned something.

                I think that Thud’s original comment referred to topological equivalence, namely whether the landlocked/waterlock patterns on (in this case) a sphere can be continuously distorted into each other. In the cold light of day (and eventually in the cold dark of last night), I think that they can so Thud is in my view mathematically correct.

27. An easy and pleasant solve here, too. Took a while to decide that there was no way to make impede have enough letters and get on to impasse. I thought George’s comment may have been assuming that the definition was “Liquid” which I thought was a bit redundant. thanks for parsing bEAR, and thank you setter
28. I didn’t feel I was on the setter’s wavelength a lot of the time, and am surprised that my 7:47 (exactly the same time as on Monday) seems to have held up comparatively well on the TCC leaderboard.

    Is no-one else worried about GALLANT = “brave man”? Surely “ladies’ man” is more like it! And not everyone pronounces the final “t” in “trait”.

    1. Faint heart never won fair lady? But yes, now you mention it, the clue would perhaps work better without ‘man’.
       1. Hm! I hadn’t thought of “faint heart never won fair lady”: I wonder if that’s what the setter had in mind. Somehow it seems just a little too far-fetched – not as bad as an indirect anagram, but overstepping the mark IMO.
29. gallant (adj) and gallant (noun) are prosodically different, not that that has much to do with anything.
30. Po(lar Ch)ristmas (5 dn) and importan(t as te)am (21 dn) are both “concealed” clues. There used to be rule that a puzzle could only contain one of these. Has this rule been dropped?
    1. Such “rules” are never published, in part because Editors do not wish to be strictly bound to them. Anyway the “rule” always used to be no more than two hidden clues.

       I recommend forgetting about “rules” such as these, or at least being prepared for them to be broken

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