Times 26,459: Hong Kong Phooey

53 comments on “Times 26,459: Hong Kong Phooey”

1. 16.06 of steady solving, with only USERNAME putting up serious resistance, so much so that I had to use treeware to write it out, vowel-test the first letter, twig the answer and only then see the reverse hidden. That’s some kind of brilliant – not me, the setter.
   If the rumours about Coca Cola’s takeover are true*, 2d isn’t.

   *Apparently they’re not, but I would still claim other colours are available, at least historically.

   1. You may want to delete your 10.11am version below, before someone adds a comment to that (I was tempted).
      1. Thank you – how very odd
2. 14:58 … really enjoyable. It felt a bit more lateral thinking-y than usual. I wavered a bit, trying to decide whether SOCRATES was actually put to death, but that’s maybe one for the lawyers (or indeed the philosophers).

   I can’t believe how long it took me to think of STONEHENGE.

   1. Good point: ‘man sentenced to death’ would cover it.
3. 33 minutes for this fine puzzle, with COD to the reverse hidden at 8d. My last in was PAROLED, where I was looking for the definition at the wrong end and racking my brains for a panto character beginning with an R.

   I could only get as far as Buttons, which is a bit of an indictment not only of my solving skills and general knowledge but also my spelling.

   1. Ah, I’d forgotten Buttons. I was trying to fit a “dame” in there somehow…
4. 40 minutes of enjoyment. Stupidly put in DROP at 13a for a few minutes. Many super clues but I will probably give COD to 8d or 23d.
5. Not easy at all today, but a very enjoyable 40′ solve. Like V and others, USERNAME COD and LOI. Is this one word or two? Discuss. Good stuff all round.
6. As the answers sped in I thought I’d push for a sub-10, which led to a careless LOOK LARGE at 11A. It put me in mind of when football commentators sometimes say a goalkeeper ‘makes himself big’ (no innuendo intended). As it was I slowed to about 15 minutes, quite quick for me but not the rare sub-10 anyhow.
   1. I rather like the innuendo. “Buffon makes himself big while De Rossi sprays it around further up the field.”
7. 35 minutes which is par for me. I echo V’s sentiments: a deliciously diverting puzzle. Quite a few write-ins to give one confidence before being hit by some trickier clues and some downright devillish.
   USERNAME was my LOI as well, but unlike others I managed to spot the hidden word before discerning it from the grid.
8. I biffed in SOCRATES right away and, I must say, “’COS” never occurred to me for “because.” It’s funny that we are punctilious enough (enuff?) to put an apostrophe in front of that word, when the rest of it is misspelled anyway. And, as I expected, the one clue I couldn’t (can’t?) entirely parse includes a term more common in the UK. I assumed that “RATES” had to do with taxes, of course, but I’m still not sure why “once” is in there. The Wikipedia entry gives the impression that “rates” is still a current term for property taxes.
   This couldn’t have taken me more than fifteen minutes, as I did it on the subway after work. (I only do puzzles on paper, so I copy the Times html from the page source and paste it into my own template before printing.)

   Edited at 2016-07-08 08:55 am (UTC)

   1. RATES is a specific term for local property taxes in the UK, which were replaced (briefly, and with well-known consequences) by the Community Charge (aka ‘poll tax’) and then Council Tax.

      Edited at 2016-07-08 08:56 am (UTC)

9. I got all but four in my hour, enjoying everything along the way.

   I could see that DITHYRAMB was an anagram of something I’d never heard of, but didn’t get enough crossers to make a go of it. That was partly because I hadn’t quite got to PREFAB, which was there for the taking, DNK the REEFER jacket, and hadn’t remembered that FORA were marketplaces, even though I’d tried playing with AGORA quite a lot. Odd, given that I did Latin rather than Greek at school.

   Ah well. Certainly happy enough with my performance for a Friday, confidently penning in the rest, starting with FOI 1a, with only a few (correct) biffs.

10. 40m. Well I found that extremely hard, for some reason. I got completely stuck for about 20 minutes at the end with four unsolved: STONEHENGE, PAROLED, OFTENER, DOGGY BAG. I’ve no idea why: with the benefit of hindsight they all look very easy. But hindsight isn’t a strategy, as someone once said.
11. 20 minutes, with USERNAME the LOI, as above, found the word eventually and then the hidden reversed; brilliant. We had STIR CRAZY – equally well clued – the other day, so it sprang to mind.
12. Verlaine – brevity does not enhance your levity, or ours – more blog and less coffee if you dpn’t mind!

    29 minutes for a more blissful Friday, for the second week in a row.

    LOI 27ac PAROLED – I manged to tumble or stumble on 8dn USERNAME early on – COD. FOI 14ac HARHEADED

    WOD 16dn DITHYRAMB with decent enough anagram.

    horryd Shanghai

    1. If there’s one thing I have learned from being a crossword blogger, it’s that you can’t please all of the people all of the time! I am quite tickled the idea of trying to blog on different substances, now that we’ve compared caffeine and alcohol, and found caffeine so wanting. But sadly most of the interesting possibilities are still illegal.
       1. Your namesake tried absinthe? I don’t know what his blogs were like.
          1. Hmm, I’ve never tried blogging in alexandrines before, but it might be worth a pop.
             1. Be careful popping those alexandrines? are they uppers or downers?
13. Sorry, that was me – I hadn’t entered my 8dn 🙁
14. Whenever I enter my name on a site, I can never remember if I put a gap before the surname. The set of such predicaments is also a member. That must be why USERNAME was last one in. Very enjoyable if a shade easy for Friday. 35 minutes, no biffs.
15. Just under the half-hour, but had to resort to aid to find anything to fit checkers at 8dn (in spite of having just entered it!). Also had biffed SWOT at 20ac, overlooking ‘heartless’.
16. 17:03 so not a hard one for me. However, I agree with all above (including z8 twice, since removed) that this is a masterclass of concise clueing so thank you setter. I also agree that V can be as long or as short as he wishes, although I tend to skip the long ones.
17. An excellent puzzle completed in 35 minutes with SOCRATES GFC’d (guessed from checkers) and DITHYRAMB remembered (just) from a previous encounter.

    After a busy morning rushing round, and coming to the Cryptic blog rather later than usual I really appreciated the concise style of blogging which I tend to favour these days. When I used to come here on my former employer’s time I was happy to while away the hours but now that I’m retired I am more conscientious and feel guilty if I’m not getting on with other things I really need to do, so I’m afraid it’s often the case that the more that’s written the less I tend to read. No criticism intended or implied, V, as all bloggers are free to blog in any style that suits them on the day.

    Edited at 2016-07-08 10:00 am (UTC)

    1. Like!

       But think of the workers, jackkt.

18. I set off at a great pace and thought I might be in record territory, the top half all going in first time except 7d. However, the bottom half took rather longer, and I finished in 11m 6s, with DITHYRAMB (which I’ve seen before but didn’t want to try until I had all the checking letters) as LOI. Usual complaint about obscure foreign word being clued as an anagram, but at least in this case the checking letters left no real choice.
19. Must record appreciation of finest “hidden” I’ve seen in 8 dn. (And slight weariness at schoolboy smut from the odd contributor. Wit is one thing – crosswords are all about that – ho-ho-ho another.)
20. ….but really quite a good puzzle. COD to 16 down, a brilliant surface.

    I did nearly biff in ‘look’ as the first word of 11, only I half-suspected that was a trap. I also wanted to put in ‘agora’ for a long time, but couldn’t justify it, so didn’t.

    1. I have the problem of knowing a very little Latin – so like you I twiddled agora until it was clear that it wouldn’t do, but fora and forum didn’t click as markets, only as general meeting places. If that hadn’t crossed with Dithyramb I might have been OK on both. As it is, DNF.
21. 13:15 for me so pretty straightforward. At 11 I did wonder what sort of spread a karge might be and I suffered from not knowing the story of old So Crates or where Augusta is (my brain always think immediately of Atlanta, Georgia). That made 5d & 4d my last two.

    Dithyramb only known from a previous puzzle.

22. 18 mins. I’m having a day off today so I was able to tackle it fully alert. For some reason I found it hard to make sense of a few of the clue constructions, with cases in point being my last two in, PAROLED and PERSONAL. It also took me too long to see POUND, PAY DEARLY and SOCRATES. Maybe it was the length of some of the definitions. Although I saw USERNAME fairly quickly I agree that it was an excellent reverse hidden.
23. 34 minutes for me, with the well concealed USERNAME LOI. Recalled DITHYRAMB from a previous puzzle. Failed to parse STONEHENGE. Although I could see bits of it, I failed to assemble in the correct order, so it stayed Biffed. I also dabbled with panto characters for 27a. Nice puzzle. Thanks setter and V.
24. Most of it has been said, but it hasn’t been said by anybody – USERNAME is a wonderful hidden word clue and all the wordplay is excellent (put me in the pro-‘COS camp)
25. …USERNAME is a wonderfully hidden solution but I did like PREFAB. It reminded me that I spent far too long yesterday arriving at BESTOW.
26. Standardish 42 minutes for me.

    Here’s a question I’d like to ask as a relative newbie: does anyone, presented with a clue like 7d (“Handbill offering solution for cleaning received by father (5)”) actually work it out from the cryptics? Seems to me that from ‘handbill’ to ‘flyer’ is a fairly quick leap, whereas from ‘solution for cleaning’ to ‘lye’ isn’t (for me, anyway). Which means you solve it by biffing, and only use the cryptics to confirm the answer. But in a really good clue, shouldn’t it be impossible to get to the answer except via the cryptics? Otherwise you’re essentially doing a quick crossword. (As in, it only took me 42 minutes, hem hem.)

    Not that I’m disparaging today’s crossword, which was certainly clever. It’s just that, a lot of the time, I could only appreciate the clever wordplay in retrospect, after I’d already biffed the answer.

    1. There is the occasional clue like that, but I started this one thinking of lye as cleaning agent and there it was.
    2. I would define the process as thinking of the word “FLYER” followed swiftly by noticing that yes, such an idea is indeed borne out by the wordplay. I wouldn’t consider that a failure of a clue; there are some clues though, where the answer is so obviously, oh let’s say, RITE OF PASSAGE or something from the enumeration, definition and a couple of crossers that it’s not even worth checking that the wordplay works, and yes, those clues might be deemed a bit unsatisfactory.
       1. Ah, thanks. I suppose I just miss that ‘aha!’ moment which comes from getting the answer from the wordplay, when I haven’t. Still, it must be nigh-on impossible for a setter to predict which part of the clue the solvers will get first, as joekobi makes clear, so I certainly won’t start getting judgemental.
    3. I think it rather depends on a number of factors, including type of mind (analytical v synthetic), length of time doing crosswords, general knowledge and, indeed, memory.

       It is interesting you should mention this clue, since I represent a halfway house position – though it must be said that I forget what checking letters I already had, which is of course important. Having tried “pa” for father, ruling out “dad”, say, on the grounds that the dye would be three letters not two, I tried F***R, then got FLYER, then remembered the crosswordy word for dye.

       Edited at 2016-07-09 01:05 am (UTC)

    4. I didn’t think of FLYER straight away, and got there from the Y appearing, which made me think of LYE for the cleaning solution. I then *immediately* thought of FLYER and made sense of the FR bit afterwards. So, yes, the cryptic was the way in for me.

       This may be because I’m not an old hand at this game, and in this case partly because I wasn’t too sure of the definition of “handbill”, so when nothing sprung to mind immediately the first time around I left it for later. I suppose the cryptic parts are more useful for those of us with less vocabulary to call on. Certainly as a stripling of 43 with a science-based education I don’t recall seeing the word “handbill” that often.

       Edited at 2016-07-09 08:26 am (UTC)

27. I obviously can’t speak for everyone else but I didn’t. “Trebly” doesn’t fit the wordplay or the definition, unless you count a whimsical definition, and that isn’t indicated by the clue. As far as I can tell “trebly” usually means “threefold”, and occasionally “having too much treble” in the sense of sound reproduction. A word like “as” put into a clue can be there just to make the clue more grammatically correct. It would have confused and annoyed me when I started doing cryptics but I have got used to it.
    1. Thanks for clarifying. As a musician I got the treble tremble connection rightaway. However the ‘As’ and the ‘very’ made me think again – both words seem superfluous.
       Be apprehensive – tremble
       Be very apprehensive – trembly
       I bow to your reply though. Thankyou
28. I read 3dn definition as ‘As singer’ and got Trebly. Anyone else think like this?
29. 14:43.

    Not my sort of puzzle, I’m afraid. Although there were some very good surface readings and the clues were generally concisely worded, I found them rather dull. But perhaps it’s just that they suffer in comparison with those from the previous two puzzles, both of which I found hugely enjoyable. There was nothing about this one that marked it out for me as a Times cryptic.

    1. I must say that, in my heart of hearts, by tastes do run to something a little more… ornate than this.
30. This word makes no sense to me, nor have I come across it before doing the cryptics. Yet it’s come up three times in the last couple of years.
    I only do Fri and Sat! It follows me around!
    1. Came across dithyramb reading “The Ginger Man” by J. P. Dunleavy 30-odd years ago. Still ranks as about my favourite book ever.
       Just under 20 mins, enjoyable. Had 11 ac as Loo, Marge both being ladies, completely missed the spread as spread rather than part of “spread round.”
       Rob
31. Beaten by 8d, which I completely failed to get.
32. I did it from the cryptic. But as one of the slowest solvers here, that may say more about my ability than about useful technique
    1. Thanks for these replies. I stand corrected then. Sounds like it was a well-balanced clue if most people came via the wordplay.

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