Times 26671 – Well, “crossword” didn’t fit….

Solving time: 34 minutes

Music: Gene Ammons, Boss Tenor

I have to admit, this puzzle was a bit on the strange side. While most of the clues were routine, and a few were even chestnuts, there were a couple that really forced you to think, and one that will probably cause a lot of complaining from its lack of a clear literal.

I like a challenge, provided I can overcome it. I thought I had, but I had to go back and type in my completed answers to make sure. The time of 1 hour 4 minutes on the leaderboard included the 30 minutes I left the crossword sitting in the printer after printing it, but the 0 wrong is what I was really looking for.

Across
1 ACTION, double definition, the first one referring to shooting a film: “lights, camera, action!”.
5 COMEDIAN, CO + MEDIAN, where the instructions are unusually literal.
9 PLAYGROUND, PLAY (G) ROUND, i.e. at your local golf course. I had seen that ‘playground’ would fit, but was looking at the wrong clue so didn’t put it in.
10 MEAN, double definition.
11 FORECAST, cryptic definition, as the Met Office provides the weather prediction in the UK. In NYC, however, the Met is much higher class, offering opera and fine art instead of a chance of rain.
12 SUBSET, the one everyone will be talking about. This is apparently an kind of &lit double definition, where the officers are ‘subset’ of the crew, and the whole lot of them is a ‘sub set’ on a particular type of warship. You’ll either love it or hate it. Kevin Gregg has managed a more correct parsing of this clue. “Officers in crew, say” is the literal, and “put on warship” = sub + set is the cryptic. Phew!
13 BLOG, B[ana]L O[fferin]g.
15 RELEVANT, RE + LEVANT. The verb ‘levant’ means ‘to leave secretly or hurriedly to avoid paying debts’.
18 INFERIOR, INFE(RIO)R.
19 VINO, V(I)NO. More popular in the eighteenth century than it is today.
21 CANNES, cryptic definition, and a good one, as ‘by the audience’ evokes a ‘sounds like’ clue.
23 PRINCESS, PR(INC)ESS.
25 ITCH, [w]ITCH.
26 EISENHOWER, anagram of WHERE ON IS. Excellent misdirection from this unlikely anagram fodder.
27 CRIMINAL, hidden in [pacifi]C RIM, IN AL[aska].
29 YESMEN, YE(S[tate]MEN, a chestnut.
 
Down
2 CELLO, CELL + O, another chestnut.
3 IVY LEAGUE, cryptic definition, referring to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and not the university in the UK.
4 NORWAY, NO(R)WAY.
5 COUNTERPROPOSAL, anagram of O + PLAN PROSECUTOR.
6 MODESTLY, MO(D[ebat]E)STLY.
7 DEMOB, DEMO + B.
8 AGAMEMNON, A(GAME M)NON. The temptation to parse ‘Greek Leader’ as ‘G’ is strong.
14 LANCASTER, anagram of ANCESTRAL.
16 VIVACIOUS, VI([sa]VA[ge])CIOUS. A very novel clue construction, that had me guessing for a while until I finally saw it.
17 EINSTEIN, EIN(ST)EIN.
20 KIDNEY, K(I’D [pai]N)EY.
22 NAHUM, anagram of HUMAN.
24 SCENE, sounds like ‘seen’, my FOI.

80 comments on “Times 26671 – Well, “crossword” didn’t fit….”

  1. SUBSET caused me a bit of grief and was my last in, though I was more confident with it than IVY LEAGUE which fit the checkers and definition but I spaced on the connection to Cambridge. 12:56 and very tricky for a Monday.
  2. DNFF after a cheery start and then came to grief in the Geordie Quarter. My twenty five minute effort was undone by the hideous 12ac as I shoved in SUBMEN rather than SUBSET.

    3dn is in reality Harvard. The IVY LEAGUE was also a close harmony group from Lincoln who had a string of hits in the early sixties, which included a fine cover of ‘Rag Doll’.

    Initially I had 6dn as MODERATE which did not help – MODESTLY being correct of course.

    FOI 27ac CRIMINAL LOI AGAMEMNON

    COD 26ac EISENHOWER – WOD IVY LEAGUE

    Roll on Tuesday

  3. with 2+ of those 19 spent wondering about 12ac. But I don’t now see a problem: ‘officers in crew, say’=SUBSET; put=SET on warship=SUB, and Bob’s your etc. And I read 21ac as indeed a homophone; film goes in a can. Well, it worked. I was fooled into looking for ‘loo’ (little room) in 2d and into taking ‘main’=sea in 6d; hate it when that happens.
  4. 35 minutes with IVY LEAGUE unparsed, no idea how VIVACIOUS worked and, like our Shanghai correspondent, SUBMEN instead of SUBSET, assuming an unknown meaning of SUBMEN which would be revealed once I had consulted a dictionary (it wasn’t). I had considered SUBSET but discounted it.

    I read 25ac as clued by both {w}ITCH (charming…female) and {b}ITCH (malicious female) but I now see that {w}ITCH serves both.

    Edited at 2017-03-13 05:59 am (UTC)

  5. Please, please, please send you’re blog in the format where the clue, including number of words, precedes your answer and the parsing. We novices learn so much more that way.
    1. I agree in the instances of competition puzzles that are not blogged on the day of publication, and indeed, when I blog I always show the clues because of the curious way I write the thing, copying the clues (via notepad) into Word, commenting on each, then copying back into TftT. Each to his own, I think. It’s not too tricky to have two windows open to refer back to the clues. You’re your own judge.

      Edited at 2017-03-13 09:22 am (UTC)

  6. 15:35. Mostly very easy with a few much tougher ones thrown in. I got seriously stuck for a while with four or five left.
    NAHUM was irritating (as ever, I thought ‘why do this?’ It’s so unnecessary) but I happened to guess right.
    I thought 21 was a homophone too, as well as a reference to the film festival. Neat.
    1. I’m not sure what you found irritating, but you reminded me that I wondered why ‘being’ was there; ‘Human altered part of Bible’ would work, no? while still irritating you.
      1. I’m imagining that the problem is, if you happen not to have heard of the Bible book in question, it’s a straight coin flip between NAHUM and NUHAM.
        1. That is indeed the problem. I think I plumped for NAHUM because it looked stranger, which seemed more in keeping with the obscure nether reaches of scripture.

          Edited at 2017-03-13 07:43 am (UTC)

        2. Fair enough; and I share K’s dislike of out-of-the-way foreign words being clued by anagrams; but I’d have thought that books of the Bible still count as GK. (on edit: Timing problem: this was in reply to Verlaine not Keriothe.)

          Edited at 2017-03-13 07:49 am (UTC)

          1. I would say that books of the bible that are generally known count as general knowledge.
  7. I’ve had a rough week and it was made rougher when my aged mum fell over yesterday and fractured the head of her humerus. Four hours in A&E in the evening followed by having to do the crossword on laptop in bed (my desktop lives in our spare room) seemed unconducive circumstances for setting a PB, and when I saw it took me almost 10 minutes to crack a Monday puzzle, I thought my worst fears had been confirmed!

    Still, turns out it was actually quite a difficult one. I confess to not having parsed VIVACIOUS or IVY LEAGUE at all, and SUBSET was my LOI as I’m sure it was everyone else’s. I did think the latter was really quite a good clue after mulling it over!

  8. A DNF thanks to my having no clue if it was Nahum or Nuham. Both looked entirely plausible to me and I wasn’t in the mood for flipping a coin. Despite a fair amount of biblical marination over the years, I honestly can’t remember encountering Nahum.

    I nearly gave up on SUBSET but the penny did drop in the end. It’s a clever idea, but it seems like a very bad example of a subset — rightly or wrongly, ‘crew’ is often used to mean everyone except the officers. Chambers, for example, has “a ship’s company excluding the officers” as a def. for crew. “Officers and crew” is commonplace, in which case one is not a subset of the other. This makes for a very confusing clue.

    1. Um, well my Chambers doesn’t (12th, ed., also 13th revised). The main def. is “A gang, a ship’s company” and nothing anywhere about excluding officers
      1. ODO has ‘a group of people working on a ship, aircraft, etc. other than the officers’.
        1. Interesting question as to how far The Times considers online versions as valid ..
          1. Indeed. I have the Chambers app on another computer and I find that it doesn’t have the exclusion definition. Dictionaries aside, I know I think of ‘crew’ as ‘not officers’, though I suspect this might annoy old sea dogs.
            1. In both my defence and yours, the full OED says: “Naut. The whole of the men belonging to and manning a ship, boat, or other vessel afloat. (Now the leading sense.) In a general sense the ship’s crew includes all under the captain, but in a more restricted sense it is applied to the men only, to the exclusion of the officers.”
              On edit: sorry, for what suddenly has become a duplication!

              Edited at 2017-03-13 09:22 am (UTC)

              1. Seems like we need a Venn diagram, with at least three circles!

                “Able seamen in crew …” might have been less contentious (but not half as much fun to talk about).

                1. Fine, provided the circles intersect! In set theory I seem to remember paradoxes can arise when the whole is defined as also a member. Best avoided, I agree, by saying the officers, like the ship itself, are not part of the crew. But I solved by assuming the opposite.
    2. Some may know of Nahum Tate, a 17th century Poet Laureate. He wrote the libretto for Henry Purcell’s most famous work, the opera Dido and Aeneas, and also “While shepherds watched their flocks by night”.
      1. Now you mention it I think that may be why I plumped for NAHUM. I think this chap has come up here before.
      2. Thanks for the reminder about Dido and Aeneas Jack. I must listen to it again – Dido’s Lament is lovely. “While shepherds washed their socks” is another favourite and I’d forgotten who the lyricist was!
    3. OED allows both so I guess that is good enough:

      b. Naut. The whole of the men belonging to and manning a ship, boat, or other vessel afloat. (Now the leading sense.)In a general sense the ship’s crew includes all under the captain, but in a more restricted sense it is applied to the men only, to the exclusion of the officers.

      Dereklam

  9. Whereas I would say, of course, that books of the Bible that I know count as general knowledge.
    1. Well of course when I say ‘generally known’ I mean ‘known by me’. 😉
      1. There’s Nahum Tate to corroborate the spelling… Though I suspect that the intersection between the number of people who’ve heard of Nahum Tate but not the Biblical figure might be sparsely populated?
      2. There was a TLS not so long ago (1127) which required you to know the Sura (chapter) headings in the Koran (in the Darwood English translation, of course. There’s 114 of those, and only 66 Bible books, a fair few of those duplicates. So in the dumbed down version of the TLS which is the Times crossword, perhaps we should count ourselves lucky to have such a slight call on our acquired knowledge.
  10. Considered SUBMEN, but as a mathematician thought of SUBSET and then parsed it. I take sotira’s point, but it didn’t occur to me. Incidentally subsets are fascinating. 21ac wasn’t parsed until now, thanks to all for that – film goes in cans, or in this case the can, the s not being pronounced in French. For 9ac, vinyl’s parsing is better, but ‘Do something’ = PLAY + ‘course’= ROUND including G also works. Thanks vinyl and setter. <20’.
  11. Enjoyed this somewhat, though I agree it was a bit of mix of easy and tricky clues. No rule against that I suppose.. not keen on 12ac but it seems a valid clue to me

    Sorry to be Mr Grumpy this morning but I’m afraid some GK is assumed for The Times cryptic and that definitely includes all the books and a lot of the individuals in the bible.. rather that than Dickens or Hardy, though for my preference..

      1. Maybe John 1. “In the beginning was the Word(logos), And the Word was with God, And the Word was God.” The logos also carries a fuller, secondary, gnostic meaning as Times Cryptic Crossword according to some scholars.
    1. Maybe Jerry, but I’ve been prompted by these crosswords and the blog to cover some of my GK gaps by reading a bit of Dickens and even Heyer. Just don’t think the bible is enough of a page-turner to elicit a similar response!

      I’ve decided the best response to a personal obscurity like this is to sigh, shrug and try to remember it for next time.

      1. I try to do the same but find it hard to miss out the ‘get irritated’ stage.
      2. Some bits of the bible are quite lively, so they tell me. My own knowledge, for that and for Shakespeare, comes exclusively from crosswords. But it builds up over the course of fifty years.
        Heyer, Dickens, now which one of those is the page-turner .. hmmm.
        1. If I don’t turn the pages, I’m never going to know why they killed the butler.
      3. It’s only one of the cultural pillars on which all of Western civilisation is built. No biggie.

        Edited at 2017-03-13 09:29 am (UTC)

        1. Though in fairness, the Book of Nahum’s personal contribution to the cause may be minimal!
          1. Well quite. With scripture as with everything else, somewhere between no knowledge and perfect knowledge is general knowledge. Where exactly the boundary lies is a matter of opinion.
  12. Usual time but guessed Nahum and put in SUBMEN. I can now see SUBSET but I am not enthusiastic. I cannot make up my mind whether VIVACIOUS is good or bad. “savage” appears to be doing double duty as an adjective and as a noun?
  13. … but with VIVACIOUS, IVY LEAGUE and ‘submen’ unparsed… well two out of three ain’t bad…

    Oh, and NAHUM irritated me for the same reason that it irritated Keriothe above. CANNES seems to be missing something… I can see what it’s getting at (“the film goes in the can/to cannes”), but just didn’t feel right.

  14. Similar to Sawbill, except that having parsed SUBSET post-solve I think it’s quite a brilliant clue.

    Used the same logic as Keriothe to plump for NAHUM over NUHAM.

    Tough for a Monday. Thanks setter and Vinyl.

  15. 17.23, so about as average as it gets, though in this case skewed by the brilliant 12ac, which took ages. But, hey, wait a moment. Is a submarine a warship? I thought they were all boats.
    I was quite happy that film goes in cans. How the French pronounce the place is irrelevant,
    Just a thought. How long before Eisenhower ceases to count as General Knowledge?
  16. Same experience as most others. A lot of chestnuts and easy offerings sprinkled with one irritant NAHUM – yet another anagram of an obscure word – the slightly unsatisfactory SUBSET and a couple of really good offerings such as VIVACIOUS and EISENHOWER

    IVY LEAGUE has to be the poorest clue for some time

  17. I seem to be out of step here (not unusual), having seen SUBSET almost right away but dithering over PLAYGROUND because I’d convinced myself that “facility for pupils” meant some sort of eyewear… Nahum lives next to Micah and they both pop up with some regularity in the NY Times puzzles. 12.54
      1. I have to admit I got there through “bitch”, and then frowned hard at the setter’s apparent tone. Didn’t occur to me I might be projecting somewhat. “Witch” fits both “charming” and “malicious” perfectly well, of course.
  18. So it seems I was lucky to have got this all correct, though it took me 55 minutes. I agree it was something of an odd mix.

    I very nearly put in SUBMEN, but couldn’t justify it and kept on looking, despite knowing that I was already on a 50/50 chance for 22d. It very much didn’t help that the first story I heard when I turned on Radio 4 this morning was about the launching of the distinguished Boaty McBoatface, a sub which is very definitely not a warship.

    In the end, though, I found SUBSET, was happy enough with it, and then guessed right for NAHUM. I agree with other commenters that while I’m happy enough to read Three Men in a Boat or Jane Eyre for my crosswording education, the Bible seems a step too far.

    1. In my youth I used to tackle the British & Foreign Bible Society Prize Crossword with my grandfather. I won a Bible on one occasion. Nahum aplenty! I stick to non-fiction these days.
      Use of a Concordance was forbidden.
  19. Late start courtesy of the old dog having a bad night. 25 minutes to reach LOI SUBSET which after ten minutes head scratching I bifffed on the basis of a warship(SUB) crew(SET) of which the officers are also a SUBSET. To read this as correct if for the wrong reason has me demob happy for the rest of the day. And no, this is not my demob suit I’m wearing. FOI NAHUM, a write-in as of course was LANCASTER. COD FORECAST. I can always remember a Michael Bentine ( the forgotten Goon) gag about a sudden increase in temperature on the Met Office roof caused either by an anticyclone over the Shetland Islands or because the Met Office was on fire. Good puzzle apart from 12a and nothing banal about the blog.
  20. Didn’t have a problem with subset, perhaps I didn’t overthink it.. LOI relevant which was easy for most
    For some reason we had to learn all the books of the Bible, in order, at school and can still manage most after 40 odd years. Prefer literary and cricket GK to musical which is where my gaps are.
    Good start to the week..
    Roin
  21. Not quite Monday fare. SUBSET is atrocious, no question, but some gems – I liked the clever VIVACIOUS, and the sneaky MADEIRA m’dear. FOI ACTION LOI MODESTLY. SUBSET written down on the side but not entered, so a DNF. I vaguely though of “sub” as a warship and “subs” as subalterns, but could not see how to parse. Having read the explanations, still don’t. And here I was expecting the usual doddle!
  22. But only because of the numerous references to “average”. If you see a hole in the street then you wouldn’t normally fall in, but I fell into two holes today with Submen and Nuham. Otherwise an enjoyable crossword. My knowledge of the bible is not what it was but it is good for a chuckle occasionally (oerr, just been struck by lightning).
  23. After a long break to concentrate on my post-retirement studies, I thought I would try a Monday puzzle to reintroduce myself gently. It took me 25 mins with only 12 ac causing a problem which I resolved by deciding SUBMEN was not a real word. NAHUM posed no problem, despite my atheism, probably because of the parentally enforced Sunday excursions to the Huddersfield Road Methodist Chapel in my youth.

    Edited at 2017-03-13 12:23 pm (UTC)

  24. Although I guessed NAHUM correctly(also irritated by this), I came up with SUBMEN for 12a and spent at least 12 minutes of my 43:34 coming up with COVENANT for 11a. I’d been fixated on the MET Police and couldn’t make it work. The MET Office never occurred to me. Annoyingly obvious once you’ve seen the answer! My FOI was NORWAY and my last correct entry was IVY LEAGUE. Liked AGAMEMNON. Didn’t see how 16d worked and spent a moment idly wondering how VIVACOUS was a savage. Tough workout for a Monday. Thanks setter and Vinyl.
  25. It took me longer to find the blog than it did to finish the crossword! Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration – the crossword took me 62 minutes, much of that struggling with SUBSET as others have commented.

    Thanks to Vinyl’s fast completion and posting, the blog appears under Sunday for me, rather than Monday.

  26. I found this relatively straightforward but hesitated over SUBSET. I did consider SUBMEN and then discarded it on the basis that a) I had never heard of it, and b) submariners are generally called
    SUBMARINERS. Impeccable reasoning, I thought …….

    Time: all correct in 25 mins.

    Thank you to setter and blogger.

  27. My LOI was SUBSET which, once I saw it and saw how it worked, I thought completely fair. No problem with NAHUM having spent enough sundays in my youth in church with nothing to look at but the prayer book and the bible. Not only did I know all the books of the bible, I used to be able to tell you how the date of Easter was calculated.

    I seem to be the only one who biffed CAMERA at 21a (when A was the only checker). It’s where film goes and “judged by audience” (as opposed to jury) seemed like a reasonable, if indirect, way to refer to trials “in camera”. Eventually I got there, kicking myself since I used to live just outside Cannes (not to be confused with Cagnes a few miles towards nice nor Caen in Normandy).

  28. For what it’s worth, its in Chambers. See Appendices, under the heading “Books of the Bible”
  29. About 25 minutes, ending with a bunch of those minutes knitting my brow about SUBSET. I see there are a representative bunch here who think it’s a fine clue. Not me, really. It went in with a shrug after a few minutes fruitless thinking, as simply being a better answer that SUBMEN. The rest was OK, even NAHUM. Regards.
  30. Well, I was another one sunk by submen at 12ac. NAHUM was a lucky guess, based on the fact that it sounded just like the kind of silly name people used to use before we invented proper ones. And yes, since you ask, 12ac has put me in a grumpy mood.
  31. No one else had maidenly for 6dn? It wouldn’t be a great answer but seems to fit for me. That made subset emblem for me as you do get emblems on ships. No wonder I couldn’t see why!

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