Times 26877 – TCC Qualifier heat 1 – Not the New Testament then.

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
A cunning puzzle for the Championships, I thought, not too difficult as a first round test but with a couple of places where you can easily get one letter wrong; I see only 30 of 88 contestants got 100% on this one so perhaps that’s why. Apart from some basic Welsh geography and musical terms there’s no heavy duty general knowledge so it is a fair test of solving skills not quizzing skills. It took me just over the 20 minutes with no use of aids, but in exam conditions so not parsing everything, I expect I’d have messed up.
Thanks to Mohn2 for the java update, it worked fine on its first outing once I’d followed the extra bit in the instructions when using a Chrome browser.

Across
1 Clean bottom lip, following medic (6)
DREDGE – DR = medic, EDGE = lip.
4 Warmer place in Wales (8)
CARDIGAN – Double definition.
9 Lack of honesty old city avoided? That’s not possible (2,3,2)
NO CAN DO – NO CANDOUR would be lack of honesty, delete the UR, our usual old city.
11 Organ that is held in each hand, further back (7)
EARLIER – EAR = organ, I.E. = that is, inside L and R.
12 Language family don’t allow, excessively outspoken (5)
BANTU – BAN = don’t allow, TU sounds like TOO, excessively.
13 Needs, somehow, to insert line, tricky without stopping (9)
ENDLESSLY – Anagram of (NEEDS L)* then SLY = tricky.
14 Staggered — so getting teeth knocked out, possibly? (10)
GOBSMACKED – Double definition, one whimsical.
16 Superior type seems noisome and obviously bourgeois, initially (4)
SNOB – Initial letters of Seems Noisome Obviously Bourgeois.
19 Old soldier on back in agony: stretcher found? (4)
YOGI – Y = back in agony; O(ld), GI = soldier. At first I had YOGA thinking it was a better definition, but couldn’t parse it; perhaps this was one of the little errors people could make in haste.
20 Weakness — old empire builder quick to conceal it (10)
INCAPACITY – INCA = old empire builder, PACY = quick, insert IT.
22 Monarch in clothes, striking (9)
BATTERING – BATTING = IN, as in cricket, insert ER = monarch.
23 Old firefighter in commercial broadcast (5)
ADAIR – AD = commercial, AIR = broadcast. A reference to Paul ‘Red’ Adair, famous oil well firefighter who died in 2004 aged 89. If you’d never heard of him, or forgotten, the wordplay was obvious.
25 Gag vacuously lame, considering skirting round it? (7)
SILENCE – LE = vacuously lame, insert into SINCE = considering.
26 A set of books inspired by remarkable island capital (3,4)
SAO TOME – SOME here = remarkable, as in ‘that was some catch’. Insert A OT being Old Testament. I of course had the New one at first making 18d unsolvable. Sao Tome the capital of Sao Tome & Principe, has a surprisingly large 71,000 population. Well, it surprised me.
27 Dark liquid drunk by Osage leader, native American bottles (8)
CREOSOTE – CREE is the native American, insert O and SOT = drunk.
28 Promise I’ve given? I don’t believe it! (2,4)
MY WORD – Double definition, one exclamatory.

Down
1 Traveller on beach in shade, European plagued by insects (4,5)
DUNE BUGGY – DUN = shade, E(uropean), BUGGY = plagued by insects.
2 Is one’s time up in Labour now, then? (2-3)
EX-CON – I think this is a sort of double definition, 1. being an EX-CON means you’ve served your time, 2. no longer a Conservative so joined Labour perhaps.
3 After a couple of drinks, well game! (3,5)
GIN RUMMY – GIN, RUM = a couple of drinks, MY ! exclamation = well!
5 Protein-rich food source, a new green bean to eat beginning to disagree with us (8,5)
ABERDEEN ANGUS – Insert D (beginning to disagree) into (GREEN BEAN)* then add US.
6 Lift not working, service called in, so mended (6)
DARNED – Not working = DEAD, lif it = DAED, insert RN = service.
7 Slides sliding off, it separates (9)
GLISSANDI – Musical slides. Insert SA = sex appeal, or ‘IT’, into (SLIDING)*.
8 Terminals in nine ready, five plugs wired (5)
NERVY – Insert V (five) into the first and last letters of NinE ReadY.
10 Cocky model on cover, if with slight flaw (13)
OVERCONFIDENT – (ON COVER IF)* add DENT = slight flaw.
15 Beauty smuggling a gun, short piece (9)
BAGATELLE – BELLE = beauty, insert A GAT, a Gatling gun.
17 Squeeze bone dry, if soused (9)
BOYFRIEND – (IF BONE DRY)*. When did you last hear someone describe their bloke this way? Me neither.
18 Can, a container of liquid drunk by bird (8)
LAVATORY – LORY is a small parrot like bird, insert A VAT. US slang for the loo.
21 Rallying mid-morning? Not quite (6)
TENNIS – Nearly TENNISH so nearly mid morning.
22 Lowest degree, like that (5)
BASIC – BA = degree, SIC Latin for thus, like that.
24 Back with vitality in abundance (1,4)
A GOGO – AGO = back, GO = vitality.

69 comments on “Times 26877 – TCC Qualifier heat 1 – Not the New Testament then.”

  1. Managed to finish but a struggle. The parsing took me over the hour when finally got to the LAVATORY 18dn and 26ac SAO TOME my LOI – as I thought originally it was SAN TOME. That made getting the 18dn rather difficult.

    COD 21dn TENNIS

    WOD 14ac GOBSMACKED in The Times no less! With 27ac CREOSOTE taking silver.

    Well done to all those who got there within the allotted 20 mins and in one piece!

    Edited at 2017-11-08 07:42 am (UTC)

  2. Another stymied by SAN TOME, which does at least exist (it’s in Venezuela) although it’s neither an island nor a capital, and I didn’t discover my error until I had given up and cheated to solve 18dn. I hadn’t thought of that meaning of ‘can’ but had been concentrating all my efforts trying to come up with the name of a prison that might fit. But for the misplaced checker and my case of tunnel-vision, 18dn wouldn’t have been a difficult clue, and I had even considered A VAT as ‘a container of liquid’ without twigging the obvious answer. I blame knowing this was a competition puzzle for putting me under additional pressure.

    Edited at 2017-11-08 07:55 am (UTC)

    1. I used ‘john’ for the first 30 or so years of my life (well, maybe not the first 5 or 6), then made the acquaintance within a space of 2-3 months of three John’s, and switched to ‘can’; it still was a long time coming here.
  3. Never did get CREOSOTE, partly because I’d flung in ‘basso’ at 22d. I think I put in ‘yoga’ first, too (it’s on my other computer)–I tend to confuse the practice with the practicer–but changed it; ‘stretcher’ seems more apt for the person. I suppose I should just shut up instead of repeatedly pointing out that the Cree–the setters’ go-to Indian tribe–are Canadians not Americans.
    1. google has “Native American” as “a member of any of the indigenous peoples of North and South America and the Caribbean Islands.”

      My geography is hazy, but I think that covers Canada

      1. I’m sure Google has just that, and I’m sure that lots of people–no doubt including some of our setters–operate with that definition. My point was that the definition is infelicitous, to say the least. Most Canadians–and most Cree are Canadians–would not accept the appellation ‘American’, and most Indians, even American Indians, do not refer to themselves or care to be referred to as ‘Native American’. Actually, the clue says ‘native American’, which most Cree aren’t on any account, not ‘Native American’, so the Google definition is beside the point.

        Edited at 2017-11-08 12:55 pm (UTC)

        1. I don’t know what you mean by finding the definition infelicitous–I think you simply mean that you don’t like it and find it mildly offensive. But it’s technically correct, and the surface reads well, which are the only requirements for “felicitousness” in a crossword clue.

          For example, I work in IT, and I object to being called a geek. However, in crosswordland, I’m perfectly ok with this definition of geek. It’s all about context

  4. Yeah I got caught out with yoga and San Tome. The former clogged my lavatory for 10 minutes, the latter flushed any chance of a score.

    The first 20 minutes were really fun though. Good puzzle, first rate clues

  5. 19 minutes .. solved on the train the morning after the champs. I think this is fairly representative of the level of the puzzles in the two preliminary rounds — somewhere on the tricky side of standard.

    I really liked a few of these, especially TENNIS.

    LOI was DUNE BUGGY, where the penny was slow to drop on the definition. Well-disguised defs were a bit of a theme on Saturday and certainly caused me problems in Prelim 2.

  6. Given my time, you are all quaking in your boots for next year’s Championships? SILENCE/TENNIS were my last two in. I see a personal nina should I ever get to the Championships – Basically overconfident, a bagatelle, endlessly nervy, incapacity, darned silence, no can do, gobsmacked, battering, my word! Lavatory?
  7. 20.37, so in with a shout of completing the other two in time. This one yielded its secrets slowly: I found most clues yielded nothing on first look, and required concentrated side-slipping to spot the definitions.
    A rather brilliant case in point at 5 down, where the determinedly vegetarian surface wouldn’t let you think of a cow to eat.

    Two queries. Is Red Adair still famous?

    And just how close is the Frank Muir My Word to Victor Meldrew? Horryd?

    I enjoyed the nostalgic reference to the long-ago Whisky sponsor which we all read as NO CAN DO. I still have the miniature, at least the bottle.

    1. …was/is an anti-nuclear power station group in Canada. It may take a fellow ex-CEGB guy or a Canadian to know what I’m on about.
        1. The former Commercial Director of PowerGen is a great personal friend. He’d no doubt claim that he’d have been the natural choice to have headed up their Italian division if only they’d had one. On the other hand, he’s a year older than me, so I’m not sure I’d believe him. We’re both more likely to be needing the NO CANDU placards.
  8. DNF in 45 mins with yoghurt, granola, berries, banana.
    I couldn’t get crapper. Due, like others, to bunging in San Tome as a half-remembered capital. Very cruel of the setter to give an OT/NT option.
    MERs at: Adair still being worthy of a mention, IT still being SA, and Yogi as a stretcher (another chance for a Boo-boo).
    Mostly I liked: Clean bottom, Incapacity, Ex-Con, Boyfriend (COD), Rallying.
    I fear speed competitions are not my thing – unless they provide a selection of marmalades?
    Thanks cruel setter and Pip.
  9. Very enjoyable puzzle which I chugged through at a slow pace whilst enjoying the excellent clues on offer. Had to look up SAO TOME to verify it was a real place but remembered Red Adair. Nice one setter and well done Pip
  10. Well, at least I couldn’t have written in EARLIIR in championship conditions, or could I? Held up by biffing BASSO, wondering about the extra S but feeling reassured by ‘Osage leader’. Got there eventually with 38 seconds to make up on the other two puzzles. Quality puzzle.
  11. I found this one quite tricky, and moved on to the next puzzle before finishing it. At the 35-minute mark I had finished the other two puzzles and had all but 18dn in this one solved. It took me another 10 minutes to realise that SAN TOME was wrong so it might conceivably have cost me a place in the final.
    1. Unlucky with SAN TOME. You’re probably right – I finished in about 34m in 6th so if you’d seen the light a few minutes quicker I suspect you’d have qualified.
    2. I think a large majority of the people in the room would admit to going for the New Testament as the first option, with a slight niggle at the back of the mind as to whether it might be SAO, only to realise what they’d done when the word ‘lavatory’ eventually linked itself to ‘can’.
  12. 55 minutes, confirming my view that the Championship would be a step too far. Took me long enough to see DUNE BUGGY and our holiday place is called The Dunes! Are you allowed to stand up and make yourself a piece of toast at the venue? That’s when CARDIGAN hit me. SAO TOME LOI, unparsed and would have been unknown too before the Armstrong/Osman quiz show. Never heard of a LORY bird but it had to be. COD GOBSMACKED as that’s what I was when I finished, although TENNIS was very good. I toyed with elevenses for a while first. To think, we called it baggin in my childhood. I’ve been in the south too long. Congratulations to the 30 heroes who solved this and quite possibly two others in the hour. Thank you Pip and setter.
      1. Bugger off back north, lengthen my vowels or emigrate? The family won’t accept the first and last, and I’m not up for the middle one. Is there a fourth option?
  13. Did all but two clues in 10 mins. And this was my second go at the puzzle!

    I was there on Saturday and could only manage half of this crossword in the time. Today I still managed to fall into the San Tome trap – and then couldn’t find the lavatory.

  14. Stopped after 40′ with two wrong, BASSO and SAN TOME, which had made CREOSOTE and LAVATORY impossible. Am in awe of finalists, but only resolved to get better. Thanks pip and setter.
  15. Got there having got my golf-ball in the SANd trap for a time. No idea how long since I just got back from overseas, so I started this, then fell asleep and woke up 4 hours later with the lights on. Finished the crossword, didn’t bother to check it, and had a EECON for EXCON. But most enjoyable. DUNE BUGGY was my FOI despite beng some people’s LOI. I just saw “traveller on beach” and wrote it in to get that corner done fast. Took way too long to see ABERDEEN ANGUS, looking for something weirder.
  16. Duly fell into every wrong last letter elephant trap the setter had laid and then spent ages unpicking my mistakes. Some sneaky stuff here.
  17. On the day, came to this one after grinding to a halt in the first. Took about 8m, with a minor hold-up due to putting in SAND BUGGY at 1D and a major one due to yet another SAN TOME at 26A. Though I knew full well that the capital is SAO TOME, I’d first guessed purely from the “island capital” and enumeration that it must be SAN something and unfortunately that persisted in my mind even once I’d figured out the rest of the wordplay. 18D was thus impossible. Having had a run of similar cock-ups in my cramming for the Championships, I soon revisited all the crossing answers for 18D and spotted the error. Fortunately LAVATORY then sprang to mind from the checkers, as I doubt LORY would make my top twenty likeliest crossword birds.

    Had passed the Toto showroom in Clerkenwell the previous evening so had to smile when the “Clean bottom” definition proved to be unrelated.

    1. Belated congratulations Mohn! I didn’t connect the name in the lists until just recently though I did know Dave Howell from the TLS.
      1. Thanks, Olivia! I am now also answering to “John McCain”, since that is how I appeared in Monday’s print version of the paper – David was credited as “David Howe”.
    2. Thanks… I think! I can’t get too upset by it. After all ‘I’d have done much better if it hadn’t been for the clues that gave me problems’ is a bit weak.
      Congratulations to you though, another very solid performance!
      1. Honestly, I was trying to stay the right side of encouraging rather than annoying! I think you’ve been just outside qualifying several times now, right, so it will come.
        1. Don’t worry, I took it that way. I do think that if I keep plugging away I will get into the final at some point. I still seem to be improving (although the rate of improvement has slowed) and I managed 14th place a couple of years ago, so all I need is a bit of luck.
          By the way for ‘solid’ in my comment above read ‘stellar’!
    3. Was once offered a job in Sao Tome, and had a very good friend who actually worked there – different time, different company – so knew the place, but still got it wrong at the first attempt before finally twigging lavatory. Even so, DNF in 28 minutes. Beaten by Cardigan – didn’t know it was a place, let alone a Welsh place – woulda guessed England. There’s a, English Lord Cardigan who invented the sandwich, or something? And just couldn’t see a word that fit the crossers. Kudos to those who can knock these over in 8 minutes, or even in 20.
      1. Cardigan more famous for Cardigan Bay, which stretches a good part of the Welsh coast along the irish Sea. I think the sandwich is supposed to have been invented by the Earl of Sandwich?
  18. 40.20 which seemed like it should have been a lot quicker, except for the problems everyone else has had. I thought that maybe my checkers were faulty until the penny dropped. Also spent ages over
  19. MY WORD thinking that it must begin with an I.
    Pressed tab there by mistake instead of caps lock and the message got sent – there’s a thing….
  21. I’m still getting that really irritating thing where crosswords I’ve completed come up blank if I’ve closed my web browser or restarted my PC in the meantime. Even this one, which I filled in this morning, is now blank after a forced restart.

    Is anyone else still getting this? And did anyone find an actual solution? I’ve tried with 3 different web browsers on my Mac and get the same thing with all of them. I did see a thread on the forum about this but nothign I read in there helped.

    Any ideas? It’s pretty annoying.

    edit: in an interesting twist, I note this grid is now pink and I can’t fill it in again, so somewhere along the line the system is registering my grid as ‘complete’, even though I can’t see the answers I filled in earlier.

    Edited at 2017-11-08 11:48 am (UTC)

    1. I still can’t use the club site at all on my PC. On my iPad they have recently introduced two exciting new innovations:
      > the bottom line of the last clues (across and down) is only half visible, so you have to try and work out what the clue says from the top half of the letters. This can be quite tricky.
      > in the jumbos it is no longer possible to scroll down to the bottom of the grid, so you have to enter the answers without being able to see what you’re typing.
      It’s really infuriating.
      1. I’ve not tried on the iPad lately – and only yesterday’s quickie on the PC (slowly coming back from saturday’s car crash).

        Maybe tomorrow. (We’ll be millionaires Rodney)

      2. Sounds like I’m quite well off then — the site only won’t let me see what I’ve written.

        Hm.

      3. Both work fine on both my PCs – in Windows 10 and Chrome – are you using a different browser?
    2. In case it affects anyone else, I may have solved my problem.

      I have an app on the Mac called Cookie that automatically cleans up browser data on exit. I had previously checked that I had Times cookies marked as favourites so they wouldn’t be deleted but I had overlooked that the Cookie app also cleans out locally stored databases associated with certain websites. Marking Times databases (javascript?) for retention as well as cookies seems to have fixed the disappearing grid content problem.

      Anyone having similar issues may have a browser setting or extension that’s clearing out local databases.

  22. I’d completely forgotten about him so this took a very long time, as did A GOGO. 21.18 so that would probably have dished me last weekend unless I’d found the other two much easier.
  23. As with the other two on the day, this beat me hands down. I’m going to blame first-time nerves/exam conditions/etc for the foreseeable future I think – not least because revisiting it today there was nothing really *that* scary or unknown.

    I think I’d got about 4 clues out of this one when crypticsue put her hand up – which kind of reinforced that it wasn’t going to be my day

    It was, however, good to put some faces to names – in no particular order, keriothe, johninterred, grestyman, Verlaine, sue, and probably some others as well that i didn’t realise at the time. Probably just as well that i had to catch a train – things could have got a bit untidy in the George otherwise…

    Edited at 2017-11-08 12:11 pm (UTC)

  24. 45 min: after half an hour all done bar 18dn, with right half taking about twice the time of left. Then spent ages trying to think of something to fit JA-A-N-Y (‘can’ suggested jail and the bird ending Y is clearly a JAY). Only after aid failed to find anything to fit checkers, did I look up the capital and find I had the wrong Testament – and then the answer became clear. So really a DNF.
  25. 14 minutes, that bottom left quadrant was very tricky. SAO TOME was a write-in, I guess I’ve been reading a bit about Africa and imperialism lately. Nice puzzle!
  26. Nothing much to add to what has already been observed, but this was a puzzle which required accuracy, which is, after all, what the Finals demand as the first benchmark, so fair enough. Like a lot of people on the day, I had LAVATORY as my last one in across the three puzzles, so I think that marks it out as the big stumbling block.
  27. Nice puzzle, which I managed to enjoy for about 90 minutes. If I correctly remember my physics, I’m pretty sure that unless I were able to travel faster than the speed of light I wouldn’t be able to reverse time and get another two done in under 60 minutes, total. Sad.

    Meantime, I’m thinking that on many days we all agree on one or two candidates for COD; reading the comments it seems that at least half of today’s get a vote from someone. Well set, or well edited, or both. Thank you

    1. I understand that it’s possible in relativity equations for a body always to have been going faster than the speed of light, just not possible to accelerate to that speed. But with a universe with an observably finite age, it doesn’t appear like this can have happened. In particle physics, it does appear possible that time can reverse in weak nuclear force interactions. It might be tricky to get that to work in the competition hall though. Sorry I can’t be more helpful. Maybe something further will have been discovered by next year.

      Edited at 2017-11-08 05:18 pm (UTC)

  28. If you guys need a break, there’s a lot of important stuff about spoons on the QC blog today. One day it may come in handy. David
  29. I didn’t have any real problems with this one, it was the first puzzle that I thought was the b*gger, and the third where I made my silly error… has it been presented for the general public’s solving pleasure first because it has been deemed to be the easiest of the three?
  30. I didn’t find it particularly easy, but I did get through all correct. It took 35 minutes, though, so no threat if I’m ever in England for the competition. Well done all who did this in the required time, as it had plenty of tricky parts. LOI here was TENNIS(H), very clever. Regards.
  31. This took 40 minutes this morning so I’m very glad I wasn’t trying to do it under championship conditions. Have had SAO TOME fairly recently in the pub quiz so didn’t fall into that trap, but I still found it difficult to complete the SE corner. The top half of this puzzle took about 10 minutes then I hit the buffers. Ann
  32. I seemed to struggle with this one, but eventually managed. Fortunately, I had ‘lavatory’ in at 18d before having to make a decision on ‘Sao Tome’ which, to quote Dr Thud was a DNK, but derivable from the clue. I would have needed stellar times on the other two puzzles to survive the prelims if I had been competing, so best to admire from afar.
  33. 3:58… which goes to show I remember well my nemesis from Saturday. After finishing the first one in good time, I was quite pleased with myself, but that euphoria soon evaporated as I failed to get going with this. With maybe less than 10 clues solved in about 15 minutes I turned over to the 3rd puzzle. Reinvigorated from completing that I found I had only 8 minutes to finish this. Biffing madly, I saw B_T_E___ and “Monarch”, and BUTTERFLY flew in. But a Y in the middle of the second word in 5d threw me, and I eventually corrected to BATTERING. But in a last minute panic, SAND BUGGY for 1d led to SPARGE for 1a… and I was doomed. I never even got to the debate on old v new testament at 26a, which was unknown to me. In retrospect it was a fine puzzle with some great clues. Just a shame I didn’t have the time to solve it on the day. We live and learn. And I enjoyed my first time go at the 3 in 60 minutes challenge. Happy to finish as an also ran.
  34. This posed no real problems. despite my OVERCONFIDENTly inking in SPEECHLESS as my FOI (but I guess a person can still talk sans choppers), and ADAIR’s being a stab in the dark,
  35. I took about 40 mins on my commute and then 25 mins at lunchtime over this and had 18dn still to do. Picked the puzzle up again this evening and realised the CAN / LAVATORY connection, saw that I had the same OT / NT error as so many others at 26ac and was finally able to complete. 27ac made me think of “Killers of the flower moon” by David Grann which tells the story of the suspicious deaths of a number of prominent, oil rich Osage Indians and the nascent FBI called in to investigate. I wonder if the setter had it in mind. I had not realised this was one of the six prelim puzzles (even though it was written next to the puzzle), I always enjoy them every year as fine examples of the setter’s art and rather Times-ian with it. I look forward to the next five.
  36. I definitely found this the hardest of the three puzzles on the day. I probably spent 35 minutes of the allocated hour on it, and despite realising the possibility of SAO TOME (having biffed SAN TOME early on !) still totally failed to find the LAVATORY…..a common problem for a night-work cabbie !

    When puzzle 3 appears, I shall read the critiques with great interest, since I sailed through it in about 6-7 minutes.

    (Phil Jordan)

  39. Had all bar 18d and 26a completed in about 48 minutes, then ground to a halt. Lavatory eventually came after trying to justify RAVEN as the bird but not being able to get rid of the Y at the end, at which point the correct CAN came to mind. I was then stuck with SAO TO_E which I suspected might be TOME, but I looked it up to confirm and then submitted at 59:43. Congrats to anyone who solved it in 20 minutes or under. I also started with SAND BUGGY at 1d but soon corrected it. A tricky puzzle indeed. Thanks setter and Pip.
  40. 25-Jan-2018 SCMP

    I found this quite hard over dinner, so was gratified to find that this was a championship puzzle.

    One biff required: SAO TOME. I didn’t parse correctly: I had “OT” rather than “AOT” which obviously depends for correctness on there being a remarkable island called SAOME which there isn’t. But the biff pulled me through.

    There was some printer’s devilry in the SCMP reprint, omitting “broadcast (5)” from 23A. But the answer was fortunately obvious.

    SA=IT: old and tired 50 years ago. I have this bogus idea that a crossword ought to be accessible to non-cognoscenti, given good enough English skills. But this acronym is *only* used by cruciverbalists these days. Maybe in the old days there was a frisson of naughtiness which excited the solvers as they knowingly typed “SA”. I would have something like “…while back in” instead of “…it separates”.

    17D: I prefer e.g. “dripping” to “soused”.

    Overall, there were some grand clues though: many thanks to setter, blogger and commenters.

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