Times Crossword 24238

55 comments on “Times Crossword 24238”

1. ….while I got most of this in 30 minutes, it took me another 60 to finish.

   I was off to a quick start, seeing ‘bluestocking’, ‘appendix’ and ‘Endymion’ right away. The setter could have had some fun with the D’Israeli novel, although a bit obscure – that silver-fork masterpiece is not much read today.

   I had trouble with ‘talk radio’ because the anagrammed word ‘dark’ appears whole, but upside down, and I couldn’t find a reversal indicator. I finally realized the whole phrase ‘dark a lot’ was the anagram material, but I would still expect the words to be more thoroughly mixed up in an anagram.

   My troubles began when I put in ‘ice cream’, and then erased it and put in ‘seahawk’. ‘Seahawk’ became ‘skyhawk’, and then ‘skylark’. I had ‘kameez’, didn’t believe it, but then got ‘equaliser’, changed it to ‘equalizer’, and back came ‘kameez’.

   The NW gave difficulty, as I thought 1 was an anagram of ‘raise yak a’ until I counted the letters – then it came to me that ‘yak’ = ‘rabbit’. Unfortunately, ‘Aquarian’, ‘quotable’, and ‘prompt’ proved difficult.

   My last one in was ‘Mede’. I spent the longest time trying to justify ‘rede’, but then I saw it.

   The puzzle seems to be themed from the Romantic era, with ‘bluestocking’, ‘skylark’, and ‘Endymion’.

2. Didn’t see the romantic connection, despite recent media inundation re Jane Campion’s new film about Keats.
   Instead, I spotted a certain football theme: Scots girls being arbitrarily at Hampden Park; flying tackles; neat crosses from buzzing wingers; match-making equalizers avoiding the scorelessness at 24 down — and just a possibility of Maradona at 8 down?
3. A breezy 45 mins, many of which were spent in the NE. This was dessert to yesterday’s meat and mashed potato. Some surprisingly original clueing. I liked KAMEEZ, BEEFALO, SCRAPE as well as the two anagrams at 16 & 17. Last in was the superbly hidden ATROCITY. But COD APPENDIX.

   Interesting to see “stop” returning as an inclusion indicator at 8, this time confounding previous usage, with the way “plugging” the mocking instead of encircling it.

   My Collins has “b is for bye”, but then it also has “b is for bolivar”, so it’s not necessarily a good guide.

   As for YANKEE-DOODLE, I took the “as it were, one” to refer to the previous American in the clue, to get the first Yankee in the answer; a self-referential device. I wouldn’t rule out other interpretations though. Is Yankee-Doodle more adjectively American rather than an American (as in Yankee-Doodle dandy, sweetheart, etc)?

4. An early morning work out of some difficulty. Once or until you have Bluestocking the puzzle becoms easier. i thought there were some clever clues like 7 down and 8 down. Not sure that a jack Rabbit is necessarily a sprightly creature but the clue does work…Saw Kameez very quickly but then was slow to solve equalizer. Quite liked scrape. took ages to see Mede. South east corner flew in though.
   Back to sleep now!
5. When I was a kid I used to collect shellfish from Essex marshes which involved slogging through knee-high clinging mud. A very nostalgic puzzle. ’nuff said.
6. 13:35, one mistake – I fell for MERE at 25A, wondering what all the unindicated French was doing in a cryptic xwd clue. Should have listened to my own preaching: when you think the clue’s wrong, it’s usually you that’s at fault.

   Very slow start – 17A was my first answer. Last in were 7A/8D, helped by an old trick which sometimes pays off: see the possibility of a pangram and then check what letters have not been used. Conclusion: at least one of the two contains a W. Speed not helped by hastily putting I,C.E. CREAM at 20 – my fault entirely, misreading “funds” as “finds”.

   14A: I think the person doing the “rough drawing(=pulling)” is a “yanker”, and the one it’s done to is a “yankee”. (Not spotted during my solving, only afterwards.) 4A: B=bye is in COED too.

   1. Thanks for pointing out the pangram and explaining the wonderful “yankee”.  Both of these passed me by.
   2. I struggled with this one and finished eventually after 70 minutes with one error at 25 where I also had MERE. But unlike Peter I didn’t have any doubts about it as “père” is in common English usage and is in all the dictionaries and I didn’t see why “mère” should not be too. However it isn’t. Neither is “mer” meaning “sea”.

      I spotted LASSIE quite early but couldn’t explain it as I had no idea that Hampden Park is a stadium in Glasgow. The setter’s mention of Eastbourne in another clue prompted me to think of a different Hampden Park, probably far less well-known than the soccer venue, but unfortunately for me it was the one that came to my mind and misled me.

      I think there is room for alternatives at 7dn as both “rose-cheeked” and “rosy-cheeked” seem to fit the bill.

      I spotted the possibility of a pangram quite early and was not disappointed but unfortunately I wasn’t able to turn it to my advantage.

      1. I meant also to say that I had difficulty getting started today and eventually got going in the SE corner and worked across to the SW. I was discouraged right from the start by not being able to see the 3-letter word at 3dn and indeed it was my very last one in having finally put both the checking letters in place.

         I’m particularly peeved that I didn’t spot “yak” = “rabbit” right at the start because it came up somewhere within the past two weeks, I think. If that had gone in early it might have made all the difference. As it was, the top half remained completely blank for first half hour of my solving time.

   3. Yes, thanks for the proper explanation of yankee, Peter. I think you should be allowed to remove the hat for that.
   4. Can I also add my thanks for the explanation of “yankee”, which eluded me. Only in the weird and wonderful world of cryptic crosswords could “yankee” be made to bear such a meaning. Great clue. Difficult but enjoyable puzzle which I was pleased merely to complete.
7. 17:02.  A sluggish solve that picked up once I hit upon BLUESTOCKING (17ac) after getting 12dn (MAKE-BELIEVE), but slowed down again towards the end.  Last in was WRISTY (8dn).

   Unlike kororareka, I thought 23ac (APPENDIX) was awful – yet another poorly-defined &lit.  When did you last see a novel with an appendix?  (For me it was about 17 years ago, in The Lord of the Rings.)  And have you ever seen a one-page appendix?

   I don’t usually think of myself as a punctuation purist, but in 6dn (TALK RADIO) I felt that the clever use of “showing after” to link the definition and the past-participle wordplay was marred by the intrusion of a colon.

   The use of CHEEK as a verb (7dn) was new to me.  I don’t know whether the answer was meant to be ROSE-CHEEKED or ROSY-CHEEKED.  I put the latter, which seems more plausible given the definition, but ROSY is a much less obvious name than ROSE (which tends to be “diminished” to ROSIE).  Neither answer is in Collins, the Concise Oxford, or the Shorter (though the Shorter contains a quotation for poppet that includes ROSY-CHEEKED).  Chambers contains ROSY-CHEEKED but not ROSE-CHEEKED, and the OED contains both.

   Otherwise, I thought this was an excellent puzzle.  A liberal selection of Clues of the Day: 21ac (RED-EYE), 25ac (MEDE), 2dn (AQUARIAN), 12dn (MAKE-BELIEVE), 19dn (SCRAPE).

   1. My Chambers has both ROSE-CHEEKED and ROSY-CHEEKED. COED has ROSY CHEEKS.
      1. Sorry, you’re quite right – so does mine.  The appendix of first names gives ROSE but not ROSY.
         1. The published solution is ROSY-CHEEKED.
   2. OK, I’ll bite, being appendix’s champion. Mark Haddon’s Whitbread Book of the Year for 2003,The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has an appendix, admittedly 4 pages long, but the mathematical proof presented there could have easily been radically shortened. (It was the first book I picked up, honestly.)
   3. Surely if Rosie or Rosy are being diminished it must be from Rosemary not Rose?
      1. It’s either, according to Chambers.
8. Half agree with sabine’s “moderately difficult” ie the difficult bit. 3 hour slog for me and still left with ?E?E at 26ac. Stuck in KIT without understanding (s)KIT and still not convinced that a skit is a take-off. Would never in a million years have come up with Peter’s ingenious explanation for YANKEE (even had I not spelt it Yankie). I thought American, as it were…was just an old word for American with Doodle obviously the rough drawn sketch.
   Deflowered my brand new Chambers this morning which confirmed my first in ie. KAMEEZ (6 weeks ago this clue would have been beyond me so thank you blog) and then BEEFALO although I confess to a protracted hunt for BUFF as a buzzing winger, BEE being much too obvious. Delighted to find neither KAMEEZ nor BEEFALO in my 7th ed. COED, so money well spent.
9. An excellent puzzle – the best since last Friday.

   I also got to BLUESTOCKING as my first solve and went on to complete the bottom half. Then the K of MAKE gave me YANKEE (one who is roughly drawn) and so DOODLE. The use of “roughly drawn sketch” to mislead is first class. I guessed BEEFALO then saw JACK RABBIT (should have got that much sooner) and it all fell into place in just under 40 minutes.

   The puzzle is just full of excellent clues (Anax?) but the hidden reverse word ATROCITY is really good.

   Is Jack not knowing of Hampden Park the equivalent of me not knowing about the TV soap Neighbours?

   1. I hadn’t heard of Hampden Park either, not giving a tinker’s cuss for the “beautiful” game.  I know it’s easy to wrongly project your own sense of the familiar onto other people, but even so I would expect Neighbours to be the more familiar.  According to Wikipedia, it has been screened twice a day on terrestrial TV for over 22 years and is now on its 5700th episode; its UK audience was over 18 million in the late 1980s; and it has often received daytime TV ratings second only to the news.  Given the readiness with which (in those pre-Sky, pre-internet days) people used to talk about what they had seen on TV, there can’t be many people who haven’t heard of it – much as you would have to be cut off from the world these days in order to avoid having heard of Big Brother.
      1. This is an interesting thread of conversation which I am sure has been touched on before, but it is clear to me that the Times crossword (and probably most cryptics) is aimed at quite a specific demographic.

         I guess until you can get good setters who are of a wildly different background then this will always be the case, but it would be very interesting to me to statistically analyse the use of ie opera/classic literature/mythology versus sports/popular music/films for example.

         What I would also enjoy immensely is trying to equate “difficulty” of concepts within different spheres – ie what would be an equivalent Operatic word to “Hampden Park” and (from a few weeks ago) why “Matt Busby” is clearly at a similar level to eg Beethoven, despite numerous protests.

         Discuss…

         1. If the puzzles were based on popular culture, I probably wouldn’t be able to solve them, since I don’t watch television or movies.

            But it seems to me that the people who do would still be unable to solve puzzles like that, or even have any interest in doing so. While reading difficult authors while listening to complex music stimulates the mental powers, staring at the boob tube seems to have the opposite effect.

         2. At the top of this site click on “memories” then “miscellaneous” then “clue topic analysis”
         3. Around June last year some of us tried to do this in “pie charts” (“pie” as in Trivial Pursuits), and Jimbo produced at least one summary of results. But reaching useful conclusions from numbers foundered on several difficulties:
            * deciding what facts are difficult enough to count (or really nasty and therefore count double) (try bird=skylark vs. cattle cross=beefalo)
            * what categories should be used? (e.g. “Arts and Books” or Music, Literature and “Other arty stuff” which from memory is what we actually used)
            * xwd cliché stuff like muse=Erato – obscure for a beginner, but a piece of cake for others, so what does it score?
            * difficulty of definitions: is “neat cross” fiendishly difficult as it’s well-disguised, or helpfully accurate because there are v. few 7-letter cattle crossbreeds? (Again, compare to bird=skylark – an easy 7-letter bird but Bradford lists about 140 7-letter birds)
            * depending on the skill of the setter and editor, a puzzle with say 10 GK snippets could be nicely educational and interesting, or a complete bore – both would look the same in the stats! Ditto 3 snippets which might be spread around or all used in one really nasty killer clue.

            Years ago the Times and other puzzles were very literary, and the chance of a football stadium being used was almost nil. But in this puzzle you need snippets of oriental clothing, cattle, poetry, football, ornithology and religion. There must be something in there for everyone. There is still an “old arts plus a bit of cricket” bias in the Times and many other puzzles, but far less than in the past, though some feel that science offers unused clue-writing opportunities. So the plea to setters is to mix up the categories and spread the GK snippets around the puzzle. Most Times setters seem to do this already – try comparing counts of “I didn’t know this but got the answer from the rest of the clue [or other answers]” and “I didn’t know this and as a result I failed to finish the puzzle”.

      2. Luckily Orwell is one of my favourite authors.
10. I seem to have solved this puzzle without knowing what a pangram is (other than the quick brown fox…)in crosswords. What am I missing?
    1. Same idea. Every letter of the alphabet occurs at least once in the grid.
    2. On the same principle, it’s a puzzle where the completed grid contains all the letters of the alphabet.  It’s a nice flourish from the setter, but it can force the use of rather obscure vocabulary.
    3. Pangrams were really trendy in the Times xwd about ten years ago – I remember Mike Rich at the championships around 2000 informing us (after solving!) that a puzzle wasn’t just a pangram, but still a pangram when you only looked at the 60-odd checking letters – much harder for the setter. If you see that JKQVXZ have mostly been used, there’s a fair chance that it’s a pangram, but near-miss cases are quite common too. By the time I notice this and review letters in the grid it’s usually too late – all have been used already.

       Grid geeks are waiting for the first triple pangram – every letter used at least thrice. Not yet done with vocab that satisfied the Times xwd editor.

       1. If I’d noticed that it was a pangram I’d have saved myself a lot of time by not entering BUCK RABBIT at 1 ac quite late on. (raise as in “buck up”). Sometimes it pays to be observant!
          Dafydd
11. Tricky one for me today – plodded through with no great bursts of speed – probably 45 mins in total, with some “guess-checking” at 22 and 25.

    I too had EQUALISER written in for a good while without really getting the exact word-play, which became clearer with the right answer! Also didnt pick up the draw-yank association, and have never heard of a pangram until todays blog.

    One thing that 25/22 illustrated to me (which I guess becomes easier the more you do) is that if something offers no obvious reference (ie Eastbourne or woven gauze) it is probably there to supply a letter or part of a hidden word. The problem with this as a tip though, is that as a beginner, there are plenty of things that have yet to trigger cross-references, so it only works for better solvers, at which point you dont need tips. I will shut up now……

    1. Another hint that whole words are being used to supply just one letter each is a wordy clue.  22ac reads: “Tunic made in seconds from ends of silky material: some waxed, woven gauze”.  That’s an awful lot of words (not making up a phrase) for a 6-letter answer, so something like take one letter from each word is almost certain to be involved.

       Likewise, Wednesday’s puzzle included the following: “Those pre-eminent in Florence really enhanced several centuries of painting” (FRESCO).  For me, the “really” was a dead giveaway – this wasn’t just wordy, it was positively flabby!

       1. Final epic comment for today (well maybe):

          “Those pre-eminent in” was the giveaway for me – by the time I got to “really” I was only looking at the first letters! fathippy’s point was made in another way by kororareka a few weeks ago when he said that some words in clues are there for their meaning, and some for their content. Anag fodder is the prime example of the “content” side, and hiding it well is a mark of a good setter. From this point of view, 17A wasn’t much of a clue – though in the context of the whole puzzle it was nice to have an easy 12-letter answer! 16D’s “done in my style” is much better (though given ?N?????? it’s a doddle for people who only know one Keats poem whose title doesn’t start with “Ode”!)

          As advice to solvers, we end up with two points:
          * Watch out for odd features like the unnecessary “really” or the really long clue for KAMEEZ.
          * For some words, it may be useful to ask “What other words could have been used, and why weren’t they?”.
          Of the two, the first seems closer to my own solving methods.

          Edited at 2009-05-29 11:59 am (UTC)

          1. Are you sure I said that? It sounds far to sensible to have emanated from me.
             1. I thought it was you – if someone else thinks they said it, do claim the credit!
12. Horribly slow start – must have read a dozen clues before solving one. I think the brain tends to lock up in that situation. Things then speeded up a lot so I finished in around 14 mins. Identical experience to sabine in trying to fathom KAMEEZ handicapped by an S in EQUALIS/ZER.
13. 
    I seem to have developed the solvers’ equivalent of the Yips. Today it was BEEFALO that did me in. Ten minutes of staring at it last night, another quick look this morning. Nothing. But I’m going to wriggle like an MP with three homes and a moat, and say that to me Olaf is more likely a Norwegian than a Swede.

    Some great clues in here, though. 19d SCRAPE is a Hall of Fame candidate.

14. Like some others, I was over half way through the across clues before I solved one (21), then filled the lower third, but plodded through the rest, ending with a guess at WRISTY from the wordplay. Several interruptions, but my overall time must have been around 55 minutes in the end, disappointingly slow, because I don’t think there was anything really difficult.
    I thought 3, 12 and 13 were very good clues, as was 4, but I didn’t know B was an abbreviation for “bye”. I’m not sure about the definition in 19. If you “just pass” an exam you “scrape through” not just “scrape”. If you “scrape” a C you just achieve a C, not “just pass” a C. Perhaps somebody could supply an example where “scrape” and “just pass” are interchangeable.
    1. You may well be right, though I don’t think the absence of the preposition from a phrasal verb is ever much of an impediment to solving, more an after the fact quibble. I think ‘scrape’ for ‘Just pass’ probably works well enough in:
       “How did you do in the exam?”
       “I think I scraped it.”
15. After long reflection I have to say that 10ac is an abysmal clue in an otherwise excellent puzzle.
    1. I can’t see anything wrong with the surface or wordplay, so assume your complaint is about Hampden Park in the definition. It’s used for Scottish Cup Finals and most international fixtures in Scotland, so the Scots Wembley in short. World’s largest football stadium (by capacity) from about 1903 to 1950. For a Briton not to know of it does seem pretty close to not having heard of Neighbours.
       1. No, I haven’t, but actually I was wrong to say I never heard of Hampden Park. I knew the name had a connection with sport but did not know which one nor where it was. If I’d been forced to make a guess I would have said it was a race course somewhere in the south of England, and since I do know of a Hampden Park in Eastbourne I’d have said it was there. You will gather from this that I also know very little about horse racing.

16. I thought I wasn’t going to get this, gave up and went to bed last night with only about half filled in. Picked it up in the morning and spotted QUOTABLE and was away again. Had to work out BLUESTOCKING from wordplay, similarly KAMEEZ. There’s some good stuff in here, I liked YANKEE-DOODLE, WRISTY and SCRAPE.
17. No wise words to add – stumbled through between fits of after lunch dozing and finally decided 25a was mere – French trip yesterday to blame no doubt. Should know by now there is only one crossword sea….
18. About 15 minutes for me (rough guess, as I accidentally stopped the stopwatch function on my touch phone at around 2 minutes and didn’t notice till the end). Like several others, I started with BLUESTOCKING and finished with MEDE, also putting in EQUALISER before getting KAMEEZ.
19. I must be extremely slow today because there are still some things I don’t understand.

    How does 11ac lead to the right order of elements, with MP inside PRO T?

    In 8dn how does “Such skilful sporting shots” (a noun phrase) define an adjective?

    What is the role of “Send up” in 18dn? The rest of the clue is a double def, and I don’t think it works as a triple def.

    1. I’ll nominate myself setter’s advocate (strictly temporary arrangement) and suggest that in 8d the definition is the adjective ‘Such’, meaning “of this type”. Hence, “sporting shots of this type are…”
    2. 11ac – “about politician’s” should be read “about politician is”

       18dn “Send up” = sky, “fool about” = lark

       I’ll stay out of 8d. I don’t trust my parsing abilities any more, since, or is it because, it appears that now there is no difference between an adverbial clause of reason and an adverbial clause of cause; a distinction that preoccupied our grammar classes for at least three years in the 60’s.

       1. Thanks both.

          In 18 I read “fool about” = SKYLARK making the “send up” redundant. What led me there is that (unlike “skylark”) “lark” is generally not used alone but with “about” or “around”, so “fool about” had to be SKYLARK not just LARK.

          For the others I can see the explanations but they still don’t sit right with me. I think it’s just personal – I struggled all through this to understand what the setter was on about.

20. About 55 minutes for me, much of it enjoyable, but I also fouled up on MEDE, and somewhat moreso than everyone else. I took the setter too literally and wrote in SEAE, another of the non-existent old folk. The really good clues, though, make up for my chagrin, including SCRAPE, EQUALIZER, and the brilliantly hidden ATROCITY. Best for the weekend.
21. I give up.
    1. It was only there to make the grid pangrammatic, which is an unusual aim, and it’s clear from the clue (and quite understandable!) that the setter had trouble coming up with decent wordplay.  So definitely not worth giving up over.
22. Excellent puzzle. 31 mins for me.
23. You left out 7 down

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