Times Crossword 24501

Author   sabine_tkPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 32 minutes or thereabouts, interrupted by a very brief phone call.

Attentive readers will no doubt be waiting with interest to see what excuse I would produce this week for failing to blog, having missed my last two turns due to inability to access the puzzle online. But all is well this week, unless my computer has a deathcrash or the router starts haemorrhaging wires in the next few minutes. As I richly deserved, I was punished by one of the toughest puzzles I’ve done for a while – full of elegant devices and stylish tricks and traps, most of which caught me out for a time at least. I can’t remember when I last had to erase so many fragments, guesses and in places entire answers, in order to arrive at a solution I was satisfied made sense. I still wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover I’ve left some glaring howler. Thanks, anyway, to the setter – I enjoyed this, though I would have enjoyed it much more on a non-blogging day.

Across
1
   JA(ZZ-RO)CK – lift=JACK as in to raise with a jack, ZZ=snoring noise, RO = or, backing, and the definition is just “music”. I suspected there was jazz involved from the snoring, and played around with JAZZ FUNK for a while, but was too nervous of the J and Z combination as starters for 1 and 2 down to have any real confidence that this was the right track.
5
   SLOV,A,K – like the backing music in the previous clue, “European King” must be separated, leading to K=King, A=a and VOLS = a small tome (volume)is – all reversed,
9
   M(ONT) B,LANC – I found this wordplay very hard to fathom, not seeing for ages where to get the LANC from. It’s MB (doctor) and LANC(e) (cut short) around (not)*.
11
   T(W)ILL – twill is a kind of woven fabric, W=wide and the TILL which it lines is the money compartment type of drawer. I had early hopes that the drawer might be RA, soon abandoned.
12
   ADD(L)ING – this was my very last clue solved, mainly because I had 2d wrong at first and so was for some time gazing at the impossible A_S_I_G. The wordplay is L (lady just starting) inside ADDING – a job for a summer in that it’s full of sums, and the definition is in the sense of “making confused or muddled”, and therefore “taking order from”.
13
   E,CLOG,UE – an eclogue is a short pastoral poem, which I roughly knew and so put in without much thought for the wordplay, which I think must work like this: Brussels =EU (European Union) is turned over (reversed), and the “with” in the clue just indicates that this goes after E=tip of one and CLOG=shoe – my problem was assuming the “with” indicated other stuff needed to be turned over as well.
14
   WATERS (HIP) DOWN – so how does this one work? HIP=trendy, WATERS DOWN=dilutes, but what indicates the containment? If you were to dilute something wouldn’t the water go in, rather than outside? Not sure if I’m overthinking, missing the obvious or just being generally dense here.
16
   QUINCE,NTENARY – Peter Quince is the carpenter in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and NTENARY = (an entry)*. I should have done better here as I had the NTENARY part figured early, which really had to be CENTENARY, and a bit of applied thought would have done the rest, and offered some desperately-needed help in the SW corner.
20
   AIR,TA,XI – AIR=bearing,TA=cheers (thanks!) and XI is of course the cricket team.
21
   UPTEMPO, hidden in groUP TEMPOrarily. This was the first clue I solved. It seems like a very very long time ago.
23
   D(R)UNK – “sink” is a verb here: “sink hobnobs” in the sense of “dip a delicious hobnob biscuit into one’s coffee and watch sadly as its lower half disintegrates into a crumby sludge”, the action known as “dunking”.
24
   GOLF WIDOW – turns out it is not the lady in question who is doing the rounds, but her absent husband. Even with the widow in place I didn’t get this right away, being distracted by the mental image of a Widow’s Walk.
25
   RID,LEY – Nicholas Ridley was a bishop burned by Mary Tudor. RID=shot in the sense of “to get shot of”, and LEY is an alternative spelling for LEA.
 
Down
1
   JAMJAR – JAR=grate, JAM=lock. I began to doubt this answer when I couldn’t solve 12A, but the mistake wasn’t in this answer…
2
   ZO,NED … but in this one, where I had reasoned thus: kangaroos live in Oz, and lions obviously live in Senegal – and so wrote in ZONES without further thought, until forced to reconsider. The actual wordplay is DEN and OZ, all reversed (to the north).
3
   REBUILT – an anagram of (lie but r), the definition being “Again put up”.
4
   CHANGE RINGING – which means to go through all possible permutations in ringing a peal of bells, a device I’m sure I remember cropping up in Listeners. A “bob” is also a term in bellringing, hence the definition. I originally pencilled in CHANGE RUNNING – something borderline illegal done by bookies at the races, perhaps – but luckily remembered to return to it later.
6
   LET SLIP – some devilish wordplay here, with LET=service (tennis, one that touches the net on the way over), and SLIP=man in the field (fielding position in cricket). The definition is therefore “Fail to keep secret”.
7
   V,A,INGLORY – V=see (Latin vide), A=a, and “criminal” is an anagram indicator for (lying or). I originally pencilled in INGLY at the end, but solved 14A in time to prevent too much damage.
8
   KIL(KEN)NY – “Kilny” meaning “like place for firing” in the same way as, say “Ovenish” – and KEN means the range of one’s vision or knowledge, as in “beyond one’s ken”.
10
   CZECH REPUBLIC – CZECH sounds like check (curb), RE=on (concerning, with reference to) and PUBLIC=open.
15
   SQUA(N)D, ER. ER here is the American Emergency Room, the equivalent of UK’s Casualty. I tried very hard to justify SQUADDIE, by logic too tortuous to repeat.
17
   CRACKLE – replace the TT (teetotal, and therefore on the wagon) with RACK, and the definition is “rustling”.
18
   ANTIWAR (train w a)*, with “loco” indicating the anagram.
19
   DO(O-W)OP – “it’s painful” = OW, inside DO OP.
22
   MEDIC – I stared at this one for a while, wary that I was being tricked into carelessness and the right answer was MEDOC – but eventually the wordplay dawned on me. The “bit” of the clue is a computer bit (binary digit) and MEDIC is reached by, as the clue says, “turning the bit on” – changing the O of Medoc to an I (they represent 0 and 1). Very fiendish indeed.

32 comments on “Times Crossword 24501”

  1. Time? Well it’s 10:48 and the puzzle arrives at 7:00 thanks to daylight saving in the UK. Utterly fiendish and likely constructed for so-called “good” Friday when most folks have much time on their hands. I won’t recount my journey to a solution. It’s too painful.
  2. 45 minutes, while being kept awake by toothache. What a fabulous puzzle, so good it made me forget the pain! No duff clues, any of them candidates for Clue of the Day, all needing more than a passing glance. Last in was the entire NW corner, spending ages trying to work out how SAMPAN fit the wordplay on 1d, and being too dumb to think of the z’s in 1a.
    I put in WATERSHIP DOWN with a certain amount of relief, but without analysing: I wonder if “dilutes” does a kind of double duty to explain what you do with HIP? I agree that it’s not all that clear, but what the hey!
    I know this blog is dedicated to speed, and I’d certainly hate to get hit with this in Cheltenham, but I felt this was a real work of art to be savoured, never mind the time. It’s a pangram, too.
  3. About 90 minutes, and pleased with that. Holy Toledo, this was utterly fiendish. Sabine, thanks for the blog and under the circumstances I’d say 32 minutes is excellent to crack this monster. For what it’s worth, I saw WATERSHIP DOWN as one of the easy ones, for when one dilutes the trendy, one ‘waters (the) hip down’. Too many excellent clues to single one out, or even 10, for that matter. However, I can’t have one of these every day, my brain would fry. Congrats to Sabine and the setter. Regards to all.
  4. Something over an hour for me which seemed a good time given how cunningly clued the puzzle was.

    In 17dn it is both “A” (article) and “TT” (on the wagon) that get replaced with “RACK”. Otherwise there is an extra “A”.

  5. I am extremely pleased it wasn’t my Friday for writing the blog or you’d probably be waiting until midday for it to appear.

    I started this last night and gave up after 30 minutes having put in only three answers (3dn, 1ac and 14ac). It was a similar slow story this morning and eventually after 90 further minutes with barely half the puzzle solved I resorted to books.

    I was pleased to finish it at all even with extensive cheating and even more pleased to understand nearly all of it before coming here.

    I wasn’t absolutely sure about MEDIC at 22dn and didn’t get the “bit” reference, but after spending time this week setting up a new PC and accessories I had in mind electrical switches marked “O” for “off” and “I” for “on” and took this as the clincher. I assume this is the “I” for “current” that turns up here regularly.

    I was surprised that JAM JAR is not listed in Collins, the Concise Oxford nor in the Shorter Oxford. Chambers has it as does their slang dictionary where it appears as rhyming slang for “car”. However I was not surprised that none of them lists JAMJAR.

    Off for a lie down now!

  6. 26:27 here. I guess HIP in 14 is being used as a noun, though I can’t find dictionary support. First answer solved though, so can’t grumble that much.

    Might have been quicker if I’d remembered Quince in 16 – I jotted down “MND?” next to the clue but couldn’t remember the right character.

    My two deletions were 8D TASHKENT which has the range and some post-fire ASH but soon felt iffy, and a punt on COPPER (=coins, and also bobby but not bob) as first word in 4.

    Other minor quibbles: the form in “peak form” which doesn’t do much in the cryptic reading, and “hobnob” for biscuit is still, I think, a trade name. JAM=lock is fiendish in 1D but the main problem here was assuming that the JAR was the first half. Surprised by no hyphen in UPTEMPO but COED agrees. I can’t see ANTIWAR as a dictionary entry so I think that does need a hyphen.

    But the quibbles are outweighed by lots of invention and confusion. The puzzle was a “pangram plus”, with 2 J’s, 3 Z’s, and by my count 21 letters scoring 4 or more at Scrabble.

    I don’t think I in I/O on switches has anything to do with I = current, just the convention that in computing binary notation, 1=on and 0=off.

    I suspect we might get one puzzle not too dissimilar from this at Cheltenham, and wouldn’t object as long as the other two were rather easier.

  7. This puzzle is so good I’m going to break the rules and say that the missing answer at 26A is ACORN-CUP parsed as A-(concur)*-P=soft. I don’t think there’s a single clue here that one could describe as “easy”. They all require considerable effort and insight.

    In a fantastic collection I thought LET SLIP and ANTI-WAR were absolutely brilliant. Thank you setter and for once the editor for giving us a really tough puzzle on a bank holiday.

  8. I have become reasonably good at the Telegrpah crossword -don’t always finish it unaided but usually have less than 5 unsolved and usually interconnecting ones so once you get one you are close to getting the rest. I do occasionally have a go with the Times and I’m happy if I get about halfway. Today I tried and didn’t get any -not a sausage. It is like moving from the third division to the Premier League! At least it seems to have been the hardest for some time.
    1. We were all at your stage once (some of us longer ago than others – but we wont go into that). I urge you to keep trying. Use this blog every day after you have attempted the puzzle. In 6 months you will make significant progress.
  9. stupendous puzzle…so relieved to have finished in about 90 minutes…some real crackers!
    rather liked Quince ntenary* amd Slovak. as dorsetjumbo says there wasnt a single easy answer. even Uptempo eluded me for some time!
    great start to the Bank Holiday weekend
  10. An utterly brilliant puzzle jampacked with clues of the highest quality. I couldn’t fine a gimme anywhere with which to prise the grid apart. After 30 exasperating minutes I threw in the towel with only VAINGLORY, WATERSHIP DOWN and WHIP ROUND unravelled and a wrong HIP HOP and ??I??ENTENARY. Can’t blame unknown words for my abject showing – only JAZZ ROCK, DOO WOP and RIDLEY were new to me. The difficulties were all in the ingenious wordplay.

    Hats off to you sabine for being able to complete this puzzle in the first instance and in writing such an entertaining blog, and to the setter for producing a sublime example of the art (but I wouldn’t like to face this level of difficulty everyday!).

  11. It’s a great relief to come here and find that everyone else had similar difficulty and a similar level of admiration. The only obscurity for me was Ridley, which made the squander/Ridley intersection very difficult. I finished with medic. Even after 40-years in computing I struggled with the bit turned on.
  12. And several hours later… I find I have two wrong. CHANGE-RUNNING was as good as I could do at 4d (the fact that I have never heard of something no longer stops me writing it in; not since the shock of Expressogate in ’09) and I had CRANKLE (a variant of crinkle) at 17d with rank=stand, no doubt confused by the crossing taxi. I also had ZONES at 2d until it addled addling, and for exactly the same wrong reasons as you, Sabine. Sometimes our minds seem uncannily in kilter when out of kilter. Congratulations to the setter. A tour de force.
  13. Who needs a bank holiday jumbo.
    About a dozen done before giving-up. Got the remaining across clues from the blog and then managed the down clues on my own. A humbling experience. Thanks as ever to Sabine for the comprehensive explanations. As I have said before, that Sabine’s blogs reveal the struggles and doubts is very reassuring to us mortal solvers.
  14. Did this on the trip to Macau – on the bus, on the ferry, and then in the hotel room. My daughter, who helped feed me a few confirmations and part-answers from the laptop, reckons I took 4 hours. I think she was being generous. A brilliant puzzle and excellent blog.
  15. Fiendishly tough, but excellent. Struggled to a correct finish in about 1 hr 50 mins, and was mighty pleased to do so. Like Sabine (top blog, by the way), I couldn’t see where the container indicator was in the clue for WATERSHIP DOWN, though even then it was still one of slightly easier solutions to get. My thanks to Kevin of NY for pointing out that no containment required and that solution should be read in linear fashion – WATERS HIP DOWN. Peter B says that in this case we have to take HIP as a noun, but I think it works just as well if taken as an adjective. I agree that 18 dn (ANTIWAR) should have been clued as (4-3) rather than (7) letters. But that’s a trifling quibble. Some devilishly cunning wordplay and/or definitional deception – e.g. ACORN CUP, MONT BLANC, ADDLED (my last to go in). QUINCENTENARY caused me no end of grief as for a long while I strove in vain to work CHIPPY or CHIPPIE into the answer. Having only a week or two earlier been to see Judy Dench as a somewhat long-in-the-tooth Titania in Peter Hall’s latest production of MND, Quince the carpenter should have spring instantly to mind but, alas, didn’t. As one who spends too much time on the golf links, my first correct solution was 24 ac (GOLF WIDOW). Jimbo’s too?
    1. No Mike my first was 1A JAZZ ROCK and my second 5A SLOVAK both derived from wordplay. In many ways this is my sort of puzzle because I have developed the technique of being able to ignore surface readings, which helps enormously with a setter of this subtlety. That combined with having been caught before by things like “bob” at 4D (if you were caught this time, in future you’ll always think of bell ringing when you see that word in a clue). Clues like 24A GOLF WIDOW actually cause me more problems because they don’t lend themselves to my analytical technique and I needed checking letters G?L? before seeing it.
      1. Thanks, Jimbo. Good tip about the perils of surface readings, which can indeed lead one down many a false trail. I was, as you guessed, caught out by “bob” at 4dn. I considered every other possible sense of the word – from a shilling, to a curtsy, to a quick movement up and down, to a hair style, to that children’s game of trying to pick up floating apples with one’s mouth – before dimly remembering that it might be a bellringing term. But that was only after I’d already made the “coins”/CHANGE connection and was pretty sure that CHANGE-RINGING was the solution from the checking letters. A high-class puzzle, as all have said. Loved DOO-WOP at 19dn and the cleverly disguised CZECH REPUBLIC at 10dn.
  16. Blinder. Quite pleased to have got there in under two biddlecombes. Speaking of whom, I have a question. This worry about hip as a noun in the dictionary, and antiwar not unhyphenated in the dictionary, etc. Surely there’s a case for seeing the Times Crossword as part of the horse that draws the cart, the latter being the accepted state of play of the language, and the good old Times to an extent wot does the accepting? But if it’s not quite in the dictionary yet, but we know it’s OK since we have an ear to the ground and all that, we do not reprimand the setter for stepping over the line, but rather, quietly, applaud? – joekobi
    1. Although I write a lot here about what is and isn’t in the various dictionaries, that’s not because I believe dictionary content should be some overriding rule about what you can do in a cryptic crossword. It’s just that the dictionaries are the easiest reliable source of information, and that the Times has been stated in the past to use particular dictionaries as its main references (COED and Collins).

      I have no problem with “jamjar” as rhyming slang for car even though it’s absent from these two, for instance (ODE has it). Ditto acorn-cup which as far as I can tell is only in Chambers.

      Making nouns out of adjectives (hip) is a bit of a grey area – it’s a common linguistic development so you could argue that the logic involved is similar to flower = a river – so not a major issue.

      But with the hyphenation, I’d stick to my guns – hyphenated phrases tend to lose their hyphens as they become familiar, but if the phrase isn’t in the dictionary I don’t think it can be familiar enough to lose the hyphen. As far as I can tell, anti-war isn’t in dictionaries. It’s possible that the setters and editors are applying a different and equally logical rule about hyphenation, but if so, I don’t know what it is.

  17. That was brutal… in a good way! Very enjoyable but really tough. I spent 60 minutes on it, getting only about 50% done. Came to the blog to cheat a little and then solved a few more before giving up. I couldn’t solve 10D (never heard of it) nor 13A nor 25A.
  18. 33 mins when hungover from protracted birthday celebrations, which I assumed to be the cause of my sluggishness. Perhaps that wasn’t as dreadful as I thought. Agree with all that has been said. Almost no gimmes and unrelenting trickery. My thanks, too, to sabine_tk for a splendid blog which mirrored my struggles.
  19. 45 minutes on this one. One of the best puzzles I can remember. I thought I was doing really well to get all but 4 clues within 30 minutes. 25,17,23 and 15 were last to fall in that order. COD – impossible to choose but GOLF WIDOW takes some beating – I was thinking —- WOMAN for a good while.
    It’s not a quincentenary of something Czecho-Slovakian by any chance?
    Excellent – and congrats to all who managed to complete this (or even get halfway there!)
  20. A quite brilliant crossword that I solved in fits and starts, so can’t quote a time (lots, though!). Well done the setter, and the editor for selecting this for a Bank Holiday. Two excellent puzzles in a row, in fact – I didn’t comment on yesterday’s, with its superb clue for BLURB. Difficult to single out clues from today’s, but I thought 18D ANTIWAR and 22D were exceptional. A hard act to follow tomorrow…

    Tom B.

  21. With time to spare on the Bank Holiday I spent the first part of the day doing one of the classic puzzles from the “Memories” section (November 2008). But this one beat it hands down – it’s a long time since I’ve come up with absolutely nothing on a first read through.

    My first entry was PLAIN SPEAKING at 10dn, which pretty much set the tone for the rest of it. Some brilliant clues, very enjoyable.

  22. No-one seems to have commented – there’s a name for it but I can’t recall it – this crossword contains every letter of the alphabet at least once.
  23. Hi, anon,

    The name is “pangram” and it was mentioned by z8b8d8k in message 2. Peter B also referred to it.

    Regards

  25. Thanks for the reply Peter. Still hoping to initiate a “horse-and-cart” discussion sometime but will drop it for now. Really I’m just writing to see if my name and image has come up after my daughter’s shown me how to do all that.

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