Times Crossword 25,092 – Moving in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform

Solving Time: Almost twenty minutes, but should have been a little quicker I think, this didn’t feel hard, especially after 1dn went straight in. No new words, but some very neat surfaces here, such as 5ac, 5dn, 20dn. Enjoyable.

cd = cryptic definition, dd = double definition, rev = reversed, homophones are written in quotes, anagrams as (–)*

Across
1 hilltop – house = HO containing ILL + T = bad time, + P. This took me a minute to sort through as I was sure the prince would be Prince Hal.. isn’t it always?
5 Cowper – intimidate = COW + PER = a, as in per head. William Cowper provided the title for today’s blog.. I see he lived in Huntingdon, as did I, though not at the same time
8 isthmuses – I + MUSES containing South = STH. This one also took a little time since although I knew what the answer must be, it turns out I can neither pronounce nor spell it
9 adieu – A + DIE + U, die being as in dying to meet you
11 Sligo – Set Living In Great Opulence = somewhere foreign where it rains constantly
12 playgroup – scope = PLAY + GRO(W) UP – another very neat surface
13 leeboard – (EE + OLD BAR)* – when I wrote this in the word seemed perfectly familiar but in fact I had no idea what it actually referred to. Turns out it’s a misplaced centreboard
15 red-eye – omitted, no doubt we all got the picture
17 Titian – giant = TITAN containing I
19 massacre – sorry, don’t get this one.. Presumably “service area” = MASS + A, and the def. is butchery, but why CRE = “West Brazil” I cannot say.. Oh, hang on, yes I can! Actually it is MASS + ACRE, Acre being the well-known Brazilian state..
22 irregular – ie not regular soldiers.. A dd.
23 fluke – another quasi-humourous dd.
24 greet – GREE(K) + T
25 assailant – “while worker” = AS ANT containing canvas = SAIL
26 stanza – STAN Laurel + Z + A
27 egghead – such as= EG + GAD containing HE = ambassador. Gad being of course the tribe descended from Gad, son of Jacob & Zilpah.
Down
1 hair-splitting – a simple cd that should have got you off to a flying start..
2 lattice – fine fabric = LACE containing TTI, a tit with its tail up. As it were. Well done setter for not making use of the horrid coffee substitute, latte
3 tempo – was satisfactory = MET rev., + PO the ubiquitous river. Does the unnecessary “for” help or hinder? Discuss..
4 passport – PA + PORT = left, containing ship = SS
5 casual – about = CA + (U)SUAL. A very neat clue indeed
6 wranglers – yet another technically simple cd, (but see comments below) one of the dafter words in use in Cambridge
7 episode – help regularly = hElP + IS ODE, sounds like “is owed”
10 unprecedented – (PUNT NEEDED)* containing play area = REC.
14 orang-utan – striking = on strike = OUT, + RANG + AN, an article
16 Fair Isle – (IS REAL IF)*
18 torment – leftist = TROT(skyite) rev., containing soldiers = MEN. And not = OR, just for once..
20 courage – can-opener = C + these days = OUR AGE. Nice..
21 alpaca – “a film making centre” = A LA containing CAP rev.
23 fling – omitted, though actually one of my last in, I couldn’t believe it was so simple

Author: JerryW

I love The Times crosswords..

37 comments on “Times Crossword 25,092 – Moving in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform”

  1. Agreed, should have been quicker but held up by the CASUAL/COWPER intersection. Hymns and John Gilpin (qv — 1st Feb this year) … a multimedia artist?

    8ac reminded me of a festive season spent on a particluarly horrible neck of land: crappy isthmus.

    And 12ac of being misled on my travels by PLAYGROUP signs. So many places in WA end in -UP.

    Bad jokes apart, no idea about LEEBOARD and had to look it up to be sure it was a device and not a direction. Ditto the Brazilian region.

  2. Just crept in under the half hour mark with the unknown LEEBOARD last in after I twigged it was anagrammatic. LATTICE was cunning and gets my COD as I “knew” the answer but needed to work out the wordplay before entry.

    SLIGO is well known to my teenage daughter as the place from which the bulk of Westlife comes. Since they will be in Hong Kong next month as part of their farewell tour, I will withhold all comment lest I offend the Tuatha Dé Dannan and their promise turns out not to be true.

  3. 15:38; like Monday’s, it went so fast after I printed it out that I decided to go for the leaderboard. I don’t think I’ve read anything of Cowper’s, but the name’s stuck in my mind because of the pronunciation (Cooper, as opposed to the gland man, Cowper). Never heard of a leeboard, and wasted time over ‘Europeans’ before twigging to the obvious. With quite a few of these, I parsed them as I wrote them in, or immediately after. But not 12ac, or 18d–thanks, Jerry–which I did treat as OR=soldiers.
  4. 49 minutes, held up, after a flying start and a solid 15 minutes of solving, by 13ac and several on the RH, mainly in the NE.

    I disagree that 6dn is simple, and incidentally, Jerry, you have a typo here, as the answer is WRANGLERS. ‘Mathematicians at Cambridge’ may well have led one directly to the answer if one happened to know the somewhat arcane reference, but if, like me, one didn’t, then there was only ‘argumentative’ to go on, which cannot by itself clue ‘wranglers’. Also the first letter ‘W’ is checked by COWPER at 5ac, another somewhat obscure piece of ‘General Knowledge’ that many would not know. I happened to remember seeing his name when singing from Hymns A&M about 50 years ago but had no idea that he was a Georgian, so that additional piece information was of no help.

    ACRE was my other unknown and I only thought of GAD after completing the grid, which I vaguely remembered from a previous puzzle, possibly written by this same setter.

    Edited at 2012-02-22 05:22 am (UTC)

    1. Agreed on “wrangler” as GK. I only knew it from reading biographical work on Alfred North Whitehead. Apparently he was only 4th wrangler. I wonder who the first three were? The whole clue, I suspect, is supposed to have a cd-ish element to it.

      Edited at 2012-02-22 05:25 am (UTC)

        1. Typo corrected, thanks Jack, and cd corrected to dd too.. I wasn’t meaning to say the clue was easy to solve, so much as that it is a technically simple dd. Few of those are easy if one doesn’t know (or remember 🙂 the required word!
          1. Jerry, I agree with your initial assessment of cryptic definition, as ‘argumentative’ on its own doesn’t mean wranglers.
  5. i was a mathematician at Cambridge and never heard the phrase wrangler. in fact the only reason i know the word is that brandy butter is also called senior wranglers sauce according to one of my cookbook. and a senior wrangler is someone who got a first in maths. not me i switched to computer science, in those days a one year course
  6. Struggled with this one (online, which always adds time) in 26 minutes, and 16 seconds, apparently. A fair bit of the time went on correcting entries going in the wrong direction or starting in the wrong place. Touch typing is obviously the solution.
    Several hold-ups: LEEBOARD, not obviously a device and with those pesky E-uropeans and an “old” that wasn’t O but anagrist;
    ALPACA even with all the crossers (cloth?);
    MASSACRE – not familiar enough with Brazil and wondered if West Brazil was just bra, or the “A” for acre was clued as being in that bit (?!);
    COWPER (shame on me), though he was possibly one of the most depressed people ever to write a decent hymn;
    WRANGLERS dimly remembered but thought they made beds or some such;
    Last in and CoD COURAGE – too blitzed to unravel a neat but relatively straightforward clue.

    Edited at 2012-02-22 08:26 am (UTC)

  7. 12m. Quite a lot of this went in from one of definition or wordplay without understanding the other, so some of the cleverer stuff passed me by when solving. Lucky because there were quite a few things I didn’t know in here. Fortunately WRANGLERS wasn’t one of them. I’m not keen on the clue, which is a bit too reliant on the GK for my liking.
    I put in HEMITOP for 1ac, which slowed me down a little at the end. It’s a near-perfect answer to the clue, marred only by non-existence.
    1. I was brought to a halt by having HEMITOP here too, although it does crop up in the US world of cars as two words.
  8. Straightforward 20 minutes with no hold ups or problems.

    Knew COWPER because as a teenager I accidently discovered that he spent most of his life living with another bloke’s wife and then widow and used this as part of a debate on religion and hypocrisy. Also knew about WRANGLERS and agree it’s not a very good clue – far too reliant upon one piece of arcane knowledge.


  9. Slightly quicker solve today than yesterday and another all correct without aids. That’s two in a row! I think my longest streak is four. I can never get 1A at first look and today was no exception – in fact it was my LOI. Also struggled in the NW corner with Tempo, Leeboard and Lattice.

    In my three years of daily solving I don’t recall ever seeing STH as an abbreviation for south. GAD was also a new word. Dredged up Wranglers from W?A…

    Looking up COWPER on Wikipedia led to some interesting reading about Westminster School. Likewise FAIR ISLE which I didn’t know was midway between the Orkneys and Shetlands, nor that only 70 people live there, the children have to go to Lerwick on Mainland, Shetlands, for their secondary schooling and that in the past 60 years the range of temperatures the island has experienced (+20C to -6C) is the smallest temperature range in the British Isles.

  10. …and that one was COWPER, where I’d not heard of the hymner, nor did I twig the a=per bit – shame on me!

    Apart from 3 or 4 in the top right, I zipped through, despite not being able to parse TORMENT, MASSACRE or EGGHEAD. Some of these clues seemed terribly easy (eg 11ac, 4dn).

    Glad you’re back on board, Daniel, as you seem to have similar success rates as me. Think 4 in a row is probably my best, too. I’ll start counting them now!


    1. Yup, four in a row is my best (I checked my spreadsheet!), on 14-17 February 2011. I’ve also managed two three-day streaks: 29-31 August 2011 and 15-17 October 2011. My 2012 records are on a different computer but I think my best this year is two in a row.

      I’m disappointed if I don’t solve > 80% of clues without aids – which I usually manage but sometimes after picking at the puzzle for days! It’s a very poor, and now rare, day indeed when I can’t solve more than half the puzzle without help.

      I’ve found the puzzle of 25 January (1A Praetorian) the hardest recent one. I finally gave up on that last night after managing 2/3rd (+ a few more with http://www.onelook.com) and turned to TFTT and jerrywh’s excellent blog for the solution!

      1. I’ve never been convinced that two is enough to make a row. But congratulations on not saying “back to back”
  11. Just happened to know these which helped a lot. Wrangler from a very intimidating school contemporary who became one (I agree it’s not much of a clue). Leeboard from a favourite book – the Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers.
    Isthmus joins asthma and naphtha as one of the words I always have trouble spelling. Didn’t parse Cowper until coming here. Just nicked past Kevin in the 15 minute range.
    1. I’ve been meaning to read this for some time (Childers was at the same school as me, albeit a little earlier) and will make that good on my next visit to the library.

      Apophthegm is a cracker too.

  12. 7 minutes for me which equals my current personal best for a Times. A lovely flowing puzzle. It did help that wranglers came up in a quiz many years ago and has stuck in my head as I rather like the sound of mathematical horse handler!
  13. Wrabgler panders to Oxbridge, putting the Radbrick amongst us at a disadvantage. it was, however, pretty obvious once Cowper and the other crosses were in. A wrangler, of course, was Clint Eastwood’s first job in front of a camera. And he never went up to Cambridge!!

    enigma

  14. I bombed on this one, being too hasty in an attempt to beat the hour. Strangely, I got all of the hard stuff but had three letters wrong in the first clue (HEMITOP? rather than HILLTOP and of course another new English word, MATTICE rather than LATTICE). It all seems so easy now!
  15. Over 50 minutes but 3 wrong as I joined the HEMITOP club with a LARBOARD that I couldn’t get to fit the clue; not surprising as it didn’t! Which all led to an inventive but non existent MOTTIER. Hey ho I think the Perth WA sunshine now has a lot to answer for after my hopes earlier in the week!
  16. 17 minutes this morning, seemed like a bit of a struggle to me, and I needed the wordplay for COWPER and LEEBOARD. WRANGLERS went in with a shrug.
  17. All done except Hilltop and Leeboard in 20 minutes, then got fed up (after being fed-up more than usual at lunchtime) and went to the blog, so DNF. Some nice clues, Cod for me, 20dn courage.
  18. I came across the term WRANGLER years ago when studying physics. (Not at Cambridge!) I remember reading that many of my heroes, such as Sir James Jeans, Lord Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell, had been second wranglers, and wondered who could possibly have been better mathematicians.

    I also seem to remember a book in which an eminent mathematician (was it G. H. Hardy?) criticized the competitive Cambridge mathematics tripos for stifling mathematical creativity. Hardy was a fourth wrangler.

    About 35 minutes.

    1. It’s nice to hear from you again.
      I’m no mathematician but generally speaking aren’t the qualities required to shine in exams a little different from those required to become truly distinguished in any particular field? I was always quite good at exams…
  19. Had heard of WRANGLER somewhere. Which helped. If I hadn’t been familiar with the term I don’t think the cryptic would have been much help. I agree that the clue relies too much on GK. COWPER I knew as a poet but not specifically as a hymn writer, so had to wait for checkers for that one.I didn’t see 1a immediately and spent far to long trying to fit the ubiquitous Prince Hal into the answer. Once this fell the rest went in reasonably quickly.21 minutes. I’m now going to try last Saturday’s puzzle which has been flagged as a difficult one – will probably take from now till Saturday for me to solve.
  20. Almost cripplingly tired when did this but that may have helped as it all went in easily enough except for the 5s, that took the last 5 minutes of 20. The annoying was I had Cow for ages but still went adrift for too long. I hope the Times isn’t dumbing down. Last Saturday’s is almost a relief to look back to.
    1. We’re going through an easy patch, no doubt. We had a tough run over Christmas though and these things come and go.
  21. Does it really? In which case it is almost an acceptable answer.
    Fortunately I’d never heard it so I was wary enough to try 2dn without the M which got me there.
  22. I’m not that familiar with the work of William Cowper, but I should have thought that he would have been a bit offended to have been called a hymn-writer. He was a poet (albeit a religious poet) and some of his poems were used as the words of hymns. Does that make him a hymn-writer?

    Peter West, the cricket commentator, used to refer to people (scorers or statisticians, I can’t remember) as ‘senior wranglers’, so I had no problem with 6dn.

  23. 7:09 for me after another slow start, getting bogged down with HEMITOE / HITEMOE / ??? straight away (imagining that the tip of “prince” was going to come from the other end). But at least I got going reasonably quickly (once I’d given up on 8ac as well) and was relieved to post a better time than yesterday’s. Nice puzzle.
  24. MET on its own doesn’t mean “was satisfactory”, but arguably it can mean “was satisfactory for.”

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