Times Crossword 25,302 – Championship Class

60 comments on “Times Crossword 25,302 – Championship Class”

1. So, with Jerry around the 20m mark. A good solid puzzle tending to the easier side for a Championship number; and best approached from the bottom up. Didn’t even mind the cryptic def at 20ac … well, not much. Had a bit of a personal groan at 26ac.

   Jerry: “hald” for “halt” at 29ac.
   And I assume the “it’s” in 3dn is a deliberate and ironic error?

   1. Thank you mc, the inadvertent one has been corrected 😉
2. 29 minutes for all but two, MONOTHEIST and HOLMES. It seems to be my destiny to be stumped so frequently by two intersecting answers following an easyish run.

   An entertaining and lively puzzle though, which I enjoyed solving. CELADON was unknown or forgotten but easily gettable.

   Edited at 2012-10-24 12:15 am (UTC)

3. About 45 minutes, as most of it went in very quickly, but then I struggled with the last half-dozen. I could not see the cryptic for ‘carton’, but what else could it be?

   For the most part it was surprisingly easy, with the ‘nutshell’ and ‘instance’ clues being chestnuts. I have never seen the ‘shattering’ anagram, but surely it has been used before.

   Jerry, your disquisition on the misuse of the apostrophe contains a sly joke…..right?

   1. Aka “deliberate and ironic error” … see above.
4. 59 minutes, so I’ll definitely fly over for next year’s competition, given I could polish off the other two in 60 seconds, I reckon. Liked APOLOGY best.

   Jerry, I think ‘gratuitous’ is playing on ‘gratuity’. So, the gratuitous in ‘gratuitous advice’, as well as being ironically gratuitous, represents also a reinforcement of the target word – a tipper on tipping.

   1. So it is! This is much too good a crossword to have gratuitous words in the clues..
5. are the three crosswords that have “already appeared” somewhere online or is it some sort of “buy the paper version” incentive?
   1. Ah, well, all Times crosswords are a “Buy the paper incentive,” are they not? Or of course, a join the Crossword Club incentive, where apparently they will be added in due course
      1. Why else would anyone buy it?

         Edited at 2012-10-24 08:45 am (UTC)

         1. I would if I could. Fond memories of folding the paper and the Cutty Sark (?) scribbling pad. The local deli doesn’t go much further than the West Australian — and it has a 13×13 “cryptic”. (I should post an example one of these days, just so you can all see what we have to put up with.) How much does the Times cost these days?
            1. It’s £1. These days the crossword takes up the right-hand half of the inside back page, which makes the folding and solving experience a bit of a pain. And no Cutty Sark.
               1. $1.50-ish sounds OK to me.
                  1. It’s certainly worth it for the crossword. I get the paper delivered to my house every morning. My subscription also gives me access to the website, I have the Times app on my iPad… and I subscribe to the crossword club… so generally speaking I’ve got a fighting chance of accessing the puzzle!
                     To be fair to the paper there is some stuff in it worth reading, but if the Times crossword were in the Guardian, I’d buy that.
                     1. Me too. I read the Weekly.
                        1. A mere 90c here in Ireland. I buy it for the crossword and read a different paper! So the strategy works.
         2. I joined the Crossword Club when my newsagent stopped deliveries. The club is the only way I can get the puzzle without getting dressed and staggering down the road. I printout the crossword every morning to do in bed with a nice cup of tea. But I still like to read the paper, albeit often a day or two late, and am still a subscriber. It’s a useful antidote to the Daily Mail which I read in my local cafe. (I should mention here that I was brought up on “The Daily Worker”, which some of you might remember – though I doubt many of you actually read. I couldn’t buy “The Times” till I left home!)
            1. I think you need a more powerful antidote (the right word) for the Daily Mail. I’d recommend a two-week course of the Guardian. It will be difficult, but it is important to complete the course, including everything written by Polly Toynbee and George Monbiot. If you repeat this treatment every six months it will be safe to read the paper version of the Mail. Stronger treatment will be required if you plan to read it online.
               1. I have to read the Mail to irritate my friends, many of whom are local Labour councillors. At my age I need something to spice up my life! Ann
                  1. Oh, that’s different: all in a good cause!
         3. You obviously haven’t met the lady at my local paper shop – nor seen the views aiding clue contemplation on a pleasant stroll home.
6. 21 minutes, making me glad I was in the second group, though I find in competition conditions a kind of idiot savant mode takes over, speeding things up at least until the last few clues when the savant bit goes west under tension.
   I also find I had inexplicably failed to go back to MONOTHEIST, so this is a DNF for me – good clue, too. I was looking for something out of Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan may have been an itinerant tinker by trade, but one who knew where to put his apostrophes. No pot’s and kettle’s on his stall.
   Apart from that, CELADON was my last in, relying mostly on the cryptic. All of the SW was slow until ECONOMICAL went in, another decent clue but much more gettable than I made it today.
   Elsewhere, HOLMES is as good a cryptic definition as one would hope to see, SWEET 0’s (correct apostrophe?) struck me as rather feeble.
   1. No
      1. Cheers, though my entry’s a figure 0: its appearance maybe doesn’t look as if it’s different from yours. People’s opinions vary.
         1. You’re right – opinions vary. In the world of newspapers it’s usually MPs DVDs, 100s, 1000s etc. Since it seems to cause so much confusion (see Lynne Truss comment I reproduced below) it’s best to leave the damn thing out if possible!
            1. I seem to remember Lynn Truss condoning “DVD’s” and so on. Did I imagine that?
7. This is the only one of the three puzzles I finished without any errors on the day. I don’t have a time because I moved on to the second puzzle with four or five clues unsolved and came back to them later… for a bit of light relief!

   Edited at 2012-10-24 08:57 am (UTC)

8. 22 minutes, several of which were spent justifying 9a. This was harder than it looked at first and I went looking for Fletcher the mutineer for a while which didn’t help.
9. According to the official standings I had 2 errors on this one on the day. I know that Holmes was one as I was utterly stumped and that was still blank after the hour. Not a great clue IMHO.

   I can only assume that the other error was a typo. Running out of time before completing the puzzles meant I had no checking time.

   1. I wasn’t sure about this while solving but given that Conan Doyle called him a ‘consulting detective’ (thanks Wikipedia) I reckon it passes muster.
   2. I suspect I wasn’t the only experienced solver who bunged in HOLMES immediately. A classic old-style Times clue.
10. Finished all correct, took an hour with two interruptions for lengthy phone calls so probably 40 minutes on the job. A fine puzzle with no complaints, well done to those who romped through it in the champs. Wrong apostrophes drive me crazy too, especially ‘it’s’ for the genitive.
11. HOLMES was my last in. I was baffled by the clue but luckily spotted that the name fitted the checkers and managed to reverse-justify it.
    1. HOLMES also my LOI on the day. I got COSMOS stuck in my mind courtesy of the checkers, and had to go on to the second and third puzzles before returning to this one, starting a laborious mental run through the alphabet and eventually hitting on the right answer.

       Edited at 2012-10-24 11:36 am (UTC)

12. 28 mins and 24 secs with one wrong. Caledon instead of Celadon.
13. Inspired by those astonishing championship times I was off to a flying start but ran out of steam three quarters of the way through and took 45 minutes to finish.

    Apostrophes These puzzle not only greengrocers.

    I have a three volume edition of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia from around 1900, so I assume there used to be Chambers’s Dictionary. That became Chambers Dictionary and now just Chambers.

    I’ve also noticed changes in mathematics textbooks: where once there was Pythagoras’s Theorem we now see Pythagoras’ Theorem. I can understand Archimedes’ Principle and Olbers’ Paradox, in preference to Archimedes’s Principle and Olbers’s Paradox, because that’s the way we say them.

    Even The Times can’t make up its mind: I have seen “King James’s suspicions” (or something similar) and “King James’ suspicions” within a few weeks of each other.

    1. Lynne Truss sums it up:

       ‘The rule is: the word “it’s” (with apostrophe) stands for “it is” or “it has”. If the word does not stand for “it is” or “it has” then what you require is “its”. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice, if you still persist in writing “good food at it’s best” you deserve to be strung up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.’

14. Penfold and the other ‘lovely’ people who nagged me on Saturday afternoon may wish to note that I solved this one in 9 mins. Puzzle 2 took me two goes with a total of 19 mins, and puzzle 3 13 mins, giving me a grand total of 41 mins for Preliminary 1. The puzzle that appears today was the most enjoyable IMHO.

    My training continues!!

    1. See, we told you you’d have done well. All correct in 41 minutes would probably have got you into the final. Bring your best pencil next year.
15. Found this pretty straightforward, largely because simple clues like Draw, Scam, Kit, Map, Oral, Lore, Airman, Tippler and Clarinet gave a lot of checking letters spread throughout the grid. Not sure though I’d have found it as easy under Saturday’s exam conditions!

    Was slow to complete the top/NW corner with my last few being Apology, Saying, Feminine and LOI Declassify. Celadon from the wordplay. Liked the Holmes cd.

16. Wow, should have made a snap trip to London last weekend – I was done in 9 minutes and didn’t find any particular hangups though HOLMES was the last one in.
17. All correct in 50 mins – so probably no ticket to the final! Enjoyable and elegant puzzle – the relatively obscure CELADON being eminently getable from the cryptic wordplay. The clever reference to the grocer’s apostrophe at 3 dn was a delight, and I liked the setter’s exploitation of the less common meaning of APOLOGY at 9 ac.

    Thanks to Justin for the Lynne Truss quote. It took me back to my schooldays. When I was about 14 or 15 I was always confusing “its” and “it’s” until one day my English master – one Stephen Lushington who died died recently well into his 90s and got an obit in The Times – who was famed for his occasional violent rages, picked up a wooden chair beside his desk and flung it across the classroom where it shattered against the far wall to applause from the rest of the form. Probably not a teaching method that would be approved of nowadays, but I never got “its” and “it’s” wrong again.

    Incidentally, Lynne T writes for The Times. As an old Times man myself, including as a foreign correspondent for 21 years, but now long retired, I feel that loyalty requires me to put in a small plug for my old paper in view of some of the comments above. I agree that the news coverage, home and foreign, now contains a lot of stuff one doesn’t want to read, but the the paper’s team of columnists is first-class, and made a clean sweep of the prizes in the recent press awards.

    1. Fair point: this is what I meant when I said that some of it is worth reading. £1 seems a fair price for a crossword but it’s nice that they throw in Daniel Finkelstein for free.
18. 7.28 with hesitation over the previously unknown CELADON though the wordplay penny dropped pretty quickly. Some nice stuff (i suppose it’s no surprise that the competition puzzles are usually of high quality, even by the normal high standards).

    I have moved on from spotting rogue apostrophes to being an aficionado of unnecessary quotation marks. My recent favourite was an A-board outside a pub which announced:

    Terry and Angela “welcome” you

    which I thought made it sound a touch insincere.

    Edited at 2012-10-24 12:53 pm (UTC)

19. How about this which was once printed on Marks & Spencer receipts.
    “LADIES” TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OUR FITTING ROOMS.
    It dates back a few years but I still have a treasured copy.
    1. Possibly intended for these two?
       ”Ladies”
20. I timed this on my alarm clock as usual and then discovered that the clock had stopped. So no recorded time but it felt like just under half an hour. A steady solve with no major problems, although I put ANALOGY at 9a as soon as I saw the word “example”. I failed to find a sport called NALO so had to go to plan B for the correct answer. A very enjoyable puzzle.
21. So, that’s why they’re called inverted commerce?
22. About 15 minutes, ending with some head scratching about 20ac before I saw HOLMES. Nice clue, that. I also tried to shoehorn Fletcher the mutineer into 8D, but clearly nothing like him would fit. A very fine puzzle altogether, though I’m lucky that the anagrist for MAESTRI was so clear. Making a plural for maestro without the helpful hint would have been a sheer guess. Regard’s to all. (Wink.)
23. I am a frequent visitor to your wonderful blog.Thank you all. I love the obscure links and the little journeys I take as a result. I am only surprised that nobody mentioned the Marx Bros. in relation to Sunup t’other day. Now the real reason for my post. I know that one of you will be kind enough to explain this clue for me.Grand Final 1. 20ac. Reform movement to meet about stopping appeal. A: Chartism
    1. CHAR(TIS)M, where SIT=”to meet” and CHARM=”appeal”. “Stopping” is used in the sense of being put inside something, e.g. a cork stopping a bottle.

       HTH

24. Many thanks Mohn. I get the stopping thing but had no idea that meet could be sit. Similarly, caution = amusing person was new to me.
    1. Chambers (2002) has a definition of sit as “to be in session”, e.g. for committees or parliaments, which I would guess is where the “meet” sense comes from. Though, if I’m perfectly honest, on the day I bunged in CHARTISM based purely on C_A_____ and “Reform movement”, as I was already in time trouble and needed to cut a few corners …
       1. Aha! I’ve been wondering who mohn could be. Obviously a useful solver judging by the TCC leaderboard, and now your comments today place you in the first preliminary and the final. I’d have guessed John McCabe if it wasn’t for the mention of “time trouble”, so perhaps Mick Hodgkin?
          1. John McCabe at your service 🙂 My reference to time trouble was because, after 15 minutes, I’d only completed about half of puzzle 1 and I was beginning to fear that my first final appearance was going to be miserable. So I stopped worrying about justifying all the wordplay, and made much faster progress from there. Of course a mistake did slip through, which a bit of checking before I raised my hand would have caught, but I guess that’s part of the fun of being a first-timer – learning from experience.
             1. In that case, allow me to congratulate you on reaching the final for the first time; but commiserations on making a mistake. As I said in my blog entry, experience counts, so I expect you’ll fare better next time. I failed on three clues in my first final, but as this was the notorious 1975 final, that was good enough for me to finish 8th (in the days when prizes went down to 8th position :-).
                1. Thanks. I did the final puzzles last year as a spectator and only solved about 2/3 of the clues, so getting within 1 of an all-correct this year was at the upper end of my expectations. I must say that your consistency over a period of decades is astounding, especially given the changes in cluing style in that time.
25. I suppose this must have taken me around 10 minutes, but my nerves made my handwriting so bad that I had to keep rubbing out and rewriting letters for fear the markers wouldn’t be able to read them – which was particularly hard in the lower part of the crossword where my sweaty palms had made the paper damp. (I’ve always been a bundle of nerves at the Championships, but things seem to be getting worse rather than better.)

26. Obviously CELADON and no problem with the wordplay apart from the use of ‘sign’. Surely if something goes through on the nod it is not signed. Apart from helping the surface, why is the word there?
    1. It means sign as in sign language, ie to signify agreement non-verbally.

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