Times Crossword 25,469 – Sexplorative Edition

46 comments on “Times Crossword 25,469 – Sexplorative Edition”

1. ….primarily due to marking 1 across as 3,7 instead of 7,3 in my copy. You’ll never get anywhere that way!

   ‘Simoom’ was a new one to me too; it appears the car manufacturers have not yet exhausted all the possible winds.

   ‘Gung-ho’ has a rather interesting etymology. I put in ‘agog to’ at first, then saw it wouldn’t do.

2. 16dn: There’s such a thing as a Platonic solid apparently, so it’s a double definition.

   40 minutes for this one with rather more unknowns than I would have liked, BRESCIA and SIMOOM for a start plus the IMP/feather meaning and “PLATONIC solid” ringing only the faintest of bells, but I think they have both come up here previously. I had no problem thinking of MANGROVE swamps since that’s where the python romps, according to Noel Coward in “Mad Dogs and Englishmen”.

   Edited at 2013-05-08 12:56 am (UTC)

   1. The platonic solids are: tetrahedron; hexahedron; octahedron; dodecahedron; icosahedron; they are also known as the regular polyhedrons
3. For a short while, I thought I might sneak in under 10′ for the first time in ages (and maybe the third time ever), but 1ac and 5d slowed me down. Just the reverse of Jerry, I thought of BRESCIA, but didn’t think of the CIA, so I had to run through the alphabet to make sure. And I associate featherbedding with unions, so the connection here took time.In retrospect I ‘knew’ IMP, but only remembered it after; but it had to be WIMP. I don’t see the problem with END PRODUCT; smashing a cup produces a result, a result is an end product, Bob’s your whatsit. Not a memorable clue, but passable, no? My recollection of Kinsey–that is, of reading about him–was that he was quite neurotic about sex, and did rather awful things to himself in that respect.

   Edited at 2013-05-08 02:13 am (UTC)

   1. I simply took it as the anagram indicator.
      1. Deleted my original comment along with my response to Jack. 79 mins, at any rate, so no Kinseyan romp in the hay for me.
         1. Didn’t know you could delete a comment once it has been replied to. Must be a privilege I didn’t know I had!
            1. It seems that if you delete a reply to a comment on your comment, you delete your comment too. It’s happened before.
4. Including a dictionary look-up for IMP at 25ac. Now there’s obscure for you. Most problems in that corner in general, especially as “bedimmed” springs to mind from “partially eclipsed” (20ac). Two big crosses against the cryptic(less) defs at 14ac and 15dn.
   1. 14ac …. ‘vote’ = ‘ballot’; ‘secret’ = ‘confidence’

      Seems OK to me

      1. Seems OK to me for a Concise!
5. Well, I may not know much about poetry but at least I can recognise a platonic solid when I see one.

   Agree with Jerry that 25A and 26A are both not out of the top draw. “IMP” would be OK in a Mephisto but far too obscure for the Daily puzzle. 26A is just a train crash of a clue. As to 6D I personally would have preferred a “for example” after the “whisky”. Distilling produces a vast range of products, not just various forms of booze.

   The rest is good fare. 20 minutes to solve.

6. For poetry and platonic solids see my comment, just added, to yesterday’s log. 39 minutes here: found it quite tricky at times. Recalled imp from somewhere. Does ‘far too obscure’ simply mean ‘Well, I certainly didn’t know it’? All the clues seem fair enough, given a general likelihood of direction of meaning (e.g. distilled and whisky), to me. An end product has a twist in itself – what you get at the end when something’s smashed – that keeps it on the rails.
   1. As it happens Joe I did know “IMP” because, as you may have noticed, I write the Mephisto blogs and so had come across the use before. It’s a usage that in my view is too obscure for a puzzle that can allegedly be completed by a man on the top deck of the Clapham omnibus.

      The fact that you only associate distilling with whisky is perhaps an insight

      1. Who said “only”? And what about the train-crash? It’s just that there’s a kind of carping that’s sometimes not so far removed from a sneer; people get in on the act; it’s all a bit, well, indecorous. But maybe the Clapham journeyer’s a bit of a tub-thumper by nature. I taught in a school in Balham, next door, many years ago and rann a magazine called ‘The Balham Omnibus’ where the pupils were fairly opinionated, as I recall.
7. 25 minutes to solve, with CRAG dragging out the process, despite that fact that rag is currently the preferred jazz in crosswordland, appearing only a week ago. I thought COAL for most of the time. Didn’t like the “in” bit of the clue.
   Since I couldn’t make any sense of it, I half thought Paul McCartney was singing about that wind but getting the N and M confused at the end. Apparently it’s C Moon. which means “cool”. as opposed to L7,which means square.
   At least I knew about Platonic solids (and Tennyson – anyone else claim both?).
   CoD to MOLAR, “part of the daily grind” indeed.
   1. The first single I ever bought with my own pocket money. Of course C Moon was really the B side, but when the BBC banned Hi Hi Hi it became the A side. Or something.

      I can’t claim both Tennyson and platonic solids. In fact, put me down for neither.

      1. Well, I’ve learnt something. I had no idea that Paul M had ever been banned by the BBC. And him being such a nice young man.

         I knew the poetry but not the solids, although that did seem vaguely familiar, maybe from an old Champs puzzle:

         http://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/324522.html?thread=3080362

         1. To be precise, it was Wings that were banned, though he wrote the song. He also wrote several Beatles songs that were banned by the BBC.. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, A Day in the Life, and I am the Walrus come to mind, maybe there were others. I think it says more about the BBC though, than it does about Paul
            1. Another Wings song Give Ireland Back to the Irish had been banned by the Beeb the previous year so he had previous, as it were.

               Mind you, given that Wikipedia’s list of songs banned by the BBC includes offerings by Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, Bing Crosby and Petula Clark, it appears that nobody is immune.

            2. I am the Walrus was written by John Lennon, who also contributed the greater part to the other two songs you mention.

               To be fair to the BBC they had other things on their mind at the time, like drawing up policies for dealing with DJs and game show hosts with wandering hands…

      2. I’ve just checked out the lyrics (I’m afraid it passed me by first time round). Did the BBC ban it because it could understand the lyrics, or because it couldn’t?
8. I usually know a Tennyson poem when I see it, but I don’t know much if any thing about platonic solids. Thanks for enlightening me, Jimbo. Is there no end to the educative process that is this blog?
9. 16 mins. It didn’t feel much easier than the last couple of days so my faster time was possibly because I was solving the puzzle mid-morning rather than later in the day.

   I thought the hidden answer in 20ac was clever, and I liked the clue for 12dn. I didn’t know about platonic solids but the answer seemed obvious enough with all the checkers in place.

   I didn’t notice the lack of elegance in the clue for 26ac, probably because I also do the Guardian and Independent crosswords where surface readings don’t always seem to matter.

   My last three in were INCUBI (once I’d sorted out what the clue was telling me), WIMP (I didn’t know that meaning of imp but what else could the answer have been?) and finally CRAG (I have no idea why it took me so long to see rag).

10. I am disappointed to discover that I may not disturb a bat, at least not without some risk, although it sounds like a good job to have, as a bat-protector I mean.

    I ground this one out in about 40 minutes, and was irritated slightly by what seemed wilful obscurity in one or two of the clues. I don’t mind tough so long as I get my reward, but there it is.

    Chris.

11. In 4 down, the ‘for’ seems wrong- I see that without it the clue becomes easy but it seems incorrectly misleading? I also don’t see how the mammal -bat- is ‘protected’ or held in 17 ac – surely the implication is that both ‘mammal’ and ‘properly’ should be either protected and/or held – unless ‘bat’ is a protected mammal? Should have got this by running through sees other than Ely but again seemed a cheat. PS While secret ballot is the answer for 14 across, I had put in second ballot which seems to work equally well (second = vote of confidence) until you can’t get any of the connectors.

12. I agree doing the crossword daily is becoming a second education:)
13. From the Wikipedia entry:

    In the United Kingdom, all bats are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Acts, and even disturbing a bat or its roost can be punished with a heavy fine.

    1. Thanks
14. Slow to get going with this one but got there in the end. Found the bottom half easier than the top.
    FOI Crag, LOI (guessed) Wimp. I’d seen Brescia on a map only yesterday when reading about the Giro d’Italia.
    Liked Secret Ballot, Gung-Ho and the definition of Molar.
    Jerry – thanks for explaining Scrubbing Up and Clementine’s father – didn’t understand those two.
15. 35 minutes, with WIMP and SIMOOM guessed from wordplay, so indeed I am educated once more. Like Jimbo I know my platonic solids. Off now to look up the etymology of GUNG HO since vinyl1 says it’s fascinating.
16. 21:32 but with the far SW my eventual undoing. After a pause I put in wimp based on the def and then couldn’t be bothered to look beyond a (very) hopeful inpupi for 19.

    I can’t see the issue with 26. Why does “end product” have to have anything at all to do with “cup trodden into pieces” other than as wordplay? “Result?” on its own seems to be perfectly valid as a def for the former.

    Brescia is one of those places I only know from Football Italia.

17. 33.24 so about average here. Lots to enjoy but as others have said obscurity and a touch of clumsiness elsewhere.
18. 27:11 .. I found this quite a struggle, but I’m not finding any of them easy just now.

    WIMP was a hit-and-hope, and BATH AND WELLS had me double-checking all the crossing letters before the penny dropped.

    Some really nice surfaces in here – I thought SIMOOM’s was the pick of the bunch.

19. I did know them (and Tennyson too Zabadak) but for the wrong reasons. The names and the beautiful shapes distracted me in geometry class so much that I never quite grasped the Euclidean fundamentals – well I had no aptitude either sadly.

    Bath and Wells did not get parsed before submission. “Wimp” (like others I’d never heard of that sort of imp) and “incubi” gave me no end of trouble in that corner and I must remember the trick with the Roman 2 for future reference. *N*U*I only yielded one possible answer however. Jerry is right that they fit in with the general theme of the puzzle.

    I’ll second Sotira on “simoom” as a really good clue. I remembered it from the rather pretentious (and fictitious) reference to Herodotus on winds in The English Patient book. I’m not sure if it made it into the movie script though I do remember a bit about desert winds. Neither is a favourite of mine. 21.33

    Edited at 2013-05-08 02:57 pm (UTC)

    1. …which makes us both polymaths, I guess, even if it appears we both know the Tennyson for much the same reason.
    2. As I’ve just mentioned on the club forum I knew SIMOOM from an old Victorian ballad called “The Desert” about a guy stranded in the desert and watching the vultures circling. I’ve just googled it. Written by Louis Emanuel. Completely OTT but thrilling stuff. Recorded on Hyperion by Gerald Finley. I remember the “SIMOOM whose hot kiss is death”. Never saw “The English Patient”. We take our GK where we find it!
20. I had COAL for 7a but couldn’t see why. I meant to go back to it for another think but forgot. I should have got RAG – I used to play the “Maple Leaf Rag” reasonably well and the “Entertainer” and “Black & White” rags were popular down the pub in the old days when there was a piano in the corner. The only meaning of IMP I know is the Tirion kind that I’m reading about in “Game of Thrones” 27 minutes with 1 wrong. Ann
21. Three wrong today, starting from the fact that surgeons over here ‘scrub in’, not up, which made WIMP ungettable (more like unguessable, since I had no idea of the ‘imp’ referred to.) So I tried DOWN for 25, with the wife inside ‘don’, and hoping that chicken feathers as well as those of geese become down. This of course made INCUBI impossible, so I tried INCUBO. Ouch. Regards to all.
22. 10:15 for me, with a good third of it spent on WIMP. The annoying thing is that I was fairly confident of the IMP part (from years of doing Listener puzzles), but, like dorsetjimbo, felt it was out of place in a daily Times cryptic, and so wasted ages looking for an alternative answer. I’d made a slightly slow start, but then really found the setter’s wavelength, so was disappointed not to post a much better time.
23. I forgot to say: I entirely agree with penfold_61 about 26ac. I simply don’t understand the objection.
    1. I will try to explain, since it’s you Tony :-). “cup trodden into pieces” is fine: ie make anagram from “cup trodden.” But “result?” means what? An end product is the result of a calculated action. It is what you do in order to achieve something. it’s not an accident or a mistake. Treading on a cup seems rather a stretch in this context. And why the question mark? Is the setter saying that it might not actually be a result after all? That is why I suggested that a ! might be more appropriate. To me it just seems very sloppy. An end product is surely more than just “something that might happen.”
       I won’t lose any sleep over it however
       1. Jerry, surely the definition part is simply “result” (as in “the final result of an activity or process, especially the finished article in a manufacturing process”, to quote Oxford Dictionaries Online’s definition of “end product”). The only reference back to the wordplay (“cup trodden in pieces”) is the question mark, which is as much as to say “if you can really call that a result”. (Well that explanation satisfied me, anyway 🙂
24. Late comment: very busy day.
    This took me 21m this morning. Lots I hadn’t heard of: pretty much anything that anyone else has said they hadn’t heard of, in fact.
    The DBE in 6dn is, in my view, a perfect demonstration of why we shouldn’t object to them on principle.
    I’m with Jimbo on “imp” though, although I sympathise: it must be tricky for these setters to keep track of which words are used in the real world and which are only ever encountered in Chambers. I think of this as Tim Moorey Syndrome.

    Edited at 2013-05-08 09:40 pm (UTC)

25. Who knew that? The TC should be solvable without a dictionary!
    1. There will always be words you don’t know, from time to time, in any good quality cryptic. I note that most managed to solve the clue anyway.
       I recommend the Club Monthly or the Mephisto as evidence that this can be done happily enough

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