Times Cryptic No 28493 — New Year’s Re-Solution?

93 comments on “Times Cryptic No 28493 — New Year’s Re-Solution?”

1. 21:48. Tricky. I knew the phrase “working like a Trojan” from somewhere but the penny didn’t drop while solving. All very good stuff.

2. 28:01, a pretty steady solve with no very long stares but a bit of trouble in the SW corner. Very nearly biffed DIMWIT but checked just before submission.

   I enjoyed some of the more unusal clueing – I got the device in IGNOMINY but couldn’t see IOM = “man”. NUCLEON was fun to puzzle out. Agree with jack above that “mid-evening” is less of an issue than “midnight”, so perhaps we’re not going to end up full Guardian with “groundwater” = (WATER)*

   MER on ABSURD. (a) BURD is, going by internet sources, poetic or Scottish. (b) I don’t see how you can reasonably insert things into a homophone, given they might change how the individual letters are pronounced. As so often, the clue was straightforward enough that it’s no big deal but I could see it feeling very unfair with a harder definition.

   Thanks pj & setter.

   1. FWIW I agree with you. I have made similar comments about the divisibility of homophones in the past but I seemed to be the only one bothered by it!

      1. I did find it “odd,” as I said.

         1. So you did! Sorry that passed me by. I think it’s worse than odd but as I said I feel I’m ploughing a lonely furrow with this one! I can’t remember the clue I objected to on the previous occasion but I seemed to be the only person who minded.

            1. Can you explain your objection more fully? What is amiss with:

               A BIRD —> ABURD

               and then insert an S?

               1. Because the insertion of the S means that the sound represented by the homophone doesn’t appear anywhere in the spoken answer, which I think it needs to. If you don’t follow this principle you might for instance clue 1ac as [BACK] + [homophone of BEER] containing [I], which I think most people (including most setters!) would object to. ABSURD is a less egregious example because the sounds of ‘a bird’ remain more or less intact in the answer, so I acknowledge that my objection is probably a bit pernickety in this particular case, but I dislike it on the same principle.

                  1. Ah! I can see that objection. Personally, I wouldn’t say that your clue for BACKBITER is unacceptable per se, but maybe a poor clue. Either way, AB(S)URD doesn’t have this problem, so it seems to meet the bar you set.

                     I don’t agree with what Sandy seems to be implying, that the homophone needs to itself be a word. If the word was spelled ABSURRED, I would accept ABURRED as homophonically equivalent to “a bird”.

                     1. I suppose we might call what I’m objecting to an ‘indirect homophone’, a bit like an indirect anagram.

                     2. I didn’t imply any such thing. Or intend to, at least. If I even understand what you mean.

                        I said that it is “somewhat odd” that the clue features a “homonym on part of the word that [referring to the homonym] you have to yourself extract.” Thus described, though, we actually have lots of clues like that. In context, I was referring to a clue where part of the word has to be extracted to find the homonym. The same thing James objects to.

3. 48:23 I thought this was a fantastic crossword where there were few “easy” clues. I agree with all the comments already made about the best bits. LOI ABSURD, which was an enjoyable PDM for me. Thanks b & s.

4. I only saw this off once I’d corrected “twister” to TELSTAR. The leaderboard position of 15th suggests my performance was better than I thought it was, especially considering how far I’d gone before even getting a start !

   FOI CHORIZO
   LOI LOVEBIRDS
   COD PATIENT
   TIME 10:18

5. I thought that only one hidden was allowed in the Times. Are we going soft?

   1. My understanding has always been that setters are allowed up to two per grid; though you don’t see two all that often..
      Another of those “unwritten rules” I dislike; and I never pay any heed to them

   2. The ‘rule’ I’m aware of, cited by Peter B in 2008, was no more than one ‘pure’ hidden answer per 15/15 grid. Reverse hiddens are not counted as ‘pure’ but I don’t know if there are other types in that category. I’m not sure this has ever been rigidly enforced or whether it still applies, but it was probably just guidance for setters anyway..

6. I was on the wavelength with this one finishing in 33.54 over 11 minutes inside target. Not only finishing but with everything accurately parsed including the tricky IGNOMINY.
   TELSTAR came easily to me as it was the first record I ever bought as a fourteen year old late in 1962. Instrumentals getting to no 1 were fairly commonplace in those days, but something of a rarity now I think. The Tornados had a follow up which sounded remarkably similar to their hit, and it didn’t fare too well. They then faded into obscurity. However one of the group members who went under the singularly styled name of Heinz had a few vocal hits I seem to recall. Ahh the sixties! The golden age of pop surely!

7. Finally a puzzle completed in regulation (for me) time. 43mins. Most of my thoughts have been mentioned above. Some tricky stuff here.

   I did like the two inclusions and RAVIOLI (filled envelopes, really) BLOWPIPE and PATIENT.

   Thanks Jeremy, I hadn’t parsed IGNOMINY either, and setter.

8. 31 mins with a load of unresolved biffs. In particular ABSURD, BLOWPIPE and TELSTAR.

9. Terrific puzzle. My first all correct for 2023. I was held up by the NUCLEON clue for a very long time at the end, and resorted to 20 minutes of meditation. It all then became clear.
   So, two hidden clues allowed then?
   Thank you setter for a great puzzle, and Jeremy for the excellent blog.

10. Brilliant puzzle, this. Chapeau, setter.
    Loved Telstar, loved it. Took me back 60 years, near enough..

11. Great puzzle, half an hour, loved TELSTAR which I well remember. The October ale (Oktober?) was a guess.

12. Excellent puzzle, and a tough one which I thought was taking me a lot longer than the 39 minutes recorded by my iPad. IGNOMINY was great, and I’m glad to say that I parsed it and solved it without much thought. Many here struggled with it, it seems. I’m always interested to see cases in which I struggle to see things which others find plain as day – and they’re much more frequent than the reverse experience. Just goes to show we’re not all wired the same, I guess. TELSTAR took me a long while, but I guess now I’ll always know it was the Tornados who had the hit (I certainly didn’t know before now). BACKBITER is still puzzling me: what’s the link between ‘backer’ and ‘Angel’, please? (See: I said we’re not all wired the same.)

    1. Angels are the people who put up money to back shows in theatres. I think it’s applied to the smaller scale investors rather than impresarios.

       1. Thank you – that’s two bits of education from one puzzle. Not a bad return!

       2. In finance we also refer to ‘angel investors’, who invest in companies in the very early stages before they are mature enough even for venture capital.

13. Another very strange puzzle which took me 57 minutes to solve, with a number of difficulties, the main one being that I kept nodding off while solving it. PATIENT was really very good, but 16dn was IGNOMINIOUS (IOM around GN for T in TINY? Really!). Being rhotic, I couldn’t quite identify tea with CHAR rather than just CHA in SACCHARIN, and it took me a while to see WORKHORSE or the joint in NUCLEON. For the strong ale, the word play seemed to be suggesting ORTOBEC (a Belgian beer, perhaps?), which kept me from seeing ABSURD until the very end. So a mixed bag, or perhaps the parson’s egg, I suppose.

14. I’d not heard ‘work like a Trojan’ (where I was raised it was ‘work like a stevedore’), and I happen to be reading The Iliad this week so I spent precious minutes reviewing the lists of heroes in Books II and III in my mind and trying to think of a name. I wasn’t helped because I had not yet parsed the nearby Nucleon, but had seen the kings in the cluing and assumed that Priam and Hector’s rough contemporary, Cleon, was part of it. I was thinking once the setter dipped into the classics it was hard to get out.
    Nice puzzle for a January Friday. Thanks jeremy

15. Am used to Friday puzzles being a tad harder than those from the rest of the week. But pleasantly surprised that I managed to rip through this in 26 minutes, including erroneous pizza delivery at front door – right house number, wrong road!

16. Maybe a bit late in the UK day but has anyone any inside information on Horryd? I know he has medical issues. I sent him an email on the 4th but have not yet received a reply, so now I’m concerned.

17. No problems today although I only vaguely remembered TENT (red wine), GARIBALDI (blouse) and OCTOBER (ale) from previous crosswords and wondered a bit about BLOW for reverse. I remembered that TELSTAR was a satellite that inspired a pop tune but unfortunately by some very approximate retrieval process I now have “24 hours from Tulsa” stuck in my brain instead. Thanks for the blog. (PS. crossed over with the previous post, apologies).

18. Is horryd Dave of advertising fame, by any chance?

19. Completed Sunday in 16’29”. Long will I remember them scoffing in Granada.

20. All said above: admired this setter for his/her novelty and wit, and enjoyed every minute of the forty-something that I spent on it, especially PATIENT, TELSTAR ( emotional response), and CHORIZO. Going off for a good bawl now…

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