Times Cryptic No 29369 — “It is always there at the end, waiting”

80 comments on “Times Cryptic No 29369 — “It is always there at the end, waiting””

1. Yes. Difficult. Over-engineered clues, under-specified answers. ‘Station feature’ is in no way a definition of ‘talk radio’. ‘Unfriend’ does not mean ‘block’. To ‘nail’ something, tout court, is not to ‘secure’ it. And I still can’t parse 26d: I guessed ‘arm’ as a form of ‘bow’ (as in bow-and-arrow); Jeremy’s parsing is more comprehensive, but ‘hurt’ seems to be doing double duty; if so, is that allowable?

   1. I don’t see what the double duty is? ‘Bow’s hurt’ is HARM > ARM, so ‘hurt’ is doing a single duty: providing the letters HARM. The other part is just ‘he’s got a good ability to throw = he’s got a good arm’ (eg of an NFL quarterback or cricket fielder). Agree on ‘unfriend’ though.

      1. ‘Hurt’ = ‘harm”, yes. But I understood from Jeremy’s original parsing (which has been revised on the blog in the light of quadrophenia’s explainer) that “hurt” is also the indicator to drop a letter from “harm” (in this case to drop the front, or “bow”, letter. If “hurt” is simply providing the letters for “harm”, where is the indicator to drop a letter from “harm”?

         1. Ah, quadrophenia has just provided the link that I was missing (below).

            1. oh, I see! Sorry.

   2. In case you didn’t know, when ‘Bow’ is mentioned in clues it usually refers to London’s East End or Cockney Rhyming Slang. So, the ‘Bow’s hurt’ in the clue becomes ‘arm’ from hurt/ harm as Cockneys would not pronounce the ‘H’.

      1. Thank you! That is what I was missing.

      2. Thank you so much and there’s a groan of belated recognition from me. I had two choices for my LOI – aim or arm. Not able to parse either I went for AIM, I completely missed the east end element of Bow, perhaps because it was already capitalised as the first word of the sentence. D’Oh.

         Otherwise I really enjoyed a very tough puzzle and 53 minutes would have had me right up the leaderboard today.

         Thx Jeremy and setter and thx Quadrophenia for Bow.

      3. Except of course Bow, although in East London (E3),has nothing to do with the cockney Bow Bells.

   3. Sorry, I was going to add more on the Bow dropping aitches business but forgot.

      As for the other definitions you mentioned, I don’t see the problems you do. Unfriending someone online is a way of blocking them. If I nail something to the wall I secure it. And how is talk radio not a feature of a radio station?

      Clues in the concise crossword are usually one or two word synonyms. I’m not sure more is needed but cryptic clues thankfully give the whole wordplay!

2. Not at all happy with a lot of this but I accept that others enjoy this sort of stuff. The main change I have noticed recently (which I admit could be down to me to a degree) is the number of answers I semi-guess from definitions but am then completely baffled by the parsing, or I construct from wordplay but then don’t understand the definition e.g. how is JUST-IN-TIME ‘made without stock’?

   1. It’s a form of manufacturing in which no stock is held in reserve. When an order is received, the items are manufactured. It’s called just-in-time manufacturing.
      I share your thoughts on some of these trickier crosswords.

      1. Although I got nowhere with this puzzle, on reveal this was my COD. “Made without stock” is a brilliant summary of a manufacturing process that goes back to the 80s.

      2. I didn’t know that either, but looked it up!

   2. It’s been in the news fairly recently, when Brexit, then the Suez fiasco, threatened supplies arriving in order to assemble or manufacture goods – a factory may be super-reliant on parts etc. arriving. I believe a former politician (Raab?) did not understand this.

   3. It’s a reference to factories not keeping huge stockpiles of components and being dependent on deliveries ‘just in time’. I very much agree with your analysis of today’s clues, many of which I found baffling.

   4. For once my working career came to my aid having spent 30 years designing JIT systems for Nissan😊

   5. I too, share your bafflement

3. Done in 1:06:46. Persevered through one of those sharp, shooting, mild food poisoning headaches. Not sure if glad I did, as many went in unparsed (GOOSEBERRY, CONFIGURE, CONTAMINATION, OVERCONFIDENT, CROQUETTE, NEOCOLONIAL, the list goes on!), as Jack said. There were a few moments of pleasure though, such as twigging TALK RADIO (although I would think of that as more of a genre of radio rather than a feature of a station, as robocot said). As for actual GK required, I think just-in-time manufacturing was useful, whereas knowledge of neuronal terminology (axon et al) proved a red herring, so it was all mostly generic.

   Thanks Jeremy and setter!

4. After ten minutes I was ready to throw in the towel, but thought I would persevere and see how far I could get. Slowly, answers started coming although with some I was checking that they were correct before writing them in as the parsing was evading me. CROQUETTE was one where I saw ‘croquet’ for the lawn game but then assumed ‘put away’ was ‘eat’ without think inking of ‘ate’. Saw BLANCMANGE quickly which gave me more to work with and then ADHERENCE and GOOSEBERRY appeared. Saw DAIRYMAID from ‘answer ID’. Parsing OVERCONFIDENT was tricky but saw the letter swap eventually. No idea about TYRANNICIDE and couldn’t parse BIRO. Disappointed to see a word such as UNFRIEND in these parts. Pleased I stuck with it at the end of the day.
   Thanks Jeremy and well done.

5. Hmf, sorry did not enjoy this much. Just too tricksy and complicated for me. Give me the brevity and precision of (eg) Dean Mayer, any day.
   Blancmange reminds me of school junket, which was disgusting.

   1. I’d forgotten the junket …. Blancmange (pronounced “blummonge”) – came in 2 colours, neon pink purporting to be strawberry and brown representing chocolate. Tasted exactly the same, vile. Then there’s the original option – white as in blanc Les Francais really had us on toast.

6. 11:12, hard work. Nothing too obscure. Didn’t see any problems when I did it but looking at robocot’s comments the definitions do seem loose in places.

   1. Can’t believe anyone could do this in under 12 minutes. Well done.

      1. Cheers. One of my better times for harder puzzles. There was a fair bit of biffing though and I can’t say I parsed it all as I went as I usually can…

7. There’s a fine line between trickery and obfuscation – this puzzle crossed that line far too often for me, though there were some enjoyable moments. We need to encourage a new generation of solvers. I have tried to get my children to tackle The Times crossword – it’s puzzles like this that make that task impossible!

   1. Fully agree.

8. All but one letter in just over the hour. Sadly, though I couldn’t quite parse it, I never went back to my AIM for “ability to throw”, possibly because I was reasonably sure that I’d find some way of making it MAIM minus the M. Sadly I can’t!

   (I also didn’t know ARM meant “ability to throw”, which didn’t help.)

9. 43.50
   Enjoyable in a way I suppose, but far too many verbs disguised as nouns in the wordplay for my taste: bathing, plugs, grabs, leaves, jam, pens, boards, bottle, parts, limits, borders; several of which were masquerading as compounds.
   Also I don’t mind the occasional & lit in The Times, but today I think we had four: FORUM, BIRO, TYRANNICIDE and ZEST.
   I agree entirely with the comment above about encouraging a new generation of solvers – one felt sorry for the first-timers at the recent Championships who were faced with this level of complexity. (I believe there were seven, none of whom got through to the second round.)

10. If I could have solved more, I’d have solved more. I didn’t have enough letters entered in the grid to work on the trickier clues. Of the ones I did get, JUST-IN-TIME was my favourite. Otherwise, the losing dice were tossed, my bridges all were crossed, nowhere to go. Thank you Jeremy for the elucidation and setter for the revelation. I thought it was a complex, but I now know I really am inferior.

11. About 35 minutes. I’ll buck the trend and say I rather enjoyed this, though the fact that I completed it obviously influences my thinking.

    – Didn’t know how ‘made without stock’ means JUST-IN-TIME, but the wordplay got me there
    – I’m happier with ‘station feature’ defining TALK RADIO than others are – I think it works well
    – Apologies if this was obvious to everyone else, but I liked how (presumably?) we need to pronounce the first word of 3d as seCREtive to get EARWAX
    – Don’t share Jeremy’s reservations over CONFIGURE – I think the wordplay is perfectly legitimate
    – My only quibble is with UNFRIEND, which isn’t the same as ‘block’, and I don’t think the question mark lets the setter off the hook
    – Thought of NEOCOLONIAL but struggled to parse it for a while as I missed that ‘assembled’ was an anagrind (I thought ‘a line’ was giving the AL at the end)
    – Don’t see the problem with secure=nail in LIBYAN… it’s a pretty clear equivalence, isn’t it?

    Thanks Jeremy and setter.

    FOI Edict
    LOI Earwax
    COD Dairymaid

    1. Just in time manufacturing means the stock needed arrives ‘just in time’ and needs no warehousing costs.

12. Spent about an hour on this, happy to finish correctly. No idea at all re EARWAX, CONFIGURE, AMOK.

    Could ‘too hard’ put off new (and old) solvers?

    Thanks jeremy and setter.

13. Here’s my 5.30am effort:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jEzJTwOJYQ

    As a non-native speaker I allowed myself to
    a) look up one word in one clue (fiat)
    b) use anagram solver once
    c) look up couple of synonyms

    Still, had to throw a towel with two to go, one of which I don’t mind not getting (but not the other one).
    ——
    As for the comments about new solvers, I don’t think it’s an issue, they just should be taught to steer clear of Fridays for the first year or so 🙂

14. >Probably this puzzle hails from you-know-who

    If you mean JH, it’s not him 🙂

    1. Oh!

15. 27:32. The kind of puzzle where I secretly hope for a mistake to preserve my SNITCH score 😉
    For most of this I was trying to spot a possible definition and then reverse-engineering the often convoluted wordplay.
    Previous editors have said that there was no deliberate policy to make Fridays more difficult. It seems pretty clear at this point that this is no longer the case!

16. Got there in the end. 83 mins and in the top 50.
    I did enjoy it, very slow start with only 6 done in 30 mins but crossers led to biffs led to parsing. Satisfying.
    I don’t see a problem with the occassional stinker like this as long as there is variety. This week we had real toughies Tue/Wed too. For newcomers it is also useful to have a pattern of increasing difficulty Mon-Fri to navigate by I seem to remember.
    Thanks both and well done plusjeremy

17. 64 minutes. A pity I didn’t finish in less than an hour, but given the degree of difficulty and the number unparsed, I’m happy enough to have completed it all correctly.

    I feel as though this isn’t quite “good form”, but seeing the pangram was the main reason I was able to get the W and X in EARWAX without what would have been a long alphabet trawl.

    1. Seeing the pangram, having earwax already, helped me get croquette 😉

18. Beaten by AMOK and resorted to the check button a couple of times when the parsing lagged a long way behind the solution. Several others were half or ‘sort of’ parsed which I take as a win in a puzzle this hard.

19. 52.01. Only sheer bloody-mindedness kept me going on this one, and even then 3 of the short answers, BIRO, AMOK and ARM were entered with trepidation, not getting the parsing, though I might have done were I not so blitzed by the rest of the grid.
    “Secretive matter” is an awful definition for EARWAX, which in my experience is only too apparent when clogging up my hearing aids! While Chambers disagrees, I’m not convinced CROQUETTEs are normally balls. Plus what others have said.
    Hard graft, and because of the tentative entries, no great sense of achievement at the end. Looking forward to a nice, relaxing listener later today.
    Respect to PJ not just for ironing out the details, but also for the additional italicised comments which resonated with me, and probably most of our patrons.

    1. As ChrisLutton suggests, ‘secretive’ is meant to be ‘that which is secreted’?

       1. “Meant to be”. Maybe, but there’s not really a proper link between secretion and secretive. Earwax is secreted, yes, but secretive is not the derived adjective from secrete, even in arcane medical jargon. A step too far!

          1. I agree with you. Merely suggesting what I thought the setter meant while I was solving it, or rather, failing to complete it.

          2. Collins says it is, in American English.

             1. It’s not in Merriam-Webster! I just took it as wordplay. Poetic license.

                1. Yes that’s how I read it but it could have done with a question mark.

    2. The setter is torturing us with unwelcome memories of school food, not made any more edible with frenchified names. The school croquettes were cylindrical as you suggest Z and made of “mystery meat”.

20. OK hear me out.

    I had a DNF due to switching BIRO to DINO because I just I didn’t like how it parsed. But DINO seemed right because:

    One of old = a dinosaur
    O + NID reversed.
    NID = a brood of pheasants.
    I thought a female pheasant could be a PEN so a brood would have plural PENS, and the (?) seemed a fair enough indicator.
    O + NID / DINO

    Next time I’ll just go with the biff 🙁

    I did feel pleased about parsing LIBYAN though so a moral victory!

21. After an hour and with less than half completed I gave up. I don’t mind a challenge but either I was off-wavelength or this wasn’t fair. Either way this sort of crossword leaves me feeling short-changed. Nothing remotely enjoyable here. To anyone who did solve it correctly you have my admiration.

22. c 60 mins – annoyed not to have a time for this as I was interrupted by a lengthy phone call (my smart watch not being smart enough to let me pause the stopwatch if a call comes through) but it was mostly a game of guess the answer from the crossers then reverse engineer to death. Lovely, but glad not to have to face this sort of challenge every day.

23. 32.59 – very surprised to be quicker than many more expert solvers, I think I just got lucky. It was definitely tough but for the most part fair.
    FOI NIMBY
    LOI AMOK
    COD jointly to DAIRYMAID, JUST IN TIME and BLANCMANGE
    Thanks J and setter.

24. From ASH to ARM in 49:54. I dithered over AIM/ARM for quite a while before twigging the significnce of Bow, which allowed me to submit reasonably confidently. Missed the parsing of AMOK, and didn’t go back to fully parse TALK RADIO once the crossers confirmed it. Also didn’t bother to look for the myriad/scores part of DAIRYMAID. Tough! Thanks setter and Jeremy.

    1. Great effort!

       1. Thanks Mark 🙂

25. I do like checking the snitch before solving, and so was set (and in the mood) for a struggle. Pleased to finish just under the 50 minutes, but I’ve found my completing one of these Friday beasts is often reliant on a bit of luck: BLANCMANGE, for example, popped into my head from nowhere when I was almost at the towel-throwing-in stage, as I had failed utterly at deriving it from wordplay (kudos to Jeremy!). I was nowhere getting BLADE without the B, or EARWAX without the E, and I’ve been annoyed in the past at missing out on similar things.

    I wouldn’t like a “200-er” every Friday, but every month or so, which seems to be the pattern developing, strikes the right balance in my books. I thought there were some brilliant surfaces amid all the trickery as well – thanks to setter and Jeremy.

26. Against the grain, I quite enjoyed that. Very difficult, needed two goes to finish it, well over the hour of solving time. Missed a few parsings: The “old one” being a Roman I; whacks for goes – thought earwax was just a cryptic def for secretion in the auditor (ear). Completely forgot to parse dairymaid after writing it in, but we’ve had similar more than once before.
    Thought at the time some of the definitions were a little loose, but never had that annoying “I suppose it must be the answer” shrug while writing in trepidation. Except perhaps with earwax, which I couldn’t parse.

27. 53 minutes DNF

    Looking forward to seeing how Simon gets on with this one.

    I stupidly posited an ending of TIER for the Director thinking (s)he was another obscurity and when the TARTAN came didn’t think anything more of it. That made TALK RADIO impossible.

    Otherwise managed – like Matt – to get ARM wrong even with A_M. That pretty much sums up my effort.

    Did kinda like it though especially the rather good AMOK even though I stared at it with rising frustration for most of the puzzle and still had to come here to parse it!

    Thanks Jeremy for a great effort/blog and setter (presumably/possibly John H?)

28. 65:40. A big post-prandial struggle most solved by guessing an answer from the definition and retrofitting the wordplay, although I failed to parse my LOI BIRO. Time for a beer in the Fox and Roman, I think. Thanks Jeremy and setter.

29. Pleased to finish (with a little help along the way) but some biffed and not properly parsed. As a relative newbie to the 15×15 I really enjoyed this. The tougher it is the more I learn, so what’s not to like. Revealed two: AMOK and UNFRIEND. Couldn’t parse GOOSEBERRY or ARM (didn’t think of CRS), or the two I revealed. Many thanks for the much-needed blog.

30. Biffed in “AMOK” but generally pretty happy to have finished this one

31. I was rather surprised to finish this – in two sessions covering in all about 80 minutes – and even more surprised to come here and find it was all correct. I gave up trying to parse a lot of the clues and only wrote in doubtful answers which appeared to cohere with other doubtful answers. This was not a very satisfactory experience because for me the test of an enjoyable clue is knowing the answer is definitely, and not just possibly, correct when you solve it. I hope this is not setting the pattern for future Fridays.
    FOI – ZEST
    LOI – RECEPTOR
    COD – ELMY, as it has shades of the UED.
    Thanks to jeremy and other contributors.

32. One wrong, and it took me all day to get there. I failed on NEOCOLONIAL. The two O crossers convinced me that the engine, to be reversed and inserted, had to be MOTOR. I never thought of LOCO. I mombled something but it was of course doomed. I think I must have enjoyed the puzzle; it kept drawing me back throughout the day

    1. I had the obvious MOTOR also. LOCO never occurred until the answer was bifd.

33. Didn’t time myself but probably tipped over the hour mark with having to do it on a busy train being my excuse.

    ELMY LOI which is one of those words that doesn’t really need to exist.

    Not on board with the general criticism of this puzzle, which was hard but had a number of enjoyable clues TARANTINO, GOOSEBERRY etc. Yes, a couple raised an eyebrow but overall enjoyable.

    Thanks blogger and setter.

    Only downer is I solved EARWAX as a cryptic definition when it wasn’t.

34. After 80 minutes, with about half done, I put it aside and returned later in the day, when I managed to finish in just under two hours, with liberal use of the Check button: I kept thinking ‘it’s probably that: let’s put it in and check it’. There were several that I didn’t understand and I was a bit unhappy with it all, but then I saw from here how they worked, and actually I think this was an extremely good crossword. No unsoundness so far as I could see, just ‘looseness’ in the sense that the definitions were occasionally rather distant.

35. Couldn’t get far with this last night, but just now finished, and quite enjoyed it. My LOI was AMOK, which I spent a long time trying to parse—as I see here, to no avail!
    Couldn’t quite believe ELMY, but figured “fine” was added because it’s not just any cathedral but one with a bishop presiding.
    Now I’ll read y’all…

36. Too many for me. Only some students, Harvard or elsewhere, are Co-eds. Thanks, Jeremy.

37. Wrestled with this all day on and off, and finally completed it. Very pleased to finish this epic puzzle.
    Thanks, pj.

38. Spent several sessions over the day trying to hack my way through this jungle – only to find I had (M)AIM wrong! Like others, I missed the significance of Bow and didn’t realise ARM meant ‘ability to throw’. However, I’d had to reveal AMOK (still never parsed), so in the end it was irrelevant. Also failed to parse OVERCONFIDENT, and share others’ dislike of the G placing in CONFIGURE – while technically correct, it made solving it ridiculously difficult. My main MER was over BADE= proposed, which nobody has commented on. To bid someone is to request without expectation of denial – absolutely not what propose means. However, I liked DAIRYMAID, REPORTEDLY, NIMBY, ADHERENCE (FOI), EARWAX and UNFRIEND. These were the ones I was able to get from wordplay, rather than biffing and post-parsing. Didn’t like ELMY, BIRO, AMOK, ARM, CODED or JUST-IN-TIME, either because I couldn’t understand them or thought they were weak. Co-ed, seriously? What on earth has that to do with Harvard specifically? Or am I missing something very American?

39. Gave up less than halfway through. Enjoyed the explanations more than the puzzle itself.

    Are Co-eds always female? Seems illogical.

40. It took the best part of an hour, but I enjoy the challenge of a tough Friday crossword. I didn’t think there was anything unfair about today’s.
    On a Friday I certainly get my subscription’s worth. My thanks to the setter, and the blogger who must work hard on these.

41. I finally finished after a couple of hours spread over two days. I couldn’t parse earwax, but it felt right. I was also a little nervous about biro and neocolonial. This one deserves the title of toughest puzzle ever; and I note that Magoo had an error. If this had been the final puzzle in the championship, someone else would have won.

42. Finished 80% then ran out of steam – not the most fun I’ve ever had.

    Thanks PJ for the welcome blog

43. I’m surprised at the lack of comments about biro. I got the parsing, but biro is singular and pens is plural

    1. I think the whole clue is the answer, ONE of old rotating ball pens

       1. My convention is to underline the definition — I agree with you.

44. Back after a while
    DNF because I had biffed AIM for 26dn
    I must remember Bow = east end, I realised it had to be ARM when I got the red letter but still couldn‘t work it out!
    Many thanks Quadrophenia for the explanation

45. Belated with this because I was pushed for time yesterday and quickly realised this wasn’t going to be a quickie by any means and put it off until today. I thought it really tough and a DNF through my own carelessness, misspelling TYRANNICIDE as TYRANNACIDE. That meant I had no chance of getting JUST IN TIME and I didn’t get CONFIGURE either, although I saw it immediately after getting the final checking letter. I’m convinced I would have finished it but for that blunder because TIME for STRETCH had already occurred to me and been ruled out because I was looking for A as the second letter. I had some of the same reservations as others about too much convolution.

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