Times Quick Cryptic 1531 by Mara

39 comments on “Times Quick Cryptic 1531 by Mara”

1. Apologies – I’m not sure why but I’ve had great problems posting this blog – especial apologies to early anon response which seems to have been lost. I’ll try to pick up the pieces as we go on.
   1. Chris, I’ve had a look at your entry’s HTML. I’ll drop you a LJ message with some suggestions.
   2. I observe that the new editor has a button marked “switch to old version” that might come in handy 🙂
2. Yes, the longish anagrams did not come quickly for me either; ‘brainteaser’ was particularly elusive, since you never expect a compound in a long word.

   I had just been reading about ‘pie in the sky’ – it was evidently the punch line to one of the revolutionary ditties published in The Little Red Songbook by the IWW. The general drift is that the industrialists encourage evangelists to promise the workers salvation after death, so that they don’t demand a living wage that would enable them to purchase their pie right now.

   1. There’ll be pie in the sky by and bye, when you die (it’s a lie). I remember that much.
3. 23 minutes, so about average for me. I enjoyed a lot of the clues, but I wouldn’t put Bengal in southern asia, and I spent a long time on DISCREET as both parts of the clue were obscure (but valid). An alphabet crawl was needed in the end. Thanks to Mara and to Chris for the blog, it reads ok on my phone. By the way, you can sometimes avoid blank lines by using shift+return at the end of the line.

   Brian

4. This was a brilliant puzzle. Not fast, took me over 20m but every time I thought the answer was going to be something obscure when the penny dropped all was fair and I’d been well misdirected. Perhaps also the brain wasn’t quite where it should be as the last two were SHANDY and PRETTY.
5. 8 minutes. Every answer more or less a write-in but some of the parsings took a little longer. Chris, sorry I wasn’t around earlier to help out with your posting problems.

   Edited at 2020-01-21 06:47 am (UTC)

6. 16 minutes held up by pie (not pig) in the sky, the unknown bustle, and LOI brainteaser.

   Liked notice and the pie, but Cod shandy.

   15×15 is approachable today, the snitch score is currently 59 which is scored as relatively very easy.

   1. I would say the 15×15 is on the easier side, but it has more than its fair share of chestnuts. Practically a whole barrowful, so particularly easy for us oldies.
   2. 👍 bar the lake.
7. Could briefly be antics? I found NE corner just wouldn’t reveal itself to me, so 35 min this morning. Thanks Chris and Mara
   1. Chambers has “an extraordinary action or trick, a caper;”, so that looks OK to me.
   2. I also fail to understand what briefly is doing in 13 d. An antic is a caper, following gig which is a concert, so why the need for the redundant briefly, as asked by our blogger?
      1. Ah. I mis-read the problem. I think the “briefly” is that ANTICS is normally plural. (usu pl.), says Chambers.
      2. I thought it should have read “capers”, thus removing the S of “antics”.
8. A nice middle-of-the-road QC from Mara today, I thought. Mention of HOGMANAY and porridge reminded me Burns Night is soon. Held up briefly in the end by the crossing BRAINTEASER and LOI DISCREET. I liked PIE IN THE SKY. 5:15.
9. I was held up by DISCREET and BRAINTEASER too, but in my case it wasn’t briefly … 12:47 in the end, estimated 2.7K and a Rather Sluggish Day. I found this the proverbial game of two halves, getting only four acrosses on first pass but every single down (bar 8dn) without pause. All the remaining acrosses then followed except 12. Once again I am reminded how dependent I am on first letters!

   I learned from this puzzle that SENATOR is an anagram of TREASON.

   Thanks Mara and Chris.

   Templar

10. Nice puzzle with a DISCREET sting in the tail. I can’t be bothered to search elsewhere for Kevin’s time so I will just say I squeaked inside the SCC limit at 1.5C (Chrisses). Thanks to Mara and Chris. John M.

    Edited at 2020-01-21 09:06 am (UTC)

11. Over my time target at 16 m plus a few seconds, so not much good. Also held up by DISCREET and BRAINTEASER, both of which I should have spotted earlier.
12. Enjoyed this overall thanks! I have a minor issue with discreet which has come up a couple of times recently. I think the definition is a bit tenuous. Cautious communicates something more than ‘not being indiscreet’- perhaps it’s just me!
13. I was flying through this one until I was left with BRAINTEASER and DISCREET. Those 2 alone accounted for 3 of my 9 minutes. Nice puzzle. 9:09. Thanks Mara and Chris.
    1. I had the same hold-ups (to scale, as I was within target), and had to alpha-trawl my LOI.

       FOI BABOON
       LOI DISCREET
       COD PIE IN THE SKY

14. My wife says, crossly, that crochet is NOT needlework. It is a crotchet hook.
    1. apologise to Mrs Anon on behalf of Collins, which says: “Crochet is a way of making cloth out of cotton or wool by using a needle.” It can be a verb or a noun
15. Badly held up by my LOI, DISCREET. I’ve never thought of it as meaning cautious but, in hindsight, I can see it now. Whilst no expert in such matters, surely crochet is hook-work, not needlework? Not that it prevented me entering the solution.

    Many thanks to Mara and Chris.
    6’10”

16. Didn’t get DISCREET, so a DNF but otherwise doable, and enjoyed ARTISAN BEER / BRAINTEASER. Seem to have seen PRETTY and STIR before quite recently.
17. …at ?I?C?E?T for fully 10 minutes until the answer finally came, dragging its feet, to my feeble mind.

    17:47, so only a couple of minutes before the toys were ejected from the pram.

    The rest of the puzzle was rather good I thought, so thanks to Mara for that. Also thanks to today’s blogger, and indeed all of the bloggers. I normally forget the sterling work they do.

18. An enjoyable puzzle taking me about 45 mins. As noted above, quite a few anagrams that took a bit of thinking – particularly 8dn “Brainteaser” (which held me up on 12ac “Discreet”).

    Was toying with “Smocking” for 5dn for a while, thinking little time = “mo” but it wouldn’t parse properly. Crotchet was then the obvious answer.

    FOI – 1ac “Baboon”
    LOI – 12ac “Discreet”
    COD – 14ac “Pie in the sky”

    Thanks as usual.

19. I was rattling along for the first 15mins, but then I had to go out. Came back and it was as if the remaining clues were by a different setter. Really struggled to see Brainteaser (it was), and Discreet, and to cap it off I had Pig in the Sky for ages, until a final parsing sweep saved my bacon 🙂. A bit of a come down after a successful attempt at yesterday’s 15×15, so not sure if this was hard or just me. Invariant
20. Solved this on a train returning from Rochester. Still no Dickens exhibition there in the 150th year since his death. Something is planned I’m told.
    LOI today was DISCREET and also held up by BRAINTEASER. FOI STIR.
    Some good clues including NOTICE. NO exact time.
    David
21. Most of this went in at a canter but like others my last two in were BRAINTEASER and DISCREET. I also made life a bit harder for myself by initially putting SHUT UP in at 16d before 24a clarified things. I managed to just sneak in under the 10 minute mark so it classifies as being at the easier end of the scale for me.
    My thanks to Chris
22. As a couple who rarely aspire even to the SCC we both saw brainteaser easily from the anagram. Does that say something about our ageing brains? However we gave up on discreet as choir practice beckoned.
23. I can’t really say I cared much for this. Two random “boys” who could just as easily be men (I dislike “boy” as an indicator of a shortened name), the redundant “briefly” in 13d and IMHO not a double definition at all at 11a.

    Apart from that I spent way too long working out BRAINTEASER.

    Perhaps I’m just tired. Thanks anyway to setter and blogger.

24. Really hard going today. I just couldn’t see what was going on with several clues, even when I had biffed the answers – so thanks for the explanations. I still struggle with ‘epithet’ as a nickname.

    Eventually, I had to resort to aids to finish.

25. Steady slow solve with much head scratching along the way, but got there eventually. Liked brain teaser a lot.
    Plymouthian
26. I thought this was an excellent puzzle for someone like me who is trying to learn and improve. After some of the very challenging offerings last week I almost felt like packing it in. And there must be many others who are not encouraged by comments such as “This was slightly challenging and so it took me 2 minutes 30 seconds.” Particularly when I am struggling to finish at all after an hour. Maybe I am just not up to it, but there again I do manage to finish around 75% of time eventually.
    This puzzle for me was challenging but not ridiculously so. It encourages me to keep going, and who knows, one day I may complete the 15×15!
    1. It’s all down to experience – the more you have the lower the time. The most experienced here give their times as an indicator of relative difficulty. When you get to know that say, Kevin, normally completes in 4 to 9 minutes and he comes in with a 7 then you have an idea of the difficulty of the puzzle and so an idea of how you fared that day. Everyone has different general knowledge so will find some puzzles harder than others – relative to others. So the times are all about all there is to get an idea of difficulty and are intended to help and in no way to discourage.

       Good luck with the puzzles – you seem to be doing really well – and remember it’s all about enjoying the ride – testing your skill vs the setter and sometimes taking your hat off to them for completely fooling you.

       1. Thanks, Chris. Those are helpful comments. Looking forward to having a go at today’s.

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