Times 28587 – all is hunky-dory.

76 comments on “Times 28587 – all is hunky-dory.”

1. All bar 3 clues done in about 20 minutes, and I got a bit stuck. I went out to run an errand and, as is so often the case, I put them all straight in once I got back to the computer. LOI was REPLICABLE. I’d had the first part for ages but wasn’t sure exactly what part of speech I was looking for (and I didn’t think the “OK” was part of the definition so I was confused about that too). Somehow it was obvious once I solved the long anagram for CONTRARIWISE. I didn’t know OLIO so just took that on trust.

2. 20:22
   PORTFOLIO took me a while, as I was misled into thinking that ‘wine following stew’ meant wine following stew. OLIO is a word I’ve only seen in NYT crosswords; neither ODE nor Collins marks it as an Americanism. Thinking that the multinational group in 27ac was UN, I couldn’t figure out what to do with the O. COD to HOODWINKED.

3. Good puzzle, entertaining, no quibbles. The blog answered my queries during the solve: wondered where the O came from in UNO, and slight MER writing in OLIO which we must have had before but I’d well and truly forgotten.
   Quite fast, but a few long ones at the end held me up – MISINFORMING, CONTRARIWISE where I needed to write down the fodder, and then REPLICABLE fell immediately.
   COD ILL-ADVISED for the surface.

   1. Or olio that wad staw a sow, Or fricassee wad mak her spew. (Burns)

4. I started off fast, getting the first four across clues, but then not much else. I did OK until the final six clues: hoodwink, replicable, Capricorn, misinforming, portfolio, and tickety-boo. I finally got going and picked away, realizing that following might = F, and that my original guess of tickety-boo was in fact the answer and fitted the cryptic.

   Time: 25 minutes.

5. 9:06 without a Teletubby to be seen, so no complaints from me. CONTRARIWISE looked strange, but the anagrist and the checkers made it pretty clear.

   Thanks Pip and setter.

   1. If you look carefully there is a Teletubby hiding in 1ac and 19ac.

      1. Until I checked your references I thought you might have been pointing towards TICKETY-BOO and HOODWINKED.

      2. Funnily enough that’s the first one that came to mind yesterday.

         (Yes, sadly I encountered the show during my parenting era. Right up there with Barney the Dinosaur in my book).

         1. I endured Teletubbies but by far the worst thing I encountered in all those years was LazyTown. [shudders]

            1. The Night Garden was pretty far down on my list!

               1. I rather liked it! Kind of trippy and relaxing. Derek Jacobi’s soothing voice. Good for catching 40 winks.

                  1. I once saw Derek Jacobi playing Kean in a London theatre (The Vic I think). His voice was less than soothing when he delivered the line “The public, the public, I hate the fu**ing public!” 🙂

                     1. An actor with range!

                        1. 🙂

6. 31 minutes. Slow to see some of the easier ones which didn’t help with the rest of the crossword. Still, this was balanced out by the not so easy TICKETY-BOO having appeared elsewhere only yesterday. OLIO joins the ever-growing list of words I think are new but turn out to be forgotten. Thanks for explaining that extra O in UNORIGINAL.

7. Very nice, not difficult but clever enough. And this was odd: I wrote next to the clue for HOODWINKED “original!”… some time before I solved the last Across, UNORIGINAL. I was hesitant about construing I DO as an “undertaking…,” but what else could that be?

   1. Undertaking to form union…

8. 43 minutes. I was very slow on some of the longer answers so the middle of the grid remained empty for much of the time.

   I’m not sure I have met OLIO before, but if I have I’d forgotten it.

   I wish I had written in ICONOCLAST when I first thought of it because that was quite early in the proceedings but I was unable to parse it past I,CO, and I wasn’t 100% sure that it fitted the definition. Should have had more faith, written it in and moved on .

   Until almost the very end I was unable to think past santé as the French toast.

   1. From Address to a Haggis

      Is there that owre his French ragout,
      Or olio that wad staw a sow,
      Or fricassee wad mak her spew
      Wi’ perfect sconner,
      Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view
      On sic a dinner?

9. ‘Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, ‘if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

   I wondered if there were a hidden theme à la Guardian because of the consecutive answers CONTRARIWISE and ILLOGICAL, but this was not so.

   A personal raised eyebrow at ‘I do’ being clued in such a way. In the Church of England the words are ‘I will’.

   A gentle puzzle, nho OLIO, 16’06”, thanks pip and setter.

10. MER for ‘salut’, which usually just means ‘hi’ (unlike ‘salud’ in Spanish, which is a toast).
    And Burns is rude about ‘olio’ in the Address to a Haggis, which gives it some claim to antiquity in Britain

    1. It does seem that the setter either confused santé with salut or French with Spanish!

11. 23:40
    Good level of challenge. Portfolio was clever.Thanks, p.

    1. From your avatar I think iconoclast raised a smile?
       Track 3 on Tarkus.

       1. Good spot, Martin! Thanks for the shout out. Carl’s trio still plays Tarkus live. Great piece of music.

          1. I saw Emerson at the Festival Hall. The first third was a reunion of The Nice, the next solo jazz piano, then he said, ‘we’re going to play the whole of Tarkus’. Dave Kilminster on guitar. Genius.

             1. Great memories, Steve. He was underrated as a jazz artist. The band with DK was very good. Saw four ELP shows, the first of which was at the Empire Pool Wembley in 74 (the BSS tour) – it was an astonishing display of power and virtuosity. As you say, a genius. He introduced quite a lot of piano-obsessed kids like me to a range of styles; I still play quite a lot of his repertoire to this day 🙂

          2. I saw ELP at Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1971 and the Pictures at an Exhibition tour at the Hardrock. Still have Tarkus on Spotify much to the irritation of passengers.

             1. Great memory from the early days of the band. PAAE was an epic achievement. Old Castle/Blues Variation rocks. Keep educating those passengers 🙂

                1. And Pictures at an Exhibition album was only £1.50 I remember 👍

12. 34 minutes with LOI MISINFORMING. COD to HOODWINKED. Live long enough and everything sounds derivative. Thank you Pip and setter.

13. 9:17. Started slowly but then picked off answers steadily as I got checkers. This is a satisfying way of solving: you feel like you’re earning it.
    As already pointed out SALUT is not a toast in French but it seemed likely the setter was getting mixed up with Spanish.

14. 30 mins but with MISINFORMIMG. It’s infuriating how cramped the mobile app keyboard is – it only uses about 3/4 of the available space.

    Lovely puzzle though, less intricate but still challening clues like DIVERSIONARY are really enjoyable. Thanks both.

15. 33 mins and no complaints. Didn’t know OLIO (which is oil in Spanish,no?) as stew but the answer came anyway. I thought “French toast” was pain perdu:-).

    I enjoyed working out the long clues and, as an anagram fan, I liked this a lot.

    COD HOODWINKED. Thanks Pip (especially for the olio) and setter.

    1. Oil in Spanish is óleo or aceite

       1. Ended up by mistake in Mexico once, trying to decipher the menu, and aceite was obviously vinegar – acetic acid. Didn’t even need to ask 😉 Oops.
          Olio is Italian for oil. Spaghetti aglio olio – yum. By the by, aceto is Italian for vinegar.

    2. The origin of olio is ‘olla’, Latin via Spanish for ‘pot’, also seen in ‘olla-podrida’.

       1. Yes, you’re right. Olla podrida is a stew. Aceite may come from aceitunas, olives, or from the gasolinera if you want to put it in your car. I know nothing of latin, per se.

          1. And vice versa 😉

16. 9:45. Quite gentle with only OLIO for stew unknown (or forgotten). LOI CONTRARIWISE. I liked ILL-ADVISED. Thanks Pip and setter.

17. About half an hour. Like several others, I didn’t know the olio stew in PORTFOLIO and failed to consider the UNO, so UNORIGINAL went in only partially parsed. I took a long time to figure out personal writing=diary and to forget about putting in ‘ed’ for edition in DIVERSIONARY, and didn’t see what the ‘OK’ was doing in REPLICABLE until coming here.

    A nice puzzle – thanks setter and blogger.

    FOI Epic
    LOI Replicable
    COD Nepotistic

18. 16:38

    Not easy for me at all. Maybe I was solving too early in the day. I’ve currently got a WITCH of 138, 99 more than Galspray!

    I was sent down just about every blind alley going, was generally slow of brain and kept misreading parts of clues.

    ILLOGICAL – couldn’t think of a word for pub beginning with L

    PORTFOLIO – like Kevin I wanted to put a wine after a stew

    DIVERSIONARY – I read personal writing as person writing

    THOROUGHFARE – I wanted starter to be the def when it’s just padding (I feel a bit cheated by that one)

    REPLICABLE – I thought OK was part of wordplay, not part of DEF

    1. I did have a better than usual day, but my WITCH is a little misleading. I submitted a puzzle a couple of months ago after leaving it open for a day or two, which had the effect of pushing up my “expected” solving time (a rolling six-monthly average) substantially.

       In golfing circles I’d be labelled a bandit.

       Starstruck probably has a list of possible enhancements to his tour de force, maybe he could add a tweak to disregard such outliers. Or maybe we’re not paying him enough.

       1. Hmm … I thought I already did exclude such big differences, but I can see that you’re quite right. I’ll add it to the list of bugs/enhancements to fix.

          1. B-b-but….my WITCH?

       2. I’m pretty sure we aren’t paying him enough… the site is a tour de fouce

19. 11:24. I galloped through most of this and was hoping to break the Ten Minute Barrier. Slowed to a TROT by wrongly biffing REPLICATES which rather spoiled my PORTFOLIO.

    Lovely surface reading to ILL-ADVISED. COD to THOROUGHFARE.

20. 20 mins. Winced at DISSIDENCE, which is now punishable by prison here in Hong Kong.

    1. A mate of mine is currently coaching the HK women’s cricket team in Namibia. Has been texting me about the stress of making sure that both the HK and PRC flags are raised, and the “correct” anthem is played. Chinese embassy officials are there each day to check, and apparently the threat of “re-education” is real.

       Winning games is very much a secondary consideration for him at the moment.

21. Dashed through this fast (by my standards, so probably 40 minutes.) Couldn’t understand 5d INSTALLER til I came here, I thought the store was a stall, and couldn’t find where ER came from. DOH!
    OLIO I was uncertain about til I looked it up and of course remembered having looked it up before for the same reason.

22. Made steady progress with this, though the down clues turned out to be more friendly than the across, finishing in 20 minutes. No issues. The four-letter words emerged more readily than is often the case.
    FOI – EPIC
    LOI – IDOL
    COD – TICKETY-BOO.
    Thanks to piquet and other contributors.

23. 23 mins. There seemed to be a preponderance of Latin derived words in this (aside of course from HOODWINKED and possibly TICKETY BOO) or maybe it’s quite normal? As a writer, I do prefer the Anglo-Saxon where I can.

    1. One of my Latin teachers – it might even have been Ximenes himself – said we should always use short, four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, if possible — advice which we teenagers were only too keen to follow.

24. I liked this, lots of nice clues. 37 minutes, with a long pause before entering INSTALLER, DIVERSIONARY and REPLICABLE, but all good once worked out. I also entered ICONOCLAST without really justifying it; in fact I was a bit vague about exactly what the word meant. By the end of it I was a little unhappy with the second CO being clued as just ‘also’. Does this indicate ‘company’? Interesting about the derivation of TICKETY-BOO.

    1. The OED says origin is obscure. The second of the example quotations however says:
       “1947 Amer. Notes & Queries Sept. 94/1 Lord Mountbatten, now Governor General of India, is credited in the New York Times Magazine (June 22, 1947, p. 45) with ‘giving currency’ to the phrase ‘tickety-boo’ (or ‘tiggerty-boo’). This Royal Navy term for ‘okay’ is derived from the Hindustani.”

25. Lived in France for a long time and never heard ‘salut’ as a toast. It’s ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’. Maybe I needed to get out more, or the setter is an expert in recondite French usage. As often, knowing another language can be as much of a hindrance as a help in the crossword.

    Otherwise all pretty straightforward in 45 mins. Liked TICKETY-BOO, NAIF and NADIR.

26. My experience, not unusually, mirrored Penfold’s. I found it a struggle from beginning to end, never being quite sure of some of the parsings, such as ICONOCLAST, even once I’d entered the clue. With most I struggled to get the definition and I managed to misread most of the direction as well e.g. looking for a wine with -l-o and the second part of REPLICABLE. As a consequence I was quite irritable by the time I finished it, though I liked FOI NEPOTISTIC and HOODWINKED.

27. Finished over 3 sessions in about 40 mins I think.

    HOODWINKED my favourite clue for some time.

    Thanks setter and Piquet especially for etymology of TICKETY BOO (another fine clue!)

28. I enjoyed this one. Solving was interrupted by a friend frantically rushing into our holiday cottage looking for a first aid kit to stem the bleeding for an oldish gent who had fallen into a concrete pit whilst trying to operate the swing bridge over the Leeds Liverpool Canal here at Niffany Farm in Skipton. We provided a teatowel and called an ambulance which fortunately arrived withing 10 minutes. Fingers crossed he’s ok! Anyway I eventually completed in 14:51. FOI NAIF, LOI, UNORIGINAL. PORTFOLIO was biffed. Thanks setter and Pip.

29. Pleased to finish this one but with ITALY, UNORIGINAL and NADIR needing the blog to fully understand the parsing, chuffed to see the parsing of both ICONOCLAST and HOODWINKED though which I thought tricky.
    LOI REPLICABLE which took an age to come up with something that met the definition and parsed.

30. 28:53

    After 15 minutes, things weren’t looking too bright, perhaps not in the right frame of mind, plus multiple feline interruptions. But something clicked and all of a sudden, picked up a lot of clues at which I had previously stared blankly. Still a bit of haze though coming up with TROT and LOI TICKETY BOO.

    A few I didn’t parse:
    ITALY – didn’t see TAL{L}Y
    UNORIGINAL – got GIN and assumed UN but didn’t know what to make of ORIAL

    CAPRICORN was a nice penny drop.

    Thanks setter and Pip

31. A good set of clues, with some traps for the unwary or careless on the way. I biffed REPLICATES for 7d, only seeing the error when I got PORTFOLIO, the wordplay for which led me to look for STEW + WINE rather than the other way round sandwiching F. Several bits of wordplay took some teasing out – ICONOCLAST (which I failed to parse), ILLOGICAL, UNORIGINAL. I particularly liked the clues to MISINFORMING and IDOL.
    30 satisfying minutes.

32. No time because I forgot to look, but it was a long ‘un due, mainly, to my unsuspected ability to think DISSIDENCE while writing DISSONANCE, causing problems with 13d’s lower offshoots for far too long.

33. That was more like it. After two disappointing days, finished in 11.40.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

34. Fairly straightforward for me finishing in 37.40. My time would have been even quicker if I hadn’t been doing it at the same time as watching the snooker. My LOI was UNORIGINAL where the parsing escaped me for a long time.

35. Quick today. Quite a lot of weeny nittypicky things, that fortunately never bother me.

36. PORTFOLIO also my LOI.
    25 mins including a phone call interruption so maybe 20 mins actual solving time.
    Enjoyable. Nothing to add to what waa already said.
    Thanks as always

37. Today’s QC was quick, so I found time to benture in big brother..A well clued puzzle with plenty of clever misdirection which didn’t have ne HOODWINKED (COD) fot too long. Completed in less time than Monday’s so-called “Quick” Crossword, and cane to blog as 9a and 5d were only part-parsed. In the latter I was indeed hoodwinked, having IN for fashionable, STALL for store and foxed by ER. FOI NEPOTISTIC, LOI UNORIGINAL. ThanksSetter and Blogger.

38. Two hours plus with a multitude of interruptions, but all TICKETY-BOO.

39. At 29 minutes very easy for me, but still a lot of fun. Many clues did take second reading to make a connection, but eventually I was on the right track. I liked the TALLER in INSTALLER, TICKETY-BOO, and NADIR. HOODWINKED wasn’t bad either.

40. My Times digital subscription ran out yesterday, as I wanted a break from the paper over the summer. But seeing Pip’s blog intro, I wandered down to the newsagent and bought the paper.
    A very pleasant afternoon solve with some excellent clues- HOODWINKED was clever.
    I think I prefer downloading and printing off the puzzle. More room for doodling anagrams!
    Many thanks for blog, and thanks Setter.

41. Late finish, but done on two separate trains for a total of about 25 mins, fast for me.

    WOD TICKETY BOO. COD HOODWINKED

42. Our compiler falls into the usual fallacy of supposing that one gets married with the words “I do”. Actually these words do not appear in the marriage service at all though the bride’s father sometimes says them when the parson asks “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?”

    He is in good company. An eminent philosopher- I cannot remember which, can anyone? – making the point that an utterance is sometimes an action claims that by uttering the words “I do” we make a solemn contract.

43. cztevnzrqdgrsuadpatzxikvwaqwkh

44. Needed most crossers for Capricorn. Gemini is the harbinger of winter in Australia, and this year in the southern half it is so far a tad more noticeable than usual.

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