Times 27,389: Snow White And The Seven No Trumps

66 comments on “Times 27,389: Snow White And The Seven No Trumps”

1. Bogged down with the last two or three–GARLICKY, BUSH TIT, LOI RAFT. I actually thought of GARLICKY early on, once I had the G, and saw no way to parse it, so moved on. Biffed FEWER; I somehow managed to ignore the ‘ultimately’ until after submitting. V, what dictionary did you consult? Would you say, eg, “There’s less apples on that tree than on this one”? Liked 2d for its surface, but COD to NOD.
   1. I’d saay There ARE(plural) fewer (as apples are countable, whereas bread for instance is not) apples….’
2. ….with a wry appreciation of the clever literals. Fortunately, ‘ogee’ is a staple of US puzzles with their thirst for vowels. I did toy with the Nifty Fifty, but you’re very unlikely to find something like that in a British puzzle, decades after the fact.

   I believe our honorable blogger is having us on with his cod dictionary, more or less….

   1. Fewness and truth, is’t thus?
   2. What, me? *gives you an “opium wouldn’t melt in my mouth” look…*
3. 47 minutes with time lost in attempts to justify ‘Trojan’ at 1ac, ‘Blue TIT’ at 3dn and ‘LITTLE lamb’ at 15ac.

   DK PRESIDIO, nho BUSH TIT (its first outing apparently) and OGEE dredged from the recesses of my mind.

   ORANGE known from my stamp-collecting days via the colourful stamps produced by the Orange Free State.

   FIFTY-FIFTY was nifty.

   Edited at 2019-06-28 04:45 am (UTC)

4. 14:43 … not hard, but tricky. And fun.

   Seems the BUSH TIT is more often the bushtit, with no space, but I don’t suppose it minds (actually, that’s very presumptuous; perhaps it minds very much). The Audubon Society is rather dismissive of it …. “Tiny, drab birds … inconspicuous …. may go unnoticed ….” But then they include a photograph that reveals it to be an exquisite little creature: https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/bushtit

   COD NOD

   Edited at 2019-06-28 06:26 am (UTC)

   1. Bushtits have a poor press, it seems to me. All about birds says they “Fly weakly between shrubs.” But I bet they fly a darned sight better than whoever wrote that.
      I did wonder if, in an English crossword, the fact that it is 100% North American might need mentioning.

      Edited at 2019-06-30 11:06 am (UTC)

      1. I wonder what the bushtits did to make ornithologists so snippy about them.
5. I did my best to hamper myself, half parsing TROJAN in place of THEBAN and biffing LITTLE LAMB instead of LITTLE SLAM. Fortunately I spotted both mistakes quickly enough. LOI RAFT where I was daunted by the possibilities for _A_T so was glad to get it by definition without resorting to alphabet trawling.

   OGEE reminded me of my time working in a DIY store as a teenager where I always found the names for timber mouldings curious – OGEE in particular but also scotia, dado and several others that I no longer recall.

6. 13:20. A slow start but easy enough in the end. Squallaby.
7. I don’t wish to be pedantic, Verlaine, but a Little Slam in Bridge is winning SIX No Trumps…!
   1. It is, but that was shepherdess Mary’s bid. Snow White overcalled her audaciously with 7NT!
      1. 15 all….
      2. Te-hee!
         P.S. I usually visit Livejournal after doing The Times crossword every day. I usually complete within 30-45 mins, but visit the blog too late to add anything that has not already been said and written far more wittily/ eloquently than I would do.
         Ever impressed by your completion times, Verlaine – rarely do I complete in under 30 mins.
         I only ever cheat with aids occasionally for the weekend ‘prize’ ones, to speed things up!
8. Another day, another DNF. Closer than the last couple of days, in that I only got one wrong in an hour and a minute, but still a tad disheartening. Again baffled by too many DNKs—PRESIDIO, LITTLE SLAM, CONTRA (still not sure how the definition works there?), the ORANGE river and the BUSH TIT all slowing me down.

   It was the unknown LITTLE SLAM that did for me, though. I put in LITTLE STAR in desperation, on the grounds that it had something to do with a Mary. I never even thought of the nursery rhyme one, confounded by visions of women on donkeys…

   1. The Contras were anti-government guerillas (hence ‘irregulars’) in Nicaragua.
      1. Ah. I guessed at the Nicaraguan CONTRAs, but I didn’t know that’s what “irregulars” meant, and my first couple of sources weren’t terribly helpful. I suppose I mostly know the phrase from the Baker Street Irregulars, which does fit, I suppose, but conjures up a rather friendlier image!
9. 40 mins with half a Fat Rascal, hoorah!
   I was delayed in the NE. Pre-Knell I toyed with Geminal converting to GeRminal but they don’t quite mean Brilliant/Pungent unfortunately. Toying with Garlicky yielded Knell.
   Thanks setter and V.
10. 27 minutes, held up by putting HAMMER for GIMLET, hoping that someone called Hamer had designed a jacket, until I saw the RUGBY PLAYER. LOI was GARLICKY. I’m not a bridge player, and I saw my COD LITTLE SLAM before I made the cards connection. I’ve never heard of PRESIDIO, who sounds more like a Castro figure. Decent puzzle. Thank you V and setter.
11. 17:28 Lots of fun deciphering the witty clues. BUSH TIT, OGEE and GIMLET all guessed from the wordplay. I failed to parse GARLICKY, so thanks for that. I liked NOD and INMATES but COD to CONTRA. Great stuff. Thanks V and setter.
    1. I assumed the setter had the Nicaraguan terrorists in mind.
       1. Before I joined it, (of course!) the airline I used to work for was involved in the first part of ‘Arms-to-Iran-Money-to-the-Contras’, Oliver North et al, so no problem with ‘irregulars’!
12. We were just coming into land at San Francisco when I put the THEBAN straight in…but then we had to put our computers away. it was many hours later when I finished with GARLICKY. PRESIDIO was easy since there is a huge ex-military base in San Francisco called “The Presidio.” I always assumed it was unique, not a generic name. Toyed for a time with IDEAL (which is a type of ring in mathematics) before I saw KNELL. Plus that seemed way too obscure for the Times Crossword, not being a poet, composer, or antelope.
    1. Ah, thank you for the memory jog. I knew PRESIDIO was ringing a bell. I now see it was from the 1980s Sean Connery film of the same name, set in and around the base
13. Thank you, Verlaine, for parsing GARLICKY. In the end, with checkers in place, it had to be but I would never have equated ‘brilliant’ with GAY. I had the G so I worked on two possibilities: ‘Genius’ was in there somewhere (‘brilliant being’) and then maybe ‘brilliant’ meant ‘gem’.
    Like Bolton Wanderer, I wondered if a Hamer was a sort of jacket.
    CONTRA brought back memories of “Arms-to-Iran-Money-to-the-Contras”, Reagan and Oliver North. The airline I used to work for was involved in the ‘arms-to-Iran’ bit but before my time of course….
    1. SOED has ‘gay’ as (4) – showy, brilliant, brightly coloured. The example given relates to costumes, if that helps.
14. 12:31 for a puzzle that felt harder than that, with a couple of unknowns (PRESIDIO, a GIMLET that isn’t a cocktail, ORANGE) and a few things that were at the edges of my knowledge (LITTLE SLAM, OGEE, BUSH TIT).

    Edited at 2019-06-28 08:12 am (UTC)

15. Slowest of the week for me, maybe because of exceptionally late night and exotic menu causing sleep shortfall. Nevertheless got there in 50 minutes with 18a and TOT my LOI. V as someone above says, a little slam is six not seven, of a suit or no trumps, 12 tricks out of 13.
    I thought I knew my tits but the Bush variety was a new one. Liked RAFT best.
    1. We always called them small slam and grand slam at our Bridge table. Clearly little slam is fine for 12 tricks, but does anyone call 13 tricks “big slam”?
16. 18.22, thanks not least to 1ac going straight in. RAFT and TOT were joint lasts, slow to gain confidence in the double definitions, and (I know, incredible) I never did see “short” for TOT. Perhaps my home measures (pub ones always seem to be too short for the money) don’t qualify as short.

    Not that most gay people I know aren’t brilliant, but it was gladsome to see the word restored to its former glory, as exemplified in the fractured English of Haydn’s Creation (South West Essex Choir, Chingford, Saturday 6th July):
    “With verdure clad the fields appear delightful to the ravish’d sense; by flowers sweet and gay enhanced is the charming sight.”

    I’d have put an A in PRESIDIO, but apparently I’d have been wrong.

    V, do you make your own lime syrup or do you make do with Rose’s?

    Edited at 2019-06-28 09:44 am (UTC)

    1. Aren’t the English words dreadful? We did it at Easter and I googled the history of the English version because it was so bad. It turned out to be a translation from German done by the chap who’d written the German lyrics and who was not a native English speaker. His German words were based on an original English treatment. So it’s a bit like Google Translate. English to German by a native German speaker then back to English. It broke the basic rule of translation – that a translator should translate into his/her native language, not the other way round. My favourite line is the description of Adams head/brain “The large and arched front sublime, of wisdom deep declares the seat”…
17. Enough unknowns and barely-knowns and hard-to-parses to make it hard to fill with confidence. I’m another TROJAN, and not a classicist, obviously. Recognised Hebe when I eventually saw her – girlfriend in 1999 had a black Lab puppy Hebe, named after a black Lab puppy Hebe in the film “Harnessing Peacocks”. Wherein the leading man (the blond Dr Who, also Tristan the vet) said Hebe was the goddess who harnessed peacocks to the chariot. I worried that all the birds got stranded on the Okango delta; had to look it up afterwards to get the right delta. Did parse LOI garlicky, eventually. Knew the Presidio under the Golden Gate, like Paul above. Wondered at first if a DINTRA was some sort of irregularity, like a DINT only more so. So not on the wavelength, almost 30 minutes.
18. Impatient today, and stopped after 28′ with NE incomplete. – GIMLET, KNELL and GARLICKY, although I did have GAR….Y.

    In my bridge days, it was known as a small SLAM. Rather liked RAFT.

    Thanks verlaine and setter.

19. Not a Friday Beast, but interesting. Flirting with obscurity without committing to it (like others above, I toyed with a number of very tricky words, such as DINTRA and OVEAL, which were indeed unnecessarily obscure, largely because I’d invented them). Also glad to see PRESIDIO reinforce my belief that time spent watching Sean Connery movies is never wasted.
20. ….then I must GO OFF. Spent some time wondering if it should be “be off”, and GARLICKY was eventually biffed. Not timed as I did it on a packed train to Chester, but somewhere in the 15-20 minute zone. COD NOD.
21. Another slog for me, with lots of unknowns and tricky wordplay holding me up. An unparseable BLUE TIT finally gave way to the BUSH TIT when I derived the unknown PRESIDIO(now that Z8 mentions it, PRAESIDIO might ring a bell), once THEBAN and HERMITAGE had put in an appearance. ORANGE went straight in as I had ADO first. LITTLE SLAM was slow to arrive as I guessed SPAN for the second word and was working with LAM for the first part. PDM came with PLAYER. KNELL finally opened up the NE and I managed to parse GARLICKY before moving on to the previously intractable SW, where thoughts of BATTRA, DINTRA and ROWTRA were finally banished when CON surfaced from Nicaragua. GROSS was next to yield and OGEE ultimately concluded the long tussle. 49:32. Thanks setter and V.
22. Bit slower today – starting now to resist solving aids for first 30 mins – more fun this way, and I’m always surprised how far I can get without – there is hope for us all!!

    Biffed a ton today, owing to tricksy wordplay. A few notes for the archives including brilliant=GAY.

    COD for me is 4d – I always think clues like this are pure genius.

    Thanks to all.

    My challenge is at 55/57. Need to work out when to stop and start the next one!

    WS

23. Finished but failed to parse “Tale”, I am beginning to regret.
    I remember people referring to the supporters of the opponents of the Contras as the Sandalistas (sic). With apologies for trivialising a horrible conflict.
    1. If the Sandalistas ever indulged in sabotage people would have got very confused!
       1. 🙂
24. 30 mins; quite chewy. LOI garlicky. Thanks, v.

    I’ve got a Russian newsfeed thingy running at the bottom of my LJ screen on my laptop; does anyone have any ideas? 🙂

    1. Oh. It’s gone now.
       1. Personally, I’d blame Donald Trump.
    2. I’ve got not only the streaming feed at the bottom but gurt big pictures / stories in the middle. Most unnerving!
       1. 
          Me too. Seems to originate in LJ under *Ratings* link.
          I’ve done the usual things to try and get rid of it – to no avail.

          Anybody got any suggestions?

25. Whew. Finished this in 37 mins with RAFT my LOI. Still not convinced by the clue.
    Thanks for explaining the biffs, esp GARLICKY. Thought taste was part of the def.
26. 10:28 but felt slightly harder than that. Too many double defs for my liking but a couple of excellent clues too, especially GARLICKY. Am pretty convinced that Small SLAM is more common/correct than Little (and obviously doesn’t have to be in Not Rumps).
27. 29ac VIOLET was my FOI but then it wasn’t, once I’d spotted ORANGE.Jack, the stamps of the Orange Free State were rather drab.

    LOI 10ac GIMLET

    COD 4dn NOD

    WOD 5ac GARLICKY

    I did not pass 14ac RAFT! I’m sure have seen 3dn BUSH TIT somewhere before, or might that be BS?

    Time 55 minutes!

    Edited at 2019-06-28 04:19 pm (UTC)

    1. Having just trawled through all the images available on Google under ‘Orange Free State stamps’, I would tend to agree with you, but I have distinct memories of stamps featuring the orange tree (as seen on some of the above) in which the foliage was deep green and the fruit thereon were bright – er – orange – which was very appealing to my child’s eye. I know it’s an area of your expertise, so what stamps am I thinking of? Were they particular rare, I wonder, that they should not now be found by Google?

       Later edit: These may be the ones I was thinking of issued by South Africa:
       https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3253/2340770373_40e9f843df.jpg

       My mistake if not the OFS then, but I was going back a long way!

       Edited at 2019-06-28 04:32 pm (UTC)

       1. I just looked through Stanley Gibbons as well as Wikipedia.
          The stamps are free of orange, bar the 1 shilling value which is entirely orange buff.

          The was also the Orange River Colony but they depicted King Edward VII with grazing springbok and gnu.

          Your child’s eye was pretty imaginative methink!

          Edit update – Ah! of course South Africa Suid-Afrika! well remembered.

          Edited at 2019-06-28 04:46 pm (UTC)

28. Chambers offers (as a separate entry to the Thor Heyerdahl idea) “a large number, a heap; a crowd; a miscellaneous lot” but says it’s mostly North American.
    1. But none of those mean ‘structure’. I still can’t see it. Mr Grumpy
       1. If you lash together a bunch of logs you’ve built a structure, n’est-ce pas?
29. I enjoyed this very much although I found it a struggle to finish. I started really well and raced through it before hitting the buffers in the NE corner. It took ages to get 5a. 38 minutes. Ann
30. I’ve come across a raft of ideas before so it didn’t raise any eyebrows for me!

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