Times 27,317: I Want My Mummy!

79 comments on “Times 27,317: I Want My Mummy!”

1. Setter 1-0 Isla. Totally defeated by the NW, 1ac & 8ac, and 1dn & 2dn all intersecting, all unknown, all needed aids. I’d say Newtonian. Also missing 5 down as never corrected the first biff TONICS: ON in almost-complete ticks, but where are the skaters?
   Surprisingly NHO INCONNU second one in, from the cryptic with only the I in place, confirmed by mix-up. RIPIENI also straight in – an unknown English word, but known from Italian menus where it means “stuffed,” literally refilled.
   A bad week results-wise.
2. After chewing through the rest, I came up against a few isolated unknowns.
   INCONNU: I knew the French word, but not that it was also a fish!
   I went to Chambers Word Wizard to find RIPIENI, though it would have been a logical guess from the wordplay if I’d only had the patience (I’d already sussed it was an anagram).
   Then, since I’d already surrendered, I resorted to the same aid to fiind CANOPTIC, a word that I’ve surely come across before but remembered only upon sight.
   Earlier, I also checked to make sure PORTIERE was a kind of curtain.
   I only reluctantly accepted that NOWNESS was really an answer.

   Edited at 2019-04-05 02:52 am (UTC)

   1. Nowness is an American word (per the Internet)! Grrrr (love ya, really). Also Lincoln is an American make of car. Will we soon have labor, color and theater???
      1. I did not get 1ac, 8ac etc so thought that guilder HAD to be the answer to 2 down – going Dutch for splitting bill. Totally convinced – oh dear!
3. For some reason I thought of CANOPIS JAR, probably because I knew the constellation, and even though I had the wordplay figured out, more or less; then I checked the dictionary. Biffed CALDERA, no idea how it worked. The rest I worked out, although in some cases after typing in the word. But RIPIENI was hopeless. A congeries of difficult clues.
4. …after numerous wrong turns. A large vocabulary is somewhat useful, as I biffed ‘caldera’ without a second thought, but the inconnu fish was indeed inconnu. Rather like solving a Mephisto without a dictionary, right?
5. 1hr 22 with one error. After putting in half-a-dozen straightforward answers scattered around the grid in about 10 minutes I ground to a complete standstill for another 10-15 before starting to find my feet and working slowly but steadily through the remainder.

   My error was at 25ac where, after working out PORE as the ‘opening’, I plumped for EVEN as ‘level’ and then looked up POREVENE just to see if it existed, but unfortunately using an on-line dictionary it immediately offered PORTIERE as an alternative, so I never got to have second bite at it. I’ve heard the word in French as a type of door, but had no idea that it could also be a curtain.

   CANOPIC JAR, CONGERIES, INCONNU were unknowns but arrived at through fair wordplay. Also NEWTONIC (not recognised in the usual sources which all have ‘Newtonian’). Biffed INNER EAR and didn’t get beyond REAR (behind) with the parsing which turned out to be wrong anyway. Was pleased to remember JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT as ‘lords and ladies’ from a puzzle I blogged last September. Knew RIPIENI as I am a big fan of Baroque concertos where it’s associated with the whole orchestra sections as opposed to the soloist(s) or ‘concertino’.

   Although this was very hard I thoroughly enjoyed the battle of wits with the setter, unlike yesterday’s which was marred by errors and dubious wordplay and definitions. I still can’t believe that when these were pointed out to the Times they responded by replacing one of the clues completely! That’s surely got to be a first?

   Edited at 2019-04-05 04:49 am (UTC)

   1. Memory test: did they swap out an erroneous clue for the word MINESWEEPER back in about the early 25000s?
      Google… google… google…
      It was 24463. Feb 17 2010. The new clue, replacing the old erroneous clue, was also erroneous and needed further amendment!
      Memory still works, I’m not quite as gaga as I feared.

      Edited at 2019-04-05 07:02 am (UTC)

      1. Thanks for the link, Isla. I have no recollection of that incident as I seem to have been on a biffing spree that day so I assume I bunged in the answer and moved on. I was still working then so it’s possible I was busy and never revisited the blog to read the discussion.
6. 24 minutes of solving time, but unrecorded as I had a power cut 5 minutes in. Been getting a few lately.

   I’ll freely admit to checking INCONNU, PORTIERE and RIPIENI before submitting. CANOPIC JAR I sort of knew from watching several different documentaries about ancient Egypt lately.

   I enjoyed this the way some people enjoy running marathons (apparently), and I’m sure it’s equally good for the soul.

   “Explosion in a dictionary factory” I like very much, v. Bravo to you and the setter

   Edited at 2019-04-05 06:38 am (UTC)

7. I am less of a fan than others. A big mix in clue difficulty. And recent crosswords have lacked zing – I miss those fun moments when you think “How Clever” – this felt like a brutish slog. Hopefully some finesse and wit will return!
8. An hour and a quarter here to fail on my last one, having plumped for PARINEYE on 25a (PAR-IN-EYE for “even”-“in”-“opening”), which I knew was shaky. Cruel word to be double-unched!

   Some of the other unknowns constructed correctly from wordplay, like INCONNU and RIPIENI.

   Bits of the more obscure stuff came straight from my Crosswordy Words list—4d JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT was my FOI, for example, and is probably the only reason I didn’t take two hours to fail! That list is also the reason I can remember that they’re not “conga” eels 😀

   Other stuff had to be pieced together from vaguer knowledge. I knew I’d recognise a CANOPIC JAR when I saw it, having watched so much Stargate, and luckily I’m steeped enough in Americana that I knew the car. Lincolns are popular among government agencies in the US; JFK was assassinated in a Lincoln Continental, to take a tragic example.

   On the whole, though, I’m much more pleased to be beaten by this one than some of the week’s earlier offerings, and I enjoyed it a lot more along the way.

   Edited at 2019-04-05 07:42 am (UTC)

   1. In my time in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia) in the 1980s, the car of choice for most locals seemed to be the Chevy Caprice. When I went back many years later SUVs had taken over.
9. Same thought processes as Jack, essaying ‘porevene’ for the curtain – my punishment for refusing to read Georgette Heyer, I guess. (I lie – I staggered through one page online last year before throwing in the linen huckaback.)

   Never heard of the mummy tube and had to cheat on pinstripe too – so all in all another win to the setter.

   Was I the only one to be secretly disappointed that there were no spectacular foul-ups today? Solving today was like coming down to earth after an adrenaline high. Perhaps tomorrow…

10. Oh, also cheated on JACK in the whatnot, since, though I got the pulpit early, I was done like a kipper on this one too. Mind you, tough if you’ve never heard if it and are ignorant of the Egyptian thing.

    Edited at 2019-04-05 07:04 am (UTC)

11. 48 minutes. I said last week that I was better at garden plants than wild ones, but I had heard of JACK IN THE PULPIT and also knew of Lords and Ladies. I didn’t know they were the same thing. I thought I was going to fail in NW and SE, but a guess of RIPIENI from anagram fodder revealed PORTIERE, which I assumed was something the French would draw across une porte. Earlier, I’d constructed the unkown INCONNU to finish off the NE. Like Sotira, I knew of CANOPIC JAR from the recent spate of television Egyptology. I guessed it had to be CONGERIES, knowing no other eels but Congers. I then played with ‘new drink’ and saw NEWTONIC. Why have I called it Newtonian Mechanics all these years? And then I had a ‘now’ moment and saw LOI NOWNESS. COD to the ANTICHRIST. Was he today’s setter. I found this hard, but it played to one or two strengths. Thank you V and setter.
    1. Yes, I had the same flight of fancy on NEWTONIC. Perhaps we should start having Einsteinish space-time and drawing Feynmaniacal diagrams…
       1. I bet Fever-tree make it?
          1. 🙂
    2. Perhaps physicists could be rebranded Newtonic Mechanians?
    3. More than fifty years a physicist and I’ve never seen “Newtonic”- but I did get it.
12. Like Verlaine, I had 6 unknowns but I’ll swap his NEWTONIC for my JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT. Phew!
    Like others, I wanted POREVENE to be a word and never thought of ‘tier’. I also thought first of ‘abe’ for Lincoln.
    I see Pontius has misjudged things again. On a day when Verlaine took an astonishing (for him) 18m 49s, he clocked in at 7m 22s. Mmm.
    1. No doubt he has skulked off to wash his hands of the whole business…
13. I thought it was just me, so I’m quite chuffed with a few seconds under 30 minutes.
    For sure the Bay of Pigs was in the NE. I was brilliantly witty in putting in GILDERS for 2d – if you split the bill, you go Dutch, obvs. Sadly (it was a more fun answer than the quasi philosophical NOWNESS) that screwed the lid on the CANOPUS (no, CANOPIC) JAR, and didn’t help much with the dubious NEWTONIC, where in any case I was convinced the raised spirits was/were NIG. All very time consuming. If the Egyptian spare parts bin had been clued as “container” rather than “case” (which doesn’t look anything like a jar) I might have found the whole thing much quicker.
    Let’s give a bit of credit to the setter for making the inconnun (sic, and sic) fish clue smooth with the Innuit link, since the dam’ thing is apparently Canadian.
    But phew and double phew, that was at least as hard as V’s time suggests. And well played Keriothe.
    1. I was very keen on the Dutch currency too, but could not persuade myself that it lacked a ‘u’, so moved on. Not to much effect, mind.
       1. I seem to be stalking you, Ulaca: two comments where I’ve replied, only for your comment to miraculously appear in between beforehand.

          Edited at 2019-04-05 10:43 am (UTC)

14. I seem to be using “DNF after 30 minutes” quite a lot recently. I checked CANOPIC, INCONNU, RIPIENI and PORTIERE on-line. The one clue where I got the setter’s trick immediately (unlike V) was 2d “currency” – so confidently that I bunged in NEWNESS. I enjoyed the INNER EAR but COD to NOWNESS (I think).
15. Solved this clockwise from NE to end up in the distinctly unfriendly NW. Once I’d decided this was yet another setter who thinks difficulty comes best from obscurity I treated it like a Mephisto (or indeed club Monthly) and used the dictionary to check answers derived from wordplay. Whatever happened to the man on the top deck of the Clapham omnibus?
    1. He’s probably strolling in the park, Jimbo.
    2. Once I’d noticed the explosion in the dictionary factory so succinctly coined by Verlaine, I did the same.
16. 17:22. A rare sub-v for me today, so I must have been on the wavelength, but I can’t say I enjoyed it much. Another collection of wilful obscurities, albeit with clear wordplay instructions throughout, and getting through unscathed is some satisfaction. Let’s call it a bracing challenge.
    I’d add CALDERA to the ‘explosion in a dictionary factory’. It’s come up a few times here, so it’s understandable to think it’s a word normal people might know. JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT is arguably in the same category.

    Edited at 2019-04-05 07:49 am (UTC)

    1. I think I first read the word on the label of a firework of the type usually branded ‘Vesuvius’ or ‘Etna’.
       1. I knew CALDERA as it was the name of a bloke who used to manage Change Control Authorisations for upgrades to software on some Content Addressed Storage units I used to work on when I used to work. Manny Caldera he was. So the word stuck and I’ve seen it in connection with craters and volcanoes since.
    2. I remember calderafrom school, then actually visited one in Mt. Gambier in 1989. OK. Then about 10 years years ago flew by (unpressurised ~5000 feet) chopper from Manila to Palawan, and went over the top of a spectacular one, giant volcanic mountain a few hundred/thousand meters high, with a big lake in the middle, with a large island in the middle of the lake which was a volcano , with a lake in the middle of that. A double-banger, a caldera within a caldera. So it’s a word I’ve always known, and even used in describing that experience to friends and family.
       1. Fair enough, I guess I have to acknowledge that it is an entirely commonplace word. I mean who amongst us hasn’t flown in a helicopter across a volcano in the Philippines?
          😉

          Edited at 2019-04-05 10:34 am (UTC)

          1. Palawan is the demesne of the rich and famous, but unfortunately I was going there for work. We landed not in some uber-resort but on the back of a greasy, smelly, noisy boat a few km out to sea.
    3. I was coming here to say I knew CALDERA from a visit to Makhtesh Ramon, a caldera in the Negev, until I checked and realised that rather than being a caldera it is in fact an erosion cirque. Well, they are both hole-like and they both begin with ‘c’, so I am claiming a moral victory of sorts.
    4. Caldera is a common enough word if:
       a) you’ve ever been to Santorini or
       b) you went to a jumble sale in about 1976 to which the then Radio 1 breakfast show producer (who lived locally) had donated a load of LPs and you bought a couple by a Latin-American jazz funk combo called Caldera because you liked the cover of one of them (see avatar).

       I score on both counts.

       1. Or c) you do the crossword regularly.
          1. or d) you go mountain walking. Plenty in the Pyrenees.
       2. Ah, you beat me to it! I also had that same album back in the 70s. It’s no longer in the record collection so must have gone in a clear-out. But it is how I learnt about calderas – a never-to-be-forgotten piece of GK!
17. I thought this was best of the week, all done in 31 minutes with a word search before my LOI NOWNESS which was clever. Would have thought NEWTONIAN was the usual term, but new tonic was clear enough. The Lily at 4d must hold the record for the plant with the most alternative names.
18. Like others, I found some of this exceptionally difficult and ended up with two incorrect after about 80 mins (‘porevene’ and a mix-up with ripieni). Personally I’m not keen on clues which are anagrams for very obscure words when there are various possibilities for using the fodder.
    Some very clever ones though, so thanks to the setter and of course our esteemed blogger for putting me right.
    I was initially convinced that 2d must be ‘guilders’ but of course it doesn’t fit! That would have been a great clue if slightly modified to suggest it was an ex-currency and there were 8 spaces to fill in. Well, I think so anyway!
    1. Of course 2dn is GILDERS!,
       Witty, urbane and a very fine clue.
       NOWNESS what the …..!?

       Three in a row to die for.
       horryd SW19

       Mood Meldrew.

19. Guilders (sic) was my first guess for going Dutch, followed by aka florins.
    1. In my defence, GILDERS without the U turns up in Chambers as a “see guilders” entry. And by way of apology, I have once again confused my cardinal points, and should have written NW.
20. Do we get an apology or even an explanation of yesterday’s cock-up? Do we hell. But what you expect from The Times nowadays I’m afraid. They seem to have joined that dreadful ‘never apologize, never explain’ brigade.
    1. There is an apology in the place you would expect: on their actual website
       1. Well you might expect that the website is the place. But I don’t see go to the website. I just buy the paper.
          1. As a treeware solver, I wondered why there was nothing in the paper too, given the answers were printed to faulty clues as if correct this morning. They must have been well aware of it before going to print.
21. Nowhere near with this one. Retired hurt.

    Chastened, battered and bruised.

22. About 45 min, but got stuck in NW and had to resort to Qinapalus for suggestions about what might fit checkers. I did have 1ac from recent egyptological TV, but couldn’t think of anything better than NEOLOGIC at 8dn, which didn’t make sense and also made 2dn & 3dn impossible – latter leapt out from list of possibles, but couldn’t get further with parsing than REAR = behind.
    I knew 4dn and 20dn, but needed to verify 7dn in Bradford.
23. I concurred with others that this was, to all intents and purposes, a Mephisto, so for INCONNU, RIPIENI and PORTIERE I was producing answers and going to the dictionary to see if they actually existed. I like a tough Friday solve, but I’m not sure an explosion in a dictionary factory (thank you, V, I shall be stealing that) is the best way to achieve it. 17 minutes, though that time obviously needs an asterisk.
24. Gave up after 20 minutes with 25a unfilled and 20d with a randomly chosen anagram (foreign words, anagrams, mumble mumble). What a slog! New words for me today are CANOPIC JAR, PORTIERE, CONGERIES, JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT, INCONNU & REPIENI (not REPINII).

    IPSO FACTO was my favourite, an excellent hidden word that took me an age to spot. INNER EAR was my least favourite for some time.

    1. My favourite too. Who can forget David Brent reasoning(?) with his ward Donna: ‘Ipso facto. Trust received, responsibility given and taken. Yeah?’
25. Blimey that was tough. And there was indeed ‘difficulty from obscurity’ (Jimbo). So not sure this is quite the thing. Though it does surpass yesterday’s…
26. The obscurities just happened to fall within my “just happen to know” area or I’d have been up a gum tree. “Newtonian” it should be, I quite agree with others. PORTIEREs are the sort of curtains that cry out to be called “drapes” and I think of them in connection with those enormous houses in Country Life, decorated to within an inch of their lives. 26.42
27. DNF. Like martinp1, I came up with porevene, but then stupidly went on to bung it in. Pfft. Another soporific slog. Thanks, V.
28. Stopped after thirty minutes, RIPIENI, CONGERIES, PORTIERE all unknown and would have taken a million years to get.
    Did like RHINESTONE.

    Thanks verlaine and setter.

29. Pleased to have got through in 19:19 with the “guesses” all correct. As K says, doing so was quite satisfying in a way.
30. I’ve not much to add to what’s been expressed here already. I thought the vocabulary range was perfectly fair for a difficult puzzle. Canopic jars? …the British Museum’s stuffed with ’em. I really enjoyed ‘in arrear{s}’. Unlike many other commenters here, I rather relish the task of making plausible-sounding words out of a random pile of letters: groping for core morphemes, plural forms, prefixes, potential consonant clusters from different language families and then to arrive at RIPIENI, hey! It was quite hard: 54 mins.
    Thanks, setter. Thanks, Verlaine.

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