May. 20th, 2009

37 comments on “May. 20th, 2009”

1. Not sure of this, but is the town Welwyn Garden City pronounced wellin?
   Barbara
   1. Yes
2. ….and even after the three Beethoven sonatas I was still wondering about ‘well in’.

   Very clever cluing with nice surfaces. I made good progress for a while on the right, and then got stuck. I had ‘local’ but took a long time to think of ‘authority’, which opened up the left. I did have a bit of trouble with ‘cup tie’, which is UK-centric.

   I did think the clue for ‘cycle’ was a little weak, as is ‘well in’. The ones I admire are ‘all important’, ‘columnist’, ‘Rodney’, and ‘parkas’, which had fine surfaces and were difficult to parse.

   Three LP sides is about 60 minutes. Oh, well…..in.

3. 27 min, with one wrong and some cheating in the SW. 15 ac at ?O?N?Y for a fellow had me flummoxed, so bunged in JOHNNY, as this can be used as a synonym for any old chap. Miffed to find it was a specific name with no attempt to point to any particular RODNEY. Indeed I believe this breaks a rule that there should be two ways in to the answer, and Fellow -> Rodney just doesn’t cut the mustard. Admiral -> Rodney OK, Trotter -> Rodney OK, Fellow -> Rodney NOT OK! The CAHIER/CUP TIE pairing caused problems. Must remember to mentally move to the UK before starting to solve.
   Large wallop of snow down to about 3000 ft on the hills here, so winter has arrived.
   1. 2 ways in: Def & wordplay innit? Cryptic defs only have one of these but a lot of Times ones have two puns so achieve much the same end. I don’t mind non-specific defs as long as the wordplay is clear (“Food” at 16D seems as vague as “fellow”).

      Edited at 2009-05-21 06:10 am (UTC)

4. For me this was one of those puzzles where at a certain point all ideas of times go out of the window and the goal becomes just to finish unaided.

   7dn – is petrol in the UK still sold by the gallon?

   The 17’s were last in – for a long time the only thing I could think of at 17dn was “cow pie”.

   19dn I have noticed a trend for references to drug use to creep into the puzzles. I know I am very out of touch, and it is probably all common parlance, but I must say I don’t really like it.

   If anyone hasn’t read Saki yet, you have a treat in store! Beautifully crafted short stories, rather like Wodehouse but better written and much more biting.

   1. Petrol isn’t sold in gallons any more here but just as babies weights are still expressed in pounds so for some reason the fuel efficiency of cars is still expressed in miles per gallon. Weird!
5. 7:14 for this, possibly helped by living not far from Welwyn GC and St Albans. Started with 10A, got 4/6/7/8 off it and never really looked back. Only 1A put in without full wordplay understanding.
6. 31 minutes for this one which is nearly within my personal target so I wouldn’t have classed it as a difficult puzzle.

   Maybe recognising all the UK references on first reading helped me. And “my eye” is a quaint expression from a gentler by-gone era that was still in popular usage in my childhood. I would associoate it with a particular comedian if I could remember who he was.

   And I first met “cahier” in the days when schoolchildren were given lists of foreign words to memorise for homework to be followed by a vocabulary test the next day.

   I think we have not had a stinker this week, so I could be in for a tough time tommorrow.

   1. I’ve now remembered it wasn’t a comedian, it was our maths teacher/Deputy Head Master who favoured this expression.
7. Progress report on the day my trial month’s subscription to Times Crossword Club finishes.

   At first my problems were starting, the middle and the end. Then it was starting and ending. So far this week (although this may have been relatively easy so far?) I have raced away but got stuck frustratingly one or two short of completion (progress thanks to all the tricks and tips picked-up from this blog)eg HOUSE OF KEYS on Monday, ALIT yesterday and today, inexplicably, CUP TIE. Interestingly, seeing the difficulties blogged above by experienced solvers, my first in today was LOCAL AUTHORITY (with a grin of appreciation) and then WELL IN, with the garden city being the only one I know. Guessed CAHIER and had to look up ESSE from CARESSED. Still taking about an hour before getting stuck and resorting to dictionary but will renew subscription as am now disturbingly hooked.

   1. Must be all those drugs kurihan has just complained about.  Welcome to the Club!
   2. If you think you’re hooked now wait till we get you going on Mephisto! Good to hear the progress you’re enjoying.
      1. I remain BC (Before Chambers), perhaps deliberately, and Mephisto looks as forbidding as it sounds. Think I need to be regularly sub-30 minutes and unaided before attempting. The real pleasure and revelation I have found is with clues such as my COD and first solved LOCAL AUTHORITY, enjoyed as much as your ever entertaining contributions to this blog.
8. I raced through this before stumbling to a halt and then groping to get Rodney, Number One, All-important and Lever. I’m a bit confused by glheard’s explanation of 1A. Surely Key is the definition and A just comes from the clue.

   Last in was lever, which had to be the answer but it took ages before I realised that I was looking for a homophone, which I think is leaver rather than the “leave her” suggested above .

   1. Both your suggested corrections seem right to me.
   2. Correct. Like me, he must have become convinced key = ‘A-G’, and forgot when it turned out to be the definition.
      1. To be honest, I didn’t think of “leaver”. You’re right, I knew key was the definition in 1, and the A came from the “a” in the clue, and muffled it when I wrote it up.
9. 13:22.  Last in was RODNEY (15ac), which I thought would end in ROY.  I stupidly wrote in CAROUSED at 18ac, but luckily spotted the mistake almost immediately.  It took me an age to get CYCLE (9ac) and AUTHORITY (2dn), even with all the letters; ditto CUP TIE (17dn), which I don’t mind so much.

   Welwyn Garden City (12ac WELL IN) is new to me, as is the very idea of a garden city.  I’m intrigued.  What’s it like?

   MY EYE (3dn) isn’t in either Collins or the Concise Oxford, but it’s familiar from my primary school in the late ’80s, so it can’t be that quaint.  CAHIER (17ac) is also familiar from vocab tests in the early ’90s, and I’d be surprised if they weren’t still a staple of language teaching.  As for 7dn (FILLING STATION), petrol is indeed no longer sold by the gallon in the UK – though, confusingly, fuel consumption is still measured in miles per gallon – but that’s not to say you can’t get a gallon if you want one.

   I find “expert” for ARCH (1dn ARCHWAY) dubious, and wasn’t sure of my answer.  Almost all dictionaries define it as [principal or] pre-eminent, but once again Collins comes to the rescue.  I’m starting to think it’s not very good.

   Clues of the Day: 18ac (CARESSED), 2dn (LOCAL AUTHORITY).

   1. “All my eye and betty martin” was the whole phrase in my too-long-ago youth – I have no idea about the lady. 30 minutes and a sluggish right to left solve. I refuse to buy a Collins dic. but got a new Chambers for my birthday to improve Mephisto performance. Welwyn has wonderful suburban architecture.
      1. No-one seems to know about Betty Martin – here’s word-hound Michael Quinion on the subject.
   2. All these “garden cities” and “overspill towns” are a bit soulless and when you stand in the middle of one you could be in the middle of any of them.
10. I only remember CAHIER from basic French lessons at school many decades ago – I don’t recall ever seeing it used in English. Seem to have found this easier than some, finishing in about 10 and a half minutes.
11. Ah, the traditional breakfast scene in this little English corner of a foreign land: a bowl of porridge, a steaming mug of tea strong enough to trot a mouse, the Times unfinished at my side…

    Quite undone by the setter with RODNEY – I can never seem to get these Christian name clues. And undone by my own laziness at 26a after confidently writing in ‘Grenadine’ for 14d. I did eventually get the devilish trio of CAHIER, CUP TIE and PARKAS, but it took me half an hour to get that far.

    Still, it’s a pretty fine puzzle when one enjoys being trounced. The Good Pub Guide is truly memorable. Hats off.

12. A slightly-longer-than-average 25 minutes. I thought it would just be me who took a veritable age to summon up authority to go with local and despite knowing cahier from the French I had a blank on picking out any bank employee other than teller, which is a bit crap of me.

    I enjoyed the clues for cup tie and parkas.

13. Fairly straightforward, but for some reason I struggled with RODNEY. Glad to see I wasn’t alone in this. I didn’t particularly care for the apostrophe after ‘miners’ in 6.; punctuation can be misleading, but it shouldn’t be inaccurate in the cryptic reading. I also thought 7 was flawed; the clue isn’t an &lit, so the only way to make it work is to see the definition as “here you can get” or allow ‘gallon’ to do double duty.
    Best clue was probably the one for LOCAL AUTHORITY.

    I agree with kurihan that Saki’s stories are wonderful to read, though his maiden aunts get a bit of a mauling. I recommend “The Lumber Room” to start with.

    1. Loved Saki from age of 10 – top favourites the set called Beasts and Superbeasts first read to me by my mother. The Reginald and Clovis stories are very “of their period” and I think really need a welter of footnotes for modern readers.
14. 26 minutes, so not too difficult, though the top half went in in ten of those, so the bottom half considerably harder. 20ac was the only one to give me any real trouble, after I’d scrubbed out my initial CORN BEEF for 16d on the grounds of – 1) Corn for Sailor is loose if not impossible; 2) It made a right mess of the SE corner.

    Lots of ticks throughout – in particular 25ac and 17d, with the former getting my COD vote.

15. A bit more on track today at 14:10, the Jimbo corner giving me most delay, especially LOCAL AUTHORITY,CAHIER,PARKAS and CUP TIE. 3 of those 4 were excellent clues and I’ll give my COD nod to the superb Good Pub Guide. Never heard of ESSE or CAHIER.
    A really enjoyable one today.
    1. ‘Esse’ is a stock word in US-style puzzles, where both vowels and the letter ‘S’ come in handy in filling a grid. It makes a good right-hand down, with the final letters of four across words.
16. 45mins of head down grind it out. Didn’t struggle overly with Rodders or the authorities, but WELL IN and CYCLE were pretty much guesses. Last in was TALE, which I just couldn’t see; I was looking for another homophone. I particularly liked CARESSED, LOCAL AUTHORITY & INDIFFERENCE but PARKAS gets my COD.

    There’s a mega mall named Garden City not far from where I’m sitting, except it’s at a place called Booragoon, which was no help at all. I’ve spent many an hour in there trying to find a way out.

17. I thought this was a bit like yesterday’s insofar as I found it generally fairly straightforward but was left with one clue unsolved, in this case Rodney. There seems to be a consensus that this was quite a bit tougher than yesterday’s, but I didn’t find it so – must have suited me (Rodney apart, obviously). bc
18. This is an easy but for all that enjoyable puzzle with some fun definitions. The only real hard part is the CAHIER/CUP TIE corner where a knowledge of French and a mind that always first associates “dish” with girls helped a lot. The Good Pub Guide is excellent. 20 minutes to solve.
19. about 30 mins, but used an aid for cup tie. i liked this crossword – it stretched me without appearing impossible. having read knave as cad spent a long time struggling with resse! cod 20ac.
20. About 25 minutes for me, and I found it fell far more easily than yesterday’s. I also finished in the tough SW corner, last entry being CUP TIE after another alphabetical tour. CAHIER is brand new to me, I parsed RODNEY incorrectly, I thought the homonym was ‘leave her’, and I’m glad my total guess at WELL IN was correct (alternate choice: ‘well on’). Over here, our most well known garden city is called, transparently, Garden City. It is on Long Island, close to and east of New York. They’re more commonly referred to as ‘garden suburbs’ in the US. MY EYE (without the ‘all’ or ‘Betty Martin’), meaning “that’s nonsense”, was relatively common over here until recently, and came quickly to mind. Regards to all.
21. Got a bit bogged down with the hoodies, which I was convinced were BURQAS until I finally got PARKAS.
    I thought, & still think, that CAHIER was a bit off in an English xwd — though I see that Moleskine notebooks are pretentiously called cahiers. Must make a note of that in my …
    CYCLE seems pretty weak: why “age”? Maybe as in “a cycle of Cathay”?
    Saki’s fine, as far as he goes, but pace kurihan there is a reason why he’s largely forgotten while Wodehouse survives.
    COD: 2.
    1. Must say I was troubled by kurihan. Have never read Saki but if he is a finer wordsmith than Wodehouse he must be very fine indeed.

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