QC 3047 by Oink

103 comments on “QC 3047 by Oink”

1. All pretty straightforward today. Can’t see any ‘oink’ answers in the grid today.
   Thanks Merlin and setter.

   1. BOAR

      1. I’d biffed BEAR and didn’t check the blog properly. Thanks

2. 10 minutes. Completely fooled by the ‘Kidnappers on Algarve seizing individual’ – what was that all about? – until I finally saw the hidden as my LOI.

   Who ever knew that the “proper” name for the wild BOAR is Sus scrofa? Coincidentally I was just watching a TV programme a few days ago about the death of King William II (William Rufus) who was allegedly shot (? assassinated) by an arrow while being charged by one of our Sus scrofa friends.

   Thanks to Merlin and Oink

3. 4.34

   Enjoyable blog and usual top-notch fare from Oink.

   PERSONAL was good – I also couldn’t immediately see what was going on, with such a smooth surface.

4. 8.12. I too had PERSONAL problems and was held up in the SW with DE NIRO and ORGANISE taking a while to arrive. Thanks to Oink and Merlin.

5. Coral is much more orange that I would have thought – thanks for the RGB, Merlin. Hopefuly looking in it up will help coral for pink stick in my mind – CORDIAL and PERSONAL held me up mightily in the end. CORDIAL because the word was dangling just out of reach beyond ‘courteous’ and PERSONAL because it was brilliant! Only four on the first pass of acrosses but then an awful lot of downs. Ended up all green in 10.52.

   If I still had a GIS licence I’d make a thematic map featuring coral in tribute to a great puzzle / blog combo, thanks Merlin and Oink.

   1. I’m glad you said that about coral as it looks orange to me too, yet pink or a light shade of red is how I think of coral.

      1. I treat myself to a Smythson diary every year, and choose a different colour each year. For 2025 I chose Coral, so it is certainly pretty orange. Though not quite Trump Orange.

         Smythson went bust this year.

         1. Your link’s missing a link.

            1. Got it. You have to use manual HTML in WordPress, and I forget the format of

6. Completed in 9 minutes, no problems.

   Merlin in your intro, second paragraph, I think you meant to write “Tiro is an accepted spelling of tyro”. It’s not unprecedented for The Times to change a clue once an error or ambiguity has been drawn to the attention of one of the editors whether by this forum or from another source.

   1. I thought the clue was better in the original form! (Mind you I’ve never seen “tiro”.)

7. Nice puzzle that we zipped through in 16.05. Mrs RH biffed personal early on but being unable to parse we left until all the crossers were in, then spotted the hidden, very good indeed.

   Liked boo and boar came with the o crosser and thinking it’s not bacon or pork so …

   Thanks Merlin for full parsing of expensive, and Oink.

8. Another 18 today. I’ll probably tank tomorrow. I went Bear and didn’t spot personal. I thought De Nero was a hard clue. I’m not seeing study = den although it comes up quite frequently.

   Thanks Merlin and Oink.

   1. It’s interesting that ‘den/study’ has been a staple of crosswords for as long as I can remember, but I just looked ‘den’ up in all the usual sources and the only one that mentions ‘study’ is Collins COBUILD, and even that is listed as a US meaning. All the others are along the lines: ‘a small private room set aside for a person’s work, hobbies, etc.’ which I guess would include a study but doesn’t actually say so.

      I’m not suggesting for a moment that this invalidates the clue in any way but it’s an example of something that came to be accepted in crosswords decades ago that most solvers don’t think to question.

      1. It’s just one of those words that drifted out of use. I learned it from “Life With the Lyons” on the old Light Programme in the 1950’s when Ben Lyon would be asked after by a visitor, and Bebe Daniels would respond “He’s in his den”. I thought it was just a play on the feline sounding surname, but found it actually far more widespread as American comedies started to hit our screens from the late 50’s onwards.

         1. My father had a den in our house. I don’t know where he picked that up but he had business contacts in the US and visited a few times.

      2. Having lived in both the US and the UK I’d say they are not equivalent. A Study traditionally has a desk and bookcases and was where the Man of the House did his paperwork/correspondence. A Den is traditionally decorated with beer signs, sports memorabilia and a huge TV. It’s where the Man of the House watches football with his buddies. The term Home Office has generally displaced Study in Estate Agent language.

         1. Btw, I just noticed that the parsing of CAMERON in the blog is the wrong way round. The definition is ‘prime minister’ and Cameroon as ‘West African country’ minus one of the Os (an old) is the wordplay.

         2. Den is more synonymous with man cave I think. My man cave / study was in an eight by eight shed. Large desk, bookcases, cycling Neo turbo trainer with training bike. Couple of storage sets of drawers full of bike bits. It was cosy to say the least.

9. Another gentle but high quality offering today. Only hold ups were with the well disguised PERSONAL and LOI SUSTENANCE where I somehow missed the fact that it was an anagram.
   Finished in 5.46.
   Thanks to Merlin and Oink

10. Very nice puzzle, quick solve. All done in 7:45, with the obligatory grimace at yet another outing for That School. Super blog, many thanks Merlin.

11. 12:12 I do like it when my time has a pattern. I had a 12:34 once but I’m still waiting for an 11:11. Does anyone else regularly wake up at patterned or symmetrical times in the night? That school and lots of ‘pop’ and modern characters. Tina would be approving if they were still regularly contributing.
    Cheers M&O

    1. If a cricket team reaches 123 runs for the loss of five wickets, it be 12345. Never seen it, though

       1. Two cats are having a swimming race. One is called “One two three”, the other “Un deux trois”. Which cat won?

          “One two three” because “Un deux trois cat sank”.

          1. Ho ho!!

          2. Extremely silly – very childish. We laughed. Thank you. : ) We will now share it with the grandchildren who, we hope will groan.. and we will be further delighted.

       2. I dont think the immortal forfar five fife four ever actually happened either!

       3. It shouldn’t be that rare. A score of 123 is probably passed multiple times in every single match. Since singles are pretty common, it would be alighted on probably half the time. I’d argue that 5 wickets down might well be the most common number of wickets down at 123.

          So far in End v India it hasn’t happened. There are eight more innings left in the Test Series, I’ll keep an eye out. I’ll be at Old Trafford on Saturday, maybe it’ll happen then. Although Australians would be on the look out for “5 for 321”, since they always say the number of wickets first.

          The “Richie Benaud” score of 222 for 2 has happened this summer, I remember the commentators mentioning it.

    2. I’ve had an 11:11 on the 15×15, notable because it’s also my birthday!

       1. Happy birthday!

       2. Nice one Busman 👍

    3. Don’t forget East Fife 4 – Forfar 5!!

       https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/44916496.amp

       1. Ham didn’t 😉

12. I get on well with Oink, and today was no exception. I just wish setter’s name showed in the Android version.
    Not so speedy as I like to take my time to reach the end, today was 20:30 so much of a par for me at the easier end of the scale.
    LOI DE NIRO. My go to for study is Den before trying Con which I only find in this usage in crosswords.
    Thanks Merlin for the entertaining blog, and Oink.

    1. Someone pointed out a while ago that if you switch on auto rotate and look at it lengthways you can see the setter’s name at the top. This works for Android; I checked, though I solve on paper, so don’t use the function.

       1. Thanks. I just tried thetimes.com in Chrome on my Samsung S24+ phone, portrait and landscape, also the Android Times App, but no joy.
          It only shows up if I view the Times printed version as expected.
          Oh well, maybe I’ll shuffle about another day!
          R

          1. Well, you are correct, in that it works on some phones (Sony Xperia 1 V running Android 15) but not on others, where the same app shows a different title bar! My Sony Xperia doesn’t show the setter – my partner’s does.

       2. I’d not seen that (working on my iPhone) – thanks for mentioning it! What a bizarre bit of app design, though…

       3. I’ve tried rotating the paper itself by 90 degrees, and nothing happens.

          1. Ha!

13. A enjoyable puzzle today, completed in moderate time with a few minor headscratchers.

    Saw the ETON reference, and couldn’t wait to get to the comments. And oh my giddy aunt, if it wasn’t Merlin blogging. ROFL.

    Pi ❤️

    1. 🙂

    2. Sotira ((Sarah), once of this parish, also had a thing about Eton and Harrow appearing in crosswords.

    3. …moderate time…? How can I know if I’m a QTPi without numbers😱

14. Pretty straightforward today and completed in just over 15 minutes – quite speedy for me. Alas, ETON figuring yet again. Please ban!

15. A good puzzle from Oink. I jumped around the grid looking for easy answers and built up enough of a structure to biff quite a few (all then parsed). I hit 16 mins with 16d incomplete and was interrupted.
    I had lost the flow when I returned and failed to see the answer to 16d. That was mainly because, despite getting the ‘iro’ bit, I was stupidly looking for a (4,2) answer! (d’oh) – so a dnf. I think De Niro was tough but it would have been easier if I had read the clue properly.
    Thanks to Oink and Merlin.

16. 10:52 (death of Emma of Normandy)

    Slow to get started, but no major hold-ups. LOI was COMPETE.

    Thanks Merlin and Oink

17. No major holdups until my LOI, PERSONAL, which I ended up biffing and then seeing the hidden. Excellent clue!

18. DNF

    Mostly done in 12 mins but stuck for 4 mins on LOI ORGANISE. For some reason didn’t think the anagram worked.

    But then a DPS. Turns out I don’t know how to spell CAMEROON. Or CAMERON. Stuck an A in the middle. Would have been obvious had it been an across clue. Probably.

19. Patience paid off today as I was about to bung in BEAR at 5a just to stop the clock after a fast start.
    A little thought led to BOAR.
    Excellent puzzle -and blog.
    Favourite clues were ELTON, OATMEAL and PERSONAL.
    12 minutes in the end.
    David

20. In re OATMEAL. The puzzle I blogged last week had PORRIDGE as an answer, and I wrote (having read online) that its first appearance to mean “time in prison” had been in the Lag’s Lexicon (1950). Thinking that that sounded an interesting book I bought a copy, and looked up “porridge”. But the entry says only this: “Summer and winter the regulation pint of porridge is issued at breakfast”. Very disappointing! That’ll teach me to believe the Guardian.

    I enjoyed this, lots of very neat and smooth surfaces. LOI PERSONAL was very well hidden, and I needed all the checkers to remember David CAMERON. How fame passes. COD to SPEEDY.

    All done in 06:55 for a Very Good Day. Many thanks Oink and Merlin.

    1. Did you expect something more romantic in its origins? My understanding was that it was always down to the fact they served porridge.

       1. The origin is obvious and well-known, as indeed I observed when blogging it. The issue was trying to find the first recorded use. The Lag’s Lexicon is often cited online as being the first recorded use, but in fact does not define porridge as “time in prison”: it merely defines it as something to eat. That was the source of my disappointment.

          The Lexicon is full of other delights though. I particularly like “Yellow Peril” for prison-issue carrot soup!

          1. Ahhh…I understand you now.

             As carrot soup can often be confused with something else, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Yellow Peril had a double meaning.

    2. Perhaps the book may bring an element of ‘argot’ to your line of work? Could surprise some of your peers. 🫡

       1. “Tosheroon” – half a crown!

          1. Catchy, but perhaps unlikely to replace guineas on a fee note.

    3. Hmm, Cameron will always remain infamous in the Invariant household.

21. 12 mins…

    I’ve always found Oink to be on the easy to average side. There was a spell a while back where they seemed to up the difficulty, but now appear to have fallen back to what I used to expect. You always have at least one clue advantage with an expected piggy reference somewhere.

    Like many, I also failed to see 8ac “Personal” for sometime – experimenting with various forms of ‘pirate’ until it clicked.

    FOI – 1ac “Sunless”
    LOI – 4dn “Spruce”
    COD – 3dn “Expensive”

    Thanks as usual!

22. I was heading for a comfortably under target time of about nine minutes until the ne corner brought me to a halt. Just the three to get, but for the life of me I couldn’t see the answers. The main problem was failing to spot the hidden (nothing new there!), and that P*R***A* coupled with mention of Algarve meant I couldn’t get PORTUGAL out of my head. Eventually BOO kicked things off, quickly followed by BOAR, and even with the additional letter it still took me nearly a minute to spot the hidden PERSONAL. Oh well, got there in the end but it took me 13.10 to make it.

23. 8a LOI Personal; I am bad at seeing hiddens, and it was quite well hidden, plus as AndyPandy above, had Portugal stuck in brain. 6d Boo corrected that eventually.
    10a Elton. One could argue that Eton does not exclude poor people, but has only a small number of bursaries to hand out. From Wiki “About 20% of pupils at Eton receive financial support, through a range of bursaries and scholarships.” However they are still toffs IMHO.
    14d Cameron. I think it is “booting out an old” meaning delete one O, with the def being just “prime minister.”
    Many thanks Oink and Merlin.

24. Very enjoyable romp through. Had De Vito instead of De Niro, even though I had DEN for some time. Also had Bear.
    A few mild observations on your chemical naming.
    OL – denotes an alchohol eg ethanol
    Petrol is a mixture of alkanes and so would have and ANE ending if a single substance. e.g. Methane, Propane and Octane, Octane being the largest constituent of petrol (hence Octane ratings). ENE is Alkenes – e.g. Ethylene (ethene). INE is Alkines e.g. Acetylene (ethine). Old name for petrol in US was Gaz oil (which I think came from the German) which evolved to Gas Oil and then GasOilEne when the marketing men got hold of it. Similarly the first occurence of Aluminum (without the i) is in an ad for saucepans where the marketing men either accidentally or deliberately dropped the i.
    Incidentally the chemical names are not “right” and the others “wrong” they were introduced to allow chemists to co-operate internationally and are only mandatory in scientific papers. Every country is free to call them whatever they like in common usage. (Do you want some sodium chloride and ethanoic acid on your chips dear?)
    I think the QC number is 3047?

    1. Sorry about getting the number of the puzzle wrong, yes it is 3047.

    2. Despite being a science teacher, I’m certainly no expert on this and I’ve had to look this up, but petrol contains a large number of different hydrocarbons and other chemicals (over 100) and only a very small percentage is octane, maybe only 1%. The octane rating does not refer to the percentage of octane, but is a comparison of its behaviour (its level of knocking) to a mixture with that percentage of octane.
       With regards the name of aluminium, apparently its discoverer, Humphrey Davy, first proposed it should be named Alumium and then a few years later used what we now think of as the American spelling, Aluminum. Other British scientists preferred Aluminium as they felt it sounded better and fitted in with the -ium endings of many other elements (although there are several that end in -um too, e.g. platinum). Both spellings were common in America at first, but the one without the i gained more traction with the general public and thus became the accepted spelling there.

       1. Agree with all – I didn’t intend to imply that the Octane rating was a %age, just that the measure’s name is derived from the alkane. I doubt if petrol is more than 1% anything it is a complete hotch-potch, but octane is one of the more common ones. I should have said ONE OF the largest constituents.
          Unusually IUPAC only state a preference for aluminIUM, noting that UM is common.
          Davy didn’t discover aluminium, he (and others) deduced that there must be an unknown element in clay and provisionally called it “allumium” (1808), as he couldn’t actually isolate a sample from clay he did not get discoverer / naming rights. (it is extremely difficult to extract aluminium from clay, even now) . Discovery had to wait until 1825 for Oerstaed (spellings vary) who proposed several names for it, none anything like aluminium. As he had no commercial interest in it his names didn’t stick.

25. A minor quibble over “forest dweller”, when a BOAR is simply a male pig, but otherwise a tidy and straightforward puzzle from Oink, made the more enjoyable by the customary excellent blog from Merlin. Whilst PERSONAL is as good a hidden as you’ll ever see, my actual COD gets it for making me chuckle.

    FOI SUNLESS
    LOI BOAR (after resisting it earlier)
    COD SPEEDY
    TIME 4:07

    1. Re boar, not so simple I think, the term is also widely used to refer to wild boar which is a forest animal. Seems a fair use in the clue to me, notwithstanding our failure on it.

26. Very fast and enjoyable. Nearly fell at the last by biffing Bear then pulled myself together, thinking of our setter, and more confidently put BOAR.
    Absolutely on the wavelength fortunately. Smiled at ELTON, also liked CAMERON (IRL too, apart from the referendum disaster), SAG, PLAY IT COOL, BOO.
    FOsI 1a, 1d, always encouraging.
    Thanks vm, Merlin. CNP DE NIRO, but biffed.

27. Very straightforward all done in 6.24 but with a fat thumbed typo on phone. Didn’t parse DE NIRO so thanks Merlin. Didn’t spot it was an Oink offering otherwise LOI BOAR may have come sooner.

28. 8,46 but stood in the dunce’s corner with BEAR for BOAR. In an Oink puzzle too! Thanks Oink and Merlin.

29. So close to another sub-half hour today at 30:37, which I’d have got easily if I hadn’t been staring for DE NIRO for several minutes 😡. Also struggled a bit with BOAR and CORDIAL, thinking about customers and dukes respectively (though maybe if I’d known the trick alto_ego mentioned I’d have got the first one). Thanks Merlin and Oink.

30. Enjoyable- as always with Oink. Was I the only one to think first of Goldilocks and her bears when confronted with porridge-maker? 6:57.

    1. I thought of Goldilocks and the three bears, also.

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