Times 24405 – Yummy with a piquant touch

30 comments on “Times 24405 – Yummy with a piquant touch”

1. I guess it’s EDDY with G substituting for D.
   And yeh, this is McText, now doing anonymous penance for chucking his teddy out of the pram a while ago.
   Sorry Peter.

   Alec

2. Found this a step up in toughness. Some great clues like Rhombic and Eddy-yes its a g for one of the d’s and Snow took me ages to see. I think if you didnt get Barbershop the SE corener was jolly hard!
   Took me an age but then Christmas party last night might have somehting to do with it
3. Sniggered at 13A, though it may be pure vanity for me to assume what the event might be. If my vain assumption is right, 22A makes a nice partner for this clue.

   I guess this is a notch up in difficulty from the rest of this week. I liked 2D and the shortness of 3D among lots of other good stuff, and Barber as “composer” was a nice change from the usual crowd. (Initial thought: “What words begin with BACH?”)

   Welcome back McText!

   1. Thank you.
      Your forgiveness is important to me.
      1. Freely granted!
4. Got there in 28 min, but only with a couple of online hints. (OXHIDE and ICKY). I am not too straight laced, but the online definitions of a YUMMY MUMMY did get a vague twitch of an eybrow.
5. Another who didn’t find this easy; too many distractions to record a time, but it seemed to go on most of the morning. In the end ANOMIE was the only guess, although Barber was a long way down my list of composers starting with B (but his Adagio for Strings would be familiar to most). Some excellent inventive clues here; I have too many ticks to mention, but my favourite was the MUMMY.

   Welcome to your regular slot Uncle Yap; not the easiest of days to blog. At 16d I think the D for Duke has to be included in the reversal, although maybe that’s what you meant.

6. I liked this very much. Only query is in 16D – assuming that “over” is the reversal indicator for ROWED what indicates that it comes between the CO and the D?

   kurihan

   1. Hello kurihan. Yes, it has to be (D ROWED)rev.
      1. Yes of course, (D ROWED) all reversed. Funny how one doesn’t see these things.

         By the way, just to say that I don’t much like tablet = E in 10ac. I may be a bit prickly but it just seems to normalise drug use.

   2. Welcome back.
7. I thought the puzzle was brilliant, but made heavy going. I had ‘password’, and the wrong enumeration for 21, which really slowed me down.

   Especially witty: ‘caryatid’, ‘crossbar’, and ‘Pete’!…but my COD is ‘ranchero’.

   I eventually understood every clue, which is the sign of a great puzzle. The only thing I had any doubts about was ‘condemn’, it seemed too simple.

8. Yes, this was a little more difficult than the past few days.

   I ran out of quality solving time (34 minutes today) with 10 clues still unsolved. The bottom half was complete apart from 18dn and 25 ac so I gave these priority as I revisited the puzzle in later snatched moments, eventually coming up with the answers.

   The NW corner was mostly complete too with only CROSSBAR and RANCHERO outstanding and both came to me after a little more thought, but in the NE I had to resort to aids to check ANOMIE (a new word to me) and to search for CARYATID (also new) and ICKY (should have got but failed to think of it).

9. Welcome as a regular Uncle Yap.

   I found this quite tough going – 35 minutes to solve. A lot of very good stuff both wordplays and inventive definitions. BARBERSHOP is my favourite.

   16A has the capacity to cause problems because “rubbish” also fits the clue. I think “used by” is padding at 4D. I also crib at tablet=E (I thought the Times was going to stop this casual approach to drugs?)

10. Outclassed by this. Does extreme difficulty equate to brilliance?
    Welcome Uncle Yap, and what a welcome. Saw DIDGERIDOO early and then took 15 minutes to parse. Couldn’t finish SE corner even with aids. As the Maestro says, if you didn’t get BARBERSHOP it was tough. (I stuck in BACHARACHS – 2 composers for the price of 1 – even though I had no idea what bacharachs were/was, turns out to be a Rhine wine).
    Welcome back kurihan and Mctext. With Alec back all we need now is more frequent visits from Mark to complete the quotidian cerebral callisthenics.
11. Oh! And I’ve heard of YUMMY YUMMY and perhaps even MUMSY WUMSY, but never MUMMY YUMMY even though I have one. (Chambers confirms alas).
12. Sorry. Meant YUMMY MUMMY, the definitive Freudian slip.
13. 30 minutes having particular trouble with anomie and caryatid. CO for pacifist was new as well but the D Rowed combo was enough to get me there.

    Clever puzzle, watchstrap COD for me.

    Ross, if yummy mummy raised an eyebrow I’d advise against looking up the synonymous (ish) acronym MILF.

14. This was very difficult and extremely entertaining with lots of unusual words and difficult wordplay. I was puzzled by the wordplay on several occasions after I had guessed the answers from the definitions but I got there in the end with the last in being hacienda.

    Its funny how one acquires general knowledge. I knew anomie from studying Max Weber in the ‘60s but I only knew hacienda from the adobe hacienda in Pat Boone’s song Speedy Gonzalez. And I only knew Rancheros as a brand of bacon-flavoured crisps.

    1. Same source as me, Lenny!
15. ‘Caryatid’, along with ‘Orion’s belt’, was my first in.

    I was glad to find at least one or two that were obvious.

16. Forgot to put COD Ranchero- brilliant deadheat with Romp Home
    and WCOD Pete-too easy!
17. About 35 minutes for me, the last two entries being SNOW and ANOMIE. I was also confused about the meaning of ‘slate’ in 16A; I was not familiar with that. Otherwise, I understood everything alse and as others have said, there’s a lot of good stuff in here today. I liked RANCHERO, ICKY, CODEWORD, ROMP HOME and WATCHSTRAP. All very nicely done. Regards.
18. I found this one an absolute beast – by bedtime last night I had the whole of the right hand side out, but practically nothing in the left! Finally spotted Didgeridoo (and smacked myself) in the morning, which took care of the bottom right, but I was left with that top left – finally got WOOFER out of my head for 4 down and saw the definition. Nice challenge, setter! Had never heard of YUMMY MUMMY but figured one of those words had to be MUM,MY – couldn’t tell which one until I got all the checking letters.
19. I have heard various ideas about the etymology of this word. Any ideas as to its origins?
    Then, with that in, I needed a 10-letter word for a musical instrument ending in “O”.
    What are the options?
    1. Chambers pours cold water on any connection with “non compos mentis”, ODE has “perhaps from the given name Nicholas or from Nicodemus (by association with the Pharisee of this name and his naive questioning of Christ, compare with French nicodème ‘simpleton’ “. More here.

       No pure ten-letter musical instrument comes to mind – “thumb piano” is as close as Bradford gets.

       1. Having got ‘nincompoop’, I had thought of ‘fortepiano’ (predecessor of the pianoforte), but 21d quickly put paid to that idea. ‘didgeridoo’ was one of my last in.
20. Very good puzzle, 24 mins. COD CROSSBAR, also esp liked OXHIDE, RANCHERO, BABY BOOMER, DO TIME. HACIENDA was my first entry (same source as others as a 4 down perhaps tho have met it in previous puzzles too).
21. The Times crossword usually features more than a few erudite words that are quite beyond me, so it always raises a smile when the knowledgeable folk on here are blindsided by a word I regard as relatively commonplace.

    How have people avoided the term YUMMY MUMMY, I wonder? After all, Cheryl Cole herself used the phrase on X factor only last weekend. Weren’t you watching? Oh… I guess probably not!

    1. Speaking as one who would rather watch repeats of the news than the X Factor, I have to say that the term Yummy Mummy became known to me first via a poster from the Guardian a few years ago depicting a series of “typical Guardian reader” caricatures. And I have scarcely heard the term since.
       How many spotted the headline “Slummy Mummy” coincidentally in yesterday’s Times Budget report pull-out?

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