Times 24555 – Jimbo’s in that park again!

45 comments on “Times 24555 – Jimbo’s in that park again!”

1. I solved this in 6:35 but thought there was plenty to like – 10 Across for example is not hard but the surface reading is nicely done.
   Also liked ‘hold on’ for WAIT and ‘like post’ for DEAF, among others.

   Minor quibble at 19D: I thought “of”, as a wordplay-def link, had to be in the sequence ‘{def} of {wordplay}’ in Times puzzles. Assuming there’s no mistake, either this rule is being changed, or ORAL is indicated by “spoken of” rather than just “spoken”. 4D has the “down clues are written downwards” presumption that I don’t like, but we’ve already flogged that horse.

   1. I took FLORAL to be defined as ‘of bouquet’, where ‘bouquet’ means simply ‘flowers’.
      1. That was my thought too.
         1. Both correct! Must think harder ….
2. Hoped for a quicker time but clocked in at 67 minutes, with PIT-VIPER last in, close on the heels of the WAPITI, neither of which rang more than faint bells. Also unfamiliar with DOGGO – my punishment for not reading more Billy Bunter when a boy? COD to OK CORRAL; also liked SCOUR in an otherwise rather lacklustre selection.
3. was rather worried that this would be a stinker but as commentators have said it was fairly striaghtforward. Im with Jackt for timing. I was also scared to see K as the second letter of a two letter word and also was slow to see tv = box in pit viper. i thought that some of the surfaces were very well done like the artful dodger for example and it actually took me a long time to see Robes was hidden word. curiously Batty was my last in

   Thanks for a godd workmanlike blog!

4. A lot easier than yesterday’s by a long chalk: the latter made all the harder by having to do it while locked up all day in an examners’ meeting. Took me 22m in all — with a couple of breaks. Interesting to see the inclusive at 1ac for a change instead of in the final down clue. And some nicely hidden stuff (“pink clothes right” & “way of lying to avoid detection”, for example). So I won’t be joining the throng of the unimpressed … well, not just yet anyway. Or maybe it’s the old fondness for anagrams again?
   1. Sorry, ’twas I, logged out.
5. 13 minutes for this absolute charmer. No duff clues (I too thought “of bouquet”= FLORAL) and some real delights, chief among them for me SINGAPORE SLING. Both RIP VAN WINKLE and DROP LEAF went in without full understanding; after all, what else can follow Rip van? Lovely surface reading on 8. DOGGO feels more Biggles than Billy Bunter to me.
   1. I didn’t read that either! Not really Enid Blyton, I imagine.
6. For the first time this year solved sitting under a sun shade sipping coffee in the back garden – closest I could get to a park Jack.

   Easy but enjoyable – about 15 minutes to solve – with some real give away definitions, rather obvious anagrams, etc. For example got PEN AND INK immediately, saw 25A started with a word ?K and knew the answer had to be OK CORRAL. No obscurities or other irritatations. Good fun.

7. Came up five short today.

   Couple of grumbles:
   – not sure LINED means “ruled”?
   – got INIGO from I???O and then twigged the Jones ref but thought indigo was a distinct colour to blue, as in the rainbow spectrum – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet

   I heard “tasers” on Radio 4 yesterday morning during an eye witness account of the Israeli commandos attack on the Gaza flotilla.

   1. COED has Rule (often as adj.ruled): Make parallel lines on (paper).
      1. I agree LINED = RULED, thanks. I meant to write “rules.” The clue in the print version of the online puzzle is “Went along with rules” not “Went along with ruled”!
         1. Sorry, I misunderstood. I can’t explain it, but it seems to make sense to me. Perhaps someone else would like to have a go at it?
8. I’m with those who found this witty and enjoyable with excellent surfaces. It was easy because most of the long answers went in on definition. I would rate this as a puzzle for improvers rather than beginners because many beginners would be stumped by seeing some of the familiar devices for the first time.

   Some of the short ones gave me pause for thought. TV for box and TT for “keeping to water” ought to be reflex reactions but I was briefly fooled by the smooth surfaces. Last in were Batty and the hidden word because I thought smother was the containment indicator and wondered whether reess could be an obscure word meaning obesity

9. 13:02 here, so about average-ish for me. I got a little bit bogged down in the bottom half after tearing through the top half in no time. PIT-VIPER was last in for me too, but only because I didn’t look at it again after the first read-through until the end. I liked “as a post” for DEAF and the ARTFUL DODGER anagram.

   My work computer’s being a pain. For the last few weeks I’ve had to log on every time I come here, whereas before I was always logged in automatically. I’m sure there used to be a tick-box for “Keep me logged in”, but it’s not there any more.

   1. I find that IE8 doesn’t remember log in info if it is stopped then restarted. Firefox is OK for two weeks.
10. While I filled in the obvious ones immediately, I was stuck for a long time on parts of this.

    I had a lot of trouble with ‘go to town’, and still don’t get what ‘push boat out’ has to do with it. I was looking for an anagram of ‘push boat’, but that’s obviously not it, although you can make ‘up to bash’.

    Since I didn’t think CRS, I put in ‘pen and ink’, then erased it, believing it was impossible to have a two-letter word ending in ‘k’. Much later, I was it.

    I wasn’t helped by carelessly writing ‘prognonis’, either.

    Oh, well, my grid was correctly filled, and no aids were used.

    1. Just a double definition, really (or a parallel phrase and a cryptic definition). Chambers has: “push the boat out: to entertain, celebrate, etc lavishly.”
11. I assumed ‘lined’ came from ‘with rules’, and was less certain about it as a definition of ‘went along’ with or without the ‘with’, so to speak. Is ‘with’ doing two duties here?
12. Went along-as in “the trees lined the avenue”;

    with rules-as in “a lined exercise book”?

    1. Those two examples of the meaning of LINED make sense – thanks!
    2. Thanks to Anon and John_from_Lancs. That has nailed it. I knew it was okay but had too much else to think about at the time.
    3. When I worked in the printing industry (very briefly) the lines in exercise books, commercial stationary, graph paper and the like were always known as rules. Hence “lined” absolutely meant “with rules”
13. A nice gentle 20-minute saunter through the park (Jimbo’s?). Liked VALENTINO and S.SLING. Didn’t know that SCARLATTI was English!

    Enjoyable puzzle.

    1. Not sure if you are raising a query, James, but in case you are “Liberates English” is an instruction to disregard the “E” in “at recitals” when looking for the anagram. Apologies in advance if this wasn’t a serious point.
14. 16:24 .. almost the ideal “half hour on the train” puzzle. Very nicely done.

    Like H_D, I’m still not entirely convinced by the grammar of LINED, but I’ve probably overthought it.

    Last in the tricky BATTY.

15. A quick start, with the easy hidden at 1 ac and the easy definition (given the word lengths) of 1 dn, but I did slow down, taking a while to get 7, 8 and 14. 30 minutes in the end.
    I agree that some of the clues were rather good. I had ticks against 7, 8, 10 and 14.
16. About 30 minutes here, sort of an average time. I really liked this puzzle, finding many of the clues very clever. Surprised to see RIP VAN WINKLE and OK CORRAL, which I think of as Americanisms. I got a kick out of SINGAPORE SLING, PROGNOSIS, and I thought INIGO was very good, although not particularly difficult. As an observation, I have never heard anyone say ANY OLD HOW, ever. Last in, like others, BATTY. Regards.
    1. “Mama don’t allow no banjo playing round here,
       Mama don’t allow no banjo playing round here,
       Well Mama don’t allow, Mama don’t allow,
       We’re gonna do it any old how!
       Mama don’t allow no banjo playing round here.”

       Though I think in this song it means “anyway” or “anyhow”, not “without a pattern”.

       My grandfather would look at a piece of shoddy work done by some tradesman and mutter disapprovingly “He’s done that any owd ‘ow”.

       Regards

       1. Thanks John, for the serenade, so to speak. I’m not familiar with the song, which helps explain why I haven’t heard the phrase. I expect it can mean almost anything. I have often heard of things being done “in any old way he wanted”, which means what your grandfather meant, I think. Regards to you.
17. 20 m half asleep on the swing seat in the sun. Last in lined (puzzled me like others for a while), gurkha (just because I left it out of the first flush of solving) and mortal (felt stupid taking time over that one and blamed the sun.
18. I didn’t get a time for this, but it was between one pint and two, seemed to be pretty a pretty breezy solve. There was a lot here that I bunged in without thinking of the wordplay – PEN AND INK, WAPITI, SINGAPORE SLING, RIP VAN WINKLE. Only one from wordplay alone was INIGO.
19. After struggling all week I finished this in just under 11 minutes, which is by some way (2 minutes to be exact) the quickest time I’ve ever recorded. I did have a couple of beers with lunch so perhaps that helped. And the sun is shining too.
    Clearly this wasn’t a difficult one but it is still remarkable to me how puzzles that seem to be quite similar in difficulty based on comments here can produce wildly different results for me.
    Lots went in without full understanding. After TENT a couple of weeks ago I immediately thought “Tinto” for 22ac and bunged in TARANTINO. Fortunately I wasn’t happy with it so checked the wordplay and quickly saw that it didn’t (remotely) work.
20. I had great difficulty with this one, and gave up the ghost with most of the clues in the lower half unsolved. Yesterday was just as bad. And I thought I was making progress…
21. If someone could design a puzzle to make people feel happy about their performance this was probably it. It wasnt so easy as to be boring, and not too obscure to be a pain, but it seemed to be both hard looking, yet eminently achievable. I intially thought this was the old “being on the same wavelength” thing, but I see that most people had the same experience. I guess this is a subtle mixture of the explicitness of the definition mixed with the clearer use of the harder elements. Things like DEAF as “like post” and WAIT as “hold on” would normally have held things up for a bit, but the fact that they came quickly made me feel like I had achieved something.
22. Very enjoyable puzzle, all clues bullet-proof and fair, tho I’d vague uncertainly about LINED like some other commenters, 23 mins. Esp liked SINGAPORE SLING and ARTFUL DODGER. Don’t recall DOGGO in Billy Bunter but memories fade.
23. Just to show there’s no accounting for taste, I found this puzzle, which most seem to have judged easy, good fun but on the hard side, whereas I found yesterday’s, which many found difficult, pretty easy. So there you go.
24. Pretty much flew through this but held up briefly by banging in ANY OLD WAY then guessing GURKHA and finally seeing the alternate reverse. Can KUKRI as a solution be expected in a subsequent puzzle? Now back to finish yesterday’s without peeking.
25. Late in today. Agreeable entertainment though don’t really care for the wording at 20. Rather liked ‘hold on one’ = ‘wait i’ in 12 though one wonders how many more of the herd are waiting in the wings to be scented. 23 minutes. COD 1 down for the sustained image.
26. I’m obviously having trouble with my ons this week. 12ac has “hold on one” = WAIT + I in an across clue. This is a departure from a long established norm. Ordinarily, it would be I + WAIT, with “on” meaning “added on to the end” in an across context. Personally, I’m hoping this is a precedent rather than an anomaly. Apologies for the late post.
    1. Hold on = wait – that’s why I like it!
       1. Thanks joekobi, you’ve saved me from myself for the second time in two days on the on front. Too bad it didn’t signal the end of the golden on rule.
27. There’s no ‘said to be’ about the ancestry of the Pitcairn Islanders. A number were resettled on the otherwise uninhabited Norfolk Island in the mid-19th century. You can hear their dialect there and the surname Christian remains prominent.

Comments are closed.