Times 24572 – Birdie Birdie Num Num

60 comments on “Times 24572 – Birdie Birdie Num Num”

1. Uncle Yap: I think you need NONCONFORMITY where Liverpool = CITY.
   1. Hence 20dn is RESTYLE. (YULE minus second letter of “turkey”).
2. In 23, ‘Liverpool’ is a ‘city’, so it’s ‘nonconformity’, that’s why you couldn’t get 20 down, which is ‘rest’ + ‘y[u]le’ = ‘restyle.
3. Strangely held up in the two places where 5- and 3-letter answers crosssed (6ac/7dn and 24dn/25ac). This wasn’t helped by guessing SECOND for 6ac (medals … cheap goods?). PIRATE has the double disadvantage of def-by-example and “at” as the link-word; and “Sophocles character” is a bit of a stretch to boot. Also: NAP seems odd for almost opposite reasons: the proximity of the defs. Surely the generalised meaning, much beloved of tabloid sports writers, derives from the bid of (all) five tricks in the card game itself?
   Had to check the dictionary to be sure that EMERSION had an astronomical meaning and only knew Baltimore was a port from addiction to The Wire! So 26 minutes all up; but including the dictionary check.
   1. I suppose there comes a point where a famous exemplar of a type, fictional or not, comes to be used to stand for the type itself. Does that mean we can expect Blackbeard, Hook and Kidd, and, those coming here in 50 years time, Sparrow? Is ‘Jack’ ever similarly used for giant?

      Agree about Sophocles – the setter just wanted to avoid using the word ‘Greek’.

   2. I think the “at” is the same “at” as in “at the races” at 22ac; to be interpreted as “next to” in a sense to be fully explained by some third person, I’m hoping. I can’t find a precise dictionary definition of it meaning exactly that; “at the table” maybe comes close or the example I used on Monday, “at knifepoint”. So, I’d read the construction as “next to very good(,) price”, with the question mark indicating the definition by example, albeit (as some here pointed out last week) not contiguous with said definition. Not that I’m defending anything here; this was my last in as well.

      At least I think we can assume “at” isn’t being used in the sense of a monetary unit in Laos, equal to 1/100 of a kip, or about 0.4 winks in our currency.

      1. I can’t find a context for “at” = “next to” either.
         Most of those I’ve consulted indicate otherwise.
         Cf: “at your house”; “next to your house”.
         1. >I can’t find a context for “at” = “next to” either

            At the checkout/till?
            At the entrance to the tunnel?
            At the back door?

      2. Perhaps “at very good price” is being used to define “pi rate” as an imagined adjectival phrase, in the same way that “of low quality” could be used as an alternative to “low quality” when defining “second rate”.
         1. An acceptable work-around in this case, perhaps, but that still leaves 22, where I can’t see it can be interpreted in any other way than “next to”.
            1. For that, my best offer is (from OED): Defining the point or part of a body where any thing is applied; hence, sometimes, hanging or attached by; sometimes defining more generally the side or direction on which the thing is, as ‘a dog at his heels,’ ‘the friend at your left hand’, to which you could add ‘seated at the right hand of the Father’.
               1. OK, you and Penfold combined have convinced me; I guess if I’d thought of “by” rather than “next to”, I wouldn’t have had so much of a problem with it. I did think of the door analogy, but in the context of “there’s someone at the door”, which is not the same thing as “the mat’s at the door”.
   3. You’re right about NAP, but does it matter? If you impose a rule that bans any use of two versions of the same definition in a double def clue, it does matter. If you take the pragmatic approach and ask whether the use of related defs can cause a serious problem like a convincing alternative answer, it seems not to matter (
      and the surface meaning is convincing).
4. Talking of aces, Mahut and Isner have managed a mere 193 so far in their titanic ten-hour duel in the sun.

   My failure to get HARTEBEEST (although I was working around heart and bee) meant I also cocked up the port, putting ELLESMORE (influence of St Helens yesterday?) and trusting to luck that ‘elles’ were exotic spices. This meant I popped the non-existent ‘emerison’ in for EMERSION – which, thankfully – otherwise it’s definitely time to give up – I had thought about. Good fare. COD to PIRATE.

5. One wrong and one not parsed. Discovered a new animal EARTHBEEST. Was convinced from early on that the anagram was EARTH and since the 2 checkers matched looked no further. FINISH way too devious for me.
   Much quicker than of late but not sure if much easier
6. I got through in about 15 minutes. Last entries were FINISH, which I didn’t understand, and INATTENTION, which I did. Everything else went in pretty easily. Easiest puzzle in a week or so.
   Thanks for the blog Uncle Yap. Others have already explained the -city thing. Didn’t know TEMPLE as a tube stop, wordplay only, similarly EMERSION. Regards to all.
7. see subject
8. For the blogger: 20 down should be “RESTYLE” – rest and 2nd of turkey missing from yule ie. xmas
9. Dismal: barbecue, canty (Scots lively?), earthbeest, nonconformist, rosette all grinning away in a pathetic attempt at a fast time. Reminds me of when my son aged about five got up before me and filled in the Times grid with random letters, informing me on my emergence the crossword was already done. Festina lente.
   1. I did have ‘barbecue’ for a bit, it is might tempting with a few crossing letters. Then I saw ‘sonny’ and had to erase it.
10. 75 minutes for the second consecutive day, the only improvement on yesterday being that I did it completely unaided though I hadn’t quite worked out all the wordplay before coming here.

    At 13ac I also pencilled in EARTHBEEST before remembering Flanders and Swann:

    Nor am I in the least
    Like that dreadful HARTEBEEST
    Oh g-no,g-no,g-no,
    I’m a g-nu.

    1. It’s a long time since I listened to the song, but I’m pretty sure I always heard that as ‘hearty beast’! The line I remember best is ‘Call me bison or okapi and I’ll sue’.

       Favourite bit of the wit of Michael Flanders: ‘Off to the airport, and you know you’re nearly there because you see this big notice saying “Beware low-flying aircraft”. There’s not a lot you can do about that, you know. Take your hat off?’

       1. Wonderful stuff! His lyric ‘Have Some Madeira, M’Dear’ introduced me to the figure of speech ‘zeugma’ and I’m hoping I shall be ready for it if it ever turns up in the Times crossword.
    2. Yes, Jack, I remember HARTEBEEST from that ditty. In fact, in my student days I went to see “At the drop of a hat” with Flanders and Swann at the Fortune Theatre.

       Incidentally, Michael Flanders is the father of Stephanie (of the BBC).

       Useless info, but interesting!

11. 12:50, ending up (I think) with FINISH and RESTYLE, both entered without full wordplay understanding.

    Temple is the answer to the quiz question “What is the only station name on both the London Underground and Paris Metro”.

    Beaten to it on quoting Flanders and Swann.

12. Most of this is excellent fare, an entertaining 20 minutes or so. It’s spoilt for me by Silver=PIRATE, a really bad definition by example and “Silver, perhaps, at a very good price” is just as good. The intersecting RHO is also poorly clued making for a very difficult NE corner. Apart from those and the perhaps questionable NAP the rest are very good.
    1. Jimbo: we’re in agreement for the first time in ages. Though you have the license to say “really bad” when I must say “disadvantage”. Ditto for RHO. What did you think of LABORATORY being other than the scientific version thereof?
       1. I wasn’t troubled by it, in fact pleased to see a bit of inventiveness and the combination with “British speaker” made for an interesting clue.

          We are slowly seeing greater use of words that have a scientific background. For example, I don’t recall seeing MARINE BIOLOGY before and it produces an excellent clue. I do hope other setters are taking note.

13. My solving today was interupted by the political turmoil in Canberra, but I may have struggled even without that. The top half proved more recalcitrant than the bottm, not helped by having LARRY (as in happy as) at 4d, which made 1 & 9 a bit tricky. Nap=winner was new to me; must be a Br. COD to the HARTEBEEST.
    1. A nap is a tipster’s best tip of the day, so technically, and typically, it’s not the actual winner. Hence ‘one likely to win’.
       1. Yep, never heard of it. I’m wondering if it’s used outside the UK at all? Maybe it’s because I don’t follow the horses. Hartebeests, now…
14. kororareka

    Sure enough, your favourite coin turned up in The Times crossword 22648 that was published in the Indian paper today!

    1. Just looked this one up in the club archive – it was published on 26 April 2004, so your puzzles are currently about 6 years and 2 months behind ours. Assuming the gap stays the same, you’ll be able to read (brief) reports from about February next year, when you get to 23,149.
    2. Prescient or what!
15. …and I did most of it very quickly, so I was quite confident of finishing. The corner of ‘finish’ and ‘restyle’ was the part I found hardest. As mentioned, ‘barbecue’ can tempt the careless solver, but it did not fool me for long.

    I didn’t mind ‘rho’ or ‘pirate’, but ‘nap’ was only a guess since I had not heard of any of the meanings used here.

16. I think one has to ask oneself just how far one is prepared to tolerate this sort of thing. How would you react to, say, “Lie” for mathematician?
    1. Sorry but that won’t do. Lie=MATHEMATICIAN (Sophus Lie, who I had to look up) is unsuitable for Times puzzles for the same reason as the plain synonym spleen=LIEN which justified by Chambers but would never be used in a Times puzzle. This says nothing useful about the validity of plain synonyms in clues, and {“Lie” for mathematician} says nothing useful about the validity of unindicated def by example.
       1. Such passion! Agreed, it wouldn’t do for me either but the point is how far can one push the boat out? The slow creep down this road may eventually arrive at Lie or Hope (another maths guy for you to Google) or many other such names from a huge diverse world.

          What you’ve said is that the line must be drawn somewhere. The trouble is that once you allow these things the line becomes blurred and tends to move over time.

          1. I think the Times setters and editor are pretty good at deciding what’s “reasonable general knowledge” and what’s hopelessly obscure. There’s always scope for dispute, but there are certainly some “lines” now drawn around much smaller areas than in the past – literature certainly, and probably classical history and mythology.

             Elsewhere a week or two ago, there was discussion of misleading use of French town names – “Nice cake = GATEAU” and the like. I suggested Lens (known in the UK mainly from football) as a possible misleading French town not yet used. Others thought it was a bit too obscure. I wonder whether the Times will ever use it?

          2. I await the day when the celebrated mathematical co-authors Katz & Baum appear, although their names almost invariably appear in reverse order for some reason, as in the Baum-Katz theorem!
17. Surely it’s “restyle” and 23 across is “nonconformity”.
    1. You might want to check the comments made at 2:37, 2:39, 2:41, 4:43 and 4:54.
18. 34 minutes. Thanks for the explanation of FI in FINISH: I could only come up with a tentative “Formal Inspection”.
19. Well, I feel pretty pleased with myself today! 11:50, and I was quite relieved to get a relatively easy one after a week of much tougher puzzles. Last one in was EMERSION, which I got from the wordplay as I hadn’t come across the specific meaning used here before.
20. This was a pleasant canter, untroubled by or oblivious to hurdles encountered by others. I liked the Silver pirate, which I have come across before and I momentarily had nonconformism before I realised there had to be a city there somewhere. Last in was lambaste and I see from Uncle Yap’s blog that I incorrectly parsed birdwatcher, not that it mattered. There were some good surfaces today including the anagram for Marine Biology.
21. 16:39, ending with an incorrect guess at 24dn (NIP for NAP).  Unknowns: LAMBASTE spelt thus (1ac), EMERSION (21ac), ALMERIA (2dn), and NAP in either sense.  HARTEBEEST (13ac) was unfamiliar, and I had trouble getting WILDEBEEST out of my head.

    9ac (MARINE BIOLOGY) is only a semi-&lit.: while the whole clue can be read as a definition of the answer, it can’t be read as wordplay leading to the answer.  But since it does include a self-sufficient definition that’s separate from the wordplay, it’s not what I like to call a botched &lit. and kinder souls prefer to call a partial &lit.

    “sea” did indeed feel a stretch for TIDE (8dn), and ROMANCE (17dn) is not a language but a family of languages (or, as a setter might prefer here, tongues).

    For me, much of the wordplay in this puzzle falls on the wrong side of a familiar divide, so it was never going to be a favourite.

    1. Romance is the old French vernacular language. Also an alternative spelling of Romansh
       1. These meanings of Romance are not given as a meanings in dictionaries unless you look in the OED (maybe the Shorter Oxford too). The first one is usually mentioned in the etymology. My understanding is that the etymology of words in a particular dictionary is not counted as fair game in the way as the meanings of words in the same dictionary. There is probably scope for exceptions inn barred-grid puzzles or when the etymology is well known. For me, this doesn’t apply to ‘Romance’, so strictly “The language of love” doesn’t quite cut the mustard as a double def, despite an alluring sruface reading.
22. c25 minutes but like Barry I carelessly went for earthbeest. Proving that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing I justified it from knowing that the literal translation of the german for aardvark is earthhorse.

    COD to marine biology.

    1. Not quite correct:
       Aardvark -> Erdferkel -> ‘Earthpiglet’
       Horse <-> Pferd
23. This was the reverse of yesterday for me. I started very slowly, then when I had about one quarter of the grid filled, the distribution of letters helped me to get remaining answers quite quickly. 30 minutes in all.
    1 and 9 stood out for me as particularly good. For a while I was very tempted to write BARBECUE for 1, like someone above, when I had _A_B_ _ _ E, even though I couldn’t see how the wordplay yielded that. LAMBASTE and SONNY were my last in.

    I wondered whether ‘Silver’ is adequate for PIRATE. Is Long John Silver ever referred to as just ‘Silver’ in the book?
    I also had doubts about ‘Sophocles’ without an apostrophe. I suppose the proper noun could be taken adjectivally, though that is usually ‘Sophoclean’.

    1. Silver: apparently he is. Try a search for ‘silver’ here, though the lower case results make it tricky to distinguish between the pirate and other meanings.
24. Like linxit, I enjoyed this just as much as yesterday’s but couldn’t match his magical time! Well done! Another 45 minutes for me.

    Made steady progress from LAMBASTE to finish on, appropriately and unsurprisingly FINISH.

    The time was taken through understanding the clues, not in solving them. COD to MARINE BIOLOGY.

25. Time – 11.10, After some struggles this week everything fell into place quite well today despite wanting to put BARBECUE (sic) at 1 having three checking letters. Also must admit my ignorance that I would have ventured LAMBAST in a spelling contest. Smiled at the topical ACES and took a bit too long to get my own location at 8.
26. Blimey! first time I’ve seen a second page
    1. Yes but it’s a shame it doesn’t roll over to page two sooner instead of hiding some comments on page one. Dreadful system.
       1. The hiding seems to start when we have about 40 comments and page 2 when we get to about 50. I’ve looked for LJ options that might change this but found nothing.
27. I thought this was going to be an absolute shocker when I only managed about 6 clues on my tube ride. Coming back to it after a busy morning I finished it in about 10 minutes. Funny how that can happen.
    I didn’t see the wordplay for FINISH (thank you), and didn’t know EMERSION or NAP in the betting sense. Otherwise quite straightforward – the second time around.
    As mctext indicates, no-one who’s seen series 2 of The Wire could possibly forget that Body-more Murdaland is a port.
28. About 70 minutes broken through the day with RESTYLE going in last and FINISH not understood.
    Patted myself on the back for leaving the start of the Beestie blank and looking for checking letters. I liked Laboratory – they are always language labs to me.
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