Times 24638: ye olde japananglais

42 comments on “Times 24638: ye olde japananglais”

1. …I was very dubious about ‘ratbag’, never having encountered the word.

   I agree the wordplay for ‘curio’ is very obscure’, but ‘goalie’, ‘picante’, and ‘Russell’ are not far behind. I put in quite a few from the definitions where could, that’s a lot easier. I got ‘two-a-penny’, ‘wool-gathering’, and ‘Good King Henry’ that way.

2. A fraught 35 min, and had to get an assist with the GOOD KING HENRY. CURIO is a rev of Royal Ulster Constabulary + Input/Output “reading in PC” (into would have been better).COD: Goalie. Had me fooled for some time. As did bunging in interrupt instead of interject. This took ages to sort out. On reflection quite a testing little intermediate level number.
   1. Thanks – I was really struggling to piece that one together, looked up RU but didn’t see RUC. Added it as an edit to the blog.
   2. There’s not much I find obscure in crosswords, but I still have no idea how “input/output” is “reading in(to) PC”!
      1. A computer’s input/output(IO) system is the hardware that imports and exports data. PCs usually input(read) via magnetic/optical/solid- state/telecom medium, and export(write) to the same or to a printer. They are all IO.
3. Hi there. Nice blog George. About 25 minutes ending with RATBAG, which I would not have been surprised to find incorrect. I saw the CURIO wordplay, but the GOALIE went in from definition alone. COD to AGLITTER, for the surface reading, very smooth. Regards to all.
4. Laboured wordplay and meaningless surfaces, I found this about as appetising as eating cold gray lumpy mashed potato.

   At 24ac “police” may be RUC, but I can’t account for the I.

5. I agree with the verdict of our anonymous poster: this felt like hard labour. Got through it in 64 minutes but with question marks against a trio of 5-letter words, TEMPO, AMASS and CURIO. Thanks to all concerned for the explanations. Light among the darkness provided by TONTO and the man between the sticks at 20dn.

   George, glad to see you’ve kept the run of 90s indie references going.

6. 12:23, so racking up the difficulty a bit. I struggled at first because I thought of barking DIN,GOES at 1A. Removed when 3D took over from 11A as the place for today’s confessional I’M…. answer. 5, 17, 21, 27, 2, 7, 14, 18, 19 all entered some distance short of complete wordplay understanding.

   I thought a few surfaces were poor by Times standards, or hard to detect – at 23D it was far harder to find the meaning of “Do well’s Roman figures” that made sense of the clue than the one that had to be the answer.

   1. Thank god I went for ROWDIES for 1 ac as my first in. If I had plumped for your equally valid dingoes, I would never have recovered. There can be few pairs of possible solutions which are so unquestionably right, and when this occurs at 1 ac!.
   2. I was trying to work ‘ll’ into the answer for some time.
7. Finding RATBAG and STONE ME in the same puzzle I rather suspect the setter may be a fan of the late Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock as these were two of his favourite expressions.
   1. I really enjoyed this one for its quirkiness. It’s nice to have a lively one for a change and I enjoyed the Hancock references whether they were intentional or not.

      But unfortunately I took 50 minutes to complete it as after 30 I was stuck with four that just wouldn’t come to me.

      The first of these to fall was CURIO which I solved from the definition and worked backwards. I should have spotted RUC for ‘old police’ because this came up in a puzzle I blogged some while ago and I remember posting something about them being disbanded. I couldn’t explain IO other than knowing there are often I and O symbols on On/Off switches as this was something also discussed in a previous blog and it might have been relevant to PCs.

      AMASS went in next. I’ve no idea what the problem was here.

      The main delay was at the intersection RIPSTOP and PICANTE. I got the ‘preventing ladders’ idea but I was fixated on ‘run’ as being the (usually American) alternative to that sort of ladder. Eventually I spotted CAN for ‘preserve’ in 6dn and its PIE crust and RIPSTOP fell too as my last in. I think I may always have assumed that PICANTE is the same as ‘piquant’ but it seems not to be so.

      Never heard of GOOD KING HENRY but I enjoyed working it out from the wordplay.

8. My reading of this is old = O police = RUC (reversed) with I being “read in”, i.e. enclosed. Otherwise, there seems no provision for the ‘old’ in the clue. Just how “PC perhaps” = I, though, I have no idea, unless it refers to ‘input’, as mentioned above.
   1. I note on Googling that the RUC is no more, has ceased to exist. Appropriately enough, a victim of PC – in the other sense.
      1. Not at all the victim of “PC” – a necessary reform I think.
9. Besides buggering up the parsing of CURIO, I had a fair bit of trouble with this one, needing to resort to aids on 4.5 clues and to the blog on one more(IN YER FACE, where I was working around an anagram including ‘one’ not ‘ace’). I enjoyed this quirky and eclectic offering – as a (non-Welsh) member of a Welsh male voice choir, COD to 10ac.
10. ALmost an hour here (56′) with a slow start on the obvious (e.g., IM-PAST-O). Then, with a few checking letters in the grid, looking at what appeared to be all sorts of obscurities — like HUSSERL? at 27ac, usw.
    Still reading across to 28ac, we get another philosopher: Stone Me is the title of the book subtitled The Wit and Wisdom of Keith Richards. Well worth the price of admission.
    COD to GOALIE for the musical misdirection.
    And note to George (if you’re still up): you need WO,APE — WO for “without”.
11. Tough as nails – 30 minutes in three short stints. RIPSTOP and the plant were unknowns but workable. GOALIE was fiendishly defined and my CoD. I thought “Engrave” at 21 was a bit on the mean edge of fair, and the inclusion of several – shall we call them – jocular phrases was a bit in yer face, with or without hyphens. Like others, couldn’t make sense of curio, though I spotted the RUC once I’d decided on CURIO as an answer. A hard solve for me rather than an enjoyable one, where it paid to be extra sceptical about surfaces, even the ones that didn’t make sense.
12. 30 minutes. Well I enjoyed this one. Thought some of the clues cheeky (in yer face?), but they gave me a chuckle, and brought back memories of “the lad himself”, as they did for jackkt. (Dear oh dear! Stone the crows!)

    I once grew Good King Henry when I was trying some of the more obscure vegetables from A.G. Hellyer’s “The Amateur Gardner”. Can’t say it was worth the effort; I’ll stick to spinach.

13. I really enjoyed this crossword.. about 25mins here, much of it spent trying to understand the wordplay having written in the answer. Helped by having Good King Henry on the allotment but hindered by much preferring “ten a penny” to “two a penny.” Why do things by halves?
14. Firmly put in my place by this one! Glad I came here to be rescued rather than persevere (thank you to blogger and other contributors). All of Peter’s list gave me difficulties. One redeeming feature: I did get CURIO and for the right reasons …
15. Glad to see others also found this one harder than yesterday’s. I knew GOOD KING HENRY, but after 30m I still had 6 answers missing and one clearly wrong. With some help from my Franklin I eventually finished it in 43m, although still without understanding CURIO – thanks for the explanation!
16. 29 minutes. Some of this was a bit clunky but I enjoyed it a lot, probably because it was pitched at a level that I found challenging but perfectly doable and where there were things I didn’t know (and there were a few) I was able to get them from wordplay. I particularly enjoyed piecing together GOOD KING HENRY.
    I didn’t fully understand the wordplay for CURIO (got the RUC bit but not I/O) and GOALIE (nice clue) was my last in so this corner held me up a bit. I also struggled a bit in the NW because I was convinced 11ac would start with IM which stopped me getting RATBAG for a while.
17. Incidentally was I alone in wishing 12ac had been clued by reference to the way a child might say “Monk”?
    There would have been complaints but I’d have chuckled.
    1. I fink wiv all the gor blimey stuff in the crossword, the setter might well have got away with it by some sort of internal reference. In yer face indeed!
18. 27:18 .. a struggle. Last in INTERJECT.
19. I thought this was a splendid puzzle and one George that I definitely wouldn’t have let a phonecall interrupt – unless it was from my good ladywife! Struggled to within six of the finish but with my ignorance of plants and philosophers was never going to finish. I thought the last word of GOOD KING HENRY might be HONEY (substance that’s sticky!)

    Miffed at not getting AGLITTER because I remember the word and same/similar clue appearing here before.

    Couple of queries:

    – Are the double quotes around Engrave in 21 significant?; and
    – WHO WAS WHO – I’ve never heard of this phrase – is it a reference to the Who’s Who book?

    1. Who’s Who deals only with live bait. Who Was Who was started many years ago by the same publishers to fill the gap.
       I think the inverted commas are only there to try to make the clue a bit easier for you by hinting that it is not the normal meaning of the word we are looking for. Didn’t work for me..
       1. Thanks for your reply jerrywh.
20. I don’t know how long I spent on this, but it wasn’t far off an hour. There were plenty of obscurities here, as has been pointed out. I didn’t really like the puzzle as a whole. First there was the very outdated proper noun, TONTO, when there are several other words that would have fitted. The clue’s surface wasn’t up to much either, while I had to struggle to make any sense of the surface of 23. In 24 the setter’s gone for obscure wordplay at the expense of a decent surface, and there are several other clues with infelicities in the surface (2, 5ac, 5dn, 9, 17, 21). The only ones I thought neat were 1 ac and 28.
21. No time today, as I finished off the last 8 or 9 in dribs and drabs after my lunchtime, but a definite step up in difficulty from the past couple of days. 2d and 8d I didn’t understand for far too long after solving, and 11ac at the last defeated me (AWAYS, anybody?)

    I stymied myself on 17ac for ages with my certainty that the plant must end in HONEY…

    COD 10ac, naturally!

22. Struggled with this for 55 minutes: I thought it was rather boring and was glad to finish. Seems I was not alone!

    Liked the Hancock references: COD to GOALIE – very sweet!

23. Still not sure about the PC reference in 24ac [my last in]. My [computer illiterate] wife suggested that 1/0 is the whole basis of the binary system. I don’t know enough to say yea or nay.
    1. What you wife suggests is perfectly true, but the binary system is more to do with the computer’s central processing unit and the calculations done in/by it, which makes a connection with “in PC” but doesn’t account for the “reading” part. Input/output has various links with “reading” – an old form of input was a “card reader” (and probably “tape reader” too), and various forms of output give the user “readings”. So I’d class “1/0 = binary” as ingenious thinking but a near miss.
24. Is not 16 AG (symbol for silver) + LITTER (paper on the ground)?

    This was a bit of a teeth-gnasher. It was not helped by my putting “HONEY” for HENRY, misled by the sticky substance and the crossing letters.

25. 27 minutes. I was also in the HONEY camp , never having heard of the plant. Also not helped by Having Ten instead if Two at 9. Wordplay for GOALIE had me deceived for a good while.
    Last struggle was with 1d and 11 which was last in. I had considered ROTTER (River Otter) for 1d for a combination of bad reasons.
    Felt I should have been a bit sharper today and although I think a couple of the clues were a bit iffy I did think 20 and 21 were both very good
26. Unlike john-from-lancs I still grow Good King Henry. In fact I have a whole bed of it and I use it as a staple food. It is perennial, nothing eats it, and it has no oxalix acid (unlike spinach) and lots of useful iron and vitamin C. Sometimes called Lincolnshire spinach, or Mercury. Recommended.

    Conrad C.

    1. On the strength of your recommendation I’ll give it another go next season.
27. 21:29, and yes, a bit of a slog.  The last 3½ mins went on 11ac (AMASS), mostly because I’d rashly put ROTTER for the unknown RATBAG (1dn).  Other unknowns were RIP as a rogue, RIPSTOP (5ac), the easily guessable FELONIOUS (12ac), GOOD KING HENRY (17ac), TONTO (25ac), and “Well I never did” instead of simply “Well I never” (28ac STONE ME).  WHO WAS WHO (2dn) was unfamiliar.

    I liked “Engrave” for INTER (21ac INTERJECT), which I think would have tickled Poe.

    Clue of the Day: 16dn (AGLITTER).

    1. I had thought that ‘rips’ and ‘rakes’ were both synonyms for ‘tears into, dresses down, carpets’.
28. Found this not a little tough. 38 minutes. Don’t care for w/o for without; the implication of Welsh backwardness; the ‘reading in PC’ for IO; ‘do well’s Roman figures’. Quite liked clue for Goalie.

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