Times 24656 – Fair to Middling

39 comments on “Times 24656 – Fair to Middling”

1. 20ac: sounds like “swayed”.
   26ac: the service is “ace” inc N.

   16 minutes today and quite a lot of fun. Agree with Uncle Yap that 12 is excellent. It’s perhaps a reason for the existence of the cryptic def — which I do not like at all. That is: 12 looks like a cd, and there couldn’t really be any other clue type to provide the distraction.

   20ac is harder than it looks. It’s homophonic at first sight, OK: but then the possibilities for “kid” and “wasn’t still” are endless.

2. Minor point but Carlisle is not in Scotland but is south of the border.
   1. Did anyone say it was?
3. ewes …sounds like ‘use’ EXERCISE
4. 11 ACROSS Locke(d) minus ‘D’ not ‘E’
5. 20 Across Homophone of ‘swayed’ “wasn’t still”
   ‘picked up by the ears’ probably the homophohe indicator
6. Thanks to Yap Suk for the blog, which helped me make sense of KING-SIZE and PERCHANCE. Bamboozled by the unknown ‘jounce’, which I had to look up – three other fine clues (for AFFLUTTER, PERCHANCE and SLEEPYHEAD) also required aids. Stuck ‘starboard’ in too hurriedly at 18ac and paid the price. Ended with 20ac; even with just 11 five-letter words to choose from at crosswordpuzzlehelp.com, I still managed to plump for the wrong one (‘Steve’). That sort of day.
7. … apart from the Q and the X. I have one of my usual fixes for the latter but not the former.
8. 26 minutes for a fairly easy one; a bit of a sleepyhead. I don’t like 12 so much for the slightly unnatural ‘drooping buyer’. No clue leaps out as scintillating. Honest; a little less cunning than the ideal.
9. thank you for a great blog and a great puzzle
10. Did G Singh say great puzzle???
    It grated me.
11. After yesterday’s failure (albeit hurried – like trying to sprint up a mountain) did rather better with this but only finished courtesy of an unintentional cheat. Had SUDCREVIC (crevice being my inlet) and SPOONBILL for my bird. This left only 9d to do with ?V?U?S?R. On checking dictionary for sudcrevic I came across SUDORIFIC and the others fell consequently. Anyway, I thought a flute player was a flautist (or flutist across the pond) unless his name is Phil?
    1. I don’t think dictionary verification is required for wordplay components. If they can make up “flower”=river, why not “fluter”?

       For what it’s worth, “fluter” is in Collins as a folk music synonym for “flautist” (which seems to match Phil), or in Chambers as the rather unhelpful “fluter, n.” under “flute”.

12. I was troubled a bit by this one – it took me 13:27. I didn’t know ‘jounce’ so although it occurred to me I waited for other letters to match.

    I’m pleased to see I was right in guessing that Josh Billings was a real person, not a made-up name. I didn’t remember Bull Run as a battle name.

    Like jackkt I thought this was an interesting and quite challenging puzzle rather than “fair to middling”, though I wonder whether that’s meant to sound as damning as it seems.

    Solved 1D the wrong way, seeing the “tin” inside JUST IN CASE and not seeing that it clashed with Justine.

    1. 6:35 for me, Peter. (I gloat! 😉

       I decided to split this week’s puzzles in two, with three before Sunday lunch and three after, and was quite pleased with the way this one, the first of the post-lunch puzzles, went. I made a good start as knew JOUNCE, and also had no difficulty with SCHMUCK, remembering Leo Rosten’s story from The Joy of Yiddish (reflecting the original meaning of “s(c)hmuck”), which someone has reproduced (with minor adjustments) here.

       See you at Cheltenham.

13. This is the third really lively and interesting puzzle this week. After 50 minutes I had all but 9dn, 10ac and 20ac in place and I had to return two or three times later to solve them without aids. Once the F from AFLUTTER went in there could only be one answer at 10ac where I had been convinced I would need to cheat, so I was pleased about that.

    I would not have known 1ac but for reading quite recently Simon Gray’s “The Year of the Jouncer”, a volume in his “Smoking Diaries” series.

    Thomas Carlyle came to mind easily as I spent my first night on Scottish soil in his birthplace, Ecclefechan.

    Didn’t know THORN as an OE letter, but then I’m not aware that I know any OE letters.

    Thanks to the setter.

    1. The others to watch out for are: ash, eth, yogh and wynn.
    2. Thorn and eth are two OE letters that we really should have kept – they represent the two different sounds of “th”. Thorn (Þ,þ) is the one that was imitated by “y”, leading to all that “Ye Olde” nonsense. In Icelandic, where both are still used, thorn as in Þingvellir is the th in “thigh”, and eth (Ð,ð) is the th in “thy”. As the use of thorn for “the” suggests, the distinction between the two sounds inOld English was less clearly represented by spelling.
14. ..got stuck for an additional 7 minutes on my last in, ‘suede’, so 32 minutes for me. I filled in most of the grid fairly rapidly before getting stuck in the NW. I was thinking of the Greek word for sweat, hidris, rather than the Latin sudor, before laboriously working it out from the cryptic. I also wanted to put in ‘jostle’ or ‘jaunty’, and only thought of ‘jounce’ very late.

    At least I was on the setter’s wavelength for most of the puzzle, and put in quite a few answers quickly from the cryptic alone. That’s why I was hoping for a quick solve, but you usually get stuck at the end when that happens. I just did not understand the clue for ‘suede’, went through the alphabet, got it from the literal, and only then understood it.

    I agree with Peter, this is quite a good puzzle with a lot of clever wordplay.

15. 28 minutes. Thought the anagram clues at 12, 21 and 7 very neat.
    1. I’m not sure if non-UK solvers will realise why 7 is particularly clever: “rich tea” is the name of a rather boring kind of biscuit, so dry as almost to be a cracker in itself.
16. Another 28 min solve, with no aids today 🙂
    Unusually, I had the complete bottom half filled in – except for 20ac, which was eventually my last one – before a single penny dropped in the top half. It didn’t help that I kept being distracted by trying to remember the Jellicle poem!
17. 13:18 here, so a rare victory over PB by a few seconds. No real problems getting any of the answers, although some of them took quite a bit of working out from the wordplay for confirmation.
18. Ran out of time again, so couldn’t finish it. I didn’t know about old English characters, so learnt something very interesting today, and isn’t that half the fun of these cryptics.
19. The thing that registered with me on this one, completed in 19 minutes, was the quantity and quality of lifting and separating that had to be done, starting with Jellicle cat in 1ac and Indian hymn in 23d. Clever cluing, I guess, as others have noted, sending you off down dusty memory pathways in search of GK you think you might have, but actually don’t need here. I liked the “soundalike” indicators “vocal exercise” and “picked up by the ears” for pretty much that reason.
    One of these days I’ll get round to composing a puzzle where every definition is more usually a cryptic indicator, so my CoD is PERCHANCE (possibly!)
20. A mostly straightforward 40 minutes, which came as a bit of light relief after yesterday’s extended travails, though with one wrong (a hideously incorrect stab at STEVE for 20ac, for want of anything better to go in there.)

    The SE corner and 8d took half of that time alone, with 8d last to fall. I must also admit having to consult a map to get 3d, my brain having refused to register any Scottish place names.

    1. And just to prove my point about being ignorant of geography, I seem to have claimed that Carlisle is in Scotland. Blushes…
21. 17:30 .. much enjoyed again and a fair challenge on the vocabulary and general knowledge fronts.

    COD SUEDE, where the image made me laugh.

22. 15 min 30 sec today so reasonable. Wasted a bit of time on 1ac thinking it must be jostle, after that none-too-well-known cat the ostle. I know a family of Ostles but they were people. Overall avery enjoyable puzzle.
23. 18m.
    I liked this a lot: much better than fair to middling for me.
    After a run of puzzles with very few there were a number of unknowns in here for me: the battle of BULL RUN, JOUNCE, SUDORIFIC and also THORN, although I did a bit of Old English at university so really should have known that.
24. After 45 mins or so I had all but 20ac (eventually my last in) and a group of four in the NW (1ac, 2, 3, 10), which took about another 25 mins.

    I was convinced that 1ac was JUDDER, that 2 must therefore be DUE-E, and that there might be a Scottish historian named ERSKYNE or similar. Once I saw UNDUE the rest came together and I was eventually very pleased to finish unaided.

25. 16 minutes, a bit of a mixed solve with a few going in not understanding the wordplay (THORNBILL, ARGUE, KING-SIZE – after giggling a bit at another 4-4 possibility that would have fit the definition, is there a Halpern at work?, LEADING ON), SUDORIFIC where I needed the wordplay, and SUEDE and CARLYLE which we’ve seen before recently, so went in from hive memory.

    Really liked 12

26. Although this is relatively easy it always maintains ones interest with a collection of good clues. 20 minutes to solve. Both JOUNCE and SUDORIFIC felt knew to me, both solved direct from wordplay. 12A is certainly economic, what a pity that the surface reading doesn’t make sense which detracts a little. All the homophones seem to work so thank you setter for an enjoyable stroll.
27. 12:46 Needed all the checking letters to guess at the unknown SUDORIFIC and fortunately got 1d quickly which led to the other unknown, JOUNCE (which was a neat clue I thought). The CARLYLE clue is particularly apposite as he was born a few miles north of the town in Ecclefechan which is also near the Solway Firth. Frequent drives up and down the M74 past the signpost proclaiming this have this fact firmly embedded in my mind. I saw a similar clue for ARCHED in the past few weeks although can’t recall in which puzzle it was.
28. A very enjoyable, challenging puzzle, far better than “fair to middling”: that description is patronising to the setter, who deserves something much better than this! Completed in 30 minutes.

    I should have solved SUDORIFIC much quicker, having seen it elsewhere recently: same applies to SARK. CODs to AFLUTTER, EWES and SUEDE for their amsement qualities!

    When was the battle of BULL RUN fought?

    1. First time round: July 21, 1861
       Second time round: August 28–30, 1862
       1. Only by the North; the Confederacy fought the Battle of Manassas.

          But, as you know, the winners get to write the history books.

          1. Thanks, chaps!
29. After just scraping through, I am not sure if I enjoyed this or not, but somehow I managed to finish it correctly with a number of what can only be called lucky guesses: JOUNCE (and OUNCE the cat), CARLYLE, THORNBILL, SCARPERED were all new to me, and SUDORIFIC was of course solved only via the wordplay (as was SLEEPYHEAD, so I guess I am one), while there were a number of clues for which I didn’t understand the wordplay at all. But I seem to have a good feeling for extending the English language correctly beyond my own narrow bounds. CODs to UNDUE (despite my mathematical background, it took me a while to realize that cardinal=number) and CRIBBAGE (for the ambiguous usage of Josh).

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