Times 24,660 Lady Brett Meets Salome

62 comments on “Times 24,660 Lady Brett Meets Salome”

1. 7:22 – a notch or two harder than yesterday, but still pretty straightforward. I’m giving myself a brownie point for caution at 4D, where I saw ACROBATS maybe fitting the def., but couldn’t see the wordplay so wrote nothing. Likewise (but more importantly) LIME GREEN at 27A.

   For “once” in 5D, see the ODE def, or wikipedia in much more detail.

   1. Um, Peter, were you being a tad over-cautious? ACROBATS is right, no?
      1. Yes, it’s right – but if you don’t know why it’s right, it’s a dangerous gamble from a single checking letter and a def. that could mean ACROBATS but seemingly could mean many other things. Any time I lost from not putting it in on first look was easily regained by not putting in LIME GREEN.
   2. I read a similar wikipedia entry on Ireland before commenting and still cannot get the ‘once’. Even the file you link to writes that the country joined the EEC as Éire and is still referred to by that name.
      1. I read the same Wiki piece when writing the blog and can’t see the relevance of “once”. Eire is also the name of the language and both are still used as far as I know.
         1. Name of the language? I’m sure that’s wrong. It’s “the name for Ireland in the Irish language …” – Eire is to Ireland as Suomi is to Finland.
            1. Yes, got my knickers in a bit of a twist there. Trying to say something about Gaelic being official language but made a right mess of it!!
      2. I guess the key sentence is:

         “Today, for all official purposes, including in international treaties and other legal documents, where the language of the documents is English, the Irish government uses the name Ireland.”

         So, the Times crossword being mainly in English, “Eire” is to some extent obsolete.

         1. A bit thin I think, Peter

            The other day we had some Latin defined as “in Rome” with no indication of obsolescence. Today we have an in my view unnecessary and I suspect inaccurate reference. Funny old world.

            1. Unnecessary maybe, but not inaccurate. The Guardian and Times style guides both seem to agree, with the Times one explicitly saying “do not use except in historical context”.
               1. As an Irishman I concur. “Eire” is defintely old hat for “Ireland” in the context specified. Tho’ were the definition itself “Ireland” it would be OK I think. I have to say though that the clue as worded suggests to me an ex-member of the EU.
                  1. As a crossword solver, I’m happy to have to work out whether “part of EU once” = (a) an old name for an EU country, or (b) a name for an ex-member.
         2. But with Eire as well as Ireland having been written on the country’s EU nameplate since 2007, this does seem wrong – unless there’s another explanation.
            1. “Eire” is on the nameplate presumably because it is the Irish for the name of the country. But “Eire” is not the official EU name of the country, which I think is what the clue is driving at.
2. This was impossible for me, I got manse and mortal, and gave up.
   Great to read the blog and get it all explained.
   1. Do keep trying, and keep reading the blog. You only have to get one more clue each day..
      1. Oh, yes, I won’t give up. Yesterday I thought I was really getting the hang of it, today put me back in my place; nothing wrong with that.
   2. Did you work out the omitted answers?
      1. Yes, no problem with those.
         The way I do it when I get stuck, is to sneak a few baffling ones from the blog and then solve the rest, once I have some crossing letters, I often see the light.
3. Plumped for the hidden TIGON and have to confess to post-solve dictionary check for the word CARUSER meaning driver (until penny dropped with a resounding clatter). Otherwise fairly routine solve a tad trickier than yesterday. COD to CANNIBAL for the scrumptious “fellow consumer”.
4. About average difficulty for me, just under 20 mins. I swear I’ve seen barcarole several times this year (though not necessarily in the daily cryptic each time).
   I liked “cannibal” too.
5. Enjoyed the 34m I spent on this this morning. Though I had the devil of a time on the SW corner — for reasons that don’t seem so obvious on reflection.
   Could this extract from the Wik sort out the “once” in5dn?
   “In Ireland, the term Member of Parliament can refer to the members of the pre-1801 Irish House of Commons of the Parliament of Ireland. It can also refer to Irish members elected to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1922”.
   So the once refers forwards and not back?
   Just a guess; always happy to be wrong. It’s good for the soul.

   1. I’m not going to say you’re wrong but that really would be arcane.
      1. Just possibly it’s there because we’ve all learned that an Irish Member of Parliament is a TD (Teachta Dála).
6. 54 minutes for this enjoyable old-fashioned offering, replete with Biblical, ecclesiastical, Classical and of course cricketing references. Was held up at 27 ac, where I had ‘pale’ rather than LIME green on the basis that pal and duck are both “Cockney” terms of endearment. The errant ‘p’ prevented me from seeing AIRMEN for a while. Last in 1 ac, a splendidly deceptive clue – enough to do for me, at any rate, who wrote ‘watchface’ (where I construed ‘face’ as ‘taking action to provide protection’, which won’t, I see now, parse). More familiar with ‘piratical’ than PIRATIC, and had never heard of the monstrous TIGON (or its alternative ‘tiglon’, for that matter). The things people will get up to …

   Fail to see the significance of the ‘once’ in 5dn too.

7. David’s refrain over his dead son Absalom has been put to music by a number of composers. Here it is in a beautiful setting by Thomas Tomkins, which I sang as a treble – but not so well.
8. 18 minutes (measured by stations – felt like and may have been longer). My d’oh hold-up was in 1d, where I confidently put in RESEW on an only slightly mangled reading of the clue. I thought 16 a bit dodgy, until I realised that the WOLF bit was the two legged variety. Mind you, there are some pretty ferocious girl gangs round here. Last in was LASS, because I expected it to be LISA. CoD for CANNIBAL, though I thought everything after the first two words could have been replaced by a question mark for an even better clue.
9. 45 minutes plus another 5 looking for alternatives to EMPIRE as I couldn’t fully justify the wordplay (because of ‘once’) and didn’t know it as a synonym for ‘sway’. Unless we’re all missing something ‘once’ is both dodgy and superfluous so I can’t imagine why it was included.

   MANSE turned up somewhere only the other day so was in my mind.

10. Moderately tricky this: 28m. I was mostly slowed down by failing to see how wordplay worked and several went in from the definition. I was also a bit thick on a couple, failing to understand TIGON because I was thinking of the wrong sort of cross, and hesitating on WOLF until finally deciding that it must be a reference to Little Red Riding Hood.
    1. I thought wolf=ladykiller a bit feeble too, since although there are lots of stories of wolves killing unfortunate troika passengers (and Grandmother in Riding Hood) it seemed weird as a definition. I think it goes with what others in this journal have called a slightly old fashioned feel and is the Terry Thomas type character, always on the prowl for available females
       1. You may be right about T-T but from memory I don’t recall him attempting many conquests in his film roles. But Leslie Phillips would be another matter altogether!
          1. Dictionary confirmation in the 2nd meaning here
          2. Oh I say, ding dong! Probably the quintessential wolf, though T-T played the role pretty well in School For Scoundrels
11. Was thrown into disarray in the SW corner by confidently putting chic (as in chic(k)) for 17ac.
    Can someone help me with what is probably a crossword staple – why is “See” in 19dn “V”? I figured that valley was probably the answer, but the V baffled me.
    Thanks!
    1. v short for vide
12. 30 minutes. 12 across brought to mind Denis Norden on the radio panel-game “My Music”, who, when asked what he knew of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, replied “Barcarole”.
13. Enjoyed this more than yesterday’s. The difference between a one-two-clunk approach to setting clues (admittedly with smooth-running surface readings), and something coming at you from all angles. 26 minutes. COD 3 for the clever use of words. (V = vide = “see” = “refer to” in footnotes of learned articles.)
    1. @ isabelq – many thanks. Ah, it’s a learned article thing? No wonder I had no idea… 🙂
14. ….finally entering ‘airmen’, ‘nile green’, and ‘tigon’ without full understanding. Then I saw the cryptic to ‘nile green’ and was confident I had finished correctly.

    ‘Barcarole’ was another one that threw me – I thought ‘about’ = ‘c’, so couldn’t understand how ‘grumble’ = ‘bar’, although what the answer must be is evident.

    I do find this style of puzzle easier. I just play around with the words until I find something that fits. A puzzle full of double definitions and cryptic definitions is what delays me.

15. Apropos nothing at all, if you have never tried a Mephisto but have thought about having a go, look at this week’s offering. There is not much obscurity, and I found it easier than Saturday’s cryptic.
    1. Hmm, you’d better be right then. I tried it last week for the first time and vowed never again. Anything that takes Peter Biddlecombe 90 minutes is a step too far for me.
       1. Anon is correct. Mephisto 2614 was the easiest for some time. The blog will appear next Sunday
          1. I’ve been too busy to develop my incipient Mephisto skills in recent weeks but if the last one is that easy (for which read incredibly difficult but just within reach of mortals) I’ll have to find the time to have a pop!
       2. I found last week’s impossible – I think I solved one clue – but finished this week’s in a bit over an hour. I always find Mike Laws’ puzzles the most friendly, but this week’s is unusually so.
16. 45 minutes entertaining minutes, though with quite a few of those worried that this was going to turn into another stinker! My first in was 22ac, which does nothing to boost your confidence, then gradually worked my way up the RHS and across anticlockwise!

    Couldn’t for the life of me get beyond WATCH…. for far too long, and was also caught out by a couple of abbreviations I didn’t recognise (B=born, AC = Air Conditioning).

    17ac and 5d entered without fully understanding the wordplay.

    COD for me 13d, with 11ac a close second.

17. A struggle for me. At 6, I was quite prepared to believe Ireland was no longer a member of the EU; the problem I did have was empire=sway. Anyway, COD to CANNIBAL.
18. 22:28 .. excellent stuff, apart from the peculiar EMPIRE, where that ‘once’ had me, like others, wondering what I was missing.

    CAROUSER and CANNIBAL both got a smile, but today’s X-Factor winner is the German boy band WOLFGANG – fantastic surface.

19. 14 minutes, last in WOLFGANG, add my vote to CANNIBAL as a terrific clue, particularly since I got it by scribbling INN, LIB and CA backwards and then saw it and laughed.

    Did not know WESER but it had to be that from the wordplay. Everything else seemed to go in with full understanding, must be having a lucid morning.

    1. It’s possibly one of the lesser known German rivers but I first heard of it aged about 7 in this verse by Robert Browning:

       Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,
       By famous Hanover city;
       The river Weser, deep and wide,
       Washes its wall on the southern side;
       A pleasanter spot you never spied;
       But, when begins my ditty,
       Almost five hundred years ago,
       To see the townsfolk suffer so
       From vermin, was a pity.

       It’s from The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

20. A very nice puzzle, not too difficult, but certainly not easy, completed in 35 minutes.

    The long down clues were first in, which opened up both sides. From there, I just went round anti-clockwise with few hold-ups. Joint COD to CAROUSER and CANNIBAL for amusement content!

21. Tackled this late at night so a rather slow time, 48 minutes. Good fun though, with some clever misdirections and lot of wit, particularly in the SE corner.
22. 9:12 Another fairly smooth ride although didn’t get the wordplay for NILE GREEN. 7 was one of these clues where the first word and the (8,7) gave it away immediately (being a Brit helps). Also got 2 quickly , I always firstly think of The Sun when I see newspaper in a Times puzzle given the ownership connection , and I read most of Hemingway in the dim past. Last in BARCAROLE where I had more trouble with the wordplay.
    Thought 16 was a good clue.
23. 23 inspired me to check up and discover that a TIGON is the offspring of a tiger and a lioness, whereas a LIGER is the offspring of a lion and a tigress. You never know when this information might come in handy…
24. I see lots of private badinage or should be raillery…at least that’s what i assume it all is…
    anyway happy to have done this in 40 minutes ratehr than much longer as i did think it was stretching. Liked a number of clues and thought that some were terrific! hard to pick out a clear winner but i did like Car User…absalom and Wolfgang!
    well done setter, good blog too!
25. 28 min, didn’t understand some of the wordplay but my answers were the right ones anyway, phew….
26. 17 mins, stuck for a few minutes at the end on BARCAROLE which I just couldn’t dredge up. My COD would be 25A BRAKING, where I thought ‘trying to stop’… was a nicely misleading def.

    Tom B.

27. Late comment, though I finished hours ago. No idea how long I took, because after 30 minutes I had to collect my wife at the airport, but I finished fairly smoothly when I had time later. Last in were WATCHCASE and EMPIRE, since I first filled in WATCHBAND and had the wrong crossing letters for 5dn; when I realized my mistake everything was clear. I much liked the wordplay for NILE GREEN, but I also found CANNIBAL very amusing.
28. 19:14, held up by lots of things, but mainly an un-Peter-like lack of caution – writing in CARDAMOM at 13ac did me no favours at all – and various unknowns, notably BARCAROLE (12ac) and THE SUN ALSO RISES (2dn).
29. I did wonder if “fast” in 13d was an adverb (help needed urgently) or a noun (help needed abstemiously).
30. uhm, so what is 14a
    1. TABU being U=united + BAT=striker, all reversed
       1. Well I thought that, except I only know it as TABOO

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