Times 24,815 Average Fare

31 comments on “Times 24,815 Average Fare”

1. Nice to see the AV making an immediate appearance to complement yesterday’s psaltery.
   17 (and a bit) minutes today, with most time spent on the haircut at 5, unaccountably not recalling any word that satisfied E?O? except for enow. ANCHORAGE was delayed by trying something with the other odd letters from cargo.
   I thought there was almost a story in the SW, with a brill prole school excursion by to Southend (presumably) firmly set in yesteryear, though why they went by Snowcat is beyond me. Must do some more research.
   CoD to TEASINGLY for the lone drinker bit.
2. 21:50, delayed more in the south than the north. Nearly plunged straight in with BEDWETTER for 24 ac, which would have given a different slant on the surface reading.
3. A darn sight harder for me, with the 40 minutes just ticking over at the end. Mostly, the difficulty was in the SW, and especially the two 23s, which I just couldn’t see for looking.
   Re the ROADMAN at 6dn: never heard a cyclist called this but I have heard it used to refer to road menders and travelling salesmen. Anyone have further enlightenment.
   Agree with z8: COD to TEA,SINGLY.
   1. I was so unconvinced I looked it up in Chambers when writing the blog. It says “road repairer; road user; an itinerant; a competitor in a road race” so whichever way you look at it, it’s definition by example.
      1. A roadman races on the road, as opposed to on the track. So a roadman is a particular to the cyclist’s general. This is what confuses me about d by e. Just because a roadman can be other things doesn’t mean that in this case the clue went in the wrong direction. (Draws some Venn diagrams, shades in various bits and pieces.)
4. I put most of it in fairly quickly, but just could not see ‘brill’/’bedsitter’/’fiddle’/’drift’, as well as having problems with ‘tipple’/’lather’. I should not have been stuck for so long, but I always have trouble with short double definitions.

   I hesitated for a long time over ‘snowcat’, thinking it was a brand name, but eventually concluded that must be it.

5. Two minutes and thirty two seconds has me at the top of the leaderboard, and who am I to argue?
   Needless to say this was after the website twice erased my solution. I was getting pretty good at filling in the grid by the third attempt.
   Actual solving time was about 45 minutes, the last few of which were spent on ETON CROP before I guessed correctly. Horrible clunky clue in my humble opinion.
6. Stuck in snowcar for a time: a halting 36 minutes. Also held up by Eton crop. Otherwise straightforward. As others liked teasingly.
7. 53 minutes for me, and just to add to the mixed bag of experiences, my biggest hold-ups were HIGH POINTS and SUPERSTAR.

   Enjoyable enough, but In retrospect a couple of the clues seem a bit loose. I suppose a pint at party can just about lead to A DO PT, but to my mind imprisoned briefly = CEL is stretching things.

8. Did anyone else put peeps in 23 dn? I was thinking of seaside peep shows viewed through openings – or so I’m told
9. Jim must be holing a few putts lately. Feared for the setter as I tut-tutted my way through this. Nothing much to balance up what I thought were some dodgy clues: DWELL, CAMEL, ROADMAN, SUPERSTAR. Still, average solving time down to 40 minutes, that if you just count the last 2 days.
10. I agree with richnorth in that I found “briefly imprisoned” = cel stretching the friendship a tad. “Lone drinker” = tea singly was also a little far fetched for me. Is “hoar” an acceptable synonym for grey? dictionary.com doesn’t list it and anyway I thought hoar frost was white. (Realise that dictionary.com is not the work of reference used) Didn’t know “sat” was an exam; nor did I know the term “eton crop”, but now that I do, I believe that’s the style sported by the wonderful Cate Blanchett in some movies and plays. Anyway I got them all and, most importantly,although it was a slow time (1hr 50mins) I completed the crossword without error after some pretty horrendous errors made in rushing through the grid in the past week. No real COD but I did like LATHER in 3d and 23d gave my my “D’Oh” moment and yet another opportunity to recite two of my favourite Goon Show lines: (Stop me if you’ve heard it!)
    SEAGOON: “Moriarty, I’ve made myself a peer!”
    MORIARTY: “Good, I’ll get down the end of it and start a concert party!”

    1. The Mac (US) has this:
       adjective
       grayish white; gray or gray-haired with age.
       noun
       hoarfrost.
       ORIGIN Old English hār, of Germanic origin; related to German hehr ‘majestic, noble.’
       1. Thank you!
11. I also thought this was a workmanlike puzzle with a few dodgy bits here and there, though nothing too off-beam. 22 mins, so very fast for me.
12. Sorry, the penny has just dropped with 1d. D’Oh, indeed!
13. 59 mins on the club timer. Held up , like Joekobi, by snowcar and by wanting to put pickle as variant of piccolo at 22dn. The relative ease of the clues evidencedby the fact that only BENDER was not understood while solving.
14. Ran out of time on the commute with barely half the puzzle completed. If I’d been left with only two or three unsolved I would have cheated on arrival at the office to get it out of the way but I was determined not to be so roundly beaten by the setter so I put it aside until lunchtime and I have just managed to complete it without aids. I simply wasn’t on the setter’s wavelngth today and really struggled in the lower half.

    I don’t actually see how ‘the usual’ defines TIPPLE.

    1. Like a number of these definitions it’s a bit vague and slightly unsatisfactory. I suppose “my usual” could be said “my tipple” but it doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence. As Barry has said if I hadn’tbeen doing the blog I might have had a bit of a moan about some of this.
       1. In my experience people would be more likely to say “my usual tipple” or “my favourite tipple” which suggests to me that “tipple” is non-specific and needs to be qualified if it’s to refer to a particular drink. I hated this puzzle but I that’s probably mainly because it took me so long to solve.
          1. This excerpt from “Fawlty Towers” provides a good example of the use of “The usual”

             Basil : Ah, good evening, Major.

             The Major : Evening, Fawlty.

             Basil : The usual?

             The Major : [looking at his watch] Er… er… oh, why not, indeed, why not? …I’ve just been watching one of those nature films on television.

             Basil : Oh yes?

             The Major : Did you know that a female gibbon gestates for seven months?

             Basil : Seven months? Well I never… there you are, Major… seven…
             my word…

15. 11:39 here, which was good enough for first on the leaderboard at the time (I suspect I was the first to submit a grid online), but now seems to be a pretty good time and only 18 seconds away from being a PB. ROADMAN from wordplay.
16. 24 down “Brill”

    Hoping that somebody agrees with (rare) Canadian content: Debbie Brill was a champion high jumper during the seventies and eighties, who won several gold medals at the Commonwealth and Pan-Am Games, and missed the 1980 Olympics because of a boycott.
    She invented a new style of jumping, known as the “Brill Bend”.
    from BK in Ontario

    1. Interesting and informative. Thankyou. As the lady is stll alive I doubt the setter actually meant a reference to her but the clue would work read in the way you suggest
17. Grateful to get on this site today – though gratitude somewhat tempered by Firefox giving me an unwanted upgrade overnight. It took ages for me to navigate my way to the crossword which I completed in a rather sour mood. Didn’t like it much apart from 1d, which was fun. 33 minutes
18. I struggled a bit more than was necessary in hindsight, but thought there were a a goodly number of excellent clues; e.g. PROGENY, HIGH POINTS, EXCURSION but COD to TEASINGLY.
19. This took me 44’30”, half of that being after dining out, which no doubt helped slow me down. I also was slowed down by the number of anglicisms　– rabbit, ton, brill, hoarding, fiddle, neb — some of which I’d never seen before (neb, brill; ton maybe once in a cryptic?). But I thought the clues were unexceptionable; and with wonderfully smooth and plausible surface readings.
20. Again in a skirmish with livejournal earlier. I couldn’t get on until now, so sorry to be late again. In any event I think it’s all been said. My last entry was RUMP, and I’ve never heard of an ETON CROP. Regards.
    1. Kevin, you may know it as the pixie cut. First made famous by Josephine Baker in the 1920s but still about in 21st century with for example Halle Berry in the Bond film Die Another Day
21. Very much agree with you Barrie, should have abandoned ship after “Brill” and “Prole”. That would have saved the annoyance of ROADMAN and SUPERSTAR. I hope you feel it is worthwhile having a little moan when a puzzle is not just too difficult but rather weak. It would be nice to think it gave the powers that be something to think about. Many thanks for you excellent blog Jimbo.
    Mike and Fay
22. 11:23 for me. I made rather heavy going of this one, but not because of any weakness in the puzzle, which I thought perfectly sound and quite interesting.

    The (online) OED includes

    3. a.a. A sportsperson, esp. a cyclist, whose activity is carried out on the road.

    among its definitions of “roadman”, which is good enough for me.

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