Times 24838 – Yikes!

Solving time: 80 minutes

Music: De Falla, Three-Cornered Hat/Turina, Sinfonia Sevillana, Argenta/ONDE

I suppose it’s inevitable that we will sometimes get a harder one on a Monday, but I would have fancied something a little easier after coming home tired from golf. However, I did chose to go golfing on a blogging day – the weather was so beautiful I could not resist. So it was 7:24 EDT when I set forth, and I banged the last one in at exactly 8:44.

There is some very clever cluing in this puzzle, and it is most important to take the clues apart in the correct way. I was a little dull on some of them, but at least I spotted a few others almost immediately.

I will not be omitting many tonight. Anyone reporting a time of less than 10 minutes will be dispatched to Cheltenham.

Across
1 BACKLASH, BAC(SALK backwards)H. I understood the clue well enough, but could not think of German composer of the right length. Bach is to far, er, back..
5 LIMBER, LIMB + E[xpenses] R[ejected]. Very simple and very hard for me, I spent ages trying to justify ‘nimble’. The setter had me thinking too obliquely.
10 FEVER TREE, F(EVER + T[ulip])REE, Having no idea what ‘acacia’, means is a distinct disadvantage, but eventually the cryptic spoke to me.
11 CORFU, hidden backwards in [pr]UFROC[k], You could waste hours reversing various garments.
12 GNUS, G[ood] N[ational] U[nion of] S[tudents]. No gnus is good gnus!
13 FLEETWOOD, FLEET + WOOD, where the Fleet is a river that ran where Fleet Street is now, and a wood is a golf club that is made of graphite and titanium. No allusion to the Caddy or the group, probably because Mick is still alive.
15 PERCUSSIVE, anagram of RESCUE VIPS, with a well-hidden literal.
17 BELL, as in Alexander Graham. Simple, obvious, and one of my last in.
19 Omitted, my first in.
20 REASONABLY, anagram of ORLEANS BAY. This classic lift and separate I did manage to spot.
22 CUT IT FINE, anagram of FIT IN inside CUTE. One of the easier clues in this one.
24 PAIL, PA(I)L. For a long time I hesitated between ‘pair’, which fits the literal, and ‘pain’ which fits the cryptic. Then I tried the alphabet a got it.
26 AMOUR, sounds like A MOOR. I was afraid this could also be ‘amore’, so I had to keep an open mind.
27 IVY LEAGUE, [l]IVY + LEAGUE, where the literal is only ‘universities’, but seeing ‘class’ makes it easier to jump to the answer.
28 EVENLY, E(VEN)LY. I keep forgetting an archdeacon is a Ven, and not a RR or a DD, which slowed me down considerably on this one.
29 STRESSED, DESSERTS backwards. The urge to think this must begin with ‘p’ is very strong.
 
Down
1 BUFF, double definition which I didn’t see until I had both crossing letters.
2 COVENTRY PATMORE, COVENTRY + PA + T[hirty] + MORE. A poet? Hmmmm…..Donne, Blake, Stevens, anyone?
3 LARKSPUR, LARKS + PUR[e]. At last, a flower I am familiar with. Any difficulty is in the form, which is plural in sense without a plural ending.
4 Omitted, a rather frequently-used clue.
6 INCITE, sounds like IN SIGHT, another one where I had the wrong end of the stick, thinking ‘prompt’ was the literal.
7 BURN ONE”S BRIDGES, BURN(ONE)S + BRIDGES. I have blogged both these poets before, so anyone who knows it is my night should be expecting them to turn up again!
8 ROUNDELAYS, anagram of SOUND + EARLY. I was a bit worried when I got the ‘y’, then realized there was an ‘s’.
9 RESERVES RE + SEVRES backwards, not too tough.
14 APPRECIATE, double definition, another generous gift from the setter.
16 SPECIFIC, SPEC + IF + I C[old]. The use of ‘specific’ as a noun to indicate a drug for a particular disease is rather old-fashioned.
18 ONE PIECE, double definition.
21 STEROL, S[ober] T[hen} + LORE backwards. I didn’t see that I also had to use the first letter of ‘then’ for the longest time.
23 EGYPT, [el]EGY + PT. I didn’t see this until I had all the checkers, and even then stared at it for ten minutes before seeing the obvious. Very clever use of ‘part’.
25 LEAD, double definition.

40 comments on “Times 24838 – Yikes!”

  1. Agreed: difficult! 48’ this morning. Thought it was going to be eaier on spotting BUFF first off. But …
    … never head of Patmore — who famously divorced his wife when she took to wearing his surname on her T-shirt — so lots of difficulty in that area, particularly the Ven. and the alcohol. And had to scratch my head over ‘seconds’ = MORE until the penny dropped.
    Ditto one of the other poets, Cavafy; and the fine porcelain. So, all up, a troubled but eventually rewarding solve with lots of ‘hats off’ moments.
  2. 36:01 .. which felt okay for this. I do hope we’re going through a series of tougher puzzles just now. The alternative is that I’m getting dimmer. Lots of times in the 30s of late for me.

    As quite often, I solved after getting in from a night at the symphony. Sibelius tonight (Adele Anthony playing the violin concerto rather wonderfully, plus the 2nd symphony). A contrast with the other night when Grieg caused me to notch up a record 5 incorrect answers on the club site in a time so poor that I had to slap a superinjunction on it.

    Conclusion:
    Sibelius – crossword friendly.
    Grieg – crossword kryptonite.

    Last in: STRESSED, which I wasn’t.

    1. You’ve now given me what the Germans call an “earworm”. I can’t get Sibelius 2nd out of my head. Went to Helsinki last year. He’s got a great metal sculpture as a monument. Tubular thingys that you can sing or shout into and get interesting echoes. So much more appropriate than the usual statue!
      1. Now on my ‘To Do while in Finland’ list. I have the same earworm. As earworms go, it’s certainly one of the better ones (a while back I had two days of Yellow Submarine – it took strong liquor to kill the thing).
        1. ITV used to use part of the Karelia Suite to introduce their This Week current affairs programme as I remember it. It was the first piece of classical music I really liked. Still love Sibelius but, sadly, he doesn’t seem to get much of an airing in Sydney.
    2. There;s a Sibelius Park in Toronto complete with bust of one of my favourites composers.
      One in Montreal too, I think.
      This took a while, particularly 9d and 23d…did some looking up. Very satisfying
      to complete this toughie.
  3. 44′, and I’m not quite sure why I wasn’t faster, given that I didn’t find it necessary to flag any clue to think about the parsing. Largely, it was just my, well, dimness, I think; trying to work Alexandria into the Cavafy clue, for instance, or thinking ‘member’ must be MP, or thinking that 1ac must contain SALK in reverse but not listening to my thought…. Anyway, I don’t mind starting off the week like this. CODs to 9d and 29ac.
  4. Similar difficulties, and lack of knowledge, to those who have already commented. ‘Successfully’ completed in about an hour before coming here but with the use of aids to ‘confirm’ speculative answers (LIMBER, FEVER TREE, COVENTRY PATMORE, EGYPT).

    Thanks, vinyl1, for a good blog; I would never have resolved wordplay for EGYPT in particular.

  5. Too difficult for me because the setter found too many gaps in my GK. Didn’t know PATMORE, STEROL, SALK, that Cavafy wrote in EGYPT or FEVER TREE = acacia.

    I hope the Bank Holiday explains this being very hard for a Monday and we shall have lighter fare this Friday.

    90 minutes with some use of aids.

  6. 20 minutes, so above average difficulty. At least I knew two of the poets, but I was ignorant about so much stuff in this one (mostly as others have acknowledged above) that I regard this as a triumph of unassisted wordplay. STEROL I got because, in my experience, you can put -OL on the end of any collection of letters and it’s some form of vaporous hydrocarbon. Salk? Sorry, woeful ignorance. At least I’ve heard of BELL.
    Other educational note: now I know rondelay is spelt with a U, and Acacia is a) a tree (not a bush or shrub) and b) either causes or cures fever. I did know LARKSPUR.
    I took time out trying to justify SPECIFIC, because I thought it was a dd with some unnecessary extra words (“provided with one cold”)
    CoD to AMOUR when the penny dropped. Next time, I’m hoping for something about Desdemona.
  7. I’ve just looked up Coventry Patmore and his magnum opus “The Angel in the House”. It may be many things, but it sure isn’t poetry.
    1. Indeed. Just read it and William McGonagall will be turning in his grave. Jimbo, however, will have still more to say I fear.
  8. spent rather a long time on the north west…nd still can see 19 across…any help please
  9. I didn’t find this very hard, though I didn’t really understand 23dn til coming here. I did find it irritatingly arts-centric however, and “bell” is just a sop..

    I urge solvers not to be put off by words they haven’t previously met; it makes clues harder but not necessarily very much harder..

  10. 12:18 for me, with a couple of those spent justifying the wordplay of COVENTRY PATMORE, who was unknown to me. I was also far too slow to see FLEETWOOD. Not as hard in retrospect as I made it seem. COD to 20ac
    1. I’ve only just got round to doing this puzzle (I was on holiday last week), and am relieved to find that for once I managed to beat your time with my 10:25 (I made a horribly slow start but knew all the poets).

      Have you competed at Cheltenham? I think your times (apart perhaps from today’s 😉 could be good enough to put you into the final.

  11. Presumably this setter eats obscure poetry books for breakfast – can he/she really not see other constructions to clues. 23D is particulary convaluted.

    25 minutes to solve thanks to good, clear wordplay. As Jerry says (and as we have bothed blogged on the Club Monthly Puzzle) you don’t need to know words if the wordplay is good enough.

    Truely amazed that people have not heard of Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine. Polio was a real killer when I was a child and I well remember both the death of a friend and receiving the injection one day at school

    1. Gratified, though a little surprised, to learn that some others found this hard, as it struck me as pretty straightforward, the obscurities balanced and rendered penetrable by good wordplay. (But then again the ones that I find hard are the ones that nearly everyone else finds a stroll in the park). Even as a poetry buff, I must admit that Coventry Patmore, though known to me, was a pretty esoteric piece of GK, as was the fact that Cavafy, though a Greek, lived in Egypt. Sorry to shock you, Jimbo, but I was among those who hadn’t heard of Jonas Salk (I agree that I should have). Like you I was among the first schoolchildren to receive a polio shot – quite a painful business, as I recall, in those far-off days.
    2. > you don’t need to know words if the wordplay is good enough.

      OK, agreed. But then there’s the reverse: cf. 23 down where we know the word “Egypt” but the wordplay is (as you note) akin to the first word of 29ac. And, I’m not sure that all of the wordplay in last month’s (or indeed in this months’s) Club Special was/is that fabulous either. We could take ’em apart over a pint if I were a bit closer.

    3. Well I have similar memories to yours, Jim, but I don’t remember anyone telling me who invented the vaccine. How many inventors of vaccines for other diseases are household names?
      1. I guess you should have heard of Jenner who made the initial breakthrough when dealing with smallpox and Pasteur for rabies and anthrax. The guy you wont know but who really was the Daddy was Hilleman who has saved more lives than one could count but is virtually unheard of. I discovered him when reading around the subject of the disputed triple vaccine some years back
      2. Why do they have to be household names? Is patmore a household name??
  12. Far too tricky for me, this one, as it included so many unknowns (all the ones mentioned by others + far more besides!). Only managed to complete with copious use of solvers.

    🙁

  13. Dammit. Completed this in just over 20 minutes, which I was very pleased with, but forgot to go back and check FLEETFORD, which I knew was wrong as it went in. An occupational hazard of solving online: on paper I wouldn’t have put anything in in the first place.
    Tough but fair puzzle, with lots of unknowns. I managed it all from wordplay though, with the exception of EGYPT, which I got purely on the basis of checking letters and the word “where”. Thanks to vinyl1 for the explanation.
  14. My third DNF in as many days. Glad it was your turn to blog, vinyl. Done in by PATMORE, or perhaps by EASILY at 28, which made me suspect he ended in an “S”. I was looking forward to your explanantion of why ASI was an archdeacon, but then, if Patmore can be a poet almost anything is possible. I didn’t even know Cavafy wrote, let alone in Egypt. And I can’t say I was familiar with cobbler as a dessert. I read in Wiki that a variant is called Brown Betty in the US; presumably when it’s burnt it’s called Black Betty (bam ba lam). On the other hand Salk was very familiar, having been made to line up for the shot a very few years before the Sabin oral version on a spoon replaced it; a lesson in the unfairness of life at an early age.

    Compliments to the setter. Speaking of Black Betty, COD to REASONABLY, as elegant an anagram as you’ll see.

  15. The top half was easy, making me feel reasonably confident of finishing in 20 or 25 minutes, then I hit many problems in the bottom half. In the end I used Google to get PATMORE, to enable me to finish. I had PATERTS, which fitted the wordplay, though didn’t sound terribly convincing. 40 minutes to finish, with that bit of help.

    I thought the clues were good, on the whole, in spite of the obscurities. I liked ‘spring’ for FREE in 10, seconds for MORE in 2. All diverting stuff.

  16. Never heard of FLEETWOOD, VEN, PATMORE, LARKSPUR, ROUNDELAYS, STEROL or CAVAFY, but got them all through wordplay, which makes it an excellent puzzle in my book.
    ACACIA is familiar to all Australians (as LARKSPUR seems to be to the British commenters) but still had never heard of a FEVER TREE.
    Was very pleased to get an all-correct, albeit in an hour and a half.
  17. I didn’t find this particularly difficult and finished in 35 minutes, which is around my normal time. But after coming here I think I must have just been lucky in my GK. I was surprised to see PATMORE here. Even after I had the P and the T of the surname I still resisted on the ground that he was too obscure. More suitable for the TLS puzzle. When I was a kid the polio vaccine was often called the Salk vaccine – so no problem there. Didn’t know EGYPT for the Cavafy reference but got it from the crossing letters and then saw the cryptic. I got a bit sidetracked by 11a and was thinking about Prufrock’s “grey flannel trousers” before I spotted the hidden word.
  18. Finished fine, but cant parse The Ivy League (despite “Tossing and Turning” 1965).Feeling daft since nobody else has a problem. Can anyone elaborate please?
    1. I can’t quite tell if this is superfluous at this point, but ‘Roman historian ignoring first’= (L)ivy.
      This was one (EGYPT was another) that I got before I got the wordplay.
  19. About 40 minutes. In defence of Coventry Patmore he wrote a lovely poem about what he found in his son’s pockets – no suggestion of prying – after he’d raged at him for some reason and sent him to bed. He details the various items – one line is ‘And six or seven stones’ – in a light agony of self-recrimination. Re Salk, I’m anything but a scientist but would have thought the eponymous vaccine absolutely within the bounds here. One good thing – a general point – about the Times puzzle is that it has a root-tendril in the past.
  20. 63 minutes on the club timer with four cheats towards the end. Pleased to see Patmore make an appearance; he was one of C.S. Lewis’s favourite poets.
  21. Spent ages trying to work the letters UTE or MIN into where PATMORE eventually fitted on the basis that “thirty seconds” is half a minute. Too clever by half! Incidentally, it is my distinct impression that people with, shall we say, flamboyant names, such as Coventry, often end up in the arts. A lecturer on art I came across recently rejoices in the name Jolyon. Not many of those on building sites I would suggest. Some sort of nominative determinism. Always pleased with myself when I can work out answers such as FEVER TREE from the wordplay all by my little self, then I get annoyed when words like BELL don’t leap out at me, or LIMBER. “D’oh!”
    1. The exception that proves your rule is Man City’s Joleon Lescott. There was also a Jeremy Goss who banged in goals for Norwich against Munich 25 years ago. No Oscars I’m aware of as yet.
      1. Hi Ulaca, but, sorry, I’ve consulted the consultative consultancy and Jeremy doesn’t count as it is a little too prosaic! My wife’s son might disagree but he works in market research and not in the arts.I suppose you could say that Robert Morley, the actor, did his bit by naming his son Sheridan. The latter went on to become a leading London theatre critic thus keeping artistic nominative determinism alive. I feel that Sheridan definitely passes the flamboyancy test.
  22. I like falooker’s and Sotira’s earlier reference to “earworms”. Currently occupying that space is Kenneth McKellar’s lovely rendition of “Angels Guard Thee” which is on a CD I played the other day. Slightly apposite as the awful Eurovision Song Contest approacheth and I have a memory of Mr McKellar representing G.B. dressed in a kilt. Such taste seems to have left that competition a long time ago.
    Like many who have offered comments on the subject, I remember polio vaccines. Perhaps it’s my memory playing tricks but I remember the needles used as being huge…and terrifying for a young chap.
  23. You mention, vinyl1, that there is no allusion to the group (Fleetwood Mac) as Mick is still alive. Had the setter so wished he/she could have referred to Mick’s sister, Susan who was an accomplished actress but who died in 1995. I remember her from the TV adaptation of John Mortimer’s novel, “Summer’s Lease”, which also featured John Gielgud. See:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Fleetwood

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