Times 24872 – A not-too-taxing holiday solve

48 comments on “Times 24872 – A not-too-taxing holiday solve”

1. 27 minutes for this one. Might have been quicker if I could find the anagram in 6dn and if I hadn’t gone for INANIMATE MATTER at 3dn. The human brain is supposed to work best at 8˚C which is about what it was this morning. So: here’s official refutation of that theory!

   Liked the puzzle but, esp Ms Jolie!

   Note to Dave: Lieder is plural.

   1. Thanks, mctext. I did know that lieder was plural, but obviously forgot when I wrote the blog. I have now changed it.
2. It’s 34 degrees Celsius here and I’m not on holiday until next month, so those are my excuses for a DNF in 55 minutes. After 45 mins, I was left with three (13, 16 and 20). I managed to fluke INTRIGUE from the definition alone, but somehow got it into my head that ‘half-cut’ meant ‘half’ to be separated off to either end of the solution as in HA —- LF. That meant of course that I couldn’t get the French one, even though I got close with JOLIE OLIVE, which is what that woman in On The Buses would have looked to you if you’d watched the show half-cut. COD to SPOT.
3. There’s a definite European feel to this, with bits of French, German, Spanish and Greek in there. Quite enjoyable, although I thought the clue for INTRIGUE, my last in, was more laide than jolie. Many hours = TUE seems a bit weak. 43 minutes for me.
4. 50 minutes with the last 20 spent on 7dn,12ac, 16dn and 26ac.

   I thought of INTRIGUE but couldn’t justify it for ages. I agree with richnorth that many hours = TUE is weak and I’m not sure that I buy it.

   At the moment I am still unable to see how “treatment” = “discussion” but I’m probably missing something.

   The French woman was new to me too.

   On the whole this was easier than it had seemed at first. I struggled a bit to get started but this is now a regular feature of solving on Fridays whether I’m blogging or not.

   1. mctext’s treatment of human brain optimisation (above) is most enlightening.
      1. Thanks, Rich. I’ve now checked that COED carries this meaning. Earlier I had looked in Collins and Chambers which don’t have it. SOED also has it but labels it “Rare”.

5. 15:35 today so reasonably OK. A good puzzle I thought with just the right balance. Agree that Tue = many hours is a bit thin though.
6. 
   Finished all but three relatively quickly, and was left with INTRIGUE (eventually worked it out, but also thought TUE=many hours a bit dodgy), AVOWAL, and CURTIS. Only managed to get CURTIS (LOI) once I’d corrected my INANIMATE.

   I found this straighforward and, dare I say it, a little dull. No COD today.

   Best wishes to all for a great weekend. J

7. Can anyone help? I’ve just installed Windows Explorer 9 and now I can’t submit completed puzzles on the Times Crossword Club or use the Forum. Everything else seems to be OK. What to do?
   1. I have IE9 on my PC and the club works okay. Are you sure you have Java script enabled?
      1. Select Internet Options from the browser’s Tools menu.
      2. Click the Security tab.
      3. Click Custom Level in Security Level for this Zone.
      4. Scroll down to Scripting, near the bottom of the list.
      5. Under Active Scripting, choose Enable.
      6. Click OK to leave Security Settings. Click OK to leave Internet Options
      1. ThankS, jackkt. I’ll try that!
8. 10 minutes for all but two clues. Another 7 for JOLIE LAIDE, which I had to construct from wordplay (although I think I’ve heard the expression before), and AVOWAL, which I was convinced would start AM and sound like a confession of some sort. It’s so hard to get round an idée fixe like this even when you know that’s what you’ve got to do. Yet another enjoyable but straightforward puzzle.
   A couple of queries:
   > What’s “perhaps” doing in 5dn?
   > I’m not 100% clear on how 17 works. “Of Parisians'” appears to define DE, which is a bit awkward (in a way that “Parisians’ of” wouldn’t be). Have I missed something?
   1. Yes that’s it. ‘Parisians’ just implies ‘in French’. So ‘of’ in French is DE.
      1. Or rather ‘Parisians”!
         Adopting Parisians’ speech marks for clarté, it’s «Parisians’» not «Parisians».
         My point is that the word order makes the thing awkward. If it were «Parisians’ of» then it would be straightforward, because that clearly means «the ‘of’ of Parisians». «Of Parisians’» doesn’t really mean the same thing. So unless there’s another interpretation I don’t think it quite works.
   2. I think the “perhaps” in 5 down is an acknowledgement that there aren’t really any lieder in the Ring Cycle, or that (if there were) Ring lieder would be an example of Wagner’s songs, and we all know what apoplexies definition by example raises on this board if there isn’t a “perhaps” in there. So it’s there to reduce blood pressure.
      1. If that’s the intention then “subject” becomes superfluous, doesn’t it?
         The way I read the clue (and as mmagnus has it above) the lieder and Wagner are unrelated. “Subject of Wagner” is RING. “Songs perhaps quoted” is LEADER.
         I wonder if the “perhaps” is there to reflect the fact that LIEDER and LEADER aren’t necessarily pronounced the same.
         1. I took it that the “Subject” was only there to aid the Mastermind surface. The Ring and Lieder don’t really go together, since there’s really only the Wesendonck song cycle that qualifies. Spoof subject, needs the “perhaps”.
         2. Sorry, see what you mean about “Subject of Wagner” being Ring. I was (and still am) taking the phrase as a whole, using the perhaps to acknowledge that it’s sketchy musicology.
            1. And if it wasn’t Wagner’s (or some other German composer’s) songs it wouldn’t be Lieder.
9. Another really rather easy puzzle – what a long run this has been. This one not as entertaining as yesterday, a somewhat mechanical 20 minute solve.

   I spent a little while after solving trying to find an alternative explanation to TUE = many hours but couldn’t find one so I’ll join the “its a bit weak” club.

   Knew JOLIE LAIDE by remembering a conversation with a Frenchman whilst looking at The Mona Lisa – funny old world

10. Defeated by unknown JOLIE LAIDE (wordplay helpful – but ignorance meant I would never have worked it out). Nonetheless enjoyable and pretty straightforward. Particularly enjoyed CLASS ACT.
11. A shade tougher than yesterdays at 28 minutes for me, and while there were none of yesterdays fireworks, there were some excellent clues, mostly the ones that have caused most head-scratching and comment here. Add SENORITA, where I was trying for too long to work an anagram of “miss” into something.
    MIMICKED is one of those words that just looks wrong, and I was glad of the cryptic for affirming the spelling. The ugly but charming woman was entered from cryptic and very distant echoes.
    CoD to RINGLEADER, despite the musicological question marks. It made me snort.
    Last in was AVOWAL, because I stuck on AMORAL, which does after all approximate to “confession read out loud” but doesn’t mean “in a letter”.
12. Which phrase exactly? “Subject of Wagner songs perhaps”? I suppose that kind of works. “Your specialist subject is Ring Lieder and your time starts… now.”
    1. Yup, that’s how I “heard” it.
13. 17 minutes, but most of them trying to justify JOLIE LAIDE from wordplay, and banging my head over something to fit the word pattern for INTRIGUE, being so fixated on it being UNDRsomething that I’d even put in the U and D. Finally got there.

    Count me in for the ones that liked RINGLEADER, I thought it was a cute device.

    1. I agree it’s a nice clue, but I’m still not sure exactly how to parse it. I’d be interested to know how you read it.
14. My compliments to everyone who got JOLIE LAIDE, whether by definition or by wordplay. Suspect I could have stared at it for hours without getting close.
    Is BLOKE = JOE a crossword chestnut? Don’t recall coming across it before.
    1. Joe does have specific connotations. It means “an ordinary man”. It occurs in phrases such as Joe Bloggs, Joe Blow, Joe Public and Joe Soap. I have heard a taxi referred to as a Joe from the rhyming slang Joe Baxi.
       1. We always called a taxi a “Boris”, as in Boris Spassky. Yeah, I know it doesn’t work, but somehow that made it more appealing. Then again, that may have something to do with the circumstances in which a taxi was usually required.
          1. Also GI Joe.
       2. I wondered (in a Friday afternoon sort of way) where this might come from and it appears to come from one Joe Baksi. Fancy that.
          1. I’m just delighted to see Joe making it to the grid.
    2. Is BLOKE = JOE a crossword chestnut? Don’t recall coming across it before.

       I’ve not met it. I took it that the clue demanded any man’s name and if there’s a more specific connection to JOE then I’m not aware of it.

    3. I thought of “ordinary Joe”. Collins has:
       Joe [dʒəʊ]
       n (sometimes not capital) Slang
       1. US and Canadian a man or fellow
       2. US a GI; soldier
15. Another day, another typo – this time INAMIMATE. 18:24, mistake notwithstanding.

    Struggled with the two long downs and the French lass.

    JOLIE LAIDE does come out of the Google translation engine as ‘Pretty ugly’, which would seem to mean something rather different.

    I’m sure I would hyphenate CARRY-ON as a noun, but I’m assuming there’s authority for doing otherwise.

    LEAN-TO is neat, but I liked the stylish if easy DELIBERATION best. Une clue jolie, n’est ce pas?

    1. According to my missus, Google gets the translation exactly right, pretty having its “good looking” meaning rather than “somewhat”. conventionally ugly, but with a bit of je ne sais quoi (or possibly vavavoom) thrown in. I’d give you an example, but from a male perspective, it would seem unchivalrous.
       Is it me, or are we getting more “foreign” words than usual after bridling at hwyl?
16. An enjoyable 27 minutes but when I came here I realised that I’d left out AVOWAL. I don’t know how long it would have taken for that particular penny to drop. Possibly never because I had been thinking of AMORAL. I was impressed with the anagram for STANSTED AIRPORT. A sad trainspotter – brilliant!
17. For some reason this took me a long time, 70′ in fact. And like Z8, I was stuck on AMORAL, thinking of AVOWAL at the very last minute, having typed everything else in. Got JOLIE LAIDE after running through the alphabet; the only time I’ve seen the term was in one of the novels (‘Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant’ it would appear) of Powell’s wonderful ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ series, but like so much else, it managed to find a corner of the lumber-room that is my memory. I didn’t understand 16d, and now that I do, I also don’t care for the TUE clue. COD to 15d
18. No time to post due to interruptions, but a DNF due to JOLIE LAIDE. Never heard the term, and didn’t suss out the wordplay. Most of the rest went in fairly quickly though, and like falooker I was quite impressed with the anagram for STANSTED AIRPORT, very well done. However, my COD goes instead to Sotira’s new avatar. Regards to all.
19. Tue = part of a day = many ours
20. Done in bits ‘n’ pieces so no time. Felt a little tricky. Like the photo Sotira. We had a SHCOOL down the road for a year or so. !6’s a strange clue; it’s not just the poor Tue. somehow but the weak grin of the surface … compared with the crispness elsewhere it’s almost as if the setter owed a mate a favour. Spotting the clue someone else thought up – now that would be a class act.
21. A sluggish 10:10 for me – I thought I’d been a little faster, but I’d wasted time hoping that the second word of 6dn was going to be STATION, and I was slow to get AVOWAL (put off by A-O-A-, with AMORAL crowding out other possibilities).

    No objection to “many hours” for TUE – surely this is fairly standard stuff!? And I’m amazed at how many people haven’t come across JOLIE LAIDE before.

22. Unlike those above who just got this word into their heads, blocking the correct path, I actually put it in, being fairly (but not totally) happy that it fitted the wordplay, and thinking that it was a new word that I didn’t know: an amoral (with the stress on the first syllable), based on amo, a love-letter.

    Otherwise pretty good I thought, with an excellent anagram at 6dn and an excellent hidden at 8dn. Not in my opinion the routine and humdrum affair that one person above reckons it is.

23. Can someone please explain how you get RIG from Carry On Doctor? I’m a novice and don’t get the reference.
    1. ‘carry on’ is the definition=INTRIGUE; ‘doctor’ here is a verb (doctor the statistics)=RIG, which is inside (‘fills’) INTUE
       I don’t recall if anyone objected to the RIG coming, not between IN and TUE but between INT and UE.
24. Now for some reason I’ve been logged off and rendered anonymous. I am NOT anonymous, and I’ve got the documents to prove it.
25. How enjoyable it is to be doing the crossword 8years after everyone else! It’s like meeting old friends again to see comments from Galspray and Tony Sever. And Sotira’s new avatar is old by now; she seems to be aging well. We wish we could post a sluggish time of 10 mins or so and share Tony’s disappointment. But he’s amazed we’ve never heard of the LAIDE part of Jolie , so it went in on parsing and hope. LOI AVOWAL, got amoral stuck in brain like others,refusing to be displaced for several minutes. Didn’t help to biff IMAGINARY for the first part of 3d. 45 minutes in total.

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