Times 24940 – Don’t cry for me, I’ve no Vesta

43 comments on “Times 24940 – Don’t cry for me, I’ve no Vesta”

1. Yep, pretty straightforward until you get to the SE corner. 17 minutes. Couple of notes:
   1. PERFECTA seems to be a US term for the more exact (=Australian) EXACTA.
   2. SAD IRON is most usually two words, far as I can tell.

   Liked the very economical cluing but had to give COD to BLANDINGS. Wot?

2. About 30 mins for me. Got held up in the SE with TREAT, SURFACE and PERFECTA (which I’d never heard of but is obvious once you see it and have the other checkers).
3. 18 minutes; a nice way to start the week. But is an aspic a garnish? Is formal the same as regular? I wanted to put in ‘normal’, but ‘class’ clearly required ‘form’. I liked PYROMANIA. (As do we all, according to Graham Chapman in the Python sketch: ‘Can any of us truly say that we’ve never set fire to a public building? I know I have.’)
   1. NOAD has (‘aspic’):

      a savory jelly, often made with meat stock, used as a garnish, or to contain pieces of food such as meat, seafood, or eggs, set in a mold.

   2. I must admit a double-take on both these definitions, but the epicureans agree that aspic is a garnish, however unappealing that prospect, and Collins (for one) has formal = regular or symmetrical in form, like a formal garden I suppose.
4. 75 minutes and needed to cheat on MAGRITTE (disappointingly, we had him just the other day and I was in surrealistic mode having watched Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or and Los Olvidados over the weekend) and SURFACE (where I got it into my head that ‘crest of a wave’ was the difinition) to finish. To cap it off, I shoved in ‘slate’ for SHADE at the end, my brain having been reduced to ASPIC. Got PERFECTA by analogy with trifecta. My father didn’t pass his Woodhouse gene down to me, so I flirted with ‘Boat-‘ something and then ‘Blandford’ before seeing that ‘landing’ was preferable to ‘land’, in fact, rather more than preferable.

   SADIRON, as one word, must be in Collins, because it’s in neither Chambers nor ODE (online).

   1. I can confirm that it is indeed in Collins
   2. It’s in my Chambers (2003 electronic). has it been dropped by later ones?
      1. No, it’s listed under ‘sad’, while I was looking for a separate entry.
         1. I guess tat’s the advantage of getting electrons to do your looking up for you!
   3. Sadiron appears in my Chambers as one word ( I forget which edition because the dog ate the intro pages, but around 1999). Strangely, it’s listed under ‘sad’ rather than as an entry on its own.
5. 15 minutes, kind of distracted – SADIRON from wordplay, everything else fell together pretty nicely.
6. 20 minutes, so a good day for me. Unknowns were PERFECTA, worked out from wordplay and checkers, and SADIRON, ditto. Wrote in NORMAL at 22dn but quickly changed it to FORMAL as a better fit with the wordplay. With three artists turning up I thought we were in for a theme.
   1. Congrats Jack, especially when only two days you mentioned how long it is since you had a sub-20! Might have matched you if not for MAGRITTE and TREAT, but got there eventually.
      1. Don’t know how to edit here, but I’ll leave it to the reader to insert “ago” into the above.
         1. Many thanks. Still not sub-20, but getting there! If you want to edit, highlight your posted message and copy it to the clipboard, then click Delete and confirm Delete. Then paste your message into a new Reply and edit before sending.

            Note to any Anons reading this, you need to open a (free) Live Jornal account to be able to delete and edit messages.

7. 11 minutes, but with one awaiting decision on appeal, so to speak – and I’ll bet real money I’m not the only one. I also put in NORMAL and “felt” it so right I didn’t think twice about it – I venture it sits more easily with “regular” if not with “class”. If it had been irrefutably NORMAL, would we have complained about the clue?
   And while we’re at it, I wondered (a bit) about Titan for Goliath, an unnecessary confusion of mythologies, perhaps.
   PERFECTA one of those words I kind of know from somewhere, SADIRON not. CoD to BLANDINGS, faux de mieux
8. 20 minutes.
   OK, I’m lying, but all but TREAT and PERFECTA in 20 minutes. Plumped for those 2 eventually so pretty good for me. But what’s this? Oh no, I have NORMAL.
9. At least my money’s safe! Shall we start a petition?
10. Got the wordplay immediately, but was thrown by the “Just the Opposite” bit. Appears superfluous but maybe I’m missing something!!
    1. The friend (MATE) is impressing the pluck (GRIT). So: the opposite.
    2. As McT says, with impress in the sense to commandeer or seize, I think, rather than to make a mark, apply with pressure or apply pressure to.
11. The top half was very easy. I finished all but three in the SE corner in 18 minutes, then took another 10 to complete that corner. I thought of TREAT for 26 but wasn’t convinced that it fitted the definition so didn’t enter it until I got MAGRITTE. I could see nothing recognisable for 16 and ended using an aid. Disappointed in myself over that. SADIRON was also unfamiliar but at least I didn’t have to resort to an aid for that.
12. Flew through the top half, stalled on the Wodehouse clue, came home in 34 minutes. The only Wodehouse I know is his golf book with the well-known line about the disruptive butterflies, although I was reading only last night about his wartime faux pas. COD to the SURF ACE dude.
13. DNF: defeated by MAGRITTE and TREAT (did not know ‘teat’ = ‘dug’). PERFECTA and SADIRON on wordplay alone. Apart from these, it was a doddle!
14. Like everyone else, I filled in the top half with alacrity, but then got totally stuck on the bottom. I certainly should have gotten ‘tragedy’, ‘scenery’, ‘shade’, and ‘formal’ must more quickly then I did. But ‘Magritte’ and ‘surface’ were the most elusive, even though they were quite obvious when found.

15. Crikey, either I was on exactly the right wavelength or there was something in my coffee this morning. I had all of this but SURFACE/TREAT/MAGRITTE done in under 5 minutes, and only needed another 2 for those.
    SADIRON appeared in a Jumbo earlier this year (924, 7 May), and fortunately I remembered it.
    1. Disgustingly quick!!
       1. Why thank you!
16. I was held up for at least 5 minutes by SADIRON and PERFECTA, neither of which I’d heard of. I knew “dugs” in this sense. I’m sure it’s in Shakespeare or Chaucer. Anyway, I’ve read it somewhere. 22 minutes
    1. You get half a point, falooker, it’s in Anthony and Cleopatra (‘never palates more the dug’). You’d have got a bonus point for The Waste Land (‘old man with wrinkled dugs’).
       References courtesy of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, not my memory, during an abortive search for Wodehouse’s uproarious butterflies.
    2. Perhaps the most obvious Shakespearian dug is the nurse’s in Romeo and Juliet (Act 1 Scene 3).
       1. R&J it is. Plus the “The Waste Land”. Thank you both – I would have been wracking my brains all night to remember these.
    3. Seen DUGS somewhere (as it were) but not Waste Land or Shakespeare. Perhaps J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man? Or another of his novels?

       Rob

17. I’ve been away for a week on the beach in Rhode Island, which had to be abandoned early over the weekend due to the approach of Hurricane Irene. I hope all those in its path came through without difficulty. The puzzle didn’t pose difficulty, and I had all but TREAT and SADIRON in under 20 minutes, and then spent some time musing about those. I didn’t know ‘teat’ as ‘dug’, but TREAT was the only acceptable word I could think of for ‘joy’. SADIRON from the wordplay. BLANDINGS also from the wordplay only as well; I had no idea what it referred to, but it seemed clearly correct. Regards to all.
    1. Even if you don’t read Wodehouse, you should at least know a few of the titles and characters.

       I did think that the Wodehouse surface of this clue was meant to deceive, and that the answer would be something entirely different. Then I saw it…

18. 7:15 for me. I was hoping for a fast time, but was held up by TREAT and then, for simply ages, by PERFECTA, which I either hadn’t come across before or had forgotten. (I was worried that “a” = PER and that there might be a “bet” that would fit ‑E‑T‑, perhaps a FETTO giving me (the Italian) PERFETTO for “just right”. In the end I opted for PERFECTA as the more likely.)
19. I had a problem with this. It’s an intransitive verb (and isn’t defined otherwise in Chambers), so how can it mean ‘send out’?
    1. My thoughts exactly. But the cryptic pointed strongly to it. So my last in, and hesitantly at that.
    2. Admittedly, it’s a long shot, but appreciating the complexity of issues of transitivity/ergativity, I did a little searching around, and the best I could come up with for the intransitive use of ‘send out’ was this intransitive use of ‘send’ from the AV (2 Kings 6:32):

       ‘But Elisha sat in his house, and the elders sat with him; and the king sent a man from before him: but ere the messenger came to him, he said to the elders, See ye how this son of a murderer hath sent to take away mine head?’

       Actually, it’s rather a nice chunk, as it also contains ‘send’ used transitively.

       Not current, not the exact lexical item, but interesting for all that.

       1. As in “Therefore send not to know for whom the bell tolls …”
          1. Good spot! Read that, plus ‘Comus’ and a few of his other shorter poems, only the other day.
    3. It’s in both Collins and the Oxfords as a transitive verb meaning to send forth or emit.

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