Times 25051 – a holiday is almost as good as a change

44 comments on “Times 25051 – a holiday is almost as good as a change”

1. … is what lovebirds get up to under the table in a Barbrar Cartland novel (so I am told), where stockinged foot meets highly polished patent leather shoe. So, it’s a double definition.

   Edited at 2012-01-05 01:40 am (UTC)

2. As I expect may be the case for others, I got away to a quick start but was held up in the SW (+ FOOTSIE) and especially in the NE. I had ‘toddy’ at 7dn, parsing it as an &lit, where duty becomes DY (losing heart) and TOD stands for one (as in on one’s tod) – a toddy being closely related to a tot. ‘Closely related’ was of course the problem, not to mention the one/on one’s tod one. So, thanks for the parsing of 7dn, which I got with only partial understanding, and also that of 27, where I failed to see the Double D.

   77 minutes in the end, with ticks against ROAST and FLEET, but COD to the one that always gets me, the reversed hidden at 5 across.

   Edited at 2012-01-05 04:30 am (UTC)

3. I was confused at 1D since I thought LAPPER was the person using the tongue and couldn’t justify the C.

   I don’t know why you say the financial times index doesn’t fit the clue. It clearly concerns folks in the City (of London, the financial district of the UK). Plus the under the table stuff.

4. …when I got it. The FTSE is the London stock index, and ‘folk in the City’ are stockbrokers and such.

   I went great guns on this for a while. I put in the rather obscure ‘starveling’ and ‘calamus’ by instinct, using the cryptics as my guide, and I saw how ‘roast’ and ‘lethal’ worked after a bit. My only mistake being ‘pressers’ instead of ‘pressmen’. After that was corrected, I quickly got ‘marginally’, and had only the SE – what a struggle that was! It took me a long time to remember Dogger Bank, and even longer to see that 17 was not ‘lemonise’ but ‘semolina’. So my total time was 55 minutes after a promising start.

5. Going through a bad patch it would seem. Don’t know why I couldn’t get MOPED. When I presented my UK driver’s licence in Australia they asked: What’s a “moped” (pronounced as the past-tense verb). But I was generally stuffed in the bottom left. So thanks George.

   16dn: a ref to the DOGGER Bank as Vinyl suggests; beloved of weather forecast listeners of yore? Though NOAD also has it as the more general:

   noun Geology
   a large spherical concretion occurring in sedimentary rock.

6. Note to George: you can get a much better commentary here:
   http://www.abc.net.au/news/sport/cricket/
7. A hopeless 3 mistakes in nearly half an hour. A careless PRESSMAN, a mistyped FLLET and a consequent guess at PRIMITIAL.

   I can legitimately blame tiredness, solving this after spending way too much time getting the Festive Survey Results sorted out. They’re on my Live Journal page to make it simpler for people to comment if they choose.

   Edited at 2012-01-05 04:56 am (UTC)

8. 30 minutes for all but three in the NW. After a further 10 minutes in the doldrums I used aids on 1ac to get going again and completed the grid in 44 minutes total. At 1ac I had concluded that I simply didn’t know the answer but the wordplay led me to the unlikely DALUMAS so I decided to look it up and confirmed that it was indeed incorrect.

   Once I had C as starter to 1dn I thought of CLAPPER. Tongue is a bona fide word for the clapper in a bell, so not slang I would have thought.

   I considered ROAST, my last one in, fairly early on but couldn’t explain it so it stayed out until all its checkers were in place. I completely forgot about Ordinary Seaman and although I got the TAR reference I was attaching it to ‘seaman’ rather ‘one sailing’ so I wasn’t able to parse it. As I failed miserably this has to be a poor clue, of course. On the other hand I thought 27ac was pretty neat and I liked 5dn.

   Edited at 2012-01-05 07:08 am (UTC)

9. At last a reasonable time, 17 minutes, after seemingly fogged in the festive aftermath. Held up by footsie and lethal at the end. Seemed pretty straighforward but I do find the roast tortuosity overdone. There’s got to be a catchier wording for footsie…
10. 20 minutes, which is about average for me, but there were a few tricksy clues that could easily have held me up for ages on another day.
    The NE corner caused me the most problems after writing a Y in DADDY that looked like an X. Last in was 5dn LETHAL. For me Hal is Henry V so I didn’t understand the corpulent bit. I’m still struggling to see how “suffer” means “let”. “Allow”, yes, but “let”? Can anyone come up with a sentence in which the two are interchangeable? Or am I missing the point entirely? Fortunately I got it from the definition, which raised a smile.
    Unknowns today were CALAMUS, CLAPPER and “rover” for “pirate”. Dogger from early mornings listening to the shipping forecast and Farming Today. I was very up on the price of potatoes when I was at school.
    1. “Suffer the little children to come unto me” nearly does it. It’s a fairly archaic usage.
       1. But “let the little children to come unto me” doesn’t make any sense. You have to remove the word “to” or use “allow”.
          1. A meaning of suffer is allow.
             1. Exactly. But not let.
          2. I agree, of course, hence the “nearly”. Most modern translations of the phrase read “let them come”. Strictly, even in Archaic, “suffer…to” has the meaning of let and needs the preposition. Chambers, under let, has: …suffer (usually with infinitive without to) suggesting occasionally let…to is possible.
             1. Fair enough. I suppose it’s a question of whether nearly is good enough! As I got the right answer let’s agree that it is.
11. I think I must have misread my watch, as this felt much closer to the 15 and a bit minutes than the 10+ my arithmetic suggested, so let’s call it the former.
    Slightly disconcerted by the exercise=PE wordplay twice in close (geographical) proximity (18 and 23d), otherwise only really held up in the SE, which I duly skipped in my usual anticlockwise progress.
    I didn’t know CALAMUS as quill, but did know CLAPPER as the tongue of a bell (Jackkt’s right, it’s straight definition), and Albert was the obvious auteur. ROAST I failed to parse properly.
    PRIMITIVE last in: I was expecting IC in there somewhere.
    I’ve memorably played FOOTSIE under the table in the sweet agony of love, never been really tempted by the city version. It gets my CoD, not least for its near echo of floatation for the City interest.
12. The Dogger Bank?
13. Well, after struggling a bit yesterday I riffled through this in c12mins. However for some reason I wanted to complain about a number of the clues, don’t know why.. there is nothing technically wrong with them, they just put me on edge a little.. a bit contrived, perhaps. Probably just me.
    Yes, Dogger is a reference to the Dogger Bank I think. And here in the UK, until recently a moped *had* to have pedals. The word comes from MOtor + PEDals.
14. No real problems with this one and a steady 25 minutes.

    Didn’t recall CALAMUS but CLAPPER was obvious and then Camus became a virtual certainty which MACHO quickly confirmed. Others with better literary knowledge than mine will know for sure but isn’t HAL referred to by Waggledagger as one of the other Kings – Henry IV or Henry V – not convinced by Henry VIII.

    A trip down memory lane with SEMOLINA. Who else recalls those awful school dinners and a plate of lumpy SEMOLINA with a biscuit so hard you nearly broke your teeth on it?

    1. You’re right, Jimbo, Waggledagger’s Prince Hal was definitely Henry V (at least before he became Henry V, if you see what I mean). HAL as an abbreviation for Henry could denote any of the Henrys – but I guess the setter would argue that by throwing in the qualifier “corpulent” he/she had adequately pointed us in the direction of the monstrous and bloated wife-killer.

       I share your hideous schoolboy memories of SEMOLINA.

    2. I don’t remember the biscuit but I loved the lumps.
15. – presented no difficulty as I knew lapsus calami for slip of the pen (as opposed to lapsus linguae of the tongue): school Latin is helpful in later life!
16. Slowed by problems in NW, so particular thanks George for the full parsing of ROAST and SOPRANO (I missed the ‘right’ for ‘one’ substitution). COD to FOOTSIE (a genuine LOL clue – when the penny dropped).
17. The expression ‘Bluff King Hal’ refers to Henry VIII
    1. Thanks Anonymous. A quick Google throws up the following:
       Bluff King Hal was full of beans
       He married half a dozen queens
       After this strong start this bit of 16dn goes downhill rapidly.
18. 20 minutes but with an error, having written in FOOTSEE, for no apparently good reason. Obviously it looks all wrong now, but in my defence there’s no indication of how to spell it correctly from the wordplay.

    P.S. Ah, a quick Google suggests why I’m confused. Fans of Northern Soul will remember (and possibly hate) the novelty song “Footsee” by Wigan’s Chosen Few, which reached the top 10 in 1976. Having watched the weekly BBC4 re-runs of Top of the Pops from 1976 all through last year, I will go out on a limb and say it wasn’t popular music’s finest year. Though it might explain where I got my variant spelling.

19. Another torturous tortuous solve in a long line thereof. Last in the COD FOOTSIE. I remember being disappointed when I first saw FTSE written down. I thought it was a joke along FT100 = FTC lines. And why do acronyms sound infinitely more important, interesting and self explanatory than the phrase they stand for? Hypertext Transfer Protocol?!

    Messed up the NE by putting TODDY instead of DADDY: TOD = ALONE = ONE + DY for tot or toddy as in rum. What’s wrong with that?

    1. As someone who made the same mistake – see my post above – the facts that ‘on one’s tod’ – not just ‘ tod’ – means alone (not ‘one’ exactly) and that a toddy is a drink, while a tot is a measure [of strong drink] were enough to persuade me to try again.
20. I can see that “to” is the sticking-point. But the essential overlap of meaning is so great that one can let/ suffer/allow the slight technical misfit in the clue, I’d have thought.

    Edited at 2012-01-05 11:42 am (UTC)

    1. I see your point. Let’s agree that you’ll allow it, I’ll suffer it, and then we can let it lie.
21. About 15 minutes for me and I did enjoy myself, FOOTSIE making me laugh out loud – luckily I was on my own in the office.
22. All present and correct (first in a what feels like a long time…), but this took longer than I first thought it would. Some very easy clues, I thought, some much more tricky.

    Didn’t know CALAMUS, didn’t recall DOGGER, couldn’t parse ROAST or LOTHARIO, and still don’t really understand PRESSMEN. What’s the service bit all about?

    LOI: LETHAL.

    1. Press gang for Royal Navy, a ‘service’.
    2. 
       It’s all explained here, Janie:
       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressment
       1. Thanks to you both. Very informative link, Jack.
23. DNF here. After correctly guessing CALAMUS I ground to a halt on LETHAL and PRIMITIVE. I don’t recall v as ‘see’ before so must be my faulty memory. Thanks for the informative blog – as ever much appreciated.
24. Why does V=see?

    There was an almost identical clue to today’s 19D in the Jumbo a few weeks ago…

    1. v. is short for vide, Latin for see, as used in footnotes etc. in the expression “q.v.”

       http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quod_vide

25. On first read through I thought this was going to be very challenging. I like to start with 1a but, since I’d never heard of CALAMUS, I had to wait for checkers. Like others I pondered Dumas before remembering Camus (who I thought was Algerian, not French – or maybe because he wrote in French.) Anyway, it was a very slow start. But it picked up later and I finished in 30 minutes. I thought 9a was a very convoluted clue and it took me some time to see the definition at 7d, although I had the answer quite early on. I thought this was a mixed bag of very easy and very difficult clues.
26. Not easy for me, about 45 minutes. Last ones in were FOOTSIE (COD) and LETHAL. I also felt, as mentioned already, that Hal pointed to the future Henry V, and not the oversize Henry. Didn’t know of the CALAMUS, so wordplay only there, but was pleased that the bank pointed to something out of the ordinary today. The Russian Baltic Fleet sank some British fishing boats there near the outset of the round-the-world voyage to Tsushima in 1904 or -5, causing a great uproar, and there was a naval action between the British and German fleets at Dogger Bank sometime prior to Jutland, so that’s how I knew it. We don’t get the UK shipping forecast over here. Regards to all.
27. 10:15 for me, with LETHAL taking up probably a good minute at the end. As with others, “corpulent king” didn’t lead me naturally to HAL. Apart from that, nice puzzle.
28. Convinced myself that 5 down referred to Louis VI. I’m no historian, I just remember A. A. Milne’s poem Teddy Bear:

    One night it happened that he took
    A peep at an old picture-book,
    Wherein he came across by chance
    The picture of a King of France
    (A stoutish man) and, down below,
    These words: “King Louis So and So,
    Nicknamed ‘The Handsome!’ ” There he sat,
    And (think of it!) the man was fat!

29. Weird – most seem to have struggled, but I breezed through this with only the 1s (ones?) left in 23 minutes; usually 30 to 40 minutes to solve all I’m going to solve (often 3 or 4 beyond my ken). Understood it all except the OS for ordinary seaman, but Cook -> ROAST was unmistakable.

    Then messed up with 1 dn , didn’t known a bell’s tongue so guessed FLAPPER – flapping arms, flapping tongues – wrong: flapping gums.

    Leaving the known unknown (copyright D.Rumsfeld) 1 ac Quill starting with F, so never going to get it. Guessed F for French Amis for author -> FALAMIS

    And

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