Times 25242: After Geography … Music and Drama

33 comments on “Times 25242: After Geography … Music and Drama”

1. 42′, the first 12 online, at which point it was clear to me that this was going to take some time. I knew that Miss Dashwood was Eleanor, except, of course, that Jane Austen didn’t know how to spell; so that took a good deal of time. 1ac gets my COD, but 21ac and 3d come close, and I liked 14ac and 27ac, too. My LOI was, naturally, SKEWER, which I thought of early on and rejected; it took most of those 42 minutes to derhotacize my mind. I was hoping for enlightenment on KIP; I wondered for a long time whether ‘snap’ meant ‘party’ in the UK. On edit: I hadn’t seen Jackkt’s comment; ta, Jack (come to think of it, I’d never heard of the UKIP either).

   Edited at 2012-08-15 01:27 am (UTC)

   1. Just remembered where I’ve seen Elinor spelt this way, and, I’m ashamed to say, it’s not Jane Austen but this piece of doggerel:

      Would you like to sin
      With Elinor Glyn
      On a tiger skin?

      Or would you prefer
      To err with her
      On some other fur?

      For younger readers, Elinor Glyn wrote steamy fiction a century before E. L. James.

2. …but I did solve it eventually. I know ‘UKIP’ perfectly well, but never thought of using that sense of ‘party’, so it just had to go in from the definition. I was also bewildered by ‘skewer’, the obvious answer.

   ‘Alternative vote’ seemed a bit artificial, even though there is apparently such a thing. You would have thought they might have called it ‘alternative voting’.

   1. We had a referendum on the Alternative Vote only last year so one would hope it’s a term well-known to UK solvers.
   2. I toyed with ‘alternating vote’ but it sounds more like something the Chinese Communist Party would dream up.
3. 25dn is (U)KIP referring to the UK Independence Party.
   1. Thanks for that. My ignorance shines once more!
      1. Hardly ignorance! They have never been elected a seat in Parliament and took only about 3% of the vote at the last election. They hold 12 elected seats in the European Parliament.
4. Not much under the hour for this one although I had high hopes of it in the early stages because the RH went in quite easily and flowed nicely in the solving. Unfortunately this has a grid which apart from a couple of letters on each side divides the puzzle into quite separate halves and I took ages to get properly going on the left.

   There was some really excellent stuff here, for example I loved 3dn once I had found the answer towards the end of the proceedings, however I didn’t like ‘parish event’ at 9ac which I can’t find justified anywhere so I take it to be a somewhat distracting DBE. ‘Charity event’ would have been an improvement.

   I’m also more familiar with ‘tumbril’ so ended up solving 14ac from the definition and justifying the wordplay later.

   Edited at 2012-08-15 01:40 am (UTC)

5. 71 minutes – great puzzle, thanks setter. Like others without entomological or anglocentric knowledge, BOTSWANA and KIP went in from the literals on a wing (in the first case) and a prayer (in the second).

   The standout to me was UMBRELLA but there was much good stuff here. I have no problem with BAZAAR for ‘parish event’ as ‘church bazaar’ is such a common collocation – at least, it was 25 years ago when I was still living in England. If PARISH EVENT had been clued by ‘bazaar’, on the other hand, without a question mark, etc., I would have cried foul.

6. 39 minutes online, tough going. Biggest hold up was having SATIRICAL (so nearly an anagram) for 8d, which fitted some but made THESPIAN impossible. If only I had managed to start from the top rather than working piecemeal.
   My first guess on the VOTE was transferable, which fortunately didn’t fit, or I’d still be struggling.
   I have learned now that the BOT is not the fly but its maggot. In my ignorance, 1ac just had to many words, and for some time I was looking for a country ending with AH(ot). This little snippet on BOTSWANA’s climate: “The coolest average min/low temperature is 6 °C (43 °F) in June/July.” That ain’t hot.
   I rather think BAZAARs in churches are much less common than they used to be: back in the day, they might have provided a quarter of a church’s annual income.
   CoD to my last in, UMBRELLA – “condemned transport” is very cute.
7. I too found the left side tough. 45 minutes, last in rake. Not knowing manticore or patten didn’t help. Perversity’s a stretch, as from the view of the one opposed to the obstinacy, not in itself a pejorative term. But maybe one’s perversity in defiance is not a bad thing. Overall a bit of a rockface but still good to get to the top.
   1. I still don’t get what the ‘one’ is doing in the clue. For me too, the core meaning of perversity is contrariness, as in the following poem by Henry Baker, based on Psalm 23, AKA the hymn ‘The King of Love My Shepherd Is’:

      ‘Perverse and foolish oft I strayed,
      But yet in love he sought me
      And on his shoulder gently laid
      And home rejoicing brought me.’

8. Sorry to say I’m not too keen on this puzzle. Too many quibbles.

   At 1A “hot” is misleading padding: ditto “one” at 12A. A BAZAAR is not for me a “parish event” – it’s a market. At 23D I don’t equate “park” which suggests land management with “moor” which suggests the exact oppopsite. 25D is simply obscure.

   I think the parsing of 28A is EL(S)INOR-E

   1. That would be right. I shall adjust accordingly. Thanks.
   2. Agreed on 12ac unless someone can come up with something, but ‘moor’ in 23dn is to do with parking boats surely.
      1. ‘One’ is surely the reader, supplies the reader with. I don’t object to any of the clues except, fractionally, this one for the definition. UKIP is less obscure these days. If a definition includes “can quite often be seen as” which is more or less the convention they all seem to work.
         1. I see it now, thanks. But the whole clue is a bit flawed to me, what with the literal – arcane dictionary entry notwithstanding – and the ‘no uni’, which has the whiff of desperation about it.
      2. The only people who “park” boats also wear Captain Pugwash hats and have to be rescued by the local lifeboat!
         1. That’s settled – we’ll dub it the ‘Captain Pugwash’ question mark.
   3. This is the image I have in mind.
9. Hard work. It shows how odd puzzles can be that I clocked 19:46 for this, only 30 seconds more than yesterday, but this felt a whole lot tougher. Had to come here for understanding of 1ac, 14ac and 25dn for a start.
10. Just under 35 minutes. Enjoyed the variety of clues, particularly 10, 27 and 3.

    Started to scribble in TRANSFERABLE VOTE but ran out of spaces, so took a while to correct that mess.

    Bit of a guess as to whether to put in MANCITORE or MANTICORE, but thought the latter sounded better. I see there’s a TV film of that name.

    Didn’t fully understand 12 (one through) but joekobi’s comment above has clarified that.

11. the party is UKIP minus head equals KIP
    1. And your point is? This is already noted in several places above. Welcome if you are new but it helps to read the blog and comments before posting.
12. Sailed through this one, didn’t parse umbrella fully but was on to UKIP (as recently watched Nigel Farrage on You Tube in the Strasbourg parliament – his very amusing and sadly accurate speech about the euro) and finished in a fast-for-me 18 minutes.
13. I had the same trouble as jackkt, puzzle of two halves. As there are a good few Times grids that disappoint in this respect, or worse, in not providing sufficient access to corners, I always hope for, but do not necessarily receive, compilerly generosity.

    Charles R.

14. I was doing fine and actually quite liked the puzzle until I hit this one – which seemed and seems a bit too busy. I had to go away and not think about it for a bit. 27 minutes. Stage fright was very nice.

    Some noteworthy deaths recently – and one 100th anniversary celebration. Marvin Hamlisch, Robert Hughes and the venerable Julia Child. Unfortunately it seems to be apocryphal but I always loved the Julia one about dropping the (roast turkey/whole salmon/crown of lamb) on the floor and that great voice saying that after all no one else saw it happen. My mother and I did indeed drop the Christmas turkey once when I was in my teens. No harm no foul.

    1. … Nora Ephron. I hadn’t come across Julia Child until I watched Julie & Julia.
15. I enjoyed this a lot in spite of not knowing about the fly in 1a. 27 minutes.
16. Phew! That was tough. 35 minutes and a bit of a grind. 10 minutes at the end on WEAPON.
17. 28/29 today, defeated by Bazaar. That, Abruptly and Perversity held me up for a long time at the end. Guessed Manticore correctly from the checkers and wordplay. Got Umbrella and Kip from the definitions.
18. 8:53 here for a most enjoyable puzzle. No problems; absolutely no complaints.

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