Times 25470 – hope you’re not 15!

32 comments on “Times 25470 – hope you’re not 15!”

1. Share Ulaca’s dim view of the (possible) &lit at 19ac. Wrote in the margin “Where’s the embezzler?”

   Had to check that SOLO (3dn) was okay as a verb in this sense. It is. And there’s a similar conceit in the Sandy Denny song “Solo”.

   19dn: the usual Australian disbelief in “root” for “cheer”.

   Talking of which, COD to 14dn where I wanted the less obvious “prenuptial” but couldn’t make it work.

   Note to George (for later): I think 2dn has to be parsed AN(A,STASI)A to account for the “about” and the “tailing”.

   Edited at 2013-05-09 05:33 am (UTC)

2. … it’s been a long time since there were porters aux Halles (8dn). Unless they still have them in the swish shopping precinct that stands there now. Wouldn’t surprise me.
3. 31 minutes, finishing with two of the 4-letter words (LOLL and SOLO). Can’t see how a ‘stroke’ can be a brilliant achievement on its own. ‘What a stroke!’ doesn’t seem to do it. I also don’t see how 19ac works. Presumably it’s an &lit, but the definition would then appear to still refer to a speculator rather than a peculator, ie embezzler.

   Pleasant stuff. Interesting that shallot popped up after mention of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott the other day.

4. No solving time for this one as I dozed off a couple of times when I got stuck. My main problem was finishing off the two 4-letter answers at 23ac and 3dn. I satisfied myself eventually re LOLL(y), but I failed to understand the wordplay in SOLO as I didn’t know it could be a verb meaning to fly an aircraft.

   I had the same doubts as ulaca about STRIKE but the usual sources confirm the required meaning. However I agree with the comments about 19ac. I found 6dn amusing so it gets my vote as COD.

5. Managed to correct roll to loll at the end for 28.13. If 19A has assumed gambling and squandering together constitute something illegeal it hasn’t worked. Uncomfortable with solo as verb though no doubt pilots use it. A little one-two-clunky today compared with some recent puzzles. Ana seems to come up a fair amount but does anyone ever use it outside some learned Laputa-land?
6. I’m also confused by 19A – no definition so far as I can see.

   I also think Billingsgate would work better than Les Halles at 8D. Both old markets have been relocated but at least Billingsgate was a fish market. The sight of those men with wicker baskets full of fish balanced on their heads had to be seen to be believed.

   Overall a smattering of neat wordplays but nothing really difficult. 15 minutes to solve.

7. 20 minutes, with SOLO last in and very (=so, must remember) slow. No problem with the word as a verb, though I think it’s usually related to one’s first lone outing.
   I wonder if there’s a verbal confusion at 19? I had it as a clear &lit, but thought peculator simply meant wrongdoer (peccadillo and all that), rather than having its rather precise meaning. However, clearly peccavi. The inclusion of “another’s” before money would have made it a rather fine clue.
   “Crash site” (and variations) is becoming a solver’s gimme for some kind of bed.
   I thought STROKE had rather a good clue, though it would have worked without “brilliant”. Chambers’ “effective action, feat, achievement” seems to cover the ground.
   CoD to the 32nd clue for MINT.

   Edited at 2013-05-09 09:12 am (UTC)

8. Mostly straightforward, but I made a right meal of the bottom RH corner at first unaccountably entering TAILING instead of NAILING at 27 ac, which then led me to bung in POLITY (instead of COLONY) at 20 dn, on the reasoning that “polity” was a kind of community, composed of LIT (“settled”) inside POY, which I took to be a Caribbean port I’d never heard of, not surprisingly as it doesn’t exist! What a tangled web we sometimes weave for ourselves!

   No problem, for me, with STROKE in the sense used here, but I share the general mystification as to the whereabouts of the definition at 19 ac. I can only presume, along with Ulaca, that it’s intended as an &lit, but if so it’s a long way from being an accurate description of an “embezzler”.

   1. Funny: I did exactly the same thing, but fortunately spotted the error almost immediately.
   2. I did almost exactly the same thing, except I didn’t believe P-P-L-T-R, so held off writing in POLITY.
9. 15 mins. I share the same reservations about 19ac, which is a shame as the puzzle contained some nice clues and good misdirections. LOLL and SWARM made me smile when the pennies dropped. I didn’t have a problem with STROKE or SOLO even though the latter was my last in. I got APPARAT from the better known, to me at least, apparatchik. I took much too long to see CLAUSE, and spending too much time on a relatively straightforward clue seems to be a recurring habit.
10. Yep, I too have reservations about 19ac, particularly as it was my one blank today.

    Still don’t really like ‘fly aircraft’ = SOLO, just seems too specific a type of flying. No problems with any of the others.

    Sorry to be a pain (and probably cover old ground) but did I read on here that the Times are no longer allowing subscriptions to the Crossword Club alone? My subs ran out, so did the card that was registered, and now that I’ve put in a new card, I can’t seem to get it to take the payment. What will I do during my hours of insomnia?

    1. Janie, you are far from alone and so far there has been a rather deafening silence from Admin. I don’t know if this site will allow this attachment from the club Forum nor if you will be able to open it.

       https://www.crosswordclub.co.uk/forum/forum_thread.php?forum_id=5&thread_id=191032&pnum=2#191678

       In case you can’t, re new memberships someone named Willbard (presumably from Admin) says “We are currently making changes to our site so are temporarily unable to accept new members. If you would like to join [send an email to crosswordclub-newmembers@thetimes.co.uk] so that we can let you know when we are ready.” I bracketed the email info in case you are unable to make the link work and click on it.

       Also several people in the same boat as you have reported being given complimentary month to month extensions in the meantime so it’s worth phoning in to the Times to ask for it (and to see if you can find out what on earth is going on). It’s obvious that all of us need to make sure our credit card info is current when we are coming up to renewal.

       Very best of good luck and please let us know what happens.

       1. Thanks, Olivia. Can’t access Crossword Club site at all, but have sent an email to the address you gave. Will let you know what happens…
          1. I’d recommend calling rather than emailing. That’s the only way I’ve ever got them to do anything. Good luck!
       2. Unspammed
          1. Thanks Jack!
11. Made exactly the same error as Mike, putting in TAILING at 27. By the time I had sorted out the ensuing mess I had gone over the half hour. In my defence, officer, I note that Chambers gives “tail“ as a verb meaning “to grip or drag by the tail”, which is something I do regularly when I’m … er … catching animals.

    Tried to be a bit too clever at 8 down and assumed that the reference to Les Halles implied I was looking for a “porteur”.

    Had a brief senior moment when I failed to recognise CLAUSE as part of a legal document, and was only reassured by recalling Chico Marx’s riposte: “You can’t fool me, there ain’t no Sanity Clause”.

    1. Oddly enough, before I even got to the end of your post, the reference to catching animals made me think of Captain Spalding shooting an elephant in his pyjamas. Maybe watching part of Duck Soup last week has affected my perception of things.
12. 13m, with eyebrows raised in the same places as others. Last in, with some trepidation, was SOLO: I thought perhaps it could be a verb but it seemed somehow unlikely.
13. …as I put in ‘peculator’ with a shrug, and moved on. I did have ‘tailing’ for about a minute, but saw at once that ‘nailing’ would be better.

    ‘Stroke’ was my LOI, what else could it be?

14. 28.40 here so a rare sub-30 and a hint that this was straightforward. 19a went in as the only word I could think of, my LOI, but that was my only real delay. I too smiled at 6d – the grandparental joy of handing child back to parent at the pongy end of proceedings being a recent one for me. So COD to 6d.
15. I struggled towards the end and took a whole hour over it. The main delays were 3, 8, (where I was looking for a particular artist), 22 and 23, where I ended up mentally going through all the posssible permutations. I didn’t know the definition for 3 so I was quite prepared to find SOLO was wrong.
    I share the doubts of ulaca and others about 19, but I did like the anagram in 6.
16. Found this not exactly straightforward at 22:20.

    For 15a when faced with ??S?R?E?T I couldn’t think past MISCREANT for a while and 15d worried me as I don’t know what Irish soldiers are called.

    I had similar problems to others with TAILING and that L?T made lit for settled look highly plausible. I eventually revisited the crossing clues when I couldn’t get anything to work at 20 and then spotted that nailing must be right.

    As regards solo I figured that if it wasn’t a verb then we must be in J.R. Hartley territory.

    COD to loll.

17. All correct today. That’s two in a row which for me is usually as good as it gets. I’m likely to DNF tomorrow!
    First in Disposable, last in Swarm.
    Re Incorrect: I remembered the incorrect/out link from Output the other day.
    Took me a long time to get away from Reticently as an obviously wrong answer at 21ac. I was inking in Roll at 23ac when Loll popped into my head causing a hasty rewrite. Liked that one and Solo too. Hadn’t heard of Peculator but the wordplay in 19ac seemed clear enough.
18. Apropos of nothing, I got home today after a week of travelling and went to see if Crossing the Bar was in my edition of Tennyson. I found that it was, but that my (“selected”!) edition is about a thousand pages long. There are vast swathes of Tennyson I don’t remember!
    Incidentally in my edition it’s nowhere near the end: Christopher Ricks clearly had his own ideas.

    Edited at 2013-05-09 02:31 pm (UTC)

19. After an exhausting day of office moves, I was surprised to find that I had enough strength and brainpower left to do this one in 12 minutes, the last penny to clang being LOLL. D’oh.
20. Got off to a cracking start in the NW corner but then proceeded in fits and staggers. 44 minutes. LOI was LOLL which I finally got after going through the alphabet for possibles. In retrospect a fairly simple puzzle but I was not on the wavelength today. Ann
21. About 20 minutes, ending with LOLL as well. Not much else to say, really. Regards.
22. 13:41 for me, with the top half going in quite quickly but the bottom half taking an age.

    Like others I wasted time trying to justify PRENUPTIAL and POLITY. I wasn’t all that keen on LOLL, which I suppose can just about be stretched to mean “loaf”; and I wasn’t familiar with the “fly aircraft” meaning of SOLO. (Perhaps this is the setter who seems to specialise in tricksy clues for 4-letter words – like SNAP.)

    On the other hand I was quite happy to accept 19ac (with its question mark) as a straightforward &lit, even though it was one of my last answers in.

23. One of the several things I appreciate about both this site and Fifteensquared is that they give me the chance to feel that I am not a complete numpty when it comes to solving. For instance, I thought that I was really daft to enter ‘TAILING’ at 27a, and thinking of ‘POLITY’ for 20d. I did realise my errors and corrected the answers quite quickly, but it was a great reassurance to find that other, much more capable, solvers had also been barking up the same wrong trees. I shall never be a great solver, nor a fast one, but the blogs have certainly enhanced my enjoyment of crosswording, so thank you all.
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