Times 25501

30 comments on “Times 25501”

1. 27:42 .. marginally quicker than yesterday for me but another battle.

   HARD PASTE only got from checkers and wordplay.

   TWO-HANDER, I had to reverse engineer the definition! The COD for me.

2. And yes, a struggle. No idea about HARD PASTE, STARTER HOME or SAND DAB — and hope not to meet them again. Totally mis-read 13dn and thought the middle bit had to be {a}RCHEST — given that there are far too many meanings of the word “arch”. Even had to think a bit about “order” = BID; then I did as I was bidden and wrote it in.

   Thanks for the parsing of 18dn, Jack. That had me stumped. As it turns out, a great and deceptive clue.

3. Lots of unknowns – HARD PASTE, TWO-HANDER, SAND (DAB), DILIGENCE as a vehicle – in a puzzle with some innovative anagramming. Failed to see the reverse hidden as always, but had read the other day somewhere(here?) that nit typically refers to the egg form, so in it went.

   Like McT, I was clueless of the parsing of CHANCEL. Like sotira, marginally quicker than yesterday – 78 minutes, the time it took to listen to Britten’s War Requiem. I am keeping my fingers crossed for 6 July, when I will audition for the chance to sing this with the legendary Lorin Maazel.

   1. ulaca – If you’re not already aware of it, this Saturday Sir Simon Rattle is conducting a performance of the War Requiem with the Berliner Philharmoniker (and the wonderfully named Rundfunkchor). It will be broadcast live on their rather brilliant Digital Concert Hall platform, and no doubt available in the digital archives after that. I have the iPad app, which is highly recommended. You can subscribe for a just a week, I think.

      Google Berliner Phil for more info.

      1. That’s really kind if you to mention. I will certainly look it up. Ironically, the Berlin Phil was the one appointment Maazel craved, but he was passed over in favour of Abbado nearly 25 years ago.
         1. You’re welcome. I’ve been a bit of a Rattle fan ever since working as a barkeep at Brum’s Symphony Hall years ago where I regularly got to serve drinks and nibbles to ‘our Simon’ and invited guests in the green room. He was serenely charismatic. Frankly, everyone who worked at the hall had a crush on him (and I mean everyone – women, men, probably the hall cat for all I knew). Fortunately, he’s a pretty wonderful conductor, too! I spent a happy year there sneaking into every performance and rehearsal I could.

            On edit: I forgot to say “Break a leg!”

            Edited at 2013-06-14 03:07 pm (UTC)

         2. Having sung under the baton of both Maazel and Abbado, I’d say the Berlin Phil definitely made the right decision.
   2. Our city is twinned with Mannheim in Germany. During the war both suffered severe bomb damage and Mannheim was, of course, taken in 1945. In 1995 we commemorated the end of WW2 with a joint performance of the War Requiem by choirs from both cities. First in a Mannheim church on the exact 50th anniversary and then here in Swansea on remembrance day. Very emotional – so much so that one of older ladies in their group fainted when the “artillery” got closer. We used American and German soloists from the Mannheim Opera. At the end I remember the audience just stood in silence for a minute before applauding. Not a dry eye in the church. A lot of friendships were forged and I’m still in touch with some of their choristers. It’s a rare work that can have this effect. Hope you get in, Ulaca. A difficult sing but worth the effort. Ann
      1. Nice story. I’ve heard it a couple of times courtesy of YouTube but it has yet to grab me. But that is often the way with these ‘deeper’ works, especially when one is listening as background to doing other things – like crosswords!
4. There are strange things that the LJ posting interface does with some browsers (not to mention operating systems and platforms). The only way I can get close to getting the LJ Visual Editor to match the final post (which always looks the same in all the browsers I have) is to use Chrome (on the Mac, OS 10.6.x) for posting. Even then, the careful line-spacing I use in my original HTML file stuffs up and I have to correct it after checking the “preview” option. It also seems not to recognise the non-breakable-space command. None of this happened before LJ changed its interface.

   So a change of colour doesn’t surprise me at all!

5. 30m, including over ten on my last in, PRECEDENT. Just couldn’t see it. I didn’t know TWO-HANDER, but I’m all too familiar with the development stages of head lice.
6. Didn’t know HARD PASTE or SAND DAB, and never got on the setter’s wavelength at any point in this. COD to HEARTFELT, as even though “rejected sinister” was highly likely to be TFEL, I was still a bit surprised to find a word containing that string of letters.
7. 20 minute stroll in the park for this one which got easier the further down the grid I progressed. No unknowns and no queries. Straightforward average Times puzzle.

   At 10A Jack I can see your enties in red and I use Firefox

8. I work in Firefox and your red letters show in red. Felicity TT
9. 12 minutes – nicely straightforward puzzle to cheer me up after a struggle in ‘another place’ earlier today.

   I too can see the red and I use Internet Explorer (not because I want to but because it is the default position where I work).

   1. You not know your Hitch, Sue, or are you talking of another puzzle? 🙂
      1. Another one, she said cryptically 🙂 Didn’t have time for the Graun today, or the FT come to that.
10. 20 minutes found this tricky and didn’t help myself out early on by writing in CATCH instead of HITCH and MUG instead of NIP. I liked the clues for STARTER HOME and INCORPOREAL and the crafty definition of ASPIRATE. Two goodies in a row.
    1. Another MUG-er here.
    2. MUG was my first choice too, but never actually wrote it in
11. Yes, another tricky one, but nowhere near as tricky as yesterday’s. I entered SAND RAY at first for 7 on the grounds that a ray is a stroke of light and therefore a light stroke, so 15 took ages to get until I corrected 7. I found much of the puzzle fairly straightforward, but 18, 21, 24 and 25 held me up for some time. No precise time but not far off a full hour in the end.
12. 23 mins post-lunch. At least I managed to stay awake today.

    The NW corner proved the most troublesome and HARD PASTE was my LOI after I realised that 5dn wasn’t NAG (don’t ask). HOOKE should have gone in far quicker than it did, and although I was sure that STARTER HOME had to be the answer to 4dn I couldn’t parse it. I always called the device that was used to start an old car a crank handle, not crank on its own, so the connection didn’t occur to me.

    1. I had that in mind too, for ages.
13. ….as I had a lot of trouble with ‘faction’, looking for the wrong meaning of ‘camp’. Same thing with ‘starter home’, I was sure ‘old crank’ was the literal. I was also held up for a while by putting in ‘direct draft’.

    But I got there eventually. No time, an overnighter.

14. Likewise.
15. I enjoyed this puzzle which I completed in just over 43 minutes despite a very disruptive Border Terrier who insisted on sitting on my lap as I struggled with the newspaper. Thank you or parsing 18d: it’s quite obvious how the clue works once its pointed out, but I was determined to fit ‘h’ as hymn’s opening into cancel but, of course, couldn’t make ‘cancel’ equate to ‘line’.
    George Clements.
16. I also found this quite tricky, but highly enjoyable. More urban warfare, reclaiming one building at a time, than the cavalry sweeping across the plain…
    1. Me too
17. 14:12 for me, once again having difficulty finding the setter’s wavelength, but at least homing in on it more quickly than I did yesterday.

    I managed to stop myself bunging in PASHA, K????-IN and NAG on spec, but was unable to resist MUG. And there were other clues where I wasted time going down the wrong path, e.g. trying to find a 6-letter scientist who could be docked to make a 5-letter rugby player.

    No complaints though. Another very fine puzzle.

18. I was stumped by the NE corner. I’d put in RAJAH for 6a, though now I can see that it doesn’t really parse. I was thinking HAJ as the religious bit plus A R(rex)all reversed. I needed the ASPIRATE to finally sort it out. About 32 minutes.

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