Times 25572 – One For The Road

34 comments on “Times 25572 – One For The Road”

1. Thanks, for this Uncle Y, I found this quite tough, and ended up with a couple in the NE left blank. Looking at them now, I should have tried a little harder, as I was thinking along the right lines. Except for STEAM, where I don’t think I would have got to that ‘letter opener’ however long I looked at it!

   Spent an age trying to work out the spoonerism at 21ac before the penny dropped! Some good clues here (HAMSTRUNG, COLLEAGUE), enjoyed it, despite not knowing RECRUDESCE, ETTY, that Providence is in Rhode Island, or that TRACERY is a particularly Gothic art form.

   Edited at 2013-09-05 08:16 am (UTC)

2. It was the NE corner which held me up.

   Some nice clues and misdirections. I particularly liked the Spooner reference.

   Given my picture, I also liked the collie!

3. No, in this case the spooner is someone spooning tea from its caddy.

   This one took me exactly an hour parsing as I solved, and I spent the last 10 minutes stuck on STOMACH and STEAM. There were a few unknowns for me today: PIEDMONTESE, RECRUDESCE and YEREVAN, but I managed to work them out from wordplay and a bit of guesswork. As a fan of theatre I had no problems with DEUS EX MACHINA and I enjoyed the misdirection at 21ac.

   Edited at 2013-09-05 08:14 am (UTC)

4. Same difficulty as others with STEAM and STOMACHS. I’d cracked ‘letter opener’ and ‘radio’ elements for STEAM but still don’t understand ‘found next to’. Thanks, yfyap, for the blog: enjoy your break – if you get one!
   1. It’s just a direction to put the word ‘next to’ radio to get ‘steam radio’! Congratulations on a top time (yesterday was it?) by the way.
      1. Many thanks (yes, yesterday was my wonder day!). Still looks clumsy to me but your suggestion makes good sense.
5. 40 minutes, with a good 10 of those spent on the STEAM and STOMACH. Convinced myself that the radio reference in 6 was AM but couldn’t see how STE might mean “found”. Well done setter, for that red herring in particular.

   We had a mention of William Etty some time ago. I wonder if Thomas Bowdler ever saw any of Etty’s work.

6. All bar those two pesky ones in the NE in less than 40 minutes, but had to throw in the towel despite cottoning on to the ‘endures’ meaning of ‘bears’. Very nice clue. And, as Janie says, you really need 12 to open up 6, which is tough for those of us who’ve never heard the slang term ‘steam radio’.

   I studied Aristophanes in bowdlerised versions, which is a bit like going to an Air Supply concert without getting ‘All out of love’.

   1. In order to read the truly unbowdlerised version, you need the Greek text. There are many double-entendres that can’t be translated.
7. 22 mins with the last 8 of them spent on the STOMACHS/STEAM crossers. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who found those two difficult.

   At first I thought this was going to be quite difficult, but as the answers went in there were some helpful checkers. I enjoyed the Spooner misdirection even though it didn’t hold me up for long.

8. On form today, thought as first I would struggle but it went along nicely and finished in 29 minutes, best puzzle of the week so far. Liked the TEA CADDY for misdirection and my LOI was RIALTO, equally good.
9. Good puzzle with many excellent clues, all mentioned above. I too was lured up the garden path by the sneaky Spooner at 21A assuming this to be yet another reference to the first-letter transposing reverend and don of that name before seeing the alternative possibility. Nice piece of misdirection. There were also some ingeniously misleading defs – e.g. “airlines” for BRONCHI.

   My reading of 23A (NEURON) was that it was EURO inside a repetition of N as the abbreviation for “new” rather than a repetition of “news” as Uncle Y seems to imply.

   Thanks for all the blogs, and enjoy your R & R, Uncle Y.

10. Thanks Uncle Yap, for stepping in again at such short notice. I owe you one.

    I also got stuck on the same last two this morning, and had to put it down incomplete when I got off the train. My subconscious must have been gnawing at them while I was on the Tube though, as when I looked at it again when I got to my desk they both went straight in.

    POSTBAG and BRONCHI were also slow in coming and when I cracked those (after maybe 20 minutes) I though the last two would also fall, but they didn’t.

11. The NE corner held me up too, though once again had to get into Firefox before I could start.
    9A was LOI – checkers had got me thinking of PREEMINENCE, which couldn’t be made to fit the clue at all. I admit to having to resort to aids to find a word ending in HI, and then .t…c.
12. …like ‘Yerevan’, ‘recrudesce’ (put in from the literal), ‘Etty’, and ‘Piedmontese’, but like everyone else I got hung up on the bull and the radio. Once ‘stomachs’ was in, it was obvious what the last answer was.
13. 13m, slowed down a bit by bunging in POSTAGE. Must have been on the wavelength.
    Today’s unknowns: Etty, YEREVAN, steam radio. No problem with PIEDMONTESE: I’m a wine geek and it’s my second favourite region in the world.
    I liked the Spooner misdirection.
14. Am I the only one thinking that it is weak to make ‘category’ a cryptic reference to ‘categorically’? And that on 20 dn, ‘partner’ is not so much a reference to the answer of 15 as a quotation from the clue?
    1. I agree with you in principle about 17, though because of the difference in meaning between ‘category’ and ‘categorically’ I didn’t notice it at the time. In 20 I think ‘partner’ can be taken as a reference to the answer to 15, even though the word is also the definer in the clue, so I don’t see a problem.
15. 14:15 about 5 minutes of which were spent sorting out the NE corner. I knew all the obscure stuff which helped.
16. 22:40 … well, I just loved this one. TEA CADDY, BRONCHI, ECSTATIC, PASSING OVER all top-notch, but for some reason HAMSTRUNG made me laugh out loud. Perhaps it was the thought of a hamster lacking energy (that damn wheel!).

    Thanks, setter. And thanks Uncle Yap. Hope you get your sabbatical now and come back full of your customary sparkle.

    1. ‘Hamstrung’ reminded me of all these footballers said to be suffering hamstring injuries – they shouldn’t allow them to go hamstering in the playing season.
       1. I’ll never hear that the same way again now. Thank you!
17. 17:09 but it felt quite tricky at times.

    Bronchi and ode were my last two in after I’d wrangled for a bit with stomachs and steam. Like John I thought AM accounted for radio and struggled to justify the STE.

    Enjoyable puzzle and bravo for the non-spoonerism.

    Yerevan truly unknown Etty and recrudesce only vaguely familiar.

    Is today’s “extra” word Gothic? The clues are coming together. The treasure is somewhere Gothic on the streets of an old seaside town.

    1. If you Google them the first thing that comes up is Whitby Gothic Weekend [.. is a twice-yearly festival for goths, in Whitby, North Yorkshire, England]. I think we have the setter on the run now…. Then again, Whitby …. kippers, aka herrings, red or otherwise …. hmm… the game’s afoot.
       1. I should, of course, have typed “odd” rather than “old” but Google still brings up the same link.

          Whitby is only about 1½ hours from me so I’ll be on standby tomorrow when we get the final clue.

          1. Good fellow. I suggest a thermos of hot tea, a Tilley lamp and ,of course, a shovel.
             1. In Umberto Eco’s ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, a load of bored guys created as an intellectual passtime and out of nowhere a consistent world-wide conspiracy, only to find that doing this in fact brought it into existence. Go for it penfold!

                Edited at 2013-09-05 06:15 pm (UTC)

18. I took 35 minutes to complete all but 6 and 12, then spent ages trying to work them out. I realized ‘bears’ was likely to mean ‘carries’ or ‘tolerates’, but the only word I could think of to fit was ATTRACTS. In the end I resorted to a word-matcher. Once I had the M, STEAM came to me immediately, but I would never have got it without the M.
    I did manage to get 14 instantly from the E of RECRUDESCE and no other letters in place since the second word had to be EX,so I didn’t look too closely at the anagram fodder; looking back at it I think it’s a nice clue. In fact there were plenty of very good clues, though I’d not count 7 among them – the surface strikes me as awful.
    Most enjoyable puzzle of the week so far.
19. A steady 30 minutes after a very hot 18 holes – we really do need some rain now – crazy weather

    I knew the obscurities, particularly the wine region of Piedmont whilst Deus Ex …. has appeared before. I knew ruminants have four-chamber stomachs so presumed bears must have also. And of course STEAM radio is straight out of my youth, listening to Radio Lux under the bed covers hoping mother wouldn’t hear!

    Best puzzle of the week so far.

    1. Hot, Jim? Teed off today at 13.00 in 34 degrees and no wind, in the Aquitaine seniors… thankfully I did the puzzle first!
       1. No, not as hot as that! I don’t think I would enjoy playing in that heat. However, one acclimatises to temperature. I remember about a month after we landed in HK my wife complaining she was cold when the temperature fell to about 15 degrees – something she would have found quite acceptable in the UK.
20. Done in by steam and stomachs. Anything but a dim puzzle this, but if Dr Spooner kept a bull… Not my day.
21. Had to go offline after 20′ with 5 in the –of course– NE unsolved, returned after drinks and dinner to finish, desultorily, with –of course–STEAM as LOI. I realized after reading the blog that I’d come across ‘steam radio’ before, but it didn’t register at the time. I’m sure we’ve had RECRUDESCE recently–or was it in a Concise? Liked this a lot all around (ODE & TIE, not so much), maybe especially the non-Spooner clue.
22. About 25 minutes, same story as everyone else, coming down at the end to STOMACHS, STEAM and the non-Spoonerism, in that order. I have no idea what steam radio is, and I haven’t found the time to look it up, so it went in as the only possible letter opener from the checkers. Thanks to UY for stepping into the breach, and regards to everyone.

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