Times 25,578

36 comments on “Times 25,578”

1. BarnarDO ORiginally can be seen as a door keeper.
   1. Amazing time!
      1. Sometimes I’m in the flow, more often I’m in the vichissoise (sic).
2. Last 2 letters Barnado and first 2 of originally = door ie keeping, perhaps?
   Thanks for the blog Jim
3. Agreed, an easyish puzzle. Thanks to both above for explaining role of Barnardo at 5D (DOORKEEPER). Clever clue.

   And thanks to Jimbo for stepping into the breach.

4. I found this disappointingly easy (by far the easiest of a relatively easy week). I was hoping for a bit of a challenge today, but it was not to be. There wasn’t even one demanding clue. After 10 minutes I slowed down so as not to finish too soon, but I still finished in 20 minutes, leaving me with nothing to do for the next half hour at my customary solving spot.
5. One second over the 9 minutes and that was probably because I was careless writing in the first N in acrimonious and then couldn’t work out 4d properly.

   Thanks to Jimbo

6. Mea Cupla – packing up for the airport and thinking “what is it I’ve forgotten – I know, there’s a printer downtstairs, I’ll see if I can print off the crosswords for the plane… oh effing hell it’s my turn today isn’t it”.

   Schadenfreude that Jim stepped in for me, as I did the same a few weeks ago, only difference was Jim knew he was going to be away. Manypologies – in six years of doing this, I think it’s my first moment of total forgtfulness.

   1. Airport passage on 9 / 11 – stress level high enough without thoughts of blogging. Respect.
   2. And here we were about to send out search parties to local watering holes….
   3. No problem George – glad to help
7. 15:39 with a good 3 or 4 minutes at the end to get 13. I couldn’t get into it from wordplay at all. I tried every bed I could think of – cot, pit, divan, berth, bunk, futon – but didn’t hit on crib and I wanted the iron to be FE which also got me nowhere. In the end I just stared at the letters and gaps until a word appeared, then reverse-engineered to justify it.

   Doorkeeper took a while to see as well but I figured it out before writing it in.

   Thanks, Jimbo, for stepping into the breach.

8. Likewise, not quite as easy as yesterday, but finished correctly in half an hour without seeing the DOOR being kept, now I see it !
9. Thanks to Jimbo for the emergency blog.

   14 mins. I saw 1ac and 9ac immediately and the rest flowed from there.

   PRESCRIBED was my LOI and I went through an almost identical solving process with it as penfold did. DOORKEEPER went in from the definition so thanks to those of you who parsed it.

   I guess the stinker will be tomorrow then …………..

10. 16m. Same time as yesterday, despite a few more chucked in from definition.
    Some rather Mephistoish language in here: SHODDY, “olio”, and particularly the old meaning of “pedant”. All perfectly fair though.
    I wondered about the definition of MEANS: it normally just means “income” rather than “considerable income”. But then it occurred to me that a “man of means” isn’t just a man with an income.
    Thanks for stepping in Jimbo.

    Edited at 2013-09-12 03:54 pm (UTC)

    1. My Shorter Oxford Dictionary confirms one of the usages of ‘means’ as ‘wealth’, which is what I always thought it meant.
       It all went in very quickly so tomorrow looms.
       1. Wealth is something of which one can have a lot or a little!
          1. “Man of means by no means, King of the Road”
11. About 25 minutes, and I had DOORKEEPER without knowing why. LOI for me was BERG, after REGULATOR. Thanks to Jimbo for the emergency blog. Regards.
12. Thanks Jimbo. 18.26 for me because I had the composer but the brain stubbornly refused to see the work unit in 22d. I did offer to step in with an amateurish blog (see last post on yesterday’s) but yours was way better naturally.

    One good thing was that for quite a while there was a marked absence of neutrinos on the club site. Same thing happened a couple of weeks ago but I forget whose blogging turn it was that day. I do, however, have my doubts about “lettuceleaf” and “montcuquoise” immediately following MAGOO on the leaderboard.

13. Very happy with 15m 40s today. An enjoyable puzzle if on the easy side.
    Once again, it was late in the day before I could access the blog on my iPad, which is why this comment is late, even though I solved the puzzle early this morning.
    I have to own up that completing Paul’s puzzle in the Grauniad took me rather longer, though I enjoyed that too.
    George Clements
    1. George
       I guess that the custom is that the lucky solver/blogger of the day gets first shout. As the emergency blogger did not get in until mid-afternoon,there would be nothing to see until then. For what it is worth, I once again had no problem with iPad solving and access this morning. As suggested earlier, perhaps this is a luck of the draw thing.
14. 24 minutes, parsing everything as I went along, so this must be something of a record for me.

    Didn’t know or had forgotten OLIO and definitely didn’t know SABLE for ‘gloomy’.

    The TftT blogger’s diary on Google seems to roll along forever with pre-set entries for blogging duties. I think it’s about time to reinstate this as a reliable source of who’s supposed to be on duty on any particular day.

    1. I think that I saw somewhere that there is a vacancy on the Thursday blogging team. Given that not all of us are Times Crossword Club members, perhaps the proper forum for announcing who is doing what when is here.
       1. I’m not sure why that would be of interest.

          Edited at 2013-09-12 10:39 pm (UTC)

    2. George is accurately listed on the calendar as today’s blogger. When Ulaca and I do swaps, I always update the calendar and notify Andy – and so should everyone else
       1. Thanks. I saw that but I had impression it was not reliable as swaps have not been noted there on the occasions I have had reason to look. Admittedly it’s not very often I go there as I have only ever swapped once myself over many years. I must have missed your swaps with Ulaca.
15. Dear Sirs
    I am outraged to have found “Castle” used as a term yet again to describe the rook on a chess board. It is not a “castle”. It is a rook. I refer of course to 6d in today’s rather feeble offering.
    I have written to that idiot Murdoch on this matter several times in the past, and asked him to crack the whip on his fancy-dan setters, but it seems the fool has blithely ignored my communications once again.
    I was spitting with disgust after taking my coffee this morning and before setting off on a calming walk.
    Too many times we’ve seen this outrage perpetrated in what was once a fine daily newspaper. I’ve warned the top brass at the Times not to hire these jumped-up pipsqueaks and let them loose on the crossword. Alas it has been to no avail. This latest travesty is no doubt yet another example of the Times’s hiring policy, which favours so-called arts graduates above young men of steel and precision.
    Please join me in condemning this latest atrocity.
    Yours faithfully,
    Lt Col (Ret’d) Laurence Dipshaft
    1. You’ll be telling us there’s no such chess piece as the horsey next.
    2. It’s a shame you don’t mention that you have copied and pasted this in from a TftT contribution from many years ago. The old fool is probably long in his grave by now.
       1. Quite. We don’t seem to get many trolls here but you’d have thought they would at least do us the courtesy of being original.
16. had two wrong – unfortunately for me I know another name for a child’s comfort blanket – an “eventide blanket”, so my reading of “element” in the clue was “modicum”.
    So with a D instead of an I, I ended up with (but admittedly couldn’t justify) EDEN.

    Lovely (new word to me) from Merriam-Webster today – METONYMY

    “a figure of speech consisting of the use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated.”

    eg The White House for the US government, Whitehall for the Civil Service, or Detroit for US car industry. Where (e.g.) Whitehall is a metonym.

    1. You might find this site amusing:

       http://rhetoric.byu.edu/

       They catalog hundreds of figures of speech.

17. Missed George yesterday. But thanks Jim for stepping in. Observations on this puzzle:

    9ac: “banging” is an odd indicator.
    17ac: SABLE seems strange (or poetic?) for “gloomy”.
    1dn: “considerable”?
    13dn: “hotchpotch”?

    If I had a chance to re-clue 5dn, I’d have tried:
    Bernardo or Marcellus perhaps? (10)
    Since both are sentinels at the start of Hamlet and so, possibly, doorkeepers??

    1. McT, the following seems plausible:

       9a: ‘bang’ is defined (Col)as ‘to cause to move by hitting vigorously’
       17a: It’s a short step from black to gloomy, no?
       13d: ‘hotpotch’ is defined (ODO) as ‘a miscellaneous collection of things’.

       Like the Hamlet idea. I remember these characters well from, I think, the BBC version, ‘though doubtless Olivier chucked them out along with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!

18. Was in USA when this puzzle came out and hadn’t found the time to solve it until today.
    26/28 with Presribes and Sion missing. Thanks for filling in those gaps Jimbo.

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