Times 25617 – Get the bird? Just the opposite, perhaps….

46 comments on “Times 25617 – Get the bird? Just the opposite, perhaps….”

1. 25 minutes, but with ‘runnel’ for FUNNEL, which fits the literal better, even if ‘Lenn’ is a bit of a stretch for a man’s name.
   1. Make me another RUNNEL. Lenn is definitely an established man’s name and, as you say, runnel seems like a more accurate fit with ‘channel’. Oh well, nice to get the SNAFU out of the way on a Monday so I can stop fretting over Tony’s ‘clean round’ leader board.

      COD .. ENCHANTING, which is.

      1. I am another RUNNEL, however rather than LENN for the man, I was barking down the RUN=SPORT path, as in, slightly convolutedly, SPORT=WEAR=RUN. Substitution being “the paper will sport this headline on Friday”/”the paper will run this headline on Friday”
2. Like our esteemed blogger, I thought this was going to be a classic Monday doddle after looking at the first few clues. But not to be. The bottom half was a lot harder with instructions like “the last of three should be fine” meaning “find another word for ‘giggle’ with three identical letters and change one to F”. Phew! And 16dn was a bit of a gobful too.

   Also struggled to work out the IER in 9dn until the penny dropped that “with more grass” = REEDIER.

   Liked the straight charades best: NIGHT-IN-GALE and PEN-MANS-HIP. More of those please setters!

   Good job it’s Jerry’s blog this Wednesday. My familiar and trusty MacBook is in the shop and I’m trying to get my head around a new machine running 10.9. Most of my old software in now officially “legacy” — an interesting use of the word.

   Edited at 2013-10-28 02:01 am (UTC)

3. ….because I didn’t know the word. Otherwise, I would have been very tempted, but I don’t think ‘Lenn’ is really on.

   If ‘channel’ is read as a verb, then ‘funnel’ as a verb fits the literal quite well.

   1. Interesting. The new Mac has the Brit Oxford. The Thesaurus gives “channel” under “funnel” (noun & verb), but not vice versa.

      Edited at 2013-10-28 02:20 am (UTC)

   2. You’re right – thinking of it as a verb changes the perspective entirely.

      On the other point, I do actually know a Lenn and I’m going to tell him he’s spelling his name wrong (he’s a grumpy old sod so I’ll duck when I say it).

4. 40 minutes with the last 10 puzzling over 5ac where RUNNEL was the only word that came to mind. Never heard of Lenn though, so I was not convinced.

   Edited at 2013-10-28 04:22 am (UTC)

5. Fairly straightforward (or so I thought) although the Dorset corner provided some resistance at the end.

   Put me down for RUNNEL which looked good to me. I always remember the word from John Betjeman’s “Business Girls”, or at least from Alan Bennett’s parody of it

6. 11:05 at the kitchen table while waiting for the wind to die down a bit so I can drive to work – my route either involving open dual carriageway or windy roads with lots of trees.

   Split 5,2,4 7d makes you wonder whether the setter had seen a long range weather forecast.

7. Having initially put runnel I have to agree with vinyl 1. Lenn is too much of a stretch. Fun (sport) with len backwards fits much more comfortably.
8. Finished this in 20 mins in the early hours with no real hold ups. Went to bed and slept despite the gale, but woken up by Kent Constabulary a/c by fire & ambulance service at 7am to be shown most of my neighbour’s roof sitting in my back garden. Fortunately no one hurt and hope the same can be said for anyone else in the storm’s path.
   1. We seem to have escaped with just some trees down and wheelie bins freely distributed around the area. They clocked 99mph off The Needles! However as the rain runs into the rivers and comes down to the sea we may see some local flooding as they burst their banks. Quite a wild night!
9. Another RUNNEL picker, as RU seems more game like than FUN and the definition was closer. But now I see channel as a verb I admit it can work. 20 minutes otherwise. CoD the old bill 25 ac.
   1. The clue said “sport” though not “game”.
      Never having heard of “RUNNEL” or anyone called “Lenn” I wasn’t tempted by that answer.
      I did like the “Old Bill” also”!
10. The only reason that I have heard of Runnel is that it is the name of a hospital in New Jersey that I used to drive past every day on the way to work. FUNNEL went straight in for me. Right, time to put on the old whistle and flute and get the Michael Caine to the Rose and Crown. if its running after our bad birds of a feather last night.
11. Another RUNNEL, so my 23 minutes doesn’t count for much. I was going to be rude about Lenn here but even that consolation is not available. O well.
    The first half dozen went in well enough, but I hit a brick wall with the long ‘un and worked the rest form the bottom left up. Stumped on SET PIECE became initially I carelessly had PAYER, and wondered whether DRY PIECE was somehow a formal speech. Should be.
    TEA LEAF easily gets my CoD.
12. A game of two halves as they say with one dodgy incident in the FUNNEL/RUNNEL department. I can see a case for both.

    I like COMMUNITY CHARGE, NIGHTINGALE and PENMANSHIP

13. 15 mins with RUNNEL, which as far as I am concerned fits the clue. Lenn as a male name is not a stretch, and the most famous Lenn is probably Lenn Hammond, the reggae artist. Had I considered channel as a verb I may well have gone for FUNNEL, but either one works.

    Of the other clues, ENCHANTING was my LOI after CRASH HELMET. I thought TITFER may cause our foreign solvers a problem if they hadn’t come across it before, although the wordplay was clear enough.

    Good luck with the storm Jimbo. Up here on Merseyside we had some overnight rain but we certainly escaped the worst of the wind.

14. What we have here is an illustration of the truth, universally acknowledged, that a name referenced only as “chap” can be almost anything, even if Chambers list of “some first names” doesn’t give it. Open house for setters to dump any set of letters they can’t otherwise manage to clue on the basis that it’s a name somewhere.
15. 22.18 with runnel, though had no doubt funnel was better once I turned to the answers. Interesting to get an American NE. First time I’ve thought about ‘go out like a light’, what an image.
16. Have to count this as a dnf as I too went for ‘runnel’, – my reasoning the same as everyone else, though I think the clue is perfectly fair and valid. Time with the error 19m 41s.
17. This went as soon as I had a few checkers – with a short pause until I realised ‘channel’ was a verb. I was only reminded that ‘sport’ could be RU when reading these comments, as it’s an immediate turnoff for me on TV.
    Under 20 min, so a rare appearance on first page of leaderboard!
18. 30 minutes for a fairly average Monday offering. I was one that opted for RUNNEL. You don’t have to invent a name, LENN, to justify it. There’s several ways in which RUN can be ‘sport’, as in ‘hunt’, ‘race’, etc.
    1. LENN is not an invented name. It is a derivative of Lynn according to the Oxford Names Companion.
       1. Yet further justification for RUNNEL, then.
          1. Whether or not “RUNNEL” is allowable I’d say depends exclusively on whether LENN would be accepted as a name.
             “sport” = “run” I’d also say is equally stretching it. “running” certainly but “run” no
19. I saw that answer in a Guardian puzzle yonks ago. Mind you, we do occasionally see SCOT in the sense of a tax in Times puzzles, so I guess it’s okay. And there’s Danegeld. 19 minutes for me today, as it happens, with genuine Blue Mountain coffee to savour into the bargain.

    Incidentally, out on Saturday night I ordered the antipasto just to see what would happen, and sure enough, dishes. I don’t doubt you only get the one dish in the less salubrious hostelries, but I like to push the boat out. Good news, presumably, for last Friday’s writer.

    Edited at 2013-10-28 12:46 pm (UTC)

20. 21:11

    I didn’t consider runnel but did give rusnel a go to get from “chap is” to “Len’s”. Eventually decided funnel was better but it has to be said that clueing a six-letter word with a seven-letter word that shares the last 4 letters is hardly elegant and that made me doubt the answer.

    All said I’d venture that there was some pretty ugly stuff on show here.

21. Why does “hardly” convert to “ill”?
    1. I thought it was a bit of a stretch too, since we are most used to the adverb meaning something like only just or barely. “I hardly touched him, ref.”
       But it does carry the other meanings of hard, too, and can cross over in to severely, harshly. Ill-used will interchange quite happily with harshly-used. Best I can do, I’m afraid, perhaps others can improve.
       Next time I post an advert for a battered piece of kit, I think I’ll describe it as “hardly used”. Now there’s estate agent English for you.
       1. Maybe in the sense of “ill afford”? A stretch certainly but maybe that is what was being thought of
22. A clean fast is better than a dirty breakfast. autocrace
23. Funnel: tunnel was my first thought but looked iffy and I went through the alphabet for first letters to see if there was a better answer.
    FOI Rue, LOI Respondent.
    Respondent, Illicit, Crash Helmet and Frenetic from defs so thanks vinyl1 for parsing those.
    Star: don’t recall ‘is’ cluing ‘s before – but I’m sure it will have done.
24. Much the same experience as many others: made a quick start but then got bogged down. Put me in the RUNNEL club. I knew it was iffy, but couldn’t see any alternative.
25. 19m, with a lucky escape having put in RUNNEL but reconsidered. I wasn’t happy with “Lenn” as the chap but it does seem perfectly valid.
26. Another reasonable amble through the Monday foothills.

    I’m definitely in the RUNNEL camp, hang what the setter might have thought. Funnel, to me, makes less sense than sport=run.

    Some fairly “clunky” surfaces, always a clue to the structure underneath, but RESPONDENT and REINDEER were good, especially REINDEER with “north” ambiguously doing double duty. I thought STAR was laboured, and two Cockney clues, or rather solutions, perhaps an embarras de richesses.

    NIGHTINGALE a nice, classic clue, with a flash of the old Times wit.

27. Wow… did this lateish last night and didn’t think there would be anything controversial. Did think of RU at the start of 5 but rejected it as not likely to form an answer and then spotted FUNNEL. Only one I did not know was COMMUNITY CHARGE where the first word came immediately but the second needed checkers. I really liked REINDEER
28. I was originally in the RUNNEL camp, being convinced that the sport had to be Rugby Union. But then I spotted FUNNEL as a possibility and decided that it better fitted the cryptic. 24 minutes. Ann
    1. After a day to think about it, I’m sure you did right. I’ve been solving long enough to have known that an unusual spelling of a given name was a bit unlikely. I’m not sure I’m getting any better with age but my hindsight is certainly improving!
29. 48m DNF as couldn’t dredge up RESPONDENT and was in the RUNNEL camp. Thanks for the blog as I could not see how ILLICIT and TEA LEAF worked beyond the fact that they fitted!
30. I did finish, and correctly, but it took an hour and a half. Still, I’m surprised, since I knew neither of the two rhyming slang expressions (although titfer rang a bell AFTER I looked up the explanation). I was also tempted by RUNNEL until I realised that sport could simply be FUN.
    1. …this took me a round hour, but on the other hand I put in “runnel”. Still, as my aunt used to say when she was sober, “We may not be happy, but at least we’re poor.”

       “Go out like a light” took longer than it should have done, because I was hung up on “Go out with a” something. The only things I could think of that could be gone out with were bangs, flourishes and nurses, all of which were unsatisfactory in one way or another. “Set piece” also caused more concern than it needed to – is it just me, or does a “set piece” normally connote an action (similar to a “party piece”) rather than a prepared speech?

       My personal challenge, to use all of today’s answers in casual conversation with patients, is ongoing. “Go out like a light”, “crash helmet”, and “leer” were all slipped in as nonchalantly as horsemeat into a hamburger, as were “neglect”, “ugly” and “frenetic”. I have grave misgivings about “enchanting”, though.

       If the NHS is serious about bringing down A&E waiting times, it really ought to look into the difficulty of Times cryptics. If they were to bring out a real stinker on a Friday night, I wouldn’t want to be responsible for the consequences.

       Edited at 2013-10-28 11:29 pm (UTC)

       1. I think I would have liked your aunt.
31. A disappointing 15:21 for me. I was going slowly (very slowly!) but reasonably steadily before coming to a stand with TEA LEAF, FRENETIC (I couldn’t remember whether Nebraska was NA or NB – doh!) and RESPONDENT.

    I also agonised a bit over TITFER (worried about “the last of three” for no good reason I can think of now). However, I had no doubts about FUNNEL. My guess is that if the clue came up in the Championship, RUNNEL would not be accepted, on the grounds that LENN is not sufficiently well recognised as a man’s name.

32. Count me in as another RUNNEL. I was hooked on RU as the sport, so took a lenient view of LENN as the man’s name.

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