Times 25744: Lettres françaises

61 comments on “Times 25744: Lettres françaises”

1. 51 minutes, right-hand side first, NE last. Liked le French 10.

   McT, you need to entertain ‘one’ at 17.

   1. Thanks Ulaca. I’ll edit it up now.
      1. Oops, I meant NW last; mustn’t contradict myself…
2. ….led to a long solving time, as I put in ‘retitition’. Of course, I couldn’t get ‘prospective’, as I carefully checked each crossing letter except for the first one. This error resulted in a rather bad time of about 75 minutes.

   I thought the SW was particularly difficult, with ‘from nowhere’ and ‘photofit’ both having well-hidden literals, and the ‘knee’ clue not being particularly helpful.

3. Heavy weather here too, which in my case means something approaching double the time of our esteemed blogger. I thought it was all going well enough if a little on the slow side until I became completely bogged down on 5, 7, 8 &10 in the NE corner and the unchecked squares at 25dn also remained empty until the last possible moment. I found 18ac rather amusing. Never heard of the butterfly.
4. I got hopelessly stuck on this one with the NW almost a complete blank after half an hour. I admitted defeat and resorted to aids to get me going again.

   I’ll claim distraction – my flight for tomorrow night was cancelled 36 hours before it was due to leave, which may be something of a record. Hatches being battened down in these parts while I scramble to rebook travel for later in the week. You want to make God smile? Tell him your plans …

5. Numéro quatre – 12ac
   1. Indeed it is. I shall re-number accordingly. Must be something wrong with my nous this morning.
6. 
   About an hour for this one, and pleased to finish it all correctly, where the only one left unparsed was C-RATED, my LOI.

   Lots of good cluing here, I thought, with BLACK DEATH, TASKED and PROSPECTIVE being my faves.

   dnk CLOUDED YELLOW, but put it in with a shrug. Spent a couple of minutes wondering whether a momble was some sort of crypt, French perhaps…

   1. I think we should adopt the word “momble” to mean any word which fits the wordplay but doesn’t exist!
      1. Will we also be noting our MOD or Momble Of the Day?
   2. I got as far as looking it up!
      1. I tried it too, but I was mombled:
         http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/momble
         Makes the term even more appropriate?

         Edited at 2014-03-26 09:54 am (UTC)

         1. Personally I was temporarily undone by the lesser spotted BOMBIL, which I suspect may be closely related to the MOMBLE.
   3. If it’s disputed, perhaps a Womble.
      1. Front and centre: at 25d I decided a ONEL had to be some kind of adjunct to an anvil, used by plumbers or blacksmiths for bending things. Ah well.
7. 16m. I see from the Wiki article that the CLOUDED YELLOW is an ‘irregular migrant’ but surely this doesn’t make it an ‘irregular flier’. Tiger Woods doesn’t play in the UK that often but I wouldn’t call him an ‘irregular golfer’. Not that it mattered: I’d never heard of it so the definition was irrelevant as far as I was concerned.
   1. Surely all butterflies are irregular fliers
   2. I knew this one from the film The Clouded Yellow (1950) starring Jean Simmons and the brilliant Trevor Howard.

      Edited at 2014-03-26 06:27 pm (UTC)

8. Another good puzzle but again with these couple of odd irritating quirks

   What is “irregular” doing in 4D? The clue works with the word removed and it confuses by suggesting an anagram and as keriothe points out – it’s a wrong use anyway! And “shortage of food” for DEARTH I had to look up to check – good Mephisto clue

   The rest is excellent in a Gallic sort of way

9. Back to normal routine but same result – 20 minutes exactly. The first time I saw a clouded yellow it was indeed flopping around in a rather erratic fashion and I suspect irregular does refer to its flight and is neither inaccurate nor redundant.
   1. I can’t find any reference to this butterfly’s flight being a particular distinguishing feature. However apparently they “are fairly rare in most years but occasionally turn up in enormous numbers – long remembered as ‘Clouded Yellow years'”.
      But as anon points out above perhaps it’s just a reference to the irregular flight of all butterflies.
      1. Exactly. That’s what I was hinting at in a rather irregular manner. A pointer to butterflies rather than rockets.
         Malcj
         1. Should have added, other than North Korean ones of course
            1. I wouldn’t know: I’ve never seen a North Korean butterfly 😉
10. 23m. 18A reminded me of the schoolboy joke, “How do you make a hormone?”. I’m sure there are numerous possible punchlines!
    1. All I can say is that anyone who can manage that must have a very good technique.
       1. Obviously, you haven’t read The Hotel New Hampshire!
          1. And in today’s puzzle we’ll steal something – say the first (French?) letter – from her purse
       2. Well I’ve certainly succeeded on many an occasion.
11. 20 mins. I found this puzzle quite chewy and it took me a while to see some of the definitions, particularly in the SW. PHOTOFIT was my LOI after FROM NOWHERE and KNEE. I didn’t know the CLOUDED YELLOW but it seemed like the obvious answer once I had enough checkers in place.
12. It must be the cataract in my eye … I got held up for a long time when I inked in CLOUDED VISION for 4D. In spite of that, just over the half-hour.
13. All butterflies are irregular fliers, noticed by Robert Graves (who used the Cabbage White for the sake of a rhyme):

    The butterfly, a cabbage white
    His honest idiocy of flight
    Will never now, it is too late
    Master the art of flying straight
    And yet, who knows so much a I
    His just sense of how not to fly?
    He flutters here and there by guess
    And God, and hope, and hopelessness
    Even the aerobatic swift
    Has not his flying crooked gift

    – sorry about the IP option. I thought it meant I could put in my own sobriquet!

14. 30min : like Andy, found SW hardest.
    Today I had a letter from Royal Mail bearing a stamp depicting a yellow butterfly which might have helped – but on checking, it was a brimstone.
15. A good 50 minutes, but no complaints; worth the effort, I thought. The CLOUDED YELLOW was remembered vaguely, possibly because of a 1950 film with that title starring Trevor Howard.
16. About an hour ten. Took forever to remember that lizards’ tails detach, and never got knee. Needed mct’s instructions for several of the other parsings thx.
17. 14:50 here, no real hold-ups although I also considered MOMBLE briefly. I think that might have been my LOI actually. I didn’t see any problem with “irregular flier” either, good crosswordy definition for a butterfly in my book.
18. Owl – famous poem. Do me a favour! In my 59 years I’ve never heard of it. How many people really care about poetry? I think the answer is very, vety few.
    1. Poem?! Me, I’d never heard of “Hallen” Ginsberg.

       [Adopting Alan Bennett preacher voice] But, you know, the great thing about this site is that we learn (or can choose to ignore) something new every day.

       Edited at 2014-03-26 12:31 pm (UTC)

       1. “I want you, when you go out into the world, in times of trouble and sorrow and hopelessness and despair, amid the hurley-burley of modern life. If ever you’re tempted to say: ‘Stuff this for a lark!’, I want you, at such times, to cast your minds back to the words of my first text to you tonight: ‘But my brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man.'”
    2. I bet your spellchecker doesn’t 🙂
19. Like others, I was thrown for a while by ‘irregular’ but it had to be once most of the checkers were there. Otherwise some good clues but what I will take from today is the newly defined MOMBLE.

    All the best in getting back to Blighty, sotira

20. Over an hour, so back to normal for me. I really enjoyed this one, some fun clues, 24ac being my favourite. Lots of excellent word play, liked the fact that you drop letters in a bath to clean them.

    Nairobi Wallah

21. 12:15 but with several applications of Tippex.
    1. Makes such a mess on the screen, I always find.
22. 15:07 with 25 pushing me over the quarter-hour mark which shouldn’t have surprised me as I’ve got sh*t knees anyway.

    The I spy book of butterflies came to my aid again at 4 although I can’t remember whether I ever ticked that one off.

    Thanks to McT for explaining the mort noir (which I couldn’t parse) and the nowhere clue where I took “unexpectedy present” as the def which left “where” to satisfy “taking leading role” in some fashion I couldn’t fathom and for clarifying that dearth applied to food is archaic as I’d drawn a questioning squiggly line under it.

    Thanks also for momble. I now have a word to define ophod and madro.

    1. Me too. I already had one but ‘momble’ is much less rude.
23. Three on the trot looks like a pattern – it’s not my week! This took about two hours to unravel, off and on. Some nicely hidden anagrams. Again, nothing crass or unfair, just seemed unusually difficult to crack. A few went in unparsed, so many thanks to mctext for doing the heavy lifting.

    Setter obviously reliving schooldays with 18AC. FOI MOISTEN, LOI CRATED, Nothing really stands out as a COD …

24. A satisfying 15 minutes. While delayed by meditating on the possible existence of the word BOMBIL (see above), I had time to enjoy puzzling out some elegant and clever clues, most notably MOISTEN and the bended KNEE.
25. Apart from being puerile (in my school the joke was “What’s the difference between a vitamin and a hormone? You can’t hear a vitamin”), 18ac simply doesn’t work because the pronunciation is not similar enough: “or” <> “oar”. Where I come from, the ladies of the night might also have been pronounced to rhyme with sewer but, leaving that regional difference aside, it’s a rotten clue to have that big a gap in the supposedly similar sounds.
    1. H’m. I suppose it depends on whose pronunciation you want to pick. My favourite (which defies phonetics) would be Oliver Reed’s (as Vulcan, THE god) in the adventures of Baron Munchausen, about 1’45” in on this clip. But I think the universal prevalence of the schoolboy pun can’t be ignored. It’s a much closer soundalike than most.
       In your experience, do your local ladies object to being pronounced to rhyme with “sewer”?

       Edited at 2014-03-26 04:22 pm (UTC)

26. I have never forgotten my prep school headmaster’s favourite expression as above with”….since Mons”

    I am currently reading Gary Sheffield’s tedious biography of Douglas Haig (who wasn’t such a bad fellow after all!).

    My grandfather put in a very brief, but spectacular appearance in the famous Mons retreat, in our first engagement of the conflict.

    Consequently for 13a, I put in LOOS (My headmaster would have been rather predictable about my effort today)

27. No creditable time, one of those where several interruptions while working against time caused initial curses then a flurry of solutions to clues I’d been stuck on. Maybe I should formalise some sort of contract with my interruption.
    I enjoyed the French Connection today, and MESSIDOR in particular, not least for une certaine liberté avec le parsing.
    SUBTRACT inexplicably my last in*
    *Inexplicably, that is, except inasmuch as all the other clues went in before it did.

    Edited at 2014-03-26 03:03 pm (UTC)

28. Had to resort to aids after an hour and was glad of the blog to explain where I was merely baffled. Not sure if I like the frenchiness of it all or not.
29. A steady solve in 20 minutes, after a long day’s driving and no T20 to watch. LOI were SOMBRE and BAIL OUT, after a few attempts to use BOIL as a skin problem. Liked 16 ac best.
    Personally I think WHORE is a word best not pronounced at all, if it can be avoided, although in Ireland I remember it being WHOO-ER.
    1. I tend to agree, though I would make an exception for Armstrong & Miller’s Who Do You Think You Are spoof:

       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdMLvy1Xv8M

30. About 35 minutes, ending with SOMBRE (where I did consider momble, but not bombil). Never heard of the butterfly, and thought the irregular flying could describe any butterfly. I liked the OBJETS D’ART clue, very neat, as was FROM NOWHERE. Regards to all.
31. DNF after an hour, and conceded defeat. Failed on SOMBRE, KNEE and BAIL OUT, none of which should really have been problematic.

    So, it may just be sour grapes that drives me to point out that a spiral is not a helix (29d), any more than a circle is a sphere, or a square a cube. A spiral is a two-dimensional curve of progressively increasing radius (like a clock spring); a helix is a three-dimensional curve of constant radius (like the spring in a ballpoint pen). The fact that helical staircases are often called “spiral” is no excuse.

    Also far too much French for my liking, but c’est la vie.

    1. 16:24 for me, never really finding the setter’s wavelength.

       Fortunately I didn’t think of MOMBLE, but I spent far too long trying to justify BEAR OUT.

32. I’ve not read all 59 comments, so may not be the only geometric stickler. A spiral and a helix are not synonymous. A “spiral” staircase is in piont of fact a helical staircase. Euclid would be spiralling in his tomb.
    oops, just noticed thud’s excellent comment. Sticklers of the world unite!

    Edited at 2014-03-27 07:30 am (UTC)

    1. Sorry, but surely that’s just rubbish? The Oxford dictionary says of spiral, first meaning: “Winding in a continuous curve of constant diameter about a central axis, as though along a cylinder; helical.”

       Stickle all you like, but a spiral staircase is not misnamed

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