Times 25781 – anything you can do I can do 7ly

60 comments on “Times 25781 – anything you can do I can do 7ly”

1. ….at just under an hour. More construction of unknown vocabulary from the cryptics, including ‘poori’, ‘potoroo’, and ‘chunder’.

   Someone, maybe Sotira, complained bitterly the last time we had I Puritani. It wasn’t that long ago, I hope everyone remembers it this time around.

   I was a bit surprised to see ‘logos’, although quite a few non-English words and phrases have popped up lately.

   1. Probably better to do a bit of checking before attributing things like “complained bitterly” to a contributor. As far as I can see, the last time we had it was on a Sunday last year when I didn’t comment at all. The only place I can find a comment by myself on the inclusion of I Puritani was in 2011, when I made an entirely neutral comment admitting that it took me a long time to see it.

      I’m also not quite sure why you would guess at me being the bitter complainer. I wouldn’t have thought I’m the most likely candidate — certainly not in recent years when I’ve made a conscious effort to be positive about the puzzles whenever possible. I’m also a regular concert goer and classical music enthusiast (though without your apparently limitless knowledge of the subject), so unlikely to complain about the inclusion of an opera title.

      It’s a little upsetting to come here and see a remark like that.

2. A lot easier for me than yesterday’s, which in fact I’ve yet to finish–having been away for a couple of days, I’m catching up. DNK POTOROO, POORI (or puri, for that matter), PRE-ECHO, barely knew THE DAM BUSTERS (someone on the forum says it should be ‘dambusters’), but did know CHUNDER. If there’s a complaint to be made about I PURITANI, I’d think it’s that it’s always the opera to appear here, rather than that no one’s heard of it.
   1. It’s true the squadron is known as “The Dambusters” but the definition is “film” which so far means the 1955 one entitled “The Dam Busters”. There’s a remake in the pipeline apparently which may opt for the alternative spelling for all I know once they’ve sorted out what to call the Wing Commander’s dog.
      1. My grandfather’s black labrador had the same name (we’re talking late 1940’s early 50’s ). I don’t think it would have raised an eyebrow then.
         1. I’ve now confirmed the title of the remake is to be (3,10) instead of (3,3,7) and the dog will be called ‘Digger’ unless someone deems that’s offensive in some way. The remake has been mooted since 2008 and I don’t know whether it’s anywhere approaching release or even if they’ve started filming it yet.
            1. There’s a debate on Yahoo as to whether “Digger” is offensive slang or not. The consensus it “not really”. Anyone from D.U. care to comment?
               Whether the incredibly brave Gibson would ever have called his dog Digger is of no interest, of course, to those who would bowdlerise history.
               Chances of the film actually being made?
3. Another hard one completed in exactly an hour, but more enjoyable than yesterday’s collection of obscurities. I’m too ashamed to continue with my litany of words I didn’t know but there were 5 today including an unknown spelling of PURI that has not yet made it to COED or Collins but is in Chambers.

   CHUNDER raised a smile as I only knew it in connection with Sir Les Patterson, and I thought 13dn was rather clever and inventive.

   I noted a couple of rather old-fashioned expressions in BOOTS as the servant responsible for cleaning shoes, and TELEPHONE KIOSK as opposed to ‘box’ or ‘booth’, which I have not heard used for decades on end.

   Edited at 2014-05-08 01:15 am (UTC)

4. 56 minutes, with all the unknowns correctly deduced apart from PERFECT GAS, where I wnet through the alphabet, discarded ‘cat’, ‘lad’ and ‘man’ and plumped for ‘Pat’. At least it’s alliterative.

   From wikipedia, I gleaned this re the difference – or not – between ‘perfect’ and ‘ideal’: ‘Sometimes, a distinction is made between an ideal gas, where hat{c}_V and hat{c}_p could vary with temperature, and a perfect gas, for which this is not the case’, which clears things up nicely (a trip here will clear up the ‘hats’).

   Me, I preferred yesterday’s, even if it took me nearly twice as long.

5. So just a tad longer today than yesterday. My excuse is a post-MRI downer. (All dictionary entries for “non-intrusive” should be duly amended.)

   Got going by spotting the EDAM at 1ac and finished with QUIP. Along the way, I thought there were some very good clues. AUSTERLITZ and SNOW UNDER in particular.

   1. I’m surprised you could put 2 coherent thoughts together post-MRI. Those contraptions are far too dam’ noisy for anyone’s taste. Well done!
      1. Thanks for the support. Of course, they wouldn’t let me wear mine. It contains metal.
6. Just over 30 min here, with no unknowns, although I have no idea why I know SOUTANE (possibly from French).

   I enjoyed this more than some recent puzzles – not too hard but difficult enough to make you think and work through the wordplay. Not many went in on definition.

   Edited at 2014-05-08 02:57 am (UTC)

7. DNF .. after 22 minutes I had all but 11a, which I couldn’t see for the life of me. I now realise I was barking up all the wrong trees for the definition, mostly looking for something like ‘zealot’ or an expression meaning ‘a good time’. If I’d heard of a PERFECT GAS I’m afraid I’d forgotten it (apologies to Mr C, my chemistry teacher, whose remarks in my fourth year school report were, I now see, entirely fair).

   But much enjoyed, anyway. The four 13-letter answers all took me a while to work out, which I would say is good setting .

   COD probably QUIP — short and sweet.

8. Clarkson?
9. 24 minutes (and a bit – the big hand was between minute markers at the start). Needed to be something of a polyglot for this one, and a polymath. Thank goodness we didn’t have to know or spell Slavkov u Brna, current soubriquet of Austelitz. Kiosk is Persian via Turkish when it isn’t just being (with telephone) an archaism and increasingly rare.
   I had hesitations over 15 FEROCIOUS because I couldn’t account for the S – the printed version has only one promise. Just picky, perhaps, but trying to make sense of “score F” with the rest of the wordplay was a distraction.
   While I get OFF and PLAN separately (the latter somewhere in the muddle of the clue) I don’t get the whole – Chambers says its about buying a property on the basis of the architect’s plan only. Anyone care to push the penny until it drops? It was my LOI and a bit of a tant pis (Gallic shrug).
   Well (and honestly!) blogged, George – glad it wasn’t my turn this week.
   1. The IOUs are “notes with promise”, I think, with F for Frequency only. It bothered me for a while too, having got the answer with an FTP (failure to parse).
      1. Thanks very much, that covers it. Once I had started using “notes” to mean “score” and trying to make middle some sort of containment indicator, I was already at the end of the garden path and through the gate.
      2. FTP means something else in Scotland (and possibly NI) where the second and third words are ‘the Pope’.
         Geoffrey
   2. I’ve certainly encountered off-plan before, usually in the context of hard luck stories where someone has bought an apartment off-plan and then it turns out to be a money pit or not built at all.

      Conversely I’ve heard it as a positive for housebuilders who can build a development safe in the knowledge that they’ll get their money back if enough properties have been sold off-plan.

10. You beat me to it, perhaps JC will call it SL*PE.
11. . .. so better than yesterday. The app version also only has one promise in 15dn but I wrote it in anyway. DNK POTOROO but I do now.
12. Like yesterday’s, another puzzle sprinkled with unknowns that had to go in on the basis of wordplay only (e.g. PRE-ECHO, OFF-PLAN) and words that I knew existed as words but wouldn’t necessarily have been able to give their meaning (e.g. SOUTANE). Spent a while trying to figure out why OFF was “temporarily against” (still struggling with that), and also how a hook related to a telephone (gah …) An interesting challenge but a bit of levity wouldn’t have gone amiss.

    COD to CUSTARD PIE

    1. I’m off custard pies at the moment but I’m sure I’ll come round to liking them again.
       1. “Temporarily”, yes, but “against” seems a bit of a stretch, no? I couldn’t see any support for this in Chambers/ODO/CO.
13. 17 mins. I confess that LISTEN TO REASON went on from the definition and the enumeration once I had the checkers for the first word. POTOROO came up in another puzzle very recently which helped me solve it a lot quicker than I might otherwise have done, SOUTANE went in from the wordplay as did PRE-ECHO, and I’d never come across the alternatively spelled POORI before but it couldn’t have been anything else from the wordplay. PERFECT GAS was my LOI after the OFF-PLAN/BRITTEN crossers.
14. 55m, but with one wrong for the third day running – I decided sage might mean sensible so finished with SOUTAGE in 5D (not knowing SOUTANE).

    I sat with about half done for ages thinking that if I could just get one more the rest would fall into place and so it proved when FEROCIOUS went in.

    Nice reference to Men at Work in the blog – now I have Down Under as an earworm. Definitely my favourite Men at Work song.

15. Excellent puzzle, I thought: witty, inventive and fair, difficult enough to provide a challenge, but not so hard as to provoke harrumphing and hurling the newspaper across the room. Took me 35 minutes.

    First saw the word CHUNDER in Barry Humphries’s comic strip “Barry McKenzie” in Private Eye during the 1960s. There was an irritatingly memorable song in that too, sung to the tune of Maggie May and which began:

    Sitting down by Bondi Pier
    Drinking tubes of ice-cold beer…

    and ending

    And we’ll CHUNDER in the old Pacific Sea

    TELEPHONE KIOSK reminded me of those times too: walking about trying to find one that hadn’t been vandalized; the fug of cigarette smoke and urine when you finally discovered one that worked; the beep-beep-beep as you fumbled to force in your extra tanner when you ran out of time just as you were about to ask the girl if she would meet you that evening …..

    1. Go back further and you have the old-style telephones where a call cost 4d and manipulation of the A and B buttons was necessary. My father, a GP, used to ring home at the end of his rounds in case something else had come in. If not, my mother would say ‘nothing new’ and Dad would press the B button and get his 4d back. If there was something, then button A would let them have a proper conversation.
       1. I wonder when they went out; I just remember them from the early 60s in rural Shropshire.
16. Tough but fair puzzle, if you don’t mind a highish GK quotient. Some inventive clueing -e.g. FEROCIOUS. CHUNDER evoked a slightly stomach-turning chortle. I had to resort to aids to get the (to me unknown) POTEROO, my LOI. I was then able to work out the parsing retrospectively.
17. 15:49 – A mix of head scratch v chortle here today.

18. 38mim: 10ac FOI – from ‘opera’ and enumeration. 1ac gave me pause for a long time, as I’d forgotten the actual name of the film.
    LOI 13dn – had been thinking ‘services’ might indicate a famous tennis player I’d never heard of.
19. Having never worked in an ecclesiastical outfitters I don’t know a soutane from a hole in the ground and like Pootle I went with soutage. A perfectly acceptable momble if you ask me.

    LOI perfect gas. I was happy with perfect but as for the rest of the clue I had no way of knowing which field of knowledge where I have a lack of same we were dealing with. Religion? Politics? Luckily I plumped for science which made gas the obvious guess.

20. Slow going but got there. Surprised by Boots – I suppose the polish trade-name? Also by superposition, the part of speech as well as the word, potoroo though guessable, the word pre-echo and the poori spelling. In all, a clever puzzle that felt slightly dodgy. Good challenge though.
    1. See Jack’s comment at the beginning of the thread. The lad in an old-time inn who was assigned to clean all the guests’ footwear was known as the “boots”. Rather as a pageboy was known as the “buttons”.
       1. UK dwellers of a certain vintage will remember the sitcom starring Alfie Bass and Bill Fraser as “Bootsie and Snudge”.
       2. Ah yes. The dated oddness of the title now is the perfect example of how times have moved on. I’m of that vintage and remember Alfie Bass but not in that part.
       3. And of course, the crew in ‘The Hunting of The Snark’, all of whom’s trades or professions began with a B, included a Boots.
21. Didn’t get to the PERFECT GAS from the wordplay, and had never heard of (or else totally forgotten) it, A-level Physics notwithstanding. So yet another DNF. Otherwise had to look up POTOROO post-solve to confirm the beast’s existence, and vaguely irritated by the variant, non-standard spelling of “puri” (POORI, I ask you).

    So not very gruntled today, the above spoiling an otherwise enjoyable and reasonably quick solve (if a tad too heavy on the anagrams), to and from St George’s on the No 155 plus a few minutes at home, under half an hour in all, before the fruitless hunt for the aforesaid gas.

    AUSTERLITZ today, WATERLOO quite recently – can we expect a trend?

    As for I PURITANI, less known than it perhaps should be, as with all those Bellini/Donizetti operas which require an outstanding soprano with the right sort of voice, who only appears maybe every other generation. We’re still waiting for Joan Sutherland’s successor …

    FOI EAGER, LOI the excellent QUIP. COD, spoilt for choice today, a toss-up between the CHIEF RABBI and SNOW UNDER.

22. The newspaper version also has ‘promise’. Is this yet another mistake or am I missing something?
    1. See above: it’s ‘notes with promise’.
23. Came to this tired, late in the day, at first thought it was going to be a stinker but surprised to finish it in 19 minutes, 1 ac and 1 dn quickly solved set it going. Very enjoyable puzzle, LOI QUIP although it was obvious once the penny dropped. Thanks to the bloggist for explaining the BUN bit. Liked 8 dn for the inclusion of the noisy Greek chap.
24. 15m. I liked this. Not too easy, not too hard, a few unknowns to construct from wordplay.
    The last time I PURITANI came up (and as I commented at the time) I thought it was a terribly unfair clue at first, because it appears the checking letters can go almost anywhere, but then you put them in the right place and it is obviously the right answer. This time I remembered it immediately.
    Thanks for mentioning the Men at Work song, George. I need a regular supply of new ear-worms to displace Let it Go from Frozen, which my kids won’t stop playing and singing.
    1. Just today a writer in Times2 mentions Let It Go as being his earworm. Disney do come up with some good songs.
       1. BTW, that was me posting. Didn’t realise I was logged out.
          1. Yes, I read that, about ten minutes after I posted! As you can imagine it struck a chord. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great song: the earwormy ones often are.
25. 55 minutes here and I had the same list of (gettatable) unknowns. Thanks for blog as there were some I bunged in without fully understanding. I liked CUSTARD PIE., brought MR Pastry to mind from my very young days!
    1. Richard Hearne, aka Mr Pastry. I remember being in floods of tears at a local fete in the 50s because he would not sign an autograph without a donation to charity, which I could not afford. Also, he lived in a village called Trottiscliffe, pronounced Trosley. Much to their disgrace, the village is now styled and signposted as Trosley. The village is just down the road from Wrotham (pronounced Rootem) so I guess there will be a change there one day.

       Edited at 2014-05-08 10:08 pm (UTC)

       1. ‘Donation to charity’, eh?
       2. The village (about 4 miles from me) is still called Trottiscliffe, no change there.. you might be thinking of the controversy when KCC opened a Country Park nearby, which some say they decided to call Trosley country park because they thought people were too stupid to find it otherwise.. however it is sited in the grounds of Trosley House, a name at least as old as Trottiscliffe, so it seems that is wrong too..
          1. Fair enough, Jerry. I guess that this is what happens if one comments on Kent matters having lived for 25 years in Berkshire but my mind was clouded due to thinking about Mr Pastry again.
             1. No criticism intended bigtone, I was writing to inform posterity. . And indeed I am grateful for the information about Mr pastry, albeit before my time really. I share the scepticism about how far charity benefitted from his autographs!
26. Arrgh! Over an hour, and screwed up with my LOI when I opted for PERFECT MAN. That’s after fighting through the unknown CHUNDER, POORI, OFF-PLAN, POTOROO. And I don’t think I’d ever seen PRE-ECHO before either. Remembered SOUTANE and the opera from prior appearances. Better luck tomorrow to me, and regards to all of you.
27. 55 minutes today – so much better than yesterday’ offering. Didn’t know POTOROO or PRE ECHO but at least the wordplay was gettable.
    Stuck for a bit on POORI – put in PARSI for Indian when I had the P and the I, thought that was it so didn’t check the parsing properly and LOI therefore BOOTS which didn’t fit the R. Silly…

    Edited at 2014-05-08 09:09 pm (UTC)

28. A long hard slog after yesterday’s relatively quick finish.
    To be fair, I did break off to make coffee as I was feeling stumped, but I got there in the end. I still don’t really understand ‘off-plan’ and I have never heard of ‘potoroo’. I also spent a long time looking at ‘ferocious’, as I was not confident of the parsing.
    I also remember the button A and button B telephone boxes: does anyone else remember Sydney Carter’s plaintive song in which one features?
29. 11:10 for me, starting reasonably briskly for once, but slowing down towards the end as I struggled to parse one or two clues correctly. Worst was 15dn (FEROCIOUS) where I wanted (musical) “notes” = SCORE and “promise” = IOU, but then couldn’t see how “middle frequency” = F, or make head or tail of the order. (Doh!)

    If I had to guess the setter, I’d plump for Don Manley: a bit of religion (if you’re prepared to accept LOGOS), a bit of science (PERFECT GAS), and beautifully constructed clues. Anyway I thought it a delight from start to finish and I raise my hat to whoever produced it.

    Oh, and I’d even heard of the foodie POORI (though only ever in crosswords, and it was my LOI).

30. Tried to post earlier from the new job, and it clearly didn’t take. About an hour, but fooled by the frequencies which, to me, clearly referred to (middle) Cs, with the IOU (singular) inside. Not knowing the crossing OFF PLAN, meant a DNF. I won’t talk about how long it took to see QUIP. I forgot the mandate from the gurus: “see a ‘u’, thing ‘q'”. Ah well.

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