Times 25,914: The Moaning After

87 comments on “Times 25,914: The Moaning After”

1. …in “Head, perhaps very small, to dip separately in lake (10)”, I said to myself with _U________, “head perhaps” is a BUTTER, “very small” is MERE and “to dip separately”… well, I wasn’t sure about that. But BUTTERMERE is assuredly a lake: I’ve been in it.
   1. A pedant would say that the only actual lake in the Lake District is Bassenthwaite Lake
2. Enjoyed this.. I groaned at both Rimbaud and Sierra; but groans is part of what crosswords are all about, isn’t it?

   Edited at 2014-10-10 10:02 am (UTC)

   1. Groaning is too mild – I heartily disapprove of clues that depend on a very bad English mis-pronunciation of foreign names.
      1. Yr comment on 10/10/14 – what does the Chinese read?

         Thanks in advance for reply,
         Salgate

         1. I’ve answered this before, but it was a while ago. Literally, it’s: “roads are made by people walking”, or loosely: you can make your own path”. regards, Joe
            1. Good of you to comment, Joe.
               Had lingering notions of the characters from some study more than half a century ago, but couldn’t get to the overall sense. Assume it’s an unsourced popular saying. Thanks again, Steve
3. Failed the quiz. Kudos to anyone who got RIMBAUD without having heard of the poet. But then maybe I’m the only person who hasn’t heard of him.

   Bah.

   1. Rimbaud was shot and wounded by none other than today’s blogger.
      1. Wow, just did some research (or looked up Wikipedia). Quite a story.
      2. That explains the unusually average performance. Pangs of guilt.

         (Love the story about doing the sample puzzle, by the way, V.)

   2. I guess this one was never likely to stump me… going by the LJ handle “Verlaine” and all!
4. Had a chuckle at RAMBAUD but couldn’t help but think of Bob Dylan. Expected (and now found) groans about “sea air”, but ODO gives both pronunciations. The anagram at 11dn is very good; very well hidden. “What’s brown and comes steaming out of Cow(e)s?”, that sort of thing.

   Off topic but related: I heard Debussy’s “Jimbo’s Lullaby” on the radio today, played on the contrabassoon. Sounded like a buffalo breaking wind. Quite sure it would not have lulled our esteemed blogger to sleep.

   1. Actually, it is Patti Smith who thinks Rimbaud is the greatest. There are many allusions to Rimbaud and his poetry in her work, particularly in ‘Horses’, her first album.
5. Ah, I see. Thanks.

   I suppose I equate fortified wine with port, so wouldn’t have noticed this. Not that DBEs bother me anyway.

6. 21 mins. I first heard of RIMBAUD in an old Bob Dylan song (as referenced by mctext above) and have remembered him ever since. I had the same problem with POSY as our blogger but saw it in the end. I was annoyed that it took me so long to see OLD SARUM because I have been there a few times. HONOURABLE was my LOI after RAY, mostly because I had convinced myself that “temperature dropping” was an instruction to move the letter T down the answer. That meant that 14dn surely had to end in TABLE didn’t it? Wrong. At least I made sense of both clues eventually.
7. 
   Too tricky for me this morning, and after well over an hour I still had some blanks (SO THERE, RIMBAUD, SIERRA and the PREFER bit of 3dn).

   However, having assumed 1ac started with a P (something to do with PICKET…) 1dn was actually my FOI. Interesting that it was Verlaine’s last when so often we’re all held up by the same ones.

   1. I might have had more luck if I hadn’t initially put CAMP in for 1D. I figured it must be wrong when I was looking at C_C___C_E_, either that that or the Times had started to vie with Viz in the filth and obscenity stakes…

      And then I vanished into the labyrinth of looking for words meaning “bunch tending”, “bunch tending to strike”, etc…

8. Not hung over so not that tough, although the SE corner took me a while to polish off, maybe half of my 35 minutes. ‘Sounds like’ clues seldom come easily to me and ‘sea air a’ was a groan-maker, followed by the poet for another. CoD 1dn for me.
9. I found this straightforward apart from three or for clues which did for me and took me within a few minutes of the hour. I didn’t really appreciate having two homophones intersecting and they were amongst the ones giving me most grief. Having a DBE invading the same quarter added to my irritation. GUMARAJI seemed a perfect fit at 17dn so I looked it up, confidently expecting to find it, but no such luck!

   Edited at 2014-10-10 09:57 am (UTC)

   1. Which one is a DBE? I can’t see it, but then there were a lot of things I couldn’t see in this puzzle.
      1. Port
10. 32.25 after being held up at the end by sierra (OK homophone for me) and Rimbaud. He was an absurdly gifted teenage poet who gave it up and became an engineer, ‘galloping through Africa’, as Auden pictured him. Verlaine, if your daughters are anything like my grand-daughters, they’ll appreciate ‘yeah’ and ‘so there’ flung in with all the grander words, I imagine. When my sons were very young the Times crossword helped me keep my sanity in the face of their bleating demands, and sometimes the other way around.
11. Years ago when the Stallone movies were around the NY Times columnist Russell Baker had a great riff on the Rimbaud/Rambo thing. In fact I mentioned it in a comment on Jimbo’s blog for puzzle 25223 July 24th 2012 so we’ve had it before. 31 minutes for me because I found this really rather tricky. “Guacamolle” or “guaccamole” anyone – took ages to get the dip there, making me the dip.

    Edited at 2014-10-10 10:26 am (UTC)

    1. Actually, Olivia, we haven’t, as far as I can see, except in a Jumbo. While you were penning your comment, I was searching and the daily, blogged by Jimbo – come back, all is forgiven! – clues RAMBO as follows: ‘Recalled mother being engrossed in old British film (5)’.

       That’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it. 🙂

       1. You’re right of course. My excuse is that I was in a rush to leave for a long w/e and didn’t have time to re-read the puzzle itself (yes rather lame). I just remembered that I’d made some sort of connection between the 2 guys. I still haven’t found Baker’s column.
12. Totally mortified to have to bracket myself with our Rabbitoh friend after plumping for ‘Rambaud’. I know I shouldn’t have pontificated in the Quickie yesterday about Gide being the best known French scribbler in crosswordland. 39 minutes apart from that.

    Never heard of grande dame as an expression in English. Does that make me dumb?

    1. Possibly, but I’d be looking at other causes.
       1. Harsh…
    2. There’s a certain implausibility about RAMBAUD. 😉
13. ….since I put in ‘pickpocket’, ‘puffing’, ‘ordinary’, and ‘supervisor’ almost at once. But then I bogged down, and my cause was not helped when I bunged in ‘band leader’ instead of ‘mind reader’ without really thinking. Eventually, after playing with ____raja, I saw ‘Gujarati’ from the definition and was able to correct and finish.

    I’m a bit surprised the setter didn’t allude to Old Sarum as one of the most famous rotten boroughs eliminated in the 1832 Reform Bill.

14. 29:40 … with one oops. I know how to spell RIMBAUD, but that didn’t stop me spelling it RAMBAUD (glad to see I’m in fine company).

    Shockingly, I won’t be able to console myself, beverage-wise, on the afternoon of the 18th. A teensy medical thing and some ongoing tests mean I’ll have to be on the soda water. But I’ll be happy to keep any other disappointed peloton riders company (and occasionally prop them upright) if permitted.

    1. Permission granted
       1. Merci beaucoup. je vais vous vois une week on samedi.
    2. Ditto here. All the while I was writing it in (ok, that’s not very long) I was telling myself that it was RIMBAUD, and betting that many of the crew would be spelling it with an A ha ha. I wonder if Alfred Nicholas Rambaud (sic) wrote any of his history stuff in verse?
       1. Yep, pretty much what I was thinking. Honestly, when they were handing out brains I think I may have got a beta version.
    3. Ditto here. We both seem to have ended up with a RAMBO/RIMBAUD meld. Particularly annoying when you actually know the correct spelling! Ann
       1. Someone really should Photoshop that!
15. After a good week of solving I met my match today with five missing – POSY, SO THERE, PREFER CHARGES, SIERRA and MIND READER. With hindsight none are too difficult so I’m disappointed with that performance. I stymied myself at 29A by being convinced that ‘One in the pit’ was referring to an orchestra and the first word was going to be WIND.

    I did at least manage to spell RIMBAUD correctly though it took me about 10 minutes to remember the spelling. I was wondering whether it ended in an X or a T but when I finally decided on a D it looked right.

16. Quite a struggle, not helped by putting in ROD instead of RAY at 23 (I think the former is a perfectly acceptable answer to the clue, so never questioned it). That made 19d my LOI, after about 65 minutes.

    COD to 14d for me, made me chuckle. Reminded me of an incident in my youth when my younger bro. picking up a Leicester accent said “I’m going to table”. My father corrected him with “I’m going to THE table”, eliciting “I’ll beat you there!” from my kid bro.

    Happy days!

    Forgot to say, Happy Birthday for yesterday Verlaine.

    Edited at 2014-10-10 11:15 am (UTC)

17. My slowest time of the week at 50 minutes. I took ages to complete the NW; the definition for 1a was particularly deceptive. 21 was straightforward once I had the initial R and final D. I recall Leonardo diCaprio playing Arthur Rimbaud in ‘Total Eclipse’. I thought the crossing homophone clue for Sierra was awful – didn’t work for me at all and is some way from the pronunciation given in Chambers or Oxford.
    Like therotter I also had ROD for 25, initially. I suppose ‘maybe’ should have made us stop to question it; if it was just a man’s name there would be no need for that.
18. Very entertaining blog as usual, Verlaine. A very enjoyable puzzle too, was completely duped by 11d, spending ages trying to permute ‘with, different and i’ into an imaginary port on IOW. The one clue I didnt like was 9ac- i think the setter has made the cryptic too difficult in order to maintain a good surface. I understand punctuation should be disregarded, but how is one meant to deduce that ‘at heart’ refers to the brief see?
19. Slow today, 50 minutes or so for this absorbing puzzle. Clues all perfectly fair; just made some silly mistakes such as spelling RIMBAUD as RIMBEAU; then, on realizing my error, thinking I had the wrong answer and that the word must end in BARD.

    I wonder when the PC brigade will insist on HIGHWAYPERSON; after all, Margaret Lockwood did play such a character in “The Wicked Lady”.

    1. Just by chance I have a date with Margaret Lockwood on Sunday… we’re going to be watching “The Lady Vanishes”. Which, hmm, was a solution in a recent Friday puzzle, wasn’t it?
    2. The Wicked Lady? Isn’t that the one where Counsellor Troi got her kit off for a flogging? So many embarrassing things to know!
       1. Hmmm…… that sounds like the 1983 Michael Winner re-make, NOT the 1945 Margaret Lockwood /Patricia Roc version!

          1. Reminder to self. Check IMDB before looking like an idiot!

20. 23:53 and posy was my LOI too.

    I hadn’t heard of Old Sarum… until just before I started the puzzle when I was looking up ticket prices for Stonehenge on i’internet and O S was mentioned as somewhere else to go on the day. That were lucky, that were.

    I was interested to see Jack’s tentative Gumaraji. For a while I was toying will the even more unlikely Topamaji.

    1. I still prefer JAR to TAR for “preserve”. And your JAM, for that matter.

       Edited at 2014-10-10 01:15 pm (UTC)

21. 14m. I noted the dodgy homophone and DBE on the way through but neither caused me any real problems. I wondered if RIMBAUD was included deliberately in honour of our blogger today. In any event, happy birthday.
22. I found this tough going. Among other hold ups, wondered why an Arabist would be working in a café and didn’t know the poet, going for Ramhard (hmm). DNF two days on the trot. I’m losing my grip . . .
23. A slow-feeling 31.08 with RAMBAUD (see Sotira’s confession above). The port took forever. Even when I got FORTIFIED I was still looking for a generic walled port of some kind. I only mind DBEs when they slow me down that much.
24. Well, it got done but quite a few going in without full parsing. I knew RIMBAUD but having never had to say his name out loud, I missed the Rambo connection..
    Good to hear from vinyl1 about Reform Bill. Almost as well known as Bill Stickers who seems to be constantly threatened with prosecution.
    1. This American band seems to have (rather unfortunately in my opinion) plumped for calling him Rim-bow:

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDYRQX6FPQQ

       Edited at 2014-10-10 02:36 pm (UTC)

       1. Americans don’t have a great record when it comes to pronouncing European names. Van Go, for example.
          1. ‘Van Goff’ isn’t much better, to be fair.
             1. . . . although they seem to go very French with ‘Fine Herbes’, as in Feen Erbs
             2. I think an attempt at pronouncing a syllable at least shows willing, rather than leaving it out altogether!
                1. My point was that this seems to be the only US attempt at French pronounciation, and it is used universally. Why?
                   1. Topical point – everybody else is saying ‘ebola’, but English newsreaders are saying ‘eBEOUla’: gets me like fingernails on a blackboard gets some people.
                      1. You are right that every one here says E-BOW-LA. What is the alternative?
                         1. How would you say it if it were spelled ‘ebolla’? A short O-vowel, I think. That would be more accurate.
25. Thanks to the setter for an absorbing solve, which I didn’t complete. Is PREFER CHARGES a dictionary phrase? Else is it kosher to have arbitrary phrases as lights? Was undone by some easy ones like SUPERVISOR, because possibly there are too many synonyms for ‘head’. Also I thought the word ‘the’ was superfluous in the definition of ERITREA – it is only ‘a country’ or ‘country’.

    GUJARATI reminded me of what petrified me in London – pockets of Asian/Indian/Pak/Bangladeshi colonies scattered all over. Wembley, near the football stadium was one such Gujarati pocket. After the recent election of Lutfur Rahman in another Bangladeshi pocket, I feel it is better if it is possible to incentivise immigrant population to settle across the city, thus dispersing these colonies. I wonder it would or could be done though.

    1. I think what generally happens is that the first post migration generation tend to lead the dispersal out of the “pockets”, usually through increasing prosperity to the suburbs. But some parts of London are identified strongly with particular cultural groups and may not readily change: Bengali Brick Lane, Chinatown (I suppose) and Ultra Orthodox Jewish Stamford Hill, possibly London’s  fastest growing community. it’s perhaps inevitable that ethnic/religious groups will want to love in close proximity. Whether this is disturbing or just adds to the rich tapestry of life is an interesting discussion, too often subverted by fear and blunt prejudice.

       1. Indeed Z. In my fair city of Perth, by far the strongest example of “ethnic pockets” is the concentration of British migrants in the North-Western suburbs.

          And yet there is much more attention (fear and prejudice?) paid to smaller and less-concentrated pockets of other ethnic groups. With little evidence to support the distinction as far as I can see.

    2. All the usual sources list ‘prefer’ with reference to submitting or putting charges before a court of law.

       Here’s the SOED entry:Prefer. Submit formally (a statement, charge, claim, etc.) to an authority for consideration or approval. M16.

       M. Puzo Do you want to prefer charges against whoever did this to you?

26. Man ray ? Shaft? Surely shaft of light gives ray? Also what is a DBE?
    1. Definition by example. ‘Port’ is an example of a fortified wine.
27. Not if you’re relying on French O-level from 40 years ago.
28. Didn’t find this easy and had seven unsolved, mostly in the NW corner. Thanks verlaine for explaining everything.
    Have had little time for crosswords for the past month, what with a two-week business trip to China (I wonder if cryptic crosswords work in Mandarin?) and being too busy since. Getting back into them now.
    I must revisit the recent puzzle in which each clue was set by a different person. I remember I had about half of it done before that issue of the paper got deleted off my iPad.
29. 30 minutes but with one stupid spelling mistake. RAMBAUD for RIMBAUD. Very galling (gauling?) Ann
30. Well an inglorious failure today with help needed after 60m and plenty still unsolved. I would never have got 1a without all the checkers in and I can’t think of a sentence where I could substitute POCK for pitted area and never heard of a dip as a pickpocket. So I was well off the pace on that one. Didn’t like the homophone for RIMBAUD which requires a foreign accent to make any sense, so in my view a poor clue (even though I got it). Not over impressed with SNEER defined as SO THERE – again I can’t think of a substitution that would work; a question mark for once would have helped on that one. I suppose it’s another DBE essentially? Thanks for entertaining blog and belated happy returns.
    1. I also was held up trying to understand POCK and SNEER, but Chambers says that the former can be the pitting or scarring of a surface (i.e. not just one pit or scar), and the latter can be a sneering expression.

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