Times 26,249: A Nod’s As Good As A Wink To A Blind Horse

49 comments on “Times 26,249: A Nod’s As Good As A Wink To A Blind Horse”

1. Yes, nice and easy this morning and all completed on the rattler, so nicely inside 35 minutes. The only bit of parsing that I don’t understand is in 25 down where NO for traditional drama is opaque to me. Thanks Verlaine and good luck with your murder mysteries over the weekend.
   1. NO is traditional Japanese drama, also spelled NOH. It is slow, formal and largely inscrutable, unlike the more lively and popular kabuki.

      An enjoyable puzzle I thought, although quite a few were buffed. Chinese dress (9) is a write-in!

      Being a Beatles fan I had HONEYPIE for a while at 18dn, one the basis that ONE PIE is “little bread” (well at least in India it is).

      Dereklam

      1. Thanks for lifting the veil of ignorance that made NO opaque to me. I’ll try not to forget that before it comes up again. Trouble is, these days, that adding a new factoid into my memory store usually results in displacing something else – ‘there were nine in the bed and the little one said “rollover, rollover”…’
         1. I recall an Alexei Sayle sketch where someone asked him if he knew that Cardiff was the fifth largest port in Britain. He thanked them, but unfortunately that factoid displaced from his brain the ability to walk and talk.

            Pretty funny if you liked Alexei Sayle, as I did.

2. Struggled with GUMPTION and CHEONGSAM and spelt SACRILEGE incorrectly which caused a long delay. Guessed MOSAIC but still can’t quite parse it.
   1. S.A. is sex appeal and turns up quite often in crosswords (if not in real life), the rest is pretty straightforward I’d have thought?
   2. I managed the mumble ‘moitic’ for a while, using SA’s confrere IT.
3. 38:15, at least half of which was spent on the NW corner. I thought this was going to be quick when MONEY LAUNDERING went straight in and several crossers followed but then a handful of clues stubbornly refused to yield. Still, happy to get all correct for the first time this week.
4. 14m. I didn’t find this particularly easy, perhaps because it was another early morning solve without caffeine assistance. I have spent considerably more time in airports and aeroplanes than at home this week.
   Nothing unknown today though: I’ve come across both CHEONGSAM and TAFFRAIL in past puzzles, and they are singularly memorable words.
   Enjoy the ‘murder mystery play readthrough’, Verlaine, whatever the Dickens that is!
   1. I’ll leave Verlaine to explain what a ‘murder mystery play readthrough’ is, but I wonder if including the words ‘murder’ and ‘Derbyshire’ in the same sentence on his blog might have raised Verlaine as a suspect in some dark and dingy corner of GCHQ! Oh b*gger! I’ve added myself to the list.

      Edited at 2015-11-06 10:30 am (UTC)

      1. Disappointingly, there aren’t any corners in GCHQ. It’s circular! (actually, a donut)

         Edit : I just Googled an image of it to check my recollection. Now I’m definitely on a list!

         Edited at 2015-11-06 01:07 pm (UTC)

         1. And so are the rest of us on the blog now so I expect the phone to click and the Internet to start misbehaving too!
            1. The rest of us on this blog work at GCHQ so relax ( unless you are with TalkTalk, of course).
5. Solved within my 30 minute target for once. Time lost working out the answer at 22 where CHEONGSAM was unknown, but the wordplay was very helpful apart from SAM as ‘woman’. Fortunately ‘A’ was the only option once the checkers were in place. Was pleased to remember TAFFRAIL from its previous outings.

   Edited at 2015-11-06 10:31 am (UTC)

6. A pleasingly zippy Friday solve. I spent some time wondering why the homophone “DIRE” involved hesitation in the hearing of it, before realising that was a blind alley of my own invention. CHEONGSAM is one of those words filed away in my brain as “for use only in crosswords”, so it needed full parsing to be sure I was remembering it properly.
7. Pretty straightforward for a Friday, with some of the defs almost too obvious (e.g. CHEONGSAM — at least if you’d come across this item of clothing before). I got bogged down at the end with the HONEYBUN/GRANDSON cross-over in the SE corner, where I did not help myself by at first trying to make LOVERBOY work at 18D. I liked the G AND S for “light opera” device. I wasted much time wracking my brains for the title of a Savoy opera that would fit the bill. Doh!
8. Perhaps the easiest Friday for a while (especially if you don’t initially put in HANDSSAW).

   Verlaine I understand that killing your father and marrying your mother is run of the mill in the Derbyshire Dales.

9. 25 minutes, but would have been almost in my oppo Keriothe’s country if I hadn’t biffed ‘windswept’. Thanks to V for the parsing of GRANDSON, which I never bothered to come back to.

   TAFFRAIL’s evocativeness (a couple of Welshmen cornering you at the back of the boat and (re)regaling you with their stories) must be responsible for the fact that everyone remembers this after one go, while other words go in and out as quickly as English batsmen facing part-time spinners.

   Edited at 2015-11-06 10:57 am (UTC)

10. Would never have got CHEONGSAM, but I’ve had to lower my dudgeon level now that I see it was a write-in for most people. I’ll get it next time.

    Finished the rest of it in about 22 minutes. Thanks setter and Verlaine.

11. At 13:06, a PB for poking at an iPad, despite being a LOVERBOY for a while. Assisted by much (correct) biffing.
12. 34mins…

    …ending with HONEYBUN, and then GRANDSON where I failed to spot the G&S bit (my brain wanted some ref to ‘GR (King) and I’..). CHEONGSAM was kind of half-remembered (like yesterday’s T Monk, ‘didn’t know I knew it’), so worked out from wp. 7d from enumeration and checkers.

    Sounds like an interesting w/e, Verlaine… update next Friday?

13. 25 minutes for what felt like a Monday puzzle. Cheongsam was familiar, but not Taffrail, my LOI. I thought I was going to have to resort to aids looking for some obscure Welsh river as the answer, but then the light dawned that the definition must be at the stern of the clue.
14. 
    For a Friday this was very easy accompaniment to my Singapoore

    Chicken Curry as I was busy first thing

    Three Verlaines. FOI 14dn LOI 13ac

    Cheungsam added a bit of local colour

    Taffrail has been present for many years in the TC

    Horryd Shanghai

15. 10:39. The stupid Chinese dress stopped me dipping under 10′. I knew it from a past puzzle at which time I resolved to remember how to spell it but of course forgot. The use of a unisex name for the girl didn’t help matters, nor did working for a company whose owners have a “Cheung” in their name.
16. 8.57 for me. LOI was TAFFRAIL, not helped by the fact that I was ignorant of Taff, rail (a kind of bird?) and taffrail.
17. Straightforward for a Friday – I finished 8:40. I always thought gumption was more ‘get up and go’ or ‘initiative’ than common sense but who am I to argue with today’s setter/the office Collins Dictionary.
18. 11:40 … no problems except that slight doubt over the final syllable of CHEONGSAM.
19. All finished in 15 mins, bar CHEONGSAM which was an unknown word to me. SAM as woman? I’m with Jack on frowning on that.
    1. I agree. I do not expect “Sam” to be clued as a Russian missile beginning with S every time. Luckily I happened to know this answer but when I don’t I want a more than reasonable chance at getting it.
    2. Isn’t the ever fragrant wife of our glorious PM a Sam? Probably wise not to be too frowny about it, or your internet connection might suddenly get a bit iffy.
20. As said above, more like a Monday, I was looking forward to a tussle and it was a pushover. I knew CHEONGSAM although I don’t know why I knew it. 15 minutes.
21. 16m so I found this very straightforward and to quote my fellow blogger but for the stupid Chinese dress which cost me 3 minutes nearly might have equalled my PB! Same holdups and queries as others. Good blog, Verlaine, but how Oedipus Rex is a murder mystery is a mystery to me!
    1. Oedipus goes into full detective mode to try and track down the murderer of Laius… questioning suspects, sifting through clues, the works. Admittedly there were a lot of “spoilers” in the ancient world that might have prevented the denouement from being too shocking, but I think you can easily view it as a proto-whodunnit. (Oedunnit?)
22. No issues today in a relatively speedy 11.47. A lot of entry by definition, though I paused briefly to confirm, which is why I scrapped LOVERBOY pretty quickly. Indeed, I thought the clue a cut above the rest because you actually had to solve it from the wordplay to be sure.
23. 10 mins. Back to a wide awake solve thankfully. Like melrosemike the HONEYBUN/GRANDSON crossers were my last ones in. I could have biffed the latter much sooner but I wanted to parse it before I put it in and it took a while to see the G&S element of the wordplay. I’ve come across CHEONGSAM many times before in other puzzles so it was pretty easy once a couple of checkers were in place. I do the Guardian, Indy and Washington Post puzzles as well as this one, which means that my vocabulary is gradually expanding. It’s a good job there’s so much unwatchable drivel on TV at the moment because my Sky+ box is getting full enough as it is. That’s like Tivo for Kevin and Olivia’s information.
24. As many others have said, a distinctly Monday feel to this one. Horsey too; I’m sure there was a nag with Cheongsam in the name running a year or so back, while Manifesto was a dual Grand National winner. And my COD was 8dn.
    1. The Gold Cheongsam won at Newbury, Doncaster and a couple of times under Frankie Dettori at Newmarket. A good horse to have owned.
25. A friendly Friday offering with some neat wordplay but obvious definitions. Like crypticsue, I had to check that GUMPTION is in fact common sense. I like to think that we ANTISOCIAL people are not always disruptive, and not every GRANDSON is young, just relatively so.
    1. I think you are thinking of the other meaning of ANTISOCIAL. You don’t get an ASBO for just not feeling like going out this evening, thanks very much.

       Edited at 2015-11-07 09:57 am (UTC)

26. Not as speedy as others, about 30 minutes, held up by the final syllable of CHEONGSAM, and not knowing why Welsh should lead to taff or any variation of it, so that last one biffed in with a shrug. Regards.
    1. Kevin, can you check your account for an off-line message? It might be in the LiveBlog spam box.
27. Twenty-seven minutes here, though it should have been faster. I fear that the drawing in of the days is taking its toll on what I generously refer to as my brain. On the plus side, though, I am managing to stick to my personal resolution not to drink heavily until after dark, so well done me.

    Everything was pretty straightforward, apart from the Chinese dress at 22ac, which took a while and was my LOI. I think I preferred the obscure cricketing terms, or life stages of the salmon. Still, the checkers and the wordplay made it clear enough, and the answer at least looks like plausible Chinese.

    Speaking of owls (which we weren’t, but they appeared at 14d), the last few evenings have seen the return of our regular pair of tawny owls (at least, I presume it’s the same pair each year). They turn up at about this time every year, and spend the hours of darkness shouting at each other from opposite sides of the garden, for no good reason that I can understand – it’s possible that they’ve flown in from Essex. Then they disappear in January, and return for a repeat performance in the spring, producing two or three chicks. It’s all very heartwarming and charming, but it would less 20ac. if they kept civilised hours.

28. No real problems, as all the vocabulary was known to me, but I was also held up by trying to fit ‘loverboy’ in at 18d. Ashamed to say that I failed to pick up the G & S reference at 29a, despite having been a member of the D’Oyly Carte Trust when living in London, and having booked yesterday for the production of The Mikado that is coming to Newcastle’s Theatre Royal next June.
    Thanks to thud_n_blunder for the laughs, – a hoot as ever.
29. Aargh! I was going so well until I hit a wall with three clues still to solve. It took me simply ages to see ANTISOCIAL, which was the first of the three to fall. It took me a while to think of GRANDSON, but I then failed to make anything of GANDS and couldn’t convince myself that there was a light opera called GRANDSON (to be performed by GR AND SON) that I’d never heard of. So I then spend ages trying to make head or tail of LOVERBOY. Eventually I got there, but at the cost of about 10 minutes for those last three giving me a miserable 15:20.
30. I didn’t know GUMPTION had anything to do with common sense. Where I come from you showed gumption if you did something mildly dangerous. I like to think of it as a local variation but it was probably just ignorance. That confusion made it my LOI. No problem with TAFFRAIL – I remembered that’s what they tied the drunken sailor to “when she’s half seas under”. I’ve just been served a meal by a beautiful girl in a beautiful CHEONGSAM. The ending S*M made the answer obvious but I didn’t like SAM being used as a woman’s name. 30m. Ann
    1. I thought the same about GUMPTION. Collins defines it as ‘common sense or resourcefulness’, to which I want to respond ‘make your mind up!’

       Edited at 2015-11-07 10:03 am (UTC)

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