Times 26392 – at least all the little squares are on the grid

65 comments on “Times 26392 – at least all the little squares are on the grid”

1. 2 errors: ’emulater’ (well, that sounds like ‘later’, too), and, like Ulaca, ‘lorimer’. I knew the word (we’ve had it in a cryptic, for that matter), did not know that there was another possible spelling for it (why would I, when the word is obsolete anyway?), and overrode the wordplay, more fool I. DNK BRICKIE and forgot about that ‘course’. 25ac was a clever clue, but there just aren’t that many 4-letter states.
2. I read this as IONA (Scottish island), changing the N to W (making north western).
   1. aaaah – that makes more sense than my take – ta
3. 40 minutes, but trusted Hotshot Peter Lorimer rather than the cryptic for the tackle maker. Finished with THATCH, of all things, after the unknown FELDSPAR and INTAGLIO. Solid puzzle that kept one on one’s toes.
4. I thought this was terribly easy – apart from originally banging in Risotto at 5dn instead of RISSOLE!
   FOI 1ac FELDSPAR, LOI 25ac IOWA which I failed to parse. COD 18dn ESCHEWAL lovely word

   The top half just flew in and the rest followed in a time of just over 14 minutes a PB this year.

   Now I’ll have a bash at yesterday’s championship entry.I can tell you my time now – >30 minutes!

   horryd Shanghai

5. 22 minutes and the nearest I’ve come to achieving my former 20 minute target for months on end. Not that I particularly try for that these days as I prefer to aim for 30 minutes and enjoy the scenery along the way.

   STOLLEN as ‘bread’ always seems odd to me and I wonder what the technical difference is between bread and cake, which is what I would call it. Wiki seems as confused as I am, referring to it as ‘bread’ initially, but in the facts summary has it as ‘fruit cake’.

   My problem with printing the PDF file was that the text was too small and it blurred when I enlarged it. This played havoc with my ageing eyes during the solve.

   Edited at 2016-04-21 04:15 am (UTC)

   1. In the bakery where I worked, if it was made with yeast it was bread. So Stollen is indeed bread by that definition. Brioche is too (the “cake” Marie Antoinette supposedly suggested people should eat since the law was that if bakers ran out of bread they had to offer brioche for the same price).
      1. Thanks for that Paul. I seem to remember the demarcation line between cakes and biscuits was set for tax purposes as the result of a test case as to whether Jaffa Cakes are really cakes (and therefore exempt from VAT) or biscuits (in which case the VAT man would get his cut). A deciding factor was what happens when the product goes stale. Biscuits go soft and cakes go dry, and Jaffa cakes fall into the second category.

         Edited at 2016-04-21 08:59 am (UTC)

         1. I think that this is a case of the convention that if a definition is in one of the standard dictionaries, it is fair game, even if experts disagree. Chambers has “Rich, sweet German bread made with raisins, etc and coated with icing sugar”
            1. Oh, absolutely, Tone, I wasn’t disputing the validity of the clue for a moment. It’s just something that’s always struck me so I thought I’d mention it.
               1. No problem, Jack. It is people mentioning things that makes this site more interesting.
      2. So banana bread is a cake, and lardy cake is a bread!

         Edited at 2016-04-21 11:49 am (UTC)

         1. In the West Country we call it Lardy Bread, at least we did when I was a kid. But Banana Bread is definitely a cake, just look at it.
            1. Interesting: I’ve never heard it called bread. You don’t see it much these days, more’s the pity. In any event the conclusion I draw is that we can call Stollen a cake or a bread as we see fit!
6. No idea how long this took since I started during a quick stop on the road with it on my phone with no program to allow me to fill in the crossword so I had to solve clues multiple times to work out checkers. Eventually I finished my journey and got on my computer. Took me an embarrassingly long time to get nautical mile, especially since my father was in the RN.

   Although I’d never heard of it, I trusted the cryptic and went with LORINER rather than the tempting LORIMER.

   Then had my usual problem that if you start solving on one internet connection and then finish on another (with an without a VPN in my case) then the “submit” always fails and loses everything.

   Edited at 2016-04-21 06:31 am (UTC)

7. Sorry to the Anon visitor who just posted here but I’ve had to zap your contribution because it referred to an answer in yesterday’s competition qualifier which is currently off limits for discussion.

   It will be blogged and available for discussion once the solution has been published. Not sure at the moment when that will be but certainly not before next Wednesday.

   Edited at 2016-04-21 06:56 am (UTC)

8. 18:27 with my crossword brain fully re-engaged after yesterday. Memories of EASTING and for once, I read the clue rather than bunging in LORIMER. COD ESCHEWAL because I like the word and will use it a few times today.
9. Very easy puzzle solved top to bottom almost without stopping at any point. I liked 12D.

   How can anybody never have heared of FELDSPAR – it must make up a huge part of the earth’s crust?

10. Abour 40mins or so, with unknowns FELDSPAR (sorry, Jimbo!), LORINER and INTAGLIO from wp.
11. About my usual 35 – 40 minutes for this after warming up with the QC and taking too long on that (see my blog on the QC for an explanation). A nice puzzle where I managed to get the unknown LORINER from the wordplay and correctly parsed IOWA. I did wonder about my OUTCASTS which didn’t quite fit the definition for 17, and returning to it later I saw the more obvious answer.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

12. FOI STRATI, A level geography (failed), plural of stratus, whereas strata is plural of stratum. 22′, would have been 18 but agonised over whether LORINER was a word before diving in.
13. 12m. Easy but very enjoyable, I found. It all just seemed to flow nicely, including the unknowns INTAGLIO and LORINER. I needed the wordplay at 2dn not to put in EMULATER, although writing it now it looks very wrong.
14. 38 minutes for this puzzle which I found fairly straightforward, with a couple of unknowns worked out from wordplay. FOI JUST, followed by EMULATOR. Knew Lorimer, but trusted the wordplay for the unknown variant LORINER. Vaguely knew INTAGLIO as a word but couldn’t have said what it was. No problem with FELDSPAR. Couldn’t get my head round the parsing for GADABOUT or LOI, OUTRAGES (failed to lift and separate Not in fashion!), but biffed them anyway, so thanks to George for enlightening me.

    Edited at 2016-04-21 10:32 am (UTC)

15. 20 minutes, no problems, got the homophone in 1a and knew feldspar is a quartz rock (as does Jimbo) but not that it’s the semi-precious gem constituent. Kept thinking of moon rock which is volcanic basalt not quartz. Too much info I guess.
    Had vaguely heard of a LORINER but was 95% just wordplay.
16. About twenty minutes, so I found this on the easy side. Didn’t know INTAGLIO but the anagram was clear enough. SImilarly with LORINER parsing. I spent a minute or two in Tooting via Lambeth before BIRDCAGE hit me. Maybe the Queen could move to the far end of Links Road SW17 where I had digs fifty years ago, avoiding treading on the cracks between the paving stones. Most COUNTERCLAIMS are more admissions of guilt than rebuttals in my experience.
    1. Links Road (Tooting Graveney) that runs down the side of Tooting Station from London Road to Mitcham Lane?

       Cross over the railway bridge heading towards Mitcham and my grandparents are buried in the cemetry on the right and as a child I played on Figgs Marsh on the left. Used to have some real sawdust on the floor pubs down there!

       1. I can remember vaguely The Cricketers Arms in Mitcham, but that had a pleasant enough lounge bar and draught Double Diamond (which back then was thought good), before CAMRA got going. I don’t think any lager was on sale rhen either.
          1. You’re thinking of the posh end of town! The Cricketers arms on Mitcham Cricket Green is a famous pub – touring international cricket teams used to stay there and Surrey 2nd Eleven used it as a home ground.

             London Road, Tooting (the station end of Links Road) was much more down market and whilst my parents and grandparents had a few pints in The Railway I used to sit in the sawdust, out of sight, with my Smiths Crisps and a lemonade

             The Mitcham Lane end of Links Road was pure suburbia – not a pub in sight but sometimes the smell from the Pascal sweet factory

             1. I was in 146 Links Road for six months in 1968. Used ro walk from Tooting Broadway, so avoiding the flagstone cracks was a way of relieving the tedium of the walk. There was a great Italian owned cafe on the left towards Amen Corner from the tube station. A risotto followed by rum baba was my usual. We knew how to live then.
    2. As a resident of SW15 I was sent a bit off track by that reference too. Of course Birdcage Walk is in SW1 but if you go by postcodes London doesn’t have a centre!
       1. This is a trip round my old haunts- SW15 is Putney I recall

          When working with ICL we used to frequent the Six Bells near Putney Bridge which Tony Sever will know very well

          1. It is indeed, although I’m at the other end so actually closer to Barnes than Putney proper. Not that I ever get to frequent pubs there, in Putney or anywhere else!
          2. The Eight Bells, actually, Jim. (The Six Bells is in Brentford – an E2 bus ride from where I live now.)

             Anyway I am indeed familiar with the pub next to where I first worked for ICT (as it was then) in Putney Bridge House (where I might well have solved yesterday’s puzzle in my lunch break :-).

17. I strongly approve of bloggers doing the puzzles after “3 pints and a show”… it’s the only way to ensure a level playing field! This was indeed rather straightforward, but with some interesting vocab in it such that it didn’t feel like it was insulting anyone’s intelligence…
18. Fifty-three years in a day – good to be back in the present. Missed JUST and OUTRAGES, for which I swallowed the bait and put ‘outcasts’, and couldn’t figure out the parsing for IOWA. INTAGLIO is another one of those words which seems to occur more often in cryptics than it does in real life. Never heard of LORINER which was my LOI. Favourite was BRICKIE.

    Thanks to blogger and setter.

19. New to this but took ‘un’ as French ‘a’ rather than u.n.- united nations
    1. And you’d be right.
20. My experience, George, is that when I blog Thursday crosswords as not containing anything scary, everybody else piles in with “tough” “unknowns”. But if my time, sans benefit of a decent pint or two, comes within a spit* of yours, I would have to agree this was gentle fare. Not troubled by LORINER, which (with no justification whatsoever) gut instinct says is the original version. FELDSPAR is (slightly fuzzily) in my vocab, and I assumed The Moonstone was made of the same stuff: I see feldspar as such cheerfully plays the part of almost any kind of rock forming mineral, and isn’t just the interesting crystal stuff with hexagonal leanings I took it to be. I am a little more educated.
    I fear went nowhere near the parsing of IOWA: I just saw I?W? and made an inspired guess, ignoring a lisped Japanese pill box.
    *1 spit=6 seconds
21. 14:56. Despite being a Leeds fan and having been served by Lasher Lorimer in his (grotty) pub he didn’t even enter my mind at 16.

    Where I came closest to coming unstuck was at 17 where “an act of wanton violence” didn’t really tally with my understanding of what an outrage is so I dabbled with alternatives like outcasts (something can be cast, or fashioned out of bronze, say).

    I didn’t know the Wallace work and had no idea how Iowa worked.

    1. I thought the definition of OUTRAGE was a bit strange but Collins defines it as a ‘wantonly vicious or cruel act’, which isn’t exactly the same but very close. That uncertainty and the fact that I took ‘not in fashion’ to be an indication of OUT held me up a bit on that clue until I had the checkers and it couldn’t be anything else.
       I forgot to mention that I’ve never heard of Edgar Wallace, let alone his four men!
       1. Wallace has a place in the history of crime fiction as being I believe the first author to relate the story through the eyes of the police rather than use an amateur like Holmes say.

          This is clearly my day for old pubs. Wallace certainly used to have a pub named after him somewhere near the Strand end of Waterloo Bridge

          1. It’s still there. Just around the corner from the Royal Courts…
          2. Over here remembered as writer of King Kong. The crime fiction part would fly over the head of an American. I think. And I solved JUST from wordplay anyway, because I didn’t know that book.
22. Second time this week missing one, FELDSPAR, I know the word just couldn’t see it if you know what I mean aaaagh. Apart from that nice and steady with quite a few competing for COD. I must admit I always thought the plural of stratum was strata when applied to clouds, and I still do, but I’m probably wrong.

    Tyro Tim

    1. stratum > strata n.

       stratus > strati m.

       1. And I wasu
23. I generally do the QC as a warm up and am always wary when contributors to that blog suggest that the 15×15 is worth a crack that day since I then sally forth full of optimism aiming for a really fast time and end up being frustratingly pedestrian. Not so today – where I came in a tad over 10 mins which is close to a PB. I was not tempted by the great Lorimer who I watched many times playing for the greatest club football side in history. My most flattering moment in my youth was when, having a quiet pint in a pub in Leeds, a comely young lady approached me and asked me if I was Norman Hunter’s brother. Hunter was my hero as like me he was completely one-footed but unlike me could play at international rather than college level.
    1. M.O.T.
       1. Fortunately the team’s footballing skills were far superior to their singing.
    2. Worth watching for the sock tassels alone, not to mention to see what John Giles could do with the ball. Oh, um, and off it…
       1. The parents of my girlfriend at the time were good friends of Johnny Giles. This not only got us tickets to the 1975 European Cup final in Paris but also an invitation to a team black tie dinner in Leeds where I had the experience of occupying the next urinal to Giles’s brother-in-law – the legendary Nobby Stiles.
          1. I hope Nobby had his contacts on. It’s just a pity Giles left his first English club.
24. Intaglio is a term still much used by philatelists. It was used almost exclusively as the process for printing stamps from the twenties to the sixties and is also known as recess-enraving. Many bank-notes still employ this highly-skilled process.
    In the UK was perfected by security printers De la Rue Ltd., Waterlow & Sons and Bradbury Wilkinson.
    Here endeth the lesson.

    horryd Shanghai

25. Once again, failed to check the wordplay and biffed ‘lorimer’. Time with one error 16m 51s.
26. I’m having a bad week. 11 mins but I was rushing and bunged in “outcasts” for 17dn. Muppet. At least I got LORINER right because I figured it was more likely that there was a variant of “lorimer” than there was of there being a boat called a “limer” that I’d never heard of.
27. Not much trouble, 20 minutes or so. My LOI was TREVOR. My revelation today was that someone spells the reclining chair as ‘LONGUE’, rather than as lounge, as we US folks do. Apparently by mistake, but in any event that’s the only way I’ve ever seen (or heard) it, and it is quite common here. (Of course, it may have appeared in a puzzle before and I’ve absolutely forgotten it.) Live and learn. Regards.
    1. Sacre bleu!
       It’s a long chair, not a lounge chair.
       I see from Wiki that the ‘lounge’ error was “a 19th C folk-anagrammatic adaptation of the term”, in the US, so your experience is de rigeur, Kevin.
       But it’s a sad day for long chairs.
       1. They’re still long over here Pip. To us, the elongated shape is signaled by the word ‘chaise’, since we, by and large, don’t speak a lick of French. Can you picture those long, low swimming pool furniture chairs in which the seat continues, to support one’s feet off the ground? We call them ‘chaises’, too.
          1. We have a chaise longue, which my Canadian wife bought when she was a student, and refers to as a ‘chaise’. If that’s what people call it, that’s what it’s called. Whatever you call it, it’s a singularly useless piece of furniture.
28. The QC blog suggested this was at the easier end so I had a go.
    It didn’t take me that long but there were a few unknowns/ guesses. It turns out that I got it all correct apart from 1a. Put it down to my lack of science education although I did pass O level physics and chemistry. A good test for an aspiring QCer. David
    1. Well done David, I took a while with 1a and I was once a chemist. Keep going and it gets easier.
29. 8:02 for me after another ridiculously slow start. A pleasant, straightforward solve.
    1. Twenty-eight minutes here, which is not bad for me. Ignorance is clearly bliss – I’d never heard of a “lorimer”, and hence wasn’t lead astray at 16ac.
30. A good time for me (just) under 24 hours.
31. Should it not be go upwards in tether?

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