Times 26721 – I like a good seabird.

53 comments on “Times 26721 – I like a good seabird.”

1. I didn’t bother checking the fodder for SEBACIOUS (sic) as I knew how to spell it. I wonder how much else I know is wrong.

   About 13 minutes with the error. COD to EVITA for taking up 5 of those minutes as I tried to understand how Elisa, Eliza, Erica or Edina might fit the wordplay.

2. Is (Cap H) High a fair anagram indicator?
   I’ve always thought shag meant something else (a ragged mass of hair), so that was a surprise.
   1. I expect if you’d accept “drunk” as an anagrind you have to accept “high”, “tight”, etc…
   2. And a capital is OK when it’s not actually spelled that way (Ruth=pity, say); but lower case is not allowed when the word is spelled with a capital.
      1. Why, Kevin? That is the convention but it feels wrong to me
         1. There have been times–this question has come up a number of times here, as you know–when I’ve had the explanation at the tip of my tongue, but tonight is not one of them. Somehow it feels that–if we’re to make a distinction–this distinction is better than the reverse, but I don’t know why we make a distinction.
            1. Nice to have that sorted :-))

               To be clear about my own view, I think both ways are unjustifiable, since essentially they are both a lie. My best suggestion to setters is to hide the capital, eg at the beginning of a sentence, when it becomes a legitimate ploy. Otherwise it’s just wrong

               1. Yeah, that sounds about right.
               2. I would be happy either way: ignore punctuation, or don’t. To do it one way but not the other is baffling to me.
                  1. I think it’s a substitution thing: High is sometimes the exact same word as high (just happening to come at the beginning of a sentence), but lower-case don is *never* the same word as Don the name, no matter how you cut it.
                     1. But in the middle of a sentence this is true both ways. Don is not don, and don is not Don.

                        Edited at 2017-05-10 04:56 pm (UTC)

                        1. I would argue that we never look at the wordplay of a crossword clue as a unified whole, but split it up into discrete parts: therefore any sense of positional context is an irrelevant red herring!
                           1. I suppose so, if you look at it like that.
                              How about abbreviations? I might write the word ‘nut’ in capital letters for emphasis (‘Donald Trump is such a TOTAL NUT JOB’), so following the same logic ‘NUT, say’ could be used to indicate ‘fruit’ rather than ‘union’. I wonder if that would be allowed.
   3. “The common cormorant or shag, lays eggs inside a paper bag. The reason you will see no doubt, it is to keep the lightning out. But what these unobservant birds have never noticed is that herds, of wandering bears will come with buns. And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.”
      Poetry gets no finer than that

      1. I never looked on Christopher Isherwood in quite the same way after learning that he was responsible for the cormorant poem.
   4. The common cormorant or shag,
      Lays its eggs in a paper bag.
3. 43 mins approx. with croissant. LOI was 1a – once I saw the participant. Glad of the very helpful wordplay for Vesicle. That and Dolmens and Sebaceous are just on the right side of obscurity for me.
   I spent time taking the HE out of Butchering for an anagram of Paris. Surely he was a Tringcub, wasn’t he?
   COD to Flagstaff. Thanks setter and Pip.
4. Count me as another one who took a large amount of time over 25ac, agonising over whether it could be ELIZA or ERICA. Unusual and interesting device – we’ve been told a lot of times, I think, that “hidden contained in” type clues can’t have the hidden part right at the beginning or end of the word, and on some subconscious level I think that’s sunk in.

   I didn’t successfully parse 8dn until an embarrassingly long time after submission, so very glad that that one turned out to be correct too!

5. I’m having a good week this week: no mistakes and (by my standards) quick times. Today the Kernow corner held me up a bit, especially, like Sotira, sorting out which consonants to use to fill in the gaps in 25. Too many female contestants, and (since we had already had an unusual 2 “hiddens”) I wasn’t disposed to look for a third, even if reversed.
   TEHRAN took some persuading, as I firmly believed it had an extra E in it. Apparently not.
6. At 56 minutes, my first sub-hour finish of the week. Lots of good stuff, with fairly clued unknowns, though it still took me a while to convince myself that VESICLE was a thing, or that we’d had an English pope.

   A slow start—I got as far as BLEED before I wrote one in—but never bogged me down too much. LOI EVITA, which I’m glad to see caused other people some trouble, too. I think doing the Gruaniad puzzle every day recently means I no longer stop looking after a couple of hiddens have appeared.

   WOD DOLMENS. I’ve a friend who likes me to drive her around looking at tumuli—perhaps we should put a dolmen or two on the list. Thanks to setter and blogger.

7. 
   … took almost an hour, but all correct and all parsed (or part-parsed: SARCASM, M.O.). A good challenge. I too was held up by EVITA, looking where to put an ‘e’, and finished in the NE with the tricky COHERE, after the VESICLE/SEBACEOUS crossers.

   Edited at 2017-05-10 07:57 am (UTC)

8. Quite chuffed to find myself on the club leaderboard only 20+ seconds behind Verlaine. And like him, I didn’t figure out 8d until after submitting. And like everyone else, I tried Eliza and Erica before getting it. What I didn’t get was how SARCASM worked, a problem made worse by having the same doubt as Pip expresses; so I biffed on the basis of the checkers. TEHRAN can have another E if it wants, but I think that’s an older spelling. I got 12d on the basis of BOTTOMS=ships, conveniently overlooking the ‘order’; whatever works, I suppose. COD to MUTATION, which I also parsed post hoc.
9. Under 2 Verlaines so no complaints. I put in EVITA unparsed as Eva Peron felt more revolutionary than, say, Erica Jong. LOI TEHRAN as it had to be from the wordplay but like others, I thought that it had an extra E. DNK VESICLE but the wordplay was clear. Has anyone ever seen EPITOME clued other than in this way? Thanks setter and pip.
10. I thought it had too, on my map when we set off to go there, but it seems not now.
    1. Apparently it is pronounced Teh’ran in Farsi, with the h heard. The Teheran spelling was an attempt to match this in an English version, but now it’s all right to say Tay-ran in English (in the same way as you can say ‘Pariss’ in English for Paris although pronounced Paree in French).
       Just thought you’d like to know … I was curious.
       1. The problem is that we are dealing with different alphabets: theirs and ours. As so often, all bets are off and various interpretations claim to be correct.
          But then, I still think of Beijing as Pekin.

11. 11:45, but with a desperate ERICA. I had spent 5 minutes on that clue and couldn’t make any sense of it. I’m not entirely convinced that ‘finally’ to indicate the second half of a word is entirely cricket, but no doubt that’s just sour grapes.
    1. I took the clue to mean not “the second half” but “the final letters.” Being half the word was just a coincidence. So the clue worked for me, but caused a raised eyebrow as being the third hidden; and in my ignorance vaguely thinking Evita was a right-wing dictator rather than a left-wing revolutionary.
       Otherwise enjoyable, and quick at just over 20 minutes. Vesicle unknown but obvious; Teheran I too would have added an extra E.
       1. Yes I get that, but the fact is that ATIVE is half of the word INITIATIVE, so describing it as ‘final’ just seems a bit wrong. Of course it undoubtedly is the last bit of the word, but then so is NITIATIVE, and it would be odd to describe that as the ‘final’ part. If someone said ‘the final part of the week’ you wouldn’t expect them to mean Wednesday to Sunday.
          Anyway, as I said, it’s just sour grapes!
12. Seems I was on the wavelength today as this is the fastest I’ve finished for a while. There were a few unknowns/half knowns – SEBACEOUS, DOLMENS, VESICLE – but all very fairly clued (unlike the queen yesterday who I’ve already forgotten!). I did biff ERICA at one point but thankfully thought that there must be more women’s names that fit and eventually finished with EVITA.
    1. I don’t see how SEBACEOUS can be more fairly clued than CLYTEMNESTRA, since both are anagrams and both were apparently rather annoying to those trying to achieve a fast solving time. On which, I doubt either caused consternation out there in solve-as-you-please land.

       Nice puzzle, thanks both, and apologies to Pootle for being disagreeable!

       1. My take was that once I had S_B_CEO_S, it had to be S_B_CEOUS and then SEBACEOUS sounded more right than SABECEOUS. I suppose it’s questionable as to whether sounding more right equates to being fairly clued but there were far more permutations for CLYTEMNESTRA all of which sounded equally unlikely to me!
          1. This route worked for me, as though I don’t recall hearing SEBACEOUS before, I had heard of “sebum” and correctly assumed they were related…
       2. I’d say sebaceous has four things going for it in being more fairly clued than yesterday’s abomination:

          1) It’s not foreign;
          2) You get a head start knowing that EO go together;
          3) The first letter is checked; and
          4) Letters left to throw up in the air and hope they come down in the correct order are limited to 3 rather than yesterday’s 6.

          Edited at 2017-05-10 02:44 pm (UTC)

          1. For, Penfold, that lady, Clytemnestra, she is in Collins. And I don’t really think characters from Latin or Greek can be labelled ‘foreign’ in a country that has adored the Classics for centuries. But you can have your other three points, if you like.

             Maybe we should ban anagrams altogether as unfair. Who knows where the bloody letters go.

13. Not too difficult and completed in a shade under 35 minutes, though with a few Bunged In Parsed Later. Ended up still not being able to parse FLAGSTAFF satisfactorily and had ‘varmit’ (I plead plural agnosia) instead of VERMIN, so a DNF. Managed to remember DOLMENS from somewhere not long ago, but nothing else too obscure. Liked ELECTRIC CHAIR, SANDFLY and the what should have been simple but wasn’t hidden EVITA.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

14. I thought DOLMEN was the plural until I found it didn’t fit.
15. Quite hard work but a fair enough test with some points of interest along the way. Didn’t recognise DOLMENS but trusted to wordplay. VESICLE rang a bell from biology lessons 50+ years ago. Was careless over the semi-unknown SEBACEOUS missing an E and adding a U to give me SUBACEOUS. SARCASM was my LOI.
16. What with a mistyping and a complete inability to ‘chercher la femme’ I finished with 2 errors. Other than that it all went in quite smoothly, with no unknown words for a change.
17. 23 minutes. I felt quite well in touch with the setter today,since this is one of the less easy ones that I’ve done fairly quickly. (That made sense to me.)

    LOI: 1 ac!

    1. To you perhaps but to us, not so much if you give no name..
18. 11:40, with my holdups being SHAG and SARCASM, where I got the first from wordplay but didn’t recall such a bird and the latter from definition with no clue about wordplay.
19. 15:14. My first instinct for 25, once I had the final A, was MARIA, on the basis that “display… in revolution” was clearly a reversal of AIR. I actually wrote in RIA but not the MA which I couldn’t parse, unsurprisingly. I took two or three minutes at the end to get MUTATION and finally SARCASM.
20. This was the only one that gave me trouble. Like George, I’d forgotten the bird (except for the Norwegian Blue reference) and could only think of the 70s rug, Sherlock’s tobacco, and the other thing. Yes, I was another looking for an anagram that removed HE from “butchering”. An association of unpleasant ideas produced SEBACEOUS and VESICLE without too much trouble. 14.26
21. 16 mins. I was very slow to see what, in retrospect, should have been some fairly easy answers. SHAG fell into that category, as did EMUS which was my LOI after TRANSFORM. I’m another who spent quite a while on 25ac. It would have been easy to biff EVITA because of the surface reading but I thought it might have been a piece of misdirection by the setter and I tried to parse several alternatives until I finally saw the “hidden”.
22. 34 minutes, which I thought was rather good until I saw what the Japanese Jason had managed.

    I always feel sad for cormorants, when the shags obviously have all the fun.

23. About 20 minutes, ending with SHAG and SARCASM. I didn’t know of the bird at all, which is surprising as I’m usually pretty good on those. Like others, the definition at 1A didn’t line up precisely, and I flipped mentally through other possibilities for the woman hidden in EVITA. Other than that, though, a fairly standard experience. Regards.
24. I found this a little bit tricky taking 29 mins to do about half of it on the train to work this morning, another 34 mins at lunchtime and a further 5 mins on the train on the way home to finish off a couple of stragglers. FOI 9ac. LOI 16dn, I may have been the only one trying to reverse TED Heath on a word for board to get a word like “detrain” meaning disembark. Liked 11ac & 22ac but COD to the economical 15ac. Biffed “elderberry” without fully parsing so thanks to the blogger for unravelling.
25. I was having a great time unpicking everything here except 25a where I just couldn’t see the hidden. So in went EDINA on the basis that we had a televisual reference to Jennifer Saunders’ portrayal of the OTT Edina in Ab Fab. I also felt I could, admittedly somewhat tortuously, parse EDINA from “initiative finally” = E; IN [provided in the surface] and AD for “display” and then turned around per “revolution”
26. I sailed through this in a fast, for me, time of 22:16. The NW initially yielded nothing so I moved on. My FOsI were VERMIN and VESICLE. I then progressed clockwise and finished with SHAG and then SARCASM. My only unknown was DOLMENS but the wordplay was clear. I even managed to parse everything on the fly! An enjoyable puzzle. Thanks setter and Pip.
27. Sarcasm is always insulting – not to mention cruel, The Greek verb from which it is derived means “to tear flesh in the manner of a dog”. Do not confuse sarcasm with irony, which may be insulting or designed to hurt, but not always. “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit” is a cliche often employed by people who – for whatever reason – disapprove of (the hurtful kind of) irony. I think they really mean that sarcasm is the lowest use to which wit may be put. Just saying.
28. 13:10 for me, held up (like others) at the end by EVITA.
29. There were three hidden words in yesterday’s Times Crossword. 10ac, 25ac, 24d.

    I was under the impression that there is not meant to be more than one hidden word in any one puzzle

    Am I mistaken?

    Matt

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