Times 26788 – little kids, little fish and a German waterway

46 comments on “Times 26788 – little kids, little fish and a German waterway”

1. Same as George re KIEL CANAL. Not quite the same on the speed.

   Felt like an easy one overall. COD JACK LONDON.

   Thanks setter and George.

2. Pretty straightforward, one-coffee puzzle.
   A tiny bit of trouble in the NW.
   Getting STOMACHED earlier would have helped there.

   COD? My homage to 6dn.

   Your local NEUROPATH in a RAGGED FLUTTERY FRENZY.

   Edited at 2017-07-27 03:59 am (UTC)

3. Fairly vanilla puzzle, I thought; but as Keriothe says, vanilla’s nice, too. Biffed KIEL CANAL (which, oddly enough, I’d mentioned here recently) from the definition and enumeration. The K gave me JACK LONDON (a nice surface, by the way). Liked TUSCANY.
4. 39 minutes for what should have taken no more than half an hour. Like Prof. McText ‘cow-corner’ proved to be the difficulty.

   COD 9ac BRUSCHETTA my FOI. LOI 10ac ALLUSION.

   WOD 2dn CHABLIS Back in the day 5.30pm used to be ‘The Chablis Hour’ – down in in Newburgh Street.

   IMO 15dn KIEL CANAL was not a sparkling piece of setting.

5. 26 minutes

6. 18mins + 5mins to work out FLUTTERY. I think it’s because I was separating ‘flapping’ and ‘wings’, shouldn’t have taken that long!

7. DNF in my new 45-minute target. I stared at the crossers of 2d and 10a for the last five or ten minutes. I even thought of CHA for CHABLIS, but didn’t get there… I also still hadn’t filled in the remaining letters of the unknown K_E_ CANAL, which didn’t help. I wonder if I should try to rearrange my morning so the coffee goes before the crossword rather than alongside…
8. Not really a theme, but a few disorderly clues: RAGGED, DOWN AT HEEL, HASH and FRENZY. Liked PATAGONIA, TUSCANY and FLUTTERY.

   I could quibble about an ‘illusion’, rather than a ‘delusion’, being ‘a false notion’, but it’s in Chambers so I’ll let it go through to the keeper.

   All over in 34 minutes.

   Thank you to setter and blogger.

9. 35 mins ova bruschetta (well, toast, with lime marmalade – with peel in). Saw 2dn, Cha… and immediately thought of Chassagne-Montrachet. Nice to see Sappho popping up. Raised an eyebrow at children for ‘fry’. Some nice long surfaces today – like my COD 9ac, the cat that got the brunch.
   Thanks funny setter and George.
10. At the easy end of the speculum, I think. Never parsed TILLAGE so thanks George. COD to FLUTTERY.
    1. Is there an easy end to a speculum?
       1. Perhaps I was thinking of the blue flash on a fluttery duck’s wing?
       2. um?
          1. Apologies.

             Speculum also refers to specific wing feathers of some birds such as the blue patch on a mallard.

11. Charming, and just under 16. I know Jack London wrote a terribly famous book, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered him outside the crossword, usually raising capital.

    Only after turning up did I realise I’d forgotten to parse PATAGONIA and KIEL CANAL: kind of both setter and George to go to all the trouble.

    On the other hand, I struggled to parse (and went back to) SECURING because I couldn’t get past CURE for NHS success and the Home Counties as the SE RING. Sometimes these things are cleverly simple.

12. 13.28, so my hot streak continues. It could have been quicker had I not stared blankly at -R-N-Y for an increasingly desperate age until FRENZY surfaced. A very bad case of white line fever I suspect.
13. As with others I hesitated over KIEL CANAL particularly as I think of keel as part of a boat rather than a boat itself. Thankfully proved correct though.
    1. Thank you for giving me the chance to write Synecdoche
       1. Thank you for educating me. I now know what a synecdoche is and that keel is one!
14. Broke 20 minutes, just, but it was a 73 snitcher, so I can’t crack open the CHABLIS. We docked at KIEL on our cruise last month, so KIEL CANAL was a write-in, particularly given the repetitively-told weak joke about how the ship was sailing up the M6. I’ve usually eaten BRUSCHETTA in a larger portion size than a canapé. That and the cruise might account for the SPHERAL shape, a word I’ve never used for spherical. COD OPUSES. Thankyou George and setter.
15. A very rare sub 30 for me today, at 25m. Held up by ALLUSION and CHABLIS at the end or might even have dipped under 20m (dream on, Steve!). No standouts today but thought some surfaces amusing – wine and bliss for example. Good puzzle and as ever an illuminating blog. Thanks setter and George.
16. Pleasant puzzle on the low end of the SNITCHy scale (I’ve always said I think it’s actually harder to create entertainment in an easy puzzle than a toughie). The only thing resembling a delay came from thinking that Eastern Commonwealth must be an H, which was a difficult letter to fit with the other available evidence.
17. Like TopicalTim I tried to fit an H into 27a which was my LOI and took an age to see. Unfortunately I failed on the Greek poet with a careless SAPPHY, which isn’t absolutely fabulous. Shame I didn’t take a proper gander at the wordplay. Otherwise all done in 26:51. FOI was OVA. A pleasant offering. Thanks setter and George.
18. 
    It took me forever to sort out 22 down – woeful for a retired linguist, eh?

    I did this in bits today in the coffee shop, on the bus and at home, having dropped the car off for an eye-wateringly expensive service.

    Why does a three-year-old vehicle need 450 quids-worth of checking……? Answers on a postcard….

    Time: All correct but time unrecorded.

    Dave.

    1. Count yourself lucky!!! I dropped mine in for service and MOT this morning, and the bill was £900 before they found anything wrong. Two wishbones later and that is already up to £1600 and change.
       1. 
          Ouch! You have all my sympathies, Rotter. Is it a special motor or just one of the usual?

          Dave.

          1. 10 year old Jag XF – nice car but getting expensive. £1600 is about 3% of a new F-pace is the line I am taking with my wife.
19. I’ve been neglecting the 15 x 15 recently, relegating it to last choice in the available time slots. However, as I was up early solving and blogging the QC today before I left home, my commute in was available.

    I had had enough of bridge after the dramas and controversies of last evening’s bridge club outing, so I turned to this first. All done bar 3 in the 35 minute commute, but those 3 took another 10 minutes to resolve (1d, 13d and 12a).

    I enjoyed this again this morning, and will probably promote it to a higher rank again. Thanks Setter and George

20. 12:53. Thought I was finished, but then spotted I hadn’t filled in all of 19d. Nearly bunged in KIEV before realising it wasn’t a boat and found KIEL. Nothing to break into a sweat over, but thanks for parsing 19d, George. Not sure why I couldn’t see SCAN(T)Y, but the answer was clearly TUSCANY.
21. 17 minutes for this enjoyable, if not overly taxing, offering. From crosswords you would think there were only two regions of Italy – Tuscany and Umbria. Let’s hear it for Molise and Apulia – though I guess we must leave Friuli-Venezia Giulia to the Guardian.

    The Kiel Canal is prominent in Erskine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands – a rather good read, even if one isn’t a wet-bob.

    1. Slack-bob’s rule!
       1. Afraid you’ve lost me there!
          1. wet-bob = rower, dry-bob = cricketer and slack-bob = crap at both (i.e. not a sportsman). I equate myself most significantly with slack-bobs. Eton slang of which I was unaware until I googled your wet-bob expression.

             Edited at 2017-07-27 03:23 pm (UTC)

    2. The most boring read for dry-bobs until one reaches the Epilogue. My latest writings are concerning this book.

       Edited at 2017-07-27 04:19 pm (UTC)

       1. Surely better than Moby-Dick!
          1. Moby Dick’s not so bad – these days it can be treated with antibiotics.
             1. But for how much longer!!
             2. … until you get a dose of Golden Stiff?
22. Another one on the easier side of the spectrum, I’d say. I went through in 15 minutes, ending with FRENZY because it’s the last one I came to. Only NEUROPATH held me up at all as I would always use ‘neurotic’ to describe that person. Regards.
23. Hardly spoken, and up pops the other one in another of the daily puzzles.
24. Have never seen the KIEL CANAL in a crossword before but crossed the real thing in 1972 and caught a glimpse of the Olympic rowing competition going on underneath. Lots of wet-bobs at play! Ann
25. 40 minutes, good for me, but I spent the last few pondering (or wondering) about 23 ac: op-yoozes? op-yoozes? I didn’t really see OH-PUSSES until I actually entered the letters O-P-U-S-E-S into the grid. And I wasn’t entirely sure about KIEL CANAL either, although I have travelled through it on a yacht. The German name is NORD-OSTSEE-CANAL (or North-Baltic-Sea Canal, since that is what it connects, starting in Kiel). And is SPHERAL really a word? (I would say SPHERICAL, but then I’m only a mathematician.) I did rather like the surface in 9ac.

    Addendum after looking it up in the COED: spheral WAS a word, but the dictionary says it’s archaic. Fair enough in crossword land.

    Edited at 2017-07-27 05:47 pm (UTC)

26. After 23mins on the train this morning I had a handful left and tidied them up in a further 10mins at lunchtime. 1dn was alimentary, my dear Watson. FOI 5ac. LOI 15dn, or at least the first word of 15dn. I entered Kiel eventually but only after a cautious alphabet-run, I wasn’t entirely certain that I didn’t just know Kiel from being the surname of the chap who played Jaws. It took me a while to see the “with” bit in 25ac. It also took a while to spot “fry” in 27ac. I think White Fang appeared in a recent TLS puzzle so didn’t take too long to conjure 14ac. I’m so used to the ubiquitous crosswordese “op” that “opuses” took some time to solve. COD to the TU rally at 16dn which called to mind the recent reversed “number 1 TU lover” clue.
27. 7m but with a stupid mistake: I know perfectly well how to spell KIEL CANAL but somehow wrote KEEL and failed to spot the error when I checked my answers. I made an even stupider mistake on yesterday’s puzzle, which I only just got round to (it took me 10 minutes). I’ll put it down to holiday brain.

    Edited at 2017-07-27 05:58 pm (UTC)

28. Twenty-six minutes, but (like Keriothe) with one error – Keel instead of Kiel.
29. 10:58 for me, tired and some way off the setter’s wavelength.

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