Times 26881 – Oh, padre, have you got the time?

69 comments on “Times 26881 – Oh, padre, have you got the time?”

1. Nothing particularly problematic in the clues, so I created a few problems for myself, flinging in ‘harmonium’, for instance, having a long senior moment failing to recall PROSPERO, thus giving up what should have been a gimme, and having another one failing to see what could be added to SAILOR. LEMON GRASS was biffed; didn’t/don’t recognize MEL. Thanks, U, for adopting this blogging style; however, 7d needs looking after.
   1. Merci bien!
2. Held up by an abundance of obscurities, but it’s nice to learn new things: French directions, Scottish place names, fictional characters in works I’ll never read (or watch)…MOCK was a pretty great clue too
3. A Monday puzzle over in under half an hour – 26 minutes to be precise. I wonder how Our Jack did?

   FOI 2dn HARMONICA closely followed by 1ac CHAFER.

   LOI was 5dn STOIC – Graeco/Roman wrestling is one of my weaker points.

   Agree with previous comment – COD goes to 20ac MOCK – fresh!

   WOD has to be 17dn DACHSHUND – always a smile and zo German! Sausages!

   Did not completely parse 8dn GHANA and had 6dn as WEST LOTHIAN for a moment.

   With 25ac QUARTZ I thought this would be a pangram bu no BJVW or X left it well short.

4. 25 minutes for all but two. Took for ever to work out PROSPERO and failed completely to come up with SAILORLY even though I had got as far as ?AIL?RLY. Stupid bluddy word anyway!

   Is anyone else having problems with LJ? My iPhone and computers are fine, but my Android tablet suddenly displays it only as Text.

   Edited at 2017-11-13 05:47 am (UTC)

5. Couldn’t get chafer or mutinous.

   I got 21a esau, but not sure how it is parsed?

   COD TUP.

   1. Parsing added
      1. Thanks
6. 22 mins for me. Nothing really held me up. Took far too long to see which kind of pasta 18a was since I as the last letter of an italian food isn’t a lot of help.

   You have a minor typo at 4d where you mean “sounds like WRY”

7. 7:30. No problems today. A few obscure words but they are the sort of obscure words that turn up quite regularly in these things. ANA, for instance. Who’s ever come across that other than in a crossword?
   When I saw ‘rightful Duke of Milan’ and couldn’t immediately parse the clue, I moved on, since I can never remember who’s who, who’s in love with who, who’s dressed as who and so on in Shakespeare’s comedies. I never even considered the possibility that I might actually know the answer, which I did, having seen The Tempest very recently (Simon Russell-Beale, absolutely brilliant. Also a non-irritating Ariel, which was a first for me).

   Edited at 2017-11-13 07:55 am (UTC)

8. 6 minutes-odd, hooray for Mondays. Quite a few not fully parsed when going through fast, so that always makes the blogs worthwhile to study, thanks Ulaca! I know Edinburgh Waverley station prides itself on being the only station named after a novel, but perhaps stations are not football teams (wouldn’t know, myself). Is Queen of the South a football-club-novel? It should be if it isn’t.
   1. I suppose Westward Ho! station used to count (and was of course the only station with an exclamation mark), until some heartless fool closed it.
   2. I was wrong, as so often: Scott’s book was named after the jail in Edinburgh. Should have known really, as I read it not that long ago.
      1. Still it seems undeniable that Scottish football has way more poetry/literature in its soul than any of those Sassenach b*gg*rs!
         1. I think Hamilton Academical wins it for me because it is eccentric without trying to be.
   3. Queen of the South is biblical – that Sheba woman. Locally, the team – and the people of the town – are known as The DoonHamers, which translates as ‘down homers.’ Dumfries, as you imagine, is pretty parochial.
9. Had one left after 55 minutes, but even pushing another five minutes over my hour failed to get me 9a. If I’d worked out the wordplay I might have got there, but the definition would only ever have been a guess for me. Ah well. I have at least started watching the odd play this year, but I’m at a very early point in my Shakespearian path…

   FOI 1a CHAFER, which was a good start, but it was the NW corner that proved the most difficult in the long run. Enjoyed SAILORLY. Happy to have remembered ESAU and glad the former county was at least one I’d heard of this time…

   Edited at 2017-11-13 07:47 am (UTC)

10. 12:10 … a few creative things here that took a bit of wrapping my Monday morning head around — MUMMY, QUARTZ, SAILORLY, especially. All good stuff, though.

    Well done, ulaca, on your giant leap into the future. Tell us what it’s like there, won’t you

    1. It’s scary. I definitely prefer the past.
11. On the easy side. COD to MOCK. I’m never without Marijuana in my kitchen either, Ulaca. Oops.
12. 30 mins with yoghurt, fruit, etc. News about lime marmalade later.
    Straightforward except for getting my tongue around sailorly and working out the random woman to put back in oil.
    MER at motorists necessarily being still in neutral.
    Mostly I liked the TLS-lite nature: Ana, Shakespeare, George Eliot.
    Thanks erudite setter and Ulaca.

    PS With regard to my search for the best Lime marmalade – I have a new leader: Lime and Gin marmalade by Lewis and Cooper of Northallerton. Made with 44% limes. Quite a loose consistency, but fantastic, sharp flavour.

    1. I agree gin and lime is a divine combo but for breakfast and in marmalade, I wasn’t convinced. Then I looked at the L&C website and I see they have an orange with calvados and one with rum – now I’m curious.
    2. Lewis and Cooper is a gem. The shop might not look much from the front but inside it’s a veritable Aladdin’s cave – the sort of place that stocks half-a-dozen different makes of ratatouille. When I lived in Northallerton, I could always rely on it for several gifts each Christmas that the recipients would go gaga over.
13. 14.44, thinking there was a touch of TLS about this.
    I had CANNELLONI almost as soon as the I appeared, but didn’t put it in because of doubts about spelling and wondering who the priest was who ANN(E?) was visiting.
    I’m not sure how Mel Brooks, Mel Torme or Mel Smith would take to being transgendered. At least two of them fulfil the condition for entry, and I can’t think of a female example that does: I don’t count Mel Gwyn for perfectly obvious reasons.
    But this was a pleasant enough excursion and thanks for the pretty and tidy blogging.
    1. There was a Mel and a Melanie in The Spice Girls, a popular girl singing combo of its day, I believe. That’s who I thought of.
       1. Oddly, I thought of Mel and Kim (which may explain why my time was respectable).
          1. You’re obviously much hipper than me, S. It took me a minute before I realised that you weren’t talking about the last Bake Off presenters. I think that makes me more respectable though.
    2. I have a cousin Melanie who always get shortened to Mel
       1. Have you spotted that Joan Baez is bringing her Fare Thee Well tour to UK next May, John? Her voice is going now so it will be our last chance to see the Madonna, not for free as for Bob in her great Diamonds and Rust but only for £68 each at the Albert Hall. She’s playing York and Gateshead too.
          1. No I hadn’t spotted that. I’ll see if I can get to the Gateshead show. I saw Gordon Lightfoot at Newcastle a year or so ago. Sadly his voice wasn’t at its best, but it was a great experience.
          2. I remember seeing Joan Baez in Croydon in 1965/6. Glorious voice in those days. Ann
       2. Did she ride her bicycle past your window last night, though?
          1. No. Her combine harvester!
          2. “I’ve got a brand new pair of underpants that’s why I sing in this key.” I saw Melanie live in concert at The Albert Hall about 1976, my then girl friend being a big fan (of her, not me). She turned up about an hour late but she was fantastic.

             Edited at 2017-11-13 12:17 pm (UTC)

             1. 🙂
14. 18 minutes, with LOI SAILORLY. MUTINOUS, my COD, was penultimate, just after LEMON GRASS. As with our blogger, I can’t think of ESAU without remembering the Bennett sermon from our parties with friends of the early sixties which would finish with Tom Lehrer, Goon Show, Hoffnung at the Oxford Union, Bob Newhart or Beyond the Fringe playing on the Dansette. We never much thought we could get very old. Thanks for the memory, U and setter.
    1. I think of Alan Bennett every time I run into hairy Esau, too. <3
15. Quite quick today, 14 mins. Prospero a write-in as it came up yesterday, in the ST GK crossword. Cannot see a reference to Esau without immediately thinking of Alan Bennett’s sermon. Apparently it upset a lot of clerics at the time, as intended ..
    1. Having, of course, to leave the blog to follow U’s link and listen once again to that inspiring sermon, I realized that I’d misquoted when trying to correct Jerry’s version of it several weeks ago. I thought the Rev. Mr. Bennett said ‘piece’, but he says ‘bit’. Then again, when I saw the show 50+ years ago [!], it was not the original foursome but a group they’d trained for US road shows, and maybe it was ‘piece’ then. I was struck when listening this time by how scattered the laughter was.
       1. Whatever, the Rev Bennett would have done well to get the sardine can open. Those bloody keys usually snapped off before the job was done. Some of us think life’s a bit like that.

16. 30mins, but with a blank at PROSPERO. Well I didn’t know he came from Milan…

17. 37m with no real problems beyond my usual dimness. Enjoyable puzzle today – thank you, setter and also U for the explanations from the future.
18. 10.46 for a pleasant crossword free of controversy. PROSPERO for the rightful Duke should have been a knee-jerk reaction but wasn’t and, like Z, I hesitated over ANN(E).
    I really ought to have better things to do than to note that the two Annes, Mel and Nell are joined by Reg, Ian, Monica, Una, Ros, Ant, Rod, Ari and Han.
19. 23 minutes, held up at the end by the NE corner thinking 7d was a sort of celebration like a regatta or something. Liked MOCK and the sausage dog once I’d decided how to spell it.
20. At 23 minutes I can’t help feeling I made heavy weather of this, particularly 28a my LOI. Rather lacklustre I felt but that’s probably just me being grumpy.
21. PROSPERO was FOI, having studied the play and seen Return to the Forbidden Planet. Is there an East Lothian question, or is it only in the West? Just over fifteen minutes for this pleasant Monday puzzle, Thanks ulaca and setter.
22. It may have been the TLS training that gave me the wavelength here – in fact I thought it was going to be one of my increasingly rare sub-10s but I never can spell CANNELLONI. Yes, MOCK was excellent. Mel Martin was very good as Violet Effingham in the tv Palliser series. 11.15
23. Many congrats to the setter for making an easy crossword very interesting. 28 mins for this one, with MINE my LOI for no reason other than stupidity. Never actuallt=y parsed CANNELLONI
24. till I got here. There – I’ve done it again.
25. 15 mins. I dashed through most of it but then made heavy weather of the last few. LEMON GRASS was my LOI after MINE, which I thought was quite clever, and MUTINOUS, for which I had been grasping completely the wrong end of the stick because I thought the definition was “container”. I initially thought I’d finished in 13 mins but I then spent another couple trying to see how “lemon press” parsed. I eventually saw “the bleedin’ obvious” and could have kicked myself, although I would quibble that marijuana isn’t addictive.
26. Having studied The Tempest for my Eng Lit O-Level, 9a hit me like a blinding flash. It was my LOI, just before I submitted at 26:51, after metaphorically slapping my forehead. Doh! I enjoyed this puzzle which went in bursts of inspiration followed by fallow periods of perspiration. RYE was my FOI after which the NW remained stubbornly blank until the last five minutes. The pasta came up in another puzzle very recently, so no hold up there. Had to use the wordplay to spell the sausage dog. Good fun. Thanks setter and U.
27. 15:31 after dithering for a couple of minutes over 28a initially rejecting SAILORLY as surely not being a proper word. But then I looked again and saw the parsing. As for CHAFER, that came quickly and my FOI… we have had plenty of infestations around us and the birds don’t half make a mess of your lawn when you’ve got them. Thanks for explaining the unknown ANA, U, and thanks to our setter for pleasant Monday fare.
28. A perfectly reasonable puzzle in the Monday style; at the risk of being oxymoronic, the obscurities tended to be obvious obscurities like ANA, while I was another who saw Simon Russell Beale give us his Prospero not long ago, so they tended to fall pretty quickly. I hadn’t thought of lemon grass as an oil provider, more as something I bash vigorously with a rolling pin from time to time when making a Thai dinner, but I guess that’s exactly what I’m trying to release, now I stop to think about it.
29. Completed in 40 mins with head scratching over Mine for a while. If we can have sailorly can we have matelotly, yachtswomanly, seafarerly etc? Thanks all
    1. Only if (like SAILORLY, unfortunately) they appear in one of the usual sources. I still maintain it’s a stupid word, however, of no practical use whatsoever.
       1. Au contraire, Jack, very useful if you want to bingo out at Scrabble.
30. One could say HELLO! in a sailorly way especially to a jolly Jack Tar.

    Edited at 2017-11-13 02:17 pm (UTC)

31. 16:18, slowed by not being terribly well boned up on Italian dukes, hirsute siblings and stoical Eliatics. Even the gift of a foodie clue was looked at via a horse’s mouth thanks to thinking the girl was ANN.
32. Most enjoyable with lots of nice literary references which suited me. PROSPERO was a write-in as was MARINER with the Silas Marner reference. (Btw, as an English teacher I often had to “do” Silas Marner with Olevel/CSE classes and can vouch for its accessibility. Most of the kids actually enjoyed it – which is more than can be said for a lot of the prescribed works on the syllabus in those days) 19 minutes. Ann
33. Well, I suppose I can’t grumble. There have been some good geeky clues recently, so the fact that I was beaten by PROSPERO is only fair. And, had I persisted, I should have been able to get it from wordplay and the crossers.

    So, DNF in 31 minutes, which I think is a personal best as far as DNFing goes for me.

34. Hi all. Pretty standard fare today, so a normal time. My LOI which held me up a bit was SAILORLY, which went in because the checking letters were present. Not obscure, certainly, but also not a word that’s used very often even in crosswords, such as ana. Regards.
35. 30 mins for me today. A couple of literary flourishes which played more to my strengths than not. My most recently remembered Prospero was a Globe production of The Tempest shown on telly with Roger Allam (one of those actors like Michael Gambon blessed with so rich a voice that you’d pay to hear him read out the phone book) as the rightful Duke. Failed to stop and parse 18ac where the answer though obvious contained too many Annes, Elis, canons, Nells and Ells to bother about the exact nuts and bolts of the parsing. Nice light Monday fare and very enjoyable too. I’m off to race a tortoise, I’ll give it a headstart of course. Not sure I’ll ever catch it.
36. I’m not too knowledgeable about the folk scene but just to add to the folkies talk above (way above, way, way above) of Joan and Bob et al, in a round of “one song to the tune of another” in today’s ISIHAC, Graeme Garden did a commendable rendition of “I’m a little teapot” to the tune of “Blowin’ in the wind”.
    1. How many cups can you get from a pot before you call it an urn?
       1. The Assam my friend is blowin’ in the wind,
          The Assam is blowin’ in the wind.
    2. On the subject of ISIHAC: The Complete Uxbridge English Dictionary is well worth it. Norway!
       1. Yes, I have a copy lying around somewhere. On the subject of tea I seem to remember liking the Uxbridge entry for “faculty”.
37. Cool puzzle; nice blog. Thanks. 14 mins.
38. Any answers to the football clubs/novels? My contribution to Uxbridge English dictionary is rigatoni, a used car sales from Latvia.
    Nice tight clued crossword

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