Times 26,987: Not To Be Confused With Neville Shunte

52 comments on “Times 26,987: Not To Be Confused With Neville Shunte”

1. Brekker – Croissant and Blackcurrant jam (Hero)as per Mr. Myrtilus yesterday and a Jamaican Blue Mountain.

   This Friday wasn’t too bad and I was over last hurdle in 38 minutes.

   FOI MUSCOVITE

   LOI 6dn MOLE RAT

   COD 26ac RAIN CATS AND DOGS

   WOD 25ac SHUTEYE with 16dn IGLENOOK runner-up

   Edited at 2018-03-16 08:35 am (UTC)

   1. INGLENOOK is a great word but it does turn up curiously often in our crossword puzzles! As does EARLDOM, come to think of it…
      1. If only I could spell it! But I don’t remember it recently?
         1. If it’s not INGLENOOK it’s definitely INGLE…
2. 30 mins of fun with yoghurt, prune and mango. So exotic.
   Shuteye was LOI and took a while.
   Mostly I liked that one, plus Tamarind, Taint and the Bucket anagram.
   Wasn’t the Me a Lord anag in yesterday’s quickie?
   Travelling via Cairngorm today in blizzards.
   Thanks setter and V.
   1. Yes, 12ac in QC 1048 yesterday:

      Me a Lord excited in peer’s estate (7)

   2. The ME A LORD anagram has been used many times, apparently, including in the Quickie yesterday. There was an alternative recently, but I forbear to say when for fear of reprisals. All will be revealed tomorrow (have I said too much?).
      1. I thought that was at least the 3rd time I’d seen it this week. Clearly I’m not completely senile just yet….
      2. No it’s alright Z, I’m onto it! And besides, the solution came out yesterday.
3. 40 minutes and pleased that I managed to work out the unknowns (MOLE RAT, APHELION) from wordplay. The clue to SHUT-EYE was rather good.
4. 20 minutes (and a half) for this rather splendid puzzle, which achieved that remarkable feat of making you feel quite clever for solving it at all without descending into obscurity.
   SHUTEYE my last in, struggling to justify SQUEEZE or think of anyone from the limitless set called “novelists”. I would have put in a hyphen, and so would Chambers. That it would have made the clue absurdly easy (S_U_-E_E, hm, I wonder?) is neither here nor there: obviously other sources allow it but not me.
   CoD to “bucket” just for being an anagram that didn’t look like one.
   1. I thought about SQUEEZE but dismissed it as fast as I could because there was nothing in the clue to define such a thing… good band though.

      Yes, I loved the economic and clever “bucket” clue.

5. Finished this in 25 minutes, despite reading all through the across clues before 26across BEARSKIN hit me. LOI SKIMP after COD SUPPLY finally came to mind. WOD APHELION, the front two letters stuck on to the bit of the anagram I could see. Our contributor David will be preening himself that Preston’s relatively recent status as a city has been recognised. What with that and the brutalist bus station being listed, it can’t be long before it’s the world capital of culture. Easier puzzle than it looked. Thank you V and setter.
6. A DNF on this one unfortunately. Got totally stuck on SHUTEYE and PERSON otherwise not too bad today.
7. That’s where I was last week, but I suspect Verlaine has confused The Flight of the Phoenix not with A Town Like Alice, but with No Highway, also by Nevil Shute. His books were around in the sixties, and there were a couple of films and TV shows too. Also like z noted SQUEEZE fits the checkers.

   14′ for this un-Friday-like offering. Thanks Verlaine and setter.

   Edited at 2018-03-16 09:40 am (UTC)

8. Isn’t APHELION when the sun is as far from US (inter alia) as possible? I suspect one could get–and rather a large number of stars and stuff have got–farther from the sun. Anyway, I was doing fine until the SW threw a spanner in the proverbial. SKIMP was my LOI, but I had to realize that BUCKET was a verb, and how to parse PRESS, and what the LY adjective was, first. SHUTEYE I got by getting YE; I remembered SHUTE (only knew/read ‘On the Beach’) after that. And yes, I too thought (for too long) of ‘squeeze’; if you have a U, yatta yatta.
   1. Hoping I haven’t missed some obscure (though no doubt witty) US reference… APHELION is the furthest point away for any body orbiting the sun. So there is one for earth and for each of the planets (major and otherwise). Comets would have some of the largest aphelia, I’m guessing.

      As we are not in a multiple star system (unlike our nearest neighbour Alpha Centauri) I don’t think anyone regards other stars as being in orbit around our sun. So although they are large distances away, these distances are not aphelia.

   2. Hoping I haven’t missed some obscure (though no doubt witty) US reference… APHELION is the furthest point away for any body orbiting the sun. So there is one for earth and for each of the planets (major and otherwise). Comets would have some of the largest aphelia, I’m guessing.

      As we are not in a multiple star system (unlike our nearest neighbour Alpha Centauri) I don’t think anyone regards other stars as being in orbit around our sun. So although they are large distances away, these distances are not aphelia.

9. A very satisfying puzzle, without being one of those Fridays. I was part of what seems to have been a crowd of solvers a) attempting to find a definition which justified SQUEEZE, then b) looking for a possibly French author, until I tried pencilling in the YE bit at the end, and it leapt out at me. While flicking through the TV offerings last night, I caught five minutes of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which meant that I was picturing a renegade Contessa who looked very much like Diana Rigg.
   1. I try to picture a renegade Contessa who looks very much like Diana Rigg whenever I have a spare moment, to be honest.
10. Thanks for the parse on this V – I couldn’t quite get there. We had “busby” just the other day so BEARSKIN wrote itself. 17.03
11. Being suitably chastened by Horryd’s well deserved criticism yesterday, I shall stop using clue numbers, and type the words in full. It was a trait I adopted because this blog doesn’t do predictive text.

    Not as hard as I first feared, and completed in 13.52 with the SW corner giving the most food for thought.

    FOI was EARLDOM, but it didn’t help me to progress, so I motored South East and picked up the old chestnut LAUNDER. I then progressed widdershins to reach the SW in around 9 minutes. On my way, I biffed INGLENOOK (thanks to V for enlightenment), but otherwise no real problems, though I was glad to nail SHUTEYE without drama.

    It was NASCENT that finally got me rolling again, and SKIMP came once I stopped playing around with SCRIMP.

    LOI was PRESS.

    COD to TRIAGE, with honourable mentions to its near neighbour NURSE, and MUSCOVITE. UP IN ARMS also earned my respect. Thanks to the setter for an excellent offering.

    Edited at 2018-03-16 11:01 am (UTC)

    1. Many thanks PJ – much enjoyed your text and title today! A few others might take your scroll-free lead.
       1. There is an alternative to scrolling, Horryd. You can just have the completed puzzle open in another browser tab and switch between them as necessary…. Just saying 🙂
12. 13:01 … small confession — I checked APHELION before submitting as it was a toss-up between that and OPHELIAN.

    Nevil Shute, Elleston Trevor, literati, oenology and Pulp — this must be TfTT. Babies is on my default Spotify playlist ‘cos I love a guitar riff, me, even if the song is a bit weird

13. It took me three-quarters of an hour to misspell REPELLENT as “repellant”, leading me to put “grand” at 7d out of desperation.

    Very glad to see the inestimable Neville Shute Norway making an appearance. He was quite a remarkable man, being heavily involved in the design and building of the R100, the successful private airship, built in competition with the ill-starred government-built R101. He also founded Airspeed – an aircraft company that built many beautiful planes. I can highly recommend his autobiographical book “Slide Rule”, which is as gripping as any of his novels and has aged better.

    An enjoyable puzzle and an excellent blog – thanks to all parties, and a pleasant weekend to all.

    1. Yes, for some reason I too spelled it with an a, which led me to ponder over gland (something like “ooh, ‘is glands are up”? for 7 dn, along the lines of eland with g going in front and crossing out the e… Eventually realised my foolishness and finished in a whisker under 16 mins. COD 14dn.
    2. Sorry for the anonymity – I got banned for messing up my password.
14. 25 minutes for this, ending with SHUTEYE for which I own up to using a solver to propose an alternative to the impossible-to-justify squeeze. Should have got the author sooner, as he was one of my father’s favourites. I tried A Town Like Alice and wasn’t much taken by it.
15. With an inordinately long time spent trying to spot SHUTEYE. Also the length of 10a led to a “whatever the crossword equivalent is of an ear-worm”* CAMPER being in there somewhere. Which it clearly couldn’t be once NURSE was in.

    Is an emigre necessarily an exile?

    On the subject of the ear worm, I at least have a decent one going on at the moment – Warren Zevon anyone?

    *We SO need a word for this

16. I’ve just discovered that if you Google “Nevil Shute Flight of the Phoenix” you do find the autobiography of one Charles Tyrie who has also assumed the one wrote the other – I wasn’t the only one! (Though we could easily be the only two…)
    1. I’m wondering if the reason you thought “Flight of the Phoenix” had a connection with Neville Shute is that there is a slight similarity to “No Highway”. Both are about aircraft construction. In “No Highway” the hero is a structural engineer testing airframes to destruction. Both books were successfully filmed. Only one is by Neville Shute. Ann
17. In a hurry today so only did one alphabet run through at 25a (obviously SHU didn’t ring any bells). BUCKET was excellent. Thanks to the various contributors today who have provided me with new earworms to remove the excellent ‘All that you dream’ by Little Feat which has been with me since about six last night.
18. …on the train ride home from the meetup with Keriothe. A number of chestnuts like ‘tamarind’, ‘earldom’, and ‘launder’ made it easy to get started. I did myself no favors by putting in a plausible ‘penology’, and setting the word divider in the wrong place for ‘insect repellent’.
19. Oh dear! 2d is very obvious, and I got there eventually, but on competition day I might have submitted with my nonsensical CUSTOMIVE (and, as ever not trusting my limited flora & fauna knowledge, TACARIND). 10m 12s with that gibberish; a bit longer with the right entries.
20. Having seen TAMARIND in other puzzles recently helped with 1a, once TRIAGE went in as my FOI. The top half of the puzzle almost filled itself in, but then I slowed down, with most of the answers down below extracted like teeth. APHELION and Perihelion are words I’m aware of and the number of spaces sorted out which one was required here. Like Vinyl, I started off with PENOLOGY at 20a, but eventually the glass clinked. The anagram for Bucket took some time to materialise, but helped with SKIMP and APOSTATE. Eventually I was left with S_U_E_E, and like Kevin was tempted by “where there’s a U try a Q”, but couldn’t bring myself to put SQUEEZE in. Eventually I also tried the YE at the end and all was revealed. 29:33 with 20 seconds spent checking for typos. Nice puzzle. Thanks setter and V.
21. Not only did I manage to bilge up timing myself for this, I also bilged up solving it; what I lack in knowledge of Greek I make up for by having a no less appalling lack of knowledge of the plays what Shakespeare wrote so of course 9d came out as Ophelian which was far more tempting that aphelion. Well for all I know Ophelia might have tried to get as far away from the sun as she could in whichever play it was she was in.
22. Good to be reminded of Nevil SHUTE, a writer you don’t hear much about these days. My favourite of his was “Pied Piper”.

    The film version of “On The Beach” was made in Australia in the late 50’s with the proverbial all-star cast. Ava Gardner is reputed to have said (I don’t know if she ever did) that Melbourne was “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world”, a phrase which has entered local folklore.

    Liked GLOBULE (good word) and OENOLOGY.

    A spelling lesson of the day as well. I could have sworn there was an ‘-ant’ in INSECT REPELLENT (seems only logical) but now I know better.

    Thank you to setter and blogger.

    1. Shute a tiptop story-teller, the real magic realism.
23. Undone by an errant OPHELIAN which I put in on the basis that the word might somehow relate to the name Ophelia – possibly a literary reference I didn’t know. With hindsight I might have realised that the word was going to have ‘helio’ in it. Ho hum.
24. 22 mins. Nice puzzle and blog, cheers.
25. 43 very enjoyable minutes, but I spent 10, maybe 12 on my LOI, 14d. That’s 3 times this week I have agonised too long over a single last clue. 20 minutes for 3 words, when I can do a whole puzzle in 15. Ho hum.
26. 25′ for me, which seemed fast for a Friday. It didn’t feel like it, but I guess I was on the wavelength. I filled in 1A immediately and I don’t remember major holdups. No unknowns, not even APHELION (watch out for PERIHELION). I’m not sure SHUTE is really significant enough to make the grade, though. I, too, read some of his stuff in my school days (what was the one about metal fatigue?) but has anyone under 30 ever opened a page of his stuff?

    I’m in Shanghai, as it happens. It is not horrid here (although it did rain a lot yesterday).

    Edited at 2018-03-16 03:29 pm (UTC)

    1. I thought we might have had PERIHELION before but a quick search only threw up ANTHELION from last December.
27. Not much to say. Around a 30 minute solve for me, extended by also misspelling the INSECT REPELLENT at first. No problems with APHELION or SHUTEYE, though, apart (sorry) from not knowing of Mr. Shute. Regards.
28. Earldom was an easy biff from QC land which made me chuckle. Got off to a flying start in NW and aphelion and oenology were gimmes for a scientist who loves a tipple (or six). So very happy to complete a Friday puzzle in about 45 mins and I parsed everything too (must be a gift from The Times for my nth birthday, where n > 50 and n < 100). Thanks setter and V
29. 36 minutes, which was a pleasant finish to the week. In good company ending with some 25a SHUTEYE, it seems, having started with 1a TAMARIND. Liked 2d.

    I’m afraid I can’t comment on the Trevor/Shute mental crossover, V, as I’ve never read any Shute, though I count Elleston Trevor (mostly under his Adam Hall alias) as one of my great old favourites.

    I’ll pop A Town Like Alice on my list of “books wot I probably should’ve read”, but I’ve not even started Silas Marner yet…

    Edited at 2018-03-16 05:59 pm (UTC)

30. Thanks to BW for the mention.
    I was shocked to see that Preston was the subject of a recent Guardian event:
    For all its long and illustrious history, Preston could be AnyTown. It never fully recovered from Thatcherism; it has pockets of severe deprivation ­­– yet none of the size, glossiness or cash of the big cities.

    But a few years ago, Preston struck out on its own ­– adopting a form of guerrilla localism. It keeps its money as close to home as possible so that, amid historic cuts, the amount spent locally has gone up. Where other authorities privatise, Preston grows its own businesses. It even creates worker-owned co-operatives.

    Should other cities be following its path? Is this how we fix the broken economies of Britain?

    Join the Guardian senior economics commentator Aditya Chakrabortty for a discussion of the Preston model ­– and how to create stronger, fairer local economies. The panel will include Preston city councillor Matthew Brown, Lisa Nandy, Labour MP for Wigan, 2017 Turner prize winner, Lubaina Himid and Ruth Heritage, creative director of They Eat Culture.

    Running time: 90 minutes, no interval.

31. 23:19 for me. The top half fairly flew in then a disconcerting moment or two of not being able to see anything else before it all started to flow again. Saw the ye and got shuteye pretty quickly justifying the answer on having vaguely heard of Nevil Shute (which is usually as expert a knowledge as I’ve ever had or required for one of these puzzles). Skimp was my LOI. I thought the lift and separate of “stint as captain” was very nice. It must be a rare puzzle to have literati and oenology in the middle and still not be entirely to Verlaine’s taste!
32. 16:13 with a certain amount of deja vu of EARLDOM, as others have noted, and TAMARIND. I enjoyed the ‘bucket’ definition and the other 15 letter anagram. SUPPLY and SKIMP my last two in. Heard of, but never read, Neville Shute. It was the half-year YE at the end with the checking INGLENOOK that got me to the answer. Fairly straightforward for a Friday, I thought, but still entertaining. Thanks V and setter.
33. 44 but another with Ophelian and a rushed male rat which I didn’t fully parse at the time and didn’t check.
34. Loved 10 across for its witty surface

Comments are closed.