Times 27007

60 comments on “Times 27007”

1. This was easy going early on but became thornier as things progressed.

   FOI 1dn COCK-A-HOOP
   LOI 25ac MIEN
   COD 24ac ACTAEON from the IKEA stable.
   WOD 23ac ALAMEDA (lined with poplars).

   11dn CONCERTMASTER I wrongly presumed had something to do with LEICESTER.

   Time 32 mins – but it wasn’t terribly satisfying.

2. 27 minutes for this, with CONCERTMASTER last in, and ANGER holding me up till I saw the parsing. I also struggled with the POURBOIRE/PSALM crossing, not quite trusting PS as a type of secretary.
3. I don’t understand where the D in ALAMEDA comes from. On edit: sorry, of course it’s the first letter of D{own}

   Edited at 2018-04-09 02:55 am (UTC)

   1. Blog corrected, thanks.
4. Just at the hour. I like puzzles with words like Calends and Actaeon. I don’t like puzzles with words like Constrainable (really?), Esse (cutesy), and especially Pourboire (abstruse, but mostly unknown). I like blogs that get a discussion or an argument started, or that teach me something. No K in Latin does very nicely for today. Thanks Vinyl
   1. I’m with you on CONSTRAINABLE. but POURBOIRE, c’était pas un problème !
5. in fact a DNF, as POURBOIRE was light years away from anything I could think of; and the definition was staring me in the face. I see ODE has it, as an English word, so I won’t complain. Remembered CALENDS from the Greek ones, which are mainly known for their non-existence. Isn’t CONCERTMASTER a US term? It surprised me here.
6. 6m45 which turns out to have been on the wavelength despite the swingeing earliness of the hour – of course stuff like CALENDS, ESSE and ACTAEON hold few terrors for me.

   I am quite tired and couldn’t parse 11dn even when challenged on over on the club forum. I have to say that “primarily” applying to an arbitrarily large number of words before or after it seems a *little* bit shady to me.

   My main slip-up in this puzzle was buffing in ONTARIO at 5dn for a moment based on R{o}A{s}T… but of course Ontario is a province not a state! What a rookie error…

7. 11:53 … much of this flying in either from definition or from acquired crossword lore, a lot of which is on show in this puzzle.

   Held up in the southwest, especially by PSALM. I’m not sure PS for secretary was within my ken.

   POURBOIRE just about remembered from last time it came up, a year or so back (same checkers resulting in a few plumblines on that occasion).

   As jackkt says, a lot of bloomin’ foreign stuff. Thanks for the explication, vinyl

   1. God, I hope I wasn’t one of them. I actually flung it in here, rather than submit with blank squares (or rather than, more sensibly, not submitting at all).
      1. You seem to have been absent from school that day:

         https://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/1665165.html

         1. Thanks for the link Sotira. I apparently didn’t know POURBOIRE last time it appeared either, and I certainly didn’t know it today. It takes repeated slaps on the head to get something to stick these days, like ALAMEDA, which I put in right off. But like the other Kevin I threw in PLUMBLINE today, basically because it fit. DNF.

            Edited at 2018-04-09 05:09 pm (UTC)

   2. PS brought to mind Yes, Minister during solving – I was guessing it was something like Parliamentary Secretary or Permanent Secretary, but Wikipedia abbreviates those PUSS and PUS (the U being Under-) and says a PS is a Private Secretary. Close but no cigar. Same with the puzzle – had forgotten POURBOIRE since it came up last and wrote PLUMBLINE for the sake of writing something. Another not overly enthused by the foreign/classical content outside my comfort zone.
   3. I only knew it because it seemed new to me when it last turned up in February:

      PS, offer to secure run for African predator? (9,4)
      SECRETARY BIRD

      It turned out I has seen it before, even in a Quickie, but I am more inclined to think PA than PS for secretary.

8. DNF after the last quarter of an hour or so staring at A_A_E_A at 23a. Finally just gave up. Never quite worked out how the clue worked, let alone anything else. And I actually had ALAMEDA scrawled in the margin!

   Ah well. Maybe I just need to get my brain back in gear after a weekend off…

   Edited at 2018-04-09 06:32 am (UTC)

   1. I had an almost identical solving experience to you … I must remember game in the non-animal or play senses. It’s caught me out a few times previously.
9. A lot of bloomin’foreign stuff here again today, most of which gave me pause for thought though I knew some of them i.e. ESSE (Latin), SECONDO (Italian), POURBOIRE (French) and the Italian state of SAN MARINO. Unkowns were CALENDS (Latin/Greek/Old French – take your pick) and ACTAEON (Greek) but I worked them out from wordplay.

   I’d run out of steam by the time I came to my final remaining clue and guessed it was yet another foreign word, so I bunged A?A?E?A into a word-search to come up with the Spanish ALAMEDA. I had actually heard of this and might have stood a chance at it but for having only vowels as checkers which caused me to lose patience after some of what had gone before. 40 minutes for a technical DNF.

   Edited at 2018-04-09 06:37 am (UTC)

10. 35 mins before I gave up on Alameda.
    On the road so brekker is a ‘nakd’ bar. Have you tried them? Not bad, especially the Rhubarb and Custard flavour.
    Mostly I liked Chinchilla and Cock a hoop. And, grudgingly, Pourboire is good too.
    Thanks setter and Vinyl.
    1. I had no idea that Chinchilla was a flavour – Cock a hoop is mind-boggling!
       1. Cock-a-hoop flavour. It’s like cock-a-leekie but it repeats on you.
11. 10:33. I started very quickly on this, biffing away furiously, but then slowed down considerably in the bottom half. I also caused myself a problem by not knowing how to spell ACTAEON.
    There were some funny words in here, but I happened to know them from past puzzles. ALAMEDA was curious in that I knew exactly what word was required but just couldn’t think of it, so I had to construct it from the wordplay. A quick google search shows that this is the sixth time it has come up in the last four years.
    Nice to see a cocker spaniel put in an appearance. They are an acquired taste, I will grant you, but so many of the best things in life are.

    Edited at 2018-04-09 06:41 am (UTC)

    1. As a vegan I would never dream of eating spaniel… An acquired taste too far!
       1. As I wrote that comment I thought to myself ‘I wonder who will make the spaniel-meat joke’…
          1. Contractual requirement I’m afraid. Back in my days of being a dog owner I was a schnauzer man, but we drew the line at wiener schnauzel.
             1. Ah, but we were always partial to a German Shepherd’s Pie.
                1. Chow-ing down on any of those will give you the collie-ic
             2. Better than a shih tzu sandwich.
12. 15.39 for this, where I found the wordplays more difficult than the literals (code for “I biffed a lot”). PSALM, CONCERTMASTER, ALAMEDA, HINDRANCE (that old peasant turned up recently and looks like becoming a regular) are particulars in that respect.
    POURBOIRE I eventually worked out from the wordplay, however, having decided that PLUMBLINE didn’t work. My other near-catastrophe was the unpretentious MIEN, because MEEK fits unpretentious better in my personal Thesaurus, and for all I know, a MIEK, MEEQ or some other combination might be a brougham, araba or fiacre in some foreign land. I still have to squint a bit to accept MEAN means unpretentious: I know some mean people who are quite capable of giving themselves airs. Or is it MEAN as in average? I would still wonder how numbers can be unpretentious.
    Once again thanks to Vinyl for taking the time to sort out the cryptic stuff I missed. How you can do that while listening to the Brahms is way beyond me!

    Edited at 2018-04-09 07:43 am (UTC)

    1. Brahms and Liszt perhaps?
    2. I think it’s as in ‘she rose from mean origins to running West Ham United Football Club’.
       1. mean and lowly
          1. Thanks for that reference, Rob. It was what I was thinking of (but unable to pin down) when I Googled ‘mean KJV Mary’ and found not what I was seeking.
    3. That’s why I pointed to the historical root meaning of ‘mean’, which is rather different than the current usage.
       1. I rather struggled with what the historical root meaning might be, as I am familiar with the variations that mean lowly, humble and so forth, not least from the Christmas carols like One Sin Royal. The close word to “unpretentious” I would favour would be perhaps unprepossessing, not having status or position. Pretentious has the flavour of an attitude or affectation, pretending to be more than one is. Even mean and lowly people might none the less be pretentious (or unpretentious) and the one does not mean the other.
          I quite accept that this is close to pedantry, and I did derive my answer from the wordplay anyway. But still…
13. 32 minutes with ALAMEDA a total fluke. I didn’t even know HIND for peasant but fortunately remembered the days when Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requested and required that I solve the crossword without let or HINDRANCE. One word from Boris and I’m sure the rest of the world will obey. SECONDO was easily constructed, CALENDS and ACTAEON dimly known. Apart from Isla, all of you youngsters with your PAs obviously didn’t read my recent comment about the internal phone directory in the CEGB in 1974 when I first acquired one. It listed the name ot the manager with underneath, slightly inset the lettters P/S and then the name of the secretary. P/S was Private Secretary. I guess this was a good puzzle, but it was a bit of a biff-fest. Thank you setter and Vinyl for the erudition.
14. 14’30, a rare sub-15, almost thwarted by the concertmaster which once I finally saw couldn’t even contemplate working it out. Also blocked by reading curbable as curable for a time. Useful to get 14 and 17 early. I like the frisson about these here furrin words littering our otherwise pure and pristine tongue.
15. DNF in 30 mins – and another 7 mins failed to crack the bottom left corner. I toyed with plumbline but finally went with pourboire. I had PA for secretary leading to Plain as the American song. I didn’t know alameda so in went academa. I thought of psalm which suggested mien but I was already plain wrong.
16. ….or more accurately Latin, Spanish, Italian, and French. Not up my street at all, and 0 out of 10 for enjoyment.

    DNK the abbreviations for “consular agent”or “secretary”, SECONDO, or ACTAEON.

    Knew POURBOIRE, but biffed PLUMBLINE as LOI at 16:10 DNF. COD grudgingly to this one.

    I didn’t like many of the clues, but enjoyed LESOTHO and COCK-A-HOOP.

17. Also a 30′ dnf, defeated by SW. Imagine someone introducing themselves to you as a ‘PS’, perhaps we should all make up acronyms for our jobs. Dnk ALMEDA, and have never said the word MIEN in my life so had no idea of the pronunciation. A pity that all three of these were in the same corner. Thanks vinyl and setter.
    1. I only know it from ‘The Raven’:
       Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
       But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door–
18. 17 minutes, thankfully I think POURBOIRE last appeared on my watch so I remembered it, and no problems with ESSE, ACTAEON or CALENDS; CONCERTMASTER was my LOI as couldn’t make myself decipher the anagram until all the checkers were in. Didn’t know HIND for old peasant either but it had to be. Would have been faster but for lack of sleep, watching McIlroy mess up well into the early hours. Didn’t Casey do well, was last in the cut, out alone on Saturday morning and finished in top 15.
19. I rather enjoyed this one. The range of vocab was challenging, but accessible to a well-read and cultured chap like myself! ALAMEDA must have come up fairly recently in the Cryptic because I biffed it even tho I can’t see LAME = ‘game’ (could someone expain this to me, please?). I couldn’t spell ACTAEON either — I’m not *that* cultured — but the wordplay fixed it. ESSE was FOI. PS for ‘secretary’ wrongfooted me and I wasted loads of time struggling with PA.
    COD to 12a for concision and cunning.
    Vinyl’s note on 11d makes me think the clue is a bit wonky: I saw it as M[idland] + CO = abbrev for County when I did it, but now I see that an extra O is required. Verlaine is right to raise a minor eyebrow here.

    Thanks for a neat blog, vinyl.

    1. A game leg is a painful one. I’d say gammy leg, but I think it’s the same thing.
       1. Aha! Fascinating. Thank you. I know about a ‘gammy leg’. Oooo — so are ‘gammy’ and GAME homophonous?? [… no no, let’s not go down that route!]

          Edited at 2018-04-09 10:09 am (UTC)

          1. It’s always struck me as odd. By that linguistic logic, lame should be pronounced the same way as the MP David Lammy.
20. I zipped through with no major hold-ups, though I was another who had to think for longer than expected before finishing with CONCERTMASTER – a 14 letter anagram with half the letters already entered ought to be extremely biffable, but this one just doesn’t spring to mind for some reason. It was only when I came here that it occurred to me that yes, unless you’re a long-time resident of Crosswordland, words like ALAMEDA, HIND and POURBOIRE aren’t daily vocabulary, not to mention today’s various classical elements. So yes, a bit tougher than the average Monday.
21. 23 minutes, but with PLUMBLINE, as I couldn’t find anything else to fit. I did think of some way to justify that, but should have taken more time working on the wordplay.
22. but with another plumbline. Was so pleased to get MIEN as my LOI that I just hit the finish button without doing a final check. Most of the difficult words were gettable from the cryptics, but POURBOIRE? I ask you? And on a Monday too!
23. Well I quite enjoyed this and it was all within my ken so no complaints from this quarter. I seem to remember Miss Jean Brodie (in the Prime of) urging her girls to copy the noble MIEN of Sybyl Thorndike, but she pronounced it ME-EN.

    In duets, sung or played, the leading person is “primo” and the other is SECONDO. In Lucky Jim this leads to a hilarious scene in which Jim (as secondo) has been lip-syncing, hoping no one would notice, and is left mouthing his part like a gaping fish when the two tenors diverge. It’s funny on the page and on the screen. He’s saved by the bell when the ghastly Bertrand Welch (Terry-Thomas in the Boulting version) arrives. And courtesy of youtube here it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kshI_jkjZIM

    I wonder if Vinyl did the Sunday NY Times yesterday. It was a Spoonerism/homophone special and I very nearly gave up in disgust. 11.11

    Edited at 2018-04-09 01:33 pm (UTC)

    1. Nice reference, Olivia. I’m a lifelong KA fan and have adored LJ for decades. I think it’s his most innocent and optimistic novel, as well as his funniest. The influence of Larkin is strong all the way through.
       1. Sometimes the first is the best. See also Iris Murdoch’s ‘Under the Net’.
24. I didn’t know this name, but decided that “horse ultimately” could mean the ends of “horse”, and so had an h for an a. Then when checking my guess, it seems it is an acceptable spelling for the hunter. No complaints otherwise though.
25. 18:38 but failed to parse ANGER and MIEN, so thanks for that Vinyl.
    I started well with CINCHILLA, but got no more Across clues until I got some help from the Downs. I remembered POURBOIRE from what I thought was a recent outing, and eventually got ACTAEON. ANGER my LOI. CONCERTMASTER my favourite.
26. I started this puzzle with earache and by the time I’d finished I had a headache as well. Managed to dig ESSE, ALAMEDA, HIND, POURBOIRE and LESOTHO from the memory banks, and construct SECONDO(known from music parts), ACTAEON(half known) and CONCERTMASTER(struggled to find the O in the fodder) from wordplay. I knew San Marino from an internet game which I used to use to identify the shape and location of the countries in Europe. All told I found this a slog and not really enjoyable. I don’t mind the occasional obscurity, but there were too many in this puzzle for my liking, culminating with CALENDS, my LOI, for which I needed a word finder. No trouble with PS, but I had no idea about CA for consular agent. 48:44 with 1 cheat. Thanks setter and Vinyl.
27. I thought this was going along very nicely, but I got stuck on ACTAEON (which I eventually entered) and ALAMEDA (which I didn’t). Having never heard of LAME, and forgotten about ALAMEDA, I eventually went for AGAMEDA with every confidence that it was wrong. 11m 51s with that error, and the last 2-3 minutes spent on those words, as well as CALENDS which was more gettable.
28. I had all of this in under 20 minutes but then hit the buffers with ALAMEDA. I sort of knew what is was because it’s come up before but it gets me every time – especially when I only have vowels as checkers. I didn’t know SECONDO had anything to do with Italian meals – in spite of having lunch every day in an Italian cafe. It’s the second part of any musical duet. I know it mainly from piano duets – Primo & Secondo. We secondos usually thump out the lower part. 27 minutes. Ann
29. 35:32 mostly Monday-ish but a couple of tricky bits of vocab thrown in for good measure and also the wp at 11dn which I found a bit convoluted. FOI 6ac. Took a while to discard thoughts of the ides of March at 9ac before calends hove into view. I work near enough to the National gallery that when Titian’s Diana and Actaeon was put on display after being saved for the nation a couple of years ago I spent the odd lunchhour up there admiring it, so 24ac didn’t take too long to drop. The hardest one for me was LOI 25ac where I had the same difficulties described by Z and pondered a meek, meer, meeq and meen amongst others before deciding carriage had to be bearing and so, mien. Glad to remember hind and pourboire from puzzles past.
30. Around an hour with concertmaster taking a long time to see and defeated by alameda. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas – a particular favourite – helped me with Actaeon. It’s a while since I’ve had five clean Monday to Friday solves. Oh well, perhaps next week …
31. I advised my cousin to start with Monday’s puzzles because they tend to be easier than the rest of the week (so I thought) – advice I have now rescinded after struggling with this for 90 minutes and faling to dredge up the game/lame connection from my memory.
32. Completed in Jan 2020

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