Times 27,011: Friday the Sporteenth

114 comments on “Times 27,011: Friday the Sporteenth”

1. 25:28 … yikes, sporty indeed. I coped well enough but nearly undid myself by having SCHEME rather than SCHEMA in place for ages at 21d, a tricky clue to parse. GET DOWN was the other big hold-up but the golf ball finally dropped with a satisfying kerplunk.

   I sometimes visit a live stream where trolling in the chat is elevated to art form and the phrase “nice troll” is now and then seen by way of praise, so I think it works with “Winding up on internet”.

   COD in a witty puzzle to MULTIGYM, an implement of torture to which I was once, very briefly, subjected before making my escape (it was definitely trying to kill me), and a very nice &lit for a word with unlikely looking checkers

2. An hour and five here, having really slowed myself down at the end by following what I thought was the exact wordplay to come up with “O PURITANO” for the unknown opera at 7d.

   It was only when I convinced myself that “does” wasn’t the “sends up” at the end of 4a that I finally untangled things, which led to my LOI SEVEN-A-SIDE at 20a.

   Amazed I got there, given that sport is normally a very long way from my mind, possibly the only thing further from it than opera, in fact…

   FOI 1a SMARMY, COD 5d HARD BOILED EGG, presumably in this puzzle part of an egg-and-spoon race.

   A lot of biffs and question marks along the way, so thanks V for putting me on the right track, as it were, and my respects to the sporty setter.

3. Brekker was a soft boiled egg with Marmite Soldiers.

   This was a belter! Which I completed – but my time has been redacted.

   FOI 25ac PURCELL
   LOI 7dn I PURITANI (I JUBILATI by Alfredo Marcantonio was not quite up to the mark)
   COD 17dn BEER MONEY
   WOD 19ac CONK! As per ‘the Lad himself’.

   12 May is Hancock’s Birthday I do hope the crossword editor will bear that in mind.
   Go to work on a 5dn!

4. 50 mins for this cracker, while enjoying yoghurt, granola, banana. Oh for a dippy egg and marmite soldiers. Maybe tomorrow.
   I didn’t get off to a good start by wondering for a while…now what drinks could begin WHI…? Hmmm, I wonder….Doh!
   Mostly I liked: the &Lit Multigym, Innisfree and Get Down.
   I was reminded of the great machine at my gym, it does everything: twix, maltesers…
   And reminded that I should read more Yeats and listen to more REM.
   Thanks witty setter and V.
   1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLlcvQg9i6c
      for starters
5. Amazed to finish this in 35 minutes, missing my target by only 5, as there were a number of answers I had to construct from worplay as I didn’t really know them. MULTIGYM, I PURITANI (which has come up before several times but refuses to lodge in my brain), SHRUG as a cardigan, MASAI, INSIFREE.

   Great to see Henry Purcell get a rare mention.

   My cup runneth over with ‘conk’ and ‘hooter’, both Hancockisms, following on from ‘stone the crows’ in the QC on Wednesday.

   Edited at 2018-04-13 08:08 am (UTC)

6. I was desperate to finish this and hence tempted to shut down and finish offline, as I had a lecture that I hadn’t prepared for, but something clicked, I forget what, and I hung on. NHO SHRUG and could make no sense of 2d, but they pretty much had to be. I kept looking at DAISY CHAIN to make sure, again, that that Y had to be there, and at long last the light dawned.
7. I wish to register a complaint (Cleese, not Hancock alas). Surely pre-match is hyphenated, so should be (3-5) not (8) ? Especially as KICK-OFF appears as such in the clue !

   However, this was a tasty Friday offering which occupied 20:46 of my early morning.

   FOI MASAI
   LOI PRE-MATCH
   COD HARD-BOILED EGG, which set me thinking of one of my old favourites : “It’s used for shelling before the soldiers go in” (3,5).

   Honourable mention to ANGUS. This clue may be used as a headline when the Hammers eventually sack David Moyes.

   DNK I PURITANI, biffed DAISY CHAIN (thanks V), and also SEVEN-A-SIDE (parsed afterwards, but only known to me as SEVENS).

   As far as MULTIGYM is concerned, I’m afraid I’m a LOST CAUSE !

   1. Of the usual sources, both printed and online, only the Oxfords recognise the answer at 27 as a word and they list it without a hyphen.
8. Untimed, but probably around the half-hour mark, making this one of middling difficulty. My only NHO was the opera at 7d, though INNISFREE went in more on the grounds of fitting the wordplay than memory of any such place. 2d went in unparsed, and I congratulate Verlaine on parsing it – I wonder how many of us could? I’m not keen on mockney clues which, for the most part, are ‘orrible.

   Edited at 2018-04-13 08:24 am (UTC)

9. Loved it. My coffee was still warm when I chucked my biro out of the window in rapture.
10. very nice crossword this, of just the right (for me) level of difficulty. Though 8dn not known so went in with a… you know
11. Thanks Verlaine for DAISY CHAIN and SEVEN-A-SIDE.
    I particularly liked 15d as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is my favourite poem. Bxxxxy noisy bees!
    59m 33s
    1. My favourite poem is called “The Naming of Parts.” I suppose we all have one..
12. …52 minutes with LOI MULTIGYM. We’ve just given ours away on Freecycle. We had more than fifty responses, would you believe? The world truly has gone mad. OK, so I was the one daft enough to buy it in the first place. I see that where the aitch is dropped is becoming ever more specific. I certainly can add and subtract them inadvertently too. My Dad always called his nose his big conk, so the tricky 19d was a write-in. I was very proud of constructing I PURITANI, even if I did take at least 10 minutes with it, and I think we’ve had it before.The Isle of INNISFREE came to me via Bing, the singer not the search engine, although I did then manage the first line of the poem before I dried up. Hence the show-off. Hard but fair. Thank you V and setter.
13. One of those where I had bits, usually wrong, of several answers so made slower progress. I mean, I’m sure that there are cocktails that start with HI, though obviously not BALLS because this is still (just) the Times.
    DAISY CHAIN I had tentatively throughout the solve: I find when you don’t really trust its letters to help out with crossing clues it slows you down even more. I still didn’t trust it towards the end, so my LOI MULTIGYM had, at best, a smudged Y. Thanks to V (as ever) for persevering with the unravelling: that the Yankee detective might be something other that DA simply didn’t occur, making the rest of the parsing impractical.
    22.12, worth the price of admission.
    1. And worse when the dodgy one gives you something like a Y in second to last crossing spot.
14. Quite a toughie, which took me just under an hour. The final struggle for LOI was the pair at I PURITANI and SEVEN-A-SIDE. Oh, how I wrestled with ‘jape/jest’ + U (= educated?) and Di (= random girl) but simply could not construct an opera! And I didn’t see the ‘try game’ nudging us towards rugby.
    COD to the &lit at 3d, but it was a close run thing with the ‘laugh out loud’ boiled egg.
    I was niggled by the ‘by’ in BY-PLAY: the clue ought not to contain the literal ‘by’.
    Thank you, V. And thanks to setter for a proper work-out.
15. Here is a humble thought. Wouldn’t it be helpful if commenters did, where possible, put a title on their comments?

    I usually read this page on the day after, so that everything is there. And I’m primarily interested–I wonder if I’m alone–in the ANSWER, and its real or might-have-been parsing, to clue number-such-and-such; but frankly not much, with all respect, in learning that commenter So-and-So DNK this-or-that word, or how long it took him/her to complete the crossword, or to get home yesterday from Chicago.

    I appreciate that others reasonably may, and many clearly do, have different views. But whatever our interests, I’d think we’d all find it useful (especially with ‘replies’),to be briefly told what a given comment is about. Eg, simply the clue number.

    1. And here’s another humble thought .. wouldn’t it be nice if all commenters gave a name? It is not necessary to open a Livejournal account if you prefer not to. Just give a name of some sort. Anonymous comments seldom attract much in the way of response
    2. May I humbly suggest that, if you are only interested in checking the ANSWER with an explanation of its parsing and wordplay, you read only the blog and don’t bother yourself looking at any of the comments?
    3. I think titles for comments *could* be useful but probably only if you could enforce some kind of standardised format for them… a mental image of cats being herded springs to mind!

       Perhaps threaded discussion with the title of the thread being the clue number under the spotlight would work. But is the current free-and-easy approach really that annoying?

    4. 
       so a comment should only be about one clue? Or would it be okay to title it with a number of clues, as:

       1d, 14a, 26a, 9d, 13d, 28a

       And are we allowed to mention how long it took to get back from Chicago in the same comment or should we make a separate one for that?

       If the former, perhaps the title should be along the lines of:

       1d, 14a, 26a, 9d, 13d, 28a + flippant remark about public transit in Michigan

       Good grief. You probably already know to avoid my comments, but — just in case —you’re now banned from reading them

       1. Imagine the fun arguments we could have about whether the comment is strictly appropriate to the “public transport in Michigan” thread or should be moved to the “public transport in Illinois” thread instead, though!
          1. Oh, bother! You see, I can’t even be trusted with basic geography. They are next door, though, aren’t they, so someone could well be using public transport in one to get back home from a visit to a city in the other (she offers, pathetically)

             Edited at 2018-04-13 12:28 pm (UTC)

             1. Give or take an Indiana or Wisconsin, sure…
                1. I was going by ferry
                   1. 🙂
                   2. On which lake, dare one ask?
                      1. You’ve got me worried now. Doesn’t Lake Michigan link Michigan and Illinois?
                         1. Well yes, but you might have been imagining yourself chugging across Windermere for all we knew.
                            1. 🙂 true that
                               1. Am in stitches now..
                            2. Saw what you did there. As the blog’s leading ELP scholar I award you an A grade in Tarkusology 🙂
                               I recommend the Carl Palmer legacy trio if you can catch them on tour. Outstanding, imho.
                               1. Thanks for the tip.

                                  Of a similar vintage and style Rick Wakeman is appearing in our local methodist church later this month. I’ve managed to bag 2nd row seat and am expecting an evening of piano tunes and anecdotes.

                                  1. *Sorry, forgot to sign in again!*

                                     Wow, nice coincidence… We’re going to the Boston Spa Rick show on Friday 27th. Maybe see you there 🙂 Saw him 3 times last year: with ARW at Hammersmith; Piano Portraits at Wolverhampton; and at the Emerson tribute concert at B’ham Symphony Hall. Most recently saw Steve Howe’s Yes on their 50th anniversary tour in Manchester last month; great show, but not quite as much energy as ARW.

                                  2. We’re going on the Thursday so won’t bump into you unfortunately
                                  3. Well enjoy the evening with the great man – you’ve got fantastic tickets there!
                                  4. Wow, nice coincidence… We’re going to the Boston Spa Rick show on Friday 27th. Maybe see you there 🙂 Saw him 3 times last year: with ARW at Hammersmith; Piano Portraits at Wolverhampton; and at the Emerson tribute concert at B’ham Symphony Hall. Most recently saw Steve Howe’s Yes on their 50th anniversary tour in Manchester last month; great show, but not quite as much energy as ARW.
             2. I so need a “like” button here 🙂
    5. Hello. Welcome. How are you? What did you have for breakfast?
       1. The next Xmas Turkey should have breakfast with Myrtilus as the prize 🙂
    6. You succeeded!
    7. Does that help?
    8. Thank you, Sir!
       In the postings below (all the way to the bottom, not just this thread), I see that you have encouraged titular wit and elegance. Well done. Better done to the posters, of course.
    9. Hi. The blog at the top always gives you chapter and verse on parsing of clues; our bloggers are brilliant at doing this. As for the comments, we just chat, compare times (bear in mind that this is TftT, after all), talk about favourite clues, etc. and sometimes throw in little bits about what we’re up to, where we’ve been, and that sort of thing. If you only need the gen on how clues work, look no further than the blog. But as for comments, we just have a yarn and talk about anything, like friends having coffee and a chat, with no specific agenda. The perfect format 🙂
    10. You have a point but not sure if I can add a title on my (not so) smartphone – will try next time.
16. This felt exactly like the sort of puzzle that gets selected for the heats on Finals day – by no means easy but always properly crafted. Glad to see I wasn’t alone in thinking of poor David Moyes at 2dn, though I suspect most Premiership managers have neither the time nor the inclination for crosswords, so he won’t have been upset by it.
17. Thanks V for clarifying matters. Several, including ANGUS and CONK (how did I miss that hidden?), went in with a biffy shrug. NW was last to fall which probably added 15 mins to the solve. My opera knowledge is nil, so I PURITANI had to be worked out from the parsing.
18. Very clever and enjoyable. COD to CZECH REPUBLIC. Thanks setter and V for filling the gaps.
19. Quite a few DNKs or CNPs (could not parse) – ANGUS especially. My brain wanted “sporadic” and I get my cheques (checks/czechs) confused. I agree with Philip about the hyphen in PREMATCH so that took a bit of time too. 25.26
    1. I had SPORRADIC for a while, but sanity prevailed eventually…
       1. Is a SPORRADIC what a bloke from Innisfree sometimes wears with his kilt? Or is that a SPORRAN/DIRK?
          Before posting that I thought I’d confirm the obvious, that Innisfree was in Scotland. Imagine my outrage to discover it’s not a real place, it’s a made-up word. Infamy!
          Otherwise tricky/off the wavelength. And slow, well over the half hour.
          1. On the contrary:-) It’s a real place in Ireland. According to Wikki: The Isle of Innisfree is an uninhabited island within Lough Gill, in County Sligo, Ireland, where Yeats spent his summers as a child.
             However, as some of the inhabitants of Scotland were originally Picts from Ireland, it’s entirely possible they sporradically wear sporrans.
             1. What’s all this Yeats stuff. Am I the only one old enough to remember Bing?https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dZHp5DIzXQk
                1. I do remember Bing, mainly from the Road movies with Bob and Dorothy, but also from the perennial White Christmas. Definitely an exceptional voice, but I have to admit to not knowing his version of IofI. Very silky though:-)
20. With ANGUS unparsed, and INNISFREE and the opera from wordplay.

    LOI, inexplicably, 4a, where I just couldn’t see it for a good few minutes.

21. 21:16. Nice to see ANGUS, which is the name of the Border Collie, although even with him sitting in front of me pleading for a walk, the answer did not come quickly. Others put in unexplained so thanks V
22. 22 min 47 secs with one wrong. Ramb for Jamb. All done in just under 20 mins apart from the one I got wrong and guessed. It felt like a tough puzzle but by mistake I came here before going to the crossword itself and espied from Verlaine’s blog “I thought this was a lovely puzzle” before my eyes moved quickly away and I sought out the puzzle itself. These few words inspired me to raise my solving game.

    Tomorrow is the Grand National. I’ve backed quite a few. One will be revealed later in my own reply to this post.

    1. That was me.
       1. Is “That was me” running?
          1. I just know it isn’t.
             1. OK here’s the “dark horse”

                A Wildean play could describe this devoted husband?

                1. We watched Lady Windermere’s fan last month and we’re going to The Ideal Husband next . There seems to be a Lord Windermere running and not a Sir Robert Chiltern. Or is there a Bunbury in the field?
                   1. Yes, it’s Lord Windermere. If he really was Lady Windermere’s fan then he sounds like an ideal husband.

                      Whether he’s an ideal horse to put money on in tomorrow’s race is very questionable! But the odds reflect that.

23. 19:11. Great puzzle. My last in was 24dn where the definition puzzled me, because it didn’t occur to me that ‘winding up’ can be a noun.
    I PURITANI went straight in, remembered from past appearances in these puzzles. I’ve certainly never encountered it in the wild.
    I’m always a bit baffled when people insist that a word like PREMATCH should or shouldn’t have a hyphen. I regard it as entirely a matter of style and preference, but then I suppose I am a frightful libertarian in such matters.
    1. You should ask yourself, How would Jesus spell it?
       1. I,T? I’m not sure of the Aramaic but,as the southern senator on his tour of the Holy Land said, “If English is good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me.”
24. SMARMY went straight in followed by a biffed SPORRADIC( I know, I know..), after which I got little further in the NW, apart from CONK and DAISY CHAIN, unsurprisingly. I was also troubled by by in 28a. Giggled at BEER MONEY, loved HARD BOILED EGG. All in all, as already said, a most enjoyable puzzle. Eventually I sorted SPASMODIC and twigged 9a, then sorted out rest of the NW fairly quickly, although I needed V’s wisdom to explain West ‘Am. My LOI was SEVEN A SIDE. Great puzzle. 40:52. Thanks setter and V.
25. ….as I blundered about a bit before seeing the obvious, although I never did get the triple and was wondering how ‘eagle’ could = ‘get’.

    As for typos, I have made one in four out of the five Quickies this week.

    1. Four out of five? That can’t simply be blamed on fat fingers, must be a problem with the interface. #thatsmystoryandimstickingtoit
       1. I clicked on your link and Livejournal said “nothing found: try something different” .. just saying 🙂
26. 15m 11s for me, with MULTIGYM the last to fall, taking a while despite the fact that no other word could possibly fit the gaps (I’ve since checked… this is true).

    If I were being picky I’d say that the ‘by’ in the clue for 28a was a bit inelegant, and I’m struggling to get TROLL to mean ‘winding up’ (although I’ll accept Verlaine’s explanation, complete with question mark). But, all in all, a very nice puzzle.

27. 47 minutes for a very nice puzzle.

    Grateful for anyone who could give me a title and I’ll use it next time I want to say something along similar lines.

    1. “Time and niceness comment only, nothing clue-specific or transport-related”?
       1. I was thinking of a title shorter than the comment, if possible.
          1. Make an acronym of it then. TANCONCOT.
             1. Like it
    2. How about ‘Rope of Sand’? A friend of mine used that title for every paper he wrote for every class he took at college; no one ever asked him about it. (I told this story years later to a friend at Berkeley who was to give a paper in her graduate primatology seminar the next day–on baboon behavior– and she used the title. Afterwards a fellow student came up to her and said, “Great paper, Shirley! And I loved the title; I know exactly what you mean.”)
       1. Excellent – could have come from ‘Lucky Jim’.
28. I was quite surprised to have everything right, having had ANGUS, GET DOWN and JAMB unparsed or only partially parsed so thanks to Verlaine for enlightening me.

    I think Mr. Anon’s point has some validity as I do often come to look here and wonder which posts to read, particularly if I come late like today and there are 50 posts to choose from. Practically I can’t see it happening though unless someone would like to volunteer as the post title police? How about Mr. Anon?

29. Well that was rather good wasn’t it? 19:20 for me.

    I’m surprised, V, that you (and others) claim not to have heard of the opera. I’ve certainly encountered its name before but 100% only from these puzzles. So whilst I wouldn’t be able to whistle the overture or hum one of the arias (do you get more than one in an opera?) I’d be able to tell you the possible combinations of unchecked letters.

    Edited at 2018-04-13 01:14 pm (UTC)

    1. On reflection, the bit about unchecked letters isn’t true. I readily recalled the PU RITA N part but without the wordplay I wouldn’t have been totally sure if it was I PURITANI, O PURITANO, E PURITANA or something else.
30. 28:20. This was great fun. Lots of lovely clues. I thought I was getting stuck with the SW corner, but BEER MONEY – my COD, helped me crack it. The opera was unknown, but the word play was helpful. Both the ‘Pupils moving quickly’ and ‘Fare not appropriate for soldiers’ made me smile too. Thanks setter and V.
31. Developing crossword resilience, like mathematical resilience, takes time – and input from others. The unknown opera was last in, from wordplay alone. I love the Yeats poem too. COD to MULTIGYM, which has never appealed, is it a sort of high-tech Bullworker? Incidentally, shouldn’t it be West ‘am? Thanks verlaine and setter.
32. Well, this was a ticklish number, that stretched me out to around 40 minutes. Never parsed ANGUS, and I PURITANI and INNISFREE from wordplay only. LOI was CONK, which I didn’t know meant a nose, but I finally saw the hidden. Regards.
33. Nothing to add. Very enjoyable. 33 minutes Ann
34. The lesson being that my vocabulary is spottier than I thought. I knew I Puritani (I saw an excellent production in Munich once) (the beer gardens must have been shut) and I knew Charlie Chan right away; I didn’t know Conk or Shrug, and couldn’t parse Ang. I liked the shifty eyeballs and the Troll. Nice puzzle, setter. Nice blog, Verlaine
35. 38:41 for a very satisfying puzzle, just the right level of challenge. The LHS went in very quickly but I slowed down in the RHS at least until the snooker player and the law-breaking were identified, did know the opera though from past puzzles. Shrug the only unknown I think. Delighted to see our blogger in his prologue count snooker as one of seven “athletic” activities. Hear hear, Verlaine, hear hear. The late Big Bill Werbeniuk (a man whose wiki entry contents page include the chapter headings “Alcohol Consumption” and “Split trouser incident”) and I salute you.
    1. I still revere Bill W for managing to get the IRS to give him tax relief on the 6 pints of lager he needed to steady his nerves before a match!
36. I agree, but are we sure it’s a Sir and not a Madam?
    1. Good point. And these days there are other possibilities, too. But how do we resolve this? Surely not “Well played, Sir and/or Madame!!”
       1. I suppose it’s a conundrum that those who wish to remain anonymous will have to accept:-)
37. Genius!
38. I managed to get a few of these clues and I’m ashamed to say that having seen I Puritani live (a long time ago) I could not remember it today.
    I’m still struggling to see how we get US from Useless in 2d to make Angus.
    Incidentally David Moyes was a very successful manager of Preston North End before he went to Everton. David
    1. “U/S” is used as an abbreviation for “unserviceable”, hence useless. I have actually seen this on signs in real life (once on a Air Force base and once in a school, I think; it seems to be particularly a shorthand of technicians, at least in the UK.)

       It’s in Chambers.

       1. Many thanks -and to John. D
    2. US is slang for useless, probably from UnServiceable.
39. I tried Big Bill’s methodology once. Having a choice of 30 reds simply isn’t helpful.
    1. 🙂
40. 30 mins; this was no pushover. Long queue on the A45 at the Rushden Lakes roundabout today, but passed the time listening to some early Genesis.
    1. Tsk! You forgot your title.
41. I had it all worked and parsed (except for the “soldiers” at breakfast) well before this was blogged, and haven’t managed to get back to it till now. Was eager to be the first to post, but I couldn’t stay up that late! Ha.
    What is this “Hancock” stuff about?

    Edited at 2018-04-14 03:17 am (UTC)

    1. Good title.
       Tony Hancock – English comic actor, famous for “Hancock’s Half Hour” on radio and TV. Try googling for videos – e.g. The Blood Donor
    2. Hancock is just a little bit (let’s say at least a decade) before *my* time, but don’t let all these oldies know I said that, they’ll be aghast… Monty Python’s the point at which my comic sensibilities start, basically.
       1. He lives on, though. I’m reminded of him most often by my love of (whisper it) Pete Doherty, who peppers Hancock references about like confetti.

          Probably the most direct reference is the title of his song Lady, Don’t Fall Backwards, which is the book in The Missing Page…

          Edited at 2018-04-14 12:35 pm (UTC)

42. It’s rarely done, and it would give Verlaine a big thrill.
    1. I fear that this bus will explode if we press the pedal down to the metal any harder.
       1. I see that we are nearly there but feel it would be cheating if I were to make any more comments.
43. We are well over 100 comments now .. congratulations to the blogger and to the setter, whose crossword must surely have played some part 🙂 .. and to the anonymous troll too.
    Wonder how many comments before you get to page 3? Always been a fan of page 3
    1. I had p 3 before, then lost it. Is Zuckerberg getting his own back on the Ruskies, I wonder.
44. Not page 3 yet. I saw the comment count and thought I must see why. And now I am compelled to compare with an incident from my distant past… Whizzo toys for traveling executives, which got to about 700 comments.

    Edited at 2018-04-14 08:34 pm (UTC)

45. Only got to this today but glad I bothered. An enjoyable solve and my only fully correct, if slowish, one this / last week. (Approx an hour).
    Thank you Gothick Matt for the explanation of u/s, an abbreviation I don’t recall coming across before.

    Baffled by anon’s criticism – for my part I love reading the blog and its occasional quirkiness only adds to its charm

46. But disappointed in 28a with by adjacent to the answer which started with by

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