Times 27,101: Oh Canada

62 comments on “Times 27,101: Oh Canada”

1. Was much impressed by Magoo’s twelve minute film of yesterday’s events! This was slightly easier or had I learnt a few new tricks?

   But after 70 mins. I had my LOI in as DEGAGE as declining to scrap (fight) with the DEG (part of the Talmud) and AGE period!!

   So a DNF.

   FOI after a while 17ac INTERDICTION

   COD 1ac BLEW IT! 13dn HELEN OF TROY was a bit of a gimme too!

   WOD 23ac PRAVDA 4dn TRAVERSED was interesting as was 21ac GOFFER DNK.

   Update! I also shoved in SKIRT rather than SHIFT at 6dn! MER!

   Edited at 2018-07-27 08:02 am (UTC)

   1. Re 6dn i also had SKIRT S for stop plus KIRT, remarking on (sounds like) curt (very short). Admittedly a skirt is not really a dress
2. Just when you thought the torture of Thursday’s cryptic was over, along comes Friday’s. 85m 49s of torture to be precise.
   I eventually ‘saw’ TRAVERSED but didn’t understand it so thanks to Verlaine for the explanation. I just think it is a contrived solution. I also didn’t like SHIFT as I thought that was a bit contrived, too. The fact that I got it wrong by putting SKIRT, for want of anything better didn’t help.
   Thank you to Verlaine also for CHAR(t)ISM(A).
   1. Hi Martin, I fully agree that SHIFT is contrived. Happier with TRAVERSED now V. has explained it. I didn’t get it at the time.
   2. I forgot to say in my main comment that I also had SKIRT at 6dn based on S possibly standing for ‘stop’ (with added query to look it up later), and KIRT sounding like [remarking on] “curt” (very short).

      Edited at 2018-07-27 06:07 am (UTC)

      1. Frankly, that’s brilliant! Much better than whatever the setter intended.
         1. Hear Hear!
         2. Thanks for the vote of confidence but unfortunately it’s let down by S not being listed as an abbreviation for ‘short’ in any of the usual sources. It’s not even in Chambers which has an abundance of single-letter abbreviations based on the first letters of words.
            1. Be that as it may, I still struggle with IFT being “very short”. Couldn’t we surmise S(top), ie at the top, of the answer?
               1. I like that a lot – but the only problem is that a skirt is not a dress!

                  1. Indeed, I made that point myself below. But then I remembered Mrs Z has a thing called a skirt dress. Not sure if it’s hyphenated (or even pleated), but it is a thing.

                  2. Not ‘a dress’, but it is still ‘dress’ in the uncountable sense.
      2. I too went with SKIRT at 6dn, but my parsing was slightly different from Jack’s. I saw it as a sort of double definition, with “skirt” first being taken in its verbal sense of avoiding discussion of a delicate subject (“stop remarking on”) and secondly as “very short dress”. Pretty strained, I agree, but not much more so than the approved parsing.
3. I found it challenging and enjoyable again, but I would suspect a different setter from yesterday’s-I felt it had a different flavour.

   My LOI was 11ac. I convinced myself the answer would stare RE…., and when that failed I tried to find something finishing ….RE!

   Only after going through that loop twice did I try other ideas – d’oh!

   Thanks for the blog V, and thanks to the setter.

   1. I see it a lot hereabouts – what is MER? Please enlighten.

      Edited at 2018-07-27 05:06 am (UTC)

      1. I meant “RE” for “religious instruction”, not MER. La mer is French for the sea of course. If you’re in financial services, M.E.R. is management expense ratio. Otherwise, dunno.
         1. I may be wrong but I’ve taken MER to be the noise one may make when one sees how a clue works but one is not over-impressed by it. Those around here who have adopted its use may care to correct me and/or explain further.

            Edited at 2018-07-27 05:49 am (UTC)

            1. Isn’t it ‘Minor Eyebrow Raise’? From I forget who; Myrtilus, maybe?

               Edited at 2018-07-27 06:00 am (UTC)

               1. Thanks, Kevin. I got the meaning then but not that it is an acronym. But like Bruce I have also seen ‘meh’, so what’s that?
                  1. ‘Meh’ is an expression of lack of interest. An example from The Simpsons, cited here–I never saw it– was when Homer suggests the family go I forget where, and Bart, and Lisa, reply, ‘Meh’. Homer persists a bit more, and Lisa says, ‘I said “Meh”; M-E-H, “Meh”!’
                     1. Thanks again. So in TftT terms they are not the same thing and I shall appreciate that in future.
               2. Yes – it was my attempt to coin a new acronym, having often had my eyebrows raised (in a minor way) while solving.
                  My other, which has not caught on, yet, is OWAA! (Obscure word as anagram).
            2. Aha – that makes sense. I think I’ve seen that spelt “meh” too, but perhaps it’s the same thing?
      2. Yes I knew it as the coinage of Myrtilus for immediate purposes but it also works as a shortened version of “le mot de Cambronne – eh mer**” when exasperation sets in.
4. 11a was my last one, because I had PRACTISED (which didn’t parse at all), because I had BLOW UP, so after correcting the last, the other two came into focus. (Not sure I’ve heard of that mushroom.) But then I realized that I had forgotten to go back and rethink SKIRT, which hadn’t felt right. GOFFER I looked up before putting in, because it seemed slightly improbable. The parsing of SEQUIN eluded me, though I might have figured it out if beset by fewer distractions. I also wondered if this was by the same setter as yesterday’s. TRAVERSED made me (silently) laugh, as did ISINGLASS. It took forever to see that the clue for IN CHARGE involved an anagram. Nice job, setter, and thanks for the explications, V.
5. I expected a much easier ride after yesterday and to some extent I got one, but eventually became bogged down with half-a-dozen clues and, like yesterday, ended by resorting to aids.

   LOI was 11ac where I had no idea of the answer with only vowels as checkers and a clue that suggested it either began or ended with RE (Religious Education aka Scripture, in my early schooldays). I didn’t know the mushroom at 1ac and was torn between BLEW UP / BLOW UP which might just have fitted one of or other of the possible definitions but not both, nor would it have accounted for ‘trimming’.

   The unknown GOFFER was arrived at by trusting the wordplay. I also had no idea what was going on at 4dn and only got to it once I had eliminated P as the first letter after cheating at 1ac.

   Edited at 2018-07-27 06:00 am (UTC)

6. Differently challenging to yesterday’s, no way is it the same setter. I would have clocked around 20′, but the horrible 6d wouldn’t rest easy and stretched me to 26+. V’s explanation is probably the best, though why one foot (IFT) is very short beats me. Ironically, I suppose, a 1 foot skirt is very (or fairly) short but a 1 foot dress is a nonsense, and I don’t think the things are meant to connect anyway. You can get skirt (round) from “stop remarking on” but a skirt is not a dress, short or otherwise.
   I settled for shift being stop remarking on/move away from the subject and shift being a short dress, never mind the “very”. Obviously I’m either overthinking or underthinking. Meh, mer and any other tut tut sound beginning with M.
   I was going to complain about 9a “problem” very loosely cluing cataract. But I missed the “seeing” bit.
   Is Great Britain strictly an (only one) ISLAND? On that basis I started with DESERT NATION until it wouldn’t work.
   I nearly liked the &lit for SLANG, but I rather grudgingly allow the “singular speech” definition to stand.
   Don’t get me wrong: there was a lot to enjoy from the BLEWIT at the top to the missing wives in 13 and at the bottom. But there’s a but.
   1. Great Britain doesn’t include Northern Island, which goes some way towards making it an island… but doesn’t necessarily explain how the various smaller islands of England, Scotland and Wales fit into the picture!
7. 30 mins for all but 4dn and 11ac with yoghurt, blueberries, banana, etc.
   I was never going to get Decade when it is so clear that RE has to be in there. Which made 4dn too hard, although I quite like it now.
   I also put Skirt – with a M.E.R.
   Thanks setter and V.

   PS I had heard of a goffering iron. I recommend you don’t google images of these.

   Edited at 2018-07-27 07:51 am (UTC)

   1. I nearly did even better with 11ac on the “little learning” principle. Convinced that period was AGE to be preceded by a portion of scripture, I mombled LEV(iticus)AGE for a refusal to fight, though GENAGE, JERAGE and PETAGE were also candidates before I ran out of books (ZECAGE and ZEPAGE? Let’s not get silly.)
8. I had GIFTED instead of GOFFER, having thought of GIFT for ‘present’ and someone who’s ‘good’ is gifted (admittedly this was a bit loose and ignored parts of the clue). I managed to get the rest correct in about forty minutes.

   Where I’ve picked up learning French after about a 30 year hiatus, I notice that having a wider vocabulary enables me to make links between words, e.g. fourmi for ant and formic acid. In a kind of reversal today INTERDICTION was helped by knowing the French ‘interdit’ for forbidden.

   1. I made exactly the same, er, French connection Monsieur Pootle.
9. Got three corners done in good time, although SHIFT only half parsed, then ran aground for ages in the SW. Unlike yesterday I have several clues which don’t quite work for me and it all felt rather ‘after the Lord Mayor’s Show’.
10. BLEW UP, PRACTISED, SKIRT. I had em all. Thought I hadn’t done too badly till the end. Blewit unknown anyway so didn’t understand 1a. Once I had the T TRAVERSED became clear as I had heard of Travers.
11. I started out caught in yesterday’s headlights but then got going to finish in 39 minutes. I solved from the bottom up. If it was the same setter, she/ he showed more mercy today. It was another good ‘un though. COD to RUMINANT. I biffed SHIFT over SKIRT because I thought the shortness was implied there. GOFFER unknown and I thought it the weakest clue. I’m on a long drive now and I’ll pick my twelve discs for 14 across on route. Thank you V and setter.
12. Bit of a coincidence. I walked past a house yesterday and noticed the blue plaque which read ‘P L Travers who wrote Mary Poppins lived here’. So that’s where he lived, I thought. That helped with 4d. I had to look up SKIRT, or SHIFT rather, in this blog though, so I didn’t really finish. I also considered SHIRT but none of them made complete sense at the time.
    1. He = she !
       1. So I gather. I learn a lot on this site.
    2. There was a recent film, Saving Mr Banks, (Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and our very own and wonderful Emma Thompson as Travers) the plot of which dealt with the negotiation of movie rights for the adaptation of Mary Poppins. This movie helped me a lot with 4d.
13. I eventually went for SKIRT on the basis that if you stop remarking on a topic, you’ll subsequently skirt round it, though in the course of several minutes thinking about the clue, the homonym of ‘curt’ didn’t occur to me. (If it had I’d have submitted my wrong solution much sooner 😉 )
14. That was quite a workout… and I’m another who put SKIRT, on the basis that skirting the issue is the same as no longer remarking on it, and a skirt is a short dress. I put an exclamation mark by it at the time, but I’m not convinced it’s any worse than SHIFT.

    I wasn’t impressed by the cryptic definition for WEAR AND TEAR, but I enjoyed SEQUIN a great deal.

    Twenty and a half minutes all told.

15. Another tricky session. This time I avoided the traps and dithered over my last three, 1a, 11a and 4d, for most of my final 10 minutes. I was pretty sure of the mushroom, but kept in mind that 4d might start with a P, and noticed that PRACTISED fitted the crossers and definition, although I couldn’t parse it. I eventually saw DECADEnt and removed the scripture from it, at which point I re-entered TRAVERSED at 4d and spent 5 minutes trying to parse it and failing, then hit submit, fully expecting some pink squares. I was mightily surprised to find it was all green. 38:54. Thanks setter and V.
16. 74 mins. Better than yesterday, but still horribly slow! Not as enjoyable as yesterday’s: this was a bit of a MER-fest. The Travers clue was completely off the wall. ‘Closing’ in HATCHING was odd. The mushroom is a blewit, so why trimmed? 1FT is not at all short for a finger or an earwig!

    I really, really wanted to put STINT for 6d. I couldn’t make that fit the clue — neither could I make SHIFT work, but it did start with a ‘SH (‘stop remarking’). Thanks, V, for explaining.

    Agree COD for the face that launched a thousand ships.

17. Finished all correct but I can’t say in what time as I stopped the clock when I received a text from my daughter saying that there was a “tarantula” in her bedroom and forgot to restart once the true facts had been established.

    I’d say over 20 minutes anyway. I didn’t care much for the clues for TRAVERSED, WEAR AND TEAR and SHIFT, none of which I parsed.

    1. Bedroom in the same house? In our case a shriek suffices ..
       1. I’m at work about 9 miles away as the C Fs so whilst I’ve been told to expect complaints from the neighbours about the screaming (from both girls) I didn’t hear any here. Now you might think that we are dealing with very young girls here, but the main complainant is 22 and a police officer.

          They couldn’t provide photographic evidence as the “tarantula” was corralled under a largely opaque plastic jug and they aren’t lifting it up in a million years. No siree.

          1. Call in a police helicopter with a thermal imaging camera, cross reference against a database of known spider heat signatures – job done. What am I missing here?
             1. The BBC!
18. 23:35 and all correct but didn’t understand TRAVERSED. SHIFT or CHANSON or what the definition was for SLANG. So thanks for the explanation V and the mental stretch from the setter.
19. So I really wanted to finish this with no aids, which I did over the course of the afternoon but with two wrong. For 1a I put in blow it….so close and for 11a I thought I’d cracked it with Redate. I’m pleasantly surprised how many I biffed correctly including GOFFER, PRAVDA, SHIFT and ISINGLASS. Enjoyed CATARACT and RUMINANT.
    1. I’ve just Googled the unknown mushroom and I wish I hadn’t now. Pretty sure I will not forget it in a hurry.
20. 33:08, so nearly as hard for me as yesterday’s but almost as irritating as that one was enjoyable. I had heard vaguely of the BLEWIT mushroom but didn’t understand the ‘trimming’ bit. 4dn is just daft, and having considered SHIFT I put in SKIRT on the same basis as others. I don’t really see how ‘very short’ is a sensible indication for 1 FT.
    Welcome to Canada though, v. I’m at the other end.
    1. Oh. I mistakenly thought the fungus in question was a BLEWIT{t}, dropping the final T (trimming) to get the answer. But I appear to have fluked the right answer
       1. Ditto. Only just noticed.
       2. Me too. I think we need clarification from the setter!
          1. Sorry to butt in if I’ve misunderstood what you’re discussing, but the mushroom is ‘blewits’ (both singular and plural) so ‘trimming’ refers to removal of the ‘s’. This is just as indicated by Verlaine in his blog.
             1. No problem Jack. Thank you for the clarification. I did originally raise an eyebrow at blewit(s) rather than blewit(t) but moved quickly on. I still have difficulty seeing mushroom as plural though.
21. Skirt. 🙁
22. 1 FT is certainly very short for a person. But then so is anything shorter than about 6’2″, in my book.
    1. Having gone from a youthful 6’2″ to my current 6ft after a lifetime of shrinking cartilage, I consider myself “not short” but am also troubled by the lack of a comparison in the clue for the shortness of 1 ft. It’s absolutely massive compared with a nanometre!
    2. Any unit of distance is very short for something. One light-year is very short for a galaxy.
23. Oh dear, another day another DNF. I didn’t have too much trouble in the bottom half although the unknown goffer was a bit of a punt. It was the top half where I really ran into trouble with shift, hatching, blewit and traversed all refusing to yield.

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