Times 27,107: The Battle in Seattle

69 comments on “Times 27,107: The Battle in Seattle”

1. Well, I finished it, but needed to use a dictionary, as I didn’t know WHACK. I also managed not to see KNOTGRASS, even though I knew the word, and biffed HEREWARD from the checkers, never parsing the clue. BACK ROW from wordplay, had no idea what ‘three out of fifteen’ meant. I finally remembered where Coleraine is (I’d actually toyed with BAGEL before that). BREDA was an annoying tip of the tongue problem; I knew the town, just couldn’t get it out of memory into consciousness. I went offline quickly, as I thought I had an errand to run, and I’m glad I did, both because I’d otherwise have been staring at the screen for ages, and because I had the time to savor the clues, solving which felt like a real achievement.
2. I loved solving this, even though I couldn’t finish without aids. I never figured out that “Pop to Eton” was a definition, so failed to get PATER, which put the keep-forgetting-it HEREWARD beyond me (I didn’t know he was a rebel, anyway).

   But finished or not, this was just a pleasure to tackle. Major kudos to the setter, and greetings to V in the home of grunge

   1. I first encountered Hereward the Wake when I was a ten-year old trainspotter, S, before anoraks had been invented (we wore windjammers). It was a Brit, ie a Britannia class, which mainly ran from East Anglia into Liverpool and Fenchurch Street. Knowledge comes from many sources!
      1. true. I ‘knew’ Hereward entirely from crosswords. I knew he was “some bloke way back when”. I can now add “bit of a rebel”
         1. Hereward the Wake was local and came from Ely I believe. He was forever coming up in double history.
            The other one that no one’s ever heard of is Byard’s Leap just west of Cranwell, near Sleaford – a witch’s tale.

            Edited at 2018-08-03 02:15 pm (UTC)

      2. Me too – watching the Brits fly through Warrington Bank Quay – Hereward the Wake was one I was able to underline in my Ian Allen book.
         But I failed to crack the clue!
         1. It would be mainly Mickies, Jubs, Pats, Scots, Prinnies and Semis at Bank Quay, Not many Brits. We knew how to live and would ride our bikes to Skew Bridge, just south of Preston, to see them.
      3. I got HEREWARD but didn’t fathom the DRAWER EH “explanation”.
         I still remember an old TV series about William the Conqueror.
         I think Hereward the Wake was played by Alfred Burke.

         Jeepyjay

3. 60 mins finally to get there while enjoying yoghurt, granola and nectarine.
   I enjoyed the quirkiness once I got used to it.
   Last three in were Trigamy, which unlocked Myth, which made Hereward possible.
   Mostly I liked: Soap powder, and ‘about to drop setter’.
   Thanks setter and V.
4. Certainly a struggle, sucking you in with some relatively easy stuff at the top and taking you to the point of believing you can’t do these things at the bottom, especially on the right.
   MYTH I made do with the writer, MY possessing two thirds of THe – ok, not very convincing, but who said a fraction had to be half? Why not MY THoughts?
   HEREWARD kept me a-wake (teehee) a long time, as I refused to enter it until I’d parsed it, and that obvious word reward kept getting in the way. OK, from the base, very clever. Swine!
   Couldn’t see TOUCHPAD (I just use keyboard and mouse, neither fit), and while BACK ROW was solid I came to doubt its accuracy (but what else?).
   STAND-BY entered uneasily, not allowing the possibility of a triple def.
   PATER? Really? Still at Eton? Do they even still do Latin?
   My SOAP POWDER for a while had OAP as a prisoner of some very politically incorrect Italian communists in reverse.
   DITTY straight out of Uxbridge.
   We had chit chat about Coleraine not long ago, with their footie team prominent. Sadly, they crashed 0-2 to mighty Spartak Subotica and are out of the Europa. I think the setter may be upset. Better luck against Warrenpoint tomorrow.
   Tough, almost unyielding crossword – 41 minutes. Could that be why V may be Sleepless?

   Edited at 2018-08-03 08:31 am (UTC)

5. Finished in 55 minutes which I’m delighted with. Didn’t make Malham yesterday, though the weather improved enough to sun ourselves later. (It hasn’t made its mind up yet today.) Instead we did the Pendle Witch Trail and then drove through the beautiful Trough of Bowland to Lancaster. Mrs BW (sometime called MATER by me, I think ironically) reckons the only witch was the young girl Jennet who betrayed the rest. LOI PUNCHLINE, the one clue I didn’t like. I biffed HEREWARD as I wasn’t wake enough to see the cryptic. Or has it got to be ‘woke’? My big hold-up was putting TALE (two thirds of talent) for MYTH until TRIGAMY put me right. COD to FINGERTIP where I was deceived over the definition. Good puzzle. Thank you V and setter.

   Edited at 2018-08-03 08:48 am (UTC)

6. A great test indeed! I hadn’t thought of 50% of My things for 15 ac, which is clever – thought it was along the lines of part of four is fourth, so part of my is myth!

   Gandolf 34

   1. Exactly my reasoning, Gandalf.
      1. Oh yes, that is clearly how the clue works in the cold light of morning. I blame the wine!
         1. Well, I read it the way you did, and I only had my usual evening Irish coffee. And I still can’t wrap my mind satisfactorily around this explanation.

            “Warmth” is not a fraction of “warm.” “My” is not a number. Etc.

            1. It’s clearly a joke, and a wonderfully original clue! My clue of the day, in fact. In anticipation of Guy’s points, the setter included both a question mark and a warning “as you were”. Fair warning, I think.

               Edited at 2018-08-03 08:19 pm (UTC)

               1. groan
                  1. I never got past TALE(nt)
                     1. I got the TH as coming from an “enth” or “Nth” fraction.

                        Jeepyjay

7. Got there eventually but with one error, DOTTY for DITTY at 27 and it goes without saying that my answer was not fully parsed. I arrived at it only because I associate Morse code with dots and dashes rather that dits and dahs. You’ll gather that I never learned it other than knowing SOS and more recently SMS from its genetric ringtone.

   I didn’t fully understand the parsing of DOROTHY but assumed it probably had something to do with The Wizard of Oz, a film which I have managed never to see.

   I wonder if David Dimbleby’s son calls him ‘Pater’.

   1. I’m with you on dots and dashes versus dits and dahs. I made the same error.
   2. Another “dotty” here for the same reason. Was glad, in the end, that this was my only error in a 90-minute effort. Tricky indeed.
      1. Sorry, that was me
8. Any notions of doing this with my cuppa in bed were soon dashed and two hours later I have thrown in the towel with HEREWARD and TRIGAMY unsolved and an incorrect UNBOOKED (I was tired and desperate). Is the reference to Coleraine in 9a significant?
   In the immortal words of Mr Gumby “my brain hurts”.
   1. I believe Richard Rogan, The Times crossword editor, is from Coleraine.
9. Another one like Thursday of last week…(and Friday). I thought it was going to be relatively straightforward until I got to the RH side. I had to use aids for PUNCHLINE and CREPE. In the case of the latter I was looking for a word for drive to insert bottom to top. Still took 1h 55m 07s.
   I think 26ac ‘Pop to Eton’ is a bit contrived as well as “what the writer possesses’ equalling MYTHings although I should really have got from ‘story’ to MYTH.
   Like Jack, I put DOTTY instead of DITTY, primarily because Morse for me means dots and dashes not dits and dahs.

   * As rinteff and Mr Gumby said, “My brain hurts” after that.

   1. I still think Myth is fine (actually extremely good and never come across the mechanism before) if you just read it as my’th – see earlier post and Jacckt support

      Gandolf 34

10. 12ac At first I tried George Eastham (EAST HAM!) played for Stoke City and West Ham but he was left footed – Peter EUSTACE was a right footer who played for Sheffield Wednesday. So we might just have double duty here. But LV is not versed in such things – and I thought beer was your tipple! Seattle has many fine micro-breweries.

    DNF as I could not convert bigamy into TRIGAMY or add the PUNCHLINE at 10 ac. 5ac ARCTIC evaded detection as did 3dn IN PUP. A GT is not exactly a luxury car in my log book – even Ford had ’em!. 5dn AGHAST was missing too! A very bad day at the office. DNFF!

    I also discerned early on that HANDBAG was the answer to 23ac which would have made it my COD. If only it had been HANDBAGS. It was however HELPING which wasn’t helpful.

    FOI 1dn BUGLERS

    COD 24 BREDA

    WOD DOROTHY my mother’s name.

    Edited at 2018-08-03 02:07 pm (UTC)

11. What a brilliant crossword! Pleased to have finished unaided in 52′ and avoided traps. ‘Pop to Eton’ may seem contrived but it misled me – I believe ‘Pop’ is some sort of society at the college? COD undoubtedly to IN PUP – despite the enumeration this took a very long time to fall. DOTTY seemed not quite right, and I am more careful now, and did eventually parse DITTY. Also very much liked DOROTHY. So, in toto, brilliant! Thanks verlaine and setter.
    1. In Toto. Very nice, made me smile. Regards.
12. Well this was a proper challenge, though it’s probably as well we don’t get something this brain-hurting (©
    Mr Gumby) every day, or even every week. The sign of a hard but fair puzzle is that you keep soldiering on, however dry the well of inspiration seems to have run, because you know that the penny will suddenly drop, and the cunning definition will reveal itself, even if it takes a while. Good work all round.
13. For me this was the most wonderful crossword in a long long time. Clue after clue was a delight. Well done setter! Thanks V for the blog.
14. But then DNF. Some brilliant clueing, needed to go away and come back to it when maybe (poor clue) MYTH then never-seen TRIGAMY revealed themselves around the dubious PUNCHLINE. Ultimately beaten by EUSTACE unable to make anything out of EU and N (and as a WASP that’s not a name. Not at all. Not ever. No-opne’s called that. And the clue’s the wrong way round – the stance ignores the N, the N doesn’t ignore the stance.)
    Also beaten by the unknown HEREWARD. Guessed it was an historical figure, toyed with bot EH and DRAWER, but never saw “from the base” as being upwards.
    Oh, well, soon will be tomorrow.
    1. Forgot to mention, knew Breda from travelling through it on trains one year while working in Eindhoven, and from reading the football scores – their team is NAC Breda. And guessed ditty not dotty after we had the sailors’ gear in their DITTY BAGS a few years ago – 2012 google tells me – somehow that stuck.
15. Too hard for me. Gave up with several incomplete. Felt more of a chore than a pleasure but of course that’s because I just couldn’t make the necessary connections! Well done to all who completed this. I hope we can get back to ‘normal’ soon.
16. Well well well, that is twice in the one week that there has been a clue I have been utterly unable to understand from both wordplay and definition, today HEREWARD. Better luck next week.
    1. I can see that this might be a problem for some but for those of my (pensionable) age, the story of Hereward The Wake and his exploits in the Fens of East Anglia was bread-and-butter history from a young age.
17. 30:30. I enjoyed the challenge of this once I got on the setter’s rather odd wavelength but I wasn’t entirely enamoured with it. There’s lots of great stuff but also some decidedly loosey-goosey bits. ‘Pop to Eton’ is very odd, as isla3 points out the wrong bit of 12ac is doing the ignoring, neither of the definitions in 23ac is really right… and so on. Too many instances of having to ignore elements of the clue, or the plain meaning of words, to see what was going on.
    I feel fairly sure that the setter intended the parsing indicated by Gandolf 34 in the first comment: MYTH is to my as fourth is to four. This doesn’t actually make sense (one divided by MY?) but that’s par for the course in this puzzle. MY THings requires a random fraction (why not MY THeological objection to the death penalty?) which seems somehow unsatisfactory.
    1. I think MY THings is more plausible. Attaching the suffix “-th” to “my” seems really far-fetched.
       1. So why ‘a fraction’ and not just ‘half’? And why ‘as it were’?

          Edited at 2018-08-03 05:01 pm (UTC)

          1. -TH wouldn’t necessarily mean a fraction; I find it hard, in fact, to see how that would work, as “MY” Is not a number. -th also forms “nouns of action (birth) or abstract nouns denoting quality or condition (depth; length; warmth).” So “myth” could mean “my-ness” more readily than “part of what is mine.” Is that it? Anyway, I took “fraction” as more accurate than “half” or “50%”—after all, do you count the space in “MY THINGS”? And all of MY is there, so “fraction” could refer to “THings” alone—and “as it were” as referring to the latter part, since there is more than one way to express the thought “what I possess.”

             So, if I am wrong about the setter’s intent, I think the clue is defective.

             Edited at 2018-08-03 06:30 pm (UTC)

             1. I don’t know about defective but it’s certainly loose I think intended to be humorous. I still think it’s what’s intended, but unless the setter pops by there’s no way to be sure.
18. I’ll go along with MY’TH as well. Think the clue is ok in terms of the rest of this toughie.
    Some serious misdirection here with EUSTACE which I got but rejected as I didn’t understand the clue, also CREPE -when I see back I assume it’s something reversed. Never heard of DITS
    1. CREPE was another that irritated me slightly, not because of the reversal but because of the use of ‘light’. This not an, um, obvious way to describe fried batter.
       1. The thought crossed my mind, too. But when you compare a crepe to an American flapjack…
19. Not very keen on this crossword. I thought a number of clues cumbersome, in particular 26ac and 16dn. Crosswords with this many ? and ! (9) often are a sign of trying too hard, i think.
    I managed to decide that penetrate was a suitable answer to 10ac, which didn’t help and took a while to sort out.
20. I needed a little help. I thought some of the clues were wonderfully, misleadingly convoluted. Longer definitions also make it harder to see how much of the clue is wordplay. I didn’t know the relevant sense of WHACK (UKism) and by the time I was finished I must have been just too tired to parse NIGEL and HEREWARD (a bloke I am not familiar with either). I really liked DEFT.

    My quibbles: “ignoring” seems grammatically askew in 12a. I had never seen, and not all dictionaries seem to have, a verb sense for FINGERTIP.

    Edited at 2018-08-03 04:06 pm (UTC)

    1. It might appear in sports commentary – he fingertipped the ball around the post – but sports commentary is basically anti-English.
21. Blimey! A DNF today with nearly two thirds of the grid completed. The SE corner was a no go area and even looking at the answers I can see many words in the parsing and solutions that I do not know. Thank you Verlaine for your efforts to bring me into the light.
22. What is “one” doing here? “One horrified” would be a horrified person. You’re not, of course, left with that but simply with “horrified.” I was thinking (not being familiar with the Grand Tourer) that there must be a three-letter luxury car name including GT.

    Edited at 2018-08-03 04:59 pm (UTC)

    1. Just equivalent to ‘leaving us’ or ‘to leave’.
       1. OK. I’m not fond of connecting words. Wordplay + definition + nothing else. That’s my motto.
    2. Could the car be a (Golf) GTI?
23. Well now, that was another challenge like the recent hard one, but a bit less satisfying. I had to go to the aids to find HEREWARD, and TRIGAMY as my LOI. I don’t think I’d ever run across TRIGAMY before, though it’s pretty clear what it means. Some really convoluted thinking was needed to get even that far. Regards.
24. OK another gripe.. Why is ‘fingertip’ ‘manipulated digitally’?
    1. Moi aussi. At the top of the Google results, I find the adjectival sense “using or operated by the fingers. |”police made a fingertip search of the area” (this is what you find in Oxford online)—is that close enough to “manipulated”? In Merriam-Webster, the only adjectival defs are “readily accessible” and “extending from head to shoulders to mid-thigh—used of clothing.”
       1. Another of the examples in ODO is ‘the safes are constructed of 16-gauge steel and feature fingertip keypads’.
          1. Aha.
25. Sailed through the top half, struggled with the bottom.

    FOI MYTH

    Couldn’t see 16D but TRIGAMY got me a foothold. Didn’t much care for DEFT, or IN PUP.

    Gave up after 20 minutes or so. I would never have got TOUCHPAD, and biffed “dotty”. Dits and dahs my a**e.

    COD DOROTHY. Not a great puzzle, but a vast improvement on yesterday’s appalling load of tripe.

    Edited at 2018-08-03 07:37 pm (UTC)

26. DNF. Bah! Too tough for me today, beaten fair and square. I could not get trigamy, myth or Hereward and actually all three were very far from any of the thoughts swirling around my head so I won’t feel too bad about it. A lot of satisfying pdms from the ones I was able to get as solutions emerged which were often quite at odds with the way I had been looking at the clue.
27. After a tough day golfing, which was interrupted by the mother of all thunder storms, I was mightily miffed to find that having solved this beast correctly, with the exception of the exact parsing of EUSTACE, I’d managed to type FALLOTT at 19d. I even managed to solve HEREWARD with PATON giving an N as a crosser, which then allowed me to get PATER. What a letdown! 67:33 with a stupid bl**dy typo. Grrhh!. Thanks setter and V.
28. Soundly beaten by this one, as I seem to have been by every puzzle this week. I do like a challenge, but I think it’s time I threw in the proverbial and migrated to the Telegraph, which seems better suited to the smaller brain.
    1. I agree.Seems to have gone form the ludicrously easy to the ludicrously difficult in a very short space of time.Personally,even having seen the explanations,there is no way I would have ever have solved some of these clues, after 10 years of Times Crosswords.Perhaps I am dementing.
       1. Sorry about the Typo!
          1. I think what gets me down about long runs of very difficult (or very easy) puzzles is that it reminds me that, whenever I solve one, it’s only because the setter is letting me win.
29. After 20 minutes I had solved only 10 clues, before I had to leave this for a rehearsal. A second round later still left me with about dozen to solve, mostly in the SW and NE corners. But I refused to give up or use aids and finished this morning, all parsed, which felt quite an achievement. No overall time, but it must have been over an hour. CREPE, EUSTACE and TRIGAMY my last 3 in. I’m in the Gandolf camp of parsing MY’TH, which I quite enjoyed. Several answers had me hesitating until I could understand the tricky word play – e.g. spotting the ‘number’ in 27a was a song, helping me avoid putting in DOTTY as some did. All a bit of a mind-bender, but enjoyable in the end. IN PUP my favourite. Thanks V and setter.
30. Far too late, but just had to say what a fantastic puzzle this was with some of the best defs. I’ve seen in a long time, including the ‘prairie girl in work’, and the ‘about to drop setter?’ and some v. intricate wordplay, eg for HEREWARD.

    Finished with all in correctly after about 2 1/2 hours. Hard work, but satisfying and definitely worth persisting to the end.

    Thanks to both setter and blogger.

31. Did this today, as away from home yesterday seeing the Carl Palmer band in Sussex. Tricky, but satisfying. Around 40 mins. Thanks to setter and blogger.
32. i found some (In Pup) clever, some (Crepe light?) a bit iffy, and some unknown (Trigamy, Hereward). The last two never went in, as the crosser for me was clearly TALE(nt), which parses better than myth if you don’t know that the A and the E are wrong.

    Interesting that there was another easily parsed but wrong with Dole Time – same thought process, just O(ne) instead of I, and inside rather than outside the Dime.

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