Times 27,239: Cutting A Dash

56 comments on “Times 27,239: Cutting A Dash”

1. Slowed down by a couple: ESCUDO–took me a while to get the ‘bit’ bit–LOI CROP CIRCLES, which I biffed without bothering to parse, CRUCIBLE, where I needed all the checkers. Also biffed BERMUDA SHORTS, once more being taken in by a punctuation mark; my COD.
2. Pretty sure Pope André would say SURREALISM isn’t a “style”—not merely and not even—but close enough for crosswords, I guess. It’s funny that a NEO-LITH is an “old tool.” Very enjoyable puzzle, but (the holidays having disrupted my weekly routine) I was sure it was the one for Thursday until the blog took so long to appear.

   Edited at 2019-01-04 08:31 am (UTC)

3. I didn’t know André Breton was a surrealist, so that’s my GK learning for today. Also held up in SE corner by unaccountably writing BLEATER in for 28A when I knew the answer was BLETHER, which made NEOLITH my last one in after I had corrected it. Lots of clues to admire, but I liked the corn cutter, my SLOI, best. 18:51
4. I enjoyed this puzzle, particularly piecing together from the cryptic some half-known words – DUENNA and ESCUDO. As is typical I hampered myself for a while by putting in HAILSTORM but I did at least see my mistake quite quickly. LOI HIERARCH which I didn’t know as ‘high priest’ so for some time I thought this was going to be an unknown obscurity and as such it provided a satisfying penny-drop moment.
5. M. Andre Breton, je le connaissais pas.

   45 mins for a Friday ain’t so bad, here in Meldrewvia.

   I bought a new pen and suddenly realised it contained silver ink! Gees! I could not read my answers from certain angles!

   FOI 24dn TOMB

   LOI 21ac CASELOAD – homophonic Spoonerism denied.

   COD 17ac REINCARNATION

   not 14ac BERMUDA SHORTS from IKEA

   WOD 26ac CHIROPODIST – a rare breed in China.

   I’ll 5dn

   Edited at 2019-01-04 09:03 am (UTC)

   1. I didn’t know anyone bought a pen these days, I seem to acquire them from taxi drivers, restaurants, hotels, various freebies… even two from a solicitors office. Still, a silver pen will be able to write your bons mots in the correct colour.
      1. As a writer, I love pens – especially for doing the crosswords.
         It is mightier then the sword and the keyboard!
6. 26 minutes with LOI CRUCIBLE. I was down to the SW in 15 minutes, but I took time to shift the CASELOAD without the INSIDER knowledge. Another enjoyable puzzle. Thank you V and setter
7. 45 minutes and was just pleased to get through it, although as things turned out I had a wrong unchecked letter in the African city – the only one I cheated on because I knew I didn’t know it. No wonder I couldn’t make its wordplay work!
8. Another middle of the road puzzle that was always fun to solve

   14A is excellent but sadly too easily solved without full parsing. “sort of umber” starting “b” for “beachware” in 7,6 is a write-in. The beauty of the “-” passed me by until I read the blog!

   1. One of the things that kept me from solving 14ac for so long is that I would never have associated Bermuda shorts with beachwear!
      1. I see you’re not alone in that assessment

         Puzzled, I looked them up on Wiki to discover that they originated with the British military as proper dress in appropriate climates. They were then copied by the business community of Bermuda and have spread from there – so you are absolutely correct, nothing to do with beachwear

         1. And, if my pals in Bermuda are to be taken at their word, they are properly only worn with over-the-calf socks. That bit would never go down on the beaches I know.
9. I thought at first reading that 28 ac was going to be BLATHER – which would have been an acceptable answer if it weren’t for the fact that it had to fit 15 d!
   Or am I wrong?
   Many thanks to setter and blogger.
   Adrian Cobb
   1. I think you have to account for the “avoiding area” bit of the wordplay: hard to make that “take out the first E”. BLATHER fits the definition, mind: Chambers has BLETHER as Scottish, and BLATHER as US and dialect.

      Edited at 2019-01-04 10:23 am (UTC)

   2. I knew I was supposed to remove the A, but put BLATHER anyway until I got HAILSTONE!
10. 50 minutes. The top half went in steadily enough, though I had to start on the right with 5a CATWALK (great clue) and work my way backwards.

    The bottom half was a different matter, and took me three quarters of the time, especially my last couple in: 16d CRUCIBLE, where it seems I managed to think of every other vineyard and forecaster before I got to “cru” and “sibyl”, and finally 13d where as with others I didn’t know André Breton, and assumed I was looking for some kind of rustic furniture style, or a name for those stripy tops…

    I’d give COD to 14a BERMUDA SHORTS, but I biffed it early based on the enumeration and a letter or two, so I didn’t appreciate it at the time. Instead 17a REINCARNATION gets my vote.

    1. Strangely, I found just the opposite – breezed through the bottom half, and CATWALK was my LOI.
11. A horrydesque 45 mins. I thought odist=poet was a bit iffy, but saw the solution from def quite quickly. 1d my LOI, after too long spent trying to think of tourist sights in Lisbon before the escudo finally dropped. And CROP CIRCLES was penultimate one in, since I was certain the ‘rings’ would be a double-O in the first word. Biffed BERMUDA SHORTS and then admired the use of the punctuation in the wordplay: my COD nomination, too.
    Thanks, V, for blogging this enjoyable puzzle.
12. A better than yesterday 18 minutes, CASELOAD the last with those rather unpromising checkers.
    I might have heard of the surrealist before, but I wouldn’t Breton it.
    And speaking of which, Mr Grumpy can have another crack at getting us to accept that it’s BETTOR, which it wasn’t yesterday either.
    1. You beat me to it! I think the setter is picking on me, toying with me even. But I find my unnatural seasonal goodwill is lasting longer than I had hoped, and I cheerily congratulate the setter. You can’t argue with the dictionary can you? In my defence, I think we may be talking about two slightly different things anyway, but that’s obviously not a discussion to have on this blog. Aside from the ‘betters’ raging controversy, this was another good crossword though- even though I technically DNF and had to cheat on two or three.
    2. (Mr Grumpy)
13. Back at work properly today, so back on the iPad, which means it’s typo-time folks.

    Quickie and 15×15 today – and both times on crossers so a grand total of 4 errors today. Just when I thought I was clearing up last year’s.

    Therefore I resolve to never submit on the iPad before I’ve read every answer at least twice.

    aside from that, 21 minutes for this, with SURRE(y) steadfastly refusing to show itself in my head despite having lived and/or worked there for most of the 90s.

    1. I have gradually perfected the art of proofreading only the unchecked letters – but I only do the Quickie online.
14. Struggled a bit at 23:15 with quite a few of what might be called half-parsed entries.
    M. Breton new to me too, so that needed the ALISM on the end before the fog cleared and I was another with STORM for STONE for a while in 15d.
15. Very enjoyable 14m solve. Held up at the last hurdle by the Breton but got there in the end. I was maybe looking for something ‘beret-like’ as I was unfamiliar with the artist! Also I was dreading one of those Irish counties which generally I have never heard of.
16. Dnk Andre, thought it was a reference to Asterix. Liked the clue though. I believe 8d’s country was actually known as KINSHASA Congo when I was a child. 25′, thanks verlaine and setter.
    1. Yes, and Brazzaville Congo across the river.

       Edited at 2019-01-04 10:09 pm (UTC)

17. Not too difficult, especially for a Friday, but a lot of clues which you had to look at the right way, which I didn’t always do to begin with. This led to several nice penny-drop moments, such as the corn-cutter and the Breton who actually came from Normandy, and not least, how on earth to get enough letters out of the clue to make the obviously correct BERMUDA SHORTS. Good work.
18. ….CALL IT A DAY. Thank you Mr.Farage, don’t call us, we’ll call you.

    I totally ignored “Breton” at 13D, and biffed BERMUDA SHORTS. Both of these pieces of subterfuge were lost on me but caused zero delay. Thanks V for pointing me to them ! I can’t consider them as COD material, clever as they are, as they were so easy to crack.

    I would have thought that DUENNA was well enough known not to need “in Madrid” as a qualifier.

    FOI DUENNA
    LOI CATWALK
    COD EMPRESS
    TIME 12:36

19. Pseud’s corner here – I get Breton and the photographer Henri Cartier Bresson confused and can’t remember who did what. In any case the setter sent me all over Finistere looking for the name of the lace in those caps. Echoing Kevin, there are no beaches in our immediate neighbourhood but we certainly see a lot of those shorts around here long before and long after the summer. 18.35
20. Tough going but arrived in 47’08. Liked the unexpected directions here and there, especially perhaps in 17, no doubt at once apparent to the rest of the world. Generally fell into the trap of a sort of anti-synonymous over-focussing, or thinking too precisely on the event. One would like to think Hamlet as a kind of pre-Verlaine regularly thumped Polonius at the Elsinore daily, but who knows? Perhaps – indeed a more cheerful prospect for me – it was the other way round.
21. Tough going at about an hour for me – which is top end for this untalented cruciverbalist. My FOI was CALL IT A DAY whilst running through the early down clues, mostly from the shape of the answer and the phone call. I struggled with CRUCIBLE and never saw the significance of the dash in BERMUDA SHORTS, which I also rejected initially because I understood them to be comfortable business attire on the island, rather than beachwear.

    Thanks Setter and Verlaine for an entertaining hour, and enlightenment.

    1. Sorry, that was me – I thought I was logged on
22. 12:59 with the shorts biffed and no real issues other than having to overwrite KinChasa.
23. Several clues here which I got half of, and then struggled to get the other half -eg ALIST, LOAD, CARNATION. LOI’s were CRUCIBLE and CASELOAD – didn’t know what a CRU was, not being a wine drinker. That’s my bit of GK for the day!
24. With a long painful wait for the last clue to go in which was Caseload. 17 across reminded me of a recent Spectator crossword, where the multiple meanings of pink were the hidden theme. By memory, they also include to stab, and a type of dye. Funnily enough the same pink theme was used about a decade ago, which goes to show how we all run out of ideas eventually. Duenna and Hierarch went in without much difficulty, though to be honest if I’d been asked to define them I am not sure I could have. Difference between passive and active knowledge. Corn cutter is — methinks — an example of a definition which is both extremely clever, and by the same token quite easy. Assuming we don’t take it at face value, then the foot association is the obvious one. COD to Crucible for reminding us of the Sybil. Many thanks to setter and Verlaine.
25. As Verlaine says, not as hard as Fridays used to be, a gentle 15 minutes. Nothing to dislike. Saw the hyphen in the beachwear. Maybe Fridays will toughen up once we’ve had next Wednesday’s final final.
26. …even with two erroneous biffs, ‘blather’ and ‘Kinhassa’, which had to be corrected from the crossing words. I didn’t get to appreciate a lot of the wordplay.

    I was unusually sharp in picking out the trick literals, and saw almost at once that a ‘corn cutter’ must be some sort of foot surgeon. Strange how that happens sometimes.

    1. My mind was working the opposite way. I panicked when I realised I didn’t know the names of any Irish corn cutters or old bits of Lisbon.
       1. ‘Escudo’ was one of my first ones in – a Portuguese coin ending in -do? Easy.
          1. Yes, I basically biffed it from “old bit of Lisbon… (6)”, and worked out the wordplay later.
27. Not knowing M. Breton, SURREALISM was my LOI. I had a filled grid at 32 minutes but went back to my biffed BERMUDA SHORTS, and found all the parsing bar the dash. That added a couple of minutes and I submitted at 34:42. A careless removal of the E from leather rather than the A held up HAILSTONE for a while, but at least precluded HAILSTORM. Saw the CHIROPODIST fairly quickly but the CROP CIRCLES took longer. Liked REINCARNATION. ECCENTRIC was my FOI. Nice puzzle. Thanks setter and V.
28. I must have vaguely known that there was a painter called Breton but it didn’t register at the time. So SURREALISM only became obvious when I had all the checkers. My LOI. A very enjoyable puzzle solved with a fair amount of biffing. 27 minutes. Ann
    1. Not a painter!
       1. Thanks for the info. I just googled him. No wonder I haven’t much heard of him – even the Wikipaedia page seems bewildered. It’s a good job I had all those checkers in place…
29. Went to the auction of Breton’s Paris flat contents a few years back. Loads of waffle-irons, for some reason.
    1. It wasn’t all auctioned off. Many of the most interesting things he owned are collected in a reconstruction of his flat permanently installed at the Pompidou Centre.
30. Slow today; over half an hour, but no dramas. Feeling a bit dozy. LOI crucible. Nice puzzle, and great blog, v, thanks.
31. 10:47, quite straightforward today.
    I had no problem with the definition of BERMUDA SHORTS: the term seems to have expanded to include more or less any sort of long shorts.
32. I got the top half of this fairly quickly and then put a lot of time into the bottom half without complete success. A RAINSTORM held me up; I noted Blather for 28a but it didn’t fit.
    Crucible, Caseload, Neolith and the foot man also wanting.
    I would have said my caseload was my normal level of work but perhaps the point is that work is never done.
    I think I need a glass of bobbly.
    David
33. I liked this and I was pleased with my time. Last two to solve were Crucible and Caseload. This puzzle appeared somehow familiar. Maybe there were a few commonalities with recent puzzles.

    COD: Bermu – orts. I didn’t spot the dash.

34. 40:28 not too chewy for a Friday but still challenging enough to keep me mightily entertained. FOI 10ac. LOI 13dn. Big ticks for 14ac, 17ac, 26ac, 27ac and 16dn.
35. Did not know Escudo so confess I entered Eucado. Therefore DNF. Also correctly entered Crucible without knowing why. Nice puzzle, though, with fair share of unusual words.
36. Are all of you Mensa members????? I feel triumphant when I actually solve half or more of these puzzles. As an Aussie I may be excused for not knowing many British towns and counties etc. This crossword is my “drive myself insane” kind of challenge. Thank you for this site.
37. I started doing the Times puzzles two or three years back, often not finishing more than about half of the puzzle, and am still gradually improving with experience. Coming here to find out what I got wrong and why was definitely a big help!

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