Times 27244 – what happened to Les One through Five?

57 comments on “Times 27244 – what happened to Les One through Five?”

1. A lot of time taken dragging BRIMSTONE from memory (parsed after the successful drag) and then trying to see why NIMBUS (didn’t until after submitting). FUSEE was another that took time to remember. And then I had THE SIX, which of course made it difficult to come up with MANUEL & STIPULATE. Biffed 3d from the enumeration, never bothered to parse it. Liked MAN-YEARS (I wasted time trying to think of EAR-something), but COD to STIPULATE.
2. I knew ratafia would come in handy one day!. I heard it mentioned in a Kingston Trio song decades ago! My favourite today was TWENTY-FOUR-SEVEN, although that sort of phrase is not one of my favourites!
3. Ah, RAFFIA of course. Though I had the right answer, I was fixated on RATTAN which did not work for the wordplay.
4. Kudos to Martin for his spanking time. Is he the new Cassandra, we wonder?

   Like Aphis I fell at the RAFFIA fence (knowing neither biscuit nor drink), but since I also refused at the BRIMSTONE obstacle, this meant two days in a row where the setter was the winner by a distance. Pleased at least to remember LES SIX from a previous puzzle, which gave me a sort of Burton Albion kind of consolation.

   Edited at 2019-01-10 03:37 am (UTC)

   1. Thank you, ulaca. It surprised me, too, especially when I saw that my time was better than Kevin Gregg’s. No idea where it came from. I had been thinking I was going the other way and losing the crossword plot!
5. ….and gave up after an hour with several unsolved. I read several chapters of Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs while listening to a Sonny Stitt CD (yes, I do have a CD player), and then came back. I biffed ‘ratafia’, thinking it was the fiber rather than the biscuit, and then saw ‘rosella’.

   I then looked at the butterfly, and suddenly remembered the ‘brimstone’, which left only 11. But I had ‘peg out’, which didn’t really seem very right, so I erased it and tried again. Bingo! ‘Log out’, and then ‘Scot’s Pine’ followed, although here in the US we say ‘Scotch Pine’.

   So I did solve it in the end, but my time was pretty bad. I never did understand ‘twenty-four seven’, either.

6. 34 minutes but missed some parsing re TWENTY-FOUR SEVEN and TREMOR where I would never have thought of ‘Omerta’. DK FUSEE nor HEAD VOICE. For the record, LES SIX were: Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre.
7. I just wish I’d remembered to go back and try to figure out how to parse the clue for TWENTY-FOUR SEVEN before coming here, as it seems obvious now! Not obvious was the bird, of which I’d never heard, but the wordplay spelled it out, as it did FUSEE, which was at least vaguely familiar, though (or because) it looked French. Thought this was a great puzzle, starring the luminaries DONATELLO (my sculptor friend calls him the greatest of them all) and COCTEAU. Coincidence, if not synchronicity: One of the two I worked today for future issues of The Nation included as an answer STIPULATED.
8. Lovely stuff, in the words of Shakin’ Stevens. A few things which were right on the edge of my vocabulary – FUSEE, ROSELLA, HEAD VOICE – but the word play was impeccable.

   Fans of the Molesworth books will have immediately thought of Grabber, Head of Skool captane of everything and winner of the Mrs Joyfull Prize for Raffia work.

   1. Yes I remembered the Molesworth connection Tim. I think Fotherington-Tomas always won that prize. In skule crafts class we did raffia-work along with crewel-work to decorate the backs of fire-guards and embroidering tray-cloths. Carpentry wasn’t offered.
      1. Now I’m going to have to look that up this evening. I’m pretty sure it was Grabber. Nice to see the references to Nigel appearing right above his picture (see post below: maybe Bletchleyreject picked his posting time with care today.
   2. Molesworth belongs to that select band where the illustrator is better known that the author.
9. Didn’t know the biscuit, the match, the composers, the high-pitched sounds or the butterfly but all were gettable and I finished in 39 minutes. Missed the parsing of TWENTY-FOUR-SEVEN.

   I liked the MANY EARS word play and the (almost) ‘omerta’ reversal, but my favourite was ROSELLA for reminding me of Eastern Rosellas, some of the most beautiful birds you could wish to see.

   Thanks to setter and blogger

   1. Yes, Rosellas are beautiful but, in our experience, they get bossed around by the cocky Lorikeets who strut around as if they own the place.
10. Your setter, solitary, into books, many years, sign off endlessly depressed by painful condition, log out, out of date, being out, having left …….the end.

    I hope the setter is ok as I rather enjoyed this and trusted him/her with LES SIX, HEAD VOICE and FUSEE. Usual time.

    1. Having recently suffered my third attack of gout, I was definitely depressed – but not quite suicidal !
       1. I sympathise deeply. An Allopurinol every day keeps the gout away in my case but I can remember awful attacks in the past.
11. 25 mins with yoghurt etc.
    I liked this and I seemed to have the right GK except for DNK Fusee.
    A few minutes lost ruling out LOI Sti(m)ulate by stopping to parse it properly.
    Thanks setter and G.
12. 58 minutes, with the last five spent on the unknown 14a RATAFIA, not least because I didn’t know if raffia or rattan was going to be involved and wasn’t entirely certain about the unknown 4d ROSELLA, either… Also unknown were the BRIMSTONE butterfly, FUSEE, and not just LES SIX collectively, but now Jack’s enumerated them, all of them individually!

    Still, there was enough obscure vocab scattered about to have more confidence in biffing the unlikely-looking ones from the fair wordplay.

    COD to the many ears of 28a, which raised a groan.

13. Our Western Rosellas are pretty special birds too.
    29 mins for me. Never heard of RATAFIA,FUSEE or LES SIX – in fact I have heard of one of them, Poulenc, but the other five seem to have sunk without trace. Maybe music buffs on here will correct me.
    1. I’m watching quite a lot of old British films at the moment on Talking Pictures TV and Georges Auric’s name comes up quite a lot in the music credits. He wrote for some of the famous Ealing comedies and also some of their lesser known (but still excellent) thrillers.
       1. Honegger’s 2nd symphony is worth a listen, has a jolly ending. Milhaud wasn’t bad but a bit dreary. The Poulenc organ concerto is great, I think my friend John Marsden played it in Christ Church cathedral on at least one occasion. The other 3 I don’t know much about.
14. Proving once again that 20 minutes is my default setting. LOI Tremor, which had to wait for Brimstone, which had to wait for Fusee which had to wait for Skewer. A nice French sub-theme, what with Les Six and Cocteau. Darius Milhaud lent his name to the conservatoire down the road from me, and a Cocteau painting adorns my workplace, so both were familiar. Happy to have worked through Ratafia to a successful entry, though I did not know the word. Many thanks to setter and blog.
15. 32 minutes with unknowns FUSEE, ROSELLA, HEAD VOICE and LES SIX all proving correct. TWENTY-FOUR-SEVEN was clever enough to have me wondering about twenty past seven for a while before the penny dropped. MANUEL hadn’t come by then as I no doubt wrongly pronounce it as Emmanuel without the front bit, but I was saved by Fawlty Towers. I liked IT’S A FREE COUNTRY although by now I imagine Big Brother is watching me from the other side of this iPad screen. COD though to MAN-YEARS, a term we used to use all the time when the world believed in corporate planning. Is it people-years nowadays for the forlorn few left trying to plot a future? Good luck to them. I think my avatar is holding his head in shame at the moment, as I am. I don’t think Christian Doidge does the Times crossword but if he does, sorry pal. Thank you George and setter

    Edited at 2019-01-10 10:34 am (UTC)

    1. I suspect Mr.Doidge would even be happier at Burton Albion.
16. More than a little TLS about this intelligent and witty puzzle, which took me 16.21 but didn’t at any stage feel easy. Perhaps I was lucky with the vocab, the arty references all being within my orbit and and an empty packet of ratafia biscuits only recently chucked in the recycling. Yum!
    Loved the Uxbridge SKEWER, the neatly mathematical 24/7, and (though well beyond 64) the MANY EARS from now.
    Clever to include the incredibly talented COCTEAU in with LES SIX: he appears in the celebrated painting of (cinq de) LES SIX and was very much a part, even a leading part, of that group.
    Perhaps if Sawbill’s astute observation is correct, saying enough nice things about this grid will persuade our setter to eschew retirement and come up with some more quality stuff. I do hope so.
    1. Your subject line reminds me of the time when one of the teams on ‘My Word’ had to make something out of ‘Apocalypse Now’. I think the solution was an Italian movie director telling an actress to pout : ‘A-pucka da lips Now’!
       1. Only punchline I can remember is ‘You can’t have your kayak and heat it’ after a long excursus about an Inuit water-borne picnic, or some such.
          1. Lovely!
17. Excellent puzzle today, took 25 minutes with 13a requiring a look up at the end. And guessed the parrot. Hot stuff Martin our NZ champ.
    1. Thank you, Pip! As I mentioned to ulaca, I don’t know where that came from. ‘No artificial aids like WordWizard were used in the solving of this puzzle!’
18. 39 mins. A most enjoyable puzzle. I rejected raffia for several minutes, unable to see how the raw material could be synonymous with the artisan/maker. My GK on butterflies, biscuits, composers, sculptors, singing and meteorology was quite adequate: but fell short in avian species. The wordplay fixed it, though. I had also forgotten that the mythical chimera was indeed monstrous — the word drifted into my head but I quickly dismissed it, thinking it only some sort of will-‘o-the-wisp, fantasy, idealised vision.
    Thanks for this neat and precise blog, George.
    And thanks for this lovely puzzle, setter.
19. Well I will swear I saw RATAFIA only the other day .. a search doesn’t bring that up, though it has appeared several times in the past. Jumbo 1027 had 50ac: “Basket-maker’s thanks for first fine liqueur (7)” which is nearly the same clue..
    Fusee familiar from Hornblower books but still my last one in. Nho les six, and only vaguely knew rosellas.
    Altogether this must have taken me 1/2hr by the time I was done, and I found yesterday’s hard too .. struggling a bit this week!

    1. Thank you, you saved me from googling fusee to check my conviction that somewhere amongst the Hornblower, Jack Aubrey, and Richard Bolitho canons I had come across fusees being touched to the cannons to fire them.
       R
    2. I was in the UK over Christmas and caught an episode of Pointless. One of the answers (to ingredients in Mary Berry’s trifle) was ratafia biscuits. Maybe you saw it too?
       1. I did! You are right .. that is what I was thinking of. Thank you! I recall that none of the contestants knew it
20. I took nearly an hour longer than our excellent blogger to work through this, finishing, just, in 1h 3m. With absolutely no criticism of the setter – the failing is mine, not his – there was too much classical education needed here to suit a pleb like me.

    However, the word play throughout was definitely fair and even allowed an ignoramus like me to make some inspired guesses at the gaps in GK before entering the LOI (SOLITARY) and thereby submitting my homework for marking.

    An excellent puzzle, for which I give thanks, and a most helpful blog – thanks again.

21. ..went reasonably straight in, never heard of him before the TV programme.

    Having stood for years next to tenors who will suddenly let go with their HEAD VOICE, that was quite quick too.

    I wonder how a French speaker would cope with 3d? – or has this gross Americanism become universal?

    15’27”, thanks george and setter.

22. ….write-ins and DNK’s.

    Thanks to Jack for identifying LES SIX – I’d only ever heard vaguely of Poulenc and Milhaud, but then I’m more blues and rock.

    I knew both FUSEE and RATAFIA, and they went straight in, but the other DNK’s were ROSELLA and HEAD VOICE.

    Thanks to George for parsing SOLITARY, and the clever TWENTY-FOUR-SEVEN.

    FOI NIMBUS
    LOI ROSELLA (I was lucky that “roseola” didn’t fit, parses OK, but the wrong definition entirely !)
    COD IT’S A FREE COUNTRY
    TIME 12:18

23. Comes up in Georgette Heyer as a sort of lady-like drink so perhaps the biscuits were considered a dainty kind of snack to go with it. I first encountered Cocteau when our school French club rented La Belle Et La Bete – marvellous. Auric (one of Les Six as Jack and Pip note) composed the dream-like score. 16.11
24. 15:24. I got completely stuck with four clues left and didn’t solve one for over five minutes. Eventually I decided to just assume that FUSEE was a word, which unlocked BRIMSTONE and then NIMBUS (which I should really have got more quickly) and SKEWER.
    I didn’t know the match, the voice, the composers or the butterfly but I remembered the birds from previous appearances here. I knew RATAFIA as a drink but not as a biscuit.
25. Having completed two in a row under the hour (Tues – 43.46 and Thurs – 59.45, didn’t dare take on Weds) felt emboldened to dip a toe into big cryptic blog. Really enjoyed the challenge up from QC. Only 3dn beat me with its parsing, so thanks blogger.
    1. Well done soj!
26. I’m sure it appears somewhere in Flanders and Swann, but I can’t place it. Jack will know. (It is both a biscuit and a liqueur, but I’m not getting mixed up with Madeira, which Donald Swann’s nephew thought was about cake.)
    1. Have some Madeira my dear!
       1. wonderful song, the only one I know with the word “antepenultimate” in the lyrics
          1. We had a Duo called Quicksilver at a Saltburn Folk Club Concert last year, named Quicksilver, who sang it brilliantly. One half of the Duo is Grant Baynam, who also writes his own comic songs, and has appeared on the Beeb doing them. There is a Grant Baynam who sometimes bloggs on 15 squared. I wonder if it’s the same chap?
27. I had many of the same unknowns, but managed to work them out from the precise wordplay. Had heard of Honneger and Poulenc but not THE SIX. RATAFIA was familiar, probably from the Jumbo mentioned by Jerry. Didn’t manage to fully parse 3d, but just moved on. Unfortunately, unlike Myrtilus, I didn’t pause to parse STIMULATE properly, thinking create a demand has to be right, so I had a pink square. 31:52 with 1 error. Drat! Thanks setter and George.
28. 14:28, a few tricky bits and an enjoyable puzzle overall.
29. 31 min., not understanding everything, but enjoying the sharpness throughout. Perhaps the whisper of the labour of solitary man-years, 24/7, chimera etc., applies rather to the business of living than to the setter’s occupation…a drear thought but 6 dn., and somehow perversely satisfying for the new year.
30. Donald helped me a bit with this one, by curtailing my work in Washington and returning me to my comfort zone here in East Anglia where I could re-boot my brain. Thanks to that, I got through this in about 22 minutes.

    There were a few NHOs: RATAFIA, ROSELLA and LES SIX. A quick bit of Googling tells me who LES SIX were, and I have to say that I’d’ve struggled to recognize any of the names. Personally, I’d say they were just un six, rather than les six. FUSEE was more familiar to me from horology, where it is an elegantly ingenious invention, but it wasn’t a big leap from “fuse” to a match.

    Despite this puzzle being a little on the light side, I thought there were many excellent clues. Thanks to the setter and, of course, to our blogger.

31. Held up at the end by FUSEE and LES SIX, neither of which I knew. Didn’t get the minus nine bit either – was trying to remove IX from something.
    Talking of parrots, I discovered this in a free audiobook from Stephen Fry, which might be up many of our streets: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Frys-English-Delight-Series-1-Audiobook/B0797YWFBN?qid=1547139885&sr=sr_1_4&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_4&pf_rd_p=c6e316b8-14da-418d-8f91-b3cad83c5183&pf_rd_r=XA1248S4X3GHBSA10GX8&

    Two parrots are sitting on a perch. One says to the other “What’s that smell?”.

32. 22 mins. Cracking puzzle and great blog. Cheers.
33. Pretty comfortable though NHO BRIMSTONE as a butterfly nor ROSELLA as a parrot. Fortunately my daughter’s name translates into Italian as ROSELLA (my wife has Italian relations) so the word at least was familiar. SKEWER took a while to think of, even with checkers, and parsed only a third of STIPULATE.
34. 33:12 with a dithersome few minutes at the end trying to remember the butterfly and trying to convince myself that 13ac really was going to be fusee. An enjoyable solve.
35. In my experience the French say “ze twentyfourseven” .. but they don’t need to say it very often. It would leave no time for lunch! Not to mention “le weekend”
36. Thanks setter and glheard
    Took just under the hour to get this one out and enjoyed it a lot. Didn’t end up parsing the 24-7 clue and after seeing how it worked, I wish I did. Also liked MAN-YEARS after puzzling for a while with the word play.
    A number of new terms, mostly that have been previously mentioned, but had heard of LES SIX (only from other crosswords) and of course the ROSELLA, which was one of my last in – shouldn’t have been as it is a very common bird here. Finished in the NE corner with that bird, LEARN (with the other meaning of ‘digest’) and RATAFIA (where I also went down the rattan path for way too long) as the last few in.

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