Times 27,251: 28ac was a write-in!

58 comments on “Times 27,251: 28ac was a write-in!”

1. Not the stinker we anticipated, I even thought it was easier than yesterday’s, but that’s probably just because I had fewer distractions. Sometimes I think I get stuck on one or two at the end (usually crossers) just because they are last, and I neurotically get anxious (though I don’t time myself) about finishing as quickly as I thought I would. But this time I was seriously doubtful about PIN being a flag, and I was stuck on DUST-UP rather than BUST-UP and couldn’t parse it (almost looks like “dues” is in there)—it’s not an American expression! So that was my LOI. I also didn’t realize till I came here that I forgot to go back to parse a couple I biffed.
2. I could have shaved 3 minutes off that time if I hadn’t had doubts about RUSTICATED, my LOI, and which I never did parse. I was wondering if REL was some sort of material I didn’t know of (1d)–having taken ‘South American’ to be SA. I thought PONG was the stink, not the stinking thing; not that that kept me from biffing 23ac. Yale is a US university, all right; Berkeley is a city. A city I do hope you can settle down in, V. I spent 15 wonderful years there, including a couple sharing a house in the hills directly across from the Golden Gate Bridge. COD to LEAGUE.
   1. I’ve asked a local expert on such matters and the “University of California, Berkeley” is referred to as Berkeley a lot in practice; though more often “Cal” by people who went there! It probably passes muster I think. I mean, Oxford is probably *technically* “the University of Oxford” or something similar, &c…
3. Easy stuff for a Friday, concluding a pretty easy week. PIN is common parlance among golfers. Collins (14) has ‘(golf) the flagpole marking the hole on a green’.
   1. I thought about this, but was then left pondering whether a flagpole is a flag.
      1. I’m not a golfer, but I’m pretty sure ‘pin’ refers to the whole thing, not just the pole. The slight query I have is whether the object in question is ever called a ‘flag’ in the context of golf.
         1. It is indeed often referred to as ‘the flag’. In fact, in casual golf talk, ‘the pin’ and ‘the flag’ are completely interchangeable, even though they both involve a bit of synecdoche.
            1. That makes sense. More generally when people refer to ‘flags’ they are often implicitly including whatever the flag is attached to. Flag-waving crowds aren’t generally just waving around bits of cloth.
         2. Within the interchangeability that Vinyl notes, I think the difference between the pole and the pennant is still residually visible in collocations such as “nearest the pin” (the award given to the tee shot nearest the hole on a par 3) and “right over the flag” (an aggressive approach shot whose trajectory takes it directly over the pennant).
4. Ditto ulaca
5. I managed to turn this into a stinker. The North West passage unstuck me again.

   It all began when I took 2dn to be a DDF and stuck in PRIOR!
   For 1dn I could only muster LIGHT PEN and for 10ac, instead of taking STOCK, I had THICK and finally 12ac appeared to be MARGINATE – MARGATE and IN somehow! Trouble was none of this fitted together terribly well. So a horryd DNF!

   FOI 1ac LIPSTICK

   COD 11ac MORECOMBE (The hilarious National Treasure John Eric Bartholomew) Forget Margate!

   WOD 20ac WHITHER? – upwards I hope!

   1. My sympathies – I nearly went for prior too. Luckily, I got stock while I was mulling that over.
   2. The NW was definitely the hardest corner in my estimation too, and where I spent much of the second half of my solving time, so commiserations!
6. 18:55. Held up at the end for nearly 5 minutes by my last two, which I resorted to an alphabet trawl to get – PIPPIN (which I only knew as a type of apple) and LASER PEN, which I failed to parse thinking, like Kevin, that REL must be a material I’d never heard of. COD to RUSTICATE for me too. Thanks V and setter.
   1. Ditto re PIPPIN
7. Loved the PLUTOCRAT clue! I had a lot of difficulty getting started so I was a bit suprised to have all but two answers in after 32 minutes. But as often happens to me in such situations I couldn’t summon the energy to stare at the unsolved clues any longer so I used aids to prompt me with a synonym for ‘implied’ at 12 from which I was able to deduce RUSTICATE as the answer. But even then, with all the checkers in place and having thought of LASER as the most likely first word at 1dn, I failed to come up with PEN as the second word so I used Reveal to put me out of my misery. Up to that point it had all been very enjoyable.

   Edited at 2019-01-18 08:18 am (UTC)

8. Whither goest thou Britain in thy vintage car in the night? I always ask my youngest ‘Whither goest thou?’ as he goes out. He treats it as a rhetorical question. A nice puzzle but quite easily done in 19 minutes. LOI RUSTICATE. I think COD to PIPPIN, because it’s a while since I’ve heard it used to mean an example. Ear worm for today – Connie Francis and Lipstick on your Collar. Thank you V and setter.

   Edited at 2019-01-18 09:06 am (UTC)

   1. When things are getting particularly jolly on CBeebies show “In The Night Garden”, slumming narrator Derek Jacobi is wont to exclaim in forced excitement “isn’t that a pip!” Which I expect is the closest we get to a modern usage of “pippin”.
9. 8m on the nose today. Another easy one, and another where I seem to have been on the wavelength (NITCH of 52).
10. 19 minutes, wondering how RUSTICATE worked and just remembering not to spell MORECAMBE with an O in time to submit.
    The setter is to be commended for not quite resorting to CRS to clue BERKELEY.
11. 22 mins. Another nice puzzle without too many hold-ups. No plants or rare antelopes, so just my sort of thing.
12. . .didn’t help that I had Panstick at 1a . .
13. Another one here who thought the REL was material (short for “relevant” maybe – oh never mind). I didn’t really get PIN either although a Stars and Stripes lapel pin is de rigueur for members of Congress to signal how patriotic they are, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t what the setter meant. The juxtaposition of AWFUL and OFFAL made me smile – I know quite a few Americans for whom those would be homophones. When you wake up on Pacific time V you mean 15D, not A, in your intro. Nice puzzle for which I had a rather sluggish 20.16

    Edited at 2019-01-18 10:45 am (UTC)

14. Done in the lounge at Gatwick. Really wanted a difficult one to occupy me on my 9 hour flight. Oh well. The Guardian and FT will have to do.
    I too stuck in PANSTICK for a few seconds until the laser pen pointed me in the right direction.
15. Add me to the people whose solve started with a confident PANSTICK at 1ac, which meant that corner needed undoing again before I could finish. Not sure there’s a word for a perfectly valid solution which is only proved to be wrong by other clues; difficult to see past something which looks perfectly legitimate in isolation, of course.

    Elsewhere, I had fingers crossed for PIPPIN, because it’s a rather obscure usage, with half of it clued by what some might describe as one of those three-point turns in the thesaurus things. Still, as pilots say, any landing you walk away from is a good one.

16. Spent some time thinking of a breed of cattle with five letters, until STOCK surfaced, making swiftly entered PRIOR wrong, as others have noted.

    A hypothesis is an informed guess, a theory fits the known facts, or at least most of them, until another theory comes along. Only in mathematics do you get the elegance of proof.

    I love PLAINSONG.

    20′ 37” thanks v and setter.

17. I was relieved not to be faced with the expected Friday stinker, and surprised when my FOI was the NHO EUPHONY, the O of which allowed me to TAKE IT ON THE CHIN. The NW rejected any further attempts at conquest, and I moved on. I made steady progress in a clockwise direction and eventually returned to the NW, where STOCK and LIPSTICK jumped out at me and allowed me to pop in PIOUS and work out LASER PEN, before finishing off with RUSTICATE. I did like PLUTOCRAT, and actually worked out the parsing before typing it in, despite the temptation to biff. Nice puzzle. 26:36. Thanks setter and V.

    Edited at 2019-01-18 11:23 am (UTC)

18. While 28 had to be Berkeley, I was not happy with the vagueness of “getting one letter wrong”. Shouldn’t the setter be more precise indicating, albeit cryptically, that an E is replaced by an A?
    1. Ideally, yes. I’ve seen a few clues in my time indicating that “a change in the first letter is required”, where that change is arbitrary (though usually obvious). “Getting a letter wrong” is a big ask of the solver! Let’s hope no one didn’t know Berkeley or how to spell it immediately they thought of BERK, or there may have been tears before bedtime.
19. Had a severe case of Wandering Mind Syndrome this morning, but I kept on coming back to the job at hand and eventually finished in 54 minutes, with the crossers of BUST-UP (why do I never think of “sub”?) and the unknown meaning of PIPPIN. Happily I was okay with “pin” for “flag”, dictionaries notwithstanding, as I reckon it’s become a metonym (synecdoche?) for the whole thing over the years, at least among golfers.

    Wasn’t helped by trying to stick PRIOR in at 2d, nor by wondering why “whiter” would mean “waste” at 20a, having completely failed to notice the fact there was more than one “H”!

    Mostly I enjoyed being prompted to think of Eric MORECAMBE. I’d give my short fat hairy legs to be as funny as he was.

    Edited at 2019-01-18 12:18 pm (UTC)

    1. I went to the BFI to watch an afternoon of “Missing Presumed Wiped” TV a month or two back, and was treated to some rediscovered, early Morecambe & Wise… he was indeed a brilliant comedian, though I expect they might have preferred the verrrrrrry broad Irishmen/IRA sketch to have remained in obscurity!
       1. Hah! I think I was treated to a bit of that BFI footage this afternoon, as I went to see The Goodies at the Bristol Slapstick Festival. Richard Herring (presenting) mentioned the BFI when screening some obscure rediscovered bits from a show they did with Engelbert Humperdinck, anyway…

          Edited at 2019-01-19 04:49 pm (UTC)

          1. The funny thing about those events is that, as far as I can tell, they’re essentially entirely populated by ageing Doctor Who fans who are desperate to relocate the lost episodes from the 60s, but have to make do with screening the stuff they find in film canisters in remote African television studios that *isn’t* Doctor Who…
             1. Well, if it keeps ’em out of trouble…
20. I did this on paper for a change and was rather pleased with my time of 17:40 for a Friday. But I misspelt Morecambe as Morecombe, had Greene for Orwell with doubts, and missed out League where I had E-A-U- because of Greene. I also saw a Carbon dog in 15 down where there was none. So all in all a concatenation of errors.

    COD: League.

21. 9m 27s, nothing too terrifying here – although I also was confused by REL at 1d. PIPPIN was my last entry, where the meaning of pin escaped me but the answer was pretty clear.
22. But I feel I should have been quicker. A couple of quite corny clues, I thought, like Adverb and Exclamation Mark. Berkeley should have been a shoo-in once I had the K, but for some reason it was my LOI. Euphony was one of W. Somerset Maugham’s three definitions of good writing. Can’t remember the other two. Economy? Rusticate reminds me of Exeat, which we had recently. At boarding school in the 70s, being rusticated meant being sent home for a period as a punishment.
    1. There’s nothing corny about grammar! I quite enjoyed those two clues, though they can’t have been the hardest to put together.
23. Whenever John Mortimer’s father would catch sight of his four year old son, he would question him, “Is execution done on Cawdor?”

    I’ve often been tempted to greet my own son in the same way. So far I’ve avoided doing so and have spared myself one less withering look.

    1. My bastardised reference was probably to obscure to be recognised. Jack Kerouac in ‘On the Road’, the Beats’ Bible set in the late forties, wrote: “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” I was too young for the Beats but was a big enough pseud to read ‘On the Road’ in the sixties. I suspect the better lyric for Britain’s present confusion would be Dylan’s ‘Senor’. “Can you tell me where we’re headin’? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?” David (davidivad1) and I are meeting at The George next Tuesday, 22 January, at 2.30 pm for a modest libation. If you or any other poster is about, we’d be delighted to see you.
       1. I didn’t know your reference but google had enlightened me. I’d love to join you at The George next week but sadly can’t. Have a great time!
       2. Your youngest is really missing a trick by not replying “to Rome, to be crucified again” to your queries…

          On the subject of Shakespearean interrogations of children, I’m thinking I might take up “Nothing can come of nothing; speak again” when met with surly or iPad-engrossed silence.

          1. He’s a mathematical physicist, not a theologian. Whether something was an up or down crucifixion would be no more than a matter of convention.
    2. Wasn’t John Mortimer’s father blind?98
       1. He became blind but could see when John Mortimer was a young child.
24. No real idea of time, as I did this in drabs and dribs. It was all fairly straightforward, I thought, apart from PIPPIN. In the end, I deconstructed it from the apple, figuring that it was called Cox’s because it was bred by a Mr. Cox (or possibly a Mrs. Cox), orange because it was orange, and PIPPIN because, well, it must mean something excellent.

    I was also confused about LASER PEN – thanks to Verlaine for clarifying.

25. I managed to get into this-Exclamation Mark was a big help- and I had the RHS done whilst the LHS completely blank. Eventually I finished with Bust Up and Pippin. For 18a I was sure that DUE = membership fee, maybe followed by NOT reversed. Anyway I avoided that and went with the American golfing term for flag in 19d. I like to hit the pin as a golfer, my wife does the same with her credit card.
    We had an American spelling in the QC today and two American universities here. All a long way from Morecambe (also in the QC recently) which is a place that very few people seem to visit. When I lived in Preston we invariably went to Blackpool or Southport. David
    1. Blackpool and Southport: the chalk and cheese of seaside resorts, kiss-me-quick hats or the Flower Show. I love ’em both.
26. ….as I avoided all the traps, although I had to trust the wordplay for ‘pippin’.

    I did think that 1 across would turn out to contain ‘slap’, and thought it might be ‘slapdown’. Since I could make that work, I wisely left it blank until I had some crossers.

27. ….not ! My late father pronounced MORECAMBE in faux Italian as “Morricambi”. I was there briefly late last year, but there’s nothing to encourage one to stay any longer than necessary these days, nor has there been for 25 years or more.

    I made heavier weather of this than I should have done, and a third of my time was spent swimming uphill through treacle in the NW corner (despite having picked off both LASER PEN and LIPSTICK quickly enough).

    EUPHONY should be split after two letters, and used to describe Juncker in my opinion.

    I liked the “punny” crossing of AWFUL/OFFAL in the SE corner, but BERKELEY was one of the poorest clues of the year so far.

    FOI EUPHONY
    LOI PIOUS
    COD COMPANY
    TIME 15:04

    1. Ah! But cometh the Eden Project…
    2. Italian citizen leaving front of Morecambe bay (4).
       17a in yesterday’s QC.
       David

28. I found this easy, and pleasant, as most others did. Thanks to the setter, the editor, and the blogger. I think you are going to find getting the puzzle at 4pm useful and time-saving.

    I get grumpy when unusual usages keep me from finishing in good time; today the two eyebrow raises didn’t slow me down. Following our bi-annual ‘is MIT a college or a university’ discussion earlier this week, the first one was that I rarely hear Berkeley – it’s either Cal, or U.C. Berkeley in my family (classes of 1908, 1944, 1947). The other was that I’ve never equated taking it on the chin with bravery (or cowardice, either) – I’ve only used it to mean take the full, and probably unpleasant, impact. “Give it to me on the chin”, by contrast, implies bravery (or foolishness).

    1. Getting the puzzle at 4pm is going to be very good for my sleep schedules… but I will miss being there for the best hours of raucous badinage in the comments!

       Your MIT reference reminds me, my resident Cambridge alumna was very tickled by the juxtaposition of an alt-Cambridge college (MIT) with her actual Cambridge college (Pembroke) in that puzzle.

29. Well not really, but that’s what I thought the literal for 4d was. I don’t seem to be flexible enough to adjust my initial assessment of a clue. Especially as ‘actors’ is usually ‘cast’.
    Once I was in good COMPANY the rest fell into place very nicely, with a bit of a hiccup over my LOI LASER PEN, where I tried to put the REAL around the whole clue. However fortunately there aren’t too many words that fit _ER. I also didn’t know about American PENS.
30. A half-decent crossword ruined by some poor clues, although all biffable except for ‘laser pen’ which I had NHO. Not sure that ‘lip’ equates to insults. More like cheek. ‘Take it on the chin’ isn’t really showing courage. It’s merely the acceptance of perhaps unforeseen consequences that is taking it on the chin. The courage comes beforehand. Close but no cigar IMO. What has shouting got to do with exclamation marks? 8d was a bit clunky, and while clearly biffable, 28a just doesn’t work really. Apart from the above-mentioned vagueness, I think the surface is unfair. I read it as reversing another fool because of the colon separation. Leave the colon out, insert a comma after ‘fool’, and I think it would read better? But we’ve had nearly three weeks of pretty reasonable crosswords by and large, and It had to end sometime, so I’m not getting too grumpy about this aberration. (Mr Grumpy)
31. No time today. Running round like a headless chicken all day at work meant I didn’t really find time to have a decent run up at this. So I did what I could over lunch finishing off in the pub after work. Baffled by laser pen where I also put the south and the American together rather than the American and the prison. Also had a QM at Berkeley which I entered from US University and the fourth letter being K but still don’t quite get for the same reason as Mr Grumpy above. Rusticate was a nice clue.
32. Thanks setter and verlaine
    One of the quickest Times solves ever …. only about 4 times as long as the average of some in here. Was a rare time when I took it to a cafe and was able to get it done in the single sitting.
    My first one in was PRIOR and the last one in was the fixed up PIOUS. PIPPIN was the penultimate one in and the only one that I had to fix up the parsing from here – as a golfer, the PIN / flag equivalence was never an issue. PLUTOCRAT is one of those words that has just stuck and also presented no problem, even though it was in the second half of the solve. Was another who took an age to find REAL instead of REL at 1d.

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