Times 27256: I called it!

50 comments on “Times 27256: I called it!”

1. Well over an hour. I can’t believe my almost last one was RECONNOITRE, with all the letters in that long word staring me in the face.

   You have a minor typo at 5A where you put FOR not FOE

   Edited at 2019-01-24 04:13 am (UTC)

   1. ta
2. …I took an hour and 29 minutes, but don’t worry, I enjoy the hard ones. All correct, parsed, and understood.

   I would say this puzzle is quite as good as the ones in the Championship finals, and would have given Magoo a run for his money.

3. I’ve been absent for a while due to busy times with family hospitalizations, but I had to drop in to compliment this brilliant but difficult puzzle. Wonderfully put together. Took me around an hour, but worth every minute. Regards.
   1. Very sorry to hear that Kevin. Hope things look up soon. I’d noticed your absence.
4. Hard work. I got through the bottom half in reasonable time but struggled every step of the way with the top half, eventually resorting to aids in a couple of cases to give myself a kick-start. I’m none the wiser what ‘President’s’ is doing in 15dn.
5. I think the definition is actually “US student president”
   1. Except she’s not, although the setter may have thought she is.
      1. Good to have that confirmed, Kevin, as I looked up PROM QUEEN and couldn’t find any reference her being given that title. Wouldn’t being both President and Queen be a contradiction anyway?
         1. It didn’t stop George Lucas; if I recall correctly, in one of the Star War movies, there was a Queen of the Republic of Whatever.
      2. Doesn’t a PROM QUEEN ‘preside’ over proceedings in some way? Perhaps just symbolically.

         Edited at 2019-01-24 08:13 am (UTC)

         1. I haven’t been to a prom in over 50 years, and I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a queen (or king). But maybe where they do have them, she does preside, as it were. It wouldn’t make me very happy with the clue, but deleting the word would be unsatisfactory, too.
            1. My husband was his high school class valedictorian but he certainly wasn’t king of the prom – that role went to the best athlete who anointed his date the queen. That was then …..
6. I can’t believe I’m within 11 seconds of George. Biffing helped: NULLIFIED, OVERSLEEP, TOP HAT, STYLI. Never heard of an ACID HOUSE PARTY–just now looked up ACID HOUSE–but it was inevitable with the checkers. I can’t explain ‘president’ either.
7. 53 mins for a hard but enjoyable puzzle. I thought 25d was a really nice clue – it would be even better if John Betjeman had actually defended Slough rather than attacking it.
   1. In 2006, Betjeman’s daughter, Candida Lycett-Green went to Slough and said that her father had never meant to write that poem and certainly never meant for it to be published. She presented the mayor with an inscribed book of her father’s poems.
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/berkshire/5351512.stm
8. 15:02. Another cracking puzzle but I didn’t find it particularly hard: certainly easier than Tuesday’s. Just goes to show something or other.
   The top half was much harder than the bottom for me, including the rather brilliant hidden.
   The definition for AUDIT is wrong – someone else has to do the books for them to be audited – but close enough.
9. Well, at least I’m not the only one who found this a bit tough. I had to set it aside for a while before finishing with NULLIFY and RECONNOITRE, neither of which seems hard, after the fact. I couldn’t parse the “wordplay” for NOOKY—about which all I can say is, “Good grief!”
10. Oof. An hour and ten here, limping home with 4d RECONNOITRE. Thought I was going to do quite well after starting off with 1d and 1a in quick succession, but no. Thanks for the parsings, especially for OVERSLEEP.

    Enjoyed lots, from the “glass slipper” to the NOOKY.

    MER at 19d, as we haven’t had anything called ROAD TAX in the UK for quite some time, but I suppose it’s a common enough phrase.

    Also wasn’t sure about the PROM QUEEN being president of anything, but most of my knowledge of them comes from shows like Buffy, and presumably can’t be entirely accurate. I understand that real proms are quite seldom endangered by attack-trained Hellhounds, for one…

    Edited at 2019-01-24 08:34 am (UTC)

11. One of those rare days on which I find a puzzle on the easier side only to find from the comments here and the Snitch that it’s apparently a toughie! Unusually I had to stand up on my commute today so maybe that’s my ideal solving position.

    I was surprised by a couple of answers which I wouldn’t have guessed would be in the dictionary. I thought ACID HOUSE PARTY would have been and gone by now because as far as I’m aware they don’t occur any more. And BAKEOFF has made the dictionary? Is it all off the back of the very dull TV show or was it already a thing beforehand?

    1. I wondered about BAKEOFF but it’s in ODO and from the examples (‘for almost half a century, the Pillsbury bake-off has celebrated American home cooking’) it clearly predates the show.

       Edited at 2019-01-24 09:05 am (UTC)

12. An excellent puzzle.

    According to the stats for Saturday’s crossword someone took minus 108.55 minutes and collected over 1,000 points. How is this possible? I trust one of you computer whizzes can explain it in terms a technophobe can understand. My guess, in one word, is: hack.

    Midas

    1. I suspect programming bugs. When I was a member I once had a recorded time of 18 seconds – blew the neutrinos off the board – when the real, elapsed time was closer to 30 minutes. Certainly not hacked, only just now trying to teach myself web programming.
       Still, 18 seconds is much more than -108 minutes!
       1. Many thanks for your reply. Very impressive!
13. Slowest of the week for me but like keriothe I didn’t find it that much more difficult. My one potential stumbling block was seeing ‘what drivers pay men to lift’ and biffing GOLF BAG, luckily corrected almost immediately thanks to the very biffable ‘German diet’.
14. 58 minutes with LOI NOOKY. I’m not middle-aged so haven’t been to an ACID HOUSE PARTY, but could you go to the kitchen and share a cup of tea with the shy girl in the corner? Obviously not the PROM QUEEN. In my day, George Best would have already disappeared with her. We could discuss together the fact that the accountant did the books and the auditor reviewed them, one of my better chat-up lines. Although there were no unknowns, this had a few too many difficult clues for me to get going. I liked casing the joint in RECONNOITRE, but COD to TUMBLER, because I saw it early. Like many, I suspect, I was sorry there were no worms in the German diet, but the building instructions for the BUNDESTAG were neat. Thank you George and setter.
15. About 40 minutes for the sort of puzzle that makes the subscription worth every penny. So much to admire throughout.
16. Took a long time to see RECONNOITRE, which led to NULLIFIED – discuss grammar? Something that has been nullified is invalid, but isn’t the correct clue ‘invalidated’?

    Very enjoyable. Perversely, my good, for me, time of 23’50” gives me less than my average score, because there is an absolute scale on something that is relative, changing from day to day. And, with harder puzzles getting fewer submissions…

    Thanks george and setter.

17. Like (few) others, found it mostly straightforward – 22 min against aim/average 20 – but no less enjoyable for that. 1ac tumbler spotted immediately, ditto reconnoitre, and the top half was in in a flash. Except audit where it had to be, but I was stumped by the plaudit. Only other parsing problems were nooky where again it had to be, but first thought was OK for well; and marooned where I was hung up for a minute or two trying to remember the SEN or SER or SNR or whatever the acronym for nurse is that occasionally appears.
    Many write-ins eg Bundestag. I’ve actually been in it, had a friend who was PA for a German minister. Few hard clues; just slightly trickier than normal.

    Edited at 2019-01-24 10:39 am (UTC)

18. Just got it done within the hour: 59 mins. Much of it I found entertaining and clever — the hidden RECONNOITRE was an excellent example of the genre; ANNEXED was clever, and an uncontroversial homophone; some clever defining in ‘German diet’, ‘US student president’, ‘engravers’, the tricky ‘Asian native’; and several neat surfaces. And yet some of it felt too strained. To ‘doff’ means to ‘remove’ (from ‘do off your coat’=doff, the opposite of ‘do on’=don) rather than uplift. The double-def for NOOKY was naff. ‘Military buff’ was hardly cryptic. The wordplay for the totally biffable OVERSLEEP seemed ridiculously awkward. And the ‘president’ component of PROM QUEEN does seem to have caused some harrumphing.

    Anyway, thank you, George, for taking on the massive task of elucidating all of it.

19. In further proof of something or other, I found this even tougher than the SNITCH suggested I would, which just goes to show. No complaints, of course, this was a very fine puzzle which took a lot of thought, but gradually fell in a pleasing clockwise fashion.
20. In retrospect nothing too obscure or difficult, though I couldn’t work out what ‘president’ was doing in 15d either. All in after 65 minutes, with the OG bit of 25d unparsed, even though it’s a bit of a crossword chestnut.

    The very good reverse hidden and def. for RECONNOITRE and the ‘huntsman’ were my favourites.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

21. ….TOP HAT, and then DOFFING it to the compiler. A thoroughly enjoyable puzzle, but more Championship Heat material than a Final puzzle.

    I don’t often finish quicker than George, and I thank him for parsing AUDIT and QUAKE.

    FOI ADIOS
    LOI BEL
    COD ANNEXED
    TIME 15:56

22. A struggle from start to finish at 28.57. I simply stuck fast in the SLOUGH at the axis of BAKEOFF and BEL. And I would have left “takeoff” in there had I not been unconvinced by t*l meaning anything at all to do with units, whereas I could sort of just about stretch “fat”=”phat”=ace. Among other hang-ups I was sure there should be a hyphen in the middle of the cooking competition.
23. After mikeosborne’s comment on the QC blog, I thought I was in for a long hard session, but I found myself submitting at 31:04 with all correct. I was surprised to find how difficult the Snitch rated it. I suppose seeing TOP HAT and RECONNOITRE straight away was a big help. ACID HOUSE PARTY was also a write in from _C_D and the enumeration, although I hasten to add that I’ve never attended one! I needed all the crossers for 17a though, with Attila the Hun, Alfred the Great all crossing my mind. I was delayed by QUAKE as I initially miscalculated the middle of weakened as AKE, and it was only when I saw PROM QUEEN that the denarius dropped. BAKEOFF and BEL were my last 2 in. A very enjoyable puzzle indeed. Thanks setter and George.
24. Absolutely loved this, 23 minutes of sheer enjoyment. What a great reverse hidden RECONNOITRE is. At first glance the clue looks completely intractable.
25. 26:58 which gives me a sub-SNITCH NITCH of 112. I enjoyed this a lot, especially NOOKY. BOG and my COD, ANNEXED, which I parsed differently to you, George; as sounds like (broadcast) “AND NEXT” (article following) – as a radio announcer might say. But I guess your parsing is more likely what the setter intended.
26. We have 13dns at the bottom of our garden – well just over the road at Shanghai Zoo. They are far more attractive and livelier than their cousins, the GREATER PANDA.

    This was a splendid crossword which took me well over an hour.

    FOI 1ac TUMBLER

    LOI 5dn BEL (doh!)

    COD has to be 4dn RECONNOITRE! Wow! 25ac BUNDESTAG for silver.

    WOD ACID HOUSE PARTY I once attended one – but did not inhale!

    If you enjoy cakes etc then BAKEOFF is hardly dull fare!

    1. The LESSER PANDA (or red panda, I have only just realised they are the same thing) is more closely related to seals than to the GREATER PANDA.
27. 38 mins. Tricky!
28. I though this had some exceptionally clever clueing, and feel lucky to have come in with the time I had. Many thanks setter and blog.
29. As Pootle above, I was very surprised to find the comments as to the difficulty. However I guess that I did complete it in about 4 sessions over the day. LOI was BAKEOFF which I thought was a TV programme, but it parsed OK so in it went. Would have thought it would at least merit a hyphen?
    I look forward to HOWS YOUR FATHER in forthcoming crosswords, or has it been used?
    1. https://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/1939377.html
30. A great puzzle. For me this was a slowish but steady solve. I loved the long hidden word at 4d. 35 minutes. Ann
31. A toughie. I wasn’t on the wavelength and found this more a chore than a labour of love but did appreciate the long reverse hidden and a few others. Although I’ve seen him here more than once I clearly dinnae ken John Peel because I can never remember him and so was a bit bemused by oversleep. I also failed to twig plaudit, bunging in audit from what I now see is an erroneous definition. Lots of trouble in the NE with bakeoff, fast days and nullified and in the SW with oversleep, marooned, doffing and nooky which word always reminds me of Dr Nooky, Jim Dale’s hapless character in Carry on again Doctor (in Carry on Doctor he played doctor Kilmore). Time about 38 mins at lunchtime and about 30 mins after work.
    1. I always think of Roger De Courcey and Nookie Bear!
32. Did not finish – ended up 5 clues short. Annoyed that I did not get Styli – for some bizarre reason I read it as Stasm and that blew the SW corner. Toughie.
33. Beaten by MAROONED and NOOKY.
34. A good time for me – took a few mins to get going but seemed to flow quite easily after that. Not come across a LESSER PANDA before, but easy enough with checkers. Last in BOG just after DOFFING.
    1. They’re also known as the “fire fox”, so if you’ve ever used a certain web browser, you’ll have seen a stylised one in the logo!

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