Times 27307 – “…but you’re already caught!”

61 comments on “Times 27307 – “…but you’re already caught!””

1. Well, this sure seemed easier than Sunday’s, which I finished quite late today. But maybe that’s just me. But I had forgotten that nut = en, if I ever knew it (so what’s the word for an em?), and I’m not sure I ever knew what COPRA is.
   1. Apparently it’s mutton (the word for em that is). Makes sense to distinguish them clearly, phonetically in the noisy clatter and rattle of a printing press, I assume.
   2. It’s not just you! Yesterday’s took me the best part of two hours over three sessions…
2. as in ‘a punch in the chops’
3. Biff City; at least 7 answers went in from def. I may have once known about en/nut, but not today; but I assumed some sort of equivalence, since the answer was definitely OFFENBACH. The spelling of 26 took some time; in the US it’s ‘apothegm’, a step forward for mankind. I just noticed that we have ‘bound’=HOP in 21ac, and ‘spring’=HOP in 18d. Significant? Well, probably not.
4. Small thing: French has to be abbreviated FR to give you enough letters.
   1. Biffers don’t count letters!

      However, I will correct this.

      1. Quite so. Counting letters must surely be the type of arrant pedantry up with which one would not put!
5. Perhaps it’s a British thing, but “hit him in the chops” would be a punch on the jaw I think.
   1. Or “get your chops around this”, when presenting a meal:-)
6. 8:10. Lots of biffing for me too today. I know en/nut from past puzzles but I didn’t even notice it today.
   The first definition of ‘chops’ in Collins is ‘the jaws’, so I don’t see this as much of a mystery.

   Edited at 2019-03-25 03:54 am (UTC)

7. This took me about 30 mins with the last 10 spent trying to construct the unlikely word APOPHTHEGM from the wordplay. The rest of the long solutions were biffable without having to bother with the often convoluted wordplay. I didn’t much like this puzzle.
8. Vinyl1, FYI,Pinner is where Elton John comes from. I suspect, but I could be wrong, that you don’t have any of his music in your collection.
   Thanks for the explanation of PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM. I just biffed it without bothering to analyse it.
   Thanks also for EN in OFFENBACH. Another NFI.

   Amusingly, BILINGUAL started out life as bilguanil! Que¿

   As for 26ac, I see from ODO that Americans spell the word ‘apothegm’ and leave out the ph. Much more sensible.
   28m 50s

   1. You are correct. Elton is a guilty pleasure, and if you have a lot of Graham Parker and Richard Thompson, he wouldn’t fit in. If you need to hear a song, you can always go to YouTube for your fix.
      1. No Graham Parker but I do have some early Richard Thompson. I saw him live in Sydney back in ’97 when he was accompanied by DannyThompson on double bass who was, in turn, accompanied by a bottle of what looked like Riesling at his feet.

         I was an early fan of Elton John but he lost me with “Captain Fantastic etc” and beyond.

9. The parsing at the start should be: P{rinting} [head of], HO (house), GOT (fetched) reversed [back], etc.

   I biffed a few including the above, which was why I looked at the explanation so closely. I’d previously read RA as ‘painter’ missing the artist’s name and that led me into confusion whilst solving to the point where I gave up trying to work out how it worked.

   I was very pleased to get the almost unknown APOPHTHEGM by trusting my interpretation of the wordplay. Also to remember EN/nut which caused me so much grief on a previous occasion.

   Edited at 2019-03-25 07:50 am (UTC)

   1. Ooops, sorry about that. I had worked it out, and botched it up as I typed it in. Now corrected.
10. 13:40 … with a few bleary-eyed Monday morning missteps along the way.

    Some neatly disguised definitions in here, even if intersecting biffability slightly undermined them.

    Nostalgic trivia: Pinner was also the surname of Vincent, the character played by Paul Nicholas in the sitcom Just Good Friends.

    1. At a recent quiz, one question asked exactly this (in fact, the surname of either Vince or Penny would do for a point – hers was Warrender, FYI). I could remember it had a connection to North London, but couldn’t for the life of me come up with the right suburb, although I was pretty sure he wasn’t Vince Neasden.
       1. I suspect his (charming, of course) appearances on the Real Marigold shows have rekindled interest. They’ve certainly made me recall the old sitcom after many years of never giving it a thought.
11. 60 mins all complete.
    FOI spam.
    LOI Apophthegm

    Couldn’t parse the laud from plaudit, sa(nd)paper or the en from offenbach.

    Like let up, sales force, maelstrom, but Cod kangaroo court.
    Thanks.

12. This was also a bit of a biff-fest for me today. The only clue that troubled me somewhat was that for APOPHTHEGM, for which I had considered SPAPATHEGM which seemed a plausible parsing with spa for hotel, but seemed an even less plausible word than the correct answer.

    COD to NOTELET – I always like the observation that a word backwards is almost another one.

13. 14 minutes dead. Funnily enough, I was going to come here with the observation that the wordplay in this one took a poor second place to spot the definition and chuck in the answer, but I see V’s innovative display technique has beaten me to it.

    Apart from APOPHTHEGM, the wordplay was largely redundant, and occasionally misleading: I paused over OFFENBACH to wonder whether FAN/nut was involved and there was another composer with a spookily similar name. The Z8 medal for exemplary devotion to expository duty is on its way to Vinyl.

    I am glad to learn that Elton John comes from Pinner. It lends fresh impetus to a Muir/Norden/Spooner joke I’ve been working on for years which ends with the line “When you wash a Pinner star”. A career in stand-up beckons.

14. I tried to make an anagram of “bouncer to try to w” – which led to a court but not one with an “a” in it. I also struggled with the spelling and parsing of apophthegm, with “Pa” for “Pop”, but got there in the end.

    COD: APOPHTHEGM.

15. 30 mins with yoghurt, granola, etc.
    I have a friend who refers to someone who is agitated about something as having “a wasp in his chops”. It is like a bee in his bonnet but more likely to lead to an oral outburst.
    Mostly I liked: Jaws being shown in empty cinemas.
    Thanks setter and Vinyl
16. Didn’t time myself and took a nap with five left after which the remainder fell easy. It’s easier to call a saw a saw rather than an APOPHTHEGM – why would you ever bother?
17. ….an affectionate (I hope) nickname an early girlfriend gave to me. I wonder if she still has a photo of them in an early PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM. That now has to be COD. 21 minutes with the only problem matching the spelling of APOPHTHEGM to the cryptic. Once upon a time, I would struggle to get the pH right when using Phenolphthalein. Nice Monday puzzle. Thank you V and setter
18. If we want to be scrupulous, submitted with errors, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t write RREFESHER COURSE under exam conditions, so I’ll award myself a pass. Add me to the club who knew APOPHTHEGM as a word, more or less, but would have needed several goes to spell it right without wordplay. Otherwise, pleasant Monday solve with lots of Monday biffing.
19. There’s also the 20th Century Shoenberg/Berg. Like Sotira I had several mis-steps along the way. e.g. 8D had to begin CI – wrong, 20A had to end ENT – wrong. I was pleased to derive the only vaguely remembered APOPHTHEGM from the wordplay as I’d never have spelt it that way with the weird extra PH in the middle [Although I see now, looking it up, the word is derived from the greek phthengesthai to utter]. 19:13.

    Edited at 2019-03-25 10:07 am (UTC)

    1. There is also ‘phthisic’, which only T. S. Eliot had the nerve to use in a non-medical context, in a poem that would not be considered very PC today.
       1. The word I remember with that curious combination of letters is the chemical acid/base indicator phenolphthalein, which I seem to remember turning a very pretty colour during titration experiments at school. But are these experiments allowed any more?
          1. Of course not, no more than anti-Semitic poems that are so obscure only grad students can understand them.
20. Just like everyone else, I biffed my way happily through this in 20 mins. I didn’t rate this as a great puzzle: some of the surfaces were horribly clunky (e.g. 14a, 3d). But, I agree with myrtilus, “Jaws” showing in an empty cinema was rather good. The spelling of APOPHTHEGM held me up not at all — I have that word filed alongside ophthalmic and diphtheria on the “Spellings To Catch You Out” shelf of my brain.
    Well done, vinyl, for working out all that needless wordplay!
21. When is a saw not a saw? When it’s an adage. I did the same dithering as others with the placement of the Hs. CANDLELIT invariably reminds me of Hyacinth Bucket. There’s nothing particularly romantic about candlelight when we’re in Rhinebeck – it means we’ve had a power outage. The biggest one was 2003 when the entire NE quadrant of the US blacked out. 14.11
22. Okay, so this is how the descent into oblivion starts: I misread the enumeration for 7dn as 6,3 and then wrestled with it for ages, finally caving in to the wordplay, and entering the correct answer with a despairing shrug, wondering what the hell a pinnum ber was.
23. 20’55, all worth it to write out apophthegm.
24. No, he doesn’t OFFENBACH (sorry, couldn’t resist it).

    Like Quailthrush I didn’t much care for this. I wasn’t helped by a comment on the QC blog which led me to believe it would be easier than proved to be the case.

    I took “en = nut” on trust.

    FOI SPAM
    LOI HILLTOP
    COD PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM
    TIME 13:16

25. Plenty of biffing here as well, particularly when I thought I might be edging towards a PB. No such luck, but 6m 02s for a fairly gentle Monday. APOPHTHEGM was very fairly clued with helpful checkers, fortunately.
26. Did you hear that the man who invented the PIN number and the ATM machine has died? May he RIP in peace.

    Anyway. I woke dozy after reading late into the night so I’m happy to have finished in exactly half an hour. And I even vaguely knew how APOPHTHEGM was spelled after the last time it came up, so my revision must be going well. FOI 1d SANDPAPER, COD & LOI 20a CANDLELIT. No problem with CHOPS, but the book I was reading was a Chris Fowler Bryant and May novel, so I’m somewhat steeped in Victorian slang right now.

    Thanks for parsing all the bits I hadn’t spotted, Vinyl. I’m currently going through a different exercise for music: occasionally popping into Rough Trade and picking an LP purely based on its cover and/or written notes by the shop staff, like I used to do as a teenager. So far it’s been more hit than miss, and the experience is fun, regardless…

    Edited at 2019-03-25 12:34 pm (UTC)

    1. I didn’t even know we had anyone else who had a turntable here! Retail LP prices tend to be high right now, and I do have 4000 already. I did pick up a copy of Donald Fagen, The Nightfly, over the weekend. The cover can only be described as Poor Minus, and the record is very dirty, but it is a Quiex II promo cut by the great mastering engineer, Robert Ludwig.

       In CDs, beside the Foo Fighters, I got Green Day, Dookie
       Sting, Mercury Falling, and Coldplay, Viva La Vida.

       1. I have a Technics SL-BD22D FG-Servo deck hooked up to a JVC AX-1 amp and Philips speakers, which I should use more often, and an ION USB turntable which I use to transfer my albums to my computer, CDs or, more usually now, my iPhone, as I do most of my listening whilst driving.
          1. I imagine Bentley have an option for mounting a remote-controlled multi-disc Linn Axis player on a gimbal in the boot…

             My turntable’s an Audiotechnica LP-5. I upgraded from the cheaper one I bought at first because it didn’t play in tune. (I don’t have perfect pitch; I just like strumming my guitar along to the music sometimes…) It’s plugged in through my fairly average surround sound amp, but at least it terminates in a pair of Q Acoustics speakers.

             Edited at 2019-03-25 02:27 pm (UTC)

             1. Bentley! Ha Ha. Dreams of the unattainable:-)
                I’ve just dug the music cabinet out from under the pile of stuff accumulated on the lid that opens to reveal the Turntable, and am currently listening to Joan Baez’s album Come From The Shadows. There’s a definite upgrade in quality listening to the “black stuff” 🙂 Sadly the cueing mechanism has frozen. I may have to dig a bit deeper into the inner workings.
             2. I am still using a Basis 2001 with a Graham 2.2 arm that I bought in 1998. Some guy in my online group who was a reviewer had bought it at an accomodation price, but never bothered to set it up and kept the boxes under his bed. He sold it to me for the same as what he paid, about $4200 as I recall.

                I worked well for 15 years, but then developed loud motor noise. Basis wanted $1200 for a new motor. So I bought a used Pro-Ject RPM 9.1 as a temporary replacement. The trouble with that one was that the arm hung out into the empty air, and it was very easy to destroy cartridges.

                After 3 years, I had a guy in my Friday club fix the Basis. It is really helpful if you know someone who has a lathe and a milling machine in his basement. He machined the existing motor housing to take a new motor we bought on eBay for $70, but had to machine the pulley and the spindle to make everything fit. It is now running well, and I boxed up the Pro-Ject and put it in the basement.

                Edited at 2019-03-25 04:53 pm (UTC)

                1. Impressive!
       2. 4,000! Gosh. Even including singles, I imagine I have fewer than a hundred.

          I bought one mainly for nostalgia, still having a chunk of my teenage music lying around—Pet Shop Boys, Transvision Vamp, Marillion: all the sins of 1980s youth!

          Then I started buying ones I’d owned at the time on CD, but seemed more suited to vinyl—Fields of the Nephilim’s Psychonaut, for example, which I first heard on my friend Daniel Gish’s record player as a boy, and random similar things like Half Man Half Biscuit’s Trumpton Riots, which I spotted at a secondhand stall.

          Recently I’ve been alternating older stuff (The Byrds, Jethro Tull, etc.) with the random purchases of new records I don’t know (last one was Bowery Electric’s hypnotic Lushlife), but as you say, it’s an expensive business! My local secondhand stall owner is quite exacting, so it’s often good quality stuff, first pressings, etc., and correspondingly pricey…

          1. In the 90s, when records were ‘obsolete’, they were giving them away. You could buy huge piles of stuff for nearly nothing. My only regret is that I didn’t buy more!
       3. The Nightfly is a very underrated album. Mr Grumpy
27. The day I get to use the word apophthegm in a regular conversation, I will be both proud and embarrassed. Proud of the achievement, embarrassed for being the pedant my children keep telling me I am. Neat puzzle. Many thanks.
28. 20:55 nothing to frighten the horses, even the difficult word at 26ac was very clearly signposted. Didn’t bother to work out photograph album, that was a parse too far.
29. Just over half an hour for this slowcoach (and that’s if I finish, which is not too often!) So another good day. I’m waiting for a return to norm, when having just a few blanks at the end feels like a success. As others have said, lots of biffing but I like to parse as I go wherever possible. All the same I couldn’t see ‘appears’ as an anagram in 1d – I was convinced some sort of guide had to go round ND! Sapaper – another entry to the momble dictionary ☺ It’s strange how you can get a total blindspot when the clue is perfectly fair.
30. As noted by many, a bit of a biff fest, but none the less enjoyable for that. POP-UP popped up first with SANDPAPER dropping by next. My initial thought of CATNIP at 5d was ruled out by being a letter short, but PILS wasn’t far behind in the Beer Stakes Handicap. MAELSTROM was still fresh in my mind from a recent puzzle, so went straight in. I didn’t bother to parse PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM or SELF PROPELLED. I did, however, pay careful attention to my LOI, APOPHTHEGM. I spotted the parsing for 1d on my final check before submitting. Thanks setter and V.
31. 9:02.

    Lots of biffing: CHECK.

    Didn’t biff APOPHTHEGM: CHECK.

32. Had to come here for the parsing of OFFENBACH, otherwise nothing enlightening to report,aside from having my first game of golf today after severely damaging my shoulder while babysitting. Dangerous occupation!
33. 18 minutes again. Didn’t like some of the surfaces, since they appeared ‘clumsy’. LOI model, since I was convinced ‘lines’ meant l.
34. A shade under 20 minutes for this one, which I found fairly straightforward apart from APOPHTHEGM, which sounds like something there should be a treatment for. I paused briefly at PIN NUMBER, not only because I failed to spot Pinner, but because I doubted the Times would give in to such recursion. TTFN for now.
35. Just for the record: today’s 6 across in the Telegraph cryptic is the same answer and almost the same clue as the Times.
36. After starting cryptic crossword puzzles in April of last year, this was my first completion of the 15×15 puzzle.

    Almost always complete the quickie. But always a few, (sometimes more than a few!), short of completing this one. Until today!

    Suitably chuffed!

    LOI APOPHTHEGM which took me about 20+ minutes to get on its own. Unfamiliar word for me.

    RC

    1. We congratulate you. If you keep trying and read the blog every day when you don’t finish, you should be able to improve further. There are lots of little bits and pieces that experienced solvers know, and you can gradually add these to your repertoire.
37. Since we tend to be pedants, I was very surprised to find that nobody pointed out the tautology; until thud_n_blunder did, rather elegantly.
38. Easy enough today apart from “Apophthegm” which is a NHO. Maelstrom is a lovely word.

    Edited at 2019-03-25 10:26 pm (UTC)

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