Times 27,311: Undercooked Overcooked Gangling Free

67 comments on “Times 27,311: Undercooked Overcooked Gangling Free”

1. …as I put Burkina Faso in the wrong place, and biffed Quasimodo for the hunchback. Even with that damaged repaired, I was still thinking ‘Lapp’ instead of ‘Lett’ in my attempts at 15. But 14 was my biggest problem; just because Q is not the first letter, doesn’t mean there isn’t one hiding somewhere.

   Time 46 minutes, but all correct and understood.

   1. I wondered if anyone would be biffing Quasimodo there – surely the obvious 9-letter hunchback? Sadly it doesn’t cooperate much with the wordplay…
2. I biffed a bunch of acrosses, solving only post-submission. I stuck with the wrong ‘lead’ (Pb), and the wrong Villa (Pancho), which is why those clues were biffed. I also didn’t know that RIGOLETTO was a hunchback; I’m not an opera buff, to say the least.
3. is not my bag (no more than it was that of John Cage, composer of Europeras), so I had to cheat for RIGOLETTO. GANGLY came very near the end, nice trick there. I liked this a lot, though “brush,” tout court, for “skirmish” seems a bit of a stretch.

   (Anybody think Friday puzzles may sometimes just seem harder because, well, it’s Friday…? But this one didn’t.)

   Edited at 2019-03-29 04:37 am (UTC)

   1. Collins has: skirmish – any slight, unimportant conflict; brush.

      1. Good. It seemed “a stretch” only because I’ve never encountered (“in the wild”) “brush” used in that sense without a qualifier (e.g., “a brush with the law”) to make that sense clear
4. Well I thought this was quite hard & had to come back to it before finishing. COD to FEATHERED FRIEND.
   Why are DEMOS masses?
   Excellent puzzle and a pangram to boot.
   1. DEMOS (singular noun) is just the Greek word for ‘the people’, whence DEMOTIC etc. Not as snarky as HOI POLLOI
      1. Thanks for that, but I’m a bit unconvinced. Demos is (an English transliteration, changing alphabets of) a Greek word. Not an English word. Not written in the English alphabet. As a clue element, I wouldn’t like it much. As an answer, No, Never!
         For instance, a clue:
         Football administrators phoned foreigner (6) Solution: FARANG, an English transliteration of the Thai word ฝรั่ง. If you saw that in the Times crossword, you’d be up in arms. I see DEMOS/MASSES, if it is as you say, and I’m equally unimpressed. I don’t care if I’m expected to be classically educated and speak ancient Greek, I still don’t like it.
         1. DEMOS is in reasonably common use in English. You come across it fairly often in discussions of the EU: try googling ‘European demos’ and you will see it used in articles in the FT and Independent, among others.

            1. Indeed! Common in English English, never seen in Australian English. I stand corrected.
            2. It’s also in the dictionaries. I hadn’t looked it up because I *knew* it wasn’t a word (hangs head in shame and embarrassment).
         2. It’s definitely a clue that’s very easy for classicists and not so much for those who live in the actual modern world… but it is kosher I think. The wordplay couldn’t be much more straightforward, and you could just about believe that DEMONSTRATIONS are “masses” to get the right answer by the wrong route, at least after the recent anti-Brexit march.
            1. …which is what I did, not seeing past demos = demonstrations, which require masses of people, Thanks for the enlightenment!
5. Once again I nodded off and finished in the morning so I have no solving time to offer.

   I had some lengthy hold-ups along the way, the worst being the African nation which no doubt has come up before but was not retained in my failing memory. I did however remember ZENO which last appeared a fortnight ago.

   I also didn’t know that RIGOLETTO was hunchbacked.

   LOI was GANGLY where my first thought had been ‘gawky’ but realising I needed an extra letter I wasted time wondering if ‘lanky’ might take an ‘e’. Then I thought of ‘walkway’ as ‘aisle’ and tried to work with that.

6. Booted the pangram in 26m, brusquer taking longer than most, if not all. Never having seen one,I didn’t realise I liked opera until I was dragged along to see Rigoletto at ROH a few years ago.
7. 11:13. This one felt harder than it was, with some tricky words and references that somehow yielded more easily than expected. ORION, for instance: I wouldn’t expect to remember either the hunter or the prayer easily but somehow I did.
   I liked ‘undercook’.
8. Around 15 minutes for this, but some short circuit in my brain made me put ‘eczema’ at 6a, an answer that made total sense to me at the time.

   Some very neatly turned clues, I thought. My favourite the economical PILLOW

9. Good fun. Thanks setter. Liked SOUS CHEF, PILLOW, ILL-STARRED and GANGLY.
10. 13:07, held up only by trying QUASIMODO at 15D, having spotted we were on for a pangram, and initially spelling the country BURKINO FASO, but 22A came to my AID(E). Count me as another who didn’t know RIGOLETTO was a hunchback, not being and opera-lover. Several nice down clues got ticks on my copy – HOW ABOUT, GANGLY and MISERABLE all raised a smile, but COD to the &lit FEATHERED FRIEND. Very neat. Thanks V and setter.
11. EGAD! A new p.b. of 20 minutes for me. Relieved that I’d seen the spectacles device before in 15, as I didn’t know a) that RIGOLETTO was a hunchback, or b) how to spell him.

    Also happy 21a was biffable, as I’ve never heard of “I’ll star”, and it seems to be one of those expressions that’s nigh impossible to look up. It doesn’t appear in any of my dictionaries, and Google just gives you lots of people mistyping “I’ll start”…

    Apart from that, all parsed. FOI 1a SOUS-CHEF, LOI 19a DERAILED where I found it hard to see the anagram. COD 20d GANGLY (I think airline seats make most people feel like that…)

    1. Congratulations on the PB. I did not think that this was an ‘easy’ crossword.
       1. Thanks!
    2. But it’s not a fixed phrase or anything, it’s just a way of sayng ‘The lead is mine’.

       Edited at 2019-03-29 09:35 am (UTC)

       1. AHHHH! The penny *finally* drops. I’d misinterpreted V’s comments in the blog intro to mean that “I’ll star” was some kind of bridge-related phrase, rather than being an observation on the other bits of the clue. No *wonder* I couldn’t find anything out about this odd “expression” I’d completely made up!

          Thanks for giving me the correct jog, Kevin.

          Hopefully, as my times improve, I’ll need to be increasingly wary of reading the blog when I’ve still got plenty of coffee left in the cup 😀

          Edited at 2019-03-29 10:17 am (UTC)

    3. I thought it was going to be “I’ll start” then couldn’t see how the latter T was to be removed. I biffed it and crossed my fingers. I gave up bridge very early on when I realised how many domestics it could generate.
       1. Me too! (Except for the Bridge playing; never tried it)
    4. I don’t think you have to have “heard of” I’LL STAR… it’s just “I will star in the play” or whatever?
12. 30 mins with croissant and Gin&Lime marmalade. Hoorah.
    Rigoletto is fantastic. I vaguely remember Ken Dodd’s version: “Woman is fi-ickle, give her a ti-ickle…”
    Mostly I liked the feathered friend &Lit and the clubs toured by Ken Dodd.
    Thanks setter and V.
    1. I so love your pun. Especially since the last “song” in Rigoletto has the hunchback jester singing in the night. (With a small contribution from his daughter in the sack!)
13. …words that drive me into the other room to watch something obscure on BBC4. So I must have picked up COD SOUS-CHEF subliminally. I half-thought he was the drunk guy who did the profiteroles. 22 minutes, held up in the SW while I tried and failed to parse ILL-STARRED, thought of another hunchback apart from Quasimodo and Richard III, and finally constructed BRUSQUER. ASTONISH will be pretty straightforward for one of our contributors and was FOI for me. A fun puzzle. Thank you V and setter.
    1. I have the same trouble with Strictly Celebrity Love Jump Dating on Ice Island
    2. Yes, I got 10 across quite quickly.
14. 18 minutes of fun, but like sotira I stuck in ECZEMA at 6a because it fits and I didn’t see the anagram. The rest was fine.
15. Pleased to finish in 23.42 until V put me firmly in my place by being almost 20 minutes quicker. To think I waste all that time opening the puzzle and reading the clues, painstakingly typing in the letters one by one when I could be doing it all with the cruciverbalos spell.
    Of course I wasted more time with QUASIMODO on the grounds there was a Q somewhere and the spectacles might be round D for Dane. These days, does a baritone have to have a real hunchback to be considered for Rigoletto?
    But HOW ABOUT gave me most pause. No idea why.
    PILLOW I took to be a straight cryptic definition: pleased to see it was better than that.
    Two pangrams in two days! At least it helps me remember where the Z key is.
16. ‘Cooking doesn’t get any tougher than this’ was me. I’d been logged out.
17. I just remembered: I actually saw ‘Rigoletto’ (on TV, of course), with Plácido Domingo in the title role; and he wasn’t hunchbacked. I suspect that opera companies have dropped the hump, on–dare I say it– PC grounds. (So far as I can remember, whether he’s hunchbacked or bowlegged or pigeontoed is irrelevant to the story.) The other day I watched on YouTube an Australian production of “HMS Pinafore”, where Dick Deadeye (Dick. I’m ugly too, ain’t I? Buttercup. You are certainly plain. Dick. And I’m three-cornered too, ain’t I? Buttercup. You are rather triangular.) is no longer a hunchback.
    1. I played Buttercup in my Grammar School’s production of Pinafore. On the last night I introduced a hand movement while addressing Dick, and had a very uncomfortable visit to the Head on Monday morning (even the fact that most of the audience found it funny didn’t save me from serving four Saturday detentions).
       1. I’m trying, and failing, to think what that gesture would have been (mine was a boringly innocent childhood).
18. Not a Friday Beast, but a very entertaining piece of work. Various satisfying moments, such as working out the “undercook” and realising that I had actually heard of a second hunchback, after all.
19. I’d never heard of Burkina Faso and went for Burnika Faso. I met someone the other day from another African country I’d never heard of – Djibouti. A search of Google Maps just now reveals Guinea-Bissau as another new one to me. Back to Geography class, I think.

    COD: ASTONISH – of course.

    🙂

    1. Djibouti isn’t too far from what was once the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas.
    2. Burkina Faso is memorable to me on account of having the deliciously-named Ouagadougou as its Capital.
    3. As long as you knew Cabo Verde, Sao Tome & Principe, Comoros and the Seychelles you’re probably doing fine. It’s the island nations I always forget…
       1. Pleased to finish under the hour in 56.09, finding, like some here, going fairly tricky in parts. I can contribute to the Burkina Faso thread in that I once arrested the President of Burkina Faso’s jet for a debt (not due to me) until diplomatic immunity was successfully invoked.
20. MeToo with Pip and Sotira and an undercooked “excema” making a muddle in that corner for a while. RIGOLETTO reminded me of watching the Muppet Show when my children were small. There was an ILL-STARRED Miss Piggy in Pigoletto and partnered by Nureyev in Swine Lake. She also cornered him in a sauna for a very good rendition of Baby It’s Cold Outside which I’m sorry to say has fallen out of favour with #MeToo even when the roles are reversed. 15.35
21. A clue I once wrote for “how about” that caused regular readers of the staff magazine to struggle.

    DNK SILVERSIDES, or Rigoletto’s disability. Biffed ILL-STARRED and GANGLY. Apart from that I enjoyed this one.

    FOI KNEE
    LOI EGAD
    COD BEHIND BARS
    TIME 9:34

    1. Hmm, it is only three weeks since SILVERSIDES last appeared .. and you commented on it then 🙂
       https://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/2099828.html?page=2#comments
       1. That’s not like me – I must be starting to feel my age !
          1. Happens to us all I suppose .. all I will say is that there is definitely advantage to be gained from trying to ensure that unfamiliar words are only unfamiliar once! Whenever I find one, I always take the trouble to look it up in the OED and read the article through. I would say it works for me, were it not that tomorrow I may be proven wrong 🙂
22. I can only add to the non-opera buffs, as I had three quarters of this done in 10 mins, but the SW had me scratching my head. Eventually BRUSQUER released a torrent of answers but had to look up RIGOLETTO just to be sure. COD to the Undercook. My dumb moment was when I was trying to think whether ILVER was a place…
23. Very satisfying puzzle, this. Is there a slight Hugo theme with RIGOLETTO, les MISERABLEs and hunchbacks appearing?
24. My time of 10:31 suggests that I found this pretty straightforward but that doesn’t mean that I “got” it all:

    – I couldn’t see where the PIL part of PILLOW came from (I decided that LOW was turned down as in the volume of a radio) and had no idea what part of what sort of face a PIL might be.
    – For CHASMS I accounted for text with MS so was left wondering how AS equated to in a.
    – I didn’t know ZENO – the recent puzzle he was in must have been one I didn’t have time to do on the day and have filed away for “practice” later this year.
    – Like others I didn’t know RIGOLETTO as a hunchback.

    So thanks to Verlaine for filling in the gaps for me.

    Thanks to the setter to for an enjoyable solve.

25. Plodded through this in three sittings, owing to unexpected visitors. Quite tricky, I thought: more so than the snitch would suggest. Thanks V.
26. I started off with PILLOW and made reasonable progress before becoming bogged down. BURKINO FASO and FEATHERED FRIEND got me moving again, and I was eventually aided by 22a to get the correct spelling of the former. I was familiar with the opera, although I’ve not seen it and was unaware that he was a hunchback. Like Jack I toyed with GAWKY at 20d until the penny dropped. I tried for ages to do something with METER at 6d. BRUSQUER was my LOI, painstakingly assembled from the wordplay. A most enjoyable puzzle. 32:32. Thanks setter and V.
27. What everyone else said – found it very tricky in places, kudos to Verlaine for a sub-5. Last in was brusquer, which needed alphabet trawls on both the skirmish AND the shorter. If demos is as per aphis99 above then I’m not a happy bunny.
28. All wonderful stuff – except for one howler – like Pip I put eczema for 6 across! I hang
    my head.
29. Pretty decent crossword. In fact more than decent. Just a minor quibble at 14a- ‘…with French that…’ would have been better than ‘…in France that…’. I believe the surface would then read a little better, and do away with the awkward and orphaned ‘in’ as well?
    1. Sorry-that last was Mr Grumpy. Although strangely, not that Grumpy today.
30. I breezed though most of this but got stalled for quite a bit on my LOI, BRUSQUER. I never say the skirmish part of the wordplay, so I half biffed it after realizing how ‘que’ fitted in. High praise to the setter for ‘undercook’. Regards.
31. Didn’t expect to complete a Friday puzzle! Just had to check that Rigoletto was a hunchback. Nice puzzle.
32. Very enjoyable. Nothing to add to the comments. Knew Rigoletto, hunchback and all. I’ve seen it quite a few times. (Including one production set in a coal cellar – which went down very well in Wales) 35 minutes Ann
    1. Oh, is that how he became a hunchback – years of toiling down a Rhondda pit? Makes a lot of sense.
33. 20:38 pitched at just the right level for me today. Took a bit of time to justify I’ll star red and pillow parsed post-solve. Other than that I seemed to be on the wavelength and enjoyed this very much.
34. Thanks setter and verlaine
    Found this a steady solve and needed electronic help to get SOUS CHEF, discover that RIGOLETTO was a hunchback, to re-map BURKINA FASO and to re-remember ZENO and his paradoxes. Didn’t fully parse DORMOUSE, putting it down as some sort of cryptic definition.
    Thought that FEATHERED FRIENDS was the pick of the day … what a great clue !
    Finished in the top left corner with BRUSQUER (took a while to understand the wordplay), SILVERSIDES (easy in hindsight, but hidden from front-sight view for too long) and PILLOW (with its devious word play) as the last few in.
35. Almost a sub-Olivia at 16 mins! Might have done it if FOI 16a , the Japanese ceremonial cloak KOBE had been correct . Robe was more convincing when seen a little later. Liked the undercooked sous-chef and the Spanish Nina ‘ Rio Exe’
    1. Not logged in!

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