Times 27331 – My tenth anniversary blog!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Time: 34 minutes
Music: Berlioz, Harold in Italy, Menuhim/Davis.

Yes, my very first blog for Times for the Times was that of April 20, 2009, which is still available in the archives.   I got the assignment from our founder, Peter Biddlecombe, at the beginning of April: Kororareka and I were to replace Foggyweb, a fine blogger who has disappeared without a trace, with Kororareka to go first.   I was quite chuffed at the time just to be a blogger, never imagining I’d that eight years later I’d be taking over running the blog.   Things were a little different back when I started: for some mysterious reason it was customary to omit one or two clues, and of course we didn’t have the fine automated blog-generating templates that Mohn2 later developed.   Over the years, I’ve had a lot of fun, blogged a lot of puzzles, and recruited and trained a number of rather good bloggers.

Now for today’s puzzle.   I did not find this as easy as I should have, stumbling over some answers that should have been obvious, and having to resort to an alphabet trawl to finish.   However, I seem to acquired the knack of preparing my brain to recognize the correct answer and parsing when it finally does show up.   I did biff a few, and will have to figure out the cryptics for the blog.

Across
1 Peg once adjusted with skill in instrument (12)
GLOCKENSPIEL – Anagram of PEG ONCE + SKILL
9 Poor knight, feeble, wanting wife (5)
NEEDY – N + [w]EEDY.
10 Fellow lawyer Conservative required (9)
MANDATORY – MAN + D.A. + TORY.   It is rather surprising that the American ‘D.A.’ has become so familiar it can be casually referred to as ‘lawyer’ in a UK puzzle.
11 Putting arachnid in pipe? (8)
STICKING – S(TICK)ING.  If you think a spider is the only arachnid, well, you’re wrong.
12 Reflected on hard image in code (6)
CIPHER – RE H PIC backwards, biffed by me.
13 Story from a relative omitting one gripping point (8)
ANECDOTE – A + N[i]EC(DOT)E, a rather busy cryptic.
15 Holy ship’s company mostly in blue (6)
SACRED – SA(CRE[w])D.
17 Walk out on expanse of land without water (6)
DESERT – double definition, although the ‘without’ tries to make you think otherwise.  Deletion?  Enclosure?   Why, no.
18 Anxious at home with scoundrel coming into view (8)
INSECURE – IN + SE(CUR)E.  Another biff for me.
20 Stop business, enthralled by stone church (6)
SCOTCH – S(CO)T + CH.
21 Beginners lead rest astray (8)
STARTERS – STAR + anagram of REST, and not an anagram of LEAD REST at all.   If you glanced at the clue and wrote in ‘learners’, you didn’t count the letters.
24 Boring sport, one followed by a few (9)
WEARISOME – WEAR + I + SOME.
25 Weakness about love, say (5)
VOICE – V(O)ICE, I think we just recently had the reverse in another puzzle.
26 Revolutionary behind lines, protected by new name, unusually polite (4-8)
WELL-MANNERED – LL in an anagram of NEW NAME + RED.
Down
1 Style of rap starts to generate almost overwhelming dread (7)
GANGSTA – G[enerate]ANGST A[lmost].
2 Chaps in team, number climbing on Scottish island above loch lacking depth (3-11)
ONE-DIMENSIONAL –  ON EDI(MEN)S + IONA + L, one everyone will biff.
3 King and leader of armada chat in boat (5)
KAYAK – K + A[rmada] + YAK.
4 Propose an item broadcast after drama (8)
NOMINATE – NO + anagram of AN ITEM.
5 Long stretch of trip in Europe (4)
PINE – hidden in [tri]P IN E[urope].
6 Destroy order, losing time after time (9)
ERADICATE – ERA + DIC[t]ATE.
7 Impure hero, sort mistakenly being made head of religious community (6,8)
MOTHER SUPERIOR – Anagram of IMPURE HERO, SORT.   For this one, I actually did use the cryptic.
8 Cross in past hour, upset, then relieved (6)
HYBRID –  BY H upside down, + RID.  I couldn’t think of anything to fit the checkers, came back and saw it at once.
14 Dreadful in operation, ignoring a command (9)
DIRECTIVE –  DIRE + [a]CTIVE.   I had at first put ‘direction’, which sort of fits the cryptic, but doesn’t work with WELL-MANNERED.
16 Area guarded by soldier perhaps on border, a thing that’s abhorred (8)
ANATHEMA – AN(A)T + HEM + A, another biff, and one that caused me to erase ‘learner’.
17 Reject racket broken by seed (6)
DISOWN – DI(SOW)N, with ‘seed’ as a verb.
19 Dean set to work in part of London (4,3)
EAST END – anagram of DEAN SET.
22 Bird that’s black and yellow, not caught (5)
RAVEN – [c]RAVEN, a chestnut I was slow to recognize.
23 Mere share (4)
POOL – double definition.   I had prepared myself by thinking ‘mere’ might refer to a body of water, so when I did an alphabet trawl I saw at once what the answer must be.

37 comments on “Times 27331 – My tenth anniversary blog!”

  2. I biffed a couple–GLOCKENSPIEL, ANECDOTE, HYBRID (once I remembered that meaning of ‘cross’)–demi-biffed 2d on the basis of the enumeration and IONA-L. This is Monday, but DESERT & EAST END really belong in a QC. I took ‘lead rest’ as the anagrist, wasting some time.
    Happy anniversary, Vinyl! and thanks, for all the blogs and for running the show.
  3. Felicitations on the momentous occasion!

    I remember when a clue or two would be omitted; seemed they were always the most obvious ones.

    I biffed a lot, but the parsing often came in the midst of writing.

    My very belated LOI was the dreaded four-letter DD, and the alphabet trawl just seemed to make my mind freeze. How devious, that “mere” is really a noun and “pool” a verb!

  4. 12:37 … turned out to be gentler than I initially suspected. A few short delays pondering things like whether a MERE is a pool and STICKING is exactly putting and a raven exactly black before deciding that everything was close enough for government work.

    Well done, vinyl.

    Off to lay down my first gangsta glockenspiel mix, yo

  5. All but four answers went in quite easily but I completed the grid 4 minutes over my half-hour target because of difficulties with GANGSTA, CIPHER, HYBRID and STICKING – the last of which required a leap of faith that a TICK might be class as arachnid.

    Congrats on your milestone, vinyl1! Tempus fugit, and all that. I remember foggyweb’s (Stephen’s) blogs with some affection as they were the ones that encouraged me to put my name forward when Peter was trawling for new recruits.

    The reasons given for omitting certain answers were three, the first being saving of bloggers’ time, which no longer applies since mohn2 made life so much easier for all of us. The second was to do with the Times’s income from their ‘Phone today’s answers’ service which I see is still available at a cost of 80p per minute plus network charges, although the answers are now readily available on-line to all Times subscibers. The third was so as not simply to hand TftT readers every answer ‘on a plate’, but most days we ended up explaining the omitted clues in the ‘Comments’ section so it all became a bit pointless. One of our regular contributors (npbull) is currently doing sterling work revisiting all these blogs in the archive and explaining the omitted clues.

    Edited at 2019-04-22 05:31 am (UTC)

  6. FOI 5d PINE, popped in to figure out whether 1a ended with …SCOPE or not. When it didn’t, I looked for the musical variety of instrument and found a GLOCKENSPIEL quite quickly.

    Plain sailing after that, taken a minute over the half hour by coming up with 23d POOL and LOI 8d HYBRID.

    In the end my only question mark was against the tick of 11a STICKING. I see I shall have to add an exclusion to my generally easy truce with the British branch of arachnida; I have no problems sharing my house with spiders and harvestmen, but I draw the line at Lyme-disease-ridden vampires…

    Happy anniversary, Vinyl!

  7. Happy anniversary indeed!

    15′ 28”, with STARTERS LOI as, like others, looking for an anagram. Spent some while staring at ANECDOTE.

    Thanks vinyl and setter.

  8. Happy anniversary, Vinyl. No paper delivered today, so I had to drive down the road to get one. 24 minutes with LOI CIPHER after HYBRID was finally constructed and understood. Having spent a day at Martin Mere Wetland Centre the week before last, I perhaps should have seen POOL a little quicker too. COD to ONE-DIMENSIONAL, as String Theorists necessarily are. Pleasant start to the day. Thank you V and setter.

    Edited at 2019-04-22 08:17 am (UTC)

  9. 22’50”, so pretty straightforward, especially if you are the afore-mentioned mohn, who was troubled for a mere 3:22 (making Verlaine look pretty shabby in the process, I might say).

    Congratulations to my Monday confrere on all his erudite explicating, and – now I learn – training too. Whatever they’re giving him, he deserves a bit more, I reckon.

  10. Congratulations Vinyl! I found it a bit awkward to get a start in this puzzle, finally breaking my duck with EAST END. Perhaps the coffee hadn’t kicked in. I then wasted more time trying to make something from LEAD REST astray. MANDATORY helped me to get a foothold in the NE once I had spotted NOMINATE, but 8d refused to materialise until it was my LOI and I wrote it out on paper, at which point the correct meaning of cross jumped out at me. It still took another few seconds to see the parsing. GLOCKENSPIEL was tardy in appearing, but along with IONA and Loch, allowed me to shove in ONE DIMENSIONAL. ANECDOTE and DIRECTIVE were other late entries. Eventually got there in 36:20. Thanks setter and Vinyl.

    Edited at 2019-04-22 09:22 am (UTC)

  11. 18 minutes, pleasant, with STICKING put in last without realising that ticks were arachnids. I should have known all about ticks, as two of our dogs have died from tick fever.

    Keep up the good work, vinyl1.

  12. Congratulations on a fine milestone (I nearly put millstone, but I’m sure that’s wrong).
    I blew this one with a hasty submit trying to beat 13 minutes, which generated 3 errors with WELL-NANEREDD, which is the sort of thing you get if you don’t watch the screen when typing.
    Even that was delayed by (also) having DIRECTION at 14, which I (also) think works almost as well as the real answer – great minds eh, V?
      1. Indeed. V said “sort of” and I “almost”. I suppose the thing is, when you’re cheerfully whizzing through, you don’t notice these trifling inconveniences.
  13. Made somewhat wearisome work of this but nothing too serious. Vinyl I think in 13 you have the omitted i wrongly placed. Congratulations and thanks for your dedication over the years.
  14. ….CIPHER the good old days, when I could clear up the puzzle in my ten minute morning tea break. I had real trouble with the left hand side of this, and I don’t really know why. Congratulations on your milestone Vinyl, and thanks for parsing ONE-DIMENSIONAL, ANECDOTE, and WELL-MANNERED. The last two of those shouldn’t really have caused me any problems if I’m honest.

    FOI MANDATORY
    LOI DESERT (a “duh” moment, as I’d tried to use “dry”)
    COD RAVEN
    TIME 13:20

  15. 15:37. Yet again I did most of this very quickly and then got stuck at the end on a small number of clues. Why does this keep happening to me? My last in was POOL, which required an alphabet trawl even though I clocked almost immediately that ‘mere’ might refer to a body of water.
    Congratulations vinyl, and thanks.
    1. I reckon you are pining for the championships, around which your solving now rotates.
  16. Congratulations on your decade, Vinyl!

    This one went smoothly until I was left with 23d, and had to resort to a two-dimensional alphabet trawl to be sure I wasn’t missing something. That took my time up to 28 minutes. I’m still not convinced that POOL is “share”; pooling ones resources is not the same as sharing them, or perhaps it is?

  17. A bit slow today after a week away – I need a holiday…. LOI STICKING my wife picked one up in Australia and took 6 months to recover despite removing the critter immediately.
  18. 6m 13s with plenty of biffing today. I’m another who had DIRECTION at first, and finished on POOL.

    Congrats on the anniversary! By the way, I think you have an i out of place in 13a – a clue that I didn’t try to parse at all while solving.

  19. And many happies from me Vinyl. Perhaps we’ll have an occasion for a get-together of the stateside representatives of TFTT this summer. If so I hope it’s a little less eventful than the last two plenary sessions!

    A slight pause to register the parsing of the HYBRID/CIPHER axis but otherwise this was one of my faster efforts. Those of us dwelling in the NE US are all too familiar with those noxious little arachnids. They’re so small you can’t even see how many legs they’ve got until they’ve done the damage and are under a magnifying glass. 11.28

  20. Congratulations v, and many thanks – top blogging 🙂
    I started this in a relaxed frame of mind, with pen in one hand and cup of Waitrose latte in the other. About 7 or 8 mins in I realised I could have gone for a good time if I’d attacked it with vigour from the off, but by then it was too late, so I drifted through the rest of it at a steady pace, finishing in 22 mins.

    Edited at 2019-04-22 11:48 am (UTC)

  21. I was on the wavelength for this one, for a PB and rare sub-HKM time.

    Thanks, Vinyl, for all your illuminating blogs and congratulations on the anniversary.

  22. Happy anniversary!

    19:13. I was expecting something a little stiffer for the bank holiday but managed to rattle this off in fairly short order. No less pleasant a solve for that though. I hesitated over the less familiar arachnid in sticking, wrongly pondered lead rest as potential anagrist for 21ac, biffed mild-mannered across the bottom but had to revisit, couldn’t be bothered to parse 2dn, I also finished with an alphabet trawl for pool.

  24. I also bounced along through this with no particular holdups, except needing to do my own brain search for POOL. A little lateral thinking required on both sides of that one. But some kind of body of water to fit in ?O?L sort of focused the mind.

    Congratulations and best regards to vinyl, and everyone else as well.

  25. Another Vinyl record! Well done, Sir!

    FOI 5dn PINE
    LOI 23dn POOL
    COD & WOD 1ac GLOCKENSPIEL

    horryd Walthamstow Avenue

  26. A late post. I have just managed to finish this before the final of University Challenge. FOI was East End and last two were Anecdote and Directive.
    A big thank-you to Vinyl – and all the bloggers – for the work on this site which has been invaluable to me. David
  27. Pretty fast for me and chuffed that I actually made a good start and finished this one. Looked at the weekend ones only briefly and not enough time to really get stuck into them, too much glorious sunshine and bicycles to enjoy up at Rutland Water. So, I’ve decided to initially restrict myself to weekday puzzles – if I speed up significantly then I might go for the weekend ones as well, but for now I think having 5 crosswords per week (plus any quick and concise I can squeeze in) is enough. I can use the weekend to catch up on any potential DNFs and try to convert them into successes.

    I found this one quite tough actually, like others quite a lot of biffing went on, then later worked out explanations. LOI was 11 which was biffed too, but I luckily guessed the right word. Without a significant amount of dictionary bashing this would be a half-completed grid so my brain has a way to go. No unknown words for me today but sometimes they just don’t jump out at you.

    Thanks for a nice solid set of clues, with some spiffy wordplay. Thanks to the blog maintainers for the explanations which were required in the end for 11.

    3 month challenge: 3/5.

    WS

  28. Hmm. I suppose so, sort of, maybe. But you put things into a pool before sharing them out.
  29. Belated congrats from me on your milestone – I was just having a browse this afternoon for the first time in months. As my first blog was in April 2006 (yes, before Pete started the “community edition” I took over for a month when it was still a solo effort), you should overtake me in about 8 months or so 😉

    Great to see it’s busier than ever here. The mysterious reason you allude to above is that The Times used to run a Clue Hint line (costing about 60p a minute I think), and Pete thought they might be a bit miffed if he gave all the answers away for free, so his policy was to always skip a few clues (mainly the easier ones). Eventually I just stopped doing that, as it made no sense on Saturdays anyway, and everyone else soon followed suit.

  30. Thanks setter and vinyl
    Actually good to see some of the history of the site from the comments above.
    For a change, I actually found this one a little more straightforward than usual and happy to see my 31 min is closer to some of the times of the seasoned solvers. Didn’t have the issues that some had with DIRECTIVE, STARTERS and TICK as an arachnid. I did take time to fully parse ONE-DIMENSIONAL and like most POOL was last in.
    Enjoyable puzzle that was still appreciated almost a year on in a world that is very different to when you all did it.

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