Times 27,377: If Java Man Is An Early Human, Is Gin Man A Late One?

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
A rather middle-weight crossword today, I felt, with rather straightforward wordplay throughout and some clues that bordered on the chestnutty – 10ac, 16ac, 25ac, 4dn all having an air of familiarity about them, or maybe I’ve just been doing this gig too long. On the other side of the coin, there were a few things that did feel more surprising; I liked “arm” for GLOCK and “inheritance” for DNA, for instance. COD to 15dn for obvious surface-related reasons, and also for having another original-seeming definition (very popular, but not resulting in V IN or anything like that) and also requiring a bit of mental twisting and turning to fit the pieces together. Nice clue, thank you setter. FOI 11ac after a quick mental enumeration of various early hominids, LOI 17dn as for some reason I hadn’t considered anything other than the ocular sense until it became absolutely necessary.

ACROSS
1 Youth shy to admit blunder (9)
STRIPLING – SLING [shy, as in fling or toss] to “admit” TRIP [blunder]

6 Copy record covers wrapped in cloth (5)
CAPED – APE [copy] that CD [record] “covers”

9 Provoke Scottish footballers coming out of their shell (5)
ANGER – {r}ANGER{s}

10 Plan to get great pies brought round (9)
STRATAGEM – reversed MEGA TARTS

11 Ancestor of mine: the fellow isn’t able to get personnel work (15)
PITHECANTHROPUS – PIT HE CAN’T + HR OPUS [mine | the fellow | isn’t able to + personnel | work]

13 Arm wrapped around free jam (8)
GRIDLOCK – GLOCK [arm, as in a weapon] “wrapped around” RID [free]

14 Continent‘s cold precipitation (6)
CHASTE – C HASTE [cold | precipitation, as in hurry]

16 Swallow picked up playfully (6)
INGEST – homophone of IN JEST [playfully]

18 Garment fastener comes with a warning (8)
PINAFORE – PIN + A FORE [fastener + a warning]

21 Its entrants are bound to stagger, cheered in old country (5-6,4)
THREE-LEGGED RACE – REEL EGGED [to stagger | cheered] in THRACE [old country]

23 Subjective report on hip turning around (9)
INVERSION – VERSION [subjective report] on IN [hip]

25 Green sort of water sent back (5)
NAIVE – reversed EVIAN

26 Unaccompanied chap‘s sides split by joke? (5)
LONER – L R [(left and right) sides] “split” by ONE [joke, as in “the one about…”, according to my dictionary]

27 Peels bananas with fast, misjudged motion (5,4)
FALSE STEP – (PEELS + FAST*) [“bananas”]

DOWN
1 Astute playwright shortened kind of speech (5)
SHARP – SHA{w} [playwright “shortened”] + R.P. [Received Pronunciation = kind of speech]

2 Blue team member (5-6)
RIGHT-WINGER – the RIGHT are blue, in the UK at least, and a WINGER is a team member, and the whole vaguely &lit?

3 Drag worn by right church organist (7)
PURCELL – PULL [drag] “worn by” R CE [right | church]

4 Not abroad bearing case (8)
INSTANCE – IN STANCE [not abroad | bearing]

5 Line up in entrance to give twirl (6)
GYRATE – reversed RY [line] in GATE [entrance]

6 Problem with cold vehicle needing to keep Jack hot (7)
CATARRH – CAR [vehicle] “needing to keep” TAR [Jack], + H [hot]

7 Member or Leader of Parliament, say (3)
PEG – P{arliament} + E.G. [say]. At first I had an optimistic OWL in here, then LEG, but a PEG is just a LEG.

8 Middle Easterner vexed about a disturbance (9)
DAMASCENE – reversed MAD [vexed] + A SCENE [a disturbance]

12 Writer finished with gold stars (11)
PASTORALIST – PAST + OR A-LIST [finished + gold | starts]

13 Mist dispersing in eatery where corn is found (9)
GRISTMILL – (MIST*) [“dispersing”] in GRILL [eatery]. Odd looking word without its hyphen, derived from thankfully easy wordplay.

15 Pure alcohol, very popular to imbibe it (8)
VIRGINAL – GIN [alcohol], VIRAL [very popular] to imbibe that

17 Small person perceiving one who removes coat (7)
SHEARER – S HEARER [small | person perceiving]

19 Turning up an inheritance, bet deliberately (7)
ANDANTE – reversed DNA [an inheritance, of the genetic kind] + ANTE [bet]

20 Rest of ridge covering about 500 metres in China (6)
RELIEF – REEF [ridge] “covering” LI [about 500m, in China; much beloved of Scrabble players]

22 Appraise report of the writer, not lying (3,2)
EYE UP – homophone of I [the writer] + UP [not lying, as in abed]

24 Topless Russian camper (3)
VAN – {i}VAN [“topless” Russian]

110 comments on “Times 27,377: If Java Man Is An Early Human, Is Gin Man A Late One?”

  1. I had trouble with this one, especially, but not only, in the SW. GRIDLOCK was slow in coming, as was CHASTE. INVERSION was my 2d to LOI, ANDANTE my LOI. I never did understand how STRATAGEM worked, but the G_M was pretty convincing. DNK LI (I don’t play Scrabble), but inferred post-hoc.
    1. LI was first associated with the card game Waddington’s ‘Lexicon’ (1932) way before ‘Scrabble’ came along.

      Edited at 2019-06-14 06:50 am (UTC)

  2. I had to… deliberate a bit before deciding “deliberately” could be a definition for the score marking of a slow movement. LI was new to me. Was glad to recognize our prehistoric ancestor, and also to meet PURCELL here.

    In US electoral maps, the Democrats (“liberals”) are blue and the right-wingers are red…

  3. They might have been chestnuts, but I was way off the wavelength. Not quite finished in 30 mins, so wandered off and the missing 12dn & 14ac flashed into mind. I didn’t know that meaning of continent. 11ac unknown but looks like a word and easily built. Also didn’t know there was such a thing as a gristmill, “grist to the mill” notwithstanding.
    Very enjoyable fare, thank-you setter and blogger.
  4. Happy to finish this in close to my average time, as I thought it was a bit tricky.

    BTW, it looks like the SNITCH is not updating properly. I will need to look at this.

      1. Thanks, pootle, it should be back now. We’ve missed a bit of history during the day, but the latest values should be right.

        It seems that the site updated its security protocols last night (from the 1999 version to the 2008 version 🙂 and I had to update it at my end as well.

      1. Hi John, yes – that was probably yesterday’s time. I think I’ve now fixed it, so your time should now be correct.
        1. Excellent! Well done. Nice to see that the SNITCH rating is also well up on its original. I thought it was harder than 96:-)
  5. Despite apparently being middleweight, full of chestnuts and with straightforward wordplay I had major problems getting to grips with this and scored it as a technical DNF (according to the definition now helpfully supplied in our new Glossary) because I resorted to aids to find the last 6 letters in 11ac. I didn’t know the word and I needed to do something to boost my failing attempts to find a foothold in the NE corner.

    LOI was RELIEF which was little more than a biff based on ‘rest’ because I didn’t know LI and hadn’t equated REEF with ‘ridge’.

    I looked twice at PEG for leg because because I think of it as false leg made of wood, rather than a real one which might be a ‘pin’ if one were to refer to it jocularly.

    At 3dn it seems somewhat perverse to define the greatest English-born composer prior to the 20th century as an ‘organist’ although undoubtedly he held such a position for a while. What next, Mrs Thatcher defined as a chemist anyone?

    Edited at 2019-06-14 05:01 am (UTC)

    2. The position was a little bit more significant than that in Purcell’s life: John Blow was so impressed by the 20-year-old that he resigned his position as Organist at Westminster Abbey in Purcell’s favour, allowing him to devote himself fully to composition. Blow resumed the position when Purcell died 15 or so years later.
      1. Not disputing that for a moment but he’s remembered as a composer. If organist was all he’d ever been it’s doubtful anyone but a few scholars would have come across his name.
        1. Of course but since being an organist was such a significant part of his life and work it seems fair to me. In a similar vein you might reasonably define Liszt or Rachmaninov as pianists.
          1. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong on this one, I was just expressing surpise, but having said that I would suggest that the examples you cite are somewhat different and it would be perfectly reasonable to clue either of them as pianists as Liszt was famous across Europe as a virtuoso pianist throughout his career as was Rachmaninov who also went trans-Atlantic.
            1. Of course there’s no right or wrong. I’m probably more open to the Purcell definition just because the random and largely malfunctioning repository that is my memory happens to contain a snippet of relevant information for a change.
    3. Snitch is saying this is a significant amount above average difficulty (without being a pure stinker) so it looks like I underestimated it. Having said of that, a lot of us *did* get quite close to our par time…
    4. Second greatest. You’re forgetting Thomas Tallis. I agree with your criticism though. Mr Grumpy
      1. I hadn’t forgotten him but as with most views of ‘greatness’ they’re largely subjective. Perhaps if Tallis ever turns up as an answer he could be defined as ‘choirmaster’?
    5. Peg is common in football contexts: ‘Maradona had a great left peg.’

      ulaca

  6. 23:08 … my crossword memory isn’t good enough for any chestnuts to have registered here. I found this distinctly tricky, most of the clues coming together the hard way through several revisits.

    I finally managed not to misspell DAMASCENE, historically an orthographic shibboleth for me, but I half-remembered a conversation from the last time it came up and finally got it right.

    I’m sure there’s some sort of visual joke in this grid involving CHASTE and VIRGINAL sitting atop the THREE-LEGGED RACE, which is of course virgin on the ridiculous.

  7. After getting THREE LEGGED RACE straight off everything flowed nicely from there. It took me to my penultimate answer to get the other long one though, having to piece PITHECANTHROPUS together from the cryptic as I couldn’t fully remember the word. I then banged in RELIEF unparsed to finish and on this occasion didn’t regret my haste!
  8. Congratulations on the new GLOSSARY, an excellent addition to Mr. SNITCH and the family.

    Might I suggest the addition of IKEA(N) often used to describe highly complex clues, akin to IKEA’s assembly instructions. I believe it was instigated by Lord GALPRAY back in the day.

    Also are the supposed difficulties of MONDAY and FRIDAY worth a mention? This was a typical FRIDAY for Meldrew.

    And ‘The Club Monthly’ makes no mention that recently no one, except Lord Verlaine, can manage it!

    FOI 24dn VAN

    LOI 6ac CAPED mainly due to my puzzlement over 6dn CATARRH

    COD 19dn ANDANTE

    WOD 3dn PURCELL

    Time 66 long mins

    Edited at 2019-06-14 07:05 am (UTC)

    1. Wrong, to conclude that because you can’t manage the club monthly, no-one can.
      The club website no longer provides statistics but when it did, there were usually about 60-70 all-correct answers
      1. Wrong, I have managed (to complete) the club monthly.

        And what of IKEA? It has appeared 60-70 times.

        1. A contradiction to your earlier post, then .. I just get bored with your regular attempts to rubbish the club monthly.

          As far as Ikea is concerned, I hadn’t noticed it being in regular use .. what do others think? Should it be in?

          2. I may have referred to it occasionally. I think it’s a reasonable description of a charade, except that there aren’t usually any bits of the clue missing:-)
            1. Well, I’m willing to add it, if someone can come up with a reasonable entry
              1. IKEA clue. A charade in which the definition pops out if you assemble the components of the clue in the correct order.I think there’s a nod to Z8 in that description:-)
                  1. Does an IKEA clue imply tears of frustration as you realise you’ve put a piece in back-to-front and have to painstakingly disassemble again almost back to the beginning? Or is that a connotation IKEA has for just me?

                    Edited at 2019-06-14 06:11 pm (UTC)

                    1. Never mind the furniture. The outrageous claim that only Verlaine can manage the club monthly spurred me into action. I admit that with previous attempts I gave up having solved half a dozen clues or less, but the mention of the Mephisto in the glossary definition (thanks guys!) inspired me to tackle it as I do with the Mephisto. (I’ve been doing that regularly for about a year now, I think). And by approaching it with a preconception that I will never have heard of a lot of the answers and liberal use of my dictionary, I have completed and submitted my first Club Monthly! So, Verlaine, you will have at least one new reader of your blog of this month’s. P.S. There were only(!) 20 answers that were words I had never come across.
  9. 45 mins with yoghurt etc.
    I liked it. Mostly gold stars to the setter for Pastoralist.
    Thanks setter and V.
  10. A typo stopped me from beating my PB (set last Friday). In the short time that I have inhabited these parts, I’ve seen it mentioned that Friday’s puzzles are deemed to be the trickier ones, strangely, I limp through the week in very ordinary times, and seem to find Friday bringing me my best efforts.
  11. Excellent crossword, this one. It didn’t feel at all chestnutty to me, and I started in the mid 1960s .. but my memory for past clues is hopeless.
    Li I knew from the wonderful Kai Lung stories, by Ernest Bramah. Long forgotten but very popular, in their day.
    Loved 11ac, the word seems designed from scratch to be a crossword clue
    1. I once found a very battered copy of The Wallet of Kai Lung in a job lot from an auction, no idea what happened to it after I read it. No problem with LI though, Chinese weights and measures are a useful weapon in the Listener-solving armoury!
      1. One of my favourites, though it seems to come up more in barred puzzles, is the “rotl”, which can also be rendered as “artal”, but ROTL is so much better as it makes me think of “rolling on the floor laughing”.
    2. Dorothy Sayers quotes Kai Lung in several of her Wimsey novels and uses him in chapter headings in one of them, but LI doesn’t appear there and I didn’t know it.
      1. I think you would enjoy them, Olivia. The ones that were issued as penguins are easy to find .. some of the others, less so. There are five or six altogether .. his Max Carrados detective books are also highly rated
    3. I’ve been catching up on old puzzles that I missed when I was on holiday. I’ve just come across your reference to Kai Lung. He can unroll his mat at any time for me. I loved those books. It’s nice that someone else remembers them.
      1. I have a complete collection now, including one that was quite rare, and cost me the fantastic sum of £20 I think. As opposed to 1p + postage as with most of the others .. Hilaire Belloc said “If you think writing like this is easy, just try to do it yourself.” Works of art .. His Max Carrados stories are good too but crime fiction not really my bag ..
  12. I had STRAPLING for STRIPLING.

    I found this both challenging and enjoyable. I didn’t help myself by lobbing in LAPEL where CAPED belonged. I saw an LP where there was actually LL. So I didn’t run with CATARRH for quite some time.

    COD: VIRGINAL. As already nominated by our esteemed blogger.

  13. Slowish (for me) finishing in just over 30 minutes, with GRISTMILL last in because the innocuous GRILL was slow to identify itself as a diner and the full word was unfamiliar.

    Are there rules on product placement? Glock and Evian are trademarks, and while I’m aware that other marques are available, the “camper van” pings the VW logo into the mind’s eye.

    And does it matter that at 1d, the playwright I thought of was the much more abbreviated SHAkespeare? (plus my TV’s a SHARP, more subliminal advertising)


    1. What immediately pinged into my mind with 24d was the Uxbridge def. of campervan: ‘One with more sequins than most’.
    2. I agree about the trademarks, which seem to be creeping in. I only know GLOCK through reading thrillers.
    3. I was OK with Glock; I’m sure there’ll have been some or more of Colt, Bren, Sten, Gatling Gun, Uzi, Kalashnikov, Magnum, Beretta, Armalite, Remington, Winchester, Browning, Mauser, Derringer… (not all of which may be trademarks)
      But I did have mer at Evian – 007 may “carry a Beretta” but “drink an Evian” just jars

      jb

  14. 15:13. This was my kind of puzzle: little biffing, lots of grappling with wordplay.
    Is MEGA TARTS a chestnut? It does seem unlikely that someone hasn’t spotted it before. In any event, it was my favourite today just because it’s so delightfully silly.
    1. A search finds hits on MEGA TARTS for puzzles 24443 and 25132, ST 4317 and 4573, QC 127 and Jumbo 1134.
        1. The advent of the google search has put a big kink in what I think has been a long term setter practice .. “What’s more, it turns out you can use the same clue over and over again, because they never remember the last time(s)” ..
            1. It’s not like MEGA TARTS wouldn’t be almost irresistible, when trying to come up with a clue for “stratagem”. I’m not saying it’s a BAD chestnut. Chestnuts are tasty.
    2. No chestnut for me. An acorn perhaps? I must have done all of those puzzles and still had no clue what was going on here.
      .
  15. 30:26. All a bit of a struggle, but satisfying to get there in the end. Several unknowns/unparsed for me. How SHARP was derived, ONE for a joke, GLOCK for weapon, LI as a measure of distance and the archaic PASTORALIST. COD to THREE-LEGGED RACE. Thanks V and setter.
  16. 18:56 here, with one 5-minute interruption. I had a bit of a blank in the bottom right corner for a couple of minutes at the end, but once I got one they all fell into place. I was pretty sure I’d seen MEGA TARTS a few times before, thanks to Jack for confirming.
  17. I was blind but now I see. Took an estimated 45 minutes on this excellent offering, interrupted many times on the phone while supervising a job taking place 232 miles away. I was pleased to find that RELIEF was right as I didn’t know the Chinese measure. All the rest was parsed, the ancient hominid needing all the instructions. The crosswords must have had some cracking anagrams in those days. Great puzzle. Thank you V and setter.
  18. I found this very hard going, and was despairing of finishing when I had a late rally, and dragged myself home three minutes over my hour. FOI CAPED, but struggled to keep up a rhythm. A few unknowns—PITHECANTHROPUS, “li”, GRISTMILL—didn’t help, but mostly I was fooled by stretchy definitions and just not being on the wavelength. Still. At least I finished, even if not quite in my hour…
  19. Pleased to have unpicked both 12d and 11a from wordplay, not so pleased about spending more time than was decent having –R-T-G– for 10a, and therefore unable to get out of my head that it was some kind of anagram of GREAT PIES. Once I decided it had to be what it was (never did parse it, so thanks V), DAMASCENE made itself visible, along with the bruise when I kicked myself.

    THREE-LEGGED RACE semi-biffed on the basis that there was probably an anagram in there somewhere, so never properly parsed. And, of course, there wasn’t one.

    Like others LI unknown. I’d love to say “but it will be now”, but I just know it won’t.

    SHARP came only once I’d got PITHEwotsit, which jogged the memory for RP. I gave a small trim to SHAW rather than a butchering to Shakespeare but I guess the end result is the same.

    17.58 so my slowest of the week, only just beating Monday and Tuesday combined.

    1. Snap on failing to understand the recipe at 10A, trying to cook GREAT PIES too.
        1. I cannot deny that it was my first thought too. Which makes the clue a rather clever bit of setting, I now see.

          Edited at 2019-06-14 06:43 pm (UTC)

  20. I found this a bit tricky. ANGER and SHARP were my first 2 in, with the latter parsed along the SHAW line before moving on. PITHECANT then went in, but HROPUS took a lot longer to arrive. In fact, VAN was my next entry and then the teeth pulling started. Eventually PINAFORE led to ANDANTE which led to NAIVE, which left me with _E_I_F. I saw RELIEF from the definition, and saw REEF as ridge, but had to take LI on trust. MEGA TARTS took a while to see even though I was convinced STRATAGEM was the answer. An enjoyable puzzle, but it took me 44:32. Thanks setter and V.
    On edit: Oddly the SNITCH has me at 40:03 for this puzzle, but I took 44:32.

    Edited at 2019-06-14 09:02 am (UTC)

    1. A 10% bonus reduction on all your times is the least you deserve for your long dedication to the Times, John!
  21. A chewy Friday puzzle, 28′. COD to CHASTE, so misleading. Missed the DNA, despite being very interested in it. As noted above, trademarks seem to be becoming more common. MEGA STARS may be a chestnut to some, but I spent ages looking for an anagram of great pies.

    I still can’t find the links to the glossary or SNITCH, will look on PC which has a different display.

    Thanks verlaine and setter.

  22. Like jerrywh, found this enjoyable and not too difficult, 35 minutes or so interrupted by a caller for something we were selling off. FOI the hominid, then the easy 21a, LOI SHEARER was a PDM and never did parse RELIEF. CoD for me was the GLOCK for arm at 11a.
  23. Sorry that was I, stupid laptop keeps logging me off FB and thence LJ. Never used to do that.
  25. Glad to finish this even if in 43’30. Slow to yield.’One’ as ‘joke’ seems a bit of one: you need something like ‘Have you heard the…’ for the substitution. Took ‘li’ in ‘relief’ on trust. Happy memories of HMS Pinafore at school in the ‘fifties. Incidentally there’s a marvellous letter in today’s Times from a lady who sat her school certificate examination in June 1944 in the midst of doodlebug alerts … an absolute classic for these timorous times.
    1. Yes, “one” for “joke” is technically justifiable from the dictionary definition, but it’s a bit lawyerish. Reminds me of seeing “the” clued as “my” in barred puzzles more than once, because “the wife” = “my wife”. Sort of?
      1. Ouch. That’s why barred puzzles, whatever they are, for me shall probably remain barred. Do check the Times letter out if you can.
        1. I read it. I was taught by nuns in primary school. They were fierce! Kudos to the kids who survived!
  26. I certainly found this chewy but not chestnut flavoured; more, in fact, one of those wavelength puzzles where I absolutely couldn’t see what I was trying to find, right up until the moment I saw it, when it was suddenly blindingly obvious (this would be why they’re called cryptic crosswords, wouldn’t it).
  27. Satisfying to have solved in 68 minutes. Like a few others I had no idea about LI so had to put in the answer from the def. I’ll have to take up Scrabble.

    A few music related clues, including VIRGINAL. If PURCELL was an ‘organist’, maybe Ludwig VAN Beethoven qualifies as a PASTORALIST?

    Thank you to setter and blogger

  28. A toughie, in which several answers took an age to come – even FALSE STEP, which I’d seen was an anagram relatively early on, only yielded itself very grudgingly.

    PITHECANTHROPUS is entirely unknown to me, but fortunately it was comprised of the first things you’d think of for each of the definitions given (I’ve never heard of an ‘Ikean’ clue before, but I guess this counts?).

    18m 30s with SHEARER the last to fall.

  29. Not laterally, figuratively, hypothetically, not now and not ever.

    Shit clue.

    1. Deliberately can mean slowly so whilst it might take a bit of a dictionary three-point-turn (one for the Glossary?) I think you’re being a bit harsh, whoever you are.
      1. As musicians know, that’s ‘allegro’. ‘Andante’ is usually interpreted as meaning ‘walking pace’, which really doesn’t equate to moving ‘deliberately’. There were so many other ways the setter could have clued it. This was poor, and overly misleading. We want these puzzles to be challenging, not irritating.

        Or so say I.

        2. The dictionaries say “quite slowly” or at a “moderately slow” tempo. They don’t go on to say “as musicians know, this in usually interpreted as walking pace”.

          You can’t expect the setters to consult experts / enthusiasts on every clue that has a specialist slant to it.

          Or so say I.

          1. Whilst I wouldn’t describe the clue using the same term as anon, I think he (?) has a something of valid point with regard to the definition here.

            ANDANTE only exists in English in the context of a musical direction so the meaning of the word as understood by musicians and others interested in the subject is surely what’s important, and that’s what’s reflected in standard dictionaries and musical text books.

            Almost without exception the usual dictionary sources refer only to speed, using terms such as, moving along, slowish but not slow, at walking pace etc. The only exceptions I found are in Chambers which on-line also mentions ‘steady’ and in my printed edition adds ‘even’.

            It’s via those qualifying words I can see one might arrive at ‘deliberately’, but it’s a bit of a three-point turn and I think generally we’re not too keen on those. Also ‘deliberately’ on its own doesn’t really encompass the speed factor which was rather the point of the musical direction in the first place.

            Edited at 2019-06-14 04:29 pm (UTC)

    2. Deliberately is in my dictionary as “quietly, without fuss or haste” which tallies well enough with andante’s def of “moving with moderately slow, even expression”. It’s totally a three point turn in a thesaurus queue though.
  30. Is it my imagination, or have we had STRATAGEM 3 times in the last week? A bit slow partly due to watching the cricket, but some odd clues which held me up. ONE for joke in particular very odd.
    As a typical scrabble player, I did not know the meaning of LI, but I do now! Considered PASTORARIES for a while until a different kind of star presented itself. Having coined the term yesterday, today’s Litbomb was PITHECANTHROPUS. (Lurking in the back of my bind)
  31. 17:01, certainly tricky in places. Relief was last in once I’d finally recalled that there was a Chinese measure I’d forgotten about that could plausibly be Li.
  32. I found this an easier than usual Friday puzzle. Did it in one session either side of cooking my mid-day meal. Got off to a good start with 1ac and 1dn straight in. Some of the clues I thought rather weak. Most tricky clue 19dn ANDANTE.

    from Jeepyjay

  34. Back in the seat after a few days driving round Brittany. Relieved to find this not too much of a challenge. Is deliberately for andante ok? Nearly put shedder for shearer but thankfully stopped short.
  35. Thirty-six minutes for me, consisting of optimism, surprise, despair, revelation and completion in that order. COD to PITHECANTHROPUS, if only because it was so intricately assembled from so many small parts.

    Wishing a good weekend to all and one.

  36. A bit of a cock-up on the catering front today. Pies aren’t tarts. And isn’t Evian a brand name? And even if it’s allowable, water is just. . .water isn’t it? Mr Grumpy
  37. Normal time for me, say 20 minutes, but that included not bothering to parse the MEGA TARTS and being surprised to find that definition of CHASTE. Kudos to the setter for persisting in making a clue that actually led to PITHECAN…., which needed an extra measure or two of construction. Regards.
  39. 24:49. I went out last night for a friend’s birthday, got home late and spent much of today recovering so am only now commenting on Friday’s puzzle. I ran through this tricky offering in a pretty decent time for me but it was a bit unsatisfactory in that I left a few too many unparsed and that always runs the risk of a pink square here or there. Can’t believe I failed to see the mega tarts I was too distracted by the clear anagram of great inside something else that I couldn’t quite fathom. I also missed the reversed DNA for inheritance (andante was probably the one I was most anxious about from the point of view of both wp and Def). Relief was hesitantly biffed not knowing li.
  40. Mysteriously entered LEG rather than PEG which held up the NE for a long time. RELIEF was LOI – NHO LI.
  41. I had trouble with LI…. from other comments it’s clearly a well known convention. Please can anybody explain?
    1. It is actually just a word, a Chinese unit of distance. We’d never have heard of it over here, except that some of us play Scrabble, and it’s in the famed/hated 2-letter word list.
  42. Thanks setter and Verlaine
    Was a struggle for me heading over the 100 min mark. Nothing particularly hard when looking back over them, but seemed to struggle to progress through the clues. Didn’t end up parsing SHARP at all, even though the answer was clear enough. Was the first time that had come across the PITHECANTHROPUS.
    Liked the clues for CATARRH (both definition and word play) and VIRGINAL (for both of them and the great surface).
    Finished in the NE corner with CHASTE (and a new definition of ‘continent’ for me), DAMASCENE (that pesky Syrian took way too long to find) and what looks simple in hindsight CAPED as the last one in.

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