Times 27385 – ‘Armless Fun

Welcome from sunny Milos – product of 100 volcanic eruptions, supplier of a quarter of the world’s cat litter and home to the extraordinary Eleonora’s falcon.

This was, on the whole, I would say, a pretty Mondayesque offering, which would not have been out of place on Verlaine’s watch of late. I managed it in bang on 18 minutes, showing rather less of the 13d that has characterised my recent attempts. Since I don’t have access to the magic widget on my iPad, this offering will be ‘imperial’ rather than ‘metric’, i.e. all answers and no clues. A bit like poor old Aphrodite without her appendages…

ACROSS

1 PLAYGROUND – PLAY G[ranted] ROUND
8 SPAR – DD (double definition)
9 INSOBRIETY – IN BRIE in SOT Y
10 BIRD – DD; girl=bird in many British people’s lexicons; a falcon is sometimes mistaken for a hobby
12 WATER BUFFALO – BUFF A[ctive] in WATERLO[o]
15 BILITERAL – B[ritish] I[ndustry] LITERAL; ME is a two-letter word, which is what the solution means
17 IRENE – I RENE (with acute disorder)
18 UPPER – [s] UPPER
19 PEACETIME – E in PACE (with deference to) TIM E
20 ESTRANGEMENT – STRANGE MEN in ET
24 EYED – sounds like IDE
25 TANTAMOUNT – ANT in TA MOUNT
26 SEMI – reverse hidden
27 STAFF NURSE – NUR (former rail union, run for eternity by the gloriously named Sid Weighell) in STAFFS (Staffordshire) [engin]E

DOWN

1 PRIM – P RIM
2 ALSO – A LSO (London Symphony Orchestra; geddit?)
3 GIBRALTARIAN – BIG reversed ALTAR in anagram* of RAIN
4 OLIVE – O [c]LIVE; Sir Robert Clive gained fame in India, but died, as I recall, in Quebec. His former residence in Kent is well worth a visit, along with Ightham Mote. On edit: I am getting my 18th century adventurers hopelessly mixed up. Clive was very much an India man, while it was Wolfe who found fame, as well as his end, at Quebec, and had a pile in Westerham, Kent, which is now run by the NT.
5 NOTABILIA – BATON reversed I AIL reversed
7 PHILATELIC – LATE in PHIL IC
8 RADIOMETER – TRIED A MORE*
11 OF MICE AND MEN – COMMEND A FINE*; when Hitchcock told Truffaut that it was easier to make a film from a short story or a novella than a long novel, he could have been thinking about Lewis Milestone’s faithful adaptation of the Steinbeck story.
13 OBTUSENESS – extended definition, as some angles are obtuse, i.e. more than 90 but less than 180 degrees. (Yes, I had to look that up.)
14 SLIPSTREAM – PILS reversed MASTER*
16 REPUGNANT – PUG NAN in RET (to soak)
21 MOTIF – MOT (test for used cars in the UK) IF (the poetical ide of the cruciverse)
22 BURR – RUB reversed R (king). Apparently, some older Northumbrians produce their R in this way (along the lines of the French R in ‘restez ici’). Daniel Defoe picked this up in his travels through the land: ‘I must not quit Northumberland without taking notice, that the Natives of this Country, of the antient original Race or Families, are distinguished by a Shibboleth upon their Tongues in pronouncing the letter R, which they cannot utter without a hollow Jarring in the Throat, by which they are as plainly known, as a Foreigner is in pronouncing the Th: this they call the Northumberland R, or Wharle; and the Natives value themselves upon that Imperfection, because, forsooth, it shews the Antiquity of their Blood.’
23 STYE – T[ack]Y in SE

41 comments on “Times 27385 – ‘Armless Fun”

  1. 30 mins with yoghurt, banana, granola, etc.
    MER at ‘Bird’ for Girlfriend. I know, but must we?
    Spent too long looking for an obscure battle to complete an obscure Buffalo, neither of which turned out to be obscure.
    Thanks setter and U.
    1. Think BIRD is fine for girlfriend – very common from my lowly beginnings.
  2. On paper.

    NHO hobby = BIRD so was questioning whether there was some other type of arcane METER at 8d.

    Wasn’t sure whether BILITERAL was actually a word.

    Guessed that a fricative trill is a BURR rather than a PURR from wordplay.

    Didn’t quite get RE……..T from REPUGNANT.

    Edited at 2019-06-24 07:29 am (UTC)

  3. 39 minutes, along the way learning what BILITERAL means. I didn’t think that was a bad performance after a stag weekend in Newcastle city centre. I feel a tad under the weather this morning… FOI 1a PLAYGROUND, LOI 27a STAFF NURSE just after working out BURR.
  4. A straight work through. I’d never heard of BILITERAL either but the wordplay said that and it seemed plausible as a name for a two-letter word. My only stupid delay was that I figured that “odd blokes in films” had to be EXTRAS and felt smart for spotting the misleading clueing…but I was indeed misled but not in the way I expected. In 5D I was just looking at BAT and could see nowhere the ON came from. Doh!

  5. 14:35 … impeccably Monday offering, with a couple of things requiring a bit more thought. I had to stop myself throwing in ‘bilateral’, and took a while over the very neat PEACETIME (couldn’t parse the clever ‘fellow European’ for a long while).

    Nice to see the old blog format. Reminds me of the days when we had to send in comments with a stamped addressed envelope. Ee, we didn’t ‘ave much but we were ‘appy ….

  6. 3 errors, purr, bilateral, and misspelt altar in 3d.

    Dnk pace or ret.

    Cod also.

  7. 28 minutes, all enjoyed. I thought twice about BILITERAL before seeing half the definition, but not the two-lettered other half. The old cockney joke about what’s the difference between a buffalo and a basin doesn’t work at all if it’s a WATER BUFFALO. (What’s the difference between a buffalo and a bison? You can’t wash your hands in a buffalo.) When I got an MG MIDGET in my youth, I hoped it would be a BIRD puller but it seemed like I needed more than that. When Sidney Green was General Secretary of the NUR, they had their conference at the Cambridge Hall, Southport where I had a vacation job. Would you believe the delegates voted down his pay increase? He needed a better Union! He was a smashing bloke too. An ideal Monday puzzle. Thank you U and setter.
  8. I was imprecise at 15a with a careless BILATERAL which I knew didn’t parse, but I only spotted the correct answer when the pink square appeared. Drat! Possibly due to last night’s 9a. Otherwise an uneventful 24:54. Setter 1 – John 0. Thanks setter and U.
  9. This was my kinda Monday. 17 minutes of Philatelic Phun!

    FOI 1dn PRIM and proper

    LOI 18ac UPPER

    COD 13dn OBTUSENESS

    WOD 10ac BIRD – the hobby gave its name to the table football game Subbuteo – Its creator Peter Adolphus wasn’t allowed to use the generic name ‘The Hobby’, so he elected for half of the bird’s latin name, which is ‘subbuteo subbuteo’!
    A game of two halves as they say.

    Remember the Liverbirds? It’s ‘ow we spoke in them days.
    Ee, we didn’t ‘ave much but we was ‘appy!

    Edited at 2019-06-24 08:31 am (UTC)

  10. A frisky 16 minutes with no real hold-ups and NOTABILIA not parsed. Thanks ulaca for taking the trourble while in such a nice place.
    1. Sorry that was me, cursed LJ had me logged out even though I was logged into FB. why has it started doing that?
  11. I had to pause this to have a quick nap, which is very unusual on the morning commute. It seemed to help as once I woke up I knocked off what I had left pretty quickly.

    I finished with a tentative BILITERAL, having been tempted by BILATERAL on the basis that I knew it to be a word but I managed to resist this temptation.

    1. 9:11 here, pretty straightforward Monday fare.

      Funny you should mention having a nap on the train, used to be a common occurrence for me, directly related to the previous night’s alcoholic excesses!

      Get on at Coventry, do about a third of the Times before nodding off (probably much to the annoyance of my fellow passengers as I snore very loudly), then wake up at Watford fully restored, finishing off the Times and Guardian before reaching Euston.

  12. 34 minutes with a few unknowns and oddities but impeccable wordplay leading inevitably to the correct answers.
  13. ….that the 15×15 isn’t difficult, I just know that I’m in trouble ! Sure enough a careless “bilateral” undid me. COD GIBRALTARIAN.
  14. 14.36, though it felt as i is might be longer as there were some clues that needed some serious working out. I spent quite a while on GIBRALARIAN worrying about possible alternative spellings and not seeing the altar table in the middle.
    It also felt like there were a lot of random blokes and –ahem- birds in the frame.
    For what it’s worth, ulaca, I quite liked the old school blog, though I had to look up General Wolfe of the Quebec Heights of Abraham to be sure it wasn’t Clive, who apparently died either at his own hand or of natural causes or an opium overdose at his home in Berkeley Square.
    Enjoy Milos, and please post a picture of the falcon if you see one!
    1. Seen the falcon both times we went to the south coast, where they live on the towering ash cliffs – once while kayaking, the other while boating (us, not the birds) – but they were a bit high to get a decent shot of with the iPhone. Cunning buggers, they are. Catch tired migratory birds on the wing and keep them alive in a larder for their young. Don’t breed till August, which is quite a thing for birds that fly to Madagascar for the winter.
  15. Good Monday stuff, and even if you’ve never come across BILITERAL (like me) you didn’t need to be Susie Dent to conclude that the wordplay was suggesting something quite reasonable. Mostly, of course, pleased that I didn’t just bang in BILATERAL and leave it at that. I must be growing as a person…
  16. 9:58. No real problems today. I managed to avoid BILATERAL, which I bunged in initially before reconsidering.
    I would prefer not to see words like BIRD, personally. Lowers the tone a bit.
    The reference to this kind of BURR reminds me of Unlucky Alf from the Fast Show. Bugger.
  17. 35 minutes having had all sorts of problems with ‘also’ and ‘burr’. Dnk that definition of ‘pace’ so I came here to understand ‘peacetime’. Thanks for the blog.
  18. Was the subject of one of the original clerihews as follows:
    What I like about Clive
    Is that he is no longer alive.
    There is a great deal to be said
    For being dead.

    15.03 after dithering over BILITERAL/lateral. Yes, BIRD is not quite passe enough to be entertaining.

  19. DNF. 24:02 but with an unthinking bilateral instead of biliteral. Just off now to write out 100 times on the blackboard: “If you can’t parse it, it’s probably not the right answer”.
  20. 9:11 with more than a little hesitation over BILITERAL. OK, so I wrote in BILATERAL and did a messy alteration.

  21. But with a doorbell interruption which added on at least a minute.

    I managed to avoid the bilateral hazard. I literally missed it by one letter.

    COD: OF MICE AND MEN.

  22. 40 mins including an untimed nap… spent most time over the 2 DNKs. BILITERAL and FRICATIVE, the latter of course being in the clue, BURR thrown in in hope.
  23. enjoyed this – wouldn’t expect to see bird for girlfriend in 2019. Mrs C was not impressed 🙂
      1. I’ll grant that it’s fairly mild as some terms go, but I’m not sure that just because some dodgy terms are still prevalent we should encourage their continued usage.
  24. All straightforward enough … except for ‘tender’ for ‘staff nurse’? – must be missing something. Thanks U for the Defoe quotation, forsooth.

    Edited at 2019-06-24 04:29 pm (UTC)

  25. Mostly not much of a challenge, except for taking a bit of thought too unravel PHILATELIC, and like most others, puzzling over why that wordplay could possibly lead to BILATERAL. Finally saw the road sign posted by ‘precise’, and I admit I then looked up BILITERAL to find out if it existed. So vocab expanded again today, assuming I can remember that. Regards.
  26. Didn’t get on so well with this. Spent 30 mins resisting solving aids and staring out of the bus window a lot. Bus was hot, and so was my brain from heat. Excuses, excuses.

    Few odd words here like BILITERAL. Notes for the archive like RET = steep/soak.

    FOI was 1a which is always a boost at the start of a puzzle, but could not get anything to flow from that, annoyingly. LOI 2d which I couldn’t parse at the time, ie BIFD but was the only word that I could see that fitted.

    Thanks to blogger and setter

    WS

    Challenge total 51/53.

  27. According to my dictionary app, “burd” is an old word meaning “maiden” or “lady”, nothing to do with our feathered friends. I kind of like “bird” for a girlfriend accordingly. Sure beats “bi***” anyway.
    1. Thanks for that, V. You are veritably, in spite of any and all differences pertaining to character and upbringing, as a lark, soaring high upon a thermal to envision the one it has espied from afar and fell immediately fully and helplessly in love with, my Robert de Saint-Loup. (Apologies for the brevity of the Proustian sentence, but the wife has just called me for supper.)
    2. Very interesting, V. I was just about to chime in with James on this, but now I have a different view. “Burd”! Whodathunkit!
  28. Had to use aids about 2/3rds of the way through this, which means I found it considerably harder than last Friday’s. Then again, not too surprising given that my GK doesn’t (didn’t) run to Hobby, Ret and Biliteral. Invariant
  29. On an Apple, you can get the apostrophe (rather than an open single quotemark) with shift-option-], but it seems that on a PC (WIndows) you have to use some complicated numerical code…?!

    Edited at 2019-06-25 06:31 am (UTC)

  30. Thanks setter and ulaca
    Second single letter error in consecutive days – the B.I. bit was easy enough – but then got mixed up with definition and word play – had LATERAL for ‘like me, the setter” and never quite working out what the definition was. Oh well !!!
    Other than that, found it mildly challenging with a mix of easier clues, some new terms such as ‘fricative’ and that BILITERAL, some tricky word play and well disguised definitions. Was a little surprised to see the BIRD definition but took no offence at it.
    Started of with the two shorties (1d and 23d) at opposite corners of the grid and finished back at the top with the clever ALSO and OLIVE (which took much longer to convince myself of than it should have).

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