Times 27424: I’d rather have a 21 than a 10

52 comments on “Times 27424: I’d rather have a 21 than a 10”

1. Thanks for explaining Liability, GH. I liked Archivist. A number of the definitions didn’t click right away with me, either. The difficulty then is that once I’ve realised that the definitions are going to be tricky, I lose confidence in deciphering the wordplay, assuming that it, too, will have some words that need squinting at.
   1. I guess George’s job sometimes comes in handy in his hobbies, although I can’t think of how a knowledge of chemistry could be useful in amateur theatrics.

      Edited at 2019-08-08 02:32 am (UTC)

2. A challenge, one I was not at all sure I’d meet. As it was, I biffed a few. SEMI was one of my LOsI, largely as I wondered about the suspension dots; still do. Biffed ANT BEAR–is NEAR a noun (miserly sort)? DNK KNOCK ON, just biffed. Didn’t know that lability was also a chemical term.
   1. Aaah – I think SORT is part of the definition, then NEAR=MISERLY works
      1. Aha; thanks. I did biff this, and it was just as well. And then I didn’t notice your underlining.
3. Is actually contained within houSE MIght

   Didn’t realise this until I was reading the blog just now

   1. So it is – an odd clue becomes odder
4. …..as I certainly did! I spent a long time trying to make some use of ‘dogeared’ even though it didn’t fit, and I already had ‘agitato’. I just biffed ‘liability’, which was the other tough one. I was also leaning towards the ‘record holder’ being some part of a turntable, a typical misleading literal for this type of puzzle.

   My time was equal to a very long CD, as I was too lazy to clean and play a record tonight.

5. I’m currently the only person to have clocked in under his/her NITCH, which makes me feel the kind of outlier I’ve always wanted to be ever since I didn’t read the book by the bloke who looks like Coco the Clown.

   Clueless how the science clue worked but loved CARYATID, paying homage to the king of the ad-lib and the double-take.

6. The definition seems to require a singular, so I was hesitant to put in the rather obvious answer.
   I think of “lability” as having to do with moods, but I am no chemist.
   SEMI seemed to be an &lit, with the hidden word.
   My LOI was DOGLEGGED, because the cricket sense of ON was elusive. And I didn’t get the rugby in KNOCK ON THE HEAD at all!
   1. My take on this is that the setter is using both words in the plural, cheekily using the alternative form ‘anana’.
      1. So… “At first, bear one [word for] fruit [and “fruit” can be plural] or another.”
         Both “banana” and “ananas” are singular, though the latter is also plural. “Fruit” can be plural, and if we take it as such, BANANAS fits the bill.

         I don’t see how thinking of “anana” helps. “Ananas” is the plural of “anana,” but nothing indicates that we must find a plural; “fruit” merely allows the answer to be plural. We needed something to give us the “S,” and it’s irrelevant whether we take “ananas” to be the plural of the rarer “anana” or its own plural.

         1. I think it’s just a simple case of parallelism between the two plurals.
7. At 8ac CL is from ‘colonel’s coat’ – C{olone}L.

   No solving time to offer as yet again I got stuck with only about a third of the grid completed, however on this occasion I didn’t nod off but made a conscious decision to abandon the task for the night. On resumption this morning the answers came a little more easily.

   One time I do have however, is that it was 10 minutes before I could enter my first answer, and then it was only the hidden SEMI at 22ac though I’m pleased to note now that at least I spotted it was hidden.

   I used aids for the unknown CARYATID and to unravel the long anagram at 21ac where I had no idea from the definition ‘heady mixture’ what I was looking for. Having failed Chemistry O-level twice I didn’t get the parsing at 12dn of course.

   AGITATO is supposed to convey a bit more than ‘hurriedly’ but I suppose in layman’s terms it just about passes muster for crossword purposes.

   Edited at 2019-08-08 05:46 am (UTC)

   1. The word is used a lot in philosophy, it would appear. I first encountered it in a paper of the late, much lamented Jerry Fodor: ‘Any device whose computational proclivities are labile to its computational history is thereby able to learn, and this truism includes networks and classical machines indiscriminately’.
      1. I very much hope you have that memorized, and didn’t have to look it up, Kevin.
         1. It’s engraved on my heart.
8. 27.44, so a bit tougher than average. SEMI was almost my last in, as I thought the clue was heading in that direction, but couldn’t see the “hidden”, deceived by those dots. Usually that pattern means there’s a missing word to be inserted to fill in the gap, but not this time.
   LIABILITY was my last in, and only when I set the letters out flat. I knew labile, but apparently not that it meant unstable – I’d have guessed it meant flexible. We learn.
   At 4d, I had the wrong end of the clue for definition, and thought errant only worked if UNHINGED was the answer. Thanks for more careful analysis, George.
   The AGIO bit of 13 was yet another known word with a unrecognised meaning. We learn (again)
9. I finished with an unparsed AGITATE. I had earlier thought this was going to be a musical term so should have guessed AGITATO despite not knowing this or AGIO.

   I was held up considerably by going down the wrong path on 2 clues. I thought that DOGLEGGED was something to do with dog-eared thinking that ‘turned’ was something to do with pages being turned. I also thought that CARYATID was going to end in ED, being a ‘leader in the papers’. At least my satisfaction in finally resolving these made up largely for the annoyance at my error.

10. … the puzzle is quite hard. 47 minutes. CARYATID was in on a wing and a prayer, pleased I’d at least spotted Cary Grant, and AGITATO only because ‘agitate’ couldn’t be right. I’d also no idea why it was CHUCKLE, forgetting Mr Berry and others. I liked COVETOUS and COD KNOCK ON THE HEAD. A stiff challenge. Thank you George and setter.
11. Ah, my favourite sort of crossword: one that I didn’t find hard but others did.. doesn’t happen often!
    Having said that I never saw the hidden SEMI, and dnk lability, but entered the answers happily enough anyway 🙂

12. 25:21 … had to ‘hit and hope’ with both LIABILITY and AGITATO (if I ever knew ‘agio’ I had certainly forgotten it). Quite hard work, but gratifying.

    On the plus side, I now have a wonderfully mellow Eagles earworm to keep me company though the day. If you need to chill out: Tequila Sunrise – https://youtu.be/bi5ihNyplBs

13. Tough one but doggedly managed to get over the line.

    What held me up was a drink problem (Eagle’s) TEQUILA SUNRISE at 21ac an anagram in plain sight, but….

    Some of today’s definitions were iffy. That clue might indeed have read,’Spirit of Cacti, using qualities nurse twisted’ and I’d have been there a tad quicker!!

    FOI 14dn ARCHIVIST

    LOI 25ac CARYATID there is a nice example of the gals opposite Euston Station, on the Euston Road, near The Friends House.

    COD 25ac CARYATID it wasn’t Ulysses but good Old Cary Grant!

    WOD 25ac CARYATID

    Time – can’t remember that far back.

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

14. Yeah, definitely a toughie fo me. Thanks to George for parsing CHUCKLE. Doh! Simple really. I still can’t see the cryptic role played by “coat” in UNCLOTHING at 8ac. No doubt this is staring me in the face as well. Can anyone put me out of my misery?
    1. Coat refers to the outside (first and last letters) of colonel
       1. Silly me! Thanks
15. 38′ for this toughie, with LIABILITY and. AGITATO unparsed. Saw CHUCK straight away but could not work out where the LE came from.

    Thanks gl and setter.

16. Probably would have finished in another couple of minutes but have never heard of LABILITY. COD to CARYATID.
17. Biffed ‘Caryatid’ without seeing the reason why – many thanks for explaining. Could not for the life of me figure out ‘overeat’ for ages and ages. Last one in, again without really understanding the derivation.
18. A tough workout! EPISTLE was my FOI, followed by DROOPY, but I got nothing else until IMPRESSIVE and then DYNASTY. ARCHIVIST was another early entry, then I went back to the NE and gradually made progress. KNOCK ON THE HEAD was a breakthrough and gave me a foothold in the NW. I saw CHUCK but didn’t linger to work out the LE. I saw ANT BEAR early on but couldn’t parse it until I came here. TEQUILA SUNRISE was a big help. A postulated BANANAS lead to ASQUITH and LIABILITY. Didn’t know the definition of LABILITY. Didn’t spot the hidden SEMI. CARYATID was laboriously assembled. DOGLEGGED finally gave me a way in to LOI, AGITATO, which I changed from AGITATE after some pondering. ADDUCED was my penultimate. 46:50. Thanks setter and George.

    Edited at 2019-08-08 10:18 am (UTC)

19. DOGGED was the way that I had to be with this – one of those where you have to look carefully at the clues just to work out what’s required, but everything’s there when you look at the wordplay the right way (with the exception of AGIO, which I didn’t know, possibly not for the first time). Good tough puzzle.
20. This took me an hour and a quarter, but I did fall asleep briefly in the middle. That’s not to cast aspersions on the quality, it’s just that I got up at 5am to take photos of the local Balloon Fiesta’s morning launch and didn’t start the crossword until lunchtime, when I really needed a nap.

    FOI 8a UNCLOTHING, LOI (without a lot of hope, but apparently with a lot of luck) 13a AGITATO. Now I’ve seen the definition of “agio” it rings a bell, so it may have come up before. (The most recent occurrence here seems to have been a 2014 Mephisto, so perhaps I saw it in the Guardian, or something…)

    Enjoyed 25a CARYATID the most.

21. ….quite IMPRESSIVE. A game of two halves, where I completed the bottom while the top stared blankly at me.

    Biffed UNCLOTHING (didn’t twig “cl”), AGITATO, and LIABILITY. My thanks go George (yet again !)

    I spent far too long trying to justify “chortle” at 1D, though I didn’t succumb to entering it.

    FOI EPISTLE
    LOI EXAM
    COD ANT BEAR
    TIME 14:21

22. The toughest one for a while: 22m 48s for me, with most of the SE corner proving difficult to fill. And, for that matter, most of the SW corner.

    TEQUILA SUNRISE took ages, despite the fact that it came up in a quiz only last night, and I had the pleasure of seeing the Eagles at Wembley a few weeks ago.

    For SEMI I didn’t spot the hidden word, but I do think the ellipsis is misleading and superfluous. CARYATID was my LOI after much head-scratching and alphabet-searching.

23. Another very slow starter. I got DROOPY and then nothing else for several minutes. I was quite sure there must be a “liqueur” in 21a but that left “tisanes” which wasn’t very convincing. Same non-parsings as others. Kevin may remember that we used to get “agio” fairly often in the NY Times puzzles which is how I knew it (never heard it in any other context) – haven’t seen it lately though. 25.20
24. I was going to mention the NYT, but as you say, it seems to have finally been retired; along with ‘tret’. Now that they’ve been replaced by pop singers and sitcoms and TV networks I’ve never heard of, I wouldn’t mind that much if they returned.
    1. Ditto. Anent and a few others too.
25. A deliberate knock-on is indeed a foul but otherwise an infringement.
26. 35:18, struggling for over 10 minutes over my last few ARCHLY, CARYATID and LIABILITY, but at least I parsed them all. Earlier, COVETOUS and VICTORIAN held me up for a while too.I thought “Heady mixture” was rather odd as the definition for 21A and was a bit uncomfortable about the plural fruit at 15A. I liked ARCHIVIST best.
27. No time, as I solved a bit, went to play golf, then solved the rest. Tricky one. Agio was new to me. Is unhinge a close match for trouble? Maybe it is; I dunno. Thanks George.
    1. I thought it was a bit weak but saw it better in the past tense as being troubled/unhinged.
28. In particular, Ara Parseghian
29. I can’t revise my earlier comment, as it has been replied to, but this clue is definitely an &lit!
    I also don’t think prefixes or suffixes standing alone can be answers, as the “a little” sense of SEMI would be.

    Edited at 2019-08-08 04:02 pm (UTC)

30. Surely unhinge is a verb, errant adjective
    1. Errant, v, to travel abroad like a knight errant.
       1. But in this case the definition is “trouble”, not “errant”.
       2. OK, thanks. On second thoughts, maybe ‘to trouble’ was the key

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