Times 27568 – time to get on the case

89 comments on “Times 27568 – time to get on the case”

1. Finished and fully parsed in under 40 mins was a good workout for me. VALISE took me a while also, George, despite its simplicity. LOIs were the TACITURN/KINTYRE pair, where I again was slow to spot the anagram indicator for TACITURN. DNK the Isle of Wight town, so assumed it must be some such name from the answer. Also DNK the fish name in 14ac, so needed most of the crossers to unravel the anagram.

   Thanks, George, for the blog. And to the setter for a nice medium-difficulty challenge.

   Edited at 2020-01-23 02:02 am (UTC)

2. I had no idea whether JEER was going to be correct since I didn’t see the JEWELLER thing. A bit delayed by KINTYRE since I thought I was looking for something in the Med. But all correct in about half an hour.

   Also I’ve never seen St Peter’s Fish to refer to tilapia. Normally it is John Dory, at least that’s what St Pierre is in France.

   Edited at 2020-01-23 03:01 am (UTC)

   1. I thought the same about the fish but the usual dictionaries only have talapia. As usual Chambers is the outlier, offering dory as an alternative. John Dory is also San Pedro in Spanish I believe.
3. This might have gone quicker if I’d known that Fiancée has a male counterpart, and if I didn’t usually spell Valaise with the optional a. I liked the walrus and the Yeti anagram. Thanks for the parsing on Jeer, GH, along with the rest of the blog. ditto setter and ed.
   1. Huh? I don’t know what you mean.
   2. The a is not an option in English. Valaise not mentioned in Collins, ODO or Chambers
      1. A CASE of malaise perhaps ?
      2. As Phil suggests (and my post proves), I am not good at spelling Anglified Gallic words. But, Valaise is in the OED (online version), and it’s the way I’ve always spelt it.
         1. So how do you pronounce it?
            1. One of the reasons I spell it incorrectly is that I probably also pronounce it incorrectly.
         2. Why the cap?
            Wiktionnaire gives the etymology of the French valise as:
            (1560) De l’italien valigia.
            An old book in Google books says “La Valaise” is “an old French word signifying a bank or sloping hill.”
            Utterly mystified am I.
            What does the OED say, exactly?
         3. “Valise” came into English intact and unanglicized.
            1. The cap is because I usually capitalize clue answers when I post – trying to identify answers to make the sentences more clear, and easier to follow than 26d, 17a, etc. So that bit isn’t part of my not knowing how to spell.

               The OED lists it as a variant (and, I’ll admit, a variant that is third or fourth on the list). As I said, I’m not good at spelling Anglicized words of Gallic origin, and I’m equally not good at spelling words used in English of un-anglicized Gallic origin.

4. Hard work and a technical DNF as I didn’t know the philosopher at 11ac and was unable to get to HOBBLE from ‘create difficulty for’.

   Also I’ll raise a cry of ‘foul’ re 23 where yet again we have an obscure word clued as an anagram with four unchecked vowels that might have gone in in almost any order unless one happened to know the answer from the definition.

   I might have accepted ‘top item’ as definition of BATHING CAP at 1ac but that can’t be so unless ‘item’ is doing double duty. ‘Top’ on its own is not sufficient in my view for any sort of headgear as when it comes to items of clothing a top is something that covers the upper half of the body – jumper, tee shirt etc – discussed here at some length recently.

   NHO the ‘swing round’ meaning of CANT, nor the fish.

   Edited at 2020-01-23 06:37 am (UTC)

   1. YOSEMITE isn’t an obscure word to Americans, anyway (it’s the name of a national park, and we all know the Looney Tunes character Yosemite Sam) nor to Apple computer users (as it is the name of a fairly recent operating system).
   2. I agree on ‘top’ for ‘cap’ and can’t find any support for it in the usual places… including, I am happy to report, Chambers 😉
5. I enjoyed working on this, and at times it did seem like work, but discovering ST PETER’S FISH and marveling at the devious wordplay for JEWELLER and others kept me entertained. I didn’t even mind much leaving two squares blank because I couldn’t think of TYRE.

   I’m afraid the intended definition of BATHING CAP has to be merely “top” (nor do I see what “item” would add to that), because for the life of me I can’t see how California and a bread roll could be part of the definition. Happy to remember “bap,” a word I know only from working these things.

   Over here, it’s called “drunk driving,” or I would’ve gotten that one sooner.

   Edited at 2020-01-23 07:03 am (UTC)

   1. Isn’t it universally known as DUI?

      Edited at 2020-01-23 06:46 pm (UTC)

      1. Known universally as a very bad idea.
         Besides Driving Under the Influence (applicable to drug use also), we have Driving While Intoxicated, and some states make a distinction of severity between the two offenses, an attribution that can flip-flop from state to state.
         Wikipedia says, “In the United Kingdom, the offense is often known as ‘drunk in charge of a motor vehicle’ or ‘drunk in charge,’ and there is also a narrower offense defined by having blood levels of intoxicants “over the limit.”
         Since you asked…
         1. My daughter is a police officer and they know it as OPL (0ver the prescribed limit).
6. At 7ac cantilever bridges swing do they not?

   Nice puzzle lots of goodies including 2dn ALL SORTS as per BERTIE BASSETT- about an hour.

   14ac ST. PETER’S FISH was rather easy – a foreign fish as an ananagram!

   FOI 4dn NOISE

   LOI 11ac HOBBLE

   COD 5dn CARACAS

   WOD 23ac YOSEMITE I thought it was a very fair clue – hardly a foreign word these days and certainly not to Kevin & Co.

   1ac BATHING CAP as a top is hardly obscure and at 15dn VENTNOR and its caves, makes a nice change from Cowes!

   Over here at 17ac I had DRUNK DRIVING too, but soon sobered up!

   Edited at 2020-01-23 07:29 am (UTC)

   1. ‘Top’ for BATHING CAP isn’t obscure, it’s wrong.
7. I really enjoyed this, my third successive solve in half an hour (ish) or less and under my 6V target. Lots of nice surfaces (like the walrus-free harbour) and misdirections (like the Med port). Paul McCartney lost out as earworm for the day to Don McLean after the delightful aha moment yielded by 24. Thanks for the fun, setter, and to George for the excellent blog.
8. …but biffed ANCESTOR for 16d instead of searching for an IoW resort.
   Thanks, George, for ALL SORTS, JEER and thanks for explaining the fish in BREADWINNER.
9. Finishing with KINTYRE thanks to Paul McCartney as for George.

   There was a nice letter on the Times letters page today from one of our setters:

   Sir, Matthew Parris writes that the former Bolsover MP Dennis Skinner could be “a sour old thing” (My Week, Jan 22). Maybe so, but it’s not the whole story, as an anagram of his name is “inner kindness”.
   Tim Moorey
   Crossword setter for The Times, London EC1

10. 10a is shown as having 8 letters in my paper copy not that it held me up changing SWERVING to SWERVE. I hope the setter is not being rude on the sixth line?? Thanks George for parsing JEWELLER.
11. 31 minutes, with LOIs VALISE and JEER. The penny eventually dropped, but is a JEWELLER necessarily rich? I knew YOSEMITE as a park, and not from the other two examples mentioned by Guy. I know Yogi Bear but he lived in Jellystone, didn’t he? I can recall being given something called a Peter Fish to eat by the Sea of Galilee, so that dawned on me when trying to work out what the first two letters of the anagram were. Capernaum was well worth the visit. COD to HOBBLE and TACITURN jointly. Thank you George and setter.
    1. I took ‘rich’ to refer to the setting, in the way that if you go to a ‘bespoke tailor’ it’s not the chap himself who is created specially for you.
12. 25 mins with yoghurt, granola and cherry frangipane tart (in place of banana).
    I liked it except: Top doesn’t define bathing cap. And I get that a jeweller is a sort of setter, but ‘rich’ setter seems insufficient.
    Thanks jeweller and G.

    Edited at 2020-01-23 08:45 am (UTC)

    1. Thank you for this one Myrtilus. I remembered it from an earlier TLS, which also contained “yesterday”.
13. Well, that was a toughie. 58 minutes, and like others submitted with not much confidence in my LOI JEER. Along the way I met a new fish and found out that KINTYRE is a peninsula and YOSEMITE is a valley. Held myself up by darting down a few blind alleys, too, including assuming that 20a was going to be a somethingDUCT.

    Ninja Turtling came to my rescue at 11a; while I do know Hobbes as a philosopher, I probably recall his name most from Bill Watterson’s excellent cartoon strip…

14. Just over 21 minutes, but technically a DNF, as I swithered between ANCESTOR and INVENTOR, neither of which made any apparent sense if, like me, you had no idea about the Isle of Wight resort.

    A propos of yesterday: Where can I order a zebus skin, west of Tibet?

    1. This is why I do the crossword on paper. Should read:

       Where can you order a zebu skin, west of Tibet?

       1. Nice! How about substituting Tashkent for Tibet, being the capital of Uzbekistan?
       2. Unknown bus I take north breaks down on the Silk Road.
15. “To top it all” is surely the same as “to cap it all”. I biffed the answer and only just now has the penny dropped.

    PPJS

    1. That’s like saying you could clue a hair net as a catch on the basis that net and catch can have the same verbal meaning.

       Edited at 2020-01-23 01:13 pm (UTC)

    2. For the purposes of this clue the phrase ‘to bathing cap it all’ would have to exist.
16. My limited travels helped with this one – have been to YOSEMITE and have several times visited VENTNOR. Also was once within fifty miles of KINTYRE. Knew BASEL from Euler’s life and work. Having been to California did not help with 1ac, I just assumed that the definition is ‘top’ = BATHING CAP. And I haven’t been to CARACAS.

    Dnk the fish, had heard of Hobbes but could tell you nothing about him (wrote Leviathan, but none the wiser). And I now realise there may be a homophonic allusion to another philosopher.

    A good challenging puzzle, 16’55”, thanks george and setter.

17. Also very good. I just think it needs to end “somewhere on the Silk Road” for the definition.
    1. Country radio’s seepage touched on an inner British English
       ooze, kissed, an, be
18. The enumeration for 1a made it likely to be a HAT or CAP, with POSTERIOR confirming the latter, so it wasn’t difficult to work out the BATHING bit, with BAP in mind. HUT was my FOI. Before getting CLEAN SHAVEN(which I will do later), I was playing with ST STEPHS FIRE(who knew?). I managed to parse JEER, but raised an eyebrow at the “rich” bit. YOSEMITE was very familiar, both as the National Park and the cartoon character. HOBBLE was my LOI after BREADWINNER, which gave me the B to summon up Hobbes from the depths. Enjoyable puzzle. 33:55. Thanks setter and George.
19. quite a few stutters here – the only jumper i could think of was a POLO NECK, and there’s lots of sailors in crosswordland, but never heard of POLO being among them, so had to rethink. Once I eventually got that, everything flew in, until the inevitable last one, where i was left with JEER or LEER. On the basis that a rich setter could be a jetter (?) and TT might be an unknown variation of well (maybe teetotallers are well??!) it went in. I’ll call this a RAWR – right answer, wrong reasoning. It may catch on?
    1. I actually put in POLO, and almost left it on the basis that Marco of that ilk was a sailor. Fortunately I realised quickly enough that there was only one of him.
       I also had exactly the same reasoning for JEER. It didn’t make an enormous amount of sense but it was the best I could come up with!
20. further thoughts – my daughter’s a jeweller but she’s not rich…..
    1. As mentioned above I read ‘rich’ as a reference to the setting rather than the setter.
21. Same as Guy and others with Yosemite – perhaps slight advantage to US solvers for that. There is a famous photo of the Falls by Ansel Adams and they are a big destination for climbers. Tilapia is the local supermarket go-to budget white fish – I had no idea that it was thought by some to be the fish distributed with the loaves in the Bible. Hobbes is the one who coined the phrase that the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Often paired with Locke who took a more optimistic view of nature. Neat puzzle (on my wavelength so I would think that) 14.26
22. A leisurely half hour watching Oz tennis this morning, all satisfactory and enjoyable, except 25a where I put in JEER on definition without any idea why. I did try WELL inside JEER but couldn’t see why the word RICH was there, the clue would work better with just SETTER?

    Thanks to all who attempted an alternative clue for UZBEKISTAN yesterday, some contorted surfaces turned up to make up anagram fodder. I’m reluctant to pick a winner in case it starts a new debate thread.

23. rich jeweller means jeweller for the rich.
24. jackkt complains about an obscure word being clued by an anagram. What about 14ac? Hands up people who knew what a tilapia was and also had ever heard of a St Peter’s Fish.
    1. Chacun a son gout, I thought 14a was fine. As I said in my comment I did know tilapia, very well. However, perhaps that’s another one where the advantage was to US solvers.
       1. Is that french for,”red wine affects everyone differently.”?
          1. It was the wine speaking – it said I’d like some more.
             1. I was using gout in its ‘leg pain’ sense. You appear to be to tending towards ‘legless’??
    2. Morrisons and Sainsburys both sell tilapia. I avoid them because small bones
    3. In the Caribbean a few chickens are kept in a small coop with a floor of wire netting. This sits on a small tank containing tilapia who eat everything that falls through. They grow almost visibly. A very efficient sustainable use of tiny backyards.
25. Cant is not given as a recognised short form of cantilever as far as I can see. Is it given in any good dictionary as such?
    1. from collins. Cant:

       1. inclination from a vertical or horizontal plane; slope; slant
       2. a sudden movement that tilts or turns something

       .. the clue doesn’t mention cantilever so not relevant

    2. My Chambers app gives cant as a verb to turn on the edge or corner, tilt or toss suddenly or tilt or slope. No mention of cantilever. I didn’t know the word myself but it’s there in the dictionary.
    3. I’ve seen it in a nautical connection (Conrad, Riddle Of The Sands I dunno) describing the sudden tilt of the deck in a lurching movement at sea when the ship yaws.
    4. My 2004 Aussie OED has cant as a verb:
       4. Intr. Naut. swing round.
       So I’m with Olivia, a precise and specific nautical term. Albeit one I’d never heard of.
26. 18:21, tricky stuff. I didn’t know the fish in either of its guises (and if it has loads of bones and eats chicken poo I’m glad) nor was I familiar with the verbal meaning of cant. Yosemite well-known enough though.

    I was a bit worried about 11 as that meaning of hobble is unfamiliar and although I’ve somehow heard of Hobbes (despite his being absent from the Monty Python song) I did wonder if there was also a Nobbes.

    1. Oh, it turns out Hobbes is in the song. I need to brush up on my lyrics.
27. I bet I’m not the only one who hums through Monty Python’s (Bruces’) Philosophers Song whenever the thinker in question isn’t obvious. Coincidentally today also mourning the passing of Terry Jones, not only a great writer and performer but also, like me, an Old Guildfordian. Two down, four to go.

    Edited at 2020-01-23 01:25 pm (UTC)

28. I knew tilapia was a fish and I knew of St.Peter’s fish from my days in the Middle East. They fished it in Lake Galilee I think. Isn’t there a smudge mark or something around the eye, which was where St Peter the fisherman picked it up … or something like that??? I would not have said tilapia was a St.Peter’s fish because I thought the tilapia was uniquely African – happy to be put right.
29. 17:30. Didn’t know that other name for a tilapia and took a while to parse JEER find Hobbes the philosopher for 11A at the end. I enjoyed the licorice at 2D and the CLEAN SHAVEN walrus. Thanks George and setter.
30. 27 minutes. Didn’t manage to parse jeer but OK with ‘rich’ – I don’t see why there can’t be a sense of one who sets ‘rich’ things. We’re a little too one-two-clunk or insistently logical sometimes when there’s leeway for a slightly expanding envelope. E.g. the top in 1 is helped on (as it were) by just a touch of double duty for item. Didn’t know the fish or its legend but cheering somehow to know latter (though the loaves can stay random). jk
31. Pleased with how I got on today, especially having read some of these comments. It probably helped that I know the Isle of Wight well. ST PETERS FISH was a guess but seemed likely (I knew it was a fish). I even forced myself to pause before putting JEER in (my LOI) until I’d worked it out…

    But of course I’d made a typo so it was all for nowt. Sigh…

32. I felt as if I was making unnecessarily heavy weather of this puzzle, but apparently I wasn’t alone in finding it a challenge. Plenty which was on the edge of my understanding, but I got there in the end. The Mull of Kintyre peninsula occupies an interesting, but probably apocryphal, niche in the history of British film.
33. No idea about the ‘swing round’ bit of CANT, the 14a fish or the parsing of JEER but all could be entered from def or wordplay and I finished in 48 minutes.

    Thanks to Monty Python (and RIP Terry Jones) for helping with 11a.

34. ….and knowing what was wanted, I failed to solve TACITURN. Had I done so, I would have got KINTYRE and avoided an ignominious DNF. I’m wondering why I didn’t just try the alternatives (T,C,R,N) in 18D. I’d have got there if I’d done that (probably at about 20 minutes).

    Thanks to George for parsing JEER. NHO tilapia, let alone it’s other moniker.

    The port of RIO seems to be turning up a lot lately.

    I must seriously disagree with the clue for BREADWINNER. Dinner and supper are two totally separate meals, and are taken in that order. I was sent to bed without my supper more than once, but never without my dinner ! A fish supper is what a Glaswegian buys on his way home from the pub – maybe after his dinner is in the dog.

    FOI CREW-NECK
    COD CLEAN-SHAVEN

    Edited at 2020-01-23 02:34 pm (UTC)

    1. Where I come from, they’re synonymous, the three meals of the day being breakfast, lunch, dinner (aka “supper”).
       Cambridge has, for “dinner,” “the main meal of the day, usually the meal you eat in the evening but sometimes, in Britain, the meal eaten in the middle of the day,” and for supper, essentially identical US and UK definitions as the main meal of the day, in the evening, but also your sense, “a small meal eaten in the late evening.” Not such a harsh punishment to be deprived of that.

       1. So when do you have your tea then?
          1. Ha!
             Hardly ever! (Addicted to coffee, though.)
    2. I’ve always used the two more or less interchangeably. Dinner is just a slightly posher version where you might have a napkin.
35. I took the RICH SETTER to be someone who puts stones in rich settings. Setter on its own seems inadequate for JEWELLER.
36. 25.35. Took a while to get going and plodded thereafter. Last two in were hobble and epicurean, the latter delayed by putting in drunk rather than drink driving. Never mind, got there in the end.
37. After the excitement of hunt the nina in the QC, I thought I might be too tired for this and was about to give up with the bottom half done when I had a breakthrough and finished it off. FOI was HUT then EPICUREAN. LOI POSTERIOR after BATHING CAP. We’ve had a lot of tops recently.
    The last two years I’ve played golf on the Mull of Kintyre so that was no problem. Dunaverty is a very pleasant course right at the very bottom in Southend (sic);worth a detour.
    Could not parse JEER and DNK Tilapia or the derived answer.
    David
38. Around 20 minutes or so, a normal time here. I happened to know all the oddities here, including the Saint’s fish. But that’s only due to seeing St Peters Fish on a menu a couple of years ago, and I asked what it was. Answer: tilapia. I passed. I find it impossibly bland, but if I had to multiply something to feed a multitude, I suppose it’s as good as any. Regards.
    1. I would have just assumed it was John Dory, as it is in French and Spanish, and been very disappointed. John Dory is superb.
39. A lot of my leisurely 41 minutes was spent agonising over BATHING CAP and JEER. In the end, I biffed them both without getting the parsing and hoped for the best. I also spent a long time over 14ac, before deciphering the NHO ST PETER’S FISH.
40. I went for Ancestor instead of Inventor.

    COD: Drink-Driving.

41. I knew both, although the answer possibly only from French.
42. DNF. I didn’t find this too difficult and finished in around 24 mins but managed to enter a bleary eyed inventer instead of inventor. I didn’t know the fish but it wasn’t too hard to work out. I wasn’t sure about cant for swing round, had I thought of cantilever I would’ve been more confident with it.
43. 9:57. No dramas, in spite of a M*ER at ‘top’ for BATHING CAP and knowing that the fish was that fish.

    *major

44. Didn’t see the WELL trick with JEER, but guessed it anyway.

    HOBBLE held me up the longest as I mentally trawled through names. I know nothing of his work, only that there is a cartoon strip called Calvin and Hobbes about a young boy and his toy tiger. Of the two, the tiger is the more philosophic.

45. Thanks for JEER, I gave up trying to see a reason for it. Isle of Wight references are always welcome on the ferry in the morning. For West Country climate without the A303, head to Ventnor.
46. my name is Carol and my husband’s name is David, in February 2017 I went to my doctor for a check-up as I had suffered from light bleeding and pains in my womb for the last couple of months, listening to my symptoms my doctor quickly realized that something was seriously wrong and referred me to our local hospital for a colposcopy. During this examination the specialist realized that I had a tumor growing on my cervix and told me straightaway that it looks very much like cancer.  As you might imagine I was really shocked and scared and lots of thoughts went through my mind.
    As I was a mother of four young boys I was very quickly referred to see a specialist consultant.
    After a great deal of prayer I decided to have surgery (a hysterectomy), but no other medical treatment whatsoever. My consultant referred me to different specialists for scans and MRI. I was scheduled for surgery in mid April and he wanted to make sure that the cancer had not spread. When I went in for surgery I was provided with nurses and other medical staff who looked after me and comforted and encouraged me to keep my eyes on God, particularly when none of my family or friends could be with me. The surgery went very well and the following day my consultant remarked on how well I looked and asked if I had a blood transfusion as I did not look pale. Later on my consultant, who had been my surgeon asked me to go for another test, which I did, only to find out I still had cancer.
    Well this offcourse was very troubling. So I taught it was nice if I switch diets and decided to do more of veggies. I was also doing a lot of research on the internet. And I came across a testimony of a man telling stories of how e had hepatitis b for so many years, and had tried to treat it. But with no solution, the man went on to explain that he tried different doctors in different countries but still couldn’t get help. So he tried to talk with his colleague at work who is an African, and the friend explained that alot of these diseases can be cured with herbal medications, which at first he doubted. But due to the fact that he had tried so many things without a positive result he didn’t have much options than to try herbal medications, Which he did. Well to cut the whole story shot. The man got healed from from hepatitis b using herbal medications and I am cancer free today. All thanks to herbal medicine.
    The reason for this is because I know a lot of people are going through different situations with their health, and a lot must have spent a lot of money too and still have the same problem.
    I am going to drop the Email and WhatsApp number of the Doctor that cured me. Just incase anyone else needs help. Please share this message, as you never know who needs Help.
    I am not sure what your health issue is, but I will advise you contact him,
    His name is Dr. Biodun Adesola. You can contact him through his email or directly through Whatsapp.
    Email: drbiodunadesola@gmail.com
    Whatsapp : +1 323 515 0854
47. You certainly need help, David’s wife. I recommend a diet consisting solely of Spam. And you must completely avoid posting on crossword blogs, as it tends to aggravate the complaint, and can cause complaints to arise in the blog readers too.

    Whilst not enjoying David’s wife’s news, we did enjoy the crossword. 28mins, so as per usual 2x Olivia.
    Thanks for parsing jeer. Liked bathing cap , and embarrassed about the time taken to solve the anagram of ‘ one is ‘ .

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