Times 27580 – I’m not loving it

51 comments on “Times 27580 – I’m not loving it”

1. Two errors from hasty reading: CURTAIL at 5d and HARDIER at 18d. Fortunately, the L was a checker and was corrected with NASCENT, but I never looked at HARDIER again. DNK CHINE=ravine. LOI BRAKE, where an alphabet trawl somehow overlooked K the first time.
2. I had TRENCHANCE which fits the clue apart from not being a word. So one pink square. I spent a long time with WENT FOR A BURTON since I couldn’t quite dredge up the correct phrase, which made getting EXPLORING impossible. Surprised to see what I think is a McDonalds’ trademark (famously a Royal in French which I knew from living in France before Tarantino made it common knowledge).
   1. I see from the Wikipedia entry that it’s a trademark in the US, but not in the UK. If you can find one of the UK’s remaining Wimpy restaurants, you can still buy their own Quarterpounder over here!
      1. I stumbled upon a Wimpy in King’s Lynn last year and was a bit surprised. I didn’t go in mind.
      2. Wimpy still exists? Wow. I live in California these days so I don’t have to endure Wimpy. I don’t even have to endure McDonalds since we have In’N’Out. And Shake Shack just opened in San Francisco which has the reputation of being the East Coast equivalent of In’N’Out although I’ve never been (nearly went to one in Yokohama last year since it was just by the hotel).
3. …as I continually misparsed clues, and put the correct answers in the wrong place. I ended up with a 65 minute solve. Now 3 down, that’s got to be a seabird, right? Maybe a Chinese Puffin? Nope. Well, maybe it’s a variable shade, some sort of something pattern? The actual answer eventually appeared, but it wasn’t easy. I did nearly put ‘tack’ for 1 down, only ‘stack’ cannot be made to mean ‘fast’ in any sense – I tried. Time 65 minutes.
4. I got CURTAIN, but somehow didn’t think of the relevant phrase for “the end” and was hung up on thinking “curtail”—”cut short”—had something to do with it that I couldn’t see (unless the clew was scrued up). I had it all finished except the last bit of GONE FOR A BURTON and resorted to Googling my hapless guess, …BUTTON, which brought up the answer. There are various conjectures as to the etymology of the saying, and I wonder when the last person lived who knew for certain from whence it was derived.
   1. I cannot say why the phrase rang a vague bell – I have read many books about the RAF in WWII, and I don’t recall ever seeing it, although I picked up a lot of other useful RAF slang.
      1. In my memory (of books about the RAF, not direct memory) they seemed to use the phrase “bought the farm” more. Which has a sort of obvious etymology.
         1. USAAF rather than RAF, I fancy. PO Prune
5. 48 minutes delayed by QUARTER POUNDER, ON THE QUIET and CHINESE LANTERN. I’m not sure why the last of these is a ‘variable shade’ unless it’s to do with their being collapsible when not be used. Is that the idea?
   1. I assume that’s what’s intended, and I suppose that before it has a light in it a CHINESE LANTERN can be described as such even though it isn’t really a lantern at that point.
      I wasn’t helped by thinking of CHINESE LANTERNS as the things you light a flame under so they fly (associated for me and I would assume anyone else with youngish daughters with the end of Tangled) whereas it seems it can also refer to those spherical paper things that are undoubtedly a sort of lampshade.

      Edited at 2020-02-06 07:37 am (UTC)

6. 9:51, but with a silly error. What’s the opposite of biffing, when you put in an answer from the wordplay without pausing to check that the result is actually a word? That’s what gave me TRENCHANCE. Drat.
   1. 18:09… but me too with TRENCHANCE. But then I didn’t know that THRENCHANCY was a word either.
      1. I’m not entirely sure I did either, but I’m pretty sure that if I had thought about it I’d have corrected my entry, so my subconscious mind must have registered the existence of the word at some point. Thinking about it it’s very far from obvious: adjectives ending -ANT seem to adopt -ANCE or -ANCY in their noun forms more or less at random. So I’ve decided that the clue is unfair after all and awarded myself a moral victory. I may not have got all the clues right but I feel that I won the debate.

         Edited at 2020-02-06 01:24 pm (UTC)

         1. Please will you convince me that “leading to” is a valid position indicator?
            1. We read left to right, so I think ‘banana leading to hexadecimal’ is a reasonable way of describing the words being positioned consecutively to give ‘bananahexidecimal’.
   2. It’s a momble, as documented in our comprehensive glossary.
      1. I don’t think it’s, quite the same. A momble is a word you construct from wordplay and put in because you think it might be a word you don’t know. It’s what happens when the process we use to solve unknown words (which all use often) misfires.
         I put in a word I knew didn’t exist just because I didn’t pay attention.
7. 48:48 but a pink square as I too rammed in the plausible TRENCHANCE, ignoring ‘leading to’ as padding. Note to self: there is no padding in Times crossword clues. Otherwise a tough but rewarding battle to a fair time for me after several sub-30m canters. I share the general MER at the definition of CHINESE LANTERN. Why variable? And how is a lantern a shade? Perhaps one of our Chinese correspondents can enlighten us.
   1. SOED has: Chinese lantern (a) a collapsible lantern of thin coloured paper.

      As keriothe has mentioned above they are a sort of lampshade. They don’t have to be round, though; they come in all shapes and sizes often with Chinese motifs printed or painted on.

8. It’s nice to find I’m in good company with TRENCHANCE. Not knowing TRENCHANCY I don’t feel too bad about that one. On another day I’d have been annoyed with myself for bunging in quilt for duvet and not questioning what ON THE QUILT meant. As it is I’m hopeful that getting two errors out the way today means a longer gap before the next one.
9. 40 mins with yoghurt, granola, banana, etc.
   I was held up by the Q – in Quiet/Quarter. Maybe the tip should be ‘if there’s a U, or, indeed, even if there isn’t’
   Mostly I liked the Momentum one – very topical.
   Thanks setter and G.
   1. I’d already got 20a when I came to 9d and I’d like to add another rider—’even if you’ve already seen a “Q”, don’t discount the possibility that there may be another…’
10. Another membership for the TRENCHANCE club, please. DNK TRENCHANCY. Shame, as that one took me a minute over my hour. Curses.
11. 48 minute with LOI TRENCHANCY. The first shall be last. I know that the derivation of GONE FOR A BURTON is disputed, but I’ve always understood that it was a way of saying that someone who had been killed in action had effectively been demobbed early, and was thus in the queue for their demob suit. It’s CURTAINs for him. I’ll give COD to CUI BONO, as I dredged it up from somewhere. Overall, I found this pretty tricky, bu t worth the effort. Thank you George and setter.
12. 3 Down to be corrected as CHINES(ravines)
    1. Say please.
13. Must admit I found this tricky. Roadblocks at 13 dn “on the quiet” and 3dn “chinese lantern”. With the latter I got fixated with chinese whisper and whisper as a tad or in this case shade. By the way is a chinese lantern a shade or a light or both?

    COD for me was quarter pounder, obvious when you get it but took me a while probably due to treating my body like a temple and never sullying my digestion with burgers- NOT.

    In the end 30.25 .

14. Seemed like hard work, but managed in 21’26”. Loved GONE FOR A BURTON, still around in my childhood, and I got my first suit there. I have walked the Isle of Wight coastal path, which has many CHINES. I believe that CHINESE LANTERNS are very bad for the environment, and particularly birds. TRENCHANCY late in.

    Thanks george and setter.

    1. Undoubtedly, as are toy balloons when released to float away. I think the Chinese devices that do this are commonly referred to as ‘sky lanterns’ to distinguish them from the harmless decorative lampshade referred to in our clue.

    2. Not to mention the fact that releasing hundreds of burning candles to land who knows where seems… not entirely safe.
       1. They were suspected of causing a major fire in a German zoo last New Year’s Eve.
15. Some tricky stuff here, with careful attention to the wordplay needed, particularly for my LOI TRENCHANCY where I had put in CHANCE before getting TREN(d), but then dithered over whether to put Y on the end. I did, phew! I notice there aren’t any pure anagram clues in this puzzle, just partials. Is that rather unusual, or have I just not noticed previously? Hadn’t heard the phrase CUI BONO, but it was easy enough to work out. Liked QUARTER POUNDER and GONE FOR A BURTON. FOI, CAPRI. TUCK was a late entry, my penultimate, in fact, and led nicely to my LOI, the aforementioned TRENCHANCY. Enjoyable puzzle. 29:54. Thanks setter and George.
16. Tricky but enjoyable. That NW corner gave me some trouble, not least because I WENT FOR A BURTON rather than going, so needed to correct that before the crossing answers could fall. I also took a long time to see the correct sort of “fast”, and started by writing in ___CHANCE at 1ac before removing it, at which point the correct answer sprang to mind, so I may have saved myself a pink square there.

    Edited at 2020-02-06 11:44 am (UTC)

17. Made some of the same mistakes as those above, which made it impossible to finish in allowed time so came here. As my FOI I had WENT for a Burton which made 2d and 3d impossible, was convinced 3d was something PATTERN (still don’t see why a Chinese lantern is ‘variable’). Had CURTAIL for a while before seeing nascent and correcting 5d. And of course I had invented TRENCHANCE. The rest was right, if that’s relevant. A nice tricky puzzle, of which I made a complete hash.
18. Turns up in old-fashioned whodunits where the gentleman sleuth is explaining the principles of crime-solving to his admiring acolytes. Strange phenomenon on the Club leaderboard last night. I’d checked to see if I’d expiated my latest typo and found myself at #33 – which is unheard-of. I’m usually much further down the table. It had righted itself by this morning and I’m at #64. Glad I didn’t wake to find I’d won the Iowa caucuses. 22.06
    1. That is so messed up. They have about 1500 results ot correlate. So instead of everyone mailing some clerk to put everything in a spreadsheet, they pay a company (with a really sketchy name) $50,000 or something to create an App that fails totally. And the backup is to use the phone, not text or email. What a mess!
       1. You said it Paul! Apparently no one took into account that many of the “precinct captains” were of an age that might make them less than adept at using phone apps. They also overlooked the fact that cell phone connection can be very iffy indeed in many parts of rural America – even in some areas of NYC there are dead spots.
    2. Very much the old-style equivalent of “follow the money”, then – many classic whodunits start with the reading of a will, of course.
19. Put me down as another TRENCHANCE – made even worse because I scribbled down TRENCHANCY as a possible answer, spotted that it almost had ‘CHANCE’ in it, and changed to the made-up word. Somehow didn’t spot that ‘CHANCY’ was also there.

    A tough one today, 15m 40s with that error, also doing silly things like CURTAIL, UNQUESTIONABLY and QUI BONO, but happily all those errors were checkers so at least I could change those.

    CHINESE LANTERN only sprang to mind as a flower, which is very unusual for me as they’re usually my nemesis.

20. Count me as another whose whose tossed coin landed on the wrong side leading to TRENCHANCE.

    14:01 but for that.

21. See your TRENCHANCE and raise you ON THE QUILT…
    1. Thanks for making me feel better about having those two mistakes.
22. Add me to the TRENCHANCE pink square gang. Otherwise would have been happy with a shade over 20 minutes. So basically exactly the same as yesterday. Sigh…
23. I had Chinese pattern. No idea what one is. Was encouraged with chines for ravines, but could not parse tape into lean!
    Agree with previous comment that clue should have read ravine.
24. I am not quite sure why 3d CHINESE LANTERNS are having such a bad press – Berlin Zoo had a torrid time from the RAF as well. I usually aim ours towards the ocean.

    FOI 1dn TUCK and SOI TRENCHANCY

    LOI 9dn UNQUESTIONABLY

    COD 20ac QUARTER POUNDER

    WOD 11ac PERONISTA who was PORTENSIA for a while!

    My failure was at 13dn where like Lord Ulaca I erred but with IN THE QUILT, otherwise I was but 34 mins.

25. On the cui bono, classicists will remember the difficulty of parsing the dative bono. Cui, sure. To whom. But why bono, and not bonum? It’s called something like the dative of purpose. To whom for the good.
26. 29:07. Nice puzzle. I ummed and aahed over trenchancy versus trenchance but went with my gut which told me the former was definitely a word I’d heard of and the latter just didn’t sound quite right. It was a close call though. I did wonder after submitting how many of those with one error on the leaderboard were down to that. Chinese lantern, gone for a Burton and on the quiet all took a while to appear.
27. I feel much better after coming here. It took me only 43 minutes today to generate my two mistakes, one of them (TRENCHANCE) seeming really to have won the Iowa caucus and one of them (GONE FOR A BUTTON) simply being beyond my ken. Of course I have never heard of an actor named BUTTON (although there was a comedian once named Red Buttons), but Richard BURTON just didn’t come to mind and I wouldn’t have believed he’d fit anyway (“gone for a button” had me imagine having to sell one’s ancestral estate and getting only a button for it, in which case one would be ruined).
28. LOI Trenchance , which seems to have won by common acclaim. ‘ Gone for a Burton ‘ was a commonly used expression by my ex- RAF father, so went in early. MER at 8d , which doesn’t really parse. If the definition is ‘wanting momentum’ it should be ‘stagnating’ rather than ‘stagnation’, surely?
    35mins cutting ‘trenchance’.

Comments are closed.