Times 27,629: Please Look After This Blog

80 comments on “Times 27,629: Please Look After This Blog”

1. I didn’t know the relevant meaning of BUMP, and could only come up with BOMB in any case. Something felt wrong about KEENEST, but I didn’t stop long enough to raise an eyebrow. I biffed a few, but managed to parse them before submitting, except for ALUMNUS and the bear (no idea who his creator was). Same experience as V with 13d: got the BOARD, couldn’t think of a game (it was only at the end, when I had ALUMNUS, that I thought of ‘game’).
2. I couldn’t see MATCHBOARD (or anything else) and went with CATCHBOARD. I’ve never heard of either of them, but there is a game of catch, although obviously match is much better fit (and the board exist). I had no idea what was going on with LITERATURE either, but it seemed unlikely anything else would fit so I just put it in. PADDINGTON BEAR was brilliant. I knew it was written by Bond, but that was no help. I only remembered the connection after I’d solved it.
   1. Snap! Never heard of matchboard, either.
   2. I think I stopped looking for -ATCH words having dismissed BATCH and (more reluctantly) CATCH at one point 🙁
      1. I was looking at PATCHBOARD – Electric panels
3. More enjoyable than yesterday’s but I still managed to be tripped up by a 4 letter 1d for the second day in a row – a ‘bomb’ for BUMP for me too, for a 34 minute DNF. I couldn’t parse PADDINGTON BEAR and just bunged in KEENEST without considering the subtleties. DADO was new and CHAPLET only vaguely remembered.

   I liked the ‘hand-outs’ def for LITERATURE, but my favourite was JOHN GALSWORTHY for the B&W (in video tape as I remember) reminders of Susan Hampshire, Nyree Dawn Porter et al.

4. 13dn MATCHBOARD was on TV (Grand Design) the other day so although my penultimate effort, no biggy like 25ac DADO.

   I was sidelined by 1ac BACK STREET (BOYS who were on the Elton at Home Gig) which I had as SIDE STREET – when is a lorry not a lorry? – When it turns into a SIDE STREET (Christmas Cracker, c.1955).

   FOI 5dn ERRATIC – most comedic

   LOI 8dn LITERATURE – pamphlets – it pays to 23ac

   COD 1dn The BUMP

   WOD 12ac PADDINGTON BEAR

   Very entertaining for a Friday – and smartish 34 minutes.

   9dn JOHN GALSWORTHY was a write-in as 13 letters were not quite enough for an anagram and female mis-direction.

5. MATCHBOARD and LITERATURE came near the end for me too. I didn’t know who wrote about the BEAR—was pretty sure it wasn’t Ian, though he wrote all kinds of things (“Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang,” anyone?). I‘m afraid there’s no other way KEENEST could be intended. I enjoyed this, mainly because I found it rather easy.

   Though confined to home except for the daily walkabout, I’d been too busy to work any puzzles since Tuesday, so Wednesday’s and Thursday’s 15×15 still await me (I caught up on the QCs before tackling this one). The Nation just produced another print issue remotely, and I had to produce web versions of those articles, while copy-editing all the web-only stories about the pandemic, and we have posted quite a few. We’re making them all free, too, as most public-spirited outlets are doing in this critical time.

   Edited at 2020-04-03 06:42 am (UTC)

   1. was written in two parts by Fleming. I am writing a new book on IF and his writing. He wrote far more than anyone has ever imagined. He started as a ghost writer back in 1924!! I will send information if you can send me your email address via the private bit of this blog.
      1. Your book sounds interesting. I hope you will drop us a hint when/if it gets published. Before I ever heard of Ian Fleming I was aware of a cellist called Amaryllis Fleming. (Who could forget such a beautiful name?) She made several TV appearances. A sister, I believe. I started reading the Bond books in the late ’50s but didn’t enjoy them. Not meant for women… Ann
6. Like others I finished with LITERATURE and MATCHBOARD. For the latter I had thought of MATCHBOARD early on but I wasn’t entirely sure it was a thing so left it to see if any other ideas came to mind. I did similar with CHAPLET. Boy for chap seemed unusual to me – I’d expect it to typically be man, so I wasn’t sure if I was missing something. I then thought the boy might be called Chas or Chad which gave me pause for thought but thankfully my intuition that CHAPLET sounded most likely proved correct.
   1. No problem with ‘chaps’ for ‘boys’ as evidenced in schoolboy literature of a certain era. ‘Play up and play the game, chaps’ and all that sort of thing.

      Edited at 2020-04-03 07:10 am (UTC)

   2. I did wonder if a CHAPLET might be a humorous description of a small man – hence a boy. Perhaps the setter’s in-joke ?
7. Having nothing in the diary nowadays, I didn’t realise it was Friday until I came here having solved this and saw Verlaine’s name at the top. The puzzle, completed in 31 minutes, seemed quite a bit easier than the last couple of days to me, though CHAPLET was a biff and MATCHBOARD in with fingers crossed. LOI was LITERATURE, eventually parsed and the bumf meaning seen. Those of us of mature years will think of Susan Hampshire as Fleur and Eric Porter as SOAMES on mention of the Forsyte Saga, but, impressionable as I was, I read the whole lot too, almost as bad a decision as reading Lord of the Rings. PRETTY WELL wasn’t the greatest clue I’ve ever seen, but otherwise a worthy puzzle. COD to BUMP. Thank you V and setter.
   1. Once I think of Susan Hampshire, it’s easy to forget Eric Porter.
      1. True. I sent a private message a couple of days ago, Phil.
         Of any interest?
8. Solved all but two clues (the intersecting 6 and 8) within 35 minutes but then stalled. At some point in the next 20 unproductive minutes I considered LITERATURE at 8dn, thought I saw the definition (and it turned out later I was right about that) but couldn’t parse it so it didn’t go in.

   The one that did for me was TALL{y} where even with the A checker and the possibility of L as the last letter I couldn’t come up with a word meaning ‘unlikely’. Eventually I gave up and used a thesaurus to look up ‘score’ and found ‘tally’ and once the L was confirmed for sure I spotted the elusive wordplay for LITERATURE.

   Apart from all that I found this quite straightforward though I relied on wordplay to come up with the unknown flower at 2dn. Ditto MATCHBOARD.

   1dn was no problem as I only just completed a 500 page novel by Peter James featuring a pregnant woman who referred to her unborn child throughout as ‘Bump’.

   Edited at 2020-04-03 06:20 am (UTC)

9. I did the same, read the whole Forsyth Saga because of the TV series.

   Today’s puzzle had some hard answers, but none biffed apart from PADDINGTON BEAR, recently watched both the excellent films. CAMPANULA constructed, vaguely heard of. Only knew DADO rail, have learned something.

   18′ 52″ thanks Verlaine and setter.

10. Bah, good time but BOMB and invented CHASLET, rejecting chap as not meaning boy (enough).

    COD 24ac TESLA, it’s the surface for me. 16dn LUMINESCE also very nice.

    Yesterday’s answer: the only team in the English league without any of the letters of mackerel is indeed Swindon Town – inspired by (purple) hearts.

    Today’s question: which tube station has a platform 10?

    1. My station in life, Moorgate. Do you want us to put up the answer, Angus, thus depriving others of the opportunity? I don’t think there’s a mark as spoiler facility.

       Edited at 2020-04-03 07:35 am (UTC)

    2. I thought it was Baker Street: Moorgate has lots of platforms but they’re a mixture of rail and tube lines so I don’t think the numbering goes up to 10.
       I’m not much of a quizzer but this question or something like it has come up in a couple that I have been at in the last few years.
       Edit: having googled it I wonder if this question is ambiguous. Moorgate and Baker Street both qualify.

       Edited at 2020-04-03 07:51 am (UTC)

11. Trusting both MATCHBOARD and CHAPLET turned out to be a good leap of faith in hindsight, and so I managed my fastest time of the week (I think) at 34 minutes. As others, I considered CATCHBOARD and had doubts that I’d come up with the right boy at 15. I believe I’ve seen MATCHBOARD DADOs, come to think of it, but I didn’t know it at the time. I only knew that DADO could be the bottom bit of the wall as well as the rail because it’s come up here before.

    Anyway. Getting the first half of 1a got me my true FOI, 2d CAMPANULA, and then I danced around the grid without following too much of a pattern, enjoying very much 19d KEENEST (blissfully unaware of the grammatical issue) and 23a’s “retro technology”, and finally flailing around on 15a and 13d until the ticking clock made me throw in what I can only really call lucky guesses at best. Have a good weekend, all, if you’re finding it any different from the rest of the week, given the current climate!

    Edited at 2020-04-03 07:47 am (UTC)

12. An epic Led Zeppelin earworm for the morning, for which many thanks setter.

    45 minutes for me, greatly held up by trying to shoehorn CIRCLET or CORONET in, and also confidently entering STANDARD (two ways, very nice cryptic) as the first word of 3D. Lots of aha moments here, though I have to agree with V and others about the worthy but obscure MATCHBOARD and mis-declined KEENEST.

    1. Don’t you mean mis-conjugated;-)
       1. Absolutely right. Latin O level is an awfully long time ago!
13. Another day another unaccountable mispring, but apart form that, a steady-ish solve (TALL took a lot extra) in 22.35.

    It’s possible I’ve been doing too many Mephistos and Club Monthlys, but I took KEENES to be a variant Bard spelling with T(ime) at the end. I obviously have no verifiable data to back that up!

    PADDINGTON, when it went in, did so with incomplete parsing, putting on weight giving PADDING TON, head of Bar then somehow conference provided the EAR. Of course the clue was cleverer than that, and my reward was that typo.

    1. I’d be surprised to see such a Mephistoish clue in the daily puzzle, particularly as it doesn’t even conform to Mephisto rules as there is no entry for KEENE in Chambers!
14. …Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,
    But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
    25 mins to triumph, during yoghurt, granola, banana, etc.
    I liked Clamour and Galsworthy, but am not keen on U R.
    Thanks setter and V.
    1. My dear Mr. Marmalade, it does make a nice change from that chestnut avenued ancient city.
15. 16:56. I was all done apart from 13dn in under 10 minutes. I came very close to bunging in CATCHBOARD in desperation but it didn’t quite look enough like a word so I kept trawling the alphabet. I’ve never heard of MATCHBOARD but it seemed more likely. Not the most satisfying of clues to solve, and KEENEST looks like an error: the clue works perfectly well with a singular ‘lament’.
    1ac reminded me of this excellent bit of TV.

    Edited at 2020-04-03 07:53 am (UTC)

    1. Great clip K. One of my daughters watches that show a lot and whenever I pay attention to it there’s always something that makes me laugh.
    2. Perhaps the declension of weak verbs in Middle English is not the setter’s strong point?
       1. I’m not sure I’d call Shakespeare Middle English but whatever you call it, if the setter’s going to use it he or she ought to take care to get it right.

          Edited at 2020-04-03 02:13 pm (UTC)

16. Went with BOMB, which wasn’t a case of “I’ll throw this in without parsing it out of desperation”, rather “That seems to fit the bill, even if it isn’t a very good clue”. Annoyingly, when I just had the initial B, I’d seen that it might be BABY, and abandoned that tack too quickly. My normal rule of “If you can’t parse it, it’s probably wrong” might need a sub-clause “If your answer works but is a clue so weak that you wonder how the editor allowed it, that’s probably wrong as well”. Bah.

    I did enjoy the Bond hero though.

17. I tried to parse KEENEST like Z, then couldn’t account for the ‘s, then moved on. Just bunged in LITERATURE, which yet again caused me to query the existence of ‘quite’ in the definition of BIFD in the Glossary. And yet again made me wonder if I could claim to having solved a crossword if I get all the answers right without knowing why.
    1. Sounds like my half-remembered epistemology tutorials which were all about blue barn facades – if you’re travelling through the countryside and see a bunch of blue barns, you don’t “know” that the barns are blue if behind the blue barn facades that some malicious philosopher has erected the barns are actually red. But what if the barns behind the blue barn facades are also blue? I’m sure it made sense on some level: I did not ace the philosophy papers of my degree.
       1. I bet any cats inside are dead?
18. Not hard .. nho matchboard, i would just call it tongue & groove boarding ..
    V, is 12ac another film you can’t watch now, for fear Paddington is dead? Don’t worry, the film industry never kills off stars with that sort of stellar earning potential ..
    1. Will there be more Paddingtons than Rocky movies before too long I wonder?
19. Thought so at the time, but it should have a capital, according to Chambers. (Can’t be bothered going next door for Collins, and don’t have OED.)

    Therefore slightly dodgy?

    1. Both Collins and Lexico also show this with a capital C so I think you’re right.
       1. I thought the rules allowed the setter to use capitals irregularly?
          Andyf
          1. The rule is that a common noun can be capitalised but proper nouns cannot be un-capitalised. The logic for this is that they are never written without a capital letter, whereas common nouns are sometimes capitalised (at the beginning of a sentence for example).
             1. Given greengrocers’ attitude to apostrophes I’m sure they don’t care much about the correct capitalisation of their wares either.
20. I am wondering if 19d could be considered as not being ‘split’ at the point after ‘most ardent’ ( whereby all comments about ‘laments’ being in the wrong person could be circumvented) and rather the clue is a sort of composite cryptic, with the question mark giving the necessary leeway for its slight dodginess.
21. 20:54. I was a bit slow in getting going on this. NHO MATCHBOARD or CHAPLET so had to trust to wordplay for them. LITERATURE and TALL my last 2 in. I didn’t much like KEENEST, which I parsed erroneously like Z, but I did like PADDINGTON BEAR.
22. No problem with this one. Didn’t bother too much with fully understanding KEENEST – saw “most ardent” and “laments” and wrote it in. The Bear from wordplay – completely forget author was called Bond.

    Magnetic flux put crudely is the strength of a magnet. So if two magnets have the same magnetic flux but one is bigger than the other then the smaller one has a higher magnetic flux density than the larger

    1. And on my iPhone, I’ve got an app that measures electromagnetic flux in micro-Teslas – in three dimensions. It useful for troubleshooting audio systems.
23. 13:21 and I was another:
    1. Something board, I’ll type that in and come back to the other bit later.
    2. Just 13 down then. No flashes of inspiration, need to do an alphabet trawl.
    3. Could be catch.
    4. Ooh, or match.
    5. Which one to choose, which one to choose?
    6. Match is marginally more likely-sounding, I’ll go with that and hope for the best.

    I’m not sufficiently well-versed in Elizabethan English to have merred at KEENEST. If anything the S triggered my “could be a verb” radar.

24. 24 mins. Thanks v.
25. 27.15 with last two in being the north east corner- tall and literature, the latter being especially taxing. Favourites were Paddington Bear- a real head slammer when I finally worked it out and luminesce.

    Really enjoyable puzzle. The setters are on a hot streak this week in my humble opinion.

26. A good week of solving for me. Went through catch and latch before match, natch. COD to the bear.
27. For those who still take the paper copy, three letters on page 28 about removing the virus from the outer pages prior to solving the crossword. Ironing for ten minutes seems a bit excessive? V would have solved it before the iron got hot.
28. ….a WORK OF ART, but it certainly had its moments.

    I wrote in “John” at 9D, tinkered with the anagrist, saw the answer, and “eminent = worthy” came to me only then.

    Enjoying a rare day when I’m above Verlaine on the leader board, I must still thank him for parsing my two biffs – BACK STREET and LITERATURE.

    FOI MAMBA
    LOI LITERATURE
    COD PADDINGTON BEAR
    TIME 9:20

29. 31 min. Perhaps the setter should apologise for keenest or explain. I can’t see it as anything but a slip myself. An ESUTS or eyebrow shooting up the skull at UR unqualified. (Though I quite like the definition hand-outs.) A little hazy as to how standing is a way to rank as opposed to being another word for it. Last in 8 and 13 as some others. Enjoyed 12 once I saw it.
30. Scraped under my NITCH. A few biffs, KEENEST passed me by completely. Watched a programme about the life of Michael Bond recently, apparently he wanted the bear to come from Africa, but had to make it Peru instead as there weren’t any African bears. LOI and COD BUMP
31. I only knew it because it turns up in realtor’s descriptions of older houses in the Rhinebeck area – it seems to be a selling point. The corresponding placement of BUMP and LITERATURE, aka “bumf”, was mildly amusing. 17.06
32. Meant to say before, v; you’re bang on correct about keenest. It needs pairing with lament, not laments. No pedantry about that one – the clue is wrong, pure and simple.
33. …so couldn’t finish unaided. Yes, sidestreet parses as sides + sounds like treat, and sides does mean supports, but there is a better answer. I suppose when you can’t finish, you should just erase the whole area and start from a different end.
    1. Did you miss my note?
       1. Sorry, I didn’t – I kind of skimmed through the blog since I was so late.
34. Easier than yesterday which took me almost an hour.

    COD: Paddington Bear.

35. After failing to solve the QC correctly today, I tried this puzzle to restore some confidence. And I did most of it very quickly until some of the same problems and errors mentioned above emerged.
    Bunged in CHASLET at 15a. At 13d came up with lots of options until the obvious LARCHBOARD emerged -fancy a game of larch?
    Best I could think of at 6a was RARE so I failed to properly consider my queried LITERATURE (from the clue, thought it started R and ended Y).
    I was at Earls Court in the 1970s when Led Zeppelin played Kashmir, and many others, VERY loud. A great memory.
    David
    1. I’ve always been a bit on the fence about Led Zep but Kashmir is 100% great!
       1. I tend to agree. The only Led Zep album I actually own is Led Zep IV -which should be in everyone’s collection. A friend owned Physical Graffiti which I listened to a lot.
          I have never been a massive fan of Led Zep II which conventional wisdom has as their best.
          1. I still love the first album, especially “You Shook Me” and “How Many More Times”.
             1. Logged out again….
             2. Serial plagiarists of (mainly) black music. No time for them.

                And don’t start me on Page’s proclivities. (He’s also way overrated as a guitarist.)

36. I understood 19d as KEENS ( laments) with E(lizabethan) & T(time)…

    Particularly enjoyed 12a and 2d

37. I had the same 2 struggles as Verlaine, with 13d and 8d my last 2 in. Like others, I had the BOARD bit, but couldn’t get a control panel PATCHBOARD out of my head, but I couldn’t get PATCH to mean game, so eventually trawled my way to MATCH. LITERATURE didn’t arrive until I tried the L at the end of 6a and saw TALL(y). I did manage to parse it though. BACK STREET was my FOI and the rest of the NW made me think I was in for an easy ride, but it wasn’t to be. I was also thrown by CHAP for LAD, but was fairly sure CHAPLET was and headband. Liked PADDINGTON BEAR, but didn’t see all of the parsing, particularly the PEAR bit. Nice puzzle though. 36:06. Thanks setter and V.
38. Where’s the phonetic indicator for ‘you are’? Mr Grumpy
    1. It is presently halfway up the M40, heading for Oxford.

       Does this indicate that U R unhappy? Meldrew.

39. Done, 30 minutes, knew BUMP and the creator of the bear, but NHO of CHAPLET, so guessed that and the Match bit and also stuffed in LITERATURE without fully understanding. Likewise KEENEST just from def. didn’t get why TREAT is a party really, either. Worst one of the week IMO.
40. I’ve not seen it John – how do I access private messages ?
    1. Press on your mugshot in top right hand corner, then on messages, (you’ll see all the comments on your posts) and then on the left there’s another category confusingly also called messages. That’s where any private messages are.
       1. No – not bringing anything up. I have an email account I don’t normally use if you’d like to send it there :

          1147philjordan@gmail.com

41. DNF. Used aids to get literature. LOI tall fell shortly thereafter. I’d already done an alpha-trawl for the match of matchboard. Paddington worth the price of admission though.
42. Doesn’t WAIL mean complain rather than complaint?
    1. I think it works as a noun as well as a verb. “This was the desperate wail of the party’s smaller beasts…”
43. Could we please have either an explanation or an aplogy for (thou) keenest.

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