Times 27657 – half an hour of pleasure and no pain.

96 comments on “Times 27657 – half an hour of pleasure and no pain.”

1. I found this somewhat tough, but fair. I’d heard of “baby…” but not of PUPPY fat. My LOI was the fish with the first and last name, which I had to look up, as I couldn’t quite believe it. Nice to see BEBOP intersecting BASIE. Needed the wordplay for most. ALPHA RAY!

   Edited at 2020-05-06 05:22 am (UTC)

2. I was a bit surprised to see that currently the NITCH is at 123, with only one person in a green zone. I came in a bit over my average, having finally brought SEQUESTER and ALL SQUARE to their knees. No idea what ALL SQUARE was about, not knowing who Lowry was. Also DNK HUSHPUPPY; like Pip, I only knew it as a shoe. DNK SORDINO, but the def pretty much determined how to spell it. JOHN DORY from the enumeration, then twigged. Liked MENTHOL, loved TARTRATES.
3. Excellent crossword, I thought. 46 pleasingly stretchy minutes. I didn’t know the “quare” of 11a, 15d HUSHPUPPY or 21d SORDINO, though knowing that one of The Deaf Man‘s aliases from Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels was “L. Sordo” made me suspect I had the right arrangement of letters…

   Enjoyed the great surfaces at 7d and 29a, and 8d’s “band at a funeral”. Should’ve got 14d BASIE much sooner, given that I habitually listen to Miles Davis while solving… FOI 2d REFERENDA, LOI—proving that I have a clean mind, clearly—12a TARTRATES.

   1. You beat me to quoting Ed McBain, great books, same reasoning.

      Edited at 2020-05-06 10:49 am (UTC)

      1. It’s been a long time since I’ve read them—my dad had many on his shelves when I was a youngster—but I certainly still remember them with fondness.
4. 12a worth the price of admission alone. If only all science clues could be so humanly clued!

   40 mins

5. Another pleasant if undemanding solve. Enjoyed the TART RATES but had no idea HUSHPUPPY is fried bread – just trusted the wordplay and checkers.
6. 41 enjoyable minutes, with LOI CLOSED. DNK SORDINO, and needed all crossers to come up with the right combination of letters. Like others, I wore HUSHPUPPY shoes for casual wear in the sixties, having no idea of the fried bread then or now. The cryptic was good. I’ve always liked the word ESCHEW but COD to ALL SQUARE, I have a print of Lowry’s Going to the Match on my study wall. The match in question was at Burnden Park. With LOFTY in this puzzle too, I’m doing a Lancastrian impression of Proust and smelling the Woodbine cigarettes being smoked on the Railway Embankment at HALF TIME. Nice start to the day. Thank you Pip and setter.
7. Brought to mind the racing commentator confronted with the name Quare Times, believing it to be Latin, went with what sounded like Kwa-re Teem-ez. Thanks Blogger and Setter.
8. Gave up overnight with only 10 answers in and I was getting nowhere. On resumption it came together with heavy reliance on wordplay and minimal biffing.

   NHO ALPHA RAY nor the required meaning of HUSHPUPPY.

   I knew SORDINO from the musical expression ‘con sordino’, a general instruction to use a mute, not restricted to trumpet, and those diligent enough to do the Saturday cryptic Jumbo will have met it there (in the plural, sordini) as recently as 25th January.

   ‘The QUARE Fellow’ is a play by Brendan Behan, his first produced, which was also made into a film starring ‘Danger Man’ Patrick McGoohan.

   Edited at 2020-05-06 06:39 am (UTC)

9. Wednesday seems to be my nemesis, found this hard. NHO SORDINO, DOTAGE meaning fondness. Guessed EXEAT. If dorsetjimbo finds that undemanding he can’t come across many demanding ones.

   COD TARTRATES, of course.

   Yesterday’s answer: there have been 44 presidents of the USA, even though Mr Trump is 45, because as keriothe noted, Grover Cleveland had two non-consecutive terms and so is counted twice.

   Today’s question: what is 111111111^2?

   1. 123454321
      1. WQithout calculating, you’re about 8 digits short.
         1. 4 Ms and a silent Q. Excel tells me it’s 12345678987654300.
            True, not lying!
            I must have one of those computers where Intel introduced numerical errors into their maths coprocessors, hoping no-one would notice. Except that was the noughties, and this PC dates from the teens – Intel must have deemed numerical errors to be Absolutely Necessary in all their computers, for all tine, no matter what.
            1. I think you entered one too many 1s. It’s 123456787654321.
               1. It goes up to 9, 12345678987654321
                  1. So it was me who miscounted the number of 1s – doh! And I did it so carefully.
                     I’ve just checked in Excel and I get the same result as isla3. Curious.
                     1. Excel’s precision only allows it to store up to 15 significant figures – it just loses any more, doesn’t even round them
10. Definitely not a horse for this particular course. Not sure if it was my unfamiliarity with compound names or with red-light districts which made 12a hard to come by. And I got nowhere fast with 13a, being fixated with the eventually sense of sometime.
11. As far as parsing was concerned, I ran into the sand with ALL SQUARE, BYE-BYE and EXEAT, all entered fingers crossed. For definitions, of course HUSH PUPPY, ALPHA RAYS (waves and particles confuse me nearly as much as they confuse physicists) and OESOPHAGI (I’ve queried that canals definition before, unsuccessfully) all had to be taken on trust.
    So a bit of a skate, really, over nearly 24 minutes, because I don’t like leaving that many holes before hitting submit.
    I was OK with SORDINO, and can’t resist calling to mind and attention the glorious Hoffnung contribution:
    “But what makes zis middle bar of silence so important is zat ze silence makes a crescendo! Because it is ze only moment in the whole piece when every instrument in ze orchestra has the mute off.”
12. 21:44. I found this a bit trickier than average taling some time to see MENTHOL and where I finished in the NE corner – SEQUESTER, EXEAT, ALL SQUARE and DOTAGE. NHO QUARE so never parsed that one. I liked ALPHA RAY but COD to TARTRATES.

    Edited at 2020-05-06 07:00 am (UTC)

13. …but I got the dreaded message that I hadn’t completed the crossword when I had so my time was at least a minute less as it took at least a minute to sort out.
    Anyway, another pleasant puzzle and thanks, Pip, for explaining 21ac, 21d, 28ac and 13ac.
    With 11ac, I knew QUARE from the Behan play, as Jack has mentioned but I always thought it just meant ‘strange’.
    Shouldn’t the clue for HUSHPUPPY had some indication that it was an American usage?
    COD to TARTRATE and particularly to CLOSED. I always think it’s a clever trick to provide a definition from a small word or from punctuation.
    1. Marking HUSHPUPPY as an Americanism–although you’re right, vide Jerrywh passim–wouldn’t have done American me any good. But then the South is a foreign country to me. And a pretty awful one, too.
       1. Frankly I would take some persuading that a hushpuppy is anything more than a deeply unfashionable men’s shoe. Friedmbread? Yeah, right ..
14. COD for me was WREATH. Great crossword!
15. I enjoyed this a lot though I got stopped dead at least twice for lengthy spells; also left the clock running by mistake when it should have been paused, so my huge time of 2h 16m is going to be a dark red outlier in the SNITCH. It probably took 90m in elapsed time but it was so good that I soldiered on with no thought of throwing in the towel. NHO SQUARE, HUSHPUPPY (as food), SOLDINO or TARTRATES but the wordplay was fair and witty throughout. Thank you clever setter. And thanks Pip for smoothing our the tangles.
16. 48:25.
    Not easy. Probably on my own here but I’d rather have seen 12 clued differently, possibly with a patisserie theme or something that didn’t include a derogatory reference.
    Thanks pip.
    1. I agree with you, but every time I object to something like this I get stick for being a politically-correct snowflake so I often don’t bother!
       1. Thanks k. I don’t like unnecessarily dissing people or doing them down, which I guess makes me a woke PC snowflake by today’s standards of discourse. Wear that badge with pride 🙂
          1. I’m sure most of us don’t, though .. the problem is that there are so many words these days that have suddenly become derogatory to some. Sometimes it seems that almost every word is doing somebody down
             1. Words that hurt other people have always been around, jerry. I can’t say I ever find it particularly difficult to avoid them, thb. But then, as noted, I’m a PC snowflake 🙂
                1. I suppose .. though I was brought up to believe that unlike sticks and stones, words couldn’t hurt me.
                   Leaving things like the whole tortuous “people of colour” area to one side, a simple example might be “Jap.” Apparently it is a derogatory word, even though it is merely identifying a Japanese person. From Japan. But despite that, it seems that calling me a Brit or a Pom is OK. Where we stand on “Yank” these days, I simply wouldn’t know. It all feels like a minefield to me
17. Wasted many minutes on ALL SQUARE and SEQUESTER, only getting there in the end because I (mistakenly) thought we had a pangram.

    I’m not a huge fan of ‘e-quest’, but my main quibble is with ‘quare’. It’s an adjective, whereas from my reading the clue calls for an adverb. Mega eyebrow raise.

    1. Collins has it as an adverb too. It defines it as ‘actually’ and gives the example ‘it’s quare hot today’.

       Edited at 2020-05-06 09:30 am (UTC)

       1. I stand corrected. It’s only listed as an adjective in Chambers and my (admittedly 20 years old) Collins.

          Never heard it used that way. Tempted to check with my Dublin and Donegal contacts.

18. I found this tough and nearly threw in the towel.

    LOI: TARTRATES. This took several minutes to finally reveal itself . I was convinced charged was tore.

    COD: BASIE.

19. The easily offended should pass by on the other side.

    Scientist’s riddle : “What is a hormone ?”
    Answer : “A complaint about the cheap TARTRATE”.

    Like Jack, I remembered SORDINO from the January Jumbo, and had the same two NHO’s, plus DNK “SL = Solicitor at Law”. A most enjoyable puzzle despite 19A.

    FOI HALF-TIME (pie and Bovril)
    LOI EXEAT
    COD ALL SQUARE
    TIME 19:22

    1. I’m by no means easily offended, but I would prefer it if derogatory (and in my view inherently sexist) words like ‘tart’, ‘whore’ or ‘slapper’ were avoided in the Times crossword. It’s a matter of tone and context.
       Take your joke for instance: I’m not offended by it, but I expect (and hope) there are contexts where you wouldn’t tell it.

       Edited at 2020-05-06 10:14 am (UTC)

       1. I’m with you on this. To me it’s a matter of decorum. I’m not prudish or particularly P.C., but there are expressions and areas of language I would prefer not to see in the crosswords in a supposedly ‘serious’ newspaper. Things that I would happily accept at a comedy club, or in a Private Eye crossword rankle with me in The Times puzzle.
20. 22:30, tricky but most enjoyable, same knowledge gaps as others.
21. 20:23. Unlike everyone else it seems I found this one a bit annoying, with some rather convoluted wordplay and quite a lot of obscurities. But in at least a couple of cases (failing to parse EXEAT and BYE-BYE) I was clearly just being dense so it’s almost certainly just me.
    Pedants will tell you that actually the plural of REFERENDUM is REFERENDUMS, since it’s a verb form (gerund ‘referring’) and so the Latin principal of turning an -UM ending into -A in the plural doesn’t apply. As ever though if people use it they use it: the etymological fallacy cuts both ways!
    1. Good point k. It doesn’t go like bellum, which I remember chanting at school back in 1970. By the way, IIRC in a recent crossword (can’t recall which) the setter referred to ‘declining’ a verb. Bring back Latin :))
       1. Does it matter where ‘referendum’ comes from? It’s an English noun, so the plural is ‘referendums’. The plural of ‘formula’ is ‘formulas’. And so on.
          1. All that matters in crosswordland is that the dictionaries say that the plural of referendum is either referendums or referenda.
          2. And of course in general matters of language all that matters is whether people use it.
             You still see ‘formulae’ sometimes but ‘analysis of the Oxford English Corpus shows that formulas is increasingly the dominant form in both technical and general uses’.

             Edited at 2020-05-06 10:20 am (UTC)

          3. I’m a helpless victim of my own pedantry, Kevin. And now I’m confused: I’ve just checked, and Latin gerunds and gerundives are declinable, so maybe it is referenda… Daren’t look up formula or I’ll end up not knowing what day of the week it is 🙂
             1. I don’t know Latin, and I don’t see what Latin has to do with it; as I said, ‘referendum’ is an English noun–as is ‘formula’–and English nouns as a general rule take ‘s’ in the plural.
                1. Nor do I, but just pretend to so as to look cool on here with all the brainboxes :)))
             2. I have no idea about the Latin. I could ask my daughter, but as Kevin says it’s irrelevant. Where I would disagree with him is that I would say that if lots of people use ‘referenda’ then there’s no reason not to accept it, even if it doesn’t follow the general rules of English.
                1. Me neither .. the OED is uncharacteristically chatty on the subject: “The plural forms referendums and referenda are both found; in the early 21st cent. usage is fairly evenly divided between the two, as it was also in the late 20th cent. The form referenda is by analogy with memoranda, agenda, etc., and more generally with plurals in -a of Latin-derived words with singular in -um. This form is sometimes deprecated in usage guides, etc., on the grounds that a Latin plural gerundive referenda, meaning ‘things to be referred’, would necessarily connote a plurality of issues, but this view is unlikely to affect actual usage.”
                   I thiok it means they agree with you 🙂
                   1. “It’s fine. Yes, really, fine! Absolutely fine. What me? No, ha ha, I have no problem with it. Why would I? Totally fine. LOOK ITS FINE OK???!!!”
                   2. (Personally I dislike ‘referenda’ and never use it: to me it has a sort of Hyacinth Bucket character. However I know that this is just a personal foible and, frankly, snobbery.)

                      Edited at 2020-05-06 08:24 pm (UTC)

                2. No disagreement.
                   1. Understood, thanks Kevin.
                      I get too exercised about these things. It’s the zeal of the convert.
22. Superb crossword. Thanks Pip and setter. One of the best for a while, IMHO.
    Wreath was lovely, but I enjoyed each clue.
23. 9dn CLOSED: I think the definition is just ‘to’, because otherwise ‘keep to’ = closed, and it doesn’t. And how else do we explain the ‘keep’? It’s lose = fail to keep. Isn’t it?

    I expected a louder outcry about REFERENDA, a well-known solecism. But to echo Keriothe, every time I point out something like this I get stick. As Johnny Grimond says in the April Oldie, “With English, howler turns to orthodoxy when an errant meanig becomes prevailing practice”. No doubt one day ‘referenda’ will become like ‘agenda’.

    1. ‘Agenda’ is a good example of why objecting to this sort of thing is silly. You will occasionally come across people who argue vehemently that ‘data’ is a plural, but if they insisted on treating ‘agenda’ like that they would just look daft.
    2. My worst triggers are ‘restauranteur’ and ‘criteria’ where they mean ‘criterion’.
       1. The continuing invasion from US TV is depressing too. My bad. Eeeew instead of urgh. Did NOT see that coming (which my five year old daughter has taken to saying). And many more.

          However, they all pale beside reading ‘should of’ in emails. Much grinding of teeth and deep breathing required in order not to reply like a prissy schoolteacher.

          1. All very true. Yes, ‘should of’: ubiquitous and appalling. A variant of that which manages to shoehorn an extra horror in is ‘If I hadn’t of done it…’
          2. ‘Should of’ is really a spelling mistake, and spelling is much more fixed these days than word meanings. Which means we’re allowed to be snobby about it (thank god ;).
       2. The mangling of RESTAURATEUR makes one’s back teeth melt!
          And the incorrect pronunciation and spelling of MINUSCULE is simply ghastly!

          Busy today Mr. Harmonica!?

          1. Well tbh I’m usually pretty taciturn on here, but today I thought what the hell, throw in a couple of comments; I enjoy the pedantry stuff. In addition to that I got the grass cut and did some piano practice, so not a complete waste of a lockdown day. Hope you had a nice day too, h 🙂
             1. Steady on, that’s a whole week’s worth of activities – you have to pace yourself!
                1. Good point :))
    3. So that’s how it works ‘fail to keep’ and definition is ‘to’. I had it as definition = ‘to keep to’ as in ‘the matter is closed’, but this is better.
       Tough puzzle as I was not fully convinced by several (correct) answers so had them lightly penned in until confirmed, such as SUSAN and STAIR, as well as CLOSED.
       LOI SEQUESTER
24. Satisfyingly chewy. FOI ALL SQUARE, LOI HEAVE as I was hitting and hoping (T)HE and then AVE for some kind of perfect place – needless overcomplication. Like others, enjoyed TARTRATES and MENTHOL. Thanks Pip and setter.
25. I don’t like the definition of referenda. This plural means “items to be referred for discussion”. In the interest of differentiation, the plural for “occasions for choosing” should be “referendums”.
    1. As someone commented above, what counts is not what you think, but what the dictionary says
26. Nho HUSHPUPPY, but couldn’t be anything else.

    Re the discussion on sex workers: not words I’d use.

    Knew ALPHA RAY from school, and seem to remember that a sheet of brown paper would stop them (just had to check that was correct in case it came out at a press conference).

    Did not know S L for solicitor at law is that a Scots thing?

    COD to ALL SQUARE, knew the Behan play as mentioned.

    26′, thanks Pip and setter.

    Edited at 2020-05-06 11:02 am (UTC)

    1. The alpha emitters are far more deadly than beta and gamma when ingested. It’s better not to eat the plutonium.
27. Glad to see others struggled with this – I was way off the wavelength and had to make a second cuppa before limping home. HUSHPUPPies join grits, sloppy joes, French toast, tuna melt etc as things I prefer to avoid in a diner. 25.27
    1. I prefer to avoid a diner.
       1. There’s actually a pretty good old-fashioned one in an old railroad car in Red Hook, the village north of Rhinebeck.
    2. Indeed, I experienced all those disgusting items, especially the grits, at breakfast in a low rent hotel on a miserable winter golfing trip once in Myrtle Beach. Many of the breakfast guests (Canadian? Minnesotans?) were wearing their reversed caps to dine, probably had slept in them.
    3. Do they actually have real vegetables over there at all, Olivia?
28. With you on that Kevin.
29. Like Lord K. and Lady O. I was well off the wavelength today and gave up. The main problem was 12ac, as I had put in TARTRATED which made 9dn a real struggle. (I note the smelling salts are out again in numbers – I remember Jordan’s jokette but as ‘How does one make a hormone, but am struggling to remember the punchline….. avoid payment perhaps?)

    I once knew 15dn HUSHPUPPY but had believed it to be best forgotten when not footwear. I was further hampered by BEB?? at 23ac thinking it be a musical instrument in the rebec family!

    FOI 1dn HALF TIME so a gimme!

    LOI a few!

    COD 5ac ESCHEW

    WOD JOHN DORY and his sloop.

    Instead of finishing I watched JO JO RABBIT my FOD!

30. I found this quite tricky, and had a number of interruptions, but quite enjoyed it overall. Didn’t know QUARE, SORDINO or that definition of the comfortable shoe. Liked TARTRATES and SEQUESTER. Had to work lots of clues out by the wordplay before the definition became clear, so loads of PDMs. 27:52. Thanks setter and Pip.

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