Times 27691 – Not so Sharp……

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Time: 39 minutes
Music: Mozart, Symphony 41, Fricsay/BPO

I suspect this was a very easy puzzle where I was way off the wavelength.   Except for 1 across, an immediate write-in, I struggled with simple clues that should have been immediately obvious.   None of the answers were obscure, either.   Oh, well, that’s the way it goes sometimes.

I see the SNITCH is a little above 100, but it’s very early.

Across
1 Sorting out crash blame? Cue an ——— (9,6)
AMBULANCE CHASER – Anagram of CRASH BLAME? CUE AN.
9 Wonderful place — no opening for larceny, reasonably secure (9)
FAIRYLAND – FAIR[l]Y + LAND, a lift-and-separate.
10 Deploying thought after losing millions (5)
USING – [m]USING.
11 Agreement backing troops in difficult situation (6)
ORDEAL – OR + DEAL, my LOI, one I was strangely blind to.
12 Negative figure in drama, ultimately, or in the novel (8)
ANTIHERO – [dram]A + anagram of OR IN THE.
13 Artist in time for lecture? (6)
TIRADE – TI(RA)DE, time and tide, that is.
15 Most successful pledge disposing of Bible as a gift (8)
BESTOWAL – BEST + [av]OWAL, remove the Authorized Version.
18 Stop endlessly walking round equipment (4,2,2)
PACK IT IN – PAC(KIT)IN[g].
19 Newspaper report dismissing new collection (6)
RAGBAG – RAG + BA[n]G.
21 Capital person finished after working to link both sides (8)
LONDONER – L(ON,DONE)R, where left and right are the sides.
23 Sport involved in covering winter sports venue (3,3)
SKI RUN – SKI(RU)N.  Nearly always Rugby Union.
26 After initial cut, give positive response to extra money (5)
RAISE – [p]RAISE.
27 Subsequent events end in a religious expression I let loose (9)
AFTERMATH – A + F(TERM)A[i]TH, one nearly everyone biffed, including me.
28 Note: tipsy gamers ruined computer software (9,6)
OPERATING SYSTEM – anagram of NOTE: TIPSY GAMERS.
Down
1 A feature of church keeping Father upset (7)
AFFRONT – AF(FR)ONT, which I thought was a front when I solved it.
2 Window fitting, large, wedged in awkward position (5)
BLIND –  B(L)IND.
3 Hedging material in line daily becoming wilder (9)
LEYLANDII – anagram of LINE DAILY, a rather obscure plant over here – must be British.
4 Ingenious fuel, replacing source of power with nitrogen (4)
NEAT – -p,+N EAT, a simple letter substitution clue.
5 Risk complete outrage (8)
ENDANGER – END + ANGER, another one I inexpoicably struggled with.
6 Spirit vital to embellish our ideas (5)
HOURI – hidden in [embellis}H OUR I[deas}.
7 Rest before we start in battle? It’s a trap (6,3)
SPIDER WEB – SPIDER + WE + B[attle], the spider that’s used in billiards.
8 Mock lines about the same toy (3,4)
RAG DOLL – RAG (DO) L,L, which most solvers will biff.
14 Energy concentrated in anger? Make friends again (9)
RECONCILE – R(E,CONC)ILE.   Conc is given as a valid abbreviation in Chambers.
16 Author shows computer expert diving into river (9)
THACKERAY – T(HACKER)AY.
17 Large copy, mostly one for regular readers? (8)
LITERATI – L + ITERAT[e] + I.
18 Duller month in Mediterranean city (7)
PALERMO – PALER + MO.
20 Stuff that may be checked and good to be included amongst drink and meat (7)
GINGHAM – GIN (G) HAM.
22 Nothing gets ahead of the greatest, latest thing (5)
OMEGA – O + MEGA.
24 “Banter”, as in “nonsense” (5)
ROAST –  RO(AS)T.
25 Mount tailless deer (4)
STAG – STAG[e], another one that I wasn’t too swift on.

63 comments on “Times 27691 – Not so Sharp……”

  1. Not an easy one for me, anyway. FOI SKI RUN. I did biff AMBULANCE CHASER, as well as FAIRYLAND, a late one. I made things harder for myself by persisting in looking for PA or AP in 1d, and in taking ‘mount’ as the def and looking for a tailless deer. Finally getting PACK IT IN, giving 3d a final I, led to my recalling LEYLANDII, which we must have had here some time. ROAST struck me as a far cry from ‘banter’. I liked RAGBAG.
  2. Yeah, I couldn’t figure out AFTERMATH, took it on… faith. Still don’t know why the December 1965 Rolling Stones album is called that.
    LEYLANDII wasn’t known, or remembered, or easy.
  3. Three answers ending in I. Four if you count SKI. Is that a record?

    In recent weeks I’ve taken advantage of my free time to read some of the long classics that I’ve been afraid to take on in the course of a busy working life. I’ve just finished two, Vanity Fair and Bleak House, about 2000 pages of reading, which were both suberb. Thank you Lockdown.

    1. I keep planning to read Vanity Fair, having enjoyed the radio adaptation (apart from doing a massive double-take every time George Osborne appears).
  4. Glad to see that others were finding this tricky in places. I went back to carefully parse AFTERMATH before decoding ROAST as my LOI. I had very similar issues to Kevin and Vinyl on the rest.
  5. Is the anagrist in 1ac not CRASH BLAME CUE AN?

    Obviously was on the wavelength today – 26 mins.

  6. I found myself on the wavelength for this one, only slowing down in the NW corner where I finished with ENDANGER. TIRADE gave me pause for thought, as the phrase “time and tide” suggests to me that tide is something different to time. Indeed I think it is in that phrase but Chambers also has “4. A time or season (archaic or poetic)”.
    1. Yes, we had ‘time’ for ‘tide’ in one of the puzzles last week or the week before and somebody made the same point about ‘time and tide’ but there’s so much crossover between the dictionary definitions of both words I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that they can mean exactly same thing in certain contexts. And everyday usage blurs the boundaries even further.

      Edited at 2020-06-15 07:28 am (UTC)

      1. ‘Tide’ as in ‘Eventide’ means a period of time, as opposed to the sea tide that waits for no man!
  7. Like our blogger I didn’t find this particularly straightforward and I came home only 4 minutes faster than he did.

    I looked twice at SPIDER WEB as although I’m familiar with ‘spiderweb’ and even ‘spider-web’, to my mind the two word version needs to be ‘spider’s web’. The Oxfords agree with me and Collins says SPIDER WEB is American, but Chambers is not so picky, though it does also mention America in one of its entries.

    NHO ROAST as ‘banter’ but again Chambers supports it when the other usual sources don’t.

    Got AMBULANCE CHASER early on.

    Amazed that LEYLANDII has raised some eyebrows. They are the scourge of suburbia in the UK. People plant them to provide boundaries and screening for privacy between properties but they grow like topsy and can reach up to 50 feet if unchecked, cutting out all daylight and sunshine. They are also expensive to maintain and keep under control which is why they are so often left to their own devices. The cause of many a neighbourhood dispute.

    Edited at 2020-06-15 05:33 am (UTC)

    1. The most famous case of a Leylandii dispute was in Gloucestershire whebn a neighbour objected to a 60ft hedge belonging to advertising film director Paul Weiland. It went on for months and in the end he became Paul Weilandii. You had to be there!
  8. 24 minutes, zipping through after a slow start. Regrettably, LEYLANDII are everywhere in BRITAIN. About twenty years ago, I took down a forty yard long hedge of them, just leaving the end one, and replaced it with a mix of shrubs and deciduous trees. Looks great now. COD to SPIDER WEB, with BESTOWAL in second place. Thank you V and setter.

    Edited at 2020-06-15 06:42 am (UTC)

  9. 25 mins pre-brekker, which will be a Fat Rascal, hoorah.
    MER at Banter=Roast.
    27ac is only possible as a biff-and-work-backwards (or BAWB, as I will now call such).
    Thanks setter and Vinyl.
    1. Thanks for that. I’d say that once I have some letters in place, up to half of my answers are BAWBS.
  10. On the wavelength, or thereabouts, at 25 mintues. I had to skip over a section of the NW and come back for them, but mostly I didn’t find things too tricky. FOI 1a AMBULANCE CHASER (it probably helps that I’m working for a law firm at the moment) LOI 11a ORDEAL, COD 9a FAIRYLAND.

    I’d like to join the ranks of lockdown LITERATI but the necessary state of mind for concentrated reading seems hard to gather at the moment…

  12. As jack and boltonwanderer have noted, LEYLANDII are a big problem in the UK. Their very attractiveness as fast-growing and shielding plants soon pales, with loss of light and spreading roots.

    Both ‘roast’ and ‘banter’ have now lost their earlier, gentler, meanings, which I think are being equated in the clue.

    COD to BESTOWAL.

    16’07” thanks vinyl and setter.

  13. Easy today, though never did parse 27ac, and struggled to parse 9ac too.
    Leylandii are English, so our colonial cousins may not have come across them, although in fact they are a hybrid cross of two American cypress species, first observed in the Leyland Forest, which walkers on St Cuthbert’s Way will traverse. I asked a tree surgeon once how tall they grow, and he said nobody knew because none in the UK have stopped growing yet .. but there are several over 130ft tall now. I hate them.
  14. 11:24 but only parsed FAIRYLAND, AFTERMATH, SPIDER WEB and RECONCILE afterwards. Not heard of ROAST for “banter” before. PACK IT IN was my favourite.
  15. Felt longer than that. Nothing particularly obscure if one is familiar with LEYLANDII. As noted, vinyl, AMBULANCE CHASER is an anagram of ‘crash blame cue an’ not ‘out crash blame’ – it doesn’t have a T or O in it. ROAST was in Friday’s crossword as well (‘Cook’s pan’).

    COD AMBULANCE CHASER, very nice &lit.

    Friday’s answer: the next in the series Austria, Belgium, Cuba, is Germany – single-letter international vehicle codes – the one after that is Spain.

    Today’s question: of the 100 largest Mediterranean islands, estimate how many are Greek.

    Edited at 2020-06-15 08:08 am (UTC)

    2. Interestingly although Greece has by far the largest number of Mediterranean islands, in surface area terms Italy beats it by miles with Sicily and Sardinia alone.
  16. As for others, not as easy as I thought it would be after writing in AMBULANCE CHASER. Complete mental block in the NW which only resolved itself when I remembered FR for father.

    As Chairman for many years of our local Residents Association I know more about LEYLANDII than is healthy. I’d cheerfully blow them all up. There is no actual law that limits their height but a local council has powers to act once “a hedge is affecting a neighbour’s reasonable enjoyment of their property”.

  17. Well I think I was duller than Palermo today. Tough going and finished in 27.15. An early problem was thinking the answer to 11 ac was enigma. Took me ages to work round that.

    LOI was houri but affront, ordeal and fairyland were only just before- that was a trying corner.
    Still, a good lesson in not being complacent about Mondays.

  18. I found that tough! NEAT and STAG were my first 2 in and I struggled for ages to get any further. Eventually I saw AMBULANCE CHASER, but it wasn’t until I got PACK IT IN that I made much progress. I made more rapid progress once the top half was complete, and finished with a spurt in the SE with RAGBAG and GINGHAM in 42:28. Not easy at all in my book. Thanks setter and V.
  19. A pink Monday as I had biffed AFTERWARD and forgot to go back and change it once the GINGHAM penny finally dropped, thus submitting AFTERWARH. Grrrr. It took a slow 55 minutes, though that included making proper coffee.

    My least favourite clue type is omission, and there were at least seven in this puzzle – so I already had the hump before the self-inflicted final derailment. Shared the MERs of others on SPIDER WEB and ROAST.

    All in all a grumpy start to the week.

    Edited at 2020-06-15 08:49 am (UTC)

  20. I managed not to spell THACKERAY with an E at the end, but not BESTOWAL, which seems bizarre. Otherwise 15.25 thinking it was taking much longer, especially since I tried INSURANCE-something for 1ac to begin with and struggled to deviate.
    Like others, I’m not convinced by ROAST for banter. While I recognise that “it’s just banter” is an increasingly futile attempt to cover up rudeness or “hate speech”, it feels a long way from severe criticism. But the I’ve just noted that Chambers has “to criticize excessively, even sarcastically; to banter” under roast, so I guess I’m behind the times.
    I had no idea what was going on in AFTERMATH, so thanks and congratulations to V for actually working it out.
    1. Lexico also has ‘subject to good-natured ridicule’ (marked as North American) which is presumably related to the noun meaning referring to those TV shows where people line up to take the mickey out of a celebrity. This seems a good equivalent to the ‘speak to or tease lightly or jokingly’ (Collins) meaning of ‘banter’.
  21. I put in Leylandei. I even checked It wasn’t Leylandai by noting the presence of only one “a” in the anagrist. Other vowels escaped such forensic scrutiny. 17:29.

    COD: Pack it in.

  22. 10:33. I seem to have been on the wavelength today: nothing I didn’t know which always helps of course.
    As others have noted the notorious LEYLANDII will be familiar to most people in this country but perhaps not on the other side of the pond.
  23. Don’t understand ‘term’ as ‘end’ in 27ac. Can anyone help? Otherwise quite hard for a Monday I thought; never heard of roast as banter or mo as month, though.
    2. I shared your concern but Chambers has def no 1 for term as ‘An end’. News to me and makes the phrase ‘end of term’ a bit tautologous.
      1. The one usage of TERM for END which is quite common is when a pregnancy ” comes to term”.

        Dave.

  24. Mostly not too hard, but struggled mightily to get the last few: endanger, fairyland, and leylandii. Leylandii unknown, though I learn today I had one in the back yard. Called a pencil pine here, horrible thing, chopped it down and dug out the stump – not easy.
    Another MER at roast/banter, but otherwise a typically excellent puzzle.
  25. Gentle start to the week. If our east coast American friends look hard enough over the horizon they will probably spot a LEYLANDII they are so tall.
  26. Half of this was done in the last 5 mins, so I must have been a bit dozy earlier on, or else I chose the hardest bit first. We have a timeshare in the Lakes which used to have beautiful view…..
  27. Made heavy weather of much of this. About 35 min. Liked clues for fairyland, aftermath.
  28. Owing to lockdown I’m still solving online rather than my
    preferred paper – subsequently I am still prone to mis-entering answers and then having to re-type them……
    Hence 32.57 rather than the actual solving time which was around 29 minutes.

    Thank you to setter and blogger.

    Dave.

  29. Other than starting out with an A on the end of LEYLANDII, which had to be sorted out, I had no problems with this. When I was a kid my parents planted a macrocarpa hedge to screen one side of the tennis court. Now I gather that’s the fast-growing part of the leylandii hybrid. I don’t recall any AFTERMATH with AFFRONTed neighbours but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. 18.31
  30. After feeling sluggish all last week, I was another who was on the wavelength, so feeling much more sprightly now. I was also in the club who were held up in the NW corner, largely by expecting to find PA in 1dn, where he never appeared.
  31. As with many I expected an easier run after 1ac went straight in but then immediately stalled. I also have a complete blind spot when it comes to plant names so I had low confidence about LEYLANDII. In the end I took a clockwise tour of the grid, eventually convincing myself to look beyond PA in 1dn and completing with a NEAT finish.
  32. Nice puzzle, just tricky enough in parts.
    Can someone help me with the “DO” part of Ragdoll?
    thanks
      1. Thanks, Penfold. Either I didn’t know that, or my memory is getting even worse than I’d thought. Or both. Appreciate it.
  33. Defeated by RAGBAG – I’ve never heard of “report” as in the “bang” of a gun.

    Slightly embarrassed that ENDANGER didn’t come to me until my second go, and AMBULANCE CHASER seems to have taken me longer than most. SPIDER WEB took me a while too, as I was expecting the second word to be “war”, and I didn’t work out spider = rest until after it had gone in.

  34. ….Rag Week, with both RAGBAG and RAG DOLL in the same puzzle.

    Didn’t parse AFTERMATH, same MERs as other contributors.

    FOI AMBULANCE CHASER
    LOI ANTIHERO
    COD SPIDER WEB
    TIME 10:02

    I sit 34th on the leaderboard, but isn’t there something that can be done to freeze out the persistent neutrinos ? Never mind, I’m off to find the truth as shown in SNITCH !

  35. Late solve today. 11:39 and a witch of 82 puts me in the on wavelength / easier side of average camp. I thought I was heading for sub-10 but ground to a plod in the SE corner.

  36. Three minutes to get started with OPERATING SYSTEM.

    Didn’t manage to fully parse BESTOWAL or AFTERMATH.

    Otherwise not too difficult.

  37. Solving interrupted by a couple of chaps coming to dig out a philadelphus. A horrible bush which has outgrown its welcome in every sense. Quite unsuitable for a small garden but not nearly as bad as LEYLANDII – at least it finally responded to violence. This was my first interaction since the beginning of March with anyone outside the household.We danced around each other keeping a wide berth as per recommendation. I was enjoying this puzzle and after allowing for the break clocked out at 25 minutes. ORDEAL was my LOI and in retrospect I can’t understand why I found it tricky. I can’t see GINGHAM without thinking of tablecloths and Brigitte Bardot’s wedding dress. Ann
    1. Unspammed. The lack of a space after the full stop in ‘household.We’ was what sent it there.
      1. Thanks for that. I can’t really see why lack of a space tags it as spam but it’s good to know. Ours not to reason why…
        1. It’s the Live Journal spam filter. It interprets a full stop not followed by a space as a potential url linking to another site which could be potentially harmful or unsuitable. To be able to post a link you would need a higher than basic access level and posting rights.

          Anything LJ regards as suspicious it bungs into bin marked ‘Suspicious messages’ so that one of the TfTT bloggers can review it and decided whether to ‘unspam’ it. This may seem a bit cautious but you might not believe the number of porn links it catches. I seem to spend a lot of time deleting them and I assume other bloggers are doing it too.

  38. Long day at the computer and with a glass of red wine consumed I felt like I was about as far off the wavelength as one can be but it seems 33 minutes was an okay time.

    Laughed out loud at the BAWB suggestion from our illustrious Sunday Setter – if ever there was a parsing which justified a new acronym, AFTERMATH was it.

    Unlike others 1ac wasn’t a write in for me as I originally started this at 600am this morning having thought I had clicked on the Concise. A degree of bafflement briefly followed and even when I re-started this evening it didn’t jump out. Liked the clue though

    Thanks Setter for an enjoyable half an hour and Vinyl for the blog.

  39. 35:03. A bit ponderous today. Nothing too hard apart from the parsing of aftermath. Just struggled to wrap my brain round it all.
  40. Couldn’t see “Bestowal” and spent a while trying to figure how “Teatowel” could be the answer. Well, people do give teatowels as gifts! Annoyed with myself again!
  41. FOI 10ac USING

    LOI 2dn BLIND

    COD 12ac ANTIHERO

    WOD LEYLANDII

    Time Very Slow!

  42. Could someone explain “rag doll” please? I don’t understand where the “do” comes from. Thanks.
  43. I don’t think they have metastasised to this part of the world (SW Oz). The trees in the pic are common. So this was LOI, trying the anagrist in various combinations until this looked correct…surely British Leylandii was a car manufacturer!
    28mins all ok in the end.

    Edited at 2020-06-16 01:16 pm (UTC)

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