Times 27,905: Pursued By A Bear

77 comments on “Times 27,905: Pursued By A Bear”

1. I finished all but two answers within my target half-an-hour but then I became bogged down with the SPLATTERED or SPLUTTERED issue, neither apparently parsible based on S = second which turned out to be incorrect. I also had a blank spot over 11ac where I was unable to come up with a word that fitted, and what was going to be the definition anyway?

   I also failed to parse STALEMATE but the answer was so obviously correct I didn’t bother to pursue the matter.

   No problem with CASALS; he went in with no checkers on reading C primarily, cellist and (6).

   Edited at 2021-02-19 05:50 am (UTC)

2. 7Down. At the drop of a hat.
   Should the clue not be ‘When’ rather than ‘Where’ boater may
   go down instantly?
   1. For sure, when fits the idea of timing better, but where is surely ok: where does this happen? At the Flanders and Swann show.
3. Like Thursday’s I found this very difficult.
   Thank you, verlaine, for explaining STAGE DIRECTIONS and SPLATTERED. I managed to solve 2d but never picked up that it was an anagram.
   Never heard of MELA in STALEMATE but it had to be that.
   I also remember a Rosie CASALS. She was a tennis player whom I saw at Wimbledon in 1967 partnering Billie Jean King in the doubles. I thought she was related somehow to the cellist but I’m not sure.
   FOI: AT THE DROP OF A HAT
   LOI: STAGE DIRECTIONS
   COD: STAGE DIRECTIONS

   Edited at 2021-02-19 07:58 am (UTC)

   1. Sorry, Martin. See below. Our memories and our posting overlapped.
      1. Yes, snap!
   2. Rosie is Pablo’s great niece.
   3. Can help you here Martin .. Rosie completely unrelated to Pablo!
4. 42 minutes. I thought I only knew one cellist, Jacqueline Du Pré, but to my amazement I suddenly remembered not only Pablo but his tennis playing namesake Rosemary. I spent a while between DISCONCERT and DISCONTENT but eventually realised what the ‘throw’ was doing there. STAGE DIRECTIONS was a horrible anagram, and AVERAGED a dodgy definition. COD to CROCKERY, although the Elvis in question needed to be defined as pre-army. Toughish puzzle.Thank you V and setter.

   Edited at 2021-02-19 08:03 am (UTC)

5. 30 mins pre-brekker.
   DNK Mela. MER at self-obsession. And I think ‘game’ is a stretch as an anagrind.
   Mostly I liked For example, Disconcert and Cashmere.
   Averaged does not mean usually around.
   Thanks setter and V.
   1. If my average time for a Times crossword is 15 minutes then it seems fair to say that I am – assuming a normal distribution – usually around that time. Close enough, I thought, especially given the deployment of the question mark that covers a multitude of sins.
   2. Game as in gammy leg?
6. Well at least I managed to finish today, albeit in 1hr 15 mins. Very tricky as V admits. LOI CASSALS, whom I did not know but luckily got right after the same trawl as v, and after having bunged in SPLATTERED, without really knowing why. COD NIT-PICKER. Thank you V and setter.
7. 28:12 It wasn’t really that hard. Is diminished crossword solving ability a known side-effect of the Pfizer jab? (I had mine yesterday). I made a right mess of the grid by starting to write in ELECTRICITY for 15A, leaving me thinking for ages that I needed A_E_A_I_ for 3D, my last one in. Spluttered my way through this in fits and starts and wrote in SPLATTERED for my POI without parsing. NHO the Hindu fair. Thanks V and setter.
   1. I had a fuzzy pink square the day after my jab, brain mushy.
8. 14:21. Tricky, with similar MERs to others.
   I suspect CASALS will divide solvers neatly into those for whom it was a write-in as soon as the C appeared, and those who had to search alphabetically for a dance to shorten. Fortunately I was in the former category.
   I don’t remember coming across MELA before.
   1. Every year hereabouts we have a Maidstone Mela. Nobody goes, because nobody knows what it means, but it helps to spend the ever-increasing equality budget
9. My FOI was a confident HERE at 1dn which I thought was a bit recondite but ideally suited for Verlaine’s weekly test. This led to a long and fruitless attempt to parse REPECHAGE where STALEMATE eventually elbowed its way in. Should have had my specs on because I then looked at 2dn in the grid and misread it as hyphenated (never looked at the enumeration in the clue!) and gave up in frustration at about 25 minutes. So a combination of too clever by half and too stupid for words.
10. I finished up with a hopeful CASALS, who wasn’t in the list of cellists I know. I had thought that list had zero entries but boltonwanderer has reminded me I’d heard of Du Pre, so in fact my list has now doubled! Elsewhere I biffed SPLATTERED and feel I got lucky in not having thought of “spluttered”.

    1A reminded me of a joke I heard recently. I saw a guy in Tesco’s with a trolley full of chorizo and San Miguel; I thought to myself “Hispanic buying”.

    1. I read the top line of this grid and thought “ah yes, Casals in Spain.”
    2. Does the name Yo-Yo Ma not ring any bells?
       1. No, but he may bounce back:-)
       2. I’d probably have guessed he (?) was a violinist, but yes, I’ve heard the name.
11. I thought the ‘fair’ reversal in STALEMATE was TAME. Fair and tame aren’t really synonyms, but more likely than an obscure Hindu word
    1. Maybe, if a considerable stretch. But then you have to make report produce STALE, which no stretch allows it to do, I think.
12. I certainly made heavy weather of this, and just shaded in under 30 minutes.
    Had I spotted HIS PANIC (and giggled accordingly) early on instead of nearly last, I might have slipped though more smoothly, but even then I would have dawdled round the fiendish LATTER in SPED (yeah, S(econd) plus PLATTERED: something to do with shellac discs?). And the swinish 2d, with brief part of the definition not the wordplay. This setter knows how to tease.
    I didn’t notice that I needed a Hindu fair for STALEMATE, just relieved to slot in the answer.
    Did anyone else wonder, after getting the two As from AdAm, how Charlie produced RON? I know I did.
    1. Yep. I did too.
       1. me too
       2. Moi aussi !
    2. #metoo
    3. Another one.
    4. And me!
    5. Yep!
    6. Yup, me too.
13. Dnk MELA, and agonised over this.

    I was also delayed by being fixated on 1ac beginning HE (what about).

    A good Friday puzzle.

    20′ 13″ thanks verlaine and setter.

14. I can’t blame the vaccine for the pink squares today. The first 5000 doses arrived here yesterday and haven’t been given to anyone yet. I put TESTEE for the guinea pig – pig ignorance! 38’43”
15. 21.57 so a welcome relief after yesterday’s personal travails. Everything well clued though I biffed stage directions having reckoned on stag being the game! Anyone else? Also biffed stalemate NHO mela.

    FOI Hispanic, LOI Refer. Between those two regular rather than spectacular progress. Slight hesitation between taster and tester but eventually chose the flower I recognised. COD Casals.

16. CASALS was my first in but it took a bit of straining to bring to the surface the cellist I knew whose name began CA.

    I didn’t notice MELA (although it rings a bell), sort of semi-biffing and thinking that the internal reversed word was TAME.

    SPLATTERED bunged in as a hopeful LOI unparsed.

    I spotted scent for trail at the end of 15 so didn’t go down the false anagram route, and took a while to shake off the conviction that the def for 2d had to be game, even though SPACE INVADERS didn’t fit.

    4:50 for Mohn V, so you needn’t be that disappointed.

17. Yes, pretty tough today – thanks for explaining STALEMATE and STAGE DIRECTIONS, both of which I biffed on my way to 12m 9s and an alphabet trawl to get CASALS. Couldn’t stop seeing CALAIS.

    Not convinced that ‘averaged’ and ‘was usually around’ are really the same thing – indicative of a low standard deviation? – but it’s a nice, misleading clue so I’ll take it.

18. Learned some new vocabulary, biffed quite a few and enjoyed myself thoroughly.
    I think that age may be the main determinant as to whether one knew Casals, I’m 61 and remember him well. As soon as I saw the word ‘cellist’ I thought, ‘if it isn’t du Pre or Casals I’m in trouble’.
    Thank you very much setter and V for explaining several (esp splattered).
    1. Julian Lloyd Webber doesn’t yet qualify for inclusion in one of these puzzles but he’s the only other I know of.
       1. As I said to pootle above, not Yo-Yo Ma? Also doesn’t qualify for these puzzles but certainly the most famous living cellist.
          1. Also I remember Mme Suggia, as portrayed by Augustus John in the Tate
       2. There’s also Mme Suggia —

          [Error: Irreparable invalid markup (‘<a […] /a>’) in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

          There’s also Mme Suggia — <a href=”https://tate.org.uk/art/artworks/john-madame-suggia-n04093″/a>
    2. OK, fellow solvers:

       Pablo Casals
       Emmanuel Feuermann
       Janos Starker
       Pierre Fournier
       Yo-Yo Ma
       Aldo Parisot
       Lynn Harrell
       Mstislav Rostropovich

       And that famous rock cellist, Jack Bruce!

       1. And Steven Isserlis. I also have a wonderful recording of the Bach Cello Suites by Maurice Grendon.

          Edited at 2021-02-20 08:45 am (UTC)

19. I suppose my mind was running on musicians rather than actors as players because I had “score” DIRECTIONS for 2d which made a right mess in that corner for a while. DNK “mela” and failed to parse SPLATTERED. Managed to get husband to the station to go for his Moderna booster yesterday but now I don’t know when he’s getting back and it’s my job to shovel a path to the car and clear it off. Time to get suited up. At least we have power. 22.41
20. Just under the hour today but a lot of that on my last two, SPLATTERED and PETAL. I was thrown by the question mark at the end of 8 down, which had me hunting for something cryptic, rather than simply synonymous. Does it have any actual purpose beyond being random? I also thought PETAL for MY sweet was also a stretch too far. Had it been just SWEET it would have still been difficult since almost any word appears to be a term of endearment in the right cicumstances. But then had I got them straightaway I wouldn’t have noticed. Thank you for the explanations, V.
21. 2dn (STAGE DIRECTIONS) was one of those rare things, for me – a perfect clue in every way.
22. Chuffed to the gunwales to have done this in a second over 30 minutes only to have found I’d typed Discincirt, which is discincirting. Two top-class puzzles on the trot and I bungled both of them. The service revolver in the study beckons.
    1. I’ve started giving mine a quick scan before submitting to try to eliminate typos. Reckon it only adds 10-15 seconds and I think worth it to avoid a blooper.
       1. Me too. I normally do that but having taken longer than usual over the puzzle I think my eyes must have glazed over a bit. Ah well, lesson learnt (hopefully).
    2. Check all the entries before submitting … time is an illusion but errors are not
       1. True but as someone once advised me:

          A good way to spot mistakes you’ve made in any manuscript you submit is to read it slowly and carefully, with a clear head, immediately after you hit “send”

23. Foiled by TASTER in the end, having gone for ‘Tester’ instead. Oops.

    Didn’t know mela, so STALEMATE went in with a bit of a shrug, and I relied on the wordplay for HAFT and BIREME. I didn’t worry too much about parsing SPLATTERED. Thought NIT-PICKER was a nice clue.

    1. …my gripe also — TESTER seems just as valid as TASTER

       What say you, ed?

       1. How would you parse flower = ester.
          1. I can’t speak for 84801442, but I just put it in without much thought after seeing that the T came from the end of ‘giant’. If I had paused for a moment, I would have realised that aster is a plant and ester isn’t. But the fact that they’re so similar, and because ‘tester’ immediately leapt out at me as a word that can mean ‘guinea pig’, meant that it went straight in. My fault entirely.
24. ….but had to analyze some of the clues post-solve. I never saw the cryptics for stage directions and splattered, although I suspect I must have had latter in the back of my mind as I biffed. I saw how stalemate worked, but didn’t know mela.
25. 28.32. A generally straightforward puzzle with a lengthy holdup at the end over Casals which did ring a faint bell when it arrived and the shortened salsa did feel solid enough. Knowing of the Kumbh Mela helped confirm stalemate, I’m a bit surprised that so few in this erudite community seem to have heard of it but as has been said before everyone will have their own definition of what falls under GK and what falls under outrageous obscurity. I wasn’t convinced by me for self-obsession in the clue for mega and utterly failed to parse splattered.
26. Easier than yesterday’s, but not by much. Some difficulty justifying otherwise obvious answers, with the Indian fair, PETAL and SPLATTERED applying the brakes. 37m.
27. An improvement on yesterday’s travails. The khyber pass held me up, like others I’d pencilled in ‘here’ at 1dn. I keep forgetting ‘host’ as a crowd. Biffed discontent at 14dn but thought it wasn’t right. I got 2 dn without spotting the anagram. MER at 1ac, I thought Hispanic had come to mean from a Latin American country.
    Pleased to get iridescent after trying to anagrind cycletrail .

    Thank you blogger and setter.

28. I think I was on the wavelength today -of other solvers.
    AARON, ELECTRICITY etc. My invention was that Elvis=KING which fitted neatly into 16d at the time. And for some reason I was trying to justify PAR EXEMPLE at 20a.
    I did get CASALS early, but lots unsolved when I came here.
    David
29. Game of three quarters and a quarter here, with the NW being the tricky quarter. The rest went in less than 20 mins and I thought Verlaine would be displeased. In the end I gave up, recommenced this afternoon and it all eventually fell into place, starting with the fairly obvious SENTENCE which had eluded me. Not too keen on self obsessed either.
    COD HISPANIC when the penny eventually dropped.
30. He will say, find me a plant called “ester” .. a species, not a varietal 😉
31. I can’t recall seeing a dozen C’s in the same grid before.

    After yesterday’s ignominious surrender, this perked me up considerably. I tried to use “S = second” before realising how “latter” worked, and didn’t know “mela” which could have been “amel” and the clue would still work.

    FOR EXAMPLE and STAGE DIRECTIONS were parsed afterwards.

    FOI CREE
    LOI HOST
    COD SPLATTERED
    TIME 10:03

32. Found this difficult and solved it in a stuttering fashion. Knew the cellist, considered ‘Aaron’, was pleased when I realised I did not have to know an obscure member of the guinea pig family, and finished with DISCONCERT.
33. A stimulating puzzle, and one of those where the first 85% went in steadily, if not quickly, and there was then a slower process in which I worked out STAGE DIRECTIONS, and the tricky NE corner, held up at 8dn like lots of other people by thinking the “second” was S, which made that clue a lot harder.
34. Utterly defeated by 2dn. Guessed SPACE DIRECTIONS, but knew it was wrong. Also had TESTER rather uncomfortably. But CASALS a write-in.

    Not for the first time, The Times had given me today’s paper with the exception of yesterday’s crossword in Firefox, so I had to do it in Chrome, which I don’t enjoy as the interface is so odd. Not sure if it’s a problem of The Times. Perhaps it’s my tablet? Possible?

35. It was the NW that hung me up a while at the end. (Actually, I started at bedtime and put it down till the morning when I lost steam.) I couldn’t parse STALEMATE, but finally bunged it in. I didn’t know that MELA can mean “fair,” though that sense is related to the sense of “gathering” that I know very well from the name of the nonprofit Mela Foundation that promotes the work of my friends La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. The sense of HOST as “present” was also elusive.

    Edited at 2021-02-19 07:52 pm (UTC)

36. It was the western edge that held me up — “Host”, “Hispanic”, “Stage Directions”, “Disconcert’ and “Crew” — I needed alphabet trawls to get Stage, Host and Crew. Once I got Crew, I remembered that we had a very similar clue some while past (clearly I don’t learn).
    Pleased to finish but it took me well over an hour.

    Edited at 2021-02-19 08:30 pm (UTC)

37. 81:50 on the clock, the sum of several sessions, but it feels good to have finished. FOI 7dn AT THE DROP OF A HAT then steady, but slow, progress following the checkers round the board, leaving much the same set as everyone else for the final push. LOI SPLATTERED with very little confidence having parsed it as S (second) PATTERED (dashed?) with L (liquid?) in. Liked NIT-PICKER and CROCKERY
38. Decent time for me helped by knowing Casals. Famously “discovered” Bach’s Six Suites in a music shop in Barcelona. Scraped away playing some of them for my Grade 6 37 years ago. Fortunately Bach was long dead and no one’s had to suffer my efforts since 😀 Like others PETAL and SPLATTERED my last two the latter hopelessly unparsed as was the clever 2d. Thought DISCONCERTED was very good

    Sad to hear about Dorset Jimbo. I’m a relatively new solver but he felt like he was part of the blogging furniture

    Thanks all

39. I’ve no idea how long I spent trying to do this, off and on, but it must have been several hours. Gave up with the cellist, which is doubly annoying as I did know the name but just couldn’t bring him to mind — if I’d just thought of the dance… Testee for 28ac looked wrong at the time, and so it was. Pleased to get the Disconcert/Iridescent crossers, and thankful that latte for liquid pushed me towards the right answer for the wrong reason in 8d. Invariant
40. Finished this yesterday and never got round to reading the comments or commenting, as the plumber came to investigate the smell of gas and discovered that the main supply pipe to the house had rusted and was leaking from a point that needed the emergency crew to cut it off from outside the building and then replace the whole thing from the main in the pavement outside to the meter. All credit to Northern Gas Networks who arrived within the hour and having dug up the foot path, inserted a new plastic pipe up the inside of the old iron one and had my gas supply reconnected by 10pm. I found the puzzle difficult but managed to solve it correctly in 64:24. The last 10 minutes of which were a futile attempt to parse SPLATTERED. Didn’t notice MELA as I biffed STALEMATE. Thanks setter and V. Took me ages to remember Pablo! STAGE DIRECTIONS was my POI after I finally spotted the anagram.
41. I’m surprised Sheku Kanneh-Mason hasn’t featured in anyone’s list of notable cellists. He’s the current darling of the establishment, and i expect he will be the preemient cellist for some time to come. But hard to clue.
    1. …and also wouldn’t fit in a 15×15

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