Times 27921 – a piece of that confection

86 comments on “Times 27921 – a piece of that confection”

1. I thought of WATTING STREET–had the STREET, thought I remembered WATTING, and looked it up, so a technical DNF. I was surprised to see BRIDECAKE, as the only time I’ve ever come across it was in “Great Expectations”, where Miss Havisham uses the term to refer to the rotting heap on her dining table; and it’s annotated in the Penguin edition I have.
2. Easyish, but nowhere near a PB. And one 50-50 out-and-out guess required for NHO/forgotten moles. Almost went with NAEDI, it rang a faint bell, but I think it was nematode that gave the dejavu (a close homophone? well, it has the N and the D). So a lucky guess. Watling street rang a faint bell, too, but bridecake was a NHO.
3. Unless there’s been a directive that I haven’t seen there’s no ban on bloggers using the words hard, easy or whatever when discussing puzzles, and nor should there be in my opinion. I find it interesting that Pip, although without actually using the word, implies he found this puzzle easy when I didn’t particularly (needing 40 minutes) and that sort of thing is surely what the forum is here to discuss.

   BRIDECAKE has passed me by all my life, or at least for as long as it has been around. It’s a horrible, ugly, tacky word so I’m pleased to have been unware of it until today.

   I came within a dog’s whisker of putting CALM at 16ac as my LOI and was just about to stop the clock when BALM featuring LAB reversed occurred to me.

   NHO Dover in DELAWARE but the state jumped out at me from checkers and I just assumed.

   The unknown NAEVI came from wordplay.

   1. You took the words right out of my mouth, Jackkt.
4. For Mistress Bride the wedding-cake:
   Knead but the dough, and it will be
   To paste of almonds turn’d by thee;
   Or kiss it thou but once or twice,
   And for the bride-cake there’ll be spice.

   20 mins. Not my cup of tea.
   Thanks setter and Pip.

5. Faced part way through with S_B/_O_T_A_T_R the fact that SUB CONTRACTOR fitted so nicely proved too tempting for me. I did have a doubt when I put it in, wondering what the definition was but I didn’t have the good sense to go back and check. Indeed I failed to practise one of my better habits of recent times in leaving a letter out as a reminder if I have a doubt.

   My company’s office backs onto WATLING STREET — I remember it vaguely from when we used to go to offices. This time next week it will be a year to the day since I was last there.

   1. “Subcontractor” was a word I knew, in contrast to SUB-POSTMASTER. And I had all the rest pretty quickly, so what the hell… I hope the UK postal service is in better shape than ours.
6. A few possible traps: like jack I nearly bunged in ‘calm’, and like pip spent a while trying to get INSE as Dover’s location. Always thought that NAEVUS was a sort of skin birth stain, rather than a mole. Wasn’t sure about TINMAN, the word is surely tinsmith or whitesmith. York is an archdiocese as well as a See.

   Why so few posts as I submit?

   14′ 37″, thanks pip and setter.

7. NAEVI, NAEFI, NAEDI? If the setter cannot be bothered to help me, I cannot be bothered either. Stodgy crossword after yesterday’s.
   1. Agree – never liked random boys/girls names
   2. I agree. It was when I thought of Naedi that I remembered Naevi. I never thought of Fi (my wife’s name).
   3. Yep. The old story – an obscurity clued by a coin toss. Pfft.
   4. Yes, also agree — especially as I plumped for “Naedi” as the most likely-sounding.

      Wasn’t mad keen on “Tinman” either ( in = as member of — not very convincing IMO).

8. I agree with Pip. I don’t particularly like it if bloggers describe a puzzle in definitive terms and for the same reasons as Pip.

   In this case, I must have been on the setter’s wave length as I found nothing that I couldn’t parse at the time. Like isla3, though, I thought of NAEDI iso NAEVI for 12ac.

   In my previous life as a B747 Loadmaster for a US cargo airline, I’ve been to Dover, DE many times. There is a massive air base there. Those who remember the original film, M.A.S.H. may remember Donald Sutherland (I think) referring to he and Elliott Gould as “the pros from Dover”.

   Edited at 2021-03-10 07:48 am (UTC)

   1. It’s also well-known Martin in a rather depressing way as the base to which the remains of US servicemen and women killed abroad are returned to the US. Presidents before the one Biden refers to as “the former guy” used to go there every now and then to pay their respects.
      1. Thanks, Olivia. Sadly, thanks to my work as a B747 Loadmaster, I know only to well about the repatriation of the remains of US service personnel as we carried many of those caskets. I was also present on many occasions in Kuwait when they were loaded. On every occasion there was a simple but very moving ceremony that accompanied the loading process.
         In Dover, all of us who had arrived with the plane were required to leave before the caskets could be offloaded.
         One aspect that may not be well-known is that, initially, caskets would be sent on to destinations across the USA by commercial airline flights. It was discovered that in some cases they were not being treated with due respect so the military contracted with one of our fellow cargo airlines, but operating much smaller planes than B747s, to fly the caskets to their destination.
         Even today, just writing about it makes me quite emotional.
9. Another near naedi here. I thought 6d may have been an &lit.
   1. The crew with Dorothy, Lion, Scarecrow and Toto? That occurred to me, too.
10. Almost a PB for me too.
    At junior school I was taught “the car is stationary because ‘Arry drives the car”. It’s stupid, but it works. As a result I’ve never got this wrong in over 60 years.
    1. I was taught “a as in car” or “e as in pen”.
    2. Also, stationery is what you get from a stationers shop
       Cheers
       Des
11. that’s what I am, as I finished this in 20 mins, all present and correct. Definitely a PB. Luckily, I knew WATLING STREET and managed the trickier clues (NAEVI, BRIDECAKE and DELAWARE) without ado. I initially had TINNER at 6d but changed it to the correct TINMAN when I got BRIGADIER. Thank you Pip and setter. PS I have no objection to bloggers’ comments re xword level of difficulty as when I come here I have already made a personal decision and it is nice to compare it to better solvers and the blogger’s view.
12. 16 minutes with LOI TINMAN, which I didn’t feel sure of. BRIDECAKE was unknown but it had to be. COD to SUB-POSTMASTER in this pleasant but straightforward puzzle.Thank you Pip and setter.
13. 8:29. I thought this was going to be a sub-5 but the bottom hard proved a little bit trickier than the top. BRIDECAKE was unknown but not hard to deduce, and I managed to resist the temptation to bung in CALM.
    In my last job our office was close to WATLING STREET, so I was aware of it and also knew somehow that it was an old Roman road.
14. The satanic TWITCHERs are near
    They inTEND RILing me, it’s so clear
    I’ve GROUNDS ELaborate
    For this EMOTIONAL hate
    But infiDEL AWAREness lives here
    1. Bad luck Astro_Nowt — on a day when there are no birds to be seen, the setter bungs in a Twitcher ! Enough to make you snap your binoculars.

       Personally, I’m OK with birds — it’s obscure poets/painters/authors/sculptors and composers that get me jittery.

15. 13:16 LOI BALM. I knew NAEVI but failed to parse it. NHO BRIDECAKE but it had to be. No stand-out clues for me today.
16. Didn’t find this very easy at all. NAEVI? GROUNDSEL? BRIDECAKE? DELAWARE? I had no idea.
17. 15.38 but I did use a checker for naevi. It had to be either that or naedi and whichever was a NHO for me.

    FOI Norse and LOI Tinman which I havered over before deciding I couldn’t think of anything better. Spent a good while over the Dover clue before the checkers reminded me that Dover is in fact the state capital of Delaware.

    COD Sub Postmaster if only because its solution stopped me from continuing to try and make sub commandant fit!

    Thanks setter and blogger for a rewarding midweek work out,

18. Straightforward, despite nho bridecake, (why no groomcake?) but none the worse for that. A MER at tinman, the only one of those I know was in Wizard of Oz. Tinsmith, surely?

    When it comes to state capitals, I tend to flounder. Was there a competition once, to pick the most obscure town in each state to be its capital?

    The full title of this blog is “Times for The Times,” so words such as easy or hard are nearly impossible to avoid. Sorry if that offends, but then, doesn’t almost everything, these days?

    Edited at 2021-03-10 08:48 am (UTC)

    1. No International Men’s Day, or Man’s Hour on Radio 4 either. Pure discrimination.
       1. Great owl! Though I like one of the others (looking half right) even more..
       2. November 19.
    2. Whose family pays for it?
19. This was a breakfast completion crossword so I assumed a low SNITCH.

    Like others, NHO of bridecake or naevi. Also considered calm as being more likely since I wasn’t sure about balm as a verb (or comfort as a noun), but went with balm.

    I was put right about stationery/stationary in my first job, having missed it at school. More recently I made myself anonymously unpopular by correcting the spelling on some cabinets in the office.

20. 14 mins with naedi. Thanks pip. I guess posted times and the snitch already give a good heads up on how tricky a puzzle is 🙂
21. Foiled by NAEVI – I went with ‘Naedi’, not knowing any better. I didn’t find this too tricky otherwise, as the words I wasn’t familiar with were otherwise reasonably clued. Liked DELAWARE as a clue, though I will doubtless forget that it has its own Dover.
22. Being of a medical background, naevi flew onto the page with the same smug smile that I imagine gardeners smile when the answer is yet another plant that I have never heard of. But I had heard of groundsel so I got one over the gardeners today. And it was a PB.
23. From their album ‘Holiday’:- Tin Man – 1974
    ‘But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man’ One of my favourite bands -saw ’em live twice.

    22 mins with NAEDI – who knew!? On edit Dr. Rich did!

    FOI 2dn NORSE

    LOI 28ac TRENDY = funky, only in America!

    COD 5dn WATLING STREET

    WOD 22ac BRIDECAKE one man’s meat………!

    Operations ‘Postmaster’ and ‘Sub-Postmaster’ Ian Fleming and his Naevi.

    Edited at 2021-03-10 09:43 am (UTC)

    1. Glad to see someone else knows that funky has a different meaning to trendy.
24. Just slight pauses over NAEVI and TINMAN. I’m not convinced that “as a member of” works for IN and if you take it as parsed by Pip then what is “as” doing?

    Watling Street known from having been brung up near Dartford and Gravesend.

    1. My bad, as they say, i meant to type “as member of” not “a member of”. Correcting now.
25. With my delicate self esteem inevitably dented by Pip’s opening inferences, this was nevertheless near my PB, whatever it may be, as I only occasionally stray from the QC and rarely complete the 15×15. However, it did all eventually fall into place including the NHO moles, ring and cake, and it’s still morning.
    Much pondering on many others but I do feel I am starting to get the feel of how clues go together, at least some of the time. Thanks to the kindly setter for encouraging me, especially for the two long and accessible down clues, and (sniff) to Pip for clarifying the finer details.
    1. My apologies, plymouthian1, if I dented same, it was not my intention, in fact the opposite. After all this is “Times for the Times”, we are expected to report our speed or otherwise. Personally I am more interested in whether a puzzle was challenging and satisfying to me, rather than too easy or too hard; my 11 minute PB is often 3 times Verlaine’s or Mohn2’s regular times, yet I am not dispirited.
       1. My tongue was very firmly in my cheek. I was delighted to finish. A bit like climbing Everest for me, to worry about how long it took would be ridiculous. But thank you for your kind message — you and your fellow bloggers are unfailingly kind and helpful in my efforts to become vaguely competent.
26. “In the naevi…tum ti tum ti tum ti tum!” Whatever happened to Village People?

    A very gentle stroll and I feel slightly cheated it’s now over. Balm was the last one in. Tinman seems a bit weak and I’m with the blogger on Birdcake. I did like Delaware and Hermitage, though.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

    1. Village people are still going, albeit with some 30 different members, over the years .. these pop groups become a valuable brand name, after a while, not to be binned ..
       1. Glad to hear it. The idea of the Beverley Sisters being binned is too awful to think about
          1. I KNOW .. they made the big mistake of tying it all into the family. Scissor Sisters, Puppini sisters, and you would have been still good to go.
27. Just over 7 minutes. International Men’s Day is on November 19th, but not widely celebrated, it would be like the other 364. Stationery has “E” for envelope, that’s my mnemonic.
    1. I remember as a child being told by one of my older relations ‘E for notEpaper’
       1. How these things work is beyond me. I wanted to reply to jonny peacock, yet my post is nowhere really near.
28. Straightforward and pleasant. Paused for thought at BRIDECAKE and TINMAN, but wordplay led there pretty clearly, and they both looked very plausible. Also glad that I stopped long enough to dismiss WARM and CALM before alighting on the dog.
29. Thank you for the tip, I shall bring it to the attention of Mrs K and hope for recognition (but not hold my breath!)
    1. That is what Fathers’ Day is for, isn’t it? Tough on those who aren’t, mind you. Or have ungrateful offspring, I suppose
30. 22m with a fatal stumble at NAEVI. I had also never heard of ANNULET, BRIDECAKE or TINMAN but the cryptics helped. I suppose the occasional memento DNF keeps one humble.

    Edited at 2021-03-10 11:24 am (UTC)

31. I’m not blogging until tonight, so I’m safe to say this was a crossword in which my 12.16 felt like a missed opportunity to complete my 10 sub-tens. I slightly stymied my chances by attempting to go straight through the acrosses: it’s a way of making an apparently simple crossword a bit more of a challenge. I got as far as 12 before getting help from the downs.

    I very much like mrkgrna’s suggestion that TINMAN is an Oz-based &lit, elevating it from a much scoffed at dodgy word answer to a very good clue.

    I thought BRIDECAKE sounded a bit Bardic, and thanks are due to Myrtilus (who else?) for confirming the same.

    I knew NAEVI. Just saying.

32. And by the way, the STATION(E/A)RY confusion is enshrined in the old rag-mag joke: “excuse me, miss, do you keep stationery?”
33. Entered NAEDI, thought about NAEVI, but then decided to stick to my guns. Bad choice… just over 7m with that mistake. I didn’t find this one particularly on the easy side, partly because I’d never heard of WATLING STREET and was convinced I was looking for a STRAIT.
34. Another Oz connection here for the TINMAN – I was trying to make “tinker” work. Tinman was a pejorative term for an unscrupulous seller of aluminum siding (a kind of cladding for houses popular in US suburbia in the 70s). I think a naevus is what Gorbachev has but it’s not a mole. 11.13
    1. Gorbachev has (had?) a port wine stain. I knew NAEVI by chance, having had what was at first diagnosed as a Spitz naevus, then as a melanoma, scooped out of my shoulder last December; they’re evidently hard to distinguish.
       1. Isn’t a port wine stain just a big naevus?
          1. So it would seem; had no idea. They’re also known as nevus flammeus.
    2. I think ‘naevus’ is what New Yorkers should be with Putin’s finger on the button?
    3. Ah yes, now I remember the film, Richard Dreyfuss & Danny DeVito. Aloooominum.
35. nice and quick today, except for LOI BRIDECAKE, which I had never heard of, and was contemplating BRIDEWARE, which was meaningless. NAEVI known from Scrabble.
36. They deliberately put them away from the financial and commercial centres to separate business from politics and mitigate the threat of corruption. See also Ottawa, Canberra, Brasilia etc. It doesn’t seem to have been very effective.
    1. That sounds too selfless to be true. As an alternative, perhaps it is a way of sorting out competition between the bigger cities: Toronto/Montreal, Sydney/Melbourne, Rio/Sao Paulo. There is an interesting book in here, somewhere..
       1. At many weddings there is a Groom’s cake (often chocolate) in addition to the Bride’s / Wedding cake (almost always white).
          In addition to state capitals, Washington DC was also built on a “neutral” site which lay in between the financial and trading centres of Philadelphia and Boston (New York wasn’t important until the Erie canal made it the gateway to the midwest 50 years later) and the agricultural areas of Virginia and the Carolinas.
          1. My extensive historical study of the period* tells me that it was more a compromise between Hamilton and Jefferson whereby the federal government assumed war debts and in exchange the capital was put somewhere closer to the slave-holding southern states.
             Surely the neutral site between Philadelphia and Boston would have been… New York!

             *watching Hamilton

             Edited at 2021-03-10 09:00 pm (UTC)

37. Foiled by thinking the random girl was DI. Bah humbug! 21:16. WOE. Thanks setter and Pip.
38. Could not see stationery at all. Was looking for a material with a homophone of writers still. Doh.
    Another naedi. Didn’t even think of Vi. Had never heard the word so would have preferred wordplay which didn’t offer an option. Never heard of annulet, bridecake, tinman (other than in Oz) or Dover in Delaware. On that basis, I was rather pleased with a time of about 40 minutes with one wrong and one not completed.
    Certainly better than yesterday when I didn’t even comment having failed with half a dozen.
    Thanks to setter and blogger – who should hold forth on their views without worrying about the reactions of the readers. When I first started reading the blog, I would have struggled for ages to complete half the grid only to find the blogger had knocked it off without too much trouble in ten minutes. Much gnashing of teeth and bad language occurred, followed by a determination to do better the next day. Pretty much the same process now except that I often finish in under an hour!
39. 22.07. I don’t seem to have found this as easy as others. Can’t see anything too hard now I look back. Perhaps I was just making harder work of it than I needed to. Took a while to get started. Lucky enough to have seen naevi in puzzles several times before so that wasn’t a problem for me. Wasn’t sure about the definition of tinman.
40. A bit of a mer from me for NAEVI. Obscure words should be clued more explicitly in the wordplay surely? Glad to see I’m not the only NAEDI😊

    22:38 otherwise — nice puzzle but did not find it as easy as snitch and leaderboard and indeed pop suggests.

    Thx pip and setter

41. ….so few problems encountered. A rather anodyne puzzle.

    FOI GANGES
    LOI SEE-THROUGH
    COD GROUNDSEL
    TIME 7:51, but checked before submitting in 8:14

42. I thought there were quite a few difficult or unusual words today. I was lucky to know Watling Street (not the sort of thing I’d expect non-UK solvers to know) and Dover (not the sort of US city I’d expect UK solvers to know); Groundsel and Naevi were just not in my vocabulary. Bridecake (as vs Bride’s Cake), Sub-Postmaster (who he?), and Tinman instead of tinsmith were accessible but not familiar. Thanks pip.
43. I couldn’t bring myself to put Tinman in as the “man” but can’t mean crew unless you use it as a verb in which case the “in” bit doesn’t make sense. Grrr
    1. As Pip says in the blog it’s not as member of crew = INMAN.
       It’s as member of = IN, crew = man.
       Lift and separate!
44. 41 minutes, but DNF, though I feel a bit better seeing that other people have made the same mistakes. I did correct TINNER to TINMAN (BRIGADIER wouldn’t have fit otherwise), but nothing rescued me from SUB-CONTRACTOR. NAEVI was OK, since it seemed much more likely than the alternatives. It can’t have been a too interesting puzzle, since I fell asleep for about 10 minutes in the middle of it.
45. Really enjoyed this — just the right level for those of us moving up from the QC. Surprised myself along the way by remembering Naevi, and working out Delaware, Bridecake, Balm and Ganges. Nearly fell at the last fence, with Oarless a huge pdm after spending time trying to think of obscure names for swords. Invariant
46. Nothing to add.
47. The snark hunters included a Baker who could only cook BRIDECAKE — so that easily came to mind.
48. As a ,usually, non-blogger I will admit that I finished in a rather less than impressive time for me, a rather un-accomplished solver. Two chaps, one croon, maybe haughty, dear Pip. But I am not discouraged.
49. My cod was 22ac, being a tribute to Lewis Carroll though, I must admit, it gave me an agony in eight fits for a short while.
50. This one wasn’t much trouble at all. My LOI was TINMAN. I’m not convinced this is even a word; it certainly isn’t in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. The only Tin Man I’ve ever heard of is the one in the Wizard of Oz. Having done some further research, I can be excused for not knowing it – the word is obsolete and has been more or less so for over 100 years. I still put it in though because I couldn’t think of anything else, and I could see how it parsed so I was sure it was right. Call it sour grapes, but I thought it was a pretty lame, clumsy clue.

    Edited at 2021-03-11 08:31 pm (UTC)

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