Times 27927 – wizard stuff.

68 comments on “Times 27927 – wizard stuff.”

1. 4 in a row! Like Pip I didn’t get MILK TRAIN and went with the more familiar MULE TRAIN. With plenty of solvers with errors on the leaderboard to date it looks like I at least have company today.
   1. Me too!
2. The minute I saw the pink squares I thought of MILK TRAIN. If I’d thought of it I’d have put it in instead of MULE, but I can’t see any reason to prefer either (NHO of the dairy, of course). That was the one flaw in an otherwise fine puzzle. I spent a lot of time trying to fill in the unches for BICYCLED, and trying to justify GRAND DUKE, as well as recalling OG. Not to mention accounting for ‘broadcast’; isn’t the definition ‘own’? I had a note by MUGGLE: “GK?” I’ve never read any Potteriana, sat through I think the first movie and saw some bits of others, but like Martin was able to solve; but I could do without Potter references. I especially liked MR BIG, THE VERY IDEA, GRAND DUKE.

   Edited at 2021-03-17 07:09 am (UTC)

   1. I justified the “broadcast” as a homophone indicator, or else you have one K too many: ‘ack knowledge. And certainly the def is own.
3. Goodness! I seem to be the first commenter! (Well I was the first when I started this comment!)
   I thought this was going to be a repeat of yesterday with my taking an age to get off the mark, but I got there in under the hour so that’s OK.
   Pip, with 14d I wonder if it’s a reference to an espresso coffee and that’s why express is in inverted commas? In which case I don’t see the relevance of TRAIN.
   I do remember milk trains but never caught one. There was one mentioned in “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”. As I remember it, Tess and Angel Clare had to take their farm’s milk to catch that train.
   Unfortunately we don’t get ‘Pointless’ here in NZ, certainly not on free-to-air. I watch The Chase. I just remember AXOLOTL from a previous crossword.
   Never read or seen any Harry Potter but worked out MUGGLE from the wordplay.
   Thanks, Pip, for explaining THE VERY IDEA, WHISKER and ‘distant’ in BICYCLED.
   I was going to query equating ‘as’ with EG but obviously it’s OK.
   FOI: TARIFF
   LOI: MUGGLE
   BANDEAU was very good but COD to ACKNOWLEDGE.
   Thank you, Pip!

   Edited at 2021-03-17 06:56 am (UTC)

4. fell into two bear traps with MULE TRAIN at 14d and MEN at 6d. Still can’t see how MILK parses any better than MULE. Held up by MUGGLE, but then having got it put MULE for the last train, perhaps subconsciously influenced by the similarity ( a MUGGLE is a GG in a MULE).
   6d MEN parsed as ‘or’ = other ranks= men, and ‘staff’= men as a double definition. 40mins with pinks.

   Edited at 2021-03-17 07:13 am (UTC)

5. I was going to remark that 5d-6d is a rare example of suspension dots actually functioning to connect two clues. MAN is a chess piece–bishop, perhaps.
6. An axolotl is an amphibian, no?
   1. Yes axolotl is an amphibian as are salamanders.
      Andyf
7. I didn’t enjoy this one at all. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood. For one thing I can’t deal with references to contemporary popular culture such as a Harry Potter. LET’S DO IT was more up my street although I prefer Noel Coward’s parody, published with Porter’s approval. I looked up a couple of things along the way once I realised how badly it was all going, and still needed 70 minutes to complete the grid.
8. Further to my earlier comment which suggested “express” might be a reference to espresso in that there is no milk in espresso, it might be a reference to the fact that women can express milk from their breasts. Liquid emerging thus could possibly be a ‘MILK TRAIN’?
   Just a thought.
   1. It think you’re clutching at straws Martin! Just acknowledge that as I got this wrong it must be a duff clue 😉
   2. This has to be right Martin. I tried to justify MULE on the basis that reading the Express always makes me cross, but MILK is much better. Oher than that, a few went in on a ‘mine is not to reason why’ basis. And as for AXOLOTL, thank goodness for crosswords.
   3. Coffee reference, for me. In the unlikely event it alludes to breast milk, it would have to be ‘expressed.’

      Edited at 2021-03-17 09:55 am (UTC)

   4. I read this as a breast-feeding reference. There is no context in English in which ‘express’ is a word for coffee, whether with or without milk. And if it were a reference to Express Dairies it would need to be capitalised.
      Edit: and I see the setter has now confirmed this below.

      Edited at 2021-03-17 01:20 pm (UTC)

9. What a great crossword! Really enjoyed this, and completely parsing it for once.

   MUGGLE was FOI, it’s a fabulous word. MILK TRAIN brings back memories of adolescence. Agree with kevin that MAN refers to the bishop rather than the young attendant.

   Many contenders for COD, with DONOR CARD just edged out by HONOLULU.

   Thanks pip and setter.

   Edited at 2021-03-17 08:18 am (UTC)

10. Had corymbia’s MEN, for the same reason. Can bishop do double duty in 2 clues? Can cabin boy, come to that?
    Never heard of a milk train so that was impossible, eventually looked it up. Also failed dismally with Honolulu and bandeau – with four left and needing aids I conceded.
11. 58 minutes but with MULE TRAIN. I should have gone back further than Frankie Laine to Thomas the Tank Engine. I biffed ABLAZE, wasn’t quite sure why Lulu wasn’t invited to HONOLULU (you can bring Pearl, she’s a darn nice girl), but at least thought I knew of GELID. LOI was TOEHOLD, something I never felt I had doing this. COD to BONANZA. There were so many ear worms , but official worm of the day to Let’s Do It, the Victoria Wood version of course. Where’s that copy of Woman’s Weekly? Tough puzzle.Thank you Pip and setter.
    1. Thanks for the steer to the Victoria Wood LETS DO IT it is BRILL! I had forgotten what a supernova she was.
       Ta, andyf
12. ….Bringing the cheque and the postal order

    Well not my wavelength at all. I gave up after 40 mins with a few left.
    Confidently putting Mail Train didn’t help at all (Daily Mail versus Daily Express, obviously).
    Well done Pip. And thanks setter — you win.

    1. I had a tentative MAIL TRAIN for a while with the same reasoning. The appearance of MAILBAG then made me think that we probably wouldn’t have another mail carrier.

       Edited at 2021-03-17 08:47 am (UTC)

13. I reckon that this one was tricky
    Either that, or I’m a big thickie
    I prefer a hard one
    Especially when done
    Much more fun than a vacuous quickie

    I knew 14 down was a train, and went initially for “mail”, thinking that it was some allusion to competitve British newspapers. When i finally solved BICYCLED i realised i had too many of the letter “i” for the anagram at 17 across. When LET’S DO IT went in I plumped for mule, with a vague thought that the pony express would have been a lot faster than a mule train. So sadly I’m a DNF today.

14. 28 glorious mins!

    FOI 13dn SNOWBOARDER – an Inuit Old Etonian

    LOI 11ac RIB – knitting something we don’t see much these days.

    COD 14dn MILK TRAIN was a write in for us Oldies – choo-choo! Boat Trains were good too!

    WOD 24dn GELID – as a boy we saw gelid eels in the River Slea. How we laughed!

    I fortunately spotted the damned AXOLOTL lurking early on.

    1. Well done that’s a good time for this monster.
15. 26:46 Lovely stuff! I was well and truly bamboozled at times, but got there in the end with the excellent BICYCLED my LOI. I had SLOW TRAIN at first for 14D, until I saw how MUGGLE worked. I took “express” as referring to expressing milk. Too many to choose from for COD, but I choose BOG for the biggest laugh.
16. Just under my 60m limit today and needed aids for HONOLULU and the amphibian, as well as plumping for MULE rather than the equally likely MAIL. Sadly milk didn’t occur to me, but I think the link with ‘express’ leads to that version.
    Not therefore my finest solve, to put it mildly. Thanks for the explanations, Pip.
17. Don’t understand NO LULU as not great example?
    1. Chambers has “An outstandingly bad or impressive thing or person (slang)” for Lulu.
18. All the dictionaries (esp Collins meaning 5) give a meaning of to extract the juice from or “milk”.
    I agree that MILK is normally used literally or figuratively whereas EXPRESS can be used more generally of any liquid, nonetheless I felt it was close enough for people to make the association. No one thought of MULE at the time, which might have given some pause, but I am not sure there is enough of a double “express” connection there to warrant that being anything more than a solution to a non cryptic clue.
    1. in addition to which I must confess to dwelling in a cave, as I’ve never read a Harry Potter book or seen any of the films!
       1. As Pip says, give Harry Potter a try. Five or six pages should be plenty.
          Not a huge fan of 14dn, which hinges on a single idea, rather vaguely “expressed”
          1. Tried Potter once. Gave up at page 10. Like having my toenails pulled without anaesthetic.
    2. Thanks Mr Setter, I enjoyed blogging this, give Potter a try!
19. A lot of these clues needed careful examining before the sudden realisation of what was going on, so plenty of those penny drop moments which make a crossword properly enjoyable, to my mind. Many places where I look back and think “well that’s obvious…now”.
20. Bang on wavelength for me and as Tim says plenty of thinking needed. However I didn’t hesitate over the MILK TRAIN. Perhaps the setter is female and like me remembers the bad old days when you had to take refuge in the ladies’ BOG in order to attempt to fill up the little bottles which then had to be stored in the mailroom fridge. THE VERY IDEA… I hope it’s a bit easier now though I’m not so sure. 22.33 P.S. In the meantime we’ve heard from the setter on the subject of “express”.

    Edited at 2021-03-17 11:02 am (UTC)

21. Bottom half was not too bad, but struggled with top half.

    MAILING rather than MAILBAG didn’t help but made some progress after ACKNOWLEDGE went in. Wondered if the ACK was something to do with network broadcasting.

    MR BIG, GRAND DUKE and HONOLULU provided the skeleton to wrap things up.

22. I thought this was inventive and slightly off the wall, with a lot of clues requiring post biff sorting out to justify, which needed to be done. My last in, for example, was ABLAZE: the answer was obvious from “burning”, but I went through my entire repertoire of legumes and brassicas before realising which veg was meant.
    Now then, MILK TRAIN. I hear (read) what the setter is saying, and I get express/milk, but I didn’t when solving. I just thought it was a cryptic hint sort of clue, and put in MULE TRAIN. It’s one of those where, having put in the answer after some thought, you don’t see any reason to try something else. MILK TRAIN is simply not as ready an association as MULE, for one thing, and I don’t think the clue is as much a bear trap as it is an insufficiently unambiguous one. I’d appeal to VAR, but as a Spurs supporter I know there’s not much point!
    22.17, but two red (or in this case pink) cards. A very good puzzle mule-ered
23. Having struggled for ages in the SE I finally realised that my SOLID wasn’t correct because there really wasn’t a ladies that was B.S. so pleased to complete only to find the dreaded pink squares.
    Also baffled by ORDINAL till I came here. Hate missing an anagram.
24. Sorry, but I don’t share the enthusiasm of some. There were a few things that struck me as very dodgy and they don’t seem to have been mentioned, so perhaps things have moved on from Ximenes and now from Azed. veg = laze is surely a ludicrous stretch (OK I see now that Chambers has it as an informal verb, although Collins doesn’t). Is ‘split’ any good as an anagram indicator in 27ac?; Does nudie really mean ‘showing up people’s skin’? Is a bandeau specific to women? (what about Stuart Broad?).

    But some very good clues, like 29ac.

    1. Chambers doesn’t seem too think so, but a bandeau is not just a Stuart Broad hair tidy, it’s also a (definitely female) stretch covering for the chest. Try Googling for appropriate pictures.
    2. You say ‘ludicrous stretch’, I say ‘common part of my everyday vocabulary’. I’m very surprised this usage isn’t in Collins, but it is in OED and Lexico.
25. Witty and inventive, I thought, and quite chewy to boot — one of those puzzles where the evident ingenuity of the clues becomes increasingly apparent when parsing post-solve. 33 happy mins.

    Edited at 2021-03-17 12:51 pm (UTC)

26. 45.37 but a walk intervened between part one, 35.30 and the finish. The exercise seems to have triggered some fresh creative juices.

    Found this tough with my FOI owe which tells the tale and LOI milk train. Before my break got well and truly bogged down with the NW frontier- becoming an unwanted theme- and the SE corner. Whisker eventually gave me an opening which led to bower and bombastic, though I thought the latter was aggressive rather than empty. Still a bit of a wait till Harry Potter made an appearance and didn’t understand milk train but knew they existed.

    Somewhat in need of smelling salts at the use of bog for ladies. No ladies I know who would refer to going to the bog!

    Still, good puzzle so thanks setter and blogger.COD axolotl, mainly because I remembered the animal without having to struggle through the cluing.

27. I liked this one, despite being defeated by it. Didn’t get MAILBAG (I put ‘Mailing’), which meant I didn’t get RIB (I didn’t know the knitting term, and was convinced the G at the end of 2d would give -ing). And put me down for another MULE TRAIN ticket.

    veg = laze was new to me, but 19a couldn’t have been anything other than ABLAZE.

    I thought BOMBASTIC was a good clue, with the misleading punctation, but my COD was OFF ONE’S HEAD.

28. ….and did finish in 58 minutes. My main problem was having put mailbox, plausible but wrong. It took me a long time to see muggle, but then I was able to progress.

    Milk train was my last one in – I just put it by instinct, without really thinking too much, or seeing how the clue was meant to work. I’ll keep express = milk in mind for solving Mephisto!

29. I havered over this, because I couldn’t find a vegetable called ‘laze’, and ‘veg’ as a slang verb didn’t occur to me. I still don’t think I have ever heard it used, but perhaps I lead a sheltered life.
30. Too much for me. Gave up after the hour with a number of clues not even understood, let alone answered. Another “cave dweller” here. HP never read nor seen. NHO the salamander or GELID. Bah humbug. Thanks Pip.
31. 22:31. A great puzzle, I thought. There were one or two looseish things that caused half an eyebrow-raise, but I’m more than happy to forgive such things when they’re in amongst so much wit and originality. Thanks setter.
32. 53:59, but with MULE TRAIN. Too ambiguous I thought. Thanks setter and Pip.
33. Wrote in answers for everything eventually (with help). Slow progress but pleased to parse most of it and thanks to Pip for the rest.

    My school-age son got Muggle on the first part of the clue alone, while I was still thinking “surely there won’t be a Harry Potter reference”. Not ashamed to say I read all the books before he was born!

34. he rode before the barley-sheaves…but not much sun came dazzling through the leaves hereabouts. Managed to finish, untimed but probably about 40 minutes. Irked by the assumption we should all have read JKRowling who to my mind writes good yarns for children in stultifying style – count the cliches on any one page. Also mildly irked by the ‘perhaps’ of 6 dn, I suppose a loose link to the chess term; veg as laze, not knowing the vegetate abbreviation (but admitting it makes sense); nudie (again because I didn’t know the usage); the clumsiness to get to ‘ac’ from ‘hack’; the ‘express’ peculiarity . . . yet enjoyed a lot of the quick-dodge stuff too. Some work-out.
    1. I have sympathy with your complaints, Joe, as I also didn’t get on well with this puzzle but I think 3dn is fair enough.

       The Cockney journalist gives us {h}ACK rather than AC, then the rest of the clue, NOWLEDGE is a homophone [broadcast] of “knowledge” (facts)

       1. Yes, but a homophone’s a word and ‘nowledge’ isn’t, which is why I conclude ‘broadcast’ as well as ‘Cockney’ is all in aid of ‘ac’.
          1. I just read it all together: ACKNOWLEDGE is a homophone of ‘ack knowledge.
             1. Yes, I guess that works.
35. A milk train is the slow train, that’s why it’s not an ‘express’?
    1. Oh, and, just seen, lactate etc.
36. No problem with MILK TRAIN for me. When I lived in Chatham as a teenager I used to occasionally get the milk train from Victoria (which left at about 3am or 4am, I think). Despite the name, at least in that direction, it carried newspapers not milk. Struggled with HONOLULU even though I’ve been there (I was told it means something like “good harbor” in Hawaiian when I was there so yes, a port. And Pearl Harbor is there too).

    Edited at 2021-03-17 04:13 pm (UTC)

37. Excellent puzzle that I struggled through in 40’22.

    I really struggled with the 3 letter clues today which I thought were beautifully misdirected. I join the Collective mer at milk train and I have a personal dislike of clues such as axolotl where aloxotl perfectly fits the word play and those of us ignorant of salamanders can easily go for the wrong one.

    So much to enjoy in this though — esp bicycles mr big the very idea.

    Thanks pip and setter

38. ….and it was a miracle that I eventually returned an all green completion, and a wonder that I didn’t give up half way through when I found the bloody Harry Potter clue. I biffed MILK TRAIN (parsed post- solve), GRAND DUKE, ALBANIA, and GELID (thanks to Pip for those three).

    My personal NITCH of 357 is the highest on the entire table, so maybe it was just me.

    FOI NUDIE (I was already beginning to consider binning it off)
    LOI GELID
    COD SNOWBOARDER (also liked HONOLULU and ABLAZE)
    TIME 34:06 (nearly 4 times my average)

39. Only got nine correct answers. I’m going backwards. I can see why the top solvers would enjoy the workout but it seemed completely out of the normal range of difficulty. Maybe I’m having a bad week.
    Thanks for the explanations which clarify it all (apart from 14down).
40. A pleasant solve, of the sort that after the first read through, the grid remains blank! As I am “of a certain age” Milk Train caused no problems, and I grinned at the reference to Eva Herzigova’s famous advert. Hello Boys! FOI Mr Big, LOI Bog — I looked hard for an alternative, as “bog” and “bogs” were very much treated as vulgarities worthy of three of the best on the hand if uttered in the presence of a teacher. I notice that the online OED now has “British, informal” after the definition. O tempora, o mores!

    Does the need to understand “muggle” imply that the Potter books have now entered the canon of Eng lit? Not sure whether I approve.

41. I seem the be the only solver who invented DONOR CAST, assuming it was some sort of funeral mask, in order to accommodate GILET (as in jaune) as a top that might be freezing on a cold day with ST instead of the blindingly obvious RD now I see it. Ah well. Overall, tough, witty and entertaining. Thanks setter!
42. DNF. I made a right pig’s ear of this one. The express milk train clue was too subtle for me. I thought of milk train and mule train, went for the latter but didn’t find either particularly convincing. A couple of other errors lead to even more pink squares. Not my cup of tea.
43. All done except bandeau which I’m surprised nobody else commented on- how does “at the ready” equal dough?
44. It doesn’t.
    “at the” are link words, and “ready, we hear” equals dough, as the blogger clearly states.
45. Another MULE TRAIN here. Problem is when you’ve thought of a word that fits and vaguely seems right it’s difficult to persuade oneself that there’s another M_L_ TRAIN. Am fully persuaded by the Setter’s comments

    Not sure of the objection to contemporary culture? I’d love to see more. I do the QC as a lockdown Zoom activity with my grown up kids which they love but they’d struggle with the fact that much of the time the 15×15 has cultural references and knowledge which is more the preserve of Oxbridge educated cricket loving gardeners. Count me in; count them out. So more MUGGLES and BOGS please 👍 PS Not in the slightest bit embarrassed to say I love Potter — pleasant memories of all the family sitting together each hungrily reading their own version of the 7th book the day it came out

    Thanks Pip and Setter

46. This is a very late comment, because I only just screwed up the courage to put in BOG at 23 ac, and although I was expecting pink squares, I actually got them for MULE TRAIN. I haven’t counted remarks, but this may actually represent a majority of the posters here and it is simply an ambiguous and therefore totally unacceptable clue. We seem to have had the same rather obscure setter all last week and although there were some superb clues, they were clearly outweighed by unnecessary obscurities and outright disasters like this.

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