Times 27928 – no train spotting

72 comments on “Times 27928 – no train spotting”

1. Another ‘milk train’ victim from yesterday so good to be back in the all green today. Finished in 34 minutes, with GRILL as my last in. I liked AGITPROP, DEFENESTRATION and the surface for TEDDY BEAR

   Interesting to see TABLELAND again after it appeared here (or elsewhere – can’t remember which) so recently. Sounds as though you were in a bit of a hurry and the parsing should be: TAB(Bill) and LEND(grant) containing LA(the in French). Thanks for explaining BAY which I couldn’t parse.

   Thanks to setter and blogger

   1. That might be the intention. In the US there is often talk of a LAND GRANT, so that was the parsing that came to me.
      1. Out of nothing but curiosity, is UNC/A a Land Grant college?
         1. It isn’t – two schools in my system are, NC State and North Carolina A&T. UNC Asheville was originally part of the Asheville Schools system and underwent a couple of name changes before becoming part of the University of North Carolina system.
            1. Often surprising which schools are, and which are not Land Grant.
         2. Yes, I thought of Land Grant schools too.
2. Thanks for this blog as OVERDONE was my last in but not parsed and I was nervous to submit. This is a fine time for me, but felt very slow as the puzzle was full of longish anagrams that my brain just wasn’t solving for me.

   You have a typo ‘Reafgan’, and I believe ACROBAT is ACT around ROB + A. (Only parsed this just now.)

   ILL = ‘difficult’ was a headscratcher. I was happy to have remembered OU from a few Mephistos ago.

   Edited at 2021-03-18 01:43 am (UTC)

   1. Ah – thanks for that. I was looking for something more and couldn’t do any better than a TABOR was a performer and figured it must have been a cryptic definition.
3. I confidently put in defenestration and graveyard shift without even looking at the cryptics. Same thing with agitprop, stonewashed, and influence – well, I tried the parse influence, but I thought the F = French, so not my finest hour. I parsed acrobat as actor + ab backwards, forgetting that indirect anagrams around backwards abbreviations are not allowed.

   I still finished all-correct in 26 minutes, though, not bad for me.

4. Did this on my laptop, which always takes me longer (normally use my big desktop). And TOLERANCE took time, and ATHENS took me time to parse. Biffed BAY–never would have thought of BARMY–and FALSETTO, never thought to parse it. Enjoyable puzzle, pretty easy for a Friday.
   1. Friday’s is still to come!
      1. That would explain why it was easy for a Friday.
5. I struggled with some of this after getting off to a racing start in the NW quarter. Having completed the grid eventually I decided to sleep on some of the parsing but then forgot about it and read the blog without revisiting.

   TABLELAND for ‘plateau’ came up on my watch a week or two ago but I had already forgotten what came after TABLE, and having parsed TAB and LE I needed checkers to think of LAND and was unable to square it with ‘grant’.

   Edited at 2021-03-18 06:22 am (UTC)

6. Medium difficulty for me.
   Thanks for explaining BAY, ACROBAT, TEDDY and FALSETTO, all of which I biffed and hoped.
   But I have difficulty equating ‘difficult’ with ILL and ‘excellent’ with DEF. Don’t see either of them.
   RUM I liked a lot (the clue that is) while COD to ATHENS.
   1. DEF in this sense has come up several times before (once quite recently, although I can’t find it – it’s a very common three-letter string!) and it isn’t even that modern. It originates from no later than the 1980s. OED suggests it’s an alteration of ‘death’.

      Edited at 2021-03-18 07:37 am (UTC)

7. Collins has:
   def
   slang
   very good, esp of hip-hop

   Word origin
   C20: perhaps from definitive

   1. Oh, dear! Modern life is DEFinitely passing me by! Thanks, Jack!
      1. 
         And this one’s archaic!

         SOED has:
         ill
         4 Difficult, hard, (to do). arch. ME.

         E. Nesbit And if a lad is ill to bind, Or some young maid is hard to lead.

         1. Thanks, again, Jack!
            At least I didn’t find MILK TRAIN too ill yesterday!
      2. Actually on ‘def’ I had assumed it was short for ‘definitely’ giving approval or agreement in the same sense as great, absolutely, ace etc.
   2. Yes, there’s a rapper called Mos Def whose name I assume springs from “most definitely”.
      1. I was going to mention Mos Def but I see you beat me to it. Also familiar from the Def Jam record label, a major name in the hip hop world.
         1. I mentioned Def Jam last time the word came up. Since it’s also an abbreviation for ‘definition’ you really can’t search for it on this blog!
            Mos Def is indeed short for ‘most definitely’. The phrase is much used in The Wire.
8. I put in DEFENSTRATION (actually I started with -ING) without bothering to work out the wordplay, which helped a lot, since I was having trouble getting many starter clues. Funny to see TABLELAND again. It showed up just recently, and I’d never heard of it (although it was an obvious plausible word even so). I had no idea about BAY (apart from the horse bit). I didn’t bother with the wordlplay for ACROBAT but assumed it was something with ACTOR as the second performer (which it wasn’t).
9. It’s a year to the day since I first started working from home due to the pandemic and a week to the day since I last successfully completed a crossword. Whilst the former shows no sign of changing imminently fortunately the latter did change today. I thought this puzzle contained a couple of stand out clues. I didn’t parse ATHENS whilst solving but since seeing George’s explanation I think it clever. I also particularly liked the device for OVERDONE.

   I’d always taken GR, as in the GRILL answer, to mean George Regina. A quick bit of research reveals this as an embarrassing error. I’d never stopped to think that Regina was the female of Rex though it seems obvious now!

10. 10:44, but with a typo. My last in was DEEPLY, which took me long enough that I questioned all the crossing solutions, but I still managed not to notice that I had typed GRAVEYASD. Drat.
    Otherwise this was a biff-fest for me: I didn’t engage at all with most of the wordplay.

    Edited at 2021-03-18 07:26 am (UTC)

11. Today is a wonderful high
    ANDROMEDA! A thing in the sky!
    It’s a huge galaxy
    And the furthest you’ll see
    If you’re using your unaided eye
12. Enjoyable again today. FALSETTO took too long to bring to mind. COD to ATHENS. I have a vague idea of the 9d of Prague as important.

    The ANDROMEDA Strain is a good film, bringing to mind all sorts of thoughts re pandemic and vaccines. OU is definitely the Open University. Speaking as a three degree alumnus, that’s what we say (Oh-yew).

    21′, thanks george and setter.

    1. Yes, the Defenestrations of Prague like the Diet of Worms feature in Protestant history and were guaranteed to send a class of schoolgirls into gusts of giggles although neither was in the least funny.
    2. In The Andromeda Strain (book/film) the bug eventually mutated into a non harmful variant all by itself. Just saying….
    3. A for Andromeda, better and quite a few years earlier .. one of the earliest TV programmes I remember, watch with mother apart ..
13. 25 mins pre-brekker. I liked it, mostly Mettle.
    I never did parse Bay.
    Thanks setter and G.
14. 39 minutes with LOI DEEPLY. In parsing DEFENESTRATION I had to assume DEF had that meaning. I didn’t know either that a rope could mean a group of climbers. We’ll all go together when we go. COD to OVERDONE and ATHENS was also very clever, with GRAVEYARD SHIFT a good anagram. Julie Christie suddenly appeared in A for ANDROMEDA in late 1961 on BBC, a moment that the just-turned-16-year-old me will never forget. A decent puzzle.Thank you George and setter.
    1. As another who fell for Julie Christie (what a chin!) as a callow youth and have since seen many of her films, I defer to Pauline Kael on her screen presence: ‘brilliantly faceted but with something central missing, almost as if there’s no woman inside.’

       Edited at 2021-03-18 08:55 am (UTC)

       1. I never really noticed her chin…..
       2. Perhaps they gave her the Oscar because of her chin, then?
15. 16:55 LOI DEEPLY took a while to come, but so did a few others. I liked OVERDONE and ATHENS in particular.
16. We’re being spoilt this week: another intelligent puzzler that repaid working through the wordplay, which I had to anyway as my autobiff was out of whack. So 18.39 – my first under 20 in this rather good series.
    I’ve had A TEN S lolling around in my inchoate collection of ideas for a Listener for years, so it was almost an old friend.
    I like slightly naughty clues so TEDDY BEAR was delicious. As I type this, I am also naked under my clothes. Some of you might prefer to replace that image with Robrolfe’s evocation of Julie Christie.
    1. Love it! Where else on the internet can yuo read such a sentence.
       1. For me the opposite – autobiff in full flow and although finally all green in about 38 minutes, an embarrassingly large number of answers not parsed. Blog very necessary today — mostly very clever clues but some DNK as well. Why for example is lingerie teddy? Also not familiar with rope for a group of climbers, or the meaning of def (among others …)

          Definitely a “learning opportunity” today!
          Cedric

    2. Does your collection of ideas for a Listener imply you are a sometime setter or is it just an ambition?
17. 41m pleasant solve today. No real hold-ups. Thank you, setter and blogger.
18. For the life of me I couldn’t work out why it was APOSTLE, so that was a hold up. LOI FLABBY and BAY. spent too long trying to put NT in 1d and trying to justify NAY. Otherwise NHO TEDDY and DEF.
19. I really enjoyed this crossword. I found that when rhe penny dropped there was no other answer possible. COD to 2dn for clever clue and superb surface.
20. I’ll add my mite to others in applauding a first-rate puzzle. Another one here who didn’t parse ACROBAT properly. I recall buying a pair of STONEWASHED jeans only to have my daughters say Muuummeeee you can’t go out like THAT. 19.52
21. 7m 42s, a lot of biffing, and the last 2 minutes of that spent trying to figure out TABLELAND. It seemed the only plausible option but I had LE as the French bit and couldn’t make LAND = grant. It was only when I was halfway through an alphabet trawl that I realised what was going on.

    I didn’t have a clue how DEFENESTRATION broke down – DEF has come up here before, but never in the real world – so just put it in with fingers crossed.

    1. Expect ‘Deffo’ next…
       1. Only if you spell it “correctly” with a single F.
          1. Double F is valid according to Collins:

             deffo
             in British English
             EXCLAMATION
             a variant spelling of defo

             Lexico too, and adds it’s Australian slang from the 1940’s.

             1. I’ve got too used to “textspeak”. I should hang my head in shame…..
22. Not been a great week for me — just being a bit slow I think.

    Not too bad on the left side (though didn’t parse BAY) but the right I found tricky to break into.

    Could have done with seeing the anagrams much more quickly, each of GRAVEYARD SHIFT, CREDENTIALS and TOLERANCE (where I was looking for an actual play) were slow to come.

    NHO GOP nor STOIC as a school of philosophy.

23. An enjoyable and elegant puzzle which became increasingly knotty as I progressed anticlockwise from the NW corner to the somewhat recalcitrant NE. 34m
24. Couldn’t parse CASTRATO!
    Otherwise v enjoyable. Thanks setter and blogger.

25. I wish I could say it was even as advanced as an ambition!

26. Much to enjoy. Clever wordplay and excellent surfaces, with some quirky devices. LOI ATHENS gave a particularly satisfying penny-drop parsing moment. Thanks to setter and blogger. All green in 24’59”.
    Userpic courtesy Mrs C who took this picture of the Andromeda galaxy through our backyard telescope last year. (Don’t make any long-term plans. Andromeda is on a collision course with our Milky Way)
    1. Nice work Mrs C! 🙂
27. Had to biff the Bay in the end. Spent too long trying to persuade myself that an Apostle might somehow be fostered. Some excellent clues with Athens, my LOI, the pic of the bunch. I’m left with a nice mental image of a group of drunken climbers.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

28. For most Brits of a certain age the old king at 11a would be George not Gregory. You can still see GR on postboxes and suchlike.
29. 26.05 so another plod in comparison to the setter. A couple of handy guesses bay and rum, both excellent clues I just didn’t have the wit to parse them. Lots to like about this puzzle and a few candidates for COD status.
    In third place, defenestration in memory of A level history and the defenestration of Prague, second goes to Amiens , which I hesitated over mightily but the winner is Athens .

    Thanks setter and blogger.

30. Lots of PDMs in this puzzle. I had to take DEF on trust too. Biffed AGITPROP, otherwise managed to parse everything except BAY. Took and age to see GRAVEYARD SHIFT. Had most trouble in the SW corner, with TONGA LOI. 32:13. Thanks setter and George.

    Edited at 2021-03-18 02:11 pm (UTC)

31. If I’d known that the Republicans were GOP and that Def meant excellent — and not half a Sheffield rock band- I’d have been more confident with my biffing.
    1. Oh yes, hadn’t thought of the Leppard. Rock on!
32. ….I shall begin by thanking George for parsing BAY, and then Bletchley Reject for the same guidance on TABLELAND, and Plus Jeremy for ACROBAT. Thanks also to the setter for a most enjoyable puzzle, and to the Crossword Editor for not giving us another horror like yesterday’s offering.

    I only parsed AGITPROP afterwards.

    FOI ANDROMEDA
    LOI BAY
    COD ATHENS (but also really liked OVERDONE)
    TIME 10:43

    Edited at 2021-03-18 03:17 pm (UTC)

33. Maybe this is too pedantic, but at least in the countries that I am familiar with (UK and Brazil) there are very different legal, practical, and financial frameworks for fostering v adoption. So much so that I didn’t think of them as substitutes when doing the puzzle! In Brazil at least if you are a fostering carer you are not legally allowed to adopt.

    Best
    Henry

    1. I thought of that too, but if you look at a wider definition of foster, you can foster something other than a person – a thought, an opinion, a position.
    2. Yes, there’s a distinction in strictly legal terminology but outside of that there’s crossover, and exact equivalence sometimes when used figuratively. For crossword purposes definitions don’t have to match in every circumstance, just in one.
34. Gregorius Rex? Not here in England, surely. And what was your christian name again, George?!
35. Fifty-seven minutes, finished but not fully parsed. FOI Andromeda LOI stonewashed. Had Graveyard watch for a while, graveyard being clear from checkers, which fouled up quite a bit of the SE corner. Swapped watch for shift and pennies began to drop. My first solve in three days after two didn’t really starts. I enjoyed this, pleased to see that others thought it was a good puzzle. Thanks, unraveller, bloggers all and setter. COD defenestration. GW
36. 23.59. Very enjoyable. Had to squint a bit to get ill from difficult in the King George grill. Didn’t see act for performer so failed to parse acrobat. A couple of generous definitions: going out the window and dark hours. And another: play which had me trying to make a work for the theatre out of the available no Electra anagrist for far too long.
37. Did this one this morning but too busy on zoom and elsewhere to comment until now. Good puzzle, no problems, but didn’t parse BAY so thanks George for that. No other issues. 25 minutes. Liked the wordplay at 28a best OVERDONE.
38. would someone kindly explain what GOP is.
39. I put mule train and i am quite hapy with it. It depicts the slow movement adequately

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