Times 27,995: John Arrests: 85% Less Funny In San Marino

83 comments on “Times 27,995: John Arrests: 85% Less Funny In San Marino”

1. Nothing to hard except a hold up at the end having to do an alphabet trawl for MEWL and it wasn’t the more obvious xELL or xEAL/EEL. I could only fit SEAL that way, and I don’t think it has a homophone, let alone one that fits the clue. But it is an animal.

   Chambers doesn’t allow GETABLE. At the time I didn’t notice since it was so obviously VEGETABLE.

   1. Collins has it, with ‘gettable’ as an alternative spelling.
      1. And don’t get me started on the monstrosity that is get-at-able…
2. MEWL/MULE wasn’t my problem, rather REDCOAT, which I thought I might never get. After complaining to Vinyl, I focused on the crop, got OAT, and from there felt confident even though the definition was rather masked.

   True, it’s very easy for a Friday, but I won’t complain: This is my first sub-20 time since May 11th.

3. As I also got stuck on redcoat, but suddenly saw what Washington was doing in there. The two long ones were quite good, and Betelgeuse is probably as far as the alternate-letter method can be taken.

   You should note that Soul Train was a 1956 album by John Coltrane, rather well-known in jazz circles.

4. My whole entry evaporated! So I had to do the whole thing again! Time 13 minutes – a saving of well over half an hour!

   FOI 1ac DIPSTICK – Peckham speak – accusative to Rodders! Divine!

   LOI 28ac WEBSITES

   COD 10ac NECK OF THE WOODS – very difficult to translate for Chinese.

   WOD 22ac BETELGEUSE what a star – bigger than Elton

   6dn REDCOATs only found at Butlins these days!

   Edited at 2021-06-04 04:50 am (UTC)

5. 43 minutes but DNF because I was stuck on 22ac and after a brief attempt at an alphabet trawl I ran out of steam and looked it up. Actually 22ac had been my FOI as WAIL (sounds like “whale”) and remained so all the way through until ODDMENT arrived at 16dn with the realisation that something was very wrong.

   DNK IOC at 3dn but I guessed the C stood for ‘committee’.

   1. I too put in the W word. Dismal fail compared to yesterday though. Clearly I get on better with Thursday’s sort of puzzle.
      Hadn’t heard of the Chisel/Cheat meaning
   2. I tried H(eard) + owl — muttering that a howl isn’t a whimper until the crossers set me straight.
      1. This is the way the puzzle ends, not with a howl but a whimper.
6. Like others I finished with REDCOAT but fortunately I spotted it quite quickly. I’ve said before that compound words are a blind spot of mine but R_D_O_T does stand out as having to be a compound word. I also sympathise with Paul having to do an alphabet trawl for MEWL — when faced with _E_L I immediately thought that gives a lot of possibilities and considered it might hold me up, but fortunately I spotted it quite quickly. I biffed BETELGEUSE but now I see the parsing I’m not sure if it’s clever or too contrived. I’ll give the setter the benefit of the doubt this time.
7. …Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

   25 mins pre-brekker. Nice one, which meant I was happy to alpha-trawl for LOI Mewl.
   MER at ‘of the’ being clued as, er, ‘of the’.
   Very enjoyable. COD to Walter Raleigh’s Trawler.
   Thanks setter and V.

8. 17′ 52″ but one typo.

   MEWL LOI after trawl.

   I am not sure if my memories of TAPIOCA are real, but I retain a horror of the texture.

   COD to BETELGEUSE.

   Thanks verlaine and setter.

9. 31 minutes. LOI DIPSTICK as I had previously carelessly put in ENTENTE rather than DETENTE. A well constructed puzzle but one with no Eureka moments. COD to BUCKWHEAT on that basis. When TAPIOCA was the pudding at school, it was a bad day. Thank you V and setter.
   1. Semolina Sunday! If all those school puds are made correctly and with a little finesse, they are all absolutely delicious. Served on a bit of Lowestoftware – tapioca with ‘crême de cocoanut’ is just divine!
      I must also recommend a fresh-baked Jam Roly-Poly served with hand-made vanilla custard. Bliss, with a glass of Muscadet.
   2. I too put in ENTENTE to start with — a truly excellent hidden clue, due to the misleading word “inside”.
10. 15 minutes working on an unfamiliar android tablet, so pretty pleased with that.
    I didn’t spot the cleverness of BETELGEUSE, partly because the number of named stars in my list permitted only the one possible entry, and I was confident V would explain.
    Last in STARVE after correcting a stray S at the end of VEG.
    MEWL was serendipitously helped by recently driving past Samantha Mews, which has always amused me as an ISIHAC fan. Strange how the cryptic connection synapses of the brain work.
11. Very satisfying on a Friday morning. A setter who cares about surfaces always gets my vote. Not a bad clue in there, Thanks.
12. BETELGEUSE was my COD. An early BIFF, when the B appeared from the VEGETTABLE! Dredged from the Beetle-juice of schooldays, along with Copernicus and Uranus – supply your own pronunciation – boys will be boys. Only saw the even letters after all done. A most pleasant Friday puzzle. Thanks verlaine and setter.
13. Tractable Friday fare; felt like I should have been tad quicker but got held up occasionally. GETABLE: Surely not? BETELGEUSE clue was a triumph. Sympathies to previous blogger who bunged in WAIL which could easily be justified too. Thanks to setter & blogger. Off for my jab this afternoon so if you don’t hear from me hereafter,….
14. Not a fan of prepscholic versions but have to confess that one of the finest starters I have ever eaten was at the DOM restaurant in Sao Paolo, and was a tapioca and oyster dish …
15. Same as jack: thought it was wail, but mewl did for me.
    Thanks, v.
16. Stymied on BETELGEUSE. Never ‘erd of it. Didn’t see the alternate letters, which is annoying as I had …..USE at the end from unseen but the rest remained, well, unseen. DNK MEWL either so two alphabet trawls were on no use at all. A clever crossword and I am just sorry that I couldn’t finish it. Thanks V and setter.
    1. Clearly not a Douglas Adams fan, Rose! It is where Ford Prefect comes from..
       1. Known in these parts as one of the best setters there ever was: Gillian Champion used the pseudonym Betelgeuse, and she was one of the best ever from down under, fighting for the honour with Crowsman.
       2. Yes, Ford ‘Perfect’ – the joke was lost on the Americans – was actually from Betelgeuse Seven.
       3. You are right, the only Ford Prefect I know was a motor car!
          1. Indeed. Coming from Betelgeuse as he did, Ford had failed to do his research properly and chose a name that stood out rather more than he thought it was going to … The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of the great comic novels. I would not want to be seen with anyone who had read it and didn’t like it 🙂
             1. I remember once in a restaurant I once owned in the mid eighties, we created a cocktail called « Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster ». Named by my stepson. Don’t ask what went into it! I will have a look at the book though.
17. An easy Friday, but I’ll take that as it’s humid and heavy here today. COD BETELGEUSE, which I’ve finally learnt to spell properly, just pipping the LOI REDCOAT.

    Thanks to Verlaine and the setter.

18. Not such a fearsome puzzle for a Friday, although I struggled to get started, with nothing appearing in the NW until quite late in the solve. BEDTIME finally arrived and allowed me to get LUMP SUM and DUMP. Nothing else was forthcoming in the top half, so I turned my attention SE and made a bit more progress. MEWL fortunately came to mind easily, and I spotted the celestial body trick quickly too. Spotting ENCLAVE allowed me to progress in the NW, and surprisingly soon I was filling in the last bits of NECK OF THE WOODS, my LOI. A cautious 30 seconds proof reading took me just over the half hour. 30:14. Thanks setter and V.
19. I wouldn’t have been sure of the spelling of BETELGEUSE if it hadn’t been spelled out unmistakably in the clue. The expression TOWN GAS was new to me, but the anagram couldn’t be anything else. I biffed a few, and utterly forgot to parse REDCOAT before coming here.

    Expected Verlaine to be more disgruntled, but I was glad this was way over on the easy side, as I finally got to it tonight after finishing Thursdays. It’s nearly 5 AM here and I may be able to go to sleep soon, though I was under anaesthesia for a few hours (hernias) this afternoon…

    1. I don’t mind it being on the easy side (though a sub-5-minuter for the cheetahs on a Friday would raise eyebrows) as long as the surfaces are good, which they were today.
20. Just like my old school! Prepscholic indeed! COD TRAWLER. MEWL was excellent too. Betelgeuse was a write-in – even before I observed the arrangement within. Time 12.11 – with paper and pen.
21. 11:43. I was another with WAIL, which seemed so clearly the right answer that it prevented me from seeing ODDMENT for a while. My other hold-ups were caused by my caution in bunging in what also seemed clearly the right answers without understanding the wordplay. With BETELGEUSE I particularly wanted to check the spelling, and with BUCKWHEAT I thought the power unit was KWH, so I couldn’t see how ‘chisel’ fitted in. I untangled it all eventually.
    1. I do not recognise it. The terroir is Burgundy methink.
       1. Definitely looks like a Burgundy vineyard I would say. Could be Clos de Vougeot?
          1. Romanee-Conti – so you’re only out by a couple of kilometres!
             1. Well, I’d happily drink a bottle of either! One of my favorite areas of France.
                1. I have drunk many bottles of Clos Vougeot but never tasted Romanee-Conti.
                   1. One of the best, for me, is Flagey-Echezeaux,lovely little village, and the wine is little known and, for a lot of people, unpronounceable, so the prices are much keener. We stay in a gite there if we are driving to the UK. DRC has a vineyard there.

                      Edited at 2021-06-07 01:31 pm (UTC)

                      1. DRC (along with various other producers) has parcels in Echézeaux and Grands-Echézeaux, both very well-known among Burgundy fans and far from cheap!

                         Edited at 2021-06-08 01:26 pm (UTC)

       2. Correct! Good call. It’s Romanee-Conti, considered by many to be the best vineyard in the world. I have never tasted it, and since a bottle of an indifferent vintage will set you back over £10,000 it seems unlikely I ever will.
22. From Messiah: The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible . . .

    That’s the only time I’ve ever heard ‘incorruptible’ and ‘corruptible’ was therefore no great problem. I’d forgotten that the Messiah bit goes on to use that very word.

    1. ‘Power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is.’ Dylan’s
       song ‘Blind Willie McTell’.
23. Being on holiday is slowing my times up no end. Made a meal of this, including paprika pudding. If I remember rightly, TAPIOCA is poisonous and the poison has to be beaten out of it. That may be apocryphal but one does have to ask why go to that bother?
    COD BETELGEUSE

    1. Cassava is poisonous. Big in Jamaica.
       Also avoid fresh green walnuts with Port – and Lampreys with apricots!
24. Very smooth puzzle, and everything fell elegantly into place. Like others, I felt a bit lucky to have spotted MEWL early on, so I didn’t require an alphabet trawl to sort out _E_L (checking the possibilities – post-solve, I must stress – there turn out to be more than 50 of them, apparently).
25. I think my brain is too tired from attempting the 15×15 every day this week. At least that is the excuse I am comforting myself with in light of my paltry 5 clues answered. Answered correctly I hasten to add.

    I think it’s odd how, when I am, say, attempting one of the clues in The Times Cryptic Crossword book, I can stare at a clue for an hour and not understand it. Yet I come back to it the next day and see the answer right away.

    Why do the 15×15 compilers remain anonymous yet those of the QC give their names?

    1. Tradition. Times cryptic setters have always been anonymous and after more than 90 years no editor dares to alter that.
       being a new(ish) crossword the QC can be a bit more modern about it.. they only give pseudonyms, not names, but it is not hard to find out who is which.
       Anonymity has the advantage that solvers approach the crossword with fewer preconceptions. Personally I prefer it but opinions do differ
       1. “Anonymity has the advantage that solvers approach the crossword with fewer preconceptions.”

          You raise a great point there. I confess that when I open the QC each day, my hopes can either sink or rise when I look at the name of the setter.

          Thank you for your answer.

          1. Along the same lines, The Times crosswords seem to have standards they have to adhere to, which to some extent makes them easier. Remarkably consistent, no matter who sets them. But at the same time not always easy – they can have the most obscure words and the most obscure clues; and sometimes they overlap, to the chagrin of (me) most.

             Edited at 2021-06-04 02:12 pm (UTC)

          2. I get excited when I see it’s “Des”!
26. …a pink square for TTAWLER — it’s my biggest bugbear about the online grid that one has to be far more careful when typing in the odd square, than writing on a paper grid, particularly at 1am with the light off and tired eyes. The majority of my DNFs are caused by this. Grrr.

    Did not really get 6d, so was torn between REDCOAT and REDROOT (a crop? probably not) but bunged the right one in.

27. Slowed at the end because, like BW I’d confidently entered “entente” at 1d which made rubbish of 1a. Yup TAPIOCA aka frog spawn – even the strawberry jam couldn’t make it edible. There was a movie called “Beetlejuice” some years back but I didn’t see it. A well-known weatherman for NBC used to live in our apartment building and always gave the local weather report saying “and now for what’s happening in your NECK OF THE WOODS”. 18.10
    1. It was awful.
    2. It was great.
       1. Tim Burton is not beyond reproach, but overall, I’d say all Tim Burton films are worth watching. One of *the* directors whose every film is a door to the very strange universe inside their heads.
28. BETELGEUSE was cleverer than I realised until coming here. On the whole an easier Friday ride than the ingenuity of many of the clues might have led one to expect. 25 mins
29. I am a long-time reader of the blog, first time posting.

    Ironically, it has been a lack of visits to the blog — due to an unusually successful run of solving this week — which has prompted me to comment. I wanted to express my gratitude to the TftT community for the daily blog which has been an invaluable resource for improving my solving over the years as well as a source of amusing commentary on individual clues and their tangents. Particular thanks to the bloggers for the excellent explanations and helpful trivia titbits (I’m more comfortable in science/cricket territory than literature & music).

    1. Please don’t leave it so long until your next posting.
    2. The posts really encourage us bloggers .. especially in the darker corners, like the jumbos, club monthly and mephistos.
       And especially those from us science/cricket folk 🙂
30. COD to 21a DEAD TO THE WORLD, as one of the best bits of anagram fodder for a while.

    Like most people, I finished on MEWL & REDCOAT – 7m 12s.

    Thanks for explaining ATTACHE, I’m so used to seeing it as ATTACHE[d] that I didn’t consider any other options.

31. Around 30 minutes though I had all bar mewl sorted in just over 20. Put seel in after convincing myself it was an old english word for wail. Never managed to totally convince myself and a tube ride gave me the time to think again. After a frustrating series of rounds of alphabet trawling, finally recognised mewl as more likely. That made me cross especially as “ Heard cross animal whimper” would have made for less toil even if it would defeat the object of the exercise.

    Anyway, at least I finished which I should do now rather than witter on.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

32. A nice stroll for Friday. As noted above, I tried Howl until crossers made me change, and I saw Redcoat as a definition right off, but couldn’t parse it and wasn’t sure enough that it wasn’t an unlikely-to-be-known Americanism, so LOI. I liked Neck of the Woods.
    1. HOWL as a homonym for OWL? Do you need to change your username to Paul_in_East_London?
       1. In a comment earlier Isla, I explained that I was willing to consider H(eard) to be an accepted abbreviation. That doesn’t work, either, but that’s what I got to.

          Edited at 2021-06-04 10:37 pm (UTC)

          1. Yeah, but I couldn’t resist 🙂
             1. Ba-dum tish

                Sadly, i DID consider the cockney bit, along with the even less of a whimper Bawl — Bull. I was pretty sure that if discussion got started at least one of us would’ve had a great aunt from somewhere we’ve never heard of who used to pronounce Bull as Bawl. Surprising what you can come up with when you can’t get the right answer.

33. ….and needed a hefty alpha-trawl for my LOI. MER at “cruiser = police car”. Is a let really a foul shot ? TAPIOCA parsed post-solve.

    FOI DETENTE
    LOI INCORRUPT
    COD ENCLAVE
    TIME 12:10

    1. “police cruiser” definitely registered with me as a thing, such that my eyebrows remained more or less in place and I moved quickly on…
34. Thank you Verlaine as always for the great blog, even if (for once) I didn’t need any help with the parsing. I’m surely not the only benighted heathen baffled by the heading, though. Please explain and allow a Doh! moment. Jeffrey
    1. Re the surface for 11ac, maybe it was just me but I read the John in the surface as possibly referring to its “client of a prostitute” meaning. That’s a much bigger story if it happens in one of the two landlocked Italian microstates than another…
35. Enjoyed this puzzle with most clues falling into place. I especially enjoy it when I find certain clues relatively straightforward which other commenters have found difficult – such as redcoat today. Not sure whether this is a sign of a healthy desire to measure my improvement against the best or a sad need for reassurance.
    Didn’t get mewl which I would claim to have never heard of until a commenter referred to mewling and puking. Bah.
    Was ironic that it took me so long to work out the power unit in buckwheat as I had just come off the phone to British Gas where I pointed out that they had made a mistake with my meter reading resulting in usage for the last quarter in excess of a million kWh. Would have been an interesting bill.
    Thanks to the setter and to Verlaine for the blog.
36. 16:11. Not as tough as many Friday experiences as many of you have pointed out but I still found the setter provided plenty of challenges for me.
    Indeed 23 ac Betelgeuse was interesting – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a longer clue of this type before but at the time I biffed it, so thanks Verlaine for the parsing. I wonder what setters think of their favourite clues getting biffed?
    I thought 11 ac “Enclave” could have come straight out of the Grauniad!!
    LOI 22 ac “mewl”. Glad to see I wasn’t the only one to say this. I got it from the definition and the homophone then confirmed it.
    COD 10 ac “Neck of the Woods” – just enjoyed how the setter put the clue together.
    Thanks to Verlaine and setter for providing a good end to the week.
37. Surprisingly amenable Friday, much enjoyed. Not easy, still a few clues that needed teasing out, but no hold-ups at the end. Ready to harumph at Betelgeuse, seeing the U_S_E_ were the even letters but not how it worked, but that was quite good.
    I’ve always wanted to clue police car as Polar bears get frozen cold flat-feet here or something, but never quite been able to marry the clue and the surface reading.
    1. How about “polar bears get frozen cold fuzz here”?
       1. Better, but still doesn’t quite nail it. There’s the old joke about the polar bear cub:
          “Am I really a polar bear?”
          “Of course you are”
          “Then why are my feet so ******* cold

          i.e. the clue has to include feet

          Edited at 2021-06-04 09:04 pm (UTC)

38. Is let a foul shot?
    1. It’s not a fault but it’s not exactly a GOOD shot…
39. Felt sluggish after healthy (ie unhealthy) portion of pasta and wine but got it finished even though missed the parsing for DEAD TO THE WORLD (very good and COD for me) and struggled to make head or tail of ODDMENT.

    Thanks Messrs Setter and Verlaine

40. 11:47 Doing this a day late is I was out yesterday. Surprisingly straightforward for a Friday. Biffed a few so good to see what I missed on the solve – didn’t spot the excellent alternate letter clueing of BETELGEUSE, which makes it my COD. Thanks V and setter.
41. In spite of myself I had a go at this and for the first time ever got precisely zero. Not a one! And yet when I look at Verlaine’s beautifully explained parsing, every answer is right there in each clue. It’s really not that hard. Sigh. One day….

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