Times 28425 : let’s talk about the mind – body problem.

56 comments on “Times 28425 : let’s talk about the mind – body problem.”

1. I think it’s meaL UNCHanged

   1. That was what I assumed too. It seemed a bit weak but I could see LUNCH just sitting hidden there and it couldn’t be anything else with the checkers and the enumeration.

      1. There’s nothing weak about it – lunch is packed into meal unchanged.

2. I was sure that 26A was going to have HAAR or FRET in it. But I was being far to crossword. Took a long time to see the anagram for ANAESTHETISED and remember in it is spelled in British English. I had the same problem with GORMANDISE that it looks wrong with no U…but with those letters it had to be.

3. I wasted a bit of time with HAAR; if I had remembered FRET I would have wasted some time on it, too. Biffed EGOTISM, STREAMLET, & MIXED METAPHOR, parsed them post-submission. ODE gives GORMANDIZE as a variant of GOURMANDIZE, while Collins only has GORMANDISE. As a verb, that is; it also has ‘gourmandise’ as a (rare) noun, pronounced -eez, meaning ‘a love of and taste for good food’.

4. I early delighted in the clue for MIXED METAPHOR, and enjoyed seeing poetry meet philosophy in DUALISM. Proceeded fairly steadily but had to take a break to eat before getting my last few. If I’d eaten earlier, the long anagrams that were my POI (11) and LOI (12) might have been solved sooner. Hesitated a bit over GORMANDISE because U is missing. Merriam-Webster has GORMANDIZE, with a Z, defined as, intransitive, “to eat gluttonously or ravenously,” and, transitive, “to eat greedily : DEVOUR,” and defines GOURMANDISE, with the U and an S, as “appreciation of or interest in good food and drink.”

   I learned about the E labeling indicating food additives over there through reading Le Canard enchaîné. Is the UK sticking with that post-Brexit?

5. I wondered if the ending “us” in ANXIOUS was just less of “use”?

   1. My dear Mother simply noted that ‘US’ was the abbreviation for useless. Meldrew

6. 35 minutes. I parsed 7d as LUNCH which is PACKED inside ‘MeaL UNCHanged?’ as pointed out by Kevin.

   Glad that I was impatient and bailed out of the alphabet trawl at the end for the OGEN bit of 16a. An obvious anagram of ‘gone’ now, but I wondered if the ‘What’s’ was doing anything. I’d forgotten the ‘fruit’, even though it was referred to in a puzzle back in May. Another to have toyed with “fret” for 26a. I liked the MIXED METAPHOR reverse anagram and the ‘can’ hint in the def for RING PULL.

7. 24 minutes. A very enjoyable puzzle. I might have knocked 2 or 3 minutes off my time if I had gone with LOUCHE as my first instinct at 10ac as my LOI. I saw it fitted but couldn’t see the first part of the wordplay and wasn’t 100% on the definition.

   I like PACKED LUNCH. We are used to the occasional anagram where the anagrind is in the answer (e.g. 20ac) but this may be the first time I have seen a hidden answer with the enclosure indicator (packed) in the answer.

8. I was helped a lot by the recent discussion of gourmand vs. gourmet, so gormandise went right in – it is a typical sound-change for unaccented vowels to get shorted in compound forms, so the spelling didn’t bother me. I was held up by incorrect biffs, having first blues and then downs before settling on dumps, and I had put in rehost at first. Being a US Anglophile, I easily put in both Garfield and lollipop lady.

   I do object to louche as a poor clue – you really can’t take time out of lout when he’s already gone by, and FOR short time is not a removal indicator.

   Time: 24 minutes.

   1. It’s LOUT but with CHE for (instead of) T. That’s not OK?

      1. Thank you, Guy for this explanation of LOUCHE. It was my LOI as I found the wording of the clue confusing (well done, setter!) and thought it should read perhaps “disreputable yob, revolutionary short OF time” until you clarified the parsing.
         26:33

         1. I think your clue works, Corymbia, and the setter’s doesn’t. My LOI, too.

            1. Maybe it would at a push but ‘yob’ is sufficient for ‘lout’ and doesn’t need ‘disreputable’. Anyway fortunately we need look no further than Guy’s parsing it as a substitution as that works perfectly and is clearly what the setter intended.

               1. “Disreputable” is the definition. LOUCHE is an adjective, not a noun like “yob,” which is only part of the wordplay.

            2. I thought this when solving but as GdS points out it works fine: you have to read the word ‘for’ as meaning ‘replacing’. LOUT [with] CHE [replacing] T.

      2. I had problems with this as well. The answer was pretty obvious – I realised it was LOU (T) + CHE but still found the definition confusing.

9. 37:12, so handily beat my Snitch/2 target.

   Never heard of HAAR or FRET, so MIST was the first fog I thought of. Sometimes inexperience works in one’s favour.

   Two reverse cryptics today. PACKED LUNCH and MIXED METAPHOR. I never see them, so they remained semi-parsed until I came here.

   LOI MITIGATE where I wanted yALE for “back of university” as the ending.

   NHO OGEN as a melon type, decided it was slightly more likely than ONEG, although neither look likely.

   COD LOLLIPOP LADY

   1. Most fruit & veg shops and supermarkets sell ogen melons. They’re the little, perfectly round stripy ones.

10. A rather enjoyable puzzle that took me roughly thirty-five minutes. Lots of interesting vocab.

    FOI 1ac GARFIELD – with no mention of that utterly dreadful cat or the wonderful Mr. Sobers.
    LOI 24dn AVE – I never use the word MITIGATE and used MINIMISE instead. Thus ICE for ‘Hail’ was incorrect for a while….
    COD 4dn LOLLYPOP LADY – she held me up , as she ever did.
    WOD 10ac LOUCHE – a nailed-on Kenneth Williams word!

    Our school made more fuss over ASCENSIONTIDE than any other festival. We all had to march down to St. Deny’s Church, where the entertainment was simply dire. Thems with with dog-collars droned-on all afternoon without a break for a ‘Woodbine’ or even a pee! Torture!
    This was before ‘Guy Fawkes Night’ was popularised at schools by the chemistry master at Kimbolton, the Reverend Rob Lancaster. He was titled ‘Maker of Ye Queen’s Firework. When he retired, my ‘son in law’ took his place at Kimbolton.

11. Just inside 30 minutes, which is fast for me. I have a cold and had a second consecutive stinker of a night as a result, so rose earlier than my norm. It seems to have helped with my speed both here and on the QC. The first three acrosses went straight in, along with most of their descendants to give a good start. LOI RHEA after LOUCHE fell. Many thanks setter and blogger. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one distracted be fret and haar.

    1. Another bad haarday? Never fret!

12. 37 minutes during which I never really picked up momentum in any particular area, instead taking several sweeps across the board gradually adding answers here and there. It didn’t help that I’d heard of “gourmand” but not GORMANDISE and “Ascension” but not ASCENSIONTIDE, and I also fell into the same trap as others by trying to crowbar both “haar” and “fret” into 26a. Pleased to have parsed LOUCHE correctly in the end, and I liked STREAMLET and MIXED METAPHOR, even though I saw the latter a bit too quickly.

13. 33 minutes, with LOI RHEA. I was somewhat thrown by GORMANDISE which, like others,I would have spelt with a U. And I’ve never made a season of Ascension Day, so ASCENSIONTIDE took too long. COD to MIXED METAPHOR. Decent stuff. Thank you Pip and setter.

14. 37m 38s
    A pleasant puzzle with some fun clues but, initially I agreed with vinyl about LOUCHE. However, I think Guy has it right.
    While studying ‘O’-Level German it used to amuse us lads that the German for ASCENSION was ‘Himmelfahrt’.
    CODs to MIXED METAPHOR, OGEN MELON and PACKED LUNCH.
    LOI: LOUCHE

15. 37 mins for a well put together puzzle
    I really liked 20a
    Like some others I tried for ages to fit fret in 26a not seeing the more simpler option

16. GARFIELD could have had many indications. For me, he is most famous for his original proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem.

    15’15”, thanks Pip and setter.

17. 32:26

    PACKED LUNCH went over my head – didn’t see the hidden. Missed the parsing of COMPRO too.

    Couldn’t think of the MELON until I had the first letter.

    GORMANDISE spelling – shrugged at that, but it gave me the President.

    Last in SEAMIEST – was thinking how FRET would fit for a long time, didn’t think of HAAR.

18. DNF

    RUN{g} instead of RAN{k}.

    I’m going to go against the flow and say I didn’t particularly like this. I thought there was too much looseness / stretchiness (if that isn’t contradictory) e.g. heart / emotions, mitigate / cut down on, dumps with no the, and one or two of the definitions.

    I didn’t understand LOUCHE so thanks to GUY for his parsing (it doesn’t really work Pip’s way).

19. 25 minutes which I thought was going to be longer and be one of those days when you get nearly everything but the last few prove difficult, but I managed in reasonable time. Or perhaps you could say that I finished in a reasonable short time: in the LOUCHE clue the setter has ‘short time’ when ‘time’ would be fine for the wordplay, but it’s needed for the surface. Agree with Penfold about DUMPS and THE DUMPS.

20. 14:21. I’m with Penfold on this, finding it mildly irritating for the same reasons. I also disliked GORMANDISE (whatever the dictionaries say), and I don’t think 22ac RESHOT 7dn PACKED LUNCH or 11dn ANAESTHETISE work. Mind you I was also annoyed by 10ac LOUCHE, which turns out that was just my failure of understanding, so perhaps I’m just being dim.

    1. I think ANAESTHETISE is fine. As Piquet clearly indicates, ‘gets’ is part of the definition and not just a link-word. If you get someone knocked out then you anaesthetise them.

       1. If you get someone knocked out you aren’t doing the knocking out yourself.

    2. Anaesthetise and reshot were both within my catch-all “one or two of the definitions”.

       Re the former, when one of my daughters had to have a general, the anaesthetist gave her a three-way choice of methods. He said “you can have gas, we can give you an injection, or we can hit you over the head with the big hammer.”

21. I’m another one who dithered over the non-U in 1d. And like Penfold I started out with RUN[g] (rung=row seemed perfectly arguable) at 2d but switched it when proofing having remembered Lars Porsena of Clusium – who was stuck to his chair with very hard gum. Somewhere towards the end of that very long poem you get “the ranks of Tuscany who could scarce forbear to cheer”. I hope British children don’t have to learn that stuff now. 19.03

22. Just under 18 minutes, which was ridiculously fast for me. (I will spend all day feeling odiously smug!) From other comments, it would have taken a lot longer if I had taken the trouble to fully parse my answers instead of biffing them in, but there we go. Thanks to setter and blogger.

    1. I’m with you on the smugness, Scribbler! Did decidedly better (and faster) on this puzzle than the last several, and came here thinking bloggers would declare it too Mondayish! ( not in the OED). Only 2 hold-ups were the NHO type of melon, and LOUCHE, in which I was confused about the lack of the T. But very happy otherwise.

23. Easiest of the week for me, just out of the teens at twenty minutes. Quite a few giveaways.
    FOI: GARFIELD
    LOI: LOUCHE

24. About 30 mins
    Steady solve.
    Thanks, pip.

25. Reasonably quick but not that keen on this effort because of the various loosenessess already mentioned above. Also 1dn grated, dictionary support or no.
    Still, nice to see the cartoon cat at 1ac.
    Also nice to see the bird. I will check back later for the wonderful limerick that I hope it will bring forth..

26. 21:01, MIXED METAPHOR being the favourite.

    Although I think 14d might be the strangest surface I’ve seen for ages. I still can’t parse it as an English sentence.

27. 26 mins so fairly quick. Several odd clues which have all been mentioned. LOI LOUCHE, I’m not even going there.

    I liked RING PULL, the MELON and MIXED METAPHOR.

    Thanks Pip and setter.

28. How can I have reached this age but never heard of an OGEN MELON. Maybe they call it something else in the supermarkets near me. I tried to come up with some word to cover the phrase “What’s gone wrong”, like odea (oh dear!). I shouldn’t confess to that really.

    1. we call it ‘honeydew’ melon in Western Australia.

       1. That’s more like it. Thank you.

29. DUALISM could be DEALISM. Also a philosophy

    1. Idealism, OK; but dealism? In any case, how do you get the DE?

30. 14.02. I found this largely straightforward. Pondered gri mist for a while until sanity prevailed. Untroubled by the alternative spelling of gourmandise. Did momentarily weigh run(g) against ran(k) but instinctively felt the latter was a better fit. Failed to see how packed lunch worked.

31. 20:37
    Middling is about right. Similar experiences to others – looking for a HAAR or FRET; fretting about the absence of a U in GORMANDISE. I was baffled by PACKED LUNCH till I come here and I managed to get RAN by assuming row meant rant.

    Several good clues of which MIXED METAPHOR was my favourite, as is this example, “Mr Speaker, I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air and darkening the sky; but I’ll nip him in the bud” attributed to Irish politician Boyle Roche.

    Thanks to Pip and the setter.

    1. My favourite mixed metaphor was Hamlet’s “take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them”.

32. To fly up is to rear, like a horse
    The end is the rear, and of course
    RHEA listened to is rear
    And hence it is queer
    That the answer’s a bird – what a sauce!

33. 15’03”. I took a lucky shot at the melon. I knew I’d seen it somewhere but it could have been oneg or ogen. Fret and haar never occurred to me, I think because I had the last three checkers. 10 ac, as has been noted above, is a perfectly fine clue. In fact rather a good one. Took far too long on ANAESTHETISE.

34. Tried this today after Rotter recommended this in the QC blog. 62 minutes, so just over 2R, but pleased to have finished at all.

    17ac had me spending a long while trying and failing to make Nanolitre work.

    Many thanks.

35. Late today, nothing constructive to add to earlier discussions.

    FOI TEMPER
    LOI ASCENSION TIDE
    COD LOLLIPOP LADY
    TIME 9:25

36. The last few clues slowed me down so much I was worried I was in for a DNF, but crawled home with LOUCHE my LOI once I recognised the ‘replace this with that’ construct. I also thought it rather clever. Perhaps I was projecting.

    My school also celebrated Ascension day with days out. I remember fun in Stratford before a play and shows in London among other things. Sounds a bit more fun than Meldrew’s experience.

    I see an ogen is more commonly called honeydew here which may explain why like many others it was new to me.

    Thanks setter and blogger

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