Times 29059 – A Comedy of Errors

Time: 48:10

Music: Stan Getz, West Coast Jazz

I will admit I thoroughly messed up this puzzle.   I couldn’t read my own handwriting, put the word separators in the wrong place, misidentified the literal, etc, etc.   At the same time, I realized this was a high quality puzzle with a lot of novel wordplay.     I struggled to get started, then wrote in the longer answers fairly quickly, and then got stuck at the end.

My problem crossing was redesigned and Nimrod.   I was operating under the assumption that left = red, and that I was looking for a place to sleep in, but I just couldn’t make Orion or Diana upside-down work.   It looks from the early SNITCH like everyone else is doing considerably better.

Oops, I nearly marked the blog as Mephisto – looks like it’s just not my day.

 

Across
1 Something spicy for starters, made by expert (4)
MACE – M[ade] ACE
3 Grass up old lag, getting time inside as such? (10)
SHOPLIFTER – SHOP + LIF(T)ER.
9 One’s legendary in performing musical phrases back to front (7)
GRIFFIN – RIFFING, with the G moved to the front.
11 Defender turned to protect area, leading 5-1 (7)
SAVIOUR – S(A, V, I)OUR.   Turned meaning turned sour.
12 Achievement in martial arts something to build upon? Not ideally (9)
GREENBELT – GREEN BELT.   Not a DD, because the martial arts achievement is  two words.
13 Go off to collect a small piece of meat (5)
ROAST – RO(A,S)T.
14 I’m surprised — small figure’s brought in by top earner (5-7)
MONEY-SPINNER –  M(ONE)Y + SPINNER.
18 Grunting, chew nuts — awful! (3-9)
GUT-WRENCHING – Anagram of GRUNTING, CHEW.
21 Excuse me from meal”, I repeated, interjecting “Bravo!” (5)
ALIBI – [me]AL + I(B)I, where the B is from the NATO alphabet.
22 Fugitive’s fantastic leap across border — Steve, actor featuring at the end (9)
EPHEMERAL – EP(HEM, [stev]E, [acto]R)AL, where the enclosing letters are an anagram of leap.
24 Crazy fool keeps on grabbing son (7)
BERSERK –  BE(R(S)E)RK.  No etymology, please.
25 Accuracy is maintained by compass (7)
REALISM – REAL(IS)M,  where both realm and compass indicate a large extent.
26 Journalist, left outside, changed plans (10)
REDESIGNED – R(ED)ESIGNED.
27 Hide pepper (4)
PELT – Double definition, hide as a noun, pepper as a verb.
Down
1 Married twice, gauges somehow it’s a futile endeavour (4,4)
MUGS GAME –  Anagram of M,M and GAUGES.
2 Church is welcoming poor country’s folk (8)
CHILEANS –  CH I(LEAN)S.
4 It may be concealed by varnishing edge (5)
HINGE – Concealed in [varnis]HING E[dge].
5 Form of verb is beyond many English (4,5)
PAST TENSE – PAST + TENS + E.   Are tens many?
6 Mark seen in the middle of hammock? (8,5)
INVERTED COMMA –  Yes [h]AMMOC]k] contains an upside-down comma in a down clue.
7 Blimey — hemmed in by river in both directions! (3-3)
TWO-WAY – T(WOW!)AY.
8 Equality with king usurping power is an uncommon thing (6)
RARITY – (-p,+R)ARITY.
10 One vessel capsized in curious Scottish loch — foul play? (5,8)
FUNNY BUSINESS – FUNNY (I SUB upside down) NESS.
15 Under pressure, worked shifts say, in potentially dangerous situation (6,3)
POWDER KEG – P + anagram of WORKED + E.G.
16 Fighter with precipitate manoeuvre, ultimately leading to painful episode (8)
MIGRAINE – MIG + RAIN + [manoeuvr]E.
17 A hair product I’m regularly into — you’re never too old, unless it’s applied (3,5)
AGE LIMIT – A GEL + I’M + I[n]T[o].
19 Caught traffic light about to change, arriving at curve in road (6)
CAMBER – C + AMBER.
20 Hunter erected a place to sleep in (6)
NIMROD – DORM +IN upside-down.
23 Maybe old farm worker’s beginning to regret cutting into pipe (5)
HORSE – HO(R[egret]SE.   I was hung up on hand for a long time.

61 comments on “Times 29059 – A Comedy of Errors”

  1. Some clever stuff here and I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I was beaten by GRIFFIN and had 26A as REASSIGNED, which made NIMROD impossible. I also thought of Diana. Didn’t know that FUGITIVE also meant EPHEMERAL. I found MONEY SPINNER difficult to parse for quite some time until the PDM. Liked INVERTED COMMA when I finally saw what was going on. COD to TWO WAY.
    Thanks V and setter.

  2. Really enjoyed this! Not sure I’ve ever heard of MONEY-SPINNER. In recent years, I’ve occasionally had visual MIGRAINEs, which are actually painless, thank goodness—iridescent, shimmering apparitions… can’t read for about twenty minutes…

    INVERTED COMMA was very cool.

    1. When I was a kid I had terrible painful migraines every few weeks, but no visual disturbance, Then it all went away. In my 40s I started to get the visual disturbances. Apparently that is quite common.

      1. Interesting consonance! I had them regularly in my teens, then not again until my late 40s! I also used to get large boils/carbuncles in mid-teens that thankfully didn’t re-occur!
        6 Down had me. Had to use additional resources. was thinking of ‘seen’ as viewed, but that didn’t make any sense. 3 across was clever. Great word play!

    2. Me too, visual migraines, those shiny arcs of interwoven triangles. The first few were really scary, but my optician knew immediately what I was talking about.

    3. And me. Just like Paul although in my teens I probably got about one a year. They were never diagnosed as migraines though because I think the diagnostic criteria require a certain higher frequency. There would be a very bad headache and the visual disturbances would start and gradually grow to fill up the whole of my visual field. The pain would get worse and worse as the visual disturbances grew and then when the whole visual field was filled my sight would suddenly clear back to normal and I would be left with just an ‘ordinary’ headache which felt blissful by comparison. In those days the analgesic of choice was Distalgesic (which has since been banned I believe) and I would take a couple of those and go to sleep and wake up feeling wonderful and so grateful to be back to normal.

    4. I get the visual migraines too. I see a ring of coloured prisms, which stops me from reading, but is painless and which gradually expands and disappears after 20 minutes. My brother gets them as well. My optician says it’s quite common.

  3. I liked this. The only thing I didn’t understand was how REDESIGNED worked since I, too, was convinced RED was left and I couldn’t see how the sign worked. It was my LOI so I submitted it without worrying too much. When I was a kid my mother had a dog called NIMROD, the mighty hunter, so that one was a write-in.

  4. I finished most under an hour with problems in the NE corner. My biggest problem was with 11A where with all the numbers at the end I mistakenly thought I had a (6,1) phrase. Once I finally saw my error It all came out. Really enjoyed it. FOI MUGS GAME LOI TWO WAY. I tried to get a blimey synonym between two Rs. I initially interpreted the wording as looking at the word spelling forward and backward.
    Thanks Vinyl

  5. Anybody else in solidarity with the poor CRIMEANS in 2d? I saw that mean could mean poor, then put IS around it. I should have thought more about the inverted Roman Catholics, but loved the inverted commas.

    1. Moi aussi, except I refused to accept that RC was Church in any version, and would have complained that Crimea was not a country. Eventually saw the South American version, but it was a close run thing.

  6. I had to solve this in fits and starts, which is always annoying, but came in at about 27. A really nice puzzle, I thought, especially liked INVERTED COMMA, TWO WAY and BESERK with its container in a container. Slow to get going, even though MACE was FOI. Seeing HINGE was a hidden would have helped a lot, it held me up for a while and I never got it until coming here. LOI the tricky but clever NIMROD. Thanks V.

    From Like A Rolling Stone:
    You said you’d never compromise
    With the mystery tramp, but now you realise
    He’s not selling any ALIBIS
    As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
    And say do you want to make a deal?

    AND: You used to ride on the chrome HORSE with your diplomat
    Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
    Ain’t it hard when you discovered that…

  7. 50 minutes. My only unknown was EPHEMERAL as defined by ‘fugative’.

    ROAST seemed a bit familiar, and indeed we had it only 5 days ago. Also I’ve seen MUG’S GAME within the past week, but possibly in The Guardian as I can’t find it as recently in the archive.

    I don’t think it’s necessary for HAMMOCK to be a Down clue for it to work as ‘inverted’ can mean back to front as well as upside down, and in any case when reading the clue, COMMA isn’t upside down .

    I was a little surprised by GREENBELT as one word as to my mind it’s always two and Chambers and all the Oxfords agree. Only Collins has it as one, which I might have conceded when used as an adjective but not as a noun. The concept was introduced in legislation in the UK by the Green Belt (London and Home Counties) Act of 1938.

    Edit: Forgot to add that NIMROD was my downfall here and added a good 10 minutes to my solving time. Crazy, as I have known Nimrod as a hunter from Elgar’s Enigma Variations all my life. It was named for a friend of his called ‘Jaeger’ which is German for ‘hunter’.

  8. 14’42”, held up, like our blogger, by REDESIGNED.

    FOI was GREENBELT, I had one in karate in my youth, and there is a Christian festival of that name – but I agree with jack that the clue isn’t quite right.

    I really liked INVERTED COMMA, and had no idea about EPHEMERAL.

    Thanks vinyl and setter.

  9. All good and fast till NIMROD tripped me up. As I was sure REASSIGNED was right the only thing that fit was SIERRA which didn’t answer the clue , of course. Silly me.

    Otherwise an enjoyable romp.

    Loved INVERTED COMMA.

    Thanks V and setter

  10. 23 mins but the dreaded pink space as I spelt griffin with an O. Took a while to be persuaded my prole should have been horse. Shows how unconnected with things bucolic I must be.

  11. DNF. Not my day either, with CRIMEANS refusing to budge from my brain once I saw it. Nice puzzle.

    Thanks both.

  12. I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
    Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour
    (Hurrahing in Harvest, GM Hopkins)

    30 mins on IPad pre-brekker. I liked it. I was slow to parse my LOI Redesigned. I was looking for a journalist containing an anagram of plans.
    Ta setter and V

  13. My LOI was TWO-WAY. Finished in 20:41, didn’t have any problem getting redesigned or the chileans but put the inverted comma in without understanding why.
    Thanks setter and blogger

  14. A good 45′, finding it initially difficult to solve the longer clues so not really getting a toe-hold until I entered GUT WRENCHING and MONEY SPINNER (unparsed, nice clue). EPHEMERAL as fugitive was NHO so solved from wordplay. We’ve had NIMROD a few times recently I think, so once I got over my Diana fixation it came easily enough. Nice puzzle, thanks Vinyl and setter

  15. 18:00
    It took a while to get going but thereafter it was a steady solve apart from stymying myself by lobbing in PARITY for 8D and not returning to it until after I’d struggled manfully with 3A. NIMROD held me up at the end as my biblical knowledge is somewhat lacking but otherwise no unknowns.

    I think EMPHERA/L might be the favourite word of the Times crossword.

    Thanks to both.

  16. 13.55
    Grand start to the week, nothing too taxing, though LOI GRIFFIN took me a while to get my head around. Shame there were no actors called Steve appearing at the end of the TV or film versions of ‘The Fugitive’.
    COD INVERTED COMMA.

  17. It’s worth making explicit the allusion in 22a to Steve McQueen clearing the prison perimeter on a motorbike in The Great Escape – or can we all just take that for granted?

  18. I’m generally two or three clues short of a full grid and have to come to this blog for enlightenment. Thought today was going to be the same but Nimrod came to me in the shower and alibi dropped in nicely after that for a 60 minute solve (including shower).

    Inverted Comma was very sly.

  19. Just over 10 minutes. Only slight hold-up was wanting BERSERK to be ‘bonkers’ for a while and being uncertain of the parsing of GRIFFIN, but I eventually worked it out after I’d entered it. Liked the allusion to The Great Escape in the clue for EPHEMERAL.

    A nice puzzle to start the week. Thanks vinyl and setter.

    FOI Mugs game
    LOI Shoplifter
    COD Saviour (as much as anything, for being a football clue that actually kind of works)

    1. As the proud owner of a 16 year old Vauxhall Vectra ( MOT due next week) I managed to get GRIFFIN without too much difficulty as the Vauxhall logo is of the legendary beast

  20. Continuing the series of not-Mondayish Mondays, taking 21.36, delayed at the end with what couldn’t really be CRIMEANS. I also gave up puzzling why M could be INVERTED COMMA, because at best it was W, but nothing else would go in.
    NIMROD of course from the 9th variation: what a friendship that must have been to inspire such a powerful work!
    Entry to the site today only via the Times puzzle section, and only after completing the quickie. Bizarre.

    1. I think that’s five tricky, or at least ones that require care and attention, Monday puzzles in a row.

  21. 54 mins. Excellent puzzle, testing without recourse to obscurity.

    Exactly the same experience as others. Had REASSIGNED leaving the Hunter ending in A and trying to fit Diana in.
    Even had those migraines which are called Scintillating Scotoma but not since I stopped staring at computer code all day.

    Thanks all round.

  22. Not a good day for me. Lots was easy and some was NOT.
    9a GriffOn, could not parse, plumped for wrong unch vowel. I know nothing about music; I HHO riffing, but didn’t connect that with musical phrases.
    11a Saviour, forgot turned=sour, couldn’t make sense of “ruos”, biffed.
    21a Alibi, my usual moan, denied by the dictionaries, alibi=I was somewhere else so didn’t do it, NOT =excuse (I did it for a reason). I am not going to win this battle.
    26a Redesigned, biffed so unconcerned about the complexity!
    8d rArity; was unable to decide between that and pArity until shoplifter showed up.
    20d Nimrod. Knew of Elgar’s Variations, but the hunter bit was slow in coming.

    1. Never. To what are you referring? “5-1” is in clue, but that refers to V and I in the answer, which is seven letters long.

  23. 11:41. I started slowly on this, then gradually picked up speed. Really good puzzle, INVERTED COMMA is delightful.

  24. INVERTED COMMA was cool indeed.

    Two errors, I couldn’t see REALISM or MIGRAINE after 30′ so gave up and wrote nonsense in – despite having tried to think of words ending in RAINE at least twice! Awful. Punishment: five more cryptics from the archives completed, and a chapter of the Pickwick Papers plus an essay by Carlyle in the hopes of magically absorbing more rarities.

    On the other hand, I achieved my goal of being first on the Concise leaderboard – at least for a while, until Heyesey’s 0:59 pipped me by 3 seconds later in the day. Nice work, if you’re reading!

  25. Very nice puzzle, with no discomforts at any stage except the making of GREEN BELT into one word; in both senses so far as I can see it’s two words: despite what Collins says I should have thought the two word spelling is far more common. 40 minutes.

  26. 10:42, and enjoyed it; full disclosure, I never understood why INVERTED COMMA worked, as I couldn’t see past it being simply “M” at the centre of the hammock. D’oh! Still, at least I had discarded the possibility there might be an INTERNET COMMA once I got SAVIOUR.

  27. Late arrival at the ball as I’m on doggy day care duties for a five- month old golden retriever whose attention span isn’t yet up to the 15×15. No time to offer, not that I finished anyway with EPHEMERAL not even passing my mind fleetingly. COD to NIMROD, a sad ear worm. Thank you V and setter

  28. Just a silly OWL with Griffon letting me down.
    Excellent puzzle. Liked INVERTED COMMA and NIMROD. We had FUNNY BUSINESS on Friday.

  29. 16:45

    A very pleasing Monday puzzle where much that I thought of went in quickly. Didn’t equate ‘Fugitive’ with EPHEMERAL but the wordplay was clear. Held up at the end only by NIMROD – could not think beyond Diana for a while particularly with both I and D checkers.

    Thanks V and setter

  30. 15:20 – a steady solve with no pencil-chewing pauses, though I would never have written green belt as one word in either of its senses. I am not sure what was gained by doing so here.

  31. 21.08 but sadly my 7d somehow went in as TWO-WAA. Drat! Missed it on the cursory proof read too. MACE was FOI and I finished with CHILEAN, GREENBELT and NIMROD in that order. Thanks setter and Vinyl.

  32. 23:23
    Lots to like in this, particularly TWO WAY and INVERTED COMMA. Had a narrow escape by realising just in time that Griffon was the French spelling. Didn’t fully understand BERSERK until I saw vinyl’s parsing.

    Thanks to vinyl and the setter.

  33. 24:45. Very nice puzzle and tricky too.

    Eventually I escaped from a few traps. Shopfitter, Griffon and Reversed Comma all had to be corrected before successfully getting over the line unscathed. LOI was TWO-WAY and COD: INVERTED COMMA.

  34. No time to record as done in two sessions, but would guess at approximately 40 minutes. A very enjoyable puzzle where I got very little on the first pass, but nearly everything on second inspection. REDESIGNED came to me right away, as the answer to the clue ‘changed plans’ perfectly describes what an architect does for a fair proportion of his (or her) working day.

  35. Stuck with two at the end. Couldn’t decide between GRIFFON and GRIFFIN because I couldn’t parse it, and plumped for the wrong one. And my REVERSED COMMA (is it a thing?) prevented me from getting SHOPLIFTER until I spotted my error.

  36. I dont mind taking an hour as I did when it is so enjoyable.I confess that I missed parsed saviour by inventing Ruos a spanish footballer.

  37. 34’30”
    Eased when couldn’t trouble leaders.

    This reminded me of the Grand Military Gold Cup at Sandown Park; try and take the Railway Fences flat out, in the style of a dashing Captain of cavalry, and you’ll come a cropper.
    So, back on the bridle, got the griffOns, greyhounds, Wyverns, Orions et al out of my noodle, and finished safely under standard (albeit my standard) with all parsed.
    I wondered whether the river was two-way too, but a Yat’s a gate/gorge not a tributary of the Wye, it seems.
    Great fun; many thanks to the setter and Vinyl.

  38. 37:39. A tricky treat, I thought. Ended up a bit stuck in the north-east until SHOPLIFTER got me going again. I liked INVERTED COMMA (you don’t often see just the one) and AGE LIMIT. I agree with andyf that ALIBI is being somewhere else but, even with the two of us, it is a lost cause

  39. Really fun puzzle for a QCer who only occasionally ventures across the border. All done in 22:31 with lots of answers coming quickly. I had to winkle out LOI MIGRAINE with an appropriately painful trawl. Many thanks vinyl.

  40. Likewise QC visitor, but only to check the answers – couldn’t achieve too much first pass.
    How come they look so easy when you are given the answer??
    Anyway minor point – 19d in the blog incorrect definition underlined…
    Only proving I read it thanks!!

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