Times Crossword 26,013

67 comments on “Times Crossword 26,013”

1. 22 minutes, but would have been a fair bit quicker if I hadn’t struggled in the NE, not helped by putting ‘left’ at 7a, and working around the second part of 10a being ‘-quis’ (sounds like ‘key’). Quite a bit from the literals, as has been the case with all of this week’s puzzles, AFAICR.

   Edited at 2015-02-04 01:39 am (UTC)

2. About 34 mins but doing other stuff for maybe 5 minutes. Nice puzzle.

   Although Mary Poppins and Maria were both played by Julie Andrews, it was the latter that sang “Doh a deer…”

   And here is something I only discovered recently. Eidelweiss was written by Rogers and Hammerstein and is not a traditional Austrian folk song (although many Austrians believe it to be!)

   1. Pedant point – it’s Edelweiss.

      Can any other parent claim to have watched (AKA glazed over to) the first half of The Sound of Music in excess of 20 times, I wonder?

      *My dear, is there anything you can’t do?*

      1. Did your kids get repeatedly sick of it halfway through?
      2. I’ve never got anything like that far with it. I can’t bear it. I have a slightly higher tolerance for Mary Poppins, for some reason, so I have watched the beginning of that with my kids a few times. The furthest I’ve got before falling asleep is the bit where they start riding on the carousel horses.
         1. I’m proud to have entered my 70th year without seeing it, and intend to keep it that way.
            Chewy puzzle, LOI heterosexual.
   2. Yes, Maria.. corrected, thanks
3. A very skin-of-the-teethy feeling as finally I saw HETEROSEXUAL through the checkers; tricky clue, indeed, and my COD. I’m glad Jerry parsed 6d, as I gave up; I had ‘replicate’ for a while for no good reason, then REPRODUCE, but only because I saw ‘drop’; whatever works, I suppose. I persisted in taking ‘house’ in 2d as HO; looking for …HGO… was not a productive use of time.Liked 2d, 20ac, 15d inter alia.
4. Naughty!

   Even at the age of one, my kid (singular) had developed (inherited?) such exquisite taste that she knew it was all downhill from the wedding.

   1. Now, if it had been a boy, you would have been spared the wedding part, too.
5. 32 minutes. If I’d gone with my instinct I’d have bunged in REPRODUCE at 6dn when I first thought of it and would have achieved my 30-minute target. As it was, I was cautious and waited until I had all the checkers before deciding it had to be right,though I still couldn’t parse it. Very enjoyable with a good mix of answers from definitions that then needed reverse-engineering, and others that were constructed piece by piece from wordplay.

   Edited at 2015-02-04 06:07 am (UTC)

6. But that was with a lot of interruptions, so not too bad.

   Agree that 14ac was a great clue. Thanks setter and blogger.

   Does a shot putter throw?

7. 
   … but couldn’t parse REPRODUCE or ORATORIES, so thanks for those.

   LOI: MILEPOST, and like others, took far too long to unravel HETEROSEXUAL.

8. Best of the week so far although still not difficult. Another pleasant enough wander through some reasonable clues but with too many solved from obvious literals and checkers without the need to delve into the cryptics. One or two exceptions with 14A a stand out clue as others have said.
9. 21:06 .. with nearly half of that on ORATORIES and last in HETEROSEXUAL. Agree with the plaudits above for that and several others.

   I guess this isn’t the place to reveal that I like The Sound of Music, even if the second half is a bit Springtime for Hitler.

   1. Any musical with a song containing the words ‘Men in the midst of a table d’hote heard / Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo’ merits serious attention.
      1. I’m absolutely with you there mate! I proposed to my first wife on the spot when I came home unexpectedly and heard her belting out the whole song word perfect as she was preparing dinner – enchanted, I was….
         1. Nice story, Nick, with added pathos (bathos?) provided by the fact it was your ex…
   2. I don’t see why you should be wary of expressing a liking for Sound of Music, Sotira

      I like it because it is a wonderful example of a product designed and manufactured to suit a target market and succeeding very profitably for all concerned. That is true of both the score and the film.

      As a bonus much of the music is good to sing and also to dance to – things don’t have to have a massive intellectual content to be enjoyable.

   3. Second Jim’s comments.. if the only alternative is murder, blood and violence as it usually is these days, I say bring it on..
      1. Of course, in reality, if the Von Trapp family had sung an Austrian folk song to a theatre full of Austrians at the time of the Anschluss, they would have been been resoundingly thrashed by an irate audience, who would then have burst into a rendition of the Horst Wessel Lied. Its a point to bear in mind for anybody who wishes to produce a remake.
10. Quite difficult enough for me though!
    Completed in 50 minutes but there were far too many that went in on the definition only (hence LEFT at 7a & REPLICATE at 6d which held me up for some time) so thanks to Jerry for unravelling them for me.
11. You can learn something from these puzzles. We always pronounced it as if spelled “piquette”. It’s rather a good game if you’ve got time on your hands (we used to play it at boarding school back when – sans tv or internet time was in ample supply). I see from google that some also call it “picket”. The ever-reliable Georgette Heyer uses the term “piqued, re-piqued and capoted” to mean being completely put to rout. Nice puzzle. 13.42
    1. Hi Olivia, we also learned this game as children and pronounced it like you (cf the Gosford Park English pronunciation of ‘valet’ which does not follow the French either). I have taught it to my own children and believe it is one of the best ever card games for two, with a combination of luck, skill, mental arithmetic and curious terminology. Sue Sweeper.
       1. I too love piquet. I have never found a more satisfying card game for two.

          As to pronunciation, it has always been PK to me. (and vallay for that matter). The US seem to have a fairly stern, take-no-prisoners approach to both pronunciation and spelling. All I would say is that our English approach of accepting whatever is thrown at us does have its downsides..

          On a related note US practice seems much more finicky about slang terms. An American friend told me that “Jap” to refer to a Japanese person was highly insulting and couldn’t be used. This confused me a bit, since it is just an abbreviation. All the more so since apparently it is quite OK to call me a “Brit!”

          1. I can think of at least one other term that is ‘just an abbreviation’ but extremely offensive.
       2. You too Sue! BTW, I hope you are recovered from your Christmas misfortune and are off crutches and feeling like yourself again. Unfortunately unlike you I was never able to interest my children in the game and husband is playing-card-illiterate.

          I’m not sure I agree with Jerry about the rigidity of US pronunciation – pretty much anything goes here too especially regionally. I learned the game in the British boarding-school gulag and have never really lost my UK speech patterns (although I can do a dead-on NYC rendering if I must).

          1. Well, as you know I am British too and also a product of the boarding school gulag! Thanks for asking about my leg, I am still holed up at home but getting better! Sue
    2. Heyer’s forerunner as historical novelist (indeed, the progenitor of the genre), Walter Scott, writes as follows in Rob Roy (ch. 10): ‘He seemed perfectly to understand the beautiful game [piquet] at which he played, but preferred, as it were on principle, the risking bold and precarious strokes to the ordinary rules of play; and neglecting the minor and better-balanced chances of the game, he hazarded everything for the chance of piqueing, repiqueing, or capoting his adversary.’
       1. Rob Roy – aha, you’re right Ulaca, so that’s where she got it from. It’s a foggy memory but I don’t think I ever finished reading it after getting bogged down in Scott’s rendering of Scots-speak. Heyer is accurate in quoting that phrase (though it’s not attributed) because the book would have been widely read at the time most of her novels are set.
          1. CS Lewis loved Scott (the man more than the books) and I love Lewis and so I read Scott. The Antiquary is my pick of the five I have read so far. I actually prefer George Macdonald, though as Lewis says, none of his novels are very good and only a few are good. Incredibly preachy, but preachment – and Scottishness – was what he did best. Re the Scots, I used an online dictionary quite a bit at first for both of these authors and after a while it pays dividends. Depends how motivated one is, of course, and with a book on Lewis as my goal, I certainly have that!

             Edited at 2015-02-05 02:50 pm (UTC)

12. Really enjoyed this one. Most went in fairly rapidly for me (like in about an hour or so) but then spent an age sorting out LATE and THEBAN, on account of having put LEFT in for 7a.

    I join the chorus in praise of 14a, and also enjoyed the groanworthy pun in 21a.

    Thanks Jerry for a nice blog, particularly explaining 6sd and 15d which I could not parse.

13. A few seconds under 8 mins so a completely different experience to that of yesterday, although I confess that I entered REPRODUCE without bothering to parse it once the checkers were in place. I was probably lucky that I got HETEROSEXUAL as soon as I saw the “x” in the anagram fodder, and ORATORIES was my LOI.
14. 15m. Another enjoyable puzzle at just the right level of difficulty for me. I’ll join the chorus of approval of 14ac.
15. 18 mins or so of pleasant enough solving but thanks jerry for explaining some of them
16. 21.11, of which 10 spent trying to work out 14 and parse REPRODUCE jsy in case it wasn’t. Succeeded(eventually) in the former, but not in the latter.
    14 earns its praise through not having an obvious definition, and having a wide range of parsing options. Nice surface, but even when you discount that, because it’s a crossword clue, there are so many possibilities. If you spotted that it was an anagram (Andy, well done!) it was easier, but you could have started with Criminal exhausted delivering CL, Thesaurus meanings for any of the words, “deciding” to get pushed to the front, some sort of &littery…. All very clever.
    “Edelweiss” still gets me every time, but what does “soon her mama with a gleaming gloat heard” actually mean? Ah well, so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn goodnight.
    1. Zabbers, I’m amazed at you. If you’d come across that lyric in a Pink Floyd song, or The Ricky Horror Picture Show, or Brazil!, you’d be singing its praises and extolling its hermeneutical valency. Just because sweet little Julie Andrews sings it, you cast aside your wonted critical acumen, take it at face value and adjudge it to be sugar-coated tosh. Sheesh!
       1. How does a gloat gleam?
          1. No, no, no – it’s the gleam that gloats.

       2. Hm. I’ve never really contended that karakakora kakarakak ever really meant anything,  and I yield to no one on my appreciation of, say Blinded by the Light or Facade with their ingenious but nonsensical lyrics, but surely Lonely Goatherd is deliberate – erm – tosh. Probably deserves its own appreciation society, but I doubt I’d be joining!

          1. “No more lonely nights? Goatherds return in pairs to gobble up rubbish” (4)
             1. Any known crossing letters?
                1. Second letter O – not a very Ximenean clue, I fear.

                   Edited at 2015-02-04 03:47 pm (UTC)

          2. I think if you were a goatherd, you might well be a lonely one.. many are, I expect
17. 15:14 finishing with unholy and urban. Satyric unknown everything pretty much parsed as I went along including reproduce with its Anax-esque device.

    Although we’ve doubtless had it before I enjoyed the £51 trick.

    Regarding TSOM, a rather crafty quiz question I’ve used a couple of times is to give a list of words and ask which of them is NOT in the lyrics to My Favourite Things.

    Throw in rainbows as the impostor and intersperse with some of the unlikely “things” like geese, doorbells and girls and plenty of people get caught out. Probably not Jimbo though.

    Edited at 2015-02-04 12:58 pm (UTC)

18. I too finished with UNHOLY in a time of 10 mins with Tippex used twice.
19. Back from 10 days crosswordless holiday (apart from a couple of Jumbos on the plane).

    Like jerry, I raced through the left half and the bottom only to come to a grinding halt in the NW, not helped by having AWAY at 7ac until I saw THEBAN.

    14ac is nice, but not very sure about “righteous” meaning “right (wing) ” in 15dn which seems to be pushing it a bit.

    Edited at 2015-02-04 01:24 pm (UTC)

    1. ‘Righteous’ gives MORAL. The TORIES are just politicians, so the setter takes no party-political stance.
       1. Of course. Thank you. Just lazy parsing on my part.
    2. Derek, I think the parsing is RIGHTEOUS = MORAL, remove the fringes and you have ORA. Then politicians = TORIES.

       Explained more succinctly by Jerry in his blog.

       1. …and by Keriothe.
20. Of course, silly me!
21. 28m of which around 10 on HETEROSEXUAL and ORATORIES. The latter I might have BIFD but didn’t want to make the former impossible. I couldn’t see how we got to ORA… so thanks for the blog. I enjoyed this a lot – just the level of challeng to keep me interestedly hopeful of eventual success. I have to confess to having always avoided The musical discussed above though always enjoyed Mary Poppins, a favourite of my two children. I’m not sure what long term damage this may have done but we also had a video recording of ChittycChitty Bang Bang which ended rather suddenly just after the kiddy catcher is looking for the children in the town square, tempting them with cream puffs as I remember it. It was a year or so and several viewings later that we discovered there was another 20m of film and a happy ending. Even now some 20 years later we refer to a surprise ending as ‘jelly pie, cream puffs, off goes the tele’!

    Edited at 2015-02-04 02:29 pm (UTC)

22. Enjoyed today’s puzzle very much with 14a outstanding. I also fell for the “left” trap at 2a before Theban cleared up the mess. I managed to justify “pope” and “away the country from Urban Grandier in Huxleys The Devils of Loudon, although in retrospect he was not a pope…..could someone explain why urban=pope please?
    1. You could do worse than ask the mothers of any of the Pope Urbans (Popes Urban?) I-VIII.
    2. saying why does urban = pope is just the same as saying why does john paul XXIII = pope…
       1. Pedant alert – is it not Pope John XXIII?
          1. They would have had to ‘top’ quite a few more JPs to reach that figure, but anything’s possible, I suppose.
23. 28 minutes generally working from S to N. LOI was UNHOLY. My vision of Hell is having to watch TSOM in IKEA.
24. Thirty-two minutes, though I’d have been quicker if I hadn’t taken as long.

    I enjoyed this one, but didn’t really find a COD in it – perhaps because the overall standard was quite high. Nice to see HANGOVER in there, along with its cause and cure, LIQUID LUNCH.

    I spent a few minutes trying to work out how to morph ‘uncle’ into UNTIE, before realising I was meant to be starting with an auntie. “D'” – as Homer Simpson would say – “oh”. My LOI was ORATORIES, because I couldn’t parse the ORA bit, and had never heard of an oratory as a place of worship.

25. I didn’t fly through this, it took me about 45 minutes, ending with ORATORIES and with the same general appreciation for HETEROSEXUAL, and a groan for UNHOLY. But I don’t have strong feelings either way about The Sound of Music. I did find Paul’s nugget about R&H having written the supposed Austrian folk song pretty funny, so thanks to him, Jerry and the setter. Regards.
26. Tell me why the d got chopped off exhausted.
    1. “deciding initially to go”
27. 9:13 here for a straightforward enjoyable solve (though as usual I felt I should have been faster).

    The combination of Julie Andrews and Rodgers and Hammerstein is enough to make me throw up, so I’m firmly in the group who’ve never seen The Sound of Music and have every intention of keeping it that way. In fact the thought of being confined to a chair in an old folks’ home and forced to watch it is as good a reason as any for that final one-way trip to Switzerland!

28. Don’t know why, but I’m with thud_n_blunder in the knowledge that I would have been quicker if I hadn’t taken so long.
29. To throw someone is to unsettle them.
30. To throw someone is to unsettle them.

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