Times Cryptic 26954

96 comments on “Times Cryptic 26954”

1. (I could have done without this one, but anyway) I think you want ‘bleu’ for the first instance, Jack.
   1. Thanks. Now amended.
   2. Vous avez raison, this one was atrocious.
2. Didn’t parse BEEF WELLINGTON. BLUR went in with a shrug and I knew HONEYTRAP better as HONEYPOT, but I didn’t find this one too difficult, came in around 11 minutes.
3. For what it’s worth, in rugby a banana kick is commonly used to gain maximum distance before the ball bends to cross the touch line.

   I actually enjoyed the originality of “Bleu” as a homophone!

   1. But BLEU is really not a homophone of BLUR. Highly “original,” indeed.
      1. In my (Scottish) accent, Bleu, and blur don’t sound remotely similar. I feel strongly that homophones used in crosswords should work in all english-speaking accents. I didn’t solve this clue.
      2. exactly
4. Just under 23minutes, but with a stupid ‘ulner’. Not a typo, just a blend of failure to read the hidden properly and general osteal ignorance.
   1. This comes of talking funny; I bet you say ‘bleu’ for BLUR.
      1. I can be a bit neurhotic…
5. ….as it turns out I didn’t understand most of the cryptics, but didn’t need to. I hesitated to put in ‘blur’ because the cryptic seemed so unlikely, but what else could it be? ‘Gazillion’ was my LOI, a very cleverly disguised literal.
6. I raced through this but got held up at the end with the KICK part of the banana, and the RECHECK (somehow I never thought of K in either case, and I was pretty sure for a long time that “rector half removed” was REVE so something like review or revision.

   I think in the last clue you meant to type “bleu”. Or probably you did, but the spell corrector “fixed” it for you.

7. Biffed 6ac (had ‘stun’ at first) and 3d, parsed post hoc. NHO BANANA KICK, but with two N’s and KICK it became inevitable, forcing me to correct 6ac. I never did parse TRIMESTER or AITCHES. I wasted time trying to think of an epic hero; the Z made me give that up. LOI 10ac, 2d to LOI 1d, which I rather liked.
8. Bunged in BEEF WELLINGTON from definition, and I would never have thought of Mrs. Beeton. Also didn’t parse TRIMESTER, and not sure “rim” for “skirt” would ever have entered my mind. I agree that this one was tricky, with anagrams it took extra seconds to spot. The soccer term was unknown to me, and I still haven’t bothered to find out what the yellow peelable fruit has to do with propelling a ball with one’s foot. (Edit: Reading the blog again, I gather it’s a reference to the curvature of the ball’s trajectory.) Nice to see TYPESETTER, something I used to be (and are there still any out there?). I was very reluctant to put in BLUR, hoping against hope that we were not being asked to ignore the difference between the vowel sounds in the two words—it is not just a matter of some dialects’ dropping an “r.”

   Edited at 2018-02-06 07:25 am (UTC)

   1. I suppose that there is, at least if you say them as isolated words, a slight difference in *length* of vowel (blur being longer than bleu, even if length of vowel is not phonetically contrastive in English, as it is in, say, Cantonese), but in Standard British English it is the same vowel sound, as confirmed by Oxford Online: blur/bləː/; sacré bleu/sakreɪ ˈbləː/
      1. Is the Standard British English pronunciation of a French word the same as the French pronunciation? The dictionaries use different phonetic symbols and I’ll have to wait till I’m really awake (just up temporarily; it’s 6 am here) to sort them out. But Collins gives the British pronunciation of “blur” like this:
         blɜː
         and “bleu” in “bas bleu in British” comme ça:
         French (bɑ blø).
         But I just looked at Oxford too, where “blur” is:
         blur/bləː/
         and
         sacré bleu (which no one says anymore, by the way):
         sacré bleu/sakʀe blø//ˌsakreɪ ˈbləː/

         Edited at 2018-02-06 11:10 am (UTC)

         1. All I know is I say ’em exactly the same!
         2. I say sacre blur *all* the time..
            (JerryW not signed in)
            1. Ha ha. They would look at you funny in France.
               Wikipedia: “The expression today is not used in the major French-speaking countries France, Belgium, or Switzerland,[citation needed] but in the English-speaking world it is well known from Agatha Christie’s books about the fictional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.”
               I know Poirot only from the telly.
            2. I thought it was sackry blew, which is French for Bah Goom.
               Pace Stanley Holloway.
               Peter from Yorkshire
9. Thanks for the parsing of 2 dn, saves me getting puzzled when not finding the unknown skirt MEST in the dictionary. The MEST in TRIER – thought that was a bit unTimeslike, same root in clue and answer. Also parsed PORT wrongly, at the time… vessel’s just left port? Yes, that works, I thought to myself. A few chewy ones with unexpected words, but a few easy ones amongst them to keep you going, so 2 minutes over par.
10. About 33 mins with yoghurt, granola, compote and a kick of banana.
    I remember ‘banana kick’ being used briefly in soccer circles circa 1970 – for free kicks from the likes of Zico. I think it is well out of fashion now.
    MER at ’embarrassing’. Whatever the possible ways to get there, it is dodgy in my book.
    Mostly I liked: Beef Wellington, Barista and the Northerner abandoning London. You come home lad.
    Thanks (Inspector Clouseau) setter and Jack.

    1. Well before Zico’s time. I remember it from Rivelino in the 1970 World Cup finals.
       1. Snap
    2. The great Revelino was the acknowledged progenitor of the banana kick.1970 world cup. Didn’t help ne much, couldn’t see this answer for the longest time! T
11. 43 minutes. Found it very hard to get started, with nothing going in until a pencilled BARISTA at 17a. Then got the bottom half and worked my way slowly into the top—as Jack says, then wondering why it took so long, in most cases.

    Which is usually a sign of a good puzzle. LOI the unknown BANANA KICK, COD and WOD 11a GAZILLION, though perhaps if I’d managed to parse a few of the others I’d have found them cleverer!

    I have a vague recollection of my mum using Mrs. Beeton’s cookbook for her rhubarb crumble, among other things…

12. Garincha (Brazil) was the first banana-kicker I remember.
    I thought this was on the easy side getting in in 25 mins. Perhaps getting 11 ac GAZILLION early on helped.

    FOI 1dn MOWN
    LOI 24ac DRILL
    COD 22dn BLUR – it is homophonic en mon livre!
    The clue I did not like was 14ac AITCHES from the IKEAN back catalogue.
    WOD 12ac BEEF WELLINGTON. Yum!

    23ac HONEYTRAP is fine with me – if your brave enough.

    1. Sorry, H, I repeated what you’d said about Garrincha, only I gave him another ‘R’. I was trying to finish my post before going out and skim-read the previous posts. Our memories tally.
13. Strange puzzle. I kept reading convoluted clues, spotting the definition and writing a largely unparsed answer into the grid. The least said about 22D the better – a cordon blur clue it isn’t

    Another typeface problem, reading 14A as “to bum” but guessing “letters” starting “a” would be AITCHES. You sometimes hear a curving golf shot referred to as a “fyffes” being a reference to a bendy banana

14. My FOI was the unpopular BLUR, but it’s definitely a homophone with bleu in my pronunciation. I always like to see AITCHES written down as it reminds me how many of my colleagues wrongly think there’s a letter ‘haitch’!
15. 10:32 … with a lot of biffing.

    BLUR raises nothing but a smile round here.

    So Mrs Beeton became Britain’s most famous cook without necessarily knowing how to boil an egg. I like her style!

    1. Another interesting fact is that she died at only 28!
16. 17:16 on this somewhat wordy puzzle. In 30 years of playing Rugby, have never heard of a BANANA KICK but then as a front-row forward, unlikely to do or even see one.
17. Presumably an 8d could go 20ac. The ‘reportedly’ in 20d could only apply to bad schoolchild French. ‘À point’ is my preferred answer to the above. I noticed that changing the third o for e in 3d gives a totally different meaning. 25′, thanks jack and setter.

    Edited at 2018-02-06 09:33 am (UTC)

18. 40 minutes with GAZILLION and SIZZLER taking ages. I liked the challenge and am prepared to forgive BLEU (On first pass I wondered how NOIR meant vague shape).
19. Oh come on, guys! Give the setter a break. Every individual speaker produces varying sounds as they vocalise words, and these sounds are interpretable because they fall within the range of sounds for the phonemes that define pronounced words. So 22d is fine. Yay!

    25 mins for this.

    1. Well said, pserve_p2! I simply don’t understand what all the fuss is about. I played the sound-files for ‘blur’ and ‘sacré bleu’ in the SOED and the two elements sound identical to me, as they do when I say them. I can see the symbols indicating pronunctiation are different, but so what? Nobody pronounces everything strictly in accordance with them.
       1. Some phonemes *are* subtly different — as I discovered many years ago when our family took the Brittany ferry on holiday and our 5-year-old son excitedly talked about travelling on the “fairy”. We tried to correct his pronunciation: ‘No, darling. It is “ferry” not “fairy”‘. But he simply couldn’t manage the distinction.

          And of course there’s the old EFL-teachers’ joke about the foreign student in class who asks the teacher “Plees, I need a piss. A piss of paper?” – “Ah, Stefan! I think you should probably say ‘a sheet of paper’.” – “OK, OK, so now I really want a shit!”

20. 30 min 53 secs
21. Found this pretty straightforward. The solutions were dropping in quite easily for the first 10 mins — 25a, 1a, 21d, 13d, 1d, 23a all went in with hardly time to take a breath. I agree with jackkt that the clueing for BARISTA is a bit iffy, and that ’embarrassing’ is rather dubious as an anagrind. LOI 11a, and I was also desperate to find some Gilgamesh-like hero.

    Thanks for blog, and parsing of TRIMESTER.

22. Well, did you see Sammy Ameobi’s goal on Sky on Friday night? I guess you didn’t. In the same year as my avatar St Nathaniel raised the FA Cup, 1958, I became aware of the BANANA KICK courtesy of Brazil. It was at the World Cup in Sweden, and from Garrincha rather than Pele. 38 minutes with NW last to fall, MOTIONLESS followed by WHITE, after a groan at MOWN. It’s bad enough for my English accent making homophones in RP dodgy, but my impecccable French accent acquired around the same time as the banana kick definitely has BLEU much shorter than BLUR, said with a soft bouche. Re-reading Perry Mason as reported earlier in the week made COD BLANK CARTRIDGE a write-in, or is that incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial? Very enjoyable. Thank you Jack and setter

    Edited at 2018-02-06 10:58 am (UTC)

23. This felt like a wavelength puzzle (i.e. as per the blog, one where you really can’t see why certain clues took so long, but only after you’ve solved them). I didn’t have a problem with BLEUR, apart from the fact that I now keep hearing Peter Sellers in my head asking for a RHEUM. Glad to see I wasn’t alone in seeing TRIER=someone who tries, and being unsurprisingly unable to work out how MEST could possibly mean “skirt”.
24. How times change! If you were a front-row forward today, you would be expected to do miss passes, score from the 22-metre line, drop goals, eat quinoa, and even know how to say it.
    1. Don’t get me going. Back in the day, lifting in the line-out was a penalty offence; Now it is compulsory. And when was the last time you saw a ball being put in straight at a scrum? A hooker speaks.
       1. I think the first test Dad took me too was an England match at Twickers when Phil Judd was the captain. It was an attritional 3-3. The modern game has some things to recommend it!

          I was a scrum-half, and scrupulously fair, putting in before the ref caught up with play.

          1. Clearly before the current method of crouch, touch, kiss, make up, bind and then get on with it.
             1. Every year I tune into the 6 Nations they’ve got a new scrum incantation.
25. 26 minutes, so a bit of a slog, really. For me, the problems started with the long ones, none of which went straight in, and none of which provided a quickly recognisable definition. BLANK CARTRIDGE was particularly tricky, pushing ideas of whales and camels with hump and humpback, and (for me) lank not readily giving lean. The former is usually (in my lexicon) dodgy hair and only really gives tall and thin when you put a Y on the end. Not unfair, just unhelpful.
    Harry Kane does a pretty good BANANA KICK every now and then, but I’m not sure that’s the language currently in use.
    Add me to the many who decided MEST must be an obscure kind of skirt out of my ken.
    Good challenge, and a tough game of spot the definition. And then work out what on earth’s going on in the wordplay. Many thanks, Jack, for sorting it all out.
26. 22 minutes, odd puzzle, all been said above, blur definitely not a homophone for bleu chez moi and in 11 years in France I’ve never heard a french person say “sacre bleu”. They say merde a lot.
    1. Watching the rugby on telly on Saturday as the final kick went over in the France V Ireland match I discovered that I can lip-read in French (the P word).
27. Quite pleased with time really, considering that I barely got started after 15 mins, having only 3 answers in, including STUN for 6a, which seemed half-reasonable, but ultimately wrong. Got going with a completely unparsed ROUND THE CORNER, and then most of the rest fell into place. Left with a few at the top, including the confusing TRIMESTER (see above) and being a veggie, the 2 carnivorous clues held me up. LOI WHITE
28. I thought I was in for a long night(mare) when 25ac was my FOI, but 26ac followed immediately on its heels and the downs must have proved a lot more tractable, as I was all done and dusted inside or 7 minutes. Many things were very biffable, which helped, but I didn’t have any problem seeing what was actually going on in the post-submission parsing, certainly nothing as tricky as yesterday’s COTANGENT. No problem with blue/blur – everyone loves Allo Allo, right?
    1. Never ‘eard of it.
       1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ3M8cj70vs
29. At 8 down Banana Kick- the Brazilians may have invented it but it was made most famous back here in Blighty. Perhaps a bit of justice for them nicking our game in the first place and being much, much better at it than us?

    As for 22 down – I like Franglais as much at the next man but there is no Sacre Blur around here. However it was possible to solve the clue now that I understand that some people talk funny and are not very good at French either.

    Here at the Ministry of Slow Solvers (MoSS) about an hour of relaxed fun. Thanks to setter & jackkt.

30. 37’37, with the last few on mown and white as my mind felt by the time I got there. Surprised as many others at 22. Some interesting twists and turns. Liked 20.
31. Doesn’t BARISTA break the unique Times convention for Across clues where A on B means A comes after B? Or has that changed?

    ~ Nila Palin

    1. No such convention, I think: merely snares to catch the unwary. All goes so long as it literally adds up.
       Incidentally, jackkt, I used to try to convince myself after a marathon that I’d had ‘an hour’s more fun than the speedsters’ but it didn’t feel right.
       1. Don Manley confirmed in a comment last year at fifteensquared.net that there was such a convention for The Times, but not in the other nationals. I believe he’s still a Times setter.
          It’s the first time I can remember seeing it used the ‘non-Times’ way in a clue, anyway.
          I suppose Richard Rogan would be able to confirm it either way (no pun intended), but I doubt that he trawls the blog for late replies.

          ~ Nila Palin

          1. Unspammed. Nila, if you include urls (or even omit a space after a full stop) Live Journal will deem your message as spam and send it to the sin bin.

             On the point about BARISTA and ‘on’ in a clue, I’ve never heard of the convention in the 10+ years that I’ve been blogging for TftT and I’m sure there have been many occasions that it would have come up for discussion if it had existed. It may be a policy that Don follows when he’s setting for the Times.

             1. Thank you jackkt, and sorry for inadvertently ‘spamming’.
                Don Manley’s comment did imply that he wasn’t sure why the convention existed, but I’ve since checked Brian Greer’s book, which confirms it (on Page 51): ‘on’ in an across clue means following rather than preceding when used to indicate the juxtaposition of parts of the answer.
                I guess only Richard Rogan will be able to confirm whether it still applies today.
                ~ Nila Palin
                1. Perhaps you could raise a query about it in the Times Crossword Forum and RR or David P may respond.
                   1. Good idea, although I wouldn’t want it to look like I’m pouncing on a mistake. I’m genuinely interested.
                      I’ll wait until your blog has moved down the page before I do it, in case they spot the query here first.
                      ~ Nila Palin
                      1. A little research suggests this has been a matter for discussion for some time. Here, for example from 2008: https://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/244016.html. Peter B said he was sure that current practice then was that ‘A on B’ could go either way in an Across clue but only ‘AB’ in a Down clue, but somebody else disagreed quoting a guide to the Championships. Elsewhere in another blog Andy (Linxit) mentions it going either way based on ‘on’ meaning ‘next to, beside’. Anyway there are examples of ‘A on B’ meaning both AB and BA in Times Across clues going way back, so if there’s a rule that’s broken occasionally (as you have pointed out re today’s puzzle) it’s nothing new.

                         Edited at 2018-02-06 10:09 pm (UTC)

                         1. Thanks for the link. I should say that the rule doesn’t make any sense in an across clue to me either, but it certainly does seem to have once been a convention. I know Peter Biddlecombe allows it either way in Sunday Times puzzles.
                            I’ll bring it up on the Crossword Club forum shortly, at the risk of being replied to with “No one cares, you crashing bore”!
                            1. If anyone’s still interested, Richard Rogan has just confirmed that the convention still exists. He didn’t comment on the clue for BARISTA apparently defying the convention. Perhaps we’ve misread it.

                               ~ Nila Palin

                               1. Thanks for that, Nila. I just posted this in the Forum: “Thanks for responding, Richard, but if the rule still applies then how do you account for the clue quoted by Nila (17ac in #26954)? Is it an error that slipped through the net, or have we misunderstood the parsing?”

                                  IMHO it’s not good enough to assert the rule applies and then let a breach of it pass without comment

                                  Edited at 2018-02-07 02:09 pm (UTC)

                                  1. I see Richard has now replied and agreed it’s an oversight.
                                     I wasn’t sure if he’d missed my point about that particular clue, or just didn’t want to discuss it – I didn’t want to push my luck with another post. Thank you for the follow-up!
                                     It’s a convention that was worth clarifying I hope.
                                     ~ Nila Palin
                                  2. Indeed. The only thing is, when I researched this yesterday I found enough ‘oversights’ in previous puzzles to make it a convention one can’t really rely on.
32. Well I really enjoyed the slightly liberty-taking feel here. BLEU is “close enough” to BLUR for it to be pretty evident was was required and none of the other quibbles raised above bothered me.

    20:25, anyway, so trickyish for sure.

    I remember a letter to a newspaper years ago asking how, without getting too technical, to kick a football so that it bends, as in a banana kick. Among the answers that cam in from readers were “Ask a Brazilian to kick it for you” and “Ask Vinnie Jones to kick it straight”.

33. 22 min, with 8dn LOI as I’d biffed STUN at 6ac. – I had the bottom half mostly done before anything else above 17ac. (22dn did recall Clouseau rather than Monet’s accent!)
34. Twenty-seven minutes for me, so I was pleasantly surprised (in a schedenfreudeny way) to see that some others thought this was a tricky one.

    I got off to a very slow start with only a couple going in on a first pass. Then I realised I’d forgotten to boot up the other neuron, and things got a bit faster after I’d poured some coffee into it. All very enjoyable, although I thought SIZZLER was a bit of a weak clue.

    Regarding “pear-shaped” – I find it hard to believe that it refers to an aircraft that’s gone in nose first, as the result is seldom any recognisable shape. A friend of mine was astonished to learn that the phrase was not – as he had been saying for many years – “it’s all gone bear-shaped”.

    Edited at 2018-02-06 01:46 pm (UTC)

    1. Those of us in the City think that ‘pear shaped’ and ‘bear shaped’ are pretty close equivalents this week.
35. 14:28. Another odd solving experience for me: I didn’t seem to be making much use of the clues. I got a lot either from the definition or, in the case of the long ones, the enumeration and a few checking letters. This wasn’t easy in all cases but it was far from the wordplay-based solving I like best.
    The way I say the words ‘blur’ and BLEU don’t sound the same but it’s close enough as far as I’m concerned.
36. I had a slow start to this and skipped all over the grid trying to get a way in. TAINT and BATS, followed by BLUR were my first entries and then the SE began to take shape. BANANA KICK and RECHECK brought up the rear in 32:52, but it was all in vain as I’d failed to interpret 3d correctly and biffed ONE OF THESE DAYS. Eejit! Bad day all round with a stupid typo in the QC too. Thanks setter and Jack.
    PS I’m in the groan, but close enough camp on BLUR/BLEU.

    Edited at 2018-02-06 02:50 pm (UTC)

    1. Time for me to offer commiserations today. No Formula One solve for me today, but at least I got one all right for a change.
       1. Thanks George 🙂
37. 33 mins; okayish puzzle. Good blog; cheers.
38. The clue for BLUR asks for the Impressionist painter’s pronunciation of “bleu,” not the distortion of it by some foreigner!
    The French pronunciation, according to Wiktionnaire, is
    bleu blø
    whereas the pronunciation of BLUR is
    ˈblɝ (États-Unis)
    ˈblɜː (Royaume-Uni)

    1. Where was Monet from? What accent did he have?
       I’d imagine people from Corsica would pronounce bleu differently than people from Alsace, who’d pronounce it differently than Parisians, who’d pronounce it differently than Bretons, who’d pronounce it differently than Pauvians, etc.
       I’m with others above in defining the absolute reference of French pronunciation as Peter Sellers in Inspector Clouseau. Your perambulations around the web finding 5 different pronunciations in 5 different websites would confirm to me that they can all be taken with a pinch of salt.
       1. Wiktionnaire offers the standard French pronunciation—the one approved by l’Academie française. I don’t think, either, that there’s that much variation in the pronunciation of this particular vowel sound among different dialects, “eu” being pretty standard everywhere. You exaggerate, also, O Nameless One, in counting the number of different dictionaries I cited. And your reference to Clouseau merely indicates that you don’t think French is a matter to be taken seriously. So you are full of merde.

          Edited at 2018-02-07 04:11 am (UTC)

39. A whole lot of biffing in a slow solve, say 45 minutes. A lot of that lost on NOT biffing ONE OF…, but toiling through the wordplay. Just entered BLUR from the checking letters without wondering about it too much. LOI was actually BATS after finally being reduced by the checkers into the unknown BANANA KICK. Regards.
40. Plenty of biff it first and worry about parsing later. Fortunately all right today, though I lost the will to live and waited to come here for the parsing of ‘Round the Corner.’
41. I think I recall the surprisingly articulate eponym of ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ once explaining the art of the banana kick to a journalist (after THAT goal against Greece) in the following words (or something fairly close):

    “You just sort of, like, wrap your foot around the ball…”

    I imagine it helps if you have a fairly prehensile foot to start with.

42. Memories of the summer of 1970 are coming back into focus and I’m thinking we knew it as a banana shot, rather than kick.
43. I foolishly attempted this when blurry-eyed this morning and didn’t get very far. Things slowly came together at lunchtime. I was unruffled by the homophone, my French pronunciation is from the Allo Allo / Clouseau school (incidentally I was delighted to see Poirot get a run out for France against Ireland at the weekend – must admit, I thought he was Belgian). Found a couple of the long ones (8dn, 9dn) tricky and was slow on the uptake for others (ashtray was my last one in – even with the checkers and the bloomin’ obvious staring me in the face, I was convinced I was looking for kippers or hookahs). The most striking example of an 8dn I remember is the Roberto Carlos belter from a free kick against France in 1997. All this talk of Brazilian footballers and 11ac reminds me of the joke doing the rounds when George W Bush was president: following a particularly bloody day of fighting in the Middle East, Donald Rumsfeld attended the Oval Office and informed the president that three Brazilian troops had been killed. “My god man, that’s terrible” replied the president. “Just how many millions are there in a Brazilian anyway…”
44. After what can only be described as several years of trying, I finally completed the Times crossword today, without aides (although I did look up a couple of definitions (e.g. “whit”) to make sure they meant what I thought they meant.

    Thought I would find a whole load of comments decrying how easy it was, so pleased to see that wasn’t the case.

    Dropped by to say thank you, on the grounds this blog has been responsible for pretty much all of my progress from barely understanding the clues even when I had the answers, to finally completing it today.

    All best,

    Jonathan

    1. Congratulations Jonathan! The first of many we hope. Let’s hear from you again.
    2. Well done sir!
    3. Hey well done! I am definitely one of those who found it more tricky so I am very impressed. But honestly, they get easier once you know you can crack ’em in the end. “What do you read, my Lord?” “Words, words, words.” That’s all they are, and they’ve got to fit in the grid somehow according to the rules!

       Next thing, get yourself an identity, introduce yourself and get involved!

       Welcome to the club.

       Don

    4. Jonathan,
       I’m another who rarely contributes so don’t have a proper identity but I’m impressed that you managed to complete this one. I thought this was really tough and only managed to complete 31% of it.
       That’s how I track my progress (or lack of it), by working out what percentage of the crossword I complete rather than how long it took to do (like most contributors).
       But I did have a rare 100% on Monday!
       Phil R
45. Oops, that was me, dislodged.
46. A banana kick in Aussie rules is one that is kicked (usually from the boundary} and bends – as in a banana – to goal.
47. Holy guacamole! After almost three years and many “almosts” I finally got a Times Cryptic out without aids – yay for me! And snitch says it’s an average not an easy one – I am so chuffed 🙂 Your blogs have been invaluable to my growth in solving – thank you one and all. Best regards, Caryn from Oz.
48. Solved it in about an hour. There were a few red herrings I had to throw back into the water to allow for the real solutions to leap forward: HUMDINGER is surely a bee’s sting, and UPPER & LOWER CAMELCASE are both things.

    I was also fooled by MEST as a skirt. With a more careful setter, I would have been suspicious, but here we had RECtor & IS both entering the crossword without conversion, so why not TRIER as someone who tries. Just grateful that TRIMESTER was biffable, otherwise it would have been sad to fall at the last.

    What’s DBE, please, that someone mentioned in the context of BARISTA?

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