Times Cryptic 27044

49 comments on “Times Cryptic 27044”

1. I didn’t know NABOTH, although I assumed he was in the Bible (looked it up: Ahab wanted his vineyard, Jezebel had him killed), or CUADRILLA; ASTRAGAL was somehow vaguely familiar, although I probably would have said it was a kind of wool. Knew, though never eaten, PECORINO, although I would have spelled it with two C’s if given half a chance. Given the checkers and definition, ROMP was inevitable, but I never figured out the wordplay: I had P at the end of ROM, all right, but couldn’t see how ROM = ‘concert’! This may sound a bit sour-grapey, but NABOTH & CUADRILLA struck me as fitter for a Mephisto.
2. A bit over an hour for a DNF, with the vowels in the incorrect order for the unknown NABOTH and ‘ego’ for 16d. Several other new ones half-guessed from the wordplay.

   ASTRAGAL has appeared elsewhere within the last week, though with its architectural meaning and funnily enough in the same crossword AVE came up in the wordplay of another clue for ‘farewell’ rather than the ‘greeting’ of today.

   Hello goodbye.

   Thanks to setter and blogger.

3. This was a strange crossword, but I got there in the end. A lot of easy stuff, and then CUADRILLA, ASTRAGAL, NABOTH and maybe more that seemed vaguely familiar but had to be worked out laboriously from the wordplay. GABONESE took a long time to get too, I knew I was looking for a word for talk but somehow GAB didn’t come, and the checkers were not a lot of help. At least I knew ROBUSTA and PECORINO, they both went straight in.
4. I thought this was a brilliant crossword, apart from the ‘dreadful’ 5 across, where I put ‘picoreno’, before looking it up. So many brilliant clues, including my last on I’LL BE BOUND (if a multi-word answer is last in, it must be good), but I’ll give my COD to NABOTH for the excellent wordplay, the beautiful little story and – in this week of the extraordinary royal wedding – its own heritage value.
5. I managed CUADRILLA, ASTRAGAL and NABOTH but then came a cropper with ECO for which I put EGO (“one first of all”). Never did spot Umberto. The MATTERHORN was also a difficult one for me to spot. I started with AM for “early part of the day” then moved on to DAWN before the light dawned.
   It seems that when I commit a faux pas in the Concise, I commit one in the Cryptic as well.
   1. Um, I also had to check my ‘ego’ before submitting (offline).
6. LOI was GABONESE. I didn’t know NABOTH but my first guess checked out online. For PECORINO (is that really so obscure?), I was thrown for a while by reading “com” for “corn”… I thought this was brilliant and I’m glad I took the time to savor it (amidst various distractions).
   1. Everything’s obscure if you don’t know it! Especially if you live abroad in a non-cheese culture – even as a cheese-lover.

      Edited at 2018-05-22 07:03 am (UTC)

7. Gave up after an hour with _A_ONESE at 9a, plus 10a NABOTH and 28a ASTRAGAL still to fill in.

   Don’t feel too bad about the biblical reference, but slightly annoyed by 28 as I was thinking along the right lines and “astrogel” had come to mind a couple of times, so perhaps the right answer was lurking in my unconscious somewhere. As for 9a, just didn’t think of “gab”, plus Africa’s a very big place…

   1. Conventionally, when ‘gel’ appears in a Times cryptic, it’s clued as ‘upper-class’ [young lady etc.]. That’s why I chose GAL today after thinking ‘astragel’ looked more likely.
      1. Yes, I think I would have plumped for “gal” there, for exactly those reasons. I think my “astrogel” is an actual word from some science fiction novel or other, possibly a type of foamed aluminium. It was just interesting that something only two letters away from the real answer kept intruding on my thought processes!
      2. Me too.
8. Or rather it was, as I DNF’d in the vineyard after 40 mins of, otherwise, excellent entertainment.
   Meanwhile I was a Scoffer of yoghurt and granola with a cup of Robusta.
   Now I feel uneducated but not ineducable.
   Mostly I liked: Matterhorn, 0pens and COD to Medici
   Thanks wordy setter and Jack
   1. Nice TLS last week Myrtilus. I got my tombs mixed up (and so I think did Pip) and so that corner took some unravelling. Thank you!
      1. Thank you. I’m glad you liked it. I miss the blog feedback.
         1. Thanks from me too Myrtilus. I’m a recent convert to the TLS puzzle on Olivia’s recommendation. I had to resort to reference sources for one clue, but that’s far less than I usually need for the other TLS setters (my cultural knowledge, such as it is, stops around the start of the Twentieth century. Not quite art stopping short in the cultivated court of the Empress Josephine, but close).
9. As I was completing this in 26 minutes, I was thinking (in my old-fashioned way) “there’ll be letters”.
   Obviously the first prompt was NABOTH, easy for me for whom vineyard is almost automatically preceded by the land-grab victim, but who will be unknown to many.
   Others were of the known word unknown meaning type
   PECORINO, a bit close to some kind of minor misdemeanour.
   ASTRAGAL something to do with navigation?
   CUADRILLA a dance (for Spanish lobsters?)
   ROBUSTA a porn actress, by any chance? Actually,I knew that one, but it would have floored those who knew not ARABICA in the ST last week.
   ECO a gimme (of sorts) for TLS aficionados (and, I suspect, NY Times solvers) but with EGO a strong temptation.
   Add in GABONESE (not the first African to spring to mind) and the whole thing’s clearly a deliberate provocation. I once learned in a French holiday camp an Italian silly song about sardines which finished with an emphatic “gabon” at the end of each chorus, which will now be my earworm del giorno.
   Personally, I thought this was great fun, with I’LL BE BOUND a favourite penny drop – that omitted apostrophe always throws me. Let’s hope with all those weird entries, none of us is INEDUCABLE.
   1. Oh, and I just thought GLAD was the leading part of a lady called Gladys, and never twigged it was a hidden. Doesn’t help that all of Gladys is hidden as a kind of subliminal prompt.
10. 24:10. Like others I had to trust to the wordplay for CUADRILLA and ASTRAGAL, but NABOTH was vaguely remembered and I know my cheeses. As for the coffee, there was a recent story about some coffees, claiming to be pure Arabica, being found to be adulterated with the cheaper Robusta beans. Like Martinp1, I found MATTERHORN tricky to spot, and for the same reasons. Last two in were BRADFORD and LABEL. COD to the nicely hidden GLAD.
11. I thought most UK based solvers would know CUADRILLA as the fracking company who have been mentioned in the news a lot in recent times. Not that that has anything to do with a Spanish team.

    I thought there were some very good surfaces again today, in particular in my COD, CROWNED. My LOI was NABOTH which I thought I was never going to get.

12. 32′ today, online, with lots of crossed fingers. Same unknowns as everyone else – CUADRILLA, PECORINO, NABOTH, ASTRAGAL. Knew ROBUSTA only because of a news story recently that coffee sold as ‘100% Arabica’ is being adulterated with Robusta. Challenging but not satisfactory. Thanks jack and setter.
13. Some very nice clues, some that didn’t seem to be so hot, and many (for me) unusual or difficult words. I was WELL long on this, probably due to the SWOT in less familiar words, but it’s not necessarily something I’m averse to in a quality crossword like The Times. It was however most unkind for a Tuesday!

    Thanks setster and blogster.

14. Some tricky elements to this, and, as ulaca points out, things are generally easy if you know them, rather more difficult if you don’t. Happily, I have eaten plenty of the cheese in my time, and if I’ve learned one thing about Naboth in the course of solving crosswords, it’s that he had a vineyard (or, to be more accurate, I have literally learned one thing about Naboth, and that is it), so those were write-ins. On the other hand, once it became clear that 2dn wasn’t Barcelona, that had to be teased out from the wordplay, likewise the joint. Very enjoyable.
15. Same experience as others – too many obscurities. I don’t have the patience these days to sweat over them – I just derive an answer from wordplay and look it up Chambers or use Google, Mephisto style. New solvers should try to remember NABOTH who crops up from time to time and is a write in once you know he owned a vineyard. Well blogged Jack
16. Some good stuff here and also a few of the usual things that I dislike.
17. That’s what this Jezebel of a puzzle did for me. Worth it for the Frankie Laine ear worm alone. Over the hour and used checkers for ASTRAGAL, PECORINO and ROBUSTA, so a DNF. I did know Naboth and his vineyard though. I can never hear the Matterhorn mentioned without hearing Kenneth Horne replying to Kenneth Williams that there was nothing the matter. I was off form today, even spending a couple of minutes on BRADFORD, thinking “surely Gerald was a republican.” This was altogether too good for me. I can’t solve and chew gum at the same time. Thank you Jack and setter.
18. Much the same experience as others above. 40 minutes to all done except NABOTH which was plonked in from word play, never heard of him, so went to Wiki for enlightenment.
    CUADRILLA looked familiar but also really just wordplay.
    The rest was fun.
19. I was about to be cross that PICERONO cost me this one – usual complaints here, as well – but I also had a stab at EGO so I wouldn’t have passed muster anyhow. That clue, in retrospect, should have been easy to solve – maybe it’s the different pronunciation of ECO that baffled me.
    I’m not having a good run at the moment. Probably too keen to hit the stopwatch with dodgy guesses left in the grid.
20. The PECORINO Romano sits next to the parmesan in the local supermarket. The biblical and literary stuff came courtesy of the TLS so no real hold-ups there. It seemed plausible that a Spanish football team might be called something that sounds like a “quadrille” (except I see thanks to Jack that it’s not actually football after all). 22.32
21. I was very lucky to get through this one unscathed in 35 minutes. CUADRILLA and ASTRAGAL were both loitering in the very darkest recesses of the dusty cabinet I use as a memory. The parsing for CUADRILLA made sense, retrospectively, but that for ASTRAGAL was largely beyond me. NABOTH was completely NHO and went in on a wing, a prayer and some parsing.

22. I thought this was tough. 37 mins with fingers crossed for unknowns ASTRAGAL and NABOTH – not helped by dithering over whether ASTRAY could be clued as “leaving”. Isn’t it actually an adverb meaning “having left”?

    1. I think it works in its adjectival sense, as in ‘no thread was astray’.
       1. I’m still not entirely convinced, but it’s a bit of a minor quibble and you are probably quite right.
23. 36:42, but with EGO. I had no idea what was going on in this clue and guessed the definition wrongly. Simple if you know Umberto, I suppose, but I didn’t. Went with GAL rather than GEL for same reason as K and U. Chose the correct order of vowels for the cheese as it then seemed very vaguely familiar, as did the vineyard owner once I constructed him from the wordplay. CUADRILLA was familiar from the Shale Gas outfit, and the parsing worked. I was held up in the NW by biffing CORONET at 3d, but eventually untangled the corner. I feel vaguely miffed at the effort involved to finish up with that one error. Thanks setter and Jack.

    Edited at 2018-05-22 12:38 pm (UTC)

24. I didn’t find this too hard (under 15 mins) but for the second day running I’m wearing a Ken Bruce “one letter out” virtual t-shirt. Yesterday was ARENA / ARECA (sounds like a Eurovision entry) and today was ASTRAGEL.

    No problem with Pecorino (food & drink is one of my few strong suits). It’s delicious with figs and honey.

    1. ….. I am reading this with a hard ‘G’.
25. 14:19. I seem to have been on the wavelength for this, in spite of a large number of unknowns. I thought everything was fairly clued, but I am sympathetic on PECORINO. In the setter’s defence it would never have occurred to me that it might be unfamiliar. Just goes to show, one person’s whatsit is another’s thingy.
    1. Are you saying that cheesy Wotsits are flavoured with Pecorino?
       1. Never mind PECORINO, are they even flavoured with cheese?
26. Good, because that’s how I typed it
27. Jeez. Quite a mass of obscure stuff in this one, so I DNF. I actually knew ROBUSTA, ECO and PECORINO, so no problems there. I even found the GABONESE. I deduced CUADRILLA from wordplay, and actually also figured out NABOTH from its wordplay, but had never heard of him/it, so had to look him up along with ASTRAGAL. And I’m apparently the only one who has never heard I’LL BE BOUND. Bad day for puzzling today. Regards.
28. My favourite Italian deli/cafe is literally across the road so I pass the PECORINO every day en route to the coffee (ROBUSTA?). Anyway, the only real problem I had here was with ASTRAGAL – completely unknown but gettable with a lucky guess for the penultimate letter. Hugely enjoyable. Thanks to setter and blogger. 34 minutes. Ann
29. 24 mins. Tricky! Great blog.
30. I own to being down on concentration when I tackled this one, but I’m pretty sure that I would have been slow even on top form. Same experiences as most others, and pleased to tease everything out from dim recesses of memory and wordplay, even for the unknowns and forgottens.
31. 42:20 tricky in parts but I enjoyed being pushed a bit out of my comfort zone by some of the vocab (Naboth and astragal in particular). FOI 1ac. LOI 28ac where “astray” came to me in a moment of inspiration. I relied on wordplay for cuadrilla, Gabonese wasn’t exactly on the tip of the tongue, like others the recent Robusta subbed for Arabica story in the paper helped at 7dn, I found franchisee and enrapt odd words, zero pens was nice, glad was well-hidden and I remember being shocked at Umberto’s previous, pre-deceased appearance, not so this time around. COD lemon drop.
32. Finally got to this at 11.30 p.m. and found it extremely frustrating (even though it only took me seconds over 13 minutes)

    Too many biffs and DNK’s for it to be enjoyable, but COD to PRESS, another concise triple.

33. No way to decide between COADRILLA and CUADRILLA except that in retrospect the latter looks more Spanish. Got it wrong though, which was very annoying after struggling for ages with ASTRAGAL, NABOTH, and GABONESE. (Nearly put GABOYESE on the grounds that “I see” = “O yes” and E = an obscure abbreviation for extinct, but common sense prevailed and I figured out the correct wordplay afterwards.) Knew George Sand from her well-known affair with Chopin.
34. Didn’t see the triple def. for PRESS, read it as “Iron stuff” for first definition, “in” as a link word”, then “cupboard” as the second def. – quite wrongly as I realise now. Thanks for clarifying some tricky points, ROMP being another.
35. Mostly very good. Only got Naboth by biffing – nb can we exclude obscure characters in an obscure book not many read any more.
    ordinary bloke

Comments are closed.