Times Cryptic 27,083: Larks Ascending

51 comments on “Times Cryptic 27,083: Larks Ascending”

1. The last 5 or so minutes of that time were taken up with staring at the NW sector hoping for enlightenment, which came all of a sudden: thought of EEL (with the ‘line’ of 1ac)/LEEWAY/WEASEL in about 5 seconds. Or 5 minutes, 5 seconds. DNK WIG, so perhaps I’m younger than I thought. I was a bit slow on the uptake with 26ac, as I only knew ‘tragedy queen’. Wouldn’t it have been the subject, not the king, who was over-familiar? Not that either would have been likely to use ‘Ted’ in 13th- or 14th-century England. There was a period in my life, when I was even younger than Verlaine, where I’d wind up after work at a bar that offered triple whiskeys for $1, and I’d have a couple while smoking a cigar and playing liar’s dice with some other barflies; amazed that I survived that epoch. Verb. sap., V.
2. 30 mins pre breakfast – which was yoghurt, blueberries and other superfoods. Not tomato.
   No MERs.
   Mostly I liked: Triple Jump
   Thanks setter and V.
3. Very easy this, with just a couple (28ac, 8dn) I was a bit slow to get
   1. Nice lyric.
4. TWIG was my LOI, because the “lecture” sense of “wig” is even more obscure to a Yank than it seemed to be for Keriothe. HALO was great when I got it, but I’m not sure I’d ever heard of “flourine” before.

   To me, “stiff” in relation to the alcohol content, or “strength,” of a drink is proportional. A double or triple wouldn’t then be any stiffer than a single of the exact same potion, there would just be more of it.

   Edited at 2018-07-06 07:16 am (UTC)

   1. So would a single Scotch straight up be stiffer than a triple on the rocks or with a splash of soda?
      1. I would say the stiffness of any drink is directly proportional to the total alcoholic content of it, though with extra brownie points available for lack of dilution. simples
         1. You sound like my kind of drinker.
      2. Does anyone here like Dalwhinnie?

         Tesco gave me a £35 bottle of it for free, presumably by accident, in an online shopping delivery. Curiously, it still has the security tag on (making me look like a right criminal to all my house guests), but that hasn’t prevented me getting the lid off.

         Today’s puzzle is well easy for a Friday I think, but nicely balanced in other ways. So TRIPLE JUMP possibly the fave.

         Thanks both players.

         1. The whisky is good. But don’t bother visiting Dalwhinnie. It is a desolate place that the A9 now bypasses, consisting mostly of a petrol station and a distillery. The only reason I have even been is not having enough petrol to make it to Aviemore in student days to go skiing. It is the opposite of some of the wineries here in California that have beautiful settings, but the wine doesn’t measure up.
            1. And in a demonstration of total lack of taste, my spellchecker puts a red line under “whisky” and says it should have an “e” in it. Philistine.
      3. Yes, by my preferred definition, by which “stiff” pertains to how strong a drink is, sip by sip: how it tastes and feels.
5. 10:56 … with a genuine typo that I’ve decided to ignore.

   I don’t think the pangrammaticality of it’s been mentioned. So now it has.

   Quite fun. Liked HALO and the Shrek reference especially

   V, re the comment in your intro, isn’t Hamlet’s mum one of the people to whom the play within a play is shown?

   1. Yes, that observation definitely makes the surface actively rather clever, rather than just a random stringing together of weakish parts… Caught in the setter’s mousetrap! I shall retract my implication that it was the least satisfactory clue of the puzzle.
   2. We crossed!
      1. 🙂
   3. That’s a great word, but it will only fit in a jumbo.
6. 12:12. Nothing to frighten the horses today, at least in so far as I am a crossword-solving horse. I was a bit surprised to see tomatoes described as a SUPERFOOD, but why not? Most of the claims made about such foods are bogus anyway. And I wasn’t 100% sure about WIG for ‘lecture’.

   Edited at 2018-07-06 06:37 am (UTC)

   1. I suppose compared to a big mac, almost anything is a superfood
   2. WIG as in “give someone a wigging” seemed OK to me, although its not a phrase I’ve heard for a long time.
      1. My wife often gives me a wigging although I would describe it as an earwigging, which has nothing to do with a keyhole.
7. Took me a teeny bit longer than V (14 minutes longer, in fact) mostly because I came up with some perfectly good answers of my own. Most derailing was TRAP at 10, which certainly approximated “suddenly get” and RAP for lecture was at least as good as WIG. But that left poor old Zola trying to be some sort of prickly pear (like the infamous OPUNTIA) which I hadn’t heard of.
   I don’t think I share V’s enthusiasm for 16 either: that second sentence in the clue had cryptic elements that were plausible but superfluous, and there are lots of TAX RE-somethings that could have been intended. In the end I took the TURN bit to be the reverse-clue anagram indicator, didn’t equate it with change, and ignored the padding.
   Tomatoes can’t be a superfood – I eat them and they’re not obscure, scratty vegetation even an elk would hesitate at. Plus MacDonalds use them (if not in the Big Mac™), never knowingly healthy.
   Add to that the (now not-so-sneaky) W(ith) at 1 across and I was getting tetchy. Maybe I’m just a drama queen.
   Be that as it may, thanks V for making the most of it and setting a benchmark time. I’ll see if I can compete on the Quickie.
   1. I wouldn’t claim 16 is a clue for the ages, just that it stood out a little in a fairly straightforward puzzle!
8. Nice spot on Gertrude: elevates the clue to something much more sophisticated that would have looked good in a TLS.
9. Made heavier weather of this than I should, taking 35 minutes with LOI SUNKEN. Wasn’t helped by an initial biff of a refund on my TAX RETURN. Ever the disappointed optimist. COD to TRIPLE JUMP or DRAMA QUEEN? I’ll go for the latter as I still call the other one hop, skip and jump. Maybe that’s a SYNOPSIS of what the drama queen did. Whoops, has my HALO just slipped? Pleasant puzzle. Thank your V and setter.
10. I started this having had all my confidence knocked out of me by a QC that took me 30 minutes including a gentle nudge from a thesaurus concerning my LOI – so technically it was a DNF. I felt I was struggling all the way through this one but I completed it without refernce to aids and was amazed to find only 34 minutes on the clock missing my target by just 4 minutes.

    I don’t think anyone has mentioned it’s a pangram.

    1. Drat! Dead heat on the clocks but you got over the line first.

       Edited at 2018-07-06 07:28 am (UTC)

    2. My bugbear is the QC. I think one of my posts about one of them has been deleted, so I must have been on a right rant. Anyway, it’s not just you jackkt.
       1. It’s very rare for TftT posts to be deleted penge_guin.
11. 16:45. Nothing in until I reached ABU DHABI then steady progress anti-clockwise. I also fell in the TRAP trap until I twigged old Emile and I spent some time wondering what might be good or light about SAGO. Note to self: sometimes you just have to let go of the word that first came to mind.
12. 15:04 with a lot of fun along the way. Tomatoes as a superfood caused a MER. I liked TRIPLE JUMP and TWIG, which were 2 of my last 3 in. Thanks V and setter.
13. LOI 1ac WEASEL in 32 mins.

    North West Passage held me up badly with 4dn LEEWAY the main culprit.

    FOI 14dn ARTBITRARY

    COD 9ac TRIPLE JUMP

    WOD 26ac DRAMA QUEEN

    Re- Mr Myrtilus’s Gin & Lime Marmalade:-

    I purchased three jars sadly only two arrived safely.

    I was not entirely spellbound with the product none of my friends or family were – on my travels round England.

    I think a couple of shots of Gordons stirred into in a jar of Roses would be equally as good.

    As for the label a real chance has been missed by Messrs. Lewis & Cooper. Noting a new British affectation for gin some of their labels are divine – the St. Germain with Elder Flowers especially.

    The Lewis & Cooper label is just awful and is laser printed – so it soon rubs off – but not the contents I’m afraid.

    I did however find some excellent quince jelly in a tapas bar in Walthamstow village.

    1. I don’t believe it!
       I appreciate the honest critique. In my view it is unsurpassed.
14. Two minutes over the half hour for this one, much of it spent either over-thinking or failing to think (I’m not sure which).
15. 22’43. Wig as lecture now being no more than an unusable back-formation from wigging, one wonders if the setter might have found another approach. Latch onto excrescence etc. Are superfoods those capable of remarkable growth? As for Shrek…
16. 20 odd minutes for this one. Several aha moments required otherwise straight forward. Only realised it was a Friday today when I saw Verlaine on the blog. 2 last ins were HALO and SUNKEN both of which took a bit of thinking. Sun doesn’t immediately come to mind with bask. Esp when I had already typed in SON…
17. 23 minutes – several spent in SE, where I had first put RELIEF at 16dn (only partly parsed), which made 26ac & 28ac impossible. After seeing 26ac, which confirmed the pangram, went for REFUND, which I still couldn’t parse, and also meant I was trying to make SYDNEY (or SIDNEY) work at 28ac. However another think about how to parse 16dn put me right, with a thumbs-up to that clue: so 28ac was LOI.
18. As the 30 minute mark approached I had completed around 75% of the puzzle and was beginning to think I’d ground to a halt, but inspiration suddenly struck and I was away with LEEWAY and BARCODES enabling me to TWIG the rest. DRAMA QUEEN was my LOI as the clock struck 33:46. I considered TAX REBATE at 16d, but then it struck me that a RETURN could go either way, so was more likely. Perhaps I should get a helmet considering the number of times I’ve been struck during this puzzle! Thanks setter and V.
19. This did feel on the easy side, especially with SERIES = SERIES & BEER = BEER in 2d & its symmetrical partner at 24d. For some clues I should have been quicker – e.g. for 11a I discarded ?EPROA?? for some reason, before coming back to it towards the end – but didn’t get too held up, finishing in 8m 24s.

    If I’d decided to go for TRAP it could have been worse, but fortunately I wasn’t quite convinced enough to pen it in. LOI was 28a, where I was tempted by SON?E? for a while.

20. Just under the 20 min mark, so time available to work on the surprisingly hard QC.

    Vaughan Williams’s music
    Is not always wrong
    But it tends to be basic
    And goes on too long

    Cf The Lark Ascending, Fantasy on a Theme by Thomas Tallis etc

21. Office, rebate, relief, return…..tried three of these.

    LOI TWIG, took a while to twig.

    15’25” thanks verlaine and setter.

22. Way back, in honour of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, my work colleague Vaughan was rechristened as Vogon.
    Puzzle mostly straightforward but needed a bit of thinking eg in 16 dn where the clue seemed too long, as Verlaine says. Halo took a bit of thinking, but LOI by far was SUNKEN where I’d correctly guessed what was needed but still took 5 minutes, ending with an alphabet trawl, taking me over 20 minutes.
    1. I hope he didn’t sing in the office !
23. I agree with Verlaine and others: the world was turned on its head today. After taking ages to finish the QC with one wrong, I managed to solve this in one sitting. FOI was ARBITRARY and LOI was SUNKEN (like so many).I did not help myself with TAX REFUND for a long time. Held up a bit in the NW and wasn’t sure about HALO.
    Now onto a diet of continuous football.
    Talking of diets, I am sure I have read in The Times that tomatoes are considered by some to be a superfood. David
24. ….else I might still be struggling with LOI SUNKEN, where I failed to see bask = sun, and tried for too long to fit around SON-E-

    14:08 with FOI TRIPLE JUMP, and the need to come here for V to parse TAX RETURN for me.

    COD DRAMA QUEEN

    I see those damned “men” have returned at 20D

    Edited at 2018-07-06 01:40 pm (UTC)

25. Had to work south to jorth on this but answered steadily in just over 30m (unusual for Friday). Toyed with sago at 13a thinking gas was in there somewhere, but couldn’t justify this as either good or light! COD 9 across while I savour a Belgian tripel watching the footie. Thanks all
26. 48:14 for me. I made harder work of this than I needed to – trying to find lift and separation at some point in “a very stiff drink”, looking for some sort of eco giant in 12ac, missing the anagram and persisting in looking for a sound-a-like indicated by broadcast at 5dn, trying to crowbar e-fit into 19ac and so it went on. Found superfood, leeway and weasel in the NW hardest to get.
27. No bother with this, other than repeatedly falling asleep. Too hot.
28. Too stupid a crossword to get into this.
    So many could be this, could be that clues.
    Even the whizzos above were questioning some
    e.g. superfood, Ted, ease.
    13 ac is the dunce of the day. it is also ‘fair’
    ordinary bloke
29. No problems for me (nor with the QC which I did faster than this). I think about 30 mins. Not exactly sure since I opened tabs on both crosswords since my internet was being flaky. Now sitting waiting for the cable guy to show up. Now, of course, it’s working perfectly and so I have no way to know if anything is fixed.
30. ‘Bout 30 mins for me too, dead tree. That means rather easy for a Friday, so agree with Verlaine. Nice things throughout though, other than items singled out passim.

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