Times Cryptic 28970

84 comments on “Times Cryptic 28970”

1. 25:33
   I never figured out OBLIQUE because I stuck with ‘liquor’, never thinking of ‘liqueur’. Also failed with POKER (DNK ‘plonker’) and CAPER. DNK ROCAMBOLE, but as Jack says. DNK QUANT. I thought of ARIZONA long before I figured it out, guessing that there is/was a Harry’s Bar in Venice; I thought it was in Paris. I liked TOWPATH.

   1. ‘Plonker’ has come up on numerous occasions either as an answer or as the definition of a word meaning ‘fool’. It owes its popularity in recent decades to the TV sitcom Only Fools and Horses in which the lead character Del Boy used it frequently as an affectionate term of abuse for his younger brother, Rodney Trotter. In fact in September 2018 we had a themed Quick Cryptic on the show (#1174) set by ‘Del Boy’ who I suspect was Richard Rogan as that was the only time that setter name appeared. Unusually you didn’t comment that day.

2. Yes, very tricky but managed to finish without resorting to aids. I thought Rocambole was a good example of a little known word clued with helpful wordplay rather than an anagram or homophone. Liked Byronic. Thanks for sorting Arizona as I had no idea of the parsing and never heard of Harry’s Bar, also a change from the usual Cockney hint to omit the H.
   And it’s a pangram!
   Thanks Jack and setter.

3. POI 1A, LOI 1D!
   Know of Cipriani, and have been to Venice, but am not big on Hemingway and didn’t know the bar.
   “Therm” as the ancient bath is not in Collins but I found it in Chambers.

   1. Guy – for what its worth, the owner of Harry’s Bar was Cipriani – Arrigo Cipriani. I met him several times because my father actually bought the Cipriani hotel which “old man Cipriani” (as we all called him) developed with the Guinness family. In spite of all the history and connections (I go to Venice several times each year), I completely missed the ARIZONA link! Doh! Not the brightest start to my day, even if I did complete the xword correctly.

      1. Splendidly arcane name-dropping! It’s good for the less well connected of us to know that intimate knowledge of Harry’s Bar did not necessarily assist in solving the clue! Many thanks.

4. About 90 minutes. Most enjoyable. FOI INSTANCE Thought JIGSAW was very clever when I parsed it. LOI CAPER. AFICIONADO seems to be a regular.

   1. I wondered if there were a contest among setters to come up with clues for AFICIONADO!

5. I was expecting a toughie, but I had all the knowledge and zipped through – zipped for me, anyways. Poker was the only one I couldn’t parse, but it had to be. Being a close follower of finance, a quant came to mind immediately, and I enjoyed Harry’s owner – almost as good as the Paul McKenna puns.

   Time: 20 minutes.

6. 51 minutes. Hard going, not helped by two new words in MICKLE and ROCAMBOLE and taking ages to work out the CEREMONIAL and LAMBASTES anagrams. I ended up bunging in ARIZONA as a ‘state’ without any idea how the clue worked so I was fortunate to not have any errors. The pangram and that precious crossing Q helped with OBLIQUE and QUAINT.

7. After 25 mins, was staring at and not getting REVERE, ROCAMBOLE, KERBSTONE (‘Kerbspots’?) and MACHINERY (despite considering; had convinced self it must be some Scottish-named 18th-century landscape gardener), gave up and went to work. Only REVERE to be added to the must-know bank, I think. Roll on tomorrow! Fun solve though.

8. Gave up at about 40 with ROCAMBOLE and TERM unsolved. Never knew of a therm and the wordplay for the plant was a bridge too far for me. I had been working uselessly on an anagram of recall my + o, and getting nowhere even though the checkers fitted that pattern. Meanwhile I missed the anagram for the lovely TOWPATH clue and was held up for quite some time. I knew Harry’s (it’s right there in the square) and got ARIZONA without seeing the ‘owner’ part, just one of many challenging clues that made Jack earn his money today. I thought the def for KERBSTONE was too much of a stretch.

   From Tombstone Blues:
   The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course
   The city fathers they’re trying to endorse
   The reincarnation of Paul REVERE’s horse
   But the town has no need to be nervous

   1. no mention of pangram
      or wasn’t it?

      1. It’s been mentioned 7 or 8 times – originally by the second poster at 02:27am. Not in the blog though as I didn’t spot it myself.

9. ROCAMBOLE unknown, of course, but helpfully clued. I did know that was a Harry’s Bar in Venice but I didn’t get the ‘owner bit, although with checkers there was only one state it could be. I did know QUANT since I’ve heard theoretical physics PhDs all go to Wall St to be quants. I also only thought of LIQUOR so OBLIQUE went in with a shrug since it couldn’t be anything else.

10. 12:57. NHO ROCAMBOLE, my LOI, but well-clued – perfectly fair, with a bit of trickiness given the crossers. I wanted it to be be ROCK- for a while.

    I’ve heard of QUANTs, though had a very similar thought process as Jack regarding MICKLE.

    Thanks both.

11. 12:29. There were a couple of words unfamiliar to me – MICKLE and ROCAMBOLE – but I thought both were quite generously clued. Like Amoeba I had expected the plant to be a ROCK-something.
    I find it curious that cars like the original CAPRI look really dated about 10 years or so after production ends, but then a couple of decades on they look classic. I wonder why that is – maybe nostalgia?

12. Having just commented on the QC blog that it’s modern words that account for most of my NHO’s, I came here to find ROCAMBOLE. And I only knew “quant” as a punt pole, or the recently deceased fashion designer – fortunately I’d realized it was a pangram by the the time I spotted OBLIQUE, and promptly biffed QUAINT. I also biffed ARIZONA. The only Harry’s Bar I know is Jethro Tull’s “Another Harry’s Bar”.

    FOI CURTSEY
    LOI ARIZONA
    COD MACHINERY (great misdirection!)
    TIME 13:32

    1. Mary Quant the fashion designer appeared as answer last April in breach of the ‘living person’ rule two or three days before she died. Spooky!

13. Listen, my children, and you shall hear
    Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
    On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five
    (Longfellow)

    25 mins pre-brekker left me worrying about the NHO Rocambole and puzzling over Poker. I don’t like the attempt here to indicate losing two letters without being more specific. Other gripes are: Quant (NHO) and I don’t think ‘covers’ is a fair indicator for ‘on top of’.
    Ta setter and J

14. Only 44 minutes, which seemed pretty good considering the difficulty level, and all correct, despite worrying rather about ROCAMBOLE and ARIZONA. Don’t recall Harry’s Bar despite being a Hemingway fan—did he actually write about it, or just drink there? Enjoyed a lot along the way, especially penny-drop moments like “way past locks”…

    1. From memory I would say the main character, Richard Cantwell, in Across the River and Into the Trees, drank there.

       1. Thank you! I have just dusted off a red, hefty brick-like tome that includes it for a re-read.

15. A dnf today as I had banged in ‘ceremonies’, not gone back to it, which meant I couldn’t get OBLIQUE. I would have guessed QUAINT, with no idea at all why. Stopped after 28′.

    ROCAMBOLE was worked out, I liked SAXON, and MACHINERY.

    Pleased to see the proper spelling of KERB – I’ve read fiction recently where the word has been edited to the American spelling.

    Thanks jack and setter.

16. 56 minutes with the last 10 constructing the unknown and unknowable ROCAMBOLE. Otherwise, I had the knowledge, even of the derivatives geek although would have preferred that to have been clued by the fashion designer. Of course I came to Paul REVERE via the reincarnation of his horse. It strikes me that right now the town has every reason to be nervous. COD to ARIZONA and BYRONIC jointly. Tough but enjoyable. Thank you Jack and setter.

    1. Thank you for reminding me, John, that there’s a very good version of that song on Bob’s ‘Unplugged’ album. I shall now give it a whirl.

       1. One small problem with the unplugged version is that Michael Bloomfield is not on it…

          1. Nor, indeed, is Al Kooper!
             That must be one of the proudest boasts in rock: “I played the organ riff on “Like a Rolling Stone”.
             To match that, Rick Wakeman can proudly say “I played piano on “Life on Mars””.

17. 35 mins and very enjoyable, with the last five spent trying to work out the T-R-. Eventually the penny dropped. Lots to like today, especially MACHINERY. ‘ARRYS OWNER (I have been several times, love the Bellinis ),KERBSTONE & TOWPATH.

    DNK the plant but I just followed instructions, which, after yesterday’s debacle were unambiguous!

    Thanks Jack and setter.

    1. How to let us know you’re rolling in it without actually saying. From Wiki on Harry’s Bar: Anthony Bourdain said of Harry’s, “You get a pretty good plate of food—and the Bellinis are just fine. They just cost a f**k of a lot.

       1. 22 euro – that’s quite a drink

       2. I can promise you that when I went there last, maybe 20 years ago it wasn’t that expensive, but you certainly just had the one, I remember, to say you’d « been there »

          Like a lot of things in Venice!

18. 22.00, with most of that trying to construct LOI ROCAMBOLE.
    I spotted the pangrammatic possibility early, which helped with OBLIQUE and PRIZE (though I’d already got ARIZONA, having once quaffed Bellinis in Harry’s Bar).

19. Just one short after 30 mins, which I’m pretty pleased with. Knew QUANT, and got MICKLE from an old carol that claims “There was MICKLE melody at our childes birth”.

    But ROCAMBOLE was new to me, and it doesn’t look much like a plant, I forgot the My=COR device, which sank me.

    Definitely getting better (say this and tomorrow is a toughie)

20. 11:35. My only unknown was ROCAMBOLE, a suitable counterexample to yesterday’s mongoose in that it is fairly and unambiguously clued.
    According to the OED MICKLE is a variant of MUCKLE, i.e. with the same meaning. They are the root of the modern ‘much’ and cognate with numerous ancient and modern European words including in Swedish where ‘thanks very much’ is ‘tack så mycket’.

    1. Not sure about mickle as great. The Scots saying is “ many a mickle maks a muckle” which doesn’t suggest the former is large.

       1. Thanks. I set out to make that pont in my blog as I’ve always thought of it as small.

          1. There are dozens of citations in the OED for mickle and muckle (not to mention meickle, mochel and numerous others) as variants of the same word over hundreds of years, but no examples of ‘mickle’ meaning anything other than a lot.
             And in the entry for ‘muckle’ it says: ‘A large sum or amount. Chiefly in proverb: many a little (also pickle) makes a muckle (now frequently in the garbled form many a mickle makes a muckle).’

             1. I blame the Scots – not a new concept……

       2. Agreed. I’ve always taken MICKLE to mean a small quantity, although in my native Borders dialect, we used “pickle” for a small amount, and “muckle” meaning large.

21. I see from Twitter that this crossword was set by Rob Jacques.

    I took about 25 minutes, with the last 10 spent on the COAX/ARIZONA corner. I should have got the former quicker than I did, and I entered the latter with no idea how it worked, so thanks for the explanation.

    I keep forgetting that LAMBASTES has (or at least can have) an E in it, so the cluing was very helpful here; relied on the wordplay for the unknown ROCAMBOLE; knew MICKLE from the “Lullay, mine liking” carol; and didn’t know REVERE the horseman or quant as a derivatives geek for QUAINT.

    Thanks Jack and Rob.

    FOI Curtsey
    LOI Arizona
    COD Yardstick

    1. Ah very nice – he’s also in the Indy today

    2. He’s interviewed here:

       https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2018/mar/26/crossword-blog-meet-the-setter-knut

22. I took just under 36 minutes, was making quite good time till the last few. NHO ROCAMBOLE but pieced together from the clue, then I had to piece MACHINERY together from the clue, I had been expecting that to be another obscure botanical thing, then my LOI was PRIZE which took me simply ages and endless alphabet trawling to finally (and feeling very stupid) think of the RITZ.
    Thanks Jack and setter
    PS Also for me that spelling of lambaste was new, luckily I got it quickly and took it on trust

23. Gave up after 35 mins completely stumped by Rocambole which I’ve never heard of. Thanks blogger for explaining. Makes sense but not if you have no knowledge. I hate these botanical clues !

24. So I submitted in a decent 20.56 but fully expecting pinks across the board. Since there a many MICKLEs in a muckle I couldn’t see it meaning great, and since Harry’s Bar is unknown to me (I’m currently limited to the King’s Arms, which I don’t think knows much about Bellinis) ARIZONA was a total hit and hope. It had to be ROCAMBLE from the kind wordplay but still looked very unlikely. QUAINT couldn’t be much else, but a quant sounded to rude to be in the Times. Are they’re associated with merchant bankers?
    To my (poor) credit, I did sort out POKER and the clever TOWPATH. Masterful blogging today on a nerve-jangling pangram of a crossword.

25. 45m 30s
    Yesterday’s escapee from the Mephisto was ichneumon. Today we have rocambole. What on earth will Pip have to blog tomorrow?! I had to laugh when I discovered that rocambole was a real word.

    1. Ha! Wait until some setter uses rocambolesque, which is defined as fantastic, incredible, fabulous.

       1. Please! Don’t encourage them!

    2. It’s only rocambole, but I like it.

       1. 🤣🤣

       2. 😄👍

26. NHO of ROCAMBOLE or MICKLE, but wordplay was helpful on both. Liked COAX and ARIZONA. In fact, liked it all – a great test today. Challenging without being stupidly difficult/silly.

27. 22:59 but…

    …inexplicably I have a C where there should be an A in CEREMONIAL – how did that happen (the letters aren’t even close together)?!?!?!

    Otherwise it was a decent puzzle – no idea about Harry’s Bar (ARIZONA was the only ‘state’ I could think of which fit with the checkers) nor what a ROCAMBOLE might be. MICKLE only known of in the saying, but never knew it actually meant anything. QUANT as ‘derivatives geek’ unknown. The rest was fine.

    The modern Ford CAPRI is a blatant use of a much-loved series to attempt to sell their electric carbuncle – they could have at least stuck an E in there somewhere… 🙂

    Thanks Jack and setter

    1. Ford Crapie, maybe?

28. About 45′ but as yesterday only finished after a search (this time on the garlic plant). Not as annoying as yesterday as the wordplay is reasonable I think. Didn’t parse ARIZONA but the state was obvious and I’ve never used the “e” in LAMBASTES before but presumed it must be there. Good meaty Tuesday puzzle though, thanks Jackkt and setter.

29. DNF; defeated by 23a Rocambole. Not in my Cheating Machine. It is now.
    2d Carelessly biffed CeremoniES in error delayed 20a Oblique.
    1d Mickle confused me; I knew “many a mickle maks a muckle” but that implies mickle is small. Shrugged, moved on.
    Otherwise all pleasant and not too hard.
    14d POI we’ve had a lot of aficionados of late; I can now spell it.
    26d DNK that meaning of Therm.

30. No undue probs today, familiar with Harry’s Bar even though I’ve never been there (or to Venice, come to that, nor likely to), nho rocambole but helpful clue.
    I wasn’t sure about mickle, Jackkt’s excerpt from Brewer’s seems as clear as mud to me, but if a muckle is big surely a mickle is small, or so I thought to myself. Still I have been up Mickle Fell, which is huge, so I bunged it in anyway.
    The OED is quite clear that mickle and muckle mean exactly the same thing. It says “In present regional use mickle is the prevailing form in the north of England, and muckle in Scotland.”
    So the “many a mickle etc.” thing is just plain wrong…

    1. Indeed, OED specifically says it’s ‘garbled’ (see my comment above).
       Having said that, if the only context in which most people know the word is that phrase, and in that phrase it necessarily means ‘little’, then that is, ipso facto, what it means.

31. Like others never heard of ROCAMBOLE but managed to construct it from wordplay, and didn’t know the meaning of QUANT, although the answer was obvious. I enjoyed this one a lot, the unknowns were fairly clued and it just became a steady solve from start to finish with few gimmes. I crossed the line in 39.30 with everything parsed for a change.

32. 45:16. A good challenge. NHO ROCAMBOLE, and very cross with it when I thought it was an anagram of my stroll + o, but then CAPER arrived and ruled out the anagram and the plant fell nicely into place. I was confused, like others, by the size of a MICKLE. I liked MACHINERY (oh! that sort of plant) and ARIZONA which I rolled around in my head for ages before getting it to work

33. I wanted it to be pigsty instead of jigsaw, reckoning that pigsty = mess = labyrinth = puzzle (yes, tenuous) but couldn’t make anything out of pty, so resorted to aids and kicked myself. ROCAMBOLE also a complete unknown so I looked it up to check that it was really a word, as one does when solving Azed. Quant in that sense a complete unknown, and ARIZONA a bit of a mystery, since Harry’s Bar is at the outer reaches of my general knowledge. 62 minutes.

34. 18.51

    Loved this. The NHOs were helpfully clued and some nice touches (CAPRI being the Ford not a t, and the excellent MACHINERY). The finger hovered over the M I and E of LOI MICKLE but it had to be

35. Didn’t know MICKLE, QUANT or ROCAMBOLE, but the wordplay was kind. Took me a while to parse ARIZONA, but a smile was duly raised as the penny dropped. I stood outside Harry’s Bar in Venice when I went there for my 50th birthday, but the tariff looked a bit pricey, so I just gazed through the window. LAMBASTES was FOI and KERBSTONE LOI. POI was ROCAMBOLE. Lots to like in this puzzle. 17:51. Thanks setter and Jack.

    1. You should have been bold! It’s a once in a lifetime thing.

36. After finally working out ROCAMBOLE, and carefully proofreading for typos, I confidently pressed submit to discover I had one error. I had entered MUCKLE, since knowledge of the proverb had convinced me that MICKLE was a small thing and MUCKLE must be the great one; not sure I ever really equated mule with distance.

    I liked 15a. The first car I owned was a mark one CAPRI, kept going with spare parts sourced from scrapyards.

37. 25 – Didn’t know ROCAMBOLE, but the geeky back-room boys, Harry of Venice etc were familiar. Some oblique definitions to track down but all very neat once uncovered.

38. 16:13

    Good puzzle. Sometimes they just seem to fall in nicely although I biffed ROCAMBOLE and didn’t have a clue as to how ARIZONA was parsed until Jack explained it. I liked TOWPATH and JIGSAW/

    There are Harry’s Bars in both Venice and Paris. Neither has a dartboard.

    Thanks to Jack and the setter.

39. 45’20”
    Asleep in the stalls, got baffled by the ‘Goowoodian’ loops, delighted to finish at all.

    What a difference a day makes; clearly a great deal of work has gone into this. Masterful misdirection, silky smooth surfaces and a pangram to boot made this a pleasure to solve, and then a pleasure to parse the stragglers over a leisurely espresso. The garlic aside (clued with ‘Pasqualean’ panache), even the quant in the wordplay was gettable; it seemed very feasible that a quant(ative) thingummybobist might be so nicknamed.
    Treno Italia put me on a train to Venice once, but I had to disembark in Milan; my coffee drinking in Italy was restricted to the bars where the barrista looked shamefaced at the twenty cents over the euro for the beaker of water, but I was never served a duff.
    Well done Jack and bravissimo Mr. J, if you are the setter; I very much look forward to your next challenge.

    1. Couldn’t agree more!😃

40. 34 mins including a snooze. Not sure which cheating machine is used by andyf but ROCAMBOLE was in mine…. Some very obscure references, especially QUANT.

41. Seemed to have all the knowledge today and be on the proverbial wavelength. Zipped through in 14 minutes and was surprised to hear of other difficulties but that’s the crossword game – one mans meat etc. Very enjoyable and I thought generous clueing of the unknowns such as ROCAMBOLE. When X and Z appeared in the NE I thought we might be in pangram territory and indeed we were.

    Thanks J and setter

42. I’m sure the Snitch for this was in the 80s when I looked earlier before starting, but it’s over a hundred now. Not just me then. Kept plugging away and eventually finished, but couldn’t parse 23ac, Recompose. . . A failure to parse in the QC always prompts a re-think, but here it comes with the territory, viz Quant in 21d. Invariant

43. Good fun! Didn’t think I was going to get very far with this but was only stumped by ROCAMBOLE. Lots of clever clues especially MACHINERY, ARIZONA and BYRONIC.
    I’ve only ever thought of a MICKLE being smaller than a MUCKLE. Never heard them being used interchangeably when I was growing up in Aberdeen – but happy to be corrected that they are corruptions of the same word although that makes the usual phrase problematic…
    Thanks yet again to setter and blogger.

44. 25’30”, but with a few unparsed – MICKLE, for which I still don’t get the definition, ARIZONA, which went in as soon as I had the first and last letters but which, as a southerner, I can only just about force to work if I put on a northern accent which would quite rightly get me sent home, and POKER, which now makes sense but only because of a re-surfaced memory of an unaccountably successful TV series which woefully under-used David Jason’s considerable acting talent. (Jason was superb as the old man, Blanco Webb, in ‘Porridge’, especially as the actor was only 35 at the time.)

    1. I took ‘rough’ as an instruction to drop the H and a welcome variation on the more usual customary reference to Cockneys.

45. 22:24, with the last 5 of that spent working out ROCAMBOLE (NHO).

46. I chuckled with pleasure at AFICIONADO, thinking now I really know how to spell it, no double “f” or “c” or even “n”, then I went and changed the first “o” for an “a”.
    ROCAMBOLE became ever so hard to fit in.
    Other than that a corker of a puzzle, so many of the clues required second thoughts.
    Great blog too, thanks

47. There is of course a Harry’s in Paris too. It is where James Bond lost his virginity, according to one of the Fleming stories. Can’t remember which. The one where he starts off reminiscing on the Champs Elysees. GREMLINS were dreamed up by Roald Dahl, weren’t they? Wartime RAF lore about why things inevitably went wrong on planes. 20’21”. Many thanks as ever.

48. No idea of my time because my iPad was doing most peculiar things with the puzzle.

49. Am I the only one not to know RV for Recreational Vehicle?

    1. No, you’re not alone as I didn’t know it until I looked it up when writing the blog.

50. You know you’re off your game when you look at A _ I _ O _ A and think, well, it’s not a state in the US.

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