Times Cryptic 29228

95 comments on “Times Cryptic 29228”

1. A nice easyish puzzle for a Tuesday, I thought. No hold-ups and lots of BIFDs, TIBERIUS, COMMON OR GARDEN, MAKE DO, and more. NHO TILTH but the wordplay was clear. DOGGY BAG took a while after seeing dog/pet but couldn’t see what was required but eventually saw gag/muzzle. I’m assuming ‘can’t get into’ is saying the diner has had enough and requests a doggy bag?
   Lots to like here today and thought it was fun. COD to INDISCRIMINATE.
   Thanks Jack and setter.

   1. I thought it meant a dog wearing a muzzle can’t eat whatever is in the doggy bag.

      1. Think that’s it!

      2. Thank you. Got it.

      3. That’s obviously the surface reading but the structure of the clue is such that ‘can’t get into’ has to be part of the definition. So something like Quadrophenia’s idea is required.

         1. It felt a bit ‘clunky’ to me, but not sufficiently so to hold me up. 22 mins and a bit today.

         2. I’m quite unsure of the intended meaning of ‘doggy bag’ in this clue. Here in Oz, it is either a bag for cleaning up after a dog in the park, say or a takeaway package from a restaurant when someone cannot finish eating and requests it to be wrapped to take home. Is there another meaning?

            1. It’s definitely the latter here. The former is a ‘dog poo bag’ or similar.

            2. You’d definitely need to watch for the difference in real life 😂

         3. I agree with Paul about DOGGY BAG – I think the question mark covers the fact that “pet” is doing double duty. 25 minutes, though nearly ended up with “glaze” at 23D!

2. Straightforward for a change. FOI TWO-BY-FOUR and COMMON OR GARDEN was a write-in. LOI HOOPOE which I NHO but the wordplay spells it out nicely.
   Thanks Jack

3. Yes, should have been straightforward but a fail instead. Managed to get the unknown JABOT and forgotten TILTH but I had a mental blank for AUSPICES for which I put in a weak SUSPECTS – doesn’t fit wordplay or def. I remembered HOOPOE from “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” books and funnily enough, an episode of “Midsomer Murders”.

4. Like jack said, a lot which needed a second squint to make sure the parsing all worked properly, but very little that caused trouble, especially after a crosser or two. Nice to see someone other than Nero when we get around to emperors.

5. My LOI was GLACE… properly, “glacé.” Yes, I resisted this answer because the acute E is a different letter to me.

   1. Interesting that it is/isn’t a different letter.
      I’m sure we’re both aware that the Times Xword ignores accents.
      In ASCII as extended, for instance, it has a different code, but in script (used to drive a laser printer from a mainframe many years ago) you have to reverse over the letter and overwrite an accent, so not a different letter.

      1. In French accents are optional on capital letters so E and É are in fact the same letter. Not to be confused with E 😉

         1. They are indeed optionnel or facultatif on capital letters when typographical constraints make them impractical. As in a crossword grid. Of course I’m used to this in crosswords. In this case, however, lacé was nevertheless the cause of my brief resistance to accepting this word.

         2. “Not to be confused with” what?

            1. The E in GLACE is the same letter as the E in CAFE, but should not be confused with the E in PLAGE.

               1. Ha.
                  Not to mention the second E in DERRIERE.

                  1. Let’s not get started on ETAGERE.

                     1. EVENEMENT

                        1. Mèrçî Pétrônèllà91!

6. I did not find this that easy. I had to jump around the grid, trying to get started somewhere. Yes, everyone was obvious, and anatomist is a chestnut, but I wasn’t expecting Tiberius to show up. As I got further, I sped up, but I still had the glace/treat/asteroid belt corner left, which proved difficult.

   Any setter who expects you to know jabot, poisson, and apices will probably give most solvers all they can handle.

   Time: 34:47

   1. I didn’t remember jabot but it didn’t matter… a jot.
      I don’t believe setters expect solvers to know all of the words in any grid.

7. 14:22. Not really all that tough considering the presence of JABOT, TILTH, GLACE and HOOPOE.

   Australia must be the only place where the timber is referred to as “four-by-two”, which has to be rendered as “four-be-two” if you want to be understood by the relevant tradie.

   I liked HEDGEHOG (although I wouldn’t have parsed it as a cryptic) and COMMON-OR-GARDEN.

   Thanks setter and Jack.

   1. Four-be-two is the old cockney pronunciation. My grandad always called it that.

      1. What do we call it now we’ve gone metric? fifty by hundred? Or is it like the rest of the shambles of metrication, totally irrational and ignored officially?

      2. It’s also a rather unpleasant rhyming slang, but rarely heard nowadays.

         1. Yes, I remember that. Not nice.

      3. In my days, long ago, as a builders merchant, the timber we sold was always referred to with the greater dimension first.

   2. I don’t know how it is down under but here they will happily sell you four by two in the full knowledge that actually it isn’t. Usually it is 45×95 mm, if planed.
      My house was built using feet and inches and the difference is occasionally irritating..

   3. Yes surely DD

8. My benchmarks for notable completion are 5 for the QC and 20 for this, and today I was a shade over both (5.11 and 20.08) so not a bad day all round. Was a bit confused by LOI GLACE and I’m not crazy about DOGGY BAG but otherwise a fun solve, obscurities and all. Thanks Jack and setter.

   Lots of Bob options today but from Spirit on the Water:
   I wanna be with you in PARADISE
   And it seems so unfair
   I can’t go to paradise no more
   I killed a man back there

9. I must admit to have wasted some time in considering if there was a HEDGESOW (if there is a HOG, then why not a SOW?) constructed of EDGES and a clever anagram of WHO, but in the end I plumped for the obvious with my fingers firmly crossed. Phew!

   1. A male hedgehog is a boar, a female is a sow, a baby is a hoglet. But they are all hedgehogs

10. 26:58, fast one.

    LOI JABOT and BOMBE. NHO JABOT, and tried to make JOUST work.

    Didn’t parse AUSPICES, as never heard of the pedantic “apices”. Apex is an English word, so it should have an English plural. This is as pretentious as going into Starbucks and asking for two “capuccini”.

    COMMON OR GARDEN now rendered as “bog standard”.

    COD HEDGEHOG

11. 6.20 – PSB (Personal Second-best)!
    I didn’t have to follow my usual solving sequence (3-letter words, left border Downs, then Acrosses from top downwards) as answers kept jumping out all over the place. If only that happened every day!
    LOI AUSPICES
    COD JACKET POTATO

    1. Well done! Cracking time.

12. 17:10
    No major problems but I felt a little slow making my way around the grid. JABOT, BOMBE, and TILTH were all words I’d seen before but didn’t exactly know what they were, and I spent an age putting together the rather straightforward COMMON-OR-GARDEN.

    A sluggish start to the week for me.

    Thanks to both.

13. Insufficient care resulting in a pink in GLAZE. I’m prepared to believe almost anything as a material but yes, Lace is obvious now.
    25 mins though so mostly plain sailing once I ignored JABOT to come back to later.
    Not sure a JACKET POTATO is a snack, I’d class it a decent lunch.
    Thanks both.

    1. I agree about the jacket potato! I considered GLAMÉ before deciding there surely had to be another _A_E fabric, and thankfully it came to me.

14. 9:33. Some chewy bits in this. I may have come across JABOT before but I didn’t remember it. I don’t know where I know TILTH from but I do.
    For the reason identified by Quadrophenia above I don’t think the clue for DOGGY BAG quite works. But if you squint a bit you won’t notice.

15. A PB for me. 22 minutes with no aids and no spelling mistakes.

    JABOT seemed vaguely familiar. AUSPICES evoked memories of studying the Scottish play – one day we might encounter haruspication perchance?
    Stumbled across (rather than towards) a quotation from Yeats yesterday so that helped too.
    COD for me was ASTEROID BELT very nice but surprised not to have encountered it before.
    Thanks to setter and jackkt.

    1. Well done with your PB!

16. Easy for 20 mins the it wasn’t. ANATOMIST’ PROLONGED, GLACE all held me up.

    Hoopoes wake me up every morning. They live in a tree by our garden.

    I led Two-BY-FOUR.

    Thanks Jack and setter.

17. 12’54”, only JABOT nho.

    I’ve not used the word ‘apices’ but it seemed to fit with vertex, index, appendix etc.

    Thanks jack and setter.

18. Just over 20 minutes.

    – Relied on wordplay for the unknown JABOT
    – Same for TILTH
    – Biffed INDISCRIMINATE from the checkers
    – Had to trust that a HOOPOE is a bird

    Thanks Jack and setter.

    FOI Jettison
    LOI Hoopoe
    COD Hedgehog

19. One error! GLAZE for GLACE. Would have been a decent time. Just under 12 mins.

    COD: INDISCRIMINATE

    1. Me too, must be something about us Villa fans…

       (Except I took a lot longer than 12 minutes)

       1. 😀

20. 32:41
    All good.
    Thanks, jack.

21. 7:55 having wasted time at the beginning failing to get either of the 1s at first look. JABOT was obvious at the end but needed all the checkers. We once had a HOOPOE feeding on our lawn – a very rare sight in rural Wiltshire.

22. 11:30. NHO JABOT but BOMBE giving the 3rd checking letter meant it had to be. I was on for a sub-10 minute time but got stuck on my last 4 (9d/18A and 16D/24A) for a couple of minutes until they came in a rush.. I liked PARADISE and JACKET POTATO best. Thank you Jackkt and setter.

23. Piece of gateau today, 15 minutes, nearly wrote in GLAZE at the end but failing to explain it meant a re-think to see G-LACÉ. But I agree with Guy de S, É is not the same letter as E but liberty has to be accepted in this case.
    We had hoopoes nesting in our garden in France, beautiful birds.

    1. Accents are optional on capital letters!

       1. My French master taught me that the acute on E is optional, all others are OFF. Don’t know if this is still the case.

    2. That’s Guy DU Sable. ;-D

24. Reasonably plain sailing. I had a good spread after the first pass so it was just a case of working my way out from many points with INDISCRIMINATE LOI.

    NHO of JABOT and HOOPOE (which looked unlikely but it was the best I could put together). Not seen COMMON-AND-GARDEN without it being followed by ‘variety’ but that didn’t cause any problems.

    It would have been a blazing time if I didn’t spend so much time trying to think of something better for the NHOs. Although the time I don’t do that, Sod’s Law, it will be an obvious, commonly used word.

    Didn’t clock the CD for HEDGEHOG but saw EDGE and HOG and I wasn’t going to come up with anything else.

    Late save with GLAZE to GLACE. Was just a bit too tempting with the crossers to not fully parse.

    COD: ASTEROID BELT

25. 15.18, eventually discarding HEDGEROW as not really having a spiky individual involved. My first shot at 14a was VALHALLA, with a certain noise prompting its choice (hojotoho! heiaha!). Wrong mythology.
    I’m inclined to agree that a JACKET POTATO is hardly a snack, especially with decent fillings and a bit of salad. As I recall, during Covid, a scotch egg, on the other hand…

26. 18.35 with two errors

    Just couldn’t see beyond HEDGEROW and SUSPECTS even though neither parsed (nor fitted the definition…) Spent quite some time on _A_E _O as well. The difficult words didn’t cause a problem but those three accounted for a fair bit of my time.

27. 19 minutes after a late start. LOI GLACE with the accents beyond my skill set on the laptop. (The busticated iPad has gone to the place where the good iPads go.)I’d put in GLAZE first. The only unknown was JABOT but the cryptic was helpful. Very enjoyable. Thank you Jack and setter.

28. Nothing really very difficult, but I also was hung up on ‘suspects’ at 16dn. And the asteroid belt was slow to come, although in retrospect it stares you in the face. My take on the doggy bag was obviously the wrong one: the presence of a gag never made me think of the difficulty a dog would have getting into the doggy bag. I saw a doggy bag, if interpreted literally, as a sort of hammock the dog would rest in (yes really!) but when you see a doggy bag as a tied-up thing for holding leftover food, the dog wouldn’t be able to get into it. Very silly, but the answer was obvious. 38 minutes.

29. From HOOPOE to ASTEROID BELT in 21:22. JABOT was unknown, but the cossers and wordplay seemed to confirm it. Reverse ninja turtled the sweet from the machines at Bletchley Park. Thanks setter and Jack.

30. 21:31

    Didn’t know JABOT and wasn’t sure I’d heard of TILTH. LOI was GLACE when I couldn’t think of anything else except G+LAMÉ which didn’t make much sense – at least I’d heard of GLACÉ cherries. For once, I got the bird without too much thought, not that I’ve ever seen one…

    Thanks Jack and setter

31. 32:54. pleased to complete this one as brain is a bit foggy today. INDISCRIMINATE I found very hard to find but then that led me to my LOI AUSPICES. Great puzzle, thank you both!

32. I enjoyed this one. Not too hard but not so easy that it felt like a 15×15 QC.

    NHO HOOPOE but the wordplay gave it away.

    Didn’t realise that was what AUSPICE meant and also had to guess that the plural of APEX could be APICES.

    Not sure I ever knew what TILTH means, but my late Dad used to use it as a word meaning “mess”, as in “clean up all that tilth on your desk!”, so remembering that it sounded plausible to me that it could mean ploughed up ground.

    I did know LOON but only from earlier visits to Crosswordland.

    NHO JABOT, but had J—T so didn’t see what else it could be. That, in turn, gave me my LOI BOMBE (only ever heard of this through watching Masterchef Australia, don’t think I’ve ever eaten one).

    Thoroughly enjoyable, thanks Setter and thanks jackkt.

33. Sadly I anagrammed the DIES part to side before adding the para bit thinking paraside might have been some mythical version of say heaven! Never considered an alternative until I got the dreaded pink squares! Shame as I managed all the rest in around 20 minutes! I’ll hope for better tomorrow!

34. 11:40 – JABOT was a confident guess and didn’t know GLACE so was pleased there wasn’t another word for glossy surface or a fabric I hadn’t thought of.

35. Maybe 25′ in between making tea for workers and other chores. But relatively straightforward even with the few unknowns and almost a write-in with glaze until I decided to read the clue fully. Thanks Jackkt and setter

36. Thanks jackkt and setter. On the whole easy but a few NHOs and tricksies.
    NHO 1a Jabot AFAIK but not difficult. Actually must have HO because the plural version is added by me to the Cheating Machine a year or few ago.
    20a Tilth. My mum told me what it was when I was of primary school age and trying to grow something. Such a lovely word.
    4d Hoopoe. HHO. Not often seen in UK.

37. Enjoyable and all correct for a change. Last two in were JABOT and BOMBE (I’m usually good at puddings).
    I liked ASTEROID BELT. GLACÉ took a while, as I was trying to use the a in the clue (the clue would have made sense without it).

38. I found this as comparatively straightforward as I found the QC, finishing in a speedy for me 23.41. I almost biffed HEDGEROW for 4ac before putting my parsing hat on.
    I’m interested by the term TWO BY FOUR to describe a piece of timber. All my fellow architects (at least in my neck of the woods) used to reverse it using the larger dimension first. Four by Two or the more common timber joist size of Eight by Two were the expression preferred by chippies. What makes it even stranger is that it is a reference to the old imperial inch, when we went metric way back in 1971. The building industry in general seemed to retain a mixture of imperial and metric terms, particularly when given verbally.

39. I found that aviation uses an incredible mix of metric and imperial, altitude in feet, visibility in km, distances tracked on a map in nautical miles, and speed in knots or mph, depending on the plane.
    “Four be two” used in the classic Harry and Paul “helpful builders” sketches

    1. For the weather I use Fahrenheit in the summer and Celsius in winter.

       1. Excellent. Must try that

40. DNF at 30mins.
    Held up by SE. As a tradie, happy to understand “by” but would never say it in the timber merchants.
    As a newbie, may I just say how much I enjoy this blog and the daily struggle with the cryptic in my lunch break. Thank you.

    1. Is this your first blog entry? If so, welcome…

       For me, solving on the Australian reprint,this was a satisfying ‘monday’ puzzle. So+called from the (increasingly inaccurate) expectation that the difficulty increases as the week progresses. I find a crossword dictionary (cheat book) very useful, especially as I annotate mine with unknown or quirky synonyms, finding the act of writing aids recall.

41. Greetings from Zambia where, even in the bush, there is reasonable internet access.

    13.51 with LOI auspices. Now back to trying to work out how to transfer photos from my camera to my iPhone. I fear that’s going to take a lot longer!

    Haven’t seen a hoopoe yet but they are about apparently. This crossword might be a portent…

    1. Hi, are you another blog newbie? If so, welcome.

       I hope to see a hoopoe some day, have done so ever since I read Michener’s The Source. I’ve not yet ventured to Africa or the Middle East, every plan has been stymied by political upheaval or worse. The head bobbing bird sounds so cute.

42. My SNITCH rating is currently 11:32 and is the poorest it has ever been. It’s largely down to taking more care to avoid typos, though I still commit them far too often. I haven’t bettered a score in my top 5 puzzles since 2023, and probably won’t, but today’s very accessible offering gave me one of my fastest times this year.

    FOI JABOT
    LOI MAKE DO
    COD JACKET POTATO
    TIME 6:57

43. Got the tricky NHOs, unusuals and odd definitions (JABOT, HOOPOE, JACKET POTATO) v quickly, but wasted more than half of my 45 min solving time agonising over ANATOMIST and ASTEROID BELT… both of which were not very difficult at all.

44. 21.21 My quickest for ages. I didn’t know JABOT or apices. I knew TILTH only from previous appearances here. ASTEROID BELT went in last from the checkers. Thanks Jack.

45. 23 minutes but had convinced myself there was a fabric called LAZE. So DNF.
    Glace, now it’s obvious, always is afterwards!
    Thanks Jack and setter

46. 24 mins. Easy but struggled at the end with G-A-E and the very suspect SUSPECTS. NHO that meaning of GLACÉ. (Note that autocorrect puts the accent on there!)

47. 28:23 with some that took a while to see, including INDISCRIMINATE. COD to the ASTEROID BELT

48. 23:21, with ASTEROID BELT my LOI.
    Only knew GLACÉ from the cherries, but these have a glossy finish (albeit a sticky one), so decided this was more likely than there being a fabric called LAZE.

    Thanks Jack and setter

49. Very fast (13 mins) by my standards, and thoroughly enjoyed. DNK ‘apices’ but had to be, and COD to ASTEROID BELT.
    Thanks setter and Jack.

50. 17:51

    A tad fortunate as ‘rock circulating’ said ERO to me and that’s how I got astEROid.

    HEDGEHOG FOI, ANATOMIST LOI.

    NHO’s fairly clued-nice.

    Thanks all

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