Times Cryptic No 27066 – Saturday, 16 June 2018. Fast but unsure.

22 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27066 – Saturday, 16 June 2018. Fast but unsure.”

1. Rather easy, despite a number of DNKs: CLEMENT Freud (I thought this might be the artist, as I’d forgotten his given name), NEARSIDE, Finn MacCool (actually vaguely familiar, maybe), and NHO Keith Moon. KITH was my LOI; I finally remembered KITH and kin. EMO shows up often in the NYT; otherwise I know nothing, and I think have heard nothing, of it. Setters here vary on how they spell carcase/carcass. Bruce, you’ve left out a T on JUNC.
   1. Thanks. Always good to get it right! Proofreading this stuff is hard!!
   2. Never heard of Keith Moon? Next, you’ll be asking who Jimmy Page is….
      1. OK, who’s Jimmy Page?
         1. Not dead yet.
2. Very enjoyable and completed correctly without reference to aids, but I used them afterwards to look up the things I didn’t actually know: BOILERPLATE, EMO and MacCool. Interesting that the Times sees fit to include the posthumously disgraced grandson of Sigmund Freud whereas the BBC has removed all trace of him from their archives.

   Edited at 2018-06-22 11:38 pm (UTC)

   1. The “outing” of Clement Freud had passed me by: we’ll son run out of heroes. I suppose we’ll just have to hope the setters never need to clue Jimmy or Rolf. Purely in crossword terms, if they’re famous and dead, what they did doesn’t matter. After all, we’ve had Crippen, the Ripper and Attila the Hun before: their presence surely doesn’t indicate approval?
3. Thanks brnchn. Didn’t know or get nearside – I decided, ala Tyneside, that there was also a Wearside going through the NE and damn the rest of the parsing. I surprised myself by thinking of Kieth immediately on reading the clue, but also thinking ‘too abstract for this’. So I reminded myself instead of the names lots and lots of planetary moons.

   Edited at 2018-06-23 01:02 am (UTC)

4. Quite enjoyed this, helped by knowing Keith Moon and also Finn MacCool who appears as an Irish terrorist in a Hornblower story by CS Forester. Not mentioned in the Wiki article, I notice
5. Agree with our blogger’s view that this was fun and mostly accessible. However there were a few problems for me.I had WAIL and felt confident about it. I had Copperplate initially at 1d which caused big problems for 8a and,in the end, I assumed that Moon must be one of the very obscure moon / planet names which I don’t know.And I found Nearside impossible to deduce. I did get Clement quickly and prefer to remember him as the rather appealing personality and one-time politician; indeed I’ve forgotten what he did. Perhaps the name Liberal Party implied too much. David
6. A gentle Saturday stroll, 15 minutes. FINNEGAN’S WAKE went in purely on the strength of it being an Irish book. This is not the TLS!
7. My notes for this were “Quick solve but felt harder”. I remember being a bit surprised to see TED, though it’s familiar enough from Mephisto-type puzzles. There is a homophonic footballing Nina, perhaps as a nod to the World Cup.
   1. Yes, I suppose it’s related to the World Cup, as I couldn’t see other footballing or ‘stylistic’ references in the clues or answers. Sad to hear about his illness which has highlighted the link between Alzheimer’s disease and head trauma, something that will become even a bigger deal in ex-sportsmen in coming years.
8. 23:25 but I corrected wail to bawl a short time afterwards. I was a bit unsure about “if” for “uncertainty” in 3dn but testifier was obvious. A pleasant solve.
9. All done and dusted in, what for me, is a good time. As a sixteen year-old drummer Moony was my hero. I even played with him once at the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm. Never imagined I would see his name come up in a Times crossword. Like others DNK BOILERPLATE, MACCOOL, or DEIST. A very enjoyable xword, thank you setter and B for the enlightenment.
10. jerrywh, I think you’re confusing Finn with Barry Ignatius. “Hornblower and the Widow McCool”
11. DNF in 30 mins. Couldn’t get Kith or Nearside.

    WOD (Word of the day) is TED. Like our blogger, I’d not come across this before. This new knowledge will encourage me to mow the lawn so that I can then nonchalantly declare my intention to ted the cut grass.

12. 34:02, but led astray by my LOI 17a where I had WAIL. Boo hoo! I didn’t know Finn McCool, but managed to cobble the book together from the rest of the clue and knowing the book existed. Our erratic drummer raised a smile. Nice puzzle. Thanks setter and Bruce.
13. Very pleasant puzzle completed in a quick time . It would have been under 20mins but for NEARSIDE and THIS.
    I had forgotten about the outing of Clement Freud. I prefer to remember him for “Just a Minute” and for his appearance on the cover of “Band on the Run” by Wings. Wings, a band that didn’t have Keith Moon as its drummer.
14. Since I worked on a farm as a teenager, I knew TED since there is a piece of equipment called a tedder that you tow behind a tractor to crinkle up the cut grass so that it dries faster and can then be baled up into hay a couple of days later.

    I knew Keith Moon and put that straight in, with the only slightly raised eyebrow being his appearance in the Times crossword at all. I’d heard of Finn MacCool too, although I couldn’t say who he was…i’d probably have guessed he was a James Joyce character (ad although I’ve never read Ulysses I have picked up over the years that he is called Leopold Bloom).

    I did this very fast. Don’t remember the time and I was on a plane with no internet so I couldn’t submit it, so the time is lost to history.

15. Re TED, it’s a word that is a chestnut in a local daily’s simple crossword here in Kenya, below the DT cryptic which is syndicated here.
    Ong’ara,
    Nairobi.
16. There is no apostrophe in the actual title. Joyce wanted it to also be an imperative (with an invisible comma and exclamation point): “Finnegans, Wake!”

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