Times Cryptic No 28380 – Saturday, 27 August 2022. Wine, songs, fairy tales.

38 comments on “Times Cryptic No 28380 – Saturday, 27 August 2022. Wine, songs, fairy tales.”

1. 62m 43s
   This was a good exercise but my notes say I had “enormous difficulty in the NW corner”.
   I had difficulty parsing PENICILLIN, the ‘tip’ in WHEELIE BIN, UNCLE and SWEEP. I did not know that about The Water Babies.
   With 7d, SKILLED, I thought this was what Val, once of this parish, used to call a double helix: SKILLED or Skillet? Fortunately, the right one I have chose.
   FOI: LIED
   LOI: DRUG. DNK a dug is a teat.
   Thank you, Bruce for your usual excellent blog.

   1. Except that you have ‘saving time, over days’, which eliminates the ambiguity.

2. I didn’t have much trouble, except for penicillin, which gave plenty of trouble. Which Fleming is this? Not Ian, not Peggy.

   The drug = treat thing becomes clear once you realize they are verbs, not nouns.

   1. Alexander, and I’d say he discovered penicillin rather than creating it: Nobel laureate.

      1. Definitely ‘discovered’. Didn’t he see it growing on a Petri dish?!!

      2. According to Wiki he came up with the name, so in that sense he created Penicillin.

      3. All he did was notice the germ-killing properties of the mould from which penicillin was later developed – the work of many years, largely done by the Australian Howard Florey.

   2. I saw that DRUG and TREAT were meant as verbs, but even so it felt a bit of a stretch.

3. 17:20
   Pretty straightforward, except that I didn’t get the CIA bit in 26ac PENICILLIN, and never having read ‘The Water Babies’ I had no idea what the definition of SWEEP was. (I tried to italicise The Water Babies, and the result was that nothing appeared: ‘…never having read I had…’ )

   1. I don’t know how to display the coding you needed for italics here but this is a description of how it goes.

      open angle bracket
      i
      close angle bracket
      The Water Babies
      open angle bracket
      forward slash
      i
      close angle bracket

      1. Thanks. I think that’s what I did, or tried to do, trying to remember what someone here (Keriothe?) told me a while back. I’ll try again.

4. 34 minutes, so pretty straightforward for a Saturday.

   I knew the word JOURNEYMAN but had no idea of its actual meaning.

   I also looked twice at treat = DRUG before realising it was fine.

5. Water Babies Worked! I wonder what I did wrong.

   1. So the idea is that the < and > symbols act to bracket
      formatting commands which might be ‘i’ for italics, ‘b’ for bold, ‘u’
      for underline and so on.  The \ symbol cancels the previous command. 

      1. Except I used / .

         1. My guess is that you accidentally omitted the first ‘close angle bracket’ as that makes everything disappear.

      2. I think we discovered the underline script doesn’t work here unless the poster has Author rights or higher (i.e. bloggers and admin only). I also think this was diagnosed as a WordPress thing rather than to do with our set up.

         1. water water water italics, underline, bold [on edit: sure enough, the attempt to underline ‘water’ resulted in no underline appearing.]

            1. Using s for strikethrough is another option that’s available to all.

6. 55 minutes with DRUG at best pencilled in. COD SWEEP. I found this tough. Thank you B and setter.

7. Completed, in the usual hour or so, but with a few unparsed. Couldn’t figure out 9ac DRUG, – NHO “dug” for teat – nor 16ac -NHO Indic. 4d: knew “uncle” for pawnbroker but failed to come up with “unclean” for corrupt. And 7d: got in a scramble over the “t” and “d”. However, all done, and now, thanks to the blog, I know where all the answers came from. Oh, and I also now know that these are called angle brackets! Thanks, all.
   Edited to say, the angle brackets didn’t show in my comment, which given the context is hilarious!

8. Came unstuck at the end with 9A and 3D crossers, where – R– refused to yield (didn’t think of treat as a verb, nor did dug come to mind) and I was looking for a garden, with the confusing husbands at both ends of the word leading me astray. I didn’t know garth either.
   I have decided that putting italics into a comment on a mobile is far too laborious to be worth the effort!

9. According to my notes at 66 minutes I had two left. I did finish but I can’t remember the last two nor the added time. FOI was DRUG and I needed the blog to understand the parsing of LIED and PERFORMER I was confident with both answers just not the WP.
   HOGARTH, NHO GARTH = Historic garden but the answer was clear.
   SWEEP the WP was clear but I checked Wiki for The Water Babies post solve.

10. The NW was where I had most problems. On my paper copy I see I started with TRIP at 9a; it seemed OK to me. Later I found HOGARTH; garth unknown but sounded plausible. So back to 9a. I have DRUG written at the side but I rejected it. Too much of a stretch for me; and I did consider verbs.
    Anyway, one wrong in a generally enjoyable puzzle.
    David

11. I completed this in 24:42, but sadly missed a typo, LIFE PPER. Drat! Thanks setter and Bruce.

12. 10:31. No major problems with this: a couple unknowns (e.g. GARTH) but enough in the rest of the clue to get to the answer. Not entirely convinced that UPTHRUST is a proper word. I will always associate dugs with The Waste Land (‘I Tiresias, old man with withered dugs…’).

    1. UPTHRUST is used in physics and geology according to SOED. ‘Dugs’ would be familiar enough to old Farmer Giles and his type.

       1. As I suspected, not a proper word 😉

          1. Very funny. It’s in all the dictionaries, as you well know!

             But speaking of something being “not a proper word,” I was mystified by a phrase in a Closing Statement on my grandmother’s will, which I have to sign before a notary and send along to my sister: “per stripes and not per capita.” Turns out that it should say per stirpes, Latin for “by roots.” I have, of course, sent a message to the lawyer about her typo. At least, I hope it’s just a typo and she hasn’t spent her whole career down there in West Virginia saying “per stripes”!

13. 21.21

    Liked it. Now back to the footie!

    Thanks all

    1. Just home from the footy. Epic comeback win by Freo!

14. Just over an hour (after giving up on Ian Fleming and remembering there was another one). This one went in like treacle but it was fun, and obviously PENICILLIN was my LOI and I never managed to parse it. The longish walk I took before solving slowed my thinking down a bit. Are cruise ships called LINERs? From my early youth I do remember ocean LINERS, but they ran regular passenger routes (hence the line) before flying became affordable.

15. This took me a long time (56 minutes) because although I was going quite well I became quite stuck in the NW corner and eventually had to use aids. Two MERs: one at liner = cruise ship, although that may be OK, and one at plain = restrained in 6dn.

    1. Collins Thesaurus offers plain (in the sense of unadorned):
       austere, bare, basic, muted, restrained, simple, Spartan, stark

       1. Well yes fair enough, but I tend to take the view that if it’s significant in the wordplay then the Collins dictionary is the arbiter, not just the thesaurus. However, what is or isn’t significant is perhaps open to question.

          1. Also fair enough. One has to be very careful with thesaurus entries as the synonyms often apply only in specific contexts and that has to be taken into account. For ‘plain/restrained’ I was thinking in terms of design or artistic style where they might match exactly, but in another context perhaps not.

             1. Plain dress or architecture might well be restrained.

                Plain speaking might be the opposite!

                I like the test, can you give a sentence where one word can replace the other?

16. Enjoyed this romp, all apart from the ‘word’ that held me up: UPTHRUST (really?). No problems with HOGARTH nor DRUG (despite not knowing Garth), but did not see the parsing of LIED nor the definition in 16a; so three not in after my allotted time was up. Happy (ish) with that ☺️

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