24170 – The right stuff …

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
… for me in terms of ‘general knowledge’, for a start. Started with 9 and the intersecting 6 and 7, and never looked back except for some daftness at 11 and minor puzzlement at 14, stopping the clock at 7:04. There’s other right stuff here, with good surface readings throughout, and a couple of special clues at the end. Not sure whether these are new or from the treasure box of old classics, but it doesn’t matter.

Across
1 NOT HALF – 2 defs
5 RIGHTS = “rites” = liturgies
8 ORPINGTON – NG in portion* – a useful chicken that comes up from time to time.
11 AD(i)EUX – I had the plural as ‘adieus’ and somehow accepetd that “a deus” meant “for two”, until ANNEX (last answer) saved the day.
12 HAWKS=offers for sale,MOOR=room rev. Nicholas Hawksmoor was a student and colleague of Wren, with six London churches to his name.
13 AGREEING = (in reggae)*
15 R,I,GOUT as in “chacun a son gout”. I=1=”upright figure”
17 CU(t),RACY
19 ARCH,IVES – Charles Ives is the American composer to remember for xwds.
22 INSOL(V)ENT – a stock wordplay and immediate write-in for old hands
23 MO(CH(icks))A – hadn’t particularly realised that mocha is a colour, but no surprise. Nicely worked clue.
24 MUFTI – first letters. In my schooldays, annual “mufti days” were the first trace of dress-down Friday and wear heaven knows what for Red Nose day. It’s just slang for “civilian dress”.
25 BROWN COAL = (low carbon)* with ‘running’ as a slightly cheeky AI. Brown coal is the same stuff as lignite – somewhere between peat and proper coal
26 FLARES – F(ashionable)+Lares as in “lares et penates” – Roman household gods.
27 FRET=mist at sea oop North,SAW=was rev. There was a trend 20 or 30 years ago for BBC weathermen to use local dialect terms like fret and haar.
 
Down
1 NEO-LAMARCKISM = (claims no maker)*. Look it up on Wiki for full detail, but derived from Lamarckism, high-speed evolution in which a blacksmith’s son might inherit strong arms directly from his father.
2 TOP=best,GEAR=clothes
3 ANNE,X=cross
4 F,ETCHING – the louche implications of ‘etching’ are quite good for Fragonard, best known for “scenes of love and voluptuousness”
5 RE=note,N,OWN=admit
6 GOLDSMITH – ref. Oliver G and the profession of Benvenuto Cellini, which I probably picked up from concert program notes about the Berlioz overture.
7 TIE,POLO – another immediate write-in for old hands as one of the setter’s favourite artists
10 HARD TO(p),SWALLOW – not a stock phrase, and well-clued
14 EXCELS,I,O,R – the only bafflement – I vaguely remembered a poem called Excelsior, and could believe it was Longfellow, but “strange device” was a mystery. It’s a heraldic “device” in the poem:
The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, ‘mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!
16 WRITE-OFF = “right off” for the auditor=listener.
18 RESTFUL – a two-word &Lit! (Fluster-free!)
20 V(A,CU)OUS
21 LE(S,B)O’S – for “pope”, Leo is always worth a punt
23 MANSE – a three-word &Lit to go with 18 (Some clergyman’s edifice)

45 comments on “24170 – The right stuff …”

  1. 29 min. Another in a run of well worked uncontentious puzzles. COD 18 dn. Tiepolo deserves a long holiday.
  2. 40 minutes which would have been 30 but for my mind going completely blank for 10 minutes in the Tyneside area with 5a/d,6,7,12 and 15 unsolved. Eventually I spotted RIG OUT and wrote in the other missing answers straightaway using some guesswork to get the three names. Too many names intersecting in one quarter, I think.

    I didn’t know the required meaning of FRET and was also completely baffled by the “strange device” reference which I suspect may give rise to a complaint or two (Why would anyone know that?) but it was easy enough to solve if not to explain fully.

  3. The general knowledge and French words made this fairly easy – 22mins. I saw 1dn straight away which was a handy start.

    At 14dn I had the opposite problem from Peter – the lines “A youth who bore ‘mid snow and ice/a banner with this strange device” sprang to mind immediately, but I forgot the “Excelsior” bit! In any case the wordplay came to the rescue.

    The inclusion of Sappho at 21dn seemed a bit too obvious – I started thinking it might be deliberately deceptive, but no.

    I also wondered about the plural of “Adieu” – Chambers give both “x” and “s” versions.

  4. I don’t think we’ve had a trivial pursuits puzzle for a while, so were probably due this one. All very straightforward and solved in 20 minutes.

    I also got 1D immediately (there just aren’t that many evolutionary theories – Pavlov with his dogs is the best known proponent I recall). I had to guess EXCELSIOR from wordplay but knew “fret” (probably from old weather forecasts or perhaps bar crosswords where they go in for these pieces of dialect) and Cellini from the music. I liked 18D and 23D and don’t recall seeing them before, which I find quite surprising.

  5. I don’t pride myself on general knowledge, but this one just seemed to suit me – the easiest for a couple of weeks. The clue for Lesbos may have been a “gimme” but I thought it beautifully worked, incorporating references to Sappho, Pope Leo and and Pope’s translation of the Illiad without seeming too contrived. bc
  6. 12:34 .. Good fun, and a nice change of pace. COD 18d RESTFUL, brevity being the soul of wit.

    One Across Rock would have to be former City traders turned skiffle collective Not Half Insolvent.

  7. I failed completely in this through lack of general knowledge. I could not get neo-lamarckism, despite getting the anagram. I have never heard of hawksmoor and I thought Benvenuto Cellini was an overture.
    At least I knew Excelsior from James Thurber’s illustrated edition in The Thurber Carnival.
  8. 25 mins for me. That’s the first time under 30 mins since I started keeping an eye on the clock. Thought I’d try Mark Goodliffe’s method of moving on, instead of establishing a face (usually a twisted grimace) and chipping away at it. Now just have to work on Mark’s other methods of thinking really quickly, parallel processing and almost total recall of past clues and answers. Cheltenham 2020 here I come.

    OK, so this one really was on the easy side for me. Liked both &lits and the appearance of yet another NZ bird (for Jumbo followers) but my COD is 16d.

    Charles Ives is probably best remembered in crosswords. Polytonality (instruments playing together in different keys) has a limited developmental arc, and Ives wasn’t as good at it as Darius Milhaud (or the Not Half Insolvents for that matter). Darius never did step out of the shadow of his operatic mother, the famous Mama Milhaud.

    1. A bit harsh – a few pieces like Three Places in New England get played quite often. And he did have a sense of humour – you can’t help liking parts of Variations on America for sheer cheek. (If UK-based folk don’t know the tune of America / My Country ’tis of Thee, enjoy the penny-drop moment whenever it happens.)
      1. Yes, but it’s not quite the same as 1920’s Paris, with Satie & Cocteau throwing parties with attendant lions. I found this Milhaud offering, which proves he was actually listening during harmony lessons, despite his protestations to the contrary. And this high camp version of Le Boeuf sur le Toit. I once lived in an Australian country town where the local butcher had a huge fibreglass cow on his shop roof, presumably to attract clientele and not passing surrealist cabaret aficionados. You can imagine how we used to swap Milhaud stories over pigs trotters.
  9. One of the easiest puzzles for some time, taking me 21 minutes. Only 12 had me scratching my head, but once I had the H from FETCHING the answer was clear. The name rang a distant bell but he’s buried pretty deep in my mental catalogue of architects. TIEPOLO seems to be putting in a regular appearance these days, and the clues don’t change much. I suppose TIE + POLO is hard to resist, but it would be refreshing to have a different breakdown occasionally.
    1. Checked kororareka’s recent stats for TIEPOLO. No more than two appearances in the daily puzzle in 2008!
      Maybe he’s in the Jumbo more often.
      1. …only because I’ve not stepped out of the house yet.

        I couldn’t resist. Lesson 1: Never, ever, invite Anax to re-work clues which “don’t change much” – you know what he’s like.

        EASY:
        Painter in oil, poet in trouble (7)
        HARDER:
        Artist of old, bound one time to make a comeback (7)
        EVIL:
        Printmaker browsing software, having recalled trim for frames (7)

        Note to setters: I’ve completely ruined things now, haven’t I?

        1. If you want an evil Anax clue, try this one from his collection #4 referenced by Peter somewhere:
          “Noble rank – ruin rather restricts it” (10).
    2. I don’t think it’s that often, it’s just that the last occurrence was pretty recent, in 24115 (anagram of POLITE,O)
      1. A search of fifteensquared.net shows the TIE,POLO has been used twice – Independent 6373 and Independent 6284, both by the same setter.
  10. This one went really quick for me, started when I got on the train at Coventry, finished before it pulled into Rugby, so well under 10 minutes. No problems with the general knowledge apart from HAWKSMOOR, but I’d heard of the name anyway and the wordplay left no doubt.
  11. In 10 minutes I had ripped through everything except 1 down, and in a fit of anagrammatical desperation invented the term NEO-MALARCKISM, in which you develop malarkey at an alarming pace.
    1. No no no! I invented NEO MALARCKISM where things evolve based upon all that malarkey.
      Got all the other brown cheese stuff based on wordplay so fair dos – I agree with Penfold that there was a bit too much of it though.
  12. 24:30 for me. Had to look up neo-whatsit and hawksmoor and trust to hope that Cellini was a goldsmith and excelsior a Longfellow device. Knew fret but not manse.

    A few too many wedges of brown trivial pursuit cheese here for me.

    I’m pretty sure flares made a comeback recently – maybe the setter should spend a bit less time in the arts section of the library and more out on the streets, innit?

    1 across rock, Camden’s newest gay all-girl harmony group Not Half Lesbos.

  13. After over a week of struggle, I finished this comfortably in half an hour, so I guess this was more like a ‘new solvers’ puzzle than yesterday’s! A few I didn’t understand fully until I came here, but there were enough checking letters and / or decipherable definitions to help me on the way. Though I’m not sure I would have got 1d without a Google search to confirm it. COD for me 23d, which was very nicely done.
    1. Americans still regard Ives as a Very Important Composer Indeed. As an illustration, in Jan Swafford’s very popular introduction to classical music (The Vintage Guide) he is one of only 14 Twentieth Century composers considered important enough to deserve a chapter to himself (along with Debussy, Sibelius, Ravel, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Berg, Webern, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Copland, Shostakovich and Britten). Ives is given plenty of space in Alex Ross’s recent (and very fine) “The Rest is Noise”, as close to a publishing sensation as any book about modern classical music is ever likely to become. There’s some American bias in both these books but that’s probably no bad thing if you want your reputation to survive. bc
      1. To my shame I thought it was a reference to Burl Ives, whom I reckoned must have written The Ugly Bug Ball himself.
        1. Certainly I knew of Burl before I became aware of Charles. I’m afraid I would struggle to name anything by Chas., but Burl had his own songbook and many of his recordings were played by Uncle Mac and his successors on Children’s Favourites. I don’t know that he wrote any songs himself. Ugly Bug Ball was by the Sherman Bros.
  14. I was going to mention Jamaican ragga/dub luminary Orpington Goldsmith but me not sure if him still breathe.
    1. I just checked the One Across Rock rule book and dead or alive, it makes no odds. After all, first band in were Mystic Jim-Jams, three members of whom did away with themselves in a bizzare suicide pack involving brown lentils, hemp seed and two cases of Blue Nun. Orpington Goldsmith deserves a place in any Pantheon of crossover dub.
      1. I found the comments here more interesting than the crossword itself, today. My senses are reeling at the thought of death by Blue Nun, what an appalling way to go..
  15. The most entertaining example of Lamarck’s “high-speed” evolution was his suggestion that the giraffe’s long neck evolved as successive generations of the animal strove to reach the highest and sweetest foliage, each passing on as a result of these life-long exertions a slightly longer neck to their offspring. Even though we now know this to be complete nonsense, I suspect I may not be alone in secretly finding this idea not much more implausible than the presumably correct Darwinian explanation: that random genetic mutation produced a member of the giraffe family with a longer neck, thereby conferring on this individual and its genetic descendants an evolutionary advantage so great that over time they supplanted all other forms of the animal. No doubt it’s a bit more complicated than that. Any biologists out there?

    Pretty much everything that needs to be said about this puzzle has been. A good, solid and not too difficult solve, though with perhaps a little too much trivial pursuit general knowledge required.

    I loved Anax’s “easy” and “harder” alternative versions of 7dn. I’m too innocent to get the wordplay for the “evil” version. Explain please.

    1. ;o)

      Yes, it is a bit evil:

      Printmaker is the def (obviously!)
      Browsing software = IE (Internet Explorer)
      “recalled trim” = reversal of LOP = POL
      And this is “framed” by TO (= for – easy to latch on to the synonym when you think of the interchangeability of TO/FOR on a gift tag).

      T(I.E.+POL)O

      2. As a matter of interest, Anax, do you have an authority for IE=Internet Explorer (it’s more usually an abbreviation for Indo-European). I ask in case it comes up in a Mephisto or Azed.
        1. Nope, it was off the top of my bonce Jim.

          However, it’s one of those abbreviations whose non-crossword use is roughly as frequent as other recent additions; SIM, RAM/ROM, Mb, Gb and loads more. It can only be a matter of time before the crossword community adopts all of these fully, as indeed they should. The world moves on and, let’s face it, we should all welcome the opportunity to put some of the more ancient abbreviations to bed.

          1. Fair enough but with your new crossword in mind all the other abbreviations that you’ve given are in Chambers and are thus fair game. For the moment I think IE would be ruled offside!!
    2. I’m not a biologist, but if you believe that the Darwinian theory of natural selection (as refined and confirmed by subsequent genetic theory) is no more credible than Lamarck’s ideas about the inheritability of acquired characteristics, then I think that while you may not be alone you would be in very strange, and not entirely rational, company.

      I thoroughly recommend Richard Dawkins’ “The Blind Watchmaker” and “Climbing Mount Improbable” as brilliantly readable and lucid books on the subject.

      1. Hi kurihan. I can put your mind at rest. My observation was more of a tongue-in-cheek comment. I’m not a Lamarckian and I fully accept that Darwin’s is the best-attested theory of evolution we have. No rational person could think otherwise after reading those two brilliant books by Richard Dawkins that you mention (which I have). That said, it is not hard to see why Lamarck’s ideas about the inheritability of acquired characteristics held sway for so long and continued to hold an emotional attraction for some distinguished intellectuals well into the 20th century (and perhaps for some still). As Dawkins mentions, George Bernard Shaw, admittedly no biologist, was a Lamarckian, apparently because of his loathing of the randomness inherent in Darwin’s idea of natural selection, that “chapter of accidents”. GBS wrote: “There is a hideous fatalism about it [Darwin’s theory], a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honour and aspiration”. I suspect this would still strike a chord with many people. Arthur Koestler was another distinguished man of letters who couldn’t accept the implications of Darwinism. He wrote a brilliantly readable, if not doubt misguided, book – The Case of the Midwife Toad – about a Viennese biologist, if I remember rightly, in the 1920s who bred midwife toads in the laboratory and claimed to have demonstrated their ability to inherit acquired characteristics. Alas for Lamarckians, it appears certain that he faked his evidence. At any rate no one else has been able to repeat his experiments. Have you read the Koestler book? It makes much of the Lamarckian obsession with the fact that babies are born with thicker skin on the soles of their feet. How else is this to be explained, Lamarckians triumphantly demand, other than as the result of countless generations of bipedal humans developing slightly tougher skin on the bottoms of their feet by walking barefoot over rough ground and passing some of this acquired characteristic on to their descendants until eventually babies are born with already toughened feet? Dawkins has an entirely convincing Darwinian explanation for this phenomenon – and for similar ones, such as why people in hot sunny countries tend to have dark skins – but you can see why the Lamarckian idea seemed plausible to many.

      2. That was melrosemike, and not anonymous, replying to your earlier comment, kurihan
  16. Not much to add to what’s been said, except to say that Anax’s evil version is truly diabolical. The actual puzzle I got through in about 20 minutes. I’m not a follower of modern music or atonality, but Mr. Ives’ hometown of Danbury, Connecticut, about 45 minutes ride from my home, considers him one of their most noteworthy products and boasts a large performing arts venue called the Charles Ives Center.
  17. What amazes me about Ives is not the (it seems to me)less than inspiring nature of his music but the fact that it was considered worth putting a blue plaque on a house in London to commemorate the fact that he lived there briefly. I should have thought that therefore just about every house in London deserves one.

    Anybody know where that house is? I have a vague idea that it’s somewhere round Piccadilly.

  18. The thing about general knowledge is that, if you know the answer, it is obvious and, if you do not, it is impossible. So I found Tiepolo, Ives and Excelsior obvious but I had no chance with Neo-Lamarkism, Hawksmoor and Goldsmith. The crossword was padded out with compiler cliches so it is not surprising that many people thought it was a doddle. With a quick Google, I could have finished in a few minutes but I don’t think that is the point of the exercise. As an example of the relativity of general knowledge, you only have to look at today’s Times magazine section (OK it headed “young times”). The question is: Anchovies are often used as a pizza topping. Where do we get them from? (a) a field (b)the sea (c) a nest?
    In twenty or thirty years time, anchovy home could clue field or nest.
  19. I had no idea that Benvenuto Cellini was an Italian Goldsmith nor that Berlioz wrote an opera about him. However, I do know how to look him up on Google (or similar) and I also know that Oliver Goldsmith was a classic author despite never having read any of his books. Hopefully I will retain that knowledge for next time?

    Just the one left out of the blog. This was PBs FOI and, coincidentally, mine as well:

    9a Old physician giver shelter by church (5)
    LEE CH. Francis Lee used to play for Manchester City.

Comments are closed.