27310 Thursday, 28 March 2019 Look for the bare necessities

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
An amiable piece of work, with pleasures to be found on the way and enough misdirection to keep it interesting. The right side went in quicker than the left for me, possibly because 1 across was not readily resolved. I once crossed the steppes of the Ukraine in an Austin Maestro just as things were changing in 1989, allegedly the first western visitor to Nikolaev  since Operation Barbarossa, so perhaps should have seen it sooner.
We have a full collection of the letters in the English alphabet with no visible strain, though we’re slumming it a bit at 24.
The anteater might be unfamiliar, but if the mathematician is unfamiliar you need to look him up in awe and wonder.
My time at the point of writing is as close to average as it’s possible to be at 21.58.
I present my reasoning below (click click) with clues in italics, definitions distinguished therein in by underlining, and solutions in BOLD capitals

[click]

Across
1 Plain academic abused (7,2)

STEPPED ON The plain is the endless STEPPE of Eastern Europe and Asia, more often, I think, met in the plural.  The attached academic, (presumably flowing quietly) is the DON. Respace.
6 Pole that’d need another pound to prosper (5)
DOWEL Not sure about pole as a definition, dowels in my book being on a smaller scale. However, given another £, it will “do well”
9 Nitrogen in parts of piping grows warmer (7)
UNBENDS U BENDS for your bits of piping, N for nitrogen.
10 Finally, young idler becomes fitter (7)
GLAZIER Last letter (finally) of younG, then LAZIER for the comparative, not noun, idler.
11 Give up supporting game (5)
FORGO A neat charade, being FOR (the game of) GO
13 Improving where chess player’s attention should focus, close to board (2,3,4)
ON THE MEND Chess players should focus ON THE MEN (never thought of it before, but the Queen is also a man). Add the close of boarD
14 Sharp old partner is interrupting reasonably (9)
EXQUISITE Not the first definition, perhaps, but think of exquisite pain. Old partner EX, then IS inserted into QUITE standing in for reasonably. Quite/reasonably good works
16 Jet from Kentucky home first (4)
INKY (Jet as in black. Kentucky is KY, home IN, which goes first
18 What gossips do to fat champ? (4)
CHEW Gossips chew the fat, the rest is a straight definition
19 Distressing nonsense written about mathematician (9)
TORTURING Alan TURING is rightly these days feted as one of the greatest of mathematicians though for sure a lot of distressing nonsense was written about him in less enlightened days. Get the TOR by writing ROT, nonsense, “about”
22 Issued fourth of columns penned by our top roaming journalist (9)
OUTPOURED The construction is: fourth of colUmns penned by an anagram (roaming) of OUR TOP plus the perennial journalist ED
24 Sounding more tolerant, in a way (5)
KINDA I don’t have to like this expression, but it sounds like kinder, more tolerant if you are lazy with your Rs. Sorta
25 Make unorthodox start on training workers, initially cutting commission (3-4)
HOT-WIRE Love the definition here. On Training Workers initially “cuts” HIRE for commission
26 Lacking cover, hospital department stops operations (4-3)
OPEN-TOP  Two Operations are stopped/plugged by the most  frequent of hospital departments, ENT
28 Spades pinched from dictator’s store (5)
DEPOT Take the S(pades) (cards) from DESPOT, our dictator du jour
29 Singer keeps a band of volunteers that one can deal with (9)
TREATABLE The singer is a TREBLE, you need the unobtrusive A and TA as the traditional band of volunteers

Down
1 Dragging of feet that dealer’s used to? (7)

SHUFFLE Something a card dealer is used to
2 Contrary characters from bible regularly fall (3)
EBB  Contrary instructs you to reverse the odd letters (regularly) of BiBlE
3 Insectivore suffering long in acute discomfort (8)
PANGOLIN After failing to find an anagram of L(ong) IN ACUTE, I reverted to an anagram (suffering) of LONG in acute discomfort: PAIN. This is a pangolin. “You eat ants?” “Sure do!”
4 Democrat is leading business party (5)
DISCO A simple charade of D(emocrat) IS and COmpany)
5 Tossing in the raw, without good pyjamas? (9)
NIGHTWEAR An anagram (tossing) of IN THE RAW without (in its green hill far away meaning of outside) G(ood)
6 Finding it harder to pick up base metal, expensively coated? (6)
DEAFER Despite the fact that my hearing aid box is on the desk in front of me, this last of my entries resisted identifying the definition for a good while. FE is the base metal (“any metal other than the precious metals” – Chambers) contained within DEAR for xpensively
7 Craft with engines standard at sea (5,6)
WHITE ENSIGN The flag of the Royal Navy (and the Royal Yacht Squadron) “crafted” from the letters of WITH ENGINES
8 Shockingly deficient law set up without effort (7)
LURIDLY Law gives RULE, lop the E off to make it deficient and set it up/reverse it. Add IDLY for without effort
12 On expeditions, better ask to halt here (7,4)
REQUEST STOP on: RE plus QUESTS for expeditions, TOP for better (beat). Respace
15 Chip in plane with 100 aboard south of Bury (9)
INTERJECT Chip in is a verb. Plane is JET, with C (Roman for a hundred) on board, placed to the south of INTER for Bury (ignore the capital B)
17 Like ground with broken fencing, extremely heavy (8)
BULKIEST BUST for broken fences in an anagram (ground) of LIKE
18 Wrapped article found in mug (7)
CLOTHED Article: THE in CLOD for mug
20 Clutch rind of granular fruit (7)
GRAPPLE The rind of granular is (are?) its outside letters, GR. Fruit? APPLE
21 Council beginning to organise contest to fill vacated seat (6)
SOVIET Vacated seat gives ST. The filling is replaced by beginning to organise O, and VIE for contest (verb)
23 Before ramble, daughter went by car (5)
DROVE D(aughter) before ROVE for ramble
27 Boat sinking though rising (3)
TUB BUT is though, rising to produce a boat. “sinking” is not really doing anything beyond improving the surface

48 comments on “27310 Thursday, 28 March 2019 Look for the bare necessities”

  1. Failed to see the import of 6d so on the basis of ‘coated’ I put DRAPED instead of DEAFER.
    Still, 3d made me smile. As Joni Mitchell NEARLY sang on “Song For Sharon”, “I went to Staten Island, Sharon, to buy myself a pangolin”…..
  2. 11:36. I liked this one, and it didn’t have any of the fustiness or obscurity of the last couple of days. No unknowns for me today: not even the anteater.
  3. so even closer to average, or else slightly further away, than Z’s. A heap of lovely surfaces today. Fortunately, I had the A already before dealing with KINDA, so I was prepared for another attack on my rhoticity. The PANGOLIN was in the news recently, I think because it’s become endangered.
    1. Very few pangolin left in the wild — but there are plenty in captivity, inside crosswords.
      1. We even have moas, rocs and dodos .. only place that does these days, pangolins too before long
  4. No solving time to offer because I nodded off with less than a quarter completed (scattered around the grid) and abandoned it overnight. On resumption I needed 34 minutes to polish off the remainder.

    Another here slightly surprised at pole/DOWEL as the dictionaries all have ‘pin’ or ‘peg’. One adds ‘rod’, which seems a bit nearer to ‘pole’ in possible length, but Collins actually specifies that whatever it is it’s ‘short’ whereas a ‘pole’ is ‘long’.

    Edited at 2019-03-28 05:45 am (UTC)

  5. I wondered about DOWEL as “pole” too. Otherwise, all was clear, but engaging throughout.
  6. Finished eventually in about an hour and 15 but struggled with unbends, ebb, pangolin (guess after alphabet trawl), deafer, luridly and loi glazier.

    Didn’t get why unbends = grows warmer
    Cod do well.

    Edited at 2019-03-28 05:57 am (UTC)

    1. It’s (possibly older) slang for warming emotionally. “He unbends after a couple of drinks, you’ll see…”
  7. 22:20 … I struggled a bit but loved it. Lots of penny-drop moments for me, especially with last in HOT-WIRE.

    I slowed myself down considerably by confidently biffing ON THE MOVE (where a chess player’s attention should be) at 13a, which kinda works if you ignore a fair sized chunk of the clue. This, of course, is why the hare didn’t win the race.

  8. As it happens, the Alan Turing Award (basically the Nobel prize for computer science) was announced today, when he shows up in the crossword. It’s a trio of people who came up with the ideas that underlie all the recent developments in vision and language recognition: Geoff Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio.

    Oh, and I finished the crossword. No real time since I started on the plane and almost immediately we started coming in to land and had to put our computers away. I had the same minor quibble about DOWEL as everyone else, but it was obviously correct so I didn’t worry too much.

  9. 25 minutes here, so about as on the wavelength today as I was off it yesterday. FOI 1a STEPPED ON, LOI 24a KINDA, generally working my way from top to bottom.

    AOD (animal of the day) and WOD 3d PANGOLIN. Maybe if I remember an image of the little fella playing a MANDOLIN I’ll bring him to mind more quickly next time…

    Now I’m off to write some congratulations to the Turing Award winners on an infinitely-long tape. I may be a while.

    Edited at 2019-03-28 07:10 am (UTC)

  10. Fairly straightforward today, just slowing down on my last two DEAFER and LURIDLY. I was convinced the latter was going to be something to do with baldness from “shockingly deficient.

    I watched the film about TURING and the Enigma machine recently with Benedict Cumberbatch (I forget the name of the film). I was left feeling slightly irked by the fact it portrayed him as a weird loner when apparently that wasn’t the case at all.

      1. The whole film was a bit of a travesty, though of course very watchable. Possibly even worse that the depiction of Turing was that of his boss, Denniston (Charles Dance) as an obstructive old fart, when in reality he seems to have been a supportive and decent man. I seem to recall his family were upset by the movie. There’s a whole Wiki section on inaccuracies in the film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_inaccuracies. Probably whole websites, too
        1. Oh, gosh, I never realized… I have seen (and, in fact, own: ripped the Netflix DVD) that film. And our crossword at The Nation participated in a promotion for the film with a special two-page spread for one issue.
          1. Sorry, Guy! Now I feel terrible. I did like the movie, regardless. I just found it a bit frustrating that they felt the need to take the liberties they did when the reality was all pretty astonishing and fascinating. If anything, Turing’s story was even more poignant and remarkable than the film suggested., and Bletchley Park even more interesting. The really great movie / series about all that has still to be made. There are some terrific books on the subject, though. Sinclair McKay’s and Michael Smith’s are both very good.
            1. Ah, don’t feel bad about imparting this vital information. I’m amazed by all the arbitrary departures from verifiable fact, and certainly glad I’ve been disabused of the notion that the film was essentially factual.
    2. films are fiction, totally. They feed off real life, but do not reflect or portray it ..
  11. 35 mins with yoghurt, granola, banana, etc.
    I enjoyed this. Mostly I kinda liked: the young idler becoming fitter, the hospital dept lacking cover, tossing in the raw and COD to the tortured mathematician.
    Thanks setter and Z.
  12. 32 minutes with the SE providing a sticking point. I’d gone for BURLIEST, the lie of the land in BURST, which kinda works. It was only when it KINDA didn’t work for 24 across that I revisited and found BULKIEST. Pleasant puzzle with no other problems. although DOWELs have also mainly come into my life courtesy of IKEA. COD to ON THE MEND. Thank you Z and setter.

    Edited at 2019-03-28 11:19 am (UTC)

  13. Another night waiting for voting…will it ever stop? Or maybe Turing proved it was undecidable?

    Really liked DEAFER, not so keen on KINDA.

    About 23′, thanks z and setter.

  14. Better puzzle today, 28 minutes of which it took 10 to be convinced about KINDA and to see 17d – bulkiest? Murkiest? And my LOI SOVIET. Liked DEAFER once I heard the p drop.
  15. I was stumped for about 10 mins on my LOI, DEAFER: just could not see through it, and spent the time alphabet-trawling over D_A_E_ . ‘Draped’ was an early fail. So a disappointing 39 mins to the finish.
    I thought some of the defining and equivalences to be strained and rather skewiff: pole=dowel (of course), but also clod=mug, grapple=clutch, stepped on=abused, unbend=grow warmer, bulky=heavy (a big empty cardboard box is bulky but not heavy), etc.
    Many thanks for this fine blog, Z.
  16. Very enjoyable, and everything fell firmly on the side of the line where knowledge becomes general, apart from DOWEL, where I luckily didn’t have enough to make me sceptical. As I wrote it in, I thought that 24ac was a rather un-Timesy word, and there might be letters from Tunbridge Wells, or e-mails from anywhere, but I KINDA liked it.

    I visited Bletchley Park a few years ago. If you do what I did, and take a photo of the Colossus computer with your smartphone, it obviously makes you look at both with renewed amazement.

  17. How about dearer? Harder to pick up (more expensive) with Re (Rhenium) in “dear” instead of Fe.
      1. I reckon it’s technically passable but it would be a clunky clue with ‘dear’ doing a sort of double duty.
  19. Enjoyed this. Only dabbled with NEWEL as DOWEL didn’t seem quite right but got there in the end.
  20. A more straightforward puzzle after yesterday’s horror. Many enjoyable clues. I shared the difficulty quite a few others had with DOWEL= pole, and wasted much time trying to make NEWEL work. In my book, and most dictionaries, a “dowel” is a projecting wooden peg used to connect one part of a structure to another. “Peg” would have served the setter’s purposes just as well. I found KINDA quite chuckle-worthy, though I can see why it wasn’t universally popular.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

  21. DOWEL with a shrug, KINDA with a (to use the down wid da kidz parlance) “srsly?”.

    Didn’t know UNBEND in that sense, so crossed fingers on that one.

    No problem at 19 – ending obviously ING which immediately brought Mr Alan to mind, and ROT is almost at the point of replacing either nonsense or rubbish when I read it (see also Priest/Eli, hospital/san, hospital department/ENT etc)

    12.34

    Edited at 2019-03-28 12:11 pm (UTC)

  22. Not quite on form today, with several that were easier than I made them out to be, including PANGOLIN which I knew perfectly well but needed most of the letters to get. LOI HOT WIRE which I had to come here to understand.
  23. 10m 36s – a nice puzzle today. DEAFER was the one that caused the most problems as my LOI, although LURIDLY also took a while before it. As usual, spotting that it was going to be a pangram didn’t seem to help me much.

    REQUEST STOP was biffed, but having come back to it I think it’s a lovely clue, probably my favourite of the day. On the other hand, I didn’t love TUB with the unnecessary ‘sinking’.

  24. Though marred again by a mistype on the laptop resulting in two errors. Purely technical errors, the way I see it. LOI hot-wire. Enjoyed the hidden anagrist at 7 down.
  25. I wondered about DOWEL as a rod too, but Vinyl1 has cleared that up nicely. I wrote DON in at 1a straight away, but the next step took a while longer. DISCO and FORGO were my next entries, and the O from FORGO led nicely to our insectivore. I liked HOT-WIRE, INTERJECT and ON THE MEND. In fact lots to like about this puzzle. As usual I failed to notice the pangram. No trouble with that meaning of UNBENDS. LURIDLY had me looking at the wrong end of the clue for a while. WHITE ENSIGN was my LOI. I’ve been to Bletchley Park several times and have a number of books which explain the theory behind Enigma, Lorenz, The Bombes and Colossus. Mind bending stuff! I also have the DVD of the Imitation Game which is entertaining if not strictly historical. If you haven’t been to Bletchley, and the National Museum of Computing next door, put it on your to do list. Thanks setter and Z8 for the usual entertaining blog.
  28. DEAFER and BULKIEST proved most troublesome. Took ages to see that FE was the base metal – I was not happy with DEARER which also fit the definition through lack of metal. BULKIEST – does it really mean ‘extremely heavy’ or simply ‘largest and most cumbersome’? After all, a bulky amount of polystyrene is not going to be very heavy….
  29. Quite apart from the fact that bulky doesn’t equal heavy, if it’s bulkiest it isn’t necessarily bulky. They might all be very unbulky. Why didn’t the clue say something like ‘most unwieldy’ instead of ‘extremely heavy’?
  30. I’ve been Mr Grumpy recently, but no gripes about this puzzle. I get the criticisms others have made, but the pleasure factor leads me to overlook them.
  31. ….very early in this puzzle, but it didn’t go off before I finished. Thanks to Z for parsing HOT WIRE and REQUEST STOP.

    FOI FORGO
    LOI BULKIEST
    COD WHITE ENSIGN
    TIME 11:53 (two minutes on KINDA/BULKIEST)

  32. 46:10. A bottom to top solve with quite a few holding out in the top half – the steppe, unbends, luridly, deafer and pangolin. FOI Glazier. LOI exquisite. COD hot-wire.
  33. Maybe us Scots should get bonus points or something, because I reckon we get phoney homonyms at least once a week. ‘kinder’ has an r at the end of the word where I come from. Maybe I’m sounding tiresome, but I’m getting very bored with this arrogance/lack of awareness. I actually find that I’m having to put on an English accent to solve some of the clues, and that’s ridiculous. 38 minutes with a break, and as I have found recently, after the break I can look at the puzzle again and fill in perhaps 5 or more answers immediately. Either the break is refreshing the brain or the brain is working in the background. LOI interject having tried intercede, intersect, intervene.
  34. Thanks setter and z.
    Enjoyable puzzle where I was happily able to skip over the long DOWEL without too much trouble and similarly solved DEAFER midway through too.
    Finished in the top left hand corner with FORGO (very neat clue), PANGOLIN (which I did remember when I had enough letters) and STEPPED ON (which was well constructed and a penny dropper for me).
    Liked many clues, especially HOT-WIRE, ON THE MEND and FORGO.

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