27586 Thursday, 13 February 2020 Round and round and round we go

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I have to admit to this being a rather dozy solve over 24 minutes with a single typo which I should have spotted and (probably) a rather dozy exposition. An impressive five “rounds” appear in the clues all encouraging the same action. Through heavy lidded, dormouse eyes I will endeavour to squint out any typos in the following, while marking clues thus, definitions so, and solutions in THIS FASHION

Across

1 Children keeping dog brought to safety (7)
SECURED In a slightly old fashioned way, children are SEED, familiar enough for people who sing the Magnificat either in Latin “Abraham et semini ejus in saecula” or English “Abraham and his seed for ever.” Be that as it may, keep a CUR dog
5 Zealot to rock around (5)
BIGOT A reversal (around) of TO (in plain sight) and GIB, the big disputed rock on the Southern Spanish coast.
9 Flood having subsided with river contained (5)
DROWN Subsided is DOWN, insert the R(iver)
10 Outdoor job travelling round forest, missing nothing (9)
GARDENING The forest is ARDEN, in Warwickshire and As You Like It.  Travelling is just GOING. Remove the O as instructed and put the remnant round  the forest
11 Add to workers in holiday month with our lot off (7)
AUGMENT The holiday month is AUGust/ Remove the US (our lot) and add in MEN for workers
12 Fellow holding church party in kingdom once (7)
MACEDON More often seen with the IA on the end. Fellow is MAN, who holds a CE (church) DO (Party)
13 Survey revealing deception: sect’s up for reform (10)
CONSPECTUS Not a word for survey I’m familiar with, but a combination of CON for deception and an anagram (reform) of SECT’S UP
15 Top style in Russian city (4)
PERM Top style as in hairdo. PERM is a city on the banks of the Kama River in the European bit of Russia. I had to look it up
18 Chemist placing vanadium in period (4)
DAVY He of the safely lamp and also an accomplished chemist who isolated potassium and sodium in 1807 and calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron. V vanadium in DAY for period of time
20 School with top athlete (4,6)
HIGH JUMPER Rydell High was the school in Grease, but is also the epithet for any number of schools. JUMPER is a top when top means an item of clothing
23 Game men with desire, heading off into dances (7)
BISHOPS You’re looking for chess MEN, so it’s desire: WISH with its heading banished inserted into dances: BOPS
24 Membrane’s wrecked by a puller (7)
PLEURAL The apostrophe in membrane’s suggests you are looking for an adjectival version, an anagram (wrecked) of A PULLER
25 What’s provided by painter, pretty gloss (9)
INTERPRET Today’s hidden, on paINTER, PRETty
26 Guy in cricket side leaving Somerset’s ground (5)
TAUNT So a verbal meaning of guy, constructed from TAUNTON (indeed where Somerset cricketers play) without ON the cricket side
27 City match expecting many away supporters? (5)
DERBY Well, I suppose larger numbers of away supporters because in a Derby match they’re local (unless Manchester United)
28 Give description of fish coming to harbour (7)
PORTRAY RAY coming to PORT. Teehee

Down

1 Military commander admitting oversight finally — one’s fired (7)

SHOTGUN A Japanese military man with the last of oversighT inserting
2 Mockery of politician in debate that hasn’t succeeded (8)
CONTEMPT Debate is  CONTEST, from which the S(ucceeded) is removed and MP, your politician, replacing it
3 Reference compiler exposing nonsense about good English (5)
ROGET Of  Thesaurus fame. ROT (nonsense) around and about G(ood) E(nglish)
4 Rush to get mug in seaside location (9)
DARTMOUTH a charade of DART: rush and MOUTH: mug. The Devon Home to the Britannia Royal Naval College
5 Quail, being left stuck in seat (6)
BLENCH L(eft) in BENCH: seat. Easy as they some, unless you  sre unfamiliar with the word blench
6 Cook requires good little sieve (7)
GRIDDLE Good provides the G again Chambers says a RIDDLE is a large sieve so perhaps the little suggests the diminutive form of good
7 Element hanging round game making one cross (5)
TIGON The Tiger shall lie down with the Lion and produce an random element TIN round GO, a game with pebbles
8 Five in a social event meeting duke, getting on (8)
ADVANCED A social event is A DANCE and five is V. The whole construction meets D(uke)
14 A new shirt PC ordered — I’d retain his helmet? (9)
CHINSTRAP The self aware helmet retainer is an ordered form of A N(ew) SHIRT PC, his referring to the PC doing a bit of double duty
16 Goodness gracious, having to get round exam on modern technology! (8)
MORALITY  Split the mild oath. Gracious (!) becomes MY (!) around an ORAL exam and IT for terribly modern technology
17 Roman official’s search round area to get gold (8)
QUAESTOR  Rely on the wordplay if you lack encyclopaedic knowledge of Roman officials. Search: QUEST surrounds A(rea) and gold provides the OR
19 Six sandwiches bought up for guest (7)
VISITOR More Latin: Six is VI. The sandwiches are ROTI (I think not really a plural) which are (is) brought up, or reversed
21 Criminal offence of a group in court (7)
PERJURY One of those clues where the innocuous A gives PER and the court group is a JURY
22 Cheer coming from old men in dance (6)
HOORAY O(ld) OR: men both in HAY for dance. I reckon the best known use of HAY for dance is Percy Grainger’s ctchy Shepherds’ one
23 Uncritical learner in tricky situation (5)
BLIND Your L(earner) in a BIND
24 Old man, head on verge of retirement (5)
PATER  Even more Latin Head is PATE, and the evrge of Retirement is just the R

48 comments on “27586 Thursday, 13 February 2020 Round and round and round we go”

  1. Some real unknowns here, but I figured everything out—LOP (last one parsed) was TAUNT(on! Aha!). Have I ever seen CONSPECTUS before? Familiar with “blanch,” not so much with BLENCH. Never heard of a HAY dance. There are lots of quiet bigots who fall short of ZEALOTry.

    Edited at 2020-02-13 04:51 am (UTC)

  2. To me, the ‘by’ in the clue for PLEURAL seems an unnecessary intrusion. My toughest area was the south-west, with a late BISHOPS finally suggesting BLIND and then DERBY.

    I used to live in Hatch Beauchamp which is in the vicinity of Taunton, but that still also took me a while…and I am now writing from a very summery February in Melbourne, Australia.

    1. As I read it, ‘wrecked by a puller’ indicates a reverse anagram, i.e. that A PULLER is a ‘wrecked’ version of the answer.
  3. Slow start (FOI 25ac), slow finish, but slow in between. If I recall correctly, the creepy lawyer Mr. Vholes in ‘Bleak House’, supports his father and 3 daughters in the Vale of Taunton, which is presumably how I know the place. I biffed BIGOT and assumed that GIB was a verb meaning ‘rock’ in some sense; only twigged after submitting. I also biffed BISHOPS, wondering–given HOPS ‘dances’–what _BIS was. Z, you’ve got a typo at MACEDON: wrong church.
    1. Thanks Kevin, I’ve suspected that for years!
      I have now moved to correct it.

      Edited at 2020-02-13 07:37 am (UTC)

  4. At around an hour this was a bit of a struggle but it was all gettable one way or another, which is as things should be. The only unknown words were CONSPECTUS, QUAESTOR, oh and PERM as a Russian city. BLENCH came from the recesses of my mind but if I’d been asked beforehand what it meant I’d probably have said it was a type of fish.

    A little useless research may be of interest in that CONSPECTUS, QUAESTOR and BLENCH all appear to be making their first appearance in the TfTT era. Although BLENCH brings up 9 or 10 hits when searched on the site, all but 2 of these are in comments made by our breakfast correspondent Myrtilus who seems to favour the term, and the other 2 (prior to today) were from Z8.

    Edited at 2020-02-13 07:13 am (UTC)

  5. 50 minutes, and this may have the largest number of question marks in the margin of any puzzle I’ve recently completed.

    I barely knew a derby was a football match, let alone that it would attract away supporters, only knew of PLEURAL from its related effusion sometimes shouted about in episodes of House, didn’t know where Somerset’s cricket ground was, NHO QUAESTOR nor CONSPECTUS, didn’t know Molotov had changed its name to PERM, or that meaning of “gloss”, didn’t know “hay”…

    I’m sure there were other gaps, too. All in all I’m just surprised to have finished.

    1. It was Perm before it was Molotov, as well as after .. only 17 years as Molotov, I looked it up
  6. ending up in the south west, just after TAUNTon.

    FOI 9ac DROWN

    LOI & COD 25ac INTERPRET – nicely hidden.

    WOD 17dn QUAESTOR (Valdemar I presume?)

    DNK CONSPECTUS

    No!The other Sir Humphry! No ‘e’. Yes Minister!

  7. 28 minutes. LOI BLIND. The SW was the tricky bit for me, not spotting the hidden INTERPRET for a while and taking a time over DERBY as it wasn’t a City when I was taking in such things. I guess Brian Clough got his way later, but their team are Derby County. I met a United fan in Birmingham once and she was very upset when I said you don’t get many this far north. I had to construct PLEURAL, as I do with most anatomical definitions. I’ve never heard of a CONSPECTUS, but it could be nothing else. I had heard of a QUAESTOR though. COD to HIGH JUMPER, although I’ve seen a similar clue before. A normal puzzle. Thank you Z and setter.
  8. 30 mins pre-brekker and gave up, with a shrug, on the ungettable Perm.
    I quite liked it, mostly the simple High Jumper, but there were some irritations.
    The biggest niggle was ‘wrecked by’. Please, let’s not allow this sort of construction to infiltrate the Times.
    As Jack mentions above, I remember that a few of us blench, usually when the definition is a plant – or an obscure Russian city.
    Thanks setter and Z (great blog).
  10. 11:55. Another where I started quickly and then got bogged down a little bit. Quite a few funny words but my only out-and-out unknowns were CONSPECTUS and the Russian city.
  11. Held up for a long time by biffing prospectus instead of CONSPECTUS. Liked most of the clues! Still puzzling over CHINSTRAP, but getting there. Dug up PERM from somewhere. Once met a girl from DARTMOUTH (the seaside town in Devon).

    22’31”, thanks z and setter.

  13. Interesting one, this; I knew most of the more obscure references (nice for the smug classicists to be reminded of the existence of QUAESTORs), but not CONSPECTUS, which had to be constructed. While far from his best-known, Antic Hay is perhaps the most enjoyable of Aldous Huxley’s novels IMO, so also nice to be reminded of that. Enjoyable all round.
    2. Thank you for the nudge Tim. It’s a very long time since I read it. The one I enjoyed was Chrome Yellow – except for a rather dull digression in the middle about a dwarf family.
  14. I didn’t know Blench, Conspectus, Quaestor of Hay.

    COD: Goodness gracious. It has to be MORALITY.

  15. Slow slow quick quick slow which finished me up at 18.21. I thought the hay dance had to be some sort of morris-ing about and I see that seems to be right. The one that really made me feel dense was DAVY because although I knew him perfectly well I’d been looking at a (?Swedish) chemist called Dovt perhaps. I think we must have had PERM before because I remembered it, in the end.
  16. today, of easy clues and tricky ones. Took me a while to get going, then more than half was done in 15 minutes, then a slow plod to the end with PERM and MORALITY. The Russian city did ring a bell, I must have seen it on a map once, or maybe they have a football team in the Europa league. The hidden at 25a was well hidden, that and Derby and the right choice for 23 down took a while. All in, 35 minutes, as fast as possible because Mrs K was waiting for us to go exploring in East Devon where we’re currently holed up waiting for the next storm. Of some good ones, I think CHINSTRAP gets my CoD for its smooth surface, well disguised definition and not obvious anagram result.
  17. Gave up – infuriatingly – on Perm. Typo in newspaper edition, bought up for brought up in 19. Not desperate about mug for mouth, rather face. Pleasantly circuitous reasoning however by and large. jk
  18. 18a was easy if you remembered that:

    Sir Humphrey Davy
    Abominated gravy.
    He lived in the odium
    Of having discovered sodium.

    1. I had a similar thought. I got as far as thinking it started “Sir Humphrey Davy, didn’t like gravy”, but couldn’t remember the rest of it.
  19. Many many happy memories of watching the Cidermen at “Ciderabad” (the nickname for the County Ground because of its subcontinental-style turning wicket) 🙂
    Less than two months to go till the new season. Cross fingers we finally win the County Championship this year.

    A good photo here, but without the new floodlights installed last year:
    https://www.google.co.uk/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x486df45137c0f01f%3A0x3bf09990ed857946!3m1!7e115!4shttps%3A%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipPxcw9qqdOf5eesQRNBw2ym-2F3aJ62gZnaS7RI%3Dw308-h184-k-no!5sphoto%20cooper%20associates%20cricket%20ground%20-%20Google%20Search!15sCAQ&imagekey=!1e10!2sAF1QipPxcw9qqdOf5eesQRNBw2ym-2F3aJ62gZnaS7RI&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi0rN_Hxc7nAhVB66QKHSjwAb8QoiowE3oECA8QBg

    Not to forget its most famous resident – Brian the Cat (a magnificent ginger – the Bangladesh fans loved him when they visited for the World Cup because their symbol is a Bengal tiger)
    https://twitter.com/scccbrianthecat/status/889912820384632832
    https://twitter.com/scccbrianthecat/status/1140584131258200065

  21. This came in fits and starts. I knew from early on that the Russian city would be my LOI but in the felt that PERM was better than 50:50. Phew. CONSPECTUS was also unfamiliar. The rest yielded with just the right amount of pressure.
  23. I enjoyed constructing the unknowns in this one. Started with ROGET and finished with the unknown PERM. QUAESTERS, BLENCH and CONSPECTUS also unknown. As mentioned, there was a fair smattering of Latin throughout. Liked CHINSTRAP. 23:14. Thanks setter and Z.
  24. ….a low PERM count (I’d heard of it before, and possibly it was here ?)

    I spent almost a third of my time on 4 clues in the SW corner, but might have been quicker if I hadn’t fixated on “hoorah” and then tried to justify “Perth” before seeing BLIND. I also had to deal with a biffed “prospectus”, as NHO CONSPECTUS.

    Thanks to Z for parsing BISHOPS and VISITOR.

    FOI MACEDON
    LOI DERBY
    COD PERJURY
    TIME 13:07

  25. Quite hard compared to yesterday’s but not too bad once I’d got into it. 19D seems to have a typo – shouldn’t the rotis be “brought up” rather than “bought up” to indicate reversal?
    NHO conspectus and I too wanted there to be a chemist called Dovt.
    Thank you for the explanations, especially Derby and the “hay” part of Hooray.
  26. 19.50. Hooray was last one in and guessed Hay was another form of dance but a bit of a flier. SW corner was the final piece for me with interpret, bishops and hooray- of course – being troublesome. Being exposed to Liverpool Derbies helped get momentum and thereafter pretty solid progress.
    13 would be my COD but a fair clue allowing you to get the solution without having to know it before. Anyone else ignorant of Conspectus?
  27. I went off to bed without BLIND and INTERPRET (how is it so easy to miss a hidden when the letters are staring you in the face?). Saw them the moment I glanced at my computer screen this morning.

    And yes, I have never heard of CONSPECTUS either, but I was pretty confident.

    Edited at 2020-02-13 05:02 pm (UTC)

    1. A Derby match is a match between 2 clubs in close proximity, eg Liverpool/Everton or Sunderland/Newcastle, so the away fans aren’t likely to have to travel far, therefore there should be more of them than there would be at a remote ground.
  29. Needless to say, I came unstuck with this and needed aids to get Blench, Conspectus, Perm and a few others as well. However, I did then manage to parse nearly everything, so progress of sorts. Invariant
  30. Please can someone spell out TAUNTON a bit more fully. I knew the ground but can’t understand how ON relates to the rest of the clue.

    I’ve given up on this one and just reading the above now to understand how the clues work further.

    Thanks!

  31. The blogger had to look up perm to make sure it was a city therefore he did not finish. What else did he have to look up to kid himself that he solved this crap fair and square.

    1. Gosh, that’s a bit mean on so many levels. I completed the grid without looking stuff up, only checking PERM for detail writing up the blog. And “crap”? Really? Not a crossword fan, then? Or just objectionable for effect?

  32. 29mins. Held up by Dovt the Eastern European chemist for some time, before the Davy lamp lit. Not seeing the hiddens is a bugbear too. Interpret was hiding in plain sight….
    The grauniad had this lovely example ‘ winged overseer in grange loft, hen or thrush ‘ (5,2,3,5).

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