Sunday Times 5172 by Dean Mayer – the need for seeded

37 comments on “Sunday Times 5172 by Dean Mayer – the need for seeded”

1. DNF
   I had no idea what was going on at 14ac, although now I see the answer I do vaguely recall seeing it here once some time ago. Also NHO Hovis; having found it in my English-Japanese dictionary, I can appreciate the brilliance of the clue. DNK PORTAKABIN.

2. 40 minutes. Very enjoyable challenge as usual from Dean. The cleverness of 18a was lost on me as, like Kevin, I didn’t know or had forgotten the significance of ‘Hovis’ but I agree it’s a beauty. Lots of others to like, including the deceptively simple HAND which I needed for my LOI NOTATION. MASS as an adjective for ‘extensive’ took a while to come.

   If you do happen to have the Chambers app or dictionary at hand, it’s worth looking up the definition of SLOANE RANGER; I bet the people at Chambers had a lot of fun coming up with that one.

   Thanks to keriothe and Dean

3. I thought this was first-class. Unusually, I saw pretty much everything without much trouble, even the bird GODWIT as it was in a 15 two or three years ago and one happened to land in Oz a while back apparently many thousands of miles off course. Thought KEYHOLE SURGERY was very good along with ‘fed Hovis tuna’ for the five-thousand. SLOANE RANGER also very good but possibly a stretch for overseas solvers. Took a while to see ROB ROY for ROYALLY. Also bunged in portacabin as wasn’t familiar with the ‘K’ spelling. Liked GET LOST.
   Thanks K and setter.

   1. Sloane Ranger a stretch for overseas solvers perhaps, and quite right too … it’s an English crossword. Hovis! 🙂

      1. English? Or British?

         1. English. London!

            1. Both!

      2. Damn straight Jerry! Bloody foreigners.

         I think “Sloane Ranger” gained wider exposure when Fergie(?) came on the scene. Not sure why I would know this, I’m not normally a fan of reality TV.

4. 48 minutes. For those of a certain generation MAVERICK will always bring to mind the Warner Brothers TV Western series (1957-1962) featuring the Maverick brothers, Beau (James Garner), Bart (Jack Kelly) and their cousin Beau played by Roger Moore. According to the storyline, Beau had for some reason spent time in England which conveniently explained the accent. Later a third brother, Brent (Robert Colbert), emerged from somewhere when Moore departed to star in The Saint.

   The origin of the word was from Samuel A. Maverick (1803–70), a Texas engineer who owned but did not brand cattle.

5. Some wonderful clues this week. I particularly liked PORTAKABIN, SLOAN RANGER and FIVE THOUSAND, which I thought was brilliant. But I do not understand 1ac. I had HINT. I read it as a reverse clue: a straight pointer being a (snooker) cue, and a cue could be thought of as a hint. I’m clearly on the wrong track here … Now I’ve looked at it again I realise that the could simply have been ‘Straight pointer’. It’s the ‘for example’ that completely threw me. OK fair enough, many other things to enjoy.

   1. ‘For example’ indicates a possible definition amongst others – a ‘straight’ is one hand of cards as opposed to a flush, say.

6. I didn’t finish this by any means.
   What I did do I enjoyed.

   I agree that 18across is excellent. The clear short clue giving the answer in two ways within three simple words was inspired.
   ( And yes I did solve that one).

   Thanks you Dean and ketiothe.

7. A Dean classic. Annoyingly, the simplest clue – 1a- was the one which gave me most trouble.

8. I have no notes on this, but I think 1a was also my LOI. At first sitting I thought it would be a DNF, but I came back to it and chewed away until it gave up its secrets. Loved MOTION PICTURES and especially 5000, which is great on multiple levels. But every answer was a revelation and worth the effort. I would always say TROTSKYITE, though crossers indicated the correct answer.

9. Two goes needed.

   – Trusted the wordplay to get the right spelling of PORTAKABIN
   – Didn’t parse ROYALLY as I missed the ‘Rob partner’ trick
   – Had no idea how NOTATION worked
   – Didn’t quite figure out the definition for MAVERICK, though I get it now

   A great puzzle. Thanks Dean and keriothe.

   FOI Omaha
   LOI Surmise
   COD Five thousand

10. 27.34

    Too much time watching poker shorts on YouTube meant 1a was straight in. Otherwise a bit slow on a few I half-got but couldn’t finish off. And was also a C in PORTAKABIN making the SURGERY much delayed. Agree both the long anagrams were excellent. Like MAVERICK as well.

    Thanks Keriothe and Dean

11. 26ac. I could only think of more modern people called “Kit”, who when I looked up their full name were “Christopher”. Of course it is Marlowe, famously known by both names, that I should have been thinking of – thanks for that!

    15dn. I hadn’t particularly associated “Warhol” with “Nihilist”. My 1990 Chambers Biographical Dictionary talks about Andy Warhol “attempting to suppress artistic individuality” in his work, but I don’t think I really understand the definition in this clue.
    On searching “Warhol” on this site, I can see you’ve got a lot of knowledge about him and his colleagues. Would you be able to give your thoughts on “Warhol et al” = “NIHILISTS”?

    1. Kit Harrington is the other person I thought of.
       I’m afraid I know next to nothing about Andy Warhol, I just took the definition on trust.

       1. Oh, I’m sorry – I’ve mixed up my Sunday bloggers!
          (I did a search on “Warhol”, and it returned lots of Sunday blogs by Guy, with stuff about him – and then forgot it was your name at the top of today’s. Apologies!).
          Thanks for everything else, very clear and interesting as always.

          1. No problem!

       2. I felt that attaching that label to Warhol was unwarranted. I can imagine a sense in which it might be used as an outraged epithet in reference to some of his statements or other provocations. But Andy regularly went to church and among his last paintings was a series of Last Suppers and the like. He was too sentimental to be a nihilist.

          I think of T.S. Eliot, who said that his own art, poetry, “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

          1. ‘Nihilist artist’ is really a contradiction in terms.

          2. Descriptions of artistic creators are not related to their personal lives, but to their style in their art form. I don’t think anyone thinks that “Romantic” composers had any more girlfriends or boyfriends, or better relationships, than Classical or Minimalist composers. I’ve seen “nihilist(ic)” as a description of Warhol’s art, and if one of someone’s best-known works suggests that soup tins are as important as a subject as anything else, I don’t think they can really complain about “nihilist” as a description. Your point about Warhol’s Last Supper paintings omits the fact that the best known ones seem to be reworkings of a better-known Last Supper painting, rather than independent creations.

             1. I see “nihilist” here as an intrusion of personal opinion in place of an objective and unobjectionable descriptor (or, rather, a more apt representative of nihilism—from a Dostoyevsky novel, maybe). Your opinion doesn’t make it any more objective… in my view!
                It’s not a term of art-history classification, to say the least.

             2. No one (but high school dropouts) thinks “Romantic” in speaking of the Romantic Age means that. A joke, I guess.

             3. “If one of someone’s best-known works suggests that soup tins are as important as a subject as anything else, I don’t think they can really complain about “nihilist” as a description”
                I must say I think this is a bit of a leap. Questioning what constitutes a worthy subject for art is a long and noble tradition in art, particularly (although not by any means only) in the last century or so.
                (I don’t object to the description of Warhol, by the way: he seems quite widely associated with ‘nihilistic cinema’, whatever that is, so while Sandy’s objections are no doubt valid this is probably one of those occasions where we can go with an imperfect consensus!)

                1. “Whatever that is” indeed!
                   “Nihilist[ic] cinema” would be a contradiction in terms, according to you, mere hours earlier. That is, if cinema is an art. Art requires an artist.
                   “Nihilist[ic] cinema” is not a “school,” merely a label applied from outside.
                   Clearly, Samson’s enemies are still with us.

                2. Meanwhile, some grammatical nihilist has omitted the period after “al” in “et al.”

                   1. I guess you haven’t noticed that for more than a decade, abbreviations like i.e. and e.g. have not had dots in Times/ST copy, including crossword clues. I’ve just confirmed that “et al” is the norm too.

                      1. I hadn’t noticed yet that things had gone so far, no.

             4. It is implicit in Warhol’s Last Supper paintings that the thing has, in the most important sense, but in many senses… all the way to paint-by-number, been Done Before.
                “Hey! He’s just copying Leonardo!” rather misses the point.

12. Some brilliant stuff here. I had a typo (PIDTURES for PICTURES) so technical DNF, but otherwise all green. Like everyone else, I thought the feeding of the 5000 was brilliant (well, as long as you knew that Hovis is a kind of bread, which did, since not only did I already know but I worked in a bakery one summer and we used Hovis which is technically a brand of flour).

    1. Hovis is also probably the best-known brand of bread in the UK, albeit not the largest – that is Warburton’s. I’m not sure what the US equivalent would be – Wonder, perhaps?

13. Great puzzle Dean, great blog K. Took me 23:08 and I allowed myself a peek at the end to confirm the NHO PORTAKABIN.

    FIVE THOUSAND is very good, but a bit lost on me as I didn’t know Hovis (sorry Jerry!).

    The classic Dean clue for NOTATION was my favourite. Just five words, each one critical, including a single-word definition. A diverting and plausible surface entirely unrelated to the answer required. Crossword perfection.

14. After a bad trip, a HUGE MESS (meal service); why not?

15. Really enjoyed this, despite holding up proceedings by bunging in GEL LOST for my FOI, and thereby rendering 2d an impossibility! Had the first half of 1d for ages before I hit on the right kind of service, which then gave me SLOANE RANGER and images of Fergie in my head. Liked the lot, FOI was OMAHA ( correct, that is); held up for ages by spelling PORTAKABIN with a C, and discovering that there was no such word as C?Y?O?E. Surprised myself by putting both WOLFRAM and GODWIT in straight away ( must be learning something from this daily ritual!). COD FIVE THOUSAND ( when I was in England t he only Hovis was a small loaf of brown bread usually bought only by health freaks.)

16. Thanks Dean and keriothe
    Cross with myself for leaving a partially parsed HINT in at 1a. Especially with Dean, one needs to nail the parsing 100% – would normally have used a word solver to look for alternative H – N – words – the poker ‘straight’ just didn’t come to mind today.
    Without knowing ‘Hovis’ other than a poster on another blog, the nicety of 18a was lost on me. Lots of other excellent clues that was solved right on the three quarters of an hour, a bit quicker than normal for this setter.
    Finished in the NW corner with HIGH MASS, GET LOST and that HINT (nope HAND) as the last one in.

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