I’m posting this on behalf of Hugh (ulaca) who is unable to do so himself for reasons he explains below. I only received this an hour or so ago and I haven’t had a chance to “speak” to him yet, but I shall be offering him the services of the TftT Tardis in the hope it might enable him to continue blogging from home in future. Here’s his blog…
After years of interrupted use of Livejournal at work, the powers that be appear to have decided that the site represents use of an application “which is in violation of my internet usage policy”. What this means in the short term is that I am unable to post and will have to rely on a fellow blogger – which is not ideal – and, in the longer term, that I may have to hang up my blogging boots. However, first, we shall see whether this is a temporary blip (IT has a few of those on its CV) or an actual policy.
As for the crossword, I thought after my first run through (in which I got only my last –1 across – I start from the bottom) that this was going to be a real toughie. However, once started, I soon gathered pace and was for once not held up by a couple at the end. Even the dinosaur revealed his secrets with minimal prompting, even though my knowledge of these marvellous old things is not much to shout about. I guess those early visits to the Natural History Museum made less impact on me than early visits to Lord’s, Twickenham and Kempton Park. 27:19.
| Across | |
| 1 | Three, reduced by one, divided by four: finish with flourish (6) |
| THRIVE – IV in THRE[e]. | |
| 4 | Parisian is transfixed by international player — is in a fantasy world (8) |
| ESCAPIST – ‘in a fantasy world’ (adjectival); CAP (‘ international player’ ) + IS in EST (French for ‘ is’ ). | |
| 10 | I’m reduced if not losing heart, and rash (11) |
| IMPROVIDENT – ‘rash’; cunning wordplay here: IM + PROVIDE[d] (‘reduced if’) + N[o]T (‘not losing heart’). | |
| 11 | Reprimand avoided by learner, a poor student (3) |
| SAP – S[l]AP; SAP normally means a foolish or gullible person, so I’m not sure where the student fits in, unless we are talking about ‘students of life’ . | |
| 12 | Negative about eggs being recalled in avian activity (7) |
| NESTING – NEG around NITS reversed. | |
| 14 | Record I demand missing final sound (7) |
| LOGICAL – ‘sound’; LOG + I + CAL[l] (‘demand missing final’). | |
| 15 | Alright in earth, possibly, but able to get above it? (7-4-3) |
| LIGHTER-THAN-AIR – anagram* of ALRIGHT IN EARTH. . | |
| 17 | Organic material in proper pool (radius varying) (10,4) |
| PRIMORDIAL SOUP – ‘organic material’; PRIM (‘proper’) + POOL RADIUS*. When a scientist isn’t sure what something is, s/he calls it soup. | |
| 21 | Feeling daughter should be excluded from downgrade (7) |
| EMOTION – [d]EMOTION. | |
| 22 | Extended material on the radio producing clean behaviour (7) |
|
HYGIENE – sounds like HIGH JEAN; I think the connection between high and extended is a little tenuous, but I suppose extended in its ‘stretched out’ sense and ‘high’ in its ‘extending above the ground’ sense are close enough. |
|
| 23 | Expression of refusal to name revolutionary (3) |
| NOT – ‘expression of refusal’; TO + N[ame] reversed. | |
| 24 | Dinosaur artist coming in second best (11) |
| TRICERATOPS – RA in TRICE + TOPS. Needed the wordplay here, as the creature rang only a vague bell. | |
| 26 | Banter not good for the elderly? (8) |
| BADINAGE – the kind of banter intellectuals might have, as they quibble over variant texts; if something is not good for the elderly then – if you were the type of intellectual who quibbles over texts – you might say that it is bad for folk in their old age. From there, you might contract this to ‘bad in age’, especially as all such dense, elliptical phraseology is open to multiple interpretations and therefore worthy of an academic paper (plus rejoinders and replies) or two. | |
| 27 | I may be found next to North East China? South West, actually (6) |
| NEPALI – actually if you were in NE China, you would be perilously close to horryd; far safer to be down in the Tibet Autonomous Region, which, as everyone knows (I need to keep the rest of my Internet connection in this Special Administrative Region of the Middle Kingdom) is absolutely definitely part of China – like all those islets off the Philippine and Malaysian coasts – and does indeed occupy its SW portion. Oh, the wordplay? It’s I after NE PAL (‘China’ is a British slang term for mate or pal). | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Confusion about equipment, losing good kitchen item? (8) |
| TRIANGLE – ‘kitchen item’ (the percussion section of an orchestra is informally referred to as the kitchen); TANGLE around RI[g]. | |
| 2 | Charge has you transported, not getting time (3) |
| RAP – ‘charge’ (as in criminal charge); RAP[t]. | |
| 3 | Six old items for one following score (7) |
| VIOLIST – ‘one following score’; VI + O + LIST (‘items’ – well, a list has items, as do a lot of other things, like my kitchen cupboard – Marmite, Branston and Bisto). | |
| 5 | Warplane — rates the flight ‘turbulent’ (7,7) |
| STEALTH FIGHTER – RATES THE FLIGHT*. | |
| 6 | Inclined to withhold information, maybe, for component of medicine? (7) |
| ANTIGEN – ‘component of medicine’; I think the idea here is that if one is inclined to withhold information, then s/he is ‘anti gen’. Geddit? Well, then you’re doing better than me. | |
| 7 | Hornet, for instance, scrambled into service (11) |
| INSECTIVORE – ‘hornet, for instance’; INTO SERVICE*. | |
| 8 | Chief request to remove a tip (6) |
| TOPPLE – ‘tip’ (as in knock over); TOP (‘chief’) + PLE[a]. Nice clue. My COD. | |
| 9 | It reveals the touching behaviour of a criminal (14) |
| FINGERPRINTING – cryptic definition. | |
| 13 | Wildly outraged as introduction of conscription is made acceptable (5-6) |
| SUGAR-COATED – ‘made acceptable’; OUTRAGED AS + C[onscription]*. | |
| 16 | Urge King to participate in excellent social event after sport (5-3) |
| APRES-SKI – PRESS + K in AI. | |
| 18 | Nothing in aerosol curtailed intent to dampen (7) |
| MOISTEN – O in MIST + EN[d]. | |
| 19 | Traps ear: joke ending in heartache (7) |
| LUGGAGE – ‘traps’ (a little used word meaning luggage or possessions); LUG + GAG + [heartache]E. | |
| 20 | One book introduced by famous Quaker writer (3-3) |
| PEN-NIB – ‘writer’; I + B[ook] following [William] PENN. The only Quakers I know are George Fox and William Penn. Or was Florence Nightingale one as well? | |
| 25 | Means of reproduction of various animals primarily (3) |
| OVA – initial letters of O[f] V[arious] A[nimals]. | |
Very enjoyable puzzle, I thought. COD SUGAR-COATED
I do hope ulaca’s powers-that-be see reason. Hard to imagine a more educative, mind-expanding experience than a daily visit to TfTT. I hate the thought of him having to spend the time on Buzzfeed instead.
My comments echo yours – after a slow read through the only one that went in within the first ten minutes was 25dn OVA.
Then all of a sudden it all clattered in within half an hour once a couple of long anagrams 15ac LIGHTER THAN AIR and 5dn STEALTH FIGHTER had been unravelled.
So 42 mins on the clock.
LOI 1dn TRIANGLE – I did not know the pecussionist’s ‘kitchen’terminology – even though my Dad was a drummer – he was rarely seen in the kitchen however. But what else might it have been!?
COD 13dn SUGAR COATED. WOD PRIMORDIAL
Traps. Portable articles for dress, furniture, or use; personal effects; baggage; belongings.
1813 R. M. Cairnes Let. 4 Apr. in Dickson MSS. (1910) 3rd Ser. 866 The rest [of the carriages] is for the Jolly Captain’s Shirts and Stockings, &c., besides a mule for his other traps.
1828 W. Carr Dial. Craven (ed. 2) Traps, small tools or implements, always used in the plural number; equivalent to the classical arma.
1830 Chron. in Ann. Reg. 153/2 This was the general signal for getting our ‘traps’ on the ice.
1831 John Bull 7 Aug. 254 No one thought..that only three days afterwards he would be obliged to pack up his traps and be off.
1834 F. Marryat Peter Simple I. xiii. 191, I packed up my traps and went on shore.
1887 J. Ball Notes Naturalist in S. Amer. 194 To carry some of the traps with which a botanist is usually encumbered
Edited at 2016-10-17 07:51 am (UTC)
Xiang Kong always trouble!
If this gets back to Beijing – you’ll be spending more time in Stanley! Congee all the way!
How to parse IMPROVIDENT – thanks Jack! I got some of it, but couldn’t work out what to take out of the middle of what.
Hornets eat insects. Does that include other hornets? Or have I read something incorrectly, again?
SAP really does mean a poor (Chambers “plodding”) student.
Bunter means the same as banter – that’s what I read, anyway, more evidence of my early morning declining eyesight. Must remember to up the font size.
TRAPS means luggage: Collins online gives the completely useless example: “He will help the student completely break through the worldview that traps her” in the bit devoted to the traps=luggage section.
Still no real sign of a Monday Easy, then.
Thanks to jackkt and, Ulaca, I hope that your “internet usage policy” is accidentally deleted by someone with appropriate skills (or possibly inappropriate skills).
Gloria! Swansong cancelled!
Edited at 2016-10-17 07:48 am (UTC)
Good luck Ulaca with the Faceless Ones and thanks Jackkt for helping out. Being served up the daily post breakfast dose of enlightenment is much appreciated.
COD to LIGHTER THAN AIR, just because I solve in Bristol, a preeminent ballooning city.
Glad to hear that you may have a workaround for your work-woes, ulaca.
Edited at 2016-10-17 08:27 am (UTC)
This went fine until HYGIENE which took far too long. I thought of high but didn’t think “Y”. And I think of jeans as being made of denim, so not a material in its own right (although Chambers says it is, so I guess I’m wrong).
Ulaca, can you not use 3G or 4G and create wifi hot spot for PC to see? Bypassing Big Brother?
My work recently introduced the same policy on social media, so I’m typing this on my iPad with the wifi switched off.
This meaning of ‘kitchen’ is in the same category as CHEONGSAM for me: formerly desperately obscure, now very familiar.
‘Extended’ really doesn’t mean ‘high’, does it? Not even in Chambers, where one can sometimes get the impression that every word is a synonym for every other word, and can be abbreviated to its first letter.
Edited at 2016-10-17 09:18 am (UTC)
This one took me 29 minutes and, like our blogger, the initial pass was quite discouraging with only a couple in the grid. After that, though, it went fairly steadily. LUGGAGE made me stop and think for a while, but the wordplay made it inevitable and I assumed there was some relationship between “trap” and “trappings”. TRIANGLE also worried me for a while, not having heard of the percussion department being a “kitchen”. I assumed, instead, that a TRIANGLE was some item of cooking equipment.
Not completely convinced about ANTIGEN being a component of medicine, unless one counts a vaccine as a medicine, which perhaps one might. And, like some others here, I wasn’t convinced by SAP, which I would define as a mug or a chump. Still, all’s well that ends well.
Dinosaurs were my thing when I was a tiny tot (gateway drug to Latin, really) so the three-horned beastie was quickly biffed in without any pretence at parsing whatsoever.
Edited at 2016-10-17 01:23 pm (UTC)
Edited at 2016-10-17 10:42 am (UTC)
Would never have known traps for luggage if it hadn’t come up in the last few weeks. Must have been in the Quicky or a Jumbo.
COD TOPPLE, LOI ESCAPIST.
Thanks setter, Jack and Ulaca. Hope you’ve learnt your lesson about visiting dodgy websites.
As K suggests kitchen has come up often enough (I seem to recall with timpani) for the percussion connection to be made but for too long I was mentally browsing in Lakeland Plastics rather than Dawson’s Music shop.
So someone who is ‘anti-gen’ would presumably not want to give the troops any information at all, no matter how innocuous and widely-rumored.
As for the present kerfuffle, I’m sure Ulaca will figure out something. I would won’t to lose another Monday co-blogger! It was probably the suddenness of the switch that threw him off – they typically implement changes over the weekend, and people come in on Monday and nothing works and everyone is in a panic.
At my former establishment, we had a tightly controlled official corporate network, where no one was allowed to do anything without approval. But we also had uncensored free wi-fi for personal devices and visitors, which was not connected in any way to the corporate backbone.
Not a difficult crossword, unfamiliar with traps but only a short jump from trappings so no big deal. A couple of clues struck me as rather tricksy .. when dod you last use the word “violist” I wonder?
Far more famous Quakers around than you might think .. Cadbury family, Abraham Darby, Bradshaw the railway timetable man, luvvies Paul Eddington, Sheila Hancock, Herbert Hoover, Donald Swann (as in Flanders & Swann), Oliver (Bagpuss, Clangers) Postgate … they tend not to shout about it, that’s all. An attractive religion, as religions go.
Edited at 2016-10-17 05:45 pm (UTC)