QC 1865 by Pedro

Posted on Categories Quick Cryptic

I went through this completely sequentially, from top to bottom then left to right. Either I was on that mysterious ‘wavelength’ or Pedro was being especailly kind to us for the bank holiday weekend. Only you can tell me which it was and I look forward to reading your comments. Many thanks to Pedro (who I don’t think I have blogged before? Certainly not more than once or twice anyway) for a gentle start to the week.

Following my comments above I don’t really need to say that my FOI was 1A and LOI 19D. But there, I’ve done it anyway. I think my COD was 11A which took slightly longer than the others to go into the grid.

Definitions are underlined and everything else is explained just as I see it as simply as I can.

Across
1 Militia crazy to jettison leader (4)
ARMYbARMY (crazy) ‘jettisoning leader’. Unless, of course, you are in the Barmy Army following the English Cricket team around the world (when allowed to do so).
3 I’m supporting exercises, right? Wrong (8)
IMPROPER – IM (I’m) + PRO (supporting) + PE (exercises) + R (right).
8 Church provided most of item for baptism — material for gown? (7)
CHIFFON – CH (church) + IF (provided) + FON (‘most of’ FONt, ‘item for baptism’).
10 Prosper — not, say, going backwards (3,2)
GET ON – NOT + EG (say) all ‘going backwards’ (i.e. reversed).
11 About to move round striker in later game (6,5)
RETURN MATCH – RE (about) + TURN (to move round) + MATCH (cryptically a ‘striker’).
13 Desire a bit of sunshine in most of the days of November (6)
THIRST – S (a bit of Sunshine) ‘in’ THIRTy (‘most of’ the THIRTY days in November).
15 A second court case will liberate one of the stars (6)
ASTRAL – A + S (second) + TRiAL (court case ‘liberating’ I (one))
17 Anti-regalia, possibly, being against class distinction (11)
EGALITARIAN – straight anagram (‘possibly’) of ANTI REGALIA.
20 A bishop not entirely sharp? These assist with calculations (5)
ABACI – A + B (bishop) + ACId (if ACID is sharp, then ACI is ‘not entirely’ sharp).
21 Pens, say, recreated a connection in the mind (7)
SYNAPSE – straight anagram (‘recreated’) of PENS SAY.
22 Article put behind sailors in drink (8)
ABSINTHE – THE (definite article) ‘put behind’ ABS (Able-Bodied Seamen, or sailors) + IN.
23 Fool left in bed (4)
CLOT – L (left) ‘in’ COT (bed).
Down
1 Precise account supported by clergyman (8)
ACCURATE – AC (account) ‘supported by’ CURATE (clergyman). As this is a down clue CURATE is ‘underneath’ AC and therefore ‘supports’ it.
2 Damp fog — nothing visible in that (5)
MOIST – it’s that least favourite Susie Dent word again. O (nothing) ‘visible in’ MIST (fog).
4 Note on area identifying low points (6)
MINIMA – MINIM (a note of two beats as I remember it) ‘on’ (i.e. ‘above’ in this down clue) A (area).
5 A hart rising after injury, quite fit (5,2,4)
RIGHT AS RAIN – straight anagram (‘after injury’) of A HART RISING.
6 One throwing a jug (7)
PITCHER – double definition.
7 Area of frozen water? Heading away from edge (4)
RINKbRINK (edge with the heading taken away).
9 People here are often told to go to blazes (4,7)
FIRE STATION – cryptic definition.
12 Resonant scheme supported by man (8)
PLANGENT – PLAN (scheme) ‘supported by’ (i.e. ‘above’ in this down clue) GENT (man).
14 Cold areas? One cold area turning up here (7)
ICECAPS – I (one) + C (cold) + ECAPS (SPACE (area), reversed, i.e. ‘turning up’ in this down clue).
16 Equipment given to school is trashy stuff (6)
KITSCH – KIT (equipment) + SCH (school).
18 The writer’s heading for Pamplona, taking on the Spanish force (5)
IMPEL – I’M (the writer’s) + P (heading for Pamplona) + EL (‘the’ in Spanish).
19 Asian island language used by programmers (4)
JAVA – double definition.

47 comments on “QC 1865 by Pedro”

  1. Nice going, Don! I was my usual desultory self, although not slowed down for long by any clue (well, MINIMA). Liked ASTRAL. To be a bit nit-picking, a SYNAPSE is a connection in the brain, not the mind. 6:19.
    1. Thanks Kevin. I did think about the SYNAPSE point but thought I would leave the mind/body problem to the collective consciousness so thanks for raising that as well.
  2. Not a good Bank Holiday attempt from me, 24:35 with one error. RING (=edge)for RINK at 7d. Since I don’t always parse all the clues before final submission, I get errors like this now and again.

    Spent an age on ICECAPS even though I could see how the clue worked, 13a THIRST also took time, and ‘days of November’ signalling ‘thirty’ looks obscure to me. Tried many ways to get N=November in there.

    12a PLANGENT. Is a word I don’t think I really knew, certainly not it’s meaning.

    Isn’t ABACI one of those bogus plurals like hippopotami that is used by writers of grammar books but never by specialists in the field who write about them every day?

    COD ABSINTHE, also my favourite drink

    1. Like you, I struggled a bit with this one and took half as much time again, probably over the same clues, particularly ICECAPS.
      My COD ASTRAL although I note that absinthe makes the heart grow fonder. Certainly dizzies my head. I think I will stick to a glass or three of Chablis although last night’s dinner of venison in dark chocolate sauce (interesting, courtesy Gordon R) occasioned a robust burgundy.
      PS Another outing for PITCHER, getting to be a regular chestnut.

      Edited at 2021-05-03 09:25 am (UTC)

      1. I don’t like to suggest improvements to clues, but “Sailors in the drink (8)” seems quite cute to me.
    2. Plangent is a strange word in that it has two or three meanings which are quite distinct: (1) doleful, mournful; (2) booming, ringing; (3) resonant, sonorous. (2) and (3) overlap but are certainly different from (1).
  3. 9 minutes. Straightforward apart from SYNAPSE which I’d heard of as a word but didn’t know what it was nor exactly how it was spelt, though the checkers and remaining anagrist didn’t leave much room for doubt.
  4. I seem to have found this tougher than some, getting particularly stuck on ABACI, MINIMA and LOI CHIFFON where the answer was clear but I was very slow working out how it parsed. Looking back now I’m not sure why as the there was nothing overly tricky about the clues. Hopefully it will act as a good warm up for the jumbo. Finished in 11.42
    Thanks to astartedon
  5. Steady and mainly top to bottom, but never really flowed for me. Didn’t much like 13A where November, having the common =N overtone seemed a slightly unfair choice of month where no indication that other months of 30 days were just as relevant – but could be a justifiable red herring I suppose. Anyway, it became obvious enough with checkers. Nearly had ICEMASS at 14D but obviously the parsing didn’t quite work once I’d biffed it initially. 17A made me smile so COD.
    1. Doesn’t the rhyme go “Thirty days hath September”? So that would have been a more satisfactory choice of month. Choosing November, which of course appears in the NATO phonetic alphabet seems a bit mean.
      1. I thought the rhyme was:

        Thirty days hath September
        April, June and November

        So I think it still works 😀

      2. You get sunshine on most days in September, April and June, so November is the correct choice.
  6. FOI: 21a SYNAPSE
    LOI: 5d RIGHT AS RAIN

    Time to Complete: DNF

    Clues Answered Correctly without aids: 15

    Clues Answered with Aids (3 lives): 3a, 1d, 12d

    Clues Unanswered: 10a, 13a, 4d, 7d, 14d, 19d

    Wrong Answers: Nil

    Total Correctly Answered (incl. aids): 18/24

    Aids Used: Chambers

    I started off very slow, and that dictated my progress for the rest of this puzzle. Some of the clueing seemed a little too difficult for me. However, if I am honest, once I saw the answers it seemed easy enough. I guess that’s always the way.

    4d. MINIMA – An unanswered clue, and a word I am not familiar with. I have heard of minim/s, used, for example, in entomology, but minima was not in my vocabulary. It is now.

    14d. ICECAPS – Another unanswered clue, and one that had me frustrated. I had worked out the IC, but the rest eluded me. Again, easy enough when I saw the answer.

    12d. PLANGENT – A life used here. Not a word with which I was familiar, though I did get the PLAN part of the answer. But I kept trying to think of a man’s name for the rest.

    A disappointing DNF, but an enjoyable puzzle nonetheless.

  7. A quick start with the easy ones from Pedro today but things got chewier in the E & SE and I ended up just tipping into the SCC. JAVA was fair but held me up, ABACI needed crossers (I like Merlin’s description — a bogus plural). ICECAPS led me to my LOI THIRST (a very odd clue to me) which took quite a while and ended up as a biff (thanks Don for parsing it). Very much a Curate’s egg, I think. John M.

    Edited at 2021-05-03 08:37 am (UTC)

  8. Not that easy for most less experienced solvers in my opinion. However there were a number of words I had seen recently and I felt on the wavelength.
    After 9 minutes I needed two: THIRST took a while and then I had to have a long pause over ICE …
    I resisted biffing Icebays or similar and eventually found CAPS. COD to that.
    10:31 on the clock.
    David
  9. … for a 10 minute finish. Not quite the fastest I have ever completed a Pedro crossword but I think he may be generally toning the chewiness down a bit, as a year ago I was regularly taking much longer with his puzzles.

    Like Merlin I wondered a bit about Abaci. But my dictionary suggests that it is indeed an acceptable plural, along with Abacuses, as the word reached English via Latin. I gather its origin is much earlier though, as (according to some sources) it is from the Semitic (Phoenician or Hebrew) Abaq “sand strewn on a surface for writing”. Inevitably other sources, not unconnected with Beijing, claim that on the contrary the abacus was invented in China, while over in Silicon Valley I gather there are serious claims that it stands for Abundant Beads, Addition and Calculation Utility System.

    At least Abaci is a plausible word. I would never attempt the Monthly Club Special, but I do enjoy reading the blog for it, and today’s, by Verlaine, contains a comment about “a word the chances are you haven’t heard of”. I haven’t heard of fully three-quarters of the answers to that crossword!

    A good start to the week, and many thanks to Don for the blog.
    Cedric

    1. Prompted by you, I looked at the monthly Club Special and, like you, knew startlingly few of the words. But I did like 6d.

      Thanks, Don and Pedro, for the QC, which I enjoyed and very nearly finished.

      Diana

  10. How nice to have a leisurely coffee and puzzle session! Viva Bank Holidays.

    Held up by JAVA (I have only a smattering of IT knowledge; fortunately this fell within it) and MINIMA (where I read the “note” as MI for a long time).

    FOI ARMY, LOI MINIMA, CODs ICECAPS & THIRST (both v clever), time 10:16 for 1.6K and a Decent Day.

    Many thanks Pedro and Don.

    Templar

  11. One for the fast set, I think, I was pleased to finish four minutes over my target of 20. I spent a lot of time un-picking the wordplay rather than biffing, which is how it should be. I don’t think I would have finished this one a few years ago.
    Thanks to Pedro and astartedon

    Brian

    Edited at 2021-05-03 09:30 am (UTC)

  12. Seemed on the wavelength today and zoomed almost straight through fairly quickly by my standards. FOI ACCURATE which helped with CHIFFON (COD?). EGALITARIAN sprang to mind thanks to FIRE STATION, good clue, as was KITSCH.
    LOI ICECAPS. Also slow on JAVA until penny dropped, and hesitated about MINIMA.
    Thanks all, esp Don.

    Edited at 2021-05-03 09:36 am (UTC)

  13. Biffed in FIRE SERVICE and ICELAND to start with, which held me up, but eventually realised my mistakes. Liked 15a
    Regards
    AndrewK
  14. Very quick for me for most of this, but got held up at the end with the crossers RIGHT AS RAIN and ASTRAL and, my last ones in, ICE CAPS and THIRST. Didn’t stop to parse the latter before stopping my watch on 22:54. Got to go, but I will just say that, to me, mind is synonymous with brain, and thanks to Astartedon and Pedro.
  15. I’m another on the wavelength at 7:13 – would have been quicker had I not typed THISTY at 13ac so FIRE STATION and LOI ABICI got a little held up.
  16. 13 minutes and change for a pleasant start to the week. 1 and 3 across went straight in on reading the clues to give a good start. Slowed down by CHIFFON, THIRST and CAPS, and with MERs at ABACI and THIRST. Good puzzle though, thanks both.

    On edit, I forgot to say that I agree with Cedric’s comment about the Club Special and Verlaine’s blog — it looks like a foreign language to me.

    Edited at 2021-05-03 09:36 am (UTC)

  17. Very much on the ‘found it tough’ side here. Very few went in first time and a lot of effort needed to get a few more. Eventually a DNF as I had to look up SYNAPSE (nho), JAVA (not a computer buff) and ICECAPS (just did not see it). Must do better.
  18. ARMY was my FI, but I had to come back to 3d as my LOI as I moved SW-wards when I didn’t see it straight away. IMPROPER preceded it as POI. No particular holdups though. 8:03. Thanks Pedro and Don.
  19. 16 minutes; not helped by foolishly guessing ICEBERG which slowed me down.
  20. If they keep drinking Absinthe I reckon they’ll have more than a few things to worry about.
    1. Did it once. On the following day I put people’s lives in danger. Never again.
  21. A steady solve at 26 mins with lots to like. Got off to a pretty good start in the NW corner but then rapidly slowed down.

    Felt there were a lot of clues where you had to find an equivalent meaning for a particular word and take off a letter here and there — 7dn, 13ac and 20ac are just a few that come to mind.

    9dn seemed so straightforward that I thought “Fire Station” surely couldn’t be right. But, the checkers said otherwise.

    FOI — 1ac “Army”
    LOI — 15ac “Astral”
    COD — 11ac “Return Match”

    Thanks as usual!

  22. Just under 10 mins. Held up at the end by JAVA which I knew as both a software download and an island but for some reason required an alphabet trawl. I studied biology all the way to University so SYNAPSE wasn’t a problem. CHIFFON was biffed from the first four characters.
  23. I solved ACCURATE and IMPROPER quickly, but was then unable to get any of the eight clues that led off them. Most frustrating! So, I had to switch my attention to the higher-numbered clues in order to start making inroads into this puzzle. Fortunately, I did manage to make progress, although ICECAPS only fell after an interminable alphabet trawl, and I eventually had enough checkers to crack the clues I had struggled with earlier.

    My LOsI were MINIMA and PITCHER (I couldn’t see beyond ‘minors’ and ‘pottery’), but the key to their solution was finally getting RETURN MATCH (I was thinking of ROTORS or ROTARY something, and I don’t remember seeing MATCH for striker before). Eventually, I finished, all correct and fully parsed (except CHIFFON), in 50 minutes. Challenging!

    Mrs Random finished in 37 minutes, although she nearly DNF’d with ‘data’ for JAVA, but she corrected her error and said that she too found it quite tough today. Perhaps she’s being kind – she has a better way with words than me.

    Many thanks to Pedro and astartedon (I’m amazes you were able to solve this sequentially).

  24. I often struggle with Pedro puzzles but this one seemed fairly straightforward. All done and parsed in 12 mins. A lot of nice clues here – thanks Pedro.

    FOI – 1ac ARMY
    LOI – 19dn JAVA
    COD – 9dn FIRE STATION – raised a smile!

  25. I thought this was a good puzzle from Pedro, with my only DNK, Plangent, generously enough clued. Even so, it was around the 25min mark before Java and Rink rounded off proceedings. Minima was another tricky one until I realised what type of low points were involved. CoD to either 8ac, Chiffon, or 13ac Thirsty, both a pleasure to parse. Invariant
  26. Or like “tarsi” from the other day – still irritated by that – tarsals in common medical usage.
  27. Having put 4,2,5 for 5a slowed us down until the penny dropped, otherwise a steady progress and finishing just about our target time. Scoolboy latin, long ago, helped with 4d and 20a. Pleasant start to the week.
  28. I had no problems, but could see where less seasoned solvers might struggle, eg ABACI, and SYNAPSE.

    FOI ARMY
    LOI MINIMA
    COD ICECAPS
    TIME 3:33

  29. Both courses today..never heard of plangent but liked the tone of it.

  30. it was Monday.

    5:55.

    Not fast, not slow. ABACI LOI as I’d bunged in FIRE STARTER mistakenly. Correcting that made it fall into place.

  31. But most of it achievable.
    I didn’t understand why Thirst but it had to be, but my confidence dented I gave up with Icecaps, Abaci and Java remaining.
    Plangent would have been impossible for me except I do recall it from before — when it was a word that annoyed me so much at the time that I haven’t forgotten it! Not that I could recall what it meant!!
    I haven’t heard the ‘right as rain’ expression in many a year though.
    Thanks all, a good but tricky puzzle.
    John George
  32. Nobody seems to have pointed out that precision and accuracy are quite different. I thought we had some scientists here!
    Katy
    1. Hi Katy

      You are absolutely right of course. Both to point out the difference and that there are quite a few scientists here. I am, or have been (I have been many things), one myself.

      My philosophy on doing the blog is more or less if I can see what the setter is trying to achieve then I will just parse the clue and move on. Only if there is a mistake in the way the wordplay works or some glaring error will I point it out. But of course sometimes it is subjective: every now and again there is something that just gets my goat and in that case I may just comment on it because it bugs me personally.

      But largely I will leave it to the commenters to pick up on — as you have done! And as kevingregg did in the first post of the day (he’s ALWAYS the first post by the way — or nearly always) regarding SYNAPSE, and you will see a similar reply from me there. Because you are the people we do the blogs for anyway and we love it when you get involved, start a conversation, challenge someone’s thinking.

      Having said all that, I did just check on the online dictionary and the first definition of ACCURATE gives:

      “…free from error or defect; consistent with a standard, rule, or model; precise; exact.”

      So what we often find is that language moves on, and sadly for some of us pedants, walls are broken down and definitions start to include other terms that were originally quite distinct. Examples are endless and I gave up tearing my hair out over them long ago. Language is whatever it becomes. I fully expect, for instance, that the distinction between PRINCIPAL and PRINCIPLE will be eroded by the tides of ignorance at some point in the future simply because nobody out there (including subeditors of certain newspapers that shall remain nameless) really gives a damn.

      Don’t get me wrong. I’m with you on this and I do give a damn. But that’s how it is.

      But lovely to hear from you. Why not join up and become part of the community? Then when you get involved in a discussion we’ll feel like we know you!

      Kind regards

      Don

      1. And having seen jackkt’s reply as well I would also say it is possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast and also to hold two contrarian views at the same time. Because I agree with both of you. When you are using it in the precise (oops!) sense of describing the characteristics of some sort of scientific instrument then the two terms have quite distinct meanings. But in the wider world such distinctions are less important. Context is very often all.

        Edited at 2021-05-03 07:58 pm (UTC)

    2. In some circumstances they have different meanings but in others they can mean the same and the usual dictionaries reflect that e.g. SOED has:

      Accuracy: 1 The state of being accurate; precision, correctness. M17.

      Precision: 2 The fact, condition, or quality of being precise; exactness, definiteness; distinctness, accuracy. M18.

    3. After an engineering career which included the specification of many systems, several being expressed by more than a thousand individual requirements, I can offer the following. If, e.g. the velocity of a object is measured as 270.000 degrees, 358.495 kt, the measurement is precise. But if the actual velocity is 275.000 degrees, 340.000 kt, the measurement is inaccurate.

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