Saturday Times 25825 (28th June)

15 comments on “Saturday Times 25825 (28th June)”

1. an enjoyable 8 mins-ish. (Timer didn’t work but Mr CS reckoned it was under 10 mins from start to finish).

   Thanks for the blog – oh to be only 2 in 1965!

2. 13 mins, and from what I can remember I felt that this was a very straightforward puzzle. ASTARTE was my LOI.
3. Easy this. I did like 5dn, very neat clue.

   I was 11 in 1962 but not paying much more attention to current affairs than a 2 year old would. It’s called “history,” and does not all have to be experienced personally 🙂

   1. From school history I don’t remember us getting much more recent than Henry VIII…but anyway it was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, like your comment 😉
      1. My schoolboy history concentrated on the Stuarts but as any reader of 1066 And All That knows, after the Great War, History came to a .
4. Enjoyed this one – about the right level of difficulty for me (albeit that makes it a walk in the park for the senior pros). Stretching but attainable.

   Particularly liked IMAMATE, CALVADOS and AUDIT. I was 10 in 1965, and UDI became a catch phrase at school when one of my more waggish – and sophisticated – classmates announced we should be declaring UDI against Latin: funny how these things stay with you, occupying valuable shelf space in the finite memory available…

   Found today’s even more straightforward, so if any Quickie aficionados happen to be reading this, I suggest you have a crack at it – it (for me) was around the same difficulty as one of the more challenging Quickies.

5. Around 50 minutes though I’m becoming more relaxed about timing the weekend puzzles so that may have included any number of diversions and distractions along the way.

   I certainly lost time having written in CLA(S)P at 6ac though the definition doesn’t quite stand up on close inspection. Didn’t know MON or understand the Swann reference at 27.

   I wish I could have gone without hearing of UDI in 1965 and probably for about two years before and 10 years afterwards. Reports inevitably spoke of Ian Smith “declaring UDI” which always struck me as a somewhat tautological construction.

   Edited at 2014-07-05 09:38 am (UTC)

6. Didn’t take too long, but a clever puzzle, I thought. Particularly liked NURSERYMAID and RUE.

   The only Mon I know occurs in Black Country dialect (Ow om yer owd mon?)

   There’s an apocryphal tale about Sir Thomas Beecham’s opinion of whether or not STOCKHAUSEN could be described as a composer, isn’t there?

   I’ve come across the pun in 13 before as the punch line of an old joke: “Tri-weekly, try weekly, try weakly.”

7. 14m. I remembered UDI from at least one past crossword. It’s a bit obscure really: I suspect it’s very rarely taught in schools these days so if you weren’t alive at the time your chances of having heard of it are pretty slim.
   I agree that CARBONARA isn’t a type of pasta any more than Alfredo or Bolognese.
8. SOED defines pasta as: A type of dough made from durum wheat flour and water and extruded or stamped into particular shapes… Also, an Italian dish consisting largely of this and usu. a sauce. L19.

   1. That’s fair, because if you say you’re ‘having pasta’, some sort of sauce is implicitly involved (or you’re having a very dull meal), but I don’t think this is the same as saying that CARBONARA is a ‘type of pasta’.
9. Excepting only that I agree more with Nick (a nice puzzle for those of us with less experience) than with Sue (a bit longer than 8 minutes here); Carbonara is a sauce, not a pasta but the clue still led unambiguously to the answer; old enough to know UDI but my State-side education meant I had to look it up after the solve, (a nugget I am now glad to have); and for the same reason I never learned English rivers – so thought it was TEE, not TEES (or are there both?). A long way of saying that I guessed tee+n = a slightly unparsable kid, for an error. thanks for the blog

   Edited at 2014-07-05 02:09 pm (UTC)

10. I interpreted “type of pasta” for carbonara as shorthand for “type of pasta dish”, same as bolognese would be.

    BTW, Tommy Beecham when asked whether he had ever conducted Stockhausen is reputed to have replied “No, but I think I trod in some once”.

    1. Indeed. It seems clear enough to me too.
    2. If you wanted to say ‘type of pasta dish’ why wouldn’t you say ‘type of pasta dish’ (or indeed just ‘pasta dish’), since ‘type of pasta’ means something else? At the very least it would be confusing.

       Edited at 2014-07-05 07:50 pm (UTC)

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