Times 24368 – The Landed Gentry

29 comments on “Times 24368 – The Landed Gentry”

1. 32 min of fits and starts, and cheated for GOLDENEYE. Blasting gelatin is an alternative name for gelignite, but can’t offer any enlightenment on INDIA. COD: NONAGON.
2. Oh yes I can – delta, foxtrot, golf, hotel ,?
3. 23 Across – PAKISTANI – The A and K are honours in card games, especially bridge. BUT, although Pakistan is an Islamic state with 95% of the population being muslim, “A Pakistani” is not necessarily “A Muslim”.

   1 down – FRAPPE – Similarly to the above, a rapper is not necessarily black.

   Mike O
   Skiathos

4. Forgot to time, but under the hour. I was also a bit perplexed by GELATIN but Wiki says blasting gelatin is synonymous with gelignite. Likewise AK, and I think Mike O’s explanation is the more likely; the Australian Order being very short lived. Some looseness in places, as has been pointed out, but I liked it none the less. COD to the outrageous NONAGON.
5. We’ve met this setter before-some nice ideas and constructions but not always entirely accurate. There are several examples today of which RAPPER and PAKISTANI are the worst apart from GELATIN which I suspect is just wrong. I can only assume he/she is confusing it with gelignite (which is made from potassium nitrate and not reduced bones).

   All that apart it was a pleasant 20 minutes. INDIA for I, coming after Hotel for H is a reference to the phonetic alphabet.

   1. Jimbo, I agree with most of what you say, but I think we have to concede the setter’s contention that GELATIN can = something “that’s highly explosive”. The COED gives two meanings for the word: 1. “a virtually colourless and tasteless water-soluble protein prepared from collagen and used in food preparation, in photographic processing and for making glue” (presumably related to your “reduced bones”), and 2. “a high explosive consisting chiefly of a gel of nitro-glycerine with added cellulose nitrate”. So no grounds for complaint, as far as I can see.
6. 23A – An alternative source for the AK is the Ace and King in a pack of cards, being honours in bridge.

   Harry Shipley

7. 12 minutes, also raising an eyebrow at Pakistani being defined as “Muslim”, and gelatin. It was clearly what was required, but as far as I can see, gelignite can be called “(blasting) gelatin” – but that doesn’t mean it works the other way round, and gelatin can be called gelignite.

   I suppose it depends on personal taste how upset you get about this sort of looseness: I saw that “black artist” clearly meant rapper, and as I wrote it in, I thought that Eminem* would beg to differ. However, did it stop me getting the required solution, or even delay me? Not really.

   Spent a while trying to justify a word something like DIOCESAL, which combined the DI—-AL and the bishop, before going back to the good practice of exhausting those words which actually exist before making one up.

   *Mr Marshall Mathers Jr, m’lud, a popular, and distinctly white, rap artist.

8. Parsed INDIA while shaving 10 minutes after finishing puzzle. Now have a bloody face. Don’t care if it’s a chestnut , gets my clue of the day closely followed by EYES DOWN.
9. t took me a while to get on the setter’s wavelength, and I didn’t see many of the anagrams right away. It didn’t help that I carelessly put ‘regularise’ instead of ‘generalise’ as a solution to one of them.

   I never understood the cryptics for ‘eyes down’ and ‘India’, and took a long time to realize why ‘upper class’ is correct.

   I think there were some really good ideas in this puzzle, but the setter is wiling to sacrifice too much accuracy to get a smooth surface to the clues. A little more work and he could have a great puzzle.

10. 37:22 .. an almighty struggle for me. I’m not sure if that was the late solving hour last night, or just general dimness. As vinyl says, lots of good ideas in here.

    Nitro-gelatin and ‘gelatin dynamite’ seem to get dictionary credit.

    We’re had the debate before about rap or rapper being defined as ‘black’. I don’t have any problem with the music being defined as ‘black’, which it demonstrably is, in the same way as blues, but to define a performer of it that way is another matter, and much more tenuous for crossword purposes.

    COD 3d DIAGONAL, which took forever to click.

    One Across Rock: disgruntled Seattle grunge crew The Foundling Fathers

11. Got most of it in the first 30 minutes but then slowed down and really struggled in the NW where I had thought of UPPER CLASS and INDIA quite early but couldn’t justify either so didn’t trust their checking letters with 10ac and 12ac. The only clue that actually beat me was 7dn where I didn’t know the word or the chess term that would have enabled me to guess it.

    Ran out of time at around 50 minutes.

    1. ….so ‘pion’ was my first in. That’s obvious, right!
12. Never heard of it. Don’t do physics. Don’t do chess either, so that didn’t help. Stuck LION down, hoping that LIN was something to do with chess….
13. The clues in his didn’t strike me as significantly harder than yesterday, but I still took over twice as long – 35 minutes. Frappe was new to me. I certainly queried “black artist” for RAPPER and “Muslim” for PAKISTANI, though I wasn’t terribly concerned. The definition for GELATIN is supported in COD, so there are no grounds for criticism there. I didn’t understand how honours led to AK, and as my copy lacked the ellipses in 22 and 24, I wondered where the definition was in 24.
    1. The last word of 22D is “destiny” and I take that to be the definition for KARMA. It’s typical of this setter’s approach in that it’s doing double duty.
       1. Yes, I realized that when I got home and in the brighter light of my room I could just see 3 dots at the end of 22, though none at the beginnning of 24 (probably my printer).

          I’ve got no problem with the device. In fact in this case it seems more justified than most, since it’s essential to the cryptic element, whereas often the linking of two clues is merely cosmetic, relating to the surface only.

          1. Your printer is not to blame. The online version invariably omits the ellipses at the beginning of a “continued” clue, and in this case seems to have underrepresented those at the end of 22 as well. Beware the clue not commencing with a capital letter. I’ve been caught out in the past by this curious phenomena, which doesn’t appear to translate to the newspaper version.
14. 25/30 minutes or thereabouts saving my dimness for timing the exercise today rather than for the solving process (paused for an interruption but forgot to stop the clock, then stopped the clock for a further interruption and forgot to restart it. Double whammy).

    PIN as in chess move came up very recently so 7 was a confident answer even though I didn’t know the sciency bit.

    I found this trickier than it perhaps should have been but is was fun along the way. COD Stalin.

    Right, I’m off to raid the larder for gelatin to make some homemade fireworks for next Wednesday.

15. 54 mins. A mixture of some good clues, and some highly questionable. Like everyone else, I raised an eyebrow over RAPPER and PAKISTANI, and remain unconvinced over GELATIN.

    I didn’t know PION or GOLDENEYE (except as a Bond film!).

    My last in was ERNST.

16. 32 mins, toughest GOLDENEYE, PION. COD WHODUNIT
17. Aren’t there usually 2 Ns in WHODUNNIT?
    1. I have always put only one.
18. Did not like some of this and it took me 30 mins. Quibbled over pakistani, rapper and gelatin (Chambers consulted after; faery is archaic, OK in a bar-grid; other things than drinks can be frappe – melon in particular sprang to mind. Solved from 26 to right and then up, COD for me 13a and 5d. Liked the pair of k’s at 22 & 24.
19. This was the hardest so far this week for me but, paradoxically, the first that I have got all correct. I finished with Stalin and it was not until then that I was confident about Lined and Pion.

    I have been known to use Procrustean methods to solve difficult crosswords but, despite considerable stretching I could not get Diocese to fit 3 Down.

20. About 25 minutes, mostly enjoyable. I’m not a habitue of bingo parlors, so EYES DOWN was my last entry, really a guess from the checking letters. COD: GOLDENEYE, which I found particularly clever, followed closely by STALIN. First entry was OSTRICH. Had never heard of PION, but saw the chess reference so that was OK. Regards to all.
21. My Chambers (11th edition) only has “blasting gelatine” with the final E. (Under gelatin). I’m not keen on 2D: after translating “You, say” into U, we have “U may represent the aristocracy”. I know Nancy Mitford’s “U” is a designation for “upper class” but wouldn’t something like “The aristocracy you, say, may represent” be more accurate?
22. I’ll join the chorus of dissatisfaction expressed with GELATIN, PAKISTANI,UPPER CLASS. And can I ask about PERFORATE? I’m aware of the various conventions for indicating deletion of the final letter of a word, but the final three? Or does -rce stand for something I’d know about if I went and bought a Chambers?
    Also, did no one else find OSTRICH rather a freebie?
23. 12:40 in my post-holiday catch-up. Surprised by gelatin but as discussed, the Concise Oxford has it. The deletion of more than one letter in 12A is signalled by “substantially reduced”, though that could cover a range of possibilities.

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