Times 24620 – The Blue Danube Waltz

47 comments on “Times 24620 – The Blue Danube Waltz”

1. I think the parsing is: ASTER (daisy) inside MC (host) + LASS (girl); and the whole is probably a ref. to the sorts of things that famous/master musicians hold for the unwashed. So it’s the teacher who is the master — not an MA/MSc, etc. student.
2. A bit longer for me: 34 minutes, but impeded by last night’s bottle of Margaret River red and some good company. Things I liked: The multiple senses/uses of “bolted” in 15ac making one wonder whether it would be the horse or the door. The archaic “sore” in 26ac which reminded me of reading the nativity passage from Luke 2 at a certain Grammar School every Christmas. (I never was sure what “sore afraid” actually meant.) The two girls whose names seem, sadly to my mind, to have disappeared in recent times.
3. 40 minutes for me, the last 10 spent going through the alphabet in search of EDDA. Quite a lot of tricky wordplay here – CAM for eccentric and KNOT for garden were new to me. But I enjoyed the challenge and there were some welcome chuckles along the way – oink oink.
4. Stuggled through in 37 min. The west, particularly in the north gave pause. BE TOAST, HAPPY EVENT, and EDDA gave most trouble, I knew of EDDA as scandanavian mythology, and “eddo” as a taro root, but “edda” as a different root veg (yam) was new. Certainly an enjoyable solve with many clever clues but, oh well, OINK!
   1. Have you fallen for the ‘m’ / ‘rn’ confusion?
      1. Another good reason for the on-line site to move to a serif font, perhaps … um … Times?
         1. Guilty! But did find an online reference to lead me further astray.
         2. I also had this problem, which held me up for a while. Especially on a little laptop. I found out a lot about yams before seeing that it had to be yarn and EDDA.
5. The wordplay for 12D is ASTER (=daisy) in MC (=host) + lass.

   A well-balanced puzzle – I clocked in at 10-11 mins, including a brief pause to stop and savour 15A.

6. Some very good clueing here, which gave me little respite until I got MASTERCLASS two thirds of the way through, whereupon the rest, apart from AYE, HAPPY EVENT, PLANTER and KNOT, fell into place quickly. When AYE finally capitulated, this confirmed my hunch about EVENT. However, I would have solved the clue a lot earlier had I not been undone by HAPPY being the only dwarf to go AWOL from my mental mini role-call. PLANTER from aids (sadly) and GNAT entered as a guess at 14ac, just to fill the grid.

   Thanks to Uncle Yap for the refrain from the film. Until today I had always thought the words were “… it’s off to work we go”. Before someone questions my ability to align the visuals with the audio, I should say in my defence that, although I watched the film maybe a dozen times over a two-year period, it was always the Cantonese version with my bairn, which proved no corrective to the idée fixe that had been sown in my brain the first time I heard the song as a nipper.

   On the other hand, I do enjoy asking people what the first words of Elton John’s “Daniel” are, and hearing them say “Daniel is leaving tonight on a plane”.

   1. Both lines of lyric are correct. They sing it at each end of their working day.
      1. I Googled both, but alas with insufficient time. (That had all been spent on the puzzle.) Still, I never knew the homebound lyric, which still sounds odd to me – or, more accurately, reads oddly.
7. I had ‘ace’ instead of ‘aye’, so obviously did understand the wordplay at all.

   It turns out I didn’t correctly understand a few of the other cryptics, too, but at least those answers were correct. I thought ‘Anubis’ was really clever, my COD. ‘Knot’ was a bit of a guess for me, I never heard of that bird but figured he must exist.

8. Did not finish, the pesky KNOT and EDDA outstanding. Frustrating as everything else done unaided in what for me was a very tough but highly pleasurable puzzle. Too many terrific clues to mention but broadest smile to HAPPY EVENT.
9. … should be memorable for most of us.
   The new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English comes out today.
   1. … and I’m sure there’s more to the new edition than the addition of ‘vuvuzela’, which most of the news stories seem to be focusing on. Judging by this entry, the online version is already updated.
      1. Well The Groan is trumpeting the Vuvu … but it also gives some more insights.
         1. Quite so – as does a similar Times article written earlier this month. [Link requires paid/trial run access to the new site.]
            1. That means, I guess, getting beyond the “paywall”!
         2. It also gives the interesting sub-head spelling of cheesebal, which is presumably “someone or something lacking taste, style or originality” only more so.
      2. Do they use a simple usage threshold to decide when something goes in, or is it a panel of “experts”. Something like vuvuzela has been around for years – indeed it has been in Bradfords for ages – so clearly it is only the world cup that has brought it to the attention of OED.
         1. Best I can find is this.
            But it may be misleading, as they don’t seem to know exactly which work they’re writing about.
            1. I think that article is definitely about the full OED, as it includes the statement that once a word is included, it never gets removed. The Times article implies that a few words in previous editions of ODE are culled to help make room for the new ones.

               The same article also says:

               Traditionally, if a word was flagged up a set number of times in a fixed number of years, from a range of reputable sources, it found its way into the dictionary. The dictionary still employs human readers — and an electronic one, a web crawler that trawls selected sites to augment a database of two billion uses of words. Yet the final decision is more of an art than a science.

               “The old methods really aren’t sustainable,” Stevenson says. “There’s a feeling that, with the internet, people are freer with new words. People meet them more frequently, and people put down in print things that up until now they would have been less happy to do.” It would be silly, he adds, to leave it a few years for words such as staycation to qualify. “You already have people’s aunties saying ‘I’m going on a staycation this summer’. How could we wait?”

         2. I have the 7th edition (2007) and can’t find it – I’ve looked up “vuvuzela”, “horn”, “musical instrument” and “trumpet”. Where else should I try looking?
            1. Ages may have been an overstatement. Don’t know which edition mine is but I remember chuckling when I saw it.
               1. If it has vuvuzela, it must be the 8th edition, which came out in September 2009.
                  1. You are right that I was looking at the 8th edition, however interestingly it only appears in “instrument” not in any of the categories you mention above – which is perhaps wrong… but it does suggest it may be in 7 or before.
                     1. And so it is – “instrument” also includes forceps, syringe and megaphone. Instrument but not “musical instrument” is a bit harsh but fairly accurate. I suspect addition to “horn” and “trumpet” is already on Anne B’s index cards ready for the 9th edition.
                        1. Which is bit harsh? the instrument or the description? But more seriously, Is there any musical instrument which is only capable of one pitch and one intensity, given that drums, triangles etc are played is sets, or provide accents within a score. I await the first concerto for vuvuzela and orchestra with interest (and from a safe distance).
                           1. You’ve never played a brass instrument, then! The vuvuzela is no different in essence to the kind of trumpet you can see in medieval paintings, or to instruments like the lur, alphorn or bugle – military bugle calls use just 5 notes. The difference is in the players (without using valves, a beginner on the trumpet can usually only produce a few different notes instead of 10 or more) and manufacture (much detail here). This clip is the best evidence I can find that multiple notes are possible – although the player changes the pipe length early on, he later gets a few different notes, and doesn’t play at ear-splitting volume.
                              1. Thank you Peter. I am indeed edified. Perhaps there is scope for a musical composition after all. It would make a great challenge!
10. Well I finished my solving after 45 minutes but still had two outstanding and I never got any further in the time remaining. On arrival at work I used a solver to come up PLANTER and fully expected the intersecting word ?D?A to leap out at me but it didn’t so I had to resort to the solver again.

    I was at a disadvantage never having heard of Planter’s punch and as far as I know the Edda is a collection of myths etc so I would have thought “yarns” would have been more appropriate than the singular. However I have only a casual knowledge of the subject so I may well be wrong about this.

    Apart from the disastrous end to the proceedings I found this a tough but very enjoyable solve.

    1. Having checked the detail on EDDA, I agree that “yarn” is a poor definition, though probably close enough for people who vaguely recognise it as something to do with old Nordic literature.
11. 11:01 for this one – a slowish start, with 11A the first answer written in. Also a slowish finish, not seeing the right answer to 16D and being distracted by first ACE = “one” and then the unlikely-looking AME(n) = “not quite an approval”, until my journey through the alphabet for the middle letter was not quite complete.
12. 20 minutes today, which surprised me as I thought it was longer. ANUBIS didn’t come quickly to me: I though the setter was being hyper clever and picking the OS out of the middle of supposedly, so OSIRIS (the “is” is in there too) was a first gamble.
    I must have been feeling fuzzy, because I tried several ways to get candlestick in at 23 before conceding it probably wasn’t. I think I was hoping the composer would leap out at me when written down.
    I didn’t like BE TOAST very much: it looks like a back-formation infinitive from battle cries in any Schwarzenegger film. It’s right, of course, but doesn’t look it.
    CoD a dead heat between HAPPY EVENT and OINK, both for chuckle factor.
13. I found this anything but easy and, if I ever knew EDDA, I’d forgotten it, so this was a Did Not Finish (I”m not going to tell you what my guess or my reasoning were for 21a – I’m pleading the hundred and fifth ammendment, which gives everyone the right to a measure of stupidity).

    I also struggled with PLANTER and the NEW GUINEA/KNOT cross but put them in with minimal understanding.

14. Didn’t come to this in the best of moods, having been soaked by a downpour on the 8th tee and unable to complete my round. But the puzzle cheered me up – laughed out loud at OINK and thought the whole thing of a very good standard. 25 minutes to solve.
15. I did this in 11’49 – “not” knowing of a knot garden held me up, but considering I had nothing written in the grid after 2 minutes, bar an incorrect OSIRIS at 1 across, then it wasn’t so bad. Did not understand the wordplay for SYCAMORE until coming here.

    I smiled at the HAPPY EVENT!

    After reading Uncle Yap’s highly entertaining preamble I am glad to see I am not the only one to be waylaid by musical delights on Youtube!

16. 10.16 First thought for 1 was DANUBE with part of Anubis but discounted this and passed on to other across clues. I had OLIVE GREY written in for a bit which was making 29 difficult – always helps to actually check the anagram fodder against your answer!
    Liked OINK and BE TOAST – the latter must be a fairly new coinage? I await someone to tell me it is an 18th century usage.
    Off to check what the first line of ‘Daniel’ is.
17. 21:30 for what I thought a tricky but enjoyable puzzle. Last in sycamore from def and checkers and y for unknown.

    At 20d I don’t see how the tense of disperses makes this a satisfactory anagrind (at least not when placed before the fodder). Should it not be an adjectival dispersed? It certainly wouldn’t harm the surface.

    1. I agreed that “dispersed” seems just a bit better.
18. A good puzzle – a few laughs, including my CoD DOGMA. The word play for SYCAMORE left me behind – eccentric cam? Perhaps I’m just ignorant about engineering – and “very ancient” is super-sly.
    1. The Wikipedia article for camshaft has an animation that should help, in conjunction with the second noun meaning of “eccentric” here
    2. Eccentric = cam must be one of the hoariest of chestnuts in the Times, possible the most used of all substitutions. Anyone with the stats?
19. I found this pretty hard going – got maybe 10 clues during my lunchtime, and then picked off the rest off and on through the afternoon, so no proper time. Notice now that I got 21ac wrong – IDEA seemed as good a guess as any!
20. Tough puzzle for me, about an hour. I had most of it complete rather quickly, but stuck on SYCAMORE for a bit, which I got from the checking letters, and then finally the crossing ANUBIS/BE TOAST/KNOT area in the NW. My mind was absolutely stuck on the Blue Nile, and when I finally realized there was another Blue one in the back of my mind, ANUBIS went in, BE TOAST became clearly correct ( I had thought of it early but didn’t believe it could be correct; I thought it was a US-ism), and then the KNOT. I had thought of the bird immediately when I had ?N??, but the garden part was beyond me. COD to STABLE DOOR, which over here is the barn door, as in ‘shut the barn door after the horse is gone’. Regards.
21. Pretty much the same as Kevin although I never got KNOT or BE TOAST which is ironic because my surname in Ukrainian was Chmiel (hops) before it was changed to
    a more Anglo handle and I knew the term ‘oast house’. Got STABLE DOOR right off
    reasoning from the barn door expression over here.

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