Times 24812 – Three authors and a physicist

Author   daveperryPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 38:30. Nice to get a straightforward one on my turn to blog for a change.

I very nearly forgot it was my turn to blog today, only remembering just in time. This one was a welcome relief after a few pretty tough ones this week. But despite this there were still some neat surfaces and interesting wordplay. It’s nice to see a puzzle that’s well put together without being unnecessarily difficult.

For those tracking the Arts v Science balance, it’s 3-1 to the Arts in this one. Conrad, Belloc & Emerson on one side, Rutherford on the other.

12 would probably get my COD for its clever &lit surface, but lots of other good ones.

cd = cryptic def., dd = double def., rev = reversal, homophones are written in quotes, anagrams as (–)*, and removals like this

Across
1 B + EVER + AGE – My first thought was B + E’ER to make some sort of beer, but I managed to get away from it when the right answer suggested itself.
5 Transform Her + RUSH
10 HEART OF DARKNESS – cd – a work of fiction by Joseph Conrad
11 SLA(VET + RA)DE – The Slade School of Fine Art is a famous London art college
13 deliberately omitted
15 S(CUFF)LEw
17 CUR + VIER
18 dAIRy + DR + OP
19 PENzANCE
21 TEST = SET rev + augusT
22 BROCATELLE = (CELLAR TO BE)*
25 25  Rule a staycation out — Belloc’s warning lines  (10,5)CAUTIONARY TALES = (RULE A STAYCATION)* – I remember Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales from my youth. If you’re not familiar with them, you should have a quick read of one or two. I might try reading them to my kids.
27 hidden word(s) – but quite well disguised
28 HOOLIGAN = HO + (IN GAOL)*
Down
1 BEHESTS = Soldier in (THEBES)*
2 VIA = A + IV all rev
3 RUT + HER(FOR)D – Ernest Rutherford was known as the father of nuclear physics.
4 GO + FERry
6 sHAKEs
7 UNEMOTIONAL = TOME rev in UNION + ALl
8 HUSTLER = (RUTHLESs)*
9 HANDICAP = “HANDY” + CAP
12 A + CU(P)RE’S + SURE – my only complaint is that the word ‘spa’ is superfluous, but the surface is excellent so this can be forgiven.
14 GRAND TOTAL = GRAN + LAD rev about TOT
16 EX + PI + RING
18 ARTIC + L + warehousE – The definition is: Maybe ‘the’
20 madE + M(ER)S + ON – Ralph Waldo Emerson is the author this time
23 deliberately omitted
24 sTrIkErS
26 sLUG

72 comments on “Times 24812 – Three authors and a physicist”

  1. 14 minutes: a nice tidy puzzle I thought, just slightly too heavy for the Nursery (3.5/10). Love a good (if obvious) anagram, and 25ac ain’t bad at all.
    Noted the sci vs fi count and thought it could have been balanced a bit by a reference to Georges Cuvier at 17ac. A bit of a golf reference at 9dn might also have pleased our esteemed Dorset colleague.
    Not terribly fond of the delib. om. at 13ac though; or, indeed, the clues to the short answers in general.

    Edited at 2011-04-01 05:16 am (UTC)

    1. You must have noticed that when scientists are included they are only the very well known ones. For a time Newton had the stage almost to himself but others like Watt are thankfully creeping in. My guess is that very few Times setters will have heard of Cuvier although extinction as a concept will be very familiar to them. Later in this blog Rutherford is described as “not the first scientist one thinks of” which leaves me for one gasping.
      1. I agree, Jimbo. I’ve not heard of Cuvier, but I remember covering Rutherford at school. I would think he should certainly be as well known as many of the artists/authors that grace these grids. Surely more people have come across Ernest Rutherford than brocatelle?
        1. My scientific knowledge is patchy at best but Rutherford is definitely fair game. He’s not the first scientist I’d think of but he’d come earlier in my list of scientists than Belloc would in my list of writers.
          Brocatelle is obscure but perfectly gettable from the clue. Unless you’re a complete muppet.
        2. It looks as if most contributors have heard of Rutherford and this leads me to ponder who are (or should be?) the most well known scientists? Off the top of my head I’ll have a punt at: Bohr (atomic theory); Crick and Watson (DNA); Curie (radio activity); Darwin; Durac (quantum theory); Einstein; Faraday; Hubble; Kepler (planetary motion); Lavoisier (chemistry); Newton; Pasteur (germs); Rutherford (atomic theory). Any more nominations? Anybody not heard of some of these worthy people?
          1. A few more spring to mind. How about Jenner, Fleming, Boyle, Euler, Mendeleev & Oppenheimer. Hawking probably warrants inclusion too. And of course there are the older ones Galileo, Copernicus, Euclid & Archimedes.
          2. I’ve heard of them all Jimbo. Others returned by Google and known to me are:

            Archimedes
            James Chadwick (discoverer of the neutron)
            Copernicus (heliocentric solar system)
            John Dalton (atomic theory / colour blindness)
            Richard Feynman (quantum electrodynamics)
            Alexander Fleming (penicillin)
            Galileo Galilei
            Carl Linnaeus (taxonomy)
            Charles Lyell (modern geology)
            James Clerk Maxwell (electromagnetics)
            Gregor Mendel (laws of inheritance)
            Robert Oppenheimer (theoretical physics / atomic bomb)
            Linus Pauling (quantum chemistry / molecular biology)
            Joseph Priestley (discoverer of oxygen)
            Jonas Salk (polio vaccine)
            Edward Teller (theoretical physics / hydrogen bomb)
            Joseph Thomson (discoverer of the electron and isotopes)

            No doubt there are more in Bradford’s.

          3. ‘Fraid I’ve not heard of Lavoisier or of Durac, but I have been to CERN. The science there rather baffled me but I wonder if that might make it to the crossword? Is it an allowable word, do you think?
            1. It’s all very interesting this. Lavoisier is “the father of modern chemistry” so really quite an important historical figure. He discovered both hydrogen and oxygen and did all sorts of other useful things. PD is more modern and perhaps more understandable.

              What does all this say about our education system?

              1. After the third form at grammar school in the early 60s, at the age of 14 I was “promoted” to the A stream. That meant choosing between arts and sciences. I chose arts. I still took two science subjects (Maths and Biology) at O-Level but had I stayed in the B-stream I would probably have had a more rounded education
          4. Dirac, surely, Jim? (I’m not surprised martinp1 hadn’t heard of Durac.)

            I’ve a vague recollection of CUVIER actually appearing in some past Times crossword, but I’m afraid I can’t put my finger on a particular one. I’d have thought he was fair game, along with all the other scientists mentioned. Bring ’em on, I say (but keep the literary folk as well ;-).

    2. How did you edit your post, MC? I get only an option to delete.. you’re surely not (gasps) paying Livejournal, are you?!
  2. 55 minutes. Took time to get going and was thereafter, like Corporal Jones, always playing catch up. 12dn proved most resistant, partly because I’m scarcely New Man enough to bother with spas, but probably more so because I was looking for a word beginning with ‘aqua-‘. Last in 17ac, but only becasue I had to correct it from ‘curving’, where, to be honest, I couldn’t justify dropping the ‘y’ from ‘vying’. COD to my penultimate in, HUSTLER with its cunning anagrind.

    Thanks to the setter and to Dave for the fine blog … especially the lowdown on 15.

  3. 24’40”. I thought at first I might be faster, but I slowed myself down at various places, such as trying to think of a dog that would fit 17ac, and forgetting about artics. Never heard of brocatelle, but it was easy enough with the checkers in. Remembering Belloc was a lucky break. I liked the misleading surfaces of 16 and 28. And I never did work out the parsing of 18ac and 12d until I got here; thanks to the blogger, yet again.
  4. An easier offering, less than 15 minutes to end with a guess at the anagram at 22. I thought BROCATELLE looked the most likely when faced with ?R?C?T?L?E, than anything else involving the letters neded, so my stab was correct although I never heard of the fabric. My COD to CURVIER, clever. I’m unfortunately unfamiliar with Slade as the art school as well. I agree with vinyl about ‘the cure’ being a common spa treatment, and it was my way in to the def.: anagram of (spa cure) to ‘sure’, for certain. If that’s what you mean Dave, I agree. Well blogged, especially considering you shorted yourself on time. Regards to everybody.
    1. But ‘cure’ isn’t part of the clue, so Dave’s parsing has got to be correct, including the possessive ‘-s’ of ‘treatment‘s’. (The anagram of ‘spacure’ is mere coincidence!)
      1. Yes, that’s right. The Times never requires the solver to find a synonym as part of an anagrind. I’m sure I read that in a comment in the monthly clue-writing comp. Of course, I’m not including the Mephisto in that as it has its own set of rules.
        1. You are both clearly correct, yes. I got there via the wrong route, completely by accident! Thanks and regards, Dave and ulaca.
  5. An very enjoyable 30 minutes or so, with BROCATELLE being the only extended moment of indecision. COD to ACUPRESSURE
  6. 40 minutes on the dot. Got off to a false start by confidently putting BEER at 1ac and then wondering how to finish it off. After that I had the most trouble with 7dn, where I took the bait and was trying to fit LOV into the answer. No great problems though, possibly because the two 15-letter answers were relatively easy
  7. Went off like a train but slowed, mainly trying to fit what seemed slightly awkward clues to solutions I was already pretty sure of. 20 minutes. Belloc would have abhorred the word to be found in his title.
  8. 11′ 02″ today. Nothing terribly good or bad to get excited about (bearing in mind that by most objective standards an “average” Times puzzle is still a pretty fine thing). Like everyone else, I didn’t know BROCATELLE, and, like everyone else, I correctly worked out what the only really likely solution was.
    1. Not quite everyone else. I put in BRECATOLLE, which is daft.
      Other than that a nice easy one with little to comment on, finished in 14 minutes.
  9. I had most of this done within 30 minutes but then ground to a halt and took another 25 to fill in the gaps on the LH side.

    RUTHERFORD, SCUFFLE, S???? TRADE (just couldn’t see the obvious answer) and finally ACUPRESSURE for which I ended up using a solver despite having considered separately ACU and PRESSURE as component parts. I never heard of it and discovered that it is a less common alternative to the word “shiatsu” which if called upon to define I would have said was a breed of dog thus exposing further depths of my ignorance.

    The RH side and the edges of the LH went in quite easily, the only guess being BROCATELLE which I thought, correctly as it turned out, might be some sort of ‘brocade’ and that informed my decision where to place the unchecked letters.

  10. Another straightforward workmanlike puzzle with no real quibbles and some decent surface readings. Too much literary stuff for my liking but one is accustomed to that.
  11. ACUPRESSURE was not helped before checkers by conceivably being aquatherapy or acupuncture – I was slowed down by this and essaying TERRIER for the dog at 17 and stumbled home in 25 minutes. I also couldn’t nail down the elusive memory of the Slade, and at one point toyed with scape grace. HANDICAP though obvious, was compromised by the terrier I had forgotten to justify at 17 across and I was working on something that ended -top.
    BROCATELLE is one of those obviously made up, April Fool fabrics that populate the dictionary.
    EVER SO brought back a humiliating memory of primary school English – I put my hand up and asked if it was one word or two and was told bluntly that it was a lazy phrase I shouldn’t be using.
    I also thought it was a bit mean to describe Penzance as a resort.
    All in all, a bit of a shambles today.
    HEART OF DARKNESS is my current read – my mobile phone does a plausible imitation of a miniature Kindle, and it’s one of the free downloads.
    CoD to the crunchy Belloc anagram.
  12. 40 minutes. Longer than it should have taken me, but it being April 1st, I was expecting shenanigans and meticulously checked each answer before entry.

    Does anyone else remember a desperately difficult April 1st puzzle many years ago which had April Fools’ Day as its theme, and whose central light was POISSON D’AVRIL?

  13. For many years of retirement I had a weekly lunchtime drink with a pub landlord friend in Northumberland. His name was BEVERIDGE so I had no trouble with 1ac!

    I suppose an aamusing list could be compiled of appropriately named tradesmen; there was (is still?) an Earth Remover in Durham called MOLE.
    PS

    1. This link between names and careers was the subject of an extensive correspondence in New Scientist some years ago. The term Nominative Determinism was coined:

      “….. introduced first in 1994, when it was remarked that a paper on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology was authored by J.W. Splatt and D. Weedon.”

      1. Here in the East Midlands one of our many BBC weather forecasters is Sarah Blizzard.
    2. I had a friend at Uni named Ian Smith who went on to become an optometrist. Or as he prefers to call himself, an eye-smith.
  14. Quite a nice crossword, buoyed by some excellent surfaces and by the inclusion of Our Ernest, but marred by inclusion of quack medicine.
  15. I’m happy to sign up to the ‘complete muppet’ brigade for not knowing BROCATELLE, and being unable to see it as the obvious answer based on wordplay (to my mind the vowels could go almost anywhere once all checkers were in place; perhaps I should have spotted jackkt’s ‘brocade’ as a hint). I would also add my freebie online OED and online Chambers 21st Century Dictionary to the list of muppets. Otherwise pretty straightforward.
    1. That’s interesting because BROCATELLE is certainly in the printed Chambers. Are the online and printed versions not identical?
      1. I suspect not (and I don’t have the tools/resources to check): another similar discrepancy has come up recently. My assumption is that you get more if you put your money up front: i.e. a paid version (online or print), rather than freebie, will be more comprehensive.
        1. The key words here are “Chambers 21st Century Dictionary”. This is not and never has been the same as Chambers Dictionary. The name is confusing because the book that’s now Chambers Dictionary was called “Chambers 20th Century Dictionary” until the 1983 edition.
      2. Not quite sure where to place this comment in the thread …. This is written after most other comments in this thread.

        I’ve now paid my £15 for a 3 month subscription to the full Oxford Dictionaries (nothing too rash!) and, yes, you get a bit more.

        The ‘Dictionary’ again produced no results; but it did include a link to Vocabulary Builder which cited BROCATELLE under Themes (Fabric and fibres) but with no definition. The Anagram solver produced nothing; the Crossword solver (after entering all the checkers) came up with the same link to brocatelle.

        1. I have the two-volume Shorter Oxford (6th edition) both hard copy and the CD-rom which have ‘Brocatelle’ (also ‘Brocatello’ a type of marble for future reference).

          But anyway ‘Brocatelle’ is in Collins with its alternative US version ‘Brocatel’.

    2. Sorry for the unintended slur!
      I do think that if you consider the alternatives properly BROCATELLE is a significantly better guess than BRECATOLLE (or ERLCATBLOE perhaps). My problem was that I latched onto OLLE as the ending (subconsciously thinking of something like “barcarolle” perhaps) and so never did consider the alternatives properly.
      1. No slur taken! This is a good-humoured site (one of its great attractions). I too latched on to ‘olle’ as the possible ending (maybe for the subconscious reason you suggest) and my best guess was BRACETOLLE.
  16. Same experience as for others but not enamoured with 12d.

    With Jimbo on the evening up campaign of arts vs. sciences (to be pedantic, I think you meant Dirac in your list – he was the big shot at Bristol, my old uni)

  17. All present, correct and unaided with FU in a goodish time. Held up briefly by putting in TERRIER (something to do with TRIER?), till I worked out 9d. Didn’t we recently have another obscure fabric where the anagram was clear, but the positioning of vowels less so?

    Anyway, a satisfying puzzle to start the weekend. Catch y’all next week! Janie

  20. I’d never heard of ACUPRESSURE, probably because I avoid like the plague anything to do with health. Another gap in my GK was BROCATELLE. I think the other recent fabric was BOMBAZINE which I knew from novels. Can’t recall any of my literary heroines wearing BROCATELLE. I think all the writers and the scientist in this puzzle were well known. I can’t believe there’s anybody with any education who hasn’t heard of Rutherford. (I had friends who once worked in the lab) It still took me an age to complete this thanks to the ACUPRESSURE and its checkers. 50 minutes
    1. … well, I’ll be the first to put my hand up and admit I’ve not heard of Rutherford – shock horror! (and for the record, my post-school education, consists of a 4 yr language degree at Bristol Uni (like Dupin!), followed by a year’s PGCE at the Institue of Education, London).

      Somehow, he passed me by…

    2. Like Janie, I hadn’t heard of Ruherford the scientist, either. Can’t match her tertiary education but my excuse is 3 “A” Levels in French, German and Geography. Now had the clue contained a reference to Genesis or Mike & The Mechanics, that would have been a whole different test tube of molecules
        1. Oh, absolutely none taken, falooker! I just love the exchange of views on this blog. As I said in another comment to dorsetjimbo, at the age of 14 in 1961 and at the end of the 3rd form year,I was “promoted” to the A-Stream at my grammar school. That meant I was forced to choose between arts and sciences. Although I was able to go on and take Maths at O-Level (pass) and Biology (fail), I chose the arts. Had I stayed in the B-Stream I would have had a more rounded education.
          1. I love this blog as well. I’ve been struggling with the Times crossword for over 45 years and in my neck of the woods I never meet anyone else who does it. So these forums are the best way of communicating with other solvers. I lurked on this site for over a year before I actually joined the club! (It reminds me of my days as a Star Trek fan in the early 70s. Then I lurked for 2 years before I came out!) It’s always good to know you’re not alone. BTW, my grammar school forced the A stream to do Latin. I resented it at the time but it’s proved useful in crosswordland.
            1. O me miserum! Once I reached the A-stream, I had to do O-Level Latin as well, but what I remember most about Caesar’s “De Bello Gallico” is that they were forever girding their loins!
              I’m actually in a foul mood. In today’s Saturday crossword I completed it in under an hour for the first time ever, but made a stupid spelling mistake in 1ac. I think I changed the buccaneer’s gender by putting an E instead of an I. Bah Humbug!
        2. Absolutely none taken! Goodness, if we can’t all take a little teasing now and again…!
          Oh, and btw, both my 13yr old and 15yr old sons HAVE heard of him (and can tell why he’s such an important scientist), but they are both passionate about science, unlike their mother!
    3. I think this is a bit harsh. And the use of ‘muppet’ by somebody up-thread. Everything is easy if one knows the answer. I knew the name Rutherford because I studied Physics and Chemistry to O-Level 45 years ago. His name has stuck, but nothing else about him because I have been busy with other unassociated matters in the meantime. Others who have never studied science may not have heard of him but that doesn’t mean they have not been educated.
      1. For the avoidance of doubt I wouldn’t dream of using such a term in this most amicable of forums if I weren’t referring to myself.
  21. Interesting biography of him recently, by Farmelo, though he comes out as not that strange at all.
  22. Mistakenly put in TERRIER for CURVIER and so was left trying to fit “race” to ?A?D?TOP.

    Approached 25 with trepidation knowing nothing of Belloc but the answer was obvious after I had T?L?? for the second word.

    Like ARTICLE for the “maybe the” definiton.

  23. About 32 minutes. But messed up by putting in EVEN SO for 27ac, telling myself to come back to it later because it didn’t make sense, then remembering it and seeing the correct answer as I pressed “submit”. Bugger.
  24. The reason there are more literary than science references in crosswords, and in particular the Times Crossword, is that most literary or arts references are either more interesting or clueable.
    I take my hat off to the setter who can make an interesting and accessible clue about nuclides or the ins and outs of the the theories of relativity. It doesn’t mean science is demeaned or deprecated, it’s simply that generally speaking it’s not good territory for standard cryptic crosswords.
  25. It’s odd in a way that the discussion should have been confined to names of scientists, which is, after all, not a major part of the field of science. But if it’s merely the frequency of Rutherfords appearing vs. Prousts, there’s not much justification for the scarcity of scientists’s names.[And I’d add Turing, Shannon, & Chomsky to the list.] I have no idea what Ohm’s Law is, for example,or what Ampere did, or Gauss, etc., but I’d be surprised if many of us would complain about their appearing in a cryptic.
    And on the other hand, I wouldn’t think it’s any harder, or more unfair to the solver, to make a clue using, say, ‘charm’ (the quark) than ‘hendiadys’ (the rhetorical trope). What it comes down to, alas, is that in the world at large, including the world of setters and solvers, the area of knowledge called ‘general’ is severely skewed.
  26. A sluggish 11:22, not helped by being unfamiliar with BROCATELLE and being desperate not to make it two failures in a row. It seemed the obvious guess (from BROCADE), but I was wary of some April-foolery.
  27. Something’s gone wrong. I don’t get invited to give my name etc: the only heading I get offered is ‘Anonymous’.

    Azed set a puzzle on April 1st a year or two ago in which the clue word was POISSON D’AVRIL. Perhaps this was what john_from_lancs was thinking of.

    Wil Ransome

    1. Something’s changed with the log-in procedure recently, Wil. Click on the log-in button at the top left of the screen and then sign in at the top right.
  28. “It’s nice to see a puzzle that’s well put together without being unnecessarily difficult.”

    good grief …. I struggled on and on (with little reward), and even under the influence of a glass of malted prune juice could I get anywhere

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