Times 25081 – Millennium Madness

44 comments on “Times 25081 – Millennium Madness”

1. Uncle Yap: I think you need MATES with the E changed to H.
2. …is clearly a letter substitution, ‘h’ for ‘e’, and in the ‘midsummer’ clue, MM is just the Roman numeral representation of 2000.

   Edited at 2012-02-09 01:53 am (UTC)

3. Not that enamoured of this one myself, as too many answers went in on the definition alone. There were some good clues – 1dn, 17ac, 22dn – but much intricate wordplay was wasted. At 4dn, for example, many people will read ‘crack’ and bung in the answer. OPPIDAN’s just a naff word.

   45 minutes.

   1. Just for the record, ATTEMPT was my LOI (though admittedly there were only two or three clues I didn’t solve at a first read-through). I must have met “drain” = EMPTY several times over the years, but this time I could only think of ATTSEWE, and so moved on to the next clue.

      I suppose we should be grateful that they’re no longer clueing OPPIDAN with reference to Eton.

      1. Going by the evidence of this blog, my ‘many’ should be downgraded (like Y2K hyperbole) to ‘almost no one apart from me’. Actually, I’m secretly as smug as a bloke near Slough wearing tails and a topper to have got this with only a checker or two.
4. I think the meaning here (1dn) is ‘original’ in the creative, new sense.
5. ….no real difficulties, but I had to reach for ‘oppidan’. I also had my doubts about ‘coal tit’, but that’s what the cryptic indicated.

   All cryptics completely understood, a rarity for me.

6. 27 minutes for all but 5dn. After a further 10 minutes I reached for the dictionary to look up words starting OPP?D and didn’t find anything that fitted the clue. That was in the COED. I should have reached for Collins or Chambers where I would have found the answer immediately. I ought to have cracked the wordplay but it just wouldn’t come to me and there’s only so much time I’m prepared to devote to a single unsolved clue with all its checkers in place. I’m inclined to agree with ulaca that’s it’s a naff word anyway but that’s probably just because the clue beat me. Other than that this was a fairly straightforward solve which in some cases was more hampered than aided by the wordplay.

   Edited at 2012-02-09 04:46 am (UTC)

7. 28 minutes, the last 5 of which were spent struggling with 4d, which gets my COD. With all the checkers, all I could come up with for ages was ‘automat’, and even I didn’t think that would work. I also wasted time by misreading (3d) ‘meditators’ as ‘mediators’; it wasn’t until I got MATHS that I realized something was wrong. OPPIDAN, COAL TIT and BLEAK were somehow floating around in my memory, the fish no doubt from a previous cryptic. Thanks, Uncle Y, for the explanations of 15d and 13ac, which I couldn’t parse but knew had to be right.
8. I have just visited this site and saw two obvious spams at 8 and 9 and took the liberty of deleting them. I prefer my spam fried and presented by the Monty Python Flying Circus.
   1. Thanks – since the site has been difficult to access today, I assumed they were part of another form of DOS attack
9. 33 minutes. I’m inclined to agree with Uncle Yap. Some great surfaces and anagrams. COD to HAIRNET, though.
10. 14 minutes here, with a fairly lengthy pause at the end scratching my head over MIDSUMMER and ATTEMPT.
    Fairly straightforward but very good puzzle I thought, with some good surfaces and anagrams as already noted.
    The fish was the only unknown today, although the bell that OPPIDAN rang was a faint one.
11. 17A really in 20 minutes. I liked 23A HAIRNET

    Can’t let you get away with that libel at 13A UY. I was employed through much of 1999 fixing oldish computers that would have crashed as the year went from 99 to 00 and certain software that would also have crashed. No scam involved there and I would be grateful if you could modify your comment.

    Mention of the millenium reminds me that the world went potty one year too soon. There being no year zero the millenium was actually 2001!

    1. The Y2K affair was long drawn out during the whole of 1999. I well remember the relief and feeling of being had when on 1st January 2000, no satellite and no aeroplane came crashing down to earth; and the world went on as normal. But in 1999, we went through a period of misgiving and anxiety and expensive computer overviews. The word “scam” was not invented by me but by respectable press columnists in many papers round the world.
       1. Not sure about “respectable press columnists”. Much of the loopier stuff about the Millennium Bug was generated by a press which welcomed the chance to print apocalyptic headlines. There was hysteria about Y2K, but there were real issues to be addressed, too. If you have a few minutes, do visit this page and listen (15 min.) to Stephen Fry interviewing Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge The first five minutes are on point. The comments below the piece are very informative and well-balanced. I certainly think “scam” is a gross oversimplification.
       2. I’m no expert on this stuff but I have a very good friend who is. He never used words like “apocalypse” but at the end of December 1999 he was a nervous wreck. He’d been working like crazy dealing with very complex systems that had been built up over decades and there was no way of being certain that they’d identified and dealt with all the possible glitches embedded in the code. When the system he was working on didn’t grind to a halt he was very relieved and quite surprised.
       3. No Uncle Yap, Jimbo is right and you are wrong.

          My company spent millions of pounds correcting errors that would have caused problems. The word “scam” was coined by the gutter press who love to predict disaster – but as it turned out the business world was responsible and (mostly) fixed things. If you had spent years doing so, successfully, how would you feel if everyone turned round and accused you of a scam?

       4. Spent much of the last years of my working life, along with mumerous colleagues, checking and where necessary amending millions of lines of code. Our company was one of the biggest in international banking software, so a system wide failure would have had a disasterous knock-on effect. Fortunately all was OK. I can think of no equivalent endeavour where so much was expended globally to ensure that nothing happened. This result of course is what infuriated the odious little hacks and got the screaming “Scam!”.
    2. I’m actually glad Uncle Yap used the word ‘scam’, precisely because it provoked the responses it did from dorsetjimbo and others. Not being a reader of the gutter press and not having many paranoid friends or acquaintances, my understanding — and, I thought, the received opinion among us bien-pensants — was, not that there was any scam, but rather that it was all a tempest in a teapot. I’m happy to be disabused.
12. I wasn’t switched on particularly by this one and got there in 20 minutes. Hardy wrote ‘The Darkling Thrush’, I’m sure dorsetjimbo will be glad to know, consciously on the last day of the nineteenth century, Dec.31st 1900. Trust a poet to get it right.
    1. Did that poem for O Level. Still remember it well but I don’t think I really understood it at the time. Nice to be reminded of it.
       1. I think it’s his finest poem. The one carrying the most interest this year however may be ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, ref. ‘Titanic’.
13. As Jimbo says this puzzle was reasonably 17ac. But I think I would have found it much harder if several of the long down and across clues hadn’t gone in as quickly as they did. I happened to go to one of those ancient schools much given to weird and archaic jargon such as OPPIDAN, so no difficulty there, but I took an age to see the required definition of “crack” at 4dn, with the result that ATTEMPT was my last in. I too liked HAIRCUT and also ANY PORT IN A STORM.
14. Who invented it isn’t the issue. Nor is the hysteria drummed up by the irresponsible press. You have written that the IT profession perpetrated a scam and that simply isn’t true. The fact that there were no disasters is down to the way people like me and many others worked very hard to mitigate the problems and we don’t appreciate folk perpetuating the myth.
15. 20 mins ish for me. The 17a were very much that, but some of them were definitely on the trickier side and held me up possibly more than they should have done.
16. No accurate time for this as I solved it on paper whilst eating but I’d say comfortably under 20 minutes.

    I actually enjoyed it very much thanks to the not-too-obvious definitions (unlike yesterday where many went in on the def alone and I had to untangle the wordplay later),some inventive constructions and a lot of very tidy surface readings. My kinda puzzle.

17. 27:04 .. yesterday I was SLEEZY, today Grumpy and Sleepy. Really struggled to get going on this one.

    Last in OPPIDAN, despite eight years of Latin at school. Clearly I wasn’t paying attent…. oh, look, there’s a squirrel!

18. Was the last in, because I was waiting for the remaining crossers to prompt me to some sort of bread, which I thought I had at the end.
    16 minutes for this one, a decent, honest and S?R?I?H?F?R?A?D Times, with a couple of mild-mannered devices for MIDSUMMER and MATCHMAKER to make it interesting.
    Wiki is mildly scathing about the coal tit’s capability as a singer (“if song it can be called”) but I guess that’s a convention that can happily ignore reality.
    MIDSUMMER my CoD, though I wondered whether the “possibly” referred as much to the likelihood of the British midsummer being warm as to the device used in the cryptic.
    1. We have coal tits in our garden and on the bird table, very pretty little birds they are too. And they sing nicely, whatever Wiki says. It is a myth that robins are the only birds which sing in winter, at least here in SW France they sing even though it’s minus 12 just now.
       30 mins today, LOI attempt, had to use solver for oppidan, Cod 13ac, didn’t much like ‘high’ for ‘wasted’.
19. Agree with consensus, an agreeable 33 min solve. Would have been quicker if it was not for 4 down. For far too long I was convinced “automat” was the answer. It fit the cross checkers and was ‘not closed”. Regards to setter for disguising crack for attempt.

    Enigma

20. Yup, I had that for a while but after yesterday’s sleezy gaffe went back for another look. Oppidan no prob thanks to my favourite cousin who suffered the usual humiliations at that lycee in Windsor Berks. Last one in his year still in bum-freezers owing to his failure to grow to the required height for tails until he was 16. Unlikely to sport the old school tie. Don’t think it was a naff clue though. 16 minutes.
21. Scam’s such an ugly word Inspector! More of a nice little earner a la Arfur Daley. And the proof – all the cheapskates and technosceptics who didn’t pay IT pros ‘to fix the bug’ suffered …not at all. A ticketing machine in Mid Wales was rumoured (falsely) to have failed though, now that was a shock, computerisation in Mid Wales!
    1. The fact that you think that nobody suffered at all over Y2K indicates to me that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. The rubbish peddled by the media did indeed not come to pass. But in many companies, large and small, there were glyches even when every precaution had been taken. Software written in COBOL more than 20 years previously crashed when trouble spots that were not identified prior to the date caused difficulty. However these failures were quickly spotted and corrected thanks to checking regimes established by IT professionals as part of the overall process
    2. anonymous, ignorant sarcasm is likely to attract the contempt it deserves
22. I completed all but 9a in 25 minutes then spent another 10 minutes on that last clue before I finally spotted that I had the word lengths wrong and had been looking for C*A*T/?T. Oh dear!
    1. I too had the word split wrong! I had it as 3.4, so took an age to get it!
       1. It’s like when you misread a word. You can spend ages barking up the wrong tree, as it were. I blame encroaching senility – but that
          probably doesn’t apply in your case!
23. About 40 minutes, ending with OPPIDAN, hitherto unknown. Also delayed by seeing ‘mediators’ instead of the ‘meditators’ in 3D. Beyomd that, though, I agree that it’s a 17A puzzle. I liked the MIDSUMMER deveice better than the confusing instruction to keep only the ‘R’ at the end (right?), so COD to 13A. Regards to all.
24. Took a long time, but got there in the end! OPPIDAN last one (unknown vocab).

    COD: HAIRNET

25. 7:08 here for another nice straightforward puzzle.

    I’m absolutely with dorsetjimbo and jerrywh on the millennium bug issue. The reason things didn’t go badly wrong was that a hell of a lot of work went into ensuring that they didn’t.

    It reminds me of the advert where a girl finds a bottle of head & shoulders anti-dandruff shampoo in her boyfriend’s bathroom and says: “But Dave, you don’t have dandruff!” (Could have been a different shampoo and/or a different boyfriend, but who’s counting?)

26. My thanks to all those who have helped to give an accurate view of what happened at the millenium

    Uncle Yap I imagine that you do read the comments made on your own blog. That being so I think you have to agree that your use of the word “scam” in your comment about Y2K is indeed incorrect not to say derogatory. Can I please ask you once again to make some reference to that in what you have said.

    1. Would it help if I were to change
       “As it turned out, that was probably the biggest scam by IT professionals.” to
       “As it turned out, that was probably the biggest anticlimax of the century when nothing untowards happened on 1st January 2000, leading to accusations of a colossal scam by IT professionals, who predictably answered that it was precisely their hard work and anticipation that prevented dire consequences.” ?

       This is hardly a subject that I would lose sleep over or to go to war for. Off to a Hashing weekend in Ipoh. Cheerio. On! On!

       1. Thank you for responding. I’m not asking you to change anything. I’m asking you to add something like “On edit: this proved to be a very contraversial statement. Please read all the comments for details”

          I’m a great believer in free speech and so far as I’m concerned you’re free to say anything you like short of accusing me (and others) of being crooks – which is what you (I trust inadvertently) did.

Comments are closed.