Times 25108 – What’s Latin for Cook’s tour?

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: 70 minutes

Either these are getting a lot harder or I’m losing the plot. The old adage “if 1ac goes in at first sight then you’re in real trouble” proved correct in this instance. I grabbed the short end of every clue that followed and battered myself about the head with them. C’est la gare, as they say, pointing in the general direction of Paddington. On y va!

Oh! And it’s a pangram too. Thanks jackkt. Went right over my head. Kudos to setter.

Across
1 ASTER IS in ELAND = EASTER ISLAND and they don’t come much easier than that
9 REEVE = EVER around E all reversed
10 ATHLONe  after TRI sounding like “try” = TRIATHLON. I’m thinking the cryptic needs “follows” and if community is a mass noun, so does the surface. Am I wrong?
11 DOWNTURN = DOWN for blue + RUT for habit reversed + Nun
12 QUICHE = QUE for that around ICH for I in Germany, Cologne in particular. I didn’t know it was Spanish, although I seem to recall a clue for Spanish omelette… how did that go? Oh, it’s the that that’s Spanish. Thanks to mctext
13 MOONBEAM = ON for aboard + BEA for the old British European Airways all inside MOM. This was a gaping hole for a long time
15 CLIENT = LIE for remain + N for new in CT for Connecticut. Connecticut is the 5th of the 13 original states, it says here, and a client has something to do with servers.
17 Deliberately omitted. If the lights go out in the Bronx, this is what you fix.
18 GENTLEST = T for temperature by GEN for information + LEST for in case. I was thinking TGEN inside PORT.
20 VERNAL is hidden in CataLAN REVolution backwards
21 CLEANSER = E for “opera’s heartily” inside CLANS + ER, which is a hospital drama. I had that completely wrong too.
24 DISCOVERY = IS + C for about inside DOVER + journeY. One of the ships on Cook’s last voyage, although not captained by him. I quickly penned DISEMBARK and immediately regretted it. I’m sure there was a Dutch explorer Dem Bark.
25 BASTE = BEAST with the E going to the end. My LOI. A sewing term as quickly forgotten as learnt.
26 MAR for March + BRA inside LONDON* = MARLON BRANDO
Down
1 EAR + DOM around L = EARLDOM
2 SHERWOOD FOREST = (FOODS SHORT WERE)* and they don’t come much better than that
3 EXERT = TamaR + EXE all reversed
4 (VENTILATOR -TO)* = INTERVAL and a fine subtractive anagram
5 Deliberately omitted. It’s easy, unless you want to argue otherwise and make a liar out of me.
6 NUT for National Union of Teachers + CUTLET being outlet with a new beginning = NUT CUTLET, one of those dishes meat eaters think vegetarians will like. I floundered around with tutor for way too long.
7 BLACK-EYED SUSAN, a cryptic definition I think, unless susan is a generic term for wife.
8 INJECT = IN JEST with the S for son replaced by C for the speed of light, whose recent eclipse as the fastest thing in the universe was found to be caused by a faulty cable.
14 BOSS + A + AVON reversed = BOSSA NOVA, a dance craze of yesteryear. It was that easy. I spent many a minute trying to think of that Latin phrase for a taxonomic key. Well, I had the Latin bit right.
16 SEW reversed + LEAN around Y = WESLEYAN, the “perhaps” to excuse the DBE
17 DIVIDE = ID in DIVE, as in “What a dump!”
19 TORPEDO = TOR for hill + PE for training + DO for party
22 AMBER = RA for painter, reversed outside MBE, and no, ARDER isn’t a form of stucco, although it is Spanish for “to burn” which segues nicely into our last clue…
23 ZEAL = newZEALand, to complete the Cook’s tour

47 comments on “Times 25108 – What’s Latin for Cook’s tour?”

  1. An hour, but two wrong: ‘blind-eyed susan’ for my plant and ‘quince’ for my ‘Spanish’ tart.

    Interim report: Could do better.

    1. Surely it’s “in Spain that” = QUE.
      QUICHE:
      ORIGIN French, from Alsatian dialect Küchen; related to German Kuchen ‘cake’.
  2. Not too difficult here this morning, though far too much time spent on the CLIENT/INJECT intersection at the end.

    Totally mis-parsed WESLEYAN, assuming WAN (gaunt) containing a reversal of ELSE+Y. That leaves “rising hem” as the wordplay for ELSE — which doesn’t work at all. So thanks to Koro for the correct version.

    BTW: you have a slight mis-enumeration starting with the across omitted clue which is 17. So VERNAL goes astray too.

    Edited at 2012-03-12 04:07 am (UTC)

  3. I finished all but CLIENT/INJECT in 30 minutes and took another 22 to crack those, some of which time was spent working out which letters were still needed for the pangram, noting only J was missing and then rejecting the idea that a J could possibly help me come up with either of the two remaining answers. Oh me of little faith!

    I wondered about stream = AVON at 14dn and can we ban supporter = BRA please?

    I think we might all knock off some solving time in compensation for the length of the clues today and the extra time taken to read and digest them.

    Edited at 2012-03-12 05:25 am (UTC)

    1. Don’t tell me I missed the pangram too! I remember thinking at the non-Spanish omelette’s Q that I should check, and did, but since I only had about 4 clues completed then, I came up short. Knowing that would have helped at ZEAL, too. (Curiously INJECT & CLIENT went in pretty quickly, but then chacun has his goo)
    2. Agree. Every time I come across the device now, I have a vision of this prep school boy spluttering into his handkerchief at the back of the class.
  4. 26 minutes here, of which about 10 at the end agonising over INJECT/CLIENT.
    CLIENT is a particularly nasty clue. A technical term clued with an unusual meaning for “remain” surrounded by a bit of history that allows many possible answers. I’m slightly surprised I got it at all.
    Today’s unknowns: Athlone and BLACK-EYED SUSAN. I also thought I must be missing some specific wife reference in that one.
    I haven’t seen the term NUT CUTLET for a long time. You don’t see lentil rissoles much these days either.
    1. We called them salt patties at ours, since that seemed to be the main ingredient.
      1. I suppose that’s just what a vegetarian had to do to make food tasty before the invention of curry.
        Incidentally your introduction has given me a new expression: à la gare comme à la gare, which I intend to use the next time I am hungry enough to buy a limp sandwich before boarding a train.
  5. I was strangely on the wavelength this morning and got through in 12 minutes. Liked the clues for QUICHE and ZEAL a lot.
  6. Finished all but ‘inject’ and ‘client’ in 20 minutes, then agonised for ages – got inject eventually (very clever clue) but baffled by 15ac. So DNF. Also had ‘hell’ not zeal, from Seychelles, I still like that better than zeal as an answer! Friar Tuck the CoD.
    1. sorry this was me pip.kirby not anon – for some reason LJ has logged me in instead of using Facebook link.
  7. 21:28 for me. Mostly straightforward with only triathlon, inject and zeal giving me cause to tease my imaginary beard. Had I been quick-witted enough to spot the pangram I dare say they would have come quicker as well.

    Following last week’s anonymous comment I ought to take the trouble to thank the blogger but it’s only Koro so I shan’t bother.

    COD to Tuck’s hideaway.

      1. Such an elegant exchange. But I will demaean myself to thank Koro for his efforts. This is one I would have hated to blog!
  8. 16:43, with one mistake: another HELL for ZEAL (23dn).  Got off to a flying start with most of the grid before getting bogged down, particularly with 10ac (TRIATHLON), 15ac (CLIENT), and 8dn (INJECT).  Unknowns: Athlone (10ac), BEA (13ac MOONBEAM), and BASTE meaning loosely stitch (25ac).  I am glad to say that I have never seen a NUT CUTLET (6dn).

    PS.  If you’re considering seeing The Raven, the new film involving a series of murders based on Poe’s works, it might help to know that it’s nothing like Roger Corman’s 1960s Vincent Price vehicles – more like a substandard Sherlock Holmes.

    Edited at 2012-03-12 01:49 pm (UTC)

    1. Why does HELL (from Seychelles) have to be wrong?

      I accept that ZEAL is in the exact centre of NEW ZEALAND, but Collins Dictionary says that ‘centre’ can also mean ‘approximately in the middle’. So, HELL from Seychelles would be okay.

      And Seychelles is in the southern hemisphere. And Seychelles has lots of islands – 115 or maybe 155 islands (according to Wikipedia). New Zealand also has lots!

      1. Apart from my HELL/ZEAL standoff, I thought this was the easiest puzzle in many a long while – about 13 minutes.
      2. 1. In the usual sense of the word the centre of SEYCHELLES is CHEL
        2. Describing Seychelles as a “southern island group” is a little bit like describing Birmingham as a “southern UK city”
        On both counts ZEAL fits much better so I don’t think HELL would be allowed as an alternative.
      3. In The Times “centre” always means exactly in the centre as far as I’m aware, unless the rules have changed. None of this loose Collins waffle here, I’m afraid. This makes life easier in general and more difficult for the hell raisers in this case.

        I’d also argue that hell was a fairly loose description of fire; a bit word associationish.

        I see keriothe has just pipped me to this post.


  9. Thanks for the blog Koro and for explaining Moonbeam. Got that from the def and checkers. Hadn’t heard of the defunct BEA.

    Found this one harder than the weekend’s two. 23/28 with all my troubles in the right hand side. Hadn’t heard of the Susan plant nor the veggie dish and couldn’t get Client even from ?lien? Liked the “Tuck” reference to Robin Hood’s pal.

  10. Yikes – the preceding comments make me feel ancient. So you also didn’t know the sobriquets – BEA (British excuse for an airline) and BOAC (better on a camel). The Beatles were filmed while covering up the TLES on the side of the plane. While on the subject of horrible jokes, there’s the one about George W. Bush and the quiche. On second thoughts, perhaps not. 20 minutes but for some reason I can’t call to mind I actually knew the client term so that saved a lot of trouble in that neck of the woods.
    1. I still keep paperclips in a BOAC cigarette tin. Nostalgia time. (For both BOAC and cigarettes!)
      1. Oh a cigarette tin – I’m envious. I’ve just got the zip shoulder bag in an advanced state of decrepitude.
    2. Always preferred the Lufthansa acronym:
      Let us f@#* the hosties and not say anything
  11. 37:50 .. similar solving experience to our blogger, getting the wrong end of every stick and not really knowing a few things that would have helped.
  12. Struggled a lot with this and finally abandoned it after 45 minutes with CLIENT still unsolved. I’ve heard the term in compuspeak but didn’t realise it referred to software. I particularly enjoyed 2d and 10a, although the latter gave me a lot of trouble and I needed all the checkers.
  13. Just over 20 minutes, with all my trouble in the SW for once. Despite having checkers, DIVIDE, DISCOVERY and ZEAL put up strong resistance. Divers kept intruding itself, and I couldn’t work out the cryptic for that – a strong hint, in my experience, that it’s not the right word. DISCOVERY had me looking for the bloke, not the boat, or possibly for a peaceful equivalent. I tried IS backwards and got as far as RISIO… before accepting I was going the wrong way.
    WESLEYAN was temporarily torpedoed by the disadvantage of specialist knowledge: I half remembered the LEYSIAN connection, and with LEAN round the outside of everything, struggled to spell it wrong enough to fit.
    CoD to INTERVAL for clever cluing that threw me right off track.
  14. All but INJECT and CLIENT, but, as I can see I’m not alone, I won’t beat myself up too much. Had I figured it out as a pangram, I may have got INJECT, but don’t think I’d ever have got CLIENT.

  15. Started off, like Koro, at a fair lick with 1ac going in almost straightaway, but then got badly bogged down on the right hand-side, the CLIENT/INJECT intersect taking a particularly long time to crack – a common experience, it would seem. Lots of other clever stuff – among which ZEAL, INTERVAL, BOSSA NOVA, CLEANSER, QUICHE and SHERWOOD FOREST (with its wickedly misleading use of “tuck”) stood out. Over an hour to complete in the end. Deeply impressed by George’s 12 mins. Well done blogger. Well done setter.
  16. I flew through three quarters of this very quickly, less than 15 minutes, but screeched to a halt in the NE corner, and took another 30 minutes for that. I finally clicked with the BLACK-EYED SUSAN, and the rest, but never got CLIENT. I did try, though, with OLDEST, as ‘in original state’, an anagram of DOS for the software and LET for remain. And no, I didn’t think it was correct, but I would never have thought CLIENT was correct either. From some of the comments I can form a fuzzy picture of what a NUT CUTLET is, and it’s not very appetizing. QUICHE was clever, but COD to the Tuck lair. Regards to all.
  17. 20/28 today, which is better than any of my attempts last week. Nearly all the problems for me in this puzzle were on the east side. I couldn’t get 6D, which is ironic because I am a vegetarian, and have always known the food as nut roast, although I hardly ever eat the stuff. I had 5 down as LAIR but still can’t justify it…oh I see it’s LAIRD without the final letter.

    Edited at 2012-03-12 07:32 pm (UTC)

  18. 13:48 for me, but with HELL for ZEAL. I spent around three minutes agonising over this, but couldn’t come up with anything better (I probably gave up searching through the alphabet at about X or Y!) and went with HELL despite noting that it could hardly be described as being at the centre of SEYCHELLES. Doh! Relieved to find I wasn’t the only one, though. (Why do I never spot pangrams?)
  19. No particular problems with this, except for inject/client which took as long as all the rest of the grid, and I see I am not alone in that!

    Another fine crossword, but I am starting to find them rather hard going.. isn’t it about time we had an easy one or two?

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