Times 25195 – bombarded by pianists?

36 comments on “Times 25195 – bombarded by pianists?”

1. 32:31, but with one dumb error, 21d, where I put in ‘set off’ for no good reason, and only just 2 minutes ago thought of the right answer. I was generally sluggish in dredging words I knew from my memory, like HARRIS, YAWL, RAVEN (couldn’t get past ‘robin’ for ages, which had me looking for a scientist beginning C_B…). So I had to be grateful for the few giveaways, like 4ac (dance,3-3-3, I ask you) and 16ac. There were some vastly clever clues, though; 3d, 22d,28ac,15d…

   Edited at 2012-06-21 05:01 am (UTC)

2. Most difficult of the week so far for me. Had the dickens parsing 20ac, DEMOLISHED. What is it with “on the contrary” and the various bits of work it can do that always gets my knickers in a knot? Also wanted TOP OFF at 21dn for reasons inexplicable. And now I come to think of it, I suppose you have to tee off another 8 or 17 times after the start of play. But what I know about that game Jimbo’s already forgotten by now.

   So most trouble in the SW with the 22s and 21dn. I know Ivan pretty well having been subjected to Fathers and Sons albeit in translation; but failed to spot the anagram! And having been called McTypo and McMisprint before, I should have seen the obvious at 22dn.

   1. … note to George: you doubled the URL for Mill’s On Liberty at TURGENEV.
3. A tricky number which had me backtracking quite a bit as I dealt with words where I wasn’t sure of the spelling and never got the full wordplay till after solving (DILETTANTE) and words I didn’t know (ABREACTION). I thought the latter’s cleverness in using ‘about’ to signify simply RE was somewhat vitiated by the gobbledygook nature of the target word itself. Last pair in the 18/20 cross, where once again I didn’t see the clever wordplay (MO clued by ‘second’ when there’s an S in the definition) till finishing.

   Another boat to add to my mental shipyard; also learned that MINISCULE can mean lower-case. COD to BELATEDLY. Coming here, I see that ‘set off’ did for me too.

   1. Watch out for “uncial”!
      1. Back to scule for me…..
4. 42 minutes with the last 7 spent on 20, 18 and 6. I never heard of GIGAFLOP and until I cracked 20 I had been working on meGAFLOP as the possible solution. But 6dn was the main cause of delay and it was a real d’oh moment when the answer finally came to me having worked my way through the alphabet for each unchecked letter. Although there is undoubtedly a Harris tartan I think the island is better known for its tweed cloth.

   ABREACTION was unfamiliar but I doubt I have been doing crosswords for as long as I have without coming across it before. I don’t recall ever meeting MINUSCULE for ‘lower case’.

   The cheese might have presented more of a problem if it hadn’t come up here as recently as 30th May. Perhaps I should rephrase that!

   Edited at 2012-06-21 07:32 am (UTC)

5. 21 minutes, though I think I would have been quicker without dozing off, fuzzy vision and uncontrollable coughing: manflu has properly set in (or should that be teed off?).
   Almost a TLS, though with better quality cluing. PADEREWSKI one of those rare people that managed to combine serious politics with top class artistry. We had Ted Heath.
   Several other answers might have been clued as arts people: CAGE and PETTY for two. There must be any number of famous dead WARDs.
   Knew ABREACTION, and now I know what it means. SIEGFRIED and BELATEDLY very clever, either for CoD.
6. Half an hour’s worth of solving this morning. I thought it was going to be far more difficult than it turned out to be: once CHA-CHA-CHA went in, I was able to work steadily clockwise. Having decided that 5 must be ABREACTION, I must have stared at it for a good five minutes, not believing it could be a proper word.

   Good to see that brilliant if eccentric scientist Henry CAVENDISH included.

   Favourite clue today must be MILL.

7. 24m, with about 5 at the end unpicking the anagram for PADEREWSKI. Fortunately I managed to put all the letters in the right place.
   Lots of people today, and lots of variety: a philosopher, a novelist, a Wagnerian chappie, a pianist and a scientist.
   I didn’t know MINUSCULE could be used in English to mean “lower case”, but this and “majuscule” are familiar to me from French.
8. 
   Far too much unknown GK led to this one being a very dismal dnf today. Couldn’t recall CAVENDISH (was thinking cavenboat, cavenship…?), didn’t know Mr MILL (a giveaway? not for me, KevinG!), TURGENEV (yep, I had turnegev) and of course PADEREWSKI. Managed to work SIEGFRIED out, and ABREACTION, but both unknowns, too.

9. 42 minutes, commencing with the CHA-CHA-CHA and making rapid progress down the right until I met SIEGFRIED sashaying across from the left. Thence slower progress back up the dance floor BELATEDLY to a residual ABREACTION. Nice puzzle. COD to BOGUS.

   And speaking of the French and minuscule… or perhaps teeing off.

10. Why was Cavendish an early scientist? I’m obviously missing something here.

    Surely the Mill reference is to his book on utilitarianism.

    1. He was the son of the Duke of Devonshire; so, as he came from an aristocratic family, he might be considered “Earl-y”. Hmmm, perhaps that’s stretching things a bit far.
11. A smidge over 15 mins for me. PADEREWSKI has appeared in cryptics before so wrote himself in with a quick check of the anagram fodder. Lots of good clues in a very nice puzzle.
12. Agree CAVENDISH 1731-1810 is hardly early (Galileo 1564-1642, Newton 1642-1727). Best known for discovering Hydrogen.

    A lot of weird names here which I looked up and verified before putting them in the grid. Also a good deal of convoluted wordplay. All in all fun but a bit long winded – 25 minutes after golf rained off after 12 holes. Luckily the bar was open!

13. a bit too much for me, esp paderewski. bobby crush more my level
14. Cavendish was sort of between the first and second scientific revolutions, so if you think of the second scientific revolution as the beginning of true science (the time when the word scientist was coined) then he probably was early.

    Thanks for picking up on the poor copying/pasting of the Turgenev link – it should now go to a Bartleby page. I put in “On Liberty” because it’s the only Mill I’ve read (and I haven’t read the whole thing).

    Seems like most agree this was tricky.

    1. Pioneering would have been better
    2. According to Wikipedia the term “scientist” was coined by William Whewell (yeah I’d heard of him too) in 1833. Cavendish died in 1810 so by this linguistic measure he wasn’t a scientist at all, early or otherwise.

       Edited at 2012-06-21 01:52 pm (UTC)

       1. I think before the word “scientist” was coined they were known by their discipline, astronomers, mathematicians, chemists and so on. I don’t think that stops them having been scientists!!
          1. Funny this comes up today – on September 28 I’m giving a public lecture on the second scientific revolution and the rise of the scientist (I’m going to include far less about Darwin and more about Davy than those who invited me would like). It will have a few jokes, but be mostly around some research I did into 19th-century chemistry a few years ago. It appears the story is right that Whewell (a strange character – wrote a bazillion papers on tides then turned his hand to philosophy and really antagonized Mill) popularized the term scientist in “Philosophy of the inductive sciences”.
             1. Quite right too – biology isn’t real science is it (particularly if you count DNA related activities as engineering!)?
                1. Do I rightly remember a quote along the lines of all science is either stamp collecting or physics?
                   1. Ernest Rutherford founder of nuclear physics. It’s rubbish of course. He should have said mathematics or stamp collecting!
          2. I wouldn’t argue with that. My point is just that you can’t justify “early scientist” as a definition for Cavendish by reference to when the word was coined.
15. Limburger, mm. Left yes but I’m burger—this person wanting something hot—is hard to digest. And its companion—belatedly meaning everyone has left the table is a definition new to me but was odds on once one had the cross checkers. Cavendish Earl-y? Again cross checkers and a Cambridge education signposted the answer. Blogger’s 16 minutes impresses. This was for me a tricky solve.

    Enigma

16. I didn’t enjoy this much. An unsatisfying slog. I knew all the proper names but had a bit of a struggle working out the right spelling for PADEREWSKI – I realised it was him but wasn’t sure of the anagram fodder. I find Polish names difficult – too many consonants. (My mother used to sing a ditty that went “When Paderewski plays his one-man-band, it’s grand…”.) Then he bacame prime minister of Poland! I can’t see why the BURGER in LIMBURGER is particularly hot. Chilli or pepper I could understand. But burgers? And I still can’t get how the “table” fits into 1d. 54minutes
    1. Just be thankful it wasn’t Czywczynski.
       “Something hot” is a pretty loose definition for a burger I agree but I can’t see anyone wanting a cold one!
       I think the definition in 1dn is just a whimsical one that requires the context of the first half of the clue (a boy filling his stomach) to make sense of the second. Again a bit loose but the question mark covers it.
17. I got through in 20 minutes, ending with TEE OFF, after considering SET OFF. I hadn’t known of ABREACTION before, but I did identify all the various individuals without much trouble. My difficulty was with the complex wordplay for SIEGFRIED, which was a bit tortuous. COD’s to TEE OFF, BOGUS and BELATEDLY, pretty clever all. Regards.
    1. Same for me, finished in half an hour but never heard of abreaction. Keriothe, I take the point about Cavendish being a scientist before scientists were called such, but in retrospect it seems fair to call him an early scientist now we have the word, it’s not nearly as loose as some of these clues today, esp. for LIMBURGER I think.
       Paderewski was not olny a tinkler of the ivories but the second PM of Poland, a good composer, and a Californian winery owner. An all round good egg.
       1. I don’t disagree with that either! I’m not expressing an opinion on what constitutes an “early scientist” (Archimedes?) and I for one had no problem with the clue. I’m just saying that you can’t justify the definition “early scientist” by reference to the coining of the term. If the start of science is when the term was coined, then Cavendish is pre-science.
18. 30 minutes. Slow, fast, slow. I agree early isn’t right; but otherwise rather like the whole thing.
19. 40 minutes plus today and as others have said some loose clues which I was glad to get right without ever being confident. Thanks for blog and clearing up 1 down particularly.
20. 12:00 for me, with TEE OFF taking me a minute or two at the end. No real problem with any of the proper names, though I felt the need to check the wordplay for PADEREWSKI to make sure the answer wasn’t some weird variant spelling.

    I kept being thrown by words which I felt were going to have a different significance to what they turned out to have, like “burial” in 28ac and “table” in 1dn. No complaints though – particularly not with CAVENDISH, for whom “early scientist” seems entirely reasonable.

21. Thanks for the link to history associated with Dr Foster, alias King Edward I (27ac). I really enjoyed it!

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