Times 25,285 – Fair is foul and foul is fair

37 comments on “Times 25,285 – Fair is foul and foul is fair”

1. The cor anglais has a bell at one end and a reed at the other.
2. 30 minutes for all but 24 and 20. Couldn’t think past “lid” for “hat” in 20dn until the second checker was in place.

   Didn’t know NUMBAT but worked it out.

   Is there any attempt at a definition at 23ac apart from “this”, a word you can make out of the anagrist? If I’m right then it’s a very feeble effort

   I note the Club have yet again failed to renew their security certificate and I had to override manually to gain access.

   Edited at 2012-10-04 01:11 am (UTC)

   1. I suspect this is an attempted semi-&lit where an outlier may be an unusual result: specifically (stats), a data point … in a set of results that is very much bigger or smaller than the next nearest data point — Mac Oxford.
      1. Thanks. I didn’t know that meaning, only stones and boulders.
         1. A hack called Gladwell has made a mint from playing on ‘tiger’ parents’ obsession with squeezing out oustanding results (‘Outliers’ is the title of one his books) from their little Johnnies and Jemimas. If you hear people going on about ‘10,000 hours’, you can blame the same fellow. Sorry, I refuse to link to this stuff, but it’s all out there.
3. Much speeded by the obvious long answers. Not overly impressed by some of the clueing: 21ac and 25ac being cases in point. Thought “form of writing” was a bit loose for REDACTION.

   NUMBAT not a problem. I once met a serious numbatologist and she even looked like said creature. They really are quite wonderful to behold if you’re lucky enough to encounter them. [Not the -ologists!]

   Edited at 2012-10-04 04:59 am (UTC)

   1. numbatologist.. now *that’s* a word to conjure with
4. 22:39, with the 1’s holding out until the end; TOBY JUG just wouldn’t surface to conscious for the longest time, even though I had JUG. Like Uncle Y and mctext, I was helped by the long ‘uns, 12ac and 6d going in without even thinking of confirming them. Like mctext again, I was dubious about REDACTION; hardly a form of writing. I rather liked 24ac and 18ac.
   1. SOED has: The action or process of preparing something for publication; revision, editing, arrangement in a certain form. L18.

      The definition is “moving form of writing”.

      First learnt of REDACTION during Government attempts to censor documents they didn’t want us to see a couple of years ago re MP’s expenses amongst other things.

      Edited at 2012-10-04 05:10 am (UTC)

   2. I thought of ‘toby jug’ early. My apartment is full of toby jugs. What was nearly my LOI?
5. 31 minutes, with CAULDRON last in. Made a bit of a false start in the NW, where I had ‘milk jug’ at 1dn for a while, and then the marsupial I had heard of, ‘wombat’, at 4dn for a time, before coming to the conclusion that a womb my be many things, but hardly a metaphor for deadness.
6. The puzzle must have been fairly straightforward as I completed it in less than half an hour, a rare occurrence these days.

   There were many good clues, but I particularly liked 25, 5 and 16. Hadn’t heard of NUMBAT but guessed it was one of those Australian animals with unbelievable names, such as the long-nosed potoroo.

   I assume there is no significance to the name L BERIA appearing in the second line of unchecked letters.

7. Could someone explain what “killed” is doing in 12ac. Thx.
8. 12 minutes but with one error too embarrassing to specify. Loved the serendipitous AULD CRONE but thought the surface a bit clunky ( not that I could do better).
9. I think it just means you delete (‘kill off’) letters on a regular basis in the following words.
   1. Thanks for that Ulaca. I was stuck with working that out too

      Regards, Roger

10. Fairly straightforward puzzle, but with some cleverly deceptive clues which sent this solver at least wandering up the wrong garden path. TIERRA DEL FUEGO (6 dn), for example, took a long time to fall because I’d convinced myself that the solution involved a cricketing reference, as the setter no doubt intended by opening the clue with the word “fielder”. Similarly, at 16 dn (CAULDRON), I wasted time cudgelling my brains for an erudite quote from Macbeth thus failing to spot as quickly as I should have done the relatively straightforward wordplay. I’d never heard of a NUMBAT, but the cryptic clues made it eminently guessable. I liked FOREFINGER and REBELLED. Thanks to Mctext for reminding me of the meaning of OUTLIER required at 23 ac.
    1. Strange how different minds work – after immediately dismissing TRISTAN DA CUNHA (wrong letter lengths!), this was one of my first answers entered!

       Darryl

11. 28m with 20 and 24 still to do; 30m later a sad DNF! Thanks for blog – a loud DOH when I saw 20 but not sure even with that I would have cracked 24. My COD to CANNIBAL such a neat use of Carthage.
12. 14:17 .. enjoyable for me.

    I liked OUTLIER. We seem to be seeing more of this type of clue which have no explicit definition but read like an old-fashioned riddle (“The more you take of me, the more you leave behind” kind of thing). I find them rather refreshing but they’re not to everyone’s taste, I suppose.

    I see from the club leader board that Magoo is in poor form as he prepares for the Champs. This one took him more than four minutes.

    1. Go easy on him – probably had to take a phone call.
13. 15 mins for me, held up a bit by the unknown NUMBAT.
14. I enjoyed this slightly quirky effort, especially 5dn, the lovely surface at 3ac, 23ac, 6dn and others. I’m curious to know why the “all” is there in 7dn.
    Thank you Uncle Yap for your usual effortless sounding blog.. I didn’t find the “biggies” quite as easy as you: c22 minutes in all
    1. My take is that it’s unnecessary but I read it as A and PHD together (all) about I (one).
15. 15 minutes for all but 20 and 24 then another 4 minutes or so for those, 24 because I didn’t know the word and 20 because the wordplay indication is clumsy at best and plain syntactically wrong at worst.

    That said there were some pleasingly clever clues elsewhere (e.g. rebelled and forefinger).

    1. I think I differ here.. to me the syntax is intended to be deliberately misleading; but (therefore) if you look carefully, it works
16. …by having ‘wordfinder’ instead’ of ‘forefinger’ for the longest time. ‘Outlier’, too, gave a lot of trouble. But at least I put in ‘cloche’ from the definition.

    I ended up with one missing, didn’t know ‘numbat’.

17. About 30 minutes, ending with COGNATE after finally seeing CLOCHE. I hadn’t known of the NUMBAT, and frankly neither had I known the office of COLONEL-IN-CHIEF, so the clear wordplay was helpful in getting those. Not helped by my inability to count letters correctly at GUINEA, where I entered GUIANA at first, which may or may not exist, and if it does I think its in South America. I liked CANNIBAL and FOREFINGER. Regards to all.
18. 21 minutes, the last 4 in the cauldron, where (like melrosemike) I was hunting for a quotation. Reading the play for O level 54 years ago and teaching it for what seems like a good few of those years since, and never tiring of it, made it more or less impossible not to. What went in that cauldron, incidentally, is worth re-acquainting oneself with – delightfully gruesome.
    1. Joekobi, we must be of different vintage. Macbeth & Far from the madding crowd by Thomas Hardy were the set books for 1964 O Levels (Cambridge Local Exam Syndicate) Although I wasn’t allowed to include Literature as I had too many other Science subjects, the two books have an enduring afterglow in my life.
       1. My other text (Oxford and Cambridge Examinations Board) was Chaucer’s General Prologue, in the original. Together they woke me up to literature and study of Greek and Latin texts for A level sank the nail. No such luck these days for the young.
19. Is anyone else having this problem, or is it just me? When I click on a link to this site, up comes a green area and then a long thin rectangle is cut out of it at the top left and this is sometimes filled with an advertisement, sometimes with nothing. And that’s that. I have to go back to the link and try again. Today it was on my ninth attempt that the page loaded. Then to get all the comments I had to go through it all again (but mercifully the comments appeared first time: they usually do, but not always and I have to go back to the page, which loads if I’m lucky).

    It would be good to avoid this. It’s such a pain that I’m not exactly encouraged to come here.

    1. I used to get this a lot too. I switched browsers from IE to Firefox. Seems to work for me. Good luck.
    2. It’s fine in IE, Chrome and Firefox at the moment. Suspect it’s a temporary glitch, possibly not affecting all areas. Don’t leave us!
20. Another tricky but enjoyable effort, 29 minutes, guessed NUMBAT of course and am now off to see what it looks like and consult a numbatologist… can’t be too many on LinkedIn. LoI COGNATE, my CoD CANNIBAL for the clever link to Carthage.
21. Didn’t time it, but I was in the mechanics waiting room so it was probably 15 minutes that felt like an hour. Funny thing is that TIERRA DEL FUEGO was on my mind since I gave a public lecture that included the paintings from the Beagle. I’ve seen a NUMBAT so that went straight in – it was BEECHAM (from wordplay), REBELLED (from definition) and CLOCHE (from wordplay) that held me up.

    That clue for COGNATE is mighty fine work, setter!

22. 17 mins 48 secs.

    Not heard of Numbat. Put Toby Jar in for a while, for no explicable reason.

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