Times 25290: A cold coming

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 27:52

A few obscurities including a poet, a composer and a sculptor. Had most trouble with 23ac though, where the parsing took a fair while and I didn’t want to enter the answer until I had that sorted. A record number of proper nouns today?

Across
 1 WINDING SHEET. One of those where the grist is in the clue (‘these’) and you have to find an anag(r)ind (WINDING) plus an anagram of the relevant letters (SHEET).
 8 MOLOTOV. MO (second), LOT (chance), 0, V (against).
 9 DERWENT. WENT (left) behind DER (the German). Runner as in river.
11 Omitted. Simple substitution.
12 THE MAGI. A GI (one in uniform) after THEM (which is given in the clue). Among the most legendary journey persons ever.
13 NOYES. Rhyme for ‘poise’; perhaps thereby excusing the obscurity. Alfred Noyes: try reading ‘The Highwayman’ in a Wolverhampton accent?
14 BARTHOLDI. BART (Richard, composer and one of those left-handed fiddle players that gets in the way of the others), HOLD (stay), I (symbol for current). The sculptor is Fred who did the Statue of Liberty.
On edit: it’s actually Lionel Bart — Richard was a BARTH; hence my confusion; see first comment. Thanks jackkt.
16 GOD(LINES)S. The gods: AKA the cheap seats where you clap along as opposed to rattling your jewellery.
19 MU,SHY. The character in this case is Greek.
21 A(MNE)SIA. Anagram of ‘men’.
23 NON-ZERO. Reverse ORE{g}ON (state that’s minus G); insert NZ (a small country … perhaps). I shall leave the meaning of the term to the maths buffs.
24 ENFIELD. ’en field.
25 FILLIPS. See/hear ‘Phil(l)ip’s’.
26 CRITICAL MASS. Enough said?
Down
 1 WALLABY. WALLY inc A and B (demographic classes).
 2 NOTIONS. NOT ON (unacceptable), inc 1; S (second). Def: thoughts.
 3 INVISIBLE. B (bishop) IS both reversed inside IN (home) and VILE (base). Blind=INVISIBLE explains why children cover their eyes in order not to be seen.
 4 GO,DOT. A dot is a dowry. Yet more artsy stuff to upset our esteemed Dorset contributor.
 5 HARLECH. {c}HARLE{s}, C{onstructed}, H{is}. Built by Edward I but.
 6 Omitted. Two defs.
 7 AMAZING GRACE. Ref to the (sometimes) good Doctor, W.G. Grace, though my thoughts were elsewhere.
10 TRINITY HOUSE. Anagram: Tory in suit he. A body that concerns itself with lighthouses and pilotage in (some) British waters.
15 RESENTFUL. Anagram: left nurse. Neat surface.
17 DONE FOR. E{nglish} F{emale} inside DONOR.
18 INS(P)ECT. A device we’ve seen before.
19 MANILLA. Two defs. One a metal bracelet from W. Africa; the other a brownish type of paper.
20 SP(EC)IES. EC, the biz district of London.
22 AS,DIC{k}. Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee: hence its early form of sonar.

37 comments on “Times 25290: A cold coming”

    1. Dead right! I was letting my enthusiasm for lefties get the better of me. Richard, as now noted, was a BartH.
  2. I thought this was going slowly but reasonably well but about 40 minutes in I realised I was not going to finish without aids because I didn’t know 22dn and that rather knocked the spirit out of me. I then became completely bogged down in the SE with 19, 20, 23 and 25 outstanding and took another 40 to complete the grid. In the end I cheated only on 22 and 23.

    NOYES was a guess. Didn’t know DOT for “dowry”, BARTHOLDI, ASDIC, NON-ZERO.

  3. 34:39; almost gave up until 5d and 14ac clicked, and as it was I didn’t figure out 5d until after submitting. I was stupidly trying to think of a composer who would fit 14ac, and wondered finally if I knew any of Bartholdi’s music. I probably don’t. I also spent a lot of time thinking of sausages for 1d: poloney went in, bologna even. Didn’t Tolstoy say something about dumb people each being dumb in a different way? DNK the bracelet or ASDIC, but felt in each case they had to be. Oddly enough, they were.
  4. Resorted to aids after an hour for my two guesses in the SE, ‘non-hero’ (I was onto Oregon but without the ‘without the good’) and ‘manulla’ (I thought manila paper was spelt with only a single ‘l’).

    In fact, I created something of a record here by managing to get 4 of my 6 guesses wrong, the two already mentioned plus ‘asdec’ and the ingenious ‘Berghalti’, hitting the mark with only 1 and 13 ac!

    Much to like here, eg MUSHY – I flirted with ‘pishy’ – but overall just too much unknown stuff to make it as enjoyable as usual.

  5. All this talk of the fellow reminds me that McT has made him excessive in the alphabetic department to the tune of one.
    1. Thanks. Now corrected. Maybe it’s my job in life to add letters to people’s names, cf the BART{h} error in the same clue.
  6. 30 minutes. A bit of a curate’s egg this one. Too many poets, artists, and all the rest of them for my taste although I got GODOT from the definition with only very vague memories of DOT and dowry. MANILLA is rather obscure and I needed a dictionary to check the paper after recalling the Spanish for bracelet is something like MANILLA? I’m not entirely convinced by “small country” for NZ

    I knew ASDIC and you must all have seen the old war films where the operator in the destroyer listens for the “ping” of the ASDIC to indicate a submarine has been located.

    Also NOYES because the female lead was the first public performance by my daughter in Wimborne Minster when she was about 12 years old

    1. Two tramps come on stage.
      They don’t say anything for five minutes.
      ((Actors to improvise))
      At that point a third person appears and one tramp says:
      “Godot! I wasn’t expecting you so soon!”
      1. Yes, but why “small”? It’s not needed. He doesn’t say “little England” for E.

        I omitted the Fludde bit out of NOYES comment above

        2. There was a discussion in the forum recently in which it was pointed out (by PB, I think) that there’s no rule that setters have to use the fewest number of words on every occasion. I don’t think E is valid for England anyway, is it? English, yes.
    3. >MANILLA is rather obscure and I needed a dictionary to check the paper

      Never been handed a wad of fivers in a manilla envelope?

  7. Disaster in SE. Dnf. Enjoyed what I did but the brain-freeze took hold. Should’ve gone off in a different sense and returned. Top puzzle though.
  8. 21m. I enjoyed this a lot. Lots of obscurity (i.e. stuff I didn’t know) but all deducible from wordplay, which is always fun.
    I remembered Noyes from this puzzle, which is surprising because it was rather a long time ago. Just goes to show how looking things up properly and discussing them here helps to lodge them in the memory.
    My last in was BARTHOLDI, where I had the tricky task of deducing a sculptor I’d never heard of from a composer I’d never heard of. I put it in with much trepidation, but then when checking my answers I found that, although I’d never heard of him, I somehow knew that Bart’s first name was Lionel. The memory can do funny things.
  9. The interesting thing, for me at least, about the debate so far on this clue (23ac) is that no one has come in with a reading of the term itself. I was counting (see blog) on the maths buffs. Is Koro out there these days?
    1. Non-zero simply means having either a positive or a negative value. I can’t see the problem.
    2. As a maths pedant continually annoyed by the ignorant, innumerate masses, non-zero is the term never used when it should be by journalists, politicians, commentators etc.

      “Finite probabilities” are always pompously invoked by stupid people who mean “non-zero probabilities.”

      “Finite probability” is a tautology; all probabilities are between 0 and 1, so probability is always finite.

      Rob

      As for the puzzle: tricky, though all the guessed obscrurities – bracelet, composer, sculptor, dowry and (being non-English) Derwent, Harlech and Trinity House – were correct.

  10. The left hand side went in rapidly and I thought a personal best might be in the offing but was slowed down on the right. Still, I see Magoo is timed at one second short of 15 minutes and if I could achieve 2 x Magoo every day I would be a happy man.
  11. I had to put this down and leave it to cogitate for a bit but when I returned it didn’t take long – about 16 mins in total. MANILLA as a slave bracelet was in a programme on BBC2 last night about the copper industry in South Wales – very timely as I wouldn’t have known it otherwise.
  12. Absolutely first-rate blog, thank you indeed.

    I did this one jigsaw fashion with the 4 long outer-edge clues going in first without too much of a struggle. The sculptor fell in quite easily too, but as a New Yorker I’d be ashamed if it hadn’t. However if it hadn’t been for those clues I’d be a DNF. Where I got completely out of my depth was with “non-zero” and “manilla”, both of which I looked up before submitting.

    26 minutes.

  13. A fine puzzle that kept me entertained on and off all morning. Found it much harder that yesterday’s and Monday’s. Didn’t get going until I got a couple in the southwest corner.

    Came up two short in the end with Asdic and Bartholdi missing – neither of which I’d heard of. Thought the clue for Harlech castle was very clever. I visited it in May. The beautiful Royal St David’s golf course nestles below the ramparts.

    Very well blogged mctext. Thanks for explaining Winding Sheet and Godot both of which I guessed from checkers and definitions.

  14. A sluggish 31:26 and a fail on the sculptor. I was still thinking of Bert Baxendale from last week’s xylophone clue.

    Slowed myself down on 15 by looking to put “feeling” inside doctor left, thinking nurse was an Anax-style surroundicator. Only once I’d twigged doctor as an anagrind (and kicking myself for it) did the SE corner finally fall into place.

    Some clever stuff here so thanks to the setter. COD to 7.

  15. I saw the Welsh thing too, but 16 minutes I cannot match. What a mess I got myself into – no need for Stan Laurel.

    Overall feeling, somewhat drab, but I dropped sub-surface to fathom these clues and stayed there without much thought for the goings-on up top. It all works though, no quibbles at all.

    Thanks for the blog.

    Chris Gregory.

  16. I hr 4 mins 51 secs.

    Pleased to have finished this without aids. Nearly gave up a couple of times.

    Didn’t know Bartholdi, Dot, Trinity House, Manilla or Asdic.

    I liked species – “city type” disguising “type” and notions – “second thoughts” disguising thoughts.

  17. Finished eventually after 30 minutes, a break and another 15. Took me ages to see my LoI fillips. Knew we were still waiting for GODOT but didn’t know the dowry link. Had heard of Bartholdi but until I checked, didn’t know he was the chap who did the statue of liberty. Very good puzzle, compliments to the setter and mctext.
  18. A tough one. About 45-50 minutes, but I had to look up the totally obscure MANILLA, which then led to my LOI, FILLIPS. I totally derailed myself by thinking 1A needed some anagram of ‘shroud’, instead of seeing (as I did eventually) that it was the simpler ‘these’. UNK’s include ‘dot’ as dowry, both senses of MANILLA, TRINITY HOUSE, and ‘gods’ as a gallery. But I did, of course, know BARTHOLDI, and also surprisingly, ASDIC. COD’s to the finely surfaced EYEBALL and RESENTFUL. Well blogged mctext, thanks. Regards to all.
  19. I found this rather hard today and needed help for a couple (BARTHOLDI and WINDING SHEET). Also a couple of guesses that fortunately turned out to be correct (NOYES and GODOT). Struggled with the NE and SE and was not helped by being unable to see the obvious anagram at 10d despite the fact that my brother has worked for them in Harwich for some time! COD goes to 5d. Never heard of ASDIC but worked it out from the cryptic.Thanks to mctext for the blog and the explanation of 16a as I have never encountered that meaning of Gods.
  20. Can you please explain what you mean by “Omitted”, as in 2 of your answers. Sorry if this is an obvious convention that you always use, but it is currently unclear to me.

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