Times 25421: AS MAD ’S MONOD

73 comments on “Times 25421: AS MAD ’S MONOD”

1. (Raises hand)

   Other than that, a rather easy puzzle. I’m surprised the editor let’s them throw things like this in. If I had known the battle, I might have got it.

   The clues for ‘abductor’ and ‘undergo’ were very good. More clever clues, less obscure vocabulary!

2. I didn’t time it but I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t a PB.

   But surely the first letter of Theseus is Theta

   1. My view would be that Θησεύς begins with theta, while ‘Theseus’ begins with tau.
      1. I disagree. ‘Theseus’ begins with T, but if you’re going to use the cryptic crossword convention of transliterating Greek names into Greek characters, then the first letter has to be Θ (i.e. THETA rather than TAU).
3. 36 minutes today.

   Missed the “die is cast” meaning at 7dn and explained 12dn by thinking I was looking for a harbour and picking “Rhodes” (where the Colossus stood) without noticing there was no homophone indicator. I never heard of “roadstead” if that’s the true explanation.

   DK GAME THEORY either, I’m afraid, and not sure what “relatively” is doing in 25dn. ALMA was easy for me as I used to know a pub named after it and the H in front of it for a game rang a distant bell.

   Edited at 2013-03-13 03:11 am (UTC)

   1. My usual source (NOAD) has:

      ROAD: [often in place names] (usu. roads) another term for roadstead.
      ROADSTEAD: a sheltered stretch of water near the shore in which ships can ride at anchor.

      I only know it from the famous America’s Cup win in Fremantle (1987) when Gage Roads first came to prominence. Apparently, there’s also a Boston Roads and a few others.

      On edit — and there are these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadstead

      Edited at 2013-03-13 04:01 am (UTC)

      1. Gage Roads was my reference as well, though I’d have called it the not-as-famous America’s Cup loss. Guess it depends on your perspective.

         There were the inevitable yarns at the time about American tourists demanding that taxis take them to Gage Roads, Fremantle.

   2. GAME THEORY is a fascinating field Jack with applications from management training to cold war strategy. I was once told that the US used it in the face down by Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis.
      1. You may have come across John von Neumann, Jim, who made a primary contribution to this field and who Jacob Bronowski described as the most intelligent man he had ever met.. which would be saying something indeed!
         1. Indeed – he also invented a method of sorting random numbers into a sequence that was applied in early computers to sort computer records.
         2. And reportedly one of the inspirations for Dr Strangelove, the movie and the character.

            I came across game theory during an elective political science course which focussed on the Cuban crisis. My recollection is that after extensive gaming of the military options the consensus (leaving aside the nuttier members of EXCOMM) was “We’re screwed either way – have we considered talking to them?”

4. I’m with vinyl: aside from HALMA, there wasn’t a lot of meat on these cryptic bones. I asked my brother if he’d ever heard of halma, and of course he hadn’t, but he immediately Googled around and informed me that the game shows up in an Agatha Christie (different pseudonym) short story, in Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and in Forster twice: ‘Maurice’ and ‘The Longest Journey’, where both heroes indulge in the pastime. Who knew? Also Monica Dickens.
   I’m fine with Mctext’s explication of INROADS, but I still think that ‘raids’ would have been better. (Ships are supposed to follow, I believe, the rules of the road, not roads. And of course, while a raid is an inroad, an inroad isn’t necessarily a raid: steady advances would be enough.) Paulmci’s point about the Greek alphabet hadn’t occurred to me (well, it wouldn’t, would it?), but I think the setter can be defended; and I think we’ve had this issue raised before. Anyway, fairly meh, but I did like 26ac.

   Edited at 2013-03-13 03:37 am (UTC)

5. ‘Helba’ for HALMA (not the only one, I would guess), but apart from that pretty straightforward, ‘though 12 raised an eyebrows (sic).
6. 9:01, so clearly this one agreed with me, though I was delayed by putting in the perfectly convincing ARROW for 4dn very early on.

   Re: HALMA, it’s always tricky to know where general knowledge ends and specific knowledge begins. I happen to know the battle from the Alma pub in Wandsworth, which is one of the places I wasted many an hour as a young man, and the game from reading/listening to/watching The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as an even younger man (in an early chapter, the shipboard computer regularly challenges members of the crew to a game of electronic halma instead of dealing with their more pressing requests). This knowledge has never transferred into an attempt to learn anything more about the game, never mind play it, an attitude shared by me, all the characters in Hitchhiker’s, and everybody else here, it would seem.

   1. A Youngs Pub me recalls – a really superb pint. One of the things I miss about London
      1. Is it as good now they have shut the Ram brewery & moved to Bedford?
         1. I didn’t know that. What has replaced the waters of the Wandle? The Ouse presumably?
            1. Essentially Youngs is no more:
               http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young%27s
               Brewing was transferred to a joint venture with Charles Wells in 2006, when the London brewery was shut down, but now it is just Charles Wells and Youngs have sold all their tied houses, at least all the ones in the SE. I believe the Ram site is now part of the Olympic Park..
7. Hmmm… a blank at 1ac, and also at the 22/23 crossing. Should have got OHMS, but was playing with helba for the game. I got INROADS, but thought it could refer to fleets of cars…? Probably not.
8. Very easy fare but with this rather strange INROADS clue and the obscure HALMA plus WHOLESOME that doesn’t make sense (in golf you hole them all, the question is how many shots it takes you)

   I entered INROADS after looking up “roads” and discovering the obscure meaning. I knew Alma from the same Wandsworth pub as Tim but had forgotten HALMA.

   Agree with the comment above about a few better clues and less obscurity would improve the puzzle

   1. It’s “hole sum”, isn’t it Jim,the total for the round. Mind you, I could also say that in a round of golf I do indeed count it an achievement when some of them are holed rather than lost in the lake!
      1. This was also my reading, the homophone being indicated by “so to speak”, and must, I think, be the correct one. My fellow golfing addict, Jimbo, is of course right that in a (medal) round it is the total number of shots, not holes, played that determines whether it is a good/healthy one. But in match play, the player who wins the bigger number of holes who wins, so I think the setter just about gets away with it.
9. 17 minutes, with neither INROADS nor HALMA causing any grief. A chequers/checkers game for up to six people, leading to ferocious family quarrels. Alma Road was my very first school, but I hadn’t made the connection with the battle until now.
   Slowed in this one by the odd contingency of starting with 13 because it caught my eye, but was in possibly the worst “springboard” space. 1ac was my LOI.
   Mentions in despatches to ABDUCTOR and the sneaky ALTOGETHER.

   Edited at 2013-03-13 09:04 am (UTC)

10. Hadn’t heard of roads in the marine sense, nor the Battle of Alma – HALMA would have been a nasty clue if the game hadn’t cropped up in some Rupert Bear cartoon in my youth (I don’t recall encountering it since). Otherwise quite a straightforward puzzle.
    1. Do a search on: “Rupert and the Jumping Men”.
       ἅλμα = to jump.

       Edited at 2013-03-13 10:00 am (UTC)

       1. Thanks for the hint – looks like this appeared in the 1976 Rupert annual. I still have a couple of Warlord and Victor annuals from about the same time.
       2. Didn’t know the Greek (not much jumping in the New Testament so not in my lexicon). But perhaps that dates the game to the misty time when people would have made the connection because they had studied Greek at school.
11. Glad I read Daniel Finkelstein’s column in The Times today before attempting the puzzle, his theme is GAME THEORY. Very straightforward for a Wednesday, I thought; forgot to check the clock but certainly under 25 minutes.
12. One missing today – the unguessable Halma. Didn’t get many of the downs on first look but had much more joy with the acrosses. Thought Minotaur, Abductor and Withstood were all very good.

    I think Wholesome just about works as z8 describes: “sum of the holes” = total no. strokes for the round.

    Game Theory – the study of strategic decision making – is a fascinating branch of applied maths with real world applications in economics, business, political science and biology. For instance, the telcos hired game theorists to advise them with their bids in the UK Government’s auction of 3G spectrum.

13. I thought this was a fine crossword, if not too challenging. 14ac and 6dn particularly good clues. I had trouble parsing 3dn even though I play the game
14. No problems here, but can someone please explain what “relatively” is doing in 25dn?
    The clue seems to work quite well without it.
    1. I agree that the clue would work perfectly well without “relatively”, but I guess what the setter is saying is that a “hardy” person would be better able to endure exposure than a non-hardy one – hence “relatively able” – but would not necessarily be absolutely guaranteed to be able to so.
       1. I think we’re in the world of horticulture here where there is a division of plants classified as “hardy” e.g. in the term “hardy annuals”. They are not termed “relatively hardy” so I would agree the word is superfluous.
          1. Good point. It does seem, I admit, much more likely that the setter had hardy plants rather than hardy humans in mind. And I think we’re agreed that the clue would work at least as well, if not better, without the “relatively”. That said, even though “relatively hardy” does not exist as a horticultural term, I suppose there are some conditions which even “hardy annuals” might not be able to endure, but would be relatively better able to so so than other plants.
15. On the whole a straightforward puzzle, but I was stumped like most others by HALMA, despite having both the H and L crosscheckers in place. I guessed correctly that the name of a board game was required and HALMA quickly presented itself when I consulted the list of “games” in Bradford’s. According to Wikipedia, the game was invented by a thoracic surgeon at Harvard Medical School in the 1880s and is a variant of an older English game called Hoppity. So perhaps our American cousins will have found this less obscure than most of us on this side of the pond. It sounds much like draughts to me, though apparently you can’t capture your opponent’s pieces. No problem for me with INROADS – “roads” in the sense used here being pretty well known, I would have thought (but then again, it is true that “obscure” tends to be an adjective that one applies to anything one doesn’t happen to know oneself!).

    There were some very good clues I thought, among them ABDUCTOR, ALTOGETHER, MINOTAUR and WITHSTOOD

    1. I agree with your definition of “obscure” .. but not that “most” would be stumped by Halma, a familiar game to me. I suspect those who haven’t heard of it are more likely to say so than those who have, thus perhaps giving a misleading impression
       1. I wouldn’t disagree with that – obscurity is, as I say, very much in the eye of the beholder.

          I live quite close to the Alma in the Old York Road, but haven’t been there since the closure of Youngs. It used to be a great pub, with excellent food, but not sure what it is like now. Perhaps we should make a joint visit?

       2. So you don’t agree with the idea that “most would be stumped by Halma” on the basis that “it’s a familiar game to me”.
          Eh?
          😉
          1. Not sure what your point is… just saying I suppose that if you were my age, which you may be but I rather suspect not, you would likely have heard of it.. I even remember beetle drives
             Not so old that I remember the Alma, but I’ve seen plenty of memorials over the years

             Edited at 2013-03-14 01:57 pm (UTC)

16. I remember playing HALMA with one of my aunties when I was evacuated to IOW, so no problem there. (and Cowes Roads familiar, too)
    Held up for a while in NW by putting ARROW (quarrel for crossbow) at 4d.
17. I took it to be Rhodes the Greek island
    1. So did I (see above), but we were wrong, not that it matters much if it gets one to the correct answer.
18. Fairly easy today, giving me 25 minutes of fun, though it took me a while to fathom why ABDUCTOR was correct (nice clue). I wasn’t certain of the initial A because my entry of INROADS was very tentative. I’m not convinced by the singular definition “raid”. Chambers defines ‘inroad’ as raid, so ‘inroads’ should surely be ‘raids’. “To make inroads” is to make headway, which is rather different.

    Halma was familiar, but Alma wasn’t.

19. Quite an interestingly different puzzle, I thought.

    I was beaten by HALMA. I didn’t know the game or the battle so I ‘gamed’ all my options and came out with “Use a crossword solver” as the optimal strategy.

    Seeing some of the ALMA/HALMA cultural references mentioned above – Christie, Adams, Waugh, Wodehouse, not to mention all the pubs – I’m surprised that neither had lodged in my memory. No complaints.

    COD .. WITHSTOOD

20. 25 full filled minutes here with lots to admire. My pick For COD is MINOTAUR now that the learned blogger has explained the tau reference. No problem with HALMA having heard of game and battle, though I’m ashamed to say I did not know in which war it occurred.
21. I’ve certainly come across Alma as a pub name and have read, listened to and watched the Hitchhikers’ Guide in all its forms but that didn’t stop me plumping for HELLA at 23. Sigh. 17:38 anyway.

    Inroads was a total guess as well as it didn’t seem to fit either part of the clue but was the only word I could think of.

22. Count me in the HELBA camp. Oh well…
23. 11 minutes probably helped because I knew the battle and the game, and the Minotaur turned up in an almost identical clue in the Sunday Telegraph back in February.
24. I’m with kevingregg & vinyl – not too much to this one, it somehow seems. 27 minutes though, which is a pretty good time for me, so I’m not going to protest too much.

    Many thanks to all concerned.

25. Some discussion of the singular/plural thing on the club forum. I never stopped to think about it, probably because I have been known to say sarcastically to a family member who has made a raid on the fridge “I see you made inroads on the leftover pud last night”. I narrowly missed putting in “halva” but remembered the battle from somewhere and also the sweet. 16 minutes.
26. The unit of resistance is the OHM, singular. So measures of resistance?
    1. “The measure of resistance on this device is 42 ohms”
27. 25m. I didn’t like this much, I’m afraid: I was mildly irritated by INROADS and WHOLESOME for reasons mentioned above. I really dislike clues like HALMA: I’m just glad I’ve been to the same pub as Tim and haven’t heard of the Battle of Elba. Throw in Paris and tau and there’s a bit too much obscurish GK for my taste, even if none of it actually tripped me up.
    The thing that really slowed me down was putting in AGGRO for 4dn. It works perfectly, and I was so convinced by it that I spent ages trying to find an answer to 4ac that wasn’t an anagram.
    1. I can see the wordplay goes (or fits!) perfectly but I’m not sure about the definition as I can’t get ‘aggro’ and ‘quarrel’ to work in the substitution test.

       I toyed with ‘arrow’ for a while here thinking of the alternative meaning of ‘quarrel’ so I also tried to avoid the anagram at 4ac .

       1. Yes come to think of it I think you’re right.
28. I’ve been thinking all day about the “Battle of Elba”, since the only thing I know about Elba is “able was I ere I saw” it. Turns out there really was a Battle of Elba, in which the British Navy fought out a kind of draw against the Dutch Navy. That it wasn’t a resounding and improbable victory is probably why the Brits choose not to remember it very well.
    1. Travel is always worthwhile if you want some perspective on history. While I was in Amsterdam last year I saw the captured stern piece of the English flagship Royal Charles, a reminder that as far as the Dutch are concerned, the Battle of Chatham was a daring and glorious victory, which should be conspicuously remembered.
       1. It was teatime!
29. A quickish <20 minutes to a final guess at HALMA, vaguely remembering a battle of that name (Alma, that is), but on checking I had it in the wrong war. Didn’t know there was a Battle of Elba, z8, or I might have gone that way. The game, however, is a complete unknown to me, so the comment above postulating that it might be more familiar to Americans since it came from Hahvahd, is not true in my case, or vinyl’s, as I see. Obscurissimus. COD to the MINOTAUR because the Greek letter trick, while not really uncommon, still amuses. Regards.
    1. Like you, I vaguely remembered that Alma had a battle, and since I played what turns out to have been a variation on the game, Halma was an easy entry. I had the battle placed somewhere in Spain during Richard Sharpe’s single-handed trashing of the French during the Peninsular War. Don’t think he made it to the Crimea!
       1. I had thought it was one of Napoleon’s battles, so we’re in the same era, but mistakenly, as it happens.
30. I knew the battle and remember playing the game with a school friend. So no problem there. In fact, there was no problem anywhere. But it was still a steady, rather than a quick, solve. A pleasant but undemanding puzzle. 26 minutes. Ann
31. Plenty of time to write a comment since this was my best time ever, even if for most of you it was an unimpressive 30 minutes 17 seconds, the last minute being spent convincing myself that SHRED was right (I had been thinking of T. Rex all the while). A very easy puzzle indeed. My CODs are ABDUCTOR and ALTOGETHER, perhaps. I thought everyone knew Halma (which in German is called “Mensch, ärgere dich nicht” or “Don’t get upset, man!”. I think the idea is to race your pieces from the edge to the centre of the board, propelled by the cast of the dice, and knocking your opponents back to the start if you land on their spot (which is what they get upset about).
    1. Congrats on the PB. Under 30m beckons!
    2. The game you describe is the one I know as Ludo: the Halma I played with my auntie was like Chinese Checkers, but played on a square board. The object was to move your pieces across to your opponent’s base by leaping over one another – no dice were needed.
       1. I stand corrected about the game and thank you for pointing out the error — Halma seems to be a well-known game in Germany but it is not “Mensch ärgere dich nicht”, which I seem to remember was called Pachisi in the U.S. of my distant childhood.
          1. Yes, I agree the game known as Ludo here is called Pachisi in the U.S.
32. 7:16 here, for a pleasant, straightforward solve. HALMA was a very popular answer when I first started solving crosswords, though admittedly that was some time ago now. (I didn’t know that yams climbed.)
33. I must be dimmer than I thought. I’ve still not worked out what McT’s title means.
34. Go to rows 12 and 14 of the completed puzzle.
    1. Cheers!
       1. The weirder question is: where’s George today?
          1. Do you need a volunteer for today’s?

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