Times 25518 – some bloggers do ‘ave em

Solving time : 23:07, which was good enough for fourth (out of four solvers), though I’m a little distracted at the moment with people over and my mouse freezing up. There’s some very tricky stuff in here, and a few out-of-the usual uses. It’s also a pangram (not far from a double pangram).

Tomorrow is the 4th of July, which is a big deal in the country in which I live at the moment. So happy USA day, and if I finish the day with fewer fingers than I started with, I will have celebrated appropriately.

Away we go…

Across
1 MAR(blemish),MO(doctor),SET(fixed)
9 REIGNITE: TIN,GI inside EER allk reversed
10 FAN,G: Extractor here meaning a fan that removes a smell or air from a room
11 AIR AMBULANCE: A, then an anagram of (c)UMBRIA(n), then LANCE(puncture)
12 EMPIRE: MP(representative) in EIRE
14 END(scotch),PA(pop),PER(through)
15 MAJESTY: JEST(kid) in MAY
16 DIVERS,E
20 NO MATTER: MAT(pad) in NOTER(journalist)
22 CO,(l)OLLY
23 ROCKING CHAIR: since A RICH is an anagram of CHAIR
25 I-SPY: hidden reversed in gYPSIes
26 ACID DROP: or A CID DROP
27 SPEEDWAY: DEEP(hidden) reversed in SWAY
 
Down
2 ACADEMIA: alternating letters in lAb CoAt then AIMED reversed
3 MAGAZINE RACK: MAGAZINE(arsenal) then CAR(train) reversed, (sac)K
4 SCARIEST: C(rofter),ARIES(ram) in ST – this is an excellent clue
5 (s)TRUM,PET
6 LIQUID: QUI(who) in LID
7 LION: N,OIL reversed
8 TENEBRAE: reversal of EAR,BE,NET
12 AN AXE TO GRIND: double def, one cryptic
15 MONTREAL: MO(modus operandi), N(ightspo)T, then REAL(official)
17 IN(accepted),CHARGE(cost)
18 SPLIT PEA: LIT,PE in SPA
19 TRICEPS: sounds like TRY CEPS(mushrooms)
21 TUNDRA: DR(bones – term for doctor) in TUNA
24 C,RIB

39 comments on “Times 25518 – some bloggers do ‘ave em”

  1. 24:52 .. I found this harder than yesterday’s. It felt like there were at least a couple of very tricky clues in each quadrant.

    The fiendish SCARIEST was my LOI and probably COD.

  2. Once again I was surprised to find I had taken the best part of an hour to solve all but three or four clues. In the end I resorted to aids for TENEBRAE (never heard of it, probably since the last time I said here that I never heard of it, and in any case it sounds more like a Scottish village than a religious service), and ACID DROP where I was fixated on the second word being CHOP. Not over-keen on either of these, nor of ‘journalist’ = NOTER which I refused to accept until all the checkers were in place leaving me no alternative, but it’s probably all a case sour grapes.

    Edited at 2013-07-04 01:28 am (UTC)

  3. 68 minutes but got ENDPAPER wrong (‘endpages’), which scuppered my chances of getting the service, which I was sufficiently familiar with to get with the correct checkers.

    I also felt vaguely discontented with this puzzle (‘strum’ and ‘pluck’ both involve the digits, but different ones, typically, and the words are separate not synonymous in most people’s mental schema), but that may be as a result of staying up till all hours to watch Murray prepare for his ultimate demolition by Djokovic by only starting to play properly when he was two sets down.

    1. You can strum without the relevant fingers touching the strings; e.g., with a pick/plectrum. But you can’t pluck, as such, without some finger action. Believe me. I know this. So you were very right!
      1. It’s a nice point and indeed Chambers compares and contrasts plucking with strumming when defining the latter. However ‘strum’ can also mean to play a stringed (or keyboard) instrument carelessly or unskilfully, a more loosely defined concept in which it is perfectly possible that plucking would be involved.

        Also in the setter’s defence, ‘strum’ and ‘pluck’ are listed as synonyms in both thesauruses I have to hand although as we have discussed here previously that doesn’t necessarily make it all right.

        Edited at 2013-07-04 06:09 am (UTC)

        1. That’s a bit like telling a fiddle player that bowing and pizzicato are much the same thing. I for one won’t have a bar of it! (Let alone 12.)
  4. All morning and some of the afternoon (with breaks to contemplate an obscure and difficult bit of Heidegger in the German). And this really was a bugger. Left at the end with SCARIEST and TENEBRAE outstanding. Pencilled them in on a whim. So a technical DNF.

    George: your mouse is probably mourning for Douglas Engelbart.

    1. To save people rushing off to Google, DE invented the computer mouse and has just died. He made no money out of it because he didn’t own the patent. Indeed by the time use of a mouse became common I think the patent had probably expired
  5. 35 minutes until I was left with 8d. Then spent another 30 minutes wondering how I could get REHEARSE to fit. Finally I was rescued by TENEBRAE as a ‘religious service’ (nudged by a Benedictine education).
    I got the anagram part of 23ac and guessed ‘rocking’. Can someone please tell me if that is another word for ‘rich’.
    Thanks, Cozzie
    1. Not so far as I know – this clue features the ‘internal anagram’ device which has been popular of late (there was one on my watch on Monday), whereby ‘possibly A RICH’ indicates that you need to supply your own anagram indicator and anagram fodder (in this case ‘rocking CHAIR’) to get the solution (denoted by the whole clue in this case).
      1. Being very much an “amateur”, can I ask you to run that by me again please in lay-man terms?

        Are you saying then that the “Rocking” should therefore be a guess?

        1. If you like, yes, but an inspired guess. Various sources provide a list of anagram indicators (or anagrinds as they are sometimes called), for example, Bradford’s Crossword Solver’s Dictionary and Chambers Crossword Dictionary, and they would include ‘rocking’.

          Here, most solvers will reverse solve this, if you like, by fixing on ‘a + rich’ as the letters to be ‘ground’, seeing CHAIR and then coming up with ROCKING.

          Hope that helps.

          1. Errrrr………..yes, and er no.

            As The Lad Himself would say – “It’s a game innit!”

            Thank you so very much – I think I am getting the ‘ang of it.

  6. Complex and interesting puzzle that kept my occupied for 35 minutes. I liked it and had no gripes when solving except that “using” in 7D looks like padding. I think the pluck/strum debate is a bit arcane in this context. Thank you setter and well blogged George.
    1. You wouldn’t think mixing up a putt and a drive was arcane would you? We must slay ignorance where it lies.
  7. 24 minutes, finishing with much head scratching in the SW corner. (At one point I was contemplating PORK CHOP for 26ac, though I strongly suspected the editor really wouldn’t entertain a clue with quite such a choice of anti-establishment language). TENEBRAE came up in the TLS not long ago, so anyone else who does that would have shared my advantage.

    Anyway, enjoyably tricky challenge (for the more mature solver, at least, I can see it being a bit indigestible for those with less experience).


  8. Took about an hour, and even then I ended up with one stupid four letter blank: CRIB, which I don’t know why I didn’t get! Grrr… so another DNF today.

    Didn’t know TENEBRAE, but worked out the cryptic, and only managed to get MAGAZINE RACK once I realised it was a pangram. In fact, it was my last one in as I was convinced the answer was the name for some sort of sports-related home stand.

    I always marvel at how, when for example someone comes to the door (as happened this morning) and your thought process is broken, you come back and can immediately spot something that you’ve been pondering for ages! ARCADIA (a random caller at door interrupts activity?)

  9. 23 minutes today, which appears to be quite good. Very slow in the SW where I had nothing except the now commonplace answer-as-wordplay for most of the second half, not least because I was looking for the Z to complete the pangram. Should have taken a second look in the MAGAZINE RACK, where most missing things are to be found on about the third rummage through.
    TENEBRAE from TLS, where you also had to know your Star Wars. DKK CRIB as a place where animals (oxen, it seems) live, possibly thrown by “Away in a Manger” where there is “no crib for a bed”. So it isn’t a manger, then.
    CoD to the cheap and cheerful TRICEPS, expecting to see the same clue tomorrow for BICEPS. Not sure my greengrocer knows what a cep is.
    1. The hymn-writer ought to have written ‘Away in a crib, no manger for a bed’, it seems, but it didn’t scan as well.

      Edited at 2013-07-04 09:54 am (UTC)

      1. Depends how you punctuate it. Maybe the final version was incorrectly transcribed from the first draft including the writer’s musings:

        Away in a… manger?… no, crib… for a bed

  10. 24 mins mid-morning, so back to some kind of form after yesterday’s disaster.

    As has been noted already this was a very devious puzzle that took plenty of concentration to unpick. TENEBRAE was vaguely familiar and the wordplay was clear enough, ROCKING CHAIR didn’t fool me because this sort of clue seems to be appearing more frequently, and the use of “bones=Dr” in 21dn was good even though I have seen it before. I must confess that I didn’t bother to parse AIR AMBULANCE once I had a few checkers. MONTREAL was my LOI after I finally saw the wordplay.

  11. 29m. This was hard, and there was some good stuff in it (notably SCARIEST and TENEBRAE) but quite a few things that grated with me at least:
    > EMPIRE = “corporation”
    > Per = through
    > “Jumpers at seaside” = “divers”. A jump and a dive are not the same thing, and people don’t really dive at the seaside anyway: you’d hit your head.
    > “Journalist” = “noter”
    > “Real” = “official”
    > “Strum” = “pluck”
    > That meaning of CRIB
    > ACID DROP: hard to swallow? Not the ones I used to eat.
    > What are the words “according to home” doing in 3dn?
    I’ve no doubt much of this can be justified by reference to some dictionary and/or I’ve got the wrong end of the stick, but it all contributed to a feeling that the setter was stretching quite a lot, and for me it made the puzzle hard for the wrong reasons.
    As for strum = pluck, I don’t care what it says in any dictionary. Mctext is right.
    I thought at first that 26ac might be CHOP CHOP. Replace the initial “a” with “quick” and it could be.
    1. >…
      >ACID DROP: hard to swallow?

      I nearly had this on my list of dodgy definitions, but I came to the conclusion that the setter was contrasting it with (say) a piece of fudge, which would be “soft to swallow”.

    2. The defn is ‘home stand’, I believe. And according to would then be something like ‘coming together to mean’.

      Me, I was wondering whether it was fair to label all neonates as animals…!

      1. Presumably I’m being thick but I can’t see how “home stand” means “magazine rack”.
          1. Really?
            I refer my honourable friend to my earlier comment about “stretching”.
  12. Lots of these went in first from the definition and checkers, then confirmed with the wordplay, so this seemed of average difficulty. Didn’t know TENEBRAE but I vaguely remembered tenebrous as meaning something to do with the dark, and it wasn’t a stretch to assume there’d be a religious service related to darkness – the wordplay took over from there. Initially put in PEAR DROP at 26A as it made me recall a choking incident as a child that put me off such things for life. Slightly surprised to see a nice, clean surface like 21D in the same puzzle as an appalling surface like 9A.
  13. I thought this a tricky one, needing the alphabet and then the wordplay to be convinced about TENEBRAE. Just over the 19 min mark.
  14. Gave up bored after 30 minutes with tenebrae, Montreal and crib missing.

    Keriothe pretty much sums up my thoughts.

  15. 9:30 for me. I was pretty much bang on the setter’s wavelength as far as clue construction was concerned, though I too thought some of the definitions a bit iffy. I found this far easier than yesterday’s puzzle, but I was feeling much less tired (and yesterday’s AGONY wasn’t repeated :-).

    As a member of the Musical Mafia, I had no problem with TENEBRAE once I’d thought of an EAR for the “organ”.

  16. I completed the puzzle successfully, but, like some other contributors, was left feeling a bit flat. As usual, untimed, but within half an hour.
    I do get the impression that, sometimes, pangram puzzles are more satisfying for the compiler than for the solver. I would agree with the comment previously made that some of the clue surfaces were very good, and others rather ‘iffy’.
    George Clements

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