Times 25543

46 comments on “Times 25543”

1. Fairly straightforward puzzle, though I enjoyed it. Left at the end with the two 22s, not knowing the colloquial “chin” for “punch” and unable to conjure up the old car. Liked the “spots” in ISAAC NEWTON and tempted first off by BOUNDS UP for 1ac.
2. 26:23 .. as I wrote in SPEER I was thinking “Now where did I read that devastating piece by Clive James recently?” Take a bow, Ulaca the Seer!

   No real problems but a few answers that needed careful spelling out. ANTONYMOUS must be one of the most awkward-looking words in the language.

3. An enjoyable puzzle – just right for a Friday! I’m sure NYM must have come up before, but I had quite forgotten it.

   For me, 12dn always conjures up the picture of Sir I N in his black and gold waistcoat, rather than anything to do with maths.

4. One of those odd coincidences that Albert Speer came up just a day or two after I quoted the Clive James passage on him. Should have been a write-in for Jimbo after the heads-up! Marchioness always conjures up memories of The Old Curiosity Shop, though sadly the Thames tragedy is also now brought to mind.

   43 minutes, but done by the ‘energy-saving’ clue, where I was doing all sorts of things with the E apart from the required thing, so COD to CREATE for the trickery and the well concealed literal with its devious expolitation of the tense system. At least ‘Cresta’ was an old car!

   1. Had a hard time getting past ‘chitty’
5. 50 minutes with no attempt to rush things along unduly.

   Took a while to work out PHOSGENE which I don’t remember meeting before but undoubtedly have. After completing the grid I needed to look up the corporal NYM who appears in Henry V and to a lesser extent in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Last in: FROZEN and EARNEST.

6. Phosgene is better known as mustard gas Jack and as 2014 approaches we may hear more of it
   1. Oo no Jim, two very different gases. The odd reason I know this is that my father was an instructor at the army gas school (ie teaching how to cope with it, not make it!) during part of the 2nd world war. He thought phosgene was a particularly nasty gas.

      the school was near Salisbury so not all that far from you..

      Edited at 2013-08-02 12:06 pm (UTC)

      1. I’m having a not-quite-with-it day and here’s another example. Jerry is correct. PHOSGENE is a carbon-chlorine compound whilst mustard gas is a sulphur-chlorine compound

         Both were used as chemical weapons in WW1

   2. Phosgene is NOT the same as mustard gas. Phosgene is carbonyl chloride and mustard gas is bis(2-chloroethyl) sulfide. Phosgene is inhaled and once in the lungs, reacts with water to form hydochloric acid and carbon monoxide. Bis(2-chloroethyl) sulfide is a blistering agent. Mustard gas did lead to the discovery of nitrogen mustard based chemotherapy drugs. Just my $0.02.
7. Very enjoyable tussle this one with some interesting words and GK required to solve

   Hackney is a DBE but posed no problems as the last word had to be CRAB. Not sure PRO and sportsman are synonymous – indeed in some games the first appears to preclude the second. With apologies to Ulaca, got Speer without giving Clive James a first or second thought.

   I see the Times favourite scientist is in again but at least with a different approach to the clue and no obscure poets, painters or other usual Times suspects – a good day!

   1. I would have thought Hackney (carriage) and cab were direct equivalents. A Hackney is not an example of a London taxi, it IS a London taxi.
      1. i agree, a hackney is a cab
         1. Quite correct of course. Indeed the laws relating to the taxi trade are called Hackney Carriage Laws. As my father was a musher (black cab driver) I really shouldn’t have got that wrong – but it’s been one of those days.
   2. Devastation scarcely begins to describe my feelings, Jimbo…
8. 16.08 and very much a wavelength thing, once I got onto it. Today’s stuff I learned: that Rembrandt is just as famous as an etcher – I’d have had Blake, I think.
   Would Isaac describe himself as a lawmaker? Do scientists and mathematicians make laws or discover them?
   CoD to LOI SPIDER CRAB for leading me up the garden path with rivers in Hackney. That’ll be the Lea, then.
   1. My thoughts exactly.
      1. Scientific laws are theoretical constructs, not entities to be discovered. Newton formulated his laws, so it seems acceptable to me to describe him as a lawmaker in the context of a cryptic crossword.
   2. Newton was an MP for Cambridge

      As to scientific “laws” I agree with you. Not sure what the setter had in mind.

      1. Not sure if it counts as “science”, but I immediately recalled a puzzle I blogged a while back, which depended on “Sod” being described as a lawmaker, so it’s clearly a convention which setters follow.
      2. An apocryphal tale, or true? Did he not sit 10-odd years in the Commons, recorded in Hansard as speaking only a single time, saying, “Could you shut the window, please, I’m cold.”
   3. This week probably the Lee.
      1. I’ll remember that when I next drive down Lea Bridge Road past the Lee Valley Park.
9. Great puzzle, pitched very well for a Friday, with some lovely clues. Occasionally we get puzzles that are not ridiculously difficult, but which reveal many delights as one unravels the wordplay, and this was one of ’em. Lots of good ‘uns, THUMBS UP, IMAGINED, MARCHIONESS, FRICASSEE all elevating my dander. ‘Lawmaker’ passed me by as a typical Timesian misdirection, though you could argue…

   Re SPEER, well, how odd. Did you set this one, Ulaca?

   Many thanks to Dave Perry, I hope you have a great time wherever it is you’re off to.

   Chris G.

   1. I couldn’t set a decent clue let alone a whole gridful of them.

      I hope you managed to get your dander down in the end – if that’s what you wanted, of course. Not wishing to intrude…

      1. :-))
10. 18 mins so I must have been on the setter’s wavelength, although ANTONYMOUS went in without full parsing as I had forgotten Corporal Nym. As I solved FRICASSEE I wondered how our overseas solvers would have known the FRICS part of the wordplay if they had never come across it before. ACTS was my LOI after I finally got the ISAAC NEWTON/SPIDER CRAB crossers.

    I empathised with Dave for having to blog this one knowing that he was under time pressure because of his impending holiday. I never solve well when I know I only have a set amount of time.

    1. Overseas solvers in Australia doubly-hampered, a typo had the clue reading, “Survey or…” rather than “Surveyor…”
       Not that it made any difference, put the answer in with a shrug, as well as the other unknowns: NYM and the second meaning of EARNEST; though they were ignorance. But unusually, no hold-ups, it all flowed, so 26:14 – good for me.
       Rob
11. Found this tough, though I was immediately put off by some of the Google Translate-style surfaces. LOI was EARNEST purely on the checkers, as I didn’t know one definition and the other seemed slightly oblique. Some interesting vocab, though, for which this has been a good week.
12. Very enjoyable crossword today which took just over the hour. Nice to see everyone’s ‘favourite’ nazi at 4dn,and to see another one at 19dn. It seems that at Yalta Stalin introduced Beria to the US President as ‘Our Himmler’. He should know I suppose!
    As for Speer, all I can say is that he must have had one heck of a lawyer.
13. Just under the 20 min mark. An enjoyable battle – the NKVD are in the Telegraph Toughie today which helped!! I was also helped in that puzzle by remembering from the Times the other week that FELL was an animal skin. The more puzzles you do, the more it helps!

    Edited at 2013-08-02 10:44 am (UTC)

14. 31m. I felt I was making very heavy weather of this, so I’m relieved to find others found it tricky. A very enjoyable puzzle, though, with lots of “aha!” Moments.
    Thanks to Dave for such blogging dedication. Have a good holiday. I’m off on holiday today too. In fact I’m in Heathrow as I type, waiting for my flight to Toronto, so the blue jay in 24dn was rather topical.

    Edited at 2013-08-02 10:10 am (UTC)

15. Good Friday puzzle – tricky and challenging but not impossible, with some ingenious anagrams and unusual GK. I once knew but had forgotten the apocryphal palindrome attributed to Boney at 16A, so ABLE went in on def alone, and also that Nym was the name of a corporal in a couple of Waggledagger’s plays. I wasted much time trying to work out how NYM could be an alternative for NCO.
16. It took me around 45 minutes, though a quick start encouraged me to think it would be easier. FRICASSEE went in on a wing and a prayer as I didn’t understand the surveyor reference, nor did NKVD mean anything to me. 22a & 22d were my last in.
    A good puzzle. COD to 11.
17. I somehow managed to do this in 20:50 despite not knowing Nym, one meaning of Earnest or what the NKVD was and who its leader may have been. In the case of the latter that forced me to consider Icenian as well as Iberian but I fugured that if you came from Icenia you’d just be an Iceni.

    No probs with FRICS as my dad was one when he worked (a quantity surveyor, not an estate agent, before you start throwing things at me).

    I might have struggled with Speer but for Ulaca’s prescient interjection earlier in the week so thanks.

    Nice puzzle with some interesting containicator work going on. I iked imagined for its construction but I’ll give my COD nod to 14 for including a Steely Dan song title.

18. Ah yes, the old Reelin’ in the Years. I hadn’t seen that.

    Re DANDER, it seems to be bits of hair or feathers. One of our stranger expressions.

    1. I imagine if a bloke had a perpetually steely dander, he’d look just like the character in your photo… 🙂

       I may have taught others Speer, but you have taught me dander.

19. It’s the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors

    Anon ARICS

    1. So it is. Is there a reason why it should be an Institution rather than an Institute?
20. About 20 minutes, but I had no idea of the full parsing of FRICASSEE and SPIDER CRAB. The surveyors were a mystery until I came here, and so was the snooker thing, although now that I see it I think it has appeared here before. Everything else went in without a lot of difficulty. COD to MALADMINISTER for the definition. Thanks to Dave and regards to all.
21. 10:35 for me, so at least considerably better than yesterday’s miserable showing (no doubt helped by the temperature in West London being down by about 5 degrees C).

    An enjoyable solve, though as usual I made unduly heavy weather of a few clues – particularly 6dn (FRICASSEE), where I somehow confused its “surveyor” with 4dn’s “architect” and tried to fit FRIBA into the answer.

22. Pretty difficult with excellent clues like 1D mikxed with the seemingly weel 8D. Would welcome explanation of earnest = guarantee,I suppose earnest = firm is just about possible.
    Best wishes
    |Mike and Fay
23. Collins has: Earnest (2) – a part or portion of something given in advance as a guarantee of the remainder.
24. Agree with jackkt – think of ‘earnest money’. Unfortunately agree even more with Kevin: just when I get my head around china and mate, up pops FRICS and spider (known to me as a bridge).
25. Struggled mightily with this on Friday and had eleven left (mostly on the right-hand side) when I resumed today after the weekend away. Getting Frozen, Isaac Newton & Neatness then moved things along quickly and in the end I had just one missing (Create). Lots to admire in this puzzle – I particularly liked ‘Galaxy’ for ‘mutually attracted group’.
    Well blogged, Dave – not an easy puzzle in my opinion.
    1. …fitting right in with the Isaac Newton theme – if Newton hadn’t invented gravity (by chopping down a cherry tree) galaxies would be flying apart all over the universe!

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