Times 25611- Welcome to the world of Master John Thursday

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

40 minutes, so slightly meatier than your average Monday. Since I’m reading Gargantua and Pantagruel at the moment, I was pleased to see Rabelais pop up. A couple of centuries later, across the Channel, he was to exert a considerable influence on another madcap tome, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Back to the puzzle, and the top half was a lot easier than the bottom. For those who haven’t done it, Dean Mayer pulled out all the stops yesterday.    

Across

1 BRICKBAT – RICK (‘strain’) in B + CLUB.
9 HEAT WAVE – anagram* of HAVE WE around A[bnormal] + T[emperature].
10 AMEN – the literal is ‘I agree’, and the wordplay first-rate (simply A here, rather than AI) + chaps > MEN.  
11 JULIUS CAESAR – the Ides fell on the 13th day of the seven months with 29 days and the one with 28, but on the 15th of the four months with 31 days, including March, when JC bought it; after the dictator’s death, the fifth month ‘Quintilis’ was renamed Julius (July).
13 VIENNA – my last in, though it’s pretty simple, actaully: V + ANNE+I reversed. 
14 HELIPORT – HER + PILOT*.
15 P+LATTER
16 ACTRESS – C (musical key) in A TRESS.   
20 SECONDER – simply, SECOND ER, as in the second king called Edward.
22 REMARK – RE (‘spiritual instruction’) + MARK (his gospel – ‘part of NT’); the literal is ‘say’.
23 CROSS-SECTION – CROSS (irritated) + NOTICES*.
25 TRAP – PART reversed to give you a slang term for the mouth.
26 RACINESS – as Python might say, Rabelais was a very naughty boy – as well as a doctor and a monk – with lots of jokes about flatulence and procreation. On the other hand, his creation of the ‘liberal’ Thelemite monastic order with its motto ‘Do what you will’ (which he borrowed from Saint Augustine) shows him at his satirical best, reacting against the hypocrisy of ‘ascetic’ orders, which he’d experienced first hand.
27 SINGLETS – SING (‘to celebrate’) + LET’S (‘we should!’)

Down

2 REMEDIAL – ME (‘the writer’) is ‘appropriated’ by REDIAL (‘call again’).
3 CONJUNCTIONS – CON + J + UNCTIONS; they say that should never start a sentence with a conjunction. But lots of people do it.
4 BALL GAME – GAMBLE* around A+L.
5 THOUGHT – THOUGH (‘allowing’) + T; ‘performed brain operations’ is a nice literal.
6 PASCAL – PA[y] + SCAL[e] for the mathematician turned Christian philosopher, best known tome-wise for his Pensées.
7 BASS – for the fish and the voice at the bottom of the SATB scale.
8 DETRITUS – another anagram… IT+RUSTED.
12 EXPERIMENTAL – and another one… IN+EXPERT+MALE.
15 POST CARD – DR + ACTS + OP all reversed.
17 CARDIGAN – Lord Cardigan made the charge at Balaclava; Lord Tennyson made the poem just a few weeks later.
19 SERGEANT – the US painter is John Singer Sargent, who sounds like ‘sergeant’ to my ears at least.
21 DASHED –  I wasted time trying to fit in a tar or an AB , but in the end it’s just a double definition, with ‘dashed’ used in a Wodehousian sense, as in ‘Dashed fine filly, that one!’. Rabelais would have known what to do with her…
24 OUCH – [p]OUCH.

53 comments on “Times 25611- Welcome to the world of Master John Thursday”

  1. 15:17 .. flew through in 7 minutes or so until … SECONDER – PROCESS – SINGLETS and CARDIGAN, which all took a while for the penny to drop.

    POSTCARD has a lovely surface.

  2. Nice way to start the week (unless you start the week with Sunday, in which case it’s a horrible way to start the week; but I digress). Thank you, Ulaca, for prising “Fay ce que vouldra” out of my memory; about all I could remember from Rabelais was one of his flatulence jokes, and his story of the two monasteries fighting over a piece of land. I was misled on DASHED in the same way, as well as looking for DE at 26ac. And trying to think of a military rank for 17d, which made it my LOI. I think I should have known RICK from a cryptic here, but I got 1ac from checkers. COD to 5d.
      1. Dean’s puzzle had a mini-theme, which, if spotted, may save you a little time. However, it’s hardly in mainstream crossword territory.
        1. It has so far taken me longer to find a mini-theme than it did to finish it. I am sure that it will hit me eventually
  3. Pretty standard Monday I found. But then, I was already in solving mode having finished the Stickler earlier on.

    Could have done without the continuation of the mind-brain conflation fallacy at 5dn. (Yep … I’m stuck in the middle of Bennett and Hacker’s Philosophical Foundations of Neurosciece.) Otherwise, a neatly clued puzzle with, as Sotira notes, 15dn being among the best. But not sure about the “cricket club” at 1ac … a bit of a liberty with the fine and ancient game.

    Noted the two pilots, used in different ways.

    And … Tony S. has the results of the Championships on his blog in the “Other crossword sites” in the TƒT sidebar. Interesting!

    Edited at 2013-10-21 04:19 am (UTC)


  4. All done and dusted in 45 mins, with CARDIGAN put in with a ?, as I half remembered both bits of GK (probably from previous crosswords).

    Took an age to get SINGLETS, kept trying to justify ‘doublets’.

    VIENNA was my LOI today, too.

  5. Well, I’m reading Jeffrey Archer at the moment which perhaps explains why this took more than an hour.
      1. Like Dan Brown, Jeffrey Archer doesn’t do nooky, even though everyone’s either “tall and ruggedly handsome” or “petite, athletic, with almond-shaped eyes”. Don’t ask me how I know this.
  6. A pleasant start to the week, thereby freeing me up to start again on yesterday’s Dean Mayer. Not half way yet.
  7. 36 minutes but I struggled to finish the bottom half with 27ac and 17dn as the source of my troubles. I don’t like 17dn because there’s no alternative way into it if one doesn’t make the Light Brigade connection which, considering Lord Cardigan is not even mentioned in the poem, is entirely possible.

    And talking of tenuous literary references, with J as the starter I wasted ages convinced that 11ac had to begin JO before remembering that Beth was the ‘March fatality’, not her older sister.

    Edited at 2013-10-21 07:31 am (UTC)

  8. 14 minutes, the adrenalin from Saturday possibly contributing. All the good clues in the bottom half, and the worst at 17, where I nearly had CORSICAN on stretched reasoning: the little corporal was definitely in charge, and somebody must have written a poem about him (I gather Byron did!). And I hesitated over the spelling of SERGEANT: presumably the J version is also correct, though I bet it gets you 1 wrong on the Club.
    CoD to SECONDER.
    PS Chuffed about finishing in the second session on Saturday with 30 seconds to spare but all correct. You don’t have to beat Mark (or even get into the top 25 in your group – that’s still an ambition unfulfilled) to feel good about taking part.

    Edited at 2013-10-21 08:41 am (UTC)

    1. Me too with the chuffed – I squeaked into the top 25. Disappointed, however, having been in the first session, not to have met you. See you next year??
      1. If I can scrape together the entry fee I’ll be there. Think I might have struggled (more) in session 1, so congratulations on getting through to the free places!
        Maybe next year I’ll wear an id badge!
        1. I did the session 2 puzzles yesterday in the more comforting surroundings of my kitchen and thought they were much more user-friendly than the session 1 puzzles.
      2. Well done for reaching the top 25, crypticsue. I watched out for someone looking like a basket of flowers but failed to spot you. Perhaps we’ll meet next year.
  9. A poor clue surely and not a cryptic one. It fits, but he wasn’t directly immortalised in the poem- he is not mentioned.
    1. I made a similar point already (see above) but it has to be said that the clue can be read so that it’s the charge that was poetically immortalized rather than the officer.
  10. 16 mins so a decent Monday puzzle.

    However, I agree with the negative comments about 17dn. I had the necessary GK for it to have been a write-in, but as jackkt said if you didn’t there was no other way to get to the answer. SECONDER was my LOI.

    I have considered tackling Gargantua and Pantagruel but haven’t got around to it so far.

    1. Indeed it would be possible to get the connection to the battle, know the poem by heart yet still not remember who the commander was, and unfortunately that was my situation exactly.

      Edited at 2013-10-21 09:47 am (UTC)

  11. 11:38, with a disproportionate bit of that spent staring at C_R_I__N. That said, when the penny dropped, I didn’t feel that it had been unfair, just that it was a matter of turning the clue in my head till I read it in the right way (but having got it, I would say that, wouldn’t I).
  12. Not my cup of tea. The top is very easy with 11A a very poor clue. The bottom is harder with even worse clues at 26A and 17D

    PASCAL was a strong proponent of the scientific method, invented the mechanical calculating machine and developed theory that underpins economics. He had an early programming language dedicated to him. All surely worthy of a mention?

  14. I found this very easy Monday-ish taking 6:49, quite a lot of that spent at the bottom of the grid.
  15. Almost broke 15min today (glad took time for typo check, though).
    LOI 17d – was tempted by CORSICAN, but ‘charge’ eventually caused penny to drop.
  16. 15:18 with Cardigan LOI after Vienna and remark.

    The sporran clue made me checkle but it’s hardly PC.

    How does allowing equate to though?

  18. DNF today with several missing in the bottom half. After turning to aids I still had Cardigan and Remark missing so thanks ulaca for answering those two.
    Didn’t know the dramatist Racine or Lord Cardigan.

    Are Saturday’s Championship puzzles available online as pdfs or in today’s ‘paper’ paper? I can’t find them on thetimes.co.uk

      1. Thanks Tim. I can’t get this to print (it’s very long and thin on screen) but will try on a different computer and printer later. Daniel
        1. You’re welcome – to be honest, I suspect it may be a bit of a fudge. Peter B. has posted on the forum that there have been unspecified “technical difficulties” with publishing these puzzles, but they hope to have all three available in the normal online format as well as .pdf some time soon…
  19. Enjoyed the puzzle, and didn’t see any problem with the clue for 26a.
    Having read the Times article about the Championship finals, I have some trepidation about tackling the puzzles, but I’ll have a go. I thought that it was a real spoiler for the article to reveal the answer to one of the clues, and I seem to remember that they have done it before.
    George Clements
    1. Funny thing crossword solving. I am normally a 40-45 minute merchant i.e. very far away from Championship standard. I read the article about the Championship where it goes to great lengths to say how difficult the puzzles were, so it was with some trepidation I started the Grand Final Puzzle No 1, expecting to get almost nowhere with it. To my surprise, I finished it in less than 30 minutes with no real pondering at all. There was only one word unknown to me (28 ac) and that was quite gettable from the wordplay. That old canard about ‘wavelength’ must have some truth in it after all!

      Chris

        2. Now you see I got on really well with the second puzzle (recognised the setter’s style which gave me confidence) and struggled with the other two! It is, as people always say, a wavelength thing.
          1. In response to Chris, I think that completing the first Final Puzzle in under half an hour is a pretty good performance. His posting encouraged me to try it tonight and, assuming that I have got it all correct, my time was 21m 08s. That’s a very respectable time for me for a daily crossword of medium difficulty, and I found that I needed rather more checking letters than usual to solve the clues, suggesting that I was working back from the answers to the wordplay rather than t’other way round.
            Too late to try the other puzzles tonight, but I sense that I’m going to struggle.
            George Clements
  20. Chambers gives it as a direct equivalent, though (!) I’ve struggled to come up with a substitution that doesn’t require “for” or “that” after allowing. Try replacing “though” with “allowing” in the above to see what I mean.
    1. Thanks for that. It didn’t stop me solving the clue and if it’s in Chambers it must be OK but like you I’m struggling to get it to pass the direct substitution test without adding another word (or words).
  21. 31m here so average for me though struggled for 8m on SECONDER and DASHED. Otherwise nothing outstanding for me.
  22. Odd mix of the hard and the easy. I liked POSTCARD, and can’t see much wrong with JULIUS CAESAR, CARDIGAN and RACINESS, which some others seem to have disliked.

    Congratulations to Mark Goodliffe on yet another remarkable performance in the annual xword championship. And my apologies to all for posting a super-neutrino time of under 5 minutes for Dean Mayer’s fiendishly clever Sunday Cryptic in the ST. (I doubt that even Mark G could have matched that!) My real time was about 1 hr 30 mins, but, having done the xword on paper, I then filled it in online and inadvertently clicked on the “submit” icon instead of the one which enables you to submit without appearing on the leader-board.

  23. No real hold-ups but I put CARDIGAN in on it being the only word that fit, missing both parts of general knowlegde.
  24. I blew through the top half in a couple of minutes, but needed more, about 25 minutes altogether, to slog through the lower section. LOI and COD to CARDIGAN. Obviously once I saw it I liked it; ‘officer in charge’ is priceless. DASHED was an incompletely understood guess. Regards.
  25. A pleasant Monday morning amble, with the solutions plopping into place nicely until held up by Edward II, which had me starting down various unpleasant rabbit-holes until I realised that a Monday crossword would not require knowledge of mediaeval history nor of Marlowe – beautiful clue, with SECONDER hidden in plain sight. I’d been over-thinking DASHED, sailors etc, until I got the D, when the solution wrote itself in.

    Thank you, Setter, and for the sheer joy of today I won’t throw BRICKBATs at your meagre CARDIGAN, but hope you get plenty of RACINESS-spiced POSTCARDs …

  26. Got to this very late, and managed it in under 10 minutes with a slightly desperate guess at CARDIGAN, helped by a dim memory of the poem.
    However I had put SIENNA, for some unfathomable reason.
    I seem to have entered a phase of careless errors, starting on Saturday morning.
  27. What’s wrong with the RACINESS clue? It struck me as rather good.

    Unusually quick on the top half and unusually slow at the bottom, so overall not very good after thinking it was going to be a doddle.

    I was uncomfortable with latter = second in 15ac.

  28. 6:01 here for a nice old-fashioned Times crossword. I should have been faster but I’m still feeling v. tired after Saturday’s exertions.

    What’s wrong with the RACINESS clue? Absolutely nothing. Nor with any of the other clues for that matter. 17dn (CARDIGAN) in particular is just fine.

  29. Well, I suppose it’s only fair. I had long since given up on history and poetry, and the two of them ganged up on me in 17d. Would that the setter had had the decency to use a knitwear-related clue instead, or even thrown in a Corgi (which is always worthwhile). I don’t suppose there are any poems about a famous Corsican commander? No, I was afraid not.

    On the brighter side, as far as I can remember this is the first time that my avoidance of history and poetry has caused me a moment’s trouble in life. No doubt my third area of active ignorance – philosophy – will bite me in the arse one day, but I shall be philosophical about it when it happens. I figure that knowing the lyrics of Monty Python’s “Philosopher’s Song” will see me through most situations.

    Speaking of which, [mctext], I can probably save you a few hours by pointing out that the second half “Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscie[n]ce” does not get you much further than the first half. The more useful aspects of neuroscience are largely concerned with what happens when neurons are hit by, for example, a Ford Mondeo – a subject on which philosophers have relatively little to contribute.

    Other than that minor disastrophe, about half an hour, the last ten minutes of which were spent in a state of word-blindness over Vienna.

    Slow night in A & E, but the roads are wet so there’s the hope that things will pick up.

    1. Some poems to read, perhaps: Pushkin ‘Napoleon’, Byron, ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’, Browning ‘Incident of the French Camp’ and this by Roger Dunn –

      Asked the Duke, “Where’s our next head-to-head?”
      And Napoleon Bonaparte said,
      “Waterloo.” With a grin,
      The Duke said, “If I win,
      St Helena’s quite nice, so I’ve read.”

      Rather more, I think, on the Corsican than on the Charge.

Comments are closed.