Times 25697 – bring on the neutrinos

53 comments on “Times 25697 – bring on the neutrinos”

1. Looks like George got his stinker … at least in my book. Had to fight to get quite a few answers. Still not convinced that TWO-INCH is kosher as an answer. (2/9 of Trent Reznor perhaps?) And the problem for me in 8dn is “by” where “from” would make sense — except on the surface.

   Last in were in the top left: PYRAMID, CUPPAS and INDIE where a sheer guess at CASUAL (for 1ac) threw the whole thing out of whack.

   PERIHELIA/perihelion is a favourite since the measurement of the perihelion of Mercury famously shows the occasional irrationality of the physical sciences (at the time, “natural philosophy”). It was known for centuries that the Kepler/Newton laws failed to account for it but no one accordingly rejected or refined them. Mercury was just anomalous in its behaviour. Until General Relativity got it right.

   Edited at 2014-01-30 03:47 am (UTC)

2. 65 minutes – got going again after a mid-solve lull (needed a dog and a swim!) with SQUADDIE. The only one I wasn’t mad about was TWO-INCH; the rest was very good, especially…well, let’s settle for my last in, INDIE.

   Re EARTHY (which I didn’t parse in- or post-solve), I reckon the ‘by’ is just about okay if you view things from inside the clue – the personified ‘earthly’ doing the extraction herself.

3. 33:31 .. had no clue what a TWO-INCH might have been but assumed it had to be a something. My post-solve research led to some alarming references in the Urban Dictionary. I trust those aren’t what the setter had in mind. I’m still a bit bamboozled by that clue all round.

   Otherwise, a very good work-out for the little grey cells.

   Nice time, George.

   COD .. toss-up between DETOXIFY and THANK YOU

   1. Now I have a title for my memoirs. Thanks!
      1. You’re welcome 🙂
4. 30m. Definitely tricky, but also highly enjoyable. Very few gimmes but all perfectly clear, including unknowns CAMBRAI, ALL THE GO (an expression that I suspect isn’t) and “earthly” as a noun meaning “chance”.
   I read ZOOMED as just “sped” (“shot”) rather then anything to do with photography.

   Edited at 2014-01-30 07:00 am (UTC)

   1. I think you’re right about ALL THE GO, K. My father-in-law uses it, which would support your assertion, as would the fact that it immediately brought to mind The Man From Ironbark (where “flowing beards are all the go”).
      1. I think I must have heard it before, because although I have no conscious memory of it I did have a vivid mental picture of a generously moustachioed Spitfire pilot saying it, followed by “what?”
         1. Required reading for all aspiring Australian citizens:
            http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/patersonab/poetry/ironbark.html

            They don’t have an earthly of remembering it all but!

            Edited at 2014-01-30 07:52 am (UTC)

            1. Some of us do McT. It gets easier after a few frothies.
5. Had to do this in two shifts, but would guess my time to be 64:59.

   TURANDOT and CAMBRAI were unknowns, and didn’t know how a monkey could be a prior, but struggled over the line eventually.

   Enjoyed CUPPAS, as one does, and also the spotted item.

   1. I think we’ll round that up to 66 minutes, shall we?
      1. 65, perhaps? Or is this time added on for stoppages?
         1. Z, this may be to do with my time being one second faster than Ulaca’s. Entirely coincidental of course.
            1. Yeah, but I still think 64.59 rounded up is 65. Or are Australian round-ups just bigger on principle?
         2. Too right, Zed! They’ll try anything, will these Antipodeans.
6. It’s mostly been said already, but this was a rare occasion these days that I didn’t look at the puzzle until after a night’s sleep and I am utterly discouraged by the result. I got there in the end with a little help once the hour had passed.

   I’m rather surprised to find that Chambers lists TWO-INCH defined simply as an item measuring two inches. I haven’t checked whether they also have four- five- six- seven-inch etc ad infinitum.

   1. Wordnik doesn’t help much. But I like some of the entries:
      https://www.wordnik.com/words/two-inch
   2. I checked Chambers for one inch and three inch – neither appear and yet there is TWO INCH with the slightly daft definition. There must be a reason for it appearing but I haven’t found it yet
7. Hardest puzzle for some time complete with some interesting quirks. 35 minutes to solve.

   At 14A “in” for “burning” has appeared here before. It appears in the old phrase “keep the fire in” meaning to keep it burning. A job that used to be delegated to the children in the household

   18A likewise is a tad dated and as of today certainly isn’t “in”.

   Some first class wordplays here – great time George and well blogged – can’t have been easy

8. A bit baffled about TWO INCH but I knew about Capuchin friars as they have an establishment in Luxembourg, a city to which work used to take me with monotonous regularity. They have very distinctive headgear, the shape of which has been adopted in a type of portable sundial.
9. Really glad this wasn’t mine – I’d still be wondering what to say about TWO INCH and ALL THE GO (sounds Wodehouse-ish to me). Well handled George, ansd an excellent time – I was somewhere beyond 30 minutes and had to look up ALL THE GO to make sure it made some kind of sense.
   Curiously, the only clue remotely like a gimme was PERIHELIA. Everything else had to be rather painfully dug out of the (often brilliant) obfuscation. Can you guess what the definition is, yet?
   I took ZOOMED to be just “going very fast”. And, yes, I wasted time trying to find a J somewhere.
10. A propos nothing much, but here’s Clouseau getting befuddled by mernkeys, minkeys and the leu: http://youtu.be/JoHc6qerUh0
11. 29 mins and definitely the trickiest puzzle of the week. An excellent mental workout with some very devious but enjoyable cluing.

    PERIHELIA was my FOI and I thought it would open up the NW straight away, but it was exactly the opposite because I completed the rest of the puzzle before another answer went into that corner. The order I finally solved the rest of the NW was CAPUCHIN (I finally saw what MUCHO VINO was doing in the clue), ABHORRENT (I hadn’t been sure if rum or revolting was the anagrind), CUPPAS (the A checker was very helpful), CAMBRAI (I have read so much about WW1 I should have got it much sooner, although the wordplay was very clever), PYRAMID (I finally saw in=amid) and my LOI was INDIE (“spotted item getting thrown” for DIE was superb).

12. Perhaps as a verb, TWO-INCH is to steal something 4 times.
13. A real struggle – well over an hour – not helped by grid almost falling into quarters. (About 40 minutes in, had nothing but APPRO in left half.
    Eventually saw that 15 had nothing to do with the dreaded Ring, and started to make progress, with 21 LOI. (10 was FOI)
14. Tough for me too, around the half-hour mark, with a big empty top-left corner until the end. With the train on the last half-mile stretch before Euston I managed to find some inspiration and finished it. Last few that went in with a rush were CUPPAS, CAPUCHIN, PYRAMID, ABHORRENT and INDIE – not even the trickiest clues, but they all held me up for ages.
15. 
    Too tricky for me today with a couple of blanks in each of the SE and NW corners.

    Should’ve got PYRAMID and THANK YOU, and RAT=desert has been used before, so should’ve seen that one. Bah humbug.

16. Thank you Big Tone, very witty.
17. DNF due to NW corner and never heard of ALL THE GO and INDIE being a UK newspaper (in Ireland it was the INDO I remember). Difficult is good but clues with unsatisfactory answers are not so good. Hats off to the blogger George who made sense of it all.
18. 29:49 making this the trickiest Times puzzle for ages as far as my solving experiences go. I did like the ‘flower of the university’.
19. So have we got a ruling on this? Someone over on the Club Forum claims it’s in all the standard dictionaries but it’s not in my 2 vol. shorter OED and when I look online I get the same results as Sotira, any one of which seems unlikely since this isn’t Private Eye. Was one of them your “daft” definition in Chambers Jim? Or is it just that there’s less here than meets the eye….. Very good time George.

    Edited at 2014-01-30 03:33 pm (UTC)

    1. Chambers just says “a length of two inches” which isn’t very helpful – and in some ways echos the Private Eye angle you’ve mentioned. Other than that I’ve got nowhere in trying to explain why 2 as against 1 or 3 or 10 for goodness sake!
       1. The Chambers on my Ipad gives it as an adjective “measuring two inches” which in not quite the same. I didn’t raise an eyebrow while solving having purchased many two-inch nails in my time, but I do agree, in that context, why not three-inch or six-inch etc?
          malcj
    2. I’ve consulted Chambers further and I think I can clear this up.
       Two-foot, three-foot and four-foot are all words. Five-foot is not. Neither is one-foot.
       Onefold is a word, likewise twofold, threefold, fourfold… all the way up to ten. Elevenfold is not a word. That would be silly.
       With pounds it’s completely different (come on, keep up at the back). One-pound and two-pound are not words, naturally. Three-pound is fine. Four-pound is out (although four-pounder is OK), and so is everything above that. Except ten-pound, which is a word, for reasons I don’t think I need to explain.
       Obvious really, when you think about it.
    3. Just reached Australia… is Chambers the dictionary that has the occasional off-the-wall facetious definitions? And all the Scottish words, random collections of letters never used by those north of Hadrian’s wall, only by lazy crossword compilers?

       I think they’re just having a joke with us.

       My 33 mins looks reasonable… marred by one error, GLT (sic) IN THE FACE OF. Didn’t notice when I overtyped the E in GET with the L in PERIHELIA. Wondered about the plane in the clue, forgot to go back to check.
       Rob

20. A three part problem – the first 18 went in, with some thought but straightforwardly, on my morning ride to and from Balham-Bank, 9 each way. FOI CAMBRAI. Especially enjoyed TURANDOT, memories of Amy Shuard and Birgit Nilsson in their prime.

    The next four were the excellent CAPUCHIN, INDIE and PYRAMID while having a few pre-prandial CUPPAS back home. All seemed – oddly – tough at the time, but were certainly enjoyable. Hit the 40 minute mark around here.

    The last eight were sheer murder, helped considerably when I twigged our gracious leading lady and so opened up the NW, which then came with a rush: SQUADDIE a fine clue, EARTHY less so, as the clue is the wrong way round. The execrable TWO INCH and ALL THE GO made up the inglorious rear.

21. A puzzle that took me over the half-hour but was time well spent (with the exception of 13ac, of course – but I guess as often happens, if the setter uses something which is in a reputable dictionary and you don’t like it, your argument has to be with the lexicographer, not the setter).
22. 55m and looking at the comments that was for me a success! Less than 2 x jimbos is very rare for me and I also blessed his advice to ‘lift and separate’ when I couldn’t see past ‘put up with’ 5d. Also very glad of blog to explain why my guesses were right! Solved all the LH side in about 20m but then got nothing for the next 20m so an odd and challenging solve.
23. A bit of a slog and a technical DNF because I’ve only just noticed that I’ve left ASHANTI off the grid. 53 minutes
24. Challenging puzzle. Much to admire – all commented on above – but none of the explanations/justifications so far offered for 13A (TWO-INCH) persuades me that this was anything but a feeble and unsatisfying clue.

    Well blogged, George, and an excellent time.

25. I am re-reading David Niven’s autobiography “The Moon’s a Balloon” – which I first read in the mid-seventies.

    After solving 12ac this morning, I picked up the book and was amazed to discover on the next page a reference to Cambria!

    1. Totally up to you Anon,but one of the advantages of having a name is that you can correct posted errors. Cambria?

       Edited at 2014-01-30 07:07 pm (UTC)

26. Relieved to have finished just over the hour mark (in 3 separate sittings. Really difficult to get going: foi 24d! That opened up the SW, then SE, NE & then struggled with the NW. Some clever clues, (I quite liked 5d) but what’s with “all the go”? Never heard of it. And as for “two-inch”…
27. About 45 minutes to get through, like others beginning with PERIHELIA, and I ended with INDIE. A lot of cleverness today. I too am baffled about TWO-INCH, and I was also baffled by ALL THE GO, APPRO, and the unlikely IBROX. Lucky to have finished at all, but even if I hadn’t, I enjoyed lots of these excellent clues. Thanks setter, great time and blog George, and regards to all.
28. I wasn’t overly fussed with defining TWO-INCH because, like Kevin, I was too busy being bamboozled by IBROX, ALL THE GO, CAMBRAI, and wasn’t so sure in my mind that EVEN MONEY is a price as much as it is odds. I was thinking that APPRO and probably INDIE are a little close to the slangy edge for my taste, but the dictionaries says quite clearly that I shouldn’t moan. Liked NOW THEN.
    1. Paul, “price” and “odds” are are synonymous in betting circles.
       1. Thanks, G, that was the conclusion I came to – just it didn’t suggest itself as an answer. I guess I didn’t have as sufficiently mis-spent a youth as I had hoped I might have had.
29. 19:07 here for this exceptionally fine puzzle – tough but fair. I’ve no objections to any of the clues, including 13ac which, although not my COD, seems just fine.

    My compliments to the setter.

30. Thoroughly enjoyed, but just glad to have it all right regardless of my completion time.
    A very good crossword day today.
    As others have said, respect to the blogger.
31. I found this a very strange but very enjoyable puzzle, with hardly any straightforward clues except maybe for 6dn. It took me a bit over an hour but I’m surprised I was able to finish it at all, since it was full of words and expressions I have never seen before (IBROX only from wordplay, ALL THE GO,ASHANTI, APPRO and almost everything else). It felt like running on ice all the while. Perhaps THANK YOU and NOW THEN would be my CODs.
32. Well, I’m happy to admit that I’m not just a DNF, but more of DHAFC and consequently DEFGH. Awed congratulations to those who not only Fd, but Fd in under half an hour.

    Were I speaking from a sounder position, I’d say that “TWO INCH” was stretching things, and that “ALL THE GO” was suspect too. As it is, it’s just sour grapes.

    Thank goodness for patients to take it all out on.

33. rather than tripe without the t for ripe, I think it is gripe without the g to beef is to gripe

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