At first sight I thought I was going to be a rabbit in the headlights with this one; with weightier problems on my mind, the little grey cells were slow to wake up. But in due course – half an hour or so – and a couple of visits to Wiki, I struggled through. Was this quite hard, or was it just me?
Across |
1 |
DESIGNATE -TANG (smack) IS, back in DEE (river), DE(SI GNAT)e, def. ‘appointed’. |
9 |
VERMEER – Took me an age to parse this. VERM(IN) = nasty people, not IN, EER = ever, def. ‘interior painter’. |
10 |
LEPANTO – ‘Le Panto’ could be where French kids get taken. Battle of Lepanto, 1571, off the coast of Greece. |
11 |
DRONE – ‘Doctor One’ = DRONE, a bee which is not a worker, or possibly a member of Bertie Wooster’s Drones Club. |
12 |
TORTURING – Nonsense = (ROT)* in TURING, def. ‘really hurtful’. We seem to be seeing a lot of Alan Turing recently, although I was trying to get Babbage into it at first. |
13 |
ROSTRUM – Remedy perhaps = NOSTRUM, replace the first letter by R. |
15 |
MAINE – MINE (of information) with A (archive’s first) inserted, def. ‘state’. |
17 |
NODDY – NY (New York) captures ODD (not even), a noddy is a seabird, it comes in a range of colours; black, white, brown… |
18 |
ARSON – A R(SO)N, RN is the service, arson is the crime. Nice surface. Are we in for a Wimbledon series? |
19 |
NONET – Group of nine players. Paid gross? No, net. |
20 |
CALYPSO – Def. ‘sarcastic air’, CAL(L), SPY rev, O(ver). |
23 |
REPROBATE – Def. ‘sinner’, RE – PROBATE. Self explanatory I hope. |
25 |
LOWRY – LOW (base) RY (lines), def. ‘artist’. Laurence Stephen Lowry, the painter chap from up Salford way. |
27 |
KINGDOM – I’m not sure I fully understand this; there’s the Animal Kingdom, and a kingdom is a big territory; is there more to it? Are lions involved? |
28 |
BIRD FLU – BIRD = slang for prison time, FLU sounds like flew (passed quickly). |
29 |
SAVOYARDS – Amusing cryptic def., Gilbert & Sullivan operas are known as the Savoy operas (having been supported initially at the Savoy theatre); Savoyards are Frenchmen from the bit near Italy (Savoie). What a nice clue. |
Down |
1 |
DILATE – DI (inspector) LATE (behind), def. ‘become more open’. Especially of cervixes, or cervices. |
2 |
SUPERMODEL – (DEPLORE SUM)*, def. ‘sort of celebrity’. |
3 |
GIN RUMMY – GIN RUM = one drink after another, MY = wow!, def. ‘game’. |
4 |
AIOLI – AI = superb, (OIL)*, aioli is garlic mayo which does have lots of oil in it. |
5 |
EVERGREEN – Amusing (slightly) cryptic def. |
6 |
TRADES – Swaps = trades (you can trade blows), and the Trade Winds blow. Brilliant two word clue. |
7 |
VETO – Hidden word, N(OT EV)EN, reversed. |
8 |
FREEDMAN or FRIEDMAN – I spent a while thinking of John Milton quotes (without much success) then twigged it was Milton Friedman and he sounds like ‘freed man’.EDIT see below; apparently it is FREEDMAN not FRIEDMAN although I didn’t think FREEDMAN could be one word. |
14 |
ROSE MADDER – He went to bed more sane and rose madder (groan). Chemistry time at last. The plant dye Madder Lake contains two organic red dyes: alizarin and purpurin. Rose madder is a commercial name for it; def. ‘in the pink’. |
16 |
IGNORAMUS – Reversed, SUM, A (W)RONG, I, with the W (wicket) removed. |
17 |
NICKLEBY – NICK (edge, in cricket), L, (BYE)*, def. Nicholas, eponymous Dickens chap / novel. |
18 |
ATTORNEY – (ENTRY TO A)*, def. profession’. |
21 |
PAYOFF – PLAY OFF = theatre production cancelled, with the L (pounds) removed, def. ‘profit’. |
22 |
HERMES – HER(ME)S, where ME = this compiler, def. ‘a god’, the chap with little wings on his heels, Greek equivalent of Mercury. |
24 |
PSKOV – I know, I’d never heard of it either. A Russian city of only 202,000 souls near Estonia, founded in 903; the wordplay gets you there, VP with OKS inside, all reversed. |
26 |
WARD – DRAW = attract, from the south = reverse it, get WARD, where you find patients. |
I also don’t understand 27A KINGDOM and I think ROSE MADDER is a tad obscure. I think the book/film may be better known.
The rest is straightforward enough – 20 minutes to solve
Didn’t know Pskov. I had heard of Peskov, once part of the Hanseatic League, but didn’t connect the two.
Much prefer Savoie to the Savoy
Took me a fair old while today, with about an hour, before taking a break, and then finishing with half a dozen or so on the rhs falling into place in another 10 mins or so.
Same ?s as others at KINGDOM and CALYPSO, and I too had ‘friedman’, thinking that FREEDMAN would be too much of a gimme.
Lots of unknowns today (inc PSKOV, NODDY bird, SAVOY theatre), so was happy to finish with only one error.
As an aside, anyone in New York wanting a gluten free meal should head for Friedman’s Lunch, a fab diner in Chelsea Market. Of course, you’ll have to pay for your lunch…
Never thought of a calypso as sarcastic: the ones I know are joyful, celebratory songs: “London is the place for me” and “Those two little pals of mine, Ramadhin and Valentine” from Lord Kitchener and Lord Beginner respectively.
The puzzle initially put me in a very good mood, particularly as it is still printed on the back page; but these couple of niggles have taken the edge off a little.
One quibble I do have now that we’re three days into the reintroduction of the puzzle onto the back page of the paper is that the font used for the clues seems to be smaller than it used to be.
If you have the correct checkers, maybe (see below)
Otherwise same quibbles, really. I keep imagining there’s more to the KINGDOM clue than there is.
For CoD, I’m a suceur for Franglais, and am fortunate enough to remember the spelling of the battle so could forgive le wordplay ambigu.
And as for the sarcastic song, that’s not quite justified in any of the usual sources though I suppose Collins mention of ‘satire’ might just cover it. But my earliest memories of calypso come from the time of the Coronation where there were several popular ones celebrating the occasion without any satirical or sarcastic intention whatsoever.
I would have used the word “satirical” for the stuff he produced on a weekly basis.
Nice amiable plod after an initial panic.
Also thoroughly approved of 17a!
Edited at 2014-06-18 11:07 am (UTC)
Time was about 50 minutes.
His model climbed up on her ladder
Her position to Titian
Suggested coition
So he leapt on the ladder and ‘ad ‘er
(I believe he discovered rose madder – hence the flesh tones)
As I commented above in a reply, my interpretation of 27 draws on Richard III.
One wrong at 10, as I entered LAPANTO for an unfamiliar battle.
A mixed bunch of clues, I thought. 4 lacked a definition (it’s certainly not &lit), 5 seemed rather silly, but I liked the cryptic complexity of 9 and the surfaces of 23 and 18d.
Friedman was one, natch.
Also the Frenchies. I cry foul there (and disagree forecefully with Pip that it’s a “nice” clue). Whilst having to make the link between G&S’s Savoy Operas and the French area of Savoie is fair game, if you don’t know what the area’s residents are actually called you’re into a bit of a roulette game with ?R?S. I plumped for Savoyeros, shoehorning the “love” bit in (and what with Savoie being so near to Spain!).
Where next? No not Lepanto (recalled that from a previous puzzle) but the crossing calypso and payoff.
For the latter I somehow took the wrong letter off play (P, that well-known abbreviation for pound (well as least it begins with the same letter)) to give layoff, clearly a betting term where, once you’re sure to win something back on a bet, you lay off some of the risk to crystalise some profit.
That left me C?L?L?O for the sarcastic air. I didn’t once think of air as a song so went for the momble calileo (“Indeed, Sir,” intoned Jeeves, with more than a hint of calileo), with ELI the well-known “agent” of God.
Anyway, the presence of calypso gives me an excuse to report back on last night’s UED, with this three-for-the-price-of-one from Tim Brooke-Taylor:
PANTING – a Jamaican cooking receptacle
GLOATING – a Jamaican light bulb
GRATING – a Jamaican elephant
Barry Cryer evoked the spirit of yesterday’s puzzle with:
CELERY – a bit like a cellar.
I also had LAY OFF for a while.
Thanks for the Jamaican entertainment.
All in all not my favourite puzzle of late.
If you visit American city
You will find it very pretty
Just two things of which you must beware
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air.
The new Times editor seems to lurch from the sublime to the ridiculous with great frequency. A bit more consistency in degree of difficulty would be greatly appreciated in this neck of the woods.
But I share the concern of others (eg jackkt and keriothe) regarding LEPANTO. If you don’t know the battle it’s a toss of the coin.
Also didn’t like SAVOYARDS, but that’s just because I didn’t know either reference, so resorted to cheating. Shame on me.
David B
I’m not really all that sympathetic to those who hadn’t heard of LEPANTO: not only is it an important battle but there’s Chesterton’s poem as well (required reading in the old days). Also it last came up less than a year ago!
And then there’s Jumbo No. 993 (18 August 2012) where the clue was “Battle providing the French with a form of entertainment (7)”, a slightly longer version of the current clue.
I’m not sure what to make of people’s ignorance of European history. I have to admit that at Dotheboys we weren’t taught any until we reached History O-level, and then we just did from around the middle of the 19th century until the start of WWI. However, I must have come across the Battle of Lepanto (in various contexts) many times in the 50+ years since.
As for LEPANTO – all I can say is that I have managed to stay alive for 52 years without knowing about it, and I don’t feel I’ve missed a lot.
Nice to see Tom Lehrer mentioned in the annos – he’s about the only one of my childhood heroes who’s still alive. But PSKOV wasn’t one of the town’s mentioned in “Lobachevsky”. (Actually, the only quibble I have with Lehrer is that he sullied the name of Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. ) The towns mentioned are:
I have a friend in Minsk,
Who has a friend in Pinsk,
Whose friend in Omsk
Has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk.
His friend in Alexandrovsk
Has friend in Petropavlovsk,
Whose friend somehow
Is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk.
Edited at 2014-06-18 11:29 pm (UTC)
Started in the SE, veered North, then SW and ended, with some headscratching, in the NW, LOI TORTURING. Enjoyed the rather odd juxtaposition of the sublime VERMEER and the gritty LOWRY, with Titian thrown in via the ROSE MADDER reference in the scurrilous limerick which every skoolboy kno. I was surprised by the muttering over the GK – it all seemed a bit straightforward if a tad “traditional”. My only GK flutter was the wretched NODDY, which I may have vaguely heard of once, and indistinctly at that, but it couldn’t have been anything else with the wordplay and those crossers.
I was in the FRIEDMAN camp, but have been convinced of my error by the many commenters above.
Given the state of the world, I’d have thought that a knowledge of the interactions between the Christian and Mohammedan worlds was rather essential GK – and that LEPANTO was a rather daring topical political statement by the setter …
Well that’s rather patronising isn’t it?
Incidentally, as the noddy’s conservation status is “least concern” (that applies to the brown or common noddy, the black noddy, and the lesser and blue noddies) it’s more than likely that there are a lot more of them around the globe (whilst a tropical seabird they have a global distribution) than folk from Savoie or fans of G&S.
And any foodie knows that noddies are a dietary staple on the island of Nauru.
So if you didn’t write noddy in straight off there must be something wrong with you.
1. A production of The Pirates of Penzance my daughter’s class put on a couple of years ago. It was highly enjoyable in the circumstances but it didn’t strike me as a suitable activity for grown-ups.
2. Crosswords.