Times 26,006

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
19 minutes, certainly the trickiest Tuesday puzzle I’ve had to solve for blogging purposes in several months. A satisfying test, with plenty of thinking required, as expanded upon below.

Across
1 INCAPACITY – Insert your P.A. into the ancient Peruvian capital of Cuzco, which is an INCA CITY.
6 HERD =”HEARD” as it would be, er, heard.
10 CARAT – A in CART. A carat is 200 milligrams, usually of something valuable.
11 VOICE OVER – 0(nothing) in VICE, OVER.
12 NEGATIVE EQUITY – NEGATIVE(=no) EQUITY(=justice); what happens when falling house values mean the outstanding mortgage on a property outweighs the value of the equity in it, usually meaning the borrower is unable to sell/move.
14 ANTARES – ARE in ANTS. A very large and bright star in the constellation Scorpius.
15 TRIUMPH – The cryptic first definition refers to Kipling’s poem If (you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same…)
17 DAY GIRL – boarders being a different matter perhaps.
19 BLENDER – L in BENDER.
20 MIDDLE DISTANCE – 1500 metres being a middle distance athletics event, and STAN being the middle of diSTANce.
23 SPLENETIC – (PENCILSET)*.
24 INNER – begINNER without the beg(=request).
25 DIET – DIE(be hanged, maybe) + {gibbe}T.
26 PERSONALLY – (ONLYPEARLS)*. Nicely concise.
 
Down
1 ITCH – {T}ITCH.
2 CARPENTRY – PENT inside CARRY, the definition being “joining work”.
3 PITCAIRN ISLAND – CAIRN (terrier) IS inside [PIT(=mine), LAND(=acres)]; the Christian is Fletcher, formerly the mate of HMS Bounty, latterly founder of the colony on Pitcairn after the famous mutiny. The enterprise did not end well.
4 CIVVIES =”SIEVE”, I.E. {libellou}S.
5 TRIDENT – RIDE in T.N.T.
7 ENVOI – ENV{y} is the unattractive emotion cut short; the two bits are the binary units of information 0 and 1. An envoi is a short verse appended to a longer poem.
8 DERBYSHIRE – DERBY(=race) SHIRE(=sort of horse). The Peak District, Britain’s first National Park, lies largely in the county.
9 SESQUIPEDALIAN – QUIP in (SIDES,ALAN,E{xplode})*. Using words like “sesquipedalian” instead of “overlong” is exactly what you do if you are the former.
13 RANDOMISED – (NOMADSRIDE)*.
16 MEDICINAL – DICIN’ in MEAL.
18 LADETTE – AD in LETTE{r}.
19 BISECTS – SECT in BIS(=Latin for twice=again. As seen in musical notation, and indeed the twice-cooked “biscuit”).
21 DELVE – hidden in moDEL VEry.
22 TROY – R{un} in TOY.

30 comments on “Times 26,006”

  1. Talking of the long word for using long words, Grice’s maxims for cooperative conversation include the injunction to avoid ‘prolixity’. Academics have of course debated long and hard in a series of peer-reviewed articles whether he was taking the piss or not. (Alan Sokal’s ‘Towards a feminist hermeneutic of mathematics’ (title from memory) remains the benchmark in the piss-taking peer-reviewed journal article field.)

    A careless ‘Anteros’ for me as I just snuck home under the hour (57 mins).

    1. The actual title was “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. (Social Text, 46/47, 1996). And yes, it was a fabulous spoof. Though I’m not not sure that mag. (rag?) was ever peer-reviewed. But all this has nothing to do with unnecessary prolixity.

      May I humbly suggest, dear Ulaca (or whatever your real name is) that, with some of those that you lampoon, you get your facts right?

      Edited at 2015-01-27 06:51 am (UTC)

    2. Reminds me of a WRNS officer I once knew who rushed off to check after being told that the word “gullible” did not exist in any English dictionary. That was a memorable lunchtime.

      Edited at 2015-01-27 04:38 pm (UTC)

  2. So not too hard by my standards. It helped to get the 4 long answers early and there were a few (3?) straight anagrams. All that got lots of letters in the grid to work with. Have to admit to putting lots in without parsing. For example I saw “Christian home: mine …” where one needed an (8,6) beginning with PIT.

    Liked to see ENVOI, a word from a title of a paper about the letters of Malcolm Lowry I co-authored a while back. There it has its other meaning of an author’s concluding words, with shades of the French meaning: a sending-out (e.g., in the post).

    For all that … I had no idea how 15ac (TRIUMPH) worked. Should have remembered the poem, but haven’t read it since high school. Thanks to Tim for the explanation.

  3. Surprised myself; like Vinyl, I had little to show for 10 minutes of staring, other than CARAT. And like Mctext, I had no idea how TRIUMPH worked, but now that I know, I’m not much bothered (what I remember is “If you can keep your head, when all about you are losing theirs, you probably haven’t grasped the situation”). LOI DIET. DNK NEGATIVE EQUITY, which came once I had 9d. Liked 1ac once it hit me.
  4. …you will be the tallest person in the room”.

    That’s how I remember it at least.

  5. Another really good puzzle I thought. DNK ENVOI, or the sesquipedalian SESQUIPEDALIAN, but they were both fairly clued.

    Didn’t parse TRIUMPH but should have, and as such I award it COD.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

  6. Coming to this immediately after a discouraging effort on today’s Quickie I was pleased find this a steady solve and most of it went in comfortably within 30 minutes. However after a few recent experiences I now have a mental barrier that goes up as I approach the end of a puzzle (akin to getting the first answer on a blogging day) and I struggled with the two 19s and 9dn (my LOI).

    I was quite pleased to remember ENVOI from somewhere though I had no idea how to account for ‘both bits’ despite all that business with 0 / 1 in the recent millennium puzzle’s Nina.

    40 minutes in all.

    Edited at 2015-01-27 06:29 am (UTC)

  7. I just remembered how I knew ENVOI: the wonderful François Villon (he of ‘où sont les neiges d’antan?’ fame). They’re always addressed to a prince. (There’s also the wonderful Dorothy Parker, e.g. ‘Prince or commoner, tenor or bass,/Painter or plumber or never-do-well,/Do me a favor and shut your face–/Poets alone should kiss and tell.’)
  8. 17m. Very enjoyable puzzle, I thought. I was left at the end scratching my head over A_T_I_S until I realised I had typed in PITCARIN.
  9. Solved most in 15 minutes, then ground to a halt and made no futher progress despite a break and a second session. Neither NEGATIVE EQUITY nor SESQUIthingummy were anywhere near my train of thought, and I couldn’t see a way into either clue. Beaten all ends up.
  10. Another slow start, needing the penny to drop on “Christian” to kick start the thing, and finishing in 19.02. The intersecting DAY GIRL and LADETTE, surely not the same person, my last 2.
    MIDDLE DISTANCE was a cracker, and in an ENVOI to self, remember what bits are.
  11. Like Sotira I found most of this reasonably easy and made steady progress but was left with 3D and 9D with all the checkers and some headscratching.

    Suddenly saw mine=PIT (should have been an immediate spot) and made the Fletcher Christian connection. Then guessed QUIP for the middle of 9D and played around with the anagrist and a dictionary to finish. Don’t recall seeing the word before.

    1. I’m comforting myself that Rafa Nadal and I had the same sort of day. Except for the A$340,000.
  12. 15 mins. I was another who started slowly and I didn’t get an answer until I came to, and parsed, MIDDLE DISTANCE. I then made steady progress and my last three in were ENVOI, SESQUIPEDALIAN and TRIUMPH. I confess that I only got round to parsing all three of them post-solve, although I was fairly sure that the last of them had something to do with Kipling’s poem. I enjoyed this puzzle.
  13. Thanks for parsing that. Binary stuff is utterly out of my ken. At the sesquicentennial celebrations of husband’s college some years ago one of our waggish friends made a wince-worthy pun about the 9d quality of the speeches and for some reason it stayed with me.

    Sometime in the last month a rather lame clue reminded me of the song made famous by Miss Peggy Lee – Is That All There Is. New Yorkers are waking up this morning with that feeling. Only 6 inches of snow, where’s our 3 feet? Oh I forgot 19.5

    Edited at 2015-01-27 12:11 pm (UTC)

  14. 11:20 quite a bit of which was spent trying to dredge that SESQUIP… word from the depths of my poor old brain.
  15. 18 minutes to have all but the NE done, then a break for soup and toast, then about fifteen minutes to the finish, having to check ENVOI for meaning. Once the EQUITY word was twigged and the Q was a checker, and CIVVIES was twigged, we were only looking at 7d. Had no idea how TRIUMPH worked. Good puzzle and certainly trickier than recent ones, as usual I am nervous about tomorrow…
  16. It may be only Tuesday, but this is already shaping up to be a good week. A lot of stuff to like here, with TRIUMPH the best of the bunch. 20 minutes or so, although I didn’t time it exactly.
  17. 40m here but with resort to aids for SESQ.. as I only vaguely remembered it, though sure of the QUIP element. I BIFD quite a few of these : TRUIMPH, ENVOI and INNER for example which I doubt I could ever have parsed fully. Thanks to blogger for explanations and to the setter for a tough but fair challenge with some clever clues – 1a for example and the clever use of Stan which had me wandering around in my ahead tryng to convince myself that Alf Tupper was really called Stan or was there another Stan I ought to remember?
  18. 25 minutes for all but 9d, which I eventually worked out after another ten minutes or so and then checked the dictionary to be sure. Enjoyable puzzle I thought.
  19. Unlike most above I started reasonably quickly but then had to look at a few clues in the East for about 5 minutes. I finally worked out what the second word of 12ac was from which the Q led me straight to SESQUIPEDALIAN which I knew. COD to Stan. LOI was TROY in around 21 minutes. Will be looking out for Nottinghamshire in tomorrow’s puzzle.
  20. I made a mess of this but somehow righted the ship in the end – 12 is a mass of scribble with NEGATIVE MOTION, NEGATIVE ACTION tried before NEGATIVE EQUITY. 20 started as MEDIUM distance. Gak! Eventually got them all – with SESQUIPEDALIAN the last in. Oh… put TRIUMPH in without having a clue why, but what else fits?
  21. Just over 20mins. Wrote in but failed to see DELVE, and despite having one as a daughter for a while, took time over LADETTE. Christian’s place however went straight in like mctext, although with an ongoing niggle about from where Christian (the pilgrim in Pilgrim’s Progress) actually started out.
  22. Like others, I liked this, taking about 50 minutes, but needed help with SESQuiwhatsit. Couldn’t get my mind to stop thinking about NEGATIVE ENERGY which didn’t help, although I was fully aware of the right answer having suffered enough from it in the early 90’s. I kind of ignored whatever STAN was doing there until after completion, but when I twigged, that became my COD rather than TRIUMPH which I also liked.
  23. 55 minutes here, so not a walkover. Failed to parse MIDDLE DISTANCE – I assumed there was a famous runner called Stanley Middle (which, clearly, there isn’t or I would have heard of him).

    12ac (with only some checkers) had me pondering “relative clause”, until a trawl through the alphabet suggested “NEGATIVE” and “EQUITY” then followed, giving a hintful Q for 9d and a mysterious terminal I for 7d. I’d never heard of an ENVOI (and missed the “two bits” reference) but nothing else fitted. CsOD would be SPLENETIC and PERSONALLY, though TRIUMPH (one of my LOsI) was also quite nice – I only parsed it at the last moment.

  24. Highly pleasurable, with some very stimulating clues. I managed to parse everything except the ‘oi’ element of ‘envoi’, despite, like others, reading all the blog contributions on puzzle 26,000. Many thanks to setter and blogger.
  25. 11:12 here (after another slow start) for a most enjoyable puzzle with some nice twists. My compliments to the setter.

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