Times 26,114

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
So after the excitement of a fortnight ago, we are back to normal. Wrestling with a real toughie is invigorating, but it makes a blogger’s life much simpler if their allotted puzzle is a nicely constructed but comparatively straightforward affair, which is what we had today: clock stopped at 11:22 without getting bogged down anywhere. As far as flavours go, vanilla can be very pleasant.

Across
1 PEDESTAL – DES breaks into a PETAL.
5 HAGGIS – G{retel} inside HAG IS. “Great chieftain o’ the pudding-race”, as Burns put it. The last haggis I had was in Fort William and involved Drambuie sauce. Tasty.
9 LANGUAGE – [U{niversity} in GAG] in LANE. Profanity as in the expression “mind your language”, say, where there’s no need to specify that it’s bad.
10 PORTAL – PORT(=left) AL{l}.
12 METAL DETECTOR – MET(=encountered), (LEADETC)*, TOR (=hill) &lit.
15 STEER – TEE(=support) in SR.
16 HARLEQUIN – L{ine} in HARE, then a QUIN, who would obviously be one of five siblings.
17 STAGNATES – NAT(as in, say, a Scots Nat) blocks up STAGES.
19 VIDEO – [{secon}D in VIE], O.
20 TREASURE TROVE – T{ime}, REAS{S}URE, (VOTER)*. Using “floating voter” to indicate the TROVE anagram was very clever, I thought.
22 PROUST – on our side = “PRO US”, +T{ime}. Good evening and welcome, or as Proust would say, ‘la malade imaginaire de recondition et de toute surveillance est bientôt la même chose’.
23 MERINGUE – (GIN,RUM,E{nergy}x2)*. Lift and separate to get the simple definition “sweet”.
25 SIDING – 1D{emocrat} in SING.
26 IN FLIGHT – N{ote} in IF, LIGHT.
 
Down
1 PALIMPSEST – {G}LIMPSE minus G{ood} in PAST. For non-classical people, a palimpsest is a manuscript that has had the original writing erased and been written over, because parchment is expensive. When they’re treated using modern scientific techniques, it often turns out that the recovered original documents are much more interesting than what replaced them. Google doesn’t agree with me, but I’m sure this has come up recently in a daily puzzle.
2 DIN – double def.; the DIN system is a way of classifying the sensitivity of photographic film. Presumably this is one of those clues which will baffle youngsters whose cameras have only ever been digital.
3 SQUALOR – [L{iberal},O{ver}] in SQUAR{e}. If it wasn’t at the start of the sentence, that would be a small-c conservative to produce the right sense.
4 ARGUE THE TOSS – (ROUGHESTATES)*.
6 APOSTLE – ST{reet} in A POLE.
7 GET AROUND TO – GET AROUND(=travel on a wide scale), TO{ur}, so the definition is “finally do”.
8 SOLE – “work on crossword” is SOLVE, remove the V{ery} to get SOLE=”one”.
11 NEUROSURGEON – (GENEROUSOURN{ew})*.
13 THE LAST WORD – a nicely self-referential clue: the literal last word in today’s puzzle is “band” at the end of 24 down.
14 INCOHERENT – [C{ommanding}O{fficer}HERE] inside the INN, + nigh{T}.
18 NIELSEN – 1, ELSE(=”other”) inside two N{otes} produces the great Dane.
19 VITRIOL – a pleasingly musical clue has a TRI{O} inside a VIOL.
21 OPUS – reverse hidden in ideaS UP Once.
24 GIG – GIG{I} is the curtailed Lerner and Loewe musical.

56 comments on “Times 26,114”

  1. … at the end in the HAGGIS corner. Reminded me of being in Brittany many years ago. In the bakery there was a big grey sausage-y looking thing. Had to enquire about that. The lady of the shop was very surprised I didn’t know what it was: “M’sieur, c’est le pudding!”

    16ac: is commedia dell’arte a form of pantomime? I know not.

    Finally … happy birthday to Don Manley, aptly celebrated today in another place.

    1. As per wikipedia:

      “As the Harlequinade portion of English pantomime developed, Harlequin was routinely paired with the character Clown. Two developments in 1800, both involving Joseph Grimaldi, greatly changed the pantomime characters. Grimaldi starred as Clown in Charles Dibdin’s 1800 pantomime, Peter Wilkins: or Harlequin in the Flying World at Sadler’s Wells Theatre…”

      1. Thanks very much Tim. I’m now suitably informed re an area previously beyond my ken.
  2. 31 minutes, with the NW putting up most resistance, like yesterday. Though I know palimpsest from two sources – crosswords and Gore Vidal’s book (which like many books I know the title of I’ve never read) – this still didn’t stop me from putting this in last.
  3. Fortunately I knew PALIMPSEST (for some reason I thought it was Mary McCarthy not Gore Vidal; I didn’t read them both), as I had to biff it, only getting the parse post-solve. 15ac was my LOI, partly because I’d flung in ‘squalid’ instead of SQUALOR for some reason. Nicely constructed but comparatively straightforward, is how I’d put it.
  4. 19 minutes for all but 1dn, but unfortunately I wouldn’t know a PALIMPSEST if it stood up in my soup. Still, it was there for the taking if I’d seen the GLIMPSE. Well played setter.

    1. Knew this from post-structuralist aesthetics; which, I’m happy to report, I have now put well and truly behind me. No wonder when you get stuff like this:

      [Sarah Dillon] further notes that the palimpsest represents what Derrida describes as a “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present”: The present that the palimpsest projects, is constructed by the unintended presence of texts from the past and the possibility of the inscription of future texts. Therefore, the palimpsest “evidences the spectrality of any present moment which already contains with it (elements of) ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’.”

      I won’t dignify this with a URL and assume no-one here wants to read the rest.

      Edited at 2015-06-02 05:19 am (UTC)

      2. As Captain Corcoran says, though I’m anything but clever/I could talk that way forever. Actually, I couldn’t–too much effort. Can I assume you’ve seen Frederick Crews’s ‘Postmodern Pooh’? Not as much fun as ‘The Pooh Perplex’, but still.
        1. Let us not confuse postmodernism with post-structuralism. The former was always silly. The latter had its serious and important moments in the humanities and social sciences.
        2. If anyone wants it, I own a copy of the Pooh Perplex. Somewhere in my loft, I think.
          1. “Ecce Eduardus ursus scalis tump-tump-tump….” I recall Winnie Ille Pu, Milnei, being in the school library and even memorised the first sentence in case I ever had to quote it. You can still buy it on Amazon.
            1. I remembered it as tunc-tunc-tunc but I see I was wrong. Surely I am the only person on earth capable of hypercorrecting the Latin translation of Winnie the Pooh…
              1. Hmm. Let me check…. Oh. Sorry. I got it slightly wrong. The real text is apparently “Ecce Eduardus Ursus scalis nunc tump-tump-tump occipite gradus pulsante post Christophorum Robinum descendens.” Oh well. It is more than 40 years since I last read it!
  5. DNF for me. I needed aids for PALIMPSEST (never heard of it) and THE LAST WORD, and didn’t understand their wordplay having found the answers. Didn’t understand DIN either and that it was also hidden in the clue didn’t help trying to unravel it. STEER as a noun meaning ‘guidance’ seemed alien though I was able to confirm it later. All the rest of it I found straightforward and had expected to complete the grid well within my 30 minute target, so when the clock reached 50 minutes I decided enough was enough.

    Edited at 2015-06-02 05:27 am (UTC)

    2. I’m afraid I got DIN from the obvious definition and the “hidden” without stopping to listen to that still, small voice.
  6. A nice gentle 25 minutes, though I wasted time in thinking 1a as an anagram of PLINTH BOY was PHYLOsomething until I was disabused of this by getting 4d. I had to ask Mrs Deezzaa how to spell PALIMPSEST (I forgot the “P”) as she’s far more erudite than me.
    Good to see an appearance of Carl August Nielsen. He wrote some good music (I recommend his symphony No 4) but as composers go he led a pretty mundane and ordinary life.
    1. Best concert I ever attended had Simon Rattle conducting Nielsen’s 5th and 6th. The side drummer almost did stop the progress of the music in the 5th, and the 6th was so passionate that the audience actually laughed out loud at the Shostakovich jokes. Unforgettable.
      1. Thanks for the tip. Checking the 5th out now on Youtube with rattle and the Denmark radio Orchestra.
      2. My only exposure to Nielsen was at a concert where I had gone to see Mitsuko Uchida play Beethoven. I found it very dull, but everyone else in the audience was in raptures. I self-diagnosed a Nielsen blind spot and haven’t bothered since. Maybe I’ll give him another go.
        1. I think the Fifth is the easy way in: the first movement is the one with the snare drum instructed to improvise “as if at all costs he wants to stop the progress of the orchestra” before the big, Sibelius-like tune gets its own way. Credit to my Bristol neighbour, many years ago, who shared his love of big, dramatic 20th century music, or I’d still be stuck with Mahler and Bruckner.
          1. Thanks, I’ll give it a whirl. Mind you I don’t like Sibelius either so no promises!
  7. 11:08 here, solved online for a change. No problems with any of the vocab, but I took a while to get going. FOI was METAL DETECTOR after drawing a blank with the first few acrosses and all the top row downs. I stopped the clock without bothering to parse everything though, so that saved a bit of time.
  8. No problems in 12.04. Knowing, but not parsing PALIMPSEST helped (NT studies, among other things). I worked out the clever cluing post solve.
    I also didn’t full parse METAL DETECTOR: I assumed “lead etc” gave you metal, and saw the TOR, and the rest filled itself in.
    I liked the conceit for the LAST WORD. Biffing has its hazards: I initially wrote in (most of) THE BEES KNEES.
  9. 17:10 for a more even paced solve than yesterday but finishing in a similar time. I was held up near the end by PALIMPSEST, STAGNATES and NIELSEN until I saw that PALIMPSEST fitted despite not knowing its meaning. It was only when I parsed it afterwards that I worked out it is some sort of document.

    COD to ARGUE THE TOSS for a nice surface.

  10. 18:25. I also knew the word, but not what it meant and couldn’t parse PALIMPSEST. I carelessly put in ARGUE THE CASE without checking the anagram so 17ac was LOI. Would have been close to a PB for me without that mistake. 13d made me smile.
  11. 14 mins. A biffed PALIMPSEST was my LOI, although I managed to parse it post-solve. DIN went in from the “noise” part of the clue so I guess that counts as another biff, and I needed to check my Chambers post-solve to make sense of the rest of the clue. Two more biffs were SQUALOR and THE LAST WORD, although I parsed them both post-solve. Biffing on an industrial scale is bound to come back and bite me sooner or later.
  12. Ditto Vinyl on PALIMPSEST and Z on BEES KNEES – I think the BeeGees were lurking in the back of my brain and now I’ll have that falsetto din in my head all day. 14.17
  13. 12m, so another in the ‘no problems’ camp partly as a result of knowing PALIMPSEST. I suspect I only know this from past crosswords: it’s come up before. The way things are going I’m going to get to a point where everything I know comes from crosswords.

    Edited at 2015-06-02 09:27 am (UTC)

  14. Good thing PALIMPSEST was the title of Gore Vidal’s autobiograhy, as I don’t think I would have gotten it that quickly from wordplay and that was a tricky corner for me.

    Happy Birthday DM, whose hand I suspect may be involved here, making the clean sweep of Times, Times quick, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent crosswords today.

  15. A steady 35-minute solve, also held up in the ‘HAGGIS corner’ as mctext so nicely puts it. I’m surprised by the problems caused by ‘palimpsest’ because I’m sure it’s come up before. I was a bit slow after the start, but no real problems. Nice puzzle.
  16. I once had to type a report for an archaeologist so PALIMPSEST is one of those words I never have problems with.

    7:35 – I wonder what Verlaine did today?? (Not that we are in competition or anything)

    1. Nowhere near the Magoo, but respectable enough eh? Your turn to trounce me tomorrow then…

      This was one of those puzzles where I felt able to bang in a lot of the answers without fully parsing them (hence the good time). The baffling DIN was the only one I felt like I was entering on a wing and a prayer.

      Edited at 2015-06-02 05:46 pm (UTC)

    1. If that is so, I’m afraid you may have been given a bum steer, so to speak…

      OED has
      2 (informal) A piece of advice or information concerning the development of a situation

      1. There might be a point in here about count/mass nouns but I’m not sure what the convention is, if any. Would ‘dollar’ be indicated by ‘money’?
    2. Chambers has it as a noun meaning an act of steering which is close enough I’d say and see also reference to bum steer in earlier comments.
  18. I’ve absolutely, definitely, completely never heard of palimpsest so there’s irrefutable evidence that we’ve had it in this puzzle in the recent past.

    I recently sold my old Zenith E SLR on Ebay so I knew the film speed meaning of DIN.

    Get around to and treasure trove were biffed, whereas I had to write all the letters down in a jumble to get argue the toss.

    COD to metal detector.

    P.S. hands up who else tried to put a G into a pudding to get the name of a witch.

    Edited at 2015-06-02 12:46 pm (UTC)

    1. Absolutely. If FOGOL had looked even a little more like a real word, I was quite ready to give it a go.
      1. Another hand up here. ORESS, that delicious American pudding made of slightly misshapen Oreos…
  19. Knew palimpsest, but waited on all the crossers to give me a steer regarding the exact placement of the post-m letters. Liked the last word. Thanks setter, blogger, and a tip of the Stetson to those able to quote Pooh in any classical language.
    1. 25 minutes for me, after a slow start. I was quite proud of myself for half-knowing “palimpsest”, even though I also half-remembered that it was a type of urn or possibly something used in holy communion.

      Also pleased to see a reference to proper chemical photography at 2d, from the days when a digital camera was one where you had to load the film using your fingers. I’m more familiar, though, with DIN plugs – a set of standardised multi-pin connectors beloved of electronics buffs and hi-fi manufacturers of yore. Both DINs come from the same source – Deutsches Institut für Normung – the German equivalent (although of course somewhat inferior) of our British Standards Institute. The British Standards Institute is clearly the more friendly organisation, since its logo is a diagrammatic representation of a double-scoop ice-cream cone.

      Almost put “SOLO” for 8d until I figured out the parsing. I also failed to parse 13d (which I thought was very nice, now that I understand it), and biffed in some others without parsing. I always find parsing biffable answers retrospectively to be a bit soul-destroying: it reminds me of maths lessons where you could get the answer immediately but then had to go back and show your workings for the “right” way to solve it.

      Nice to see NEUROSURGEONs get an honourable mention as well. They are a brave (or possibly just foolhardy, but in any case hugely skillful) lot. One advantage of working on things _other_ than the brain is that the different bits tend to have different colours, or at least different textures; once you get inside the head, it’s all just grey blancmange. Also non-brain surgery tends to leave patients either well or safely dead; in neurosurgery the alternatives are often either well, or alive-but-suing.

  20. Pleasant puzzle, completed in about half an hour. Knew PALIMPSEST. Biffed 13 dn.
  21. About 40 minutes due to long hold-ups in the NW. Finally got PALIMPSEST after wordplaying through LANGUAGE, but I really hadn’t a good idea of what it means. Sort of the opposite of biffing, the old ‘tossed in as the only thing I could think of that fit the crossers’. I thought DIN was simply a hidden. LOI was ARGUE THE TOSS, because I first had to correct my original PEDIMENT to PEDESTAL, showing how I’m not fully up to speed on my plinths. The AGRUE… phrase would raise some eyebrows over here, I think. In any event, regards.
  22. 11:31 for me, so way behind both Verlaine and crypticsue today. With hindsight I really ought to have been a lot faster!

    After Beethoven, Carl Nielsen is probably my favourite composer, with “Fynsk Foraar” (“Springtime on Funen”) joining me on my desert island (and, if I have any say in the matter, the first and last pieces from it book-ending my funeral).

    1. Perhaps I’ll start there then. I spend quite a lot of time in Denmark these days – I’m in Copenhagen next week and Aarhus the week after – so it’s almost a professional obligation.
      1. I’d start with the Overture to his opera Maskarade and his Helios Overture.

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