Times 26164 – how’s your general knowledge?

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 29:30 on the club timer, and although I’m feeling a bit under the weather, and the cricket isn’t helping, I didn’t find this a lot of fun. There’s a ton of general knowledge – I count 10 proper nouns in the grid, including two battles. Not sure if there’s a theme, there isn’t a pangram, but this seems a little excessive. Not all of them have crystal-clear wordplay. I suspect there will be a lot of the blogs favorite term, biffing, going on here.

Grumble grumble, grizzard, groan, time for this one to go home.

Away we go…

Across
1 DOMAIN: Definition is the sphere of the knowledge, and I think the wordplay is alluding to if you DO a M.A. IN an area, you’re getting a higher academic degree
4 CHILEANS: LEA in CHINS(socks) – the southern Americas
9 CLARKIA: LARK in CIA for a bird plant I don’t recall seeing here before. Tricky wordplay for an obscure bird plant. Note: I had bird here inexplicably when I wrote it up
11 ANGLING: remove the T from TANGLING. Not an activity I think of as a sport but sometimes it is covered on ESPN (as is poker and Magic: The Gathering)
12 OT,HER(e)
13 LAS PALMAS: Cheltenham is A SPA in L,L(fiftes), then MA’S
14 WORKAHOLIC: (HOW,AIRLOCK)*
16 GNAW: was waiting to be incorrect here – I think it’s a cryptic definition based on GNAWing being almost silent – might be corrected in comments. Note – it took about 11 seconds for the first comment to come in that I had missed the homophone of NOR
19 OLAF: hidden reversed in stafF A LOcal
20 STALINGRAD: anagram of L,GRANT,AID’S
22 CABALLERO: clever clue – C(cape) then A, BALL, ‘ERO
23 TIBIA: first letters of That Is Broken In Accident
25 BIODATA: A TAD O B, containing I, all reversed
26 LUCINDA: U in an anagram of (CLAD,IN)*
27 TAKE SILK: definition is “to be brief” or to become a barrister. TAKES, ILK(kidney)
28 ASH,ORE
 
Down
1 DOCTOR(cook),WHO(that)
2 MEAT,H: county in Ireland
3 INKER,MAN
5 HEADS WILL ROLL: HEAD, ROLL around SWILL(most mass-produced American beer products)
6 LOG JAM: I liked this one too – LOG(entry) and then you will get JAM tomorrow, but not today
7 ASIA MINOR: very odd clue – I AM IN (yours truly’s home) inside AS(when), OR(men)
8 SIGHS: sounds like SIZE
10 A FLY ON THE WALL: anagram of THA(t) with ONLY,A,FEW’LL
15 ROADBLOCK: L inside (BACK,DOOR)*
17 WIDEAWAKE: WIDE AWAKE – scratched my head over this one, with no space it is a hat with a wide brim
18 D NOTICES: got this from wordplay – DICES containing TON reversed – gag orders for print media
21 ALWAYS: ALS(o) containing WAY(fashion)
22 CABOT: first letter in C(ontrol), A, BOT(program that uses the internet to make annoying ads appear on your screen – there may be one in the banner of LiveJournal now)
24 BANJO: JO for D in BAND. By the way, orchestras love being called BANDS – next time you see the conductor of a symphony orchestra, make sure you ask “so how’s your little band doing, eh?”

34 comments on “Times 26164 – how’s your general knowledge?”

  1. 16ac is a homophone for ‘nor’ – furthermore not [heard by many].

    Once again I struggled to complete and just failed to make it without resorting to aids once the hour had passed as I didn’t know INKERMAN and couldn’t think of anything to fit 17dn, never having heard of the hat – (4-5) might have helped but two of the three usual sources have it as one word. I got CLARKIA from wordplay but needed to check it. Missed out on ‘ERO for “hero” at 22ac, so thanks for clearing that one up.

    Edited at 2015-07-30 12:43 am (UTC)

  2. A miserable morning’s solve after a miserable night’s cricket.

    From the time I saw a plant crossing with a battle I knew this one wasn’t for me.

    Thanks George for unravelling the many mysteries.

  3. … the same as Gals (above). Not helped by waking up late after staying up to the bitter end of the cricket. As they say, more nicks than a Greek wedding.

    Maybe 9ac is a plant that needs to be weeded out and replaced by younger, healthier stock?

    With Jack, had to check INKERMAN before writing it in. A struggle, but not at all an unpleasant one.

    1. Ditto… battles crossing plants crossing counties crossing the tricky domain. But guessed them all in the end, Inkerman from Melbourne, Australia street names: Inkerman Rd, Balaclava (which I think is also Crimean from Imperial times).
      It was Angling and Log Jam which beat me – never heard of “jam tomorrow,” and angling isn’t a sport any more than knitting is. Pastime. Though no doubt people want angling in the Olympics.
      Rob. 42 mins then gave up.
  4. Lots of good stuff – LOG JAM, ASHORE, WORKAHOLIC – but some weird stuff too, including the plant, the battle, the gags, the hat and the ‘bot’. I knew the last only because ‘Googlebot’ regularly trawls my blog.

    To the blogger, 9a is an obscure plant not bird, as I can attest, it being one of two (the other being CHILEANS) where I needed to resort to aids after the hour, even though I was onto the wordplay in each case. Frustrating – a bit like Ian Bell.

    Edited at 2015-07-30 03:10 am (UTC)

  5. I liked this one a lot. No problem with any of the GK or the vocab, but parsing was a challenge in places.

    Oddly, at 28ac my first thought was ASH+ORE but I failed to realise that it actually made a word until I came back to it later.

    I used to grow clarkias from seed as a teenager – I was a strange child.

    Dereklam

    1. I had the same experience with ASHORE – spent time wondering if there was an Ashore Sea. Funny how you can have the answer in front of you like that and still not realise it.
  6. Everything in after about 25 minutes except for … CLARKIA. A month of staring at it wouldn’t have got me there.
  7. 28.31, so a tough solve. Many thanks for untangling BIODATA, George. I could see most of the ingredients (if not TAD) and assumed it would work out from there. Just as well the checkers allowed nothing else.
    On 9a, I thought I knew Clarksia, which I now know doesn’t exist, but certainly not the answer. George, I assume that when you wrote “bird” in your explanation, you meant “plant”? (On edit: I see Ulaca got there first. I must learn to read).
    Pleased to say I now know another hat (Aussie, perhaps, along the lines of Drizabone?)
    I’m pretty sure we haven’t had D NOTICES for many a long year, since they became devices for getting cabinet ministers out of embarrassments (60’s?).
    And, re cricket (and with plenty of scope for schadenfreude later): bitter end? Miserable? Not helping? I say chaps, triumph and disaster and all that.

    Edited at 2015-07-30 07:38 am (UTC)

  8. Tough, enjoyable, quirky, fair. Finally got clarkia from ‘what a lark’ i.e. game. Anything under the half-hour seems good to me – I was nearer double that. Outside the Goldilocks range for me but damned satisfying to complete.
  9. What larks, Pip! A great relief to take 33 minutes and find others had to wrestle with this. I hadn’t heard of CLARKIA for many years but it came back as soon as I remembered Ireland had counties too and so found the middle A. Loved the definition for JAM and chuckled at TAKE SILK so was happy to overlook the fact that one can be a brief without doing that. Couldn’t wait any longer for log in to work, malcj.
  10. Took me nearly an hour. Came to this journal because I could not parse the first part of 17d, and found here that it is a hat. I would not have got Inkerman if I had not got clarkia entered early on.
    Nikki.
  11. 45 mins and still couldn’t see the excellent LOG JAM/ANGLING combination.
    Appreciated CABOT, WORKAHOLIC and LUCINDA.
    Liked the image of Cheltenham twinned with Las Palmas.
  12. Really enjoyed this for the best part of an hour. Re general knowledge, it’s funny how you know stuff you thought you didn’t know, like WIDEAWAKE and INKERMAN, and then there’s stuff you really don’t know, like CLARKIA. Donald Rumsfeld springs to mind.
  13. Well I thought this was fun.

    I can imagine apoplexy in some quarters over BAND for orchestra but who cares. Never heard of the hat but guessed from checkers and “on one’s toes”. Knew CLARKIA the plant (seen in the USA George and named methinks after an American explorer?)

    Amazed folks don’t know INKERMAN – very famous battle fought in the fog that broke the back of the Russian army and followed by a famous siege at Sevastopol

    Thanks setter and well done George

  14. A DNF from me today, clearly a case of too much unknown vocab/gk, since for most of my blanks I had figured out the wp. (Was toying with towerman for the battle, cludoia for the plant and whamleas for the Americans…ho hum). Well done setter and blogger, I definitely fall into the goat camp today.
    1. CLUDOIA went through my mind then when I got INKERMAN my next best guess was CRISKIA!
  15. Nearly an hour – no GK new to me, but I must admit to using aids several times when I knew what sort of word I needed, but couldn’t think of the one that fitted.
    LOI CHILEANS, as I didn’t think they could be described as a race.
    1. Quite agree – they’re a nation. But imagine the fuss if the clue had required, say, Mapuche.
  16. Just over an hour… I found this the toughest for some time. Took me ages to see 5d (needed for 4a and 11a) and 14a. DNK INKERMAN, that WIDEAWAKE was a hat or that kidney was more than just an internal organ. Lots of good clues – 22a my favourite.
  17. Did not finish by a very long way having given it 30 mins and with other stuff to do at home this afternoon.

    I did know the plant, though, as our garden was full of it in the 50s and 60s.

    One of those days which make me dread October.

  18. 22 mins. It looks like I was on the right wavelength for this one, although I suspect that having the required GK helped the most. I was pretty certain from the clue that 3dn was going to end in “man” and I almost misbiffed “Omdurman” before realising that a) I really couldn’t parse it, and b) it was fought more than 40 years later on a different continent. Remembering INKERMAN (and seeing how it was parsed) certainly helped me get CLARKIA, although it was vaguely familiar. I got WIDEAWAKE from the second half of the clue once I had all the checkers because I had certainly never heard of the hat. TAKE SILK was my LOI after ALWAYS.
  19. Worst result in a while, failing to get CLARKIA, MEATH, TAKE SILK and WIDEAWAKE. With hindsight all were gettable, so no complaints from me – a fair victory to the setter.
  20. 20 minutes on my lunchbreak. A lot of tough stuff to process in here, which made it a bad puzzle to attempt to while simultaneously trying to eat a Co-op “sweet & crunchy salad bowl” with my fingers…

    Liked both the Doctor Who reference and the very unexpected Magic the Gathering reference in the blog. This is clearly a safe space for geeks and nerds like me!

  21. With the clock ticking towards 30 minutes I bunged in the hopeful/hopeless crankia and leg man.

    Really well-crafted puzzle, win to the setter.

  22. Well, my GK seems OK! WIDEAWAKE was the only biff in my 40 mins effort. LOI was CHILEANS.
  23. Finished in under two hours, with just a couple I had failed to parse. Turns out I got them both wrong. LOS PALMAS (geography is always a weak point) and BIORAMA, which looked very plausible. A WIDEAWAKE hat is specifically a felt one, because it has “no nap”.
  24. Decidedly DNF for me – far too many Ks for my liking. Spent ages trying to think of a metal connection to SOM to make JETSOM work in the bottom right, and had to give up in order to concentrate on the cricket. Well done Setter, definitely one up for you, and Blogger, makes me realise how lucky I am not to be on the rota.
  25. I had lots of interruptions while solving this but I’m not sure I would have improved on my 46:52 without them: you can keep trying to think of a word meaning ‘game’ that fits _A_K while making toast and spreading Nutella onto it (we’re on holiday, usual breakfast rules are suspended).
    I said the other day that it helps when you know the words, and today was a reverse illustration of this principle: CLARKIA, INKERMAN, D NOTICES and WIDEAWAKE all new to me, and all caused me a lot of trouble. Having the first two crossing one another was particularly evil on the part of the setter, and they were my last in by a long way. In the end I put them in rather desperately after failing to think of anything better and was very surprised to find that they were both right.
    I found this very hard indeed but I enjoyed the struggle. There’s lots of really clever stuff in here.

    Edited at 2015-07-30 08:32 pm (UTC)

  26. Another DNF, but not due to those already mentioned. My downfall was TAKE SILK, which I don’t recognize at all, even now, and where I threw in TAKE SILL because it has something to with the wordplay. CLARKIA and INKERMAN from wordplay, WIDEAWAKE as well. Despite failing, I did find it a high level puzzle, so thanks to the setter. Regards.
  27. 12:35 for me, feeling slightly more hopeful about October now that I’ve seen crypticsue’s and keriothe’s times for today’s puzzle when compared with Monday’s and Tuesday’s.

    I made heavy weather of 25ac (my LOI) having somehow missed the significance of “about”, but otherwise I worked my way slowly but steadily through this interesting and enjoyable puzzle.

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