Times 26,270

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Continuing a run of mostly very straightforward puzzles, clock stopped today at 7:25, helped by all the required general knowledge / vocabulary falling within my comfort zone, and much of it quite possibly learned from previous crosswords. A notable bias towards science rather than the arts today, which will please those solvers who claim (with some justification, I think) that it’s almost always the other way round – no reason why classicists like myself should always be given a headstart. All in all, a very pleasant solve.

Across
1 SPEECHLESS – SPEECH(=elocution), LESSON minus ON.
6 IRIS – IRISH minus H{ospital}. Do these puzzles long enough and this is one of those definitions which are baffling first time round, and (you hope) always remembered thereafter as they crop up again on a regular basis. Well down the list of definitions of “flag” in the dictionary: a plant of the iris family with sword-shaped leaves.
10 SUCCUBI – U(=posh, from the Nancy Mitford lexicon) C.C.(cricket club) in [SUB (edit articles), 1].
11 PUBLISH – PUB, L{andlord}, IS H{ard}.
12 IMPOTENCE – I(current in scientific notation) M.P., [TE in ONCE].
13 GLOOM – G{ir}L, (MOO)rev.
14 RADAR – RADA (Royal Academy of Doing Acting Dramatic Arts) + R{uns}.
15 ZOOLOGIST – Z(today’s unknown) + OOLOGIST(posh word for an egg expert).
17 EASTER EGG – E{nglish}, ASTER, E.G. G{arden}.
20 RELIC – ELI(the Biblical High Priest) in R.C.
21 TRUSS – TRUSTS minus {transpor}T.
23 PILLAR BOX – ILL AR{a}B in POX. A distinctive bright red, of course, though when Trollope (yes, that Trollope) introduced them to Britain, they were actually green.
25 EMPEROR – EM(a typesetters’ space, twice the width of an en) PER(=for each) OR(=gold).
26 ANDORRA – AND O.R., R.A. Two perennial abbreviated soldiers, Other Ranks and the Royal Artillery.
27 SERF – reverse hidden in reFREShed.
28 MANHANDLES – N{ew} HAND(=worker) in MALES.
 
Down
1 SUSHI – (SHIATSU)* anagrammised without the AT. I suppose “local” course in that it’s particularly tied in origin to a specific part of the world, despite the fact that nowadays you can have it for lunch in most UK city high streets.
2 ESCAPADES – E{astern}, ChAp in SPADES.
3 COUNTERMEASURE – double def., one of them a playful one based on the haberdashery counter (the sort with many little drawers underneath, reflecting presumably the need to keep your buttons and ribbons and things separate). edited to expand: as Derek and others discuss below, the specific reason for using this example is because there is a rule built into the top of the desk to allow the vendor to easily measure items which are sold by the yard (other units are available); is this actually a drapers’ counter rather than a haberdashery? I am not expert enough to say, but I can certainly find this item, which illustrates the idea, and is definitely described as the latter.
4 LEIBNIZ – N{ot} in LEI(=currency of Romania), BIZ. His name came up on TV recently (I suspect an episode of Q.I.) as a candidate for being “the last man who knew everything” i.e. a gifted polymath at a period in human thought when we hadn’t yet learned enough about the universe to make that impossible.
5 SUPREMO – SUP (MORE)*.
7 RHINO – double def., another one acquired from crosswords, I think, as it’s a slightly archaic word (by which I mean nobody in my circle goes looking in their wallet for “rhino”).
8 SCHEMATIC – (MATCHES)*, I{mpress} C{rowd}.
9 I BEG YOUR PARDON – (REGROUPINABODY)*.
14 ROENTGENS – O{ld} in RENT GEN, S{ociety}. The unit, unsurprisingly, named after the man credited with the discovery of 24 down.
16 ILLIBERAL – lots of numbers, and some Soviet history: 1, followed by several Roman fifties, LLL; and the NKVD (a forerunner of the KGB) was headed by BERIA, who is inserted with the 1 moved upwards.
18 EMPORIA – P{iano} in {M}EMORIA{L}.
19 GOLIATH – (TAIL in HOG)all rev.
22 UPPER – double def., one from the shoemaker, one from the pharmaceutical vernacular.
24 X-RAYS – X(=cross), “RAISE”.

34 comments on “Times 26,270”

  1. 35 mins, with five of those at the end on SERF and the devious COUNTERMEASURE. RADAR and SERF the pick of a nice, if rather too sciency, bunch for me.
  2. Nice tradesman-like puzzle today. Needed all the checkers to get ROENTGENS. RHINO and SUCCUBI from crosswords.

    Quite liked “beams in hospital”.

    Thanks setter and Tim. Impressive time, BTW.

  3. … found this easier than yesterday’s. LEIBNIZ should satisfy the whole arts-science spectrum. I was once invited to a meeting of the Leibniz Club at Manchester U. So called because of the biscuits rather than the philosopher-mathematician.

    LOI was TRUSS. I wonder why.

      1. Would that be the one with six rabbits stuck up his … ? If so, he can have my support … I’m not wearing it right now.
  4. Not so hard but I enjoyed the rather different sciency aspect of this one. Quite a few answers biffed, including SUCCUBI IMPOTENCE ROENTGENS and GOLIATH.

    I suspect that the reference to haberdasher in 3dn may be an error and should be to a draper, whose counter has a built-in metre rule to measure out cloth.

    Dereklam

  5. A technical DNF for me as after 30 minutes I had failed to crack 4dn and resorted to aids. I vaguely knew the name but would never have thought of it. Similarly I knew I was looking for an Eastern European currency to start it off but couldn’t bring that to mind either. As for the ending (I was still missing 15ac at that point) I thought it was going to be CO.

    Edited at 2015-12-01 08:04 am (UTC)


  6. Haberdashers had countermeasures for ribbons etc

    The old Rhino was used ‘The Sweeney’.

    I wasn’t aware that Manchester United had a Leibnitz Society!

    I am a recently inducted menmber of their Schweinsteiger Society

    which meets twice weekly.

    Wilhelm Röntgens (111) may be finally going back to Bayern Munich.

    COD PILLAR BOX LOI SERF

    horryd Shanghai

  8. One blank today, and that was the unknown SUCCUBI. Oh and LEIBNIZ went in because the letters fit, nothing to do with wp or definition… The other one I couldn’t parse was X-RAYS. Didn’t catch the devious ‘caught’. Thanks for sorting those out.
  9. 16:47 … just chewy enough to make life interesting. I spent a fair bit of time, as often before, pondering the spelling of Roentgen. I would save myself much effort in the long run if I just learned it.

    I thank the setter for prompting me to read up on the remarkable Leibniz, where previously all I really knew about him was his name. And the biscuit. Do all polymaths end up known for something banal? I happened to pop into the loos at Tesco yesterday and noticed that the toilet roll dispenser was named for Da Vinci.

    I could have told you, Gottfried/Leonardo, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

  10. 11m. I found most of this slighlty harder than yesterdays, but the absence of a stupid mistake and a couple of tricky ones at the end meant that it took me the same amount of time.
    LEI was my only outright unknown today, but no doubt it’s come up in the past. I don’t think I’ve come across OOLOGIST before, but I knew that ‘oo’ denotes eggs (in more ways than one), which was enough. RHINO and IRIS are pure crossword knowledge, of course.
    I can’t see the problem with describing SUSHI as a ‘local’ dish, Tim, even if it is widely available outside Japan. By the same token you might see a Balti Chicken Tikka Masala in India, but if you described it as a ‘local’ dish everyone would know you were talking about Birmingham.
  11. Very enjoyable puzzle for reasons outlined by Tim and overall standard of clues (small typo at 14D Tim – should be 24D). Helped of course by experience so that clues like 6A are a write in

    Please take a moment like Sotira to look up LEIBNIZ. He has had an enormous influence on your life and has an unbelievable list of achievements to his name. It’s hard enough for most people to understand calculus – how like L and Newton you discover it is mind blowing

    1. Leibniz was indeed a most remarkable combination of philosopher and mathematician whose “optimism” was somewhat unfairly satirised by Voltaire in Candide as “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.
  12. My ambition to be a polymath was dented today by the conviction that the German fellow was spelt with an inserted T, which made it a) my last one in and b) the one where I simply had to work out the wordplay. Tat endeavour was also complicated by the certainty that the Romanian currency is the lev (which it is, but not when it’s in a handful of change). Leis are, as every word game enthusiast knows, Hawaiian garlands.
    Still a (for me) much better time today of 12.53, which in this crossword shows I at least know some stuff. Then again, my forgetery firmly believed that Hibernian meant Scottish.

    For distraction: quite a few of the down unchecked cells looked as if they were engaged in the formation of words that might exist some day if we worked out what we’d use them for:
    PUMA ARME, for when the Planet of the Apes franchise decides big cats are the next in line
    ECO-ATSEF, a save the planet movement
    ILLGEROD, that part of a car engine that doesn’t quite fit
    SULLNA that bone which might be either arm or leg if only you could remember
    ISOSIORE, a line joining points of equal levels of mineral deposit
    and by far my favourite:
    ECOGIN for environmentally concerned drinkers. Probably already stocked in Waitrose.

    Edited at 2015-12-01 10:41 am (UTC)

    1. You may have found the missing isopleth. For 40 years my office has used “contours” for the surface of the ground and “isopachytes” for the thickness of a mineral. I have never found a word for subterranean contours on the surface of an underground seam.
  13. I had rather hoped that I was getting better at this with something around 10 minutes all while perched awkwardly on half a seat begrudgingly ceded by a fellow commuter on the overcrowded 08:18. However, it turns out to be an easy one. I should have known.
    1. Surely both can be true? (Or perhaps it’s just the law of diminishing returns – unless I suddenly wake up to find I have acquired Mark Goodliffe’s brain, I don’t think any achievement in crosswords will please me as much as the first time I solved an entire Times puzzle unaided, and that, sadly, was over 30 years ago…)
    2. 10 minutes is inside of 2 Magoos! That’s a great time, especially achieved in such a cramped and unpromising sitation.
  14. 19:34 I too enjoyed the scientific flavour today. 23a and 19d my favourites. 28a my LOI if only because it was at the bottom and I was thinking ANT rather than HAND.
  15. 6:37. I think this seemed easier than it actually was, perhaps because many of the more complex flourishes came in answers that were easily biffable given a few of the letters…
  16. Rather fun puzzle, and for all the sciency stuff I thought the double definition at 3 down was the cleverest of the lot, though I will admit to putting in ILLIBERAL without figuring out the wordplay.
  18. 30m today – pleased to finish. Good blog – thanks as I’d biffed a couple and worked out the X-ray measure from the clue. Enjoyed the puzzle which at first pass seemed very difficult but in fact fell over quite easily.
  20. 13 mins, with ROENTGENS my LOI after TRUSS. I would have been a tad quicker if I’d realised sooner that the 24 in the clue for ROENTGENS referred to the clue number and not something to do with hours. Muppet.
  21. I managed to spin this one out for 31 minutes, just to get my money’s worth (or at least what would have been my money’s worth if I’d paid for the paper). As our illustrious blogger pointed out, there was a nice smattering of techy-sciency clues, albeit of the fairly elementary type.

    Somebody ought to compile a table of equivalent obscurities for scientific and classical terms. For instance, I’d rate Roentgen or Liebnitz on about the same obscurity level as Cromwell or Homer. Conversely, perhaps some of the more obscure Greek gods would be at the level of, say, Hoyle or Helmholtz.

    Nice to see the alternative definition of MANHANDLES – around here the term usually refers to the rolls of surplus flesh on the midriff of a plump young lady.

  22. Late in the day, enjoyable, no exact time as was also being sociable but about half an hour, liked the scientific slant.
    If you’ve never been to Andorra, don’t bother, go somewhere else instead.
  23. Nice puzzle with some clever clues (I particularly liked 27ac (SERF)), but once again I was off the pace, finishing in a disappointing 10:12.

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