Times 26413 – A Nice Mosaic

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
What an enjoyable puzzle with which to start the working week! Not particularly difficult, but a satisfying challenge, in the main, with a pleasing mix of clue types and subject matter.

It will be interesting to see what causes the hold-ups/mistakes. For me, it was the pesky three-letter words – with 25 down being last in, and 7 down requiring a rethink – that were responsible for the former, while 5 down had just enough trickiness in it to derail me; in other words, not an awful lot. 33 minutes.

ACROSS

1. TURING MACHINE – an anagram* of CHIMING and NATURE. I am told by a reliable source that a TM is actually a mathematical model that defines an abstract machine which manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a set of rules. Wevs, as my niece in Weston would say.
8. CRAB – a crab cannot be a bad mood, it seems – only a possessor of such – so what we have here is not a double definition but a cryptic one (as suggested by the question mark). And a jolly good one too!
9. ROGUE STATE – A GESTURE TO*.
10. DISTRAIN – IS + T in DRAIN. One of those ugly Latinate legal words, this one meaning to seize property to get yer money.
11. PRAISE – PR(A)ISE
13. TO CAP IT ALL – TO CAPITAL + L. I loved this. Who didn’t try to shove an UP in one of the 2-letter spaces?
16. SUNK – SUN K[ing]: four sevenths of old Louis. Very nice too.
17. FIRM – FIR + M[ature]. I was looking for trees beginning M, so the setter had me at least where he wanted me.
18. EXPOSITION – I had ‘exlocation’, which I thought was pretty clever of me, until I realised it was wrong.
20. FLITCH – FL + ITCH (‘what you’d associate with some scratchings’ – brilliant). This came up in a puzzle by Dean Mayer (the artist formerly known as Anax) four years ago. The tradition of awarding a flitch (side) of bacon to a married couple at Dunmow in Essex who had not quarreled or regretted their marriage for a year and a day is mentioned in Langland’s Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. What is not mentioned is whether they were still talking to each other or whether the husband was a North Sea oil-rig worker…
22. REST MASS – a charade (A + B) of no great difficulty.
24. NEGOTIATOR – an excellent semi &lit: NE (oNcE regularly) followed by GOT (secured) I + A TOR (rise).
26. WAND – N (note) in WAD (many sticks) to give a single stick.
27. FIGHTING WORDS – a nice charade to polish off the acrosses.

DOWNS

1. TERRITORIAL – it’s a pity that Crosswordland’s favourite fighting force is the TA (recently renamed the more prosaic “Army Reserve”, which setters and editors are quite rightly ignoring), as this would actually be a very good clue were it not a write-in.
2. REBUT – reversal of TUBE ([London] underground) + R.
3. NORMATIVE – NORMA (opera by Vicenzo Bellini, a contemporary of Donizetti) + I in TV + E. Casta Diva is perhaps the best known piece from the work.
4. MAGENTA – AGENT in MA[n].
5. CHEEP – the Romans always made a deliberate mistake in their mosaics so the gods wouldn’t be offended. This was my Mosiac Moment. Sounds like ‘cheap’, so actually CHEEP.
6. IN TRANSIT – INN ARTIST*.
7. EFT – [l]EFT, not ‘ent’ – they were what Tollers invented and are not yet in the dictionary, even if a phrase most Singaporeans have never heard of is.
12. SONG OF SONGS – double definition. It may not be Fanny Hill, but the two lovers exchanging lines like ‘Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, which feed among the lilies’ (that’s the bloke speaking, by the way) would have been a shoo-in for the Dunmow Flitch. So long as they were married, of course – preferably to each other.
14. ARMSTRONG – double definition, referencing old Satchmo and Neil, and a nod to HG Wells’ First Men in the Moon?
15. LAST STRAW – our third charade – arguably even simpler than the first one.
19. PURITAN – RITA in PUN. Of course, the 16th century Puritans were anything but was is meant by the term these days. As CS Lewis points out, to the Elizabethan Puritan ‘purity’ meant not chastity but ‘pure’ theology and ‘pure’ church discipline – a Presbyterian Church established by force, if necessary, along the lines of Calvin’s church at Geneva. ‘We must picture these Puritans,’ writes Lewis in ‘On Edmund Spenser’, ‘as the very opposite of those who bear that name today: as young, fierce, progressive intellectuals, very fashionable and up-to-date. They were not teetotallers; bishops, not beer, were their special aversion.’
And since this entry has become something of a thesis, here’s Henry Fowler on puns from his Modern English Usage: ‘The assumption that puns are per se contemptible, betrayed by the habit of describing every pun not as “a pun” but as “a bad pun” or “a feeble pun”, is a sign at once of sheepish docility and a desire to seem superior. Puns are good, bad, and indifferent, and only those who lack the wit to make them are unaware of the fact.’
21. HEIST – IS + THE* for another semi &lit.
23. MOWER – M + OWER
25. ELF – FLE[d] reversed; Chambers has ‘tiny’, while Collins and Oxford (ODO) have [typically] ‘small’. You pays yer money…

43 comments on “Times 26413 – A Nice Mosaic”

  1. Not that the Puritans were particularly easy-going when it came to chastity, or tolerant of adultery or homosexuality or any form of rumpy-pumpy outside of marriage. Still, I imagine they were keener on killing Quakers than adulterers. And all in all, they were a major pain in the butt. But I digress. This was enjoyable, although I didn’t feel as keen on it as Ulaca evidently did. Wavered for a bit on cheep/cheap, wasted time trying to make sense of NORMATIVE–finally remembered that meaning of ‘box’. I misread ‘photon’ as ‘proton’, which does have a rest mass; but since I’d never heard of rest mass, no harm done. Reference to (non-Tolkienian) elves always puts me in mind of Morris Bishop’s poem on the subject.

    Edited at 2016-05-16 04:36 am (UTC)

  2. Off to a flier with TURING MACHINE (my COD). The rest flowed relatively smoothly from that point, despite only half-knowing DISTRAIN, REST MASS, FLITCH and SONG OF SONGS.

    Almost SUNK by 16ac at the end, but got there via an alphabet run.

    Good Monday fun. Thanks setter and U.

  3. … will appreciate a sprinkling of computing and physics. I did.
    Didn’t remember FLITCH from any previous outing, so my LOI and parsed after the fact. Anyone ever knowingly used DISTRAIN?

    Edited at 2016-05-16 05:35 am (UTC)

      1. Those same law students would also know “debentures” but when asked what they are a Jamaican might say that they are the governing bodies of the inns of court.
      2. At the risk of sounding a bore, I have used this word for many years. In England and Wales, landlords “distrain” for unpaid rent i.e. send in the bailiffs – it is a commonly used word in legal/real estate circles.
  4. Hard work with several unknowns that I solved only through wordplay. I’m not familiar with 1ac as such but I spotted MACHINE in the anagrist and TURING in the remainder so what had to be had to be. Only vaguely knew DISTRAIN and NORMATIVE. Never heard of REST MASS and the “photon” reference was of no help; just as well the wordplay was solver-friendly .

    The TA became TAVR in 1967 but didn’t affect crossword-setting conventions so I don’t see any reason to drop it now that it has become the AV (in 2014).

    SONG OF SONGS is a book of the Old Testament also called “Song of Solomon”.

    ELF was my last one in too.

    Edited at 2016-05-16 06:58 am (UTC)

  5. Not sure where all the 17’42” went, as most answers went in on sight, the up train one and the one that could have been DEFOLIATOR from the crossers being the two exceptions.
    As a matter of prudence, solving on the club site, I always now press the large font button to give my morning eyes a chance, but I still misread photon as proton, and know enough science to be puzzled by it. Puzzled, but not deterred, so absolute was the wordplay.
    Mrs Z and I could compete for the Dunmow Flitch if it wasn’t for the crosswords…
    1. My instantaneous comment was – ‘ No, that’s not true!’.. Ah well, better luck next year.

      Incidentally.. I was rather surprised that none of you picked up on Z’s bit of wordplay genius in the Thursday blog last week. It made me guffaw at 3 am in the morning, dipso fatso.

      1. FLITCH … I was going to say nothing but (l)OI (d)NK! Thought better of it.
      2. It was indeed brilliant, but, um, what were you doing at 3 o’clock in the morning, pray?
        1. Staying awake! I’m not good at sleeping when the other side of the bed is unoccupied 🙁 It also means that I can call out the odd bit of encouragement to the blogger in the study/help to keep him awake!
    2. You’re not alone, Z, but fortunately having seen your comment I was able to go back and edit my contribution above. As for the solving, it didn’t make any difference as I don’t actually know what either word means beyond being something vaguely scientific that I probably knew when I passed my physics O-level 52 years ago and then promptly forgot about.
  6. Flyer today, then stuck in SW. COD FLITCH, LOI NEGOTIATOR, parsed after finishing. The TURING MACHINE is a fundamental concept in computing, while the ‘halting problem’ (would it ever stop if you set a particular problem?) is a great illustration of Godel’s incompleteness theorem… (getting carried away here) . Whatever, nice puzzle, good start to the week, 17’.
  7. …pleased to come here and learn that I’d got the unknowns correct, then saw that it was EFT, rather than ‘ent’. Think I’ve probably come across that before, but not recently. Bah humbug.
  8. 13m, finishing with an unparsed NEGOTIATOR and grateful along the way that some of the less common words (FLITCH, DISTRAIN) happened to be ones that I had both come across before and somehow managed to remember. EFT is also rather an obscure word in the real world, and ENT would be very tempting if you didn’t know the newt. In Crosswordland though EFTs are quite common so I don’t expect this caused too many problems.
    The one thing I really didn’t know was REST MASS, but the wordplay was kind. At some point today I must look it up and find out what it is.
  9. I don’t feel too bad about having not finished in my allotted hour.

    I might in the end have got SUNK, but I was reading the clue the wrong way around, plus I had no idea what anyone called Louis XIV. I also failed on FLITCH, which hopefully I’d have puzzled out if left to my own devices for another few minutes, even though I’d never heard of it.

    On the plus side, filling my head with computing and physics rather than history stood me in good stead for the others. The TURING MACHINE is oft-cited in computing circles to this day, and REST MASS was a quick write-in.

    The LO I actually put I was HEIST, after a self-kicking moment when I finally saw the anagram.

  10. Was going at great speed, banging in the ELF and safety one but unfortunately also banged in wENT so a DNF. Some nice clues though
  11. Managed not to trip myself up with this one, finishing in 25 minutes, so an easy start to the week. FOI REBUT, LOI NEGOTIATOR. Dragged FLITCH up from the depths of my memory. Liked ARMSTRONG.
  12. Or so the theories have it. Difficult to tell when you’re normally travelling at the speed of light. Speaking of which, so was I today. 12 minutes, all parsed. What a wonderful world!
  13. Romped through three quarters of this with a few smiles in 10 minutes, then slowed down with the SW corner, couldn’t convince myself that FIGHTING was so obvious. Took a while to see the excellent ARMSTRONG as I at first had TO TOP IT ALL and didn’t see why. Took a long time to see and parse NEGOTIATOR and so my LOI was ELF in 20 minutes. I could explain what ‘rest mass’ is, if you have a while, or look it up in Wiki. A photon behaves both as a wave and a particle so it would have no mass if were allowed to be stationary. Hope that sheds some light.
  14. I was on about 7m 20s, before spending another couple of minutes on 20a and plumping for CLUTCH in desperation.
  15. 14:06 with a couple of minutes at the end trying to spot what would fit the negotiator clue.

    I thought this was trickier than your “average” Monday what with distrain, normative and rest mass (what I know about photons and protons you could probably write on an electron).

    I ended up with a messy grid having initially gone for GRUB instead of CRAB and having a square left over when I got to the end of FIGHTING TALK.

    I think “feeble” is rather unfair on the humble pun. One can have a lot of fun with fish puns in particular.

  16. 22 mins with “negotiator” bunged in unparsed as LOI. Forgot Mrs M’s birthday today so the flitch will have to wait another year.
  17. Add me into the crew who spent an unpardonable amount of time to sort of NEGOTIATOR at the end. I also very nearly shrugged my shoulders and put in SANK for Louis XIV… glad I slowed down and actually thought that one out!
      1. I bet Louis XIV was constantly shrugging his shoulders, in a Gallic yet regal fashion…
    2. Do you know the one about the swimming race between One-Two-Three the English cat and Un-Deux-Trois the French cat? You should be able to figure out the punchline.
        1. Sorry that was me. Too busy enjoying a glass of french water (or Sancerre as I call it) in the sunshine.
  20. 16 mins, the last couple of which were sleepily spent on NEGOTIATOR as an early start (out of bed at 5.05) and a busy day started to catch up with me. I was pleased the wordplay for REST MASS was so clear because it certainly wasn’t a write-in for this ignoramus of matters scientific. I was also glad I remembered TV/box relatively quickly for NORMATIVE. On the other hand EFT and ELF went in fully parsed almost as soon as I read the clues.
  21. I completed the QC quickly this morning so had time to look at this.
    Compared with the struggle I had with the Saturday cryptic, this was reasonably straightforward.
    There were several unknowns to me but for once I managed to guess them correctly from the clues: Turing Machine was gettable once the machine bit was clear; Rest Mass was clued clearly I thought; and my LOI was Flitch.
    Eft used to appear regularly in the Evening Standard crossword which I did in pre Times cryptic days; along with that sea eagle which I have now forgotten. David
  22. Done in about 15 minutes at most, LOI was DISTRAIN, which I didn’t know, and I wasn’t sure I’d heard of REST MASS either. Beyond that, no real problem although probably the most time was used up fighting through NEGOTIATOR. Regards.
  23. A minute under the half hour for me. Very happy to see Turing acknowledged in 1ac, and the geek in me appreciated 22ac. It is one of the stranger paradoxes of modern physics that, although the mass of most objects approaches infinity as they speed up, my own mass continues to increase despite my remaining largely stationary.

    FLITCH and DISTRAIN were my NHOs for today, though the former rang a very muffled bell somewhere.

  24. 7:42 here for this pleasant, straightforward start to the week. My only objection is to using “feeble joke” to clue PUN in 19dn, since the best puns are anything but feeble.

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