Times 26793 – The classical Wednesday ‘Thriller’, or monkey puzzle.

90 comments on “Times 26793 – The classical Wednesday ‘Thriller’, or monkey puzzle.”

1. 19:40 .. I found this tough, though I can’t really blame the classical emphasis for MICHAEL JACKSON being almost my last one in.

   The precise definition in 28a made me think of the if-only-it-were-true story of Noah Webster, caught in flagrante with the maid by his wife. “Noah, I am surprised!” “No, my dear, it is I who am surprised. You, surely, are astonished.”

2. … with its great mix of classics and mods.

   I think I’d have been tempted to put “newspaper” in shudder quotation marks at 2dn. A very well-selling publication, mostly for those things that, when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them both. Tabloid style in a broadsheet form. Sadly, one of Europe’s best selling organs.

   Grateful that the two long answers both involved anagrams.

   We didn’t have any bulldogs at my down-market post-Robbins joint. But there was a Beadle who bore a striking resemblance to the Vice-Chancellor and was often mistaken for him.

   No doubt there will be some later comments re the inaccuracy of the answer to 15dn. (As in “How much can a … ?”)

   WOD has to be SLEDGE, for all sorts of reasons, some of them personal. My old mate Percy (“Sledge”) Trovatore would have loved it. If he could do crosswords. The sense required here has a rather fruity history.

   Edited at 2017-08-02 07:31 am (UTC)

3. Very happy to have completed this in 50 minutes, as the classics aren’t my strong point. I think this is the first time I’ve got the ARAUCARIA and recognised it as a reference to a setter, too. Glad BULLDOG was fairly clued, as I’ve never heard of them. Also grateful that Guardian and ARGUS are both common names for newspapers, as that’s what pointed me in the right direction…

   FOI 4d, LOI IVANHOE, just after the ROISTER crosser, WOD ARAUCARIA.

   Thanks setter and blogger.

4. Wasted a bit of time trying to do something with IG at 9ac; the L finally straightened me out. Had no idea what SLEDGE or BULLDOG meant; if the bulldogs wore bowlers, though, it’s good they were abolished. Not a Michael Jackson fan myself, but Fred Astaire thought highly of his dancing. And he did inspire Weird Al Yankovic.
5. Considering how long it took me to come up with the answers at 1ac, 6ac and 1dn I was rather surprised to find only 33 minutes on the clock when I entered my last answer. The one-time unknown (to me) EULER has become a a write-in for me now. I could never stand 13ac, but anyone who as a child records a love song to a rat is probably destined for a strange life.

   The Club site is currently up and running as normal.

6. About 35 mins with overnight oats – and very enjoyable. I liked the reminder of John Graham, the Imp Ale, and the many TLS-ish clues which were do-able but made me think I knew a few worthy things too: cruellest month, sea god, Ivanhoe, etc. And something for the mathematicians too. Good stuff. Thanks brainy setter and Pip.
7. What on earth is a koala bear?
   1. Guessed it’d be your good self!
   2. Chambers says it’s also known as the Native Bear. I imagine that’s even more unimpressive.
      1. Indeed. Of course the authoritative word on the subject comes from none other than Russell Crowe’s father-in-law:

         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB2y52jfRdc

   3. Probably some relation of drop bears…..
8. 29 minutes for this enjoyable offering. Roister is an excellent word and it was good to see Parnassus get a run out.

   Best sledge? Probably the Rod Marsh / Ian Botham exchange:

   Marsh: “Well, how’s your wife and my kids?”

   Botham: “The wife’s fine, but the kids are retarded.”

   1. Of all the people this one’s been attributed to over the years, and having listened to rather too much of his “commentary”, I suspect that good old Beefy is one of the least likely to have come up with it.
      1. I have to agree that dear old Beefy, great cricketer though he was, would not have had the wit to come up with that response.
      2. Yes, the Englishman could have been anyone, but there’s only one Rodney Marsh.
         1. 
            Glen McGrath (Australia) “Why are you so fat?”

            Eddo Brandes (Zimbabwe) “’Cos every time I f*** your wife, she gives me a biscuit.”

            COD 10ac CIGAR CASE as per Sawbill.

            WOD ‘in flagrante’ as per Sotira.

            Time roughly 37mins on i-pad as I was out and about.

            Edited at 2017-08-02 11:56 am (UTC)

      3. Sorry, I think the best sledge ever and one that made the Aussies laugh, was directed at Mark Waugh. In an Ashes Test, Jimmy Ormond, who only played a couple of times for England came out to bat. Mark Waugh, in the slips, kept on at him about how he wasn’t good enough to play Test cricket for England. After more of the same, Ormond said to Waugh: “At least I’m the best cricketer in my family”!!
         1. Up there with Lennon’s quip about Ringo not even being the best drummer in the Beatles.
   2. My favourite sledge is this one from a county game between Glamorgan and Somerset. After beating the bat a couple of times times Glamorgan’s Greg Thomas told the great Viv Richards: “It’s red, round & weighs about 5 ounces in case you were wondering.” Viv hit the next ball right out of the ground and into the river. He turned to the bowler and said: “”You know what it looks like, now go and find it.” Or there’s Mike Atherton and Ian Healy on Atherton’s first Australian tour. “You’re a f*****g cheat!” said Healy when the umpire gave a blatant edge not out. “When in Rome, dear boy…” said Athers. When this Cambridge man first got in the Lancashire side, someone wrote FEC on his bag, said to stand for Future England Captain. Neil Fairbrother later said that it didn’t really mean that at all. He wasn’t prepared to say what it had meant, but the middle word was’educated’.
      1. I first met Athers at Fenners when he was captain of Cambridge. He was introduced to me then as FEC, and the understanding was that it stood for Future England Captain. But of course I have no way of knowing whether it started out that way.

         All the so-called sledges quoted here have been attributed to literally dozens of players over the years. If they were ever actually delivered, it’s far more likely that it was by unheralded cricketers in the lower echelons of the game. That’s where the really funny stuff occurs.

         Not to mention the fact that as the perpetrator of the shameful dirt-in-the-pocket incident, Athers was really in no position to cast aspersions on other cricketers or cricketing nations.

         1. The Mark Waugh/Jimmy Ormond sledge which I have just quoted, has been cited many times. In fact, I heard Michael Vaughan repeat it on the radio very recently.
            1. Ormond played his Test in 2001. I reckon I’d heard stories of the same sledge against M Waugh in Sydney grade cricket for about 15 years before that.
      2. Having seen these examples, I felt the urge to search for more. The Australians seem to be well represented. The one I found that I liked best was this…
         “
         Michael Slater was playing in a state cricket game against fellow Australian team mate Shane Warne. Warne, not shying away from sledging a fellow team mate, decided to get under Slater’s skin by suggesting that his temper was like a time-bomb.

         When Slater came out to bat, Warne and Berry began the sledging:
         Warne “Tick”
         Berry “Tock”
         Warne “Tick”
         Berry “Tock”
         After several overs, Slater got impatient and holed out to deep midwicket. As he trudged off, he glared at Warne and Berry, who said in unison “Kaboom!””

         Edited at 2017-08-02 04:38 pm (UTC)

9. I rather enjoyed that, and came in just under 17. One of those where first run baffles, but then everything flows in. 1ac looked to require Georgette Heyer based knowledge of fiacres and barouches, and there was a fair element of TLSness in the whole puzzle, pleasant on the day the withdrawal of the TLS is formally announced.
   I can’t see any other changes to the site as it stands. Does that mean it hasn’t actually happened yet?
   1. Nowt yet at 09:50am UK.
   2. Yes I went looking for a “landaulet”. Are you going to post a blog for 1186 (by Myrtilus) Z? It’s our last TLS from the Club (well you know that). I’m assuming Sotira will post 1184 this Friday and I have 1185 ready for August 11th, but I haven’t yet heard back from Vinyl about this.
      1. Vinyl says “the final blog will be posted this week” but I don’t see why that should deter us, especially if you have the posting ready. I’d quite like to do the last “published” TLS, not least because it is a Myrtilus,and rather good. I’m assuming the old TLS crosswords will still be available to refer back to, but I might be wrong! Vive la Revolution!
         1. Oh, bugger. After seeing vinyl’s announcement this morning, and assuming there was a reason for it, I wrote “the last TLS blog” intro.

            Guess I’ll rewrite it 🙂

            1. “Paenepenultimate…”

               1. Hm. Of course, I should have copied the crossword off, or at least printed it, before today, as it seems it’s nowhere to be found, not to mention my transmogrification into newbie zabadak2, so all my history is missing too. Looks as though Olivia may have the last stand of the TLS gang after all.
                  1. I can send you a scan of my scrawled solution (and clues), if that would help – if so, should I use your Sky email address?

                     1. That would be brilliant, and yes, the sky one works

                        1. Sent.
      2. Sorry about all this. There are some parts of the blog that I let run themselves, and this was definitely one of them. You bloggers do such a great job, I never bothered to look at how many weeks elapse between the publication of the TLS puzzles and our blogs.

         I have amended my post about the crossword club to reflect this – of course we will blog out the remaining puzzles, even if hardly anyone can access them any more.

         1. Thanks Vinyl.
10. Evidently I was ‘on the wavelength’ today. It helped that I saw MICHAEL JACKSON straight away giving me plenty to work with.

    I was slightly thrown by EULER being Swiss. I always thought he was one of the Houston Eulers.

11. Brilliant! Flanders and Swannish with a hint of R**f H****s.
12. As Pip says, seen it all before so no problems. The demise of the TLS puzzle doesn’t concern me provided we don’t get an increase of irritating literary references in the daily cryptic such as “inspiration” to clue ERATO

    Not sure that EULER was greatest mathematician ever. As Newton himself said “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants” and EULER 1707-1783 followed Newton 1643-1727

    1. There probably can’t be a ‘greatest’ but if you’ve studied how Einstein came to special relativity and then general theory one can’t but be astounded at how he took thought experiments to such amazing conclusions. I know other mathematicians would also claim to have developed such theories also. I strongly recommend books on Richard Feynman to understand his true genius. The greatest will be in the future when someone can bring together the atomic and cosmic properties – I expect we will find some very odd things going on. By the way took an hour on this and found it hard
       1. In terms of the Maths in my Physics degree, I’d plump for James Clerk Maxwell. But we didn’t really go that far into General Relativity and Special Relativity Maths always seemed straightforward. Didn’t Einstein need Hilbert to do his Maths for him? But there are many pure mathematicians who I no doubt would concede to be far brighter if only I could understand them!
    2. I’ve got him in the top three, just behind Gauss and Reimann.
13. Flying today, with the nearby allusions helping: ARAUCARIA/Guardian, Muse/Erato. Was Waterloo a rout? And how did Sister Sledge get their name? Thanks pip and setter.
    1. Yes, a nice tribute to the Guardian’s greatest setter.
14. A bit of a slog and didn’t finish with a smile on my face. COD to CIGAR CASE.
15. Enjoyable and clever puzzle of moderate difficulty which still took me around an hour to complete. For a long time I had AEGIS (in its sense of “guard” or “shield”) at 6A but of course was quite unable to parse it. Eventually I remembered the eagle- and multi-eyed giant of Greek myth.

    I didn’t know the specific meaning of “bull” required at 12A (an inconsistent or absurdly contradictory statement) and had always taken the word simply to mean “rubbish” or “tosh” or something similar, as in such phrases as “a load of old bull”. According to Collins, the term originally was “Irish bull”.

16. 13:38, admittedly with some biffing, but all parsed at the end. I didn’t know the Muses lived on Mount Parnassus, but I do now. I was surprised to see Leonhard Euler popping up again after so recent a visit. Nice blog title Pip.

    Edited at 2017-08-02 07:28 am (UTC)

17. … with two left blank. I went to bed, and got 1s ac and dn immediately I looked this morning. Funny, that!

18. 25 minutes for me, which looks solid. I could have liked Michael Jackson if he’d stood still and if his voice had broken. Saw an ARAUCARIA in the arboretum at West Lodge this weekend. I’ve often thought of planting a monkey puzzle but my late sister, whose advice I always took on matters horticultural, told me they were too suburban. It’s amazing to what pretentious heights two kids brought up in a terraced house with a backyard (userpics don’t lie) can reach, including knowing what a BULLDOG is in Oxford. Mind you, IVANHOE was first encountered as played by Roger Moore on ITV. I do now have what we call a Tree Arbor at the bottom of the garden but I’m not sure if it’s spelt with or without a ‘U’. Is there someone on here who isn’t a parvenu who could inform me? COD ASTEROID. LOI TUTOR. Good to see EULER’s having a new lease of life this summer too. Good puzzle. Thank your Pip and setter.
19. Not my kind of puzzle, far too heavy on what z8b8d8k calls the TLSness.
20. Just under the half hour for this one. Spent a while trying to work out the parsing for MAESTRO and was held up by a few others in the SW corner. Liked the surface for ROISTER and the ‘calculating Swiss’, though the mathematician in question has been getting a bit of airplay lately and I think that Gauss deserves to be given a fair go as well. PROTEUS obviously had greater aspirations to be more than just a humble bacterial genus, which was news to me.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

21. 15 to 20 minutes: not sure whether I’ve submitted solution to Club before it was closed for updating, as had ‘invalid response’ message. When it comes up again I should amend my profile to use the same username as I do here.
    Nothing to add to comments above, though I’d vote for Gauss as being the greatest, for sheer breadth of work.
22. 10:59, done in the small hours of the morning, so not at my best but not finding anything too difficult.

    PROTEUS wasn’t the first sea god who sprang to mind, but I couldn’t justify NEPTUNE or manage to squeeze POSEIDON into seven letters.

    No problem with BULLDOG (I managed to avoid getting “progged” during my three-year stay).

    I suspect this may be my final comment, apart from on the occasional Saturday puzzle (I still buy the paper once a week), so I’d just like to thank setters, bloggers and contributors for all the pleasure you’ve given me over the years. And all the information: having just listened to the “Koala Song”, I’ll try to remember not to say “koala bear” ever again.

    1. Tony, it shocks me that you ever would have!
23. At first sight there seemed to be an awful lot of Capital Letters which can be Quite Off-Putting. However I steadily worked up from the SE, and everything fell into place in 55 mins.
    My brother lives right by an araucaria forest in Chile. When I translated the English name as puzle de mono, I got some very strange looks.
24. 25’23. Last in second letter of 1 ac.; finally got the aria right. The two long answers centre-grid rap at the skull in the cultural tussle they seem to stand for, the lower staying ahead here by means of ever-fading chestnuts but at large long gone. There will be books and theses aplenty on the Times crossword. – joekobi
25. Nothing too scary here, all done in 8m 59s. The world of plants is almost entirely unknown to me, so 1a was my last one in, but it was very fairly clued so I managed to piece it together painstakingly.
    1. For someone who belted this out in just under nine mins (rare and well done!) – I am somewhat surprised that you may have never attempted a Guardian Xword where the master ‘ARAUCARIA’ resided. My FOI!

       And whilst I think about it – could you possibly turn round once in a while!? Ulaca too!

       Edited at 2017-08-02 12:15 pm (UTC)

       1. I knew it rang a bell! I must admit that my crossword-solving is almost entirely restricted to the Times (and Listener) so my horizons aren’t very wide.
          1. Your avator suggests differently – go on turn round!
             1. Maybe one day!
       2. My front looks like the back end of a bus, horryd. Be grateful for small mercies.
26. Myrtilus notes the reference to John Galbraith Graham who was a revered setter for the Guardian and used this as his pen name. It’s fitting that it should be Myrtilus to point this out because when he sets the TLS puzzle he very often makes a punning pairing of the two top across clues. Alas. Alas. I do not have a subscription to the TLS.

    I have a quibble about describing Waterloo as a “rout”. It was certainly decisive but Wellington described it as “a very close-run thing” which would have been lost if he and the Prussian Marshal Blucher hadn’t been there.

    The Club site was down for repairs by the time I got to this so I printed from the newspaper and my time was 18 minutes or so by my phone clock.

    1. It was knowing his pen name that helped me get 1ac right. I’m not good on plants.
       I was sure that others would talk about him too – especially the remarkable way in which he used a crossword to announce his illness. Worth googling him if you don’t know the story.
       I see Gothick Matt and Rob Rolfe were reminded of him too.
27. Some classical references, but nothing too taxing, and I can’t see why such items would not appear in a daily puzzle. The TLS is much more difficult than this, which I found to be an entertaining solve.

    Was amused at KOALA BEAR, in light of other entries, which threatened to be — but wasn’t — some dark reference to encounters on Mount Carmel.

28. Why is the TLS disappearing? Not enough interest? Too damned hard?

    Why not suppport mohn2 and have a crack at The Club Monthly – that’s a real bastard! Only cracked it once! But you will need several dictionaries. No one else ever makes comments bar me.

    What will happen to The Club Monthly I wonder?

    1. mohn2?
       1. please read jerrywh – humblest apologies – a senior moment indeed!
    2. For first question, see Peter B’s comment in the posting about the new Crossword Club site.
       1. Sorry, but I could not pick it up on my ipad at the time due to The Great China Firewall. VPN down!
29. Comments here more interesting than the crossword itself, almost .. keep those koala references coming..
    1. And there were you wondering what we would have to discuss when the new Club went live…
30. Wacko Jacko and Macca can’t be wrong, can they? Almost royalty…https://youtu.be/KZKZjuYbCDI
    1. almost?!
31. I believe from previous autobiographical postings of his that I did have a Verlaine style education. I only wish this had provided me with his speed and consistency at crossword solving. Nevertheless a very respectable (for me) 15 mins today. I recall squeezing my (then) slender frame through the small window of a toilet at the rear of an Oxford pub as the bulldogs came in through the front door. Ah – the 1960’s!
32. 
    Not much to add to all the above. I found this quite a pleasant and straightforward solve which didn’t take too long.

    I enjoyed the Ivanhoe clue – people of my generation tend to associate said knight with Roger ” Eyebrows” Moore who wandered the countryside rescuing damsels in the 1960’s. Compare and contrast with Game of Thrones, with which I am currently catching up, where there is much 19 down and 20 down, not to mention various other egregious activities. Roger would not, I feel, be impressed.

    Time: all correct in about 35 minutes.

    Thank you setter and blogger.

    Dave.

33. 
    Aaaarrrgh! I must be even older than I thought I was…….
    1. Yes, sorry about that, but saw a Moore tribute programme the other day and the dates stuck.
34. I did this last night, and now the Crossword Club is offline I can’t check my time. I think it was around 11 or 12 minutes.
    Lots of classical references. I didn’t go to the kind of schools where this stuff was prominent in the curriculum but I have picked most of it up over the years, largely from crosswords of course.
    Like others I got 1ac easily from the name of the great crossword setter. I have a puzzle my wife commissioned from him for my 40th birthday. His style was very different from what we are used to on the Times puzzles (i.e. very un-Ximenean) but his puzzles were great fun.
35. It’s like a woolly bear, or a prairie dog, or a weasel cat, or a firefly, or a sea wolf…
    1. Classic South Park.

       “What do manbearpig droppings look like?”
       “Similar to pig droppings, but more manbearlike”

36. Actually, Ivanhoe aired in the 50s.
37. About 20 minutes, SLEDGE from wordplay, but everything else went in OK. Not much to add, so regards.
38. …as I am at the moment locked out of the club site after the changeover. Seems I have to cough up some cash (for a few months, I had been sneaking in through a side door that was left open–long story).
    This one went maybe a little too quickly (but I could’ve timed myself), with MICHAELJACKSON in first and ARAUCARIA in last (damn plants…). I’m not a fan of capping the definition when it’s not the first word (20 down).

    Edited at 2017-08-02 05:25 pm (UTC)

39. I spent 33mins on this one this morning but really only felt like I was picking at the edges. I needed another 21mins at lunchtime to get to the meat of the puzzle and finish it off. Didn’t help that it took me a long time to see the two longish acrosses. Held up at the end in the NE where I couldn’t fathom the second word at 10ac for ages, took a while to see past the unparseable aegis at 6ac, 12ac which was a half-known (probably from previous crosswords) and 7dn which took a while to see. I liked 17ac, 23ac, 8dn and 15dn. COD 7dn. In mathematician Top Trumps I’ll see your Eulers and your Gauss and raise you Cantor. As for 8dn “Stiff upper lips and baggy green caps” by Simon Briggs – a sledger’s history of the Ashes has the following telegram sent to Geoff Boycott after a very slow 50 at Perth in 1978-1979: “You have done for Australian cricket what the Boston Strangler did for door-to-door salesmen”. There is also David Lloyd’s response after a Jeff Thomson delivery hit him in a place to make every batsman weep: “The injury did confirm my earlier statement that I could play Thommo with my c**k”.

    Edited at 2017-08-02 07:48 pm (UTC)

    1. Lloyd later told Richie that he didn’t need a doctor, he needed a welder.
40. I spent most of my 56:28 on this puzzle going back over my entries trying to make them resemble what I thought I’d typed, but due to the new software making skips over existing crossers, it was a sisyphean task, and I ended up with two wrong; CLOSE CAAL and CONNTSATN, despite my trying to enter CLOSE CALL and CONSTRAIN. A bloody nightmare after a very busy day. I may grow to love the new site, but going by my first impressions, I somehow doubt it. I wish I hadn’t been too busy to do it before the changeover. Thanks to Pip for the blog.
    On edit: Oh and to add insult to injury, my entire history has vanished and I have apparently never solved any puzzles.

    Edited at 2017-08-03 01:48 am (UTC)

    1. If you click the “wheel” icon next to the timer, you can disable the skipping function.
       1. Thanks Hugh. I’ve just redone yesterday’s quick cryptic(which I previously completed correctly) on the new site and it says I got one wrong, but it won’t show me my completed grid to check it!! I’m going to bed now in a foul mood.
41. A final sledge from the great Fred Truman. Departing batsman ‘Good ball, sir’
    FT ‘yes, but it were wasted on thee’.
42. Perhaps Waterloo = rout has entered the language, as in ‘Finally facing my …..’?

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