Times 26959 – A new Olympic sport?

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Time: 20 Minutes
Music: George Lloyd, Symphony #8

I suppose easy Monday is back, provided you are thoroughly familiar with butterflies, Indian religions, and cookery.   If not, you may have to rely on relatively straightforward cryptics to give you the answers.   In any case, experienced solvers are going to fly through this one.   My time was in part due to lack of knowledge, and a bit of inaccurate spelling.   But in the end, really quite simple, giving me time to turn to Mephisto.

I had not played the Lloyd piece for a long time, and I have to say he is not the finest British music has to offer.   He would, however, make an interesting cryptic clue, along the lines “Composer confused old PM”, but probably few people would understand the wordplay.

Across

1 Unusually fab, iconic name for a series (9)
FIBONACCI – Anagram of FAB, ICONIC.   The gateway to some interesting parts of math.
6 Gone to get a meal from an Italian? (5)
PASTA –  PAST + A.
9 One corrupting prophet ensnares French noble (7)
SEDUCER – SE(DUC)ER.
10 Half the rally place advert for passengers (7)
CARLOAD – CARLO[w, eire] + AD, or something along those lines.   I have to admit I just biffed this one, and got the cryptic only by doing research
11 Heading for London, group is trouble (5)
UPSET – UP + SET, a Quickie clue.
13 What’s lab beaker if mistreated? (9)
BREAKABLE – anagram of LAB BEAKER.
14 Widespread disturbing pain vexes (9)
EXPANSIVE – anagram of PAIN VEXES
16 Burden of working with America (4)
ONUS – ON + US.
18 Attempt to keep old system of weights (4)
TROY – TR(O)Y.
19 Left making improvements, removing black text (9)
LETTERING – L + [b]ETTERIING.
22 Nearly run over brownish-grey butterfly (9)
BRIMSTONE – BRIM + STONE, where ‘brim’ is a verb.
24 Pop concert books joint (5)
GIGOT – GIG + O.T.   One I DNK, but the cryptic is absolutely clear.
25 Ancient religion’s home is in Jamaica (7)
JAINISM – JA(IN, IS)M, one I just biffed.
26 Good film for an actor: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, say (7)
VEHICLE – double definition.
28 Courteous man entertaining English author (5)
GENET – GEN(E)T, far from a ‘gent’.
29 Drug agent is suspect plant (9)
NARCISSUS – NARC + IS + SUS.   ‘Narc’ is actually the Romany word for ‘nose’, and indicates a police spy, but crosswords are not the place for historically correct word usage.

Down
1 Split with female’s certain (7)
FISSURE – F IS SURE.
2 Shoot mate in Chicago (3)
BUD – double defintion, one US slang, as we don’t have chinas over here.
3 What attracts smokers — nearly ten outside one small building (8)
NICOTINE –  N(I COT)INE.   For usage of ‘cot’ to mean ‘cottage’, check out the poetry of Coleridge.
4 What some substitute for chocolate over cutting sugar, perhaps (5)
CAROB – CAR(O)B.
5 Like wet weather to increase, making river into lake (9)
INCLEMENT – INC[-r,+L]EMENT, a chestnutty letter-substitution clue.
6 Father on the continent imports British wig (6)
PERUKE – PER(UK)E.
7 Present flags in support of squadron’s foremost flyer (4,7)
SNOW BUNTING – S[quardon] + NOW BUNTING.
8 Formal speech where one usually sleeps (7)
ADDRESS – double definition.
12 Belief in lie after drink is taken (11)
SUPPOSITION –  SUP + POSITION
15 Where Douglas is stirring semolina with force (4,2,3)
ISLE OF MAN –  anagram of SEMOLINA + F, a place that is seldom fully named in the crossword, usually appearing as ‘Man’ or ‘IOM’.
17 Iron is hung all over the place in a Chinese system (4,4)
FENG SHUI – FE + anagram of IS HUNG
18 Mug finding something amusing about British prison (4,3)
TOBY JUG – TO(B)Y + JUG
20 Conjecture about origins of the latest chicken (7)
GUTLESS – GU(T[he] L[atest])ESS
21 String player needing no book for help (6)
ASSIST – [b]ASSIST
23 Young fish always around loch (5)
ELVER – E(L)VER, a stock fish in US puzzles.
27 Reduced price for lettuce (3)
COS – COS[t]

74 comments on “Times 26959 – A new Olympic sport?”

  2. 12:59 so for me definitely on the easy side. I remember having to look up Jain at the tender age of 15 in 1964 on first hearing Buffy Sainte-Marie’s song “Universal Soldier” and it has stuck in my mind ever since.
  3. My hope of a sub-10 was done in by ADDRESS which was one of my “is that all there is?” ones – I didn’t quite believe it. I note that TfTT’s own Mohn came in comfortably under 4…. Not school puddings again. I’m thinking instead of a GIGOT d’agneau done a la Julia Child. If only it weren’t so expensive it would be on the menu at this address far more often. 10.28
  4. Easy peasy, though I was uncertain about UK being equated with British. I thought Britain was only England, Scotland, and Wales, excluding NI, and that the larger British Isles includes the Republic in addition to the UK.
      1. I didn’t recall ever seeing that before, and maybe I just know too many Northern Irish – if I had a penny for every time I’ve been chastised… or maybe that’s just another way of needling me. It’s not much different to irking the Canadians, Mexicans and Central Americans, and South Americans by equating America with US.
        1. Yes I’m sure it grates in NI… rather as the inclusion of Finland in Scandinavia does to the Finns. Usage doesn’t always respect political sensitivities!
  5. Easy enough, but held up by tiredness and maybe a bit more wine last night than needed for optimal solving. Like vinyl I never thought of Monte Carlo, but unlike vinyl I didn’t bother trying to explain that (I’m not blogging) so I just biffed in CARLOAD when the checkers appeared. Didn’t catch the wordplay on the butterfly clue either, so it was just a guess and my LOI. About 20 minutes or so despite not presenting a huge challenge. Regards.
  6. My wife took the T2 this morning so I looked at the main puzzle first. Was not confident after a no return on yesterday’s Dean puzzle.
    Some easy ways in and I continued without too much delay. I knew pretty much all the GK including the plant for once. Parsed Carload and LOI was the butterfly -unknown but clearly clued. I don’t time my efforts on the 15x15s but under an hour and therefore a PB. David
    PS the QC seems harder to finish -stuck on two!
  7. 20m or thereabouts in an interrupted solve. I might have twitched under 20, had I kept up the concentrated flow. But I didn’t and so I didn’t. But I did enjoy the puzzle and the blog so thank you setter and blogger. COD to 16a for yet again reminding us of why those schooldays weren’t the best days of our lives after all.
  8. Well, I beat the blogger (by all of three seconds) and this is certainly my best time ever. Very easy, but I put in SNOW BUNTING from wordplay and fortunately didn’t take the time to check it later, as I was intending to do. JAINISM and TOBY JUG were my only unknowns, but they went in from wordplay. And FIBONACCI was no problem for a mathematician, of course. The really cool thing about Fibonacci numbers is that they can be found in nature in the strangest places, for example if on a pine cone you follow the line of scales in two different directions from a common starting point and count scales along each path until the two paths meet, you will have counted two successive Fibonacci numbers. And as a reminder about what they are: the first two are 0 and 1, and then you keep generating a new one by adding the last two already generated. So 0,1 is followed by 1=1+0, 2=1+1, 3=2+1, 5=3+2, then 8, 13, 21 and so on. Fibonacci considered these numbers in order to answer a question about breeding rabbits: if a pair of rabbits produces one new male-female pair of children every month, the children also breed, and rabbits never die, how many rabbits will a single pair engender in a year?

    Edited at 2018-02-12 09:45 pm (UTC)

  9. 21:20. Nice n’ easy. I had all but 22ac done in around 15 mins and was on course for a PB but needed an alphabet trawl to get the “brim” bit of it. That pushed my time out to way over 20 mins. Though now I think I have seen this particular butterfly in a previous puzzle. I liked it when the penny dropped (with a clang) on “half the rally” and the image of Douglas and his frenzied semolina stirring.
      1. Yes, well done Dr Thud. I meant to reply yesterday but I was sunk in misery at my inability to splee Fibonacci 🙂
  12. 6:55 and a PB by more than a minute. Count me in as another who enjoyed 1a. And if anyone cares here is a programme in Olivetti P101 machine code that prints it…
    AV
    +
    Exchange
    Print
    V
    1 up
    V
  13. 28 mins so quick for me even if ponderous compared to others. Would have been faster if I hadn’t been eating lunch at the same time …

Comments are closed.