Times 26995 – Monday Monster

83 comments on “Times 26995 – Monday Monster”

1. Having just finished, I agree it wasn’t easy! Loved to see V appear this side of the proceedings. I was doubtful about the definitions of 2dn, 3dn, but the dictionary supports them. crosswords are indeed a foreign language! Thanks for parsing 1dn: I assumed “about”was CA, which left me nowhere in explaining the final GE.
2. Smacked in BICAMERAL after mere seconds and assumed I was heading for record time. Quod non. Thirty minutes later, I’d barely made a dent in the puzzle and fell asleep.

   After I woke and walked the dog, I gave it another half hour and had it all done but the NULLIPARA/GLAMORGANSHIRE crossing.

   Good lord. Not for me.

   Edited at 2018-03-26 02:17 am (UTC)

3. Are the setters onto us? Could be.

   I did complete the puzzle, in 61 minutes. You really have to trust the cryptics to get the unknowns, but I’m used to that from Mephisto. I DNK ‘coupe’, ‘iodises’ and ‘nullipara’, but the cryptics clearly point to them. ‘Midstream’ gave me more trouble, since I naively believed I was looking for something along the lines of a pistil or stamen, and so I put in the plausible-looking ‘mastiderm’.

   Fortunately, the setter did not know that ‘Rub-A-Dub’ is a musical style halfway between reggae and dancehall, or he could have thrown many solvers into total confusion.

   1. I’d forgotten about the Ginger Man! We should reconvene there sometime soon. Sadly my summer holiday this year is to Vancouver, which may or may not be closer than London but probably won’t permit a stopover in the Big Apple either way.
   2. My friend and i collect reggae themed xword clues and this was a classic. We had dreadlock not so long ago. Rub a dub is one of those ‘know it when you hear it’ sub genres. Also a dance of course but that’s another story! T
4. VERLAINE? Never heard of ‘im! This 16dn was my LOI.
   I wonder if HORRID will ever be an answer? Perhaps an anagram indicator.

   My time was gorgeous. I was on the train right after Lord Ulaca’s who had his work cut out today.

   FOI 4dn RUB-A-DUB

   COD 16dn VERLAINE

   WOD 17ac GLAMORGANSHIRE with GINGERBREAD MAN close behind.

   I would imagine our American friends might baulk at 28ac DUNSTABLE – but are at least two in the US. One in New Hampshire the other in Massachusetts. And we have TRUMPTON! Sad!

   Edited at 2018-03-26 04:04 am (UTC)

   1. Never mind our American friends baulking at DUNSTABLE, what about the people who live nearby (including, I believe, your brother) having it defined as an “industrial town”? Like its neighbour Leighton Buzzard where I live it’s a market town with a population of about 35,000. There may be a small factory or two, but it’s still largely rural in character. I don’t know the American ones but I couldn’t find anything on Wiki to suggest that they are particularly industrial either.

      Edited at 2018-03-26 04:44 am (UTC)

      1. I see now that ulaca mentioned Bedford Trucks, which I admit I had forgotten about, but it was closed and demolished over a quarter of a century ago to be replaced by a retail park and small-scale manufacturing units. I’d still maintain that even with its one old assembly plant employing about 4,000 people, Dunstable never qualified for the description ‘industrial town’ which to me suggests heavy industry blighting the landscape in every direction. It’s a market town.
      2. For Jacket:

         Interesting to hear the comments about Leighton Buzzard where I lived for several years connected to the RAF during the early 1960s – stationed at Stoke Hammond and lived on Wing Rd and Rock Lane in Linslade. A relative newcomer to the Times puzzle over the last two years and did struggle with this one! Especially Dunstable where we looked after the aerial farm on the Downs. Left LB in 1967 to a job in East Africa for 3 years before venturing permanently to OZ.

         Colin Robinshaw

   2. I dated a woman from Dunstable, MA, when we were in college. I can assure you that Dunstable Mass is as rural and non-industrial as they come.
5. I confess to losing patience near the end and cheating (Word Wizard) for NULLAPARA, and then thinking, Damn, I must have seen that in a puzzle sometime. I also checked my guess via Google for my last one inked in, Glamorganshire. I worked this in a couple sessions, with a break for an ordered-in dinner and the Quickie, and every time I was about to throw in the towel, another answer would materialize before my eyes. I hesitated to put in BICAMERAL, before parsing the anagram, because it surely does mean “in two houses,” so why “say”? I had the same reaction as Vinyl to seeing Verlaine in proximity to the Ginger(bread) Man. Had to take the AGE part of BIRDCAGE on faith (CA is “about” too… “knocking on” what? Heaven’s door?). I was trying to remember (or find!) some obscure botanical term for MIDSTREAM for longer than I would like to admit to.

   Edited at 2018-03-26 04:45 am (UTC)

   1. I wondered about this but figured that the houses in question aren’t always houses. In the context of Congress for instance if you refer to ‘the House’ it’s clear which chamber you mean.
      1. Right. I guess “house” was considered more a touch more metaphoric than “chamber” (“camera”).
6. Offline after a half-hour, managed to finish over lunch; so I think less than an hour in all, with DUNSTABLE LOI. (No idea whether it is or was industrial; ignorance can be of use at times.) A number of these took me an unaccountably long time and provoked a mutter of irritation when I finally saw the light: I had BREAD/_A_ and GINGER wouldn’t come, for instance. DNK ‘knocking on’, but assumed it must mean ‘age’, or why was it there? I’m positive we’ve had NULLIPARA, by the way, but it took forever to recall; as did GLAMORGANSHIRE–you people spend a lot of time rearranging your county lines and names.
   1. It came up once before, in 2009, as a hidden reverse.
      1. Odd; I can’t imagine remembering it from that far back, especially as a hidden. DUN, by the way, is another I’m sure we’ve had, although I knew it from elsewhere: people in Victorian novels are always being dunned by tradesmen ‘putting in their little bill’ (a phrase Lewis Carroll appropriates in ‘Alice’).
         1. It may havecome up since but that’s all the Google search found.

            Ref your comment about boundaries, yes indeed, and it’s all a load of adminstrative twaddle. It would take a brave person to tell a Yorkshireman that Yorkshire no longer exists just because it has been subdivided for the purposes of adminsitration. Glamorgan aka Glamorganshire, like Yorkshire, is an historic county and retains its identity as a whole despite being subdivided into West, Mid and South.

            Edited at 2018-03-26 06:43 am (UTC)

            1. My favourite wordplay among our administrative twaddle has emerged here in Bristol, where we sometimes use “CUBA” to refer to the surrounding area—”Counties that Used to Be Avon”!

               Edited at 2018-03-26 06:49 am (UTC)

               1. You guys have ruined the Monty Python “take this bus to Cuba” sketch!
                  1. No; it’s still a preposterous suggestion around here, but that’s because of the public transport rather than the distance 😀
7. As to the puzzle itself, I gave up overnight after an hour with nearly half the clues unsolved. My brain was working better after some sleep and I managed to finish the remainder in 15 minutes with the exception of NULLIPARA which I used aids to find as my LOI as I had simply lost interest by then. BICAMERAL I had forgotten but I see it came up some years ago with reference to Parliament clued rather appropriately as an anagram of ‘crime lab’! DUN as ‘demand to settle’ was unknown to me.

   Edited at 2018-03-26 05:21 am (UTC)

   1. Jack – My twin brother does indeed live in Leighton Buzzard.
      I did ponder the industrial bit, as at first I was heading for DONCASTER.

      With heavy industry now a thing of the past, maybe Dunstable’s light industries now make it a heavy hitter, as opposed to the ailing DONCASTER rust-belt.

      I remember DUNSTABLE best for its gliding.

      I hope to see you in May/June.

      1. Good grief yes, the splendid Downs! I thought only my family knew about the gliding, a pleasant, free outing in the Ford Classic on a Saturday afternoon watching the lazy circles of the planes with the occasional one right overhead with that gentle shsshing sound. Memories are made of this.
8. 18:30 … challenging for an undercaffeinated Monday morning but not too awful bad, and helped by a few speculative biffs early on. No yellow tape needed (I see the Aussies got a mention at 11a).

   Some great vocab. in here. I especially enjoyed the clue for GINGERBREAD MAN (which nowadays reflexively sparks “Do you know the muffin man?” for me).

   Can someone explain the “makes elementary changes” def. of IODISES to me? Chambers only gives “To treat with iodine” for iodise

   1. Iodisation is usually taken to mean the addition of iodide in a mixture rather than the displacement of another halide radical in a compound, which is what it can mean when a lighter halide such as a fluoride is being used. As such, I think the clue is misleading but then I’m feeling grumpy!
      1. Ah, yes. I suspected the setter might have been getting confused over the displacement of halide radicals (not!). Thank you for bringing some authority to the subject, even if I don’t understand a word of it
         1. As Kevin said about another clue, ignorance can be useful.
   2. Collins says ‘to treat or react with iodine or an iodine compound’. Whether reacting with something constitues an elementary change I will leave to the chemists, but when solving I just thought ‘like oxidises I suppose’.
      1. As a non-scientist, I simply assumed that if you iodise another element, its nature is changed.
9. I wondered about that; I got as far as thinking that well, iodine is an element, etc. So ‘elemental’ maybe rather than ‘elementary’.
10. Harder than Friday for me. Ashamed to say I never thought of 16d VERLAINE! A couple of the others in the south also eluded me: the unknown 14d NULLIPARA, and—one I probably should have got, despite not being too familiar with “carousal”—23a.
11. VERLAINE was also my LOI which probably goes to show that I wasn’t awake yet, forwarded clocks messing me around and so forth. Certainly this was challenging in parts and took me over the 15 minute mark which is tough for a Monday. NULLIPARA was one of my earlier entries, as I saw the
    ____IPARA ending and then had to rack my brains for what could precede it: and in general that characterised this crossword quite well, lots of stuff that had to be put together actually from wordplay, rather than just biffed in as (some of us) normally do. Good puzzle in other words!
    1. My Lord! Hang your head in shame!
       horrid
       1. Can we just call it “saving the best till last”?
    2. You’ve no idea how relieved I am to see that Verlaine was your LOI as it was mine too. My time was a tiny smidge more than yours too, and I can confirm that much muttering and a small amount of Tippex was required too

       1. I was very tired this morning but fair’s fair, it was a pretty stiff challenge for a Monday, no excuses.

          I may be started a new job whose stated start time is 8am (!) so there’s a possibility that I won’t be able to do the puzzles until at least lunchtime in future. Could prove a good thing to be honest!

          I would like to say though, in a slightly injured tone, that if SUE appears in a crossword I always put it in first!

12. 50 mins to DNF over yoghurt, compote, banana, granola.
    Couldn’t do the DNK Nullipara. Thought ‘one random woman’ was going to be in an invalid soldier. Ha.
    Mostly I liked: ‘knocking on’, Gingerbread Man, No Mad and Verlaine.
    Having lived in Scotland for three years now, the one bit of Scots creeping into my parlance is ‘No bother’.
    That reminds me of the man in the Glasgow patisserie asking, “Is that a scone or a meringue?”. To which the answer was, “No, you’re right, it’s a scone.”
    Thanks setter and Ulaca.

    Edited at 2018-03-26 07:25 am (UTC)

    1. “Mostly I liked: Verlaine”

       I hear this a lot…

13. So now I’m feeling quite bullish about my 20 minutes (and 56 seconds), and I really liked this puzzle too. Maybe it’s the odd slightly wonky definitions: the nearest thing Dunstable has to industry is the HQ of Costa Coffee, and making “elementary changes” for just “adding iodine to”. I think while solving the latter, my mind was rather thinking ionising and getting that confused with mucking about with elementary particles, which it also isn’t. There are times when it pays to be a bit vague about some things.
    Obviously, without this glorious company, I would not have known about VERLAINE, and I take it on trust that the original was a contemporary of Jules Verne, whose house in Amiens I have visited: well worth it.
    And I have to confess that NULLIPARA (which is somewhere in my list of odd words I’ll never need to use) insistently made me think of Australia’s treeless plain as much as anything.
    In defence of the setter, isn’t defining GLAMORGANSHIRE as an old area of the UK valid even if in some contexts it still exists? It’s been around a while, after all, and the setter didn’t say ex or former.
    Fave of the Day: NOMAD

    Edited at 2018-03-26 08:00 am (UTC)

    1. I had IONISING at first then changed it to match the verse…
14. As with others I found there were more clues than usual which I had to construct from wordplay, which is ultimately more satisfying. I did end up biffing the two long ones though, and they took me some time to post-parse once I had finished.

    I like to think the appearance of Verlaine was done with a nod to the forum so look forward to seeing other stalwarts appearing soon.

    1. I don’t think Messrs. brnchn or z8b8d8k will be appearing anytime soon! POOTLE would be fine.
       1. I already have, in the absolutely magnificent 26698 last April. Made me go all unnecessary.
          1. Dear unnecessary,
             And what was the magic word? – Do tell!

             Edited at 2018-03-26 12:26 pm (UTC)

             1. If I remember correctly, there were 8 “Z”s in the grid…
                1. Zowie! Fame indeed! Zzzzzzzz!
                   There was a whole bunch of Cs in a recent ‘Club Monthly Special’. They formed a C to celebrate the setter’s century! The setter (Nelson) was almost beside himself! However, from my estimate only four people finished it!

                   Edited at 2018-03-26 02:48 pm (UTC)

15. I liked this setter’s style and I must have got on his/her wavelength relatively quickly. Didn’t know the meaning of “DUN” but it couldn’t be anything else. CODs to GINGERBREAD MAN and MIDSTREAM.
16. Shouldn’t 20d start “Old money…”? Apart from Nullipara, which I worked out all by my little self, I thought this was fairly straightforward. If, today we have Verlaine, can we expect Rimbaud anytime soon?
    35m 55s
    1. The escudo is a unit of currency in several former Portuguese colonies.
       1. I have been learning all the currencies of the world with a geography quiz app recently, so the Cape Verdean escudo sprang at once to mind!
          1. Thanks, Verlaine!
       2. Thanks, Rob. I should have realised that.
17. So much for the easy Monday puzzle! Although I took just over an hour, I don’t seem to have done too badly, judging by many of the comments above. Lots of ingenious wordplay combined with good surface reads (e.g BICAMERAL).

    Nice to see homage paid to our distinguished Friday blogger at 16D.

18. …away from this stinker squared. I needed a heavy dose of checkers to complete this in the hour, so a DNF. I think this is the sort of crossword where the professionals win hands- down against us armchair enthusiasts. DNK NULLIPARA. Filled in RUB-A-DUB more or less as a joke. I was determined that the industrial town was DONCASTER which at least fitted the definition if not the cryptic. COD to GLAMORGANSHIRE. I’m sure glam organs abound at the SWALEC. They probably read little else in DUNSTABLE. Well done U for deciphering this, and setter for destroying my smug equanimity.
19. DNF. I thought the clues (at least the ones I solved in the 90 minutes before I had to quit) were very nicely constructed – clever and with interesting surfaces.
20. On my wavelength too, an excellent puzzle which took 14.38 to complete.

    FOI NEPAL
    LOI VERLAINE (rather slack of me !)
    WOD NULLIPARA, which I fortunately knew.
    COD BIRDCAGE since I’m certainly “knocking on”. In this part of the world (South Manchester), we used to tell our mates that we walked to school with that we would knock on for them in the morning, even though doorbells had long since become the norm.

    I agree on the redundancy of “industrial” as regards Dunstable, although “redundancy” was all too relevant there when Vauxhall moved out.

    Thanks Ulaca and setter.

21. Two wrong in 40 mins. Cauge for Coupe and Merlaire for our esteemed Verlaine.

    Spin out for Spin off delayed me and I don’t recall meeting Dun before. I thought drinks stout was good.

22. 12:14. I seem to have been on the wavelength for this one, and I enjoyed it a lot. As others have said it’s a wordplay puzzle and I like wordplay puzzles.
    COD 16dn of course.

    Edited at 2018-03-26 08:47 am (UTC)

23. Completely off the scale for me but crawled home in 87m. A lot of that was spent on the 17ac/14d crossing, but they both succumbed eventually. Everything fair, though, but rub-a-dub was unknown to me as a drumbeat.
24. 9m 10s for me. There were a few write-ins and biffs, but lots more where I didn’t know at least one of the words flying around – I’d never come across DUN or COUPE in those contexts, and never heard of NULLIPARA at all (my LOI after quite a struggle). I also wouldn’t have used SPIN-OFF to mean merchandise, so I needed most of the checkers before committing to it.
    My COD goes to 3d, which managed to use the old chestnut ‘flower’ in such a way that I didn’t notice it for a long time – and I have to admit that the meaning of ‘theatre’ in 24d didn’t strike me at all until reading this page.
    Thanks to Verlaine for meaning I got 16d. Never heard of him otherwise!
25. I spent ages getting started with just COUPE in the top half. After 6 minutes I saw GLAMORGAN. I used to live in West Glamorgan but no more – although I haven’t moved. I found it easier to start at the bottom and work up. BICAMERAL/BIRDCAGE corner was my LOI. A bit of a struggle but got there in the end. 41 minutes. Ann
26. 48′, would have been a lot faster if I’d got GLAMORGANSHIRE earlier. NULLIPARA constructed wholly from wordplay, is there a male equivalent? COD to 6d as it made me smile. Thanks ulaca and setter.
    1. I think all males are probably nullipari, aren’t they? Parturition just isn’t our specialty.

       Edited at 2018-03-26 12:43 pm (UTC)

       1. I am torn between RELIEVED and SMART.
27. DNF – gave up and resorted to aids after about half an hour with SE & NW corners nearly blank. After having the anagrams resolved for me I was able to complete the NW, giving me enough checkers to resolve 17ac, enabling me to see VERLAINE. With the possibility of DONCASTER then being excluded, I could complete the SE in just under an hour, but haven’t claimed that on the leaderboard.
28. With my moniker, time spent drinking in the Dun Cow in Durham as a student and a youth spent reading Leslie Charteris’s Saint books, the various meanings of DUN are no mystery to me, but, like others, I had a MER over DUNSTABLE being described as industrial. Dun has come up in that sense in recent puzzles, and NULLIPARA, having defeated me in a previous puzzle(Jumbo, I think) came to mind fairly quickly with the helpful clue. COUPE went in from wordplay, RUB A DUB from the enumeration, rub and bud backwards. NEPAL was my first aha, that’s definite, entry. Liked No Mad! The Ginger Man, written by my almost namesake, was familiar for different reasons from Jonathan, Paul and Matthew. My first stab at the currency was EDARTO, soon changed when I remembered SCUD. I didn’t bother parsing the rest of the Shire once I saw GLAM for glossy. BICAMERAL went in from checkers and a feeling it was a word I’d heard of. The SE corner was the last to yield, with our esteemed VERLAINE last to fall, with a mental cry of eureka!. A most enjoyable puzzle. 34:19. Thanks setter and Ulaca.
29. 16:09 and I felt mostly on wavelength (for instance the first missile I thought of was SCUD) until I got to 16d. I thought I’d exhausted all the French authors I know and it took a while for the centime to drop.
    1. You’re all the worst, all of you 😛
30. It took until FARSI to get a toehold and I thought uh-oh, a repeat of Friday, but the down clues got going quite smoothly after that. As Kevin says, in Trollope (and Heyer) characters are always being dunned by the boot or breeches maker so no trouble with DUNSTABLE. COUPE unknown here too but “mousse” just wouldn’t work. The one I had trouble with was BIRDCAGE – (I’d written in “bearcage”) so it goes. And I spent some time trying for “mastiderm” as part of a plant.

    Nice to see the name check for VERLAINE. I’ve had the occasional one with my very tiresome Shakespearean namesake, and it’s quite a frisson even if unintended by the setter. There are three enormous hospitals at the end of our street and I see the hordes of medical personnel coming from the subway in their SCRUBs and always think – I hope they change into clean ones before tending to patients. 24.57

    Edited at 2018-03-26 12:27 pm (UTC)

    1. They come to work in scrubs? I thought the whole point of scrubs was that what goes on in the hospital stays in the hospital. (I remember reading a couple of years ago that doctors were being advised to stop wearing neckties, which accumulate all kinds of microbes and are never cleaned.) I’m reminded of poor Ignaz Semmelweiss, who discovered that by making his students wash their hands after working on corpses and before examining pregnant women he could drastically lower the incidence of childbed fever; he was driven out of Vienna and wound up in an insane asylum.
31. I don’t think my name (or even its reverse) will be appearing anytime soon! The top half went in very rapidly, and I thought – oh it’s Monday. GLAMORGANSHIRE was a write-in, but the bottom half remained for far too long, and eventually I gave up and looked up the unknown/known French author. I was brought up near Dunstable, and as others was rather surprised to find it be industrial. Maybe the setter was thinking of Luton?
    1. We’ve been halfway there with Quartermaster 🙂
32. 30 mins. Tricky but fair. COD 16dn, natch 🙂
33. I was diluted to see this one hailed as a “monster” by our esteemed blogger, as it makes me feel less bad abut my 51-minute solve. No obscure answers (though I suppose NULLIPARA might have thrown some), so I can only conclude that this was a very artfully built piece of puzzlery.
34. Normally have a look at this on a Monday. Got Pakistani and Nepal and decided to retreat to the blog. A good decision it seems. David
35. … and I had pencilled in Rub a Dub. D
36. Ouch, took me an hour or so, ending as others did with VERLAINE. A lot of blank staring interspersed with some insight. Regards.
37. Doh! A dozy DNF for me in two 25 minute sessions either side of work this morning with another five minutes after work. I remember thinking “Tots? Aha, must be nips” but then proceeded to write in snip off rather than spin off. I agree with others that this was hard and made you pay attention to the wordplay. Didn’t know that sense of dun or Dunstable as an industrial town. Also wondered what the cockney public house had to do with tattoos. Thanks for the Bananarama memories at 15dn, blogger.
38. Hot on the heels of Friday’s effort, another one where my first thought was that my holiday habit of solving in relaxed mood at the end of the day was making for a very dilatory performance. Once more, however, it turned out that it wasn’t just me. As others have said, harsh but fair, even in the case of the very resistant NULLIPARA (following the discussion above, it turns out that I blogged a previous appearance of PRIMPARA and still utterly failed to remember that or any of its near relatives. I must also admit I only reached our favourite French poet after exploring possibilities such as SARTRANE, the well-known modernist who I just made up.
39. 45 mins for all but Verlaine which I couldn’t get in spite of two alphabet trawls. Could have been a very good time if Nepal had fallen quicker and I had had the correct anagrist for Pakistani. And if I’d actually completed the puzzle …
40. Besides PRIMIPARA (as mentioned by Tim above) and today’s NULLIPARA, MULTIPARA also hovers in the wings prepared to strike.

    Less likely to pop up, but one never knows, are the pregnancy-related NULLIGRAVIDA, PRIMIGRAVIDA and MULTIGRAVIDA.

41. So glad you found it difficult – I found it impossible. Only managed a handfull of clues on my own.
42. I took 110 minutes to complete this, but I did get everything right. GLAMORGANSHIRE went in very late a day ago and then I had only 14dn left to do and left it for a day, but that did the trick. The wordplay helped a lot, and a bit of guessing on general principles of Latin borrowings in English (since that’s the only Latin I know, except of course for the delightful phrase “de apibus semper dubitandum est” from the Latin translation of Winnie the Pooh).

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