Times 27501 – enough already.

65 comments on “Times 27501 – enough already.”

1. This was less work than yesterday’s. Biffed a couple: 22ac, of course, being obtuse when it comes to hiddens, 24ac–got the ALGEBRA, couldn’t for the life of me remember BOOLEAN. DNK LAND GIRL. 12ac and 14ac make an unpleasant pair (they both use ‘over’, too, to indicate reversal). I can sympathize with any non-Jewish solver faced with GOLEM and MAROR; I’m Jewish, and I’D never heard of MAROR. Nor is the definition accurate: the symbolic meal is the Seder, at which maror–bitter herbs–is eaten. It’s certainly not a meal in itself, although it is symbolic. This is definitely a Mephisto clue, quite out of place here. Is the badly misnamed Scholastic Aptitude Test used in the UK as well?

   Edited at 2019-11-06 06:59 am (UTC)

   1. I was going to remark upon the proximity of EMETIC and EVACUANT but somehow let it pass.
      1. 😀😀
   2. We have Standard Assessment Tasks, Kevin. Parents like them because they give an idea of the school’s performance and their child’s abilities. Teachers hate them, for much the same reasons..

      Edited at 2019-11-06 08:45 am (UTC)

2. Like our blogger I started rather well in the NW (although I spotted RAITA as my second one in) but then things slowed down and eventually ground to a halt in the SW and eventually looked up the word preceding ALGEBRA to get myself going again. I’d vaguely heard of the B word but never in connection with algebra in the long-ago days when I was forced to study it.

   I echo the comments above regarding the obscurities at 6dn and 11ac. Although they were gettable from wordplay either one of them would have been enough for one puzzle, but two AND having them intersecting was just too much.

   Mr Crisp had a refreshing attitude to household chores: ‘There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse. It’s just a matter of not losing your nerve.’

   My solve was a few minutes under an hour but a technical DNF because of BOOLEAN.

   1. I believe he would have preferred to be referred to as Miss Crisp.
      1. You may be right but in his show that I saw he referred to himself often in the third person as ‘Mr Crisp’.

         1. I didn’t even know he had a show; I was just inferring from his use of ‘Miss’ for every person, male or female, that he mentioned.
            1. He did ‘An Evening With…’ show which toured extensively and was recorded to video. Others too, I think.
3. Well, everybody’s heard of a “seder,” so maybe it’s hard to know where to draw the line. But that was a new one to me too. I think I’ve come across the Indian yogurt before (though only in crosswords). Also new to me was LAND GIRL.
   1. I’ve never heard of a Seder, so not quite everyone.
      1. Well, you hadn’t, but now that you have…
         Seriously, I’m sure I’ve seen “seder” in crosswords before, and apparently it’s been in one here at least twice, while MAROR has appeared only in, indeed, a Mephisto.
      2. Me neither
4. 14:10. I don’t mind obscurities when the wordplay is clear, which was true of GOLEM and MAROR. 24ac BOOLEAN ALGEBRA is pretty harsh though: if you don’t know the term at all the answer is close to impossible to get from the wordplay, not least because BOOLEAN doesn’t look much like a word. There are hundreds of words fitting the pattern ?O??, and BOOB isn’t the most obvious synonym for ‘error’. If you think of GOOF first you’re sunk.
   1. I’ll be interested to see Jimbo’s comment if he appears today.
   2. Gosh, I just realized that I might have gotten stuck if I’d stopped to fully parse that one.
5. Well, that made a nice change for me: a puzzle completed in a reasonable time (37m 58s) and without the use of aids.
   I came to BOOLEAN eventually because that word has cropped up in the cryptic before, I remember.
   Thanks, Pip for the decode of RAITA and ANAEROBIC.
6. Like Pip I found this quite a mixed bag of the easy and the pretty difficult. I was left with several single clues rather than a section which i always find a bit daunting but I managed to persevere through them.

   MAROR feels like a Mephisto word to me, but I’m surprised that some have suggested GOLEM and RAITA as obscurities. Perhaps not everyone shares my penchant for Lord of the Rings (I came upon golem via the character Gollum though I’m not sure there’s a connection) and Indian food.

7. 40 mins with yoghurt, granola, etc.
   What breakfast fare – what with shellfire, people being murdered, almost killed, suffocating, emptying latrines, taking emetics and evacuants. Good grief, the setter must have had nightmares.
   But thanks to him/her and Pip.
8. Beaten by 24dn BOOLEAN, 11ac MAROR and 6dn GOLEM.
   Sir George Boole d.1864, and the Hebrew robot and dish have not crossed my path – even in my times in Israel.
   I was unable to shoo-away the Greek surgeon Galen. Bah!

   FOI 21dn OILED

   (LOI) 17ac POTTERED

   COD 1ac PARIS

   WOD 26ac BOOLEAN

   Not my cuppa rosie.

9. I didn’t know MAROR but what else could it be? I have never felt the need to blame the setter for me not knowing a word. Mostly, they can be solved regardless…
   No problem re golem, they turn up every five pages in Terry Pratchett, and how nice to see Boolean algebra, a write-in for me and an integral part of Google and various other searches so hardly obscure.

   1. NHO Terry Pratchett, so luckily I knew of the Golem. (Not to mention LEM. But ‘operate’= GO?)
      1. Terry Pratchett is a much-read, start with the Colour of Magic.
10. … and good luck Lindsay Hoyle. 23 minutes, with LOI POTTERED. I wasn’t sure about ‘potted’ for ‘killed’. Has the phrase got snooker, gardening or Egyptian burial allusions? I solved this mainly from the bottom up, After yesterday’s apocope success, I entered GOLEM and MAROR as if I knew. COD to PARALLEL-PARK, with BOOLEAN ALGEBRA deserving of an honourable mention. When was the Tower of BABEL moved to Westminster? I found this puzzle easier than it first looked. Thank you Pip and setter
    1. I was also doubtful about potted. Chambers has “To shoot (a creature) for the pot” so I presume that’s the definition intended here.
       1. Hah! We both took a pot-shot at the same comment 😀
    2. It brought Victorian big game hunters to my mind. Apparently a “pot shot” is a non-hunting-style shot at an animal intended for the cooking pot, rather than for stuffing and mounting. One of those phrases it never occurred to me to analyse before I looked it up just now…
    3. Lindsay Hoyle was congratulated by the Bishop for being Lancastrian, whereas he beat Chris Bryant, who is ordained.
       1. Being a Lancastrian is an honour conferred by God directly without the need of any intercession by the Church!
          1. From the Devil’s Dictionary: “Patriotism: the belief that a country is special, because you happened to have been born in it”
             .. Now Yorkshire, that *is* special 😉
11. This felt like a very different puzzle from yesterday’s, but I finished it in virtually the same time, pottering home in 46 minutes.

    I grew up in Gants Hill and have read a fair amount of Micheal Chabon to boot but I still didn’t recognise 11 MAROR. Happily the wordplay was clear and I know 6d GOLEMs very well; they come up all over the place in fantasy fiction, from Terry Pratchett to Grimm, so I knew I had the right first letter.

    Things I wasn’t so familiar with include 4a LAND GIRLs and Quentin Crisp, but at least I vaguely remembered enough from the trailers for the film version of The Naked Civil Servant from my youth to have some idea what was going on in 9d.

    FOI 1d PARALLEL PARK (you know you’ve been doing crosswords too long when Georgian explorers spring readily to your mind) LOI 19d SAVANT, only knowing of SATs from watching Buffy; I don’t have kids so the UK version is a new one on me.

    Edited at 2019-11-06 09:09 am (UTC)

    1. If you’re familiar with Chabon, you may remember that the Golem appears in his ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’.
       1. That’s one I haven’t read, but I already had “read more Chabon” on my to-do list, so I shall pick it as my next one.
12. Much easier today. Top to bottom finish without pyrotechnics. MAROR known from Mephisto and very clear wordplay.

    BOOLEAN ALGEBRA is the basic building block of computing. It’s the algebra of logic with 1=true and 0=false. I’d be surprised if Jack studied it at school in the 1950-60s. I certainly didn’t. However, it’s the sort of fundamental scientific knowledge that I feel everybody should have at least a passing acquaintance with

    1. It’s reassuring to know I wasn’t absent that day or dreaming out the window when it came up!

       Actually in another context I might have thought of BOOLEAN as it’s a word I’ve heard vaguely to do with computers but without having the faintest idea what it meant, so it was the reference to ALGEBRA that did for me and acted more as a diversion.

       Thanks for your succinct explanation above, btw, which confirms that I even knew the basic theory but not what it is called. I hope I shall remember it now.

    2. Was not taught it in the 50s, but my pupils were in the 60s.
13. 12:22 … the only unknown for me was MAROR, but with three checkers confidently in place the wordplay only led to one possibility. Like Pootle, I knew GOLEM from some favourite reading material, though in my case not LOTR but John Connelly’s Charlie Parker series, specifically The Killing Kind, where a rabbi retells the legend. For some reason, it’s always stuck with me.

    I liked the puzzle and the vocab., though I might have felt differently if I’d had a few more NHOs.

    COD to RAITA

14. I had come across Boolean logic, but not algebra. Fell into a Parallel Bars trap
15. No problem with golem, via Terry Pratchett, or maror, via general knowledge of religions. Very much on the wavelength for this, and would have been looking at a rare sub 10 minutes, but spent too much time wondering what a herdseat could be. (Something the drover puts on the leading cow, perhaps?)
16. A slow 19:55 but after two fails already this week I was keen to finish without errors so found myself staring at 19d determined not to bung in an unparsed wrong answer.

    In the end I did just bung in SAVANT despite not parsing anything other than the S and being worried that a savant was more of a naturally gifted individual than a scholar. So a lucky escape.

    Golem isn’t obscure is it? Wikipedia lists nearly 40 instances of its appearance in popular culture. Like dcrooks and Jerry above I knew them from Terry Pratchett but they have also appeared in the likes of The Simpsons and Warcraft games.

    Edited at 2019-11-06 10:00 am (UTC)

17. Slow, but easier than yesterday, because the obscurity maror couldn’t be anything else. Knew golem from not Terry Pratchett but John Sladek: “Roderick.” The story of a young robot growing up with all the usual experiences: hunted by the CIA, kills his stepfather in a locked-door mystery, adopted by cross-dressing communists, kidnapped by gypsies, sold into slavery, joins the circus, lynched by an angry mob, etc. etc. And studied Boolean algebra, though it was very slow to arrive. Savant LOI after a few minutes pondering, SATs only vaguely recognised and no idea what the acronym was.
18. Yes, I had ‘writer’s block” too for quite some time. And I went chasing Stanley in Africa for a while. I’ll add another GOLEM reference – I knew it from the story of that name by Isaac Bashevis Singer. I agree with Kevin about “seder” being the meal and the bitter herbs just a component of it. Even in NYC (where you absorb Judaica by osmosis just from walking the supermarket aisles at certain times of year) I’d not heard of MAROR but it wasn’t a tough guess. Around here grated horseradish represents the herbs Perhaps they induced the setter’s mal d’estomac. 20.23
    1. It was horseradish chez nous, in San Francisco. There’s no doubt something in the Talmud about what the herbs should be, but horseradish is bitter and easily obtained.
19. ….and repent at leisure. Fortunately I mark any clues I’ve biffed and revisit them before stopping the timer, so I spared myself a DNF.

    I suppose there’s nothing really wrong with this puzzle, but I didn’t get much entertainment from it.

    If an astronaut has flu, does he take LEMsip ?

    FOI APPEAR
    LOI RAITA (and then amended MAROR)
    COD EXTEMPORE
    TIME 14:56

    Edited at 2019-11-06 11:14 am (UTC)

20. I started off with RAITA, which I’ve had as part of Indian meals. I quickly biffed RAISE ONES GLASS, but did parse it just before submitting. GOLEM was vaguely familiar, but MAROR was totally unknown. POTTERED, EXTEMPORE and EMETIC held out until almost the end, but the denouement was SAVANT which I was reluctant to enter until I saw the parsing with a sigh of relief. The Burroughs Series L/TC which you’d find in most of the High Street banks in the 1970s, came with a giant Logic Book which contained the entire circuit description in Boolean terms. I once spent a couple of days translating part of one into a conventional circuit diagram to trouble shoot a processor fault with an oscilloscope. The processor was on 4 circuit boards rather than a single chip and was built from TTL logic gates in dual inline 16 leg packages. We had extender boards to mount the suspect board clear of the backplane and spring loaded chip clips to put on the ICs to clip the scope probes to. 38:56. Thanks setter and Pip.
    On edit: Just found this link to a retired Burroughs engineer’s blog: http://vinchad.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-visit-to-barclays-bank-archive-to.html

    Edited at 2019-11-06 11:33 am (UTC)

21. 20 mins. Golem from Kingsley Amis’s ‘Jake’s Thing’. Maror from wordplay. Boolean, not sure; I might have remembered it from using DBAN to format hard drives. Thanks pip.
22. Sometimes I find wordier clues more difficult – too many possible ways to break them down – but today’s fell into place in good order. Knew Golem from reading and Boolean from Uni; found Marboro and Raita clearly clued. I liked Anaerobic. Thks setter, Pip.
23. From wiki:
    4. (Britain) Statutory Assessment Test. A national curriculum assessment, or exam.
    I would hate “Aptitude” if it was a result on my child. I don’t think savant = scholar.
    andyf
    1. ‘Savant’ is currently the –dare I say it?– PC term for ‘idiot savant’.
24. 11’11”, only two minutes slower than the QC today. Dnk MAROR was the bitter herbs at a Seder meal. Mungo was remembered pretty quickly, up the Niger. BOOLEAN a write-in, though only briefly studied. Knew GOLEM from horror films, clay man comes to life. ANAEROBIC from when I used to jog. Potted as killed also known, as in ‘Pot that one’. GK very helpful today, thanks pip and setter.
25. Not easy today, and I was held up by being unsure about ‘potted’ (never heard the usage) as well as being convinced that 22a was an anagram of PANICIB[o]RE. Oh, and for some reason thinking that 22a said “end of July”.

    SAVANT was my LOI after 13m 34s. COD to the well-hidden ANAEROBIC.

    GOLEM & MAROR unknown but easy to get from wordplay.

26. 22:57. Biffed my LTI – RAITA and SAVANT. Never heard of MAROR but easy enough to deduce.
27. Got off to a very quick start and did about three quarters in 25 minutes or so, which is very fast for me, but then – as is often the way – ground to a halt with one and a quarter to go. The quarter was …lean algebra, and yet again, I was undone by my lack of knowledge of mathematical terms. That held up extempore. Again, I could see most of the structure but not quite enough 😕

    Without wishing to open a can of worms, I think we should be careful about assuming and stating that something very well known to us should therefore be known to everyone else – we probably all have knowledge / specialist terminology that we regularly use, but others don’t. I don’t need to be familiar with Boolean algebra to use my phone etc. My electronic engineer husband undoubtedly will be. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be open to learning new stuff, of course!

    It’s the same with GK – sometimes I’m quite surprised when someone here says they’ve never heard of something that is well-known to me, and I have to remind myself that the question is only easy if you know the answer. I will endeavour to remember various forms of fraction and algebra for future reference though!

    That brings me onto the same couple of clues that troubled some others – golem and maror. I vaguely knew the word golem but not what it was, and didn’t know / remember maror, but the wordplay was clear and I entered both confidently without checking first. The sign of a fair clue, I would say.

    FOI Raita
    LOI Emetic (not counting extempore and Boolean algebra)
    COD A toss-up betwen nosedive and parallel park
    DNF after 45 minutes with two to go

    1. I think previous discussion has revealed there are only two sorts of knowledge:

       1) Things I Happen to Know = “General Knowledge”, any educated person should be ashamed not to know these things.

       2) Things I Don’t Know = ridiculously obscure and technical, have no place in any decent crossword.

       Hope this helps 🙂

       1. Well yes, it does. You’ve certainly summed up the situation very neatly! But does that mean I should be ashamed of not knowing about Boolean algebra, or can I classify it as obscure and technical? 😉
          1. One of the good things about this system is that you are the sole judge…
             1. I’m going with obscure and technical for now, then, and when / if the phrase comes up again, and when / if I remember it, I shall claim a wide range of GK! Of course, that would actually then be true 😊

28. Another Pratchett reader, so just the one pause for thought where my GK was lacking – MAROR was new to me but the wordplay is more than adequate, I think. A second pause for a gap in vocabulary in POTTERED, where I don’t recall hearing ‘potted’ in that sense, but the likes of PATTERED and POTHERED and PUTTERED made evsn less sense, so in it went, with fingers crossed.
29. Definitely felt a lot easier than yesterday’s. Didn’t we have Boolean something else recently? On the general knowledge debate, I’ve always thought one of the pleasures of crosswords was learning new words. So am happy to add maror to the list – though how long it’ll stay in the brain is another matter. The Arabic murr means bitter and must be related to maror (and our myrrh for that matter).
30. Thirty-eight minutes, putting my cerebral lightbulb at the dimmer end of the range. The last couple of minutes were spent trying to justify RAITA, so thanks to Pip for clarifying. MAROR was of course an NHO, and didn’t look right however long I stared at it.

    As to the question of whether BOOLEAN LOGIC is “obscure and technical” (which, technically speaking, would be “obscure AND technical”), I would say not (or rather, NOT). If I had to list the thousand most fundamental “technical” words and phrases, BOOLEAN LOGIC would easily make the list. Compare that with the numbers of composers, painters, philosophers, cricketing terms, battles, grammatical terms, poets, sportsmen, singers and other “non-technical” words that we geeks are expected to know as “general knowledge”. Bear in mind also that BOOLEAN LOGIC is arguably as central as binary numbers to the operation of almost anything with a plug or a battery in it. Without BOOLEAN LOGIC, your car won’t start and you won’t be able to ring the RAC.

31. Tougher for me than most seem to be making out. As a computer geek, I’ve heard of BOOLEAN LOGIC but NEVER has it been referred to in my nearly 40 years at the coalface as ALGEBRA – so was fairly stumped by that.

    The Jewish pairing was much kinder, but I did struggle with LAND GIRL – just couldn’t work out what was going on, and consequently LENGTH took its time.

32. Went through quickly, a nice change from yesterday, but I came here to find an error. PUTTERED instead of POTTERED. Never heard of POTTERED, and didn’t think of ‘killed’ as ‘potted’, and frankly wouldn’t have, ever. Also DNK MAROR, but it came from wp; I had heard of GOLEM but had no idea it had a Hebrew derivation. Regards.
33. DNF. Bah! All done in half an hour but my boob was a goof, hence Goolean rather than Boolean algebra. I’m sure Boolean has appeared before and I should have remembered it but once I had a reasonable synonym for error Goole looked as good a name for a mathematician as Boole and I saw no reason to spend any more time on it. I was more worried that a pink square was going to appear in raita where I completely missed the parsing. No difficulties with the unknown maror because of the unambiguous wp.
34. Unless I have missed a comment above, the word play is NOT obvious. It could be morar.
    So this is a very unfair clue – an unknown word with two possible solutions.
    Morar is of course a loch in the west of Scotland, but did not seem relevant.
    1. It can’t really be MORAR, as then the word around the ring O would be MRAR(y)

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