Times 27711 – Welcome to Nubicuculia, where there’s no social distancing.

90 comments on “Times 27711 – Welcome to Nubicuculia, where there’s no social distancing.”

1. Half an hour for all but GRAMPUS and DAMSON, then another fifteen minutes to throw in the towel. Ah well.
   1. Being a sports fan helps with the whale, as Gary Lineker ended his career as a player at Nagoya Grampus Eight, the Hamilton Academical of Japanese football franchises.

      Edited at 2020-07-08 06:40 am (UTC)

      1. I did know the whale—they’ve come up before, and I think “snoring like a grampus” comes up in the Essays of Elia. My real unknown was that “marg” was ever spelled like that!
2. I was puzzled by a couple of these, like GRAMPUS, where my query was exactly Jack’s. I biffed 2d from the enumeration, never parsed past LAND. DODGE was another that took me a while to parse, as was LOI DAMSON, where I fixated on MA, as it were, forgetting DAM. I don’t know from snooker, but assumed it has BREAKs of some sort; anyway, the B K led me there. I don’t get SCAN; the upper-case bit I got, but to scan isn’t to search for. If I look in the night sky for Venus, I’m scanning the sky, not Venus; the hospital is not searching for me when they scan me.
   1. I think it’s just ‘search’, and ‘for’ is a filler/link word.
3. …A bad night’s sleep, so up early. 28 minutes, all found to be correct, but with fingers slightly crossed for SCAN and DODGE. LOI was RIDGE. I didn’t know the Pentagon was called the Department of Defense, but guessed it had to be. I thought of a CAT SCAN but couldn’t see the second part of the sentence quite fitting in. I was happy enough with the SUP of GRAMPUS, but I’d have spelt the spread as MARGE in those years when nobody could tell talk from mutter. COD to NETWORKED. Thank you Pip and setter.
4. Really enjoyed this and thought SCAN was very clever. LOI PROFITEER, where I was looking for a noun, for some reason.

   I learned WOKE from my daughter, but it didn’t click straight away, and I proffered ‘awake’ and ‘aroused’ the first couple of times I tried to use it, failing the hip test yet again.

   Edited at 2020-07-08 05:53 am (UTC)

5. My parsing of SCAN was the same as yours, Pip, but isn’t it in breach of the capital letters convention? Everywhere I’ve looked (and I note in your blog) it’s CAT, not cat.

   I think the definition underline at 1ac needs to include the apostrophe.

   I don’t understand the definition ‘heavy breather’ at 24. Is it really nothing more than something heavy that breathes?

   I had no idea what was going on in wordplay re DODGE or CLOUD-CUCKOO-LAND.

   ‘Woke’ in modern-speak always strikes me as an odd choice of word as the examples that come before me almost daily now seem to demonstrate an extreme form of naivety and tunnel vision and a distinct unawareness of wider issues.

   Edited at 2020-07-08 06:13 am (UTC)

   1. I have heard the expression, “Snore like a grampus”.
   2. Cat in lower case becomes CAT when the case is raised which is a type of scan methinks. I notice a few of the more reliable solvers have made a mistake. I would be interested to know what caught them out.
      1. Ah, I see what you mean and how the clue works now! It’s very clever. Thanks.
   3. Chambers has ‘someone who breathes heavily and loudly, a puffer and blower (archaic)’. I’m not always keen on terms that are only supported by Chambers as you know but this is readily deducible from the sound a dolphin makes when it surfaces.
6. 30 mins with yoghurt, granola, etc.
   Similar experience to Pip, held up by the Grampus Etagere Dodge gang.
   Couldn’t parse Cloud-cuckoo-land.
   Mostly I liked: Networked, Damson and COD to Woke.
   Thanks setter and Pip.
7. I enjoyed all of this and especially the brilliant typographic clue for SCAN, which I did not appreciate until coming here. When case is raised is very clever and not a device I’ve seen before.

   New vocab for me in GRAMPUS and ETAGERE but fairly clued. Just under the half hour, with several smiles. Thank you setter and Pip.

8. Held up by GRAMPUS (who spells it marg, really?), DAMSON and ETAGERE, and put in ‘maison’ because I’m stupid. Was quite quick up to then. But at least my slow time won’t get counted by the SNITCH!

   COD: WOKE followed by SCAN, both neat.

   Yesterday’s answer: the only element with more than five syllables is praseodymium, which is apparently named for being a twin the colour of leeks (twin leeks?). First correctly clued by keriothe.

   Today’s question: what was the Rembrandt painting properly called ‘Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq’ incorrectly nicknamed?

   1. Will this do?
      1. Yes
   2. I think I answered this before you’d asked, Angus. Incorrectly, it appears.
      1. How prescient!
9. 23.35, so another above average time, with the troubles coming in the same places.
   The trouble with GRAMPUS is that a heavy breather is obviously a GASPER, but after that nothing works and it’s hard to shift. Like (possibly) everyone else, I assumed 20’s mother had to be MA, and I even toyed with I (one R (close top her) IN for the well-known MAIRIN family of trees.

   SCAN is brilliant, but I didn’t see just how, read it the same way as Pip.

   I might have understood DODGE if I’d seen that the skipped letters came from GoEs, but I didn’t. There aren’t any others words to fit.

   ÉTAGÈRE I remembered, but not as a bookcase, which made solving rather harder.

   I discovered on Monday just how WOKE I’m not, with Sir John Cass College (together with everything else so named in the neighbourhood, even the wonderful and generous Foundation) announcing its change of name because of Cass’ association with the slave trade. My granddad was a lab tech at the College back in the day, and I couldn’t resist a sense of sadness and despair. I’ll try and get used to it, I suppose, but it feels wrong. Back to sleep?

   1. What is the opposite of woke now? It should be ‘asleep’, or perhaps ‘dormant’ like a volcano, but I fear it’s something unfriendlier. ‘Gammon’?
      1. I rather hope it’s not “gammon” as that’s a million miles away from how I am (or so I imagine). I fear we are getting to a stage where all we do is trade insult words Like some mythical orange president and never actually hear what we a really saying.

         We are going to need a better way of dealing with history than just deleting it, or we’ll end up not singing Amazing Grace because John Newton was a slave trader (sic) before he became an ardent abolitionist.

         “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones”.

         1. Removing a few statues doesn’t ‘delete’ history though, does it? As is often pointed out in this context they don’t have many statues of Hitler in Germany and he hasn’t exactly been forgotten. It is undoubtedly true though that there’s an awful lot of shouting past one another without listening in many of these ‘debates’.

            Edited at 2020-07-08 10:23 am (UTC)

            1. On statues, I agree: toppling them has become commonplace once the statuee has had his past (justly, of course) demonised. The history is not erased, rather the view of history has changed: “so let it be with Hitler” (and, no doubt, Stalin, Lenin, Hussain and others).

               But others are more nuanced, as (for me, at least) my cited instance of Sir John Cass, who was part of the Royal African Company and therefore implicated in slavery, but he was many other things besides and an extraordinary philanthropist whose foundations still benefit many people today.

               By the same argument, statues to many other prominent figures should come down: Charles 11, James 11, Samuel Pepys and John Locke (yes, that one) among many others.

               1. To my mind Cass (like Colston) is an otherwise insignificant historical figure who profited from the slave trade and used the resulting enormous wealth to launder his reputation via philanthropy. A discussion about whether we should continue to honour such men seems perfectly legitimate to me.
                  I don’t think there is anything other than a fringe view that statues of people like Locke (or Churchill or Jefferson) should be taken down. But that fringe gets a lot of attention because it makes for good outrage and helps those who want to undermine the whole concept.

                  Edited at 2020-07-08 12:37 pm (UTC)

                  1. Only by current standards would we think of people like Cass wanting to “launder” his slave trade profits. Back then, and even when anti-slavery kicked in, it was just business, legitimate trade, with no particular moral dimension. Like any good London merchant, Cass was just using his wealth (not all of which was slave-related) to benefit humanity nearer at home.
                     Maybe when the world has moved on another couple of hundred years, people will be amazed at how we managed to ignore the exploitation of child labour that feeds so much of our consumption and enhances the profits of our merchant retailers. Or how we tolerated exploitation of the animal kingdom just so we could have a limitless and cheap supply of burgers and chicken nuggets.
                     We are free to judge the morals of the past by the standards of today, of course, but I find it quite hard to see where we draw the dividing line between honest but mistaken and plain wrong/evil.
                     1. I’m not sure that’s true you know. Slavery was a major bone of moral contention at the foundation of the US, for instance (with political consequences the country still lives with), and I suspect it’s always been thus. Even if not, if moral standards move on in the future and people change their minds about who should have statues in public spaces, so what? Of course it’s subjective but there’s no reason to treat a statue as an untouchable relic. In fact in many ways this obsession with preserving the past for the sake of it is a rather modern phenomenon.
         2. They should run competitions to see who can be phonier than anyone else and put up a statue to the winners.

            Then pull them down when (if) common sense returns.

            1. In what would common sense, in this case, consist? I’m afraid I’ve lost you.
10. Like others, I happily sauntered through the three corners, then came completely unstuck in the SW. I wasn’t helped by taking an age to see CLOUD-CUKOO-LAND either. Never worked out DODGE or C-C-L so thank you to our blogger for the explanations. Just over the hour today and COD to étagère, of course!
11. 8:33. No problems for me today: lost of biffing.
    WOKE to me just means ‘polite’.
    1. Ironic, since I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word used except intended as an insult …
       1. Indeed. The idea that we should be sensitive to cultural and racial inequality seems to make a lot of people very angry.
12. 14:48. Puzzled by GRAMPUS until I saw keriothe’s extract from Chambers and I understand SCAN now after anon’s comment above. NHO VICE-REGAL and never got round to parsing CLOUD CUCKOO LAND or GENE POOL. Horrified to see WOKE which I see as evangelical born-again political-correctness. What are we supposed to call spades now, I wonder? COD to NETWORKED.

    Edited at 2020-07-08 07:33 am (UTC)

    1. I don’t understand the question, John.
       1. If you speak your mind you call a spade a spade and if it’s not woke to call it that….

          Edited at 2020-07-08 09:14 am (UTC)

          1. If someone disagrees with you c’est la vie, John. You can still say anything you like. We all can 🙂
    2. You reminded me of one of my favorite passages from ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’:

       CECILY:
       This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade.

       GWENDOLEN:

       [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

       Conveniently enough, the above passage was quoted in a piece from 2013, some years before WOKE arose:

       https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763/is-it-racist-to-call-a-spade-a-spade

    3. And the poor blacksmiths?
13. In the household of my childhood, “puffing like a grampus” was a common expression. Dad was Australian, and Mum from Hampshire, so where the expression came from I have no idea.
    Rich
14. Biffed a few – CLOUD CUCKOO LAND – no idea what was going on there.

    GRAMPUS – no idea about the heavy breathing

15. 24:47
    The online dictionaries define ‘woke’ as ‘Alert to injustice in society, especially racism’, or something similar to that, without adding anything about naivety or over-sensitivity. Can’t see a problem with that, seems like a good thing to be, really.
16. A lot of people with one error, but I can’t for the life of me see where the bear trap is.

    Waltzed through most of it, briefly held up in SW, but still finished in twelve and a half minutes.

    1. I suspect 20d – a couple of comments here mentioned getting MAISON as a moderately convincing answer. I certainly managed to convince myself that there was a rough fit with a family tree, and the sort of thing that might have crossed from French to English.
17. Well Pip, not so long ago you were complaining about having to blog vanilla puzzles. You can’t say that about this one.

    Like others didn’t understand subtlety of SCAN and looked up GRAMPUS to get the heavy breather bit. Interesting challenge. Thankyou setter and well blogged Pip

18. I think it has become conflated with self-righteous virtue-signalling and further with pack-dog social media shaming (cf JK Rowling) which has rather tainted the original blameless meaning.
    1. I completely accept that people sometimes take things a bit too far (like with anything the lines are blurred, after all), but it is notable how such marginal examples are deliberately and gleefully seized upon as opportunities to discredit the whole concept.
       1. I’ll take a knee to that
19. 32’35 with not everything entirely parsed. The trouble with “woke” in my view is that it’s polemical by nature. It suggests “If you don’t agree with me you’re asleep”, and conversely it’s too easy to use by those who don’t agree as a sarcastic term suggesting tunnel vision. (On top of which the unusual grammatical shift doesn’t help the old-timers.) The war becomes more important than the discussion.
20. I was on target for around 40-45mins but the SW corner resulted in some heavy breathing.
    11ac: Is a RIDGE a slope? I wouldn’t have thought so. It can be what you reach when you go up a slope but not a slope itself, I would have thought.
    14ac: Still don’t get SCAN.
    17ac. Nor do I think WOKE follows on well from the clue.
    2d: The rest I get but CUCKOO = soft?

    Thanks, though, Pip for PROFITEER, the ON in BLUDGEON and for BOW-LEGGED

    I really liked the use of GEL for setter in 4d. I was looking for dog. RETAIL and ETAGERE were very good but I did like NETWORKED.

    PS….There’s a photo of a sleepy you in News In Pictures today, Pip!

    Edited at 2020-07-08 10:13 am (UTC)

21. A little different but still enjoyed. Never parsed SCAN completely but great now I see it. Thanks all.
22. but with quite a lot of help from my friends. WOKE had to appear sooner or later. I see that Facebook has gone all woke and is being replaced by Parler. Several of these I got correctly and then rejected, including PROFITEER, SCAN, GENE POOL and WOKE itself, until the rather obscure parsing was revealed. I did rather like DAMSON once I’d got over the MA bit being wrong.
    COD NETWORKED
23. Another who got totally bogged down in the SW, not helped by being short of RIDGE and CLOUD CUCKOO LAND. I remembered ETAGERE, so wasn’t held up by that. Saw how CAT worked and liked it. VIPER and VICE REGAL were my first 2 in. Eventually, an alphabet trawl gave me CLOUD and RIDGE, from which followed CUCKOO LAND and BLUDGEON. I substituted DAM for MA and found the tree. BLUDGEON gave me BOW LEGGED and thus WOKE, but DODGE, PEOPLE and GRAMPUS still held out. DODGE came first as I saw GE and then DeptofDef, Then I realised I needed an anagram of POLE, leaving me with G_A_P_S. I saw that GRAMPUS fitted and after some puzzlement, saw SUP MARG. Tough going! 45:41. Thanks setter and Pip.

    Edited at 2020-07-08 11:37 am (UTC)

24. Odd; the only times (not many, I grant you) I’ve seen the word it clearly was not.
25. 
    DNF because of GRAMPUS – could not get GASPER out of my head.

    I am keeping my head down in the current culture wars and await with interest the moment when the far left discover the rather unwoke views of some of their heroes such as Marx and Orwell.

    Thank you to setter and blogger.

    Dave.

    1. Another gasper. What makes you think we don’t know about Marx and Orwell?
       1. 
          Just making the general point that views held by some big names in the past would not pass muster in the current febrile climate.

          Dave.

          1. So if the climate were not so ‘febrile’ racist views would still pass muster?
             1. But the climate IS febrile and I guess at some point we will have to start making difficult decisions about what stays on bookshelves and curriculums and what disappears.

                Dave.

                1. Orwell’s racism would no longer be acceptable: this isn’t a symptom of febrility but of progress. But there is no serious campaign to remove his books from curriculums or bookshelves, any more than there is a real campaign to remove Churchill statues.
    2. Orwell has the advantage that he is everybody’s hero…
       1. Yes, I admire him tremendously and 1984 is a masterpiece in my opinion.
          However, some of his comments about Jews in Down and Out
          in Paris and London don’t bear scrutiny.

          Dave.

    3. Take a look at that other paragon Engels and his views on the Irish as expressed in The Condition of Etc.

       A lot of the twitter warriors may be woke but also rather blind.

       1. Indeed. Since 30 June in Hong Kong, certain books have been withdrawn from libraries because they were written by the wrong people and others are on the point of being withdrawn from the curriculum because they teach the wrong history.
26. I made good progress on most of this but like others got horribly bogged down in the SW by GRAMPUS and DAMSON, again in common with others thanks in no small part to fixations with MA and GASPER. I nearly mombled MAGRAN for the tree. Lovely blossom.

    I also wasted time unnecessarily trying to look for an alternative to BOW-LEGGED in case the G for GRAMPUS was wrong, largely because the only parsing I could see was LEGG in BOWED, and other than the doctor in Eastenders I couldn’t think of a wise LEGG.

27. I haven’t read all the comments, but was I the only person to put maison for damson. I had the notion that maison could mean house in a knightly sense, like House Tyrell in Game of Thrones, thus family tree! Totally ridiculous!
    1. So mine was one of the comments you skipped…..
28. I did this soon after I WOKE and wasn’t yet fully caffeinated. I did see SCAN at last but only after submission. I’m another with MA at the front of 20d for a while and was trying to make “maison” work as in the house of Windsor family tree – yes I know, a bit of a stretch. For some reason the Club site, for the second day in a row, won’t let me see the full board. 16.23
29. ….I had to rather BLUDGEON my way through this. I biffed six of the answers, resolving five of them afterwards (including the assumption that DOD was “the Pennergone”). I had to come here for SCAN – very clever clue.

    Whilst there was a lot to like, I didn’t much care for either “toast” as an anagram indicator, or “slope = RIDGE”.

    FOI/COD RECUR
    LOI GRAMPUS
    TIME 9:39

30. Didn’t parse SCAN. Biffed CLOUD CUCKOO LAND and wasn’t sure about GRAMPUS. Considering I was distracted by the return of Test Match Special (if not an actual Test Match) I’m happy enough…
31. I was also slightly distracted by (people talking about the eventual prospect of) cricket, but even so, I was led properly up the garden path by various clues. I could have biffed SCAN, but it was well worth taking the time to work out why it was right. I immediately thought of GRAMPUS and equally quickly dismissed it because there was no apparent way to make it fit any definition I could see, so it only went in after I’d dismissed the possibility of anything else being better.
    1. It was kind of you not to mention Sherlock Holmes.
32. 18.38. Thought I was going swimmingly but held up at the bottom by people, etagere and finally grampus. All well clued, I was just slow on the uptake. FOI recur, COD probably grampus.
    Another enjoyable romp through the realms of the familiar and the not so much- etagere- been a good week so far with the setters in my humble opinion.
33. Lots of social politics on this site today, which although I thoroughly enjoyed the debate makes me question whether this is the place for it.
    1. The setter throws down the gauntlet and we just pick it up. No one is injured.

       Edited at 2020-07-08 02:59 pm (UTC)

34. Way off the wavelength, very slow. Against the grain, got grampus quickly , known as a wahle = (quite heavy) mammal = must surface to breathe. Never heard of “puff /blow like a grampus”, so right for the wrong reason.
    Damson another known crossword word.
    Cloud cuckoo land no idea, in from crossers. Land for light OK, soft for cuckoo maybe UK usage I’ve never heard, but film for cloud is just wrong. While they both equate with mist in the thesaurus, they don’t match each other: film is very thin, cloud is voluminous.
    No idea either on cat scan, but seeing the solution I like it.
35. My POI and LOI were the pair side by side near the bottom of GRAMPUS and ETAGERE, which latter I would no doubt have gotten much earlier had I read “Stand” correctly, instead of “Strand.”
    Now I have to go back and read everyone’s comments. Got here late, though I finished the puzzle relatively early.

    Edited at 2020-07-08 08:56 pm (UTC)

36. Nice puzzle. I got Scan early on, which properly set my mind for cleverness elsewhere. However, I never did get Grampus or Damson. Nice blog for this puzzle, pip
37. Just sneaked in under the half hour. Stuck for a long time on Etagere. Finally got there. One typo. DODDE.

    COD: DAMSON

38. Did anyone else put maison in? It seemed there was a French theme going with etager so why not maison for house as in family (tree)?
    1. Having read the comments now, i can report that yours is utterly superfluous.
    2. I did. See below.
39. 29:52 same problems as everyone else in the SW: grampus, dodge, damson and also people. Never quite managed to parse cloud-cuckoo-land. Had some difficulty getting from horse to ride in 11ac. A good workout.
40. Isnt 14a a PET scan?

    First time poster, a slow-coach and dnf this one.

41. I enjoyed this but was surprised to find a couple of pink squares. I’d put in MAISON for DAMSON, which almost works except there is no justification in the dictionary for MAISON (in English) to mean “family tree”. I guess the wordplay is not quite right, as MA (mother) I (one) and SON (one close to her, as in the correct answer). Oh well, DNF.
42. I used to use a Cable Avoiding Tool to scan for electric cables and water pipes (in the days that they were metal) before holes could be dug in the ground. So I would CAT (= “search for”) underground services.
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