Times Cryptic 26458 – July 7, 2016 Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

53 comments on “Times Cryptic 26458 – July 7, 2016 Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”

1. I made about as much heavy weather of this as was humanly possible, but just squoze in under the half-hour. I certainly did think of LENT at 17ac, like Z and no doubt everyone else, but I also thought of Ramadan and Yom Kippur. Well, not really ‘thought’, but they popped into my mind. I took ‘docked’ as an inclusion indicator–SS somewhere, a Y at the end. I went through God knows what mental contortions at 16d before finally spotting the hidden; hidden-spotting not my 9ac. DNK ME, so I toyed with ‘dims’. I persisted in looking for MB or MO in 13d. That sort of a day for me. It may interest you to know that Pierre, SD, is pronounced ‘PEE-er’. Or it may not.
2. I thought there was more wordplay to be found in 9A. A wooer is also a suitor. If you equate his “suit” with his wooing the clue is more fun.

   – Vince (Syracuse, NY)

   1. I think Zed is actually saying this in his own inimitable way
      1. Indeed yes. I shouldn’t have put the bit about removing creases, I suppose. The problem with doing cryptic crosswords is that you train you brain to make rapid connections, some of which turn out to be entirely frivolous.
         I hope nobody noticed that I assumed the wooer (or indeed suitor) would necessarily be male.
3. 27 minutes, but with ‘sundance’ for GUIDANCE. Oh well, raindrops keep fallin’ on my head…
4. Not feeling my best – appointment today with my Chinese dentist (at two-thirty! – geddit!?) suit yourselves – was further interrupted by next door neighbours barking dog (gou jiao sheng!). So although I came in at 45 minutes it was somewhat less.

   FOI 15dn LOI and COD 5ac BESTOW!

   11ac APHIDS was a bit tortuous as was 27ac VASSAL – initialy I couldn’t decide who was doing the backing – it wasn’t the mule!

   16dn THEREFORE was not hidden too badly.

   WOD NYSTAGMUS which is the very last entry in my Chambers beginning with N – unless you count the abreviation NZ.

   Z Top blog.

5. I made quite hard work of this, especially in the NE segment where all but OPTED IN and INFREQUENT eluded me for ages. Was pleased to get the unknown 13dn from wordplay. Yes, inkwells were still around in my early schooldays too, in the 1950s. We made up the ink from powder, IIRC.

   Edited at 2016-07-07 04:27 am (UTC)

6. Only about half-finished in my allotted hour, but I have no complaints at all — an excellent puzzle, right along my kind of lines. A shame I couldn’t extend my hour and try to finish off the rest, as I think I’d have got there in the end with most of ’em.

   Happy to have got both APHIDS and AESTHETE, and at least I spotted today’s well-hidden hidden word, unlike yesterday’s. Lovely work, setter and blogger.

7. 45 minutes but didn’t get BAGGAGE or BESTOW (Thanks Z8). Much fun. We learnt to write at my village school on slate with chalk and moved on to inkwells (which made the chalk a bit messy).
8. About 45mins for this one, with most trouble in the SE, ADVERT needed a few minutes at the end. NYSTAGMUS is a funny looking word, but the wordplay left no room for error this time (…did it?)
   1. I’m sad I didn’t get as far as NYSTAGMUS, as I’ve definitely encountered it before. One of my favourite actors, Pruitt Taylor Vince, who played “J. J. LaRoche” in The Mentalist suffers from it, and I remember clicking through from his Wikipedia article to have a brief read about it.
9. Tough crowd that would boo a batsman for getting a pair! I remember Goochy’s debut in 1975. Certainly no booing from the Edgbaston crowd, and back home we just celebrated with another late-night cup of Milo.

   Nice puzzle, not too many hold-ups except for an unparsed CONSCIENCE at 17ac.

   COD to the self-describing BESTOW.

   Thanks setter and Z.

   1. Kiwis. Say no more.
      Thinking about Keith Stackpole’s last test, in Auckland.
      22 mins for all except the 5s, and 10 more minutes to get BESTOW. BAGGAGE in with a shrug – I didn’t know either definition, only know it as luggage.
      Liked the APHIDS, THWACK, and hidden THEREFORE.
      Rob
10. AESTHETE LOI. Not comfortable with BAGGAGE, how many words are there for what used to be called ‘loose women’? COD APHIDS. If I watch carefully in the garden I can see the ants farming the aphids, chasing other predators away. Between them they make a right mess of the plants. 30′ today, thanks Z and setter.
11. 30 mins – Everything was parse-able but some answers very cleverly hidden.
12. 12:04 here, gratifyingly close to the likes of Magoo and Jason. I’ve just started solving them online just after midnight, and so far it’s going pretty well (until the 6am starts catch up with me anyway).

    LOI 6D, where I failed to parse the clue and the crossing letters just didn’t suggest anything to me for a minute. I even started doubting the biffed INFREQUENT and had to go back and solve it properly!

    1. And to the likes of Verlaine – 10:49 here!

       I wish I could understand, given that Magoo solves many puzzles in roughly the time it takes to write the answers in, what it is that gives him at least some pause in others… I thought this one, while not exactly easy, was nowhere particularly opaque?

       28ac my LOI, unforgivable really given my supposed affinity to my fellow Magdalen College classicist and fop.

       Edited at 2016-07-07 01:28 pm (UTC)

       1. Well, you hadn’t appeared yet when I posted that, so I was hoping… 😉

          AESTHETE went straight in though, and I’m anything but!

13. 18:37. NYSTAGMUS sufferers also include flautist (fluter?) Sir James Galway and Pointless’s Richard Osman. At my prepschool in the 60s, the youngsters (8yo) used pencils. The next two years used dip-pens and it was important to chew the non-nib end sufficiently for them to resemble paintbrushes. The next two years could use fountain pens. The ink was made from powder and keeping the inkwells topped up was an annoying and messy punishment. Thanks setter and Z
    1. Powder separates the generations. We used Quink – blue-black, predominantly, as I recall – if you had a pen with a squeezy syringe thing, or cartridges, if you had that type of pen. I remember getting quite a bit in my mouth as well as on my fingers.
       1. Yes, squeezy pens that sucked up new ink via the nib were a potential disaster. I still have a few but these days, I use a Mont Blanc cartridge pen which carries an extra full cartridge so no embarrassing run-outs.
14. A bit of a slog but got there in the end. Didn’t know the eye complaint

    Ink wells in use 1940s and 1950s. In the 6th form some chemistry students used a duplicate key manufactured in the metal work shop to enter the janitor’s room. There they doctored the ink he had made up from powder by adding I think meths. This reduced the ability of the ink to adhere to the pen knibs with messy results across the whole school. Happy days.

15. 35 minutes. I slowed down after a quickish start. Never heard of the eye complaint, but wordplay was transparent. I certainly remember inkwells in my primary school. We had ink monitors to top the up.
16. His Bobship would have liked 12ac. As for other bloggers, with INKWELL the setter has made a happy man feel very old., though I often say that us early boomers were the last Victorians. I’ve never heard a hussy described as BAGGAGE. It gives a whole new meaning to Baggage Reclaim, though to get one there you’d have to have claimed one first. Finished in 45 minutes, checking NYSTAGMUS. COD APHIDS. Enjoyable puzzle.
    1. I’d recommend the Red Hot Chili Peppers cover of Subterranean Homesick Blues – a fine example of an interesting cover version as opposed to a carbon copy.
       1. Just caught it on You Tube. I think I might need a few more listenings to appreciate it fully. But interesting certainly.
    2. Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady muses that he might “throw the baggage out”.
       1. So he did. I guess in 1964, on the street where I lived, we paid more attention to Dylan than Lerner and Loewe. After his Sinatra stuff, Bob might be playing Henry Higgins in the next revival.
    3. I dont think that BAGGAGE means Hussy, although I am sure that a hundred dictionaries disagree. BAGGAGE usually comes with words like silly and old and refers to a cantankerous old lady, rather than one of loose morals. Think Ena Sharples.
       1. That’s what I thought too, but the Anonymous post above yours shows Lerner and Loewe using the word about Eliza. I don’t know if GBS did that too.
          1. He did, much to Eliza’s chagrin (“[Wounded and whimpering] I won’t be called a baggage …”).
17. 18m. Another really enjoyable puzzle. I didn’t know the eye condition but letters couldn’t really go anywhere else.
    1. I knew NYSTAGMUS but only because someone had called their character that in a roleplaying game I was in over 20 years ago. Ah, my wasted youth…
       1. It’s a good word, no doubt about that.
          1. It goes hand in hand in my mind with STRABISMUS, which I’m sure we’ll see again before the year is out.
             1. Ah yes, Dr Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht.
                1. Yes indeed. Impossible to hear/read the word without recalling the good doctor.
18. 47:48. I must have spent at least 15 minutes trawling the alphabet for possible letters to fit each of the gaps in _E_T_E_E to no avail. I then put it down and came back to it just now and saw AESTHETE within a couple of minutes. If only I could train myself to see a clue afresh within seconds instead of hours…I’d be Magoo.
19. 35 mins. I started to nod off midway through but I didn’t think it had affected my time that badly. However, looking at some of the other times maybe I dozed off more than I thought. Or possibly I was just being thick today. I had the LHS completed fairly quickly, followed by the SE, but my final four in the NE seemed to take an age. I eventually got BESTOW followed by INFREQUENT, and I needed the checkers from those two to lead me to BAGGAGE because I didn’t know the “hussy” definition. SLUSH FUND was my LOI after the penny finally dropped that I’d been looking at the clue completely the wrong way.
20. Like the blogger I breezed up the port side and slogged my way down the starboard. Once I got COD 5a I sped up. Also liked 12a, I do enjoy it when short answers have good clues. The blog says it all for me, thanks Z.
21. About 35 minutes here. I didn’t know the eye condition, but the anagram pointed the way. The hidden was very well done and eluded me almost until the end, but my LOI was actually AESTHETE. Regards.
22. 15:14 here for another delightful puzzle.

    I don’t recall coming across GUIDANCE = “conduct” before, but no-one else seems to have been fazed by it. AESTHETE (with those three nasty Es) was my LOI.

23. Made heavy weather of this one after a slog up the M1 from Northampton was interrupted by a shed load just north of Tibshelf, where I paused for a coffee while the queues cleared. I tried to do the puzzle whilst watching a recording of the Austrian GP, and it obviously distracted me. I’ve just had another go at it after returning from the pub and slammed in 5a, 5d, 24a and 22d which I had remaining, but totally failed on EG Oscar. I had the ATE bit, but tried to stick it in the middle and then gave up. Nystagmus reminded me of Lord Emsworth’s Pig-man, but I then remembered that he had a Strabismus. We had inkwells at primary school, and the nuns had big sticks for when we made a mess!
24. ‘Conduct’, with 2nd syllable stress, may be a synonym of ‘guide’ but in my lexicon ‘conduct’, with 1st syllable stress, doesn’t equate to ‘guidance’.
    1. I contented myself with thinking safe conduct might be equated with guidance, and I can see how the two words might run along parallel lines. But a check in Chambers Thesaurus does show a direct equivalence alongside “control, supervision, leadership, so I think it’s within the rules, so to speak. Don’t have to like it!
       1. Seemed vaguely close but worth a raised eyebrow on entering. Just now, checking Chambers dictionary under Conduct (noun) there is 3: Guidance. Who’d a thunk it?
          Rob
25. A day late, but only 47 minutes of that were spent solving. The south-right corner caused me the most problems, with GUIDANCE and IGNOBLE my LOsI. COD for me was THEREFORE – very nicely hidden in plain view.
26. Please remove the offensive comment that ME (myalgic encephalopathy) is an imagined illness.

    1. No offense intended. ME is a blanket term for a collection of symptoms, and is indeed alternatively “chronic fatigue syndrome”. For a spell in the late 1980s, it was my misfortune to struggle with a set of symptoms which could be interpreted as ME – was by some practitioners, wasn’t by others – which kept me pretty much confined to the house. Any activity was exhausting. I subscribed to the excellent ME Society for support. An eccentric medic eventually diagnosed zinc deficiency, and when that was remedied I improved greatly and have been (mostly) well since. To this day I do not know whether the psychological impact of having a believable diagnosis and treatment led to my overcoming the disability, and am only too aware of the pain of other people’s dismissal of the illness as chronic idleness syndrome, or all in the mind. To me, it doesn’t matter if it’s a psychological or physical syndrome (I rather think the spread of symptoms can be either or both) if you are in the middle of it it’s pretty horrible.
       I hope it’s clear that it’s not something I would joke about, and (if you are the same anonymous as made the next comment, it’s hard to tell) I emphatically reject the charge. Within the spectrum, with a “spread” illness like this (still with no agreed cause or even definition) there are bound to be people for whom it’s imagined (though no less a struggle, perhaps). If it’s been your struggle, or that of someone important to you, I fully understand the response, but I can’t withdraw my opinion. Sorry.

27. ‘Jokes’ at the expense of disabled people are really not good form.
    1. No joke.
28. Dime – Only just over a century ago TB was widely referred to as an imagined illness, all in the heads of the sufferers, and due to their weak and hysterical personalities. Pure ignorance. Please don’t be so quick to put down people suffering with a cruel and incurable illness that modern medicine can do practically nothing to help. You never know what illness might befall you or those you love.
    1. Perhaps if you read my reply to your first comment you’ll understand that wherever else I’m coming from, ignorance it isn’t, offensive it’s certainly not intended to be. ME is not one illness with a single pathology like TB, but a range of common symptoms. “Modern medicine can do practically nothing to help” simply because its pathologies are not yet understood fully. I was fortunate in finding a diagnosis and treatment that helped me back to decent health, but I am well aware that many others are not so fortunate. I reject utterly your assertion of “pure ignorance”.

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