Times Cryptic 26534

67 comments on “Times Cryptic 26534”

1. Well, I’ve never seen a puzzle where the solver is expected to be familiar with chip design, but I guess it takes all kinds. I hope this doesn’t catch on – who knows what we’ll be expected to know next?

   But the puzzle was on my wavelength, and my time was 18 minutes 9 seconds after last night’s struggle. I found this quite a clever puzzle with a number of witty clues, as well as some rather indirect literals.

   1. As someone who works in chip design, this (and the buses later) were a surprise to see. Usually we don’t get further than Newton and Hooke being scientists. I have to say that AND and OR gates are basically not used, since the way you get one is to make a NAND or NOR gate and then add an extra inverter. Besides, synthesis programs pick all the gates these days.
      1. > the way you get one is to make a NAND or NOR gate and then add an extra inverter…

         I tried doing that but the wheels fell off and smoke came out of the back.

2. Did a mental coin toss to decide between NATTERJACK and TANTERJACK, but I suspect the coin was weighted 60-40 to the former. Or I got lucky.

   Also didn’t know FLORET, or BORE as a steep wave, but there wasn’t much room for doubt.

   COD to ANDORRAN, one for us nerds. Although I disagree with Vinyl that one needs to be familiar with chip design to solve it, any more than one needs to be familiar with Shakespeare to know the name of Romeo’s girlfriend.

   Three under par today, two under for the tournament. Thanks setter and Jack.

   1. …and I thought you guys knew everything there was to know about surfing.
      1. Makes you wonder why anyone would bother with Mentawais or Margaret River.
3. … but challenged by the “gates” (20ac) and, to some extent, by the GO part of INDIGO. And who’d have thought that “bus conductor” could be pleonastic?

   Beg to differ with our esteemed blogger. I know plenty of so-called Professors who are mere WISEACREs. The rot set in when universities started giving the title to the upper echelons of administration (DVCs and so on) so as lend them undue academic cachet and to justify their inflated pay rates. (Rant over.)

   Jack: slight slippage between “betters” and “debtors” in the blog at 22ac.

   1. Thanks. Amended. One wonders exactly what is a “bad better” from a bookie’s point of view. One who consistently wins or loses?
      1. Normally speaking a bad better is of course a good better from the bookie’s point of view, since the punter’s win is the bookie’s loss. However good betters (which normally means people with inside information) can also be a useful source of information, so they (and the financial losses they generate) are tolerated, and indeed in some cases given preferential treatment. The vast majority of punters, and the population as a whole, are of course bad betters, which is why the bookies make money.
4. 20ac ANDORRAN LOI and COD I realised that AND and OR were computerspeak – as I learnt to write BASIC many moons ago at London University.

   8ac KHAKI is a shade chestnut as you say.

   20ac FLORETs is hip menu-speak (for the calabreses) – but obviously not in Perth.

   George Bush Senior’s first Presidential decree was to ban broccoli from the kitchens of the White House – here bloody here!

   What will Donald Trump’s first decree be!? From 2000:-

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLSy8Tl2bjs

   13ac BRIG is mainly American Naval parlance.

   FOI 22ac ODDS WOD GATE

   horryd Shanghai

   1. Unspammed. Horryd, if you add a link from the internet, your comment will go straight to ‘Suspicious comments’. Now, if a nice chap like me finds it, I will of course vet it carefully, edit it felicitously here and there, and then release it. But who knows what is to happen if a big burly Australian were to come across it first after a night on the tiles having seen his favourite footie side lose again? That Delete button can look awfully tempting.

      One may always place one’s link nicely in hypertext, as follows:

      1) use the following code, [a href= ]here[/a], where ‘here’ represents the part of your sentence you want to be linkable/clickable, but replace the square brackets with angle, or ‘diamond’, brackets

      2) get your link, i.e. this blog entry, http://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/1604832.html, and place it in the space between the = and the > (which you’ve changed from ])

      3) instead of ‘here’, write whatever you want.

      Edited at 2016-10-04 02:10 am (UTC)

      1. I’d prefer “small but perfectly formed”.
5. I rather liked ANDORRAN though it was a tricky clue. 10:45 with my only raised eyebrow coming with BORER which I got from wordplay
6. Well, I’m currently sat with Meldrew Shanghai under the stairs chuntering about 20a. This is so patently an unfair clue, with no way that human beings (rather than a Boolean bot) can determine whether it’s Andorra’s or Andorran. After reading Jack’s excellent – if puzzling – explanation, I went to Wikipedia, was directed to an entry called Logic Gate and had to leave the page after 15 seconds before my brain exploded.

   Bring back Oread and Amiens, and sharpish!

   26 minutes for the human stuff, though, on retrospect, BUS turned out to be the thin edge of the non-human wedge.

   1. I beg to differ about 20 across, that is to say the impossibility for human beings to determine whether it’s Andorra’s or Andorran. Faced simply with the definition “A little land’s” you’d have a point but we have wordplay too, and even if the first part is obscure (I’m familiar with the principals of logic but not the terminology “gates”) the last part “bolted” giving us RAN is straight out of an easy QC puzzle.

      I don’t know about big burly Australians who’ve been drowning their sorrows, but as a grumpy old Englishman, when reviewing suspicious messages with hyperlinks one of the things I’d consider is whether the link goes anywhere that’s in any way relevant to the crossword puzzle under discussion.

      Edited at 2016-10-04 04:32 am (UTC)

      1. Ah, but I’d run out of steam before I got to the ‘bolted’ part.

         I think my anti-censorship proclivities would prevent me from checking the link at all; certainly from regulars.

   2. It’s all part of the fun. Without logic gates we wouldn’t be able to google or discuss the mountain nymph, whereas without Greek mythology we wouldn’t be able to, um, wait a minute, hmmmm….I dunno, whatever.
7. A nice, round 15 minutes dead, pretty much unfazed by the alleged obscurities. I got ANDORRAN, my last in, by getting the RAN first, after which AND/OR became inevitable. Before that, I was scratching around for whatever the word is that defines some minute part of an acre. Couldn’t make either Gareth or Bill fit anywhere.
   I liked STEP BY STEP just because it raised a smile.
   AVOCATION provided us with another clue where substitution here O for A, is required. My instinct is that we are seeing a lot more of this device than we used to, almost as if it’s become, like the “hidden”, an obligation on the setter, though of course only one per grid.
8. Managed to get 13 correct.

   Probably being stupid…I get why khaki = car key but not why this is something motorists want to go?

   Is it want the car key to make the car go?

   1. ok penny dropped!
9. 18:05 … like jackkt I found a few of these distinctly tricky — SONG, DROLL, BORER and my LOI ANDORRAN.

   I notice from the leader board, however, that most of the ‘elite’ solvers absolutely steamed through this one. Verlaine of this parish was detained a mere 5:50, and is not even at the top of the board! Clearly the real quicks found little problem here.

   I misread 1A initially as “Mental suffering can lead to great work of art” and thought ‘fantastic clue!’, then read it again and realised it doesn’t make much sense as English. Seems to me it would parse just fine with ‘lead to great’ giving the G and without the comma. Did this clue get mangled somewhere?

   1. I think your version is better, and I can’t actually find any support for G as an abbreviation for ‘great’ in the usual sources. Even Chambers doesn’t have it, and you can normally expect Chambers to allow any given letter as an abbreviation for pretty much every word beginning with that letter. So maybe it was mangled somehow.
      1. Isn’t G clued by “leading to great”?
         1. I read ‘leading to’ as just filler. I don’t see how ‘leading to’ can possibly mean ‘the first letter of’.
         2. Possibly, but that’s a bit iffy, grammar-wise, as well, whereas lead to great would work just fine. Hmmmm.
      2. I originally had G = Great until I came to writing the blog when I consulted all the usual sources and found no support for the abbreviation. “Leading to” has to be there for a purpose more substantial than just padding so I read it as a take-the-first-letter indicator. Maybe the grammar’s a bit dodgy (far less so than “go” for “are stolen” elsewhere) but I thought the direction was clear enough.
         1. ‘Go’ for ‘are stolen’ is a bit (OK, very!) loose [Edit: actually this meaning is also in ODO (‘be lost or stolen’) so if we think it’s loose we should take our complaint there.] but there’s nothing wrong with the grammar (if I leave pork chops on the kitchen table when the dog is around they go/are stolen).
            For me ‘leading to’ as an indicator of ‘the first letter of’ just doesn’t work at all, to the point where I think it can’t possibly be what’s intended. Perhaps I’m being over-Ximenean about it but the Times does normally lean that way. I’d like to hear from the setter or editor on this one.

            Edited at 2016-10-04 10:30 am (UTC)

10. Sorry, sawbill, just realised I said exactly the same thing below. I had missed your comment. Great minds and all that.
11. Defeated by my last crossers of 25 and 26. I often seem to be beaten by a GOALKEEPER on these puzzles; really must try to hammer “saver” = “goalkeeper” into my mind. If I’d got that I probably would have got the unknown BORER, but not necessarily the other way around.

    No problems with the rest; logic gates are much more familiar to me than bible references, say. I’d agree that I was somewhat nonplussed at the clumsy-seeming surface at 1a.

12. Enjoyed this one, particularly the bus and the gates. Things really are looking up if the Times has progressed to recognising Boolean operators.
13. GOALKEEPER stopped me finishing but that’s their job, I suppose? No problem with ANDORRAN given RAN at the end of a small country (although I wouldn’t know a gate if it jumped up and bit me). I use “bit” in the non-computer sense.
    Thought 1a was clunky? Why not “Mental suffering can lead to great piece of art” (8)
    1. Why mental?
       1. Yeah, I wondered that, too.

          About 30mins, then I spent far too long looking at _O_G before giving up… I should’ve got ‘number’=’song’, as, let’s face it, we have had it *once or twice* before…

          ANDORRAN from checkers and RAN at the end, BORER from wp. Further computing (BUS at 7dn) passed me by too.

       2. True
          1. Why ‘piece of’, come to that? ‘Suffering can lead to great art’ would have been a great clue!
             1. True
14. Any puzzle I can finish within 30 minutes without aids is highly satisfying, even if some of the parsing defeats me – which today includes 20a (even though I did a whole term on Boolean logic at university many decades ago. Much good did it do me).
    Methinks some people are protesting too much at the use of these logic gates; they are no worse than the usual fare of obscure composers, writers, plants and foreign words.
    Incidentally, it certainly wasn’t a “Quick Cryptic” for me today.

    Edited at 2016-10-04 08:45 am (UTC)

15. I once spent twelve hours hitchhiking through Andorra, or actually failing to do so, ended up in a youth hostel as the snow closed in. The combination of this and A level Physics 1972 made 20 ac quite accessible. Not convinced about ‘are stolen’ for GO, and INDIGO is a distinct colour from blue, as in ROYGBIV. The story is that Newton declared to his students that he could see indigo, and he was so famous and revered that no-one would disagree with him. FLORET is familiar because they come in frozen vegetable bags from the supermarket, saves all the fuss and waste. Dnk BUS for conductor. 15′ today, thanks jack and setter.

    Rant warning: I see that the puzzle describes the QC as ‘easy’ (6d). Please, please can we not have this? It’s all relative, and readers of the QC blog will know that some solvers take an hour or more to solve the puzzles. Their achievement is as good as anyone’s, and should be encouraged. I’m sure it would be useful if more of the experienced 15×15 solvers completed and commented on the QC. Thanks, Rob.

    1. Well said Rob. I spent an hour on the QC and about 3 hours on this one, but pleased to finish both. Invariant
       PS Do you think the setter was Teazel, or am I reading too much into 7d ?
16. 22:57. Nice to see something I know about for a change with logic gates making an appearance. Having crashed out of first place in a quiz last week when faced with an unlikely classical music round, I decided yesterday to make a concession to things I don’t know about. So now I know a small bit of Gershwin’s music. I even quite enjoyed it.
    1. Time for Mahler’s 2nd, I think…
       1. A quick Google tells me ‘His music also gained a reputation for being turgid and depressingly introspective.’ That quite tempts me; he sounds like an olden days Radiohead.
          1. It’s not as bad as it sounds.
             1. I remember the first time I heard the 4th movement from Symphony No 5. I was sat in my car eating a lunchtime sandwich in the sunshine outside an aircraft parts factory near Hull and it came on the radio. I was completely transported. It was only a brief encounter, though, as I had to go back to work.
17. Didn’t take long to spot the logic gates and polished the puzzle off in 29 minutes, so on the easy side for me. Anyone who has seen Apollo 13 should be familiar with BUS as a conductor, as Gary Sinese spent ages trying to get the current through his busses to an acceptable level for re-entry. FOI GAR, LOI AVOCATION. Now I’m off to try and hit a small white ball around a large grassy expanse. I enjoyed this one. Thanks setter and Jack.
18. I thought that too…
19. 10:52 so no problems here despite:
    – not really liking the go / are stolen connection;
    – relying on the definition and -RAN to get 20 with no idea what the gates bit meant;
    – not knowing avocation;
    – not being 100% sure of Ichor (I’m pretty sure it has come up before but I took it to be a mythical river);
    – not knowing that a bus was a conductor; NAND
    – not knowing why a borer might be a problem for a ship.

    Loved the clue for song and am surprised that florets (be they broccoli or cauliflower) are not universally known. The supermarkets sell bags of them for lazy people.

    Edited at 2016-10-04 08:38 am (UTC)

    1. ‘Shipworm’ was the curse of the wooden navy. The worms would literally bore through the wood, chomping merrily. The only way at the time to avoid this was to cover the lower hull in sheets of copper, which was very expensive. Hence the phrase ‘copper-bottomed’ for a solid promise or guarantee.
20. 9m. No real problems today, although the bottom half was a bit harder than the top, and I didn’t know BORER or AVOCATION.
    No problem with 20ac: logic gates are basic schoolboy physics, res ipsa loquitur Caesar sic in omnibus, what what?
    1. I guess the reading list for that English degree what you read didn’t include Robert Frost:

       My object in living is to unite
       My avocation and my vocation
       As my two eyes make one in sight.
       Only where love and need are one,
       And the work is play for mortal stakes,
       Is the deed ever really done

       .. though I’ll admit to knowing it via Robert B Parker who was giving to working a lot of Frost into his Spenser novels, one of which he titled Mortal Stakes.

       1. You guess right! Although I’d almost certainly have forgotten it anyway, of course.
21. 12 mins so pretty much on the setter’s wavelength, with BORER my LOI after GOALKEEPER. However, I confess to having biffed ANDORRAN because logic gates didn’t occur to me even though I’m aware of them.
22. After thirty years in the electricity industry, busbars pronounced buzzbars are only too familiar. GOALKEEPER was surprisingly late in for me. The inclusion of ‘saving’ in the clue didn’t match my recent supporting experience. Spotted and/or as a logical gate without knowing its coding implications. Solved for SONG which I wouldn’t have a month ago. I’m getting better but not faster. 40 minutes with everything parsed.
23. And somehow I managed to miss your comment in spite of reading sotira’s comment about missing your comment!
24. Goalkeeper took me far longer than it should have done – getting on for 2 mins of my overall time of 7m 37s.
25. Found this a fairly straightforward, steady and largely enjoyable solve. Can’t really quarrel with BUS or GATES, staples of contemporary techno-speak. Had to look up BORER after entering it. FOI INCUBUS, LOI ANDORRAN after trying to make Alderney fit despite the e/a problem. Nothing really stands out as COD, but liked the intricacy of SONG. Thank you, setter.
26. 20 min, so no serious delays with 26ac LOI for no obvious reason. 6ac FOI, as needed some checkers before I could get 1ac – I agree clue was unsatisfactory. (keriothe’s suggestion would have been COD) At 10ac was wondering whether there was a distinctive JERSEY CRAB, though it made 4dn rather unlikely.
    BTW, I’m not surprised by shortage of comments on QC, as it’s not linked to by the Club website, so it’s necessary to go to the appropriate section of the main paper to find it.
27. I googled which goalie had the nickname Dracula and their answer was Dai Davies of Swansea, Everton, Wrexham and Wales. I think many others have been called it too. It comes from a dislike of high crosses.
28. They don’t seem to have such colourful nicknames for goalies as they did in the days of batch programming when we learnt about logical ands and ors through IBM courses. The West Ham goalie in the 60s Jim Standen was known as “the ancient mariner” a reference to the percentage of shots he allegedly “stoppeth”d. And who can forget Anfield’s “flying pig”, Tommy Lawrence? Are there any more?
29. How about Rene Higuita, ‘El Loco’. Famed for his 1995 ‘scorpion kick’.
30. About 20 minutes, ending with the ANDORRAN. I didn’t really know how ‘gates’ got me and/or, but it seemed right. The NATTERJACK wasn’t very familiar either, but it too looked right. Everything else was parsed as I went along, and I appreciated the SONG clue. Regards.
    1. I remembered ‘natterjack’, but that’s probably because I blogged the puzzle in which it appeared, 24324. I thought we had had it more often, but apparently not.
31. Won the FA Cup with the Hammers and then the county cricket championsip with Worcs a few months later, in 1964. Then owned a sports shop down the road from us in Camberley, where I bought gear over the years (well, my dad did, to be more accurate).
32. 44 minutes today, with ANDORRAN and HERMIT CRAB (in that order) as my LOI. NATTERJACK was just a guess from the anagrist and HERMIT CRAB relied on some faith that HERM might just be a Channel Island (I have never heard of). I did rather enjoy ANDORRAN and SONG once the pennies dropped.

    Oh, and in 14ac, I believe the “professor of knowledge” is not meant to be the university type, just someone who professes knowledge (whether he has it or not), so that does define WISEACRE.

    Edited at 2016-10-04 06:46 pm (UTC)

33. Well, this week’s Tuesday turned out to be Monday for me – I found this one much easier than yesterday’s, finishing in a (for me) unusually short time of 19 minutes.

    No problem with the logic gates, and my compliments to the setter. Are the most basic elements of computing and information processing any more obscure than long-dead poets or the juvenile stages of salmon? If so, then the world is in a sorry state. As computer people point out, there are only 10 types of people in the world – those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

34. 11:02 for me, way off the pace but not quite a disaster.

    Slightly surprised to find some folk unfamiliar with logic gates. On the other hand, I now find that although I was familiar with the word AVOCATION, I didn’t actually know its meaning!

    An interesting and enjoyable puzzle.

35. A LOGIC gate? Way back in the 60s as an apprentice with British European Airways I chose to play with the planes rather than go into their fledgling IT department. Guess I chose the wrong route, at least as far as computerspeak is concerned.

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