Times Cryptic 27026

58 comments on “Times Cryptic 27026”

1. I blithely skipped over NEW GUINEA without fully parsing, never heard of WEN. I knew the word ISINGLASS was something, but damned if I knew what it really was. Embarrassingly, it took me forever to unscramble SCYTHIA, and I was even briefly, but for too long, stopped in my tracks by STATIONERY. Which just means I’m sleepy…
   1. I was trying to fit Thyscia in. Scythia is perhaps best known for the enslaved Scythian archers (who may not have been Scythian,and may not have been archers) who served as a minimalist police force in Athens, according to some accounts daubing with red ochre stain those citizens who tried to duck out of meetings of the assembly.
      1. I have lost track of The Archers so can’t help.
2. Jack you are correct, this was hard but fair.

   It took me 55 minutes and reminded me of yesterday’s puzzle which perhaps means it was probably the same setter – do they still set several puzzles in the same week? I do wish they would adopt monicas.

   DNK 27ac STRASS my WOD

   FOI 1dn ISINGLASS (made from sturgeon and not whales – as I always thought!).
   LOI 5dn ROOSTER
   COD 4dn REAGANISM I get to appreciate Ronnie more every day.

   Edited at 2018-05-01 03:08 am (UTC)

3. ….but not as hard as yesterday, once you get going. Nothing I didn’t know, except exactly how to spell ‘candelabra’, but the crossers will give you that.

   The definition for 23 is probably ‘in cash’, which goes better with the answer.

4. 51 minutes – so not quick, and similar to yesterday’s. Didn’t know ISINGLASS (though it rang a faint bell) or STRASS (certainly), and had never come across REAGANISM before, as opposed to Reaganomics. Thanks to setter, as always, and Jack.

   Cobbett’s Rural Rides, with his blistering attacks on Wellington, Waterloo, army pensions, and his ringing advocacy for turnips and locust trees, is a marvellous read. Anyone who gets exiled and then comes back and produces his own newspaper, which outsells the Great Wen publications, must have something going for him.

   1. REAGANISM is listed in the Oxfords but not in the other usual sources and seems to refer to a wide range of policies (cf ‘Thatcherism’ in the UK at the same time). ‘Reaganomics’ was only about the economy, and principally held that cutting taxes and promoting unrestricted free-markets increases production and generates more revenue.

      Edited at 2018-05-01 04:48 am (UTC)

   2. Cobbett’s Cottage Economy is also a fine read. In the section where he discusses making rush-lights he says “You can do any sort of work by this light; and,if reading be your taste, you may read the foul libels, the lies and abuse, which are circulated gratis about me by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge as well by rush-light as you can by the light of taxed candles.”
      1. Brilliant.

         Thanks for the recommendation. Holiday reading in Chios, perhaps?

         1. There is also a totally misleading cost analysis about drinking tea versus beer. He solved it by feeding one pig only beer (which grew fatter as a result) and another only tea (which withered and died). Brilliant!
            1. I once had to stop a press release which was on the point of being faxed to the papers, in which my esteemed colleagues had compared the noise of an underground train arriving in a station with that of a bus (ours) broadcasting its wretched TV programmes when stationary.
   3. I’ve been a bit off TfTT lately, as exemplified by your inexplicable rant yesterday. But, anyone who is a fan of William Cobbett cannot be all bad. And he certainly knew how to rant!
5. A DNF in 66 minutes, failing to find the non-existent author at 9a. I’d forgotten about ‘wen’ and had never heard of STRASS – Strauss without the class.

   I liked ISINGLASS, even if it means I’ll spend the rest of the day with that song on my brain.

   Thanks to setter and blogger.

6. 19:25 …. all but 2 clues done in under 10 minutes, then totally stuck for a while on the geographical crossing — ADEN and NEW GUINEA.

   Nice blog, jackkt. I especially enjoyed the Liberace quotes. He’s been reincarnated for Amazon’s weirdly entertaining Mozart in the Jungle series, where he has taken over from Mozart as the imaginary friend of conductor Rodrigo.

   Enjoyed several inventive things in this, but BEWILDER made me chuckle so gets COD from me

7. I thought for a while that this was going to be a repeat of yesterday, where ‘DNF’ doesn’t do justice to that disaster, but I finally pulled through. The key was realizing that 15d was not ‘adaptable’ (able, daughter, apt, and some A’s that I forgot). That let me put in ADMONISH, which I’d thought of early on but couldn’t parse, and SOMALI. Also SHOWJUMPER, which I might not have got were it not for Dawn Palethorpe and her pet clam, Sir Stafford.
   1. Yup, I was “adaptable” too which was all too plausible until it made a nonsense of SHOWJUMPER and ADMONISH.
8. 50 mins with yoghurt, granola, etc. I know, I need to vary my diet.
   Much time taken by missing the obvious. For example, ‘solid eggs’ must be to do with Ovoid or something. Letter and article must be Theta or something. 9ac must be a writer.. now what 10 letter writers begin S_A? Good grief.
   The only DNK was Strass, but do-able.
   Mostly I liked: Sportsperson on TV, Rooster, haircut and COD to Undress.
   Thanks setter and Jack.
9. A game of two halves with the southern half rather harder than the north. As Jack says, knew STRASS from Mephisto

   Happy with with “in cash” for LIQUID. If you sell a holding you “liquidate” it, if you’re not invested in very much you’re “liquid” and the opposite, if you have little cash you’re position is “illiquid”

10. Was Austrian and not German
    Anyone else feel that the clue is wrong?
    1. Johann was Austrian but Richard was German
       1. Anschluß
11. I thought I might have finished with a momble in STRASS but my trust in the wordplay proved well placed.

    I didn’t think twice about “in cash” for LIQUID. Working in financial services its a term I hear often, with increased liquidity being something which has been strived for in recent times (for example by the use of quantitive easing).

12. 26 minutes with NW last to fall, LOI the Little Red ROOSTER. COD BREWERIES fell just before that, proving that I’d struggle to organise a drinking session in one. I’m happy with either definition of LIQUID suggested. I went for LIQUID assets which fits in nicely with the brewery. DNK STRASS which went in from cryptic and crossers. As a Lancastrian in London with a cockney wife, I always show my eternal gratitude by habitually referring to it as the Great Wen, which I believe means a boil. The Liberace quotes are great ones, even better than Colonel Tom Parker’s when asked why Elvis made such lousy movies. “When I first met Elvis, he had a million dollars worth of talent. Now he has a million dollars.” By then though, Parker had taken much more. Nice puzzle. Thank you Jack and setter.

    Edited at 2018-05-01 08:48 am (UTC)

13. The problem with my respectable 6-7m time this morning is that it made me think, “well, I’ve got time to catch up on yesterday’s too now, that’s a Monday so it should be a doddle”. Famous last words…

    Club Monthly blog will be up later, or, er, tomorrow morning at the very latest, I promise!

14. After the BREWERIES have finished their work, of course. I surprised myself by successfully wrapping this up in 9:45 despite the following potential pitfalls.

    FOI IN CAMERA, and I was whizzing through the top half until the unknown SCYTHIA caused me to change tack.

    A little biffing took place in the bottom half, so thanks Jack for parsing CANDELABRA and HAIRCUT – I was 100% confident of both, but couldn’t quite see why.

    LOI, WOD, and final biff was STRASS. Today’s earworm ought to be Also Sprach Zarathustra, although “Teethe Me, Pleethe Me” is currently in residence here. Jackie Wilson ? My version is by The Animals.

    COD BEWILDER

15. Thanks, jackkt, especially for WEN and STRASS, neither of which I knew. Strauss R. is one of my three podium finishers in the Composers’ Stakes alongside, Beethoven and Sibelius with J.S. Bach a close fourth.
    Like sotira, BEWILDER was my COD, too.
    Hard time with the NE corner, not helped by a real d’oh moment with STATIONERY. Found some Brie made with unpasteurised milk at a deli near us in NZ recently but it wasn’t that good, I thought.
    82m 08s thanks to having to quickly dash to clean up a doggy accident and also to wasting too much time in the NE corner.
    1. Not a bad selection Martin for 4 for the desert island, I’d prefer in order of pref, 1 Sibelius 2 Bach 3 Shostakovich 4 Rachmaninov 5 Beethoven 6 Satie 7 more Sibelius, or Dvorak 8 Elgar. Bit of a mix but it makes sense to me.
       1. Thanks, Pip. I haven’t listened to much Shostakovich, Rachmanninov or Satie, except for the last-named’s “Gymnopedie”. Fortunately, I subscribe to the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall so I can raid their archives for performances. After I had mentioned Wagner in a less than complimentary manner fairly recently on this site, someone suggested I try “Parsifal”. as luck would have it, a concer performance of the opera with Rattle conducting was posted only the other day. I still found it too heavy for my taste but at least I could hear it.
16. I seem to be going through a bad patch at the moment – can’t seem to finish crosswords without help. Today’s was STRASS for which I couldn’t think of a suitable composer. Doesn’t help that I don’t know anything about classical music, I guess. Also, knowing STRASS would have helped. Otherwise, one of the easy but difficult type of crosswords.
17. Have got so used to unPCness that I seriously considered 5d beginning with ABO before Winnie floated across my vision. It was good to see the gender-neutral DISH. Only STRASS caused difficulty, really dislike having to cross fingers. Must have been flying today after morning prayer, all done in under seventeen minutes. Thanks jack and setter.
18. Oh dam’! I was really hoping to come here and find either a spirited defence of STYCHIA as an ancient place or a general moan about foreign words clued as anagrams that would soothe my pink-tinged angst. Otherwise another robust crossword which I completed in about the same amount of time as yesterday’s, though the Snitch suggests I should have breezed it by comparison.
    All today’s answers (including SCYTHIA, I’m mortified to confess) were denizens of my internal wordery, even STRASS, the endless German street where Richard lived. I believe I once used Richard Strauss as a pseudonym when signing in to Ridge Hall (the ladies’ block) at Brum University. Sweet memories of Ein Heldenleben.

    Edited at 2018-05-01 09:10 am (UTC)

19. Enjoyed this but had a blind spot with TEETHE. DNK STRASS but it couldn’t be SCHBERT for 2 obvious reasons.
    1. Nor Schumann!!
    2. Nor Schmann.
20. Did anyone else think the apostrophe was unnecessary in 6dn? Maybe it was just a bluff after the two instances in 9 and 17. Bob K.
    1. I suppose you could have dairy products=BRIES, though I’m not a big fan of pluralising cheesy toponyms. Cheddars are biscuits in Tesco. Wensleydales? Parmesans? Double Gloucesters? Camomberts?
       In Crosswordland, in any case, apostroph’es are about as reliable as on Greengrocer’s sign’s about the price of oberjean’s, and should be treated with at least as much suspicion and/or amused incredulity. Their they’re to serve there purpose.
    2. I read it as ‘… product is’ hence BRIE’S, I am not sure you can have BRIES as a plural in English, although I see it is possible in French. If it was ‘products’ you might need to insert an ‘are’ in the surface.
       1. Ah, I see we crossed, Pip, as I took some time writing my reposnse and I was away for 10 minutes before posting. I’ll let it stand even though we have made the same main point.

          In response to BRIE in the plural, this sort of query comes up up regularly on Countdown where the resident lexicographer (from OED) has ruled many a time that if there are different types or brands of a foodstuff or dish then the plural is allowable even if ‘mass noun’ is specified in the dictionary. One can also order, for example “Two Bries, please” in a restaurant and that also justifies use of the plural. (In this particular instance Bries would not be allowable in Countdown because according to the Oxford Dictionaries it has to take a capital B).

    3. I took it that in the surface reading the apostrophe S is short for ‘is’, so not a possessive or a plural. Then as far as wordplay is concerned BRIE (dairy product) + S (‘S) goes around EWER (jug). Without the apostrophe BRIES has to be plural. I’m not saying it wouldn’t work but only that there’s nothing I can see wrong with what the setter has chosen to put.
21. Another testing puzzle, a bit easier than yesterday’s but tough enough. After 30 minutes I had the NW and SE done and 25a. Then I paused to make coffee. Resumed and polished off in another 15 minutes, once the penny dropped on 9a and 11a (nice one). Ending with STRASS guessed from the wordplay and the ‘Also sprach’ chap. Oh, and WEN was also a ? although it had to be NEW somewhere. Well blogged jackkt.
22. My time suggests this was almost exactly as testing as yesterday’s, though today’s time was allocated very differently, with a lot of it being spent on a single clue, as I conducted an alphabet trawl to find the missing author; I don’t know if it’s an excuse or not that it took so long precisely because there isn’t an author who fits, as I eventually realised when STATIONERY dropped. There’s probably a word to describe making clues more difficult for yourself than they actually need to be.

    Otherwise, I was another with crossed fingers at STRASS, though the wordplay seemed pretty clear, and SCHMANN didn’t fit, so what else could it be?

    1. Made the same mistake looking for a writer.
23. 23 min. 16 secs. I rattled through the first half of this then got bogged down in New Guinea, Scythia and Mali. A relief to post a decent time after my recent efforts, including my dismal attempt at yesterday’s very challenging puzzle.
24. No rush!
    1. I think you’ll like this one, horryd, in the sense of “really dislike” 😀
25. It must have been a bit gentler than yesterday’s because I had to get myself out of two holes dug early on (trying to squeeze Shakespeare into 9a and “adaptable” for AMENDABLE). Nice to have company. 21.05
26. 25 min: my first thought at 6dn was BUTTERIES from my student days, but couldn’t see how to get IE from ‘jug’. Even after rejecting that 9ac was still a problem, as 3dn’s ‘in’ made me look for a word with IF internally, and I was looking for either some sort of pen or an author.
27. 14:16, but with a silly typo I somehow failed to spot when I checked. Grr.
    STRASS unknown, and entered with crossed fingers. It doesn’t look like a word.
    I’m wasn’t quite happy with ‘cash’ or ‘in cash’ for LIQUID but Jimbo’s suggestion that a fund that is ‘in cash’ would be LIQUID got me there. Ironically if you talk about an asset being LIQUID you are often implicitly saying that it is not cash, since it’s usually used to describe the ease with which an asset can be converted to cash. On the other hand ‘liquidity’ is commonly used as a direct synonym for ‘cash’.

    Edited at 2018-05-01 11:37 am (UTC)

28. As I darted frantically around the grid trying to find a way in, with ION and SEAR my only entries, I suspected I was in for another long session, but BIPARTISAN came to my rescue and the NE and SE developed nicely, although SCYTHIA didn’t materialise until I wrote the letters out on paper. That gave me my LOI, TEETHE. I failed to parse TOT and the Great Wen, and I didn’t know the definition of STRASS, so trusted the wordplay. Knew ISINGLASS from my brother’s rather fine brewing exploits. Liked SHOWJUMPER. 24:49. Thanks setter and Jack.
29. 15:33 with last 3 minutes on the SW corner. I had to trust to wordplay for STRASS and then took a while to see how UNDRESS was right, finishing with LIQUID. I’m with Vinyl in thinking the definition is “in cash”. ADMONISH my favourite. Nice crossword and blog. Thanks setter and Jackkt.
30. With STRASS and WEN from Mephistoland, I was on the money with this one, 8:05. I thought it was a fun puzzle.
31. 35 mins. Slippery, challenging puzzle. Thanks to setter and blogger.
32. Around 20 minutes for me, sort of par for the course. LOI was the utterly unknown STRASS, which was clear, though, from the composer based wordplay. I didn’t know WEN either, but it couldn’t be anything else. Regards.

    Edited at 2018-05-01 04:34 pm (UTC)

33. Just a whisker over the half hour for this one, after a very slow start (not that things got any faster after that). STRASS was an NHO but I took it on trust, as I did the “wen” of AENIUG WEN. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said Wen was a place in Shropshire where they (a) have plenty of silly names and (b) consider any place with more than two sheep an urban sprawl. SCYTHIA was an NHO but sounded plausible (scythes have to come from somewhere, after all), and surely makes us even for yesterday’s electron orbitals and azimuths?

    LOsI were TEETHE, and ROOSTER (I did spend a while wondering if there was such a thing as a ‘roorear’ before untangling the parsing).

34. I found this a lot easier than yesterday’s, which took over an hour and needed aids to finish. I had some hesitation about STRASS – a complete unknown – but otherwise everything went in quite smoothly. 23 minutes. Ann
35. If anything I found this harder than yesterday, though that said, strass was the only question mark I had. After an hour I still had two left to get, liquid and new guinea. I came back to the puzzle after work and eventually managed to work them out. Strass was an unknown and it seemed so unlikely that I couldn’t help thinking there might be another German composer that would fit. Candelabra made me think not of Liberace but of Bobby George’s understated walk-ons at the Darts, I don’t think any of the big names push the boat out quite like that any more. It was interesting to note from his recent obituary that Eric Bristow was a Times crossword solver.
    1. Perhaps we will see CRAFTY COCKNEY clued one day soon.
36. a benign encysted tumor of the skin, especially on the scalp, containing sebaceous matter; a sebaceous cyst. … Old English wenn “a wen, wart,” a

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