Times Cryptic 27332

63 comments on “Times Cryptic 27332”

1. That was fun! I liked the NE corner. AT STAKE was my COD but I also liked the clue for NECK, “Deeply involved, up to this”.
   And I noticed not only was MACAW also in today’s concise, it was in exactly the same spot, 5ac.
2. ….and found parts of this quite difficult. I never did manage to parse ‘basic’, but put it in as the obvious answer after being convinced for a while that it must be ‘Ionic’, and 23 across must start with ‘imp-‘.

   I would suggest that the ‘pound sign’ refers to ‘#’: “The symbol # is most commonly known as the number sign, hash, or pound sign.”

   Edited at 2019-04-23 02:47 am (UTC)

   1. Thanks for the info on the # sign which came as complete news to me and I have amended the blog accordingly to reference the American/Canadian usage. Until I first encountered telephones with keypads in the mid-1980s when I was informed it was called a ‘hash’, my only experience of the sign had been to indicate sharps in music.
      1. The £ sign has a bar across it and I thought it was a lovely clue. It’s been spoilt for me now with the suggestion that it refers to the # symbol!
   2. I’m genuinely curious about the # denoting pound, as I’ve never come across it before. I do know that if you accidentally switch your british keyboard to American, # is what you rather annoyingly get when you go for the £ sign – any correlation, or just coincidence?
      1. Yes, it’s interesting, isn’t it? It apparently came from “℔” for the Avoirdupois weight, though I doubt anyone uses it that way any more. However, presumably because of that history, many people in the US call “#” the “pound sign”. This is something one becomes acutely aware of as a British programmer!

         I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that # and £ map to the same physical keyboard key for different languages; I imagine it’s a side-effect of the early days of the internationalisation of ASCII codes, where we were all trying to cram our important characters into just 128 slots and ran out of room. An early fudge for this was character sets where the letters were mostly represented by the same numbers, but in America you’d get a “#” and in the UK you’d get a “£”.

         These days we’re a bit more advanced along the road, and the various Unicode encodings allow for hundreds of thousands of characters, from Aramaic to, er, modern hieroglyphs 😀😎🤡, but our keyboards still don’t have that many keys. Even today, on a UK Apple Mac it’s Shift+3 for “£” and Option+3 for “#”…

         Edited at 2019-04-23 09:22 am (UTC)

         1. Many thanks!

            1. It is correlation – though an accidental one. The US has always referred to the hash symbol as a pound sign. The current international ISO keyboard layout was designed in the US. The programmer was, apparently, asked to put the UK pound sign on the three key, next to the dollar sign. He put the US pound sign there instead. That’s why the US and UK keyboard layouts differ (now in other ways too).

3. Held up by a couple of DNKs, otherwise pretty smooth going. I don’t think I knew HONESTY, I didn’t know ALBAN was a martyr, and it took me a while to connect with the town; and I definitely didn’t know CHICANE, my LOI; I finally realized that ‘line’ was RY, and figured there must be a bend of that name. I noticed we have ‘way’=PATH and ‘way’=ST(reet). I’d always called # the pound sign, until ‘hash mark’ became widespread. In 8d, is ‘can make one sick’ enough for the definition?
4. 19:34 … got a bit stuck in the southwest. Come to think of it, got a bit stuck in the northwest, too, but nothing insurmountable.

   Only vaguely knew where I was with the ALBAN clue, where my first effort was URBAN — probably a martyr and, you know, a turban with a bit snipped — and the exciting prospect of an ‘urban gentrification’ nina.

   Liked the TACHE, the NECK and the wordplay of SLIGHTING, even if the surface is distinctly iffy.

5. I suppose I’d heard of OGEN for ‘melon’ and GONERIL before but they didn’t immediately spring to mind and I had to enter the answers from wordplay or def. I didn’t know the floral HONESTY and missed the proper meaning of 10a.

   The defs. for MINISTRY (good surface too) and ECLIPSES were my highlights.

   Finished in 42 minutes.

   Thank you to setter and blogger

6. ALBAN took me a few minutes over my hour—I didn’t know the martyr or the vestment, and in the end just took a flutter on it based on the mere existence of St. Albans. It was PONTIFICAL that stretched me to the hour in the first place, so not being a Christian was something of a disadvantage for me on this one.

   Not being American didn’t slow me down in 10a POUND SIGN, though it seemed quite a loose definition for “£” when I wrote it in.

   Apart from that, I enjoyed some of the nicer sleight of hand here. COD to 21d for its Old Testament, plus I liked 23d’s “degrees Celsius” and 2d’s “Truth, for Blair”. On the whole, chewy but enjoyable.

   1. How else would you define £?!
      1. Well, that’s why it didn’t slow me down, but if I were American I think the character which is composed of bars and nothing else might’ve sprung to mind a little more quickly for “barred character”.
         1. Sorry i thought you were saying POUND SIGN was loose for £. Pretty obvious what you meant really, I was just being dim.
            I’m fairly sure the setter must have been thinking of £, but it also works with # so 🤷

            Edited at 2019-04-23 10:19 am (UTC)

7. This puzzle was right up my street with regards to the GK needed. At primary school I remember doing a piece of “creative writing” about the plant HONESTY. At secondary school we studied King Lear so I was familiar with GONERIL. And I used to live in St Albans so was familiar with the martyr.

   COD to MERE for a neat clue for such a short word.

8. As Jack remarks, one of those puzzles that appear easy in hindsight but are troublesome at the time. Usually a sign of good clues!

   Knew the # for £ so no problem there. Enjoyed “old testament” and “degrees Celsius”. Well done Jack and thank you setter

   1. # for lb. not £, no?
9. 40 mins with yoghurt, banana, granola, etc.
   And 5 of that was trying to justify Mere. Sometimes excessive subtlety negates itself, like winking with both eyes.
   Thanks setter and J.
   1. Nice bit of Billy Joel – and “HONESTY is such a lonely word” !
10. Yes, of course. Half asleep this morning – thanks for correcting!
11. Interesting crossword with some smart clues .. liked 1ac, 2dn. Knew the martyr, used to go for walks at Raby Mere when we lived in Huntingdon.
    Agree with Keriothe, there’s no need to consider # when £ will suffice. In fact if I thought # really was meant, I would be complaining.
12. 41 minutes, with everything eventually parsed. I struggled all the way through, and like others can’t see why, unless it was a surfeit of chocolate these last two days. Apparently, it does contain PATHOGENs. LOI was TACHE. COD to GONERIL by a short head from NECK and SLIGHTING. MINISTRY was a bit too contrived, and I spent too long early on trying to make veracity out of Eric. I saw POUND SIGN quickly but the hash sign was wasted on me. CODICIL and HONESTY seemed barely cryptic, so I found this puzzle a mixed bag. Thank you Jack and setter.
13. I’m with everyone who thinks the pound sign is £, perfectly barred. As far as I’m concerned, the # is there for singing a bit higher and tiny games of noughts and crosses, and what’s more, I wouldn’t think of it as barred.
    And I’m biased on St Alban too: my school’s twice weekly assemblies were held within feet of his shrine in the fabulous multi-styled abbey-cathedral that bears his name. Do visit. Alban has much more claim to be Britain’s patron saint that today’s George: the first Christian martyr in this land of immigrants: a Roman settled in Britain, who sacrificed his life to save another. Much more authentic than that Turkish parvenu responsible (at least in part) for the extinction of the draco species.
    Be that as it may, this crossword took me 17 minutes, the last in the rather clever (by which I mean tricky to sort out) MERE. Much enjoyed, especially in tandem with an excellent blog.
14. 20:46. Lots of fun. I started rather slowly with GENTRIFIED my FOI, and CLEAN my next but the Downs got me going when I recognised the setter’s style and tuned in. ECLIPSES my LOI. I liked POUND SIGN, but COD to BASIC for the degrees Celsiu.
15. 16:03. Some trickiness from the funny words (ALB, the plant) and tricky definitions (old testament, truth for Blair).
    The Times is an English crossword, and in English English POUND SIGN invariably means £, which is a character with a bar (and sometimes two). I don’t see any need for #.

    Edited at 2019-04-23 08:05 am (UTC)

    1. Come to think of it, it’s not clear that # is a barred sign in any case.
       1. It does look like a little cage.
          1. Or pound?
             1. 🙂
16. Good to see a George getting a pseudonymous mention on this day.
    I knew CHICANE from Scalextric, there was a special piece which made the cars crash.
    The sharp sign did not cross my mind.
    Have worn an alb.
    And I knew 1ac from the fatal surfeit thereof.
    Thanks to Look and Learn for all the above.

    24′, thanks jack and setter.

17. I had no trouble with either POUND SIGN or GONERIL. However I biffed ALBAN and FLOWERING – thanks Jack.

    FOI HONESTY
    LOI CHICANE
    COD CODICIL
    TIME 12:00

18. This felt like a test, so I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I polished it off. ALBAN went in with fingers crossed, as I couldn’t parse it – I started off with ROBIN, being almost ROBINg, but that didn’t fit with 8dn and on checking, I discover there is no St. Robin, anyway, just Sir Robin of Camelot (so that’s today’s earworm taken care of). Nice work all round.
19. 25’15, wish I could think fast. I like the neck pontifical.
20. Struggled a bit with this for no obvious reason except failure of concentration, so I’m glad it seemed to have the same sort of effect on others. I did the same as Tim with “Robin” (who killed Cock Robin, making a martyr of him or something equally unconvincing) which made a nonsense of that corner. HONESTY plants fascinated me as a kid, not sure why. LAMPREYs are pretty scary looking creatures so perhaps it’s not surprising that King John was supposed to have died of a surfeit of them. 20.36
21. 12m 59s with ALBAN the last to fall – I was also tempted by ROBIN for some time.

    PONTIFICAL is a rum one. I very much enjoyed the definition, surface and cryptic elements, but the grammar is pretty tenuous: “fiction troubled friend consumes” to mean “friend consumes troubled fiction” may just about pass muster but isn’t very pleasing.

    I’m also not sure about the definition in 8d – surely needs a “this can…” or similar?

    Sorry, all in all I thought this was a good puzzle but those brought it short of excellence for me.

22. No problem with GONERIL, POUND SIGN, ALBAN, HONESTY …. YOU NAME IT. My LOI had me befuddled though, couldn’t see AT STAKE for the life of me. Sometimes the easy ones are the hardest
23. I struggled to get moving in this one. MACAW was my FOI but the next few were a long time coming. I eventually made progress down under, but the top half made me ponder mightily. PONTIFICAL gave me something to work from, CODICIL went in incompletely parsed. NECK was an early entry. POUND SIGN went in without a hint of hash. HONESTY replaced FACTORY(don’t ask!) once I’d stopped trying to make an anagram out of Way Melon(LEYWOMAN anyone?). CHICANE was easy enough for a GP addict. I missed the 1984 reference. A tough workout, but none the worse for that. 39:09. Thanks setter and Jack.
24. No problems with this, 16 minutes, didn’t pause at pound sign being barred £, ALBAN my LOI. Nice puzzle. Nice blog. No need for all the fuss about # £ IMO. # is a hash sign in UK and on a French keyboard or phone it’s called dièse.
25. Maybe I’m just a bit grumpy at having to come back to work after a 4-day weekend (which itself came in the wake of a 5-day weekend, 2-day week combo) but bits of this puzzle irritated me:

    I don’t like definitions that are “almost, but not quite” the right part of speech to match the answer and this had two of the blighters (“can make one sick” and “that are regularly over our heads”).

    Secondly, IMHO the clue for MERE doesn’t fully work. It doesn’t pass muster as an &Lit in which case “water” is doing double duty as part of both wordplay and def.

    My grumpiness (further aggravated by the fortunes of Leeds United over the weekend) and struggles with MERE and ECLIPSES at the end (for the reasons noted above) meant my time stretched to 22:33 for a puzzle that wasn’t really that hard.

    Edit to add that I only thought of £ and not # for 10 despite having participated in countless wretched conference calls where one’s conference ID number has to be followed by the “pound or hash sign”.

    Edited at 2019-04-23 12:23 pm (UTC)

    1. I’m glad someone agreed with me about 8d (see moi, above).
    2. Can I add 19dn to your list, please?
       Rice as an Asian crop? With no indication of DBE?
       Apart from Antarctica (where there’s not much farming), rice is grown in every single continent in the world. What’s with “Asian”? It’s like white people wearing blackface, odious racial stereotyping.
       1. Encyclopedia Britannica reckons that 90% of the world’s rice is grown in Asia, so it seems fair enough to me.
          1. Hmmm… apologies?
             I live in Australia, and we export rice to Asia.
       2. No indication of DBE, eh? So what’s the question mark after ‘Asian crop’ doing then?
          1. Indeed. Too quick to jump on perceived slights. I hang my head in shame.
          2. But that question mark isn’t doing that specific duty is it? It merely indicates that if you read the phrase as a whole, it could be taken to mean something different. The question mark doesn’t specifically relate to just the Asian crop part. The Real Mr Grumpy
26. I was defeated by this morning’s QC but I got into this relatively quickly with GENTRIFIED and proceeded from there.
    LOI was POUND SIGN; I completely missed the anagram but, to me, it is clearly a barred character.Before that I struggled in the NE. WINCE seemed likely to be right but I was looking for something better and 2LOI was CHICANE.
    Quite a few I could not parse ( especially MINISTRY) so thanks for all those.
    A recent visit to St Albans was my saving grace for 2a.
    David
27. Got through this with no real problems, although it took me an extra bit of time to light on my LOI, AT STAKE. Clever. As an American I immediately assumed the POUND SIGN was #. After reading here I actually realise that while that symbol has always been a POUND SIGN I had no idea why it is called that here in the US. I note the references to ‘lb.’, but I didn’t know that. It’s just always been a POUND SIGN. Regards.
28. Really enjoyed this one. Tough but fair, I thought. Just had to check that Goneril was correct.
29. As an ex-programmer, I’m well aware of the various terms for this symbol – I even remember it was officially called the ‘octothorpe’, though that never caught on.
    For no particular reason this took me about 40 minutes, having got stuck halfway for a while: MERE was LOI.
30. Steady solve – no time, as I kept falling asleep 🙂
31. I enjoyed this. As a member of the 15 x 15 SCC, I was pleased to finish in about an hour. Like others, my LOI was ‘at stake’ and I also don’t know why! In my former life in journalism, I used the hash tag to mark where a space had to be added; it’s also often used to denote a number. Forget Will and George’s special day – I’m off to celebrate anniversary #26 now 😊
32. 49:46, similar solving experience to others in that I unaccountably found this one rather troublesome. Couldn’t remember the melon that wasn’t galia or honeydew, so that held me up. Couldn’t parse mere, so, even though it was obvious did an alphabet trawl for that one. Dnk honesty as a plant. With hindsight not much else that should have held me up as much as it did.
33. Hooray! Done in about 3 hours on and off throughout the day – pretty slowish, but got there in the end. Finished the bottom half before the top half – one of those days. The legend of the martyr St Alban was new to me despite living not too far from the place, and it made some interesting reading. LAMPREY was also news. Frightful looking things! OGEN=melon also DNK. One for the book, or OneNote in my case. Perhaps I should just try to remember these things…mmm…
    Thanks for the grid, clues and blogging exegesis – much appreciated for several biffers, 25 being the main one. LOI was 26 which is odd as it’s so easy. Mind you, aren’t they all when you know how they work?
    Perhaps this will get easier. I’ve just ordered Ximenes and Chambers Crossword Manual, perhaps they will help. At least I’m getting through them, albeit with dictionary help.

    3 month challenge: 4/6

34. The foregoing Anonymous identifies himself as Mr. Grumpy, but he’s got nothing on me. Today has been one of those days that would have been better spread out over a week, but not up to much even then.

    It was, therefore, in deep grumpth that I decided I was damned if I was going to check my answers before submitting. This, in turn, led to my being yet further engrumpthed by having a typo in CODICIL. I’m sure it serves me right, which makes me grumpier still.

    Thanks to jackkt for explaining 9ac, which I completely failed to parse. I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard of an alb, and would have guessed it was one of the innumerable juvenile stages of the salmon, if pressed.

    As for # being a pound sign, I’ve always assumed that when automated phone services tell me to “press the pound sign”, it’s my phone that’s deficient in having a # where a £ is needed. A Google image search for “pound sign” returns about 20 times more £s than #s. However, I’m sure that if I start ranting about American usage, someone will point to evidence that # for “pound” is of English origin.

    I am hoping that the remaining 23 minutes of Tuesday turn out better than the previous 1417 have.

    1. Spooky. We had a quiz question tonight which asked how many minutes are there in a day!
       1. Was it answered correctly? And, if so, by dint of knowledge or quick maths?
          1. Correctly by quick maths:-)
35. Is British doing double duty in Lebanon then? If it isn’t, and is just B inserted into Lean on then I suppose it depends where you are resident doesn’t it? If it IS doing double duty, then it’s equally daft because then the answer is defined as country-quite-a-bit-away-from-Britain-but-not-overly-so. In fact, not as far as the great majority of the World. Mr Grumpy
36. Don’t upset yourself, vinstappen! I think the # theory was pretty firmly discounted by the end of the day as not being the setter’s intention, although the interpretation may be perfectly valid as an alternative to those on the other side of the Atlantic who are more familiar with # than £.
37. I first thought it was a ‘dollar’ because that is barred and then I realised that the ‘£’ has a bar in it too. I thought it was quite cute as a clue and yes it does depart from the normal. But we got it didn’t we? Which means it is a valid clue.
38. Thanks setter and jack
    Found this one to be quite heavy going and did need to use references along the way – to check if there was a martyr ALBAN, the plant HONESTY and the PONTIFICAL mass. Assumed that the pound sign was the crossed monetary one – didn’t really matter at the end of the day – as long as one arrived at the answer I guess.
    Interesting to see PATHOGEN, whilst doing the puzzle in semi-lockdown with the latest version of it.
    Finished in the NW corner with GENTRIFIED, YOU NAME IT (originally had YOU HAVE IT – but couldn’t parse it) and MINISTRY (thought originally that it was the Tony Blair version until penny-dropping the real name of George Orwell)

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