Times Cryptic 28946

63 comments on “Times Cryptic 28946”

1. Last two in were SWAN and FISH, entered with fingers crossed as I was unconvinced by my parsing. Similarly RAVISH, though what else would fit 6d? (V1 power – like V8 with only one cylinder? Some reference to V1 doodlebug?) Fully expected pink squares for these – but got one for a typo in the ostentatious pianist instead!
   24mijns

   1. Vis is Latin for power (think plural — vires, as in ultra vires)

2. Just like Corymbia, my last two were, and in the same order, SWAN and FISH, which seemed very hard. The rest of this hadn’t prepared me for that, and these two took a while! Had never heard of another four-letter word either, AXIS, by that definition—but it’s certainly a fresh way to clue that letter sequence.

   I knew BALA as a Welsh lake because I lived for a few, very memorable, years in Pennsylvania, where there is a place named Bala Cynwyd.

3. Enjoyable. Same thoughts re Relish and Ravish.
   Thanks setter and jackkt

   1. T(-O) READ
      It’s O that means “nothing,” missing here.

      1. Thanks Guy. I saw it just after I posted.

4. I had no clue what was going on with PARABOLAS, but this was a sciency word I sort of knew, so in it went.

   The Liberace biopic, ‘Behind the Candelabra’, is well worth a watch for the bravura performances from Matt Damon and, especially, Michael Douglas. Indicative of modern tastes, perhaps, it never got a theatrical release in the USA.

   35 minutes.

5. I thought this was quite tricky, and I really had to work the cryptics. I completely misparsed spate, but my answer was the right one.
   Jackkt doesn’t have to worry about the fish; doctor is defined in Chambers as a fish, the sea surgeon.

   Time: 24 minutes

6. 20:23. Spent five or six minutes on SWAN at the end. Eventually thought of swank although I couldn’t think of a poet named Swan. Turns out I was right!

   Also slightly bewildered by FISH, RAVISH and AXIS but there didn’t seem to be any alternatives.

   Thanks Jack and setter.

   1. The accusative VIM is better known in English, if you accept the etymology.

7. 12:01. Lots of tricky words in this, which had me pausing to think on numerous occasions. All fair and gettable though, I thought.
   Jonson’s reference to Shakespeare (who he knew personally and worked with) is one of the many, many things Shakespeare conspiracists have to explain away. That’s nothing, though: Oxfordians can explain to you with a straight face how Edward de Vere managed to write Macbeth when he was dead.

8. DNF – gave up on the poet.

9. I parsed 9a, ASCERTAIN, as an anagram of ARSENIC + TA for “sure”.

   FISH 16a still baffles me. I parsed it as FIS{k} + H, with “fisk” meaning to pepper (or riddle) something with questions. But the doctors and nurses were surplus to my requirements.

   RAVISH can be innocent enough in modern usage: think “You look ravishing”.

   1. This parsing of ASCERTAIN is missing an anagram indicator.
      To ‘fisk’ is to refute the points in a newspaper article one by one (after the journalist Robert Fisk, whose output was particularly susceptible to such treatment), which is not quite the same thing. This interpretation also fails to account for ‘over’.

      1. My understanding was that “fisking” was coined, as Robert F.’s Wikipedia page has it, “to describe his method” of “line-by-line rebuttal,” not that Fisk was a prime candidate for having his own work so dissected. A Wikipedia “Talk” page, though, features a claim that Andrew Sullivan (ugh!) coined the term in describing Fisk’s account of being beaten up on one occasion by locals where he was reporting from. If Sullivan did rebut Fisk’s story line-by-line, it seems more logical for that to be called “Sullivaning” (as inelegant as that sounds), but it seems that there weren’t many facts to rebut there, the original story being an account more of Fisk’s own complex reaction to the experience.

         1. Interesting: ODE supports my version. In the absence of definitive proof I will agree with you and Wikipedia, if only on the basis that being on the same side of any argument as Sullivan makes me queasy.

10. I have a bafflingly bad record on 50:50 guesses – and that continued here, with the perfectly parsable and perfectly plausible IXAS.

    I’d decided to grumble about this before finishing the puzzle, regardless of whether I was right (and it’s doubly annoying I was wrong, as I’m sure not everyone will believe me). If you don’t know your types of deer, which I don’t think is fair to expect from a solver, you’re reduced to a guess – and it’s not a crossword staple either. Humbug!

    Thanks both.

    1. Nice rant!

11. A fail. I eventually managed to get some of the difficult ones like FISH and RAVISH but failed on SWAN for which I bunged in SWAG even though it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the ‘Literary poet’. Quite a few DNF’S on the club site leaderboard so looks like I wasn’t the only one to find this hard.

12. Although you hide in the ebb and flow
    Of the pale tide when the moon has set, …
    (The Fish, WB Yeats)

    25 mins mid-brekker, mostly agonising over Ravish, Vexer, Taxpaying, Fish.
    Vis, Veer (really?), I thought it would end …axing (doh) and Fish is terrible.
    Ta setter and J

    1. If you’re interested in Ravishing, try Yeats’ Leda and the Swan

13. DNF. Gave up on -I-H and bunged in WITH clearly not understanding the clue at all. Bah.

    Some good stuff though, I liked FLAGSTAFF & APPRENTICE.

    Thanks Jack and setter.

14. 51 minutes with last two the unknown ETHNOLOGIC and then FLOODLIT. AXIS, RAVISH and VEXER were all put in without conviction. I knew the Swan of Avon. It was my job as a lad to riddle the ashes through the fire grate into the ashpan, and then make the fire, so eventually I constructed FISH without bothering about the doctors or nurses. COD to DESCARTES, remembering the explanation given many years ago by either Frank Muir or Denis Norden on My Word as to why the cakes couldn’t be eaten until the end of the party. “I think they’re for one a.m.” A tricky puzzle with a couple of obscurities but enjoyable enough because I got them. Thank you Jack and setter.

    1. OK on the SIFTing and (grate) RIDDLing but also, after much pondering and help from a stronger mind, on ‘therefore I am’. Thanks.

15. Shaw was my best guess at the poet, which is not the first description I would use for Shakespeare. I agree with the grumbles at the obscure deer clued by (partial) anagram, even though I guessed correctly. Fish was also wilfully obscure. Otherwise a fine puzzle.

16. Flew through the first 90%, stumbled on FISH, eventually solved, then gave up without SWAN after 20′.

    Thanks jack and setter.

17. I finished in 22:06 having been completely baffled by several of the clues even though I was pretty sure of the answers, notably
    POISON why PO was chamber
    FISH for doctors and nurses
    AXIS for a deer
    It was really annoying somehow to have these total obscurities in what was otherwise a very easy puzzle
    Thanks setter and especially thanks Jack for researching that stuff

18. 14:40 but one wrong – I had an unparsed SHAW for the poet even though I knew of him only as a playwright which I failed to go back to at the end. I don’t think I’d have got SWAN if I’d tried harder. Lots of obscurities here but I loved the clue for DESCARTES. Thanks Jackkt and setter.

19. DNF, defeated by SWAN and AXIS (I put Shaw and Ixas respectively).

    No idea how FISH meant doctors and nurses but got the answer from the wordplay; didn’t know that SYBARITIC means luxurious; didn’t know po=chamber for POISON; didn’t see how TREAD worked; and didn’t know vis=power for RAVISH.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

    COD Apprentice

    1. Definition of PO (as in loo) is ‘chamber pot’. The only allusion I could draw

20. 38:18 but with not 1 but 3 typos!

    I found this a tricky one, and I was just glad to finish and I pressed submit without even a cursory glance of the grid. More fool me as to my knowledge ETTHOLOGIC, TRESD and BENEFICEHT do not belong in the English language.

    So much for Tuesdays being the new Mondays. Maybe Wednesdays?

    Thanks to both.

21. Walked away when I got to the veer=change mind clue. Knew my blood pressure wouldn’t cope.

22. This was only a stiff challenge with the tetragrams, especially FISH and SWAN. I spent a long time musing on what the difference was between a poet and a literary poet. There are poets called Swan, according to Wiki: US Jon who qualifies for the Times and UK Michael who doesn’t, but this is not the TLS so we’re not expected to have to use Wiki. So the Avon Lad it had to be. Once I, at last, managed to switch from SIEVE to SIFT I got the FISH easily enough and recalled at least the shark.
    LIBERACE was another slow arrival, looking for a classical, virtuoso pianist (shades of the TLS again) but could only think of Paderewski and Rubenstein, neither of which could be squeezed in. Liber scriptus proferetor.
    So a brisk solve extended to a 23.05 solve, with BENEFACENT ( I started with benefaction) spotted and corrected seconds before submission.

23. I was going along swimmingly by my standards and then came to an utter block on BENEFICENT (couldn’t get beneficial out of my head, even looked up to see if there was a coin called a cial) and couldn’t think of TAXPAYING even though it was pretty obvious (hung up on taxtaking), couldn’t think of the part of London, slow with FISH, failed to see that ETHNOLOGIC was an anagram, so a sub-30 minute solve became a 47-minute solve with some aids. Silly, because nothing was all that difficult.

24. DNF
    Couldn’t get past all the obscurities.
    Thanks, jack.

25. DNF, 16a, pISH! Don’t want to finish if clues are that riddled/strained/sifted. 19a FORD was indirect enough, but acceptable. 23a POISON I do connect chamber with pot I suppose, but Po adds abstruseness.
    26a the only BALSA raft I knew was the Kon-Tiki, but I see it is allowed (Wiktionary says esp Pacific coast of South America, as Kon-Tiki). I remember (dimly) lake Bala from an earlier outing here.
    28a POI “Rene DESCARTES was a drunken fart, I drink therefore I am”, Python’s song, and a clever clue.
    4d SWANk, another very indirect allusion. I can’t find SWAN=POET anywhere (except as jackkt found it; I didn’t.) However “swan of avon” redirects to William Shakespeare on Wiki, but without giving any explanation.
    6d RAVISH, didn’t believe it so cheated by coming here. Pish again! However vis, pl vires is familiar in Ultra Vires, so I maybe should have known it? I see in Wiktionary it says of VIM “Possibly from Latin vim, accusative singular of vīs (“force, power, strength;…”
    15d had heard of (para) BOLAS in that sense, but it is pretty niche. I am very unsure why we spent so much time on Argentina in O level Geog.
    25d Didn’t find AXIS=deer, but it is in Wiktionary, (plural axises added to Cheating Machine). By that time (LOI) I just bunged it in without care as to whether right or not, as 16a was still blank.

26. SWAN and FISH finally slouched their way into the front of my brain long after I had finished and stopped timing. I can just about swallow the latter, so to speak, but the SWAN reference seems a mental convolution too far to be entirely fair.

27. I nearly finished this in good time but FISH and SWAN were unsolvable to me, and the options were too numerous. Definitely a curates egg!

28. DNF, due to spelling error in benificent.
    Last two in were FISH and SWAN – the last with considerable doubt, not knowing any poets of that name, and unaware of Johnson’s description of Shakespeare.

    1. I did that, too (the spelling error, but the rest as well). Nice to have company.

29. Another FISH and SWAN DNF here. Otherwise, a really nice crossword.

30. 40:58 with one wrong. DNK SWAN and I didn’t think of swank, so wrote in SHAW expecting the pink squares. I liked FISH, accepting “doctors and nurses” too readily perhaps, given their obscurity. I had the dead skin on my feet nibbled by fish in a lake in Greece once; it was quite an enjoyable experience, nothing yuk about it.
    At 1dn at first I had FLAGPOLES where “workers” gave me POLES. That’s a bit cheeky, I thought, as I wrote it in. It didn’t last long once the crossers started coming

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