Times Cryptic No 26868 – Saturday, 28 October 2017. Uluru, if you please!

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I found this relatively easy for a Saturday, which is of course not to say easy in any absolute sense. I’m back to solving on paper, but I estimate it took me about 40 minutes spread over two or three sessions – that is, fast for me. The top right and bottom left took longest. 28ac was my LOI. Several answers I felt confident putting in but went to reference materials later to verify them for the blog. Nothing too obscure however, although some clues like 22ac did seem to require some local UK knowledge – which is fair enough in a London paper, I concede.

There was some comment about 17dn, but I was surprised to find that the old name of the Australian icon still has some official standing, even though one never hears it these days.

The clue of the day for me was 7dn because the pun so suited the subject. I also liked 28ac, because the cryptic worked so well even though I didn’t know the word. Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle.

Clues are in blue, with definitions underlined. Anagram indicators are in bold italics. Answers are in BOLD CAPS, followed by the wordplay. (ABC*) means ‘anagram of ABC’, deletions are in {curly brackets}.

Across
1 Length of forearm spans small artist (6)
CUBIST: the CUBIT is an ancient unit based on the forearm length from the tip of the middle finger to the bottom of the elbow. Just insert S for small. I knew “cubit” so no reference check needed for this one.
4 Monkey turned over stuff doctor put in place (8)
MARMOSET: to RAM is to stuff. Turn it over, then append MO=doctor and SET=put.
10 Various women around old flame in charge of state (3,6)
NEW MEXICO: (WOMEN*) around EX=old flame / IC=in charge.
11 Impudence that does for each of a pair of geese? (5)
SAUCE: what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, giving the two geese in the clue.
12 Child to carry most of the way (3)
TOT: or TOT{e}.
13 At which turtles are quarrelling? (11)
LOGGERHEADS: I knew “at loggerheads” to mean quarrelling, and a lookup confirms a loggerhead is also a turtle.
14 With nothing to gain, throw a ball game (6)
PELOTA: PELT around O=nothing, then A. Another lookup to confirm PELOTA is a game. (A variety of court sports played with a ball using one’s hand, a racket, a wooden bat or a basket.)
16 Board made from wood given to me first for turning (7)
EMPLANE: as in, to board an aeroplane. ME reversed is first, then the wood of the PLANE tree.
19 Qualify to make a count perhaps (7)
ENTITLE: Double definition. If something entitles you to participate, it qualifies you to do so. If you are made a Count, you have been “entitled”, and Collins has that meaning listed.
20 I beat Elsie (6)
TANNER: another double definition. One sense of “tanning” is beating. Elsie Tanner was a long-running character in Coronation Street.
22 Animal trying to buy medicine? That should be entertaining (4,2,5)
PUSS IN BOOTS: a reference to Boots the (primarily UK) pharmacy chain, and to the pantomime.
25 Boom announced in spring (3)
SPA: might sound like SPAR=boom, if you speak English with a non-rhotic accent. Here’s a callout to the rhotic speakers … we acknowledge your scorn.
26 Reindeer not quite awake (5)
COMET: awakening might be to COME T{o}.
27 What provides mast? Seaside would, say (9)
BEECHWOOD: this probably does sound like BEACH WOULD to almost everyone.
28 Space above arch one doctor replaces in dog (8)
SPANDREL: Dictionary check confirms that this is a space above an arch. Take SPANIEL and replace I by DR.
29 Head of bar takes remarkably poor sort of case (6)
BASKET: B{ar} (TAKES*). Since a basket case is in a poor way.

Down
1 King, but uncrowned, getting stick about that (6)
CANUTE: CANE around {b}UT.
2 Runners here once give way on thoroughfare (3,6)
BOW STREET: BOW=give way / STREET=thoroughfare. According to Wikipedia, the Bow Street Runners have been called London’s first professional police force. The force, originally numbering six men, was founded in 1749 by the magistrate Henry Fielding, who was also well known as an author. And there I thought they were an invention of Arthur Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes books.  No, wait … I was thinking of the Baker Street Irregulars!
3 Move surreptitiously to snaffle bargain (5)
STEAL: triple definition: move surreptitiously / snaffle / bargain.
5 Dealt with team leaders replacing chapter already introduced (14)
AFOREMENTIONED: ACTIONED, with the C changed to FOREMEN.
6 Teacher by chance losing some power gets squashed (9)
MISSHAPEN: please MISS, what is going to HAP{p}EN?
7 Typically American composer (5)
SOUSA: John Philip Sousa is SO USA.
8 With energy ousting resistance, heavily defeats in a series of games (3,5)
THE ASHES: THRASHES, with the R changed to an E. It’s that time again for cricket’s one-time showpiece.
9 Beijing balks me, translating religious literature (4,5,5)
KING JAMES BIBLE: (BEIJING BALKS ME*).
15 Made public revelation about fool being caught and got the better of (9)
OUTWITTED: OUTED=made public revelation about, “catching” TWIT.
17 On radio, broadcasts progressive music, something monolithic (5,4)
AYER’S ROCK: sounds like “airs” rock, no problem with that. But, as martinp1 noted in last week’s blog, seriously politically incorrect! The monolith in question is called Uluru, and is sacred to the Pitjantjatjara Anangu, the Aboriginal people of the local area, who have just decided to bar tourists from climbing it. Presumably for the benefit of Times crossword setters, a dual naming policy still applies: since 6 November 2002, its name has been gazetted as “Uluru / Ayers Rock”!
18 Relations that may be paid (8)
RESPECTS: double definition. “Respect” as “relation” is in Chambers.
21 Outlaw that has only one arm? (6)
BANDIT: a one-armed bandit being a poker machine.
23 Back to back, various graduates dance (5)
SAMBA: MAS backwards, BA forward.
24 Indistinct sound check in South Australian state (5)
SCHWA: S=south / CH=check / WA=Australian state. As a quibble, Western Australia is a State with a capital S. I thought that you could sneak in upper case as disguise, but not use lower case in place of a required capital. But, I am no expert. I confirmed the definition by reference to Collins: in the study of language, schwa is the name of the neutral vowel sound.

 

26 comments on “Times Cryptic No 26868 – Saturday, 28 October 2017. Uluru, if you please!”

  1. This went surprisingly quickly for me, although I did biff 4ac and 1d, parsing later. As a confirmed rhoticist, I was delayed some on SPA, but that’s my problem, I suppose. But I did wonder about the putative homophony of ‘airs’ and ‘Ayer’s’ however the R is (not) pronounced. There’s a similar discussion going on in the States, by the way, over the official name of Denali (‘Mt. McKinley’). I couldn’t parse 5d, and now I see why: ‘action’ as a verb meaning ‘deal with’ is not in my dialect. 28ac was easily biffable–‘space above arch’–even though my idea of a spandrel was a space between arches. It depends on your arch, but I knew the word in the first place from Gould and Lewontin’s famous (or notorious, depending on your point of view) paper, where the spandrels they talk about are in St. Mark’s in Venice. Western Australia is a state, not a State, and the clue (24d) is not departing from Times xword practice.

    Edited at 2017-11-04 01:54 am (UTC)

    1. Actually, being non-rhotic myself, I can clearly hear the “R” in Ayer. The confusion is I think that in Oz at least it’s pronounced as one syllable, not two, so does sound enough like “air”. PS: or, was pronounced that way when that name was still used!

      Edited at 2017-11-04 07:42 pm (UTC)

    2. To borrow keriothe’s delightful comment the other day, it’s hard to overstate how little it matters, but do you have a reference as to why an Australian State like W.A. doesn’t get a capital S? It certainly would in Australia itself. To my mind an Australian state (small s) might be “laid back”, “insular”, or “xenophobic”, depending on which Australian(s) you are thinking of!
      1. ‘state’ is a common noun, so e.g. California is a state of the United States (where ‘States’ is part of a name, hence capitalized), W.A. is a state of Australia. The State of Western Australia is a name of a state of Australia, hence the capital S. I don’t know if Oz usage differs; would you say, e.g. “I’ve lived in 3 different States in Australia”? I certainly wouldn’t; and I doubt many editors would let me.
  2. I needed five minutes short of an hour for this but had not set out to break any records as experience has taught me that’s a futile exercise and a frustrating one, so I might as well enjoy the view along the way.

    For the second consecutive Saturday we had one of Santa’s reindeer – DANCER the week before and COMET in this one – so I was a bit disappointed today that the run wasn’t continued. I’d been hoping for one per week going into December.

    According to a Chester mystery play (and perpetuated in the text used in Benjamin Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde”) the CUBIT was God’s chosen measurement when instructing Noah how to construct his Ark: 300 cubits it shall be long and 50 broad to keep it strong.

    Edited at 2017-11-04 06:36 am (UTC)

    1. That’s how I learned ‘cubit’ (although not what it meant)–the OT story learned in Sunday school. (Ah, the memories. Such, such were the dreary, tedious days.)
    2. Back in the day when Bill Cosby was known for his humour, he had a very funny routine which involved him as a modern day man having a conversation with God who had instructed him to build an ark which must be so many cubits by so many cubits. Cosby asks: “What’s a cubit”!
  3. Found this straightforward and finished in 32 minutes. The only exception was SCHWA, slightly known but solved from cryptic. The cubit also appears in one of the finest passages in the 9d. “Which one of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; They toil not, neither do they spin; And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Thank you B and setter.
  4. 25 minutes, very enjoyable, SCHWA only from wordplay the rest no problems. Also liked SO USA and the cat in the chemists.
  5. 42:06 but with a typo. BEECHWODD. Bah! I enjoyed this puzzle. SCHWA was vaguely unknown and had to be constructed from wordplay. I was delayed by my last one in RESPECTS as I didn’t know the relations meaning and dithered before submitting. Thanks setter and Bruce.
  6. Not sure that calling the thing Ayers Rock is politically incorrect, since that is one of the things it is called, but as far as I am concerned the Times crossword ought to be a ‘non-strident beacon’ against such thinking anyway. Never been too fond of people imposing their names on things, or their opinions on others. Common sense typically wins out, whether it’s a PIN number, decimating the opposition or a Bombay duck.

    Edited at 2017-11-04 10:28 am (UTC)

    1. Well, think of the various things black people are called, or Jews, etc. But yes, Ayersrock/Uluru kinds of arguments are the kind of thing that gives political correctness a bad name. (Then again, I don’t know anything about Ayers. What if Hitler had been the first honkey to discover it?) (I wonder [to start a new parenthesis] what would have been the case if the name of the rock was called, say, m!ii in the local language (that happens to be Damin, but anyway), rather than the easy for us to approximate uluru.)

      Edited at 2017-11-04 10:57 am (UTC)

  7. I guess many of the regulars are at the championships.

    Anyway, this was a DNF for me as I gave up on the hour without getting SCHWA. It seems pretty obvious now but I’ve never heard the word and it didn’t come to me from an alphabet trawl.

    PUSS IN BOOTS seemed like a fair clue, but if anyone outside the UK parsed TANNER correctly I’d be amazed.

    Many thanks for the blog.

  8. Like others, a quick and direct solve with only a little slowdown before Beechtree became Beechwood. I took Tanner on faith, and I’m pretty sure I only knew Schwa from past discussions on this site (rants?) regarding homonyms. I didn’t see the parsing, so thank you brnchn.

    Edited at 2017-11-04 04:07 pm (UTC)

  9. Thanks for the name-check on 17dn, brnchn. I am in the camp that says Ayers Rock shouldn’t be used. Aboriginal people were in Australia LONG before white people arrived. Aboriginal people are also the owners of the park which contains Uluru and the rock is sacred to them. It’s theirs to name. Ayers Rock represents the imposition of white colonial culture on them.
    Other than that, I enjoyed the puzzle, especially SO USA, LOGGERHEADS and PUSS IN BOOTS.
    No time kept as I did this on paper.
    1. I see the merit of your argument, Martin, but the fact of colonial conquest and imposition remains. Actually, all peoples, so far as I am aware, even the Aboriginal peoples, attempt to impose themselves on others. It is part of the human condition. Some win, some lose.

      What particular rankles with me is that we (white people, broadly speaking) get our way with a country (the US and Oz come to mind), take the places over, kill off or reduce to a state of abjectness the natives, do jolly well for ourselves, and then – with whatever motivation: I prefer to keep my thoughts to myself on this – start to get very involved in protecting such things as naming rights.

      Casting no aspersions at you (whose motivation and life history I am entirely ignorant of), this action makes me laugh rather rather anything else. I suppose I might cry if I were a better person…

      1. Thanks, Ulaca and I agree that colonial conquest was a fact of life. I spent twenty years living in Australia and I believe that the country as a whole is making attempts to come to terms with it’s colonial past including the naming of places. When, in early 2008 the then P.M.,Kevin Rudd, made an apology in Parliament for the Stolen Generation (that generation of aboriginal children which was removed from their families and placed either in homes or with white families), a large part of Australian society, including my wife and I, was overjoyed but a significant minority, represented by the right wing press, disagreed. Have you read “Guns, germs & Steel” by Prof. Jared Diamond? I found it very instructive on the issue of the subjugation of, basically, brown peoples by colonial conquerors. Thanks again for your comment.
        1. At bottom, I believe colonialism was an unmitigated evil. It is difficult to know whether the greatest losers were the subjugated or the subjugators, Britain, it seems to me, has never recovered.

          The issue of apologies is to me a minor one, too easily used by politicians for their own purposes. On a similar line, a few years ago there was a march by Christians through Europe to the Holy Land making restitution or some such tosh for the Crusades! If someone feels that strongly about it, adopt a Hungarian or a Palestinian child and let no one know about it is what I suggest.

  10. Strange where we learn things from. I knew SCHWA from an episode of The Simpsons where Principal Skinner has to stand in for a missing teacher and delivers his favourite – ?only – lesson to the 9 year olds.
  11. As a non-UK solver,filled PUSS IN BOOTS from checkers though l remember the picture of that cat from a storybook in lower primary school.As for TANNER,I had to google to see her picture(wordplay was helpful,anyway)
    Ong’ara,
    Kenya.
  12. Writing this after my return from The George; a most enjoyable gathering of the great and the good, and a few others.
    I managed to solve this puzzle apart from 24a. I had ER for an indistinct sound and was looking for a state; Schwa unknown to me. I derived Spandrel, another unknown from the clue.
    Enjoyable puzzle and I generally knew the GK; FOI was Sousa.
    22a was great; just my sense of humour. David
  13. Since a number of solvers seem to have been unfamiliar with schwa, I might add that it’s the most common vowel in English; the short vowel of an unstressed syllable, like the a in ‘sofa’ or ‘about’, the first e in ‘defend’, etc.
  14. Though 20a and 22a rather local,got them easily from wordplay and checkers.Remember picture of puss on boots in primary school in the seventies.’Beat’ was a giveaway for TANNER,googled and saw her picture though l’ve never heard of her.
    Ong’ara,
    Kenya.

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