Times Cryptic No 26874 – Saturday, 04 November 2017. Slowed to a crawl.

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Times Cryptic No 26874 – Saturday, 04 November 2017. Slowed to a crawl.

While, we hoped, the stars of the troupe were tripping and twirling their way through a series of competition puzzles, this one had a strange rhythm for me … rather like quick-quick, slow-slow-slow!

The left started well, and then most of the rest, leaving me puzzling over four separate down clues. Once an alphabet trawl gave me 14dn and I dredged a plausible answer to 5dn out of distant memories, I had a completed grid but three down clues (5, 6 and 8) completely unjustified. 6dn yielded to the old technique – write it down and tear it apart – but 5dn and 8dn are still a mystery as I start this blog.

The clue of the day for me was 19ac, for the nice definition! Thanks to the setter.

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}. Now that northern hemisphere clocks have gone back and southern ones forward, I may be slow to respond to comments posted after we shut down for the night here. Sorry about that.

Across
1            Old way plumber and I worked, standing progressively higher (8,6)
UPWARDLY MOBILE: (OLD WAY PLUMBER I*).
9            Cast light on Irish judge accepting help in return (9)
IRRADIATE: IR / RATE, “accepting” AID backwards.
10          Capital O that signifies R (5)
ROMEO: ROME=capital / O, all signifying “R” in the phonetic alphabet.
11          Foolish, that is, crossing old lady? (5)
INANE: I.E. around NAN.
12          Briefly show sponsor reference to what happened earlier (9)
FLASHBACK: FLASH / BACK.
13          Notice man’s running to grab one purchase (8)
ADHESION: AD / HE’S / ON, grabbing I=one.
15          A sailor appears in TV quiz about Gulf state (6)
QATARI: A TAR inside QI.
17          This writer needs stamina now and then with hard book (6)
ISAIAH: I / SAIA=odd letters of stamina / H.
19          Bath here: impressive soak, inhaling sulphur (8)
SOMERSET: SOME RET (impressive soak), inhaling S=sulphur.
22          Hell‘s dark horse (9)
Perhaps we can omit this one?
23          Key for ward (5)
MINOR: double definition.
24          Wrap small fruit, then large (5)
SHAWL: S / HAW / L.
25          Nearly ring reviewer, indicating change in sound (9)
DIACRITIC: DIA{l} / CRITIC.
26          Ignore lies: I denied savings can be made here (8,6)
DISCOUNT STORES: DISCOUNT=ignore / STORIES=lies, minus an I.

Down
1            Bentham’s idea: unlimited pointlessness based on heresy (14)
UTILITARIANISM: {f}UTILIT{y}=pointlessness / ARIANISM=a form of heresy I know only from crosswords. Utilitarianism is the principle that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”.
2            Break par during thaw playing hostile course (7)
WARPATH: (PAR THAW*).
3            Such mountains are cooler with summit obscured (5)
RIDGE: drop the F from FRIDGE.
4            Bad golfer welcomes a quiet game for kids (8)
LEAPFROG: (GOLFER*), including A and P=quiet .
5            Wild woman, crazy, eating a nut (6)
MAENAD: Collins defines MAENAD as: 1. (classical mythology) a woman participant in the orgiastic rites of Dionysus; bacchante; 2. a frenzied woman. The wordplay is MAD “eating” A EN, where Collins (again) says the printing measure “EN” is also known as a NUT. All too obscure for me!
6            Joke about which European embodies right growth factor (9)
BIRTHRATE: RIB backwards / THAT=about which / E=European, all including R=right. Population growth is driven by three factors: birth rate, death rate, and migration.
7            Sophoclean letter about a sexy dance (7)
LAMBADA: not many Greek characters with six-letter English names! So, add an A to LAMBDA.
8            Carriers stop traffic entering junctions (8,6)
FORKLIFT TRUCKS: FORKS are the junctions, to go around the outside of LIFT and TRUCK. Collins has TRAFFIC as a meaning of TRUCK. I presume LIFT=STOP, as in “the fog lifted”. More obscurity.
14          Clever clogs packs up absorbing story (5,4)
SMART ALEC: TALE=story, “absorbed” by CRAMS backwards. Another that required an alphabet trawl.
16          There’s one on schooner travelling from east (8)
FOREMAST: (FROM EAST*).
18          Asian one follows a lover round Grand Hotel (7)
AFGHANI: A / FAN / I, around GH=Grand Hotel.
20          Legislator, chap in Madrid, going about a tango (7)
SENATOR: SENOR, around A / T.
21          What carries passengers in Invercargill and Auckland (6)
LANDAU: hidden answer, indicated by “in”.
23          Value emergency room with German nurses (5)
MERIT: E.R. inside MIT=the German word for “with”.
 

24 comments on “Times Cryptic No 26874 – Saturday, 04 November 2017. Slowed to a crawl.”

  1. I made the mistake of following the setter’s enumeration at 6d and put in ‘birthdate’ (one word) rather than BIRTH RATE (two), also rather than giving the clue proper thought. 1d was a gimme–Bentham had one idea–parsed post hoc. 1ac from checkers, 14d from def, both also parsed post hoc. I never did figure out the AEN (or ENA?) of MAENAD, and now I can see why. I’d never come across the term ‘fork lift TRUCK’, just ‘fork lift’, and I wondered about LIFT, too; TRUCK as in ‘have no truck with …’? (Alan Bennett was talking with an elderly lady, a medieval scholar or some such, and had an amusing story involving a fork lift but wasn’t sure she’d know what it is. So he prefaced his story with, “Do you know what a fork lift is?” To which she replied, “Yes, to my cost.”)
    1. A buffing great failure. The Old Way (1a) wasn’t Watling Street. Joking Around (6d) wasn’t Burlesque. The Wild Woman (5d) didn’t refer to Medea.
      I could go on, but I think I’ll just take my fork ‘andles, three tins of peas, and my bill hooks and go home.
  2. But yeah I was almost done after 15; it was the forklifts and some of its crossers that held me up. Wasted a lot of time post submission trying to parse maenad and never did, until now. Thanks
  3. 50 minutes with two not fully parsed until after the event. I remembered later that I came across EN/nut recently when I was researching EN and EM in connection with another query, but I regret to say I had completely forgotten about it.

    I never thought twice about BIRTHRATE as one word, but having read Kevin’s comment I looked it up and found no support for it in the usual sources. However, a Onelook dictionary search revealed 18 matches most or all of which appear to be American, including dictionary.com

  4. I’m amused in retrospect to see that in the blog I automatically wrote “birth rate” as two words. Slack of me not to check … thanks Jack and Kevin.

    Edited at 2017-11-11 06:01 am (UTC)

  5. 42 minutes, with the parsing of FORKLIFT TRUCKS not fully pinned down. Forklift truck drivers don’t like jokes. They find them unpalletable. I did manage to parse MAENAD as LOI. UTILITARIANISM was written in as soon as I read Bentham’s name, although I’ve never quite mastered the calculus required. I wondered about BIRTHRATE as one word too. The lambda of lambada could have been clued as ‘wavelength’ for us physicists, something I was usually on with this puzzle, although it was sometimes like trying to find 208 metres on an old valve-radio. COD DIACRITIC. Thank you B and setter.

    Edited at 2017-11-11 07:16 am (UTC)

  6. 17:49. 5dn strikes me as far too Mephisoish for one of these puzzles. I remembered that ‘nut’ is another word for EN but it’s very obscure. In fact EN itself is arguably too obscure for these things but it does appear pretty regularly. Useful I guess.

    Edited at 2017-11-11 08:40 am (UTC)

  7. 19:40, so quite fast for me, but I’d never heard of Bentham so my last one in, based on all the checkers was UNIFICATIONISM put in with a shrug… and wrong. Thanks for explaining MAENAD, SOMERSET and FORKLIFT TRUCKS which I also failed to parse. 4d my favourite. Thanks blogger and setter.
  8. 36:06 so quick-ish for me. A smooth and enjoyable solve. Last two in were 19ac and 8dn. I got it into my head that in 19ac “soak inhaling sulphur” was “s(s)ot” and got held up for a while. Thanks for parsing 1dn which was a write in from “Bentham’s idea” I knew the setters’ favourite heresy but never worked out the “unlimited pointlessness”. Also didn’t get the “nut” bit of 5dn but thought “maenad” for “wild woman” almost immediately, “mad” for “crazy” and checkers made it pretty certain. I will try to remember “nut”.
  9. 39:04, but I had to look up UTILITARIANISM as I’d never heard of it. Managed to almost parse the trucks. I had the junctions anyway. I obviously don’t drive them as I chuckled at BW’s “unpalletable.” MAENAD went in with a shrug as I didn’t know the nut/en equivalence. Built the DIACRITIC from wordplay and crossers. An enjoyable session. Thanks setter and Bruce.
  10. In Somerset? No it’s not – alas not any more. Historically it was in that fair county but now it’s decreed it has to be in an abomination called Bath & North East Somerset, or BANES for short. The new county also encompasses Keynsham, a town whose spelling is well known to people of a certain generation in which their youth was spent listening to Radio Luxembourg
    Strangely, it was my last one in as well, having successfully negotiated MAENAD and DIACRITIC.
    Other than the above understandable blooper, a nice neat puzzle.

    Edited at 2017-11-11 11:31 am (UTC)

    1. I never tried Horace Batchelor’s Famous Infra-Draw Method, but I’ve never forgotten how to spell Keynsham. If I’m honest, it’s not a life skill I’ve needed to use too often.
    2. Sadly that was the reason for one of my three missing answers; I tried with West, West Country and BANES but when nothing worked there I eliminated the city from my enquiries, tried to come up with other things and eventually failed. I’m not sure Somerset ever crossed my mind, despite me living very near both Bath and Somerset…

      On the other hand, without getting FORKLIFT TRUCKS and UTILITARIANISM (a hard one to come up with from the wordplay if you’ve barely even heard of Bentham) it didn’t matter much. Ho hum.

  11. I started to solve this on the train on the way to The George last Saturday; made a reasonable start. On the way home, buoyed by beer and banter, I got quite a few more and had just two left -5d and 8d.
    I just about worked out Maenad but had never heard of the nut; but I completely failed to get Forklift Trucks. Carriers on its own is not an obvious definition and the Traffic part is till a bit unclear to me.
    Could not parse everything so thanks as ever for the excellent blog. David
  12. I disagree with KevinG in that Bentham had more than one idea; he thought up the panopticon and that was my first thought until I realised there weren’t enough letters in it.
    Thanks for the blog, as ever, brnchn, especially for 8d
      1. Tres amusant! Incidentally, Kevin, I am having great difficulty in posting in the Club’s Forum. With one exception, every post is greeted with a little red rectangle in which is the message:”It seems you are attempting to post malformed content”. I use Firefox for the crosswords and Anatman suggests changing to Firefox ESR but Firefox says that is not for individuals so I have sent a message to the Help Desk at The Times.
        Also incidentally, regarding the panopticon, I wonder if that’s where Orwell got the idea for Big Brother?
        1. “Malformed content” – that’s a new one Martin. What have you been up to? I use Firefox and so far have had no problems with the new system but they sure have made a horlicks of the Forum.
          1. Indeed, Olivia. When the message first appeared a few days ago I thought I must have transgressed in some way or another but I’m greeted with it on every occasion now.It’s galling in that I moved to Firefox, at the suggestion of The Times, after I started experiencing problems using my normal browser, Safari.
  13. Not too tricky this one. At least it didn’t have a bizarre word, like today’s. There will soon be more Afghanis in crosswords than in their homeland. I must have missed the memo re utilitarianism – if it was good enough for Mill, it is good enough for me.
  14. No I didn’t parse this either but I seem to be in good company. I trotted in just under the 20 but managed to misspell Bentham’s theory – well I was due for a typo and at least it wasn’t a double.
  15. As a foreign solver,glad to get 19a from ‘bath here’.Also got 5d though l could not parse it
    COD S(HAW)L.
    ONG’ARA,
    KENYA.

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