Times Cryptic No 27126 – Saturday, 25 August 2018. Resistance is futile.

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I did this in bits and piece during a busy Saturday so I don’t have a time to report. I thought it might have been a little harder than recent Saturdays, but it was a very fair puzzle with few if any obscurities. There was lots of cunning in the definitions and wordplay, so thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle.

I particularly liked 10ac, 14ac, 25ac and 18dn, but I think the clue of the day was 17ac.

Clues are in blue, with definitions underlined. Answers are in BOLD CAPS, then wordplay. (ABC*) means ‘anagram of ABC’, with the anagram indicator in bold italics. Deletions are in {curly brackets}.

Across
1 Disputatious European means to be heard (7)
POLEMIC: POLE (European), MIC{rophone} (means to be heard).

5 Incompetent bishop less arrogant after losing face (7)
BUMBLER: B (bishop), {h}UMBLER.

9 Park-keeper wants good person making deliveries (9)
ROUNDSMAN: {g}ROUNDSMAN.

10 Operator married across the ocean? (5)
MINUS: M (married), IN US (across the Atlantic).

11 Antelope the writer twice brought back (5)
ORIBI: I (the writer), BIRO (another sort of writer), all reversed.

12 Sentence girl’s penned about artistic event (4,5)
LIFE CLASS: LIFE (sentence), LASS (girl), around C (about in the sense of approximation).

14 Rank starter in Indian, cook admits, disadvantages diners (5,9)
CHIEF CONSTABLE: CHEF “admits” I for India, CONS (disadvantages), TABLE (diners).

17 Not out practising golf, say, in the air (4,2,3,5)
HOME ON THE RANGE: HOME (not out), ON THE RANGE (practicing). “Air” in the sense of “song”.

21 Indignant head of state formed an alliance (7,2)
STEAMED UP: S{tate}, TEAMED UP.

23 More confident underwriter drops in (5)
SURER: {in}SURER.

24 Write about boring hanky-panky, lacking skill (5)
INEPT: PEN backwards in IT (that useful Times Crossword euphemism for “hanky-panky”).

25 Hobby of foreign character not long ago (9)
PHILATELY: PHI (a Greek letter), LATELY.

26 Place for treatment, with poor lack of order (7)
ENTROPY: ENT (place for treatment), ROPY (poor). I suppose the Ear, Nose and Throat department has “ENT” over its door, so in that sense is the place to go. I know “entropy” is a thermodynamics concept, but I would hate to have to explain it to a layperson!

27 Settler’s high supporting structure (7)
TRESTLE: (SETTLER*). Delightful anagram indicator!

Down
1 Helper service’s welcoming “Do come again” (6)
PARDON: P.A. (helper), RN (a military service: the Royal Navy) “welcoming” DO.

A potential future crossword champ was looking over my shoulder at this, as I said, “maybe it has DO in R–N” and then “yes – PARDON”. He asked, “where does ‘come again’ fit in?”, to which I of course replied, “pardon?”. “Aha!”, he said.

2 Time to supplant Democrat, quite noisy and uncouth (7)
LOUTISH: replace the “D” in LOUDISH by a “T”.

3 New lad in Rome, a city-dweller (9)
MADRILEÑO: (LAD IN ROME*).

4 Followed orders: catching pet’s involved (11)
COMPLICATED: CAT in COMPLIED.

5 Outlaw putting collar up (3)
BAN: NAB backwards.

6 Note repeated: another is do (5)
MIMIC: MI MI (notes of the Do Re Mi type), then C (a note of the A, B, C type). Novak Djokovic is a great mimic – it’s worth seeing him “do” Rafa Nadal and Maria Sharapova here!

7 Old politician’s absorbed by ancient script (6,1)
LINEAR B: LIB{eral} “absorbing” NEAR (by). I wrote in LINEAR immediately from the definition, then had to grind through the wordplay to see if it was Linear A or Linear B.

8 Person fighting on, one in the habit (8)
RESISTER: RE (on), SISTER (one in a habit). The comma after “on” made it look enticingly like definition, not wordplay. Well done, setter!

13 Digitally depict female earning tip modelling (6-5)
FINGER-PAINT: F (female), (EARNING TIP*).

15 Change terms of contract finally, with organised schedule (9)
TRANSLATE: {contrac}T, RAN (organised), SLATE (schedule – “what’s on your slate today?”). Change terms from French to English, for example.

16 Coat of arms? It’s woven in famous red carpet (8)
CHASTISE: A{rm}S plus (ITS*), all inside CHE (famous communist).

18 Pole embracing female in sheepskin jacket (3,4)
MAE WEST: MAST (pole), “embracing” EWE (female in sheepskin). A lifejacket, of course.

19 In which chap covers part of body? (7)
GARMENT: ARM in GENT.

20 Design lovely, graceful clothes from the south (6)
ARGYLE: backward hidden answer.

22 Police on rounds imitating others (2-3)
ME-TOO: MET (Metropolitan Police), O-O (rounds).

25 Right to leave political group, maybe the end of Labour (3)
PAY: RT removed from PARTY. “End” being “purpose” in the definition.

15 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27126 – Saturday, 25 August 2018. Resistance is futile.”

  1. I found this fairly tricky and it took me 53:46 before I was ready to submit. I think BAN was my FOI, but LINEAR B was definitely my last entry. I had a vague idea that it was a thing, but no idea what, until I looked it up afterwards. Hadn’t heard of MADRILENO but crossers and anagrist helped. I think we’ve had a discussion on ENTROPY before, having had ENTHALPY as an answer, and one being the inverse of the other, Order and Chaos, I think! Mind you I’ve had a lot of wine and a large whiskey so I could be talking rubbish:-) Basically I found the puzzle a solid slog! Thanks setter and Bruce.
  2. Biffed 7d, then forgot to parse it. I had a ? by ORIBI; I’d forgotten about BIROs. LOI PAY.
  3. With say 165 white squares, each with 26 possibilites then I think this puzzle has 26 to the power 165 potential states. Just think of the increase in entropy, the disorder, created elsewhere in solving it, even if it did take 50 minutes. It’s probably caused a couple of wars. LOI RESISTER, obviously, as per John_Dun above, the one with the most enthalpy. COD to PHILATELY. DNK MADRILENO but it sounded better than MADRINELO. Very enjoyable. with a discouraging word seldom heard. Thank you, B and setter.
  4. Two hours of hard slog working my way through a number of unknown words (e.g. MADRILENO) or shades of meaning should have brought me a feeling of achievement but I failed at the last hurdle with the bluddy antelope thing and looked it up only realise that of course I knew it all the time. My brain was hurting by then and I just wanted finished with it.

    Edited at 2018-09-01 06:50 am (UTC)

  5. I’m glad I didn’t have Jack’s two hours of slog. I wrote “very enjoyable” in my notes. My favourites were OPERATOR, PARDON and, particularly, HOME ON THE RANGE.
    Thank you Bruce for explaining the ?? I had against CHASTISE, ORIBI, TRANSLATE and LINEAR B. At one point I became fixated on LIBYAN B, as in the Libyan sybyl.

    Edited at 2018-09-01 09:26 am (UTC)

  6. Huffed and puffed my way through most of this in about an hour but had a blank at 7dn where I either did not know or had forgotten the ancient script. I couldn’t fathom the wordplay and in the end just looked it up. Tricky stuff. COD 17dn.
  7. 17:36. I don’t remember much about this, other than a few words that I knew vaguely but still had to construct from wordplay. I don’t think I will ever remember what ENTROPY is supposed to be, no matter how many times it’s explained to me.
  8. Lost my bit of paper, but according to the club site I completed this one correctly. Looking at the answers, I remember struggling with MADRILENO the most, I think, so that was probably last one in.

    Luckily my Cretan connections mean I that I have a copy of the Phaistos disc and a book on the disc itself lying around somewhere, whence I originally learned of Linears A and B…

  9. DNF. Had osibi, on the basis of I + bis (twice), which left the O unaccounted for, so I knew there’d be trouble at mill, but just couldn’t think of biro.
  10. Entropy is not synonymous with “lack of order”

    However, it does fit better than the all the other possible words in to E_T_O_Y

    thanks for the blog

    Graham

    1. Chambers has as its second definition for entropy: A measure of the disorder of a system. Near enough to “lack of order” for our setter, surely. I’m still not going to try to explain it though! 🙂
  11. 25 Right to leave political group, maybe the end of Labour (3)

    Had TOY for a long time…

    R leaves TORY, leaving TOY… something you might use at the end of labour…
    _sigh_

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