Times Cryptic No 27264 – Saturday, 02 February 2019. Let the punishment fit the clue.

35 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27264 – Saturday, 02 February 2019. Let the punishment fit the clue.”

1. Drat! Misinterpreted 1a and had EGALITARIANIST. 50:22 WOE. I share your doubts about 18d. It was my LOI and I only got there through crossers and then reverse engineered it. Was a bit unsure about NOUNS, but followed the wordplay. Rest of the puzzle was tricky but fair. Thanks setter and Bruce.
   1. I remember now (having completely forgotten until you mentioned it) that I agonised over 1ac. ‘Heretical one’ suggests ARIANIST (an Arian person), and you have to connect the phrase ‘heretical one’ with the beginning of the clue (so it becomes ‘heretical idea’) for ARIANISM to work. But ‘fair idea’ had to be the definition, or else the word ‘idea’ wasn’t doing anything, so in the end I settled on ISM. It’s a nasty trap though!

      Edited at 2019-02-09 12:37 am (UTC)

      1. Caught me all right. Did me up like a kipper:-)
         1. I hope you mean the fish because we’re not supposed to discuss politics here 😉
            1. 🙂
2. 18:28. I’m not sure the device at 18dn is particularly unusual. Indirect anagrams are a no-no in Times puzzles, but this sort of double transformation is fairly standard I think. From a pragmatic point of view (and deciding whether these things are ‘fair’ or not should I think always be governed by pragmatism) ‘queen’ is at worst the second word you’re going to think of when ‘ruler’ is indicated, so it seems fair.
   I have been trained by these things to know that Arians are heretics. It’s hopelessly obscure really, isn’t it? You end up accepting this stuff as ‘crossword knowledge’ but if I were King of Crosswords I think I would ban it. SA for it is first on the ban list though.
   I am very familiar with the term GONZO journalism, and associate it strongly with Hunter S Thomson, but those two statements exhaust my knowledge. Perhaps I should read Fear and Loathing. Or perhaps I shouldn’t. Advice welcome.
   It’s worth making BLINIs yourself. It’s very easy.
   1. …Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. See next comment.
3. Would definitely recommend Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 as a brilliant introduction to US politics, back in more innocent, democratic times. (Is this the first time in history ‘innocent’ and ‘democratic’ have been used to describe Richard Nixon?) But I guess it depends on your sense of humour and whether you enjoy a particular style of writing.
   Found the puzzle very hard, 40 minutes, no quibble about 18 down. COD was 1dn for me: saw it and thought it was going to be a tiny town in England somewhere, but it turned out to be a straightforward double-bluff.
4. I went offline after about 25′, and I suppose I finished over lunch and submitted off leaderboard, so I must have taken quite a while; I don’t remember why. Like Keriothe, I was reminded by John that I spent some time dithering over T vs. M at 1ac, and like him was convinced by ‘idea’. I used to know something about Arianism, probably the most important ‘heresy’ in Christian history: the idea that Christ is not a co-equal member of a trinity (you might wonder what less important heresies there might be; you might indeed). Milton and Newton were evidently Arians.
   Never read any Thomson, never will; all I know about him is the GONZO tag, and that he’s the model for Duke in ‘Doonesbury’.
   Is a dog collar adornment?
   1. Re your last sentence, Kevin, I wouldn’t say it is.
5. Thank you, Bruce for PROSPERO and NO BALL. They were the two clues I had question marks over from last week. Ticks for MONICKER, ENGAGEMENT RING, MICROPROCESSOR and BOUQUET with COD to ENGAGEMENT RING. 18d, for some reason, didn’t hold me up.
6. Another caught out by 1ac here and a bit surpised to find that ARIANIST is not listed in any of the usual sources, but on reflection, what would the word “Arianist” convey that’s not already covered by “Arian”?
   1. Indeed; or ‘Tractarian’, ‘establishmentarian’, ‘latitudinarian’, … But would that stop a setter?
7. I found this hard, taking 70 minutes over it. LOI. was BLINI. COD to NO-BALL. The crossers gave me GONZO, but it’s not a word I’ve ever used, except for the Muppet. I did know but had forgotten about the journalism but thought ithe word may be in use in North America to mean ‘crazy’. I’ve always felt that ARIUS, like Origen earlier, was unfairly anathematised. His views were commonly held both in Antioch and Alexandria. Athanasius was too dogmatic on a topic where the questions are best not asked. He got his MONICKER on the creed though. That’s me excommunicated too! A tough but fair challenge. Thank you B and setter.
   1. Arius made one serious error in his battle with Athanasius; he died first.
8. A blanket of blanks for me with this puzzle. Very hard I thought.
   Possibly I was lacking in inspiration after a trip to watch Blackheath play rugby. At what point does beer hinder the solving process?
   As I’ve little to say about the puzzle,I’ll leave you with some interesting facts about Blackheath, a club so old it predated the formation of the original associations:
   Blackheath Football Club is a rugby union club based in Well Hall, Eltham in south-east London.

   The club was founded in 1858 and is the oldest open rugby club in the world since becoming open in 1862. “Open” in this context means that membership was open to anyone, not merely those attending, or old boys from, a particular institution (e.g. a school, university or hospital). It is also the third-oldest rugby club in continuous existence in the world, after Dublin University Football Club and Edinburgh Academical Football Club.[citation needed] The Blackheath club also helped organise the world’s first rugby international (between England and Scotland in Edinburgh on 27 March 1871) and hosted the first international between England and Wales ten years later – the players meeting and getting changed at the Princess of Wales public house. Blackheath, along with Civil Service F.C., is one of the two clubs that can claim to be a founder member of both The Football Association and the Rugby Football Union.

   1. I find that one pint of beer actually speeds up my solving process, and two pints are no hindrance. The third one is the problem (and four is my limit !)
   2. Even 1/2 pint of beer does make changes, though they might not be noticeable. I used to play chess at competitive level, and I found that a pint made a definite change to my playing style; it made it more rather interesting, but also less successful..
      1. The problem at the rugby club is that people return from the bar with jugs of beer and your glass is refilled so you lose track of how much you have had. It’s a nice problem to have.
         1. You do crosswords at the rugby club?!
            1. No. Not at the rugby club. I solved a few on the way there on the train. It looks like the only thing that went in on the way home was Narcotics!
               1. Good job you weren’t spotted by the Transport Police!
9. I have “LIKE TREACLE” scrawled on my sheet, so I’m grateful that others are calling this one hard! An hour and 57. I can see on my sheet the faint “T” at the end of 1a heavily over-scored with a correcting “M”, so anyone who jumped the wrong way has my sympathy.

   In the end, though, barely a question mark adorns my margins, so I must’ve found it all pretty fair. I think 23d BLINI was my last one in—for some reason I always think they’re Italian, plus I’d carelessly written in NOISYNESS at 25a, and had to get as far as writing BLYNI down before I clocked what I’d done. Oops.

10. ….BOUQUET. There was a hole in the grid until the very last moments, but I felt the clueing device was perfectly OK.

    Slow to get going, but then ploughed through steadily. Never considered Arianist fortunately, so wasn’t tied in knots at 1A.

    I didn’t much care for “mind = nous” though, regardless of the dictionary. Far too loose for my liking.

    FOI ROUND TRIP
    LOI BOUQUET
    COD BUGLE
    TIME 14:44

11. 30:07. So it wasn’t just me who found this trickier than usual, then. I have “Lots of chewy ones!” written on my copy. INDIGO, MONICKER, NO BALL and BOUQUET are all flagged as being a bit devious. I too puzzled over IST or ISM for 1A, but the “idea” led me to the right answer. I liked DRIPPING but COD to ENGAGEMENT RING. Thanks Bruce and Setter.
12. 29:23 but with one wrong. TINTIP for TIPTOP. I knew it was wrong but with the 30 minute mark approaching and serious doubts over Bouquet and Prospero I bunged it in.

    COD: MONICKER.

13. 1ac is a bit iffy I thought. I settled for ism mainly because it is in Collins but ist .. isn’t. Having read the comments above, I suppose it is OK

    My criteria for a clue are very straightforward: is it solvable, and is it fair? Can’t see a problem with 18dn on either head, though the surface is a tad unconvincing. I try never to rely on “unwritten rules,” if only because they vary between crosswords anyway.

    1. I wasted time on 18d trying to get RUL into the solution somehow; but that was my problem, not the setter’s. So it was perfectly fair in my opinion (and solvable). But your criterion of fairness–my criterion, too, for that matter– isn’t particularly straightforward, after all. One solver’s GK is another’s esoterica, etc.
       If I recall correctly 19ac is your favorite Shakespeare hero.
       1. Ha, good remembering, re 19ac Kevin .. and the fact that it was a woman (Vanessa Redgrave) playing the part, the only time I ever saw that benighted play, did not help me follow the action. Not that there was much. Call me a Philistine, but I have never dared see a Shakespeare play since. And wild horses would not get me back in the Globe

          Edited at 2019-02-09 03:23 pm (UTC)

14. If I can solve it and parse it it’s perfectly fair to me. I must have had some difficulty with this though because I see I took nearly half an hour over it. BOUQUET coincided with last weekend’s very grudging Times obituary for the actor Clive Swift. He was the put-upon Richard Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances whose wife Hyacinth insisted on pronouncing the name “bouquet”. The obit neglected to mention his role in the Barchester series among other omissions and the fuller version that ran later in the week was not much better.
15. I found this very tough but a fat fingered subpllt instead of subplot meant my 1hr and 24 mins of struggle was in vain anyway. Nouns and monicker were particularly troublesome.
16. I never even considered 1ac with a T at the end! Whew!

    Nor did I find 18dn BOUQUET unworthy – dear dear Hyacinth!

    FOI 12ac DOG COLLAR

    LOI 19ac PROSPERO

    COD 8dn MICROPROCESSOR

    WOD 11ac GONZO

    Time – over an hour m’lud

17. At Edinburgh University, the Chess Club had a competition of speed chess with just a short time on the clock (5 minutes?). The winner had to drink a beer (it might only have been a half). The playing field was evened after a few games.
18. All correct. But I see my time was over 24 hours so I presumably abandoned it and came back on Sunday morning and finished it. I never gave BOUQUET a second thought as being out of line.

    Since I work in the semiconductor industry, I was a bit embarrassed that I didn’t get MICROPROCESSOR immediately.

19. Thanks setter and brnchn
    Solved this one mainly over a lunch time session and found it a good challenge. Took a while after to finish properly parsing a couple – in particular, 1a (where I had no holdup with the M) , 1d (where through crosswords have become familiar with the market town in Herts) and 13a (where it took ages to remember the slang word for some British currency that had to look up to see it was the quid).
    Actually went out with a Russian lady for a while, so was familiar with BLINI (don’t think that I particularly liked it from memory – think that there was caviar involved with it).
    Finished on the left hand side with TIPTOP (shouldn’t have been that hard), MICROPROCESSOR (and like paul above, also embarrassed as it is my field) and PROSPERO (where all the checkers were needed).

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