Times Quick Crossword No 2964 by Wurm

93 comments on “Times Quick Crossword No 2964 by Wurm”

1. 27 minutes.
   Several were biffed. Hadn’t heard of Red Devils as Man U. Tab meaning cigarettes was a new one to me.
   Priam I had heard of, having read translations of Odyssey and Iliad a few years ago. SCARLET was dredged from somewhere but I know nothing except the name.

   FOI USED
   LOI: NOISE
   COD: Either SECRETE or TANGENT.

   Thanks Wurm and Mike.

2. It just gets worse and worse.

   All clues bar one solved on 15 x 15, so another wretched fail.

   To rub salt into the wound, it was a relatively simple clue and, had I any skill at all, I would have seen the mistake I made and corrected it very easily. I am so blinkered that I cannot see what is staring me in the face.

   I really am incredibly stupid sometimes. Another day of toil and pain.

3. Not sure how, but I crossed the line all correct just inside the half-hour. MONORAIL, ROMAN CANDLE and one or two other clues (e.g. NON-SMOKER) went in unparsed or unconvincingly parsed.

   Overall, it felt like a difficult QC, so I think I have rather dodged a bullet today.

   Many thanks to Mike H and Wurm.

4. The Red Devils was the name of the Army’s sky diving team. No problem at all with Priam here.. the problem was almost every other clue.. tab??

5. Away all day but did manage to complete though still don’t understand why TANGENT – what has “ring” to do with anything? NHO MOPHEAD but had to be, nor tab in any SMOKing sense but ditto; and NHO anything to do with football but had to assume some UNITED team are called Red Devils, indeed corroborated by teenage son (whoops – he just turned 20). So all in all a satisfying enough puzzle, thank you, Wurm.

   1. The ‘ring’ is just the circle that the line (tangent) touches but does not cross.

      1. Thank you, Invariant, for seeing my comment and troubling to reply! Now I did reckon myself a mathematician 60 years ago, and got a good grade in double Maths A level. But I’m afraid I honestly can’t remember now where a ring comes into it (if indeed it did). You have a curve, and a line that shoots off that is tangential to that curve, or goes off at a “tangent”. Isn’t that what a tangent is? So where’s the ring (or circle, for that matter)? Please forgive me for being stupid – no one else seems to have had a problem here.

         1. Not quite sure what you mean by ‘shoots off’, but the point about a tangent is that it touches but never crosses the circle, no matter how far each end of the line is extended. In other words a tangent is a line that makes no more than a glancing touch to the curve or, in the ring case, circle.
            PS Perhaps think of it as a pencil, leaning on a small ball ?

            1. Thank you, but my point is – as I am delighted to see the even later Wil below hammers in – that a ring is not integral to a TANGENT, which can exist in conjunction with any curve. It’s like making reference to the verticalness of a straight line which could just as easily be horizontal or diagonal. Sorry if I’m being tiresome?

               1. Agreed – the setter has chosen the most common example, but it’s not exclusive.

                  1. OK we’ll settle for that – thank you!

6. I spent longer on this than on the 15×15 today, partly because I was slow to see some of them although they were easy enough in retrospect, but also because of the abundance of those wretched CDs. TANGENT held me up at the end for goodness knows how long. Eventually I used aids, which gave me a few words, none of which seemed to make sense, so after yet more time I shrugged and bunged in TANGENT and to my surprise it was correct. People have been full of praise for it, but it’s misleading, although I suppose the question mark just about gets the setter off the hook: any arc, straight or curved, can be a tangent to any curve. I know the line and the circle are the most common, but this, although clever, isn’t a good enough definition in my opinion.

7. 10.25.

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