Tunes 24686: in which a 13 may 23 for a 19, but after starting in 9, like a 10 before a 17, you 25.

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 18 minutes, and there’s the one patented “I’m not sure”, which I have since looked up in Chambers to find it fits the definition part, wordplay may come to me as I write this up. I don’t think I was exactly on the setter’s wavelength here, in a first pass of the across clues, only 11, 14, 26 and 27 jumped out at me. Did a bit better tackling the downs, but it was still a pretty sparse grid after a once over of all the clues. Had to bash away at bits of it before things came together. At the end, I rather like it, with a few little questionny marks, particularly the specific knowledge required to get 18 across and possibly 12 across. Can’t always understand everything, right? Away we goooo…..

Across
1 MALIGNANT: ALIGN(dress) in MAN,T(hroat) – got the answer from the definition, worked out the wordplay for the blog
6 HEID,I: HEID as Scots for HEAD sounds Listenerish, and the clue reminded me of the first time I’d heard of Gretna Green, in a Listener by Homer
9 LOW GEAR: double definition
10 RAMPART: parts of the ram indeed
11 HEADS: I think HEADS works as “goes for”
12 I CLAUDIUS: Or I CLAVDIVS as I remember from the telly. Anagram of U(from yoUth),SUICIDAL
13 BEG,INNER: SUE meaning to petition for here
14 SARI: IRA’S reversed
17 (s)TANK
18 JAR,N,DYCE: last part sounds like DICE. Court case in “Bleak House”. This is one I have as a little tricky, I am pretty lucky in that I was leafing through “Bleak House” the other day because for a Christmas show coming up I’m doing a piece about Charles Dickens prophylactics (please sir, can I have some more), so I was looking for things in Bleak House to make jokes out of
21 OFF COLOUR: brilliant! CO,L in OF FOUR. Makes up for the Dickens clue immediately!
22 TRUMP: at least from the definition (reliable person). Not sure how the rest of the clue works – anyone? Edit: read through the comments for interpretations
24 HOUSTON: HOUS(e) then NOT reversed. My brother lives there!
25 C,RUMBLE: a dessert I’ve seen more of in the US than elsewhere
26 LATTE(r): well it’s a drink with coffee in it
27 PLASTERED: P, then ASTER in LED
 
Down
1 MULCH: L in MUCH
2 LOW-HANGING FRUIT: anagram of UNFAILING GROWTH that took me a long time to put together
3 GREASING: G then REASONING without the ON. Have you greased your car today?
4 AIR MILES: (ISRAEL,I’M)*, though I’m sure it takes a lot of them to get back from Israel
5 THRALL: H (from smasH), R in TALL
6 tough to find one or two to omit today, this is probably the most straightforward answer in the grid
7 IMAGINARY(placebo) NUMBER(pain-reliever): Hats off to the setter here for that definition – in the other case, I becomes i and i is the base of the imaginary number system
8 INTESTINE: hidden
13 BE,TROT,HAL
15 PATRICIA(n): a word never too far from the mind of Terry Pratchett fans
16 INSTRUCT: I got this from the definition, and now see it’s IN,ST,sounds like RUCKED
19 SO,F,TIE
20 JOIN UP: double definition, become a private by entering the army, or joining up by writing cursively. Although my handwriting is so terrible I’ve gone back to writing non-cursive
23 P,LEAD: another really nifty definition, “To judge, plead, speak” (sorry about the brain fade typo earlier)

52 comments on “Tunes 24686: in which a 13 may 23 for a 19, but after starting in 9, like a 10 before a 17, you 25.”

  2. Thanks to blogger for IMAGINARY NUMBER (which I still don’t completely understand) and mctext for TRUMP, which I assumed was some sort of bridge reference, guessing the reliable person sense (a toss-up with THUMP.) Last in JARNDYCE, INSTRUCT and aforesaid TRUMP. A tough one – just under an hour.

    2. I found this on the Internet and almost understood it, so, so long as it passes muster with the mathematicians here, it may be of help:

      “If -16 is a real number, it doesn’t have a square root. If it is a complex number, then it has one.

      The square root of -16 is 4i.

      The square root of -16 = [square root of 16] x [square root of -1]

      i is an imaginary number and the square of i is -1.

      1. Thank you. I follow the reasoning (just), but can’t pretend to understand the reason.
      2. Minor quibble: -16 is a real number but negative numbers do not have real square roots. Instead they are arbitrarily given imaginary roots equal to the square root of the equivalent positive number multiplied by i (the imaginary square root of minus 1). A complex number is a composite number having a real and imaginary part.
        Why do all this cheating? there are no sound philosophical grounds, but these complex numbers are very powerful when applied to areas such as quantum mechanics and fluid dynamics.

        Nick M

  3. Time taken: most of breakfast + one half-hour. Couldn’t get a toe-hold into this one, esp with the difficulty of the two long ones. There’s hardly a bad surface in the whole 30 clues.
    George: mail me if you want an intro for the Dickens prophylactics skit. Too risqué for this place.
    1. Thanks… yeah, I was poring through what I have to see if anything else in it would stand in LiveJournal… just make sure you’ve got your Christmas Carol ones handy, you never know when you’ll be visited by three strangers in the night!
  4. DNF, despite a couple of cheats (at JARNDYCE – might have got this; have read the book – and IMAGINARY NUMBER – where I could get no further than ‘number’). Embarrasingly, and somewhat uinevitably, the two I failed to get included the ‘most straightforward answer in the grid’ (‘hum’ isn’t part of my idiolect for describing nasty odours) as well as HEIDI, where my favourite among various stabs was ‘Gilli’ (head of G-retna + ill = green + i). Also, had ‘tuna’ (to fill the space) rather than TANK. One day soon, I will recognise coffee as latte instantly.

    For George: at 11 ac, I believe ‘goes’ means ‘heads’ (as in, ‘he heads the wrong way every time’) with ‘for’ linking the two definitions. And at 23 dn, I think you meant to write “To judge, speak”.

  5. The last trump = the last judgement. Part of a legal group today, with Jarndyce leading the way to plead and sue, leading the witness and good reasoning (perhaps)…
  6. About 40 min, with cheating over 15 min for the last 5. Found the whole puzzle less than satisfying, and still don’t get HEIDI.
        1. Chambers and Collins both have heid as Scots for head, with the ei pronounced like the e in “me”.
  7. Yes, my dictionary has the last trump as the trumpet blast to wake the dead on Judgment Day. Which makes the surface rather good, as long as you know one or both meanings of the word. Which I didn’t.

    That was one of three or four I needed help with at the end. I suspected IMAGINARY NUMBER but had no idea why, and was just about to give up completely on JARNDYCE when it suddenly clicked. Well over an hour. Humbled.

  8. Ran out of time on the commute with three unsolved after an hour. Disappointing as I recognised this as a much tricker puzzle than has been on offer so far this week and I was pleaseed with my progress having completed all but 5 clues in 35 minutes. But then I hit the wall.

    The remaining 25 minutes yielded TRUMP and IMAGINARY NUMBER (actually I’d had NUMBER in place for some time) but I failed miserably on JARNDYCE, INSTRUCT and PATRICIA where I kept wondering if ‘Lucrecia’ might be a variant of ‘Lucrezia’.

    I have met JARNDYCE in a previous puzzle but wasn’t able to get to it through the wordplay because (no doubt in my ignorance) I would pronounce it ‘Jarndiss’ so the gambling reference never came into my mind.

    As for ‘ruck’, I know the word but not being a sporty person I hadn’t realised the definition actually included trying to win the ball. I’d have thought that went without saying for a multitude of manoeuvres in soccer or rugby football.

    Not sure now if we are in for a real stinker tomorrow.

  9. First 4 in (CRUMBLE, SARI, I CLAUDIUS,INTESTINE) all right-hand side but this flattered to deceive. Left side went in smoothly enough but stumbled thereafter. Saw IMAGINARY NUMBER from the wonderful “placebo pain-reliever” but had never heard of it. Cheated to get HUMBUG (hopeless) which gave me today’s sop to Jimbo HEIDI. Had TRULY at 22 (after changing from TRUTH ie what you hear from a reliable witness is nothing but) thinking last heard is Yours Truly. So with Y?E?D stuck in YIELD with no hope of success. An enjoyable failure. Enjoyed HEADS (chestnut?) and HOUSTON.
  10. Another interesting crossword; still fairly easy but a bit harder than yesterday’s.
    In 23dn I think the actual definition is “To judge, speak,” ie speak to judge, ie plead.. perhaps that’s what you meant, George.
    And in 6ac, heid is a Scots spelling of head, Rich, and nothing to do with pronunciation particularly.. it’s in chambers
    1. Jerry, as soon as I pressed ‘Post Comment’ I began to regret pronunciation. Rendition would have been better, much vaguer.

      But the clue also set me thinking about where accents begin (and end). Do they change as soon as you cross the border, from one village to the next, or is it a more gradual process? Enlightenment, anyone?

      1. I’ve never lived near a border but I’d guess at “gradual process” – unless the border is like an Iron (or Bamboo) Curtain which hardly anyone crosses (or a big stretch of water like the Channel), the people from each side must talk to each other and acquire bits of each others’ accents.
  11. 15:25 today. Loved the puzzle. Only got 7d from “placebo pain-reliever”. Suspect 18ac may be today’s tripwire.
  12. I think my brain was having an out of body experience as I made such hard work of this that I gave up in the end. Such is my stupidity today that I struggled to spell Houston and although I Claudius was completely obvious, I couldn’t quite retrieve it from my head. It is fortunate that I don’t have a job operating heavy machinery!
  13. 23 minutes. I found this reasonably straightforward, but spent 10 minutes at the end on INSTRUCT and more particularly JARNDYCE. I read Bleak House years ago but any trace of memory of this word had long gone, so it had to be constructed from wordplay. I initially put in WARNDYCE but fortuntately it didn’t pass the “that looks like a real word” test so I thought again. Interesting to see a word that for me didn’t pass this test a few weeks ago being used by the leader of the free world this morning.
    I didn’t understand the wordplay for HEIDI but I do hope it’s not supposed to be a homophone.
  14. 10:24 – worryingly slow start but then made better progress, especially after getting the two long downs. 15 and 18 were among the last in.

    A couple of musical Last trumps: Handel (one trump), Verdi (several, from about 2:18)

  16. 15+5 minutes on Under/Overground. NE corner definitely the traffic jam today. Even when I got the Bleak House reference at 18, I was still trying to remember what they were arguing about in Chancery rather than the name of the case. 6 was a masterpiece of misdirection: head for Gretna has to be G, doesn’t it! That compromised 6 down and (for me) 10a, another excellent clue once the penny dropped. Yesterday’s Tube strike lent a extra poignancy to 21, but CoD for me today was that friendly, very nearly historically accurate HOUSTON. They were on their way out when Apollo 13 went bang, and “home” was the long way round the moon.
  17. Chuckled when I deciphered your headline George. I’m in complete agreement!

    I filled in the left hand side of this pretty quickly, got bogged down in the NE corner then totally stuck in the SE corner with JARNDYCE, INSTRUCT, TRUMP and PLEAD eluding me.

    Thought RAMPART and IMAGINARY NUMBER very good.

    ALIGN = dress and INNER = esoteric were new to me.

    Read Robert Harris’s LUSTRUM last week which helped me get I CLAUDIUS and PATRICIA.

  18. I was not on the same wavelength as the setter today and finished in 10:46. JARNDYCE was last – vauely remembered from TV a year or so ago.

    There was a similar reference to the last TRUMP in one of the Jumbos I blogged a few months ago.

  19. All but 5 (6a/7/16/18/22) done in about 35 minutes. 7 & 6 then came after about another 10, but the last three refused to come until I resorted to aids after an hour.
    I would never have got JARNDYCE, I was nowhere near INSTRUCT, and TRUMP I had thought of, but wasn’t familiar with either meaning so hadn’t put it in.
    As a mathematician, I particularly liked 7 (when I eventually got it) and that gets my COD.
  20. Quite a bit trickier today I thought, with the RHS causing me the most trouble. 6ac had to be HEIDI, but I couldn’t fathom the wordplay, leaving me with some doubt as to 7d (I’d got as far as something-NUMBER). Reached for a solver to get that, and 18ac (despite it having come up before, I doubt I would ever have got it.)

    Ended with 22ac / 23d. Guessed 23d correctly, though without getting the wordplay, but had no idea at all on 22ac. TRUMP = reliable person was new to me, so I guessed at THUMP…

    COD 11ac, which was a most satisfying penny-dropping moment. 🙂

  21. 9:16, which felt slow, so it seems this was easier for me than it was for others – no doubt it helped that I’ve long wanted to clue PLACEBO as “Imaginary number?”.  Unknown: JARNDYCE (18ac).
  22. 41 min, needing help at the end to get INSTRUCT and then finally twigging JARNDYCE myself just as the solver was working away at it!

    COD for me was 25 ac., which brought to mind the following old favourite:

    I sat next to the Duchess at tea
    As distressed as a person could be
    Her rumblings abdominal
    Were simply phenomenal
    And everyone thought it was me!

  23. Trying to avoid references to different puzzles i liked this one but thought it was tough. Congratulations to the blogger on a superb time…

    I too liked the misdirection around Gretna and head for but it all fell into place finally. COD Jarndyce!

  24. Not easy for me at all, and went to aids at the end to finish. Didn’t know ‘ruck’, ‘heid’, the smell meaning in 6D, the cursive writing sense of JOIN UP, that ‘i’ is the symbol for IMAGINARY NUMBER, or the last trump(et) meaning. Overall, about an hour, but wouldn’t have finished at all without help. Those I did get and understand, though, were very, very good. Regards to all.
  25. DNF. Couldn’t get JARNDYCE. Otherwise, excellent crossword. COD to IMAGINARY NUMBER by a whisker from JOIN UP.

    As for heads being a 50-50 chance, the only thing chancy about the toss is the flick; after that it’s all physics. With a little practice you can toss heads all day, to the amazement of your friends and consternation of your gaming adversaries. Just ask Persi Diaconis. He could probably fill you in on some details of complex number theory as well.

  26. 11:45 which , unlike Mark , felt like a quick time especially with 18 which , for me, could have been impossible without knowing the book. I liked the I CLAUDIUS clue and memories of Derek Jacobi from the 70’s. Confused by the ‘Head for Gretna Green’and was looking for G—- until I got 6d
  27. Probably completed in 25 minutes: I was working and watching the WGC Golf so no definite time. Hardest puzzle this week so far but perfectly fair and well set!

    COD to JARNDYCE: a serious brain-racker which took the final 5 minutes!

  28. Though I didn’t finish, Jarndyce and Imaginary Number doing for me, enjoyed this vastly more than recent puzzles. Totally unimportant but I’d say it was Softy not Softie.
      1. Since you ask, it’s more probably wellie, the idea deriving from the sense of the plural, wellies naturally coming in twos, and a back-formation leading to the singular. Whereas “He’s just a big softy” is what one would expect.
  29. 80 min. Loved the anagram for LOW HANGING FRUIT, and the IMAGINARY NUMBER. Being totally pedantic, the latter is a DBE, as i multiplied by any non-zero real number is also an imaginary number.
  30. 11:55 for me (after a slow start), for a very nice puzzle.

    LOW-HANGING FRUIT took me an alarmingly long time. I noted that CUT AND COME AGAIN looked faintly plausible and would nearly fit the enumeration, which I found slightly off-putting. And I wasted more time trying to justify EVENS for 11A.

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