Wednesday, July 8, 2009 (DT 25867)

This puzzle was originally published Wednesday, March 4, 2009 in The Daily Telegraph

Introduction

Although some of the wordplay left me scratching my head, I found this puzzle to be a bit easier than other recent puzzles and finished it fairly quickly (by my standards). At first, I was surprised to see Big Dave suggest it was "a slightly tricky puzzle". On second thought, he is probably correct - I seem to trip up on the obvious clues and thrive on the trickier ones.

Snookered

I appear to have fallen into a trap in my blog on Monday's puzzle, when I wrote about the term "in-off" as applied in billiards. All the dictionary references that I found to the term unfortunately related to snooker. As Big Dave has pointed out in his comment in response to my blog, the term has a different meaning in the two games.

In its entry on cue sports, Wikepedia says "Snooker, which while technically a pocket billiards game, is generally classified separately based on its historic divergence from other games, as well as a separate culture and terminology [emphasis mine] that characterize its play."

I must say that my experience with cue sports is rather limited, consisting of shooting a bit of pool on rather infrequent occasions. I see from Wikipedia that I was actually playing eight-ball (or some variant thereof). I usually relied on my opponent to know the rules, as I was never able to keep them straight. I eventually discovered that my confusion was largely due to the fact that in "bar pool" there are so many local variations on the rules that there are virtually no set rules.

So while snooker and billiards (and the other cue sports) may appear to the uninitiated to be quite similar, they would exhibit major differences to those who are knowledgeable about them. This is no doubt similar to the situation with U.S. and Canadian football which probably appear to those outside of North America as quite similar sports. They are - as long as you disregard the fact that they are played on different sized fields, with a different number of players per team, with a different sized ball, with a different number of downs, with some differences in scoring, and with various significant differences in the rules.

Today's Glossary

Some possibly unfamiliar abbreviations, people, places, words and expressions used in today's puzzle

atacamite - Min. an oxychloride of copper

estoc - a thrusting sword of the 13th–17th centuries

The Hoe - a ridge in Plymouth, England

Mach 1 - the speed of sound

Sunderland - a seaport in Tyne and Wear, in NE England

Today's Links

Update: During the period when I was writing my blog this morning, AnswerBank was down for maintenance. Once it got up and running, I was able to find four questions discussing today's puzzle. They (together with the clues to which they relate) are:

AnswerBank [DT 25867]-a: 19d

AnswerBank [DT 25867]-b: 9d, 20d

AnswerBank [DT 25867]-c: 7d

AnswerBank [DT 25867]-d: 12ac, 19d

A complete solution, albeit lacking an explanation for 19d (which even Anax was at a loss to explain), is found at Cryptics.co.uk [DT 25867].

Big Dave's review of today's puzzle may be found at Big Dave's Telegraph Crossword Blog [DT 25867].

Commentary on Today's Puzzle

19d Stimulant started early turn on (7)

Although the solution is obvious, I was not able to make sense of the wordplay - nor could Anax at Cryptics.co.uk. Although both AnswerBank and Big Dave's blog provide an explanation (in fact, the sites cross-reference each other), none of the correspondents on either site seem enamoured with the wordplay. Maybe it only makes sense if one is on ecstasy.

24d Square ridge nailed to a hoof (4)

I missed the reference to The Hoe. However, shoe has a large number of definitions, several of which might conceivably be considered to be a square ridge. Since one of the setters for the DT seems to be enamoured of third rails on electric railway systems, I thought maybe "the sliding contact by which an electric car or locomotive takes its current from the third rail" could possibly be shaped like a square ridge.

Signing off for today - Falcon