Financial Times 16,805 by HAMILTON

21 comments on “Financial Times 16,805 by HAMILTON”

1. Hamilton, being the ofttimes sloppy setter that he is (or quirky if you are being polite), means that clues like the ones you name are expected. Could easily have used “prisoner” instead of “swindler” in 15a and used “Saskatchewan’s music” in 5d. I think 24a is just a very weak clue. Also, as usual, some good stuff. I like BEGONIA & ALAMEDA for example.

2. Re 15A, here in Australia, we could say (about a con-man) “he’s a con” just as easily as “he’s a swindler”. As Hamilton (the musical) is currently playing here, maybe he’s picked up some local lingo!

3. Knew CHINOOK variously as a people, salmon and aircraft but not wind so I didn’t get the definition here, not helped by having parsed ‘wind’ as CHI and ‘crevice’ as NOOK.
   No problem with 5d but did wonder what happened to the direction for an inclusion. Also didn’t know ALAMEDA despite playing around with ‘alarmed’. For 24a, couldn’t get ‘pisse-en-lit out of my head so WEED BED was my entry till 25d’s retribution came along.
   So a poor Monday effort for me but I did enjoy the likes of PIEDS A TERRE, ELASTICATED and OVERPRICE.
   Thanks to Hamilton and Teacow

4. To Hovis:
   Fortunately, I’m not blogging so I don’t have to be polite & ‘sloppy’ would be fair comment, imho.
   A pity, because there’s always plenty to enjoy in a Hamilton set & I’d agree with your picks, among several others.
   D’you know, I sometimes used to have the same slight itchiness about Araucaria/Cinephile until I came to realise that the genius outweighed the oddity. I don’t think H isn’t quite there yet.

5. I suppose you might interpret “Saskatchewan music” as meaning “music from Saskatchewan”, which would justify the extraction of SKA from it.

6. Andrew @5. That was my first thought but felt it was a stretch too far. I’m willing to class this as more quirky than sloppy though 🙂

7. Ska is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska

8. “Ska music” is a bit like saying “rap music” or hip-hop music” – all three phrases are lacking the words “is not” after the first word.

9. Similar to the comment of Peter@2, in the US “con” can be short for “con man” or “con artist”, which both indicate a swindler. The word probably refers more often to the swindle than the swindler, however.
   I agree that “Music from [or in] Saskatchewan” would have been a better clue for 5d.
   I had the same trouble parsing 26a as did Diane@3.
   And Ludwig@8, in the future, please don’t be so subtle about your opinions! 🙂

10. Ludwig @ 8

    What a ridiculous, blinkered and possibly racist statement. Shameful.

11. Thanks Hamilton and Teacow
    Another tough-ish start to the week with a few quirks to help it along which took just on the hour to get completed. Got the grid all correct but there were several where the parsing was out – miss the woman’s teddy at 4d, the unknown 00 gauge railway track at 26a and the “plane” homophone at 6d (had it as a stretched triple definition). Agree with Andrew@5’s version of SKA and have seen that trick before.
    24a was the one that bugged me the most, not getting the ‘anagram’ was to be made from.
    Finished with CREW CUT (English geography had to be looked up), TINCTURES (craftily constructed) and ALAMEDA (used a word finder but had heard of this after looking up its meaning).

12. Thanks for the blog , Hovis @ 1 said it all for me really. Not convinced that WEED OUT even means put to one side.
    Were The Specials a Ska Band or was that Two-Tone ? Sorry I am very out of touch but they were my favourite once.

13. Roz@ 12
    Yes, they were a Two Tone band along with The Selecter, among others, inspired by the Jamaican music scene mentioned by Trenodia. I enjoyed them too as a teenager, only later discovering vintage ska. The Dandy Livingstone version of “Rudy, A Message To You” holds up better perhaps, these days on Spotify than the Specials interpretation but I still tap my toes.

14. [ Thank you very much Diane, yes The Selecter too , plus UB40 and Steel Pulse who were more reggae I think. ]

15. Thanks Teacow and Hamilton. Just one quibble, Pierre is the capital of South Dakota, Bismarck is North Dakota’s.

16. [ Simon S @10, with respect, Ludwig@8’s comment re SKA is about how you define music, and everyone has different definitions. It is presumptuous to call his comment racist. He probably thinks that rap and hip-hop are a form of spoken poetry. (I don’t know Ska so I can’t comment on that, and I notice that Ludwig did not include reggae in his curmudgeonly comment.) Some would define spoken poetry as music, but others wouldn’t. If one were to say that beat poetry (a primarily white phenomenon of the mid 20th century) was not music, would that be racist?

    My personal definition of music is sound that incorporates melody, harmony and rhythm. There’s a lot of contemporary experimental “classical music”, mostly written by white folk, that falls outside that definition. ]

17. A bit of a curate’s egg because of the dodgy cluing/parsing already mentioned – to which we would add 6ac since it is Cubs (and Brownies) who are organised as PACKS; Scouts are in troops.
    But there was plenty to like, such as YEAST, TINCTURES and YIKES.
    Thanks, Hamilton and Teacow.

18. Thanks Macmorris@15 – Have fixed the North/South error!

19. Late finish… well actually DNF as first put ANEURIA for nerveless 10ac.. I concocted an anagram from RUN with E n 2 As from 2nd avenue.. obvs not.. but as allan_c@18 points out none of us who were in the scouts would dream of describing it as a PACK.. so that was a late entry to slow down that corner.. was finally left with all the crossers but had to resort to a wordchecker for the actual never-heard of ALAMEDA.. pretty sure a tincture is not a small drink either.. fortunately the clueing was more straightforward.. but SKA is definitely music..
    Thanks HAMILTON n Teacow

20. Let me apologise if my intended tongue-in-cheek comment about rap and hip-hop “music” offended anyone. As a Congolese classically-trained cellist I could only admit to being a racialist (the grammatically correct term) if I had intended to insult Marshall Mathers.

21. Thanks for the explanation Ludwig@20.
    We have a “Cellomaniac” on this site, often to be found on the Guardian crossword blogs.

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