I need to fix the links to THE HINDU now that the paper has upgraded it's site, shall do so tomorrow.
Got the creeps today with so many snakes around!!
ACROSS
Got the creeps today with so many snakes around!!
ACROSS
6 - Austrian earl in Agra fort (4) - GRAF [T]
9 - One artist going round to preserve obscure matters (6) - {A}{R{CAN}A} New word for me
10 - Scandal caused by raw beginner caught in interruption (7) - {OUT{R}AGE}
14 - Fetch black ornament (5) - {B}{RING}
15 - Bow to the senior citizen as you (though old) return (4) - {OB}{EY<-}
16 - Sometimes it's needed for one to be in a job (4,6) - WORK PERMIT [CD]
19 - Men failing to dissect the thriller writer (3,7) - IAN FLEMING*
21 - Couple to make good as engineer leaves (4) - rePAIR
24 - Pitcher? (5) - ADMAN [CD]
27 - Pronounced control relating to a wedding (6) - (~bridle)BRIDAL
28 - Standard of an Agatha Christie title (4) - N OR M [DD]
29 - Big snake from Canada, no flogging! (8) - ANACONDA*
DOWN
2 - Peculiar, good man is online (7) - {ST}{RANGE}
3 - The French takes time over university alliance (6) - {LE}{AG{U}E}
4 - Change vehicles that do not have India's top grade (9) - {TRAiNS}{FORM}
5 - Tears medical officer before operations (5) - {DR}{OPS}
7 - State one's in displaying practicality (7) - {REAL{I'S}M}
11 - Time to bleat about aspirin, for example (6) - {T}{ABLET*}
12 - Floridian out to prepare a water treatment process (12) - FLUORIDATION*
20 - More lively doctor, diving into the river, rose first (7) - {NI{MB}LE}{R}
22 - Go like the clappers! (7) - APPLAUD [CD]
23 - Part of tumult I moderated last month (6) - ULTIMO [T]
25 - No ball, perhaps, for player in an insignificant part (5) - EXTRA [DD]
Hi
ReplyDeleteSSSSSSSSSSnakes ! Both Agatha and Ian in the same humdinger ! TRANSFORM and ADMAN were nice. ARCANA had to be confirmed by Googling: seems to have quite a relevance in spirituality and Tarot.
LINGUISTS reminded of a computer program of the early nineties called Polyglot which could run in Cobol, Basic, Fortran and some other languages ( I don’t remember which)
For a 8 language polyglot:
Polyglot 1
And if you thought that was cool, a 15 language polyglot:
Polyglot2
Good day to all
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed solving the puzzle in toto. Many nice clues, with challenge built in.
Liked ARCANA, OUTRAGE, IAN FLEMING, WORK PERMIT, ANACONDA, FLuORIDATION, APPLAUD, REALISM, ULTIMO etc.
EUCALYPTI was really clever one. One would not immediately think of an irregular plural form.
18D - CLI(-p)+NIC(-e) was neat.
17D - This 'supporter' thing is a 'regular', favourite term of another setter. Any infringement on intellectual property? ;-)
10A - OUTRAGE was easily cracked, thanks to the repeated power outage we had here this morning!
ReplyDeleteRichard, your point on 17D would have been confirmed had the final words of 1A been Democratic leader instead of Opposition leader.
ReplyDeleteAll quiet today on the CW front. Here is something to ponder upon, rather long but interesting
ReplyDeleteSTRANGE BUT TRUE
If your zipper has the initials "YKK" on it, this stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushibibaisha, the world's largest zipper manufacturer.
40 percent of McDonald's profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.
315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.
On the average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.
Chocolate kills dogs by affecting a dog's heart and nervous system. A few ounces is enough to kill a small sized dog.
Ketchup was sold in the 1830's as a medicine.
Leonardo DA Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.
Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.
There are no clocks or windows in Las Vegas casinos.
Leonardo DA Vinci invented scissors. It also took him ten years to paint Mona Lisa's lips.
Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to slow a film so you could see his moves. That's the opposite of the norm.
The original name for the butterfly was "flutterby"!
By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you can't sink in quicksand.
Mosquito repellents don't repel, they hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.
Dentists recommend that a toothbrush be kept at least six feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.
The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.
Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than the entire Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.
Marilyn Monroe had six toes on one foot.
Adolf Hitler's mother seriously considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor.
The three most valuable brand names on earth:
Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.
To escape the grip of a crocodile's jaws, prick your fingers into its eyeballs. It will let you go instantly.
The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.
The "pound" (#) key on your keyboard is called an octothorp.
The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.
Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.
Dreamt" is the only word in the English language that ends in "MT".
It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
In Chinese, the KFC slogan "finger lickin' good" translates as "eat your fingers off".
A cockroach can live for 10 days without a head.
We shed 40 pounds of skin a lifetime.
Yo-Yos were once used as weapons in the Philippines
Mexico City sinks about 10 inches a year.
Brains are more active sleeping than watching TV.
Blue is the favorite color of 80 percent of Americans.
When a person shakes their head from side to side, he is saying "yes" in Sri Lanka
There are more chickens than people in the world.
The thumbnail grows the slowest, and the middle nail grows the fastest.
There are more telephones than people in the nation's capital.
The average four year-old child asks over four hundred questions a day.
The average person presses the snooze button on their alarm clock three times each morning.
The three wealthiest families in the world have more assets than the combined wealth of the forty-eight poorest nations.
The first owner of the Marlboro cigarette Company died of lung cancer.
Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.
The world's youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.
Contd....
Our eyes remain the same size from birth onward, but our noses and ears Never stop growing.
ReplyDeleteYou burn more calories sleeping than you do watching TV.
A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. Death will occur about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a few weeks.
Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.
When the moon is directly overhead, you weigh slightly less.
Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, never called his wife or mother because they were both deaf.
A psychology student in New York rented out her spare room to a carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his reactions. After weeks of needling, he snapped and beat her
repeatedly with an axe leaving her mentally retarded.
"I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
Colgate faced a big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking countries because Colgate translates into the
command "go hang Yourself."
Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.
"Bookkeeper" is the only word in English language with three consecutive Double letters.
Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left handed people do.
The sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every Letter in the English language.
If the population of China walked past you in single line, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
China has more English speakers than the United States.
Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.
An average person uses the bathroom 6 times per day.
Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood they have only 206 in their bodies.
Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body.
If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.
According to Genesis 1:20-22, the chicken came before the egg.
The longest place name still in use is:
Taumatawhakatangihangaoauauotameteaturi-
Pukakpikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu -
it's a New Zealand hill.
If you leave Tokyo by plane at 7:00am, you will arrive in Honolulu at approximately 4:30pm the previous day.
Scientists in Australia 's Parkes Observatory thought they had positive proof of alien life when they began picking up radio waves from space. However, after investigation, the radio
emissions were traced to a microwave in the building.
Wearing headphones for an hour increases the bacteria in your ear 700 times.
Men can read smaller print than women, but women can hear better.
Coca-Cola was originally green.
The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
The names of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with.
There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made
using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
You can't kill yourself by holding your breath.
It is impossible to lick your elbow, nor can you touch the tip of your nose with your tongue.
People say "Bless you" when you sneeze because at that moment, your heart stops for a millisecond.
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.
.
.
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How many of you tried to lick your elbow or touch the tip of your nose with your tongue!!
The dearth and drought of comments today amply made up by these two posts.
ReplyDeleteBtw, Deepak, thanks. Really interesting stuff!
Col: Some random thoughts on your interesting list:
ReplyDelete"I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language. Equally long is the sentence "I do.", but results in a much longer sentence, and probably doesn't count because of this !
If the population of China walked past you in single line, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction. Cant these people just stand in a queue without getting into trouble ? One way to solve this problem (or at least mitigate it) would be to send people of one sex first, so that mingling (doesn't that sound quite Chinese) is avoided.
If you leave Tokyo by plane at 7:00am, you will arrive in Honolulu at approximately 4:30pm the previous day. This also apparentlly created a skewed history of the Battle of Midway involving the Japanese carriers Kagi, Akaga, Hiryu and Soryu where aircraft got short shot down before they took off and carriers got sunk before the attaching aircraft left base, since the entire battle took place over the IDT and logs were maintained at individual convenience.
It is impossible to lick your elbow, nor can you touch the tip of your nose with your tongue. This is a fallacy, at the least the second part: I can tough my nose with my tongue without any additional manipulation. Gross, I agree, but I can give you a demo whenever we meet. BTW I didn't try it now, because I have always been able to do it.
Kishore. Why don't you post a photograph of your nose licking feat
ReplyDeleteMy nose licking feet ???
ReplyDeleteMy feet don't smell and my nose doesn't run. Gross gross, as against net net.
ReplyDeleteThe feet (!) is reserved for view in person.
ReplyDeleteKishore. No offence meant.
ReplyDeleteBut I spelt it rightly as feat. It is worth featuring.
Suresh: No offence taken. And I did not fault your spelling. Just playing with words. I can even move my ears without touching them. So instead of videos, I think you should have the thrill of anticipation !
ReplyDeleteSorry, replace antic by const in above para.
ReplyDeleteHaving read this remark
ReplyDelete17D - This 'supporter' thing is a 'regular', favourite term of another setter. Any infringement on intellectual property? ;-) here,
later, when I visited my own Orkut forum on THC when someone raised the query
Is Gridman an old man?
I must have had it in my mind when I replied
Can't say!
You can never judge an author's life from what he or she puts in their work!
Fiction may be fact and fact, fiction!
They may talk of one 'supporter' but actually be wearing quite another!
I think Gridman's giving off a lot of clues here and I'm gonna presume it's all fair as usual. Agatha Christy??? Ian Fleming??? and young Gridman???? No, you can't be serious.
ReplyDelete# - We know this symbol
ReplyDeleteas 'hash' - is it right? Two names?
s -
ReplyDeleteYes, the number sign is called 'hash' (though it's not clear in what context you have raised the question).
It goes by some other names also, 'octothorp', for one.
CV Sir, # is called pound as per Deepak Sir's titbits, which was new to me. Hence the question
ReplyDeletePrior to the introduction of the IBM PC there was no unique accepted standard for entering, displaying, printing, or storing the £ sign in the UK computer industry. On personal computers prior to the PC the "#" key was often used; sometimes it was displayed on screen as "#", but many printers could be set up to print "£" where "#" was sent to the printer by an application program. Keying in, storing, displaying, and printing the sign often required special setup. The "#" sign is referred to as the "hash symbol" in the UK, but it is sometimes called the "pound sign".
ReplyDeleteIncidetally, the symbol for 'Rupee' was supposed to have been finalised yesterday.
What I saw in the paper was an R with two vertical lines running through it.
ReplyDeletes -
ReplyDeleteVisit here for more details:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-oct1.htm
There was one cute one with the Hindi r and two horizontal lines through it.
ReplyDelete