27430 Thursday, 15 August 2019 The way the world ends

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
While this continued my run this week of being in the 15/16/17 range at 17.22 it felt a lot meatier with a lot of the wordplay needing a lot of untangling. I took time to make sure I had the wordplay sussed before submitting. I don’t think I would be able to name the musteline creature if I saw one, and I don’t think I’ve come across this particular form of the one man show before, but they’re barely obscurities. There’s nothing here that comes in the category “words I don’t know”, though that might not be everyone’s experience. I appreciated the smooth surfaces.
To aid digestion, I have placed clues in italics, the definitions therein underlined, and solutions in bold CAPITALS

Across

1 Citizen’s “thing” about new copper by entrance to nick (9)
MANCUNIAN A fairly specific citizen, then. “Thing” is MANIA, which is placed about N(ew) CU (copper, chemistry) and by N(ick). The surface is a nice little vignette.
6 Victorious boxer, say, taking tea with elected member (5)
CHAMP Tea is CHA, elected member MP
9 Cool off by upper room reportedly in buff? (7)
FANATIC Buff has a variety of meanings, here it’s “enthusiast”, which Chambers traces to  “a keen attender at fires, so called from the buff uniform of the former New York volunteer firemen”. And why not?  For our construction purposes, FAN is cool off, and the ATIC bit comes from the reported sound of an upper room or attic.
10 Plaintive cry from male cat going about with queen (7)
WHIMPER The cat here is a WHIP, going about M(ale) and with the Queen, ER tacked on.
11 Incompetent people initially taken in at home and abroad (5)
INEPT People initially P, at home IN, “and” abroad (in France, anyway ET. Assemble.
12 Dodge bloke carrying extremely angular wooden slat (9)
DUCKBOARD Usually laid down over muddy terrain to provide a pathway, and I would have said a number of slats joined together rather than justone slat. Dodge provides the DUCK bloke is BOD, and the extremes of AngulaR are inserted.
13 Justification for reversing, avoiding a head wind (5)
NOSER That’ll be REASON (justification) reversed with its A avoided. A noser can also be a punch on the nose, an inquisitive person or a more general rebuff.
14 Ill-famed old port toured by other people? (9)
NOTORIOUS The old port gives you O RIO, and NOT US is what you might call other people
17 Lack of spirit in second author’s first stage piece (9)
MONODRAMA, I assume a play for one. Lack of spirit is NO DRAM placed in second: MO, and author’s first: A
18 Some retired fella backing a conspiratorial group (5)
CABAL Today’s reverse (retired) hidden in felLA BACking
19 Played for each class — Elgar and Delius to begin with (9)
PERFORMED Each class is PER FORM, and then you need the first letters of Elgar and Delius, helpfully capitalised for you.
22 Semi-divine spirit heard near a pond ultimately (5)
NAIAD Near, or in this case nigh, heard gives you the NAI bit and a gives you A, and the ultimate in pond the D
24 Resort where I live surrounded by workers (7)
ANTIBES Much loved by Graham Greene. I live gives you ungrammatically I BE, which you surround with the workers, who in crosswordland are usually ANTS
25 Demonstration disc found in a church gallery (7)
ACETATE Back in the days of proper records made of black stuff, acetates were the discs that the original sound was cut into, either for demonstration purposes or to create the master for pressing copies. Not really made of acetate, but of nitrocellulose lacquer, but the misnomer stuck. Here, a straight charade of A C(hurch of) E(ngland) TATE gallery.
26 Social distinction of Liberal entertained by English queen, perhaps (5)
ÉCLAT Those who did yesterday’s will remember that the queen is sometimes, as here, a CAT. The E comes from English, and the enclosed L from Liberal. A French word with several translations, one of which fits.
27 Furniture-maker finding love in a crowded complex (9)
CEDARWOOD You have to stop thinking about carpenters and cabinet makers and concentrate on the stuff that makes up furniture. Surprisingly only the first anagram (complex) of O (0, love) in A CROWDED
Down
1 Muslim legal expert in plain clothes (5)
MUFTI Two meanings, the second being military slang for non-uniform, possibly derived from the first.
2 No-hoper’s note about first of songs in Evita (3-6)
NON-PERSON Note: N, about: ON first of songs: S, and Evita’s married surname was PERON. More often someone whose status has been erased for political reasons.
3 Ignorant over revolutionary crushed by a French king (9)
UNTUTORED So it’s O(ver) RED (revolutionary) crushed by (here, just underneath) UN for A in French, and the king is TUT, the colloquial version of Tutankhamun.
4 Possible theatre pieces culminate in disc for distribution (10,5)
INCIDENTAL MUSIC A (re)distribution of CULMINATE IN DISC
5 Modern Glaswegian woman with a way round northern police HQ (3,8,4)
NEW SCOTLAND YARD HQ of the Metropolitan Police. Modern gives NEW, then Glaswegian woman is just a SCOT LADY, which together with a way, or A RD, finds itself round N(orthern)
6 Make progress as Conservative member (5)
CLIMB Just a C(onservative) LIMB for member.
7 Highest grade of hotel in mountain area (5)
ALPHA H(otel) in ALP (mountain) A(rea)
8 Capital fellow digesting notice, full of bliss (9)
PARADISAL The capital is PARIS, the digested notice is AD, and the random fellow is AL
13 Bloke in gym upset over recent form of identification (9)
NAMEPLATE Bloke in gym is PE MAN, all reversed (upset). Revent provides LATE
15 Storyteller’s regret about supporting crook in desert (9)
RACONTEUR Regret is RUE, which  must be reversed (about). It supports, in this down clue, crook: CON buried in desert (RAT)
16 Big tool a builder originally contrived for important bit of work (9)
OBBLIGATO A “contrived” version of BIG TOOL A plus the first letter of Builder. Musical term for what it says.
20 Charge pounds to see musteline mammal (5)
RATEL One of the badger/weasel family here indicated.  Charge is RATE especially when a local tax, L (or £) for pounds
21 Circuit minister finally overcome by memorial notice (5)
ORBIT The last letter of ministeR surrounded by OBIT short for obituary.
23 Fearfully anticipate being late securing runs (5)
DREAD Possibly the current feeling in the England batting line up. Being late is DEAD (as in the late Dent Arthur Dent), R(uns) being inserted)

55 comments on “27430 Thursday, 15 August 2019 The way the world ends”

  1. Fun stuff! Seemed a bit harder than yesterday, but a close call. Gambled on NOSER. LOI was MONODRAMA, last thing parsed O DRAM.
  2. but felt much slower. A few went in immediately, like MUFTI (a QC clue), CABAL, INEPT, but most of them required working out. Well, not NEW SCOTLAND YARD, which I never bothered to parse. DNK NOSER; LOI ACETATE (I’m one of those Vinyl alludes to). NON-PERSON took a lot of time, largely because it had never occurred to me that it could mean ‘no-hoper’.
  3. 36 minutes with time lost over several such as 8dn where I wanted the ‘capital fellow’ to be ‘Parisian’ leaving not enough squares to accommodate AD. MONODRAMA was another that put up a lot of resistance and I had NHO of NOSER as a ‘wind’. I missed part of the wordplay at 11ac so until I had 2dn in place I was torn between INEPT and ‘inapt’. Knew ACETATE as something to do with record manufacture, so that helped, but I associate CEDARWOOD more with a range of men’s toiletries than with furnture-making. RATEL from wordplay and checkers but I knew it as an animal of some sort, if not as a ‘musteline mammal’ – a definition surely worth remembering as it also covers weasels, stoats, mink, and martens.
  4. Agree with kevin that NON-PERSON, an Orwellian term, has to stretch rather a lot to mean ‘no-hoper’ – what happens if the powers-that-be change?

    WHIMPER took a while, while I tried to fit in TOM or MIAOW. RATEL known both as honey bear and an anagram of later/alter/artel. Dnk OBBLIGATO but had vaguely seen the construction without knowing its meaning. Is everybody on holiday or has LJ crashed?

    16′ 49”, thanks z and setter.

  5. 20 mins pre-brekker, so speedy for me.
    No dramas, except the Mono one and controlling the eyebrow flutter over ‘crushed’.
    Thanks setter and great blog Z.
    1. Oh, I don’t think ‘crushed’ should provoke the slightest movement of any eyebrow. Since O-RED is being sat upon by, indeed lies under the imposing weight of, UN-TUT, then ‘crushed’ is quite apposite.

      Edited at 2019-08-15 10:02 am (UTC)

        1. It was a mere ‘flutter’ while I considered whether just because something was on top of something else it necessarily ‘crushed’ it. My granola was crushing my yoghurt at the time.

          I also thought of ways of crushing things without the crushing necessarily being from above. There are enough to agitate the brow.

          Edited at 2019-08-15 03:31 pm (UTC)

  6. as I was out and about in WuJong Lu getting a much needed haircut, followed by lunch at a massive food court, where I was the oldest person by over thirty years. Everyone paid by handphone as no cash was accepted. Hence no oldies. Her indoors did the transaction for my Japanese quickie for about three and a half quid on her Samsung. She had the Xian soup noodle with lamb. Mais je digress.

    FOI 1dn MUFTI

    SOI 1ac Mancunian (IKEAN) (We can now watch Coronation Street in Shanghai on Channel 122 at 6.45pm! It now stars Polish Royalty Rula Lenska and uncuddly Ken (What of Dennis and Deirdre!): Maureen Lipman as Mrs. Grumpy – Evelyn Plummer! What is going on in my absence?) Mais je m’égare.

    LOI MONODRAMA although I wrestled with both MINIDRAMA and MELODRAMA.(Enough of the ‘Cobbles Icons’ hereabouts.)

    COD 2dn NON-PERSON (Ray?)

    WOD NEW SCOTLAND YARD

    Edited at 2019-08-15 07:40 am (UTC)

  7. On the wavelength for this one so no problems. Knew all the vocab including the badger. Consistent standard of interesting cluing across the puzzle
  8. Rather good crossword I thought, with a more than usually interesting set of vocab. I put melodrama initially which made non-person difficult, but got it untangled idc.
    Antibes brought back happy memories. Cap d’Antibes is a fabulous place
  9. This was a bit like yesterday’s for me, only happily without one that left me stuck at the end, so took a nice quick 26 minutes. FOI 1d MUFTI, LOI 17a MONODRAMA, possibly helped by thinking of “monomania” while doing 1a.

    My unknowns today conjure an image of a RATEL performing a MONODRAMA standing on a DUCKBOARD stage while accompanied by music from an ACETATE disc and being supervised for correctness by a MUFTI…

  10. Right half went straight in but slowed to normal pace on the left. NHO NOSER and didn’t know that OBBLIGATO had two Bs. Solid crossword but no stand out clues for me.
  11. Thanks, Z. Going through your blog I realised just how many clues I had failed to parse. Thanks particularly for NEW SCOTLAND YARD.
    I wavered between MELODRAMA and an invented word, MOCUDRAMA, before hitting on the correct answer.
    RATEL has come up before. At that time I thought it was a make of amplifier but that was ROTEL wasn’t it!
    NAIAD was DJINN for a while.
    No real COD.
    1. Martin I believe that MOCUDRAMA is a fine new addition to the dictionary – even though it doesn’t parse muster.
    2. I have a ROTEL RA-810A right here. I imagine it sounds rather more pleasant than a honey badger.
  12. I struggled to start in the NW corner, so moved on and found greener pastures on the RHS. Returning to the NW with INCIDENTAL MUSIC in place, I was able to fill in the blanks with MONODRAMA bringing up the rear. Didn’t know NOSER for wind. Knew ACETATE. Didn’t bother to fully parse NSY. Enjoyable puzzle. 18:44. Thanks setter and Z.
  13. ….as I’m about to depart from my MANCUNIAN abode to sample a few tinctures in Leeds (where the forecast suggests a more pleasant day than is expected at home).

    Thanks to Z for parsing WHIMPER and UNTUTORED. I parsed another four (!) after finishing. Fast, but a little unsatisfying. NHO MONODRAMA.

    FOI CHAMP
    LOI INCIDENTAL MUSIC
    COD DUCKBOARD
    TIME 7:37

    1. Where in Leeds are you heading Phil? Watch out for all the A level students (daughter included) who will be out in town tonight.
      1. Starting in Holbeck (in the Cross Keys at the moment), then into the City Centre. Will be coming home late afternoon.
        1. I daresay you’ll be in the Midnight Bell before long. The Grove thereabouts is a cracking little pub.
          1. Did the Grove first, and it’s excellent (BB King “Five Long Years” is my earworm for the day – no complaints on that score !).

            I’ve meandered into the City Centre and it’s an excellent place to sample good beer.

      2. I hope your daughter did well? And if she did, that you have given her some of the folding stuff to have a couple of Babychams. I may be out of touch with how students pay for stuff and what they ingest.
        2. Well enough to get into her first (and only) choice uni thanks. Pink gin & lemonade is her current drink of choice although she’s not a big drinker. We might give her a fiver for the bus 🙂
            1. She wont get many for that these days. I remember, back in the days, when a pound note was called a GDV (green drinking voucher) and you could buy a round with it!
  14. My opinion aligns with several others expressed here, that this was a rather good puzzle with some jolly good surfaces, clever wordplay and — apart from the no-hoper=non-person — devious but fair defining. The vocab for the solutions was a nice set. I didn’t know ‘musteline’, but I was quite familiar with the crossword mammal, RATEL. Last two in were MANCUNIAN and thence MUFTI: the latter a very straightforward double-def which I just didn’t see, and I spent a long time chopping and mashing the clue to unravel some tortuous wordplay. 34 mins.
    A comprehensive and congenial blog, Z. Thank you!
  15. Thirty-one minutes of enjoyment. NHO NOSER, and OBBLIGATO was rattling around in my memory having become detached from its meaning. I too had qualms over the NON-PERSON being a no-hoper, and I can’t find it being defined as such.

    NAIAD took a little while, and it seems to me there are umpteen -ADs, what with dryads (nymphs of woodland), oreads (nymphs of mountains) and farads (nymphs of electricity); does anyone happen to have a complete list?

    1. I lean to the right a bit but I put that down to alcohol.

      I was thinking of a joke about GONADS but this is not the place and I don’t have the …

      1. Didn’t George Bush name his school’s basketball team The Nads? As in “Go, Nads!”
  16. A nice puzzle today, albeit not too tricky – 7m 29s for me. DUCKBOARD was unknown, but fortunately my initial thought of BACKBOARD was quickly ruled out because of the lack of B in the anagram fodder at 4d. I don’t think I’d ever come across NOSER either, but it was very fairly clued.

    OBBLIGATO, coming hot on the heels of COLLINEAR, is another one that feels like it has too many letters. Fortunately it rang a bell from a previous puzzle, so I didn’t get as concerned by it as I did back then.

    I didn’t love ‘Bloke in gym’ as PE MAN, and I’m not sure about [wordplay] in [definition] at 9a. But I’m nit-picking now.

  17. Pleasant and mostly straightforward. I didn’t know NOSER or MONODRAMA, but this was one of those puzzles where the wordplay suggests a very likely looking possibility and you feel inclined to trust it.
  18. 23 minutes: MER for DUCKBOARD – known from stories of trench warfare, agree with Z that it’s not just one slat. NOSER and RATEL often seen in barred puzzles, so no problem.
    LOI 2dn, as hadn’t known it as ‘no-hoper’ and had been trying to make MELODRAMA parse for 17ac.
  19. I didn’t know the first meaning of Mufti and I also didn’t know Obbligato, Noser and musteline.
  20. The setter was generous with the placement of the consonants, otherwise I get in a muddle (same with the vowels in “wierd/weird”). NOTORIOUS reminded me of the excellent movie with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman – haven’t seen it for ages. Speaking of movies, I briefly wondered if the citizen’s “thing” might be a sled called Rosebud. Good puzzle. 14.22
  21. Glad I wasn’t alone in bunging in a sloppy ‘melodrama’ initially for 17a. This mucked me up for 2d, my LOI, until I twigged to the ‘Peron’ bit and eventually took the trouble to parse the unheard of MONODRAMA. Some tricky wordplay eg for UNTUTORED and NEW SCOTLAND YARD which did repay the effort in nutting it all out.

    Just right to do while watching the cricket. Finished in 39 minutes with another 5 minutes or so to fully parse.

    Thanks to setter and blogger

  22. I powered through the first half (the right hand side) in about 10 minutes which is super-fast for me, and wondered if it was going to be a good day, but then slowed down for the SW corner and ground to a halt in the NW.

    The trouble is I don’t always have enough faith in my parsing, so when it comes to clues like Noser, I tend to give up. I had the correct answer but didn’t like the look of at all so didn’t enter it. Quite an ugly word IMO. I solve on paper, so there’s no opportunity to use the check button.

    The mustelid reference was no problem – too many years of watching Springwatch, so it was just a question of going through the list in my brain! Mind you, I don’t imagine there are too many honey badgers in Norfolk or Gloucestershire!

    I must admit to a certain amount of biffing, with the aim of post-solve parsing, but ended up relying on our blogger’s hard work instead. So thanks Z8 😊

    FOI Champ
    COD Notorious

    I didn’t get monodrama, so couldn’t get non-person either. So a DNF for me.

  23. Nice puzzle. I confess to biffing a couple, but in the process made a problem for myself by bunging in MELODRAMA for 17A. The odd NON-PERSON sorted me out, though. I didn’t know what musteline meant but I knew there was something called a RATEL. ACETATE also wen in on trust – I had forgotten it was how vinyl’s were mastered. 12:19
  24. 9:58. Not too hard today: I managed to sneak in under 10 minutes in spite of a few false starts. It was a puzzle where a lot of answers could be entered confidently on the basis of definition and part of the wordplay but occasionally (UNKNOWING) that doesn’t work.
    Interesting to see ‘queen’ appearing as a cat in the surface reading and a monarch in the wordplay at 10ac, and then the opposite at 26ac.
  25. I got into a bit of a mess by inventing NYRAD for 22 which only got sorted when I wrote out the fodder for OBBLIGATO, and even then I hesitated more than a little as the double B just looked wrong.

    Anyway, 14:33 and I couldn’t say for certain if Mufti (as a legal expert), monodrama and noser were unknown or just forgotten.

  27. Seems I wasn’t alone with the biffed MELODRAMA. NAIAD is another of those crossword staples, like OBELI, which make me feel like I’m playing scrabble.
  28. Very enjoyable and harder than usual puzzle, and I also took a while over MONODRAMA, even with all the checkers. I don’t recall seeing the word used, but it sure looked like it should exist. Nice anagram at INCIDENTAL MUSIC. Regards.
  29. Here in pedants’ corner, for the parsing of this clue, I put a mental comma between Glaswegian and woman: Glaswegian being (the) SCOT and LADY obviously the woman. Otherwise the answer would be SCOTSLAND or SCOTTISHLAND YARD. Jeffrey

    1. I think you’re probably right, and the Glaswegian Scot should be separated from the lady woman (might be a good idea in principle too!), though at the time of solving it felt like an ok bit of shorthand.

  30. 16:34 quicker than I expected after a slow start. Dnk duckboard but the synonym for dodge felt absolutely nailed on once I had alit upon it and clicked so satisfyingly into place that I knew it couldn’t be anything else. Noser also unknown but once again the wp was so satisfying that I didn’t need to look twice. Very enjoyable.
  31. Curious that several of us have spotted the Orwell connection, as it’s not really there. Orwell’s term is unperson, as in this from M-W: In 1984, George Orwell created the concept of the unperson, someone who had been executed and of whose existence all records were erased.

    Non-person, often without the hyphen has a different online presence. Collins gives “a person regarded as nonexistent or unimportant; a nonentity” and as an example (possible tastelessness alert): “To the Church a clerical widow isn’t even persona non grata – she’s simply a non-person.”

    Wiki has an entire article dedicated to nonperson (no hyphen) including “In Nazi extermination camps, Jewish people and Romani were treated as nonpersons. The purpose of these camps was to systematically dehumanise these unwanted elements, use them where possible, and dispose of them efficiently. “Nonperson” status was required because it removed the moral and social obstacles for committing otherwise objectionable acts of violence, crime, abuse, and murder.”

    Again: “A person that does not appear on any official documents, is economically or socially inactive, or lives outside of what is defined as the ‘productive system’ or ‘organized society’ could be classified as a nonperson.”

    It seems to me that we are venturing much closer to the idea of a non-person being effectively a no-hoper in the sense of being deprived of hope, rather more than if we slip into (mombled) Newspeak.

    There was a striking example of becoming a non-person in the remarkable Chernobyl, series. Lugasov, the scientist who defied the state to reveal the catastrophic weakness at the heart of Soviet design is treated thus:

    Legasov: I know who I am, and I know what I’ve done. In a just world, I’d be shot for my lies, but not for this, not for the truth.

    Charkov: Scientists…and your idiot obsessions with reasons. When the bullet hits your skull, what will it matter why? No one’s getting shot, Legasov. The whole world saw you in Vienna; it would be embarrassing to kill you now. And for what? Your testimony today will not be accepted by the State. It will not be disseminated in the press. It never happened. No… you will live, however long you have. But not as a scientist. Not anymore. You’ll keep your title and your office, but no duties. No authority. No friends. No one will talk to you. No one will listen to you. Other men, lesser men, will receive credit for the things you have done. Your legacy is now their legacy; you will live long enough to see that.

    Did it leave him as a no-hoper? Perhaps not, as he smuggled his findings out to the scientific community before committing suicide, but there is something particularly vile in the condemnation to non-personhood he received.

    Edited at 2019-08-15 09:44 pm (UTC)

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