26254 (thanks sawbill) Walter Mitty meets Jo McCarthy in “What’s My Lie?”

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Not a particularly difficult one – 15 minutes and 1 second for me, including the usual search for typos and justification of wordplay just to be sure. Plenty of wit to go around, which, together with some interesting devices, raises this above the run of the mill. Without further ado, my workings, some of which are not much more than hopeful:

Across

1 POPISH PLOT  Hoax to discredit catholics
Even if your knowledge of late 17th century religious conflict is not as sharp as it might be, I thnk this is gettable both from the “Catholic hoax” and the wordplay. Titus Oates was the character at the centre of the piece, a serial liar who invented a plot by the Jesuits to assassinate Charles II and whipped up considerable anti catholic hysteria until (sort of) exposed as a perjuror, by which time at least 22 innocent high-ranking Catholics had been executed. To get a modern day flavour, try looking up “Tom Watson” in conjunction with, say, “Ted Heath”.* Ah yes, the wordplay. “Try” is POP, as in have a pop at, “rats” is PISH by loose association of mild expletive (I’m open to better suggestions). Wrap one round the other, and add LOT for “many”
*Other suggestions are welcome: lets have some conspiracy fun!
6 OBEY Conform
Being overweight is OBEsitY. As instructed strike “sit” out.
9 SEASIDE  Coast
No fancy geographical term required. If you exclude southeast, not only do you miss out on Margate, but you set SE ASIDE
10 MOSELLE  German wine
Endless champagne is MOË(t), insert SELL for trade. Other fizzy drinks are available.
12 HEART mood (I think)
By one of those three point turns in a Thesaurus, mood via disposition gets to heart. The wordplay invites you to imagine a similar if reversed solicism to thou is as HE ART. Don’t shoot your humble messenger.
13 UNSPOILED  pristine
Re-sort  ENDS UP and throw in a slick of OIL.
14 SPRINGER SPANIEL dog
An extended talk is a SPIEL. Put it about RINGERS for callers, and PAN for slag off.
17 EVENING STANDARD (news) paper
The London version manages to prove that you don’t have to charge your readers after all (copy to our beloved News UK, please). Quality gives rise to STANDARD, and becoming less erratic is EVENING (out). Yodafy
20 COMBATIVE  militant
Search: COMB. In operation without C(aught) gives A(c)TIVE
21 TOXIC damaging
Steer in this incarnation is OX, around which the uncontrolled TIC settles.
23 ANTWERP  European port
Take the letters of WEPT and RAN, “off” them and see how they settle.
24 ORINOCO Womble What follows Colombian course
Today’s hidden, in yakitORI NO COmment.
25 PUCE Colour
Take the lightest stone you know, PUmiCE, and strike M(arks) and I.
26 LEMON GRASS fragrant ingredient
Looks like an anagram, and is, of ROAMS GLENS. Smells like this █████ (scratch here)

Down

1 POST-HASTE very quickly
Our Setter eschews Spooner, but invites us to take HOST entertainer and PASTE fake gems, and switch the first letters, tops in down clues
2 PLAZA  public space
Arizona’s abbrev. is AZ, and after overturning it and a mountain ALP, it provides our answer
3 SPITTING IMAGE  Duplicate
A carefree symbol for slightly damp weather would of course be, well, our answer. Wouldn’t it have been a more fun clue as, say → ?
4 PRELUDE  passage that opens
Bar is PREcLUDE. Remove the C(lubs)
5 OSMOSIS  Absorption.
IS under cOSMOS or universe without the first letter. Curiously the third clue to require you to remove a C
7 BALALAIKA  Russian instrument
An Albanian is a BALKAn, most of which gathers round “in the style of” À LA plus I, one
8 YIELD  &lit…
…I think. If you take a variable, Y and use it to replace the F of FIELD (arable land), you get an answer that, if you squint a bit, is also clued by the surface meanng.
11 STOP AT NOTHING  Be determined…
…and what you do if you complete a countdown. Mind you, some of us can remember the countdown to acquisition of signal from the returning Apollo 13 extending for a terrifying 87 seconds beyond Zero, and the explosion of relief when the silence broke.
15 RHEUMATIC  to do with joint complaints
A write in for me (my sister had teenage rheumatic fever, very nasty), but it’s an anagram of IRATE MUCH
16 LUDICROUS  Laughable.
Follow the construction manual carefully. Begin with piece 1, L(earner). Add piece 2 and 3, STUDIOUS (bookish). Remove the temporary piece 2, ST(umped). Insert piece 4, CR(redit) where you can make it fit. I appear to be suffering from grandchild-induced LegOCD
18 GLIMPSE  Quick butcher’s (‘ook)
CRS. I rather appreciated this construction. Good just gives the G. Easy gives SIMPLE, in which you swap the L(arge) and the S(mall).
19 TREMOLO fluttering effect
Usually as heard on a pipe organ when rapidly changing the airflow in mawkish Victorian sentimental pieces. Activity under lids, R(apid) E(ye) M(ovement) is kept by TO and LO (behold)
20 CHAMP  &lit
More succesful to my eye than the other one. Fellow, CHAP, accepts the first letter of Medals.
22 XHOSA  South African
Strictly speaking, there should be a click sound at the beginning, but we have no space or symbol. Anagram of HAS OX

59 comments on “26254 (thanks sawbill) Walter Mitty meets Jo McCarthy in “What’s My Lie?””

  1. I knew of the Popish Plot–although while solving, I was confusing it with the Gunpowder Ditto–so why did I fling in ‘Papist Plot’? Don’t ask me. I did a lot of biffing on this one, some of which worked, some of which didn’t, like ‘excerpt’ for PRELUDE (something about ‘passage’ and ‘bar’ [except?], plus a wish to move on to something I could solve), ‘terrier’ from the I of BALALAIKA (also biffed), and ‘fast-paced’ at 1d. 16d and 19d also, but at least I was right, and parsed them post hoc. I think the relevant click symbol for Xhosa is ||, but don’t quote me. I liked HEART, he admitted.

    Edited at 2015-11-12 06:08 am (UTC)

  2. An unparsed PAPIST at 1ac did for me. I saw the correct answer (not that I’ve ever heard of it) as soon as I submitted, so perhaps there’s a lesson there to take a little more time over unparsed answers. Who’d have thought?

    Agree that this was an above-average offering. Thanks setter and Z.

  3. 39 minutes. Careful attention to wordplay saved me from an error at 1ac where I considered ‘popist’ and ‘papist’ for a long time before eventually thinking of PISH for ‘rats’ and resolving the riddle once and for all.

    I needed all the checkers to get 22dn where once again I note we have an anagram of a foreign word. With X_O_A in place there wasn’t much room for doubt.

    Common sense tells me that a wine from the German wine region Mosel ought to be spelt Mosel rather than MOSELLE which is the French spelling of the river that flows through the two countries. However both Collins and Chambers sanction the longer spelling as apparently it’s widely used by oenophiles when referring to the German wine, in which case it doesn’t take a capital ‘M’ – not that that’s relevant here.

    1. This has come up before (puzzle 25826). In my (not inconsiderable) experience ‘Mosel’ (with a capital M) is overwhelmingly more common among oenophiles these days.
      1. I concur with that. It’s not so long ago that the wine producing area was properly known as Mosel-Saar-Ruwer but they changed it – I think for marketing purposes.
        1. Quite sensible really!
          I googled a bit and found one use of MOSELLE by Hugh Johnson: ‘I learned my Moselle at Dr Loeb’s knee’. But if you look at the website of said Dr Loeb’s business (O.W. Loeb, one of the leading importers of these wines in the UK) you will see that they use the term ‘Mosel’ exclusively.
          While I’m being a wine geek, I might as well change my usual avatar for a picture of the same vineyard which I took myself on Tuesday. I may never drink the wine in my life but at least I’ve seen the horse!

          Edited at 2015-11-12 10:31 am (UTC)

    1. Chambers and the Oxfords have it as two words. Collins has both.

      Edited at 2015-11-12 06:07 am (UTC)


  5. I think our American Allies who aren’t up yet may find butcher’s ‘ook (butchers hook = look = GLIMPSE)deserving of slightly more explanation.CRS = Cockney Rhyming Slang – but I may be aht ofordah!
    Also noted for look is ‘a Cap’n Cook’ – the only Eglish Captain to tour Australia and never score a run or take a wicket!

    20 minutes with yet another PAPIST PLOT – PISH!!

    Would you Adam an’ Eve it!

    horryd Shanghai

    1. I’m trying to come to terms with the suggestion that I may be insufficiently prolix! I’ll put a note on the entry when I’m back on the computer. Can’t trust mobile devices.

  6. 20 mins which is quick for me. I liked STOP AT NOTHING following our recent discussion on whether a countdown stops at 1. Trying to hide ORINOCO was probably a bridge too far for the setter but at least “flower” wasn’t used. Much enjoyed.
  7. 18:35 … the get/got affair a few days ago has put me on my guard and I did spend some time at the end considering whether it really was a Papist Plot (my history is awful — it just doesn’t stick), managing to figure out the wordplay after the voice of Stephen Fry sounded ‘Pish!’ in my head.

    Some very fine things in this. CHAMP and ANTWERP both brought a smile with their sheer neatness. Thank you, anonymous setter.

    Z8 — re the picture clue for SPITTING IMAGE. I just hope it doesn’t catch on in the puzzle. I’d be toast. Is there a word for that type of cryptic picture clue (other than “Catchphrase-y”)?

  8. 10m on the dot. Nice puzzle, with a bit of biffing but mostly requiring at least some engagement with the wordplay. 1ac was a case in point, where like sotira my knowledge of history is sufficiently poor to have put me on my guard.
    I was a bit surprised by MOET. Is it unusual to see brand names in these things or have I just invented that convention?
    1. These days I get these puzzles mixed up but I think I recall FORD and MARMITE for example
      1. And, more controversially, given the interests of the paper’s owner, didn’t we go through a phase of having “broadcaster” clueing SKY?
        1. A bit of googling uncovers a (completely forgotten by me) discussion on this topic in January this year in reaction to HENNESSY as an answer (puzzle 25,997). It seems the rule is ‘no brand names other than booze’!

          Edited at 2015-11-12 10:19 am (UTC)

      2. MARMITE appeared quite recently, but it was defined as ‘pot’. I can’t find an example of FORD being clued as the brand name.

        Edited at 2015-11-12 10:14 am (UTC)

          1. Different rules I suppose? I have a feeling I’ve seen other brand names in Mephisto but I can’t think of any specific examples, which makes it difficult to find them.
  9. About 40mins, but with papist at 1ac. Others that went in unparsed (but parsed afterwards): SPRINGER SPANIEL, OBEY, COMBATIVE. Thanks for the creative blog!
  10. 19:15 of which the last 4 was spent staring 20a trying to find a word for ‘search’ to put in the middle of something. Lots of entertainment in the puzzle today. I enjoyed PISH for ‘rats’ in 1a and the reminder of my favourite puppet show at 3d. And even more entertainment in the blog – thanks Z!
    P.S. I tried scratching my screen but it didn’t work.
    1. Should have mentioned. You need to scratch it with some handy bit of lemon grass for the best result.
  11. Really enjoyable puzzle with a very tricky 1A. Luckily I’m interested in that period of history. Not quite sure how a champion golfer and one of the nicest guys imaginable fits into the scene or the slightly odd Ted Heath

    The London evening paper is a bit parochial – New York Post next week perhaps?

    Great blog Z

    1. I’m pleased to exonerate the excellent golfer and gentleman from any suggestion of perjury, surely the worst accusation you can make towards a golfer. Try the MP. Please, somebody, try the MP.
      1. Apologies for obtuseness Z – you mean Labour MP for West Brom me thinks. A very different kettle of fish to the golfer.
      2. So what’s this about Tom Watson and the big band leader of the 40’s and 50’s? I must have missed that.
        1. I’m sure Tom Watson MP would be able to sniff out something even for the band leader. Especially since (like Cap’n Morning Cloud) he’s no longer in a position to argue.
  12. Nice blog Z and thank you for unpacking the plot – I’d lost it although I knew the answer. A contemporary US equivalent might be the nearly half of all Republicans who believe that our current president is a Kenyan-born Muslim who wants to take away their guns. I’m unamused by Tom Watson who made the final illness even more hideous for someone I used to know back in my salad days. 17.41
    1. …and he’s gay, and Michelle is a man. And the girls are adopted, ‘cos have you seen any pictures of Michelle with the babies? Didn’t think so.
  13. 15:59 for a fairly straightforward puzzle with no holdups.

    A couple of years back there was an article in The Times about the crossword and some ‘celebrity’ solvers mentioned their favourite clues. Jon Snow’s was ‘Butcher has ox tongue’. That stuck in my memory making 22D a write-in.

  14. 15 min – no problem at 1ac, as ‘papist’ never came to mind.
    LOI 12ac, as although parsing seemed clear enough, I wasn’t convinced that ‘mood’ was a valid definition.
  15. POPISH PLOT was completely beyond me, even more so since I penned in ARENA for 2d A plus the well know Mount RENA. Pish!
  16. 12 a Surely parses as follows: Just as ‘Thou art’ comes from the wrong ‘Thou is’ so ‘ He is’ comes from its similarly wrong counterpart ‘He art’ = Heart. Mood here is the grammatical meaning, not emotional. Katie Rose
    1. The wordplay’s pretty clear, as your comment and Z’s blog suggest. But what’s the definition?

      I agree with Z that it must be “mood”, unconvincing as it is.

      Of course there may be more to it, but no-one seems to have picked up on it so far.

      1. Collins defines HEART as ’emotional mood or disposition’, and gives the example ‘a happy heart’. Whether or not you find that convincing, I think it lets the setter off (and obviates the need for thesaurus manoeuvres!).
        1. Hooray for Collins! I stayed with Chambers, which gives no such happy connection, and I struggled to bring one drifting craft alongside the other. Rather like pish and rats, I was content (in the end) for them to be, shall we say, adrift in the same pond.
  17. A pretty straightforward 25-minute solve, but I should have considered the wordplay of 1a more carefully. Another papist plot.
    As so often the hidden (24) was my last solve.
  18. GAH! 6 and a half minutes, so I would totally have topped the leaderboard today, if I hadn’t typed in POST-HOSTE (while thinking POST-HASTE, and for all the right reasons). My life is well and truly ashes!

    Edited at 2015-11-12 02:04 pm (UTC)

    1. Bad luck, Matthew – more hoste, less speed! (Someone was going to say it sooner or later, and it might as well be me.)
  19. Excellent puzzle today which I confess I was only able to complete by recourse to aids. Didn’t help myself by stupidly putting in COME TO NOTHING at 11d, Bottom half completed first, and mostly understood, but a lot of the top half was biffed on a wing and a prayer.

    Very amusing blog Z, and also comments since, so altogether nicely entertaining. I don’t know my time, but it was considerable.

  20. Very enjoyable puzzle capped off by a super blog – thanks Z8.

    Titus Oates is surely one of the most vile characters in history, and has long been a source of horrid fascination as far as I am concerned, so 1a was a write in for me. Particularly enjoyed 18d and 20d amongst a number of fine clues.

  21. Popish/papist/popist, it had to be one of the three and fortunately only the first yielded anything resembling rats. I liked the ‘neat’ juxtaposition in 21ac and 22d. I haven’t seen that often, if at all. Two steers in one puzzle but a long way from their piece of agricultural land in 8d. The balalaika reminded me of a three-word review of the movie, “I am a camera”: “Me no Leica”. I’m pleased I have finally spotted an &lit. clue (20ac) all on my own but missed 8d. 3d was my favourite and I like the idea of picture clues but not sure about suber. 33m 45s
  22. Half an hour at leisure, without ignoring Mrs K’s conversation, having returned to the settee in a good mood after better than usual golf. Very enjoyable puzzle, with a few not well parsed, still not fully understanding HEART for mood (was thinking subjunctive) or the FIELD > YIELD explanation. Good blogging, though, Z8.
    Agree with Keriothe and Jimbo about Mosel. Moselle comes from Moselle in Alsace-Lorraine.
  23. About 25 minutes to get through this, ending with the SEASIDE/PRECLUDE pair. No good reason for those holding me up, but they did nonetheless. I actually saw the wordplay to lead me to POPISH PLOT, despite ‘pish’ not meaning anything over here that I’m aware of, and my US nurtured mind has absorbed enough CRS via this puzzle to have decoded the ‘butcher’s’ reference right away. Thanks to the setter and Z also, and regards.
  24. 12 mins. I thought I was going to be in for a struggle as I didn’t get an across answer until I got to the clue for TOXIC. The helpful X checker gave me XHOSA straight away and I built out from the bottom up. I knew of the POPISH PLOT so didn’t need to consider any alternatives, or indeed parse the clue, once I had the P?P checkers. HEART was my LOI after SPITTING IMAGE. I agree that this was a fun puzzle and that’s how I like them.
  25. Solving time: 23 minutes
    Music: the psychopathic owls (not the group; our resident tawny owls that never bloody shut up)
    Drink: A long but potent gin and tonic

    I think I timed this one almost perfectly, with my LOI (LUDICROUS, which I’d left until last because I couldn’t parse it) coinciding with the end of the G&T.

    Very enjoyable puzzle, though nothing really leapt out as a CoD for me (or anyone else, by the look of it). Wasn’t keen on the hidden at 24ac, which seemed a bit contrived. Glad that 1d was clued without reference to the over-used Rev. Spooner, something that I always find irritating since the setter might as well just write “swap the first letters around”. My other pet peeve is hapostrophes used to hindicate Dick van Dyke cockneyisms. (Actually, that’s misleading. “My other” would imply that I have only two pet peeves; in fact, the two pet peeves I started out with turned out to be male and female, and I now have dozens of them.)

    Edited at 2015-11-12 07:42 pm (UTC)

  26. 7:38 for me.

    Rather annoyingly I thought of POPISH PLOT straight away as the obvious answer to 1ac, but couldn’t immediately see how it fitted the wordplay, thought it was a bit early to start biffing, and so moved on without filling it in. I then failed to solve the next three clues and feared the whole puzzle was going to be a disaster. At which point I suddenly found the setter’s wavelength and proceeded from 12ac to the end in a clean sweep.

    Nice puzzle.

  27. A minor semantic rebuke to our esteemed blogger: ‘Tremolo’ is an effect available to stringed instruments – a rapid sort of scraping. The organ stop is the ‘Tremulant’. Many organs, pipe and otherwise, have this facility. In the pipe organ proper the Tremulant is in fact a fan which introduces a wavering effect to the sound. It is not used frequently, if at all, if the player has good taste.
    1. Well, yes, it is an effect available to string players, but also to organ players, yes indeed by using the tremulant device. Wiki* says “A tremulant (from Latin: tremulus, “trembling”; French: tremblant) is a device on a pipe organ which varies the wind supply to the pipes of one or more divisions (or, in some cases, the whole organ). This causes their amplitude and pitch to fluctuate, producing a tremolo and vibrato effect”. In my past life I have been acquainted with many real pipe organs, and I’m certain that many of them had a stop (sometimes a lever) marked “Tremolo”. A quick search online provides confirmation: The West Point Military Academy Cadet Chapel organ, for example, boasts no fewer than 15 stops marked Tremolo among its astonishing 874 total.
      I’m quite happy to admit when I’m wrong and attempt to correct my knowledge database for future reference. But in this case, I ain’t.
      I’m also aware of the truism that the only difference between an organist and a terrorist is that you can negotiate with a terrorist, so perhaps I’d better concur that the effect is probably, in the modern era, left well enough alone by any players possessed of good taste!

      *Other more or less wildly inaccurate sources of encyclopaedic information may be available.

      Edited at 2015-11-13 01:37 pm (UTC)

      1. OK, marginally negotiable. Tremolo = tremulant is not recognised UK usage, or European (eg, as above, French ‘tremblant’) for that matter. If the mercans get it wrong, does that make it right ? (Of course the latter often grossly abuse the effect.)
        Anyway, this is a British crossword.
        1. I should have made it clear that I have seen and used a tremolo stop on British English organs: maybe it’s organ builders who get it wrong.
          I’ve got a bit obsessive on this now: I haven’t yet found what I really want, a clear picture of a tremolo stop on an unequivocally British English organ. Lots of listings giving “Tremolo”, mind, as one or more of the available stops, so I know I’m not completely misremembering. Meanwhile, here’s a French one

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