25990 The one with a mission to the Gentiles.

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

An odd feel to this one: it felt harder than is was, and I disposed of it in 15.12, about 2 minutes sub par for me. Mostly somewhat lengthy clues, of the kind which conjure up rather pleasing, but also properly distracting, word pictures and fragments of exciting looking stories. I counted an above-average number of (plausibly) religious references, none of them particularly obscure. It’s possible that’s just my imagination.
Two unchecked rows provide enigmatic phrases of a kind. ITS SW ONE is both a contradiction and a confirmation of the prosperous region mentioned late on, and OUT, ETC, RE possibly militates against my fancied religious references.

Across

1 SICILY Island
Ah, the heady days of Imperial Chemical Industries! That’s the “company that was”, because it is no more. It has gone to join the FTSE Celestial. Wrapped in SLY cunning, it produces the island of our search.
4 ADVANCED Sophisticated
A rather surreal surface image produces a VAN by C(hurch of) E(ngland) clamped orheldby A D(octor of) D(ivinity)
10 PAULINEGirl
Or, if you prefer, “following early Christian convert”. That’ll be Paul, previously Saul of Tarsus, whose name is attached to thirteen of the canonical 27 books of the New Testament. Try your friends out with this question, and win easy money: Who wrote Paul’s letter to the Romans? Answer: Tertius.
11 GOSLING Little bird
A fine example of surface concealing wordplay. To become is “GO” (“it’s gone green”) and shy gives SLING as in throw.
12 DÁIL Parliament
In this case the Irish lower house. A brief paper is a DAIL(y). I hope those filling in on paper defiantly put in the diacritic.
13 NEW ORLEANS port
The first clue where the definition is not at the front. The wordplay, in case you want to work it out, is NEWS (information) about Other Ranks (men) and LEAN (bank)
15 CONVERTED brought to faith

An excellent surface, this time conjuring a poignant story of redemption. Cleric is REV, who “returns” and is attached to CON, prisoner, and for once the TED you need at the end is not described as a delinquent youth, but an old rocker. That better, Jim?
16 TUTSI African
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Rwanda, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
IS revolutionary just gives SI (not Che, hooray!), and TUT is your initial word of disapproval.
18 LODGE (In  this) house
Say produces EG, party DO, line gives L. Reorder as per instruction and assemble.
19 ASH BLONDE woman with fair hair
Polite for grey, perhaps? A neat anagram of BEHOLDS AN signaled by “untidy”.
21 IN THAT CASE then
How are things boxed over there? Why…
23 CENT little money
HQ gives CENTre, the rest of the clue tells you how to dispose of the RE
26 PALMIST can one really tell what the future holds?
Our Pauline theologian of a setter, with a penchant for converting old rockers, can barely conceal his scepticism in his rhetorical definition. Friend PAL faces the MIST of obscurity.
27 EMOTION passion
Gesture is equivalent to MOTION, parked next to E(nglish). Anyone else instantly remember this hugely addictive ZX Spectrum game?
28 SWAN NECK the shape is elegant
My last in. It’s SWANK for boast cuddling the National Exhibition Centre.
29 BEAGLE dog
Perhaps the easiest clue of the set. EAGLE follows B(lack)

Down

1 SAPID completely agreeable
A word which might win the competition for “word which looks almost exactly what it isn’t”. PI is holy, more usually “than thou”, and unhappy is SAD.
2 CAUTIONED Given formal warning
In Britain, the procedure whereby the Police get something looking like a conviction without having to go through the messy business of a trial. And everywhere else too, a slightly surprising anagram of EDUCATION
3 LEIS garlands
Todays hidden, with the Hawaiians whose word it is posing as affabLE ISlanders. Pretty clue of its kind
5 DOGWOOD tree or shrub
Take your pick, because it can be either. DO GOOD for act beneficially, top of Weak provides the intruding W
6 ABSOLUTELY Yes indeed!
Skilfully is ABLY, which swallows something dissolved, which is a SOLUTE
7 CHINA chum
Me old china plate, mate. Our fellow is a CHAp, who has lost his P(arking) and is outside IN, crosswordese for home.
8 DIGESTIVE biscuit
A sleazy bar is a DIVE, in which 1 unusual GETS resides
9 RESENT Feel bad about
Remove the P(age) from pRESENT and voilà!
14 VENERATION worship
Our Pauline setter pontificates again with this observational clue. Five is V, and age gENERATION. Remove the G(ood)
15 CALLIOPES makers of music
Todays possibly less well known and pronounced word, though you’ve surely heard one: it’s a mechanical organ, originally driven by steam. Here’s one. Ivor the Engine had a rather minimalist one, featuring in this episide. A hundred provides C, ALLIES are (sometimes) colleagues, and work is OP, which goes within.
17 TENDERING Offering
An anagram of DINNER inside TEG, one of the less familiar of the 1,000,000 words for sheep. It’s a 2 year old ewe.
19 ASCETIC Austere type
No, not sans serif. Revolutionary agents are the CIA upside down, here nabbing an anagram of SECT. Paulines, again?
20 HASTEN Hurry
Yup, it’s just ATHENS, rebuilt. Scene of Paul’s possibly least successful attempt at gaining converts.
22 TULSA See one of its (America’s) cities
Universally known as the city Gene Pitney was 24 hours away from. Careful how you construct this: T(ime) first, then L(eft) inside USA. Otherwise you get USTLA, Paul Newman in a Cockney remake.
24 TENSE What could be future
A number, in this case TEN, on a prosperous region, the S(outh) E(ast). Accuracy might depend on South East of what.
25 CONE A solid figure
Just C(onservative) ONE for individual, It’s the solid figure for mathematicians, I believe.

61 comments on “25990 The one with a mission to the Gentiles.”

  1. A strange mix of fairly difficult and very easy clues. As Z8 notes, BEAGLE is probably the most obvious; though DAIL and CHINA take the places. As to the winner of the difficult category … CALLIOPES is way ahead of the others.

    Re 21ac: I suspect that “over there” signals THAT. “In THIS case” would be “The way things are boxed HERE” … or words to that effect.

    My entry for the “word which looks almost exactly what it isn’t” would be “pulchritude”.

    Edited at 2015-01-08 03:27 am (UTC)

  2. I was enjoying solving this one but unfortunately nodded off more than once whilst solving so I have no completion time to offer. I always like CALLIOPE(S) when it comes up and I manage to spot it quickly.

    Edited at 2015-01-08 03:20 am (UTC)

  3. 23 minutes with SAPID (nice description, Zed – it’s too close to ‘vapid’ to escape the influence of the better known word) and PAULINE last in.
  4. 1ac was my LOI; I was sure there was a CO in there somewhere, not to mention not having heard of ICI. And having decided it had to be ICI, wondering if a company name was kosher. I infer that it is, if, as with humans, the company is dead.Living where I do, ‘diet’ pre-empted DAIL for me, for quite a while, even though I knew it had to be wrong. I decided it had to be SWAN NECK without knowing how to account for the NEC; so thank you Z for enlightening me.I hope Jimbo will be a bit pleased at seeing SOLUTE; I was, although the clue was fairly easy with a couple of checkers.I had thought SAPID meant ‘tasty’; my (Japanese) dictionary tells me that that’s primarily a US meaning. Live and learn. On edit: live a bit longer, … I just went to the SOED, where the ‘tasty’ definition is given first, with no mention of the US.

    Edited at 2015-01-08 08:19 am (UTC)

  5. All done and dusted in about 20 mins until I got to the SW corner, where I was held up by CALLIOPES (unknown/forgotten) (before CONVERTED, I wanted it to start with AC=’a hundred’), SWAN NECK and VENERATION, which I took an age to parse. Wasn’t helped by not really getting whether it was THAT or ‘this’ at 21ac.

    Finally worked it all out, and signed off at 32 mins.

  6. Just under the 20 min mark while waiting for enough daylight to walk the dog. If I had been asked yesterday what a CALLIOPE was, I would have muttered something about old-fashioned roundabouts, without making the conscious connection to the obligatory steam organ.
    1. Maybe it’s a US thing, but I’d have thought that any Murcan (of a certain age, anyway) would know the word from childhood, and associate the instrument with the circus.
      1. Earworm… “the calliope crashed to the ground”
        Blinded by the Light? Manfred Mann? Ca 1980

        Beaten in the end by CENT and TENSE, embarrassingly. The rest in a very speedy 16 mins.
        Rob

  7. I thought the whole thing was quite easy too but I had to spend a couple of extra minutes on CENT until it dawned that the RE bit came off the end, not the start. Perhaps Pauline Gosling is an ash blonde with a swan neck.
  8. 9:44, helped by knowing everything, although the definition of SAPID was unfamiliar. I always think of it as the opposite of ‘insipid’: etymologically speaking, it is.
    My entry for ‘word that looks like what it isn’t’ is ‘sick’, innit.
  10. Yes, a very easy offering and the first overt appearance for some time of our religeous setter. I was indeed grateful for the “old rocker” – a self portrait that I can’t deny and SOLUTE which I don’t recall seeing before

    As to my conversion, that may be some way off.

      1. We do have a setter who, more than any other, goes out of their way to include references to various aspects of Christianity. As our esteemed blogger points out this puzzle is a candidate for being such an offering. I have in the past been a tad rude about said setter and am pleased today to be able to say thankyou for “old rocker”
        1. Jimbo,only referring to the typo religeous but it is a solace that you have found some common ground with Brother Setter.
  11. 24:06. Delayed myself slightly by taking “holy within” to be OL and putting that in SAD and somehow making SOLID out of it. Thankfully I saw the mistake quite quickly.

    Has anyone noticed a bug with the timer on the ipad? If I solve two of the crosswords then the time given for the second one is actually the cumulative time for the two crosswords.

      1. Thanks for confirming it’s not just me. For what it’s worth, I’ve reported it to The Times.
  12. Straightforward but nonetheless enjoyable; about 25 minutes.

    It was knowing the word “teg” that enabled me to solve 17 quickly; I can still hear my elderly father berating the long-suffering local butcher: “That ay lamb yo’m sellin’ theer: that’s teg, that is.”

    He was right, of course: all sheep meat now seems to be sold as “lamb”.

  13. 12 mins. The relatively easy (in retrospect) CAUTIONED was my LOI because it took me a while to see PAULINE and DAIL, the latter because I couldn’t get “diet” out of my mind. Count me as another who probably wouldn’t have been able to define SAPID without the clue.
  14. Found this one pretty accessible thus 12.37 and really enjoyed the romp through.Don’t recall ever seeing cautioned/education anagram before but it made for a nice clue. Held up for a bit at the end with 23ac but cent dawned eventually.
  15. Isn’t that just because it is all lamb? That’s what people want, and why would you spend more money feeding an animal to produce something no-one wants to buy? I like hogget and mutton but it’s not always easy to get.
    1. Also any sheep over a certain age.. might be 24mths.. costs twice as much to slaughter, because of extra checks and removal of certain bits that has to be carried out. Still and all, you can still get mutton, and I do
      1. So do I. But you don’t see it in the supermarkets and even buying it from a butcher (at least near me) often requires a bit of forward planning. It just has a (completely unjustified in my view) negative image. A bit like veal, for different reasons.
  16. 24 minutes. I thought I might do it in less but a few at the end held me up, notably 13, 14, 15d and 28. Many giveaways, 1, 4, 25, 26, 29 for example) but nice clues nevertheless. It’s been an easy weeks so far. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.
  17. Yes, a curate’s egg of a puzzle, mixing very easy clues, with the defs so obvious as to render the cryptic parsing superfluous (e.g. CAUTIONED), with some much cleverer and more obscure stuff. I thought CONVERTED and IN THAT CASE were very good.

    “Completely agreeable” seemed to me an unacceptably loose def for SAPID, which more exactly means having a strong and satisfying taste. I had never heard of “calliope” as the name for a set of steam-driven organ pipes (thanks for the pic, Z8). I assumed that the clue was a reference to Calliope, the muse of music, on the basis that more than one Calliope could reasonably be described as “makers (in the sense of inspirers) of music”, an interpretation which seems to work just as well.

    1. ‘Agreeable’ is in both Collins and Chambers. This does leave the question of what ‘completely’ is doing in the clue.
    2. I think our setter is relying on Chambers rather than the official Collins: Chambers has “agreeable” in its entry. As for Calliopes, I considered the Muse, but discarded her as she is most definitely only one, and the steam organs match “music makers” more than Calliope herself does.
      1. Oddly, my edition of Chambers English Dictionary does not offer “agreeable” as a def of SAPID.

        But, even if it did, I think I would still find “agreeable”, a possible synonym for dozens of words, unacceptably loose. The point about SAPID is that it relates essentially to taste. Personally, I always think it a bit of a cop-out when a setter relies on imprecision of definition rather than ingenuity of word-play to impart difficulty to a clue. But that’s just my view. That said, I agree with Keriothe that even if you accept “agreeable”=SAPID as reasonable, it’s difficult to justify “completely”.

        You are quite right that the steam-organ def of “calliope” works better than Calliope herself does. Not knowing the instrument, I was merely grateful that the muse provided me with an alternative route into the correct solution, albeit almost certainly not the one intended by the setter!

          1. I must confess that reading hadn’t occurred to me. It seems likely that’s what the setter had in mind. Thanks.
      2. What do you mean by the ‘official’ Collins? Is there a difference between this and the online version? My treeware copy is at home but ‘agreeable’ is in both the online Collins and the Free Dictionary, which uses an older edition.

        1. Only official as it’s the default dictionary for the Times (used to be Chambers). No idea why I didn’t see it in the online version.

          1. Ah, thanks. For a long time I have believed that the online Collins is something other than the ‘proper’ version, but I’ve no idea why. Did I just imagine this, I wonder?
            Incidentally I don’t think there is an ‘official’ dictionary for the Times. I think there’s an expectation that words will be in Collins or one of the Oxfords (Concise? Shorter?) but not a formal requirement. Not sure where I got that from either.
            1. Chambers is still the dictionary of choice for the Listener, and other dictionaries only get a mention when Chambers is lacking.
              The best comment I can find is from Lord Peter Biddlecombe: “Collins English Dictionary: The Times uses this as a standard.” Mind you, that was in 2005. I believe at the Championship, if your challenge isn’t in Collins, it ain’t right (which it isn’t anyway, nor never will be).

              Edited at 2015-01-08 10:33 pm (UTC)

  18. I’m another one who found it straightforward, though I would have found it 10 minutes more straitforward if I’d not jumbled the letters in ascetic when I wrote them in. I couldn’t completely parse cent, gosling, or swan neck, so thank you z8.
  19. 10:11 and yes, some of it very easy. Hasten, cone and beagle certainly wouldn’t be out of place in the quick cryptic.

    On the subject of calliopes, does anyone know why the one in Blinded by the Light (penned by Springsteen and a hit for Manfred Mann’s Earth Band) crashed to the ground? On the basis of that lyric I’d always imagined it to be a sort of steam helicopter.

    1. It might have had something to do with the merry-go-round, which our hero tripped the with a boulder on his shoulder while feelin’ kinda older, so it might not be all that surprising that it crashed to the ground. Several times.
  20. 6:08 so creeping a bit nearer to a Magoo. A mix of the straightforward and the head scratching, interspersed with a couple of ‘old friends’.
  21. 10 minutes between 4 of us. I didn’t know about CALLIOPE the instrument, but I knew of the muse and the wordplay was straightforward enough.
  23. A heady 13.32 today which is near my best I’m sure. Some very easy write-ins and I seemed to parse the more challenging ones without much trouble. I did pause for a short ‘but probably crucial in the PB stakes’ time on the spelling of ASCETIC.
  24. Just nice. Nothing to raise the hackles, unlike, as far as I’m concerned, today’s Grauniad.
  25. Very easy and at 25 minutes certainly my best time ever. LOI was SWAN NECK and that was the only clue that required much reflection. ADVANCED and TULSA were the ones I liked the best and the TEG in TENDERING the only thing I really needed an explanation for (but that the whole word was correct was clear from the crossing letters).
  26. An earlier finish as I’m usually doing thecrossword in the evening whilst we watch tv, tv rarely needing all one’s attention, but today I was on a train. And it was on the less difficult side.(I’ve not yet reached a point where I can say easy)
    I only knew calliope from a Frank Zappa song “nasal retentive calliope music” which for once doesn’t look like a rude song. I wasn’t too keen on his stuff back then and having listened to some again it must be too genius for me.
    I’ve never known why PI means holy, so if someone could explain that one.
    I also thought 15 dn must begin with AC, so is the A there because it would be a poor surface reading without it?
    Cheers Alpinecol
    1. It’s (British) slang, derived from pious, and discoverable in vintage schoolboy stories and such. The link with holy is probably via the phrase “holier than thou”, and certainly when you see pi in use it’s not to be read as a compliment.
      It saves the setter having to clue pi as 3.14159265359, which might be a bit obvious.
    2. Not only would the surface be ungrammatical without the indefinite article, but ‘a hundred’ = ‘one hundred’ = 100 = C!

      Edited at 2015-01-09 03:59 am (UTC)

  27. About 20 minutes, ending with the SWAN NECK. Only issues were not knowing the TEG, or SAPID, and that SWWNAK doesn’t mean ‘boast’ over here. Not to mention ICI and NEC. Alpinecol, ‘pi’ is short for ‘pious’, at least in crosswordland, and I believe you’re correct about the A in 15D being there to simply make the surface plausible. Regards to all.
  28. 8:35 for me, finishing reasonably briskly after a decidedly sluggish start. Looking back, I suspect that’s largely because the bottom half seems significantly easier than the top half. Pleasant, straightforward stuff.

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