Mephisto 2570 – Tim Moorey – Times for The Times

Quite a tricky puzzle this – 80-odd minutes with Chambers used from roughly halfway – though 10 minutes or so of this came from a mistaken answer for 32, without which I’d have guessed 9D (my last answer) from checking letters – as it was I waded through C for something to match my checking letters, only to find nothing and decide I must have a wrong answer somewhere.

Across
1	PALMA=Spanish island(TISE=ties*),CT. palmatisect is “deeply cut in a palmate manner”, and palmate is “hand-shaped; having lobes radiating from one centre; webfooted”. A new word for me, and I’m guessing, for you.
10	P(SEUD=dues rev.)ISH – pish is a Scots version of piss = wee, not the word for “small” that I was expecting to find
11	MAAR = “mar” – maar is “a crater that has been formed by a single explosion and so does not lie in a cone of lava” – a word seen in previous puzzles but not, I think, in A-level Geography, which often helps with this kind of stuff
13	CTENE – anag. of “eaten” with C=cold substituted for A=adult. I think this is just on the unfair side of difficult – a ctene is a body part of a member of the ctenophora, which are “like jellyfish” but not actually jellyfish, and “jelly” just means jellyfish themselves. I guess “party” as an anagram indicator is from the old meaning “game” recorded in C?
14	L=lecturer,A=a,GENA=cheek (noun) – lagena = an ancient type of bottle
15	INFAMES = (manifes(to))*
16	CISCO – hidden word – cisco is a fish from the Great Lakes (Ojibwa by way of Canadian French)
18	B(ronze)(A=are),Ni=nickel – plural of ban, 1/100 of a leu
21	(j)AILER=warder,O=nothing,N=new
23	AME=soul,NEST=lodge (vb.) – amene is listed as a rare adjective for “pleasant”
25	M=male,(p)EN’S = writer’s
27	S=Sabbath, ALVO=oval* – salvo is a saving clause or reservation in law
29	ST.,AIDER=help
31	TURIN,G – Alan of that name, mentioned in C under “Turing machine”
32	SCRAE – C=Charlie in rev. of EARS = spikes – I had a bad guess of SCRAG rather than SCRAE, adapting crag rather than scree, and either hoping that gars might be spikes or not thinking about the wordplay properly.
33	ELEA – hidden word – mentioned in C under “Eleatic”
34	THOROUGH = a passage – “the rough” = “uncut grass on course”, with O=nothing, for E=European
35	JAN 1 = New Year’s Day,TRESSES = locks. Using female versions like “janitress” is an old trick for adding a bit of difficulty – in this case, watch out for “janitrix” – another version which it’s hard to imagine being used in real life, but easy to imagine clued by something about “New Year hi-jinks”.

Down
2	ASTEISM = (A S Times)* – asteism is refined irony, apparently from the Greek town of Asteos, a classical Hove as opposed to Brighton.
3	LEETS = rev. of steel – leet is the same as court-leet, a historical coourt
4	MUN(I)CH – a German capital (of Bavaria)
5	(s)TIFF – pet = fit of temper
6	ISLAMITE – (ale is item – (troubl)e)*
7	SH(A,M.B.,L)Y
8	CAESARS = (cases ar(e))*
9	PRATINCOLE = bird (one like a plover apparently) – (1, can’t)* in PRO,LE(o)
12	A,N,A,N – an “obs or dialect” expression expressing failure to understand, which I’ve yet to encounter outside puzzles
13	CYCL(A,MAT=dull)ES – sugars, easily guessed from the -ate ending in things like MSG
17	GA(p) = “No parking space”,SLIGHT=feeble
19	MEN,S,REA = are* – legal Latin for criminal intent (literally “guilty mind”)
20	MERANTI = a Malaysian wood – ran = managed, in time*
22	(l)OUVR(AG)E – much time wasted trying to fit in “V and A” from the V.
24	MARCOS (Imelda’s husband) – RC = Taiwan (IVR), in MAO = chairman, then S = Siemens
26	EXUL = old word for “exile” – rev. of “luxe” = opposite of necessity
28	LARUS = the “the principal genus of the gull family” – Urals*
30	DIOR = r(a)dio*

5 comments on “Mephisto 2570 – Tim Moorey”

This was much more like Mephisto standard – just under an hour to solve. A rare triumph for the “steady Eddie” approach of checking and verifying as you go along! A wrong entry in these grids really causes problems because you can never assume that some combination of letters, however unlikely, is wrong.

I don’t understand the use of “party” at 13A. I assume Peter you’re referring to game=prostitution? If that’s right it strikes me as an unfair twist in an already borderline clue.

Great to see Alan Turing at 31A – one of my heroes

petebiddlecombe says:

6 December 2009 at 3:13 PM

Party: nothing so lively I’m afraid – C has “a game (obs.)” as a meaning of party – presumably matching “partie” in games like Piquet. Playing games with letters just about describes anagrams …

Edited at 2009-12-06 03:14 pm (UTC)

A good steady Mephisto, nice to see. Only commenting really to welcome the sighting of Alan Turing.
It never, ever ceases to astonish me that folks who would rather die than admit to illiteracy, are perfectly happy and content to admit to innumeracy and a general ignorance of science. Hence where we are with the world, I suppose 😉

This was a bit harder than the last few weeks but there were about a dozen clues that were no harder than the normal daily puzzle. I suppose these are what Jimbo calls starter clues. These enabled me to make steady progress until I reached Ctene and Amenest. Ctene went in on the definition alone, Thanks for the explanation Peter. Amenest went in because I trusted the wordplay. I suppose we have to assume that it is a theoretically possible word, being the superlative of amene but I would struggle to construct a sentence containing it. There do not seem to be any examples of anyone ever saying or writing it on Google

Two sessions, found this a little more tricky than the last few – saw CT and in went CTENE without much thought. My dumbass moment was writing in HEAD at 25, that kept me from getting the bottom left in the first solve. Looks a little odd to have MENS crossing MENS though.

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