Mephisto 3358 – A strange monkish ritual?

This one was a little tough, even though I finished most of it on a Saturday night, and polished off most of the rest the next morning.   Most, but not all.  There were some easy clues, some brilliant clues, and some clues I just couldn’t see.    So I picked away at it for a few days, and finally I saw what bushwhacker must be, giving me the keys to kiwi and then equine.   I had to do a lot of research for the blog, but I believe I have correctly explained every answer.

 

Across
2 Sniper woman admitting to murder alongside car (11)
BUSHWHACKER – BUS + H(WHACK)ER.    I wasted a lot of time on bushshooter, which is not a word.    A bus is a slang term  for  a car.
11 Leaving street drive from end to end (4)
THRU – THRU[st].
12 Give up and marry before accepting answer (5)
WAIVE – W(A)IVE, where marry and wive are both verbs.
14 Public appeal to demand too much work? (8)
OVERTASK – OVERT ASK.
15 About to return reward to cash in (6)
REDEEM – RE + MEED backwards.
16 Lease’s ending on Scottish girl’s pad perhaps (6)
EQUINE – [leas]E + QUINE.   Quine is not a name, but a form of Old English cwen, which gave the English word queen.   When spelt quean in English, it is an archaic word for a young woman..
18 Boisterous result after Blimp’s let loose? (7)
BLUSTER – B + anagram of RESULT.   It’s not in Chambers as an abbreviation, but the B prefix was used to designate US naval blimps during and following WWI.
20 Hindu traders taking sauna baths round Norway (7)
BANYANS – BANYA(N)S, where N is an IVR designation.
21 Escape room experience ultimately to enjoy (5)
MEUSE – [roo]M [experienc]E + USE.
22 Mushroom ramen OK in part (5)
ENOKI – Hidden in [ram]EN OK I[n], one of the few easy clues.
24 Digestive organs a little poorly turning septic (7)
PEPTICS –  P[oorly] + anagram of SEPTIC.
26 Exercise repeated t.i.d., putting jelly in bum (7)
ANGELUS – AN(GEL)US.
28 Time to divide loft in SW corner (6)
TALLOT –  T + ALLOT, giving a word for a loft used in SW England.
30 Encouragement to satisfy mostly with kiss (6)
FILLIP –  FIL[l]  + LIP.
31 Pastoral work dated around start of Renaissance given to Academy (8)
SERENATA – SE(R[enaissancree])EN + AT + A, a pastoral musical work, that is.
32 Tense scene about coming out hit high notes (5)
NETES – T in SEEN backwards – sounds like scene.    Netes are the high notes on a lyre.
33 Roll of highly glazed fabric’s fine (4)
ERIC – CIRE backwards, giving a word most Mephisto solvers will biff.
34 Read the sign wrongly like Mr Magoo? (11)
NEARSIGHTED – Anagram of READ THE SIGN, a most generous starter clue.
Down
1 Back bedroom’s outside falls away eroded, affected by bad weather (11)
STORMBEATEN – B[edroo]M + ROTS backwards, + EATEN.
3 Practice before work at hives (5)
UREDO – URE + DO.    Curiously, ure come from the Old French version of oeuvre.
4 Try and sue crooked sponsor (6)
SURETY – Anagram of TRY and SUE, another starter clue.
5 Gallagher brother retracted after he bites at undesirable post (8, two words)
HATE MAIL –  LIAM backwards following H(AT)E.
6 Crash killing cat in Welsh city (4)
WHAM – W[rex]HAM.   The Devon Rex is a breed of cat.
7 Golf club sockets bound to lose power, plugs not active (6)
HOSELS – HO[p] + SE[a]LS.   A biff for any golfer who knows what a shank is.
8 Box carrying jade pony in NA? (6)
CAYUSE – CA(YU)SE.   Yu is another one to add to you Mephisto-cracking vocabulary, it’s nephrite.
9 Member of ground crew announcing critical leak (4)
KIWI –  Sounds like KEY WEE.   The trick here is to correctly interpret member of ground crew as a flightless bird.
10 Starts to experience visitation then séance drifts to fade away (8)
EVANESCE –  E[xperience] V[isitation] + anagram of SEANCE.
13 The night before take care about changing past camping gear (11, two words)
EVEREST PACK – EVE + RE(anagram of PAST)CK.   The meaning of reck should be obvious from reckless, which means not taking care.
17 Aspirant, pale imitation ultimately a drone? (8)
WANNABEE – WAN + [imitatio]R + A BEE.   A variant spelling.
19 Last of many idiots uncovered hollow truth (8)
UMPTIETH – [n]UMPTIE[s] + T[rut]H, a brilliant cryptic that I thoroughly enjoyed.
23 Stink about place repulsed Falkland islander (6)
KELPER – RE(PL)EK, all backwards.
24 I ease off reversing boat on Ganges (6)
PUTELI – I LET UP backwards.
25 Remote access system clear after return of cancelled service (6)
TELNET – LET backwards (think tennis) + NET.   A relic of the open internet of the 90s, now everyone must use SSH.
27 Sister left in charge (5)
CLARE – C(L)ARE.
29 Pot close to a fortune (4)
LOTA – LOT + A.
30 Father to run over Scottish paddock (4)
FROG – FR + GO backwards.    A Scots word for a frog or toad is a puddock, but it can also be spelt paddock.

18 comments on “Mephisto 3358 – A strange monkish ritual?”

  1. Happy to continue my streak with the eighth Mephisto in a row finished. I had only a smattering of answers until today, but this was a quiet afternoon, too cold to go out with the head cold besieging me (and turning my tinnitus up to 11), so I stuck at it and got everything correct. I see, though, that I hadn’t entirely parsed BLUSTER correctly. BUSHWHACKER came very late and FROG was my last one in—I’d thought of it earlier, but finally looked up “paddock.”

  2. My parsing of BLUSTER was to take BOISTEROUS as both the definition and the anagrind, with BLIMP let loose to indictate dropping the LIMP part.

    I thought the Magoo clue was rather neat.

    Enjoyable puzzle marred by making a typo when entering it for the prize draw. I find Mephistos really hard to proofread when copying the solution.

      1. I was thinking along those lines for BLUSTER too, removing “limp” from Blimp. But there is really no instruction to drop it; that’s not what “let” means (though “let loose” would; but “loose” can’t indicate both “limp” and to remove it). “Boisterous” is an adjective, not a noun or verb, like BLUSTER, but “Boisterous result” could mean BLUSTER as a noun (M-W: “a violent boisterous blowing”). For me the deciding factor is that “let loose” does not say to drop “limp,” meaning “loose,” but is a good definition for BLUSTER as a verb.

          1. I think it works as an all-in-one. Colonel Blimp was a dyspeptic character prone to incontinent outbursts of rage, so when he ‘let loose’, ‘bluster’ would be the ‘result’. (Wiki describes him as “pompous, irascible, jingoistic, and stereotypically British.”)

            In terms of the wordplay, ‘boisterous’ is the anagrind, and ‘result’ the anagrist. ‘Let’ – defined as ‘to omit’ in Chambers – tells us to leave out ‘limp’ from ‘Blimp.’ (Here, ‘Blimp’s’ = ‘Blimp has’, rather than ‘Blimp is’. ‘Let’ here is a past participle, so expanded it would read ‘Blimp has omitted loose, or limp.’)

            ‘Limp’ is defined in Chambers as ‘lacking stiffness, flaccid, drooping,’ which pretty much corresponds to ‘loose’, for me, and allows the setter to use the colloquial phrase, ‘let loose.’ The more you go into it, the cleverer the clue becomes, which is the way it should be.

            1. Well, seeing as how B for Blimp isn’t in Chambers and (lo and behold) “let” for “omit” is (Shakespeare)…!

    1. Thanks vinyl1 and setter
      t.i.d is ter in die (latin for three times a day) as angelus are repeated twice daily
      For 29 across- I don’t quite see how “close to a fortune” indicates lot-a, but the answer was clear from the definition.

  3. 32a: I think it’s T for TENSE and SCENE with ABOUT = C coming out, and ‘hit’, as an anagrind.

    For 26a, in a printout BURN, to me, always looks like BUM. So I had the usual snigger, and worked on the assumption that it was indeed BURN. It was only when I got ANGELUS that I saw the light.

    KIWI was brilliant, and the best of a lot of good clues. I didn’t quite get the parsing of HOSELS, so thanks for that.

  4. I’ve been looking at my Mephisto stats over 2024. There are some interesting points to ponder:
    Out of the 52 puzzles I completed all with 42 correct is qualifying for a prize draw and of the 10 incorrect 4 were due to transcription errors. I drew a prize 5 times, which gives me personal probability of success of 9.6% but from qualifying entries I seeing a 11.9% chance of bagging a prize. These are remarkably high numbers. It’s true I could have been lucky in 2024 but if I’m seeing an expected rate of success then there can only be 42 qualifying entries each week on average.

    When I look back over the winners reported each week over the year I find that
    77% winners won only once
    17% winners won only twice
    5% winners won only thrice
    1% winners won four or more times

    That ought to be encouragement for others to enter their solutions.

    1. Well, as a (damn) Yankee, I can’t win anything anyway.
      I’m only competing with myself.
      The reward is in the playing.
      (Though I wouldn’t mind owning a Waterstone pen.)

      1. I agree entirely – it was a major personal achievement to complete the my first Mephisto in 40 years, 18 months ago. And 40 years ago as as callow undergrad I completed it only once. I do think Mephisto is much more accessible than many believe. The pleasure in discovering the byways of the English language is enormous. I love the fact that dialectal English has not been stamped out, that quite a bit is documented in Chambers, and can readily be encountered by regional speakers on the main BBC TV news.

    2. Going back, I’ve probably got 45+ correct entries per year, with transcription errors counting for almost all the rest.

      I won the pen seven or eight years ago, and a book token a year or so later. And that’s it.

      1. We’ll see how 2025 goes. What I don’t have are the total number of submissions and the total number of correct submissions (and I doubt that The Times would have that information either).
        That would settle more who’s been lucky and who hasn’t.

        I know both have applied to me: most of my 2023 entries didn’t register as submitted and those were done though the app on my tablet, while all of my 2024 entries were submitted via the website. All of those were registered. In contrast I was very lucky the first two times I drew a book token as this happened on consecutive weeks.

        Good luck with 2025!

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