Sunday Times 4818 by Dean Mayer

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
15:24. I didn’t find this too difficult for a Dean Mayer puzzle, which judging by comments on the blogs last weekend is unusual. When this happens, I generally have absolutely no idea why: it’s just that wavelength thing. When I say ‘wavelength’, I don’t mean some sort of mysterious supernatural force (what one contributor here once referred to as ‘mystic Meg’): it is just an observable fact that some find certain puzzles quite significantly easier or harder than others for reasons that are hard to pin down. Sometimes it’s because the vocabulary is tricky but this one only has a couple of unusual words.

A good fun puzzle, in any event. There are a couple of usages here that I find rather offensive but I’m not going to play that tune again. There’s also one I don’t understand, to the extent that I’m far from sure I have the right answer. I can’t think of anything else though. No doubt it will all come out in the wash.

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (THIS)*, anagram indicators like this.

Across
1 New Avengers agent, deadly one
NERVE GAS – (AVENGERS)*. An agent of the chemical variety.
6 Deep pockets right for money
BRASS – B(R)ASS.
9 Lebanon isn’t cut out to be like India
SUBCONTINENTAL – (LEBANON ISN’T CUT)*.
11 What’s wrong with feeling arrogant?
UPPITY – UP (wrong, as in ‘what’s up doc?’), PITY (feeling).
12 Backing identity parade, initially in 20’s strip club
FLESHPOT – reversal of SELF (identity), H(Parade)OT. 20 here refers to 20ac.
14 For a joke, holding on to me
PERSONALLY – PER (for), S(ON)ALLY. A SALLY is, according to Collins, a ‘jocular retort’. This seemed at best vaguely familiar, but certainly likely enough.
16 Junkie husband absent from show
USER – UShER. ‘Show’ seems a bit of an overstatement of the usual instruction to head left or right depending on the answer to the question ‘bride or groom?’
18 Birds around me, not them
EMUS – reversal of ME, US (not them).
19 People still suffer from it
STAGNATION – CD.
21 Funding remainder’s due
ENDOWING – END (remainder), OWING (due). END for ‘remainder’ struck me as a little bit loose while solving, but it’s undoubtedly there in the expression ‘odds and ends’. How would we feel about ‘odd’ defined in the same way?
22 Spa — huge disappointment
BATHOS – BATH is the spa, then OS for ‘outsize’.
25 A domestic row
TERRACED HOUSES – CD, and a very nice one. It’s so neat wondered if it had been done before, and sure enough Dean himself gave us ‘those involved in a domestic row’ in January of this year. This clue is, to my mind, an improvement on that one.
26 Fresh item of make-up
LIPPY – DD. I wonder how familiar either meaning is to non-UK solvers.
27 Islander’s problem — a coach leaving island
SUMATRAN – SUM (problem), A, TRAiN.

Down
2 End of the crack supply
EQUIP – thE, QUIP. For once ‘supply’ doesn’t mean ‘supply’. There will be a version of that meaning along shortly though…
3 See combat without a break
VACATION – V (see) AC(A)TION. V for vide.
4 Award accepted? One’s rejected
GONG – GOiNG, as in the ‘going rate’ I guess.
5 Irish club needs decoy — what about convict?
SHILLELAGH – SHILL (decoy), E(LAG)H. I remembered there was a word for an Irish club ending ELAGH but couldn’t remember how it started and it took me a while to come up with SHILL for ‘decoy’.
6 Mamma’s face
BREAST – at least I think this is the answer, I don’t understand the first half of the clue.
7 Pour wine after an assortment of starters
ANTIPASTI – TIP (pour) ASTI (wine) after AN.
8 Sad as it is, loner’s condition?
SOLITARINESS – (AS IT IS LONERS)*. Semi-&Lit.
10 More plastic bananas
SUPPLEMENTAL – SUPPLE, MENTAL.
13 Almost slide hands over soap
EASTENDERS – EASe, TENDERS.
15 Journey to the bar and back?
ROUND TRIP – CD.
17 Weedkiller ingredient containing water
PARAQUAT – PAR(AQUA)T. The word was vaguely familiar but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it meant.
20 Wet, say, after running?
SWEATY – (WET SAY)*. &Lit.
23 Carnivore had endless desire to feed
HYENA – H(YEN)Ad.
24 Fancy wife? Not her
WHIM – W, HIM.

21 comments on “Sunday Times 4818 by Dean Mayer”

  1. Note the two M’s. Mammae are what mammals have; milk-secreting organs. And no, I didn’t know that, but the double M suggested something like it.
    1. Oh yeah. Seems so obvious now you point it out. The double M didn’t suggest anything to me – Mamma Mia and all that – so I just assumed it had something to do with motherhood that I couldn’t figure out.
  2. That’s likely to be the fastest I’ve ever solved a Dean puzzle. A couple of DNKs–LIPPY, as Keriothe suggests, unknown to American me–and mamma, as above. No problem with END (think fag end; ODE has the ‘remainder’ meaning as British) or ‘usher’; an usher shows one to one’s seat in a theater, for instance. SHILLELAGH showed up recently, and I was surprised at how many people didn’t know the word.
    As always I was struck by the smooth surfaces of Dean’s clues, e.g. 9ac, 2d, 3d, 10d; and by their elegant economy: today the average length of a clue was 5 words.

    Edited at 2018-10-07 12:23 am (UTC)

  3. I’ve lost my printout and can’t recall much about the solve except I got there without actually knowing SHILL as ‘decoy’ or ‘mamma’ in the sense required although I made the connection wih ‘mammary’ once I’d found the answer and shifted to reverse engineering mode. I don’t think the third M is particularly relevant, btw, as ‘Mamma’ for ‘mother’ is common enough anyway.

    Edited at 2018-10-07 04:57 am (UTC)

      1. Sorry, I didn’t mean the clue worked without it, just that the presence of the extra M didn’t immediately exclude the more traditional meaning (i.e. mother) from the thought process. Once you’ve worked out the answer it’s clear why it was the way it was.
    2. I knew ‘shill’ just because it’s a word you see quite a lot these days, and at some point fairly recently I decided to find out exactly what people meant when they accused a journalist of being ‘just a shill for Rupert Murdoch’ or whoever.
  4. This is probably my quickest time for a Dean puzzle at 27:37. I was unsure about 6d, but went with BREAST for face as in chimney breast being the front of a chimney. Otherwise no particular problems. Thanks Dean and K.
  5. 28 minutes. I just assumed that Mamma was a piece of slang for a BREAST that my sheltered existence had protected me from, and that to BREAST something was to face it directly. A SHILLELAGH and its spelling was vey familiar to me, SHILL less so, but there could only be one answer. I think it was compulsory for an Irishman to be carrying one in 1950s comics and in most Val Doonican songs. EASTENDERS was LOI. with EASe for ‘slide’ not immediately obvious. Detesting the programme, I can’t make it COD, so that honour can go to TERRACED HOUSES, not that I like Coronation Street either. SUBCONTINENTAL had a lovely surface, but doesn’t the subcontinent also include Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka? Nice puzzle. Thank you K and Dean,
    1. Does it matter? If Pakistan is part of the subcontinent then ‘like Pakistan’ is an equally valid definition but that doesn’t invalidate ‘like India’ any more than Elvis’s suede shoes invalidate the definition ‘like the sky’.

      Edited at 2018-10-07 10:12 am (UTC)

      1. In that sense, you’re no doubt right. I was trying to make the point that what we call the Indian subcontinent contains other countries. I think SUBCONTINENTAL has come in its most common English usage to mean “from the Indian subcontinent”, but then I am a cricket fan. Dean, the master of short clues, could then have been even shorter with “Lebanon isn’t cut out to be Indian”.
        1. Not sure I follow you. Even in the sense ‘from the Indian subcontinent’, you can say that Pakistan is SUBCONTINENTAL, and in that sense Pakistan is ‘like India’. But you certainly wouldn’t say ‘Pakistan is Indian’.
        1. Assuming you mean ‘needs’, I don’t agree. Question marks are for definitions by example, which this isn’t.
  6. Took me an hour and a quarter, but that’s because I just couldn’t see the soap at 13d for the life of me. Had to leave it and come back before the light dawned. Also gnawed at 6d a lot just in case it wasn’t BREAST…

    FOI 1a NERVE GAS, with the New Avengers bit of the clue raising a smile (inevitable when I think of Joanna Lumley!), LOI the aforementioned EASTENDERS, enjoyed 8d SOLITARINESS and 20d SWEATY for their elegance.

  7. 18:45 is quick for me with one of Dean’s puzzles, so I concur with others that it wasn’t a toughie by his standards.

    FOI SUBCONTINENTAL. I take Bolton Wanderer’s point, but historically “India” is fine by me.

    I thought UPPITY was rather loosely defined, and took “shill” on trust. Only parsed EASTENDERS after solving.

    LOI BREAST, where the concept of the chimney didn’t hit me immediately, and I was reluctant to commit.

    COD ANTIPASTI

  8. A completion of a Dean puzzle for me is about as rare as a kakapo, the critically endangered parrot I was looking at in the Museum of Zoology in Cambridge yesterday.
    But I did complete this puzzle quite quickly in the end.
    Two long answers -Terraced Houses and Subcontinental came to me quickly and I saw some answers without getting the parsing -Shillelagh and Personally.
    My last three were 12a ( I originally had something ending in PIT or SPOT), 6d and 17d. Paraquat was LOI, 24d Whim was FOI.
    An enjoyable puzzle.
    I was brought back down to earth on the way home with yesterday’s puzzle where I still need to solve 8 or 9 clues. David
  9. I was definitely in the “not on the wavelength” club for this one taking the thick end of 1hr 40 mins (and that with a break of about 4 hours somewhere in the middle). The clubsite also shows that I entered paraquat as paaaquat. Brass, breast and fleshpot all took ages in the NE until I connected mamma with mammal. It was hard to derive sally from joke to get personally. Bathos, supplemental, EastEnders and hyena took longer than they should have. I remembered “domestic row” had appeared before and I remembered thinking it was a good one but couldn’t remember precisely what it had cryptically defined. 17dn eventually entered based on wp and with fingers crossed. Fat lot of good that did me. For me this was a marathon. Very tough and very gruelling.
  10. Never finished due to Servants Houses checking two crossers, but making 10d and 13d impossible, and spent forever trying to remember if there was a famous 1920s club – Kit Kat? Copacabana?
    Thx keriothe – there were a couple others that I needed help parsing, too.
    Paul In London
  11. There was a scare many years ago about the government’s spraying it on marijuana crops.
    (We also have the unseemly presence of hard drugs, with “junkie” and “crack.”)
    I’ve had SUMATRAN coffee in the house forever.
    An USHER at a theater (or, over there, a theatre) may SHOW you to your seat.

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