Nothing held me up very long here. There was only one heretofore unheard word (a bird!), which was quickly assembled from the charade, though late in the game. Conciseness and wit abound.
I indicate (Ars Magna)* like this, and words flagging such rearrangements are italicized in the clues.
| ACROSS | |
| 1 | Went with children to port (9) |
| LEFTWARDS WENT, “left” + WARDS, “children” |
|
| 6 | Trial partner in panic, wasting time (5) |
| ERROR |
|
| 9 | Legal hurdle exposed by ten in the morning (3,4) |
| BAR EXAM BARE, “exposed” + X, “ten” + AM, “in the morning” …“Coincidence”—resonance—of significance only to me with the clue below… |
|
| 10 | A new setter joins us, showing some devotion (7) |
| ANGELUS A + N(ew) + GEL, “setter” + US In the Roman Catholic Church, a series of prayers recited in the morning, at midday, and in the evening, or the bell signaling these devotions. From the Latin phrase Angelus domini nuntiavit Mariae, “the angel of the Lord brought tidings to Mary” …I hear the ringing from the bell tower of the Lebanese Maronite (not RC, but affiliated) cathedral outside my window on weekdays at ten in the morning (!), when it often acts as my alarm clock, and at nine on Sundays. I once spoke with that church’s priest at a local restaurant, and he said the ringing is actually a soundfile and called it the ANGELUS, announcing the morning service. |
|
| 11 | Scientist saw reactions in liquid (3,5,6) |
| SIR ISAAC NEWTON (saw reactions in)* |
|
| 13 | Confusion is no good in story (6) |
| TANGLE TA(NG)LE …There was a very similar clue in the past week’s Mephisto. |
|
| 14 | A ludicrous tax to cage a bird (8) |
| AMADAVAT A + MAD, “ludicrous” + A + VAT, value added tax |
|
| 16 | Firm kiss by lover, a keeper of course (8) |
| COXSWAIN CO, “Firm” + X, “kiss” + SWAIN, “lover” |
|
| 18 | Stand, fall, prepare for return (6) |
| TRIPOD TRIP, “fall” + DO<=“for return” For DO meaning “to prepare or provide; serve,” Collins gives the example this restaurant doesn’t do lunch on Sundays. |
|
| 21 | Clothes line and flapping tissue (8,6) |
| ACHILLES TENDON (Clothes line and)* |
|
| 23 | Like some sex, or some ins{tant ric}e (7) I’ll have the former, thanks! |
| TANTRIC Hidden The Wikipedia article on Tantra covers a lot of ground, helpfully noting: “Though Western views often equate Tantra with sex, scholars emphasize that sexual practices in tantric traditions are rare, highly restricted to initiated adepts, and serve as a means of spiritual transcendence rather than an end in themselves.” |
|
| 24 | Why old ladies, say, will fill in (3,4) |
| HOW COME H(O)(WC)OME |
|
| 25 | Best stuff to absorb energy (5) |
| CREAM CR(E)AM |
|
| 26 | As stated, studied map on alien world? (3,6) |
| RED PLANET “read” + PLAN, “map” + ET, “alien” |
|
| DOWN | |
| 1 | Wolf born in bog (4) |
| LOBO LO(B)O |
|
| 2 | How to get ready for holiday (7,8) |
| FOREIGN EXCHANGE CD, playing on “ready” |
|
| 3 | Get bigger poster or flyer (7) |
| WAXBILL WAX, “Get bigger” + BILL, “poster” |
|
| 4 | Chef’s memory, for example (6) |
| RAMSAY RAM, random access (computer) memory + SAY, “for example” That’s Gordon R., of course. |
|
| 5 | Woven cashmere (not a clue) (6,2) |
| SEARCH ME (cashmere)* |
|
| 6 | E for Einstein (7) |
| EGGHEAD The “head” of the word EGG is indeed E! …A trick similar to that in 8 |
|
| 7 | That’s that! (8,7) |
| RELATIVE PRONOUN CD |
|
| 8 | Edit what comes in? (6,4) |
| RISING TIDE TIDE<=“RISING” = EDIT …There should be a special term for a clue like this. |
|
| 12 | Chance of patient hugging short virgin (10) |
| STOCHASTIC STO(CHAST |
|
| 15 | One helping to hush up a report (8) |
| SILENCER CD, playing on “hush up” (“up” being superfluous for the literal, which relates to a firearm) and especially “report” (bang!) |
|
| 17 | Metal bolt and hammer (7) |
| WOLFRAM WOLF, “bolt” (as in “bolting down your food”) + RAM, “hammer” |
|
| 19 | Awakening, we cooked parts of kidney (7) |
| RENEWAL RENAL, “of kidney” is parted (split) by WE “cooked,” here meaning reversed (no other way to scramble a two-letter word). |
|
| 20 | Leaving France, got attacked with acid (6) |
| ETCHED |
|
| 22 | Times will cut offensive words (4) |
| TEXT TE(X)T TET, or Tết, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, whose celebration “can last from a day up to the entire week, and…is filled with people in the streets trying to make as much noise as possible using firecrackers, drums, bells, gongs, and anything they can think of to ward off evil spirits” (Wikipedia)—and whose opening marked the start of an historic offensive by the Vietcong against the invading Western imperialists in January–February 1968. …We saw TET clued the same way, and not for the first time, in the puzzle I blogged two weeks ago, and I don’t know when the Vietnamese New Year has been clued differently. I find this sad. |
|
I enjoyed the puzzle without rushing. Like our blogger, I had never heard of the bird, but everything else was familiar. I took too long to see Sir Isaac Newton, and wanted to put waxwing for a long time, even thought it didn’t parse.
21:29
I never heard of the bird, which is normally spelled ‘avadavat’, evidently (Wikipedia doesn’t mention the M spelling), but ODE says it’s ‘widely kept as a cage bird’. I biffed NEWTON, mainly from the enumeration. I liked TEXT for its surface, ANGELUS, HOW COME, RISING TIDE.
I had trouble in the NE having gone for SPRING TIDE. On seeing the answer RISING TIDE I wondered if we might be in green paint territory but Chambers recognises it as an expression. Collins lists it online only without bothering to define it, and ODE doesn’t have it at all.
Elsewhere STOCHASTIC, TANTRIC and AMADAVAT were NHOs but deducible from wordplay.
Good challenge , but finally undone by STOCHASTIC. Given Guy’s detailed explanation of the word’s meaning, ‘chance’ seems a bit too succinct to have been helpful for the ignorant solver.
31 minutes. Surprisingly gentle for a Dean Mayer puzzle, with LOBO for ‘wolf’ the only unknown and TRIPOD holding me up at the end. Almost fell into the SEXT trap at 22d before the usual crossword meaning of ‘offensive’ appeared just in time.
As a non-ornithologist I looked up AMADAVAT (seen in crossword land before though not in real life) and was interested to see that the two species of amadavat (the red and the green) belong to a genus (Amandava), the only other member of which is the orange-breasted or zebra WAXBILL and amadavats belong to the waxbill family of birds.
Thanks to Dean and Guy
My thanks to Mayer and Guy du Sable.
Good puzzle.
14a Amadavat, NHO, had to look it up to be sure.
3d Waxbill is pretty hard to find as well, seems it goes by the name of estrildid finch.
17d Wolfram is the usual word for tungsten ore, but not commonly the metal.
15 minutes.
– Had to trust the wordplay for the unknown AMADAVAT and WAXBILL birds
– Either didn’t know or had forgotten swain=lover for COXSWAIN
– Couldn’t have told you what STOCHASTIC means
Thanks Guy and Dean
FOI Tantric
LOI Tripod
COD Foreign exchange
Exactly an hour for this superb puzzle, with AMADAVAT the only real unknown, but many other answers having to be teased out of the darker corners of my brain. I am not sure I could have solved RED PLANET and RISING TIDE without having them first come to mind as phrases which would fit the crossers and only then seeing that they also fit the clue. HOW COME at least presented itself as a synonym for “why” before I saw how it worked. I am really never disappointed by the puzzles on Sundays — they are always brilliant.
My suggestion for a name for the E for Einstein is a Mungo after The Australian political journalist and setter Mungo MacCallum who was a master of this type of clue.