Times 24,211 – That Hoodoo That You Do

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
An enjoyable 19 minutes spent on a puzzle which I thought pretty original and surprisingly testing – left hand side went in quickly, right hand side much less so. It also extended my knowledge of textiles and the decoration thereof (though in all honesty, the bar was set fairly low on that one…) Without prejudice, I expect some robust homophone-based discussion of one clue. Q0(pace that homophone)-E8-D7

Across
1 SMARMY – S(ergeant)M(ajor)+ARMY
4 AGITPROP – A+GIT+PROP: football in a clue tends to indicate the generic “back” or perhaps “wing”, rugby suggests a more specialist term such as “lock” or “prop” is required. I tend to think of a git as being someone unpleasant rather than stupid but usage seems to take in “foolish” as well as “contemptible”.
12 NOBODYS FOOL – Charles Pooter is the eponymous narrator of Diary of a Nobody.
17 NOWISE – needs the surface broken up the right way: Not at all (def.) negative (=NO) like Solomon (=WISE)
19 GLORIA – part of the Christian order of service, as described here. I am now being earwormed by Handel.
23 ONE – sounds like “WON”. Or does it? I reckon this is one of those homophones where regional mileages may vary tremendously. Though when it’s a three letter word with two checking letters, hard to claim it’s in any way likely to prevent anyone reaching the intended solution, of course.
24 COCKLESHELL – COCKLE (=”to contract”)+SHE’LL; the most famous cockleshells would presumably be the ones featured in this film.
26 DHOTI – HOT in D(etective)I(nspector)
27 SHIFTLESS – cryptic def.
30 PENTAD – PEN + TAD; I started trying to justify the more obvious PENTET before working my way around to the correct suffix
 
Down
2 ADLIB – ADLAI – A + B. American politician, possibly better remembered for the elections he didn’t win than the positions he did achieve.
3 MEW – even with only one unchecked letter, not necessarily straightforward if you don’t know a) that hawks live in a mews as well as horses, and b) that a female cat is a queen. Actually, now I look at this more closely, if mews is the singular as well as the plural form, then does that spoil the definition? See kurihan’s comment below, it isn’t necessarily, so it doesn’t. Nothing to see here.
5 GALLOON – ALL inside GOON: the word is a new one on me, but easily worked out. Those who only know Eccles the town, famous for its cake, may have been trying to justify TALLOWN, but the actual Eccles referenced is the one played by Spike Milligan
6 TIDDLYWINKS – after the misleading “game” yesterday this was more straightforward, once I separated “merry” and “king” and stopped trying to put Old KIng COLE somewhere in the middle of the word.
7 RETROUSSE – RE TROUSSE(au), one of the classic types of nose shape.
8 PERSON – (REP)rev + SON; nice definition i.e. the third person grammatically is “he” (not to mention “she and it”).
16 FALSEHOOD – (LEAHS)* in FOOD; good diversionary use of names to suggest a totally non-existent Biblical angle.
18 STYLISED – STY + (feature)S in LIED
20 ACCUSER – Zola’s response to the Dreyfus affair was the one which appeared under the famous headline “J’Accuse”.
21 TALKIE – K1 inside TALE: last one in because I was too determined to get an “M” for Mozart in there before remembering that Mozart’s catalogue numbers are an abbreviation not of the man who wrote the music, but the one who wrote the catalogue.
22 HOODOO – =”WHO DO” which I think falls into the category of universally agreed homophones.

43 comments on “Times 24,211 – That Hoodoo That You Do”

  1. 28 min. A game of four quarters, each about twice as long as the previous one. COCKLESHELL had to be, but I felt uneasy with Cockle = contract. Always thought that cockling was wrinkling, which of course could cause contraction, but is a step removed. GLORIA was a stab in the dark, confirmed to be part of a church service. I heartily dislike the use of names which are not indicative of a specific person. It strikes me as lacking imagination. (Swansong detailed in service?)
  2. 20:33 .. fine puzzle, terrific blog (thanks topicaltim – on great form). This one definitely crept up on you with an easy opening before whacking you over the noggin with a few real testers. I’m sure MEW is fine as a singular form for the hawk cage.

    Lots of good ‘uns, but HOODOO made me laugh out loud and frighten the cat, so a clear COD.

    1. [i]”You remind me of a man.”
      “What man?”
      “The man with the power?”
      “What power?”
      “The power of hoodoo.”
      “Hoodoo?”
      “You do.”
      “I do what?”
      “You remind me of a man…”[/i]
  3. 30 mins. A very good puzzle, as noted. I had to guess PENTAD and GALLOON from the wordplay. Everything else was clear, except that while I knew there was some association between MEW and “hawk” I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. The OED has MEW (singular) as a cage for a hawk.

    (According to the OED, MEWS appears originally to have been a proper noun referring to the royal stables formerly at Charing Cross, so called because they were built on the site of the royal hawk mews, and subsequently to have become singular referring to similar stables round a courtyard.)

    1. You don’t need the OED for this (or indeed anything in a daily puzzle) – it’s given in the Concise.
      1. I realise that. I keep the COED and Chambers at home. At the office, where I do the crossword, I have access only to the online OED. Quoting my source is a legal habit I’m afraid.
  4. Every one a gem, as Neddy would say. Done in two sittings so I’ve no idea how long it took me. The things I didn’t know, like GALLOON, MEW and COCKLE = contract were fairly obvious once checking letters were in place. Great to see AGITPROP returning to centre stage; I don’t remember seeing that in years. Very much liked TIDDLYWINKS, RETROUSSE and ACCUSER among many other very fine clues.

    As far as our household is concerned the Pooter is what I’m sitting at as I type this and it’s a 1 all draw on the homophone, with one one sounds like won and one one sounds more like wan. What’s that old verse?

    Wunwun was a racehorse
    Tutu was one too
    Wunwun won one race
    Tutu won one too

  5. 9:05 – also didn’t understand ‘cockle’ but decided nothing else would fit. Thought priest=VEN was a bit cheeky in 25D, but using ‘archdeacon’ instead is sore-thumb territory. GALLOON was a new word here, with ‘cake’ my first shot for Eccles. My mother made marvellous Eccles cakes, with thin buttery pastry surrounding a solid mass of currants. She was truly appalled in a London greasy spoon when their “Eccles cake” turned out to be a mass of dough with what I now remember as a single currant somewhere in the middle.
  6. I need the dunce’s hat and the self-kicking boot today.

    The top half just about wrote itself in and I had a couple in the SW corner but then I came to a grinding halt and had to slog away one clue at a time with up to 5 minutes between solves.

    In the end I was left with 21d unsolved and although I had got the “K1” reference and considered “TALE” around it I didn’t spot that this would have made TALKIE and I ruled it out anyway because I had “E” as the second checked letter having written “COCKERSHELL” at 24a instead of “COCKLESHELL” which I knew to be the correct answer.

  7. i found this very difficult – 7 clues after 30mins before going for help. i do now see that i should have done better, but still a long way from solving ones of this difficulty.
    1. Don’t worry about big differences in success between puzzles, but if your schedule allows it, I would strongly recommend a second look rather than coming straight here. If your first look is on the train to work, dig out the puzzle again at lunchtime, or on the train home. The reason is that not solving a clue is often down to getting too fixed on ideas that don’t help. As you learn, you can train your brain to consider more possibilities quickly and calmly (and in the best order), but this takes a while – if you stick at it, your mental clerk will be shuffling index cards forever. When you’ve spent a few hours thinking about something else, some of the unsolved clues will suggest different possibilities and you’ll finish some more. Don’t take it too far though – when tomorrow comes, do tomorrow’s puzzle.
      1. As if to prove Pete’s point… I stared at this one for an hour yesterday lunchtime, struggling to complete about 8 clues. Had another look in the evening, and knocked off the rest in 10 minutes. This was the hardest I can remember in a long, long time…
  8. This was a very entertaining and challenging puzzle. It require character-specific knowledge for Pooter, Solomon, Stevenson, Eccles, Zola and Mozart. There were also a couple of capitalised common nouns, Potter and Bond that were probably intended to make solvers dally with Beatrix and James.

    I got all the references except Adlai, the eternal bridesmaid, thanks to Tim for that. Ad Lib was fairly obvious anyway. Being cat lover and a fan of Berlioz, I was torn between Mab and Mew but the checking letter confirmed that hawks do not live in mabs.

  9. 13:24 for me. This week and last I seem to be making life hard for myself – nearly every puzzle solved in the same time (give or take a minute or so), and each one leaving me stuck on one or two answers at the end, adding a couple of minutes on to what it could have been. Today’s stickers were 17 NOWISE (not many choices with those checking letters, but I couldn’t get NEWISH out of my head), and 21D TALKIE (where I wanted it to have an M somewhere). Must try harder!
  10. Overall a very good puzzle, particularly the southern hemisphere. The top took me circa 10 minutes but the bottom twice that. And some little talking points as a bonus.

    I think the setter was a bit daft going for a homophone of ONE=won. It works in London but as Tim says the regional variations are huge.

    I got COCKLE from checking letters but only understood it much later when I recalled that puckering is gathering cloth together in sewing and thus contracting it.

    Eccles of course was a character in the Goon Show played by Milligan who was the goon but no matter I thought it clever as I did KI for Motzart’s first. I bet every solver struggled trying to fit an M in there before the penny dropped.

    Not sure about Ven=priest but not to worry. Well done setter.

  11. An excellent puzzle with interesting vocabulary. About 12 mins for me. I thought the clue for ONE was iffy – I’m definitely in the wan camp, not won.
  12. 45:00 with one error (see below).  I couldn’t quite finish this puzzle unaided: at the end I spent 10 minutes staring at 21dn (TALKIE), which I only got after looking up TALMIE in the hope that Mozart’s first composition might be “M1”, then looking up Mozart compositions and finding Köchel.  Shouldn’t TALKIE have an age indicator, given that silent films died a quiet death 75 years ago?

    Before that, I had crippled myself with the acceptable alternative answer MILL-STONE for 10ac (MILL-WHEEL), which I only reconsidered after spending ages failing to get 3dn (“M.S”), 9dn (“.O.S.L”) and 5dn (“G.E.O.N”), none of which was an easy clue – especially 5dn (GALLOON), which required knowledge of more than the title of a 1950s radio comedy.

    In a similar vein, AD LIB (2dn) was a leap in the dark.  Are British solvers expected to know the names of failed American presidential candidates from the late 1950s?  (Admittedly, it seems he’d be known to those familiar with the Cuban missile crisis.)

    Just to clarify, (1) this is an issue about daily crosswords.  I would have no problem with the above in a barred puzzle where recourse to reference works is expected.  And (2) it’s the ephemeral nature of the knowledge involved, not simply its age, that bothers me.  The fact that I didn’t know how Mozart’s works are numbered is my own fault, as is the fact that I didn’t know the words GALLOON and COCKLESHELL, or the “pucker” meaning of COCKLE.

    Anyway, until I came up against these brick walls, I was enjoying this as a challenging puzzle.  My only quibbles are that 10ac is ambiguous (see above), that 9dn (VESSEL) doesn’t work, and that “Traditional” in 18dn hardly defines STYLISED.  I had VOODOO at 22dn (HOODOO), which loosely fits the wordplay (hearing “Which” as “Witch”), but fails on the definition.

    Clue of the Day: 1dn (SEMINARY), in which I prefer to read “Kentish” as “Kent-ish”.

    1. ADLIB: Flicking through Wikipedia on US elections, the loser’s name seemed at least vaguely familiar back into the 1930s, so the answer to your question may be YES. But here, all you actually need to know is that of the few famous Stevensons, one was called Adlai. Chambers Biog. Dict. has five Stevensons, two of which I’m sure will never be used in a Times xwd. As Adlai gets a couple more lines than Robert the engineer, using him seems fair – especially as the name is so unusual – except for the Biblical personage he was presumably named after, any other Adlai is a Stevenson (his father and son were in US politics too). [I don’t know what the Times xwd uses as a reference for people, if anything. Another possibility, Collins Dictionary in editions before they ditched the people, has just two Stevensons – Adlai and Robert Louis.]

  13. 17 minutes here, and – as with almost everyone – held up by trying to squash an M into what turned out to be TALKIE. I don’t understand the “potter” connection to VESSEL, but there’s not a lot else it could be.

    I had my own quibble about TANGENT, which I didn’t know could be an adjective in its own right.

    1. The idea is that a potter might make you a vessel=container for liquid, which could be seen as craft=a thing made by hand, rather than craft=boat=vessel). Extra potential confusion from trying to think of an appropriate Potter to go with any “craft” – I tried Dennis and Harry but not Beatrix.

      Edited at 2009-04-28 01:01 pm (UTC)

    2. If you Google “potter’s vessel” you’ll get biblical quotations from Isiah, Psalms, Thessalonians and maybe more. With the references at 16, I’m wondering if there is a connection there, or if it’s just coincidence. A lot of smashing of the vessels takes place.

      I have to admit I thought it might be a reference to Harry’s broomstick which could easily have been named Teasel or some such as far as I knew. (It’s not, is it?)

      1. Now you mention it, the potter’s vessel is in Handel’s Messiah which is assembled from mostly OT scripture. Here’s a Youtube clip of the relevant aria, plus the rectitative and chorus (that one) on either side. Handel in the old style (outrageous cymbals!) but you can’t help liking it. Nice Beecham story under “more info” too.

        Edited at 2009-04-28 04:11 pm (UTC)

        1. It was the Messiah that sprang immediately to mind for me. My father was a tenor and we used to have that round the house whenever rehearsals for the Messiah started!
  14. Me no likey. For me the setter was trying to be too clever by half with the Mozart/Stevenson/Zola stuff. I gave up bored after 35 minutes with the SW corner largely blank.

    Sorry and all that.

  15. This took a long time, and a final resort to aids after 45 minutes for the last couple, It was the SE corner that gave me all the difficulty. I had bits of the wordplay worked out for a number of the clues in the SE corner but couldn’t see the complete picture.

    I felt the general and specific knowledge needed was reasonable, although a bit skewed to the literature end of the spectrum.

  17. New boy so heartened that so many shared problems with mew, cockle = contract, galloon & pentad (all got by cheating). K1 once seen never to be forgotten. But will someone be good enough to explain “one exploiting Zola”; surely Zola was doing the exploiting?
  18. I’m with those who thought this puzzle was a cracker, though difficult. About 45 mins for me. The fact that I happened on this occasion to be familiar with all the musical, literary, musical and political references to which some others objected no doubt helped. Like many others, I wasted much time trying to fit M, as the first letter of Mozart, into the solution to 21dn, before recalling the cataloguing activities of Herr Köchel. (I think we can cut the setter some slack on whether K1 was actually the first composition Mozart wrote or merely the first according to Herr K. Not bothered. Clever clue either way). At 24ac I didn’t know that “cockle” could mean “pucker, contract”, but figured that “a woman will” could provide “she’ll”, after which COCKLESHELL suggested itself fairly quickly. Anyone objecting to the ONE/WON pun at 23ac seems to me to be carrying homophone puritanism to Taleban excess. Whatever the differences of regional pronunciation, the sounds are surely close enough to work. Puns are, after all, supposed to be jokes. Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!
    1. The Kochel catalogue is, apparently, updated every so often to try to keep it in chronological order, so it’s reasonable to assume that K1, at any given time, is the work *believed* to have been composed first.
      1. I’m pretty sure revisiohns are in a similar way to new motorway junctions, rather than changing the numeric part. Music librarians would go mad!
  19. Congrats to those with decent times today, because this one had me talking to myself. Resorted to aids after getting half complete last night, and some more in a second sitting this AM, and even with the aids still got two wrong! (MOW, on the Ministry of War logic, and VOODOO, since I was unfamiliar with HOODOO). There’s a much longer list of things I was unfamiliar with: K1, git, prop, SM, cockle=contract, cockleshell=boat, RETROUSSE, tiddly=tipsy, Pooter, Eccles, DHOTI. Considering I had to work my way around all these, I’m pleased to have only 2 incorrect. Much of this was very clever, although I have a slight sense of unease with DISTRACTION=bewilderment. Regards to all, better luck to me tomorrow.
    1. I think in the sense of “driving someone to distraction,” the synonym works. It had me worried for a while.
      1. Thanks heyesey, I thought of that, which is why I eventually filled in the answer. However, to me, to be ‘driven to distraction’ leaves one in a state closer to exasperation than bewilderment. When paired with ‘drawing’=’traction’, which to me was also possible but not definite, this was a clue for which I kept trying to find a better answer. When that happens, my first thought is usually wrong.
  20. Oh dear . Tim Moorey’s book had been read cover to cover and I’d had six months of trying the Times , Guardian and FT crosswords (on different days). Today I had a long train journey with nothing better to do and today was going to be a personal best, even if I didn’t finish it.
    One hour later and I’d got 28d and that was it. Looking at the answers:
    12a I hadn’t heard of Pooter and had no idea what he/she/it was .
    17a I have never heard of nowise
    19a Not being religious I have never heard of a Gloria
    23a I wouldn’t have got it anyway but I pronounce one as in w-on as in “on the table” and won as w-un.
    24a I have never heard of cockle meaning contract
    30a I have never heard of pentad
    1d The answer wasn’t given but someone has suggested “seminary” . Can someone kindly explain the answer.
    5d I have never heard of galloon. I have heard of the goons but didn’t know one was called Eccles.
    7d I have never heard of retrousse
    20d I think there was a Chelsea footballer called Zola but I didn’t know of any other Zola
    21d I had never across K1 or how music cataloguing works

    Mr Moorey states that it can be done by any moderately well educated person with a love of language and problem solving and without recourse to reference books. He says there are many misapprehensions such as that you need a good knowledge of rare words , literature and the classics.
    I have enormous admiration for those who can do this but I felt that with this crossword, I didn’t have a chance.

    1. You have my sympathies, but keep trying as long as you enjoy it. As for your specific question:

      1D is indeed SEMINARY, SE(=Kentish, i.e.southeastern UK) M IN(=popular)ARY, so here the Kentish girl is Mary, from the SE.

      1. To which I would only add that it is remarkable how quickly the skills can be learned despite the apparently hopeless odds when you start. My first few attempts at the Times consisted of a process involving: staring in bafflement; finding any obvious anagrams; staring in further bafflement; looking for any obvious hidden words; wondering how on Earth people were allowed to propagate the obvious myth that this puzzle could sometimes be solved in under ten minutes; and, finally, discarding a grid over which I had spent half an hour filling in four clues, one of which was probably a guess or wrong or both.

        It does get easier…honest!

    2. Gloria: being a bit musical might fit the bill instead – if you search youtube for “Vivaldi Gloria” I’ll bet you know it. The musical glorias, sanctuses etc. etc. come from musical settings of religious services, and these days the music is very often better known than the religion it was written for.

      I’ll take a small punt that even the major classical music folk round here don’t know Mozart’s “K1.” It’s only the K that matters. Various composers didn’t indicate “Opus” numbers on their pieces in the usual way, so someone else did the job later. Mozart/Kochel is the best known example for xwd purposes. (The BWV numbers for J S Bach are equally well known but the chance of getting BWV into a clue is zero!).

      I’ll make a small guess that sometime in the next month or two you’ll come across one or two of these “unknowns” outside xwds.

        1. I’m not too surprised that you can find it. But is there anyone here who if asked on Monday what Mozart’s K1 was, could have given an accurate answer?
  21. I really don’t understand how GLORIA can = service. The Gloria is clearly just the short name for the hymn/doxology ‘Gloria In Excelsis Deo’ – it’s a part of the Anglican communion service for sure, but I don’t know of any sense in which it can be used as a service in itself. On a separate note, queen=cat fools me every single time – each time it comes up I try to remember to look out for it, then just enough time elapses for me to forget again…

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