Times 24557 – Heathcliff again

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 43 minutes

Music: Mozart, Sinfonia Concertante, Grumiaux/Davis/LSO

First, let me thank my colleague Russel John for filling in last week. I had a most enjoyable trip, but my access to the internet was somewhat irregular. This was a suitable puzzle for a return to blogging, being of moderate difficulty with a number of witty clues.

My biggest difficult with this was getting the two long ones, which is quite a hindrance with this grid. I realized early on that 5 was an anagram, but was uncertain how to take the literal. It proved in the end to be the bird and not the whining, but by then I had nearly all the crossing letters anyway. With 8, I feared I had some dreadfully UK-centric phrase to come up with, and was pleased when it turned out otherwise for my penultimate answer.

Newcomers are reminded that obvious answers are not blogged, so don’t be afraid to ask. However, I am blogging most of this one, so try it with the crossing letters first. The ones I’ve left out have got at least half their letters supplied in this blog.

Across
1 JEMIMA, J[ob] + A MIME backwards. A name that is no longer much in use, for obvious reasons.
4 SPILLAGE, S + PILLAGE. I was quite slow on this one, but it turned out in the end that ‘small’ really does clue ‘s’.
10 MONODRAMA, M(anagram of RONDO)AMA. A play with only one character.
12 SCRATCH, double definition.
13 RETIREE, RE + TIREE. Tiree is a rather obscure Scottish island, but many solvers will just write in the answer from the literal, and assume there is such an island. It has only 800 inhabitants, but probably one of them will reply and say it is not obscure at all!
14 AMPLE, [ex]AMPLE. The components of this clue are given in an unusual order, but the idea is clear enough.
15 DWELLING, D[ei](WELL IN)G[ratia]. I thought of ‘Dei Gratia’ right away, but was uncertain of how to use it until I had some checking letters.
18 BESMIRCH, B([foliag]E [rise]S [fro]M)IRCH. I had put LESMARCH, but that didn’t seem right. So I erased all unchecked letters and had another go.
23 DEVILRY, D(EVIL)RY. Only difficult because I usually say ‘deviltry’.
25 COMPLEX, double definition. A complex number would be rather difficult to explain to those not mathematically inclined, but you could take a peek at the Wiki article.
27 UNEARTHLY, UNEARTH + L[ad]Y.
28 TAP WATER, TA(P[ower] W[ith] A)TER.
 
Down
1 JAMESIAN, J + AMNESIA with the ‘N’ moved to the bottom. This usually refers to Henry James’ later style.
2 MANTRAP, MANTRA + P.
3 MIDSTREAM, anagram of MERMAIDS + T[ide]. Presumably the current is strongest there.
5 PRAIRIE CHICKEN, anagram of PICNICKER, I HEAR. A deceptive clue because ‘I hear’ suggests a homonym, but there simply isn’t enough to work with for such a long answer.
6 LEAST, LE(A S[hilling])T.
7 ASPIRIN, ASPIRIN[g]. This should have been easy, but wasn’t – the drug was too obvious.
8 ETCHER, [f]ETCHER. Another obvious one I couldn’t see.
9 CATHODE RAY TUBE. CATH + ODE + RAY + TUBE, where, presumably, ‘tube’ = ‘Australian can’, and ‘set piece’ means part of a TV, now obsolete.
16 LONG MARCH, double definition, one jocular, a nice deceptive clue that turns out to be more simple than expected.
17 LYNX-EYED, sounds like LINK SIDE. A good homonym, for once.
19 ENVELOP, anagram of EVEN + LOP. The literal reading made me think of ‘cutting a swathe’, which got me thinking about ‘swathe’ as a noun, not as a verb as is required here.
21 SALCHOW, S[outh] A[tlantic] L[etting] + CHOW. A leap of faith, letting the cryptic do the heavy lifting. Fortunately, it does exist and is a jump in ice dancing.
22 ADROIT, AD([cricketee]R)O + IT. I suppose we will never be rid of ‘appeal’ = ‘it’ or ‘SA’.
24 LYDIA, anagram of DAILY. I had forgotten what country Croesus was king of, had to think a bit for this one.

39 comments on “Times 24557 – Heathcliff again”

  1. Indeed, a very neat puzzle with the top right being the hardest. Just under the 20m mark. Saved from a terrible time by the anagrams. No idea about SALCHOW; but what else can you do with S?L?H?W — ?
  2. Diappointd to come up 4 short on this one (5, 17, 18 & 25), not helped by failing to spot the anagram marker in 6 and marooning myself with PRAIRIE something. Reckoned that ‘soil’ was being used in its ‘mar’ sense, but that didn’t help much, as I understood ‘final bits’ to refer to ‘foliage’, e.g the ‘-ge’ bit, and then tried to reverse it (‘rises’). Can’t really agree that LYNX-EYED is a good homophone, as the word break really requires ‘joins’ not ‘join’, does it not, though one can appreciate the setter’s task in finding a synonym for ‘ide’.
      1. My point is that lynx-eyed, as a compound adjective – for British English speakers at least – would receive the primary accent on the first word (like ‘cross-eyed’). This makes it problematic as a homophone for ‘join team’, i.e. link side, which can only be achieved by an unnatural kind of linking.
        1. I’m as English as they come and for once have no quarrel with the homophone, lynx-eyed from me comes out evenly emphasised though cross-eyed doesn’t, something to do with the effect of nx lengthening the sound.
  3. Found this un peu tough what with the grouse and leap on ice and imaginary parts and an elusive Australian. And being a bit slow here and there. 42 minutes. I take it Heathcliff peers down on us in honour of Cath. Just to be reminded of that 27 story restores my good spirits. Incidentally a few negative terms to run across today – no doubt mere coincidence.
  4. Only too happy to help, last week, vinyl, or as an Australian might say, “No worries, mate!”. I’m not sure if “sink a few tubes” meaning “drink the odd can of beer or two” is still current slang, though. These days they seem to be tinnies, although that can be confused with an aluminium dinghy.

    This was a pleasant 35 minute solve for me, only briefly stuck by the DG’s and the tube (I wanted it to be tune for some reason) at the end. COD to SPILLAGE, although I liked NASTY, BESMIRCH and PRAIRIE CHICKEN. And the mysterious hybrid sow cow which the olympic ice skaters jump over has finally been explained.

    Is there a Beatrix Potter milestone approaching? We had Jemima Puddle-duck in Saturday’s Jumbo.

  5. I hit the wall after 30 minutes with nine clues still unsolved all but one of them (18ac) in the SE corner. The remainder took another 30 with one cheat – I looked up SALCHOW – after which the last two (25ac and 17dn) fell into place. At 17 I had spotted the second part of the homophone but this led me to the wrong conclusion that the answer would need to be ?Y?S-EYED.

    Following completion I discovered I had 18ac wrong having also tried LESMARCH and decided I couldn’t think of anything else.

    The anagram at 5dn put up some resistance but once I had spotted CHICKEN as a possibility for the second word I remembered meeting PRAIRIE CHICKEN here before and was relieved to find the remaining letters fitted.

    Not a very good start to the week for me but it was an enjoyable challenge.

  6. 9:53 for this – I think I’ve had trouble before seeing BESMIRCH from ?E?M?R?H, and this was my last answer. Also slow on 4, 18 (thinking of the unlikely DV = Deo volente) 23, 28, 9, 19.

    Minor correction on 21: the jump is used in ice skating rather than ice dancing, which excludes throws and jumps.

    Happy with 17D as a homophone – if all homophones had to reflect the stress as well as the sounds, we’d be reduced mostly to one-syllable words for homophone clues.

    1. At the multiword level – homophones are typically understood as referring to single words – I note that oronym has been coined. Maybe we should have Pretty Ordinary Oronyms (POOs) to go alongside the dodgy homonyms.
  7. This was a tricky solve for me because, like Vinyl, I did not get the two long answers until I had nearly all the checkers. In both cases the definitions eluded me. Likewise with Long March where the definition “Red Army withdrawal” looks like wordplay.

    I liked the hint of mathematics in Complex. I was not so keen on Nasty because I think Cockney clues should be sound-alikes and ’asty does not sound like the asty in nasty.

    1. I think this would be an unnecessary restriction. “It goes on top in Hackney” or similar might indicate ‘AIR, BARNET, or TITFER. The solver’s task is to decide which of the possibilities applies. Likewise it’s the setter/editor’s task to present you overall with a set of clues where the number of possibilities is manageable.

      Simple H-dropping must be the commonest meaning of “Cockney” or similar – if you ignore this possibility, on your ‘ead be it!

  9. 21 minutes today, not counting a break at Stratford. Doing this thing on the Tube helps pass the time, but it’s definitely slower. Those two long entries were not gimmes, with the anagram in 5d rather well hidden in plain sight. On the toughish side, but no real complaints. SPILLAGE for CoD.
  10. A good start to the week for me. 20 minutes with SALCHOW going last, a leap of faith here too.
    Dei Gratia was new to me so thanks for the enlightenment: mentally filed for future reference. Obviously I didn’t get the wordplay for 15 without it but it couldn’t be anything else.
    5dn was new to me too. Presumably the tasty little morsels of flesh on the back of a prairie chicken are called prairie oysters.
  11. Seen this play on words in clues loads lately but still takes time to solve. Let me be the Tiree mentioner. I think it was used for a reality TV show ‘Castaway’ or similar; what little i watched was painful but i recall Ben Fogel won and has become one of the family of TV presenters from whom there seems to be no escape short of junking our Cathode-ray Tubes based devices. Obsolete but still working.
    1. Faulty memory there – the island used was Taransay, which was uninhabited from 1974 to 2000. There are no permanent residents but the buildings used for the TV show are apparently used as holiday homes.
      1. doh me and my faulty memory. A screw loose maybe. Tiree just famous in crosswords then.
  12. Agree with Penfold. I remember hearing of salko(w) with Alam Weeks on TV but have never seen it written before.

    May I be the tiree-mentioner. I remember it from the BBC shipping forecast where it figured regularly (does it still?).

    Giggled at TAP WATER. COD

  13. 20 minutes.

    Knew the word salchow but not the spelling. I’d have had it as salko. Mind you, all those years ago watching Curry and Cousins win gold with Alan Weeks commentating, I couldn’t tell the difference between toe-loops, salchows and lutzes. They’re all just spinny jumps to me.

  14. 27:54 .. there wasn’t much that I didn’t find hard in this.

    I really enjoy watching skating, but like the guys above I struggle to see anything but a shiny, sequined blur when they do the ‘spinny jumps’. I do, of course, make a point of shaking my head sadly when the commentator points out the incomplete third rotation in the triple lutz and deliver one of my stock lines (“yes, he wasn’t even close to nailing that”).

    Last in DWELLING.

  15. 16 minutes, last in BESMIRCH. There was a lot of Olympics-watching going on over here, and I thought Reverse Double Salchow had to be a euphemism for something. BESMIRCH from definition, the rest I thought held together rather nicely, though a little “ugh” at the wordplay in 20
  16. 10.34 I knew SALCHOW and have encountered it before in a puzzle so that helped enormously. 18 seems to have been a well-set trap as I was one of the many who considered LESMARCH at first. MONODRAMA was new to me but obvious enough. Last in was 18.
  17. I was straight onto the setter’s wavelength here and cruised through it in 15 minutes with no problems or hold ups.

    Great to see a reference to complex numbers – things really are looking up!! Quantum physics here we come? “Grouse” at 5D was a bit of a give away – had to be the chicken. I also knew Tiree from the shipping forecast and believe it does still feature.

  18. 1 across is cleverer than you think, since Jemima is, in the Authorised Version, the name of Job’s first daughter after his restitution – read Job 42.14. The AV has Jemima, Kezia and Keren-Happuch; my more modern, everyday, version has Turtledove, Cassia and Mascara. We called one of Labrador bitches Cassia, and I had a parishioner called Kezia but, as Vinyl says, Jemima has dropped from the Christening list. Keren-Happuch was never on it!
  19. 19d Doctor even cut swathe.

    Aha I think doctor=anagram indicator. Try to anagram “even cut” but it doesn’t work.

    How do you know that you must replace cut by lop?

    Was I wrong to try anagramming even cut?

    Thanks

    1. Doctor even = enve
      Cut = lop
      Envelop = swathe, as in “swathe in mist” = “envelop in mist”.
      Regards.
      1. Thanks -I can see how the wordplay works but what I wanted to know was how I could immediately tell that I only had to anagram “even” and had to find another word for cut rather than attempt to anagram “even cut” (other than you soon find you can’t!)
        1. There’s no way to tell immediately. Looking for an anagram of “even cut” as a first stab is perfectly logical.

          I think you’re much better off trying multiple possibilities without spending too much time on each one, than trying to find an infallible method of seeing the right wordplay first time – I’ve never met anyone who can do that.

        2. The answer is that you can’t immediately tell that it’s wrong to take ‘even cut’ as letters to find an anagram for. ‘Doctor’ could refer to them both. But there’s often a garden path like this that one can be led up – misdirection is part of the masochistic joy of it all. (Sadistic if you’re the setter.)
          1. A nice excuse for quoting one of my favourite bits of Brian Greer’s book on solving the Times puzzle.

            Another view of the symbiosis between setter and solver was suggested by Edmund Akenhead, the Crossword Editor who guided me through my probationary period into tenure as a setter. Setters are, he commented “of course sadists (although in the nicest possible way) and since all solvers appear to be masochists this leads to a rather beautiful relationship”.

  20. >JEMIMA, J[ob] + A MIME backwards. A name that is no longer much in use, for obvious reasons.

    Not obvious to me. Please elucidate.

    1. And there was I thinking that the “obvious” reason was a slow-burning contemptuous reaction to the only cultural Jemima I know, her of the Puddleduck variety!
  21. Sotira’s time is a relief, as I was also completely at sea on this. I think I took over 30 mins, with more wrong answers entered (eg BESMUDGE) than I can remember on any other crossword. Last in was PRAIRIE CHICKEN, very difficult to cross with *MONODRAIN. My youngest son has a Jemima in his class, called Mima by her mother.

    Tom B.

  22. I found myself inexorably drawn towards ‘moondrama’, which slowed proceedings quite considerably.

    With lennyco on the math, grossly under-represented on the whole I think.

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