Times 24677 – Is Monday the new Mephisto?

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Mephisto
Solving Time: 65 minutes

Unless I’m mistaken or more than usually obtuse, this was an absolute stinker. If it weren’t for some strategically placed anagrams, I’d still be solving, or rather not solving. That said, inability to distinguish between a tap on the shoulder and a pat on the back did lend to my overall air of helpless and haplessness. I’ll leave it to you to pass judgement.

Across
1 (BEACH TANK TOP)* = PAT ON THE BACK. My second in, after 7d alerted me to the fact that the putative grist did in fact have the correct number of letters. Unfortunately, I opted for a tap on the back, thereby setting off numerous cerebral alarums, which I duly ignored.
8 OPENING = NINE for small number reversed in GPO, once the General Post Office. I’m not commenting on the cryptic grammar lest it be an ablative absolute again, nor the fact that nine snakes in one’s bed couldn’t be described as a small number of snakes by anyone other than a B.Com(Marketing).
9 BREAD for loaf + THat = BREADTH for size. Sound of tooth hitting spittoon.
11 NEAREST = EAR for organ inside NEST for retreat. Some devious subterfuge in that “in retreat.
12 SEE OVER (as opposed to oversee) = SEE for diocese + OVER for “from beginning to end”.
13 TEDDY = beseT + EDDY for “troubled water”.
14 EAVESDROP = (DROVE APES)*. That’s earwig as a verb, and then only informally in Britain. Still, it was a relatively easy get from the anagram, with a V already in situ.
16 IRRUPT for “break into” + OP for observation post, all reversed, containing O for nothing (thnks mct) = POTPOURRI. Yes, irrupt is a word, which thankfully occurred in some crossword or other this year, otherwise I would have been at a complete loss. As it was, I thought I might have made up that possibility.
19 GIBER = GIB for Gibraltar + vERy. Gibe is an alternate spelling of jibe. Now’dger geddit?
21 Deliberately omitted. No, put your financial inducements away. I’m well supplied as it is.
23 GAL for girl + UMPH for sex appeal = GALUMPH, a word not out of place in a Gary Larson cartoon.
24 TWO-TIME = EMIT for shed containing TOW for fibres, all reversed. Tow, I discovered later, is either “the coarse or broken part of flax or hemp prepared for spinning” or “a bundle of untwisted natural or manmade fibres”; a word not out of place in a Mephisto.
25 OR for gold + LEANS for tends = ORLEANS, a city in France and several US states and/or commonwealths.
26 (MENTOR DEEPLY)* = REDEPLOYMENT. Hurrah for anagrams.

Down
1 PIEBALD = PI for letter + ABE reversed for “Lincoln sent up” + LD for lord. Not so difficult, once I realised it was pat and not tap at 1ac; i.e. after about 10 minutes of wasted thought.
2 TRaIT + ELY for city(!) = TRITELY or not originally. My last in. See comment for 1d, but add another 10 minutes of wasted thought and a further 10 of thought capable of arriving at a correct solution.
3 NIGH for almost + TWE(e) + A + R for queen = NIGHTWEAR, which is certainly attire.
4 HOBBS = HOBBieS. Required knowledge: a. Jack Hobbs b. hobby. I tried harrier initially, but was reasonably convinced HARRR wasn’t a bat, batter or batsman.
5 BREWERS, a double definition, the first referring to that much thumbed crossword companion Brewer’s Dictionary of Fase and Phrable.
6 Deliberately omitted. I say, that’s a bit stiff!
7 POINT-TO-POINT = (TIPTOP NOTION)*. My first in. Have we had three cheers for anagrams yet?
10 HIRE for let + PURCHASE for hold = HIRE-PURCHASE aka easy instalments or the never-never.
15 VAINGLORY = (VARYING)* containing LO for look.
17 TOP-HOLE = OP for opus or work inside THOLE for pin. The top came instantly, the hole not so quick; in fact, by sea mail. A thole is what one places one’s oar in (literally).
18 OR for “operational research initially” + IF for provided + I for one + CE for church (of England) = ORIFICE or opening. Getting this one enabled me to get 8.
19 EEL for fish + I + LAG for cover (as verb), all reversed = GALILEE as in sea of.
20 BOMBAy‘S + T for temperature = BOMBAST, a word not out of place in Saturday’s crossword.
22 D for died + WE’LL for “we are going to” = DWELL.

40 comments on “Times 24677 – Is Monday the new Mephisto?”

  1. Nice blog Koro: made me laff more than the puzzle did.
    But you do need another O in 16ac (“nothing”).

    Despite the difficulties, I enjoyed this in two spells: a quick one at home and an iterminable one on the road. Altogether, probably around the 45 mark. Held up in the end by TWO-TIMER and the crossing TOP-HOLE, not knowing “tow” or “thole” (except the Scots verb); so had to guess.

    Will now make an album called “Bridge Over Eddy” and rename the band Eavesdrop (previously Adam’s Ale).

  2. I wouldn’t rate this more than medium, except for a couple of clues – GIBER and GALILEE which held me up at the end.

    GALUMPH is a Lewis Carroll invention (Jabberwocky). The OED has OOMPH meaning sex-appeal and doesn’t have UMPH as an alternative but maybe Collins will come to the rescue.

    I also thought “Let’s” rather than “Let” was a bit awkward in 10dn.

  3. … only to find that I’d not written in 2dn. So, you can add another ten minutes for how long it would have taken me to get that. Enjoyable puzzle: seemed easy, but had stings everywhere – not just in the tail. Needed the blog to fully understand 8 and 24 … and, as always, got stumped by the cricket clue, imagining that the Hobbs was a type of bat (i.e. flying mammal), despite a Wisden-reading childhood that left impressed on me for ever that Sir John Berry Hobbs scored 197 first class centuries – a record that will never be broken with all the mickey mouse stuff now being played.

    Last in SEE OVER, because I’d just never heard of this rather than, say ‘look over’.

  5. I also wondered why nine should be considered a small number and, briefly, if an opening could be seen as presenting a particular opportunity to someone small. Apart from that everything seemed to give the requisite satisfying click as it fell (slowly) into place. 54 minutes.
  6. This was an untidy solve as with only 6 answers missing I still had gaps in every quarter.

    In the end I solved all but two clues (the 19s) in 35 minutes but after staring blankly at it for another 15 minutes I admitted defeat and used a solver to find GALILEE at 19dn. Once this was in I immediately spotted the possibility of GIBER at 19ac from an alternative spelling of ‘jibe’ that I have not met before.

    UMPH as an alternative to ‘oomph’ is not in my Collins but it is in the COED and SOED.

  7. Southern hemisphere not too bad with TWO TIME from literal and the awful GIBER from wordplay (and No is the answer to koro’s question – rocks?). Also didn’t enter BOMBAST until entering GIBER as I would have preferred “old city”.
    Northern hemisphere just a grind until deducing that hobbies must be falcons which gave up BREADTH. PIEBALD regrettably from solver.
  8. Didn’t find this too tough but bypassed the more awkward rationales. I always like a long-clue perimeter. Unfortunately went for Galomph with Gal and a shortened Oomph. (Quite satisfying to write that.) 19 minutes.
  9. 22 min here, but with the last 5 trying to put some backbone into the flaccid 2 dn. Not nearly as tough as last Monday, but then again, not particularly gripping either.
  10. Hmm, I rattled through this in 12 minutes which is about as fast as I get. I started at the bottom and the NW corner was last to finish. Nothing looked hard to me, maybe I’m having a good start to the week..
  11. I found this relatively easy… at first. After my new 20 minute train journey (no more Central Line for me) I had all but 4dn and 9ac done. However another 20 minutes’ thought walking from Waterloo to the City failed to unlock these two.
    Having checked here I’m a bit annoyed about BREADTH but I couldn’t get the idea that it would be some variant of CHALLAH out of my mind. I don’t think I’d ever have got HOBBS. I vaguely know that a hobby is a small falcon but the knowledge wasn’t sufficiently close to the surface and I had no other way in.
    OPENING and POTPOURRI went in without understanding and I needed the blog to unravel them so thanks for that.
  12. 15:02 for me. Thought it was quite an easy one. Is that a greengrocer’s apostrophe in 10 down?
      1. Even more eccentric use of the aforesaid much misused punctuation mark. A subject can be followed by an apostrophe to abbreviate a verb, eg “he’s”, “they’ve”. “Let’s” here is an invocation, as in “let’s go”, where the apostrophe indicates the abbreviation of a personal pronoun.
        1. The point is that it’s not an invocation – it just looks like one.
          Personally I’m not keen on this formulation because the apostrophe abbreviating “has” isn’t really used like this. “John has got an ice cream” can be shortened to “John’s got an ice cream”, but if you say “John’s an ice cream” you’ll get some funny looks.
          However it’s pretty common so those of us unable to like it just’ve to lump it.
          1. “let’s” for “Let has” is not misuse – it’s abuse! And it doesn’t improve the clue either.
      2. Does that work? I thought let = hire must be a verb, so it can’t be the subject of “has”.
        1. It works if you parse the clue as “(A word meaning) Let (has a word meaning) hold…” Apostrophes are very useful for setters who want a misleading surface!

          Oli

          1. Thanks oli I read the comment in my email and came here to explain it but you saved me the trouble. The device is used a lot so solvers need to learn it.
  13. Thanks for the excellent blog, koro, which makes everything clear. Hobbs eluded me – despite searching the bird reference books yesterday to identify a bird of prey in my garden (it wasn’t a hobby)! ‘Lead up the garden path’ (mislead) seems a bit insufficient as a definition for ‘two-time’ (mislead, yes, but with connotation of cheating/betrayal); another, in consequence, I would not have got.
  14. 11 minutes, but with one mistake – guessed GUBER rather than GIBER. Didn’t think it was that bad otherwise.

    Oli

  15. A standard 16 minutes for me, despite the relative obscurities. Thole was he word slowest to be dragged from memory. I thought both GIBER and GALUMPH (don’t care what COED and SOED say, “umph” is not “oomph”) were dodgy (one as an truly ugly word, one as a duff clue). Otherwise, the top half put up most resistance, last in being PIEBALD. Despite its obscurity to non-cricketers, I liked HOBBS best.
  16. Didn’t time myself but it was certainly a tricky but very enjoyable one. Probably around 15 minutes.

    Filed under things you really don’t need to know: the creator of the famous table top football game couldn’t get a trademark for the name “Hobby” so used part of the bird’s latin name, Falco Subbuteo, instead.

  17. One that I made a right mess of, hurtling through only to be left with 2d / 13ac, and 5d / 9ac defiantly blank. Lots of staring at both intersections got me nowhere, until I found that my over-optimistic guesses at PEERAGE, HAWKS, and that well known dictionary BUTLERS for 1d, 4d and 5d were well off the mark. Quite a few I didn’t get the wordplay for as well, 16ac chief amongst them.

    COD 7d.

  18. Oh well, so much for the start to the week – couldn’t think of anything to put in 17 down so entered TOP BONE thinking maybe the pin was a T-BONE
  19. 14:26 .. did anyone out there get the wordplay for POTPOURRI before seeing the solution? ‘Irrupt’ is certainly new to me.

    Some clever stuff in here (TWO-TIME, BREADTH.. a nice anagram for POINT-TO-POINT) but most of it lost on me while ‘speed solving’, a process very like Woody Allen’s take on speed reading – “I’ve taken a speed reading course. Last night I read War and Peace; it’s about some Russians.”

    Last in GIBER.

    1. Thanks, sotira. I hadn’t come across Woody Allen’s take on speed reading before. Very droll 🙂
  20. I found this both tough (33:56) and dull. Pah.

    I didn’t help myself in the home counties by initially having GALITIS at 23.

  21. Tough for me, about 45 minutes, and needed aids to get TOP HOLE. I didn’t know of the ‘thole’, nor the expression itself. Also held up by GIBER, HOBBS, but eventually got them. COD to BREADTH, very clever. Certainly no walk in the park today. Regards to all.
  22. I didn’t think this particularly hard, perhaps even a trifle tedious. Some irritating small things, all previously mentioned by others. I’m not surprised Hobbs is giving trouble, it must be difficult enough for those who don’t play the game to learn the jargon let alone long dead players, however famous.
    1. Obscure, I agree, but strangely fitting that today he was announced as an opener for the All-Time World XI by ESPN Cricinfo (cricinfo.com for more details)!

      Oli

  24. In 20dn there is a reference to Bombay. I though we weren’t allowed to call it this any more (Mumbai).
  25. 10:55 for me, but it was one of those days when I felt old and tired.

    I hadn’t come across UMPH meaning sex appeal before. I think I’m going to have to buy one of these newer dictionaries!

  26. Very few comments today, but I can imagine there must be a reason. This was solving by clairvoyance for me: I put the puzzle down after an hour and came back much later, but I did manage to finish, despite not knowing mounds of things involved. I have never heard of Brewer’s dictionary, the small falcons, tholes and so on, but for some reason Brewer’s seemed a reasonable name for a dictionary and fit the wordplay, I guessed at the obscure meaning of hobby because Hobbs rang a very faint and distant bell, and so on and so forth. Next, I suppose, I shall be dreaming both the definitions and the solutions to the puzzles while asleep at night.
  28. Two British-isms which I solved only through(lucky) guesswork (Hobbs) and Google (hire purchase).
    “Hire purchase” was particularly difficult because we don’t use that expression here in the States, nor do we use “hire” for “let,” nor do we use “purchase” for “hold” (at least not in common parlance). I knew it had to be some kind of purchase and happened across “hire purchase” while Google-ing “part purchase.”

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