Times 24701 – Holy Shmoly!

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: 75 minutes

Quelle catastrophe! (as Becket’s wife said when informed her husband had won the Nobel prize for literature). Not only couldn’t I find the right wavelength, it took me at least a quarter of an hour to realise I hadn’t switched the set on. Only one wrong in the end, but it would be easier to name the ones I didn’t struggle with than the reverse. I was beaten all ends up by some ingenious guile; so full marks to the setter. Some super smooth surfaces throughout (with the possible exception of Agnes). On with the show!

Across
1 SITED, sounds like “sighted”
4 EXCISEMAN = to cut chap out, a reference to Robert Burns‘ day job. Hands up those who new that.
9 LEOPArd for “no way cat” inside CT for court, having RA for god appended = CLEOPATRA, an Egyptian!
10 CON for study + GO for “significance of green” = CONGO, a river or “flower” as only we like to call them. Remember the “significance of green” for later.
11 EMPLOY = ME reversed + PL for Place + OnlY
12 EATEn for “almost consumed by” filled with DENT for depression = EDENTATE, a largely toothless mammal such as a sloth, anteater, armadillo, some tigers etc. So technically that would be definition by example, but sloths have been habitually equated with edentates in crosswords for centuries.
14 CHATELAINE = HATE for “very much dislike” + NAIL*, all inside CE for church. A chatelaine was an early form of swiss army knife for female housekeepers, enabling them to deal with frayed curtains whenever they were encountered. It also could carry keys.
16 WEEP = WEE for small + P for penny (pence)
19 WATT, sounds like “What?!”.
20 DETACHMENT = DEMENT for “go potty” around TACHe. I tried to get halberdiers to fit but couldn’t.
22 GREEN MAN, a double definition, the first facetious, being the sign for go on a pedestrian crossing (see 10ac) and the second a genuine fertility symbol. I vaguely remembered him from an episode of “New Tricks”, thereby proving the theory expounded in the link:

When you come upon the Green Man for the first time you will recognise him, for you have always known him.
23 sleeP ON CHOice = PONCHO, a blanket with a hole in the middle for placing the head through.
26 Deliberately omitted. It’ll be open slather in the comments.
27 DUBLINERS = oUr BiLl settled inside DINERS for restaurants.
28 DECADENCE = D & E for “two notes” + CADENCE for “closing phrase”
29 RE PLY for “travel regularly again” = REPLY or come back.

Down
1 SACRED COW = ACRED for landed inside SCOW for barge.
2 TIP for end in which EU (European Union) for “political association” is placed = TIE-UP. Anybody else troubled by the hyphen, which would seem to indicate a noun? Finally, keep “in the end” in mind.
3 DEPLORED = (OLD PEER)* + D for died
4 ‘EATS or heats commonly = EATS
5 CHARDONNAY = DON for man taking on or above CHAR for “domestic worker” + NAY for no. The one that caused me more trouble than most.
6 E for energy inside SCANT for inadequate = SECANT. If I remember my trigonometry correctly (which I seldom do) secant (or sec) is the reciprocal of cosine (or cos), so called in order that cosec (the reciprocal of sin, as opposed to its wages) can be invariably confused with it.
7 (MEN AGNES)* around A = MANGANESE
8 NO (for number) ONE = NO ONE
13 GAME WARDEN = A MEW for gull inside GARDEN. A mew is a Common Gull (or ‘ull), so you should have known that. I had gate warden; well, if a tew isn’t a gull it should be.
15 AUTHENTIC = THE for article inside AUNT for “Sally say as target” + ICe for “reserve falls short”.
17 PIT for mine + E for English + LOUSY* = PITEOUSLY. I had to laugh at “mine English” for the sheer outrageousness of it.
18 CHOOSIER = O for nothing inserted between CH for chestnut (as a horse colour, I’m presuming) and OSIER for willow (speaking of chestnuts).
21 IN The END (see 2d) = INTEND
22 GELID, sounds like “jellied”
24 C for the speed of light + HEAP for “old car” = CHEAP
25 Deliberately omitted. Hint: They sang Mamma Mia! with a different key. I had this word in the last crossword I blogged (24683).

60 comments on “Times 24701 – Holy Shmoly!”

  1. Time taken? Well, put it this way: the top half watching one coat of paint dry and the bottom watching the second. Somewhat distracted by continuously thinking: Koro’s going to regret swapping with Vinyl today!
    Has our setter got a traffic-light fetish? Must be the only Times with two green-light clues?
    Couple of minor things: I assumed the chatelaine was the housekeeper herself, so it was good to get an alternative def. And: Burns the exciseman … it’s a long story but two of my ancestors were respectively the president of the temperance society and the town drunk in Mauchline (Ayrshire) where RB was known as The Gauger. I suspect he troubled one of them more than the other.
    1. I don’t rightly know which chatelaine is being referred to (although etymologically, one probably followed from the other); it seems either would do. I got the answer by mistaking it for a Paris metro station, so who cares about definitions anyway?
  2. My 99 minutes suddenly seems a bit less shabby. However … I notice I failed to enter anything at 16ac (I didn’t know know ‘greet’ could mean weep) and had to resort to aids for EDENTATE (though I was sniffing around ‘eaten’) and the sublime CHARDONNAY (where I had ‘char-‘, but was still well and truly skewered by my inability to lift and separate). Well done, setter and blogger.
    1. I detect Scots influence here – “greet” and “wee” in this context are most commonly used north of the border
  3. A very good puzzle which I ruined by putting (quite justifiably I think) SCOTCHMAN at 4ac.
    1. I flirted with this but rejected it on the basis that scotch means ‘put an end to’ rather than ‘cut’ and that Scotchman is rarely used for Scotsman, and indeed dispreferred by the natives (athough the latter consideration takes us into murky PC realms).
      1. SCOTCH can also mean to gash, cut or score. “Put an end to” is pretty close to “cut out” .

        As to the PC aspect, I don’t think that concerns the editor. I remember we have had “Chinaman” (not in the cricket sense) and “Jewess”, both of which are now derogatory.

        1. Thanks for the correction, confirmed, of course, by my dictionary at home. Ignorance was bliss here for me …
      2. “I have a game I play with all printers; I write Scotch, it appears in the proofs as Scottish. I correct it back to Scotch. About once in three times I get away with it.” Nancy Mitford (1956) Noblesse Oblige
    2. I lengthened my time considerably to 19:52 by inserting “ploughman” originally for the same clue.
  4. Tough on Scotchman above, though Scotsman probably will arouse their wrath less. Didn’t find this as tough as some and initially a bit disappointed with 37 minutes. Enjoyed the mix of clues quite a lot. COD 5.
  5. An hour without aids but DNF as I failed on GAME WARDEN where I became fixated on ?A?E GARDEN. I’d almost lost the will to live by then so I gave up. Didn’t care much for two DBEs (despite one being covered by ‘say’)and a very loose definition (CHARDONNAY) in intersecting clues and all in the same quarter. Too much for me on a Monday morning.
    1. I just received an email from the Times inviting me to join the crossword club ending “We’d love to welcome you as a new club member – maybe we’ll see your name climb those new leader boards”. I’ve only been a subscriber for FOUR years and have recently renewed to February 2012!
  6. 10:42 including the 5 seconds or so that seemed to be added by the xwd club submission process. Quite a battle for a Monday – same ?A?E GARDEN wrong idea for a while at 13, and 4A, 4D and 5 last in, in that order.
  7. A blogger matching 75 minutes…what a toughie!
    i quite liked the Congo and Green man. thought they were rather innovative. Edentate had me stumped too…thought the northe east corner was the hardest by far!. took me ages to see deplored too!
    Well lets hope the week is downhill from here!
  8. Scotchman 2nd in (after GELID) with total confidence which turned a challenging puzzle into an impossible one. About 3/4 done before conceding defeat – too many left to bother with aids. Nasty payback for a gentle weekend?
    Got CONGO easily enough as my current read is Barbara Kingsolver’s marvellous The Poisonwood Bible (now there’s an inappropriate surname for today’s performance).
    COD to CHARDONNAY (unsolved of course). Superb puzzle. Well done Koro (and PB with his phenomenal time).
    1. 25 minutes, a lot of which was spent on the devilish CHARDONNAY (nothing beats a good lift-and-separate, I think, for that wonderful moment when all suddenly becomes clear) and the SW corner. Though, as they say in Yorkshire, I got there IN T’END. I’ll get me coat.
  9. What a stinker! I wondered more than once as I struggled through if this one hadn’t been accidentally swapped with Saturday’s vastly easier offering. 53 minutes, but I too had put in GATE WARDEN. Drat.
    Several things I didn’t fully understand until coming here, including TIE UP, which I confess I thought was a triple definition. OK so “tie-up” for “end” is far from convincing but I was getting a little desperate at that point and it had to be the right answer.
    In amongst the obscurities it was some small relief that two (“greet” for WEEP and EDENTATE) fell into that ever-expanding category of things I only know from doing this crossword.
    Many thanks to the blogger for much elucidation and hats off to the setter.
  10. Well, as we say in Yorkshire I tripped up at’t end. Felt sure we were looking skywards at 22ac and came up with GREAT RAM as a fertility symbol. A good puzzle, very challenging.
      1. By ‘eck, prospector, has it tekken yer a month to finish’t puzzle? Or has it just come up in’t Australian?
        1. Aye Richo, it has just come up in’t Australian! Why does Mr Murdoch have to punish his countrymen?
          1. Ah, I used to do the same thing. But I signed up for the Crossword Club last January and it’s been $50 well spent. May as well take advantage of that strong Aussie dollar…
  11. I went the Scotchman route. Although today Scotch is only used for whisky, in Burn’s time it would have been completely correct I believe. Only when I got Secant did I realize something else must be up (and, like most of us, I didn’t know he was an exciseman) But I got there in the end with Chardonnay the last
  12. 42 minutes. Witty, entertaining, lots of Doh! moments. The sign of the cross indeed, and significance of green!
  13. Can someone please parse 26ac for me? I had “latch” which left me finally stuck on 21dn.
    JFR
  14. DNF today, too many unfamiliar words! Nothing could convince me that SCOTCHMAN was wrong, so there was no way I was going to get the downs from there.

    Always frustrating to give up, and then find I was sooo close to cracking several of them 🙁

  15. Can’t offer a time because I had to go to sleep on CHARDONNAY – as Tim says, a ‘lift and separate’ of the first order. Time minus the wine was around forty minutes. A tough puzzle indeed.

    Very entertaining blog, Koro. Thank you.

  16. 8:40 online, but with a typing error that I spotted after submitting.

    I enjoyed CHARDONNAY (I usually do) and GREEN MAN

  17. Found this one a real stretch. Well over an hour in fits and starts – longer than the weekend ones combined. Lots to enjoy though – thank you setter! – notably CONGO, CHARDONNAY and GREEN MAN which I thought were belters.

    Struggled mightily in the NW corner with my last three in being WATT, SACRED COW and SITED. EATS was my first in then MANGANESE – I’m in the habit at the moment of trying the downs first – so when the acrosses came round I got EXCISEMAN quickly from the wordplay. Others solved from wordplay were CHATELAINE, GELID and SECANT.

    Chuckled when I saw SACRED COW EATS GAME WARDEN in the grid!

  18. “About” 25 minutes. When I pressed submit I got a “500 error” or summat and then all my answers disappeared.

    Also one wrong, I went for gate warden thinking, as Koro, that a tew was a gull. I actually typed in winter garden at one point (looking at the keys rather than the grid) thinking hurriedly that it was tern in warden but that would be wternarden which must be in Holland somewhere.

    As I’m having to post via pagewash I can’t add the muppet avatar I use for failures.

    Nice challenge overall.

    1. Here is a cracking photo of some gulls by Jim Tew. Unless that’s a misprint and Jim Gull is the photographer’s real name, I think we must admit defeat on the tew front. There is a bird in my garden which goes tew, tew very loudly and repeatedly which I’ve managed to tentatively identify as a striated pardalote, (Pardalotus striatus, common name henceforth stripey tew); a very small bird for such a loud noise. Its close relative, the spotted pardalote is difficult to see amongst the foliage, hence it’s common name, spotted tew in the bushes.

      Incidentally, this blog is number 5 on google’s list for “gull tew” (without the quotes). Come on people, we must try harder.

      1. Two things put me on the wrong scent:

        1) One of my favourite pubs in the whole wide world is in an Oxfordshire village called Great Tew, just down the road from Little Tew. Great and little Tew could just as easily be bird varieties (yes I know greater and lesser tend to be used but what about little owl and great crested grebe, eh?)

        2) What do you get if you cross a tern with a curlew? Certainly not a curlern.

        1. I’ve played cricket against Great Tew, and while I have no recollection of the cricket ground at all, I can clearly remember the Falkland Arms. I think this is proof that we had our priorities right.
  19. 21 minutes, my last in was WEEP and I saw the wordplay and figured it had to have a meaning in the other direction. I had the advantage of there being a GREEN MAN brewery in town, so I knew the symbol, that and the enumeration was enough to make me feel good about that. Tricky start to the week
  20. 30 minutes – put the struggle down to a combination of no sleep and laryngitis so pleased I wasn’t the only one having trouble.

    No mistakes, but WEEP was a guess, and had NAPPIE for the blanket for a while. An excellent puzzle, nonetheless.

    Oli

  21. Hard work this, but fair: shows they can still do witty and original, without unreasonably foreign or obscure words.
    Had no trouble with greet/wee; indeed, was surprised to find such a user-friendly item.
    And: I’ve read that the usual adjectival form was ‘scots’, which was heard by sassenachs as ‘scotch’ (think Sean Connery), provoking outrage north of the border.
    1. The Mandarin ideograms read “Road is people walk out come” I think it means “roads are the results of where people walk”
      1. The translation that I prefer is: ‘Roads are made by people walking’. More loosely: You make your own path.
        cheers
    2. If only things were so simple and clear-cut …

      OED on etymology of “Scotch”:

      The three forms of the adj., Scotch, Scottish, Scots, are still current, with some difference in use, which, however, is somewhat unsettled. Down to the middle of the 16th c. the only form used in southern English was Scottish; but in the dialect of Scotland (and in that of the north of England in the 14th and 15th c.) the form was Scottis (cf. Inglis = English), subsequently contracted to Scots. So far as our quotations show, the contraction of Scottish into Scotch is not recorded before 1570 (in the compound Scotchman), though the colloquial pronunciation which it represents may well be much older; instances of Scotch cap, Scotch jig occur in 1591-99, but the adj. did not become common in literature until the second half of the 17th c. From that time until the 19th c. Scotch has been the prevailing form in England, though Scottish has always been in use as a more formal synonym. In Scotland, the authors who wrote in dialect (down to Ramsay and Fergusson early in the 18th c.) used Scots, while those who anglicized adopted the form Scottish. But before the end of the 18th c. Scotch had been adopted into the northern vernacular; it is used regularly by Burns, and subsequently by Scott; still later, it appears even in official language in the title of the ‘Scotch Education Office’. Since the mid 19th c. there has been in Scotland a growing tendency to discard this form altogether, Scottish, or less frequently Scots, being substituted. At the beginning of the 20th c., while in England Scotch was the ordinary colloquial word, the literary usage prefered Scottish in applications relating to the nation or the country at large or its institutions or characteristics. Thus it was usual to speak of ‘Scottish literature’, ‘Scottish history’, ‘the Scottish character’, ‘a Scottish lawyer’, ‘the Scottish border’. On the other hand, it would have sounded affected to say ‘a Scottish girl’, ‘a Scottish gardener.’ Although ‘the Scottish dialect’ is now the usual designation, it is seldom that Scottish is used as a n. instead of Scotch. Recent usage favours Scots in ‘Scots law’, and it is now almost universal in historical references to money, as ‘a pound Scots’.
      In the 20th c. the word Scotch has been falling into disuse in England as well as in Scotland, out of deference to the Scotsman’s supposed dislike of it; except for certain fixed collocations, (such as ‘Scotch mist’, ‘Scotch whisky’) Scottish (less frequently Scots) is now the usual adjective, and to designate the inhabitants of Scotland the pl. n. Scots is preferred (see Gowers/Fowler Mod. Eng. Usage (1965)).]

      Robert Burchfield in the “New Fowler” passes on a report that “for working class Scots the common form has long been Scotch … and the native form Scots is sometimes regarded as an Anglicized affectation.

      1. Thanks for the amplification Pete. I wrote ‘I’ve read that …’ to indicate that I didn’t necessarily believe the story; etymology is not generally as easy as that.
        And you may be interested to know that when I had Greek students in my phonetics classes, they often mistook my [s] for ‘sh’.
  22. Thank you kororareka for an excellent blog of a very good puzzle.
    Cleopatra was my favourite and the Green Man did give me trouble.
  23. 18 minutes or so online and also briefly considered SCOTCHMAN although as a good Scotsman I knew he had been an exciseman and should be ashamed that I entertained the first possibility.My last in was GAME WARDEN and like some of you I has actually put in GATE but realised this wasn’t right before submitting.
    Took a while to get PONCHO as well – I am definitely a bit slow on the uptake where hidden words are concerned.
    Good puzzle to start the week
  24. As always, it was a relief to read the blog and comments and find that it wasn’t just me who struggled. Cleopatra, intend, decadence all went in without my understanding why; blessings on thee, blogger. I actually came up with ‘decadence’ fairly early on, but couldn’t figure out what ‘decaden’ could mean!
  25. Thought my time of around 80 minutes was hopeless until I came here. Thanks for pointing out the “significance of green”. I’d just assumed that the Congo was full of green slime.
    Took a long time to see CHARDONNAY, even with all the checkers, but it works beautifully.
  26. Count me among those who struggled long and hard with this. I certainly didn’t know the Scottish stuff. My problems came mostly in the SW, where I didn’t know of the GREEN MAN, and misread the the ‘sign of the cross’ reference there as someone being angry. I had also misread the enumeration of 13D as (6,4) instead of the clearly printed (4,6) so I was all over the map with that. I put this down after an hour and when I returned I saw the enumeration correctly, slapped my head and put in GAME WARDEN immediately (never heard of a gate warden), and guessed at the GREEN MAN. Great puzzle altogether, esp. CHARDONNAY as others have said, but also PONCHO and the clever ABBE. Well done setter, and thanks to Koro for adding some color to the blog. Regards.
    1. It may relieve you to know that I had never heard of a gate warden either and wasn’t entirely happy with it as an answer, but what else could it be? ( Apart from game warden, of course.) This was the sort of puzzle where you felt that any letter in a box was better than no letter at all.
  27. Struggled through an hour and a half to finish this unaided, but with a wrong guess at 22d – GALED… Thought this was a very good, inventive puzzle, though I wouldn’t have the stamina for one of these every day. COD 5d.
  28. Tough!? Wasn’t there a time when Monday puzzles were supposed to be comparatively easy. SACRED COW and WATT took me ages, and I havered over GREEN MAN. A very clever puzzle though.
  29. Very late comment, as usual, but I only just finished this morning, guessing much of the sw corner. But only one answer wrong: LATTE instead of LATHE, and I didn’t understand the wordplay until reading the blog (even thought this was the deliberately omitted entry!). COD to CONGO for “significance of green”, but a superb and quite difficult puzzle elsewhere as well. (Gelid eels indeed!)
  30. Didn’t manage to get around to this until Tuesday morning. Had to leave a congratulation to both setter and K the blogger for a first class effort. About 35 minutes to solve and enjoyed every minute of it.
  31. Only finished this morning early, and I mean early, as up at 3.45am to catch the 5.55am ferry.. when sailing blissfully across the beautiful channel, all eventually became clear.

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