Times 25030 – Up in Xanadu, diamonds fell like rain…..

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 22 minutes

Music: Dvorak, New World Symphony, Horenstein/RPO

A rather simple puzzle that should result in some fast times among our crew. There is virtually no attempt to conceal the literals, making it possible to solve most of the puzzle while not bothering with the cryptics.

Nevertheless, beginners who don’t have the experience we do might struggle in places. I read ‘Oxford producer’ and put in ‘shoemaker’ almost without thinking, but my thought process has been shaped by years of solving.

I was not very quick off the mark, reading through most of the clues before putting in an answer that seemed obvious. However, once I got going, I really rolled through the bottom half, but had to think just a bit for some of the top.

Across
1 WITHSTAND, WITH + STAND. I was half-expecting a member of the Havington tribe, but the real answer is much simpler.
5 LISTS, double definition, the first of which was not immediately obvious to me. Then I thought of heraldry and decided to check the OED. Sure enough, the first meaning of ‘list’ (sub 3) is ‘border’, and it became a heraldic term. The ‘scene of combat’ meaning comes from the two borders on a strip of cloth, applied metaphorically to a combat arena. The whole entry is well worth reading..
9 LET UP, [mode]L + [g]ET-UP.
10 AFRIKANER, A + FRI + KANE + R, as in Citizen Kane.
11 FULCRUM, FUL[l] C(RU)M, the centimeter being the measure. I had considered this, but dismissed it because FULCM didn’t seem to be anything – so lift and separate!
12 BONGOES, NOB backwards + GOES. I had thought of bongos, but dismissed it because it didn’t fit, only to have to go for a variant spelling.
13 WINDOW DRESSING, double definition, or charade plus definition, depending on how you look at these things.
17 TREAD THE BOARDS. T(RE AD THE BOARD)S, where TS is ST backwards. I put this in from the definition, and it took me a while to figure out the cryptic for the blog.
21 ENHANCE, E + N + anagram of HE CAN. Take your pick of E, N, S, and W in this type of clue.
23 RUM BABA, RUMBA + BA.
25 CURLPAPER, CUR (L) PAPER. I’d imagine they wouldn’t sell any if they really called it the Cur Paper, so better lift and separate.
26 KUDOS, K(U D[on])OS. This Greek word is singular, and has no plural. It is often found at the end of a Homeric line in ‘mega kudos Akhaion’, which conveniently scans u u | — u u | — –, and thus is suitable as an appositional phrase following the caesura. The first syllable is long because there is a digamma; Homer would have said ‘kudwos’.
27 WRYLY, sounds like RILEY, who was famous for leading the life of Riley.
28 SAMARITAN, AS backwards + MARI(T)AN.
 
Down
1 WILDFOWL, WILD + sounds like FOUL. I wonder if they ever clued ‘wildfowler’ an an irate grammarian?
2 TOTAL, TO(TA)L, that is, TA inside LOT upside down. That’s the whole deal, that’s the whole lot, perhaps, or maybe deal is a verb, and to ‘lot out’ is to separate into parcels.
3 SUPERNOVA, anagram of PROVE A SUN, my first in. There were very few anagrams in this puzzle, and I usually use them to get started.
4 ALARMED, AL [Capone] ARMED. He always was, as far as I know.
5 DURABLE, DU + RAB[b]LE. My last in, I was afraid it was going to be an obscure literary character, but little danger of that in this puzzle…..although you never know, we’ve had some rather strange words in easy puzzles before.
6 LIKEN, L[iberal] + 1 KEN. These random-name clues are not found in top-quality puzzles, where everything locks in with Ximenean precision.
7 SUNDOWNER, SUN (D) OWNER. Oops, a reference to a living person, albeit one who won’t sue.
8 STRESS, S[lope] + TRESS.
14 NORTHERLY, NORTH + E(R)LY, where Ely is usually a see, but not today.
15 SHOEMAKER, S(anagram of HOME)AKE + R.
16 ASSASSIN, ASS + ASS + IN, where John Wilkes Booth is but feebly disguised.
18 THESPIS, THES(P[rominent])IS. The semi-legendary Thespis appears to have been primarily known as an actor, although he did write plays.
19 Omitted, look for it!
20 SEA COW, S(EA)COW.
22 NIPPY, PIN backwards + P[ark]Y. We heard some objections last week to the actual word used in the answer being in the clue. This can be a double deception in a hard puzzle, but in an easy puzzle, it turns out to be very easy indeed.
24 AUDIT, A(U)DIT.

34 comments on “Times 25030 – Up in Xanadu, diamonds fell like rain…..”

  1. Similar experience: easy bottom, harder top. The only unknown was the obscurer meaning of “list” (6ac) and when I looked it up, I didn’t find anything heraldic; just this in NOAD:
    a selvage of a piece of fabric. [ORIGIN: Middle English, from Old English liste [border] of Germanic origin; related to Dutch lijst and German Leiste.]
    So, if just the selvage, then a cloth-making term?

    (I hope later posters will refrain from mentioning the test match which has just concluded as I write.)

    Edited at 2011-12-12 08:43 am (UTC)

  2. 40 minutes for this enjoyable puzzle with stings in both the SW and, especially, the NE corners. Dredging up ‘scow’ from that not overly large part of my memory containing the names of exotic boats opened up that section, while LISTS was the key to the other end of the diagonal after LIKEN had fallen, despite having no clue as to the connection between ‘list’ and ‘border’.

    I had ‘drabble’ for a while at 5dn before I read the clue correctly and the penny dropped. Last in BONGOES when I clicked to the ‘retires’ = ‘goes’ meaning, at which point my resistance to the unusual plural was overcome.

      1. I clearly need to repair to the pub at lunchtime. Or should I just retire from this whole attempting to make lucid comments business?
  3. DNF. I finished it all in about 20mins except for 6ac. I assumed it was a cryptic definition and stared at L_S_S for a while and simply could not see any word which could possibly fit the answer. From the explanation above its seems bizarrely out of place.
    1. I was lucky with this, as I’ve just been rewatching old episodes of Not the Nine O’Clock News on YouTube, and one of the sketches has Griff Rhys-Jones as an insufferably twee version of Robert Robinson introducing Ask The Family.

      ‘Into the lists against them go the Smaughtarse family of Croydon: Mr Smaughtarse, who is a Quantity Surveyor, Mrs. Smaughtarse, who is a Quantity …’

      1. Yes, it was definitely a case of Ask the (upper middle class) Family wasn’t it? I do miss Robert Robinson’s quaint and studied verbal style though, so redolent of an era bygone at least 30 years prior to the time in which he was presenting.
        1. Oh for RR’s Call my Bluff, not to mention Joseph Cooper’s dummy keyboard and even Robin Ray’s smugness on Face the Music, in these days of the Cowellisation of television!
          1. Heartily endorse these comments! Relics of a literate society. But don’t want to come across as a whinger. Have just been doing the pub quiz at my local with gay friends and black friends. I don’t think any of them would look back to the 60s and 70s with any affection. We live in a pretty good age!
  4. 26 minutes including a pure guess for my last in, LISTS at 6ac, where I didn’t know either of the meanings. I haven’t found anything about heraldry in any of the usual sources but rather surprisingly (to me) SOED has ‘border’ as the very first definition of ‘list’ as a noun.

    Nobody has yet commented on ‘magazine’ = PAPER at 25ac so I’m wondering if it’s only me that finds it a bit dodgy.

  5. 13 minutes for this. Straightforward and, as vinyl1 points out, lots that could be got easily from definition.
    CURLPAPER and THESPIS were new to me but easily gettable from wordplay. ADIT is now familiar crosswordese.
    Like others I didn’t know the more obscure meaning of LISTS.
    Gentle Monday morning fare.
  6. Similar experience to Keriothe in every way, except that my time was (significantly) longer, and Mr Booth was also an unknown to me.
  7. An easy run though jammed at the end on the borders meaning of lists and went on the tournament alone. Bongoes an unappealing term; a few over-forced constructions as well perhaps. 19 minutes.
  8. 18 gentle minutes, probably a bit longer than it should have been, though I think this was a step or two above a Monday Easy. NE was last in, more because this was a straightforward anticlockwise solve, but I only had one of the lists on my list of lists.
    I echo jackkt on magazine=PAPER, but it’ll have to do for now.
    CoD to DURABLE for steering us unto the quagmire of half-remembered denizens of Wessex, special mention to AFRIKANER for its use of “citizen”.
  9. Sready 24 mins. Must confess I thought ‘lists’ referred to the order of play in a jousting contest but maybe this is not after all the case. Also I though Afrikaner had a double a? No dictionary to hand so unable to verify. In any case I thought the latter a jolly good clue.
  10. 23:20, my first onine solve for over a week so my fingers must have been rusty. NE corner put up the most resistance.

    Lucky guess at lists, like others the poet and the hairdresser’s consumables from wordplay.

    Like Jack I was a bit put off by magazine/paper and at one point considered the rather violent sounding curlpunch.

    Re random names Vinyl, I think they’re common enough in answers, just not in clues.

  11. 32:50 with one mistake. Went through most of it quite quickly but came acropper on 6a. I stared at it for a good 5 minutes before giving up and throwing in LOSES. It probably just summed up my thoughts at the time!
    I didn’t know either of these meanings of LIST, so I was never going to get it except by guessing.
  12. A sluggish 43 minutes here after a fast start. CURLPAPER slowed me down considerably and I needed it before I could rule out Thepsis, having failed to make the link to Thespian.

    But I quite enjoyed SUNDOWNER for the press magnate gag and the misdirection caused by ‘drink after work’, which sounds like standard cryptic fare.

  13. Paper as magazine, I feel is a stretch. Is there a solver who has the time and the inclination to prove or disprove the definition? Lists meaning borders was interesting. Like others I got the answer from the reference to combat—could only be that from the down checkers. “Wryly” for me had wit. Completed in 46 minutes.

    Enigma

    1. Enigma, I’ve had another look at it and I can’t find anything in Collins, Chambers, COED, SOED or OED to justify magazine = paper.
  14. PAPER is the title of a New York based glossy magazine. Could this be what the setter was thinking of?
  15. 19:31 .. with various distractions, including a cat fight (with actual cats – I wasn’t involved) but I still found this distinctly tricky in places.

    The NE was a total blank for a while until I realised i had overlooked the one pretty straightforward clue there – SUPERNOVA. That seems to happen a lot. Is it just me? Perhaps it’s a consequence of a less than methodical approach to solving.

    Last in: CURLPAPER

  16. 23 minutes here of which 5 spent on 7 down which I had as starting N-N after having LINES for 6 ac. However penny dropped after some head scratching before reading the clue more slowly. COD to DURABLE for me which had me for a minute or two wandering in the leafy lanes of Hardy’s Wessex!
  17. A gentle Monday exercise with unknown (CURLPAPER) guessable (or gettable) from wordplay. I too would have spelt AFRIKANER with a double A – but my online OED doesn’t like this, even as an alternative; it’s content however with Afrikaans (as a language). Similarly, I too associate LISTS (in this context) with, inter alia, jousting.
  18. Very easy 15 minute stroll without breaking sweat

    I think you’re making a bit of a meal out of LISTS. They were the place where jousts took place

  19. I took longer over this than I should have done, struggling a bit with 5dn where I was convinced the LE was “the french” bit and hardy the novelist.. 1ac took ages to arrive too. But no trouble with lists, which has appeared several times before, including only a week or two back (but in a T2 jumbo I think, not certain) in its combat guise.
    1. 48dn in Jumbo 954 (3 December): “Tips for field of combat (5)”. (The solution hasn’t yet been published, but I imagine anyone who’s been struggling with this particular clue will have cottoned on to the answer by the time they’ve read this far.)
  21. Not much of a sweat today, about 15 minutes, ending with AFRIKANER/LIKEN. COD to the citizen. Didn’t know the border meaning of LISTS, so it went in on the combat meaning alone. Not much else to say. Regards to all.
  22. 9:13 today so pretty straightforward. If you were of the demographic who use curlpapers, you might well refer to a magazine as a paper.
  23. 8:20 after a horribly slow start in which LISTS was my only answer from the first seven clues I read (the first six acrosses + 1dn). But then I suddenly picked up a little speed and filled in the top half quite quickly, after which I plodded through the bottom half and was relieved to come home in under 10 minutes.

    I agree that this puzzle ought to produce some fast times, but the fast brigade seem to be maintaining a low profile.

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