Times 25050: Clothed in crinoline / Of smoky burgundy

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
No solving time recorded: but more or less forever.

Struggled with this after a horrid spell of neuralgia early in the morning led me to take CNS-numbing medication. So it’s probably just me. Others may have found it easier. Also slightly distracted by a couple of great innings by Clarke and Ponting. And a bit of bacon saved by the anagrams.

Across
 1 ORGAN,DIE. Not a good one to start with. The Eid-Al-Adha and the Eid-Al-Fitr (etc.) are Islamic festivals.
 6 DON(AT)E. The def is ‘present’ (verb).
 9 Omitted for a minute/second.
10 FOR TWO PINS. Anagram: Profits now. Although the young chap (Stanley?) in Going Postal might have seen such things as a huge encouragement.
11 VANITY FAIR. ‘Excessive pride’ = VANITY. ‘Without prejudice’ = FAIR. Novel by Thackeray and a neat ref on the surface to one by Austen.
13 IR,ON.
14 A,DEL,AIDE. The DEL{ete} key; which is not marked in this abbreviated way on my keyboard at least. Is it on others?
16 VAL(IS)E. A short VALE{t}.
18 BR,ECHT. Yet another double literary clue. B{arnaby} R{udge} + ECHT (imported from the German).
20 NARGHILE. Anagram: Raleigh & N. Another word for the more familiar ‘hookah’. So: obscure. Especially when there’s the alt spelling: NARGILEH, which also fits.
22 {b}ALOO. More lit on the surface. Only knew this from the menu of the great Curry Club in Hilton (WA 6163).
24 RE,SENTMENT. Delete the middle-I from ‘sentIment’.
26 WALKS ON AIR. Two defs; one more figurative than the other.
28 LIED. Two defs; one German for ‘song’.
29 DOODLE. Went to town, riding on a pony; usw.
30 PIE CRUST. Anagram: puts rice.
Down
 2 R(AM-RAIDE)R. The included is an anagram: Madeira.
 3 ASOCIAL. A complex cryptic. Area-A. Take the light (LED) off ‘so-calLED’; plug 1 in = SOC1AL.
 4 DAFFY. Two defs. Reminds me of the joke about Mickey Mouse and his psychiatrist talking about his divorce from Minnie. “I didn’t say she was mad, I said she was ******* Goofy”.
 5 Omitted. Almost as plain as the nose on your face.
 6 DOWNRIVER. OWNER=one who has. Minus E. Included in DIVER. All Londoners should read the novel of the same name by Iain Sinclair.
 7 N(UP)TIAL. Initial letters of ‘Union Possibly’ in an anagram of LATIN. Def=‘of union’. Devil of a clue.
 8 TO(N)DO. A circular painting. Bugger to stretch on a canvas.
12 A,VE(R)NUS. Obscure word meaning the entrance to Hell; and an obscure meaning of Lucifer as Venus; the morning star, as opposed to the evening star. Google Frege.
15 INTERPOSE. Anagram: Simon Peter; after M (Mark) disappears.
17 SPLINTERS. Two defs; one a bit of a stretcher.
19 C(LOCKE)D. CD=album. Def=seen.
21 HUMB(L)ER. Hands up if you were looking for a cow.
23 L,LA(N)O. LAO (someone from Laos and parts of Thailand).
25 NURSE. Two defs.
27 A,PP.

35 comments on “Times 25050: Clothed in crinoline / Of smoky burgundy”

  1. 22:39 .. submitted with crossed fingers over NARGHILE.

    I’m using my Daffy picture in tribute but with some trepidation after mctext’s wonderfully inappropriate Goofy joke (for which, thank you).

    Last in: DOWNRIVER

    Edited at 2012-01-04 03:27 am (UTC)

  2. Too tough for me even without neuralgia (although it gave me quite the headache) – all joking apart, I hope you feel better soon, McT – I needed aids at 1, 3 and 20 to finish. Some very good clues, I thought, with ticks against 3, the 6-es, 15, 19 and 26 (which vies for my COD with ASOCIAL).

    I’m I the only one who’s never heard of the expression ‘for two pins’?

      1. Googling this, the first thing I stumbled on was a silent (naturally) movie with this name made nearly 100 years ago starring a young, but presumably already fat, Oliver Hardy.
  3. I now don’t feel quite so bad about my performance on this one having read the blog (sorry about your neuralgia, mct) and even less so after finding that ulaca needed aids on the exact same three that I had to cheat on. 65 minutes in all, but without aids I might still have been working on it.

    Never heard of the festivals at 1ac, neither the word itself nor the Lucifer reference at 12dn, nor the hookah pipe in any of its various spellings.

    Having failed to spot it I was a bit dubious about solitary and asocial being the same thing but I gather the reference is to the classification of insects and other creatures rather than human behaviour and preferences.

    I don’t think it has occurred to me before today when I got stuck at 1ac that there are two fine fabrics that regularly crop up in crosswords, both starting with ORGAN (the other being ‘organza’). Apparently they are not connected in their origins.

    Both my computer keyboards have ‘Delete’ in full on the relevant key.

    Edited at 2012-01-04 06:33 am (UTC)

  4. Put me down as another who struggled around this one, eventually plumpling for the correct entries at NARGHILE, AVERNUS & ORGANDIE (cue the other Simon) with no echt understanding. Balloon for not believing ALOO could not possibly be a potato, despite eating it last night. ASOCIAL was novel but COD to DOWNRIVER for its “one who has less…”.
      1. Nah. I was alluding to Simon Peter of 15d. I think Paul would rank himself slightly higher.
  5. Superb today I thought even though I elected to go for nerghila instead of narghile which does, after all ring a bell. 31 min but one wrong so might as well be 31 hrs!
  6. 20 minutes and pretty chewy going, making demands on GK broad enough to encompass Disney, Indian cuisine, queens that aren’t Q or ER, Roman mythology, and Persian hookahs.
    NUPTIAL has a spelling which refuses to stick in the mind, and with both lower (cows?) and flower I elected to leave 21 until I had some helpful crossers.
    Though there are no real standouts for me in a bunch of quality clues, I’ll suggest INTERPOSE for CoD – workable without knowing the possible relationship between Simon Peter and Mark, but nice to have the additional atmosphere.
    Does 20 give scope for puns about Jewish wedding songs?
  7. This is in parts a puzzle that suits those of us who are addicted to bar crosswords. Many of the references and a couple of the clues would not be out of place in a Mephisto. So for example “eid” as a festival is known to us and the construction of ASOCIAL (I love “so-called light off”) is expected. 30 minutes to solve (I think Sotira’s time is excellent – do you dabble in bar crosswords Sotira?)

    I think “del” keys have gone out of fashion. Mine says “delete” (probably so there is no confusion as to its function)

    Hope you feel better soon McT

    1. I went through a barred phase, jimbo, (cue jokes about ‘What were you in for?’) and occasionally still do a Mephisto but I cut them out over concerns about sanity and just how much time and energy I was spending on crosswords when I should have been doing other things.

      I agree with topicaltim below that this was a bit of a wavelength puzzle; I was more or less tuned in.

  8. 42 minutes after a good start, but a diagonal NW-SE jagged ray proved resistant. Dabbled with the harp-playing solitary Aeolist for a while. A tester.
  9. An excellent challenge but I needed to cheat for NARGHILE and AVERNUS: neither resided anywhere in the depths of my memory and so, despite ‘correctly’ working out the wordplay, nothing credible came to mind. COD to DOWNRIVER (although FOR TWO PINS proved remarkably elusive for such a simple anagram).

    This is the sort of crossword which, not so long ago, I would have abandoned with multiple blanks. So, a big thank you (and a happy New Year) to all bloggers and other contributors to TFTT who have done so much to improve my solving skills. Speedy recovery, mctext.

    Edited at 2012-01-04 10:08 am (UTC)

    1. Agree on all counts, also never heard of Daffy meaning crazy although was obvious from the cartoon duck. Toughest one for a while and I didn’t get AVERNUS. CoD for me was splinters, it brought a smile.
  10. DNF.
    I had all but 5 clues done after about 15 minutes, and gave up when I hadn’t made further progress about half an hour later. This is my worst failure for well over a year.
    Two of these clues (ORGANDIE and AVERNUS) rely on double obscurities where if you don’t know either you haven’t got much chance. NARGHILE is an obscure word clued in such a way that if you don’t know it you can’t reliably put in the answer (my best guess was NERGHILA). This sort of thing is fine (indeed welcome) in a Mephisto but not in the daily puzzle in my book. So I for one hated this puzzle I’m afraid.
    The other clues I didn’t get were ADELAIDE and ASOCIAL. Nothing wrong with either clue but I didn’t know the former as a queen (or rather had forgotten, I’m sure it’s come up before), and the latter was too tricky without more checkers. Very good clue though, I’ll admit through my grump.
    Get well soon mctext.
  11. 13:25 which backs up my feeling that I was right in tune with today’s setter. (I would like to suggest to the Crossword Editor that this person should definitely be given more work, especially when it comes to next year’s Competition. Thank you.)

    As Jimbo suggests, this teetered on the edge of barred crossword territory without quite falling in: several not especially common words which I remembered pretty much entirely from previous solves. A quick search reveals we’ve had NARGHILE (23,519), LLANO (24,876), AVERNUS (23,921) and TONDO (24,681) on the daily blog before, not necessarily recently, but all certainly within living memory*.

    *not that the previous appearance of a word guarantees I will remember it in future, of course.

    1. Yes, but it’s not so much that a word is unfamiliar but how it’s clued. As keriothe has pointed out there are candidates for double obscurities in this puzzle where there’s no easy way in if you don’t happen to know the word.

      When NARGHILE came up last time the unchecked letters were the same as today N?R?H?L? but the wordplay was more helpful – A River Gallons gusH finally, inside another (NILE) and this leads quite logically to the solution. The previous clue to AVERNUS was not a lot more helpful than today’s.

      Edited at 2012-01-04 01:02 pm (UTC)

  12. I needed aids to finish for AVERNUS, and to confirm the pipe. I also had to confirm that RAM RAIDER and FOR TWO PINS existed, because each was new to me, and because my answers had that ‘plausible, but never heard of it’ look. I also didn’t know of the festivals or the ALOO potato. So if I had a time, it would be very long, over the hour. COD to the simple and succinct APP. Regards.
  13. Needed three bites to finish this off, so count me on the “not on the wavelength” club, but everything did fit at the end and it was AVERNUS that was the last to fall.
  14. I was greatly helped on this crossword by my living among Bangladeshi neighbours and by having at least 8 Bangla (ie “Indian”) restaurants within a few hundred yards of my front door. As a result, EID was the first festival that came to mind and ALOO is almost as familiar as “potato”. The joys of multiculturalism! AVERNUS and NARGHILE were last in. I knew both words but they didn’t immediately spring to mind. 30 minutes
  15. I thought this hard.. glad I didn’t have to blog it, MC! Avernus & narghile took time to find and imho are on the verge of being too obscure for a daily cryptic.. still, I did get there in the end so no complaints
  16. 11:48 here for a most enjoyable puzzle. My compliments to the setter.

    No real problems apart from the odd senior moment, as with AVERNUS.

    Certainly no problem with EID in multi-cultural Ealing; and in any case it’s come up before as the answer to a down clue in No. 23,818 (24 January 2008): “Be very keen to get up for festival (3)”.

    Edited at 2012-01-04 11:00 pm (UTC)

  17. 63 strenuous minutes, and I couldn’t get ORGANDIE. I also couldn’t figure out why ADELAIDE (my keyboard also says ‘delete’), ASOCIAL, AVERNUS (which was one of my first in: ‘underworld entrance’ was a giveaway for me, only I couldn’t see how it worked). Thanks for the blog, Mctext–a true work of supererogation under the circumstances–and I hope you’re better.
  18. My keyboard has one key labelled DELETE and another labelled DEL (on the numeric pad, for use when ‘number lock’ is OFF).

    DEL is often used in manuals which might for example refer to the CTRL + ALT + DEL combination.

    No problems with the crossword. I seem to take at least twice as long as anyone else admits to, but I get there in the end.

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