Times 25122: More from the Spanish Embajador

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 32:55

About the same as yesterday’s puzzle: medium difficulty with a few giveaways to help us along. Thankfully, these were in most of the short answers and the anagrams.

Also glad not to see a comp. puzzle on the site this morning. Seems like these have become Jerry’s bailiwick.

Across
 1 FIRM UP. FIR (tree); M (maiden); UP (on a horse).
 5 ENFILADE. Anagram: and I feel. Watch out for the second meaning: “a suite of rooms with doorways in line with each other”.
 9 MAN(CHE)GO. ‘Half of which’=CHE{ese}. Never heard of this one despite catching a few episodes of Cheese Slices. Needless to say, it’s Spanish!
10 Omitted. ¿El muy puerco?
11 LIFE JACKET. A pun-ish cryptic def. Herself gave her name to such, originally issued to WW2 pilots. I quote: “ORIGIN 1940s: from the name of the U.S. movie actress Mae West, noted for her large bust”. See 30ac the other weekend.
13 NADA. Our in-clue-sive for the day. Spanish for No tengo salchichas. One for Goon Show fans.
14 WASH. Two meanings. The first a trail of disturbed water or air.
15 DIVER,GEN,C,E.
18 CYBERSPACE. Anagram: spy+Rebecca.
20 FAST. Two meanings.
21 BLOC{k}.
23 E,MISS,ARIES. The E from ‘EntrancE’ where you can take your pick of sides.
25 EG,ERIA. My other unknown. EG; rev of AIRE (Yorks river). Any woman adviser or counsellor. “After Egeria, Roman nymph or goddess and adviser to Numa Pompilius, a legendary Roman king”.
26 WEDG{e},WOOD. Anyone passing through Port Sunlight (Wirral) can see a fabulous collection of the stuff in the Lady Lever Gallery. If you can beat off the Americans who seem to be the only visitors.
28 FLAT SPIN. Also: ‘flats pin’ (pads + secure).
29 MAY,HEM. MAY (blossom); {deari}E inside HM.
Down
 2 IMAGINARY. {d}IARY (journal not the first), including MAGI (travellers) + N (closing letter of ‘LondoN’). Note to self: don’t get fooled by ‘close to’ ever again.
 3 Omitted for purposes of theatrical decorum.
 4 PIE. {co}P{se}, IE (that is).
 5 E-BOOK. KOBE inc O{ld}, reversed.
 6 FOR ST(ART)ERS. {E.M.} Forster’s the novelist. Good to see ‘at first’ as the literal for a change.
 7 LAC(UNA)E.
 8 DRUID. DR+{q}UID.
12 AIDES-DE-CAMP. DECAMP (leave) after A + IDES (= a day falling roughly in the middle of the month).
16 VIA{l}. Lift and separate between ‘quite’ and ‘through’.
17 CASSEROLE. Verb. Another anagram.
19 EXCE(R)PT.
20 FARAWAY. Cf FaraDay.
22 LEGAL. LEG (supporter) + A{rsena}L. The capital-A implies that Arsenal might be a football team. I find this hard to believe.
24 IOW,AN. The Isle of Wight, IOW (where music festival is).
27 DAM. Obvious enough?

36 comments on “Times 25122: More from the Spanish Embajador”

  1. Much easier for me than yesterday’s, with the unknown ENFILADE last in after defying my attempts to anagrammatise it since the outset. (The sound-alike and sense-alike fusillade is unrelated, I note.) Unfamiliars today were EGERIA and MANCHEGO.

    EMISSARIES and FOR STARTERS were good, but my COD goes to FLAT SPIN, which would have been even better, if devilish, without the enumeration.

  2. More like par for me today – got through about 22/31 clues – especially Imaginary and Emissaries after some hand-to-hand combat with the word play. No shame for me in missing Egeria and Flat spin – have not been around usage of either. Should have looked up Yorkshire rivers though. Nice old school defs lend a nice punch for modern words like e-book and cyberspace.
  3. ‘The capital-A implies that Arsenal might be a football team. I find this hard to believe.’

    Still smarting from 1989, eh?

      1. Interesting – never knew of this “theorising”. I got up to watch the game at 3am in Hong Kong as a neutral. (Okay – not quite neutral, as a Manchester fan.) Just a few weeks earlier, I’d seen the scenes unfold from Sheffield for half an hour or so after the match was abandoned, as the feed that Hong Kong was taking continued to run. Harrowing, indeed.
  4. 46 minutes, still with gaps in all quarters at 35 minutes in.

    I eventually dredged up EGERIA from somewhere but I had never heard of ENFILADE or NADA, nor of MANCHEGA, my last in, despite being a cheese fanatic. Fortunately the wordplay enabled me to complete the grid with some certainty despite these gaps in my knowledge. Another very enjoyable puzzle.

  5. Ah, that Egeria.. never heard of her, but put it in happily enough on the wordplay. Otherwise I found this significantly easier than yesterday, which seemed to take forever to finish.
    Happy, happy memories of the 1969 and 1970 IoW festivals.. to this very day, I can still remember just how bl**dy hard the ground was to sit on
  6. Like others the cheese and the lady from wordplay but an otherwise uneventful 20 minutes. A scrupulously fair puzzle which I suspect will not generate much discussion (strange football games excepted)
  7. Defeated by EGERIA and NADA (imagination led me astray here by reports of John Quincy Adams skinny-dipping in the Potomac).
  8. 19 minutes, so quite a bit less tricky than yesterday’s. Not helped much by the entirely plausible TAILSPIN at 28, (pad: to track by footprints) with the only query being that it’s usually one word.
    Cheese and lady from wordplay and memory dredge, and a mild query about FIRM UP, which I would have thought is part of the process before settling, but what do I know?
    Don’t know why CYBERSPACE took so long, because even though I was looking for -SCAPE, the remaining letters were a giveaway.
    Not much standing out as a CoD: perhaps FARAWAY, or AIDES DE CAMP for that date in Rome device.
    1. This appeared in a recent promotional email from a law firm in Hong Kong (MayerBrownJSM) who should know better:

      ‘If you are interested in applying for a new gTLD, you must firm up your mind within the next few days.’

      Nasty expression, like heads up and no-brainer.

  9. I breezed through this in about 15 minutes, but then came to a halt at 25ac. I realised that I was looking for a word I didn’t know to fit EG_R_A and a Yorkshire river to fit A_R_. My crowded train was coming in to Waterloo so I thought “sod it, I don’t know the name of any Yorkshire rivers so I’m never going to get this” and gave up. I reckon a couple more minutes reflection would have got me there via Airedale.
    I’m surprised so few people have come across MANCHEGO. In my world it’s positively commonplace. Just goes to show, one man’s whatsit is another’s, you know, thing.
  10. Just over 16 minutes – I had 25a from the wordplay but needed to check ‘she’ existed.
  11. Manchego is not A cheese, but the spanish word for cheese. Is that fair. Tasteless crud as well.
    1. If by “fair” you mean “wrong” then yes it’s fair. The Spanish word for cheese is queso. Manchego is a cheese. If you think it’s tasteless crud you need to change supplier!
  12. 28/31 today with Enfilade, Manchego and Lacunae missing. All three were unknown words to me, but I was pleased to get the fourth (Egeria).

    Good to see “modern” words like Cyberspace and E-book in the grid. I got a Kindle for Christmas and haven’t opened a paperback since!

  13. 22 minutes, having set myself a time limit of 20 minutes. Maybe I should do that more often. I didn’t know the cheese, the female adviser or the enfilade, but wasn’t going to let that stand in my way. Blossom Dearie was a nice surprise but COD to to all the Michaels FARAWAY
    1. Just remembered that Blossom Dearie made an appearance. Much missed (she died on my 65th birthday, which was a bit sad). I’m particularly fond of her rendition of “The Ballad of the Shape of Things”, but there’s no sign of it on YouTube so I’ve reminded myself of her here.
      1. Thanks for the link, Tony. The “Shape of Things” was one of my favourites, too, along with “Pro Musica Antiqua”. Where are all the songs you could laugh along with gone?
  14. Glad that I read the paper before attempting the crossword, as there was something about the Isle of Wight festival on page 11. Without this I don’t think I would have understood the reference in 24.

    A similar coincidence occurred on Saturday when, having appeared in an obituary, the name of a country house came to mind straight away, as did the answer to another clue.

    Tried some Manchego a few weeks ago, but neither my guests nor I were much taken with it. The Chaumes, on the other hand, disappeared from the cheeseboard as though it had been attacked by gannets!

    About 30 minutes.

  15. 22/31. Would have been 23 if I had properly put down MANCHEGO which I actually considered but didn’t put down because I had never heard of it (silly mistake). Probably could have got a few more but got frustrated with the blanks on the west side of the grid.

    Edited at 2012-03-28 04:10 pm (UTC)

  16. Going well until Marchero at the end. Don’t know why I couldn’t spot the mango. I seem to have a boss-shot mentality at the last. Flat spin and mayhem at the last fence. Maybe doing crosswords is telling me something deep about myself.
  17. Struggled massively with this one (much, much harder than yesterday’s), but always thought I’d finish it, and I did…but with one wrong: I had ‘path’ for WASH, although ’twas no great surprise to find it incorrect.

    Top left took the longest. I wanted to fit RAC into 2dn for the longest time, and I could only get FIRM UP once I’d seen the light with 2dn.

    EGERIA was the only unknown, but gettable.

  18. Got sidetracked trying to work Bond(i)into the answer for spy and surfing connection! Otherwise fairly straightforward and very enjoyable. Manchego is a very nice cheese, especially when eaten with a quince paste! Felicity TT
  19. 37′, with 24d wrong; never thought of Wight, even though I know IOM=Man. I knew Egeria from ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’–Miss Prism misunderstands the Rev. Chasuble’s reference to her (‘But my name is Sophronia.’). I didn’t know FLAT SPIN in any sense, let alone the appropriate one, but guessed it from checkers.
  20. Drat – heading for first ever sub 20 minute completion when came to halt with Mae West and 14 a/c. Correctly guessed Life Jacket but not Wash. Lucky that all the more unusual words were familiar to me: Spanish wife meant nada and manchego were easy, my Yorkshire antecedents meant egeria was a safe guess and as a lawyer and Latin A level student (in the dim and distant past) I know all about lacunae. No obscure plants or science which usually catch me out! Apologies for anonymity. J Calverley
  21. About 35 minutes or so, ending with WASH and EGERIA, the last from a guess at wordplay only, since my knowledge of Yorkshire rivers isn’t good. It also took me a long time to cotton on to the ‘wake’ aspect of WASH, which seemed tentative. I am one of those who think that MANCHEGO is a good chese, and like Kevin above I didn’t really understand FLAT SPIN but was able to guess at the probable meaning. Regards. Nicely crafted puzzle.
  22. 9:02 for me – so either this was significantly easier than yesterday’s or I’m a lot less tired. (Probably a combination of the two.)

    I’d have been faster if I hadn’t tried to make an anagram out of “skill at first” for 6dn (doh! not even the right number of letters) and read 17dn as “Cork needs cereals so badly” (despite the weak surface reading).

    EGERIA used to turn up pretty regularly 30 or 40 years ago, so no problem with her. And for once I’d heard of the foodie MANCHEGO, though I don’t think I’ve ever eaten it.

    Nice puzzle.

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