Times 25401 – Give Me That Old-time Religion

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

After a weekend of fine geographically-orientated puzzles (Tim Moorey’s excellent Sunday offering contains my clue of the month so far), a slightly trickier than usual Monday crossword, albeit one likely to generate less heat than last Monday’s, which I cunningly avoided by dint of celebrating the Lunar New Year in sunny Bangkok. Nice to see GK Chesterton get a mention. His books on Dickens are well worth dipping into – I’ll forgive him for rating Tale of Two Cities so highly. For those who are interested, Heretics is probably the best of his religious books. 43 minutes (for 32 clues too, the last of which I’m uncertain of, so answers on a postcard, please).

Across

1 CA[TECHI(e)]SE – my last in, which seems very wrong of me as my daughter prepares for Confirmation, as I was slow onto TALIBAN, and then ignored the instruction to behead them, leaving me with a T at the beginning of 1ac. I cannot hear of IT guys without visions of Simon from The Office.
5 PIP+I[s]+T[asty]
9 LINKMEN – an angram of lenin+km
10 CALL OUT – [havo]C+ALL OUT – nice lift and separate clue.
11 BROWN – chocolate is the official colour of Surrey County Cricket Club, patronised by one of our best known lurkers; Father Brown was the clerical tec in Chesterton’s novels. 
13 AU NATUREL – can we call this an ‘in the altogether clue’, by analogy with an all in one?
14 NEIGHBOUR – beroughin* – a little more gentle religion. ‘Love Thy Neighbour’ will be known to those of a certain age as the name of a 70s’ TV sitcom which single-handedly attempted to reverse the tide of political correctness sweeping in from college campuses in the States. Me, I preferred ‘On The Buses’, my ‘I’ll get you Butler’ impression providing the centerpiece of many a soiree chez Ulacas.       
16 EASY – double definition.
18 BE[tt]ER – I was looking for a five-letter word for gambler beginning with B before I decided to take a punt on something longer.
19 PICK[ET]ING – ‘et’ (and) is the French joiner/conjunction.
22 ESTAMINET – [france]E + itsmeant*; a café and my only unknown (‘though I have a sneaky feeling we’ve had it before). ‘Back from France’ had me looking for a word beginning with De. 
24 L[ONE]R
25 S[KILL]ET    
26 R[AIM]ENT – hands up those who tried making anagrams out of wearand and tearand?
28 DATUM – T[h]U[g] in DAM.
29 NEW+S[H(orse)]OUND – two journalistic clues and nary a hack in sight. Well done, setter!

Down

1 CALIBAN – T is replaced by C in TALIBAN; ‘The Tempest’ is the Mephisto of Shakespeare’s plays for me – just don’t get it. Caliban is half-human, half-fish, or the son of a devil, depending on who you believe, which perhaps gives you some idea why.
2 omitted
3 COM[A+N+CH]E – now we’re back in 60s’ TV-land, where I learned all about Comanche, Apache and Sioux from hardcore historical programmes such as The Virginian (loved james Drury) and The High Chapparal.    
4 IONIA – take the R out of IRON and add 1 and A[bundance].
5 ECCENTRIC – Circe backwards around CENT; Circe jostles for cruciverbal enchantress eminence with Medea and siren. Watch out for The Tempest’s Prospero for a trickster on the spear side.
6 PEL[O]T[A] – bucket as in pour with rain; pelota is generally taken to refer to the Basque game typically played on what looks like a racquets court they run out of money building, but since it’s the Spanish word for ‘ball’, it can refer to a number of other games, including a pelota variant jai alai, which sometimes pops up.
7 PROCREATION – my COD, despite its gentle mocking of numbers of the faithful.
8 TOT+ALLY
12 OLIVER TWIST – I’m not big into Thos. from Dorsetshire and was worried I would be caught napping before common sense prevailed.
15 OR[PING]TON – it may be in the London borough of Bromley, but it will always be in Kent for me. Eric Lubbock’s by-election win here in 1962 was heralded as the beginning of the Liberal revival. 50 years on, …
17 WELL-NIGH – nice clue, ‘almost’ is the definition, WEIGH = consider, LL = fifty pounds and N = note.
18 BLE[SS]ED – the definition is ‘in heaven’, as in ‘made holy’, but there seems to be a little osmosis operating subliminally, as ‘saints in heaven’ might be considered blessed too. Well, at least before they’re canonised.
20 GYRATED – tragedy*.
21 EM[B(eneficia)L]EM – remember your ems, ens, dashes and hyphens.
23 omitted
27 EMU – reversal of Hume without the H, but why decapitate him and why ‘avoid’? Stick your head in the sand like an ostrich, perhaps?

43 comments on “Times 25401 – Give Me That Old-time Religion”

  1. Raced through the top, then faced all sorts of trouble in the derrière. (Lot of French going on today?) LOI was EMU: and I’m sure the clue has been truncated in the Club version. Should read something like “… avoid hard bird”? Anyone got the paper yet?
  2. 26:12 … Quite tricky stuff. I must have spent 5 minutes at the end pondering E_U before concluding, like vinyl1, that there must be something missing, like ‘home bird’. Either that or it’s just too cunning for me. It must be EMU as my submitted puzzle came back ‘oll korrect’.

    Some very nice stuff here, even if a glance at 1d made me a tad anxious!

    COD .. WELL-NIGH for the surface.

  4. I thought the idea of loving one’s neighbour was precisely that he need not be lovable. I, too, was puzzled by 27d, and assumed that the object Hume was avoiding begins with an H and was left out of the clue. The S___T would have led me to SKILLET soon enough, but it helped that ‘top’=kill was used recently to remind me. I had almost the identical experience as Vinyl with BLESSED. Chuckled at 7d, but my COD goes to 25ac.
    1. If lovable is taken in its meaning of deserving, rather than inspiring, love then I think it passes muster. Of course, the desert may be problematic to some, but our neighbours may be said to be deserving, in God’s eyes, just by being there. Where’s Chesterton when you need him?

      Edited at 2013-02-18 03:47 am (UTC)

      1. Well, if my neighbour deserves love, it’s not much of a commandment to tell me to love him. And if he doesn’t deserve love, he’s not lovable, and the clue doesn’t work.
        1. Surely the question mark refers only to “lovable person” making sense to me at least.
      2. Where he? Here perhaps: “We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour. Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain. He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts. That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one’s duty towards humanity, but one’s duty towards one’s neighbour.

        The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. That duty may be a hobby; it may even be a dissipation. We may work in the East End because we are peculiarly fitted to work in the East End, or because we think we are; we may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting. The most monstrous martyrdom, the most repulsive experience, may be the result of choice or a kind of taste….But we have to love our neighbour because he is there– a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us.”

  5. Loner is obviously correct but I wanted to put in liner as in “one liner” thus achieving a side splitting effect on the listener. On the other hand I agree that not all one liners are funny.
  6. I would have broken 30 minutes today but for time spent thinking about 27dn and going back to it over and again hoping for inspiration. In the end I identified the most likely reference by googling “Scottish philosophers” at which point I realised the clue simply had to be misprinted. It was always going to be EMU, ECU or EAU anyway.

    But I had otherwise got on very well with this puzzle with a slight stumble over 1ac where I thought of ‘catechism’ early on but didn’t actually know of CATECHISE so I needed the final checker before coming up with it.

    Buried deep in the wasteland of daytime TV last month was a new BBC 10-part series of ‘Father Brown’ stories starring Mark Williams as the eponymous hero. It was an absolute treat and worthy of a peak time slot on Sunday evenings so it’s a mystery why it was hidden away and given so little publicity. I trust it will be repeated more prominently before long and a second series commissioned.

    I wonder if the spelling at 13 will catch as many people as it did on its last outing.

    Edited at 2013-02-18 06:19 am (UTC)

    1. I watched the “Father Brown” series as well but I still prefer the books. I think the stories are too simple for TV. It was too easy to spot whodunnit and the English village setting limited the scope of the stories. What little credibility it had was spoilt for me by the fact that this Enlish village had a large and ancient Catholic church. Presumably the C of E had sold off the village church and there were enough Catholics in the village to buy it from them. Is there such a village in this country? On the other hand it was nice to look at and made a welcome change from “Cash in the Attic” and “Escape to the Country”. Ann
  7. Good puzzle, though unfortunately the incomplete clue for 27D led to me spending several minutes before deciding I didn’t know either the Scottish philosopher or a suitable word for avoid. It never crossed my trusting mind that the clue might have been truncated.
  8. If you are doing the puzzle on the new The Times app for iPad, you will have to deal not only with the incomplete clue but also with the addition of a foreign-style ‘a’ in various clues (22A, 24A,4D for example). TonyW
  9. Just over the half hour for this enjoyable Monday puzzle. ESTAMINET is one of those words that I learned from doing crosswords, along with “atelier” and “epergne”.

    Took me a while to understand the “French joiner”, though I think I might have met it before.

  10. 19.12. First one I’ve done for a while when fresh so glad to improve, and to the date of my father’s birth at that. In his old age I used to drive him and his wife up to or down from Glasgow/London occasionally and she and I would do the Times through storms with her reading out and filling in the clues and beating me to some of them, while he was convinced we were all sailing into the next life. Good to remember them both.
  11. 20 minutes, happy to be using the paper version, which I do except when there’s a prize – not that I’ve ever won. I thought this quite testing, but I may just be going through a slow phase. I simply couldn’t get going with Mephisto yesterday.
    Last in WELL NIGH, which took a good 3 minutes of my time and was a fine clue. But my favourite for the day was OLIVER TWIST for its collision of literary references, if Ollie counts, that is.
    I could start on whether pro-creation is necessarily anti-Darwin, but let’s keep that for another board.
    1. A definite improvement on the clue in No. 23765 of 22 November 2007: ‘Novel by Hardy with an unexpected turn of events’.
  12. Hmmm … bit misleading ‘somewhere in London’ for ORPINGTON, but easy enough to work out, as were the COMANCHE (LOI) at 3dn.

    Thought GYRATED a great anagram, but COD to WELL NIGH.

  13. 29m, but with a few minutes at the end pondering 27 before bunging in EMU on the basis of the reference to Hume.
    Quite tricky, but with very few unknowns. In fact my only unknowns were PIPIT and the fact that ORPINGTON is in London. Nice puzzle.
  14. Part of a clue missing, and submission failure which meant I had to retype the whole puzzle before finding out I must be right in assuming the missing bird? Were I a grumpy old man, my week would be off to a tremendous start.

    To give credit where it’s due, however, the puzzle as it left the setter was a nice one. As already noted, ESTAMINET comes up often enough not to be a complete unknown to most solvers; I also had to go a long way out from Charing Cross before I reached the required part of London, which I previously assumed was in Kent.

  15. A rare sub 20 for me at 18.16 which might have been even quicker but for a few minutes not seeing the two 6s. All of the rarer words were known for me and like Red rosé John I first encountered ESTAMINET in a Times Crossword in 1984 as very much a novice solver – I’d never managed to complete a puzzle on my own. The word sticks in my mind as it was the Maths HOD who supplied the answer much to my young English teacher’s chagrin. I did like 29a as I spent a good few seconds trying to find a homophone for horse with virgin as the answer. Neat misdirection!
  16. 15 minutes – held up by writing in a wrong letter at the end of one word so I couldn’t solve the down clue. Really must concentrate more – perhaps its the effect of all this unaccustomed sunshine
  17. Interesting that The Times’s peculiar spelling of Taleban doesn’t extend to this crossword where we are required to spell it like everyone else.

  18. I wasted at least 5 minutes on E*U before deciding that it had to refer to Hume, even though the cryptic made no sense. The rest had gone in fairly quickly (for me) although I didn’t see the “French joiner” until coming here. An enjoyable 24 minutes. Ann
  19. Can anyone help me. I am doing an old crossword and I can’t see if my final word is right if not. The clue is “loftiness of us city overthrown at start of play” (8) and I reckon it’s altitude, but can’t see why beyond LA reversed.
  20. About 15 minutes for all but the misprinted clue, then another 15 before, like others, throwing in EMU based on the Hume going up. Anonymous above, ‘latitude’ , I think, is ‘play’, with LA reversed at the front. Regards to all.
  21. All reasonably straightforward except of course for EMU. Luckily Hume was the only Scottish philosopher I could think of so stuck in EMU on a wing and a prayer, so to speak.

    Beautiful day here today in Dorset. Not a cloud in the sky and golf course no longer under water!

    1. Likewise crossword experience today, likewise sunny weather, 15 degrees but golf course here now sticky clay-mud and too soft to mow. La balle est plugée !
  22. Hi,

    Do you know if Crossword 25,400 answers will be published soon? It was in Saturday’s paper.

    Cheers,

    Dave

      1. Yes, it will published on Saturday 23rd and a blog will appear here on that day too.

        Many thanks!

  23. 8:29 here, for a nice straightforward Monday puzzle (in which the clue to 27ac seems to have been corrected by the time I got there).
    1. Nothing wrong with the clue. There’s a longstanding tradition of omitting a clue or two so that a) the Times crossword hotline earns a bob or two and b) less experienced solvers don’t get spoonfed every answer. Solution here is THREW, in case you are missing it.

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