Times 25419 – O Mary Don’t You Weep

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
A win for the setter today. Having safely negotiated my way to Scandinavia, I sadly disappeared without a trace over the North Sea, if you get my … meaning. Those who have not yet done Sunday’s crossword will find a very fine Tim Moorey puzzle waiting for them.

Across

1 WRONGDOER – dogowner* + R; the first of our clues with a religious theme.
6 RABBI[e] – the second.
9 ROSSINI – IN (cricket) in ROSS I[sland]; nice clue, as Gioachino – the Stephen King of his day – made a mint from his operas, retiring at 30-odd before making a comeback with his Petite Messe Solennelle, which is rather fun.
10 omitted
11 SOUND+P+ROOF
12 PIER – sounds like peer.
14 omitted
15 STAVANGER – VATS reversed + INCENSE (verb); nice clue. Took me time to decide where the a’s and e’s went – didn’t parse the clue initially, did I? – but even when I got it right, it still didn’t help me with my bete noire, 13dn.
16 ADVENTURE – VENT in A DURE[r]; Albrecht DURER was a woodcutter as well as painter, engraver and all-round Renaissance man.
18 DRIFT – having plumped in desperation for Mary Martin at 13, in even greater desperation I invented ‘yoist’ here. At least it’s in the Urban Dictionary…
20 [tot]ALLY
21 REST+HARROW – today’s plant.
25 CANT+E’EN
26 BITTE[R]N – I thought it was our bird of the day, but I thought wrong.
27 ELEMI – a resin in much demand from crossword-setters and new-agers; reverse hidden.
28 SPRINGILY – RING (group) + IL surrounded by SPY (agent).

Down

1 WORMS – the Diet (Assembly) at Worms (1521) was called to denounce Martin Luther as a heretic and emasculate the pesky Protestants, but things didn’t quite work out the way the powers-that-be anticipated.
2 OBSCURE – rather weak, I thought.
3 GRINDSTONE – cryptic defintion; ditto apologies to setter – my erstwhile ignorance of wines is matched by my ignorance of clue-making – and thanks to Keriothe: ‘hard work’ = GRIND, ‘pit’ = STONE, ‘nosing here’ the definition and a semi-&lit.
4 OSIER – Rosie with the r dropped.
5 RATIONALE – IONA in later*.
6 omitted
7 BOOMING – the distinctive call of the bass section of the heron family.
8 INTERPRET – n + prettier*; speedsters starting with the downs may well have written the first eight in without a break.
13 SAND MARTIN – our second bird, though more like an alto: IN + MART + AND + S[on] on their heads; sadly, not Mary Martin.
14 AVALANCHE – I will be one among several million who got this first and then went and chucked 17 in.
15 SAUTERNES – another partial anagram: usa + sent* around our first lady, Elizabeth Regina, God bless her.
17 VALANCE – ALAN in [do]V[er] + CE; screening over bed, window or wheel, depending on who you’re listening to.
19 ISRAELI – I + [I (one) + LEARS reversed].
22 TIBER
23 WINDY
24 LE[V]I – son of Jacob and Leah; the tribe descended from him got no land when the chosen people turfed out the Canaanites, but they got tithes instead, so they weren’t complaining.

37 comments on “Times 25419 – O Mary Don’t You Weep”

  1. All correct today for a middle of the night insomniac solve.

    Had billing at 7dn, with a ? until I got TOPCOAT. BOOMING was then my LOI. Missed the elegance of ROSS I at 9ac.

    COD to SAND MARTIN, when I eventually managed to work it out.

  2. 28 minutes after at one point thinking I was going to be unable to complete the SE without resort to aids, but suddenly it all fell into place. Unfamiliars were ELEMI, the bittern’s BOOM factor, the Antarctic territory and the plant, but I suspect I have met them all before.
  3. All plain sailing until the SW corner. The problem, as so often, was the darned plant. Felt sure it had something to do with a drill. Thought the double use of VALANCE was, ahem, a bit of a Liberty.
  4. Never mind the clue just stick in sauvignon! After all it’s got sort of King George VI and the USA …
    1. Not half as embarrassing as my attempt to impress my fiancee, now wife, by ordering a bottle of Sauternes for dinner when we were courting.
  5. 19m. This was a puzzle that I hope will have cemented some half-knowns in my memory: “mole” (which appeared recently), ELEMI, Ross Island, and RESTHARROW (which also appeared quite recently). I had no idea that bitterns can boom but that knowledge wasn’t really necessary.
    I think 3dn GRINDSTONE is more than just a CD. Hard work = GRIND, pit = STONE, “nosing here” the definition but with a reference to the rest of the clue for a kind of semi-&lit.
  6. 28 minutes, with RESTHARROW an unknown but guessed, and DRIFT and SAND MARTIN my LOI. Good Monday puzzle 4 / 10 on Moh’s scale for me.
  7. I also put in SAUVIGNON, but my singer was DEAN MARTIN. (That dates me, doesn’t it?) Managed to sort out the resulting mess and finish inside 25 minutes.

    SAUTERNES? Ah yes! I remember it well; along with Hirondelle, Blue Nun and those dreadful suits that were tight in all the wrong places.

    1. …Emits scandalised shudder… Chateau d’Yquem, a sauternes, is considered by many the finest wine made anywhere in the world. NOT to be mentioned in the same sentence as Blue Nun or Hirondelle!
      1. That clearly was not what was being served at the Indian restaurant near the Savoy cinema in Walsall, circa 1966.
  8. 13 minutes, and really rather fun, with some words – REST HARROW, OSIER and ELEMI I’ve only ever met in crosswordland, or in the case of the last, in really desperate games of Scrabble.
    Post-solve, I was pleased to find that my original VALENCE (corrected once the snowfall arrived) was not as wrong as all that, since Chambers gives both spellings. Not many (there are some) Alens around, though.
    13d had the air of originality about it: I can’t remember the device being used before, but it sat comfortably and immediately in the company of “proper” clues, and I’m sure it will be used again. My CoD.
  9. I think the blog is more interesting than the puzzle – an easy 20 minute meander along the estuary watching the sand martins and hearing the bitterns.

    The boom of a bittern, like the cry of the vixen, is something once heard never forgotten. And Sauternes is an excellent cooking wine!

    1. Sauternes can be one of the finest wines in the world. If you cooked with Chateau Yquem someone might just shoot you!
  10. An odd one, this. Hadn’t heard of the Diet of Worms, and also puzzled for a few minutes over the SAND MARTIN/DRIFT crossing. Conversely, the AVALANCHE/VALANCE and BOOMING/BITTERN connections essentially gave two free answers, and lifting OUR straight from the wordplay into the answer at 2D seemed a bit of a swizz.
  11. Even our history teacher couldn’t keep a straight face. The rest of us were convulsed. You may recall Test Paper IV set by Sellar and Yeatman in which we were asked to “estimate the medical prowess of the period with clinical reference to (a) Pride’s Purge, (b) the Diet of Worms and (c) the Topic of Capricorns.” 23 minutes.
    1. Remember it well. So much so that when I once had a day free on a visit to Mannheim, I made a point of taking the train to Worms – just to see the site of that hilarious Diet. There’s a very big church and a patch of grass on the site where Luther was arraigned. There’s also an imposing group of statuary commemorating the leading figures of the Reformation. I have a photo of me standing in front of it and looking a bit bewildered. Ann
  12. 28 minutes. Pretty easy on the whole, though I was stuck for a while at the end on 13 and 18. I also thought of DEAN MARTIN, but I already had STANVANGER early on (recollected from a North Sea crossing to Norway many years ago).
    The pluralisation of LEAR seemed a bit odd, but I guess it’s justifiable (the Lears of Hopkins, Schfield, etc).
  13. All correct today except for one pesky letter (I spelled Sand Martin as Sand Marten)! Steady solve throughout but NW proved stubborn where I ended with Worms, Rossini, Alert and FOI Grindstone. Didn’t understand the Worms or Rossini answers (I thought the area was the Ross Iceshelf not Ross island so couldn’t understand the second “i”) so thanks ulaca for explaining those two. Got the unknowns Elemi and Levi from the wordplay.

    I’m halfway through Sunday’s cryptic and look forward to finishing that tonight.

  14. 19:45 with the NW corner proving chewiest.

    Like Daniel above I didn’t know where the second I in Rossini was supposed to come from but I was fixated on the Ross Sea rather than the shelf.

    Durer, Elemi and Levi were far from familiar but I remembered restharrow from its last outing.

    Edited at 2013-03-11 12:55 pm (UTC)

  15. Agree with Penfold that the NW corner was the chewiest – finished in 12 minutes.

    My brother and I were only discussing recently that the only wine we remember being on the table when we were children in the 1950s was Sauternes. We liked the grown ups drinking it as the bottles had those domed bottoms just right for those cracker-present divers who with the aid of a tiny amount of bicarb went up and down a water filled Sauternes bottle for ages and ages.

    1. Around that time Kellogg’s gave away a submarine working on the same principle with their cornflakes.
  16. Got a phone call in the middle of this so didn’t get a time. I was worried, when I only got three of the acrosses on a first glance that this was going to be rough, but I got most of the downs on a first glance. ADVENTURE from wordplay alone, and only got one half of the WORMS clue. My guess at the martin was DEAN first, but that wasn’t going to work, in the end I rather liked that clue. Good thing we had MOLE=PIER recently, or that would have messed me up.
  17. Completely agree with the answer, but, gosh that’s obscure, as is your choice of “speculation” as synonym for “adventure”. Isn’t

    Ad[z] (woodcutter, not entirely) + venture (speculation) = adventure (opening welcomed) slightly easier?

    Still not all that happy with my synonym though!

    Thanks for a great blog.

    Mark I

    1. Close but no cigar, I would venture, Mark. While ‘adz’ is the American English spelling, and therefore rather unlikely unless marked as being such in the Times crossword, the real clincher for me is the literal. While ‘adventure’ is defined in Chambers as ‘commercial speculation’, I’m not convinced that ‘opening welcomed’ really works. Is an adventure really, or typically, an opening? Wouldn’t that define ‘window’, ‘post’ or some such?
  18. Just to report a humbling 53 minutes, sand martin and springily the main delayers. Nor could I remember restharrow, excellent word. But stumbled over the line.
  19. About 25 minutes, ending with the SAND MARTIN. Interesting wordplay there. I got a kick out of WORMS, and I learned that the BITTERN makes a BOOMING sound, which I hadn’t known. Otherwise, not much to say, although STAVANGER might be a bit out of the way for those not from N. Europe. Ulaca, I agree with your comment about the Sunday puzzle, and I’ll try to remember to comment later in the week, as I thought it had a particular clue that was absolutely, incredibly clever and hilarious. Regards to all.
  20. Slow but steady. 35 minutes. Wasted time on ADVANTAGE and SAUVIGNON before seeing the error of my ways. Very enjoyable. Ann
  21. 8:26 here for a nice straightforward Monday puzzle. Most enjoyable.

    Edited at 2013-03-11 10:21 pm (UTC)

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