Solving time: 28:44
Shouldn’t present too many problems for the regular crowd; but I fell into trouble in the SW and NE corners, trying to scribble the parsings as I went. I think I have them all pretty right now. So let’s see eh?
Across
1. ALLIANCE. “Dalliance” minus D (daughter).
5. CHAFER. Two meanings. (Memories of horrible brown school toilet paper.)
9. DETECTOR. Reversal of ROTTED (went off) including EC (reversal of CE, church).
10. PRELIM. An obvious answer with the crossing letters, but held up for a while on the analysis. Delete the FT (newspaper) from “felt” to get EL and insert in PRIM (proper).
12. SECRET SERVICE. SECRET (behind closed doors) SERVICE (activity led by minister).
15. BING,E. With the E from “mantelpiecE”. Didn’t know “bust” and “binge” could be (roughly) synonymous.
16. ORANGEADE. ODE (poem) around RANGE (MOUNTAINS) & A{dvertiser}.
17. BAR MAGNET. MAG inside BARNET.
19. HE,GEL.
20. THEORETICALLY. Anagram of “the only article”, minus N. Def: “on paper”.
22. POMPOM. Took a while to see this as well. It’s OM (the medal) after POMP (ceremony). Looking for a Y here.
23. SODALITE. Anagram of “isolated”. (Not a sugar-free 16ac.)
25. RASH,ER.
26. PETER OUT. PET (favourite), {fac}E, ROUT.
Down
1. ADDIS ABABA. A, DD (Doc of Divinity), IS. Then: A, B (Bishop) twice & A.
2. LO{f}T.
3. ACCRETE. Sounds like (surprisingly!) A, CRETE.
4. CROSS COUNTRY. A pun.
6. HER,RING. Do I detect a hint of sexism?
7. FALLEN ANGEL. ALL (everyone) in FEN (bog); N (any number) in AGE, L. Not everyone would equate Satan with the devil — John Milton and some Koran scholars for example.
8. RU,MP. Scored this answer a fortnight ago. Are they trying to tell me something?
11. BREASTSTROKE. Spoonerism of “stressed”, “broke”. (One to go with yesterday’s crawl.)
13. CONTRETEMPS. CONT{inued}, RE, TEMPS (Frog for “time”, hence “the enemy”). Possible COD here?
14. DEPLOYMENT. D (500), E{m}PLOYMENT.
18. ANEMONE. ANNE is carrying a reversal of OME (’ome).
19. HECTARE. HARE is around ECT. “Mental health facility”? — not when I had to nurse patients through them in the 1970s.
21. SPAR{e}. Not as easy at the time as it looks now.
24. {f}IDO. An artifical language related to Esperanto.
‘Sodalite’ was no more than a lucky guess, and there are certainly several other plausible arrangements of consonants possible. ‘Lithos’ is, of course, the Greek word for stone, so the back half was solid, but it could have just as well been ‘dosalite’, the new low-calorie Indian food.
I didn’t bother with the cryptics for ‘pompom’ and ‘contretemps’, thinking they were probably over-clever.
Edited at 2014-01-29 02:44 am (UTC)
(* “Vehement”: used in Milton to decribe God as beyond his mind.)
Me either. The two comments are unrelated.
Also had no idea how to arrange the consonants in 23A, eventually plumped for SOLADITE. Stupid minerals.
I didn’t know SODALITE and CHAFER as an insect might have given me problems if it hadn’t come up in the puzzle I blogged only last Friday.
By coincidence I had spent much of yesterday trying to acquire a recording, audio or video, of Noel Coward’s play FALLEN ANGELS and was amazed to find that the only one available is an American audio production by L.A. Theatre Works. The BBC are sitting on their radio productions and probably long ago wiped their TV version from 1963. The ITV production from 1975 starring Joan Collins and Susannah York may still be in a vault somewhere but they didn’t see fit to include it in their ‘Choice of Coward’ DVD set released a couple of years ago. Unbelievable! I mention this for the information of Coward fans who contributed here on the subject of his plays last week. Incidentally the whole second act consists of a BUST in the sense required at 15ac, a term I had not come across until today, and it’s hilarious if somewhat ear-piercing!
In the end I bought the US production as a download via Audible.co.uk (an Amazon subsidiary) and will never touch them with a bargepole ever again because of the crappy software they force you to install to access the item once purchased. I wish now I’d paid three times the price and bought it on CD.
Edited at 2014-01-29 07:26 am (UTC)
Oh, and I didn’t get the 23A mineral either.
It would be great if theatre/ballet/etc companies would release some of their archive films, but I expect they feel the quality isn’t up to scratch.
It’s a sort of revival (i.e. same producer, same designer but with new director and cast) of a production I saw in the West End in 2000 which at that time starred Frances de la Tour and Felicity Kendall. It’s well worth seeing if you can make it.
Otherwise we could pootle off to the Yvonne Arnaud in Guildford (which I haven’t been to for years) in March.
We used to go to the theatre quite a lot, but I’m afraid we don’t go all that often nowadays.
(I’m a BFI member so I’ll keep a lookout.)
RASHER was a hold up, looking at the wrong end of the clue for definition and trying to come up with one of those words for measles. I nearly left it as RASHES before light dawned. PRELIM was another slow finisher as I struggled with the parsing.
ACCRETE, on the other hand, was so simple it defied solving for almost as long. I so wanted it to be something that sounded like “in seas” or somesuch. I hold the egregious “location” responsible.
I thought the clue for CONTRETEMPS was more generous than it might have been. “Argument against the enemy across the channel” would have made it as my CoD.
I think we should all be grateful to the setter for not linking SODALITE with sugar-free ORANGEADE. Well done!
Edited at 2014-01-29 07:54 am (UTC)
I’d like to claim ignorance of French but the fact that I hold a French baccalauréat from a French lycée in France makes this a bit of a dicky argument.
Mince.
Always amazed to come to the blog and find an erudite discussion about an entirely mythical concept
And I think it’s “le muppet” k
Monty Python to the rescue at 19a and sodalite a guess based on the most likely order of the letters (a wrong guess and I’d have been claiming it was unfair).
I nearly came unstuck at 18. Whereas spelling contretemps is one of my strengths I am pretty crap when it come to anemone as I’ve always pronounced the marine creature “sea anenome”. The fact that “towering” is a pretty poor reversal indicator (doesn’t it imply going up above or into something rather than just going up?) was nearly my undoing.
Less than 20 mins (=fast), but anemone spelled wrongly.
Rob
The use of “towering” as a reversal indicator is questionable (as mentioned above).
All correct, including the mineral where I too was lucky to put the letters in the right order, and the flower where I had to switch the second N and the M to satisfy the parsing (and the dictionary).
Never sure about a crossword where my FOI is HEGEL. Liked BREASTSTROKE and CONTRETEMPS. LOI the innocuous RASHER.
Can a totally artificially constructed language be called a “tongue”? Anywhere, that is, except crosswords?
I bunged in CONTRATEMPS, but it didn’t look right so I changed it to something that looked better (and had the added advantage of fitting the wordplay :-).
I initially misread the enumeration of 17ac as (6,3), and (working from the wordplay) wondered for a second or so if a BARMAG NET could possibly “have its attractions” before spotting my mistake.
(For the uninitiated, Tony’s coinage refers to vowels as the sole checking letters.)
I also failed to parse “PRELIM”, and thought it was a rather inelegant clue.
Busy day here (drizzle-coated roads are always good for business). The highlight of the day, however, was not a road accident, but an artistic one. A young gentleman was brought in with his entire head encased in plaster (yes, plaster). He had, it seems, had the brilliant idea of taking a cast of his head from which to make a replica.
To his credit, he had poked air-holes for his nostrils. His plan, he said (afterwards), had been to crack the plaster after it had set, remove it in sections, and then glue the pieces back together. However, he had failed to appreciate four important points. First, that plaster of Paris is surprisingly strong when set. Second, that not being able to see might impair his ability to find the hammer. Third, that simply rubbing vegetable oil into his hair would not prevent the plaster from sticking to it. Fourth (and this was the sad part, which very nearly stopped us laughing) that plaster of Paris generates quite a lot of heat in the later stages of setting.
By the time we’d got him out, he looked like a lightly-scalded Duncan Goodhew. Priceless.
Why did he want a replica of his head, by the way?
Maybe a gypsy fortune teller told him that one day he’d have a mishap and his head would end up looking like a lighty-scalded Duncan Goodhew so he decided to make a replica of his head in pristine condition before that happened.
Edited at 2014-01-30 08:44 am (UTC)