Times 25808 – Did this one give you fits? Keep fitting!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 27 minutes

Music: Bax, Symphony #7, Leppard/LPO

This puzzle should not have been difficult, provided you have the required general knowledge in your brain. Birds, plants? This will not make some solvers happy. I put in an inspired guess, and checked my work later. Bingo!

I would like to thank Pip Kirby for the fine blog he produced in my absence, and welcome him as an addition to the staff of regular bloggers.

Across
1 CURATE, double definition, although as a noun a curate is more of a hired substitute than an assitanst.
4 SWITCH ON, S(WITCH) ON, using the less common abbreviation for ‘saint’.
9 OSMOSIS, [c]OSMOS IS, a word from high-school biology, along with phloem and xylem. I can remember the words, but not the science.
11 NON-IRON, double definition, where a non-iron cannot be magnetised.
12 START, ST + ART.
13 ABSTINENT, ABS(TIN)ENT. A can of lager from Tesco’s, presumably.
14 VOCABULARY, V + O + C[on st]ABULARY. Nothing do do with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, although the position of the ‘C’ is tempting.
16 BUFF, BUFF[y], a fictional character, so fair game.
19 RUNG, RUN + G.
20 SWEATPANTS, SWEAT + PANTS, nicely concealed.
22 CONSONANT, CON’S + ON + ANT, a compendium of cryptic cliches.
23 AWFUL, A + W + FUL[l].
25 MARSHAL, LAH + S + RAM backwards, what they do in CORBA and DCE.
26 ERITREA, A + ER + TIRE backwards, where ‘flag’ is a verb.
27 LOMBARDY, LO(MBA)RDY. ‘Lordy!’ is a very unlikely place to find an MBA, but there you go.
28 IGNORE, [s]IGNORE.
 
Down
1 CROSSOVER, CROSS + OVER, but I’m not quite sure why ‘cross’ is ‘unavoidable trouble’.
2 RUMBA, apparently [d]RUM BA[ss], an implied hidden or something of the sort.
3 TEST TUBE, TEST + TUBE in different senses, unlikely to bewilder anyone for long.
5 WINDSOR CASTLE, anagram of ‘wild ancestors’. I wasted a bit of time looking for the name of a dynasty rather than a residence.
6 TENPIN, TEN P + IN.
7 HARLEQUIN, another name for the plant ‘columbine’ and a kind of duck. Whether plants can actually like a particular bird, I leave to metaphysicians.
8 NONET, TEN ON backwards, which would be one too many….although no one in the audience would probably notice.
10 SWALLOW-TAILED, SWALLOW + anagram of DETAIL.
15 CONUNDRUM, CO(NUN)D RUM, where ‘hoax’ is an adjective.
17 FUSILLADE, F(U.S. ILL)ADE.
18 SPEAKING, S + PEAKING, a venerable chestnut.
21 JOSHUA, JOSH + [imprompt]U + A. I did not realize it, but ‘fit’ is a dialect version of ‘fought’; the spiritual is “Joshua Fit de Battle ob Jericho”
22 CAMEL, CAME + L, where a camel is only a metaphorical ship.
24 FORGO, FOR + GO in different senses.

43 comments on “Times 25808 – Did this one give you fits? Keep fitting!”

  1. Here we need a reference to commedia dell’arte where Columbine is the mistress of Harlequin.

    And 15dn is CO{NUN}D,RUM — typo I guess. And COD can be a noun; a joke or hoax.

    Edited at 2014-06-09 01:10 am (UTC)

  2. Also, Moses was ‘unfit’ to pass into the promised land; the leadership of the Israelites was handed on to Joshua. (Obama, on winning his first presidential election, referred to the earlier generation of Jesse Jackson et al. as the Moses generation, his being the Joshua generation. Not, mind you, with any derogatory implication of unfitness.)

    Edited at 2014-06-09 01:48 am (UTC)

  3. I also wondered about ‘unavoidable trouble’, thinking of ‘star-crossed’, but that doesn’t seem to work.20ac was my LOI; for a long time the checkers just seemed wrong, so it was hard to come up with letters for the unches. Nice to see something other than ‘Cor!’ for ‘my’. On the other hand, this was the first time I spotted ‘my’ and knew it had to be ‘cor’.
  4. Though with much not understood on entry. Only got 17dn because it’s the name of a herbicide which only kills grasses. Reminded me that I need a batch to deal with the dreaded winter weeds.
  5. 35 minutes with the last 10 spent at the 25/21 and 1/12 intersections. I was also puzzled by “unavoidable trouble” at 1dn but it refers to having “a cross to bear” i.e. something that’s troublesome yet unavoidable.

    (Edited to clarify my explanation of 1dn since people still seem to be speculating over it and I’m now sure I’m right)

    Edited at 2014-06-09 05:27 am (UTC)

  6. And stuck on the same 25/21 1/12 as Jack. I liked some of the grid vocabulary, and very much liked that I got through it in good time for me, but found quite a lot non-magnetic.
  7. I parsed 8d as NO (certainly not) + TEN reversed.

    Harlequin a guess, after running through words beginning with ‘horse’ and finding nothing that fitted.

    Curates as I know them are pretty much assistants.

    Edited at 2014-06-09 04:43 am (UTC)

    1. Certainly in the RC Church, the Curate is the assistant to the Parish Priest
  8. 13.38 including check for typos time. No real hold-ups, though I left HARLEQUIN to last because I couldn’t remember my commedia dell’ arte stuff.
    Round here, curates are definitely parish assistants, usually priests in their first posting with a more senior colleague teaching them the ropes before they strike out on their own. Sometimes they are just a CROSS the senior colleague has to bear. I go with ulaca on NONET.
    I rather liked the weird image conjured up by the surface of 21.
    NON-IRON led me to read up a bit on one of nature’s spookiest tricks, trying to find out why it’s broadly true. More reading required, I think.
    1. The earliest ones tended to be very attractive due to their high nylon content (often 100%) and build-up of static electricity.
      1. How well I remember – that and the static crackle as you took them off, especially if a woolly jumper was also involved. Undressing in the dark could sometimes produce a visible, if minor, electrical storm.

  9. Very quick for me (23mins), but with one or two go in unparsed, so thanks vinyl et al for clarifications (JOSHUA, CROSSOVER, NONET, HARLEQUIN).
  10. 11 mins. NON-IRON went in from definition only, although I’m a tad annoyed not to have spotted the reference to magnetism, and HARLEQUIN was a best guess with both references within the clue only vaguely familiar. CROSSOVER was my LOI without understanding the “cross” element, and Jack’s explanation makes sense.
    1. Just an example of CROSSOVER, I assumed – one artistic genre fused with another. Tommy the prime example perhaps.
  12. Columbine (Columbina) is Harlequin’s mistress in Commedia dell’Arte!
  13. 8m. I was a bit baffled by 7dn, as I don’t think I ever knew the commedia dell’arte (or panto) stuff and I didn’t know of a bird called a HARLEQUIN. This aspect of the clue seems a bit dodgy to me, because as far as I’m aware it’s always a harlequin duck, so this is a bit like using ‘bird’ as a definition for ‘tufted’. Anyway, it went in easily enough based purely on the checkers.
    Nice to see Buffy.
    1. It’s actually given separately (as well as as harlequin duck) in ODO. But you;re one up on me, as I’d never heard of either!
      1. Fair enough, quibble withdrawn.
        One of the reasons the harlequin duck is familiar to me is that I recently saw this duck on Barnes pond, and wondered what it was. I managed to establish that it wasn’t a harlequin duck, or a tufted duck, or a mandarin duck, but I never figured out what it actually was.

        Edited at 2014-06-09 10:51 am (UTC)

        1. My birdman friend reckons it’s an Egyptian goose. Google image seems to confirm.
          1. Thanks: it annoyed me that I couldn’t find out. Should have asked here at the time!
  14. Quick today (for me) 13 minutes of steady going, nothing seemed difficult or unknown, although I agree with vinyl about 1 dn, the ‘cross’ part is unclear. I liked the Buffy reference.

    Thanks for kind words, vinyl – I didn’t realise we were formalised as ‘staff’ – that sounds more lucrative than the reality!

  16. I found this fairly standard Monday stuff, taking 25 minutes to complete, with no queries apart from 7 dn, but I couldn’t think of anything else to fit, and the pairing of Columbine and Harlequin did ring a bell.
  17. 13m, which puts this amongst my fastest solves. I was slightly concerned when I had all the crossers in 7D, didn’t get the references and couldn’t think of a word that fits, but managed not to get hung up on it as I would used to have done a while back. Instead I came back to it at the end, applied the principle of trying a Q in front of the U and fortunately HARLEQUIN fell out.
  19. Not much of a turn-on this one, maybe not enough cryptic action for the likes of me, but as Sue says it was nice enough.

    CROSS is just one of those words that can mean more or less anything, isn’t it, and can be anything e.g. vb, adj, wotevs? Nice one for compilers.

    Cheers
    Chris

  20. Standard middle of the road stuff for a 20 minute solve. No real standout clues and no stinkers either.
  21. A pleasant Monday post-prandial solve, about 25 minutes, held up a bit in the SW, LOI JOSHUA (not knowing the spiritual alluded to). Also didn’t know any HARLEQUIN bird, but knew the chap as Columbine’s favourite. SWALLOW TAILED rang only distant bells as a butterfly, but was straightforward from the wordplay.

    To the complainers, the major Commedia dell’arte characters are ubiquitous in art, and even pop up in Agatha Christie stories, so fair game for crosswords – be thankful setters don’t ever seem to get round to the minor characters, such as Brighella or Pedrolino. A nominally “minor” character who made it into the big league was Scaramouche, after Sabatini’s excellent swashbuckling novel and the two films starring Ramon Novarro and Stewart Granger – not to mention the reference in Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

    Edited at 2014-06-09 02:30 pm (UTC)

  22. 1d brought to mind the story of the child who named her teddy-bear Gladly, from the hymn “Gladly my cross-eyed bear”.
    1. There’s a song called Cross Eyed Bear by Damien Rice – I’d never realised the pun until now.
    2. You have picked on one of my favourite literary type of joke, known as Mondegreens after the female victim in ‘They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray, and laid him on the green’. Clerihews are fun too.
  23. 35m today but all correct and 10m of that on the 1d/9a pair. I had to guess HARLEQUIN though once reminded by the blog I did remember the commedia connection. No standouts for me today though I never felt I was on the wavelength – mind I rarely do these days!
  24. No troubles except the odd use of CROSS in 1D, where I finally came round to the explanation already offered by Jack. About 15 minutes, ending with the aforesaid 1D. Not much excitement today, but no large scale quibbles either. Regards to all.
  25. Very , very quick for me too – which echoes janie’s comment above. Maybe there is something to do with the clue types but 20 minutes is by far my fastest time ever. I had expected the usual suspects to be commenting how easy they found it so I’m a little dazed and confused. LOI tenpin as I was looking for an alley rather than what gets knocked down in one.
  26. Thirty-two of your finest minutes for me, though the crossers MARSHAL and JOSHUA took five of that. I was convinced that the “note” was at the beginning of 25ac, and so had MIR—L. Finally twigged that the “returning” applied to the whole thing.

    1. Me too. Did the same at 12a assuming the st street was at the end. Too easily fooled sometimes.

      Edited at 2014-06-09 06:22 pm (UTC)

  27. A sluggish 8:14 for me, feeling tired after a very busy day. I made ridiculously heavy weather of 1ac (CURATE) despite being a devotee of art collections and exhibitions, and 2dn despite the RUMBA being my favourite Latin dance.

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