Times 25905

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Much of this was very straightforward and I had hopes of completing it within my target 30 minutes, but I missed this by some way because of two unknown words which might have been easier to come up with had they not been intersecting. I felt that was bordering on the unfair. I had another delay at 24 with both checkers in place, and trying to work out the second part of 27 until I spotted the pun on “scatter”.

Deletions are in curly brackets.

Across
1 DECK – Double definition, the second as in knocking someone down
4 SYSTEMATIC – Anagram of MESSY ATTIC
9 MASTERMIND – Hidden
10 BALM – LAB (test site) reversed, {che}M{ist}
11 LILITH – LI{the},LITH{e} (pliant). Never ‘eard of ‘er. It’s all Hebrew to me.
12 WAR CHEST – W (wife), AR CHES (foot sides), {lef}T. I’m not sure how anatomically correct this is.
14 JAVA – JA (Germany’s certainly), V (against), A
15 MOTHERHOOD – OTHER (different) + H (hospital) inside MOOD (feeling)
17 WINE WAITER – WI (West Indies), NEW (recently found), AIT (island), ER (queen)
20 PHEW – P (power), HEW (cut)
21 UNSUBTLE – Anagram of BLUES TUN{e}
23 FIRKIN – FIR (conifer), KIN (family)
24 BUOY – O (over) inside BUY (bribe)
25 PRIMA DONNA – PRIM (demure) and  MADONNA (Mary) share the last letter of {Bethlehe}M
26 NON-PAYMENT – Anagram of ANTONYM PEN
27 ELLA –  ELLA Fitzgerald the noted scat singer. There’s really only one way into this clue.

Down
2 EGALITARIAN – EG (say), ALIT (settled), ARIA (song), N (name)
3 KITTIWAKE – KIT{e} (hawk), {tha}T, I (one), WAKE (excite)
4 SORGHUM – Sounds like “sore gum”. My second “never ‘eard of it” of the day.
5 SWIM WITH THE TIDE – “Conform” is a definition on its own and the whole clue is another. I think the plural  “events” possibly doesn’t work.
6 ENDORSE – END (destroy), {h}ORSE (heroin)
7 TRACE – T (time), RACE (speed)
8 COMET – COME T{rue} (actually happen) with ‘rue’ (regret) removed. One of Rudolph’s chums.
13 SMOKE SIGNAL – Cryptic definition
16 HYPERBOLE – H{ighwa}Y, PER (in proportion to), BOLE (trunk)
18 AUTOPSY – AU (gold), TOPS (is better than), Y (yttrium)
19 REFRACT – Anagram of CRAFTER
21 URBAN – Double definition, the first referring to Popes of this name.
22 SWOON – WO (without) inside SON (boy)

54 comments on “Times 25905”

  1. As 20ac has it: phew! An easier puzzle at last. Many answers from the defs — e.g., KITTIWAKE, MOTHERHOOD and COMET. Knew SORGHUM from the fact that a sorghum plant once started growing in my garden. An escapee from a bag of bird seed.
    1. Wasn’t that line used by the Devon Grandmother with a five foot cannabis plant on her patio? Mind you, she did contact Gardener’s Question Time asking if they knew what it was, which lent her excuse some credibility (or was it a masterful pre-emptive defence strategy?).
  2. Which makes it the easiest one for a while (IMHO), except for KITTIWAKE, which I’ve never heard of.

    Tough clue to solve if you don’t know the word. Left with _A_E for “excite”, I wasn’t able to come up with WAKE, so had to look it up. SORGHUM on the other hand was a write-in. One of those Australian things again I guess.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

    1. I wondered about this too. Do they quite fit? Reminds me of the time I arrived after midnight in Calgary with a paper to give first thing in the morning. I was very tired after a long flight and asked the young lady at the check-in if she could arouse me in the morning. I won’t record her response.
      1. COED has “excite” as “produce a state of increased energy or activity in a physical or biological system” which seems close enough to me. They’re also in the Collins thesaurus, not that that’s definitive proof of anything.
      2. In the same vein, my American house guest in the 70’s (that’s 1970’s, not a reflection on the age of my guest) was highly amused when I asked if she wanted knocking up in the morning.
        1. I’d be a little chagrined in the same position to find my interlocutor laughing at me, I must say.
  3. My ‘dry bobbery’ did for me, as my 39-minute solve included ‘sail with the tide’, which never quite sounded right – obviously. Another in our run of fine hiddens, I thought, but my favourite was the sommelier from the Windies.

    George MacDonald drew on the Lilith myth in his fantasy novel of the same name – well worth a read (together with Phantastes) if you like that kind of thing. (MacDonald was an influence on Lewis Carroll and CS Lewis among others, and a friend of Mark Twain.)

    Sorghum known to many in these parts from the Chinese film Red Sorghum, which featured Gong Li at her most voluptuous.

    Edited at 2014-09-30 02:53 am (UTC)

  4. A bit of a boost to confidence today, all done in just under 30 mins with no unknowns. KITTIWAKE was first in. LILITH no problem – we used to have a ginger cat so named, after that wonderful Pre-Raphaelite painting.
  5. 13:07 … just when we were saying how much harder the puzzles were getting, a fairly straightforward one comes along. Main hold-up for me was wondering if SORGHUM might be spelt ‘sorgham’ but went with the more obvious.

    BUOY took a bit of spotting, too.

    Loved ENDORSE, which has a very nicely disguised def. (and made me laugh).

  6. Like others I also found this easier than many of late, finishing in 23 minutes.

    I have a late-teen penchant for prog rock to thank for Lilith – Genesis had a song called Lilywhite Lilith on one of their early albums. I heard on BBC 6 Music recently that prog is gaining something of a reappraisal of late, so it might be time to dust off those concept albums with 15 minute songs about mythical beasts.

  7. 21.46, for what felt like an easier one, and which therefore might indicate the alternative conjecture to the “are they getting harder?” debate.
    Since no-one else has said so yet, isn’t MASTERMIND really well hidden?. I spent far too long trying to think of the name of that classical (Roman) architect, probably Vitruvius, who comes nowhere near fitting.
    I also spent far too long trying to fit EVE in somewhere in 11: it did at least help to convince me KITTIWAKE isn’t spelt with a Y.
    SWIM/SAIL with the tide? Painful Championship memories, but if it had been clued this way then, I’d have got it.
    I wondered if there was more going on in the ELLA clue – it’s easy to read as barely cryptic, so long as you knew the First Lady of Jazz.
    Fave of the day to the quirky FIRKIN (such a fine word!), closely followed by the seductive ENDORSE
      1. I do, I do! I somehow missed your cunningly hidden comment on fine hiddens, perhaps because the word “MASTERMIND” didn’t appear. Now I feel both stupid and guilty. Got the address of your shrink?
        It was a well hidden hidden, though, wasn’t it?
        1. I just can’t win. At my last session with the headpeeper, I was told I needed to deal with my intolerance for ambiguity. Now this happens. As therapy, he told me to try one myself so here goes:

          ‘He moved from Locomotive Leipzig to Rapid Vienna to speak to ref re Udinese holding midfielder’ (5)

  8. 30.34. I would hope to have lived without knowing the names of Rudolph’s friends. Slow going. A kind of humourless ingenuity seems to pervade this (2, 17), or maybe it’s just me. Quite liked the customised cloud.
  9. Despite what others say, in my experience I’ve generally found Tuesday’s crosswords to be the easiest of the week, with Thursday’s the trickiest. So like everyone else I was relieved to find a straightforward one today, completed in around 40 minutes (though I did have to ask my wife what gingivitis was).
    All in all an enjoyable puzzle with some nice touches.
    Lilith reminds me of Dr Crane’s po-faced wife in the TV series “Frasier” – a wonderful character.
    LOI was 24 with me running through all the possible combinations of b_o_ until the “doh!” moment.
    Thanks to Jackkt for explaining 27. – “scatter” indeed!
  10. Ah, an easy one at last.. any intention to complain about 11ac being firmly squashed by the magnificent 9ac, just above..
    Also puzzled about Ella, not knowing much about scatting

  11. Yes, I agree, a bit easier than yesterday’s, but still no walk in the park for me. My One Error was LILITH, where I had Eilish, which I thought could be another name for Eve. It wasn’t parsed, of course…
  12. 12m. The puzzles seem to be getting easier under the new editor. 😉
    I was also held up a bit at the end by the unknown pair LILITH/SORGHUM. The latter appears to be a non-homophone (the U is pronounced as in ‘tantrum’ according to Chambers) where the incorrect pronounciation in the wordplay leads you to the correct spelling.
    I initially put in SAIL WITH THE WIND, but it never looked right. Fortunately I thought to correct the first word as well as the last.
  13. 14 mins. I’d probably have been a couple of minutes quicker if I’d seen DECK immediately. As it was it was one of my last in, and it was only after I saw it that I got EGALITARIAN and KITTIWAKE, which in turn led me to LILITH, my LOI. I agree that MASTERMIND was excellently hidden, and I confess that ELLA went in from the FITZGERALD part of the clue only.

    As far as pootle’s comment about Lilywhite Lilith being off an early Genesis album is concerned, I suppose it depends on which way you look at it. In my opinion The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is the last of the classic Genesis albums, and although A Trick of the Tail and Wind & Wuthering, the first two post-Gabriel albums, are decent enough I stopped listening to them after that. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who have the opposite view and think that the Gabriel-era Genesis albums are pretentious tosh.

    1. I think it’s possible to hold both views simultaneously – it’s classic pretentious tosh!

      But certainly I’m not keen on the latter day chart friendly Genesis.

  14. Agree the comments that this was a bit easier, although I ended up putting in ZIZITH in 11 out of frustration. I had spotted the right answer, but couldn’t parse it satisfactorily, and didn’t know the wife meaning, knowing it only as some female demon. My perverted logic linked Z with A(dam) as in A to Z, and I guessed wrong.

    I too saw KITTIWAKE straight off, but wanted to spell it with a Y until all other options for 11 convinced me it was wrong.

    Edited at 2014-09-30 09:46 am (UTC)

  15. Another enjoyable 25 minutes of steady solving. Agree about the elegantly hidden MASTERMIND and confess to being another member of the FIRKIN appreciation society, (not forgetting kilderkins and hogsheads).

    Off to find some Ella Fitzgerald singing scat on Spotify; recommend the 1947 recording of “Oh Lady Be Good” with Bob Haggart and his Orchestra.

  16. My computer was maddeningly slow this morning so I was a bit better than my 22.49. “Lilith” I got from Narnia as Ulaca suggests. Supposedly the White Witch was a descendant of hers. I agree that 9a is a terrific example of its kind – I spent time looking for an architect called Vanderbilt for goodness sake. Also wasted time trying to do something with sphagnum moss….

    The club site has been riddled with errors since the middle of last week and when I googled the gibberish message that keeps popping up there’s a reference to Javascript which made 14a ironic.

    1. I’ve been keeping a watch on the TLS spot in case the techs come back from Rosh Hashanah or the blessed Peter issues a definitive report on the multiple pile up that constitutes this week’s puzzle. No joy yet, and I see the Javascript error is beginning to creep into the main puzzle too, though so far without consigning it to oblivion.
      Funnily enough, I cannot read property ‘b’ of null either.
      1. Just picked up a Forum message from PB re the missing clue in this puzzle. The poor guy goes on holiday and the whole place collapses. At present he seems mercifully unaware of the other hornets in the nest.
  17. Better off finding something when she’s singing properly – the sublime Verve Songbook series for instance.
    And while I’m on, if you don’t finish a crossword all correct or only do so with external help can you really call it easy?
  18. Oddly, I took far longer to finish this than yesterday’s, which I found easy. The NW was the last area to be filled, apart from 5d, which remained stubbornly incomplete, partly because I had pencilled in TIME for the last word. MASTERMIND was a guess to fit the definition, but I completely failed to spot that it was hidden (brilliantly so). LILITH exposed my biblical ignorance, but after going through various inventions such as MIMISH I settled for the right answer that fitted the wordplay clearly.
  19. Somewhere between 15 and 16 minutes (forgot to stop the clock during an interruption.

    Enjoyable puzzle with some very nice charades (e.g. wine waiter, hyperbole and prima donna (which I’ve seen written on football forums as pre-madonna)).

    Edited at 2014-09-30 04:19 pm (UTC)

  20. There’s also discussion on the General forum because the 30-day cryptic and concise boards have been kaput since last week.
  21. I am unable to see the word HYPERBOLE without remembering Monty Python’s early sketch about the Piranha Brothers (clearly the Krays) who ran criminal London. Apart from violence, they used sarcasm, litotes and hyperbole, pronounced hi-per-bowl, with the stress on the hi. I probably have not thought about Spiny Norman for 30 years!
  22. A nice puzzle that held me up at the end and thus lasted about 35 minutes. The later entries were BUOY, SORGHUM, LILITH and finally ENDORSE, which had me completely bamboozled and searching for a nonexistent word meaning ‘destroy’ which fit the checkers. Well done setter. Also well done, as recognized, was the hidden MASTERMIND. Everything else was fine, I even know of the bird. Regards to all.
  23. Fortyish minutes for me, so not a complete doddle from my perspective. Like some others, I tried to spell KITTIHAWK with a Y. And, blow me down, I’ve just noticed I had “traie” for 5d (“TRACE”). I’d had it as “trail” and knew it was wrong, then got the crossing “e” at the end and forgot to look at it again. Ah well. Many a slip, as we surgeons like to say.

    Like our blogger, I’d never heard of LILITH, but I’m sure it’s mutual. Also failed to parse the “scatter” part of 27ac (And, note to – “scat” used to be the singing of nonsense words – boodly-bop a doo-wop. It is now something very different which I suggest you don’t Google.)

    COD for me was MASTERMIND. ENDORSE was also neatly misdirected, or maybe I’m just easily misdirected.

  24. 15:01 for me, making desperately heavy weather of ENDORSE, BUOY and ELLA (which I failed to parse until after I’d submitted, not helped because I simply loathe scat singing, even when Ella Fitzgerald is doing it).

    An interesting and enjoyable puzzle, nevertheless.

  25. All but Kittiwake and Lilith, which needed aids, in 40 minutes, so I’m with the ‘getting easier’ crowd. Might have been a little quicker if I’d started wine waiter as a 4-6 instead of a mistaken 6-4. I, too, thought mastermind was a masterstroke (try to hide that one, setter). Thanks for another clear blog, Jack.

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