Times 26209 – My goddess, my dear creature, my dearest life

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Definitely a notch or two up on your average Monday, with some nice misdirection and one or two clues where the definition is not at the end you might expect. Feeling as bemused at times as the fellow who wandered onto the track and stopped the Grand Prix in the Land of the Li Dynasty, I finally limped over the line in 47 minutes.

Those who haven’t essayed it may enjoy Paul’s Prize Guardian, where Life of Brian meets Gibbon.

ACROSS

1. FORTH – FORTH[right].
4. PAPER CLIP – APER in P[ower] + C[onstant] + LIP.
9. NOVITIATE – N.O. [our first bit of cricket] +VITIATE; I was fortunate that I knew how to spell ‘vitiate’, as this enabled me to correct my misspelling of ‘noviciate’.
10. TABOO – TOO around AB.
11. CATCHY – an anagram * of YACHT on C[ape].
12. PECTORAL – C[arbon] (one symbol I can always remember, unlike most of them) in PET (‘chosen’) +ORAL.
14. LAWBREAKER – ‘jawbreaker’ with L for J.
16. MIND – because ‘mined’ sounds like the faculty which may be slipped on occasion, or frequently if it’s the wife who’s talking.
19. RANT – RAN + T[ime].
20. BITCHINESS – CHINES in BITS; a nice clue, made a tad more difficult by the target word being one one would not expect to find in one’s Thunderer on a Monday morning.
22. WASTEFUL – FAULTS WE*.
23. SCAMPI – [restriction]S + CAMP + I[sland] for that classic dish of the 70s to follow the melon with the glacé cherry on top before you rounded off proceedings with the scoop of vanilla ice cream on top of the tinned fruit salad.
26. GWENT– G[lamorgan] + WENT; about all I know about Gwent is that Newport is in it, which is probably about all you need to know.
27. INCURIOUS – INCUR + IOUS. Nice.
28. SATURATED – A TARD SUET*.
29. LOYAL – [cromwel]L + [r]OYAL.

DOWNS

1. FUNICULAR – FUN[d] (‘saved money mostly’) + CU in RAIL*; I wanted this to be ‘vehicular’ but was saved by the twin facts that it didn’t fit and that HK’s very own Peak Tram is of this type. I’ve always felt it was a really cool word, ’though that’s probably because I’ve never really known what it meant.
2. RIVET – hidden.
3. HATCHERY – ‘where eggs are’; made by putting together HAT (‘cover’) + CHER[r]Y (fruit without runs – cricket again – as ‘r’ can stand for both singular and plural).
4. PLAN – PLAN[e], where PLANE is an adjective and E a musical key.
5. PREFERENCE – a kind of tongue-in-cheek double definition, where the two defined terms mean much the same thing (as in the following jawbreaker: ‘Many people whose bag is not watching rugby would have found the final score from Brighton very much their cup of tea’).
6. ROTATE – ROE around TAT.
7. LIBERTINE – [Jacques] IBERT (not BERTI, as I thought/guessed) in LINE (‘score’ as in a line scratched into a surface – how cricket runs were first ‘scored’ [on a stick]). Before Don Juan came along, Robert Lovelace was literature’s definitive libertine/rake – the dominant character in the longest novel in the English language, Clarissa.
8. PROWL – PROW + L[eft]. If you are a woman, I imagine ‘cruise’ and ‘prowl’ may come to much the same thing, however they may differ in their dictionary definitions.
13. MANICURIST – a cryptic definition which was my last in.
15. WINDSWEPT – WEPT after WINDS (‘twists and turns’).
17. DISMISSAL – DISMAL around I + SS.
18. VISCERAL – ‘of the intestines’; SiCkEn in VIRAL (‘like many diseases’).
21. JESTER – JEER around ST.
22. WAGES – W[orking] + AGES.
24. MOODY – Y + DOOM reversed.
25. ICED – [d]ICED.

32 comments on “Times 26209 – My goddess, my dear creature, my dearest life”

  1. A hefty chunk of my time was spent in unprofitable staring at the grid, wondering how to justify ROTATE and MIND, as well as wondering if Glost was an abbreviation for Gloucestershire (followed by wondering if there really was a Gwent, and if so, why hadn’t I been informed). I never did figure out ROTATE, never getting beyond OO and OVA for ‘eggs’; nice to have the checkers. COD to 14ac.
  2. Solid start to the week.

    Played cricket in Gwent once. Memorable for the fact that the deep fine leg was shot in the shoulder by an air rifle. Not something you see every day.

    Thanks setter and U.

    1. Further west in Stradey Park, things were much more normal: the wicketkeeper had Tourette’s, which made batting against slow bowlers interesting. You felt a bit of a bastard if you backed away during the delivery stride.
          1. Gives me another chance to trip out my favourite bit of wicketkeeper/batsman interchange

            Rodney Marsh “How is your wife and my kids?’
            Ian Botham “The wife is fine, the kids are retarded”

  3. At first glance I thought this was going to be much harder than it turned out, but in fact I finished it in 33 minutes which is only 3 past my target of 30. And I lost those trying to make 1ac FORAY, parsing it as FOR (preferring)+ A, but then coming unstuck on the Y and also not being able quite to justify “onwards” with “foray” as the definition.

    An interesting start to the week.

  4. 11m. Some slightly trickier ones mixed in with some write-ins this morning. LIBERTINE was my last in: I needed the checkers to believe with any confidence that there was a French composer called IBERT or BERTI.
  5. 18:19 .. very nice stuff for a Monday. Thanks, setter.

    No real problems except that I seem to have a developed a case of last clue yips, today’s three-putt from two feet being MIND. Obvious solution, but it took me 5 minutes to figure out. I’m going to add “when in doubt, sound it out” to my list of handy hints.

    COD … FUNICULAR, just because I lived in Naples for a while. Funiculì, Funiculà and all that.


  6. Would have made my 30min target, had it not been for MIND. I got it, but didn’t want to commit until I worked out the why! Sneaky…

    Reading the blog (thanks, U) I realise I didn’t stop to parse NOVITIATE. Good job, as I couldn’t have (more bleeding cricketing refs, that I never seem to retain…).

    Got ICED from a recent crossie, so some things stick. Ho hum.

  7. This year I’m not going to be able to do a Christmas Turkey, or anything of that nature. I’m going to be away for much of December and just won’t have the time.

    I’ve been in touch with JerryWH, who did half the work last year, but he also has other things on his plate and won’t be able to do it.

    It must be 4 or 5 years straight that I’ve put together something around Christmas. I think I’ve earned a break.

    So, I’m putting the Franchise out to tender (just tell me how much you want!). If anyone would like to organise a festive ‘happening’, of whatever description, I suggest you throw your hat in the ring here.

    1. Earned a break? Earned a medal, for that matter. I’m keeping my hat firmly on my head, but I did want to say thanks for the past feasts.
  8. 21 minutes, ending with MANICURIST having flirted with MANIPULIST, and MIND which as Sotira says was easy when it finally arrived. I did wonder about Pierre BERTI the not so famous French composer then remembered there was an IBERT.
    The thought of all wicketkeepers having Tourettes made me laugh out loud. I certainly stood in front of a few who could qualify.
    Scampi = lobster? I wish.

    Edited at 2015-09-21 08:04 am (UTC)

    1. I was puzzled by this too as I thought they were made from monkfish, so I looked it up…. proper scampi is made for the tails of langoustines – aka Norwegian Lobster (Nephrops norvegicus). The things we learn doing crosswords!
  9. A 35 min or so pleasant meander around the gentler slopes of crosswordland. Thanks Ulaca for explaining why the fruity part of 3dn wasn’t ERY (having confidently assumed that ‘Hatch’ was the required lid). Ibert sounds eminently more French than the alternative (assumption number 2). Berti Camus anyone?

    AndrewR

    1. The Berti I knew is Nicola of that ilk who scored a headed goal in the 1990 World Cup third-place play-off match, which was given offside when he was 5 yards on. I believe in a FIFA experiment, referees, rather than linesmen, were running the lines that year.
  10. 25:30. I’m another who spent ages puzzling over why MIND (my LOI) was right. I never thought of the homophone. Doh. I had never heard of ‘jawbreaker’ so didn’t understand 14a – thanks for the explanation. Nice to see Jacques Ibert appearing in 7d, although I struggle to remember any of his music other than the piano piece ‘Le petit âne blanc’.
  11. Just over 20 mins but it seemed harder than other Mondays. LOI MIND and grateful when the iPad confirmed all correct. Thanks setter and ulaca.
  12. 20:45. Count me as another who had no idea scampi was made from langoustines despite having eaten them many a time.

    LOI was NOVITIATE. I wasn’t sure of the cryptic or the definition but the word rang a vague bell so I put it in very tentatively, quite expecting to be another of my dodgy hunches. Thankfully not dodgy this time.

  13. 12.12 and a good example of a not-too-difficult but enjoyable puzzle I thought. Given the various substances served up under the guise of scampi it occurred to me that ‘lobsters’ should be followed by ‘if you’re lucky’.
  14. 30 minutes of gentle holiday solve. I enjoyed 20a because I am currently on a chine looking out to sea.
    16a was my LOI – why did so simple a clue slow us all down?
    Thanks to the setter and Ulaca.
  15. More than one notch up on the usual Monday, I thought, taking me 38 minutes. I didn’t understand the wordplay to 14 or 5d, but bunged in the right answer rather than PRECEDENCE.
    The only time I’ve had Scampi was in Italy, and they seemed more like prawns than lobsters. I notice Chambers calls them Dublin prawns.
  16. I knew neither novitiate nor vitiate so I was stuffed and just mombled something that looked vaguely word-like.

    Not sure what “one” is going in the taboo clue.

    1. Quite agree. I was going to post to this effect but see that you have done so. Pity nobody’s answered. It just looks like padding.
    2. My best guess is that since the dictionaries list AB as ‘able seaman’ (singular), the setter wanted to retain a degree of grammaticality by not using a countable noun (‘seaman’) without an article. Of course, this explanation is at least in part vitiated by the countable noun ‘prohibition’ occurring sans article!
  17. 14 mins. I agree that this wasn’t straightforward for a Monday and I was quite pleased with my time. MIND was my LOI and I think the clue for it is excellent because of its unusual homophone indicator. LIBERTINE was my NTLOI, although I’m another who thought the French composer must be Berti. I knew NOVITIATE and “vitiate” rang a vague bell so it went in once I had the first three checkers.
  19. I found it rather easy, actually, with a very good time (for me) of 33 minutes. No words I didn’t actually know or wasn’t able to parse (can’t remember when that was last the case), although I did have to give the wordplay of NOVITIATE some thought before realizing that NO must be a cricket abbreviation (now that’s a foreign language for me if ever there was one). For a while I was wondering if “not out” was IN and the solver was meant to mutilate INITIATE somehow (but then where would the V come from?).

    Edited at 2015-09-21 07:21 pm (UTC)

    1. 40 minutes here and I didn’t find it easy, though there was no particular sticking-point. Overall, very enjoyable despite it’s having one too many references to each of cricket and Wales.
  20. A slugghish 11:27 for me. The whole house-moving thing is going very badly at the moment and I’m afraid my thoughts were elsewhere.

    I kept getting the wrong end of the stick, taking “cover” = HATCH (and trying to make a fruit out of ERY + R) and “flat” = PLAIN (and trying to make I = “a key”). Light dawned eventually, but several seconds had ticked by.

  21. Late to the party tonight. A very enjoyable puzzle. As others have said, probably a little more difficult than the usual Monday fare, but I thought that it looked, initially, more difficult than it proved to be.

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