Oops! I got those two right. I mucked up the one I was particularly proud of getting right!
ACROSS
1. VENDOR – V + ENDOR (‘village with witch’); the Biblical medium was summoned by King Saul – surely candidate for world’s most troubled monarch – but I know the story best through CS Lewis, who used the phrase ‘Witch of Endor’ as code for a particularly eccentric relative in letters to his brother posted overseas.
4. CHOW-CHOW
10. SETTLED – SETT (home of badger) + LED.
11. WREN TIT – WENT across R + IT (‘precise requirement’); according to ODO, this creature is ‘A long-tailed North American songbird that is the only American member of the babbler family’. The lexicographer obviously hadn’t met the bloke I used to sit next to in the HK Welsh Choir.
12. AMIR – an amir/emir used to be a Muslim/Arab chieftain; the word is still used titularly; M in AIR (‘state’).
13. QUARRELLED – RR (right reverend) + ELLE in QUAD.
15. BAKSHEESH – tip or bribe; SHE in BAKE + SH (‘order to keep quiet’).
16. DICTA – CT in AID reversed.
18. FIRED – FIR + [d]E[a]D.
19. EXTENSION – ‘additional time for repayment’; EX + TENSION.
21. ABOMINABLE – BAN A MOBILE anagram*.
23. DOZE – DOZE[n]
26. OVEREAT – I think this is right, but cannot see how Mary fits in. She fits in because ‘Little Mary’ is a euphemism for the stomach. Thanks to ShuchiU for this.
27. EARRING – A in ERRING (‘dropping a brick’).
28. SINGSONG – SIN + S in GONG. Nice.
29. SEVERE – SEVER + E.
DOWN
1. VESTA – apparently a minor planet / asteroid thingy, but best known to me from my schooldays as MSG in a pack masquerading as chicken curry; VEST + A.
2. NITPICKER – I can’t see this one either, so over to the floor once more. Right, thanks to Jack – if you are the type of person who likes taking away all the non-leading letters in UNIT, you might be called a NITPICKER.
3. OILY – [d]OILY.
5. HAWORTH – and not ‘Howarth’ as I had it; home of the Brontes and HA[s] + WORTH. At least, the year can only get better.
6. WEEKENDING – WEEDING Around KEN[t].
7. HOTEL – HO + TEL.
8. WITHDRAWN – I think this is DRAWN for ‘[one] yielding to attraction’, but I can’t see the rest. Thanks to Jack again – a letter substitution clue at heart, wherein the second I of WITH[i]N is deleted and replaced by DRAW (‘attraction’).
9. ADJURE – DJ in A URE.
14. SHODDINESS – ODD in SHINE + SS.
15. BUFFALOES – ‘animals’; and merely an anagram of USE OF FLAB*; merely, I say, not in disparagement of the setter, but in light of my own travails.
17. CRINOLINE – the stuff that made petticoats and thus the dresses on top of them stick out, if you will (‘it’s stiff’); [worke]R + IN (‘at home’) in CO + LINE (‘policy’). Rather cunning in terms of placement of ingredients.
19. ELASTIN – [bing]E + LASTIN[g].
20. TOLLED – I had never particularly associated slowness with tolling, but the dictionaries do, so, once again, I am the slow one, it seems; sounds like ‘told’.
22. OCEAN – [escap]E in O + CAN.
24. EAGLE – hidden.
25. TRUE – TRU[c]E.
Gung Hey Fat Choy to you all! Back later to clear up this mess.
Thanks for the blog, ulaca.
Now I’m wondering if the HK Welsh Choir is on YouTube. If so … can’t wait.
Surely there’s a word missing from 24ac: …the one lurking there may BE golden?
8dn is WITH[I->DRAW]N. ‘Within’ clued by ‘inside’ and ‘yielding to’ indicating the substitution.
It’s a pangram BTW.
I got through this in 42 minutes with some difficulty and parsed them all eventually except ‘little Mary’, which on reflection I have met before (though not here according to a google search) so now I wish I had persevered with researching it after the event.
Didn’t know ELASTIN (despite meeting it here before in July 2103) or WREN TIT but both were quite easily gettable from wordplay.
I was intending to query DOILY as ‘napkin’ but Chambers alone amongst the usual sources says it’s okay. I’d have said a ‘napkin’ serves a practical purpose whereas DOILY is purely decorative. Chambers clouds the issue by having the latter as ‘ornamented napkin’.
Edited at 2016-02-08 06:25 am (UTC)
Edited at 2016-02-08 02:10 pm (UTC)
But plenty of fireworks in the Times Cyptic for a Monday!
I stupidly went the Hogarth route – as I knew not that WREN TIT was a proper TIT!
It’s not in the Oriental Zodiac and oddly neither is PANDA!
The CHOW-CHOW is.
Failed to spot 28ac I’ll put down to the horrors of JET-LAG.
Little Mary is new to me – well spotted!
horryd Shanghai
Fortunately I’ve been caught out by the funny spelling of HAWORTH before so I checked the wordplay.
Keith Doyle (sorry, LJ won’t let me log in).
I’m not really complaining – just miffed I got completely the wrong end of the stick.
Edited at 2016-02-08 08:56 am (UTC)
Love it! Absolutely spot on. And if they can find a way of hiding a word in an entry where you don’t expect to find it they’ll do that too.
About 40 mins.
Edited at 2016-02-08 08:33 am (UTC)
“His death, which happen’d in his berth,
At forty-odd befell:
They went and told the sexton, and
The sexton toll’d the bell.”
It is the punchline of “Faithless Sally Brown” by Thomas Hood.
When I was a child, if I was unable to eat all the food on my plate, my mother’s standard comment was “Your eyes were bigger than your Mary!” It’s odd, the little things which can help in a crossword!
Dereklam
Hard work today, happy to finish inside the half hour. Had no idea about Little Mary, but it seems I wasn’t alone there. And struggled to find the protein until I realised that SINISTER was wrong at 28ac. Sucked in by the first three checkers and the first word of the clue.
Solid start to the week. Thanks setter and Ulaca, and thanks Jack for the parsing of WITHDRAWN. Very clever.
60mph winds here today and rivers again close to over-topping but my flowering cherry has come into blossom! Weather is as weird as the puzzle.
18:01 … and a few things learnt.
Sibiu
As with others, OVEREAT was unparsed though from the checkers it couldn’t have been anything else. Mary would seem to be quite an obscure term from the comments.
If someone removes the non-leaders from UNIT, you take out the NIT and leave the U. A person who did this might be thought to be a picker of NIT or a NITPICKER
Edited at 2016-02-08 12:29 pm (UTC)
Edited at 2016-02-08 12:59 pm (UTC)
I did manage to squeeze in under the 10 minute mark again for this one, which I guess is a good enough result, but boy there were a lot of difficult things going on!
If I’d pointed to where I thought someone’s little Mary was on a picture of the human body in a science class I’d probably have been sent out of the room.
Unusually the homophone doesn’t work for the way I say told and tolled.
I finished this crossword reasonably quickly for me but spent 15 minutes on the QC (just to be contrary)
Had ANGEL for 24d (anagram of A GLEN and a gold coin) but then saw it was DOZE so amended in time.
The rest of it was fun, good for a Monday, if not all totally twigged at the time.
Happy CNY to all especially those east of Suez.
I also stumbled over the Witch of Endor, my LOI, even though in the past I may have been a trifle smug in this place over knowing the lady, the place and the story.
I also confess ignorance of little Mary (should that be Little?). I look forward to any number of similarly coy and recherché references to body parts. WITHDRAWN very clever, I thought, and too clever for me to “get”. I cheerfully overlooked its biffidity.
ELASTIN – noted and appreciated, as are all techy/geeky clues which help to level the playing field in favour of us uncultured white-coats. It’s probably at about the same level as deep leg (if there is such a thing in cricket), or Beeri (and there is such a person in the bible, according to Wikipedia*).
VESTA also appreciated, not only for the geek factor but also for the memories of the dehydrated curry (as our esteemed blogger noted), which was in fact made from compressed interplanetary dust. Of course, nowadays we tend to laugh at Vesta curries, but it’s important to note that back in the 70’s they were both innovative and disgusting.
WREN TIT was an NHO, and Wikipedia (without which where would we be?) spells it as a single world. Not sure about its being the only New World babbler, though, at least based on my experience of various conferences in the US. I’d been fortunate to come across Little Mary as a euphemism for the stomach, or I’d have been thrown by 25ac.
Regarding the commented-upon easiness of Monday crosswords, I don’t think it is to accommodate post-weekend hangovers. Rather, I suspect that healthy flushing out of the cerebral arteries with mother nature’s own lubricant simply sharpens our brains on Mondays, making the puzzles appear easier.
[Edit: Wikipedia also tells me there is a Buzi in the Bible. It’s a funnier book than I’d realized, and I look forward to the movie of it.]
Edited at 2016-02-08 08:12 pm (UTC)
No problem with “little Mary”, as my mother (born a couple of years after Little Mary first appeared) used to refer to “a pain in [someone’s] little Mary”.
A pleasant start to the week.