Times 26,329 – Minkey Business

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
The Lunar New Year is ushered in with this tricky little number, which features quite a few animals but none I recognise among the Oriental Zodiac. But I have more serious things to consider, like which of 15 down and 26 across I have got wrong and which I have merely failed to parse. Over an hour to get even thus far – it is just as well I am a pig, though not, it seems, a very bright one. I must dash shortly for the in-laws place, so this may be somewhat abbreviated, especially as we get to the business end.

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.

59 comments on “Times 26,329 – Minkey Business”

  1. Shoulda not finished, rather than getting two meaningless errors: I flung in ‘grey tit’ for reasons best known to me, and I don’t know. But at least it’s a tit, which is more than we can say for the falsely hight right answer, which is neither wren nor tit. This forced me to come up with ‘Hogarth’, even though I did think of the Brontes, and might even have remembered HAWORTH if given a chance. I could make nothing of Mary or of non-leaders. Two errors on Saturday, two on Sunday, two today; I seem to be on a roll.
  2. 26a – Google search tells me that ‘Little Mary’ is a euphemism for the stomach.

    Thanks for the blog, ulaca.

  3. So by no means a Monday sprint. Thanks to ShuchiU for unlocking little Mary. With U and KG I had no idea. (Assume, at 20dn, you [U] mean “told”?)

    Now I’m wondering if the HK Welsh Choir is on YouTube. If so … can’t wait.

  4. A person who deprives ‘unit’ of all but its leading letter may be said to be a nit-picker.

    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)

    1. A former euphemism for the stomach, from the play of that name by J.M. Barrie (1903). It is not the name of a character, but a colloquialism used by a children’s doctor: ‘How’s little Mary today?’ – Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
    2. A better wording for “WITHDRAWN” might be “Shy inside, the second one yields to attraction.”
      1. Neater and easier to solve maybe, but it’s not the job of the setter to make life easy, only fair, and I think it’s fair enough as it stands.

        Edited at 2016-02-08 02:10 pm (UTC)

  5. Happy CNY – no fireworks permitted in Shanghai – creepy.

    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

  6. 28m. I found this tough. I got particularly stuck in the NW, where I got fixated by HOSEA for 1dn, which seemed feasible. I wasn’t helped by knowing Endor only as the forest moon home of Ewoks, or a reluctance to accept ‘state’ as a synonym for ‘air’. I’m still reluctant.
    Fortunately I’ve been caught out by the funny spelling of HAWORTH before so I checked the wordplay.
    1. I took this to be that if you “air” your opinions, you “state” them. This seems to me to be close enough.

      Keith Doyle (sorry, LJ won’t let me log in).

      1. Yes, I guess that’s what’s intended. Just seems a bit loose to me: certainly it was loose enough for me to wait until I had the A from VESTA.
  7. All in all, it seems my 45 minutes wasn’t so bad after all. A strange and confusing mix of the write-ins (e.g. 1d, 4a, 15d) and real stinkers (e.g. 2d, 26a). I’d never heard of little Mary either. I cottoned onto WREN early on, but trying to fit it round a river wasted a lot of time. WRENTIT was unknown to me and all the references I’ve found have it as a single word, not (4,3).
      1. My albeit somewhat ancient Chambers (1972) hyphenates it. I also scuttled back to the Concise OED and there too it’s hyphenated. Google seems to have it as one word consistently.
        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)

        1. I gave up bothering about hyphenation and ‘phrase-styling’ years ago. Anything goes, basically, like renditions of words written in a different script. Chambers I’ve always thought of as the perverse bloke who will insist on a different way of doing things after everyone else has agreed. Never learned to FIFO.
          1. “Chambers I’ve always thought of as the perverse bloke who will insist on a different way of doing things after everyone else has agreed”.

            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.

  8. Thought this was going to be easy peasy after I confidently wrote in 1ac as ‘hamlet’ (getting my Shakespearian ghosts and witches muddled up…), and ‘hosea’ at 1dn. Finally got that corner sorted, but then, carelessly put in ‘talied’ thinking it must have a similar meaning to ‘dallied’ (and conveniently missing the ‘sounds’ of the clue. And the dodgy spelling). Same unknowns as above re Mary and the WREN TIT.

    About 40 mins.

  9. 16:42 for me so clearly on wavelength given above comments. DNK the little Mary connection (thanks ShuchiU) and failed to spot the pangram. WREN TIT went in from parsing. A pleasant start to the week.

    Edited at 2016-02-08 08:33 am (UTC)

    1. The exact quote is:

      “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.

  10. Found this quite hard to parse everything.. no problem with Endor, CS Forester named a boat Witch of Endor in one of his fine Hornblower books. But little Mary was new to me.
  11. I quite enjoyed this; not too hard but with some tricksy parsing, as noted.

    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

  12. Endor seemed reasonable because Samantha’s mother’s name on Bewitched was Endora. So who needs a classical education?

    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.

  13. Weird puzzle. Mostly easy but with some real curved balls thrown in and the decidedly odd reference to Mary which I also had never come across either in real life or in Crosswordland but it’s in Chambers.

    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.

    1. I hope you still have some blossom by the end of today, Jimbo! Blowing an absolute hooley here in Cornwall.

      18:01 … and a few things learnt.

      1. Wind is increasing so hope to still have tree let alone blossom. Massive waves apparently all along our coastline pushing water back up rivers as rainwater flows down them. Hope you and yours all safe.
  14. 17:44. I’m surprised I found this easier than some of the solvers above who are usually quicker than me, particularly as I didn’t finish any in one sitting last week. Maybe the commute provides the best solving conditions for me, as I was at home all last week when I produced my below par performances.

    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.

    1. To try and put jackkt’s explanation above slightly differently…
      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)

  15. 55 minutes for this tough offering.Puzzled by the same things that puzzled others, nitpicker and overeat being the last in. Longest hold-up was in the SW corner. Some very good deception in places.
  16. 15.02 today, suggesting I was a bit more on the wavelength of the setterthan I thought I was. Like others, I biffed OVEREAT on the assumption that Mary could mean stomach, and I managed BAKSHEETH from wordplay only. The one that I found surprisingly tricky was SEVERE, my LOI.
  17. Having seen the earlier comments, I was surprised to complete this in 30 minutes, as my usual times are between 45 minutes and an hour. All correct, but with the same failure to parse 2dn, 8dn and 26ac. I also recalled Endora from Bewitched to justify 1ac. Didn’t know WREN TIT but it was easy enough to work out. I’ve walked past the Bronte House, so HAWORTH was a write in from the checkers. FOI VENDOR, LOI SHODDINESS. Thanks to Ulaca for the blog, and jackkt and others for clarifying the parsing of the rest. I now find myself in the unusual position of having read the paper and completed the quick and standard cryptics, all before lunch! As the sun has come out I may just have to take my knee for a walk to the pub and do the Sudokus. John 🙂

    Edited at 2016-02-08 12:59 pm (UTC)

  18. I think this kind of thing is all my fault – remember when I confidently asserted that, while Monday was obviously easier than the rest of the week, Friday was no harder? Now The Powers That Be are at pains to put harder ones on Monday just to make our previous assumptions look foolish.

    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!

  19. As Jimbo says, a strange puzzle, much of it quite straightforward but with some really devious stuff thrown in as well. Thanks to Ulaca, Jack and ShuchiU for respectively explaining/unpicking the full parsing of VENDOR, NITPICKER, WITHDRAWN and OVEREAT.
  20. Ouch – unparsed at submission. The memory of the Bronte story from one of the Girl Annuals of my childhood has a way of coming in handy. I was the sort of kid who refused to clap for Tinkerbell so of course I found the euphemism “Little Mary” nauseating. Hope Jim and Sotira stay safe from flying roof tiles and rising water. We’re expecting snow in NYC. 17.40
  21. 14:46 but the high question mark count suggests I wasn’t completely on top of things.

    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.

    1. Yes, the euphemism must have been particularly tough on young Victorian girls called Mary, prompting sniggers all round in the nursery.
      1. I knew that Mary had a little lamb but she must have had the roast potatoes and Yorkshire puddings as well.

        I finished this crossword reasonably quickly for me but spent 15 minutes on the QC (just to be contrary)

  22. Late in the day, after lunch with visitors, spent half an hour feeling I’d finished, but popped in AMIN for the old ruler of state, wondering how it parsed (AIN for old, insert M).
    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.
  23. Always thought Monday’s crosswords were easier because it was naturally assumed we were all nursing hangovers from weekend boozing. Maybe there’s an assumption we’ve all cleaned up our acts.
  24. 42m DNF. I confidently biffed SINISTER at 28a and then stuck on the protein. I found this a challenge with the same unknowns as everyone else. I wonder sometimes if it’s all self induced: I expected an unpleasant struggle when I saw the length of the clues and of course that’s what I turned it into! Thanks to blog and bloggers for clearing the fog around some of the answers.
  25. Happy to finish in 15.34, but annoyed that (D)OILY didn’t come to mind quicker, as I once worked with a gentleman (well, he was/is a baronet) of the D’Oyly clan who may have provided the origin of the word, if several times removed. The clan entered Britain illegally with William the B’stard, ran at various times Oxfordshire, Beds and Bucks, Ireland, Calcutta and the West Indies, procured for Charles II, and provided a middle name for a certain Richard Carte.
    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.
  26. Hi all. About 45 minutes to wander through this while watching the American football game. Biffed both NITPICKER and my LOI, OVEREAT. As you might expect, the Mary reference meant nothing to me, so it waited until the end and went in after a few minutes pondering with a shrug. Regards.
  27. A wide awake 12 mins, and it seems like I was on the setter’s wavelength based on the comments above, although I confess that like others I biffed OVEREAT, NITPICKER and WITHDRAWN. TOLLED was my LOI after EXTENSION.
  28. My hopes of hitting a sub-twenty-minute time started to fade after about 25 minutes, but I finished in 28 mins which is not bad for me.

    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)

        1. Yes, Blue Nun Liebfraumilch, Piesporter Riesling or Mateus Rose was about it! Oh and Hirondelle Red:-)
  29. A nice puzzle in the main, which I completed in about 25 mins. Some clunky surface readings, though. Good blog.
  30. 11:50 for me, though I thought I’d been faster. I wasted a bit of time trying (and failing) to parse 8dn (WITHDRAWN) – my thanks to jackkt for explaining it – but I didn’t think it was that much.

    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.

  31. There was a book called this about a famous escape in WW 1 where the heroes conned the Turks into thinking that an ouija board was delivering messages, which in some manner facilitated their escape. Can’t remember the details.

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