Times 26,561: Ecclesiastes Cake

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
An efficient and professional puzzle that I was far too much on the wavelength for, resulting in a time of barely 6 and a half minutes (under pen and paper conditions) that left me feeling a bit shortchanged for a Friday. But there are many worse problems to have. A preponderance of religious terminology and personnel lurking among the answers has suggested a possible identity of the setter to some, on which subject I could not possibly comment, other than to say I thought Tuesday’s Guardian cryptic was excellent and even more so if you like that kind of thing.

Got to hurry to do the school run – shouldn’t have stayed up late last night to do today’s Elgar Toughie before going to bed (check out my ecumenism) so a brief but still wholehearted thank you to our setter. COD 5dn for the clever surface which would necessitate a whole different 8 letter answer in a concise crossword! Boo of the day to 7dn, for being one of those clues that you have to re-read four times to try and decide if you’re putting the right answer in. As I didn’t submit this over at the Club it is of course possible that I didn’t, and have 9ac my face. Let me know!

Across
1 CERISE – sort of red: RISE [rebel] going against CE [church]
4 BEMUSED – disconcerted: SUM reversed [tot “turned over”] + {nightmar}E in BED [cot]
9 EGG ON – stir: EGG [cake ingredient] + ON [about]
10 RESURGENT – recovering from failure: USER reversed [employer “brought back”] + R GENT [right | man]
11 CAMBRIDGE – city: M [maiden] in CAB RIDE [taxi journey] about G [good]
12 GRAVY – something saucy: V [verse] “penned by” GRAY [poet]
13 NUNS – religious types: N [any number] “infiltrating” NUS [student organisation]
14 DISTILLATE – something essential: IS TILL [is | work] in DATE [time]
18 SEPTUAGINT – translation of the Bible: (SETTING UP A*) [“new”]
20 CLIP – double def: something gripping / that makes you want to see the whole film
23 SPREE – double def: merry frolic / European river
24 PNEUMATIC – sort of drill: (TEAM IN CUP*) [“trained”]
25 RABBINATE – more than one teacher: (BEAT BAIRN*) [“cruelly”]
26 RAITA – dish: {c}R{e}A{m} I{s} T{h}A{t} [“to be regularly given a miss”]
27 PRESTON – city: PRESTO [very quickly] + N [knight]
28 CAUGHT – trapped: CAT [animal], UGH [how horrible] “to be cornered”
Down
1 CRESCENTS – certain shapes: CENT [money] “invested in” CRESS [plant]
2 REGIMEN – administration: REGIMEN{t} [group of soldiers “inadequate”]
3 SUNDRY – several: DRY [shrivelled, maybe] under SUN [UV source]
4 BASTE – beat: T [time], BASE [mean] “to keep it”
5 MARIGOLD – flower: MAR 1 [St David’s Day] associated with GOLD [yellow]
6 SMETANA – music he composed: (A MAN’S*) [“excited”] about E.T. [SF film]
7 DOTTY – crazy: D{i->O}TTY [song “offering love (O) for one (I}”]
8 BRIDLING – showing indignation: BRIDLING{ton} [Yorkshire resort “lacking style (TON)”]
15 TENDERED – offered: {wa}R in DEED [legal document] at end of TEN [decade]
16 EXPECTANT – eager: EXTANT [surviving] “full of” PEC [muscle]
17 QUIETIST – religious mystic: QUIT [left] “keeping” SITE reversed [place “for reflection”]
19 PARABLE – the story of the sower: P [soft] + ARABLE [like some ground in (that story)]
21 LATHING – turning by machine: LATHI N.G. [heavy piece of wood | no good]
22 SMYRNA – old port: AS reversed [when “turning up”], MY + RN [this person’s (joining) the navy] “in that”
23 SYRUP – sticky stuff: SUP [drink] containing YR [your]
24 PLAIN – obvious: PAIN [hurt], L [left] “repressed”

54 comments on “Times 26,561: Ecclesiastes Cake”

  1. I considered 7dn DOTTY quite straightforward, no haggling.

    Also COD 5 dn MARIGOLD not the old 黄河 as I first surmised.

    53 minutes of friday Fun with FOI CERISE and LOI 28ac CAUGHT

    I considered for a second or two that 8dn might be ARROGATE!

    WOD SPREE

  2. All but 14, 17 and 18 solved within my target 30 minutes but I took ages to work them out with the two religious ones unknown. Also didn’t know the port and for some reason ended by writing SMIRNA (an alternative) although I must have thought MY as part of the wordplay to get anywhere near it.
  3. A tad under half an hour, a good chunk of it spent unravelling the particularly ecclesiastical corner in the SW.

    5 religious terms in one puzzle is too many. Tiresome.

    Edited at 2016-11-04 09:12 am (UTC)

  4. I am no expert at the officially-deprecated game of “Guess the Times setter” but I’d be pretty confident with this one 🙂

    Anyway, this was a proper Friday challenge, especially when it came to the religious elements, but no complaints about the standard of the wordplay, which was exemplary (plus 8dn was very amusing). SEPTUAGINT is one of those where I knew the word existed, but would have struggled to define it with no context. And I can’t remember who it was who gave the tip that if you have a stubborn U with an unchecked letter in front of it, trying Q is more often than not the solution; whoever it was, I thank them, as that was my way in to 17dn.

  5. Happy to confirm that DOTTY is correct, or at least is the answer expected by the Club. I went over the 20 minutes for this one which I thought should have been completed quicker.
    There was an engaging collection of sauces in this as well as the “religious” content, with GRAVY, RAITA, SYRUP and SMETANA, which as Mrs Z is always reminding me, means (sour) cream in the composer’s native language. You might like to add BASTE (in its more familiar, to me sense) and even EGG ON. And since the Czech for ice cream is zmrzlina, it may be possible to add SMYRNA in some closely related language.
  6. I thought it was going to be PLAIN sailing after I got 1a straight away, but no. I had a good third of the grid left over at the end of my hour, including virtually all the religious references.

    I should have got a few other the others, including the composer—he was unknown the last time I saw him, too!—but perhaps I was a bit too dispirited by the emptiness of the grid and rather gave up. Ah well.

  7. After yesterday’s Physics exam, today it was Divinity, my other degree. I was born within 15 miles of PRESTON, not that it was a city then. (It’s got county borough written all over it to me.) I am one sixteenth Welsh so know St David’s Day, I did operate a lathe once upon a time and I live in a CRESCENT. Tell it not to the RABBINATE, but the SEPTUAGINT is textually more complete than the Hebrew versions. Shamefully, John Knox has left me unable to hear the word REGIMEN without also hearing monstrous.
    So none fell on stony ground today, and I finished in just about the half hour. FOI MARIGOLD. LOI EXPECTANT. Thank you setter!
  8. The SEPTUAGINT is so named because allegedly seventy scholars worked on it – must have been some committee meeting. Or maybe it’s because seventy is Bible-speak for a large nunber indicating perfection and completeness. This is of course a particularly holy week with All Saints’ and All Souls’/Faithful departed.

    Knew LATHI from the film Gandhi, they are the sticks the Indian police use. COD would be MARIGOLD, but we had JANITOR very recently, so COD to BRIDLING. 24′. Thanks V and setter.

    The QC blog is good today.

    1. It had to be Scarborough, Bridlington or Whitby. Unless of course it was Leeds, the ultimate place to spend your holiday, or the last resort.
    2. Urgh. Don’t get me going on the film Gandhi. Back in the day, I advised companies of film investment at the time when a company could invest £100 and get about double that back in tax savings. I was asked whether I could guarantee that this would happen. I said no, so the potential investors did not invest. The film was Gandhi, it won 8 Oscars and investors would not have cared about any tax savings. I was for a while known in the firm as the adviser who advised not to invest in Gandhi.

      Edited at 2016-11-04 05:04 pm (UTC)

  9. I’m with Sotira on the religious bit or maybe it’s because I hit the 40 min mark for the first time in a long while.Perhaps there is a lesson to be learnt from the quietists…don’t get hung up about crosswords.

    Edited at 2016-11-04 11:06 am (UTC)

  10. 45 minutes in two sittings, punctuated by a visit from the village mayor to tell me the name of our street was to change to something obscure and unspellable to honour the chap who invented (?) our blonde Aquitaine cows hereabouts.
    SW corner took me as long as the rest in spite of getting 18a early on without knowing exactly what it meant.
    A perfect Friday test which I can’t imagine doing in 6 minutes, so hats off to V.
    1. Quite sad I didn’t do this online now as it looks as though I would have dominated the leaderboard quite impressively (barring Magoo dropping by)! Though knowing my luck I would have managed one of the disastrous typos that my brain only makes without a pen in its hand.
  11. Just over 30 mins and like Tim, I was greatly helped by the ‘See a U, try a Q’ trick, not least because of I never heard of QUIETIST. Maybe an overabundance of religious answers but at least there were no Spoonerisms, my pet hate. Other than that it was steady but pleasant Friday fare with many unexplained so thanks setter and V.
  12. Never one to duck a challenge, I enjoyed this quixotic and manly puzzle, giving it a rating of 99.94 – Bradmanesque, indeed. The only reason I don’t give it 100 izetti pasqualed up the chance to include Hooker or Traherne.
  13. Wasn’t enjoying this and threw in the t after 20 minutes with the pair of crossing funny religious words, the river and the port all unsolved.
  14. Homer’s ‘Theodicy’, Verlaine? Never came across that on Broad Street. Do you mean Hesiod’s ‘Theogony’? fourlegger
    1. I am silly enough to have gone into the world of homophones there… theodicy… The Odyssey? I’ll get my himation.
  15. My bias is that all religion is pure bunk, but after a “scientific” puzzle yesterday I have no problem with a “religious”puzzle. Got off to a bad start biffing Eastman for the composer and struggled until failing miserably in SW corner. I note the next puzzle will be no. 26562. Question to the regulars – does this mean the setter is likely to prepare a special puzzle? As always thanks to V and setter (could be the same person as I don’t think I could read every clue in six minutes never mind completing!)
    Alan
  16. Raced through this until I got to the unknown religious terms that “everybody is familiar with”. I got the anagram right, since it was the only word that looked plausible, and then took me forever to try “Q” for the silent contemplaters. I also had a weird experience with SPREE when I was thinking “I’m sure this is going to be the river that flows through Berlin but I can’t remember its name.”

  17. Aside from the QUIETIST, I raced through this as well until I got stuck with 16d, convinced that the muscle was the literal. Should know by now that muscle = pec in crosswordland. Am I the only one who’s never heard of a lathi?
  19. About 25 minutes, knew most of the religious references except the QUIETIST, from the wordplay and deducing the presence of the “Q”, which led me to ‘quit’, and unlocked that one. As said earlier, I knew of the word SEPTUAGINT, but I wouldn’t have defined it correctly. Since it fit, in it went. Regards.
  20. 12 mins so I was very close to the setter’s wavelength, although obviously nowhere near the wavelength that V was tuned into. Although I’m not a fan of religion in the slightest that has never stopped me from learning some aspects of it over the years, a lot of it from crosswords. SEPTUAGINT was familiar although it helped that the anagram fodder was in plain sight, and like a few others the U checker helped me get the unknown/forgotten QUIETIST. I actually finished in the SE where it had taken me much too long to see RAITA, and once I had it SMYRNA was my LOI.
  21. Fifty-one minutes to get through this one, with the south-left corner last to succumb, bar one. QUIETIST, SEPTUAGINT and RABBINATE were all NHOs for me, but plausible and derivable from the wordplay.

    The “lathi” of 21d was also unknown, but I just assumed that “lath” had something to do with it, shrugged and moved on. I don’t think I’d ever heard of SMETANA either, but it seemed the most plausible of all the possible arrangements of un-checked letters.

    My LOI was SMYRNA, which rang only a very distant and muffled bell. At a guess, I’d have said it was where Smirnoff comes from, but I suspect this is untrue.

    Can’t say I was particularly bothered by the welter of religious terms, or at least no more so than I would be by terms from Greek mythology, astrology or homeopathy. I’m not sure that I agree with Boltonwanderer’s suggestion that the uncertainty principle or the undecidability theorem are arguments for agnosticism – they rather suggest to me that the universe was built rather sloppily and without a godlike attention to detail.

  22. 47 minutes but with 3 errors. I biffed PLIABLE for 19d and was then left with SEINE for 23a(misled by the INE for in European). I also had SMIRNA parsed as I’M(this person) turning up with RN(navy) in SA(with THAT as an alternative for IT). Kicked myself when I saw V’s parsing of PARABLE. I actually had ARABLE, as like some ground, in my head but didn’t follow it through. The other ecclesiastical terms came easily enough after a childhood reading missals with prayers for Sexagesima Sunday and Septuagesima Sunday in them, and the rule of Q with U came in handy for 17d. An interesting puzzle with some well disguised clues. Thanks setter and V.
  23. Ooooh… ‘pliable’ and ‘skive’ for me. When I googled Skive it gave a coastal town and a fjord in Denmark… thought it was a done deal…
  24. 25m. I haven’t had time for solving in the last couple of days so I tackled this and yesterday’s (18m) on the plane back from Piedmont, no doubt slowed down a bit by a day of wine tasting interrupted only by a boozy lunch. I can confirm that spittoons remain very much in use. In some places they even have dinky individual ones.
    I didn’t mind the religious obscurities in here. I don’t mind any kind of obscurity really as long as the clues are fairly indicated. The 18/17 crossing pair (both totally unknown to me) was very tough indeed but gettable from wordplay, and I like that kind of challenge.
  25. 9:16, leaving me apparently (and admittedly in the absence of Magoo) the fastest of the non-neutrinos on the TCC leaderboard – so thank you :-). This was my sort of puzzle, and I suspect in my heyday I’d have been up there challenging your time.

    I was foxed by 17dn for a while, wanting the mystic to be SUFI (as so often), but once I had all the crossing letters in place, I eventually got round to the usual trick of trying Q as a first letter and QUIETIST came to mind immediately. (I must have come across the word some years before reading The Glass Bead Game, but that book certainly planted it securely in my memory.)

    No problem with BRIDLING though, as I used to live in Brid back in the 1950s.

    A most interesting and enjoyable puzzle. My compliments to the setter. (If it’s who I think it is, I wonder if he’ll choose “Trump” as his next nom de guerre ;-).

    Edited at 2016-11-04 11:05 pm (UTC)

  27. Solving a day late and, like others, slightly irked by the 5 religous references. Pleased to see my LOI, QUIETIST, (bunged in unparsed) was correct. Amazed by our blogger’s time of 6 minutes. Seeing how others got on, I was quite pleased with my own 24:44.
  28. As a mere amateur, And a regular visitor to the lovely place that is bridlington, could someone please explain how “ton” equates to “style” ? I buffed the answer pretty quickly, but couldn’t parse it.
    1. Hi, one of the meanings of ton is ‘fashionable style or distinction’. It’s cognate with tone, I think. You occasionally see Tony meaning chic or fashionable in Crosswordland, with that word sometimes being the first in the clue with an upper case T, as a nice bit of misdirection!

      Edited at 2016-11-05 02:05 pm (UTC)

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