Times 27,191: Mesopotamia

78 comments on “Times 27,191: Mesopotamia”

1. Nice crossword, easier than some but with a lot of nice touches.
   My COD is 9ac, a red rag to the TfTT homonymphobes, if ever I saw one.
   Another exercise in concise cluing .. is it just me, or are clues getting shorter?
   1. We had one of these examples of North American Intervocalic Flapping a while back, and as I recall there was indeed some comment. Of course for me, the homophony is perfect, as it is in medal/metal/meddle/mettle.
   2. Never knew you in your heyday, Jerry, so can’t possibly comment on any shrinkage

      Ulaca (they’ve temporarily banned me)

      1. Everything gets shorter as you get older, Ulaca.. if it is you, and not horryd masquerading 🙂
         1. I’ll take your word for it, Jerry. [Now debanned]
   3. Like Guy below, I’ll swear I don’t pronounce it rider – but I’ll be careful not to swear that I’m front of my UK-speaking friends for fear of correction.

      However, because of that certainty, I spent a long time with Twain (twang, American accent and author), which almost parses and is almost as egregious a homophone.

2. I’ll second 9ac as COD for sheer nerve and because it nearly defeated me. Spent ages trying to justify RISER (derived from ‘reisen? a step on a travelator?) before spotting my typo in 2d. Unless I misunderstand you V, surely there’s no need to separate with/in in 12ac?
   1. Oh yes, there isn’t really, is there? Look at me trying to make things more Libertarian when they’re perfectly Ximenean…
3. 30 mins with no nosh. Heading to York, so will stop for brunch at Betty’s, Northallerton. Hoorah.
   Didn’t like 9ac. And 1dn seemed a bit weak.
   Thanks setter and V.
4. Too clever for me. Gave up at the end of my hour with the unknown priest, the unknown river, the unknown bird and the American author all defeating me, especially as I’d desperately bunged in WENDIGO at 2d, on the grounds that it’s an anagram of “doing we” and I knew it was a word for some kind of creature.

   Might’ve managed it if my unknowns hadn’t all been crossing! Thanks for the explanations, V.

   1. And wintry walks the Wendigo,
      The farmers curse their fear,
      The season’s wheel is slowly halting,
      The mound folks’ time is near.
      1. Oooh, what’s that from?

         Having just done some research* I really should have known that the wendigo wasn’t a bird, given that I’ve encountered him fairly recently in episodes of Grimm and the latest TV adaptation of Dirk Gently, let alone in actual literature…

         *Slacked off on the web instead of doing what I was meant to be doing.

         1. Before I’d got any crossers I thought the bird was going to be a GODWINE. A bit like a godwit but more grapey.
5. Took a while to get going but then all done in about 30m. I’m not quite getting the supposed equivalence of ‘though’ and ‘if’ in 4ac.
   Could someone think of an example?
   1. “The show was enjoyable, if a little too saccharine for some tastes.”
   2. My previous example was a confection of my own. Here is an authentic example (true to my corpus lexicography roots!) taken from an issue of New Internationalist magazine included in the British National corpus:

      ‘…one could not escape the impression that the speaker was at least omnipresent, if not quite omniscient.’

   3. The equivalence, though/if/even if ropy, is confirmed in Chambers.
6. Agreed. Isn’t it runs R Within= IN bordered by explosiveHE? Sorry, on train.
7. I must have been off the wavelength for this as I found it the hardest I’ve seen for some time. Not knowing the river, I came up with AINO, which would seem to fit ‘one among a number’ just as well as ARNO. Alas, it doesn’t happen to be the name of a river.
   1. AINO was the first name of Mrs Sibelius, the River Arno flows though Florence. Sorry, but I am a mine of quiz trivia and a Sibelius groupie.
8. A very, very special day for me with exactly the same time as our esteemed blogger: well done V for being so quick!
   I’m all for playing around with mildly dodgy homophones: two in one crossword, the American and the p*ssed Swiss looks like teasing of the friendly kind, and only a churl would object (go ahead, churls!).
   I liked FINNISH – UED clues add to the gaiety of nations – and the (very) slightly risqué “melting in our arms” surface at 10. And a plant that’s generic rather than NHO specific – what’s not to like?
   I did wonder whether there was more to 1d than a rather stranger surface image CD, but it appears not.

   Edited at 2018-11-09 09:40 am (UTC)

   1. I used up all my speed last Saturday and now I have none left!
   2. Not so much churlish as pedantic: if I were drunk I’d pronounce it “shwish”, unless my inebriation induced inconsistency

      1. I think you’ll find that’sh incoshish…inconshenshy.. .inshishconsi…conshishini…wrong.

9. 23 minutes, much fun, no problems, 1d was last in after a flirtation with CHAIN-GANG but once all the checkers were there it fell in quickly, nice clue. 9a just about tolerable as I have no real idea how many Americans say RIDER when the word is writer. Why would you do that?
   1. I sure don’t.
      Or not that I’m aware of.
      1. You probably do, as most of us (‘us’ including Canadians) do; I didn’t invent the term North American Intervocalic Flapping. We’re generally not aware of the rules we apply in speech. I’m not sure if vowel length is the same (‘ride’ is longer than ‘write’, for instance)–there’s discussion in the literature that I totally forget.
         1. This is not the pronunciation given in Merriam-Webster, yet there is a “d” in the top Google result for “writer definition.”
            I certainly don’t pronounce it that way all the time. I rather pride myself on the crispness of my enunciation. Even after a few drinksh.

            Edited at 2018-11-09 11:48 pm (UTC)

10. LOI was PRECENTOR, which I’d NHO. Wasn’t quite sure what a JABOT was, either—and that crossed with JACOB, a sheep I wouldn’t know except from previous puzzles here. It will be interesting to see how others here will feel about “within” as one word in the clue for RHINE (at first, I thought this had something to do with the hidden rest of the word, after R for “runs,” in “witHIN Explosive”)… but the puzzlers at The Nation have done something even more outrageous in an upcoming entry (to appear months from now), in a clue that took me ages to parse, and I am going to have to let them have it. (Maybe in both senses. Ha.)
    1. Within is just there to give you IN, which is entirely permissible. It doesn’t need to be read as two words.
       1. Exactly! It’s fine.
       2. I finally saw that. Put down my cecity to a reluctance to acknowledge “within” as a simple clue for IN (as it contains the word), rather than something more devious, if unusual; combined with my recent memory of suddenly stopping on the sidewalk after leaving the office to email Henri that I’d finally parsed the clue that this one, wrongly parsed, reminded me of.

          Edited at 2018-11-09 10:11 am (UTC)

11. 31 mins and most enjoyable. My COD to the &lit quality of CULTIVAR: very clever. I wasn’t hampered by it, but surely a word that means ‘something like a fin on a fish’ would have only one ‘n’ and then to avoid a clash with ‘finish’=conclude it would be necessary to hyphenate? So maybe the clue required a homophone indicator? Anyway, it didn’t spoil a jolly good puzzle. I had vaguely heard of JABOT, though had no idea of what it might mean. I saw STRAP-HANG quickly: I like a good CD.

    Thanks to the setter. Thanks, V, for your blog.

    1. I don’t know – you’d say “clannish” or “fannish”, with two n’s, wouldn’t you?
       1. Aha! — you have a point there. As, indeed, ‘donnish’. OK.
       2. Muddy Waters certainly claimed to be a Mannish Boy.
    2. You have to have two Ns for the pronunciation.
       1. Well, no — because one pronounces ‘finish’ as ‘finnish’.
          1. And, indeed, diminish. There doesn’t appear to be a hard and fast rule. That’s English for you !
             1. But if you were literally trying to say something is ‘like a fin’ in English, you wouldn’t use FINNISH, because that means something else, you’d absolutely have to use FIN-ISH in order to be clear.

                Wouldn’t you?

                1. But then again, surely an (anglophone) Finn / Finnish person would refer to a Spaniard as being Spanish, with only one “n” ?
                2. Referring to someone or something pertaining to FInland, Finnish is capped, which distinguishes it from “finnish.”
          2. The word that already exists, sure. But if the word were just invented for this other sense, you’d tend to pronounce it with a long I, fine-ish, if the N weren’t double.

             (I posted this from my phone earlier, but somehow it wound up in the wrong place.)

12. Easier than some of late. First 8 down clues were write-ins which made the top quite easy. Knew both JACOB and JABOT so no real problems in southern half either.

    Thought 9A a bit daft – so many other ways of cluing the word why go for this offering? Liked the clue to URSA MINOR, the Little Dipper

13. Very enjoyable and great fun although for a while I wondered if I would, ever get started, never mind finished! In the end I checked out in 42 minutes which is a reasonable time for me although I must admit that because of time constraints I stretched the rules a bit by checking the unknown words worked out from wordplay as I went along, just to make sure they existed (JABOT, CULTIVAR and PRECENTOR). Special thanks to whoever was writing ‘The Archers’back in the 1960s for having one of the characters keeping a special herd of JACOB sheep.

    Edited at 2018-11-09 09:46 am (UTC)

14. Thought about him a lot while trying to make sense of 9ac, eventually put RIDER in, seemed weak. I liked 1d, spent some time with wrong wordplay, used to do that, horrific in the seventies, can’t imagine what it’s like now. Dnk JABOT.

    Thanks verlaine (did you see the correction in the Times?) and setter.

    1. What correction in the Times? I guess it’s too much to hope that you’re talking about an error found in one of Roger Crabtree’s finals puzzles solutions, several days after the fact…
       1. Afraid not, just gave the correct name for the person who came second.
15. I was slower than most on this at 48 minutes, watching cricket at the same time. LOI was the ARNO after STRAP-HANG was remembered. Nowadays, I often get offered a seat by a kind, young person, not that there are straps to hang on any longer. That makes a happy man feel very old. DNK JABOT but JACOB made it clear. I was thinking of RINGTONE for 5d and it came in useful a few clues later. I wonder if the setter did the same. I liked EVERY OTHER, RIDER, and SWISH, all three worthy of COD, but BAG LADY takes the honour as that was what we called my daughter when she was little. She had a penchant for bags within bags. Good puzzle. Thank you V and setter.
16. RHINE. And no, I didn’t much care for RIDER, one of my last ones in when I finally and grudgingly justified it.

    FOI RHINE
    LOI ARNO (Ah, no !)
    COD CLIMB-DOWN, although I much admired the “& lit” qualities of both WIDGEON and CULTIVAR.

    When our previous Prime Minister eventually shuffles off this mortal coil, there should be a prize for the first Times setter to have him “digesting nothing in Africa”.

    Time 14:28

17. I found this quite tricky, with 51:42 having elapsed before I hit submit after finally spotting STRAP HANG. My biffed SWISS was auto-corrected by REFRESHER. Phew! I assumed RIDER was something to do with Haggard. JABOT and PRECENTOR from wordplay. Tough stuff. Thanks setter and V. I now need a good excuse not to climb Cheddar Gorge!
18. Completed in just over an hour with a few biffs including RHINE, JABOT (from wordplay), SWISH and my last two in 1d STRAP-HANG and 18a GOD-FEARING which was easy when I had the G checker! I used to commute on the London Underground and I have never heard the term STRAP-HANG.
19. Some of those ‘&lit qualities’ I actually found quite annoying. As in CHEF. Didn’t like RIDER either, and two rivers together at 12 & 13 and moan, moan, moan. And shouldn’t that be FIN-ISH?

    Actually, as puzzles go, this was pretty good stuff, even if not quite what I was hoping for from a Friday.

    1. I find all ‘&lits’ extremely tiresome. Alleged homophones too. I get that people pronounce the same word differently and you’ll never get away from that controversy. What I cannot see is why, of all the thousands of true homophones available in the English language, the setter insists on choosing ones that are controversial. Unless he/she is doing it deliberately and sitting back amusedly waiting to read the inevitable arguments on here, there is simply no need for it. Mr Grumpy
20. I agree with Guy that New Yorkers pronounce them slightly differently, so regardless of context you would always know which one they meant. But I don’t have the linguistics skill to analyse exactly how this is. Perhaps for Kevin, originally from the Pacific coast, they really do sound the same.

    I didn’t find this at all easy although I did see STRAP HANG quite quickly. Last Christmas I took Number One Grandson to the Transit Museum and here’s a pic of an old-fashioned car with the leather straps. It also has an ad for Lifebuoy soap which came up here recently. https://cdn.newsday.com/polopoly_fs/1.11886407.1465408008!/httpImage/image.jpeg_gen/derivatives/landscape_1280/image.jpeg

    Congratulations V on a fantastic finish last weekend. 20.56

    Edited at 2018-11-09 12:10 pm (UTC)

    1. In London that carriage would count as reasonably up to date
    2. What a fantastic picture, what a wonderful memory! My earliest memories of the New York subway (a very long time ago, by the way) is of precisely those subway cars with wicker seats. They disappeared in the 50’s, I believe, because they would have been slashed to pieces, but there was no vandalism in the 40’s (if the child I was then can judge that). Thank you for posting the link.
    3. Intervocalic flapping is standard in so-called General American, and evidently in Australian and NZ English also, but presumably not in all US or antipodean dialects. (But think of the notorious ‘fuggedaboutit’, which is probably ‘fuggedaboudit’.) You could Google ‘intervocalic flapping’ and find out far more than you or I at least could possibly want to know about the phenomenon. I think Jimbo’s point, or what I took to be his point, is the important one: in a UK puzzle, why a clue based on US dialects?
21. I thought this was the easiest puzzle of the week, complete in about 40mins. Guessed Precentor although I was pretty confident. I was strap hanging on the airport bus in Krakow recently so 1d came immediately which helped. I love it when Londoner’s moan about to their transport infrastructure- try commuting from deepest Norfolk!! Thanks all
    1. It says it all when Stagecoach shut down their Norfolk Green bus operation after only 3 years of effort. Most of the decent buses were cascaded to Bedford. Understandably high car ownership was probably a major factor.
22. AFter 16m I bunged in SCRAP-GANG and laid down my pen. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a ‘strap-hang’, nor did I think much of the clue. Cryptic definitions can be tricky to pull off, and I don’t think this really managed it… although it could be sour grapes.

    SWISH & RIDER pushed the boundaries a bit, didn’t they?

23. 20 minutes, with 11ac LOI – I had been trying to make PRELECTOR work, with the cleric being a RECTOR and L from ‘left’ somehow, but after using aid to see if anything else fitted checkers, solution was obvious. (So really a DNF, I suppose) 9ac went in with a shrug, hoping that Ryder wasn’t an American author, relevant for some unknown reason – I did check that the author of ‘She’ was English.
24. I was another who thought this was going to be a Friday Beast after a largely fruitless run through most of the acrosses, but I suddenly got going when I hit the SE corner and worked my way steadily back. No objections to any of the things which might have been quibbles, but this may be because I solved them all, meaning I would say that, wouldn’t I. Meanwhile, JABOT appears to have sunk in from the last time it appeared, so at least the learning process continues, one word at a time.
25. Much enjoyed the puzzle, taking for me only an unusually swift 30m. Might well have been quicker had I not spent an age wrestling with various (incorrect) spellings of REGIMEN when trying to solve 16d. Helped by knowing JACOB and JABOT as well. Thank you for the blog, V. Sorry to miss you all at the weekend and the jollities in the George.
26. This puzzle seems to have been easy and hard at the same time according to the above comments, and I suppose I was somewhere in the middle with it too. Completed it without aids for the 3rd day in a row (hurray!).
    LOI was the BAG LADY who I was trying unsuccessfully to turn into a BIG BABY until the penny dropped. I always wonder about a good Christian being GOD-FEARING. Surely it must be the Old Testament God they are talking about? As I am just reading a novel about Vikings, I would have thought that if anyone was, they were the god-fearing ones.
27. I have failed dismally, managing two errors in only 41 minutes, so it’s just as well I wasn’t any slower.

    For 11ac, I went for “prelector”, for no very good reason other than that I figured somebody somewhere must spell “praelector” without the “a”. And for 13ac, I plumped for Aino, which is probably a river somewhere but, alas, not the right one.

28. I thought STRAP-HANG was utterly disgraceful: a) it is egregiously Anglocentric; b) it is irredeemably ugly; and c) I’d never heard of it.

    Temporarily IP address-banned of Hong Hong

    1. Agreed. I’m still none-the-wiser. I don’t think it’s even cryptic is it? Mr Grumpy
29. I had no problems today, finishing in a bit less than 20 minutes. LOI was BONSAI, not that hard, more reflective of a pretty much top to bottom solve. RIDER was weird, but does sound the same as ‘writer’ to me. NYers who ride the subway are routinely called straphangers here, one word, so no problem there, and apparently not Anglocentric at all, ulaca, if indeed that be you anonymously. Regards.
    1. Egregiously Occidocentric then, Kevin

       ulaca

       1. Well said. Regards.
       2. Am I the only Dire Straits aficionado among today’s correspondents? “Lions” from their very first eponymous album includes these lines:-

          Strap hanging gunshot sound
          Doors slamming on the overground

30. A rare Friday visit from me but I was quick on the QC this morning.
    I only got one wrong putting in Jarab for the sheep. I got five others right including Jabot and Bag Lady. I wonder why I couldn’t get any of the other 20 odd clues!
    David
31. Another DNF for me, even more annoying than yesterday’s effort since I’d correctly solved & parsed everything except 17d where although I’d deduced the BARE anagrist, for the life of me I just couldn’t see VERT(ical) and so resorted to aids just to get the damn thing finished!
32. STRAP-HANG was no problem for a New Yorker like me, as Kevin pointed out, but I think the T in “tube” needed to be capitalized. RIDER was a problem for a New Yorker like me, as Kevin pointed out, because my American accent only affects the T in WRITER, but the I is distinctly shorter than the one in RIDER — maybe with a Southern drawl the difference is less pronounced. I was going to complain about RHINE as well (because I thought the explosive HE was referring to helium, which is an inert gas and hardly explosive), but a quick check of the COED reveals that HE really is an abbreviation for “high explosive”, so I am relieved.
33. …and ome wrong. PRECENTOR completely unknown amd with the available checkers P_E_E_T_R. I went fpr PRELECTOR which is a real word thpugh does not quite parse. Rest was straightforward enough.
34. Took a while to figure out the Mesopotamia reference! Enjoyed this romp between the two rivers.
    34 mins , which is par for us.
    18a was made more difficult for us by being erroneously clued as “religious meal” rather than “religious medal” in the Australian printed version. Spent some time trying to think of what was eaten at Passover!
    1. Sorry that was us logged out 🙂

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