Times 27577 – Harmony and Prosperity?

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Despite a smattering of tricky vocab, the congruous nature of the literals made this a pretty straightforward Monday offering. Special thanks to the setter on two counts: evoking images of horryd at 1d and referencing a much misunderstood and maligned species at 17a.

20 minutes.

ACROSS

1 Russian conspirator’s crimes involved with debt (10)
DECEMBRIST – anagram* of CRIMES DEBT
6 Peacekeepers infiltrating old army? Something fishy here (4)
TUNA – UN in TA (the late, lamented Territorial Army, immortalised by Gareth in The Office)
9 Nothing from speaker left tucking into two molluscs (7)
NAUTILI – NAUT (sounds like nought) L in II
10 Suspicion of fluid ejected by octopuses and marine fish? (7)
INKLING – INK LING
12 Prelude of note in Italian romantic opera, originally (5)
INTRO – N in IT R[omantic] O[pera]
13 Dish encountered in hospital department, on Sundays principally (9)
ENTREMETS – MET (encountered) in ENT RE (about) S[undays]; a fancy word for something between courses
14 Popular fellow playing on lute, say, right away (15)
INSTANTANEOUSLY – IN STAN [ON LUTE SAY*]
17 Raced after lookalike, such as Fink-Nottle for example (6-9)
DOUBLE-BARRELLED – DOUBLE (lookalike) BARRELLED (‘raced’, as in ‘She fair barrelled down the slope’); Gussie Fink-Nottle is a Wodehousean chinless wonder. Granted, quite a large subset…
20 Male, one Conservative on radio introducing a Liberal leader (9)
EDITORIAL – ED I TORI (sounds like Tory) A L
21 Meat Muslims consume, primarily available in communal dining area (5)
HALAL – A[vailable] in HALL
23 Joint gamble involving danger (7)
BRISKET – RISK in BET
24 Wave initially to Sophie, a friend in Paris (7)
TSUNAMI – T[o] S[ophie] UN AMI; bien entendu
25 Leguminous plant, one originally unknown in South Africa (4)
SOYA – O[ne] Y (sciency unknown) in SA
26 Noted creation for sending off new issue? (6,4)
CRADLE SONG – a fancy expression for a lullaby

DOWN

1 Foppish fellow openly resisted when speaking (9)
DANDIFIED – DAN ‘defied’
2 What solicitors do in place of trials? (5)
COURT – double definition
3 Girl Friday reportedly composed old opus about autumn (4,2,3,4)
MAID OF ALL WORK -sounds like ‘made’ then FALL in O WORK; just doesn’t have the ring of ‘Jack of all trades’, I’m afraid
4 First-class workers in extremely robust clothing (7)
RAIMENT – AI MEN in R[obus]T
5 Dairy product in list carried by close relative (7)
STILTON – TILT in SON
7 Worldwide student poetry almost entirely unfinished (9)
UNIVERSAL – UNI (student) VERS (poetry almost) AL (entirely unfinished)
8 Protection say accepted by road workers ultimately (5)
AEGIS – EG in AI (Great North Road) [worker]S
11 Be generally hospitable, eager to welcome religious leader home (4,4,5)
KEEP OPEN HOUSE – POPE in KEEN HOUSE; ‘Open House’ is beloved by Dr Mahatir Mohamad, who I once unwittingly referred to as ‘Madasahatir’. I avoided jail time.
15 Absurdity of way Charlie gets thrown by greed (9)
STUPIDITY – ST [c]UPIDITY
16 Unexpectedly godly line in vocalisation? (9)
YODELLING – GODLY LINE*
18 Footsore person of second celebrity group? (7)
BLISTER – B LISTER; FOOTSORE is only an adjective in Collins and Lexico (Oxford in old money)
19 Joker finally in euphoric state, as the Marx Brothers were (7)
RELATED – [joke]R ELATED
20 English doctor on American board (5)
EMBUS – E MB US; ‘board’ as in get on a bus
22 Some fill a novel — that’s plain (5)
LLANO – hidden in words 2-4

58 comments on “Times 27577 – Harmony and Prosperity?”

  1. 22 minutes. A bit too easy for a 15×15 perhaps but a good one to recommend to aspiring graduates from the QC. My only slight query was ENTREMETS but I trusted to wordplay.

    Edited at 2020-02-03 05:59 am (UTC)

  2. My first sub-10′ time in ages, thanks to massive biffing; MAID OF ALL WORK parsed post-submission, the rest almost immediately on typing in the solution. I didn’t realize that HALAL could be a noun. U, you have a typo at EDITORIAL. And how do you unwittingly write ‘Madasahatir’?
  3. 49 mins. Worked carefully through this so could have gone quicker.

    FOI tuna.
    LOI entremets.
    COD double-barrelled.

  4. I was busy writing in JILL OF ALL TRADES until I found it didn’t quite fit.
  5. 9:48. Not hard, but not super-easy either. A puzzle where you have to come up with things like DECEMBRIST, ENTREMETS, NAUTILI, EMBUS and MAID OF ALL WORK is never going to be a biff-fest for me at least.
    I assume in 18dn we’re supposed to ignore the punctuation by inserting a space and reading ‘foot sore’.
  6. was an early thought but left the first word.

    FOI 6ac TUNA

    LOI 9ac NAUTILI

    COD 1ac DECEMBRIST

    WOD 13ac ENTREMETS

    I met Fink-Nottle’s son back in 1982.

    25 minutes

    1. G & S to the rescue:

      A nurs’rymaid is not afraid of what you people call work, So I made up my mind to go as a kind of piratical
      maid-of-all-work.

      Edited at 2020-02-03 09:04 am (UTC)

  7. Didn’t know ENTREMETS but seemed most likely with all the checkers.

    MAID OF ALL WORK is a horribly clunky phrase. Would anyone actually use this?

  8. I risked coming a cropper this morning by putting in ONES HOUSE at the end of 11D before I had the full answer. Fortunately I kept some recent aberrations in mind enough to question this before submitting. LOI ENTREMETS, of which I wasn’t 100% confident but my faith in the parsing was well placed.
  9. You didn’t go to jail for ‘Madasahatir’, Ulaca?! He once blew a gasket, I seem to remember, when Paul Keating called him recalcitrant.
  10. Slowed down by the unknowns and having to trust the wordplay for ENTREMETS I found this quite hard going, and stumbled across the line in 47 minutes. It’s just as well there’s a band called The Decemberists inspired by the revolutionaries, despite their slightly different spelling.

    Not heard MAID OF ALL WORK but at least that made sense once I came up with it (and, having made my way around the grid from FOI TUNA, I at least had enough letters that I didn’t try jamming JILL OF ALL TRADES in…)

    1. I see The Decemberists had an album in 2018 that completely passed me by. That’s listening sorted for when the inexecrable Sean Keaveney is on 6 Music later and I have to switch off!
      1. Apparently so! I added it to my “future listening” playlist on Spotify this morning, so it’ll cycle around eventually…
  12. 13’29”, with some anxiety over the unknown ENTREMETS. Another first thought of JILL OF ALL TRADES here.

    BLISTER only works if ‘person of second celebrity group’ is the definition, in which case what should be the enumeration?

    Some random men: DAN, STAN, ED…….

    Thanks ulaca and setter.

  13. 12:02. Like Rob, some anxiety over the unknown ENTREMETS delayed me putting it in for a while… I never got past seeing “on” as a positional indicator. Doh.

    Edited at 2020-02-03 09:47 am (UTC)

  14. 14 minutes, with ENTREMETS one of two pauses for thought. And that’s after having the injections at the Doc’s for the trip to China, including Wuhan, which won’t take place. Is an amuse bouche an entremet? We’ve been eating at too many flash restaurants. COD to DECEMBRIST, which came to me as I tried to remember the names of Rasputin’s killers. Well, we did visit Yusupov’s house last year. This all fell into place with a rush at the end.Thank you U and setter.

    Edited at 2020-02-03 09:36 am (UTC)

  15. 20 mins, although that includes a couple of brief naps (was up half the night). Thanks u.
  18. First bloody typo in ages, despite doing it on paper (because my typing is crap) and then doing it online, which gives me ample time to check it.
    1. Tsumami = the sensation experienced after a large mouthful of a foodstuff such as Marmite?
  19. No one has said it (although I’m sure many know it) so I will chime in. It’s a literal translation of “bonne a tout faire”. I note that when the phrase is googled in the US the first translation to pop up is the hilariously wrong “good at everything”. When we were kids my little brother used to refer to his 3 older siblings as BLISTERs. 11.06
  20. Good time wrecked by a stupid typo. Couldn’t think what on earth an embus was – thanks for explaining! Emory kept going round my brain.
  21. 6m 50s finishing on ENTREMETS with fingers crossed. Not a tough puzzle but enough there to make it a bit chewy in places – NAUTILI in particular would have taken longer if I hadn’t seen it recently.

    Lots of random men cropping up today – STAN, ED & DAN all made an appearance. Throw in Sophie & Charlie from the clues and you’ve got quite a party, even before you invite Gussie and Groucho et al.

  22. I wondered briefly how newts would fit into 17a, but soon spotted the required definition. ENTREMETS was new to me, but the wordplay seemed clear enough. INSTANTANEOUSLY was held up by my biffed MAID OF THE ____. until Gussie put me right. COURT and INTRO were my first 2 in and EDITORIAL brought up the rear as I was looking at the wrong end of the clue for the definition. Nice puzzle and not too taxing for a Monday. 20:11. Thanks setter and U.
  23. ….I was determined not to fall into any traps, real or imagined. My imagination wasn’t stretched in that direction.

    DOUBLE-BARRELLED names used to be the preserve of the upper classes, but seem to have become almost de rigueur nowadays. If Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Jessica Ennis-Hill had a daughter together, I could imagine her being christened Katerina-Maria Eliza-Jane Ennis-Hill-Oxlade-Chamberlain. What the next generation might bring I shudder to think !

    FOI TUNA
    LOI DANDIFIED
    COD INKLING
    TIME 8:04

  24. 15.03 . Last one in was cradle song after a couple of minutes trying to make bridge song fit! Not the easiest start to the week, be interesting to see what the next few days hold.
  25. Exactly 15 minutes despite having biffed INSTRUMENTALIST at 14ac, with 13ac LOI. As 1ac was FOI, JILL didn’t come to mind at 3dn.
  26. 11:06. Cradle was last after a bit of a delay caused by my having put LLANA at 22. I was probably still thinking about LIANA which came up somewhere very recently.

    My unthinking justification for embus was that it was probably an emery board.

  27. Long, boozy day yesterday so was pretty happy with that. About time I barrelled back into some Wodehouse.
  28. I spent a while trying to convince myself that an EMBUS was some type of committee, and never fully succeeded. Had I considered it as a verb, I would have expected an N rather than an M.

    In any event, I got there in the end.

  29. A nice start to the week – not too taxing but some interesting vocab and a good variety of clues. Lots of ticks next to clues, including Stilton, which was in the news this morning, because the village wants to start making the eponymous cheese again – apparently it was all the EU’s fault that they couldn’t. I feel sure it was more complicated than that.

    My first reaction to 17a was something collector?, but I couldn’t remember exactly what Gussie F-N collected – salamanders was definitely too long! Then – PDM 😀 Perhaps the double-double barrelled surname will go the way of the Spanish system, where one name is passed down each from mother and father to their offspring (that’s probably a simplistic explanation of how it works). Private Eye’s Blended Families is good for a laugh BTW.

    I also parsed Blister by splitting foot and sore,

    I knew entremets from watching Bake-Off. These days they tend to be complicated cakes of many layers – sponge, mousse, jelly, etc. They take hours to make and are gone in a couple of bites if you’re lucky! I think I’d rather have a large jam doughnut.

    FOI Tuna
    LOI Cradle song – that and Related took nearly a minute to sort out. Don’t know why I had such troubled with 19d
    COD Double barrelled, although Blister came a close second
    Time 26 minutes (give or take)

    1. Stilton was originally made in Melton Mowbray and stamped ‘Stilton’ as that was its first staging post – then Royston -then London.
      Stilton is of Melton Mowbray – and not Stilton itself! Much like Cheddar should only be made in and around Cheddar otherwise it is ‘wrong’. EU right for once!
      1. Ah there you go – I knew it wasn’t straightforward! I was fairly sure that Stilton had never been made there and thought a born and bred East Midlander would have the answer so thanks for the clarification!
  30. Finally finished one in a crédible time, 22 mins (a PB) so for once feel I might contribute. I very much enjoyed the variety of this offering. DNK NAUTILI but fairly easy from the cryptic. « Chambres de bonnes » are the small rooms at the top of very elegant Parisien, and elsewhere in France, houses where the staff lived. Now selling for vast prices. Thank you Ulaca and setter.
  31. 18 mins but had thrown in KEEP ONES HOUSE without much thought or parsing, and was going to come back to it…
  32. Not much to say today. Done in about 15 minutes, LOI was ENTREMETS. Unknown tome. I hadn’t heard of a CRADLE SONG either, but it wasn’t that hard to figure out. And I also didn’t know who Fink-Nottle was/is, or why he’d be described as DOUBLE-BARRELLED, but went with the wordplay. Regards.
  33. Like Jimbo says above. 20 minutes nodding off after golf. Liked DECEMBRIST which looked an unlikely anagram at first.
  34. Managed to finish this after attending a largely incomprehensible (down to me not the speaker) lecture about Einstein: I clearly did not understand the gravity of the situation.
    LOI was STILTON. I did know Entremets somehow. It was the NW that held me up the most but it all fell into place after Decembrist.
    I was another looking for an emery board at 20d until the brisket course. A lot of food in this puzzle but I can’t see a nina.
    David
  35. A little surprised that this turned out to be so easy across the board as despite generous cryptic elements, the vocab was quite rarefied!

    Can I query thebarnet’s inclusion as a verified real solver on the SNITCH though? 3m every day doesn’t appear overtly credible to me.

  36. 15:36. I was pretty tired solving this today because I stayed up late watching the Superbowl so good job it wasn’t too taxing.
  37. Not bothered that this was at the easier end of the spectrum…I completed it… my first full 15×15! Had to verify a couple of words existed – LLANO and NAUTILI but otherwise a session yesterday evening and a few minutes today to finish off 26a and 19d saw me through. Worth putting in a Comment even a day late. Thanks too to the tip from the QC site.
  38. Another late entry from a habitual QC solver, very pleased to make my first full solve of the 15×15 – even if I had to use some online aids to help speed progress. I was able to fully parse it, which I take as a personal achievement too. FOI TUNA, LOI ENTREMETS, COD NAUTILI, just because I like the word. As above, thanks for the tip from the QC site – a good learning experience.

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