Comments on: Guardian 24687 / Araucaria

By: mhl

mhl — Fri, 08 May 2009 08:05:04 +0000

Beermagnet: oh, was this the version printed in the paper today?

By: beermagnet

beermagnet — Fri, 08 May 2009 07:59:29 +0000

I see the Guardian are giving us another opportunity to do this puzzle today .

By: Barnaby Page

Barnaby Page — Fri, 01 May 2009 10:24:04 +0000

I tend to agree with Tim (#23) – very few grins in this one. (And, incidentally, long wordy clues are difficult to work with when you do the crossword with a small group, as I tend to.)

I didn’t notice the link of the theme with current events until it was pointed out here. If it were deliberate I’m sure Araucaria would have found it easy enough to include words like “pandemic”…and he didn’t.

By: Tim the Newbie

Tim the Newbie — Fri, 01 May 2009 05:54:30 +0000

I’m with Ian. Tough, clever (for the sake of it in parts) construction but often at the expense of elegance and with an unfavourably low slog:pleasure ratio. Like ‘Brie’ though.

By: smutchin

smutchin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:17:19 +0000

Geoff (#19) – “it is the only convenient generic word for the animal which doesn’t appear in any of the solutions”

I like your thinking. Maybe it is just a coincidence after all. Or maybe not. I don’t know.

By: JohnR

JohnR — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:47:27 +0000

@20 – Dave, I remember with embarrassment giggling at the warm ghouls in English O-levels. Oh dear…

On 10 dn – OED points out that a finger is “[o]ne of the five terminal members of the hand; in a restricted sense, one of the four excluding the thumb. In this latter sense, the fingers are commonly numbered first to fourth, starting from that next the thumb.” Which explains why I have always thought of the ring finger as third, whereas Araucaria, scrupulous as always, has included “digital” to make it clear that he is counting digits in the full sense, not just fingers.

By: Dave Ellison

Dave Ellison — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:11:09 +0000

Liked 20d, too, made me chuckle. Easier than usual A. as I finished on the way in to work.

“Throwing warm gules on Madeleine’s fair breast” was an (Keatsian – Eve of St Agnes) example in Lickes, translated into non-poesy as “making red marks on Jane’s chest”. So I knew this word from O – level English

By: Geoff

Geoff — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:19:14 +0000

I hadn’t noticed the relevance of the theme to H1N1 until Andrew pointed it out. Whatever the explanation for the timing, Araucaria’s choice of the word ‘swine’ to link the clues is obvious: it is the only convenient generic word for the animal which doesn’t appear in any of the solutions (unlike ‘pig’, which is used as a homophone in 25ac – and ‘porker’s flesh’ would have sounded odd in 5ac), and has the advantage of being one of those animal names which doesn’t change in the plural (hence ‘to produce swine’ for FARROW in 9ac).

By: Derek Lazenby

Derek Lazenby — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:01:44 +0000

In case anyone was in any doubt, this by definition was one of his easier ones. The definition being it was only the second of his I finished. Yee hah!

People, I’ll do you a swap, my surprise that heraldic terms are less generally well known, for yours wrt the classics!

I even managed to smile at some of these!

By: Arthur

Arthur — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:55:55 +0000

I very much enjoyed this – a bit harder than yesterday but not painfully so. Being particularly slow, swine didn’t even register as swine fever in my brain until I came on here, but I have to say I’m in the ‘it’s all a bit of fun’ camp. I think the Redgrave dynasty puzzle last month was in much poorer taste, and there was less of a fuss on here about that one…

Anyway, back on topic I enjoyed the cryptic definitions of things (newhip as hip replacement, do ma in, left 4 in digital terms etc.) although gules and pantechnicon were new words for me.