Comments on: Guardian 25,158 – Brummie

By: tupu

tupu — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 23:26:26 +0000

RE 1a.
I knew Kirov the popular politician whose murder was engineered by Stalin, and the ballet, but I did not know the city.

There was no great difficulty, however, because it was soon pretty clear that ‘second’ was going to be ‘back’ – as manehi notes.

I perpetually find it odd that some solvers seem to feel its wrong to have to make use of the letters of crossing words in a crossword!

By: Carrots

Carrots — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:26:15 +0000

Andrew/Tupu: Many thanks…I hadn`t spotted “Coo” as an interjection or expression of surprise. I dimly remember it from Dandy & Beano days and most definitely from Biggles and Ginger tales….but I don`t think we`ll go there!

By: Sil van den Hoek

Sil van den Hoek — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:20:50 +0000

Davy (and others), I don’t see it either.
It’s just take IRO + V and put a letter other than B in front of it.
Nothing wrong with it, and quite guessable.
[btw, yesterday I wrote, purely by accident, 'guettable' - shall we add this to our vocabulary? ]

Actually, that word was our first non-entry.
Non-entry?
Yes, because we thought it was KIROV, but we’d never heard of a ‘city’ called Kirov [as for others the famous Ballet rang a bell, which has nothing to do with a Russian city, but is named after Sergey Kirov - although on the other hand the (small) town of Kirov in Kaluga Oblast is named after him].
So we hesitated to fill it in.
In other puzzles and with other setters people might call this ‘obscure’.

We liked the crossword very much.
“Nothing too difficult”, manehi? [thanks for the blog , btw]
Well, before we did the puzzle I saw your preamble, so I was a bit disappointed by having a slow start. But when the ball started rolling, everything went well – this being our first crossword since, yeah since when?, that we could finish being far far away from the Real World.

She said at the end: “He’s a good setter, but sometimes a bit wacky” [nót my words ].
She was probably referring to a clue like 25ac.

Yes, Brummie is indeed a good setter.
And one who joined the Army of Lift & Separate: “Trivial Pursuit” (in 11ac) and “Mineral water” (in 19d).

By: Davy

Davy — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 20:27:14 +0000

Forgot to say that I can’t see a problem with replacing the first letter of biro with a ‘k’.
It wasn’t that difficult was it !.

By: Davy

Davy — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 20:23:26 +0000

Thanks manehi,

I really enjoyed this and found it a reasonable challenge. I certainly wouldn’t say that it was easy but compared to Pasquale, I suppose it was. The last answer in was COOL which it took me a while to see – it’s always the short clues that are problematic. There was lots to like about this puzzle and I found the level (ala tupu) to be just right. The mini theme was good and to be honest I enjoyed most of the clues especially LONG SHOT, ROCK OPERA and IRREVERENT. Many thanks to Brummie for this excellent puzzle.

PS To Moosebranley : if you begrudge paying a quid for the paper, just print the crossword from the Guardian web site – dead easy.

By: tupu

tupu — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 19:14:34 +0000

Thanks Manehi and Brummie

Like baby-bear’s porridge – just right!
Teasing and amusing but not a Herculean task.

I enjoyed 6d (back to an expletive of Beano and Dandy days to make up a very modern usage), 9a, 18a,21a, 27a, 7d.

Missed the He = ‘e while getting the answer to 5,8 (very nice).

By: muck

muck — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 18:16:27 +0000

otter@14: I had the same problem with ‘He commonly’ at 5,8

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:53:54 +0000

Nice to have a crossword with a few references to Science for a change. Spotted the theme almost immediately. Only hold up was scallops.

By: otter

otter — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 16:57:01 +0000

By the way, re KIROV, I couldn’t see anything in ‘different top’ to suggest that it was K that should replace the B of biro. Am I missing something, or was it that vague? And if so, is that legitimate in setting? It’s not something I’ve come across before. It didn’t cause much of a problem until I got to K and thought ‘ah – Kirov Ballet – that must be it’, but even so it seemed a bit odd not to have some sort of indicator.

By: otter

otter — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 16:38:20 +0000

Thanks for the blog, manehi. Like most others, I found this quite an enjoyable solve, although most of it was pretty straightforward. I am now banging my head on the table because I couldn’t understand why ‘He commonly’ has anything to do with the rest of 5,8 or the solution. I flummoxed myself at first because I was looking for an anagram of ‘this acceleration’ minus ‘r’, and was also looking for a name (Niccolo someone?), finally worked out it was more likely to be an anagram of ‘acceleration run’ and that the connecting letter was going to be R, but still took me a long time to see it. And was left think ‘why “he”?’ ‘E’ = MC squared, not ‘he’. Just couldn’t make the leap from ‘he commonly’ to ‘E’. What a dolt I am. Well done to Brummie for that misdirect.