Comments on: Guardian 25,643 – Philistine

By: mark

mark — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:43:47 +0000

Annoying and you try to hard to justify poor clueing.

By: Andrew Barton

Andrew Barton — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:39:17 +0000

27 may be a reference to:
http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/publications/the-railway-bridge-of-the-silvery-tay-and-other-disasters

By: drago

drago — Wed, 23 May 2012 23:21:34 +0000

It's a stretch, but 'metaphor' is a homophone for 'Mehta for'. He faces the music.

By: tupu

tupu — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:32:18 +0000

Thanks Miche @15. I have not encountered the Stanley effort before. It certainly takes some beating! I had not wanted to suggest that the Tay Bridge had to be his worst poem for the clue to work, but only that it had had the disastrous misfortune to become known to a wide audience.

By: Robi

Robi — Wed, 23 May 2012 14:19:43 +0000

Nice one Philistine; I thought this was going to be quite easy when I started, but then I ground to a halt for a while.

Thanks Andrew; I didn’t know, or had long since forgotten, the Tay Bridge disaster. Thanks for the links.

Like many the SUPREME ha caught me out initially and I had to look up the other TATAMI. I thought the central heating in 2 was ‘CH,’ which allowed me erroneously to solve it and see the parsing later.

Like RCW, I appreciated ECSTASY and thought RETIRED was uncharacteristically weak. The ETHER=number is also looking a little tired. For ANNEXE I was nicely misled by Provence, racking my brains for an ‘aix’ or somesuch.

By: Paul B

Paul B — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:36:25 +0000

Grid with a split personality made things harder, especially from N to S on each side.

8 & 27 seem both to be DDs. With ‘face the music’ not being a mixed metaphor, 8 uses a musical ruse to disguise the two definitions. 27, as observed above, probably just fails to do enough to draw attention to the poem.

By: Miche

Miche — Wed, 23 May 2012 12:52:52 +0000

Thanks, Andrew.

I’ve spent far too much time today reading Poetic Gems, thanks to 27a.

Tupu @10: in the hotly-contested “McGonagall’s Worst” stakes, maybe A Tribute to Henry M. Stanley shows his scansion and rhyming at their most approximate. But the clue doesn’t depend on the poem being McG’s worst, just on it being a “disastrous setting [of] lines.” I think it’s a very neat cd.

I did bridle just a wee bit on seeing that non-rhotic cooing known as RP defined as “correct speech.”

Echoing others: SUPREME was well-concealed. I made sluggish progress in SW. I think I just haven’t found this setter’s wavelength yet.

By: RCWhiting

RCWhiting — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:24:06 +0000

Thanks all
A pretty good workout – no single – clue quibbles here.
Do any of you allow the cross reference at 25ac to be included when considering the clue at 8ac. I certainly solved the former first and used it to solve the latter.
Last in was’supreme’ which it seems I was not alone in failing to un-hide; excellent clue.
20d was rather facile. I liked 18d and 21 ac.

By: chas

chas — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:58:28 +0000

Thanks to Andrew for the blog. I needed you to explain why I had the right answer for 25a.

I also was dubious about using A to Z for a map.

By: William

William — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:13:43 +0000

JollySwagman@3 – very nice try, but would one really say “there’s a nice track on face A”? Pretty sure I’d say “side A” or more likely “the A-side”.

Let’s hope Phil drops in to tell us.