Guardian 26,332 / Tramp

54 comments on “Guardian 26,332 / Tramp”

1. Thanks Eileen
   I had a couple of slightly different parsings:
   5ac an anagram (poor) of ROBS in (to make cut) ONE (person) &lit – this avoids the indirect anagram fodder.
   28ac LAY (place) DOWN (pile) with the def. simply ‘give up’.

2. Thanks Tramp and Eileen
   I didn’t think OSBORNE quite works either, and I didn’t like SPLITS very much, but these are more than made up for by the other tremendous clues and the great theme.

   NAPKIN RINGS was my favourite.

3. Thanks, Eileen.

   On reading your blog, I realised I hadn’t really appreciated the surfaces of many of these, whilst filling in the answers.

   I found it quite a challenge today.

   I concur with Gaufrid, that DOWN is PILE as in feathers?

4. I found this quite difficult, possibly because of the British politicians – MAY, KEN Clarke, Gove, Shapps, Hunt, Pickles, Balls & OSBORNE (most of whom I have never heard of) as well as some Americanisms that were new to me such as STOCKMAN & PROVENDER. Other new words were SUMACH and PERSIFLAGE.

   My favourite was NAPKIN RINGS.

   I needed help to parse, 27a, 11a (could not see why rat = split), 15a, 18a, 7d.

   5a – I was thinking of George Osborne, the UK Chancellor, and I parsed 5a & 28a in the way that Gaufrid @1 parsed them.

   Thanks Tramp and Eileen.

5. Many thanks for the superb blog Eileen and thanks for your kind words.

   As Eileen stated, this puzzle is quite recent as I wrote it in April 2014. I asked if Hugh could kindly move it up the pecking order as I hope a lot of it will be irrelevant after the next election. I also feared Cameron would shuffle his pack (which he did) making some of the clues a little out of date. I am quite pleased with the puzzle. If I am harsh on myself, which I usually am, then I would say that I don’t like the link word in the construction for 18a: “WORDPLAY in ANSWER” .

   The intended parsings are as Gaufrid stated:

   Person robs poor to make cut? (7) ONE: (ROBS*) to make cut ie to go inside. It was supposed to be &lit.
   Give up place: pile (4,3) PLACE = LAY. PILE = DOWN as in soft hair. It was supposed to have MP’s second-home connotations.

   Thanks for comments.

   Neil

6. I was with Eileen on 28ac!

   I also liked Osbourne as robbing the poor!!

   And I thought ‘rat’ = split as in to desert.

   Liked 14ac and 22ac.

   Thought it was all very cleverly worked in (or out)

   Thx

7. Too much familiarity with Uk politicians is something of a disadvantage in solving this puzzle: while 2, 5 and 20 use their names in the solution, Balls, Pickles, Shapps, Gove, Hunt are just words in the clues. Thanks to Eileen and Tramp

8. Delightful puzzle, just up my street. Arachne, and Morph in the Indy, have form for this political kind of stuff, but this was right up there with them.

   Clever weaving of the current political situation into many of the clues. It won’t age well, but who cares? Any puzzle with GOVE and PRAT in the same clue gets my vote. OSBORNE is a bit dodgy (as a clue and as a Chancellor), but I’m afraid I can’t take seriously a politician who has a foreskin on the end of his nose. And before I get accused of being focused on image, I don’t like his policies either.

   Thank you to Tramp and Eileen.

9. Enjoyed and managed to complete this. The parochial nature of the clues as phrased was no hindrance to their parsing. Thanks, Eileen, I saw 28A as you did. And thanks, Tramp, for an engrossing solve.

10. Should not that be “SPILT” rather than “SPLIT” in 11A? I have never heard of “split the beans”. But spilt would be past tense!

11. Quite the puzzle, this. Being in Hong Kong and not (whisper it softly) an anima naturaliter guardiana, I missed some of the allusions (though not the ones applied via trowel!) Kudos for getting INRI in. The other day on University Challenge one of the teams placed ‘For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son…’ in Leviticus! O tempora….

12. Hi Jeff

    Re 11ac – sorry, that was a bit confusing: I meant to split / rat [on someone] is to spill the beans about them.

    Thanks to everyone else [especially Tramp] for the comments. Things have been hectic here since posting the blog and I have to go out now.

13. As the “resident antipodean”, I like Mark Hayden @ 7’s comment, but perhaps in a different way to that which he intended.

    While I was not familiar with the politicians, I could still solve many of the clues even though I had no idea what gove and shapps etc meant! So, the puzzle travels well across continents and cultures, and the added enjoyment is to be found in the blog here at fifteensquared.

14. Jeff C @ 10 I think Eileen is setting us up for a fall 🙂

    It’s ‘split’ as in inform on someone.

15. What a lovely puzzle! Is Tramp trying out for Cyclops’s gig? 😉

    OSBORNE tripped me up as well, although I was looking at it the wrong way anyway – I was convinced that there was some way to “cut” the p, r and s out of “Person robs” to get the anagram that way, but no such luck.

16. This was a puzzle very to my taste, even containing, at 22a, a favourite word of mine.
    I was not familiar with the term for an American warehouseman, nor the variant spelling of ‘sumac’, and, at 19d, I tried for some time to make the solution end with the letters ‘co’, thinking that Tramp had employed the colon punctuation mark to serve as a word, requiring the last three letters to be removed.
    Several very clever and witty surfaces, and a level of difficulty that provided a challenge but not a headache.
    Many thanks Tramp for a pleasant start to my day.

17. Enjoyed this tremendously – great theme.

    5a, 27a, 1d, 2d and 8d are extremely apposite sadly. 17d was my favourite in the circumstances.

18. Thanks Eileen. Took an hour, hurdling the unknowns – though May & Osborne have made news here once in a while and were gettable. Loved BAMBOOzle.

19. I’ve never used “vender”–it’s always “vendor” with an O, as it is for all other Americans of my acquaintance. And I never call warehousemen anything at all, since I don’t need to. But I suppose I’m familiar with the word “stockman.” Wasn’t aware it was an Americanism.

    I have no problems with the U.K.-centric theme; it’s a U.K. newspaper, after all. In an American paper, no one would complain about a crossword that featured names like Boehner, McConnell, Cruz, Biden, or Kerry (politicians of roughly equivalent newsworthiness over here–and of whom I’m sure most of you can only identify one or two). So the rest of us just use Google and learn. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve seen most of the names before by now, anyway. I did have to look up who the Home Secretary was, and I hadn’t heard of Osborne.

    And anyway, if God gives you a guy named Ed Balls, it’s almost an insult to His providence not to use him in as many crosswords as possible.

20. I notice that most bloggers seem to use the online version of the crosswords so nobody has commented on the difference in the clue to 20 down in the paper version – this national rather than African. I thought for a moment Eileen had made a mistake in stating the clue (how could I think such a thing?) so I checked online. Why the change?

21. My first post (so please be kind to me)

    Like Michelle I’ll claim to be a resident antipodean (from Oz not far from Sydney) and like Tramp I am (or was until recently) a statistician.

    I really appreciate Eileen’s style where she underlines the definition. However I note that a couple of other bloggers use a similar style (thanks to them too).

    I sometimes struggle with Guardian crosswords and often blame the “local knowledge” requirements but that is a cross that I have chosen to bear. So I do not have a major problem with the this particular puzzle. I grew up on SMH cryptics including DH and DA. DA is always harder.

22. Thanks, Eileen.

    Very cleverly worked puzzle; some of the clues required a lot of intricacy to make a topical surface, which made it a difficult solve for me, despite being familiar (alas) with the featured personages.

    I read 5a as an &lit, which was clearly Tramp’s intention.

    I particularly enjoyed the narratives and disguised definitions of OVERRATES, PAWNSHOPS, CASE and NAPKIN RINGS.

    25a is ingenious, but doesn’t quite work for me. ‘Balls’ can only be interpreted as a noun (wouldn’t it otherwise have to be ‘balls up’?) so it would read better if it followed rather than preceded the anagram fodder: ‘Pickles is mad near Balls’.

23. Julia@20: good spot. My original clue used “one from the country” as a definition for KENYAN. Hugh thought it too vague a definition (he was probably right) so he changed it to “African”. I argued that it now became a write-in and I suggested changing it to “national”. He didn’t think it read well so he changed it to “this national” and I didn’t notice. At the very last minute I requested that the “this” be removed, as, in my book, it’s not good to insert superfluous words. I said that I would prefer “African” to “this national”. I guess he changed it but it was too late for the change to appear in the paper version.

    Gervase@22: you’re right about Balls.

    Thanks for comments

    Neil

24. Thanks Eileen and Tramp

    A very clever and entertaining puzzle. I particularly liked ‘napkin rings’.

    Re 5a, I parsed this as Gaufrid et al. I had understood that the use of substitute words (here ‘one’ for ‘person’) as anagram fodder was ‘frowned on’ by some purists, and indeed it seems to be a rare device. NB I am not complaining, just curious – this case was relatively easy to see. But I suppose life could get pretty hard if longer synonyms or other substitutes were treated in this way.

25. Hi Julia @20

    Re 20dn: I’m mortified! I buy the paper and usually solve the puzzle in the paper. Although I’m lucky enough to have an early delivery, as I knew I had a hectic day today, I got up even earlier, since it was my blog.

    When writing the blog, I cut and paste the clues from the online version, so I’m usually aware of any differences. I didn’t even have time to open my paper this morning [just saw Boris on the front page!] so had no idea of the discrepancy. Sorry, everyone.

    Welcome to Kevin @21: I hope we’ll hear more of you – we don’t usually bite! 😉

26. tupu @24
    In some circles they are referred to as “ghost anagrams”, and yes, they are generally frowned on.

27. Sorry. Coprrection of self @24

    I see I did not read Gaufrid @1 carefully enough and clearly did not parse 5a as he did. This then leaves us without a definition other than the whole clue or am I still missing something?

28. I made very heavy weather of this but got there in the end and enjoyed the challenge. I don’t think knowledge of the subject helped much (it rarely does with Tramp puzzles). Both the NE and particularly the SW corners caused me problems – last in were INRI (new to me but easy enough to look up once NAPKIN RINGS was in place) and NEEDIER – which I saw much earlier but couldn’t parse. Liked PAWN SHOPS and CEREMONIAL. My paper had the original(?) national version of KENYAN, but that was still one of my first in. Had heard of PERSIFLAGE but wouldn’t have remembered what in means, and SUMACHS was a spelling I hadn’t seen for our favourite reversed Algerian.

    Thanks to Eileen and Tramp

29. Hi tupu @24 [you’re back to lower case! – I nearly came back yesterday to apologise for capitalising you! 😉 ]

    It’s &lit, as Gaufrid said and Tramp confrmed @5, so, as you say, the whole clue is the definition. [As I hinted in the blog, I felt it must be – but missed the exact construction and, as I said, it made mincemeat of my comment in the preamble that little knowledge of the theme was required!] But it did very nicely set the scene for the theme.

    Hi Jim T @17

    “5a, 27a, 1d, 2d and 8d are extremely apposite sadly.” Absolutely: my smiles at Tramp’s wit were wry ones. [I’m just back from our weekly asylum seekers’ drop-in, which is why 2dn was one of my favourites – and 10ac was sheer genius: I’ve said here before that, as a former teacher, I served under some Education Secretaries but he takes the biscuit.] As K’s D says @8, Arachne, Morph and Tramp are brilliant at poitically satirical crosswords – more power to their elbows!

    [I know it’s a bit tough on overseas solvers but, if you follow the links I gave, you’ll find stories to help you appreciate Tramp’s wit and genius all the more.]

    Hi beery hiker @28

    “I don’t think knowledge of the subject helped much (it rarely does with Tramp puzzles).”

    Absolutely right – he proves, time and time again, that it’s the icing on the cake. You win some, you lose some. I lose on pixel films and football, for instance, but will never forget his stunning ‘Fawlty Towers’ debut puzzle, which I was lucky enough to blog.

30. Apologies – I meant tupu @27.

31. Random question for the gang (if you’re still paying attention): The “thermostat” clue (about a split that could turn to red or blue)–could be read on its surface, in this country, as another political clue. Here, “red states and blue states” is common parlance for Republican and Democrat areas. This originated from election-night reporting, when they had to color the map every time a state was announced as having been won. But it’s become common enough that it’s been expanded upon to mean red=Republican generally, blue=Democrat generally.

    Does it work that way in Britain too? That is, are the political parties color (excuse me, colour)-coded in a similar way? And if so, which one’s red and which one’s blue? (And does having a meaningful third party complicate matters?)

32. I thoroughly enjoyed this excellent puzzle. At 5ac I was reminded of a cartoon I saw some time after Osborne made his nauseating “we’re all in this together” comment, in which “this” was represented as the ocean, Osborne and his cronies were on a luxury yacht, and the people he was addressing were jammed into a small rowing boat. An excellent analogy IMHO.

    As far as this puzzle is concerned I had the most difficulty in the SE quadrant, and it didn’t really open up properly until I saw PERSIFLAGE. I was then able to enter my last few with BAMBOO my LOI.

33. mrpenny@31 – yes, it is similar over here. Tories are blue, Labour red and the Lib-Dems orange, although it could be argued that their colour should be blue as well. At least they’ll get their comeuppance next year.

34. mrpenny@31 – further to Andy B’s comment, it is interesting that in most parts of the world ‘red’ is the colour that is used to designate the more left wing party (Red Flag, and all that). It is somewhat confusing to us non-Americans that the reverse pertains in the USA. Has the red = Democrat, blue = Republican convention been used in the US for a long time? At the time of the Civil War it could certainly be argued that the Republicans (Abe Lincoln’s party, after all) were at that time the more left wing of the two.

35. Gervase @ 34
    Please correct me if I am wrong, but I was under the impression that the Democrats are doctrinally more or less equivalent to our Conservatives, whereas the Republicans are rather more to the right……….? (I hesitate to compare them to UKIP).

    (btw Eileen, what are pixel films?)

36. Correction! Red = Republican!! It just shows how ingrained the blue = conservative convention is to us Europeans.

37. When the red=Republican thing got set in stone (generally, the age of color TV) the Democrats had long been the more liberal party. It’s a long-standing mystery as to why the colors are reversed here from how they are in the rest of the known universe.

    I (and some others) suspect that the TV stations wanted to avoid branding the Democrats as capital-R Reds (which might have been seen as slanderous). Labeling the more conservative party as red doesn’t have that same association.

    Muffin @35: politics in the U.S. are orthogonal to those in most other parts of the world, so it’s hard to figure out how the parties correlate to what Britain has. And it doesn’t help that the current Republican party is at war with itself–the sane but conservative ones are fighting (and largely losing) a battle for control of the party against the crazy and VERY conservative ones.

38. Dear muffin @35

    (btw Eileen, what are pixel films?)

    You have graphically illustrated my abysmal technological ignorance. Now that I look up Tramp’s previous puzzle http://www.fifteensquared.net/2014/07/25/guardian-26321-tramp/, it seems that I mean ‘pixar’, which just goes to show, I think – I still enjoyed the puzzle! 😉

39. mr penney @ 37
    Thanks – pretty much as I thought.

40. Osbourne was my first one, obvious and set me off on a politician hunt. Thanks Tramp. Pity a cull couldn’t be done. Uncanny to use Boris though.

41. Eileen @ 38
    Ah – that explains it. I thought that you might be referring to generic computer-generated films (though I suppose that’s where the “pix” in PIXAR comes from).

42. “As K’s D says @8, Arachne, ”

    We haven’t seen her in a while – surely we must be due one?

43. Dave Ellison: Arachne is not too well at the moment, and has taken a break from setting. I don’t know whether the Guardian crossword editor has any of her puzzles in reserve, but either way we all hope that she will be able to delight us again in the near future. Get well soon, Spider Woman!

44. Hi Dave Ellison @42

    Arachne indicated recently that she won’t be setting for a while, while she gets some health problems sorted out. We’re all wishing her well in the meantime and hoping that we’ll be seeing her again before too long. We all mss her!

45. Sorry, Gervase – we crossed.

46. Ref Arachne, while she’s taking a break from setting at the moment, it’s good to know that she is well and active on twitter (@arachne_xwords) and has recently joined the green party

47. I am sorry to hear that – thanks for the replies, all.

48. I am a huge fan of this blog (especially Eileen since we share a name, spelling differences notwithstanding) and learn so much from all of you. I find it difficult to add to it in a timely manner, however, since I usually don’t complete the puzzle until you are most likely in the land of nod (I live in Chicago.)

    I did do a search on the Red v. Blue identification and found the following:
    http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states
    Apparently the current color association came in 2000, on the Today Show by Tim Russert and other journalists have stuck with it. The article goes on to say that prior to that time, while using color was popular, there was no conformity among journalists. Only 14years old! The label is but a teenager!

    Thanks for your excellent blog!

49. Good morning Eileen!

    Thanks for the blog and many thanks to Tramp for the puzzle.

    K’s D @8 has said all we need to say about the content!

50. Hi ilene – welcome, if this is the first time you’ve commented.

    Re the Red v Blue discussion, mrpenney’s first comment appeared just a couple of hours after I’d seen a question on ‘Pointless’ asking contestants to identify, from a map, states won by Obama. I’d been intrigued as to why these were shown in blue, so thanks, everyone, for the explanations. You really do learn a lot from this site, one way or another!

51. Thanks Tramp and Eileen

    Fallen a bit behind and only got to this one yesterday (Friday Aussie time). Enjoyable as always from this setter. I recognised a lot of the pollies in the clues without taking too much notice of the satire. The only minor issue the theme caused was a hold up getting OSBORNE as my last one in – and as soon as he Googled as the ‘man with the purse’, the clue made full sense!!

    Could not parse NEEDIER even though it was one of my early entries – so thanks Eileen for that.

    The SE was my last area in apart from 5a … and I too thought that BAMBOO(zle) was excellent.

52. I put schmaltz for 1ac at first… trees being that ultra schmaltzy song, and Phoebe Maltz being a writer on French literature,

53. We’re only 3 years behind – but wondered whether “Stockman” might have referred to the U.S. politician David Stockman, the father of Reagonomics,who believed in supply-side economics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stockman. He might have been a parallel figure to Osborne – diagonally across on the grid.

54. Sue & Sekhar @53, you may well be right – but I don’t expect Tramp to come back and tell us at this stage. 😉

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