Guardian 26,654 / Philistine

37 comments on “Guardian 26,654 / Philistine”

1. Thanks Philistine and Eileen

   When I wrote in SARNIES without having to think, I thought that this might be an unusually easy Philistine. How wrong! The next entry, reading the clues in order, didn’t come until 5,23.

   I’ve highlighted about half the clues for either compliment or explanation from the blog. The latter include 11a, 26a and 28a, and would also have included SABRA were it not for Google. I also took ages to see 3d.

   Too many favourites to mention, really, but I thought BEST MAN, BOOBY TRAP, ANTIGONE and STYX were all cracking clues.

   I liked 22a as well, but wondered if there should have been some rhyming slang indication?

2. In true Guardian style they’ve spelt Schwarzenegger wrong in 1 across.

3. [1d reminded of the repeated cry you will hear in Yorkshire markets……………”‘Ow much?!”]

4. Fantastic puzzle! For some reason I got stuck on DESKTOP (clever clue once you see it), but it was a really good workout and thoroughly enjoyable. Hard to pick favourites, but I’ll go for SARNIES, TANGENT, DOG AND BONE, BEST MAN and BOOBY TRAP. Many thanks to Philistine and Eileen.

5. Tom_I @2

   And I didn’t notice and simply copied and pasted it into the blog – apologies.

   [I have to go out now, so can”t deal with any more errors / omissions until mid aternoon.]

6. I usually enjoy Philistine’s puzzles, but I gave up on this one. Too hard for me today.

   I still don’t understand how 1 in 8 is the definition for BEST MAN. Similarly how AWFUL works. DESKTOP?

   Not my cup of tea today. Very clever and all that, but I’m looking for a solveable puzzle in a daily cryptic, which – for me at least – this wasn’t.

7. KD @6
   The solution to 8 is NUPTIALS, so “one” there would be the BEST MAN.

   I didn’t like the other two you mention much, though.

8. Thanks Eileen and Phil.

   I still don’t understand the explanation of 9, 19, I’m afraid – it’s the “and ‘it’s immoral or it’” part.

   Oh! I see now, after following your link. The title of the song is “It’s Illegal Or Immoral, Or It Makes You Fat”

9. GIST = SUBSTANCE is also used in 10a in today’s DT Toughie. Coincidence?

10. Thanks Pilistine and Eileen.

    A fantastic puzzle, but some clues too tricky for me to solve without help, extra thanks Eileen. ANTIGONE and ONOMATOPOEIA were great!

    Eileen, you have forgotten the I[n], 25a.

11. Great puzzle

12. I am kind of with Kathryn’s Dad @6 on this one, just felt like I never really had a chance in much of the bottom half. But one man’s meat and all that.

13. This was very hard for me, but I got there in the end, despite not knowing the song you need for three (!) of the clues. Cockney rhyming slang always gives me a rough time, especially if it’s one (like today’s) that I’ve never heard before.

    The most notable dory is Dory, the ditzy blue fish in Finding Nemo, voiced by Ellen De Generes (“Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming…”). Oh, come on—surely I’m not the only adult who still watches children’s movies….

    For onc the non-rhoticity of the ONOMATOPOEIA clue didn’t bug me, because it’s so audaciously goofy. It just about works in a Brooklyn accen which makes it funny. (I pronounce the middle syllable “mot,” not “mat,” but who cares?)

14. I didn’t get ONOMATOPEIA, but loved it once it was explained. Just wait for my clue for ALOE VERA.

15. I think a dory is a mackerel not a perch. There very questionable clues here. The removal device in 17d is very ugly and hardly makes sense. Describing a best man as ‘one in nuptials’ rather than ‘one at’ is awkward. The lack of apostrophe in 16dn is hard to justify. 28ac is unhappy as it should presumably read ‘neither L nor T D’ or ‘neither laptop or tablet D’ to make it consistent. The cryptic part of 11ac is so obscure that I doubt any solver worked it all out before putting the answer in. Having said that there were some very neat clues as well. I feel sure that people who solved this might think it a very wonderful crossword just because they solved it. Those who didn’t solve it might look at it otherwise. (I solved it but still had serious reservations even while enjoying it.)

16. @15

    The cause of chilblains is cold feet. Chilblains cause seems perfectly fine to me.

    Also, if you’re going to take a setter to task for dodgy grammar, it might be worthwhile making sure your own posts make sense…

17. Thanks to Philistine and to Eileen for the blog.

    One very minor omission in the parsing of 25a – you’ve left out I(n)!

    I agree with Tom Hutton @ 15 that a dory is not a perch (which is a freshwater fish), but it’s not a mackerel either.

18. Enjoyable as always from Philistine. Last in was DORY. Liked ONOMATOPOEIA, EPITOMISE and DESKTOP. Have to admit that the song was unknown to me too…

    Thanks to Philistine and Eileen

19. Dory is used as a tag to make other fish seem acceptable to the market, for example ‘Pacific dory’. Some dory, like John Dory are sea fish, others like pangasius dory are freshwater.

    Never seen one described as a perch before though.

20. The pike-perch is described as a dory. However this seems to be doubly inaccurate – it is neither a perch nor a dory.

21. Correction – it is a perch (family Percidae, though not Genus Perca). Still not a dory, though!

22. Thanks, cookie @10 and Mac Ruaraidh Ghais @17 for pointing out the omission in 25ac – duly sorted.

23. Thanks to Philistine and Eileen. I especially liked STYX and ANTIGONE. “Dog and bone” turns out to be a case for an i-Phone; and “Everything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening” seems to have a long history going back to Alexander Woollcott in 1933: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/09/fattening/ [I had wrongly thought it was linked to Mae West.]

24. For some reason, the version I heard was “If it’s fun then it’s either illegal, immoral or bad for you”, which covers more possibilities. Anyone know where that version comes from? I tried the link from ACD and got nowhere.

25. @16 I apologise profusely, though I thought that ad hominem remarks were not encouraged here.

26. @21. Agreed the pike-perch is a perch and sources seem to agree it is widely called a ‘dory’. Unless one is getting into some kind of Humpty Dumpty knock down argument about names, I think that is good enough for a crossword clue.

27. Hi Eileen. So this was my first Philistine and it proved good but challenging. I think DESKTOP is clever but I can’t say I like it. My favourites are DEPARTMENTAL and COLD FEET. I fancy RAKING could have been done better. I needed your help to complete a few including DORY and DOG AND BONE.

    Thanks to you and Philistine.

28. I knew the song. It was recorded by both Edmundo Ross and the Beverley Sisters in the pre rock n roll fifties which, at least, shows that my long term memory is intact. I had some trouble with the puzzle as a whole though which, in retrospect, is surprising because none of it seems especially difficult. ANTIGONE was LOI and I couldn’t parse CANAL BARGE. I did enjoy it despite some puzzlement over the two clues I’ve mentioned.
    Thanks Philistine.

29. An enjoyable challenge so thank you, Philistine. Was stuck for ages on 6a, but once it dawned it became my favourite clue.

    Enjoyed your blog too, Eileen, thank you very much. Particularly liked the link to the Beverley Sisters whom I remember well from my youth – didn’t know the song, though!

30. Philistine’s style has become more and more something between Paul’s and Araucaria’s. Allusions to sex, cross-references, wordgames (as opposite to wordplay, e.g. 28ac).
    While there is a lot of fun going on, I also find the style of clueing at places more and more idiosyncratic and sometimes over the top. Some surfaces are indeed witty, a few others are less convincing (25ac, 27ac, 28ac).
    ‘Hitman line’? Philistine could have made more of this. ‘Hitman’ is a nice find but ‘line’ for TANGENT is a bit meagre. A tangent is a line but most lines are not tangents. There should at least have been a question mark, in my opinion.

    There’s also some iffiness creeping in. Someone mentioned already the use of ‘in’ in 5ac (but you can see why Philistine did it).
    The anagram indicator in 9,19 is debatable. ‘Misrepresents’ (with an s at the end) placed before the fodder? Mmm, not sure, unless you make the preceding ‘it’ part of the indicator (but you shouldn’t, it’s part of the lyrics of that song [of which I had never heard]).
    In 1d “At first, sado-masochism”, is that really SM? I know we often ignore punctuation but here it doesn’t feel 100% comfortable to me (as it is an abbreviation for ‘sado-masochism’ anyway).
    Talking about punctuation, shouldn’t it be ‘Steep-climbing’ in 7d?

    My absolute favourites today were 22ac (DOG AND BONE), incredibly well constructed, and 6d (STYX) with a great use of ‘late’.

    As someone else pointed out the deletion of ‘met’ in 17d was not very elegantly indicated but it certainly is not wrong.
    5d,23 looks like a nice surface but actually the anagram fodder is rather weak as the solution starts with half of ‘brouhaha’. And the letters of the whole word are in that order in the solution.

    21ac (DORY) was our last one in. Double definitions are either obvious or devious, aren’t they?

    The much discussed ONOMATOPOEIA (18ac) leaves me still a bit puzzled. I had no problem to find the solution and the wordplay (homophone) was detected accordingly. But what about the definition?
    Is ‘thud’ an example of an onomatopoeia? It doesn’t sound like one to me. I digged deep into Wikipedia where it indeed got a mention somewhere. True, the setter shouldn’t perhaps go for the obvious and if it is indeed a proper onomatopoeia he cannot be faulted. But there are much better examples, I think (‘boom’?).

    All in all, an enjoyable exercise but I don’t think it was hedgehoggy-proof today.
    That is, however, partly due to Philistine’s adventurous and undoubtedly personal style.
    Where hedgehoggy puts exclamation marks I prefer to put question marks.

    Many thanks, Eileen, for another fine blog.

31. I finished this and found it a lot of fun.

    Tom Hutton @15 seems to have summed up my thoughts almost exactly so I won’t repeat them!

    Nice to see Sil in full flow again. Just a couple of commnents:

    “Thud” is in my opinion an example of onomatopeia and 1D perhaps could be parsed as “Ouch at first” for the first part of the fodder, followed by sado-masochism (=S&M in certain messageboards I believe 😉 ) “hurt” is the anagrind.

    Thanks to Eileen and Philistine

32. Sil @ 30: Yes, definitely not hedgehoggy-proof, but for some reason he is holding his fire today!

33. So people found this tricky? Can’t imagine why, but to call the clueing here idiosyncratic is ultra-polite, and I’m glad that Sil, in the absence of a hedgebloggy, gets nearer to calling a spade a spade.

34. ANTIGONE reminds me of the Tom Lehrer song Oedipus Rex.

    He loved his mother, like no other.
    His daughter was his sister and his son was his brother.

35. I’m not ging to get into this now, but I can see from a quick glance that I would have had some issues 😀

36. Thanks all
    I tried to start this very late Wednesday night but kept nodding off! So it was completed with great pleasure on Thursday.
    I especially admired 14ac,25ac,27ac,28ac,17d and mostly 7 down.
    Last in was dory.

37. Thanks Philistine and Eileen

    Actually finished this the day after publication, but it languished on a bedside table and only checked it off today. You’ll be sick of me over this weekend, Eileen – seems that you have blogged all of the ones that I have finished off or checked off!

    Remember that this one was a lot of fun, but did need your help on the last bit of the homophone of ONOMATOPOEIA.

    A good variety of clue devices and a lot of wit in the surface readings

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