Guardian 26 665 by Brummie

45 comments on “Guardian 26 665 by Brummie”

1. Thanks Brummie and flashling

   I found this hard, and took ages to complete the last two crossing LAHAR and HAMLET (I wasn’t expecting ML for “miles”, but it’s fine).

   Several nice ones – DRAMATIC, SALACITY and UNFORGIVEN my favourites (though I took a long time to parse the latter).

   A few quibbles to, though one very pedantic – technically antlers aren’t made of horn, though most wouldn’t make this distinction. I have never heard “BO” as a scare word. It doesn’t affect the clue, but I wondered why “feminine” was needed in 17d.

   Can I have another go at encouraging everyone to do this week’s Quiptic – it’s very entertaining:
   http://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/quiptic/824

2. Thanks, flashling. CRASH, REBECCA, ENOUGH and CAVALCADE too.

3. STEP UP too!

4. Thanks Brummie and flashing. I also found this a bit of a struggle to get into, and I think I made rather heavy use of the check button. Rebecca is also a film, starring Laurence Olivier. Crash too.

5. Sorry for crossing…

6. LADY DAY was a TV film about Billie Holliday.

7. Thanks Brummie & flashling.

   Made this terribly difficult for myself by charging in with BALEARIC instead of CALABRIA. (Idiotic, really, the Balearics having nothing to do with Italy) but I was on a roll and got too excited with fast progress with this habitually tricky setter. Consequently, couldn’t see STAFFER and that made life very difficult in the NE corner with the unknown (to me only, probably) LAHAR.

   All fair though, except not wild about bo as an alternative to boo of BOO in ASBO.

   Liked THERE’S NO TELLING & PINNIE.

   Nice week, all.

8. I believe Hamlet may have been filmed once or twice.

9. William @7
   I hadn’t heard of LAHAR either. I wonder how many solvers had? (Be honest, now!)

10. I wanted 14ac to be centaurs (I am sure they are know for their argumentative qualities).

11. Oscar winners, I think.

12. many thanks flashing & Brummie

    quiet hard and needed flashings parsing for UNFORGIVEN, got the rest with frequent use of dictionary.

13. sorry @12 meant flashLing, joys of spellcheck

14. Thanks Brummie and Flashling.

    This took me a while, but was fun. Luckily I knew LAHAR having supervised my granddaughter’s homework throughout her schooling, and remembered ASBO from a recent crossword. When I was little PINNy was used for tummy, but I do not see it listed as NZ slang – the COED does not give PINNIE, only pinny, but it does give BO for BOO.

15. Muffin @9…Cookie has, it would seem.

    Cookie, my grandkids are with us from NZ (Nelson area) but they’ve not heard of pinny. What part did you grow up in?

16. Thanks to Brummie and flashling. I did know ASBO from previous puzzles but new to me were LAHAR (my last in – and the spelling “lah” threw me off as had “doh” once before), PINNIE, SUPERROYAL, and “perry” as a pear drink for PERFUMERY. Also, I had not before seen ML for miles in HAMLET (so I paused there) or “mer” in MERCIA for “drink”-sea. I did make it through but with a struggle.

17. William @15, in Wellington, but my father was born in 1895, and NZ being 30 years behind the times in 1942 meant that I had a Victorian upbringing, euphemisms being used for body parts.

18. Muffin @ 9 – I’d heard of LAHAR (geography class pays off at last!), but I didn’t know the note was written “lah”, so I still failed on the clue!

19. Three goes and gave up the struggle and came here to find out what I couldn’t get so a big thank you to Flashling and a ‘you beat me’ to Brummie.

20. Thanks Brummie and flashling

    Enjoyable puzzle that was solved consistently without being fast. Needed a lot of dictionary help with a number of new terms, including-: LAHAR, TRANSFIGUREMENT, SURROYAL, RECUSANT and Mr STRACHEY. Had heard of ASBO even though it was my last one in.

    Completely missed the theme of movies / plays.

    Liked ENOUGH for some reason – simple but quite clever for mine.

21. WhenI was brought up (Cardiff, 1960s) pinnie was short for pinafore, in the sense of apron.

    LAHAR and SURROYAL were new to me, but easilysolved because iof this setter’s scrupulously fair cluing. But I smell Crossword COmpiler’s AUTOFILL option.

22. Untidy and annoying in places, but largely ok for technique I would say.

    10a ML I don’t know; 11a BO seems odd; 23a could as well be LISE for the word-play; 4d FUME is a bit obvious in the word-play; 5d not a proper homophon; 6d really obscure; 7d ‘pathetic’ is a bit pathetic!; 8d not for me; 17d ‘rebec’ is SO obscure.

    Not great, but much better than Otterden.

    HH

23. Found this one quite challenging – SURROYAL and LAHAR (my last two) were new and I’m not sure I’d seen SALACITY or TRANSFIGUREMENT either, though both of those were guessable from more familiar endings. Liked THERES NO TELLING and CHICAGO

    Thanks to Brummie and flashling

24. Staffer is US usage and should be marked as such in the clue but it’s not a homophone anywhere south of The Wash. Surroyal is a great addition to my vocabulary but how on earth can I work it into a conversation? if the Monarch of the Glen were a painter would he be a surroyalist?

25. Crossbencher @24 re SURROYAL, wondering the same myself. Love new words but, like people’s names, I feel if I don’t use it immediately, it will evaporate. I wonder if a couple of does eyeing up a stag might say, “look at the surroyals on that”.

26. I made hard work of this one. LAHAR and SURROYAL were unfamiliar, but I got them through the wordplay and crossers, confirmed by google. I missed PUP = “upstart” so didn’t fully parse 1a, though it seems obvious now, and I couldn’t parse CRASH at all. HAMLET was my LOI as I too was looking for just M (or possibly MM as the clue is “miles” plural).

    Favourites were SALACITY, the sneaky ASBO, DRAMATIC and ENOUGH.

    PINNIE – apron for me too. STAFFER isn’t a good homophone here in southern England, as Crossbencher wrote @24, but the US usage was familiar and once that penny dropped the intention was clear. I know REBEC from an interest in early music, but I don’t think it is particularly obscure as it’s a crossword and Scrabble regular.

    Thanks Brummie and flashling.

27. Ah, you young people..in the 30s and 40’s girls put on a pinny and people played peep-bo! with babies..(dodders off)

28. Was a little impatient with this at first, mainly because I couldn’t get a purchase on it for ages. But then as I began to make slow but steady progress, coming back to it now and again throughout the day, I came to appreciate its brilliance. Everything works; and always just enough crossers to get one a little further. And now that the theme has been pointed out, I’m even more impressed. Annoyed with myself for missing it, and for being too dismissive early on. Full marks. Last in lahar. No, never heard of it either, but had to be, which was satisfying too.

29. I found this really difficult and before the end I was clutching at straws. This resulted in my getting ASIO which is an owl- pest controller, and MINNIE-diminutive, I know they don’t parse but I wasn’t able to fully parse some of the others either. I’d never heard of LAHAR although I found it easily enough and I wouldn’t have said REBEC was obscure for crossword buffs.
    Some of this was fun- the Northern side went in relatively easily- but I found the rest more frustrating than anything else. I did wonder about a theme when I got UNFORGIVEN and LADY DAY but I can’t say I pursued it.
    A little too tough to be enjoyable but thanks Brummie.

30. Thanks flashling and Brummie . Didn’t get asbo and Mercia, even with all crossers 🙁

    Required two sittings; found top-half harder than bottom. Liked 1a, 27a, 4d and 8d.

31. I agree with xjpotter @ 28: hard to get into, but worth all the work and fairly clued (despite HH’s comments). I liked ENOUGH, PINNIE, PERFUMERY and ASBO among others. Many thanks to Brummie and flashling.

32. Enjoyable. Some crosswords’ solving accelerates towards the end; with this, the reverse was the case with the last few taking as long as their predecessors! And I had to strain the biceps to check RECUSANT and LAHAR (campanologically, the former tinkling gently but the latter quite silent!) I did enjoy the ASBO and PINNIE definitions.
    Many thanks to setter and blogger.

33. [muffin – since it’s you advising, I shall give the quiptic a go; I’ve never attempted one before. Do they appear in print? (‘Hive Minds’ on BBC4 now; nothing like the fun of ‘Only Connect’ – or a good crossword – but nice to see Auntie trying?!)]

34. William F P @ 33

    I believe the Quiptic is online-only.

    hth

35. William F P

    Glad I managed to persuade someone – I do hope you enjoy it as well.

    I follow “Only connect”, of course, but do you think the first two rounds have been getting harder? I seem to be getting fewer of them (but I rarely recognise any of the music connections!).

36. Simon – Thanks. I was planning to print the PDF (I’m no Luddite – but, for me, with crosswords a little something is missing without a pen in my hand. And I guess it removes the temptation to ‘cheat’!) It seems a shame the quiptic can’t be found in the DTV as it might lure in some newcomers. I had a feeling – clearly imagined – that I’d seen it in print in days of yore….
    muffin – I thought the series started quite gently – in parts – but you may be right. It’s one of those where if you see it before they do, you feel good about yourself….and if you don’t then it must be getting harder. At least, that’s what I tell myself. And perhaps later rounds are intentionally trickier. I shall now watch how it progresses this series. Actually, it probably varies randomly according to our own varying areas of knowledge and, in my case, how perspicacious my prevailing mood and level of concentration allows me to be! But it’s 30 minutes that seems to pass quickly – and enjoyably!

37. I found this a real challenge but lots of fun.

    I didn’t help myself by entering FETTLER for 5D which sounds like FETLAR. And of course a FETTLER works on railway lines. (The “permanent way”) I suppose not even Brummie is that devious

    I see the homophone brigade are out in force today moaning about 5D. What kind of mind can take “casually spoken” to infer a homophone! It obviously informs the solver that the word actually isn’t a homophone but is near enough to be badly pronounced to be one!!! My thoughts on homophones and near homophones are already well documented on here. (To no avail!)

    Thanks to flashling and Brummie

38. [muffin – I bet if you and I were to be two thirds of a team we’d either be surprisingly good or – perhaps far more likely – embarrassingly bad!]

39. Late to the party today.

    I missed the theme, embarrassingly–which, as someone said, is specifically Best Picture winners, with CHICAGO (2002), CRASH (2005), HAMLET (1948), REBECCA (1940), UNFORGIVEN (1992), PLATOON (1986), and CAVALCADE (1933? 31? somewhere in there–what a pile of doo that film is, BTW) all winning the top prize in their respective year from the Academy. At one point, I made it a project to try and see all of those movies. Then I realized just how many mistakes the Academy had made over the years.

    The other films (STEP UP and ENOUGH, at least) are probably just incidental.

    LAHAR and SURROYAL were new to me. PINNIE was a guess, and I’d never seen the word “perry” before. ASBO I only knew from other crosswords. CHICAGO took far longer than it should have, seeing as I live there.

40. Why is rebec “SO obscure”? Seems to me this is where “obscure” means “I don’t know it”! Admittedly Early Music may be a minority interest but … I really look forward to finding “crumhorn” in a Graun cryptic one day!

41. re rebec, I agree entirely – not unfamiliar at all to fans of Shirley and Dolly Collins and their friends. Crumhorns (a.k.a. krummhorns) would be fine, as would shawms, curtals and many others. Rebec has been used several times before in the Guardian crossword too.

42. We drummers struggle with the idea of ‘guitar’ of course. That is totes other anyway innit.

43. I you knew what a REBEC was without looking it up my hat is off to you, but of course it is WELL obscure.

44. For those that might, like me, be wondering, in Wikipedia we find:

    ‘The mile was usually abbreviated m. in the past but is now written as mi. to avoid confusion with the SI metre.’

    On the other hand, Chambers – naturally – has ‘mile(s)’ as well as the more familiar ‘millilitre(s)’ listed under ‘ml’.

45. My wife and I (two heads are better than one) found this quite challenging, but we got there in the end. Last in was SURROYAL, which we’d never heard of. LAHAR, once we had the crossing letters and parsed the clue, rang a very distant bell in my memory and was confirmed by the dictionary.

    Like others, I too would quibble about “ml” as an abbreviation for “miles”. It’s not in my Chambers, which only gives the standard meaning “millilitre(s)”. Maybe Brummie thought that too much of a giveaway? How about “A little liquid enters…”?

    Muffin: agreed that antlers are not techincally horns, but I think it’s fair to describe them as “horny”.

    We completely missed the cinema theme, but then we’re not movie buffs.

    Favourite clue was 23: “Man’s one…”, a lovely red herring.

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