Guardian 26,683 by Boatman

51 comments on “Guardian 26,683 by Boatman”

1. Thanks to Boatman and manehi. Good workout. YATTER was a new word for me. HOTFOOT was
   my favorite.

   Cheers…

2. Thanks, manehi. I don’t know if this was on the easy side for Boatman or if I’ve now got the measure of him and his “lift and separate” clues. That’s not to say that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy this. LIONS MANE seemed weak and somehow out of place in this puzzle, though.

   Amusing to see R for queen after yesterday’s discussion here.

   A few minor points: you seem to have missed out your parsing for ANOMALIES and RESIGN; I thought the “perhaps” in the clue for ROPES IN was related to the guys rather than Boatman; you’ve answered your own quibble about POINTS OUT, since you list the points as NESW!

3. (thanks NeilW – I managed to publish a draft rather than the final version! I also agree that “guys perhaps” is more likely)

4. Thank you, manehi. I thought this had some cracking clues, with lovely surfaces such as Amy and Bach, and especially the sewing machine, with its misdirecting ‘Singer’. HOTFOOT was brilliant too. Bravo! to Boatman.

5. Found this puzzle heavy going in places. That said, my favourite clue was 1/28ac – took a long time to get the answer, but well worth the effort.

   Needed help with parsing 17ac, so thanks for that, manehi.

6. Very nice – lots to like. Favourites were BIOPIC, SEWING MACHINE, HUMIDLY and EVERGLADE. Many thanks to Boatman and manehi.

7. I tried LION’S GAME, assuming it was a reference to the Rugby World Cup. I agree that clue is weak.

8. Couldn’t 12 across be LIONS CAGE, just as easily?

9. Good to see you all in happy mood this morning!

   Manehi & Neil – Yes, it’s “guys perhaps” as ROPES is being defined by example. I appear to have allowed a comma to separate the two words … Would I do that deliberately, to distract you? Heh heh …

   Neil – Your feelings about 12Ac demonstrate how well you’ve tuned to my wavelength: I originally had a complicated construction based around the idea that LIONS MANE could be a Spoonerism of MAYAN SLAIN, but I couldn’t find a way of making it work to Hugh’s satisfaction, so I cut the subsidiary part of the clue entirely to give the simple CD that you see now. I always tell people (in my shamelessly plugged and excellent-value Masterclasses, the next one of which will be in Brighton on 28 November – still a couple of places available) that I don’t do CDs, because all but the very best of them leave me feeling somehow cheated – I think it’s because the two-pronged mental exercise of a normal clue is such an important feature of cryptics. Having said that, some of Roger S’s CDs are sublime – it’s hard to come close to his level of skill in that very specialised area.

10. Enjoyed this very much, but needed your excellent blog manahi, to help parse several I was not sure of!! Thanks both to you and Boatman.

    Boatman @ 9, I seem to be in a minority in crosswordland who loves spoonerisms and mayan slain would have been a great one; so sad Huge was not satisfied!!
    Thanks anyway for a fun and, for me, quite hard work out!! I take it Roger S is Rufus who does, indeed, come up with some brilliant CDs.

11. Wow, what a puzzle, and what a helpful blog, thanks to both Boatman and manehi.

    My favourite clue was SEWING MACHINE, it reminded me of Bach’s prelude No 2 in C minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, which to me sounds just like one of the old Singer treadle sewing machines.

12. A great puzzle that I am very proud to have (almost) finished. I gave in at LIONS _A_E (Yes I know, I know..)

    Too many favourites to list but 1,28 had me in stitches.

    Also great to have the setter dropping in and well said Boatman on Rufus’s CDs.

13. I am having a go at posting the Bach prelude http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIPJITQHnzA

14. Cookie – Thank you, and you’re welcome. But now I won’t be able to hear that piece any other way …

15. gsol@12 – I also gave up on 24a at LIONS _a_e. I just could not think what it could be! I also failed to solve Amy/17a – was ‘Amy’ a movie that I never heard of?

    I needed help with parsing 23d, 1d, 24a, 9a and new words for me today were EVERGLADE & ACINI.

    My favourite was HOTFOOT.

16. Michelle – At a cinema near you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_%282015_film%29

17. Boatman @14, sorry, I especially chose a mechanical-sounding recording, others might not remind you…
    for me it is nostalgic, I can see a girl sewing outside under ngaio trees in the garden of a rundown old house in the wooded hills above Wellington, NZ, the tennis court wire fencing overgrown with kiwi and passion fruit vines – driving up there in the evenings glowworms lit the way.

18. Thanks Boatman; good challenge.

    Thanks manehi; I wasn’t sure that LION’S MANE was a bona fide phrase but I see it is also a mushroom.

    The falsetto did mislead me for a while but I got there in the end. I particularly liked GRASP & ANOMALIES.

19. At 18d I tried BAROQUE for a while, ‘bar rock’ being something one might enjoy in taverns and the whole thing denoting both the sound of Bach’s music and the look of contemporary churches. So there’s no homophone indicator? A trifle! Thankfully, the improbability of 17a being *I*P*B made me look elsewhere.

    Earlier, I’d been pleased to parse HOTFOOT and so looked for other bits of lifting and separating and there at 24a it was! Overall, a top-notch mental workout; thanks, Boatman.

20. Thanks manehi and Boatman. I really enjoyed this, except for 12ac where I entered LIONS CAGE.

21. Glad to see everyone happy in here so far! I really enjoyed the puzzle and its sometimes audacious cluing, but half expected to come here and find people in an ornery mood 😉

22. Thanks to Boatman and manehi. I did get LIONS MANE, but needed help parsing POINTS OUT and MOOLAH. HOTFOOT and GRASP took a long time but I finally caught on. A good workout.

23. A quibble from the US: “The Everglades” is the proper name of a geographic feature in Florida. There is no singular *”everglade”. See Wikipedia.

24. I was happy to have completed the grid, though like Roger@7 I had lions game, which seems to work equally well – so far 2 alternative possibilities have been mentioned. I had also failed to parse 23d E COLI correctly

    I’m not as used to the lift-and-separate clues as others might be – though I realise this is the Guardian. I always thought this device should be used with restraint and in situations that rewards the solver with a sublime surface. In the absence of that, for once, I might even agree with HH were he to suggest compileritis. Similarly for ON EARTH, to pull off this definition which fails in the absence of “what”, I might again expect to be compensated with a sublime surface – am I missing something there?

    In 11a ALTOS we have an “of” inserted for the surface and in 8d MOOLAH we have an “of” deleted for the surface. Other crosswords get crucified for that.

    I appreciated the singing theme and liked the clever deviations like SEWING MACHINE, RESIGN, and I even thought 24 GRASP was ok given the theme and clear definition.

    Overall I enjoyed the crossword, I sort-of knew what to expect, I just have a lot to get used to.

    Many thanks manehi for a great review and thank you Boatman for pushing my boundaries

25. Dan @ 23 – Chambers and Collins both disagree. Similarly, “The Alps” may be a proper name, but you can still call a high mountain an “alp”.

26. This was just what I needed to restore my confidence, which has taken something of a battering over the last week. ACINI was unfamiliar but guessable, and last in because I wanted to check it. Liked HUMIDLY, HELLO and HOTFOOT.

    Thanks to Boatman and manehi

27. Dutch – You’re not the only person who’s suspected that lift-and-separate clues might be somehow, well, suspect. As a general principle, though, I’d say that any technique is ok as long as it can be parsed fairly. That means that it should be possible for a reasonably switched-on solver to work out what’s going on without having to resort to guessing the solution and working back from there. If the wordplay doesn’t fall into one of the accepted standard forms, the setter has to be a bit more careful to make sure that all the pieces are easy to interpret, once the penny has dropped about the way the clue parses – for example, “false” on its own would be a pretty clear anagram indicator, so once you know that I may be playing lift-and-separate games that should tell you that you might have an anagram here, but it wouldn’t be at all fair to use the kind of borderline indicator that you might just get away with in a simpler clue. The same thing applies in “sing rap” – if you saw something like “S in G rap” you’d see it as a container clue straight away and write in the solution. The only thing that makes these clues difficult is the lifting and separating … which, of course, is why I find them so much fun. But you’re right: they do need some restraint. Even handled carefully, I wouldn’t want every clue to be a lift-and-separate, any more than I’d want every clue to be an anagram. And surfaces should always be sublime, naturally!

28. ‘CHINE’ which sounds like ‘sheen’

    Really? Only after you’ve already put it in “machine”. As a seperate word, which is where you are at when you are looking at that fragment of the clue, then I don’t think so. You have to have already solved the clue to get the intended pronunciation, which is a bit cart before the horse.

    I see that there are definitions of CHINE which I’ve never heard of which may well be pronounced that way, but the definition most people who have holidayed around Bournemouth and the Isle of Wight, or even live in the area, will know about, sounds nothing like that as the ‘ch’ is as in “child”.

    The “listen to the sound” facility in WordWeb, which only lists the uses I didn’t know, also has ‘ch’ as in “child”, which implies those usages are also not pronounced ‘sheen’.

29. Not quite as hard as some of Boatman’s offerings but a struggle for me nonetheless. Liked 1,28 and 8d in particular.

    There’s also another biopic titled Amy! though I think this one also includes the punctuation mark as an integral part of the title. If you’re interested, have a look here. For someone of my ossified musical tastes, the subject of this er… interesting sounding film (I very much doubt it was a blockbuster) is the famous Amy who always comes to mind.

    Thanks to S&B and for Boatman’s contribution to the blog as well.

30. This was a hard but enjoyable solve for me – just the right mixture of clues that could be solved forwards, so to speak (building the answer from the wordplay and then checking the meaning), and those that had to be solved by guessing the answer first and then trying to fathom the (sometimes obscure) wordplay.

    I’ve never seen the phrase ‘lift-and-separate’ before, and I haven’t often come across this technique – until today! I used to think this device unfair, but, on the principle that in cryptic cluing punctuation must always be allowed to mislead (and there are examples in this crossword), the lack of a space is a similar kind of device, and fair game.

    I didn’t get 17 across, and didn’t enjoy it after looking it up here. The wordplay was hard, and I’ve never heard of Amy as a biography or biopic. APart from that, this was a cracking crossword, made all the more enjoyable afterwards by reading this blog, Boatman’s contributions and all.

31. This was another tough puzzle for me, but still enjoyable. I couldn’t fully parse BIOPIC or GRASP. Favourites were SEWING MACHINE, ON EARTH, HELLO, MONA LISA, SOPRANO, HOTFOOT and CHORALE.

    Thanks to Boatman and manehi.

32. Awful.

33. I see that HH has delivered his verdict. Either he’s playing to the gallery, or P.G. Wodehouse’s famous line needs re-working: “It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.”

34. I’d been missing you … Where have you been all day, Hoggy?

35. Perhaps dear HH is referring to definition 3, or maybe 4, here

36. Thanks Boatman and manehi
    I really enjoyed this, despite not being able to parse a few (8d, 17a, 19a and 24a). The variety of “singers” etc. kept me on my toes throughout. I hadn’t heard of ACINI, but it was one of those where I constructed it from the clue and discovered (rather to my surprise) that it was correct.

37. Yes, a good one. Tough but fair. It took me a couple of sessions but I got there without resorting to the computer. LOI was ACINI, but only because I needed to check it in the dictionary.

    Thanks to Boatman and manehi.

38. Derek Lazenby @28

    As far as I can tell, most meanings of CHINE are pronounces as in Isle of Wight, but there is the fabric crêpe de chine (I hope the e circumflex comes out correctly), which, being lifted straight from the French. is pronounced close to sheen.

    Many thanks to Boatman and manehi.

39. Thanks PeterO. Thought there must be one. Too obscure for me, and several dictionaries though!

40. I still think that LIONS CAGE is a better solution to the clue than LIONS MANE, whatever Boatman intended.

41. Thanks to Boatman and manehi.

    I thoroughly enjoyed it – especially the lovely misdirection of ‘sewing machine’.

    After failing to complete yesterday’s offering from Nutmeg, I was surprised at how quickly this one fell before me. Reading that other, far more experienced, solvers found it tough, has boosted my ego even further. I must be on Boatman’s wavelength today.

    I like lift-and-separate clues, they provide such a sense of ‘of course’ satisfaction when finally solved.

42. Great fun after an unpromising start: the best kind of puzzle with some really nifty clues. Thanks to Boatman for this, and for his entertaining and humble contributions to the discussion. And thanks to H @32 for a meticulously argued critique.

    Many delights including NUTMEG OIL, BIOPIC (“Amy” is a fantastic film by the way: great music plus a horrifying depiction of the press hounding a vulnerable, mentally ill person for our entertainment), SOPRANO, E COLI, ANOMALIES and others.

43. [ 1961Blanchflower @ 42: Don’t be so unreasonable! What on earth (sic) makes you think that the comment at 32 transgresses any of the site’s requirements as stated in Policy Clause 2:

    “Any criticism of a puzzle or clue must be valid, constructive and presented in a polite manner. The reason for any dissatisfaction should be clearly indicated. Comments that do not comply with these criteria may be removed.”

    32 complies on all counts, surely 😉 ]

44. Late on parade today as I’ve been walking in the Devon countryside courtesy of the Woodland Trust.I didn’t get to this until after dinner and found the puzzle rather good. I didn’t like LIONS MANE much either and had to guess it but otherwise this was lovely.
    Thanks Boatman.

45. I did rather well on this — missing only 17A. Surely 14D is a almost word-for-word repeat of a clue we’ve see quite recently?

46. Well, I was extremely disappointed.

    That we only got one word from HodgyHeg.

    How ripped-off can ya feel?

47. Surprisingly delightful – and swift – solve of our snakebonechap’s offering. Keep travelling these roads – and I might even pay homage at one of your classes…..!
    A nice GRASP but my own favourite was ANOMALIES.
    (I had “lions gate” – presuming, wrongly, there was some musical so named – though pleased to report it was the only one of which I wasn’t certain)
    Yes – good stuff – many thanks. And to manehi, of course.

48. I apologise for my brevity. I should say to Mitz that in saying ‘awful’ I did not mean ‘awesome’, even with that horrid American usage. This crossword suffers with terrible (not THAT usage) compileritis, and is hard for the sake of being hard. The devices are not clever either, they just make things unnecessarily troublesome, and that is not good setting.

    I hope Picaroon will lift the mood today.

49. Thanks Boatman and manehi

    Liked the puzzle a lot … apart from 12a where I had put in LION’S CAGE. I must also have been on the Boatman wavelength today, as it was by far the quickest of his that I’ve solved … although it still took over an aggregate 1 hour across a number of small spurts.

    Think that the surface of the clues were very clever, with the misdirection at 15a and 1d where the ‘singer’ actually meant SINGER !! 🙂

    HOTFOOT, HELLO and ANOMALIES were the standouts in a very good look. Had penny drop moments with both E-COLI and CHORALE. Hadn’t seen the small e EVERGLADE before that describes a generic swampy grassland.

    Great stuff !

50. Thanks manehi and Boatman.

    I must be getting closer to Boatman’s wavelength because I found this relatively straightforward – although I did need your help to parse GRASP and shared the disquiet about LIONS MANE.

    What a pity about 14dn as noted by El Ingles above. Tramp had EPISTOLARY in 26680 with a very similar construction – using PIECE for PISTOL. Not a fault of either setter but a bit of an editorial faux pas.

51. Sorry to come in a bit late here, but we do the crossword in the Weekly. We thought of LIONS MANE, but decided that LIONS GATE was more convincing, being an entertainment company, so therefore a bit more related to “show”. Otherwise very challenging, but ultimately doable and very enjoyable. Thanks Boatman!

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