Guardian 26,875 – Qaos

57 comments on “Guardian 26,875 – Qaos”

1. Thanks Qaos and Andrew. Whew! What a workout! That SE corner was tough! Thought “freshening” in 25a might indicate an anagram, and when I googled American rappers and got “Dre”, I saw that I could use it after a mixed-up “cleans” to make a word. But I agree, Andrew, it is a most unfamiliar word and I then had to use an online dictionary to confirm my answer. But as others have said before, it’s always good to enlarge one’s vocabulary. I had not heard of John CONWAY at 21d (LOI), so had to come here to confirm my guess. How lucky you were to know him at university, Andrew, and now to get to solve a puzzle with him in it! And your parsing made sense of the clue for me. In fact your parsing helped with my understanding of some other answers too. And again I am “ennobled” by your “valiant” efforts because I had no idea that the themes was tanks; I vaguely thought the theme was leaders and that there were quite a few military-type clues, but had to come here to be enlightened. Favourites were 23a CENTAUR, 7d LAMBDA, and despite your criticism of the grammar, Andrew, I did like 15d NON-STARTER.

2. Thanks for the blog, Andrew; tanks for the theme, Qaos.

3. I thought the theme was cakes etc.

4. Thanks both. I enjoyed this apart from 25a – having to know any rapper as well as an obscure word was too much for me. Crossword fans like me live in a time when Model T Fords carry Al Capone to his crimes!

5. This looked really tough at first glance, but there were enough easy clues to help things along. I also had to look up ESCLANDRE; couldn’t parse the choc one because I thought the spelling was CHOCOHOLIC; didn’t spot the theme, although it looked as though the letter C was extremely popular. Favourites were WHEELIE BIN, NON-STARTER, ECCLES (now Andrew has parsed it) and CHIEFTAIN. Many thanks to Qaos and Andrew.

6. Thanks, Andrew, for the blog and Qaos for a fun puzzle – apart from 25ac!

   I actually got the theme [from Chieftain and Crusader, I think, which seemed to ring a bell]. I love the notion of a CHOCAHOLIC tank [however it’s spelt – Chambers has both] – but I dislike the word, along with shopaholic. workaholic, etc, because of its false derivation. [Yes, I know it’s facetious.]

   Favourites: ECCLES, LAMBDA and CENTAUR.

7. Thanks, Andrew, amazing that you should know the great man.

   Much to like here including WHEELIE BIN (nice def), ECCLES, TYPE & ENNOBLE, but a couple that I had no chance with and had to cheat such as CHARIOTEER & ESCLANDRE. The latter, I suspect, was the SE corner problem which can get forced on a setter when creating a new grid.

   Entered LORD CHAMBERLAIN without really knowing why.

   Thank you, Qaos, nice week, all.

8. Thanks Qaos and Andrew.

   Great fun, especially since this reminded me of Operation Christmas Duff, where 14 flame-throwing tanks were employed to cook a giant Christmas pudding which Eccles was assigned to deliver to the troops, “no chance of dessert” arriving, and The Man Who Won the War where cardboard tanks were placed on Salisbury Plain to make the enemy waste bombs!

9. Must make mental note: Qaos = hidden theme. Not that it would have made much difference, for I know few tank names, and some of those that I do (eg Sherman) aren’t there.

   CONWAY the mathematician was unknown to me, I would have had more chance with Russ, but the clueing was good. Isn’t the rapper strictly Dr Dre, not just Dre? And despite having held elected office, I’ve never seen CR for councillor: no doubt it’s in some dictionary somewhere, but Cllr and Coun are more conventional.

   Sorry about the quibbles. Many good clues, CHIEFTAIN the favourite.

10. Thanks Qaos & Andrew.

    Slow to get going but enjoyable. I missed the theme entirely. I guess ESCLANDRE was the only way to fill-in and retain the theme words. This crumbly had even heard of Dr Dre perhaps because of his headphones. Once I got WHEELIE BIN, the grid started to open up.

    CONWAY may be well-known to mathematicians, but Russ is better known in these parts. 😉 I’m more used to spelling the craver as CHOCOHOLIC but of course the ‘Catholic’ trick wouldn’t then work.

    I liked the ARMBANDS clue.

11. Thank Qaos and Andrew

    I enjoyed this although I failed to solve 11a and 3d (I never saw the Goon show on TV and did not think of Ecclesiastes). I could not parse 6d.

    New words/people/places were Conway, esclandre and Rhondda Valley in Wales.

    My favourites were NON-STARTER, CHOCAHOLIC & ENNOBLE.

12. Trailman @9, Cr for Councillor is in the COED, not just “some dictionary somewhere”…

13. Nice solve as always from this setter. 25a beat me strictly speaking – my knowledge of French and rap just wasn’t up to it – but the letters I guessed worked OK as it turned out.

    15d I thought was rather good. I don’t think you need to require that components of clues like that pass a substitution or exact match of parts of speech test; they’re halfway to being cryptic definitions – and there was a question mark there.

    Many thanks to Qaos and Andrew.

14. Thanks to Qaos and Andrew. Lots here that was new to me, whether CR for councillor, ESCLANDRE, ECCLES on the Goon show, or CONWAY, and I treated LORD CHAMBERLAIN as a straight definition without catching the football connection, but overall the clues were enough to get me through. A good challenge.

15. Missed the theme, the obscure 25 and couldn’t work out the parsing of TRANSFER but still plenty to enjoy. Favourites among lots of good clues were CHOCAHOLIC and NON-STARTER with WHEELIE BIN as LOI.

    Thanks to Qaos and Andrew.

16. A tricky one that I got nowhere near finishing. ESCLANDRE seemed rather obscure, but just calling the rapper “Dre” (without the “Dr.”) is fine – his most famous song is called “Forgot About Dre” and his brand of Apple-promoted headphones are “Beats By Dre“. I guess he treats the “Dr.” part as an honorific title, not a fixed part of his stage name.

17. Thanks Qaos and Andrew. Great fun as always from this setter – I loved the image of the heroic Welsh ant. Not sure however that a scone, however pronounced, is a cake though. And thanks Cookie for the Goons link.

18. Enjoyable but some tough bits. charioteer might be better with dashing-not keen on racing as anagrind. Esclandre better on Saturday but thematics need some latitude.Loved the Paulish 6.

19. All very entertaining as ever from Qaos. Spotted some of the tanks but that was never going to be much help to me. ESCLANDRE was new to me but gettable once the crossers were in place. TRANSFER also took me far too long. Liked VALIANT and CHOCOHOLIC.

    Thanks to Qaos and Andrew

20. I had indeed heard of Dr. Dre, but not of ESCLANDRE. But that seemed like the only arrangement of the necessary letters that resulted in something that looked like a word. I also admit to having cheated on CONWAY and VALIANT.

    Also, although I did put in ARMBANDS, I only just now–as I was typing this–understood the definition. Armband as in the medical device that I’ve usually heard called a blood-pressure cuff, right?

    Oh, and in the “Adventures in Britishisms” department, I also don’t think I’ve heard a garbage can (or trashcan) with wheels described as a wheelie bin before. (And yes, trashcan / dustbin is one of those classic transatlantic differences). The clue was easy enough, though.

21. mrpenney @20, blow-up ARMBANDS are often used to help children learn to swim.

22. mrpenney – I interpreted ARMBANDS as the things children wear when they’re learning to swim, as here.

23. I always try first to solve a puzzle without reference aids, but I needed them today. I got 25D (ESCLANDRE) after getting all its crossers, but it was doubly obscure in my view – the word itself and [Dr] Dre. 9A (HEADCLOTH) was also a new word for me, as was Cr as a contraction of Councillor in 17D (CRUSADER): like Trailman, who should know, I’ve only ever come across Coun and Cllr for Councillor.

    However, everything was solvable and there was much to enjoy with some very good clues. I missed the theme as always – which is strange this time because I thought of tanks when I filled in 14D (CHIEFTAIN). However, in my defence(!), I can say that I’ve only heard of one other tank in this crossword and that is 19A (CENTURION).

    Thanks to both Qaos and Andrew.

24. Afternoon all and tanks for all the comments! Hope those in the UK are enjoying today’s glorious sunshine.

    Apologies for 25ac – I blame it on too many entries beginning with C, which made the grid fill a lot trickier than usual (especially as they have to be “normal” words too). An obscure word in the SE corner is always a bit of a giveaway as to the filling process.

    @Andrew – Conway is certainly an amazing mathemeatician whose contributions across so many fields shows just how versatile he is. You might be interested in his appearances on Numberphile: John H. Conway on Numberphile

    Best wishes,

    Qaos.

25. @Andrew: I knew John Conway at Cambridge, too: I was an undergrad reading classics at Trinity, but a good friend of mine was at Caius reading maths, and it’s through him that I met J.C.

26. As usual, I missed the theme! That, as well as not knowing “esclandre”, did not detract from my enjoyment of the puzzle however. Loved the reference to the “famous Eccles” – my favourite radio character so many years ago. Too many other good clues to list.

    Many thanks Quaos & Andrew.

27. I realized that there was a theme but I didn’t know the tanks- I suppose I might have deduced it from CENTURIAN which is one of the few tanks I know. CONWAY and ESCLANDRE were new to me but were easy to guess even without the crossers.
    I really enjoyed this. Just the right level for a sunny day in North Devon.
    Thanks Qaos.

28. Qaos – thanks for dropping by and please don’t apologise for 25ac. Part of the fun of a crossword is working out a word you have never heard of from the wordplay, looking it up, and finding the exact definition. Still not sure if a scone is a cake though…

29. Marienkaefer: for what it’s worth, Chambers defines SCONE as “a flattish .. plain cake of dough without much fat..”

    Qaos: thanks for dropping in. I’ve seen some of the Numberphile videos with Conway; there’s also an interesting interview with him and his recent biographer on a Guardian Science podcast: https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2015/nov/20/mathematics-john-conway-numbers-game-theory

30. Thanks Qaos and Andrew

    I loved this. Too many really amusing clues to list them all, but I must mention the “valley ant”.

    I had to use a word search for ESCLANDRE – it was the only word that turned up, but I didn’t understand it at all.

    I didn’t parse CRUSADER completely. I thought the A was from the USA bit, but I didn’t twig “rejecting” to mean “bottom upwards” – in fact I’m not totally convinced; it seems to work better in an across clue.

31. [P.S. it doesn’t match the previous stories, but a close friend and flatmate of mine at Cambridge worked with Conway, so it was an easy one for me to get.]

32. Don’t think Qaos gets the cryptic game too well. I see a lot of mistakes in this, and some things that don’t quite make the grade. It’s hard to solve with so many unintentional ‘misleads’, 16 bum steers altogether, for me.

33. Thanks both.

    Rather a lot of people here seem to have some connection with Conway. He was one of my lecturers at Cambridge (1968-71) and in those days undergraduates and staff mingled freely over coffee in the Pure Maths Dept and DAMTP. JC caused me to lose two days of my finals revision by telling me a particular 3D jigsaw puzzle was ‘impossible’, so naturally I wasted time on cracking it. He then explained it was ‘impossible’ because the solution relied on a certain slackness in the joints, which he felt was cheating.

    I wonder if any non-mathematicians got the answer.

34. muffin @30

    You have a point concerning CRUSADER. Instead of

    CR + US + A + reverse of RED

    as written in the blog I think it’s

    CR + USA + reverse of RED

    [Regarding John Conway, I don’t know him personally but I am very familiar with the Game of Life, a marvellous invented solo game with a minimum of rules and limitless possibilites. I discovered it in an article by Martin Gardner in Scientific American many years ago.]

35. @Marienkaefer

    As additional support to the definition of scone as a cake, (as well as the Chambers def that Andrew posted) it is now (thanks to the Jaffa Cake question) acceptable to define flour-based baked goods of dubious culinary designation according to the following ‘rule’:

    If it goes hard when it goes stale, it is a cake.
    If it goes soft when it goes stale, it is a biscuit.

    I know that no-one has attempted to suggest that a scone be a biscuit, but scones do go hard when they go stale…

36. muffin – after the palaver over 26,874, you forgot to mention that 4d is telling you to change one of the directions twice, rather than both of the directions once.

    And for those who are finding Dr. Dre an obscurity, note that it is only two years since he was rated the third most highly paid celebrity in the world by Forbes magazine. The clue is possibly weakened by the over-familiarity in calling him just Dre (as noted by Shroduck @16) rather than by any measure of abstrusity. Slightly less obscure than Conway, then, but hopefully somewhat more foul-mouthed. The more fainthearted are not recommended to check out his oeuvre, particularly the work with NWA.

37. Van Winkle @36
    “changed direction twice” is fine for me – two Ns are changed to two Ss. I don’t see the comparison with yesterday’s (which I still think is wrong!).

38. I thoroughly enjoyed this one – thanks to Qaos (and to Andrew for the blog).

    I, like many others, hadn’t encountered ‘esclandre’ before.

    ‘Valiant’ made me giggle far more than one would have thought necessary.

39. I too found this puzzle a bit approximate in places.

    Governor of German city changed direction twice? is a case in point, with the cryptic grammar rather untidy, and we need the definition more than usual, as we could get any combination of S, E and W in an answer. BOWS could be correct for example, without the definition.

40. Like mrpenney @20, I was completely flummoxed by ARMBANDS. I had to Google “armbands blown up” to figure it out. I think in the US, we call them water wings.

    To me, armbands are only worn by:
    1) Mourners;
    2) Leathermen (hopefully with nice biceps);
    3) Members of fascist paramilitaries.

    I would love seeing the blow-up kind substituted in any of those circumstances.

41. OK I give in on scone, though I should like to have heard from muffin or cookie on this issue. But which of three possible pronunciations is the right one I wonder…

42. Very regional, that, one, marienkaefer!

    I was brought up in Devon, and the family pronunciation was “sconn”; I don’t know where “skone” is prevalent, but “skoon” is only SW cottish, I think.

43. Could anyone explain why B = bullets?

    Thanks.

44. Alastair @43
    It’s not “bullets”, it’s “bullets to begin”, i.e. B.

45. Ah! Thanks, Muffin.

46. Marienkaefer @41, on the issue of cake or biscuit, technically I am half-baked, not sure if I am going softer or harder with age. Scone for me is sconn, the same as for muffin @42, after all the best scones are had in Devon with clotted cream and jam.

47. On reflection, scones go hard with age, so do cookies, thus I am getting more cakey.

48. I’m losing track. If Cookie’s getting cakey, is Muffin getting biscuity? Personally I think I’m just getting crumbly.

49. Sorry Muffin, I didn’t mean to imply you’re getting old. For all I know you could be 21. I meant of course to say biscuitier.

50. Eileen @6 — the words you (and I) don’t like refer to people addicted to chocohol, shopohol and workohol. Since those substances don’t exist, neither do the people, sez I. And I don’t know what that “a” is doing in the middle of the word, since both chocolate and alcohol (does anybody say “alcaholic”?) have an “o”.

    I never saw the Goon Show on TV either — didn’t know it had been. But I’ve heard a few episodes on the radio and especially remember (to Cookie @8) the crew sailing off in a stolen Broadmoor Prison, which they had replaced with a cardboard replica so no one would notice. (Speaking of cardboard.)

    If Mariankaefer @17 isn’t sure a scone is a cake, I’m even less sure that a cone is ice cream.

    It helps never to have heard of Crystal Palace.

51. A puzzle that has no quality, a puzzle set by a non-professional.

52. Remembering Le Carre’s ‘A Small Town in Germany’ I was ready to quibble that BONN is not a city – but I see that it is.

    I am that apparently rare beast – someone who studied at Cambridge and did not come across John Conway.

53. Valentine @50. Dartmoor prison, Shirley. You can still hear the Goon Show from time to time on Radio4 Extra, if you are in the UK. I don’t know if you can stream it outside the UK.

54. BBC Radio4 Extra appears to have four Goon Show episodes available at any one time.

55. Sorry to be a day late and no doubt past anyone’s notice, but the “rejecting left-wing activist” in CRUSADER refers to Ralph [N]ader.

    Thanks, Qaos and Andrew.

56. Thanks Qaos and Andrew

    I am a fan … and this was up to the normal expectations – even with missing the tank ghost theme.

    Took a few sittings to eventually get this one out with a little bit of electronic help, especially with ESCLANDRE, CONWAY and the Goon-related ECCLES.

    Many clues to like with VALIANT, CHARIOTEER (now I see the anagram part of it as well) and TRANSFER the best of a good lot.

    Finished in the SW corner with CRUSADER (where I had the USA as America), CENTURION (which took a bit to think through the I ON part), VALIANT (after initially writing in an unparsed GALLANT) and VEST (mucking around with GI around S with the erroneous 22a for a while) the last one in.

57. Thanks Qaos and Andrew.

    This was an enjoyable challenge but I failed to fully parse 5dn ( not familiar with EL for Elevated Railway) and 17dn ( not familiar with CR for Councillor). So thanks for your explanations.

    I worked out ESCLANDRE and luckily the youngster at the next desk knows of (Dr) DRE so at least got that.

Comments are closed.