Guardian Prize 27,040 by Paul

21 comments on “Guardian Prize 27,040 by Paul”

1. Thanks PeeDee. And for the pictures which added to my education. In 15a I thought GEL was probably an adhesive and hadn’t come across the friend connotation. In 21d I was confused by the hyphen and thought I had missed something somewhere. Leak could be seep or weep I suppose.

2. Thanks PeeDee. With the interlocking 17 and 25 this looked grim until the former revealed itself and led to the latter – and to other Australian specimens at 8 and 26A. Of them all I liked BLACK WIDOW best.

3. Thanks to Paul and PeeDee. Like Biggles A I read “gel” as stick-congeal, not “friend”; bread = doorstep for BREADTH was new to me; and the SALTIGRADE spider was my LOI. Still, I found this puzzle easier (though very enjoyable nonetheless) than several this past week. Query: in 9 across need Annul be reversed as in the blog?

4. Thanks for the pictures! I never realized there were black widows with all those spots–in the US the main species (latrodectus mactans and latrodectus hesperus) have a single hourglass. I have learned something new today!

5. I actually thought I wasn’t going to get the theme all all, given the cross-referencing of the key clue, but enjoyed the gotcha moment when I finally saw how it worked. Very neat, Paul! Thanks PeeDee for the parsings for UNSINKABLE and CREEPY, which I couldn’t work out. (I did look briefly to see if CRAWLY was in there as well, but it wasn’t.) I did parse BOO-BOO as two truncated BOOKS, but somehow didn’t quite believe it. I had a quite different parsing for THRONE: I reckoned a King on a throne was enTHRONEd and the ‘end’ – the bottom – disappeared, leaving just the throne. I thought that was neat, but yours looks much more sensible!

6. Being an arachnophobe, I was dreading actual pictures of these things on the blog, and there they were.

   But I will say Paul missed an opportunity to clue an additional spider at 10, the bird spider, also known as the Goliath birdeater. The name alone is nightmare fuel, and here it is in all its, ahem, glory.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_birdeater

7. I thought that two clues couldn’t refer to each other, so I was trying to solve 25a with the number 17. Obviously that didn’t work but it probably added to the enjoyment of the puzzle because I didn’t get the theme until about half way in.

   11a was my favourite, with an actual LOL.

8. Thank you Paul and PeeDee.

   I think I enjoyed this puzzle, but still fail to understand BIRD for 10a, the only one that comes to my mind having anything to do with “Time” is the cuckoo… I also failed on some of the parsing and had to check SALTIGRADE on google.

   SteveB @6, there was a huge spider living in an old black mango tree outside our bathroom window in Jamaica that caught birds in its web and ate them.

9. Cookie @9 ‘bird’ and ‘time’ = slang terms for a prison sentence

10. Larry @10, thank you! A faint recollection now…

11. I did enjoy this but it lead me quite a dance. SALTIGRADE was new to me, and, while it was well clued, I spent ages trying to find it. Still, once I’d sussed the theme things improved. Nice puzzle!
    Thanks Paul.

12. The tangled web woven by 25a and 17 had me in a spin for days, and even though I’d already guessed WOLF from the wordplay and two check letters, that was no help; it was getting BLACK WIDOW via LACK ID, prompted by a helpful checking K, that finally revealed the beast at the centre. Cracking puzzle!

    @Cookie, @Larry: “bird” is a contraction of “bird lime”, rhyming slang for “time”.

    @ACD: “Doorstep” is a jocular term for a particularly thickly-cut slice.

    Gaufrid, many thanks for pointing out Alberich’s website, which was very helpful and even had something on my specific question:”… many &lit clues have a question mark at the end. This tends to be necessary because the definitions afforded by the clues are usually a bit of a stretch, but also it’s a way of telling the solver that there’s something a bit unusual going on.”

    http://www.alberichcrosswords.com/pages/andlit.html

    My crossword has been accepted for publication (although the cluing is much better than the grid construction!). Yay!

13. Thanks PeeDee and Larry @9 or 10. (numbering now out of sequence) I didn’t know the meaning of bird for prison time and was trying to work out some deletion from birthday – thay, nearly that!
    Spiders are friends in this part of the world, except for the funnel web. Didn’t know saltigrade but wordplay and definition very fair. Thankyou for the pics PeeDee. And thanks Paul for the fun puzzle.

14. Although I’d had a brief look at this last weekend, I didn’t get to tackle it seriously until last night, getting the bottom half done then. The top half was largely empty, though, so I had to finish that today, ending with 2d and 10a. The crosslinking of 17a and 25a was intimidating at first, but once WOLF led to SPIDER, confirmed by HUNTSMAN, the theme helped.

    I didn’t know SALTIGRADE, but I knew about jumping spiders (we have cute little zebra spiders in the house here) so Google led me to the Salticidae and the wordplay gave the rest.

    Thanks to Paul for an entertaining puzzle and to PeeDee for the blog, particularly the fascinating diagram.

15. Tony @12. Known in Liverpool as a “dorsey”.

16. Definitely not a theme I was familiar with but fortunately REDBACK made it fairly clear and a few lookups cleared up the rest.
    Thanks to Paul and PeeDee

17. I though it was doorstop rather than doorstep?

18. Dare I say it jumped out at me – SALTIGRADE was my FOI. I am no spider expert, but it is a word I remember from years ago when I used to browse the dictionary (when I had nothing better to do in my youth).

    Thanks Paul and PeeDee. Malpighian tubules I remember from O level biology, circa 1959, but have no idea what they do now.

19. I grew up (in Essex) hearing them referred to as doorsteps then later heard others calling them doorstops. So either, maybe?

20. In our house it was a doorstep. It seemed to me apt, because the inept bread slicer might well leave a “step” on the bread for someone else to create a doorstep.

21. Seems like nobody spotted the nina across the top, where backside is adjacent to bum. I’m still 3 weeks behind (pun not intended) everyone else…..

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