Guardian Cryptic 27,169 by Philistine

62 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 27,169 by Philistine”

1. A bit of a 1960s theme going on here (Hancock/Lennon/Kennedy/Best) and having John and George spent a few moments looking for Pual and Ringo. A very pleasant solve and nicely clued.

   Thanks Picarron and manehi.

2. Isn’t the theme airports and space centres? G Best, Speke = John Lennon, Heathrow, Kennedy.

   Thanks Philistine and manehi, enjoyed this

3. The airport theme is worked out very ingeniously. I was stuck for a bit on the SW corner, being slow to recognise the ‘shady’ anagrind in 17D, and not knowing the colloquial word for autopilot (24-26). But then thinking of the airport theme led at once to George Best (Belfast). Thanks to Philistine, also to manehi.

4. Possibly, Syracuse Hancock International Airport, too?

5. Thanks Philistine and manehi

   I loved this – possibly as it was surprisingly easy for a Philistine, but mainly for several great clues. Particular favourites were HARMFUL, PROVENCAL (and nice for the ellipsis connecting it to the next clue actually to be relevant), and RINGLET.

   I got AIRPORT fairly early and wondered about the apparent lack of a definition; when I got HEATHROW (another great clue) the penny dropped and I was able to write in LENNON and SPEKE, and spot the other ones I had already solved.

   OWNED stands out as a little weak compared with the rest.

6. I really enjoyed this and spotted the theme quite early on too.

   Thanks to Picaroon and Manehi

7. I also enjoyed this. Favourites were HARMFUL (tricky for those who aren’t Brits of a certain age), MODULATED, TREE RAT and WIDOWED. Many thanks to Philistine and manehi.

8. Thanks, manehi.

   Sheer delight, especially for the brilliant 4dn. Too many other favourites to list but, for ‘those who aren’t Brits of a certain age’ [and those like me who first laughed at it over half a century ago, know it by heart and still laugh], I just can’t resist giving this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcZChdM0OiI

   Many thanks to Philistine for a super start to the day.

9. On further analysis, HARMFUL is a slightly odd clue, isn’t it? “Hancock’s first” gives H; “Hancock’s (first) pint” gives ARMFUL. What would you call this?

   Not that it detracts from my favourite clue!

10. Dave Ellison @ 2: I think 2dn nails the theme as airports. Kennedy Space Center is superfluous, as New York has John F Kennedy Airport.

11. Great crossword! I particularly liked 4d and 16a. Only complaint is 7d. Hard Drive is not memory. Hard drive is where the data is stored. It is then moved into the memory, processed and then stored back on the hard drive.

12. This was quite a workout for me.

    I failed to solve GEORGE BEST – soccer-related clues always go over my head – and I never heard of GEORGE = autopilot before today.

    I did not understand HARMFUL until I googled and saw that “The Blood Donor” is an episode from the comedy series Hancock. When the doctor tells him that he must donate a pint of blood, he protests, “I don’t mind giving a reasonable amount, but a pint! That’s very nearly an armful!” So I guessed that I was on the right track.

    SPEKE was also new to me.

    I solved but could not parse 22a and 25a.

    My favourite was ATTESTED.

    Thanks blogger and setter.

13. Rog @ 9. Yes, I think you are correct; it was the proximity of SPACESHIP and KENNEDY made me think of the space connection.

14. All very well worked out, but over in a flash, with JOHN F KENNEDY a write-in from the numeration. A bit slowed down on the left-hand side until AIRPORT gave the game away. All in all, quicker than Rufus on Monday.

    But worth it all for clicking on Eileen’s link to Hancock’s finest moment, even though like her I could write this out from memory. Michelle @12, the YouTube link is much more fun than the google!

15. Thanks for parsing all the airports, as I couldn’t see how 6 & 16 worked. When I got the theme, I was expecting STANSTED at 15, but unfortunately for Philistine there’s nothing possible for T.N.R.T at 17dn.

16. What fun this was, reminding me too of my very favourite/funniest moment – or line – from Hancock’s Half Hour. George Best scored in injury time, my last one in…

17. Thanks to Philistine and manehi. Lovely stuff: not too taxing for Philistine.

    I agree that 4dn is wonderful. According to recent obituaries of Simpson, Galton and Simpson spent some time working on what the punchline should be in terms of the quantity and the part of the body.

18. I agree that OWNED is maybe the weakest but I thought ERECT was reminiscent of earlier Paul puzzles. A great trip down memory lane. I’ve had the odd nightmare at Heathrow but remember watching a 17 yr old George Best (that was first in), Took a while for the air/space theme to connect and even when it did the SE was slow to crumble. Very enjoyable.

19. Airport theme – given my time in them over the years I should have seen that! Got the setter wrong too! Need to press the reset button and start the day again!

20. Thanks Philistine & Manehi

    I enjoyed this on the whole – especially the ingenious clues 4d HARMFUL and 15a LUCKY DIP – but it did also raise the odd grumble: I found the elision of ‘For’ & ‘d’ in 16a HEATHROW a bit too much, especially as ‘without’ doesn’t indicate substitute so much as subtract. And although I liked the double wordplay in 20d RINGLET, I don’t think ‘for’ is ever a fair link word in that direction. I also didn’t like the inaccurate ‘memory’ = HARD DISK already mentioned above.

21. A lovely puzzle, though I struggled for a while in the SW corner. Plenty of excellent clueing, but my particular favourites were SPACESHIP, ATTESTED, HEAR HEAR, PROVENCAL and RINGLET (though I’m not quite sure why the setter thought it necessary to provide a BOGOF clue for the last of these). Thanks to Philistine and manehi (especially for parsing HEATHROW and WIDOWED – though I still don’t understand how “id” = “instinct”!)

22. Sure signs of a struggle for the compiler here, hardly ever concise, lots of first or last letters, substitution ideas that don’t quite work, and a battle to try to get the cryptic grammar into shape. 16 across is one of those horrible things that the Guardian allows.

    4 down is a good idea, although muffin has a point as ‘armful’ only means something like ‘pint’ in the context of Tony Hancock, so it’s also a little suspect. I liked it because it’s a nice observation, regardless.

23. Fell short of GEORGE BEST, even though I thought it might be a football player, which I knew I had no chance of getting. Unfamiliar with the autopilot. Apart from that, solved it all without getting the theme, although I was bit fuzzy on the definition for 2D. Found 1D from wordplay and google for confirmation. Second time this week solving a themed crossword without twigging to the theme. Says more about the setters than this solver. Gettable on many levels.

    I had a different take on 23 OWNED. Definition= had. got= connector. drunk= downed, with first letter deletion.

24. Or got drunk = past participle, passive = downed.

25. And ‘armful’, without knowing the Hancock reference, which I didn’t, could be a beer? Although online references indicated that an armful was more than one beer. My husband works in the industry but he’s at work and can’t ask him.

26. Thank you Philistine and manehi.

    Great fun, twigged to the airports, but GEORGE = ‘autopilot’ was new – seems there is no consensus on this usage, for me it seems to suggest that God is flying the machine, “By George”.

    Delayed through watching Eileen’s link, loved Tony Hancock’s face when the doctor said that he himself was blood-group A!

27. Found this reasonably straightforward once the theme was clear, but there are one or two that were easier to guess than parse properly, and I couldn’t parse HEATHROW so thanks for that.

    Thanks to Philistine and manehi

28. Thanks all
    Very favourite was 4down, followed by 23down
    Last two airport and deport.
    What’s with the “picaroons”, have I missed something.
    I like the wiggling and modulated type, how recently has this device arrived?

29. I was surprised how many people didn’t know “George” for autopilot, as it was a write-in for me. I assumed that I’d heard it in the film “Airplane!”, but that one was called Otto!

    Google has several different explanations for the name. The commonest is from the inventor of it. George DeBeeson, though an earlier era George Pullman, of “Pullman trains” also features – there was an ad campaign “Sit back and let George do the driving”.

30. Thanks to Philistine and manehi. I’ve come across GEORGE/autopilot regularly in puzzles (maybe more in the US than UK) and knew George Best from previous Guardian puzzles (including at least one recently) but Hancock/armful was beyond me. I needed help parsing HEATHROW and had to use Google to decide if the airport in question was SPEKE or Skepe.

31. muffin @ 29, George DeBeeson was not the inventor of the autopilot, that was Lawrence Sperry in 1912. The first man to fly in a Sperry autopilot aircraft, Navy Lt. Patrick N. L. Bellinger, took to calling the Sperry Autopilot system ‘George’.

32. Cookie
    I was just passing on what Google told me 🙂

    http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/5114/why-is-the-autopilot-called-george

    Wikipedia does give the Sperry Corporation as earlier, but this link says “practical”. I don’t know how they were supposed to work.

33. Chambers has MEMORY as a place for storing binary data in a computer which could include both the HARD DRIVE and the Random Access Memory (RAM). As an IT geek and pedant I’m ok with this clue. Really enjoyed the whole thing too

34. No-one has yet explained to me how “id” – “instinct”. Can anyone help?

35. Freud, I think – yes, it was. Probably tosh, but here it is:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego

36. Took me a while to get there but this was good- AND I got the theme( not until about half way through though). Loved the Hancock reference although I don’t suppose it meant much to some of the newer, ie younger, members! Too many other favourites to list.
    Thanks Philistine.

37. It is Freud- check out the monster from the Id in ” Forbidden Planet”

38. I wasn’t terribly impressed by this. 16a is the most unfair clue I’ve seen in a Guardian crossword since several in the most recent effort by Enigmatist. 22a is just one example of cruciverbal gibberish at surface level – unless someone can explain what is actually meant here by “Liverpool home town”. Then, without judging the soundness of the clue itself, the cultural reference at 4d is too parochially esoteric for a broad-based 21st century solvership.

    I’ll leave it at that so as not to fall foul of the “three strikes” rule.

39. I did well on this, failing only at CONTRA. Surely the correct synonym of “downed” is drank, not drunk?

40. El Ingles@ 39 I have downed/drunk three beers since I go there.

41. Oops — since I got here.

42. Valentine: Yeah, OK

43. Valentine: if you refrained from drinking all those beers, your typing would be better.

44. I found a meaning for armful in my phone dictionary. Any container that is filled to the brim. Helped me parse it without knowing about Tony Hancock. Most enjoyable puzzle.Thank you Philistine.

45. I suppose Philistine intended the misdirection in 16a, but I was totally misdirected, especially when Google confirmed that Henry Ford was largely responsible for the practice (in most of the world anyway) of driving on the right. If I had just paid more attention I might have seen the theme and then I just might have got Heathrow….. oh well. Otherwise I enjoyed most of this, but failed on about 5. Favourite was 4d.
    Thanks manehi and Philistine.

46. I enjoyed this except for the glaring error 😉 but more of this later.

    Muffin questions 4d but I don’t see a problem. We often seem to accept that certain words do “double duty” in a clue in various ways. (Often this means hovering between wordplay and definition) In this case Hancock’s does double duty in the wordplay in relating to both first and pint giving “H” and “armful”. I’ll let Muffin come up with a name for this double duty. (I suggest a “Muffin” 😉 )

    Now for the “glaring error”. A “hard drive” is most definitely not “memory”. In the logical model which still appplies to all modern computers a hard drive is storage which is something completely different as it requires I/O. I wont go in to this in detail as it would bore/”go over the the heads” of many. However we mustn’t let the fact that many modern computers use memory technology to emulate a “hard drive” confuse us. The OS still considers this as storage requiring I/O and the relevant “interrupts”.

    Still a nice puzzle though.

47. Thanks BNTO – I would be pleased for this construction to be named a “muffin”!

    “Questions” is a bit of an overstatement, though – it remains my favourite clue.

48. I have some background in IT, but I can’t agree with the objections to HARD DRIVE being “memory”. In everyday usage, “memory” is surely anything remembered – I can’t see how data stored on a hard drive cannot be considered so. I think that the objectors are confusing a very precise IT definition with everyday usage.

    (Though I accept that I have made very similar specialist objections previously – “epicentre” and “alibi” for instance.)

49. ….though I suppose you could argue that a HARD DRIVE was a device where the memory was stored, rather than the memory itself?

50. I enjoyed this and even got the theme part way through. Lots of great misdirection and some well hidden embedded answers. 15a was my favourite with 22a, 3d, 4d and 20d as close seconds. The SW corner was difficult to get going with the incomparable GB the last one standing – as he often was on the pitch (and I’m not a football fan). Thank you Philistine and manehi.

51. muffin @49
    I had a career in IT, and I readily support the clear distinction that BNTO makes between memory and storage. It’s loose at best to say that storage is memory or memory is storage, or that one is an example of the other.
    A hard drive is most definitely an example of storage, not memory. You could say it is a place where data are stored. From where? Memory, usually!

52. We found this crossword enjoyable though relatively undemanding.
    Philistine has ‘lots of tricks’ (to cite manehi) he uses over and over again in his puzzles.
    True, it adds to developing a style of his own but once you know (and recognise) them they are less ‘misdirecting’ than experienced by some of the commenters above.
    For example, using two sets of wordplay plus a definition (as in 20d) is something we’ve seen before.
    Sometimes, our beloved setter (aka Goliath) gives us even one more set of wordplay.
    Personally, I find it a bit overkill but, yes, it’s Philistine and part of his cryptic identity.
    Also, the thing that happens in 16ac (Henry Ford = H for D) is typical to Philistine.
    In the most recent Goliath (FT Saturday Prize) we even had three of those kind of splits.

    The airport theme was well integrated but after spotting it and having only the T at 16ac, I immediately went for HEATHROW.
    Just like JOHN F KENNEDY (6,11) I couldn’t be bothered by parsing it correctly – I/we did afterwards, though.
    It’s a bit of a pity that the ‘Henry Ford’ idea (whether one likes it or not) became a secondary issue.

    BNTO’s objection to the definition of HARD DRIVE (7d) didn’t occur to us while solving but he surely has a point.
    It reminded me of the discussion we had at this place when Philistine defined ISOSCELES as ‘symmetric’.

    Beth (my PinC) made clear that 4d was the jewel in the crown today.
    As a non-Brit, for me Hancock is Herbie – but true, it was a gem.

    Some surfaces were far from brilliant.
    Take 1d, what does that mean?
    Or 27ac?
    But then, Araucaria’s priority wasn’t a good surface either.
    ‘Sartre composition’? He was a writer, wasn’t he?

    Some commenters mentioned Philistine’s love for single letter devices.
    Again, one of his trademarks.
    C[ares] A L[ot] is a bit dubious as the second word has only one letter.
    Whiteking @50 names 22ac as one of his/her favourites.
    But I was very disappointed with it.
    Taking all the final letters and still coming up with a clunky surface – I’m completely with gofirstmate @38.
    With so much freedom of cluing, there surely must be a much better surface that fits it all.
    The single letter device – although technically perfectly all right – is what I would call ‘lazy cluing’ (to cite something BNTO said on several occasions, though not tonight).
    If you cannot get the surface right, just use ‘finally’ or ‘at first’ with multiple fodders.
    It’s useful for a setter but whether it’s always elegant is a different matter.

    We had WAGGLING in 25ac which may fit the clue too if one accepts extending it to ‘wagging the finger’ for the rebuke.
    But I admit, WIGGLING is better.

    Apart from the majestic 4d, we thought that for some reason 12ac (CONTRA) was a marvellous hidden.
    ‘Dry wine’ for AIRPORT was also a nice find – haven’t seen that before.
    And 15ac, a favourite too.

    Many thanks to manehi and Philistine for today’s entertainment.

53. Coming late to the memory debate, when I first got into computing in the early seventies, memory was anywhere you stored data – disc memory or core memory. And core memory was so called because each bit was represented by a ferrite core which could be magnetised by a surrounding coil of wire. There was even drum memory.

    And even today we have CD-ROMs – Read-Only Memory – and memory sticks.

54. I’m with crimper@22 and Sil van den Hoek @ 52 on the subject of single letter devices. When I made the same point about Tramp’s March 31st puzzle he replied, explaining that creating a theme added to the difficulty of setting. My reaction is “why bother then?” but I accept that many would disagree.

55. A bit late, but just wanted to say thank you for a great puzzle Philistine. Particularly enjoyed 4d which made us both smile, thank you Eileen for the link.

    Thank you manehi.

56. Dormouse @ 53 “memory sticks” – wish it did!

57. Dormouse @53
    I take your point about what used to be described as forms of memory, because I go back to the old days too. Nowadays, though, a hard drive would not be described as a kind of memory. So I think this definition without a nod back to the past is ‘loose’. I forgive Philistine (!) because the surface of that clue works so well with ‘memory’ and wouldn’t work with anything else.

58. Sil @52, a ‘composition’ can be a literary or a musical work, we had to write compositions at school, i.e. essays.

59. Muffin @48

    In your analogy you say that a hard drive could be considered as a “memory”.

    Well we can’t actually remember everything we encounter so we write things down. So could pieces of paper, books and even libraries be considered as memories?

    A hard drive is more akin to a library.

    Memory in precise computing terms is something which can be directly addressed by the cpu. A hard drive isn’t addressable in this way and it’s contents must be selected and moved into a “buffer” in memory which is addressable. (i.e. a trip to the library 🙂 )

60. BNTO and muffin, I would consider the hard drive as a ‘memoir’, in other words a ‘memory’.

61. Loved 4d … and on a day I was due to give blood! You couldn’t make it up

62. I had WAGGLING for 25a too – I toyed with WIGGLING as the answer but figured “[finger]wagging” meant rebuke so it had to be that. I hadn’t come across “wigging” before.

    wasn’t too bothered by “memory” HARD DISK, but “rebel” for CONTRA made me wince – they were counter-revolutionaries, hence the name “Contra”.

Comments are closed.