Guardian Cryptic 27,312 by Philistine

45 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 27,312 by Philistine”

1. Wasn’t expecting TWO burger-chain references, so WHOPPER took a while. BORDEREAU was a new word for me. Great fun.

   Thanks, Philistine and Manehi.

2. Unfortunately for me, I happened to look at 2d first which rather blew the gaff but a very enjoyable time was had.
   Pretty wide spectrum of difficulty I thought, with CIGAR and REORIENTATE being my personal ends.
   Thanks to S&B

3. Thanks Philistine and manehi

   My start was so rapid that I checked the name of the compiler several times – however the finish was reassuringly gnarly. I didn’t know BORDEREAU, though it was easy enough to get; I’m also unfamiliar with the expression DIRECT MAIL – why would it be unwelcome?

   Lots to like. I think the neatness of FAMOUS just tops the list for me. I did waste some time trying to find a Mendelssohn-specific work for 17d, though!

   I’m not convinced that CHANCE by itself is a synonym of “lucky”. Even the adjectival form doesn’t quite match – a “chance encounter” isn’t necessarily a “lucky encounter”.

4. Minor point, manehi. A radical isn’t a complete molecule. For instance, ethane has C2H6 molecules; ethyl radicals have lost a hydrogen atom and are C2H5; the “spare bond” then joins on to something else, as in ethylbenzene C2H5-C6H5.

5. Google to the rescue!

   Advertising mail, also known as direct mail (by its senders), junk mail (by its recipients), mailshot or admail, is the delivery of advertising material to recipients of postal mail.

   As a recipient rather than a sender I obviously know it under the “junk” term…

6. Wow, lots of fun today. Had to check bain-marie as the name for the tool/container (and not the process of heated bath) to fit utensil from the anagram. Took me a bit to get the meaning of the 1910 theme.

7. Thanks Philistine, manehi
   My way in was HAMBURGER, then MERKEL, then FAMOUS, so I got the full benefit of 2d. Didn’t think it was quite as funny at 27a (at least the 1910 bit, although I really liked the Saddam bit, once I’d twigged it wasn’t a reference to WOPR in Wargames). Otherwise, some very clever clues, particular COMMON ERA, LIONS SHARE.
   I couldn’t parse REORIENTATE. It’s the same as the other day, when we had ‘with’ for ‘et’. This takes it a step (or two) further, because not only do you have to translate love>nothing>rien, you also have to dig out the French reference. A tad unnecessary, I think.

8. Thanks Manehi.
   At 21a, I think that you have not included the reference ‘ to ‘suck’ as in ‘that record sucks’, implying that it is poor, inadequate, unsatisfactory or plain naff in ‘youfspeak’.

9. Oh dear – still in pyjamas at 10 am after a long wrestle with this. Loved the famous hamburgers, but failed tyo get WHOPPER till the very end, after hoping that mountaineer Whymper came from Hamburg!

   My heart tends to sink on seeing Philistine’s name, but this was very satisfying and well worth the struggle. Needed Manehi’s help on several parsings. Thanks to both Manehi and Philistine.

10. Just for a moment or two I was wrestling with the significance or meaning of “Common Ear” for 5 Dn. Lots of fun with this…

11. Thank you Philistine and manehi. Great fun, it took me a while to get the joke, WHOPPER being my last in…

12. An absolute cracker. Spent as long on the SW as the rest of the puzzle but worth every minute. Only quibble: ‘from’ in 7d is pretty weak as an anagrind, but who am I to want anything more complex?

13. I’m still in my pjs too! Enjoyed this a lot, but had to come here to check 27a answer. I clearly believe what politicians tell me. And I thought Angela was originally an Ossi …

14. Lippi @13
    So did I, but Wikipedia has this:
    Merkel was born in Hamburg and moved to East Germany as an infant when her father, a Lutheran clergyman, received a pastorate in Perleberg.

15. best puzzle for ages. i liked the europeanness esp 28a

16. An enjoyable challenge. BORDEREAU was unfamiliar but guessable, I spent much longer on LIONS SHARE which should have been obvious much earlier. No problems with the 1910 stuff…

    Thanks to Philistine and manehi

17. Thanks both,

    Beaten by 22a, and ‘bordereau’ was new to me. Most enjoyable.

18. Another excellent puzzle from Philistine.
    18, 28 across and 17 down stood out but, the immaculate surface and wicked misdirection of 19 down wins the day. Thank you to setter and blogger.

19. A lovely crossword, I thought. My facourite was probably Common Era for the beautifully disguised definition but many others got ticks. Thanks to Philistine; and to manehi for elucidating one or two points that escaped me, eg. why non-linear = disproportionate.

    There were some neat extended definitions/allusions:
    14a – the work of Mendel was “ignored at first”, in fact for a long time until it was rediscovered around 1900.
    5d – Jiffy is the brand name for a condom.
    24d – neap and spring tides alternate – twice each per (lunar) month, so a neap tide is “every other phase”.

20. Very entertaining. I made progress at a satisfying rate. Last one in was REORIENTATE, which I need help to parse. Thanks to Philistine and manehi.

21. Thanks to Philistine and manehi. Very enjoyable. Like others I did not know BORDEREAU (but the cluing was sufficient) or bain-marie and needed help parsing LIONS SHARE. WHOPPER was my LOI.

22. Managed to complete this, though some were BIFD, as I completely failed to understand the 1910 reference. A big groan (of appreciation) when I came to the blog.

23. Really enjoyed this one. Whopper popped out of my wife’s brain quite randomly but we needed the blog to parse it. Suck was last in but we should have had that a lot earlier. Thanks to everyone.

24. I liked this too. Got the theme fairly quickly but WHOPPER took a while. Lovely clue in retrospect. I had to look BORDEREAU up. I’ve never heard of the word but I should have been able to get it by the wordplay. UTENSIL was FOI but it was the italics that drew my eye to it.
    An agreeable puzzle.
    Thanks Philistine.

25. Like muffin@3 I did a double take on the setter having set off at a cracking pace, including getting the 1910 reference – and then I came down to earth with a bump. Like many WHOPPER took a while but that led to CROSSBOW which cracked the SW. LOI was LION’S SHARE which was fun to parse – and I came here with ETHEL (for no good reason other than it fitted) rather than the obvious ETHYL – I even got the chemical sense of radical but still didn’t get THY for your – doh!
    Most enjoyable – thank you Philistine and manehi.

26. Quite tortuous but good fun. LOI and best, for me, was LIONS SHARE – so often I get thrown by these ‘non-linear’ anagrams…

    I’m not sure which burger chain produces WHOPPERs – is it the same one as creates the egregious 2 down? Anyway, this is surely coincidence, but I see the clue as a nice tribute to Tony Booth whose death is reported today. As Tony Blair’s father-in-law, he was often, truculently, at odds with his mendacious son-in-law on many issues, among them the WMD story. He would have chuckled, I’m sure, at seeing this word used in this setting! RIP.

27. My experience was similar to that of most contributors, but not quite the same unfortunately. It was great fun until my dreadful ignorance stopped me from completing the SW corner, which was no fun at all. (I needed either 25a or 27a to get the other missing words in that corner.)

    It was not a theme that appealed to me much. Also, I thought Angela Merkel was from East Germany and not from Hamburg, but thanks to muffin @14 I can see that I was wrong.

    Thanks anyway to Philistine and manehi.

28. It’s a shame that 1910 couldn’t be related to the Dreyfus affair, in which a BORDEREAU was the key element.

29. I’m a bit puzzled by 19d. “Ramshackle” is clearly meant as an anagrind, but the anagram fodder doesn’t need any rearranging. Once you’ve removed the h,e,r from “farmhouse”, you’re done:

    FA[r]M[h]OUS[e] = FAMOUS

    So is the anagrind indicating the need to rearrange the letters to be removed? Or, I suppose, to be more precise, that we must rearrange the letters of “farmhouse” to get “famousher” and then remove “her”?

30. I forgot to ask – can anyone tell me why 28a is in italics? Is it a convention that non-English clues are written so?

31. Ted @29, I just assumed that the ‘farmhouse’ was ramshackled since some vital props had been taken away…

32. Just this little quibble relating to the “1910” theme. Most setters would have represented it as “19,10”. Is it quite kosher to run the numbers together?

33. WhiteKing @30 —

    Yes, I think that’s all it is. It’s common (although not universal) to italicize foreign words and phrases when writing in English. I don’t think there’s any more than that here.

34. FirmlyDirac @32
    I think that “1910” is acceptable misdirection. “19,10” would have been a bit too obvious..?

35. I really enjoyed this, partly because I once tried (unsuccessfully) to clue BRAHMS as a Hamburger. I saw BIG MAC early but hesitated and went looking for 1910 which I soon found. I spent ages trying to do strange devious things before I saw WHOPPER, duh. I didn’t know BORDEREAU and I’m glad I’m not alone, though I wish I’d seen LIONS SHARE and CONCERTO, so many thanks manehi.

    Just saw firmlydirac@32, I’ve seen this device used before and I would suggest its repeated use in a puzzle increases its fairness.

    Great stuff, many thanks Philistine

36. Ted @29
    I assumed that “ramshackled” was needed as “her” isn’t removed in that order – the clue would have been even better if it had been!

37. Just back from a day’s visit to my daughter in Yorkshire. I did the puzzle on the train on the way up this morning and it filled the bill perfectly – challenging enough to last beyond Chesterfield, while not needing Google, which is not available on my antique phone. Curious glances from fellow-passengers when the 1910 penny dropped. 😉

    Nothing to add by way of comment on the puzzle – but I had to add my two-penn’orth: I loved it!

    Many thanks to Philistine for a super puzzle and manehi for a great blog.

38. I enjoyed this. Thanks Manehi and Philistine.

    anotherAndrew@19:

    Thank you for the additional info on Mendel, JIFFY and neap…makes this puzzle even more lovely!

39. Just like virtually everyone today, I liked this crossword too.
    However, there are a handful of things that I wouldn’t have done (if setting) which prevented this puzzle taking the absolute top spot.
    So after all the pluses in the posts above, one might accuse me of being a bit ‘negative’, perhaps.

    Certainly after reading what Jiffy can be, 8d (COMMON ERA) is really good.
    Yet it is a bit odd to see the last two words written in capitals.
    The only reason Philistine had to was that AD must be capitalised.

    Using ‘rien’ for ‘love across the channel’ is probably OK but not something I would have used as it involves two steps which is debatable for the reason James gives @7.
    28ac was my FOI but I am somewhat surprised that no-one objected to a French clue.
    On so many occasions commenters complain about the use of French or German – and this time it’s all right?

    In my opinion, the clue at 4d (ETHYL) contains pretty bad crossword language.
    ‘THY imprisonment by EL’ for ‘THY inside EL’? Not my cup of tea.
    Perhaps it’s more a matter of taste, just like the singular ‘Beginning’ in 23d.
    Also not sure about ‘deposing sensible leader’ leading to ‘ensible’ (in 13d).
    It tells us to remove the ‘s’, but from what?
    Why not ‘has sensible leader deposed’?
    That tells you to delete the ‘s’ from ‘sensible’.

    Finally, I think FirmlyDirac @32 has a point when asking why Philistine should use 1910 when 19,10 is perhaps a fairer another option.
    Of course, it makes it all less obvious.
    But now look at the surfaces of the clues where 1910 is used.
    14ac: ‘1910 is a geneticist’ – what’s that?
    27ac: ‘ Say Saddam [….] in 1910’ – in 1910?
    3d: ‘1910’s oversized coat’ – does deleting the comma really improve the surface significantly.
    20d: that’s fine.

    Meanwhile, there was a lot to like – don’t get me wrong.
    I think Ted @29 is spot on about FAMOUS (19d).

    That’s all folks.
    Enjoyable but give me a Picaroon or a Paul any time of the day.

    Thanks manehi for the blog and Philistine for the crossie.

40. I had the puzzle mostly solved early this a.m., but was held up on my last 4 entries (all in the southern half) and especially by OSTENSIBLE, my LOI, which I stared at for quite some time until I went back over the crossers and finally had the forehead-slapping realization that I had inadvertently doubled the L rather than the S when writing MENDELSSOHN into the grid. D’OH!! This was a very enjoyable puzzle, as others have noted, with the 1910 theme adding an extra layer of fun (as well as a solving aid for me — I already knew the theme before I reached 27a, so WHOPPER went in pretty easily for me at that point). My favorites were LION’S SHARE for the nice surface and misdirection — sometimes it’s hard to stop the brain from seeing phrases, and thus my initial solving effort was to wonder if “most in need” might be the definition — and NEAP, which seemed to me to be a possible &lit, for the reason noted by anotherAndrew @19.
    FirmlyDirac @26, I’m not sure if your question was rhetorical, but the purveyors of 2d and 27a are different burger chains.
    Many thanks to Philistine and manehi.

41. Loved it. Great fun. Only word didnt know was bordereau.

42. Sil @39

    Not ‘negative’ at all. Probably several of us overlooked a number of blemishes, or liberties taken, while solving a crossword that gave us a fair-sized payback in fun and cryptic flair. I could add to the six doubts/queries that you listed, but the only one I thought worth mentioning here was 5d COMMON ERA. The ‘!’ is there for the surface (which I thought was brilliant), but what use is the ellipsis? I couldn’t see any.

    Not getting 27a WHOPPER was a frustration for me (I’ve not heard of it) as it would have ‘unlocked’ four other normal, themeless, guileless clues in that corner! Mais c’est la vie.

43. Incidentally, Antigone (in the clue for 7D) is a suite of incidental music written in 1841 by Felix Mendelssohn to accompany the tragedy Antigone by Sophocles .

44. When did anyone use the term ‘rebadge’? Rebrand, but nobody ever says, “I’m going to rebadge that” – well not in my universe!

45. Sorry, Antony, “rebadge” is more familiar to me than “rebrand”. Do you remember when BT spent millions “rebadging”. (Not the only ones, eother.)

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