Guardian 27,387 / Paul

46 comments on “Guardian 27,387 / Paul”

1. I wish I could say that Webern was new to me: think of Weber without the music!
   I now also have a mnemonic for broccoli (I can never remember wbether it’s one ‘c’ and two ‘l’s or vice-versa.
   Happy Christmas/holiday season to you Eileen, and to everyone else on the site.

2. Thanks Paul and Eileen

   A bit of a mixed bag for me. To start with, it was another of these tedious ones where a word is repeated in lots of clues (though not as extreme as Boatman’s “rocks” last week). Then some of the surfaces were bizarre – what is 15a supposed to mean, for example?

   On the other hand there were some real smiles. I liked PIRACY as I built it up from the bottom. BACHELOR, ZOOT SUIT and ARCHIVES were other favourites.

   I was hoping that there was more to SALAD BAR, but you’ve seen it as I did, Eileen.

3. All good fun, challenging but gettable — although I fell two letters short of finishing, since I wasn’t familiar with the ZOOT SUIT and couldn’t guess ‘beastly lot’ fitting _O_.

   Thanks to Eileen and Paul.

4. Oh, I my usage, SPIT doesn’t mean “polish” – you spit on it first, then you polish it.

5. I deliberately didn’t mention surfaces today. 😉

6. This was very hard, I found, so sadly dnf. Thanks all the same, Paul.

   Thank you for explaining everything, Eileen. Happy Christmas to you and all visitors to this site.

7. Muffin@4:

   Re SPIT you have a point, but doesn’t the whole phrase “S and P” mean everything to do with the cleaning operation, i.e. several sub-parts?

8. Muffin @4 It depends on whether you think of polish as what you put on or what you do to it?

9. A few clunky surfaces perhaps, but what an ingenious puzzle!

   I have no interest in the game, but even I had heard of two of the footballers. All the composers were familiar, however, and I’m a fan of serialism (ultimately a dead end, but one worth exploring). Unusually for me the parsing was easier than the solving.

   My thanks to both Paul and Eileen.

10. Great challenge helped by my love of football and music. Canton more Swiss than French? But Eric was french so fair enough.
    Happy Crossmas all.

11. Slow to start and finish. Plain sailing in the middle. Very enjoyable. A bit more spit and polish on the surfaces?

12. Thanks to Eileen for putting me out of my misery with WEBERN; I could have looked at that for eternity without getting it.

    Happy Christmas to you, Paul, and all the posters and bloggers here.

    (please forgive the shameless plug, but if anyone is interested I have a jigsaw job in the FT today, printable for free)

13. [Webern features in quizzes of composers with unfortunate ends. Lully was another – died of gangrene in an infected foot, caused by hitting it with his conducting stick.]

14. Hi Rewolf @10 – that was my first thought re CANTON but Chambers has ‘a division of territory, constituting in Switzerland a separate government, in France a subdivision of an arrondissement’. As you say, ‘French’ is particularly appropriate here.

15. This was destined to be a marmite puzzle but I must say I enjoyed it, being football crazy and a muso or ex muso. My fave combo was MESSIAEN

    WEBER(N) was bound to upset but knowing them made it OK for me.

    So tick from me and consideration of what folks didnt like.

    And Chapeau to Juilius(pick of the day)

    Thanks Paul and Eileen.

16. I remember a puzzle (not crossword) from years ago, where you had to find three instances of a composer whose surname is present in that of another. One you know from today’s crossword; the other two are below (after a bit of white space in case you want to test yourself and have tunnel vision!).

    Despite this leg-up, I was still a DNF today.

    Thanks, Paul and Eileen.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    OFFEN(BACH) and MONTE(VERDI).

17. Thanks to Paul and Eileen. I got WAGNER at the outset but did not know WEBERN or MESSIAEN and then struggled a bit before catching on to the football scorers (and kept looking until I finally spotted ROONEY). I needed help parsing CHANDELIER (I missed CI-Channel Islands). Very enjoyable.

18. Thanks to Paul and Eileen for the couple I failed to parse. A puzzle of contrasts for me, started off like a house on fire thinking it was going to be a write in. Then I hit a brick wall, and thought I might not complete. Has some difficulty switching between football and music, but got there in the end. Interestingly totally the opposite to you Eileen, last one in 4d. Looked at it for ages before it came to me. Anyway enjoy the festivities everyone and look forward to tomorrow’s Christmas special.

19. While we’re on the Second Viennese School, Chris in France @16, we should mention Berg and Schoenberg.

20. Quite an entertaining tussle – I found the right hand side much tougher than the left. No problems with the musical knowledge – to me WEBERN was easy. ZOOT SUIT was last in and needed all the crossers.

    Thanks (and Happy Christmas) to Eileen and Paul

21. Berg can go into the ‘unfortunate deaths’ quiz – died on a Christmas Eve from an insect bite.

    ARCHIVES / ARTISAN took forever, and if truth be told a word search was needed on the latter. I’d even played around with (S)TRAIGHT!

    Very ingenious, switching between the scorers, and room for Shearer in one of the clues too.

22. I thought TROUNCE was rather a good clue- TR+ my favourite big cat,the snow leopard. Lick = TROUNCE. No problem! I liked this although the puzzle took me a lot longer than it should have. I guessed WEBERN before remembering Weber was a composer. I associate the name with the rather more famous sociologist, Max Weber. I’d heard of all the footballers too, which rather surprised me although my LOI was CANTONA.
    Thanks Paul.

23. Peter @22

    The mechanics of the clue are fine – it was the meaningless surface reading that I was commenting on!

24. I’d never heard of either of the athletes and had heard of all the composers, thoughI didn’t know a thing about some of them beyond their names.  Overall, plenty of fun.  Thanks, Paul and Eileen.

25. muffin @23, I have cats and did not find the surface to 15a meaningless – if your cat goes for the skin of a terrier, which one we had in the past would have, you give him a ‘licking’, a little smack to detach him (some of our cats had an old wildcat, felis sylvestris,  off the Jura for their father).

26. Special,pleading, cookie – honestly, it is surely meaningless? It says “lick” rather than “licking” (and why would it just go for the “skin” of the terrier?)

    I’m impressed that your cats are part wildcat, though! (although in Scotland, “native wildcats” are becoming increasingly rare, as a result of breeding with domestic cats).

27. Muffin, you seem strangely exasperated!

    Surely Lick cat after skin of terrier is a straightforward instruction regarding an instruction regarding a challenge relating to a group of pets. It may be puerile but it is also grammatically correct an makes perfect sense. (And a perfect surface)

    Also regarding 22 down‘s leans skyward

    Definition is actually 22 down’s and not 22 down. So defintion resolves to “belonging to Polish”. Spit conforms to this def in the well-known phrase “Spit and polish”

    Where are the problems?

28. lurkio @27

    I’m interested – which planet do you live on?

29. muffin @26, a terrier is covered in skin, what else could the cat ‘go for’, only the eyes – the COED gives for lick v. trans. colloq. thrash.

30. A big dnf for us today – only about half the clues completed. Looking here most things were gettable but there were some I would never have got 25 & 26a and probably others. I wasn’t drawn in to want to solve it and didn’t make enough progress to give me hope that I would and – surprise surprise – I got exactly the outcome I set myself up for.
    Thanks to Eileen for showing the way and Paul for setting out the path.

31. Thank you, Paul and Eileen. I was also nervous when I feared there would be a lot of (unknown to me) soccer players. Luckily my knowledge of musical composers helped a lot and I could check the soccer players online via google.

    I failed to solve SPIT and could not parse BROCCOLOI as I was trying to make it work as BRO + CC + OL + I!

    New word for me was ZOOT SUIT.

32. Yet again a post of mine appears to have disappeared up its own j****ie!  Oh well – try again!

    I share Eileen’s sentiments here – was mightily relieved to discover that not all the ‘scorers’ were of the Cantona-Messi-Rooney genre!  And classical music is right up my street, so I was well away there.

    I actually started on this one very late in the day – so much to do!  And no – before someone asks – I wasn’t “Brahms & Liszt” – approaching season notwithstanding!

    ARCHIVES was a non-parser for me.  I got the definition quickly enough, albeit I was certain “record” on its own was a sufficient definer for ARCHIVES, despite the singular/plural ambiguity.  So I was thinking on the lines of fitting IV (= “4” = “more than one”) into ARCHES, and getting nowhere.  Hence I totally missed IVES – a perfectly familiar name to me and staring me in the face.  D’oh!

    I think one of the best is NOBLE ART – not in the theme but very clever!  BLEAR = “faint” is rather obscure perhaps – I thought we had it recently, but on reflection I think the word was DREAR.

    ZOOT SUIT was certainly a phrase we had not so long ago, so no trouble with that!  Admittedly my chief source of eductation on this topic is Tom & Jerry.

    Altogether not too taxing from Paul yesterday!  Thanks to him and Eileen.

33. Felt the same as you Eileen, but got there in the end. Spent ridiculous amount of time looking for a composer for 21 down until it twigged that footballers were in fact included. Happy Christmas to all. And thank you Paul. Have Maskarade to battle with now!

34. Yet another great puzzle, albeit a little straightforward for a Friday. Paul never fails to entertain; how does he do it?!
    Thanks to Paul and Eileen.
    And HAPPY CHRISTMAS to you both, all our fine setters, bloggers, Sir Gaufrid (of course) and all the other contributors and visitors to our wonderful little corner of cyber space. Wx

35. Muffin @28

    My early comments did not deserve such a flippant reply. If you disagree with my comments say so and it might be polite to give your reasons for this.

    Beware of hubris. It will end in tears. 🙂

36. Apologies, lurkio – I’d had a convivial dinner (at dinner-time, of course)

    However you aren’t convincing me that the surface 50 TROUNCE makes any sense!

37. Composers etc. with ‘unfortunate ends’ abound.  W.S. Gilbert (the librettist half of G&S) reportedly drowned in the lake adjoining his own home, maybe as the result of a heart attack.  Charles-Valentin Alkan was said to have died when a bookcase toppled onto him while he was reaching up to the top shelf for a copy of the Talmud (this story is disputed).  As for Tchaikovsky – the famous story that he wilfully drank a glass of water knowing it to be contaminated with cholera – and died – is probably apocryphal. if picturesque….

    Regarding surfaces (relieved to see that muffin and lurkio have made up their little spat) – I suppose the best that can be said is that one solver’s perfect surface is another solver’s gobbledygook.  Making a decent surface is one of the hardest parts of crossword-setting, as I have learnt for myself: I was told off by one of the regulars here for poor surfaces, though I’m not convinced I agree with that judgement….

    Some setters are excellent at putting in good surfaces, in my view.  I won’t name names, but one I know of who sets jointly for both the FT and Indy, who comes in for especial note.

    Others less so….  But they can still make good crosswords!

38. Lots of posters bemoaning the football flavour, but we have to have knowledge of a wide range themes to tackle setters like Paul, so tough! As my user name implies, I welcome the football theme anyway. Great puzzle, many favourites but ROONEY probably the topper. WEBERN defeated me. Still wondering about MONDALE, the vice from Paul’s phantom puzzle on Monday.

39. My reading of 15ac is that after you have licked the terrier’s skin, you then have to lick the cat ! Weird but OK re grammar.

40. Neil @39

    Grammar OK, but sense? It’s perfectly possible to concoct grammatical sentences that make no sense at al (as I think this exemplifies)…

41. People lick toads ! Each to their own.

42. Frogs, actually – I think some have hallucinogenic substances on their skin 🙂

43. The point I am making is that just because something might be very very weird to you and me does not mean that the surface has no sense.

44. Mmmmm

45. I’ll take “Mmmmm”. Have a good Christmas.

46. Thanks for the support Neil.

    I’ll also take “Mmmmm”.

    Merry Christmas to muffin and Neil. (and anybody else who is daft enough to be still reading this blog)

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