Guardian 27,438 – Qaos

49 comments on “Guardian 27,438 – Qaos”

1. Missed that theme entirely as don’t know the TV show.
   My LOI was 6d TENT. I have not heard of the wine, but I solved it from the wordplay, proving I have learned a bit about the game of bridge from previous cryptic crosswords (!).
   Definite favourite was 16d BOB DYLAN. [The yearbook from my first year university residential college magazine in 1971 summed me up thus: “Julie has a passion for Dylan and pamphleteering!”.]
   [A peak experience of my life was visiting New York for the first time in 2015 and taking a (self-guided) walking tour of Greenwich Village, visiting all of His Bobness’s old haunts, including Cafe Wha? and Fourth Street.]

2. Whoops! How rude! Got so carried away in the world of nostalgia that I forgot to thank Qaos for a tough but enjoyable puzzle (though I was going to complain about the boy’s name@19d until manehi explained the theme!) – and than you too to manehi for the explanatory blog.

3. Should have been thanK you to manehi! And now I am withdrawing quietly while waiting for the homophone storm over 15d PURPOSELY to begin!!!

4. Julie @3.

   No probs with pronouncing the swimmer. I remembered Otterden 26354.

5. Found this quite tricky, but still enjoyable. Loved ROUNDABOUT, EMBRYO and LONELIEST. The theme somehow passed me by although I did watch TMR as a child.

   I’m a big fan of Qaos’ fondness for slipping between Roman and Arabic numerals, neatly seen here in two crossing clues. (Funnily enough I was idly wondering yesterday whether OF·TEN·TIMES might be pleasingly clued as “XXX at regular intervals!”… with the first X for “of” as in “3x [3 lots of]” on a shopping list. Sadly I think the first x is an association too far! Best leave it to the professionals like Mr Q)

   Many thanks to Qaos and Manehi for the blog ?

6. Pronunciation of 15 would have to be in a slightly seedy area in Manhattanor Brookluyn where people get poypetwaited. Maybe toidy toyd and toyd.

7. Strike ? from above. My thanks are unambiguously given 🙂

8. Had no idea about the theme, but when I googled it, Dylan was there too.

   Loved copmus’es poypusses.

9. A mixture of some very clever and enjoyable clues along with one or two iffy ones for me.  EMBRYO and NO ENTRY were particularly enjoyable.  PURPOSELY was very apposite given my discussion with Eileen yesterday about accents and her link to a clue where “an ounce” in a Belfast accent was used to clue ANOINTS (link in yesterday’s blog).

   5 Ac is a bit clumsy to my mind. Presumably “strike” indicates the omission of “no” and “a”.  Which leaves “left out” as the anagram indicator. Alternatively, if “left out” indicates the omissions that leaves “strike” as the anagram indicator.  Neither satisfactorily suggests a rearrangement of letters to me. Also 21 ac – is “rubbish” a definition or synonym of DIRT?

10. I can only give this 5/10 due to awkward surfaces. Like 10a. Got to be critical sometimes !

11. Great puzzle. Everything went in very quickly to start with – it seemed a bit like a Monday – but then things slowed to usual Qaos pace. Missed the (excellent) theme as always. Favourites were BOB DYLAN, UNAMUSED and FLAT. Many thanks to Q & m.

12. Thanks, manehi.

    Lovely puzzle! [My sympathies, Julie @1 – you have been sadly deprived!]

    A real nostalgia trip – great to see the characters emerge and I loved the clever inclusion of BRIAN and ERMINTRUDE.

    Many thanks to Qaos – a great start to the day!

13. In reply to Frankie the cat, I think the anagrind is “strike”, with “left out” for the omissions, and I think it’s ok: you strike your ancient Ming vase with a hammer and it falls to pieces.
    Excellent puzzle, and I loved the homophone.

14. Excellent. I’d love to know how long Qaos spent trying to fit Zebedee in somewhere.

     

15. As usual, I forgot to look for the Qaos trademark of a theme – which was clear as soon as manehi mentioned it.

    I’m not happy about ‘cycling’ as an anagrind in 21ac – to me that means letters would moved from one end to the other (e.g. TRID > IDRT) whereas here they are reversed.

16. Just happy I managed it with only a few calls on the check button. A toidy result as they might say in Cardiff

    Thanks to Qaos and Manehi

17. What’s specifically American about 15d? The wordplay worked for Lewis Caroll.

18. I didn’t know the TV show, or the cricketer either.  I had learned about tent being wine from an earlier crossword — does anybody out in the real world us the term?

    Can anyone come up with a sentence where you can substitute “has sled” for “equipped for winter travel”?  The first is a verb phrase and the second an adjective one.

    What’s with this porpoise being an American dolphin?  I can’t find that porpoises inhabit American waters, particularly.  Do Americans supposedly pronounce “porpoise” like “purpose”?  Not any that I’ve met.

    Thank you to Qaos for creating my puzzlement and to manehi for clearing it up.

19. I loved the sound-alike in 15d PURPOSELY.  That and 17d FLORENCE were write-ins for me – I take them when I can!

    I did spot a theme, but I didn’t know it well enough to notice BRIAN and ERMINTRUDE.  9a BRAVO, Qaos.  I often miss themes entirely, so I did relatively well today.

    My last in was 13d MENOPAUSES because I stubbornly tried to make the answer (meaning ‘changes’) begin with RE.

    Thanks to Qaos and manehi.

20. Thanks to Qaos and manehi. Started of quite well with this and thought it was going to be a steady solve. Then I seemed to hit a brick wall and the last handful took longer than the rest of the puzzle put together. I spent a long time considering if 18a was obliteration or obliterating both which seem to sort of work with rating as measure. Also took a long time to get eyespots which took me an age to parse even though I was sure it was the answer. Then I was with Alan B by spending ages trying to make 13d (last one in) begin with re, and not helped with my unsureness about 18a. That said got there in the end, but missed the theme, and thanks again to Qaos and manehi.

21. About the same difficulty as yesterday but somehow much more satisfying.

22. Knowing Qaos as the ghost theme specialist, I was on the lookout and duly found it in the DYLAN FLORENCE corner.  The theme definitely helped with ROUNDABOUT and INTRUDE.  Loved the hidden BRIAN and ERMINTRUDE.  Of course, I went searching for Zebedee too but sadly he’s not there.  Maybe there’s a hint in DISPLACEMENT of his rapid exit at the end of the show.  Having looked up the Wiki entry, I found I’d forgotten about the SUGAR LUMP and I didn’t know DYLAN was actually named after Bob Dylan.

    Maybe with a hat-tip to Monday’s puzzle, 4 could have been “Orlando’s ace”.

    Thanks for the memories, Qaos, and for the decrypting, manehi.

23. I can’t believe I missed that theme! Unusual for Qaos (unlike some other compilers) to split them over multiple lights. I guess ZEBEDEE would have been too obvious! I enjoyed this one and found most of it fairly straightforward. FLAT was last in. Favourite ECONOMISTS.

    Thanks to Qaos and manehi

     

24. Thanks Qaos and manehi

    I’m very disappointed that I didn’t see the theme, as I am very familiar with it. I would particularly liked to have spotted Ermintrude! (Have you all looked closely at the solutions in Enigmatist’s Prize?) Favourite was NO ENTRY.

    A couple I didn’t like. I think “Small relative” would have been fairer for BRO in 9a, and OBLITERATE is a good example of “guess, then parse”.

25. 15a… no, just not on. And 13d… I’m not saying it’s incorrect but a plural for menopause is obscure, to say the least. That was my LOI and even then I wasn’t 100% sure until I checked it

26. The most clunky of the three I completed today as blogged here, and the more difficult for it. I find this with quite a few Guardian compilers as a matter of fact, but that’s the way it it right now. No real stand-outs for me, but the theme enabled me to reminisce pleasantly.

    Many thanks Qaos and Manehi.

27. muffin @24 – since the prize is still active we should not be helping people with it

28. Thank you manehi and Qaos. I enjoyed this as a challenge in two parts. I managed only one across clue on first pass but then filled in most of the downs which made all the difference on the second pass of the across clues. Like others above I spent way too long trying to make 13dn start with RE which became my LOI.

    I missed the theme also but unlike JinA@1 have at least heard of the show, from previous crossword blogs. Zebedee didn’t make an appearance today but has popped up numerous times prompting a reference in the blog to MR, presumably when setters are chasing a pangram.

    I was also in a college/hall of residence at my first year of university in Australia in 1971. What an experience that was for a country boy. I have assembled a collection of favourite songs from that year and it is astonishing the memories that each one provokes. Unfortunately Dylan doesn’t feature on that list, although I later became a fan.

29. bh @27

    Appreciated, but I don’t think my comment could be any help to anyone who hasn’t finished it already.

30. muffin @29

    FWIW I have solved Enigmatist and it still doesn’t help :-).  I’ll wait till Saturday … .  OTOH, I used to know Magic Roundabout well and completely missed this one, which I did much enjoy anyways.  Agreed with Julie @3 – I’m poiposely refraining now that the squall has passed.

31. Re “purposes”. Near the opening of Dashiell Hamett’s Red Harvest, the narrator says something like “The first time I heard Personville called Poisonville was from a barkeep in..(can’t remember). I paid little attention, as he also called his shirt a “shoit”.

32. What a delightful puzzle to come back to after a great trip with mates to India. I was expecting a theme but didn’t spot it although how I missed it I don’t know. With manehi’s hindsight I loved the clever inclusion of BRIAN and ERMINTRUDE and like JinA my favourite was BOB DYLAN. Like AlanB@19 and others 13d was loi and it took Mrs W to come up with PAUSES before MEN came to mind instead of RES. I didn’t parse 9, 18 or 4 properly so thanks to manehi for that and the theme, and to Qaos for the fun.

33. Mostly straightforward here (straightforward for a Qaos that is) – apart from INTRUDE which I failed to parse – also wasn’t sure if “meddle” is a good enough synonym.  I’m not too convinced about A=”Adult”.  Wrote it in anyway.

    Same goes for EYESPOTS where I dispute S=”Square”.  Would have been so easy to insert a word like “initially” into that clue, surely!

    Rest was fine, I think.

    Thought the use of L=50 in both LONELIEST and FLAT was good – it didn’t look like the same device twice over, to me.

    Perhaps both GREENGAGE and UNAMUSED needed more than the usual share of GK?  I have to admit I was pondering for a while George Stubbs the 18th century painter (think: horses).  But then I remembered Till Death Us Do Part …  Una (“Rita”) is the only one of the ‘family’ still alive I believe.  Nostalgia time!

    Thanks to Qaos and Manehi.

34. I didn’t get the theme either and I really should have especially after DOUGAL went in. What an odd name to choose, I thought. Ho hum. Most of this was quite straightforward but I did struggle somewhat towards the end. Last ones in were MENOPAUSES and FLAT. Why the latter held out so long, I don’t know.
    Thanks Qaos.

35. And of course whilst they are related, dolphins are not porpoises.

36. Perhaps someone could enlighten me on 15 down, which makes no sense to me. Americans don’t say ‘porpoise-ly”. Some of them may say “poiposely” when they mean purposely but that doesn’t equate to porpoise/purpose at all..

37. Thanks Qaos and manehi

    Though it’s not supported by Chambers, I think that R = ROYAL in 11 comes directly from (eg) RN = Royal Navy or RM = Royal Marines, HRH etc, rather than via REX/REGINA.,

38. Qaos is one of my favorite setters, but alas, today’s puzzle did not bring me the usual level of enjoyment because, as occurs every so often, I had zero familiarity with the ghost theme he chose.  I stared at the completed puzzle for quite some time, certain that there was indeed a theme but utterly unable to spot it.   My best effort (which was pretty feeble) was that I saw ROUNDABOUT, and I saw YES in EYESPOTS, but that was as far as I could get with that, so obviously the legendary prog rock band was *not* the theme.

    All in all, I would rather fail to spot a ghost theme because it is a subject (The Magic Roundabout, in this case) as to which I have no knowledge, than to come here to 15^2 and learn that there was a ghost theme on a subject I knew very well but somehow managed to completely miss — a forehead slapping moment if ever there was one.  (I have had many such FSMs in the past, and undoubtedly will have many more in the future.  Among the possible “moments” one experiences in this crosswording pastime, I greatly prefer PDMs to FSMs, but it’s all in good fun.)

    Similar to a few other commenters, I struggled a bit with 13d – my LOI.  I was thrown off by the inclusion of the word “all” in the clue, and believed it had to be part of the wordplay, as (soap all)*. i.e., with “lathered up” as the anagrind.

    I enjoyed NO ENTRY and HASSLED.  (Valentine @18, your comment about “has sled” reminded me of the old recurring skit on Saturday Night Live when they would have the Frankenstein monster, Tarzan and Tonto haltingly delivering, e.g., holiday messages.  I think that (jokey) syntax might be the only way to use “has sled” to “equipped for winter travel” interchangeably.)  (That skit parodied the speech pattern of “movie Tarzan”, BTW.  As I recall, in the original books, he is university educated and an eloquent speaker.)

    Many thanks to Qaos, manehi and the other commenters.

39. Thanks to Qaos and manehi. Not as difficult as I expected but still a big challenge for me. I did not know Roundabout so had no chance of spotting the theme, but like Peter A @34 I assumed that the choice of DOUGAL for a name was part of something. I did finally get through with some help from Google.

40. Yep.  Another American baffled by the American reference to porpoise supposedly being pronounced like purpose.  In fact, I’d wager that for most Americans, the words are even farther apart in pronunciation than they are for y’all.

    If the setter means a Brooklyn accent, he really should say so.  And I think even in stereotypical Brooklynese, there would be a marked difference between the two words.

    [On a side note, Brooklyn has gotten so expensive and full of transplants from elsewhere that I doubt you can still find a Brooklyn accent in most parts of Brooklyn.  You probably have to go farther out on Long Island–excuse me, “Lun Guyland” to hear that particular mangling of our language these days.]

41. Re PORPOISE, I can only think of the allusion in Alice in Wonderland:

    Mock Turtle: “Why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?’ “

    Alice: “Don’t you mean ‘purpose’?”

    Curiously, I missed the theme (d’oh!) but did notice that DOUGAL, whilst not a particularly common boy’s name, is probably best known as the name of a certain dog in….. (double-d’oh!)

    You can’t win!

42. In the original French version he was called Pollux, and spoke French with a pronounced English accent (“Bonjour, copains!”)

43. muffin@31

    :-).   I love Hammett and had never processed this lovely quote into memory – thank you: ““I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.””

44. Thanks geof – I don’t have a copy to consult.

45. [You’ve reminded me of a perennial trick question – who played the Thin Man in the film series?]

46. [Answer to 45 – in all the sequels it was taken that William Powell (as Nick Charles) was the “Thin Man”. However in the first film, quite tightly based on the Dashiell Hammett novel, the “Thin Man” was the scientist buried under the floor of his lab (spoiler alert!). I’m not sure if he even appeared in the film.]

47. [I was madly searching, this being extended lunchtime in CA.  Yes, he was the corpse in the first.   I;ve got to say that Nick and Nora always struck me as too smarmishly effervescent for Hammett (and sure, Nick was thin in the films, so you see why the attribution).  Chandler and Hammett were both about angst – Hollywood amplified that simultaneously for the screen and for their own ways of being. An unhappy combination.]

48. For me, a theme is often the icing on the cake. It’s Qaos and there has to be one.  But being non-UK person it didn’t ring any bells today. And if I can’t see a theme after a minute or two of trying to spot it, I can’t be bothered anymore.

    I have met (and talked to) Qaos on a number of occasions and then it’s always difficult to be critical about one’s crossword, even more when the setter is such a nice person.

    However, I’m afraid that I am with crimper‘s first line @26.

    Someone else already pointed out that ‘cycled’ in 21ac is not an anagram indicator but an indicator to ‘cycle’ the letters of a word.

    Talking about anagram indicators, I have my doubts about ‘strike’ (in 5ac), certainly when it’s positioned straight after the fodder. I am also not a great fan of nounal indicators, although I find them often acceptable if placed in the right position. In 1ac I do not like ‘fashion’ but in 5d I think ‘brew’ is fine. A while ago, I decided (for myself) that ‘fodder + nounal indicator’ is OK if it can be seen as ‘nounal indicator of fodder’. That’s why I myself wouldn’t use ‘fashion’ as it is used in 1ac. In the much-admired BOB DYLAN (the clue, not the person) the anagram indicator is ‘influence’ (positioned in front of the fodder). I have my doubts.

    In 27ac, does ‘have to go’ really tells us to do ‘+ TRY’? And replacing I by L by saying ‘going from 1 to 50’ seems to me rather iffy. Nice idea though. I liked 28ac very much but at the same time it’s not really brilliant as ‘(to be) equipped for winter travel’ does not equal ‘has sled’. It’s the wrong tense.

    Feel free to consider me to be the next Hedgehoggy if you wish but I think the editor should have been a bit more ‘critical’.

    It was an enjoyable puzzle but not good enough to beat both Loroso and Tees today.

    Thanks manehi & Qaos.

     

49. 15d Surely an American dolphin is a… dolphin. A porpoise is a different animal as this American website makes clear https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/dolphin_porpoise.html

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