Guardian Cryptic 27,505 by Picaroon

by

Delightful, with many favourites – 1ac, 12/21, 17ac, 22ac, 26ac, 1dn, and 7dn in particular. Many thanks to Picaroon.

Across
1 THATCH PM once ditching head of state in Barnet (6)
definition referring to hair
THATCHer=”PM once”, ditching Elizabeth Regina=”head of state”
4 POROUS Retiring soldiers work with country prone to infiltration (6)
Other Ranks=”soldiers” plus OPus=”work”, all reversed/”retiring”; plus US=”country”
9 DUDE Drug that doesn’t work for man? (4)
DUD Ecstasy=”Drug that doesn’t work”
10 PROSTHESIS Medical substitute aces academic assignment (10)
PROS=experts=”aces”, plus THESIS=”academic assignment”
11 LINTEL Information on length for supporting beam (6)
INTEL=”Information” after Length
12, 21 CHANGING THE GUARD What makes daughter a palace attraction? (8,3,5)
‘changing [the guard]’ in a crossword clue would indicate an anagram of (the guard)*, which makes DAUGHTER
13 REMBRANDT American rockers make time for artist (9)
the band REM=”American rockers”, plus BRAND=”make” of e.g. a car, plus Time
15 FOUR Coat’s wrapped round figure (4)
FUR=”Coat” around O=”round”
16 IONA Billionaire’s acquired island (4)
Hidden in BillIONAire
17 MACHINIST A feature film’s about manual worker (9)
A CHIN=”A feature”, with MIST=”film” around it
There is also a feature film called The Machinist
21   See 12
22 TRAINS Works out riddle, having succeeded finally (6)
=as in “Works out” in a gym 
STRAIN=sieve, filter=”riddle”, with Succeeded [a genealogical abbreviation] moved to become the final letter
24 ABSTINENCE Doing without six-pack, having drunk 9 etc (10)
ABS=”six-pack”, plus (nine etc)*
25 AMMO Rounds with ham, more sandwiches (4)
hidden in hAM MOre
26 TIDDLY Slightly tight clothing for damsel in order to go around (6)
=”tight” as in drunk
the outer letters or “clothing” of DamseL with TIDY=”in order” around them
27 GAMMON Good God! This is a bit of a pig (6)
Good plus AMMON=ancient Egyptian god
Down
1 TAURINE Bully‘s horrible nature, one admitted? (7)
=like a bull
(nature)* around I=”one”
2 ADEPT Addle-pated or highly able? (5)
(pated)*
3 CAPELLA Star‘s sleeveless garment lifted completely (7)
=a star in the constellation Auriga
CAPE=”sleeveless garment” plus ALL=”completely” reversed/”lifted”
5 OUTLAY Cost of no longer popular piece of music (6)
OUT=”no longer popular” plus LAY=song, “piece of music”
6 OVERGROWN After a few balls, berobed queen’s running wild (9)
OVER=”a few balls” in cricket; plus Regina=”queen” in GOWN or “berobed”
7 SPINNER Penny wearing Eve’s top? (7)
Penny inside SINNER=”Eve”
8 FORCED LANDING Killer arrested by lawman, getting sudden comedown (6,7)
ORC=”Killer” whale, inside FEDeral agent=”lawman”, plus LANDING=securing, “getting”
14 BENIGHTED Missing king to get dubbed ignorant (9)
BE kNIGHTED=”get dubbed”, missing the king
16 INHABIT People wearing religious clothing (7)
IN HABIT=”wearing religious clothing”
18 HETAERA High tea during hard period for concubine (7)
=an ancient Greek courtesan
(tea)* with “High” as the anagrind, inside Hard plus ERA=”period”
19 SANDMAN Fifty Shades-type behaviour an unwelcome sight in the bedroom (7)
S AND M=”Fifty Shades-type behaviour”, plus AN
20 CARNAL Lascivious, heartless church bigwig (6)
CARdiNAL=”church bigwig”, losing the heart or central letters
23 ALARM Signal recalling marines (5)
A LA=’à la’=in the style of, or “recalling”; plus Royal Marines

57 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 27,505 by Picaroon”

  3. Thanks Picaroon and manehi

    Very enjoyable with favourites 12,21 (after failing to find a Megan Markle connection!) and INHABIT for the misdirection of “people”. I didn’t parse TRAINS or FORCED LANDING.

    I don’t see why SANDMAN is an “unwelcome sight in the bedroom”. According to legend, he gives sleep and good dreams.

    I would slightly have preferred “six” to “a few” in 6d – “a few” can refer to lots of different numbers, but only six (or, a long time ago in Australia, eight) constitutes an “over”.

  4. Thank you manehi for your explanations of many of the answers that proved how 14d I appear to be today.

  5. this was tough! needed help parsing a few, thanks manehi. But why is SANDMAN an unwelcome sight in the bedroom? Doesn’t he make you sleepy?

  6. As usual, I thoroughly enjoyed Picaroon’s challenge. I also questioned whether the Sandman would be an unwelcome sight in the bedroom, but I know that there is a series of Sandman graphic books by Neil Gaiman and a film, neither of which I have seen, and I wonder whether the reference may be to them?
    The length of time it took me to parse 8d made me feel a total numpty.

  7. Billy Muggins here couldn’t shake Orca (The Killer Whale) from his head but resolved the clue by recalling Tolkein,,,  DuckDuckGo’s search engine found the correct orc afterwards.  Take til M og P.

  10. Thanks Picaroon – all good except that I still don’t really understand the “riddle” part of the parsing of 22a TRAINS. Also I see poor old Eve, biblical Mother of all humankind, is still getting bad press (in SPINNER 7d).
    My favourite was 13a REMBRANDT.
    I appreciate the blog, manehi.

  11. JinA @10

    A garden “riddle” is a sieve, use to “strain” large stones etc. from finer earth.

    Not Picaroon’s best, I thought (and not just because I didn’t parse it!)

  12. Thanks, muffin@11: just found “sieve” as a synonym for “riddle” in my Chambers Thesaurus. I didn’t know the garden connection though.

  14. Slow to start with only one full, and four partial, anagrams. Nice one for CHANGING THE GUARD.

    More of a numpty than George @6 as I didn’t parse 8d at all. Strange duplication of AMMO in the SE corner, plenty of other possibilities for ?A?M?N.

    Thanks Picaroon and manehi.

  15. Found this difficult but enjoyable. Couldn’t for the life of me solve 7 down, even with all the crossers. LOI therefore…

  16. Thanks, manehi.

    Usual excellent stuff – which I found a bit tougher than usual and highly enjoyable. Lots of ticks and smiles – especially for ‘bully’, which really tickled me.

    Many thanks, Picaroon, for making another sunny day even sunnier.

  19. {Gasp}.  Got there in the end but found it tough going.

    Fabulous clues everywhere, with MACHINIST, TIDDLY, & CHANGING THE GUARD my pick of the bunch.  Also, a giggle at GAMMON.

    Share others’ doubts about SANDMAN.  Had to use the check button to believe it.  I do hope The Pirate will drop in and put me out of my misery.

    Pure delight, Picaroon, many thanks.

    Nice week, all.

  20. Great puzzle. Like Muffin @3 I couldn’t parse TRAINS or FORCED LANDING. LOI was DUDE, which I liked a lot. Many thanks to P & m.

  21. Great stuff, Pickers.

    When the penny finally dropped for “bully” it reminded me of the old joke sequence:
    What’s brown and sounds like a bell? …Dung!
    (Only works when spoken aloud) What’s brown and filthy and comes steaming out of cows? …The Isle of Wight ferry!
    What’s brown and sticky? …A stick.
    All right, I’ll get my coat.

  24. Thank you Picaroon and Manehi; very enjoyable.

    When put to bed as a child in what was Great Aunt Mary’s room in my grandparents’ house in Newmarket, I was told the SANDMAN would come. Unfortunately for me, the bedside lamp was one of those that fits into a bottle as a base. This bottle was a big old port bottle; SANDEMAN port ! Their logo was (is) the silhoette of a rather sinister Zorro-like figure. So, for me, his arrival was dreaded.

  25. Thanks to Picaroon and manehi. As usual with Picaroon I found this tricky but ultimately manageable. Just a slow but steady solve with carnal and tiddlywinks last ones. They seem straightforward now but I was toying with abstaining until the penny dropped for the anagram part. I also toyed with prosthetic for 10a, despite having worked out earlier that the second part was probably thesis. I quite liked sandman and also liked forced landing, inhabit and spinner. Thanks again to Picaroon and manehi.

  28. Some of the best clues I’ve seen in a long, long time and so many of them in one crossword, whilst I certainly didn’t find it easy it kept my interest to the end.

    On the whole an exemplary crossword with (in the interests of balance) just a few petty queries for me….

    l wasn’t overly impressed with killer for orc and I’m not sure that 22a adequately parses the movement of a letter (and whilst it’s undoubtedly in Chambers the strain/riddle – liquid/solid nuance niggles me).

    Like others I thought that ‘unwelcome’ was off target for the Sandman associated with bedrooms.

    Thanks Picaroon and Manehi.

  29. All good stuff as you would expect from Picaroon. Took a bit of teasing out but that only added to the fun. Had a wrong guess originally with HETAERA but when it had to be TRAINS (I was on one at the time – did that help?) only one other combination made sense.

  30. A game of three thirds. It took a while to get started, the middle part fell pretty quickly and the last few took some seeing. All very classy – I liked SANDMAN and CHANGING THE GUARD. DUDE was last in but I should have seen that earlier.

    Thanks to Picaroon and manehi

  31. Ironically I had no problem with SANDEMAN as I had always thought he was the bringer of nightmares.  After reading the blog and Wikipedia I realize now I have been mistaken all these years.  Live and learn!

    Thanks all.

  32. Echoing the praises for this puzzle from manehi and so many other commenters above.  Favorites today included TAURINE, ADEPT, DUDE, MACHINIST, INHABIT, ABSTINENCE, and my CotD, CHANGING THE GUARDS.  That list looks like half the puzzle!  The other half of the puzzle was pretty excellent also.

    SANDMAN absolutely would have been up there at the top of my list, but for the off-putting “unwelcome sight” bit that so many others have remarked upon.  However, I got a laugh from reading the comment from il principe dell’oscurità @24, who, from his personal experience, thought that part of the clue worked perfectly well.

    Many thanks to Picaroon and manehi and the other commenters.

  33. Someone is spy fiction – was it Karla in John Le Carre? – was known as “The sandman”,as people who got too close to him “fell asleep” (permanently!)

  34. This was really hard!  I got only six last night and one more this morning before I had to start resorting to the check button.  Unlike Martin @18 I used it was far more than minimally!

    I’ve known from this crossword site that a riddle was a sieve, but until today thought it was any old sieve, like the one hanging a couple of feet behind me here in the kitchen.  I had no idea there were garden sieves too.  And I hadn’t realized consciously the solid/liquid distinction between a sieve and a strainer, though I think I did know it.  The same device can be used for both.  I’ve also seen a dish drainer called a dish strainer — well, the liquid does run off.

    I absolutely loved CHANGING THE GUARD.  I never can resist a good anagram.

     

     

     

  35. Me @32

    …aaaannnd now I have an earworm, “Mr. Sandman”.  I’ll spare attaching a link, as most of you probably know the song well, but I will mention that this appears to be one of those songs that has dozens, maybe hundreds of versions available on YouTube, ranging from the most well-known recorded version (by the Chordettes, I believe), to covers by other professional artists, to home recordings by amateur barbershop quartets and other “a 3dn” groups, to videos that people constructed by recording themselves singing multiple parts “a 3dn”, to spoofs and memes.  I’m sure some of them are quite entertaining.

    I was never a big fan of Metallica, but I know they had a huge hit with “Enter Sandman“, and in that song the Sandman is the bringer of nightmares, not sweet dreams.  Maybe that’s what Picaroon had in mind with “unwelcome sight” in the clue for 19dn.

  36. Thanks to Picaroon and manehi. Tough going for me, though eventually I did get and parse everything. One thing I discovered is that there are multiple anagrams (besides TAURINE) to be derived from nature-i, though “urinate” would more likely turn up in a Paul puzzle.

  37. George Clements @6: The Sandman graphic novels are fantastic – can’t recommend them highly enough. I doubt the titular character is the inspiration here – he’s occasionally terrible, but only if someone deserves it.

    There is an animated short called the Sandman, which isn’t related to Gaiman’s work, but is properly creepy and well worth a watch. A little googling shows it’s based on German story where the Sandman is very much unwelcome: Here’s a link, which includes the animation: https://www.brunosleep.co.uk/blog/2016/08/the-legend-of-the-sandman/

    Enjoyed this one a lot. Especially Changing the guard – that’s a beauty.

  39. Excellent! Slow and steady progress, and had to check on hataera. I could see the working but didn’t know the word. great clues. Only quibble is i thought it was changing of THE guard.

  41. A strange coincidence – the puzzle I’d solved immediately before this was 25901 from five years ago, a quite brilliant (I thought) offering from Picaroon. It had fewer comments than average so imagine some of us may not have seen it then. (Before Araucaria’s disappearance, I’d generally only bought the Guardian on a Saturday – mainly for the crossword. I’ve completed all the Gs since end of 2013, so have recently been running through dailies before then thanks to the wonderful archive the Guardian generously supplies). I would strongly advise anyone who missed it before to try 25901. All this is to point out, very longwindedly(!), what an absolute joy it is to solve a Picaroon.
    I also have wrongly assumed, all my life, that the Sandman was a baddie so was able to enjoy 19dn unreservedly.
    Great stuff. Many thanks both and all.
    (BTW, 25900 – a Philistine – was also a rather special joy. So if anyone’s following my steer, it’s worth printing out that one too; after all, it’s only next door!)

  42. il principe dell’oscurità @ 24 – beautifully poignant, a definite ‘aaah’ moment. Thanks for sharing.

  43. I had “teases” for 22 across, which seems to fit the clue and was in agreement with the first two crossers I completed.

    Made getting sandman rather hard, though.

  44. According to Roy Orbison a candy coloured clown they call The Sandman tiptoes to your room every night. A candy coloured clown would be pretty unwelcome in my bedroom.

  46. Good cluing pretty much throughout here.

    I thought HETAERA a bit much of an ask with the anag of TEA in it, and maybe there were a few bits in clues that were very hard to get from the subsidiary (REM, US, INTEL etc), but it’s a nice piece.

    Many thanks Pickers (your nickname now apparently, so you’ll have to live with it) and manehi.

  48. Thank you manehi and Picaroon.

    Many favourites – 12/21, 1a, 1d, 9a, 19d.

    I needed some help to parse 26a (which I presume is Tolkien’s orc rather than than an orca or killer whale) and 8d.

  49. Sinister Zorro was the character in the third verse of the demo version of “Eleanor Rigby”.  George Martin persuaded Paul to cut the song down to just two verses for the final studio recording.

  50. The Sandman is, in Germany, a very well known short story by ETA Hofmann about a figure who steals children’s eyes, justifying ‘unwelcome sight’ in more ways than one

  51. Very tough for me this one, and didn’t help that I only started in the evening, and left the last few for this morning.

    Several unknowns and non-parsers for me.  Gave up parsing FORCED LANDING though it was obvious from the crossers.  To me, an ORC is a bad guy in Tolkien, not a killer whale which is an ORCA.  If it had been clued “tailless killer” or “short killer” I’d probably have fared better!

    HETAERA was a look-up, and I had to assume TAURINE is a word (“Bully” is cheeky!).  Luckily my astronomer’s hat yielded CAPELLA at once.  I failed entirely to parse TRAINS – I’m not keen on “succeeded” = S and was looking to insert “D” in a 5-letter word for “riddle”.  And ALARM was my LOI – I had toyed with AVAST (a signal to sailors/marines to stop?).

    But plenty of gems galore.  CHANGING THE GUARD was actually my FOI but I thought it superb – even if it is more customary to say “Changing of the Guard”.  Or is it?  Memories of that old nursery rhyme – …. “Christopher Robin went down with Alice” etc. etc…  THATCH, REMBRANDT, ABSTINENCE and MACHINIST also favourites (even if I had to guess at REM).

    Thanks Pickers – a good work-out – and Manehi.

     

  52. Muffin @33 – re the SANDMAN – quite right.  In Smiley’s People (chapter 5) Mostyn quotes Vladimir as saying “Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman [i.e. Karla].  Tell him that I have two proofs and can bring them with me.”  And yes – that’s probably the reason for the nickname – seeing as Vladimir is one of the now-‘asleep’ ones… 😮

  53. I had “cure” for 9ac, ie an “e” (drug) for a “cur” (dog, ie not a man). Still, no one will read this so no matter.

  56. Having worked my way through the Guardian’s crossword archive to this point I would say that Picaroon is my favourite setter. I do however have a query/quibble – which part of the clue at 22ac directs the omission of the “s” from the beginning of strain? To me the wordplay indicates “strains”.

  57. Have just, I think, answered my own query. The s is “finally” as opposed to “after”. With respect to another clue though, (nothing to do with Picaroon), how is putting sand in a child’s eyes supposed to induce sleep?

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