Guardian 27,754 / Shed

75 comments on “Guardian 27,754 / Shed”

1. I agree Eileen, it is always very welcome to see Shed. This one was quite straightforward and impeccably clued

   Thanks to Shed and Eileen

2. I enjoyed it too, particularly GOD-BOTHERER, HULLABALOO and ATHLETIC. Many thanks to Shed & Eileen.

3. Why is Endives plural? Or is it apostrophe s?
   It was the only clue causing me pain.
   Otherwise a fairly easy solve.
   Thanks Shed and Eileen.

4. Thanks Shed and Eileen

   I got off to an unfortunate start by writing in SCRAP for 4a, then finding I had a spare square at the end!

   After that was corrected, it all went smoothly. I agree about the GK, but I knew all of it (I wonder how many others tried something with Rudolf for 8d, though?)

   Favourite was another GK one, HULLABALOO.

5. btw Eileen, minor misprint in 1d – pestO

6. Welcome back Shed and thanks to Eileen as always.

   Did this on the train this morning and noted that several commenters on the Guardian site had praised 20d for its cleverness.  There were probably more of us who got to the answer by removing CH from CHIVES.  Sort of endless but not quite satisfactory.  Nice to come over there to find out how clever it was.  And it earns COTD for me.  Others that tickled me were FOSTERLING, GOD-BOTHERER and DRUDGERY.

7. Thanks to Shed: glad to see his name again on a puzzle. This all went in quite well for me, thought I found my last three in, 22a VISCERAL, 20d IVES and 21d ISLE, took me a while (can’t believe I was caught out yet again – by “Man maybe” – until I thought “Aha, of course, the island”!!!). I was also momentarily distracted by thoughts of Rudolph when I was trying to solve 8d DONG, muffin@4. Must admit I only got FOSTERLING 2d through crossers and wordplay, not a word with which I was entirely familiar.

   I did like EVANGELICAL 18a, 4d DRUDGERY and 13d FETCHING.

   Appreciate the blog, Eileen, as ever.

8. Another one who tried to work out how ‘(ch)ives’ worked at 20d, but eventually fell in to the correct parsing. As usual, I agree with Eileen.

9. Sorry , Eileen, but 17 should be INSECT (bug) round P.

   Good stuff so thanks Shed ans Eileen.

10. Mark
    As far as IM concerned the chives explanation is better.
    Stull not sure why EndiveS.
    Sorry if typos am in tram.

11. muffin@4 same here re SCRAP doh! itsthe wrong trousers!Really nice to see Shed again but having no Lear stacked in my brain I was at a loss as to DING or DONG -or as Eric Idle (as  bore) once said-“whats brown and sounds like a bell?”

    Very enjoyable.Thanks all.

12. In, yes, an enjoyable stroll, a dnf, bunging avos at 20, muttering ‘some obscure composer minus a letter, or two’. Silly me, esp as Ives is an occasional regular. Dnk that particular Lear ref, so a biff (and searching Dong shiny nose did not help, not sure why). Always need all crossers for mythologicals: familiar, but no easy recall. Ditto Kipling characters other than Mowgli (and the sausage tree who said ‘Bosh!’, which made me giggle all those years ago, and stuck).

    Fun puzzle, thanks Shed and Eileen.

13. I agree with the views of both Eileen and Beery Hiker – I was also a member of the CHIVES team

    Thanks to Shed and Eileen

14. Typos corrected now – thanks, muffin and Mark.

    Hi Anna @3 and 10 – I don’t understand your query: ‘endives are a component of salad’ makes perfect grammatical sense to me – and, as I suggested in the blog, chives sprang instantly to my mind, too, but I don’t see how IVES could be clued as ‘endless chives’.

15. Spoilt as we are by the brilliant standard of puzzles we’re offered daily, i have to disagree with Beery Hiker that this was all impeccably clued. A great deal of the surfaces are tripe. These are solveable but inelegant. 11a, 18 ac, 22ac etc

16. Anna, what I meant was that ‘endless’ would not be a good way of cluing [ch]IVES – not worthy of Shed, anyway.

17. Eileen and others. Ok clearli im wrong. I can see the problem with chives. Suppose the real problem is I dont really know what endive is. Like lettuce? Would you say that you have lettuces in your salad? The word component in the cluu for me means a singlar is required.
    Anyway. Happy to bow yo the majority.
    Sorry. Still in tram…

18. I wonder if Anna @3 and 10 is thinking of the curly-leaved lettuce-like salad ingredient, which would normally be uncountable and therefore not plural – cf confusion between chicory and endive because their names seem to be interchangeable depending on where you are.

    But these are countable salad ingredients: http://www.freshpoint.com/archive/commodity-endives-white/

     

19. PS I also thought of ch-ives and wasn’t at all happy about it – end-ives on the other hand …

20. Quite a bit easier than I remember the last Shed as having been, but there were a few bits I didn’t know such as WH in 16d and BALOO the bear and I couldn’t parse IVES (v. clever). I managed to get FOSTERLING from the crossers and wordplay, but no such luck with DONG for which I guessed the wrong vowel.

    Not the first word that springs to mind for ‘Irrational’ and I’ll go with VISCERAL as my pick of the day.

    Thanks to Shed and Eileen

21. grantinfreo @12

    Your search for Dong with the shiny nose probably didn’t work as he had a LUMINOUS nose (as Eileen said)!

22. As far as I know, here in North America “endives” is as unlikely as “spinaches”, but of course things may be different transatlantically.

23. Another here, rightly or wrongly, who uses endive in the singular.

24. To VinnyD @22 and Xjpotter @ 23: seems to be a terminology issue.

    This description appears to come from a north American company http://www.freshpoint.com/archive/commodity-endives-white/

25. @judygs

    That link hardly clears it up.  In all but the title, endive is used in the singular (with plural verbs).

26. Had endives last night, with walnuts and slices of apple. “How many endives shall I put in?” “Two if they’re big, three if they’re small.”

27. @James: https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/endive

     

     

28. Really enjoyed today’s offering, solved in two halves with nothing in the LHS till I came back to it, then it all seemed clear. It is very strange the way the crossword brain works.
    Good to see Shed. I remember the early days of doing the Prize when he terrified us.
    We had the same problems with DONG and IVES but delighted to remember the dong. Loved HULLABALOO.. Memories of Arthur Ransome’s baddies on the Broads… And FOSTERLING, which I didn’t know as a word, though my daughter calls her niece and nephews, her niblings, which I love.
    Thanks Shed and Eileen. Can’t believe that I am typing this in the garden in England in February!

29. Yes, a welcome return for Shed, and with an easier offering than I expected in terms of filling the grid (apart from a bunged in OVAS for 20d – with similar mutterings to ginf@12 and some vague notion of eggs in a salad). I didn’t get everything parsed though with DONG (50:50 – guessed right) and W H needing Eileen’s help. I liked INSPECT for its simplicity and HULLABALOO because its a fun word. Thanks to Shed and Eileen.

30. First Shed I’ve ever done and over all too quickly; simple but elegant like a great omlette and left me wanting more. I needed Eileen’s blog for the parsing of 11 and I was another whose salad was composed of alliums rather than the more filling and tasty chicorium. Is it lunch time yet?

    Thanks Shed and Eileen.

31. Or to put it another way “Burl after tip for salad ingredients(7)”

32. Thanks to Shed and Eileen. Not a lot more to add here. Generally a straightforward solve with the exception of 8. I am another who is Lear ignorant, therefore another stuck in the ding dong debate. Opted for dong (last one in) with some misguided thinking (dogs have shiny noses therefore more likely be dog). Hey ho, I did like evangelical and God-botherer and thanks again to Shed and Eileen.

33. Why is WH Skakespeare’s “beloved”?

    Thought that was Anne Hathaway.

34. jeceris @33

    Follow Eileen’s link for the explanation.

35. It would be helpful to have some small explanation of the significance of WH in the blog – following links should perhaps be for matters that people might wish to know more about, not to be necessary to have a basic understanding of what is going on.

36. Re: WH… Shakespeare’s Sonnets were dedicated to Mr. W.H. and there is lots of learned specualtion about the identity of this person, with some believing he is the “Faire Youth”, of whom The Bard seemed especially enamoured. At this point my pub quiz knowledge runs out.

37. Thanks to Shed and Eileen. I’m another who started with chives and waffled over ding-DONG – and both ETON MESS and GOD-BOTHERER were new to me, but I much enjoyed this puzzle.

38. Thanks both,

    ‘Trim and wash Belgian endives’ Cracknell and Kauffman (1992) Practical professional cookery, 3e p588. One of my favourite cookbooks, especially if you are cooking for a mob.

39. Humph. sailed through all but 20d/22a in 10 minutes flat and got stuck. Would never have got Ives (never heard of him and endives too obscure for me to get without help) but should have got visceral.

     

40. Good puzzle. And I was also wondering about the removal of CH from CHIVES. Doh.

41. Anna @3 and Eileen  Could the salad component in 20d be chives rather than endives?  That’s always in the plural.  I feel your pain.

    I thought a lot of these clues were too obvious — FOREHEAD from “deaf hero,” for instance, or SKELETON from “lost knees” or LUSTRE from lu(st)re.

42. Howard Marks I had the precise same experience. Only got those last two by coming here. I think of visceral as being of the guts.

43. March not marks sorry.

44. judygs@18 On “countable” salad components, the writer of the link you give refers to the vegetable as “endive” (seemingly a mass noun) and then says “endive are” — a usage I’ve never seen.  Now I don’t know if it’s countable or not.

45. DONG was FOI. I’m much more knowledgeable about nonsense verse than I am about Shakespeare and WH was a complete mystery to me. WHEREVER was obvious but I didn’t understand it. I got IVES-one of my favourites-from CHIVES rather than ENDIVES.The correct parsing makes this an excellent clue. Didn’t properly parse GOD BOTHERER but it had to be the answer.
    Thanks Shed.

46. Van Winkle @35

    “It would be helpful to have some small explanation of the significance of WH in the blog – following links should perhaps be for matters that people might wish to know more about, not to be necessary to have a basic understanding of what is going on.”

    I’ve been out to lunch and have only just come in and seen your comment. If you have followed the link, you will see from the length of the article [and there are a number of others that I could have used] that it would be difficult to give a ‘small explanation’ of who W H might have been. It’s always difficult to know, as a blogger, how much [extra] information to give [it’s sometimes self-indulgence] but this time I specifically said ‘see here for discussion’, rather than implying that the link simply might or might not be interesting, as an extra. I thought this article was the most interesting / useful I found – but difficult to condense into a two-line comment. When blogging a Prize puzzle, there is a whole week to do the necessary research to draft a blog and to go into minute detail. On a weekday, the priority is to get the blog posted as early as possible, which, for us UK bloggers, becomes available at midnight, rather than breakfast-time or early evening.

    I’ve been surprised to see the endive[s] and chIVES / endIVES discussions both still going on. I think if ‘endless’ chIVES were/was the  intended cluing, there would have been some whimpers, if not howls of protest at poor cluing – which, as I said above, I don’t expect from Shed.

47. Ah! ENDives, not CHives!! Makes so much more sense! 🙂 🙂

48. I meant, of course, that the puzzle is available at midnight.

49. I thought it was (ch)ives too.  I have eaten those in a salad, but not end(ives).

50. DONG first one in (grandfather a great Lear fan) and another in the CHives camp but worried about it till I read the blog and realised how much better the clue actually was.

    Many thanks to Shed and Eileen

51. Composer’s secular component of salad (4) perhaps??
    Always good to see Shed. I thought FOSTERLING was brilliant. WH was new to me. Should have paid more attention during English at school.
    Thanks, S&B.

52. I was happy to see the return of Shed. So I set off with some anticipation of a pleasant challenge ahead. However I found the actual experience very disappointing.

    Ninety percent write-ins with the remaining clues not putting up much resistance. Why so easy? I dread “Easy Monday” coming around and then two come along at once!

    By the way I see nothing wrong with (CH)IVES. (Which end do I remove, the front end our the back end. More than one letter also not a problem.)

    I know I’ll be called grumpy but most of these clues were really too easy.

53. No mention of olives?

54. Alex@52 and aitch@53

    I was just about to say – I went for olives and chopped off the front end.  But then I don’t eat chives or any member of the onion family.  Endives are ok though.

    Thanks to Shed – I enjoyed it – and to Eileen for the usual all-embracing blog.

55. I really enjoyed this. Adored HULLABALOO, GOD-BOTHERER and EVANGELICAL. Tempted to make a joke around difficulty parse-ly-ing the not-a-(CH)IVES, but I shall desist…

56. So now olives enter the fray too, needing, along with chives, an oxymoronic ‘front end’ – i.e. two letters! – as justification, as opposed to ‘endless’ [end]IVES – which I thought was so clever, because of the misdirection. But then, seemingly, ‘endive is a mass noun’, so we can’t have ‘endives’ [debatable]. I don’t think I can remember a clue – on two counts – generating such discussion.

    Shed has been known to drop in to offer enlightenment – but I’m not holding my breath.

57. I think the problem is that there are two kinds of endives, both members of the chicory family and used in salads – the common endive in the UK has green frizzy leaves, the other, the Belgian endive, is whitish and tight and is often sold in packets of two or three.

58. I suspect I did not make clear my expectation. I wasn’t suggesting a summary of the discussion in the blog, just a simple statement such as “mystery dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets”. At the moment the blog doesn’t say anything about why WH means “Shakespeare’s beloved”.

59. PS @57, in the French supermarkets the Belgian endive’s price label always says endives and so do recipes where more than one is required.

60. Van Winkle @58 –  ‘At the moment the blog doesn’t say anything about why WH means “Shakespeare’s beloved”.’

    The blog says: ‘W H [Shakespeare’s beloved – see here for discussion …’

    I don’t know what more to say –  but I’m going to bed very soon: I was up well after midnight to solve the puzzle [see above @36] then up early to write and post the blog.

61. Just wondering if there is a singular of ‘chives’ . . .

62. Well, Monday’s just isn’t Monday without a discussion!

    As a fan of double duty clues, I parsed “Shakespeare’s beloved” as two separate elements in charade: Shakespeare = W (William) + Shakespeare’s beloved = H (Hathaway), making the phrase a misdirection.

    A straightforward enough puzzle, though god-bother was new to me. And the usual lucid blog from Eileen

63. Van Winkle

    “…and some seeds fell on stony ground… ” 😉

64. I am basically only an occasional lurker, but I realized just now that when I see Eileen as the blogger, i inwardly relax. I don’t quite know why; there may be others as good. But I like the concise yet ample indications in the original post, the helpful and sometimes surprising (Morecame and Wise!) links to other things, and the sense of personality that is never obtrusive. I also admire the grace with which she handles the subsequent discussion.

    I enjoyed this puzzle, but so much more in reading the blog (not least for the endless endives!).

65. Since Eileen@56 asks, her parsing of [end]ives in 20dn is precisely what I intended. I must admit, though, that ‘endive’ is singular in my English dictionaries. I think what happened is that I first encountered this foodstuff, and indeed this word, in the early 1980s, when I lived in France, and the French usually make it plural. That’s not an excuse, just an explanation.

    As to Mr W.H. in 16dn, I really don’t think it was his wife Shakespeare was addressing when he wrote ‘A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted/Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion’ in Sonnet 20. To say nothing of ‘Since she pricked thee out [geddit?] for women’s pleasure,/Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure’.

    Thanks all and apologies for the long absence

66. Many thanks, Shed. 😉

67. Late to the party as ever… I hope you got a good night’s sleep, Eileen, undisturbed by the trivial carping of certain posters. People can be divided into two groups quite easily:

    1. Those who have something to complain about

    2. Those who have to complain about something

68. cruciverbophile, if you are referring to me, I wasn’t complaining. Most of us had been able to work out that WH was supposed to stand for “Shakespeare’s beloved”, but many of us had no idea why. I was just suggesting that it would have been appreciated (and consistent with the customary excellence of the blog) if we had been taken a tiny step further in relieving us of our ignorance.

69. Van Winkle @68 – I can only refer you to the link [ https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jan/31/shakespeare-sonnets-mr-wh-dedication-mystery ] which I gave in the blog and quoted at comment 46 to the lengthy article which illustrates the difficulty / impossibility of identifying WH in a sentence or two.

70. Apologies, Eileen, but I think we are at cross purposes. I am not referring to the debate of who WH actually was, but the simpler fact of what WH was.  Just “dedicatee of sonnets” would have made me happy. Without, I am not unhappy. Will definitely shut up now.

71. Welcome back and thanks Shed, I have been a fan ever since the wonderful “pub crawl”.
    Lots of nice penny-drop moments solving this one.
    Al

72. Thanks to Eileen and Shed

    I thought 2d might have been a DD plus wordplay, but I’m sure Shed would have mentioned it while he was here.

    WH was new to me – very interesting article.

    With thy heart my joy and curse

    Will sever love disguised in verse

73. 21d ISLE is missing (8 Mar)

74. Thank you, Pete @73 – 21d must have dropped off the end of my ‘copy and paste’ – my apologies.

    For the archive: “Man maybe somewhat misleading (4)”:

    ISLE – contained in mISLEading.

75. If only I’d thought of endives, chives, or olives … Instead I went for CRES{s}, who isn’t a composer and who also made 22A impossible. Enjoyable puzzle, so thanks to Shed and Eileen.

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