69 comments on “Guardian 27,929 by Brummie”

1. I do like a morning when the crosswords take over from all the things one really ought to be doing on this fine sunny day

   I really enjoyed this – I spotted the theme quite early on although it did take a while for me to ‘see’ the link with 11/10/24/26

   Too many clues to pick out favourites so I’ll just say a big thank you to Brummie and kenmac

2. I really enjoyed this too; an excellent puzzle from Brummie and a very helpful blog from kenmac (many thanks to both).

   I just have a slight query about the parsing of 11,10,24,26 where I don’t see an anagram.

   I had:

   GR – King George
   EAT – put away
   MINDS – cares
   THIN – slight
   K – king
   ALIKE – just the same

3. Thanks Brummie and kenmac  _ “…my first ever blog” – and I sincerely hope, not the last.  I can never remember how to spell the ubermensch guy.  His name is unusual in having 5 consecutive consonants.

4. Hi and welcome Kenmac. I parsed the big one as GR[ex]eat[put away] minds [cares] thin k [slight king] alike [just the same?]. And from what little philosophy I’ve read the exponents of it here today didn’t think at all alike. But hey ho, fun puzzle, at the easier end for Brummie. 20d reminoscent of ‘ink duty’, primary (elementary) school in the 50s, a beer bottle with a rubber spiggot, filling the inkwells every morning. Thanks Kenmac and Brummie.

5. Rick @2 – fixed now. Sorry, sleepy eyes and tired mind took over.

   cholecyst @3 – my first Guardian/daily blog. Check out The Inquisitor where I blog once every four weeks.

6. Agree with Rick on the parsing of GREAT MINDS etc. Thanks for sorting out the two-stage clue for TOUSLE, which defeated me (think of a word for embassy, subtract C A N and anagrammatise the result…)

7. rick@2

   Tend to agree – there is no ‘c’ in the answer and no ‘m’ if it were an anagram as suggested.

   Apart from that…

   thanks to brummie and kenmac

8. … as you said, Rick.., we crossed.

9. Thanks Brummie and kenmac

   I had the same parsing as Rick @ 2 for the long one.

   cholecyst @ 3: some years ago I spotted that WITCHCRAFT also has five consecutive consonants. There can’t be many others (I will now probably be proved completely wrong).

10. A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed

11. New for me was TIZER = a soft drink brand which I found via google. I am never keen on product placement in crossword puzzles.

    My favourites were GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE, TOUSLE, TURKEY + AMORPHOUS.

    Thanks Brummie and kenmac.

12. Seemed a bit Mondayish to start with, then all the heavy-duty philosophers appeared! But all very enjoyable. A warm welcome to kenmac, and thanks to Brummie as ever.

13. kenmac@5: No problems! I know the “sleepy eyes and tired mind” syndrome all too well! )-: I really enjoyed your first Guardian blog and, like cholecyst@3, I hope to see many more from you.

    Simon@9: Like you, I doubt there are many English words with five consecutive consonants, but I can’t resist mentioning “Knightsbridge”, which has six (perhaps a slight cheat, but the London area is taken to be a single word).

14. Great to have you here, kenmac.

    I had a lovely time with this puzzle. Lots of ticks of approval – and I thought 18d LEGENDS was hilarious. I also enjoyed the link between the names of the philosophers – thanks to kenmac for the reminder of that legendary (!) Python song. And a great Socrates quip, copmus@10.

    TIZER in APPETIZER 16d was also unfamiliar to me, michelle@11.

    Many thanks to Brummie and kenmac.

15. michelle@11: I sympathize with your feelings about product placement but, for me, Tizer is an integral part of British culture (others may well disagree!). The Wikipedia page for Tizer describes it as “the offspring of Vimto and Irn-Bru”; now there’s a marriage made in heaven! (-;

16. A breezy morning after a heavy night before, so a welcome light puzzle today! I had not even thought about the parsing of “great minds…” as the answer jumped out from the enumeration. A few others also wrote themselves in from definitions, which really helped as a number of others (“tousle”, “osteal”, “effable”) were lovely, clever clues.

    “ersatz” is a good philosophical term and reminds me of my description of instant coffee as “ersatz kaffee” as opposed to “echt kaffee”. And “rustler” always puts me in mind of the “Brown paper cowboy” joke.

    Thanks kenmac for the comprehensive blog, and Brummie for making us put our thinking caps on.

17. On a side note, there are also only a few words with 5 consecutive vowels. Most well-known being QUEUEING. I also discovered there is a word EUOUAE (look it up).

18. I enjoyed this too, but didn’t bother to check what was clearly going to be a UK-only name at 16dn and blithely entered APPETISER. Now that I see it is actually spelt with a Z, I like it even less. Hard to justify being parochial and global in the same clue! Nevertheless, thanks to Brummie and of course to kenmac.

19. RHYTHM but it depends on how you classify y.

20. On the word discussion side, is BEEKEEPER unique, in that it’s a nine-letter word with five vowels, all E?

21. With the words discussion, STRENGTHS is a 9 letter word with only a single vowel.

22. Thank you Brummie for a fun puzzle and kenmac for the blog – hope we will see you again soon.

    I liked the definitions for the philosophers and the way TOPKAPI joined on to TURKEY and APPETIZER on to URINAL!

23. Donkeys’ years ago (late 70s?) Araucaria had an April Fool puzzle in the Guardian headed “There’s nothing in common except the first of April”. Every cross-checked word in the whole puzzle was an “A”. Clues were un-numbered and presented by length not in crossword order. Solvers were given the task of deciding the “correct” configuration as an April fool task.

24. Even with all the component letters laid out for the anagram, still couldn’t be certain I’d got the correct spelling for the thinker at 27 down until I’d got a few crossers in. Turkey was last one in, took a bit of head scratching to finally see it…

25. ‘Great minds think alike, though fools seldom differ’ gives a slightly different interpretation of the oft-used saying.

    The theme was fairly unmissable although I, too, struggled somewhat with the spelling of some of the thinkers.

    Thanks Kenmac for the good blog; surely, INKWELL is a cd rather than an &lit? I can’t see any wordplay.

    Thanks Brummie for making me think!

26. “Great minds think alike” – do they, though? Surely they think differently, and that’s what makes them great?

27. Dicho @19 I don’t think I’ve ever succeeded in convincing anybody that Y is sometimes a vowel. In fact, I reckon it’s more often a vowel than a consonant.

    Syzygy is another good word.

28. Hmmm, not sure Chips n Gravy. Contra my earlier comment, I suspect that these blokes were all atheists; but pace any cognoscenti, I could be wrong, again!

29. Thanks, Brummie for a somewhat easier but nonetheless enjoyable puzzle; and kenmac for the blog.

    [Tsktsks, simon@20 and TheZed@21. REFEREE beats BEEKEEPER  by 1/63 for E density.]

30. Dave Ellison @29 fair point…and BOOKKEEPER beats beekeeper for having 3 consecutive double letters.

31. A very enjoyable solve, thanks Brummie and a very helpful blog thank you Kenmac.  A DNF for me as I just could not see 29a.  Of course I kicked myself when I saw the answer and it immediately became one of  my favourite clues, along with LEGENDS, TOPKAPI and INKWELL.

32. Welcome, kenmac, I enjoyed your blog.  I’m not crazy, though, about the different layout.  It’s hard to read, and it doesn’t seem to allow room for the occasional and welcome chatty divagation in the blog.

    I’d never heard of TIZER and was surprised at APPETIZER — wouldn’t the British spelling be “appetiser”?

    I’ve hardly ever seen the word “ineffable,” and “effable” only once in my life, describing every cat’s

    Ineffable effable

    Effinaneffable

    Deep and inscrutable

    Singular name.

    For Old Possum’s full text of “The Naming of Cats” click here https://poets.org/poem/naming-cats and to hear the great man himself reading it try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXkLgtusza4. Oh, and Old Possum is T. S. Eliot.

33. I thoroughly enjoyed this, so thanks to Brummie. Didn’t know either Raleigh or Tizer, but both easily confirmed once the answer became clear. Thanks also to kenmac for the parsing of FESTIVITY, and welcome.

34. With regards to the -ise versus -ize spelling issue in English, some interesting points are made at:

    http://www.metadyne.co.uk/ize.html

    Note, in particular, the recommended spelling of “appetizer” and “appetize” in the extracts from the Collins Authors and Printers Dictionary, 1973, and the Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers, 1967.

35. Fairly straightforward, and enjoyable.

    Thanks to Brummie and kenmac

36. Thanks to Brummie for a fun puzzle that I nearly managed to finish!
    Big thanks and welcome to kenmac. Love the tabular layout of the blog, very clear, great use of colour and well signposted anagrinds. But I’m a nerd and love tables

37. As you can see (albeit not very clearly) from the 1930s advert here, the drink was labelled ‘Tizer The Appetizer’ on the bottles. It must have been stocked by every corner shop in England when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.
    http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/tizer.htm

38. Valentine @32, “Eff” is probably even rarer than effable etc. From the late great Douglas Adams: “Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

39. @Simon S @20 – QUEUEING is an 8 letter word with 5 consecutive vowels, and is in common parlance, I’d say, being in the BRB.

40. Thanks to Brummie and to kenmac (but no table-loving nerd here).

    Delighted with myself to have cracked a puzzle with such an eyebrow theme – favourite was THRALL.

41. Simon @9. If you are in the right seat at kniGHTSBRIdge tube station you might see a six-letter one through the window!

42. Enjoyed this and spotted the theme for once! Can’t say I immediately connected it with GREAT MINDS etc. I liked HEIDEGGER particularly and it was nice to be reminded of TIZER.Many bottles of which I consumed in my childhood. TOPKAPI took me a while even though I’ve visited it. OSTEAL was new to me and I had to look it up but it was very well clued.
    As I said,most enjoyable!
    Thanks Brummie.

43. Or even kniGHTSBRidge..

44. As a less able crossworder I really enjoyed this and got 80% of it so was very happy. One question which fits into the ‘is everything an Anagrind?’ Category of questions – how does ‘foreign’ indicate ‘move the parts around’ ? Is it common as an anagram indicator?

45. Valentine @32: I misspelled Nietzsche as Nietszche so that I got Appetiser with the British spelling!!  And so I was wondering about Tiser (although I know nothing about Tizer, either…).

46. Thanks to all for the word comments. Glad there are plenty of philologists on here.

    Skinny @ 39: yes, but my point about BEEKEEPER is that there is only one vowel, albeit five times.

47. The gateway clue was unfortunately guessable from the word lengths alone and proved very helpful for the crossers it provided.  I liked AMORPHOUS and REPUTABLE.  Zinc sheet is a nice anagram for NIETZSCHE but I still don’t think I’ll remember how to spell him.

    It’s worth mentioning, of course, that NIETZSCHE and HEIDEGGER were members of the German side that lost to Greece because of a controversial 89th minute goal from Socrates, despite the Germans having Beckenbauer on their side.  Probably my favourite Monty Python sketch.

    Thanks, Brum and kenmac.  I like the tabulated blog style.

48. I agree with Robi that 20d (inkwell) is a cd rather than an &lit. I thought that both that and 29a (urinal) were fairly weak cds, in that they didn’t seem very cryptic to me: while I can see what deception was intended, the actual cryptic reading was the first thing that occurred to me on reading both clues.

    I never thought that EFFABLE was a word: I class it with KEMPT and others that don’t come to mind right now, as words whose negation exists even if the word itself doesn’t. But no doubt I’m wrong and some dictionary somewhere contains it.

    Welcome to kenmac!

     

49. Lovely crossword. For once I spotted the theme but not difficult when SARTRE and HEIDEGGER were the first two in.

    Didn’t register the GMTA clue, though, until coming here. It was one of my father’s sayings which he thought originated from Churchill, the full quote being, “Great minds think alike but fools seldom differ”

50. LOI TOPKAPI, which almost beat me but had a sense of deja vu as I filled the word in a past Times jumbo.

51. I think Ted is right…20d and 29a were cds rather than &lits, and both were fairly obvious. And ‘effable’ gave me an excuse to delve into my two volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary where ‘effable’ is noted as “now only in antithesis to ‘ineffable.’ (The pleasure of consulting  printed dictionaries still remains in this world of online reference.)

52. Thanks Brummie and kenmac (welcome to the Guardian)

    An enjoyable puzzle, but a quick one. I got SARTRE and SPANGLE straight away, then saw GR EAT and guessed and then parsed the rest of the long one.

    Favourites were AMORPHOUS and RIALTO. I also was surprised how many letters NIETZSCHE had – I had to check the spelling too!

    I agree that URINAL and INKWELL were weaker than the rest.

53. An enjoyable and entertaining crossword. I felt for our overseas friends when I came across Tizer and Raleigh while solving two of the clues, but these are well-known, long-standing British names (of a product and a company).
    I liked the theme of four thinkers, and getting two of them helped with getting the other two.
    EFFABLE was new to me, being familiar only with ‘ineffable’, as another commenter mentioned.
    2d RHONE was very neat clue – as was TOUSLE, in a space where another setter might have put the familiar Scottish word SONSIE.
    Thanks to Brummie, and welcome kenmac, seeing you for the first time as a blogger away from the Inquisitor thread.

54. Valentine @32 has already referenced Old Possum – I’m a bit surprised that you haven’t come across the poems, Alan B and Ted!

    When our daughter was about ten we were nagged into taking her to see Cats. I thought it would have been quite good without all the singing and dancing!

55. Ted@48 – the best example of what you have in mind that I can recall is ‘gruntled’, which Bertie Wooster noted that Jeeves was definitely not, the morning after an escapade of some sort. And I wonder whether orthers here have a costly, but 95% unread, copy of Being and Time on their bookshelf? As always Brummie gives good puzzle, and welcome kenmac to the revered coterie of bloggers – impressive start!

56. muffin @54
    Well, I can’t speak for Ted, but it’s true I haven’t come across the poems, and until now I thought ‘effable’ was a back-formation (to make a point or just for humour) like ‘kempt’ (as Ted said). I read Valentine’s comment before posting mine but omitted to acknowledge it, so my apologies to him.

57. Irishman @55

    A year or two ago (perhaps more!) there was a Guardian puzzle full of “missing opposites”, such as “gruntled”. I can’t find it easily with a search, as “gruntled” also finds “disgruntled”, or course – perhaps BH could help?

58. Alan B @56

    No criticism intended! Of course, it might be a back-formation, but if it’s by T.S.Eliot….

59. muffin @54 —

    I had the misfortune of sitting through Cats once, which I suppose means that I have in fact heard the word “effable” before, although I have no memory of it.

     

     

60. Stuart@44: ‘foreign’ or ‘strange’ or ‘oddly’ suggest an unfamiliar arrangement, so it works for me.
    Thanks Brummie and kenmac.

61. muffin @57

    I think this Philistine puzzle is the one you are after:

    http://www.fifteensquared.net/2014/12/19/guardian-cryptic-26447-philistine/

     

62. Thanks Alan B – that’s the one I was thinking of.

63. Thank you for the blog kenmac. I think you may have missed the word “being” from the definition in 22 across. Someone may have beaten me to this.

64. Andrew @63 – well spotted – fixed now

65. I had never heard of ‘Tizer’ as a drink but when Rick @17 says “Tizer is an integral part of British culture“, then who am I to think otherwise.

    And I even have records by Elvis Costello, Eno and Deacon Blue that mention the drink – I probably never knew what they were talking about.  🙂

    Several sources tell me that the name comes from the phrase “Tizer the Appetizer”.

    In that sense, I think the clue is rather unfortunate – not wrong, just unfortunate.

    I only write this very late comment (on a good but unremarkable puzzle [in my opinion]) since nobody mentioned this.

    Many thanks to kenmac & Brummie.

     

66. Sil @65 — I mentioned it (@37) but chose not to labour the point.

67. John E, I actually did see that you mentioned it (and I should have made a reference to your comment).

    My point, though, is not that the expression is “Tizer the Appetizer” as such.

    But that ‘Tizer’ apparently comes from ‘Appetizer’, which is the answer to the clue.

    Which makes it a bit impure from a cryptic point of view, in my opinion.

    [I think we agree]

68. Sil @67 — The point that I did not labour @37 is this: although it is true that the brand name originated as a contraction of ‘appetizer’, its origins go back many decades and would not be obvious to anyone buying the product in recent years because the modern cans do not include the slogan that used to be printed on the labels of the old bottles. A picture is worth a thousand words!

69. Alan B @56  Actually, I’m a “her.”  I keep forgetting my name is androgynous.

    Valentine

     

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