Guardian Cryptic 27,971 by Vlad

50 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 27,971 by Vlad”

1. I parsed ELECTOR as ECT inside ROLE reversed.

2. Hovis – yes, I think you’re right.  I’ll correct it.

3. A proper Vlad battle but lots to enjoy – my favourites were the same as Quirister.   Thanks to him and Vlad

4. I thought this was going to be impossible after a first trawl of the across clues yielded nothing. It gradually gave way, but not in a terribly satisfying way. I also parsed “elector” as Hovis @1.

   I didn’t like “G” for force. “G” is an abbreviation for the gravitational constant and “g” for the acceleration due to gravity. Neither is a force. You can have a “G-force” but “G” is then adjectival to force, not a force itself. I can have a “t-piece” but does that make “piece” a good clue for “t”? It sometimes works (“t-shirt”, “u-bend” are commonly seen) but here there is a specific scientific meaning to G. I didn’t thinks “one’s queen” for “ar” worked either – why “one’s” not “one”? What happens to the “‘s”? In many others it seemed like obscurity for its own sake, and most of this for me was post-parsed, but not with that sudden joyous realisation of how stupid I’d been.

   Thanks Q for sorting out the parsing of “ship canal” and explaining “are” – I’d missed that subtlety completely. And thank you Vlad for the impaling, especially the “howlers” and “relative clauses”.

5. On the subject of ‘are’ (which struck me as one of those unknown but obvious words hiding in plain sight when I first encountered it) there is also a standard measurement called a barn and I wonder if anyone has ever used it to clue ‘b’?

   Thanks to Vlad & Quirister, top marks to both of you today.

6. Impaled today on quite a few. Slow to remember owls collective, despite its regularity, d’oh, cheated with a wordfinder to get oxeye, and again with the canal, a gk dnk. Music reading too long ago, so I remember da capo al fine but not al segno, a correct guess, and ditto aced, as nho Ant and Dec (still dnk, the link didn’t work), and had to look up Lord Hall to get the the DG for endgame. Phew. Hard work this bloke, but clever and not without fun if one enjoys a bit of pain. Thanks Q and V.

7. TheZed @ 4. The standard explanation is that “one’s” = “one has” but that never seems entirely satisfactory in a possessive sense without a qualifier (i.e. ‘one’s got a car’ works but ‘one’s a car’ does not).

8. Was there meant to be a space between “Put” and “In” in the clue for 1ac? Vlad having a laugh.

9. Robert @5 alas the related units, the “outhouse” and the “shed” which are small fractions of a “barn” do not appear to have standard abbreviations, or one could have quite a lot of fun with those.  Robert @7 thanks – so in this example the possessive doesn’t work you are saying?

10. CrumlinT @8: Interesting observation. I guess Vlad would be kicking himself if he missed the opportunity to use Putin.

11. TheZed @ 9. In my view it’s perfectly valid as part of the wordplay and the clue is fine (because ‘one’ and ‘queen’ are entirely unrelated), solvers who like the surface to read literally might have a different view.

12. Meant to add that 20a is one of those where you would have no chance of parsing without the answer first (but I guess we expect these from Vlad).

13. Oh and despite watching Pot Black back in the day (with Mrs Ginf sending up the comentator’s sepulchral voice), had no idea of that Trump, so snooker another biff.

14. I agree with the Z@4.

15. With regard to 16d,of which country is Belfast a capital city?

16. 28a: Why “one’s queen” and not “one queen”?

17. Hugh Carville @ 15. You’ve misread the clue but happily it allows me to remind everyone that Belfast will soon be celebrating it’s centenary as official capital of Northern Ireland (which can quite rightly be described as a country, nation, state, region, province, etc. depending on the context). A fantastic city to visit if you’ve never been (or if you have).

18. Rather flummoxed by the North East corner, inserting Hampers instead of the much more subtle and precise Howlers. Not familiar with Woolly Bears, either. And trying out Small Scale instead of Small Stuff didn’t help matters. A tough work out today.

19. The explanation of 3d KOBE uses the phrase “leaving out” but there is no “out” in the clue, and “leaving” is not the same thing. If anything, the meaning is backwards, it seems to me.

    Well, in the space of two weeks we have had ADIEU, HASTA LUEGO and TOODLE-OO. Is some weird longitudinal theme playing out?

20. Dr. WhatsOn @19 I agree with this (increasingly common) use of “leaving” and forgot to mention it.

    If there is a theme playing out, it’s taken so-long I’ve missed it. I’ll get my bullet-proof coat.

21. ‘leaving northern’ for ‘minus n’ is less oblique than ‘knob’ for ‘hunk’ imo.

22. Pedro @12 It took me far too long to parse even with the answer, and I wasn’t 100% sure until I had parsed it, though with all the crossers it was hard to imagine anything else fitting. Does anybody really call a toilet “the can” outside crossword land?

23. This was a struggle for me. I, too, tried hampers at first for 5A but it didn’t parse. The clue for 5A was, however, very entertaining.

    I never did parse LOOK SNAPPY, which had a pretty convoluted clue. I suppose voter as a definition for ELECTOR was deemed to be too obvious, but I doubt many would have known the selected meaning.

    Thanks Vlad (I would say that I was impaled!) and Quirister.

24. I am another who found this tough going, despite get a fair few on first couple of passes. The rest was simply a slow tease out, and contemplated giving up a couple of times. Last ones were Belfast, embarks (realised I had carelessly put 7d as electro) and segno (never heard of it, but it could not be much else). Favourites for me were howlers, snooker and Garibaldi. Learned something else today, I thought the woolly bear was simply called the woolly moth. Thanks to Vlad for the intense work out and Quirister for clarifying some parsing.

25. Personally, I have no issue with “leaving” in 3d. A leaving B means that A is no longer with B (and vice versa). It’s more leaving behind than leaving out I guess.

26. Thanks both,

    Hands up anyone else who toyed with ‘hooters’ for 5ac.

27. grantinfreo @6: oops, link now fixed. (Sorry for the delay – I’ve been out.)

    Tyngewick @26: my hand isn’t up, but I can see your point – especially in the context of the restaurant chain that insists its name refers to owls.

28. Thanks Vlad and Quirister

    In fact this went in more easily than I expected after a first reading, though I didn’t parse LOOK SNAPPY, SHIP CANAL or ENDGAME, or the A in UNAWED.

    I liked HOWLERS (yes, tyngewick, I did try to parse HOOTERS), but the standout for me was FOI BUCOLIC for its wonderfully apposite surface.

29. This was hard; I got less than half of it in last night.  My favorite was HOWLERS for the collective noun reference.

    In TARIFFS I took AR to mean Queen Anne, but then didn’t know what to do with “one’s”.

    The person currently in line to succeed to a title is the “Heir apparent,” — Prince Charles, for instance.  The next in line is the heir presumptive.

    Fuzzy woolly bear caterpillars were all over the place in the Hudson Valley of my childhood, though I haven’t seen one, now that I think of it, in decades.  They have two black ends and a brown middle, and we used to believe that the more black they had, the harder the winter was going to be.  Now that I look them up, I find that that belief is common, and also that they seem to be limited to the Americas, so how did they get into a British crossword?

    My cat likes to sleep in a tight circle that reminds me of what woolly bears commonly did, so I call her my woolly bear.

    Thanks to Vlad and Quirister.

30. Another top class puzzle, though I must admit I needed to used the check button a few times to finish within my allotted time slot.

    Thanks to Vlad and Quirister

31. Valentine @29: I think you’ll find that “heir presumptive” is someone whose claim might be displaced by the later birth of another. For example, if the monarch currently has no children, the monarch’s younger sibling would be “heir presumptive”, meaning he or she is the best candidate currently available. If the monarch then has a child, that child becomes “heir apparent” – i.e. definitely the heir, because there’s no possibility of anyone else having a better claim than the monarch’s firstborn. Prince Charles is the heir apparent, but there’s no need for an heir presumptive.

32. Two things.

    Beeryhiker@30 must please reveal the ‘allotted time-slot’ for puzzles! Having mentioned the concept, please don’t be coy. If I had one myself, it would have been exceeded on this occasion, as sometimes before, by Vlad, the most testing (for me) of all the setters, along with Enigmatist, but it was a matter of perverse pride today to use no checks or other aids, spinning it out over the hour.

    But ‘elector’ was not a problem. Quirister’s ‘Holy Roman’ reference makes it sound archaic, but it was a term for the Hanoverians, as used in Saraband for Dead Lovers (book + postwar Ealing Studios film).

33. I struggle with this setter at his easiest, so the outcome of today’s match was never in doubt, more to be admired in retrospect than enjoyed in the moment. Kudos to all of you solvers who managed to hold your own, and thanks to Vlad and Quirister.

34. 20a – Vlady ridiculous.

35. COD HOWLERS,liked the false capitalisation of parliament. It’s risqué surface is also brilliant.

36. Thanks Vlad – tough but rewarding I thought. ‘Leaving’ would perhaps be better as ‘avoiding’ in 3, as leave has almost contradictory meanings.
    I had FAST (fastened, done) for 11 for a while – F.A. + S[hor]T – until 2 made me rethink.
    Thanks to Quirister for the blog.

37. Gonzo @36

    VERY was my LOI, as I too was trying to work “ST” into it. I hadn’t thought of F.A., but it works just as well as the solution!

38. Sorry, “OVER”, of course.

39. Hampers!

40. No much time today so biffed my way through for the most part.  While I enjoyed various surfaces, that for HOWLERS won the day for me. I’m glad I didn’t spend too much time wrangling with the parsing because a lot of it would have been beyond me (SPEEDOS for instance but mainly because I would always have that “note” as Sol – but we all have our pedanticisms).

    So, enjoyable on balance so thanks to Vlad and to Quirister for some expert unraveling.

41. HAMPERS here too.

42. I love Vlad’s puzzles for their intricacy, humour and variety of cultural references. They are worth spending time on to finish, but I failed on this. I didn’t get the Trump ref in 1a and couldn’t see the answer for KOBE so a DNF.

    I don’t mind losing though. Thanks both

     

43. Many thanks to Quirister for an excellent blog and to others for their comments.

44. Quirister @31 – Indeed; and the present Queen was heir presumptive before she became Queen, because if George VI and Queen Elizabeth had had a son he would have succeeded ahead of her. Apparently.

45. I (actually, we) love Vlad’s puzzles for the same reasons as baerchen.

    Plus, added to these his political surfaces (and views?) which are not really written with, let’s say, die-hard Telegraph solvers in mind (like notably 16ac, 19d and 22d).

    And for those who generally find Vlad a bit too much a symbol of Anarchy Rules, there will always be another opportunity to forget about it the day after.

    To them I would say enjoy tomorrow’s (excellent) Nutmeg – just like I/we will, btw.

    But if I really had to choose between the two, well …..

    Many thanks to Quirister (for the spot-on blog) & Vlad.

     

     

46. Oh Sil(@45 if I must) you really are a card.  I always enjoy your (yizzer?(there’s two of you(yiz?)?) analysis and tonight you made me laugh – no really in a good way. So good.

     

47. Very enjoyable – I hope the “briefly” in 19d is prophetic. I  agree the apostrophes in 15a and 26a are at the very least inelegant. Surely 1d needs “standing up”, not just “standing”? And in 3d a hunk (e.g. bread) and a knob (e.g. butter) aren’t really the same thing.

48. Valentine: we also have “woolly bear” caterpillars in the UK: they are the young of various tiger moths. They seem to have a death-wish because they are often found pottering happily down the middle of paths, right in line for the next passing boot.

49. Nice to see the 125th anniversary of the opening of theManchester Ship Canal recognised by Vlad

50. Thanks to Quirister and Vlad

    I’ve asked a chef and apparently there are at least 3 or 4 knobs to the hunk.

    Apart from that superb.

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