Guardian 28,268 – Vulcan

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A typical collection of mostly straightforward clues from Vulcan, with just a couple of the NE corner that held me up at the end. Quite light on the cryptic definitions, which is fine by me. Thanks to Vulcan.

 
 
 
 
 
 
Across
1. SPREAD OUT Extended picnic? (6,3)
Double definition – a picnic might be a SPREAD that you have OUTside
6. SUMP Total pressure in reservoir (4)
SUM (total) + P
8. CAMPAIGN Returning computer nuisance, it’s said, in military operations (8)
Reverse of MAC (Macintosh computer) + homophone of “pain” (nuisance)
9. TINGLE Feel excited anticipation in time at fireside (6)
T + INGLE(fireside)
10. REASON So near sports ground (6)
(SO NEAR)*
11. BROMIDES Newly-weds receiving order for sedatives (8)
OM (Order of Merit) in BRIDES
12. AS WELL In addition, no worse (2,4)
Double definition – if a sick person is no worse, they’re AS WELL as they were
15. SWILLING Son ready for heavy drinking (8)
S + WILLING
16. BAD LOSER Sober lad goes wild — he can’t take defeat (3,5)
(SOBER LAD)*
19. TARTAN Scottish design nationalist renegade rejected (6)
Reverse of NAT[ionalist] RAT (renegade)
21. CLAPTRAP Applaud role reversal? Nonsense (8)
CLAP (applaud) + reverse of PART (role)
22. ADDICT Put on an extra court for heroin user, say (6)
ADD I (one – so, put on an extra) + CT
24. SADIST Miserable meeting first vicious man (6)
SAD (miserable) + 1ST
25. SKI-PLANE Pass over country road in Arctic transport (3-5)
SKIP + LANE
26. ALI G Supposedly black comedian malign at heart (3,1)
Middle letters of mALIGn. Ali G is a character created by Sacha Baron-Cohen, one of whose catchphrases is “is it because I is black?” (the joke being that he isn’t)
27. SYNAGOGUE A guy’s gone off to find a religious assembly (9)
(A GUYS GONE)*
Down
1. SPARE Not required to be forgiving (5)
Double definition
2. RIPOSTE Poster I designed brings sharp response (7)
(POSTER I)*
3. ASIAN Oriental perhaps like a Scotsman? (5)
AS (like) IAN (crosswordland’s favourite scot)
4. OMNIBUS The edition you pick up in the street? (7)
Double definition – book and public transport
5. TATTOOIST One may have designs on your body (9)
Cryptic definition – unusual in a Vulcan puzzle to get so far down the clues before hitting one
6. SUNDIAL On a fine day, time for reading here in the garden? (7)
Another cryptic definition – sundials are often found in gardens, and only show the time on sunny days
7. MILLENNIA ’80s child has shed pounds for a very long time (9)
MILLENIAL less its final L. Millennials are people who came of age around the turn of the millennium. Rather a weak clue if you ask me, as the two words involved are so closely related
13. SNAIL MAIL Post delivered by householder? (5,4)
Cryptic definition, from the idea that a snail “carries its house on its back”
14. LAST RITES Girl closes hackneyed religious ceremony (4,5)
TRITE in LASS
17. LAPWING Bird‘s circuit over part of mansion (7)
LAP (circuit) + WING (part of a large house)
18. ROPES IN Unwillingly involves person I sacked (5,2)
(PERSON I)* – the unwillingness is on the part of the person roped in rather than the roper
20. RED FLAG Look embarrassed to lose energy, a warning sign (3,4)
RED (embarrassed) + FLAG (lose energy). “Look” is a bit out of place – “Looking” would work better
22. AXING Cutting a crossing (5)
A + X (cross) + ING
23. CANOE At sea once, a small boat (5)
(ONCE A)*

55 comments on “Guardian 28,268 – Vulcan”

  1. Seen a few ingles in stately ‘omes etc, but needed all crossers to dredge it up. Some neat clues, eg spread out, ‘sports’ in 10ac, but agree with Andrew’s improvement for 20d. Nice Monday, thanks V and A.

  2. grantinfreo at 1.

    I’m familiar with ingles. It’s my surname, but with a slightly different (Scottish) spelling.

    Stared at 7d for ages. The solution was obvious, but was it that simple?

    Thanks Andrew for explaining 26a to me. Never watched him, but the entry was obvious from the letter count. Strange way to fill the space. Why wasn’t CLOG or FLOG or PLUG or SLUG used instead?

  3. It was the NW that held me up: I completed SW, SE, NE, and only then NW. Except for 1d – SPARE (as ‘let off’ or ‘go light on’) as forgive seems a bit of a stretch to me, but no doubt someone will tell me it’s in the relevant dictionary – I completed and completely parsed this. I have no problem with RED for ‘look embarrassed’. My route to the MAIL in SNAIL MAIL was via a homonyn (delivered by) of householder = MALE and then it had to be SNAIL from the crossers. Thank you to Vulcan (especially for going fairly light on the CDs) and to Andrew.

  4. The NW held me up too – otherwise very Mondayish indeed. I liked REASON; was looking for something more cryptic in SUNDIAL, but see there’s nothing to be found! Thanks to Vulcan and Andrew.

  5. The NE was also the last part of this puzzle to yield for me, Andrew. Thanks for the blog, and thanks also to Vulcan for the puzzle. I liked 10a REASON when I got it because I had been distracted by the phrase “sports ground” as the possible definition. RIPOSTE at 2d and SNAIL-MAIL at 13d also appealed to me today.

    [gif@1 and NNI@2, I got 9a (T)INGLE because I have performed two naming ceremonies for little ones with the surname. In talking about the significance of their given names, I also mentioned the meaning of their family name Ingle, the fireside or the hearth where the fire is in a home, and my hope that people would be drawn to the warm and welcoming natures of these little girls throughout their lives.]

  6. Pretty standard Monday fare. Agree 7 down isn’t the best and not a fan of closes as an envelope indicator (14dn). Encloses yes but closes seems to me to indicate the word should go at the end. Still entertaining enough, if only briefly.

  7. I was held up by both the NW and the NE !!  But got there in the end.

    I associate ‘extended’ with being drawn out in one dimension whereas, to me, SPREAD implies two dimensional expansion.

    Only a minor quibble.

    Thanks Vulcan and Andrew

  8. Anna, I wondered that too, but then thought of several instances of extended in two dimensions: floodwater for instance, or views (in the sense of as far as the eye can see).

  11. A nice, gentle Monday. Like others, the north was a brief hold up for us (NW for me but NE for cobro).

    Favourites were CANOE and LAPWING.

    Thanks to Vulcan and Andrew 🙂

     

  12. Like many others I was held up by the NE, and had to take a punt on TINGLE as INGLE was new to me. I also couldn’t parse TARTAN – RAT meaning renegade still doesn’t quite click?

    A well pitched start to the week, thanks to Vulcan and Andrew.

  14. Beobachterin @3: the survivors were spared/forgiven worked for me – though I’d accept the first rather implies the second.  However, I’m less keen than JinA and drofle on REASON: first time I’ve encountered ‘sports’ as an anagrind and not sure it works for me.

    I’m afraid this seems like Vulcan taking a bit of a backward step.  True, fewer cd/dd’s but too many read & writes – SUMP, BAD LOSER, TARTAN, TATTOOIST, LAP WING etc,  Some loose clueing too – ‘millenial’ only loses one ‘L” so why ‘pounds’? AXING doesn’t follow from the wordplay unless ‘xing’ is ‘crossing’.  I’m not convinced ready and willing are synonyms – isn’t that why they are combined in the phrase ‘ready and willing’?

    That said, SNAIL MAIL as a cryptic definition is in a different class to the rest and earned a definite tick.

    Thanks Vulcan and Andrew

  15. I generally enjoy Vulcan’s work and, unlike some, rather relish the cryptic definitions. Today I must really have been his/her wavelength, because vast chunks went in swiftly and smoothly – but that, of course, meant the fun was over far too soon!
    Oh well. Every silver lining has a cloud.
    In a host of pleasing moments, SNAIL MAIL SUNDIAL both had a certain sweetness to them.
    Thanks to Vulcan for the entertainment and to Andrew for the blog.

  16. PS Gillafox at 10: the phrase “the man on the Clapham omnibus” is – or certainly was – used by courts as a way of describing a typical ordinary member of the general public.
    [I lived in Clapham for many years – and would sit on the upper-deck of a number 88 as it passed Clapham Common tube and turned towards the common – and my stop just after Holy Trinity church – wondering if I was sufficiently typically ordinary.]

  17. PostMark @14:  ‘xing’ isn’t ‘crossing’, but ’x ing’ is ‘cross ing’.

    Thanks Vulcan & Andrew (for the blog, and especially for the omnibus @13 – “I sticks me flippin’ ‘and out and jams on all me brakes”  😉  )

  19. Just saw Sacha baron playing Abbie Hoffman (along with Mark Rylance and Eddie Redmayne etcRecommended

    Oh the puzzle-Rufus did good bad and indifferent so Vulcan is following his brief

  20. Typical Monday outing. I’m OK with Xing for crossing. LOI was Campaign. I couldn’t parse sundial and now I see that I was trying too hard.

    Thanks Vulcan and Andrew.

  22. [sheffield hatter (if and when you drop in) and possibly gsolphotog: I’ve followed protocol and left an off-topic follow up to our Friday exchange on the General Discussion page]

  23. I’d rank this one of the easiest crosswords I’ve ever done but I liked AXING and TINGLE. Oh and REASON for no other reason than the dodgy anagrind injected some interest into the solve

  24. For some reason that took me a while today – NW refused to yield and the utterly obvious SPREAD OUT was my LOI.

    Thanks Vulcan and Andrew!

  25. I liked pretty much all of this and I enjoyed listening to the Transport of Delight. Coincidentally it was on someone’s Desert Island Discs yesterday. The recording is just like the bus itself: you’ve not heard it for ages and then …

  26. Like for others, the N, especially NE took a bit longer. I am sure I have seen Xing on road signs somewhere to mean crossing. No real problems with any of the clues – just a bit slow on the uptake. Thanks, V&A.

  28. Postmark@14 : in my neck of the woods, diamond yellow signs of “[animal] XING” are pretty common. Deer, Ducks, Turtles. But my favorite is Dilophosaurus (It was on someones driveway.)

    I had an enjoyable time with this puzzle. OMNIBUS and TATTOOIST were my favorites.

    Thank you V and A.

  29. The sun just wasn’t shining here this morning, so just couldn’t see SUNDIAL for ages, and therefore the interlocking SWILLING in the NE corner, so these the last two in. Found some of these clues rather more chewy than the normal Monday offerings, all the better for it IMHO…

  30. 28 entries already (possibly more by the time I post) underlines the fact this was at the easy end of Monday. Fun overall. Agree that 7d was not very good though. Only 5 anagrams but, I don’t know why, it felt to me like it was awash with them.

    Thanks Vulcan and Andrew

  31. I’ve grudgingly accepted XING – though I won’t pretend it’s a neologism I like.  Not in Chambers online but clearly exists and, given that, I acknowledge it’s a good clue.

  33. XING doesn’t have to be a word, PostMark @31 – the clue works on a ‘lift and separate’ basis, ie split crossing into cross + ing. I rather liked it on that basis.
    Less keen on SUNDIAL, purely because I spent ages trying to deconstruct the surface rather than recognising it for what it is. But that’s cryptic defs for you.

  34. Another in a recent string of solid offerings from Vulcan. The half-dozen or so cd/dd clues, normally my least favorite, were mostly both clever and gettable. Perhaps Vulcan in getting better at signaling his intent to us. We have a sump pump in our basement, but I never knew that SUMP = reservoir. Also didn’t know the ALI G character, but it was clear once the crossers were in. No complaints, although ‘sports’ in 10a continues the recent trend of ‘any word can be an anagrind.’ Thanks to Vulcan, and to Andrew for the parsing of SUNDIAL (like drofle @4, I thought I was missing something there, but apparently I wasn’t).

  35. Happy with today’s offering – especially SNAIL-MAIL, RIPOSTE and SUNDIAL. As Andrew (and others) have said – MILLENIA didn’t work for me. The F&S song was a bonus. Thanks to Vulcan and Andrew.

  36. DaveinNCarolina@34. In the UK, perhaps the most common usage of SUMP is the pan at the bottom of a car engine that holds the oil that gets pumped around the engine.

  37. Quite liked X-ing personally, and had no problem with splitting it out to get the two parts (is it me or is the need to split words up more common in the Guardian’s easier cryptics than in the more difficult ones, or is it just that I’m solving fewer of the latter?)

     

    Struggled with REASON for ground because in the case of an argument it always seems to be stated in the plural eg “grounds for divorce”, “on what grounds?” etc.

  39. [Penfold @27 my evening of swing has been cancelled so plenty of time for yahoo chess – I’d better win though]

  40. Xing on road signs is common enough (at least here in the US) that I didn’t have an issue with it. I did raise my eyebrows at “look embarrassed” for “red,” because it gives you the wrong part of speech.

    It’s worth noting that “Oriental” for ASIAN is now considered offensive here, at least when describing people. (It’s Eurocentric and thus colonialist, aside from the fact that it’s been used derogatorily here.) I’ll be quick to add that I wasn’t offended. (I’m not Asian-American, though, so I won’t speak for those who are.)

  41. If someone is “red” they “look embarrassed”. It’s not trying to be synonymous, it’s just a visual thing, surely? (Like using ball for o, or spectacles for oo).

  42. postmark @14 and DaveinCarolina @34

    Sport as an anagrind is actually quite apt.  In botany, a ‘sport’ is a part of a plant that has adopted a different morphology (form) from its source. Therefore, when a plant sports it produces material of different character.  So here, the source is ‘so near’ which in different form is ‘reason’.

  43. I was held up, like Anna, in the top half of the grid. Too many clues where you have to be on the setter’s wavelngth, and too few with help from wordplay or crossers. I was stuck with a possible THRILL at 9a, and SUNDIAL wouldn’t come to help me out until I’d gone away and done something else for a couple of hours. Got there in the end, but what a struggle! Thanks Vulcan for the challenge, and Andrew for the blog. I remain unconvinced by ‘look embarassed’=RED; you are quite right in saying that looking would be an improvement. And shouldn’t you have inverted commas around ‘joke’ in your explanation of 26a?

  44. Regarding RED = ‘look embarrassed’, I’m with those (mrpenney @40, and possibly sh @43) who like their parts of speech to match up: a noun in the clue should correspond with something noun-ish in the solution, and so on.

    So 20d was a stretch for me too.  However I think my outstretched fingertips just about made contact with a valid parse, as follows:

    1)  Colours can be nouns as well as adjectives (Orange is the new Black)

    2)  If a colour can be a noun, then arguably it can be ‘a look’.  On that basis, GREEN = ‘nauseated look’, WHITE = ‘petrified look’, RED = ‘embarrassed look’.

    3)  …which leaves us with the problem that the clue says ‘look embarrassed’ not ‘embarrassed look’.  But while putting adjective after noun is uncommon in English, it’s not unheard of: pastures new, whisky galore, Mary was that mother mild.

    Trailman @33:  I wonder if all these Xing signs that lots of people have seen are a case of life imitating crosswords?  Lift-and-separate goes mainstream?

  45. [Apropos nothing, my late Great Uncle Seoma when he was over in London for a couple of years teaching went into the footwear section of a very large department store and asked for “a pair of sundials.”   “Sir will need the gardening department for that…”]

  46. [MaidenBartok @45: Not quite same scenario but Fork Handles comes to mind…

    And, in case anyone needs cheering up on what has become a very drab grey afternoon here in the Midlands, here‘s the link to six minutes of Two Ronnies magic.]

  47. essexby @44 according to the eminent linguist Steven Pinker, a noun is ‘simply a word that does nouny’ things

    Which, I think, is what you’re saying. In which case great minds think alike. Or not …

  48. essexboy @44. Nice try with the attempted parsing of RED. Look embarrassed=an embarrassed look=RED. As you say, embarrassed look works better, so why has Vulcan indulged in this reverse speak? It doesn’t make sense to me, so I tend to suspect a (half successful) rewrite or edit.

  49. Regarding red, my only quibble with Andrew’s comment was that he was being too diplomatic. I think MarkN@41 fell into the same trap as Vulcan: it is “is red” rather than “red” which equals “look embarrassed”.

    On the CCs, I generally find them tiresome, and SUNDIAL was no exception.  SNAIL MAIL was an exception, though, very clever.

  50. Re RED I’m inclined to more leniency in wordplay than I’d be re a defn, and I did think of the Yoda-speak justification, ala essexboy… but I still think it clunky at best, and am not fond of it.

    No prob with xing… as mentioned by others, quite common here in the US (and for some time… I recall seeing it as a kid, going back 50yrs now 🙂 ).

    Re sports, I took it in the sense of “frolics about” and saw no prob as anagrind. I recall seeing it often enough before… but I do cryptics dating back as far as the 60’s, so perhaps it’s cycled in/out of vogue over the years?

    Light and pleasant, overall. Tip of the hat to our setter, blogger, and commenters!

  51. [PostMark: thanks for the 2 Rs reminder @46; I’ve also left a comment (non-Ronnie-related!) on the General Discussion thread.]

  52. Pleasant enough if a bit loose – do I ‘pick up’ an omnibus in the street? Surely it picks me up. ‘Catch’ would be better.
    Thanks Vulcan and Andrew.

  53. I’m with bodycheetah here – I thought this was probably the easiest Guardian Cryptic ever (or in my experience). I’m usually in the other camp, grinding my teeth because all the other commenters thought it was easy when I found it hard.

  54. BUS is a clipping of OMNIBUS, meaning ‘(available to) all’! It’s one of those words whose etymology you never really think about until it’s pointed out, and then it seems so obvious. Kinda like cryptic clues… 1a SPREAD OUT was my favorite for that reason.

    Raised an eyebrow or two for 10a, as I’ve never heard ‘grounds’=’reason’ being used in the singular, but, eh, it worked. Had a similar bit of trouble with SUMP=reservoir, because I associate sumps with cesspools and reservoirs with drinking water, but I cede that my quibble is purely connotative rather than denotative. Also, it did take me a while to dislodge my mental thread from DOG-SLEDS for 25a, since, at least in my mind, that’s the quintessential arctic transport. And completely forgot about ‘ingle’, which I know I’ve encountered in earlier crosswords…

    mrpenny@40 *nodnod* I’ve heard it phrased ‘Oriental refers to rugs, not people’, though I’m also not of Asian ethnicity either.

    22d – this X-ing discussion reminds me about the ‘run down at the next zebra crossing’ joke in Hitchhiker’s Guide. To a Brit, ‘zebra crossing’=’crosswalk’=the guy was fussing about in traffic and got run over. For an American, more familiar with ‘DEER XING’ warning signs and all the jokey spin-offs sold at tourist traps, we get mental image of a guy getting trampled by a herd of zebras with a ‘ZEBRA XING’ sign in the background.

  55. 7D MILLENNIA[L] is one of the feeblest clues I’ve ever seen. Is there still a crossword editor at the Guardian?

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