Guardian Cryptic 28,292 by Pan

75 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,292 by Pan”

1. A pleasant romp today. As manehi has pointed it out, ‘alien contrives’ doing double duty in 20a is rather clever. LOI was CASUALTIES, which took a lot of thought for some reason. I also can’t make sense of 1a, as a COP isn’t a senior officer, surely. Many thanks to Pan and manehi.

2. AGENT ORANGE isn’t actually a nerve gas. Slightly Hanoi-ing?

   Does the ‘Senior’ in 1A make it a Chief of Police, rather than just a cop?

   Thanks to Pan and Manehi.

3. Drofle@1, I think COP is Chief of Police. I liked CASUALTIES and AGENT ORANGE was neat. Took me longer than the Cryptic this morning. Ta manehi & Matilda

4. Sorry Pan!

5. I suppose “alien” and “contrives” are indeed each other’s anagram indicators. It didn’t bother me when solving it – though tbh much of my response to that clue was pleasure that alien, for once, wasn’t ET. Likewise it made a refreshing change for 11A’s flower to be an actual thing that blooms, rather than a thing that flows.
   PROLIX and CASUALTIES made me grin, and TREE SURGEON was pleasing too.
   Thanks to Pan and Manehi

6. Oh dear I’m going back to bed. Sorry all

7. Thanks Pan and manehi

   Very pleasant, though mostly Quiptic standard. I didn’t parse SCOPED, or see the cleverness in NATIONAL SERVICE. Favourite BENDER, for its surface.

8. I won’t toss in the old chestnut about being easier than the Quiptic, but if I’m all done and dusted before 9am then a puzzle is usually on the easier side. Nevertheless, CASUALTIES and TREE SURGEON were fun, and CAMOMILE made me scratch my head fir a while.

   Thanks Pan and manehi

9. Very enjoyable, Quiptic-like puzzle.

   LIked CASUALTIES, CLOSE-KNIT.

   New: PROLIX.

   Thanks Pan and manehi

10. A pleasant start to the week, and, with a nod to Boffo @8, about the same difficulty as the Quiptic. And having got both of them out of the way by just after 9 am, no excuse for not actually getting on with stuff 🙁

    Thanks to AlanC @3 for a convincing parse of 1 across, to Manehi for the blog and to Pan for a crossword with some clever stuff (EVENING PRIMROSE a favourite, though there were others such as ROTISSERIE) which more than made up for the inexactness of AGENT ORANGE not being a nerve gas (thank you Penfold @2) – but then “War crime committed by USA following the bad example set by the UK in Malaya” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange – would have been a bit long and annoyed those of us who don’t like politics in their crosswords.

11. I agree with Penfold @2: AGENT ORANGE is a herbicide and defoliant rather than a nerve gas.  See here.  Or could be the President’s tanning lotion?

    Apart from that, as others have already said, an enjoyable and straightforward Monday puzzle.  Some nice touches, especially with CASUALTIES, TREE SURGEON and NATIONAL SERVICE which have already garnered plaudits.  BRETON was another I liked and the surface of UNINSURED brought a smile.

    Thanks Pan and manehi

12. Didn’t know chamomile sans h, didn’t think of Chief of Police, went ‘groan’ at casual ties, and if alien and contrives are reciprocal indicators, that would be a first, and brilliant… just about works grammatically..does it need to be contriveD? Thought agent orange was a defoliant, though the vets suffer lots of ailments. Nice Monday, on a par with the Quiptic, ta Pan and Manehi.

13. [Apologies NeilH.  I know we’re not meant to acknowledge accidental overlaps these days but when it comes to posting the same link…  I think you posted just as I began writing.  Hard to avoid politics in crosswords these days!]

14. Late start this morning (sleep patterns seem to be returning to near-normal after 8 months of weirdness) but a 20-minuter this morning with quite a few chuckles to-boot.

    DNK PROLIX.  FOI  RECIPE and some Monday easy drop-ins to fire up the grey matter.  Did wonder if we were heading down a botanical/medicinal path with EVENING PRIMROSE and CAMOMILE but then AGENT ORANGE stopped all that (unless that is the treatment-of-choice of one Donald J Trump?).

    BRETON had me a little confused for a while but that is only because I have a smutty, homophonic mind.

    Thanks Pan and manehi for the fun start to the week!

15. Alas 2d PROLIX doubly stumped me as I didn’t know the word or LICK as a musical phrase.

    Otherwise fairly straightforward and relaxing encounter for a Monday morning. Thanks Manehi and Pan.

16. [PostMark @11: Nice to see we were on the same path to the Tangerine Tyrant]

17. Or even 3d…

18. Thanks both. Thought that CO was Commanding Officer in 1a so couldn’t parse the P. Thanks to the posters who told me Chief of Police.

19.  

    [Prolix! Prolix!
    Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix

    We Call Upon The Author to explain]

20. can anyone provide any, er, evidence to support the idea that COP= Chief of Police? It isn’t in Chambers or Collins and  – quite apart from this – it would be bloody daft to call the top cop COP.

    Also, I’m very surprised that there haven’t been any comments about 22d

21. An enjoyable Monday crossword.

    I had the same ticks as PostMark @11, plus BENDER and INTRICATE, for the surfaces.

    Thanks to Pan and manehi.

22. As Acnestis has pointed out on the G thread, this gridfill is identical to a Pan puzzle from August 2017, with a lot of the clues being similar too.

    I’m all for recycling, but this is ridiculous.

23. [Simon S @22: Wow!  I’ve just completed two cryptics in one day 😉 ]

24. Interesting. Where the clues are different, I think the earlier ones are better.

    I’ve tried to use the site search to find the blog on that one, but failed. Any tips?

25. muffin @24

    See: https://www.fifteensquared.net/2017/08/29/guardian-27288-pan/

26. Many thanks, Gaufrid. It seems we liked it better second time round!

27. I once worked for a chemical company in the UK that was taken over by the Diamond Corporation, makers of the defoliant Agent Orange. Nothing to do with us, but we still felt tainted.

28. Thanks for the heads up about the re-used grid. muffin @26, it looks like it was a Tuesday last time round – perhaps an experiment to test our different expectations for each weekday…

29. I’m another who knew neither PROLIX nor ‘licks’. Also got held up by putting KNOT in the second part of 2d. Enjoyed the 2 long anagrams. Thanks Pan and manehi.

30. Re the lix in prolix to any jazz musician particularly a saxophone or clarinet player a short number of bars within a tune played as a solo is often referred to as a lick.

31. Nice clean solve – clean in the sense the back page of the Guardian Journal has absolutely no jottings making a scruffy mess around the grid. That won’t happen again this week.

32. Another fun Monday morning thanks to Pan although 13ac held me up for some time; when I finally saw it I decided it was my favourite which is unusual for a LOI.

    I had SCAPED for 1ac on the basis that the senior officer was a CAP(tain) but now I discover that I was making words up again.

     

    Thanks Pan and  manehi

33. Largely enjoyable, but I see in the previous incarnation that AGENT ORANGE is called correctly a herbicide. I didn’t buy the ‘anagrams of each other’ explanation and see last time it was ‘Flying alien contrives’, so I think that was just an error.

    Thanks Pan and manehi.

34. Wasn’t really on the right wavelength today. Had to use the crosses to get ROTISSERIE and CASUALTIES – which made me laugh when I got it and went to parse it. Didn’t know erie was a lake (or licks/lix). I was misled by alien which to date for me has always been ET – but it had to happen. And I daresay that one day movie/film will not be ET either.

    Thanks to Pan and maheni

    Off to the quiptic – it’s Matilda – yeh

     

35. Lovely smooth surfaces throughout, I thought. A very good, if not too taxing start to the week…

36. baerchen @20. …I’m very surprised that there haven’t been any comments about 22d. I presume your concern is with the anagrind being the wrong part of speech: tangle rather than tangled. (Or missing “in a”.) I think this is covered by the exclamation mark, which indicates the setter is taking liberties.

37. baerchen @20: maybe I’m just a general ignoramus, but I read it as “Senior” = S and “Officer” = COP with the “S” as part of empty SHED as well…

38. hi Sheffield Hatter @36

    I just can’t see how this clue is supposed to work. Bunging an exclamation mark at the end I’m afraid simply doesn’t make it right – in any case, the (!) is generally used to indicate an all-in-one or &lit clue and this is neither of those. I don’t think 5 letter anagrams are especially hard to get right. I wonder if this puzzle was a first draft of the one published in 2017 which mysterioulsy found itself un-deleted – there are several errors in it, and I’m frankly astonished to see all the love it’s getting

39. @MaidenBartok

    I suspect that the CO began life as “senior officer”, “e” is the drug ecstasy, contained in s(he)d and that during a rewrite during the draft the “p” was forgotten, much like the anagram indicator was forgotten in the clue for NATIONAL SERVICE, and that agent orange was one of the rainbow herbicides etc etc

40. How intriguing about the repeated grid!  Has this ever happened before?  I think the fact that the clues for 1a and 20a work properly in puzzle 27,288 supports baerchen’s view that (despite some valiant attempts to defend them) the versions today are simply mistakes.

    [In 1960s Marvel Comics, readers would often write in to point out errors in continuity and so on.  Stan Lee, the editor, would award a coveted “no prize” to a reader who not only identified such an error but also managed ingeniously to “explain” why it wasn’t really an error.  I think that sometimes commenters here fulfil a similar function…]

    Despite the oddities I did enjoy this and thought that 25a BENDER was particularly neat.

    Thanks Pan and manehi.

41. Fiona Anna @34 Lake Erie is a) one of the five Great Lakes in the US and b) the leading lake in crossword country.  You might tuck that into your wallet for future use.  (Useful mnemonic for remembering the Great Lakes is HOMES; Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Eris, Superior.)  (Although many US states have the same name as a river, including Connecticut, where I live, I think Michigan is the only one that shares its name with a lake.  And then Ontario ditto for Canadian provinces.)

    I got everything last night except CASUALTIES, my LOI this morning.  But why would you throw away your ties, no matter how casual they are?

    I liked TREE SURGEON.

    Thanks, Pan and manehi.

42. baerchen @38/39, your theory about the genesis of the puzzle looks persuasive to me too, but I was OK with the new (old?) clue for ADDER.  I saw ‘tangle’ as the anagrind and ‘with a’ as a connecting phrase between wordplay and def.  In terms of the cryptic grammar, ‘with’ could be interpreted in its instrumental sense of through/by means of.  So you get to the anagrist/anagrind by means of the solution, which is the other way round from normal, but surely not unknown?

    Valentine @41, thanks for the mnemonic!  I split CASUALTIES into CASUAL (throwaway like non-serious remarks, or relationships perhaps?) + TIES.

    Thanks Pan (since I don’t think I said ta last time round!) and manehi.

43. A quick/light solve… but too many quibbles for me to fully enjoy.

    Like, baerchen, wonder if any authoritative refs support COP as Chief Of Police? Yes, usage examples exist, but is that enough? To me, “senior” just seems sloppy/unnecessary… works fine without it.

    Are TIES really “garments”… or just adornments? Seems a stretch.

    Can’t abide the double double-duty argument for NATIONAL SERVICE, alluring as it might seem. Would make a mockery of traditional “mean what you say” cryptic norms. Instead I saw the defn as just “the military”, with the anagrindish “aliens” and “contrives” being misdirection, and “spell” being the actual (tho weakish) anagrind. Overall, an interesting idea but a bit clunky.

    I’m less forgiving than others re AGENT ORANGE, for which the defn “nerve gas” is patently (and inexcusably) wrong.

    Also take issue with “woodworker”=TREE SURGEON… two VERY different things in my mind, and have not (yet?) found official refs to justify the idea. Might work taking “woodworker” as a cd, but then really needs a “?” or other indicator.

    Re ADDER, was fine with “tangle” as anagrind, using the noun meaning (ala snarl) as applied to a set of things… I.e a tangle of (fodder) is a “(fodder) tangle”. But I DO struggle with that darn “a”! Can see “with” as connector but not “with a”. So “a” should really be in the defn… but then does “a snake”=ADDER really work (rather than “an adder”)? Again, seems sloppy.

    Oh well, guess it was just my turn for a ride on the grumpy bus this time around. Nonetheless, nods to our setter, blogger, and commenters… even quibbles get the brain working so there’s something to be said for that 😉

44. I don’t think Senior is superfluous in 1a.  I think it’s CO=commanding officer” + PE (Phenylephrine Hydrochloride); inside S[he]D.  See https://www.allacronyms.com/PE/Phenylephrine_Hydrochloride.

45. Lord Jim @ 40

    A couple or so years back the Indy repeated a Punk (Paul) puzzle, as the draft had been incorrectly filed and was resurrected for the reappearance.

    In May this year the FT repeated in toto a Basilisk (Serpent) puzzle from a few weeks earlier.

46. Dave Clark @44, ‘no prize’ for you!  😉

47. Thanks both.

    For the second time recently I’m surprised that there isn’t an outcry at the equation of “ale” with “beer”. Surely there’s someone who will take offence.  For clarity I should elucidate that ale is brewed with hops, whereas beer (or is it the other way round?) is not.

     

48. Alphalpha – nice bit of elucidation! I think you may have just accidentally justified the clue. Or not, as the case may be.

49. [Alphalpha @47

    It was the ale that used to be brewed without hops, but it didn’t keep very well. Hops have an antibacterial quality allowing longer storage times. I don’t think very much “ale” hasn’t had hops in for several hundred years!]

50. PE is a drug for me as I am addicted to exercise, so that’s how I parsed SCOPED.

51. Dave Clark, thx for that one… your application of PE provides some appreciated relief to my parsing discomfort 😉 Would be a bit of an obscure stretch given the straight forward tenor of the rest of the puzzle so my dim view of the clue remains, but that’s the best explication I’ve seen thus far and certainly worthy of essexboy’s “no prize”.

52. That was pleasant enough — thanks Pan — I enjoyed BENDER, CLOSE-KNIT, and TREE SURGEON. PROLIX stumped me. Thanks Manehi for the blog and its discussion — I found baerchen’s remarks quite useful as I generally don’t delve that deeply into the mechanics of cluing.

53. I thought PRO for professional was lazy. Or lax. Or loose. But not lovely. To the extent that I didn’t enter PROLIX for ages as I didn’t believe the setter would put so weak a clue in. Which I think may back up the “draft published in error” comments.

54. Simple Monday stuff. That’s ok. Not sure if a ‘cop’ is necessarily a ‘senior officer’ though.

55. Surely ale is a sort of beer, as are lager, porter, stour, pils and so on?

56. GBit of a weird one this, for me at least, as everything went in pretty quickly – I can’t remember finishing in under twenty minutes before – but so quickly that I didn’t really look that hard at the actual parsing of the clues (other than a raised eyebrow at AGENT ORANGE, presuming that I’d misremembered what it does). Perhaps it’s one that better suits the inexperienced as we’re used to working much more from crossers and then checking the parsing works, rather than putting answers together from the given elements? If so it’s an unusual way to balance up the difficulty level to suit everyone.

     

    Going back over the clues though I can see why it’s grating with most people. If it’s a draft of an earlier puzzle that’s already been published I guess it explains it. Only surprised this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often, given the potential for things to get mislabelled.

57. Simon S @55

    Yes – you would have to go back to the 14th/15th centuries for there to be a difference. Back then the presence or absence of hops was the distinction.

58. muffin @57: so you like your ales mature then?

59. Valentine @41. Am storing it up. Thanks. Learning about crossword language is fun if annoying at times.

60. [PostMark @58.

    No, they would have gone off by now!]

61. Have to admit I didn’t like chief of police, sounds like a contrived abbreviation. Many better ways of cluing COP I would have thought.
    I didn’t know 3d, and missed the anagram of room in 8a.
    All in all, an enjoyable crossword.
    Thanks for the hints.

62. More or less a write-in but there were some lovely surfaces.

    I too took CO as senior officer and PE as some sort of drug – Dave Clark @44 offers us justification for this!

    Also, I’m not sure I see the issue with the use of tangle (as opposed to tangled) as an anagrind.  I read tangle as a noun (cf. OddOtter @43).

    Thanks Pan and manehi for a pleasant start to the week…

63. A very quick start for me with PROLIX, which I think was perfectly fairly clued – much nastier clues are usually celebrated towards the end of the week! I liked the DESIGNATE surface.

64. I am with those who think there is a missing anagram indicator for “alien contrives”.  I can offer a couple of arguments.  If one is an anagram indicator and the other is the anagrind, then after you’ve done that once the two words are used up and don’t get to play again.  That’s just the way crosswords work.  If Pan had wanted to do something unorthodox, and new schemes are always welcome imo, then it would have needed something like “mutually” to indicate what was going on.  The other reason it doesn’t work as it stands is that even if you did make anagrams of the two words, the anagrams would be side-by-side and not intermingled.

65. Sorry, keyser soze @53, I was a bit slow to see why you didn’t like it. A synonym of professional would indeed have been better.

66. Dr Whatson, surely  the anagram indicator is just “spell” as mentioned by OddOtter at 43. The letters simply spell your answer. QED.

     

    Gentle moderate fun puzzle. Ta.

67. Finished a Guardian cryptic without cheating! Guess it must have been easy but still pleased. Can now take the rest of the week off.

68. baerchen@38, Re your surprise at the love for this crossword, here is my take on it. There is a spectrum of solvers, with those who like smooth, clever and amusing surfaces and don’t care about the mechanics of the clues, and those who like cleverly constructed within-the-rules clues and don’t care much about the surfaces. It’s a spectrum, of course, not an either/or preference. This one appealed to the solvers on one end of the spectrum (lots of delightful surfaces, e.g., 13a, 23a, 14d, 15d) and not to those on the other end (lots of sloppy or incorrect clues, e.g. 1a, 20a, 8d, 22d). The love for this puzzle comes from one side of the spectrum, and there seem to be many such solvers.

    And those who fall in the middle but lean to the surface-side work hard to earn their “no-prizes”.

69. PostMark@11 (and others):Alternatively, perhaps AGENT ORANGE is the Head of the President’s Protection detail – the “CO(P)” – the “chap” in question being liable to be sacked (“a goner”) if the stress of the job makes the holder break wind (i.e. emit “nerve gas”).

    Might this explain away the apparent inconsistencies in 1ac and 8dn?

70. Always late to the party, but my brother and I have solved the Guardian’s cryptic daily since March 13 … lockdown here in Ontario. We had no problem with today’s, but I could not see “pants” as an anagrind … if anyone is reading these comments still, can you help?

     

71. Paulus@70.  I’ve always known it as an anagrind but had never thought why.  Here’s an explanation from 2K13: ‘Pants’ is slang for dreadful/rubbish. And so it can function as anagram indicator.   Not something I really associate with ‘pants’ but I’m considerably less Brit than I used to be :-).

72. … and they use this lovely example from Arachne, whom I hope graces our pages again: Guardian 26016 (Arachne): Hot pants, more or less clean (10) THOROUGHLY
    (HOT)* ROUGHLY (more or less); definition: clean

73. Geoffrey@71 and @72 … thank you so much! That is not Canadian slang, though in fairness, I would never say dreadful or rubbish in that context either, we’re more prosaic and would say awful, garbage. I very much appreciate you making the time, I read the comments here everyday and have contributed before, as we don’t solve the puzzle until the evening, over a phone call after work, I never feel like I can make a useful contribution.

74. Does anyone not think that 9 across was cleverer than explained? Com for firm, as in .com and pact for agreement?

75. COP = Senior Officer = Chief Of Police

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