Guardian 28,382 / Pasquale

100 comments on “Guardian 28,382 / Pasquale”

1. OMG that was a very tough puzzle.

   Failed DIES + 4d Avogadro’s number – never heard that word before, and guessed at NUMBER from the crossers. Would not have solved it even if I had noticed it was an anagram. I had the OS NUMBER bit and thought maybe that was the ‘huge figure’ bit.

   New: PIP EMMA, LASSA FEVER, ARCTIC TERN, BIOMARKER, GOURDES (thanks, google).

   Thanks, Pasqule and Eileen.

2. As an Agatha Christie fan, I remembered Pip and Emma as two of the suspects in A Murder is Announced.

3. Well, I’m early today. Had LUPINUS, thinking it might be the Latin name! Couldn’t think of MALT so had PART. Didn’t know 20a. However, pretty enjoyable so thanks to Pasquale and Eileen

4. Challenging with a few DNKs and a couple of helpers – I’m thinking Pasquale has a science background because AVOGADRO’S NUMBER (I’ve always known it as Avogadro’s Constant though) is the kind of thing that pops-up in physics/chemisty GCSEs and possibly no-where else in life! For me, that was a write-in though – quite unlike 16a and 20a both of which were unknown.

   Step-up from yesterday requiring not just two cups-of-coffee, but one cup of posh (well, as posh as we ever get in Crawley) filter coffee (left over tub of Folgers from my last trip to the US) and a biscuit but puzzle/coffee/biscuit were most enjoyable for which I say thank you Pasquale and Eileen!

5. Boy that was really tough and I had to reveal BIOMARKER and MALT. I learnt a few new words but I was able to solve them because of the clinical clueing. I agree Eileen that HEARER was quite a strange clue.

   I googled the long mathematical clue and realised why I could never work in this field! I liked PIP EMMA (new), PO BOX and GAME WARDEN. Hardest challenge in a long time

   Ta Pasquale & Eileen

6. What a great puzzle. Pasquale’s penchant for the less well-thumbed parts of the dictionary always has me worried I’m going to fail, but today was an object lesson in how to clue obscure words/meanings clearly. PIP EMMA, MAYA, GOURDES and LUPINES were all new to me, but the cluing and the crossers got you there (or at least they got me there) each time.

   Favourite: PO BOX (partly because it was good to find an outlet for the POX which was still floating around in my head after my ill-advised POX WATCH last week!).

   I also grinned at the contrapaulian STUMP, the Man in the dog in BIOMARKER, and at the ‘odd chaps in the CU’ in CATECHUMEN. Nice to see a bit of Greek too, with the -oumenos participle ending, as well as a reminder of the ‘chi’ origin of the X in Xmas (thanks Eileen!).

   Many thanks P & E

7. tiny amendment: 12a, A MEW in GARDEN

8. For me, 21a was one of the best clues for a long time and 1d and 14a two of the worse. Personal view as ever.

9. Worth the entry fee just for 4d! “Six times ten to the 23” is etched in my brain. It was the four-letter words that went in last. I needed to come here for some of the parsing. Flirted with the SAROD, but it wouldn’t parse.
   Thanks to Eileen for the blog and to Pasquale for an excellent puzzle.

10. Also puzzled by solution to 14c (could it be “sounds like Hera” – ie, a role? No; I know that is silly). Re puzzling – in 10ac puzzle is used as anagrind but also as a second definition. Really enjoy the challenges set by Pasquale and agree, Eileen, that his clueing is usually so meticulous that answers can be found even when the term is not known. Having said that I worked out 20ac partly by being familiar with meaning of “catechism” and partly be impeccable word play. Thanks all round.

11. Goodness knows where I remembered AVOGADROS NUMBER from – University Challenge maybe? Certainly not something I’ve ever studied. New to me: MAYA, GOURDES, LUPINES with an E.
    I gave up on DIES and MALT – and thank you for parsing ARCTIC TERN, for which I always seemed to have a letter missing. By the way, I think GAME WARDEN is A MEW in GARDEN.

12. Thanks Pasquale and Eileen
    I thought HEARER made sense (it’s the function of the ear), but the definition for GAME WARDEN was odder. I needed the anagram solver for GOURDES, and a wordsearch fo CATECHUMEN, but the rest was accessible, though MALT was from definition only. Favourite was BIOMARKER, as I constructed it “upwards”.

13. I’m one to whom Avogadro is way more familiar than either a CATECHUMEN or the goddess MAYA. Never heard of either! (And as for dollars = GOURDES in Haiti. Surely, as everywhere else, dollars = dollars in Haiti. No?)

    Thanks as ever to Eileen and Pasquale for broadening my education!

14. Like essexboy @6 I thought this was a really great puzzle, particularly BIOMARKER which is clue of the month for me so far. I liked PIP EMMA and PO BOX in the NW corner; got stuck at the very end on MALT, and had to resort to looking up synonyms for ‘abuse’. Remembered AVOGADRO’S once I had NUMBER, Many thanks to Pasquale and to Eileen for the blog.

15. I was misled twice in the first NW corner: my first two – PIP EMMA and PO BOX – made me think I’d chanced early on a theme of abbreviations and then MAYA, BILLY GOAT and XIAN had me half way to a pangram that wasn’t to be. Not that either of those are complaints. A few dnk’s but that’s par for the course with this setter: I’d heard of the long number but needed help to get the first element; CATECHUMEN came together from the wordplay; ASEPSIS was an anc (am not certain) and I didn’t equate GOURDES with Haitian dollars.

    Several big ticks: BIO MARKER is very clever and highly topical and I loved GAME WARDEN. FLICKER, TEE OFF and STUMP all brought smiles, ARCTIC TERN was nicely constructed and DIES was classy. I’m more used to hearing ‘as a’ last resort rather than ‘in the’ which felt a tiny bit clunky to my ear but is the most minor of quibbles.

    Thanks Pasquale and Eileen

16. With over half a dozen of these unknown to me, including AVOGADROS NUMBER and CATECHUMEN, this was a bit of a tussle. And last one in was BIOMARKER, with the cleverly disguised IOM last to succumb. TUTORED, which often occurs in crosswords was cleverly clued here, I thought…

17. …oh, and I wasn’t at all convinced by HEARER, either…

18. Remembered 4d (something to the 23rd?) from school chem, and look forward to more from the chemists (never really got what a mole was). Back to the top, pip emma similar to Eileen, encountered somewhere. 20ac, otoh, was a nho, and hence a bap (bung and pray), whereas 21ac was just within my meagre Latin (carpe deum [sp?], etc). My feel is it’s not all that long since the previous agouti, Eileen, but I could be wrong. Anyway, tough puzzle, took me hours, but no complaints, ta both.

19. Quite a challenge indeed. Several DNKs for me too. I don’t recall AVOGADRO’S NUMBER from any physics or chemisty lesson that I was ever in, but then I may have been larking about at the back of the class.

    That stray E that was evicted from the middle of Tehran, got caught up in a bunch of lupins. I’m not sure that Dennis Moore would approve.

    +1 for BIOMARKER as favourite clue today.

    Thanks to Pasquale and Eileen

20. PIP EMMA derives from the British Army’s old code for pronouncing easily misunderstood letters over the primitive phone connections of the time. Several have survived in other terms: ack for A gives us ack emma for the morning, and ack-ack for anti aircraft fire: toc for T gave the abbreviation Toc H for the servicemen’s charity Talbot House.

21. Thanks, quenbarrow @7 and gladys @11 – corrected now.

22. gladys @20: thanks for that. Spurred me to look up the old code and I see, as well as ACK, PIP, EMMA, TOC and VIC, one of the earliest was BEER for B. Good old British servicemen! And, apart from four years as BUTTER during WW1, it remained so until we adopted the NATO alphabet in 1956.

23. Penfold @19: haha, I remember us all at school learning that off by heart.

24. Strewth. All went in but with 5 or 6 question marks so thanks for the blog Eileen.

    Although, I have to say that I still don’t truly understand what a mole is even having read the link. Perhaps a chemist will charge in with a pipette or something and slay this dragon for me.

    Thought MALT was neat, IN THE LAST RESORT good fun, but still a bit baffled by HEARER.

    Toughie but fairie, for me.

    Many thanks, both.

25. [OK, I’ll give it a go. The relative atomic mass of hydrogen is 1; of carbon is 12. Thus there are the same number of atoms in 1g of hydrogen as in 12g of carbon. If 12g of carbon combine with 4g of hydrogen, there are 4 times as many hydrogen atoms, so the compound is CH4 (or some multiple).
    Avogadro’s number (or constant) is the actual number of atoms in 12g of carbon, roughly 6x 10^23.
    The amount of substance that weighs its relative atomic (or molecular) mass in grams is called a mole of the substance.]

26. Thanks for the reminder, gladys @20 – I wondered why I couldn’t find my blog of PIP EMMA in the archive: I think the answer was probably actually TOC H!

27. I remembered that “Beware of Maya” appears in George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness”.

28. I struggled with most of the 4 letter words. I thought I had 3d correct with MAG (PM once) + I, but billy-goat sorted that for me. Quite a lot of unusual words, but that’s what the wordplay is for – a nice puzzle.

29. Still don’t understand why “One may take note of that” defines GAME WARDEN.

30. “…meticulously clued and therefore ultimately solvable” sums this up very nicely. At least 3 unknowns, but all possible from wordplay, and parsing which could (eventually!) be worked out.

    Big ticks from me for BIOMARKER and GAME WARDEN.

    Funny how one’s memory can be wrong. I always thought AVOGADRO’S NUMBER was 6.023 x 10 to the 23rd power, whereas looking it up I see that it’s 6.022 x 10 to the 23rd power. Doesn’t sound like much but that’s an awfully big difference in the number of atoms / molecules. Well, now I know.

    Thanks to Pasquale and Eileen

31. Thanks Pasquale and Eileen

    @26, Eileen, you may be remembering Enigmatist’s Prize 26101 which you blogged way back on 16/11/13: 2D was TOC EMMA.

32. John Wells@29: I think it’s supposed to be an &lit: a GAME WARDEN would take note of animal sounds in an outdoor area. Doesn’t quite work for me either.

33. William@24
    Hydrogen is the lightest element, so we give it a weight of 1. Carbon is twelve times the weight, so 12 units. Iron on this scale is 56 and so on. It turns out that 1g of hydrogen, 12g of carbon and 56g of iron all have the same number of atoms. (It works for all atoms and indeed molecules). This is hugely significant to our understanding and very useful for calculations. The amount of material in question is one mole.
    Incidentally, Amadeo Avogadro didn’t know what the number was. Canizzaro worked it out later.

34. Muffin@24 – you type faster than I do!

35. Some of the definitions seemed vague to me. DNKs outnumbered lightbulb moments overall too. Onwards and upwards.

36. There are a couple of those coincidences that I think can’t be just coincidences, but almost certainly are, with today’s Independent cryptic by Skinny.

    Carry on!

37. Bless you, Simon S @31 – that’s the one!

    gladys @32 – my thoughts exactly.

38. [Muffin @24 and Auriga @33: Just discovered that the Avogadro Constant is taught at Key Stage 4 these days! https://keystagewiki.com/index.php/Avogadro_Constant My memory must be failing me or I was just asleep through O and A level because I’ve just found it mentioned in my old Quantum lecture notes (we did a “combined” 1st year of general sciencey bits at Uni) mentioned with Planck and I can’t for the life of me remember what it was all about except I have a scribble in my notebook about not liking avocados… Those were the early days of the Indy and I used to sit in lectures doing the crosswords and sweet …. all else.

    Now I’m going to spend the remaining 45 minutes of the morning worrying that I’ve forgotten something that I had incredibly scant understanding of anyway unless somone can explain what it was all about in the first place! Google – help me!]

39. I think AVOGADRO’S NUMBER may be something that is taught fairly early on in schools these days [any teachers out there that could comment?] I don’t suppose they teach CATECHUMEN though, although I managed to put it together from the wordplay. I see that Collins says about GOURDE: ‘C19: from French, feminine of gourd heavy, from Latin gurdus a stupid person.’ Well, that derivation I definitely didn’t know.

    I liked BIOMARKER, TUTORED and the PO BOX.

    Thanks Pasquale and Eileen.

40. … forgot to close the italics after ‘person’

41. A bit more about GOURDE from Wiki: ‘The word “gourde” is a French cognate for the Spanish term “gordo”, from the “pesos gordos” (also known in English as “hard” pieces of eight, and in French as “piastres fortes espagnoles”) in which colonial-era contracts within the Spanish sphere of influence were often denominated.

42. There were too many obscurities here for me to finish without resorting to aids but I enjoyed the challenge and was pleased to completed more than three-quarters of it before deciding enough was enough.

43. I really liked this with MALT and DIES last in
    Thanks for blog Eileen and Don for puzzle

44. Typical Don as his background is a long association with academia and publishing at Oxford. Always clued well although I do struggle with hearer. Loved Isle of Man though .Thanks Don and Eileen

45. [gladys @20: You said, “toc for T gave the abbreviation Toc H for the servicemen’s charity Talbot House.” Thanks for that. I’ve never known till now.

    Why was it an issue for me? At school, a maths teacher – one of my favourites, with an excellent dry wit – often used to say, playfully: “Eee, lad, yer as dim as a Toc H lamp.”]

46. The 4 letter words were the hardest!, DIES and MALT going in last. Learnt about AVOGADROS NUMBER in high school chemistry, ( though I wouldn’t have been able to say now what it is so thanks for the explanations, muffin@24 and auriga@33), must have read the same Agatha Christie as blaise@2, and dragged CATECHUMEN out of some distant memory. Dnk MAYA though and could not parse BIOMARKER, failing to see IOM for what it is. A couple of slightly dodgy definitions 12ac and 14ac but otherwise a fine puzzle. Ta to Pasquale and Eileen.

47. Thanks to Pasquale and to Eileen for a blog which I needed for IOM – I stared and stared…

    I enjoyed this and it was a succulent chew for the most part but PILLAGE and MALT stuck in the throat somewhat, the former because I don’t like clues that require me to solve from select wordplay (“village” from “small community”) and then make an unspecified change (“new leader”) to get what is really quite a tenuous definition (I can just about equate “devastation” with PILLAGE but I have to suck my teeth and squint a bit), the latter because I am expected to pluck “maltreat” from the air with the aid of “abuse” and ditch half of it – a level of clairvoyance which I achieved after a mesmeric alphabetic trawl (but the surface is so good).

    CynicCure@13: I’m inclined to hop the ball that “dollar” is now a universal term for cash of any sort.

48. I think if I had a hang-up about using aids to finish a puzzle, I would have hated this, but, as it was I enjoyed fiddling it out. GAME WARDEN and HEARER for me were rare examples of clues that I worked out from the word play but still didn’t really get the definition part. I had a vague recollection of the huge number, but couldn’t be sure whether it was AVOGADRO, AVODAGRO or some other combination. The more you stare at the possibilities, the more plausible they become.

49. Far too much need for a dictionary in this one. For me, trivial wordplay and obscure definition is the very opposite of what a good clue should be. The wordplay makes the answer seem obvious, but the definition still needs to be checked. How much more satisfying when the challenge is in the word play, and definition is familiar.. Dictionaries are ok for weekends, but weekday puzzles should be possible on the train. Some excellent clues here, but far too many recherche definitions.

50. Great fun. Did most in bed last night and a few this morning, including changing 5d (see below). That’s the way I like ’em. Thanks Pasquale and Eileen.

    I think I also learned about PIP (and ACK) EMMA from Agatha Christie, both the siblings in the novel mentioned and (I think) war talk in general.

    Did anybody else try ‘ARPY for ‘orrible woman? Or AT THE LAST MINUTE/MOMENT (I tried both) for 5d? I’m with PostMark @15 on last resorts.

    I got NUMBER first, from the crossers, but it took a while to assemble the rest from what was left in the anagram fodder, till I remembered the Avogadro Number (that’s what we called it) from high school chemistry.

51. One of the great things about G crosswords is the range of setters and their different styles. As with others above it was DIES and MALT which held out until the end – with the latter being my least favourite clue for the reason given by Alphalpha@47. I also am still underwhelmed by HEARER, but otherwise thought it was an excellent puzzle and was pleased to work out CATCHUMEN (a jorum) and dredge up A’s NUMBER – thanks to muffin and auriga for the explanations – between the two of you I get it, but doubt it will stick. PIP EMMA was new to me; it was nice to see the AGOUTI again and my favourite clue was the much praised BIOMARKER. Many thanks to Pasquale for a different challenge and Eileen for the ever exemplary blog.

52. Well I rather liked the puzzle, despite having to use a dictionary once or twice to confirm an answer (not much different than the Check button I suppose, as long as you got it right!)

    Like Eileen, I was underwhelmed by HEARER.

    I was a bit perplexed by the definition in 2d of PILLAGE. I always thought that in the expression “sack and pillage” that the sacking was the devastation, and the pillage was the looting. Like fish and chips, they go together but they’re not the same. I don’t think the clue would have suffered if it had used “Looting…” and then there would have been no question.

53. My (online) dictionary got me GOURDES, but it wasn’t my first try. Why not Geurdos or Gruedos for example? That’s the problem with the anagram of an unknown word – there may be alternatives that are just as plausible.

    But I quite like my Pasquale challenges, and he seemed to have cut the obscurities recently so this seems something like a return to form.

    Since Eileen has ‘fessed up to some online help, I don’t see why I shouldn’t. 20A wasn’t going to solve easily. Something derived from Catechism? Blithely ignoring the Union, but with a good supply of crossers, Catechiser seemed plausible and fitted. Chuck it into Google just to be sure – no Catechiser, but there’s CATECHUMEN instead. Didn’t mean to, honest.

54. Thanks for feedback — appreciated

    STUMP — 2 defs (Dismiss (cricket) and puzzle)+ must=stum (remarkable anagrammatic synonyms) + p (=pee)

    I mention this because the blogger missed it and a Ximenean ( bless him!) was troubled by the dash between the supposed anag indicator and the word anagrammed

55. Trailman @53: point taken re anagrams, but on this occasion I felt we had a pointer from the Haiti ref. I took it that I was looking for French rather than Spanish endings, which meant -DES not -DOS. It was then a straight choice between GOURDES and GRUODES. (If there was such a word as GRUODES, I’d rather like to see it clued as ‘cultivated poetry, we hear’ 😉 )

    On 20a – you may never need to use this, but a catechist catechises a catechumen.

    Pasquale @54: glad I didn’t have to know what stum meant!!

56. Thank you, Pasquale @54. I’ll amend the blog.

57. For the none scientists, a mole of sugar and a mole of peas would have the same number of sugar grains or peas. The number of each would be Avogadro’s Constant.

58. Re: GOURDES. I understand that everyone has their own criteria for what if any reference works they allow themselves. In this case I think it is perfectly fine if on reading the clue you realize that what is required as a stepping stone is the name for Haitian currency, and look it up. I know I did.

59. Thanks Pasquale @54; TILT is stum = must.

60. Thanks to Pasquale for popping in to let us know about must=stum. Yet another obscurity! We learn something new every day here, it seems.

    I have mentioned before about how anagrams for obscure words are unfair on solvers. Today I had two possibles, noted on a corner of my Guardian, for 7d: GOURDES and GUERDOS (and Trailman @53 has mentioned GRUEDOS as well). I got lucky when the final crosser dropped in, but I had to go and check in Chambers to be sure. In the case of 4d I recognised AVOGADROS NUMBER once I got the fourth crosser; having paid attention during school chemistry lessons also helped (yes, I’m looking at you, MaidenBartok @38 and Penfold @19)! But without that knowledge the clue is hard to solve accurately because the letters in the fodder can be arranged in so many ways. On the other hand, CATECHUMEN and BIOMARKER were solved with confidence from the wordplay; if the former in particular had been an anagram instead, I would still be staring gormlessly at it.

61. essexboy @55: Yes, but see Robi @41 which shows how your logical “looking for French rather than Spanish endings” could have come unstuck – “pesos gordos were also known as “hard” pieces of eight and piastres fortes espagnoles”.

    I’m with Trailman on this one; and yes, I know we could always look up the Haitian currency (as Dr. WhatsOn @58 suggests), but – and I don’t want to use the word “cheating” here – if I do that I always feel that either I’ve let myself down, or else that the setter has provided an inadequate clue.

62. Like Blaise @2, I remembered Pip and Emma from Agatha Christie.
    Mr B looked at me very sadly when I said I had never heard of Avagadro’s Number and said ‘Didn’t you do any Chemistry?’ Finding that it was out of Eileen’s comfort zone too, has restored my self esteem somewhat.

63. PIP EMMA, AVOGADROS NUMBER, and GOURDES were new to me but the latter became obvious with the crossings. I enjoyed BILLY GOAT and GLEANER and I liked the challenge of much of the rest. Thanks Pasquale — I know from your Bradman alter ego never to expect a write-in. Thanks Eileen as always.

64. [Pedro @57. A mole of peas! That’s a huge amount of peas.

    If an average pea is about 5mm across, you could lay out 200 peas along a line one metre long. So there would be 40,000 in a single layer in a square measuring one metre on each side, and 8 million in a cubic metre. If you packed an Avagadro’s Number of peas in cardboard boxes, at the rate of 8 million per box, you would need 7.5 quadrillion boxes (that’s 7,500,000,000,000,000). To stack all those boxes in a warehouse – say, 15 boxes high – it would need to have a floor area of five billion square kilometres, or more than 70 thousand kilometres on each side. That’s about 10 times the surface of the planet. That’s if we could grow that many peas.

    Supposing we did grow that many peas, the present population could maybe eat 100 peas every meal, that’s about 1000 meals a year. There are about 7.5 billion people, so between us we could eat all the peas in one mole of peas if we ate peas every day for just 800 million years.]

65. sheffield hatter @64 Picturing a Mole of Peas

66. [Penfold – thanks for that. In that linked article they stacked the peas over the entire surface of the USA and they came to 17 miles deep, or high, whichever you prefer. Don’t try this at home. Stacking this mass of peas to this height would cause the planet to wobble on its axis and plunge us headlong into the sun within a few days. OK, I’m just guessing now, but we don’t want anyone growing all those peas just to find out what happens, do we.]

67. No.

68. Pip Emma conjures up an image of Lord Peter Wimsey to me. Not sure whether from a great book or a mediocre dramatization.
    @50: I was also leaving 5d to the “last moment” but finally decided to change it as a “last resort”
    I found 23d to be the hardest clue – *A*T is not a lot of help and there are many spirits. Perhaps I should have concentrated harder on 8 letter words for abuse but somehow assumed that would end with *A*T.
    Oh well, good fun.

69. [hatter, Penfold et al: it’s a shame no-one’s tried to picture a mole of moles. That would be a sight worth seeing. That said, I’m glad you decided to give peas a chance.]

70. What a lovely blog and set of comments today! I found the crossword a bit curate’s eggish. HEARER and MALT were my least favourite, and BIOMARKER my favourite – a brilliant clue, but there were several other great bits of wordplay for obscure answers, – CATECHUMEN being another educational example.

    I got AVOGADROS NUMBER pretty fast, being a chemist, but just like WordPlodder@30 I’d misremembered the second decimal place!

    Thanks to Pasquale, Eileen and the excellent commenting throng!

71. Thank you, TimW @70 – I’ve been feeling a little bruised re STUMP. 😉

72. Eileen@71 Please don’t feel bruised. Most of us have been STUMPED by many less abstruse allusions. In fact, the Don’s explanation creates more problems than it solves. Most clues puzzle me at first without stumping me, so the double definition doesn’t quite work.

73. Bless you, Petert @72. I knew that MUST was unfermented wine but had never heard of STUM as such (confirmed by Chambers, now that I know what to look up), so too clever by half for me and, from lack of comments, most other folk here, it seems. The setter has every reason to be proud of coming up with such an intricate clue for a five-letter word – but I’m afraid it still doesn’t quite work for me, either.

    As we’re forever saying, it’s always a privilege when setters drop in here – so I’m sorry that the Don didn’t address any commenters’ queries regarding today’s puzzle.

74. Eileen@71/3: Having pondered Pasquale’s stum/must offering I feel like a reluctant Mother Superior – nun the wiser really. I think you’re entitled to feel maltreated. A swift jorum is recommended – then you can feel malt-treated.
    I suppose we all try to find merit in the compositions that underpin our pastime – I know I do and rarely post unless I have something positive to say; I was moved to offer today in response to a couple of clues which I thought were, erm, a trifle slack. I could have gone on. Now to find that the setter is telling jokes among himself is fairly galling. I feel the need for further restraint. Must stay https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stum.

75. Why didn’t that link work?

76. Grandiloquent – that’s the word – grandiloquent jokes.

77. Nicely clued and suitably chewy for a Tuesday. My guess for the Haitian readies was GERUDOS until the crossers sorted me. I’m another chemist and felt relief at getting AVOGADRO’S NUMBER from the long anagram (at which I’m usually pretty bad) without cheating.
    I enjoyed the definitions for HEARER and GAME WARDEN. I’m with Eileen in the parsing of STUMP. I’d never have got the 2 defs + wordplay alternative in a month of Sundays. I fail to see the problem with the hyphen, for Ximenes or anyone else for that matter.
    Good fun today.
    Thanks, Pasquale, Eileen and posters for the blog.

78. I’m I alone in feeling STUMP = dismiss isn’t playing by the normal rules? Stumping is one way of dismissing so shouldn’t it be “way to dismiss puzzle! – must pee” or similar. If I’m wrong please explain why and I’ll have learned something. Thanks for a challenging workout Pasquale.

79. Apols – typo. Should say: Am I…

80. Alphalpha @47: if you are still reading, what is this ‘hop the ball’ please ?
    Thanks to the Don and Eileen – defeated by DIES.
    Morpheus: it’s not a definition by example, so no different from clueing ‘setter’ as ‘dog’ rather than ‘type of dog’.

81. Hi Alphalpha @74
    I was about to log off before your kind words – thank you for your understanding.
    I think I’ve said several times here that I try to adopt the Thumper principle as far as possible. 😉

82. Gonzo: perhaps I should have run it up a flagpole. No salutes as it turns out.

83. [Alphalpha @74: “telling jokes among himself” – I’ll have to try to remember that one. No knowing when it may come in handy!]

84. Don Pasquale still needs to be taught manners …
    Thank you Eileen for a very helpful blog, luckily I had just re-read the The Comedians by Graham Greene, so GOURDES was no problem.

85. Many thanks, Cookie x . Now I really am going to bed.

86. Loved this and wanted to say so, albeit belatedly.

87. I thought you’d given up setting, Don

88. Just an afterthought on Avogadro’s number. I was taught it in top-set Chemistry in Key Stage 3, in 1994.

    Lovely puzzle, with BIOMARKER an especial highlight.

89. Sheffield Hatter @ 64: Thank you for your thesis on peases (or piece on peas). Nice to see someone has considered the practical implications.

90. A DNF having failed on DIES. DNKs: MAYA, LUPINES, CATECHUMEN, GOURDES. Three of these worked out from the cryptic and crossers. I was stuck with CU T(e)A(c)H needing something inside it, until I did a word search.

91. Came back to check on this because of somthing in today’s post — I’ve already forgotten what. But thanks for the Thumper Principle, Eileen — new to me. I think I saw Disney’s Bambi as a tot, but don’t remember much of it.

92. Hi Valentine – I’m not sure whether you’re asking for an explanation but it’s here

93. Would you believe that Avogadro’s number and MOLE have just popped up in a question on Richard Osman’s House of Games?

94. Thank you Eileen, as you can see this took me a while and having finally guessed BIOMARKER i couldn’t get past Mark as the bitten man – now i realise I should have paid more attention to that question mark! Same sentiments as the broad consensus above, enjoyed winkling out the parsing of ARCTIC TERN and needed some online help/checking but very happy with the Lorumic AGOUTIS and LASSA FEVER. Even happier that my GCSE / A-level chemistry has finally been justified – my favourite today, thanks Pasquale.

95. gladys @93 – my instinctive answer to that would be, ‘Never!’
    I do watch House of Games, as light relief, as being a programme whose participants are unfailingly nice to each other but I record it, as it clashes with the News. I have a Zoom meeting at 7.30, so I’ve just had a quick look – amazing! (I guessed that it would be in the Highbrow / Lowbrow round!)

96. I for one was delighted to learn from Pasquale of the words that are both anagram and synonym (must and stum). Are there any others in the English language?

97. I had wile for Dies …. wile away the time as an classical phrase for passing time and wile as a strategy or fashioin

98. Surprised no one other than Eileen queried the enumeration in 1D. To me it’s plain wrong, which compounded an already impossibly hard crossword.

99. Barrie, Auckland @98
    For the record, I was not querying the enumeration, which has been established as standard – just acknowledging the fact that some folk still don’t like it!

100. Hoorah for Gazzh at 94! I too thought Mark for man and spent ages trying to track down a strange dog called Bioer! Duh! Thank you, Eileen, for putting me out of my misery – I’d never have thought of IOM for Man

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