Guardian Cryptic 28,430 by Pasquale

100 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,430 by Pasquale”

1. 8D – ‘ego’ is centred in ‘the gods’

2. This defeated me (as Pasquale usually does). I wondered if 7D was a double definition? Choice and letter size for keyboarder

   minty

3. Rohanm and Minty

   Thanks – I just didn’t look hard enough for the cryptic elements.

   That sometimes happens when I find the answer so obvious that I just wrote it on without thinking.

4. Ref EMERY. I took grotesque to mean absurd or bizarre, which describes many of Emery’s characters. I struggled with the use of “comedian” in the clue, since he wasn’t remotely funny. Thanks both.

5. Like rohanm @1 I spotted ego in the gods and that made EGOCENTRICITY my favourite clue though RETURNEES was close.

   I was proud of myself for working out so many words that I either did not know or were lurking in the deepest and darkest corners of my memory: NERVINE, AERIE, NILOT. Nor do I understand why EMERY was a grotesque unless this is a technical term for his sort of comedy: I remember there being a lot of travesty involved. And I was unaware of ELITE as a print size (perhaps I am too young at 64) or CHAMBERED as ‘like a shot’ (because it is in the chamber of a revolver??). So this crossword was an education for me.

   Not sure I’m terribly happy about the definition of TRIBESMAN as ‘native’.

   LOI was TERRACE (another clever clue)

   Thanks for the workout Pasquale and the blog loonapick.

6. The wikipedia entry for Dick Emery says ‘The show involved Emery dressing up as various characters, “a flamboyant cast of comic grotesques”. These included the buck-toothed Church of England vicar, sex-starved, menopausal, man-eating spinster Hetty, and Clarence, an outrageously camp man who coined the catchphrase “Hello Honky Tonks”…’

7. …oh, and I took “elite” as also being a [sort of] synonym of “choice” (in the adjectival sense).

8. Just about managed this apart from SHIES; in AERIE, ‘overlooking North’ seems rather redundant. Had to check NILOT. Liked CHAMBERED, DOUBLE-CROSSED, HEART-STOPPING. Many thanks to Pasquale and loonapick.

9. DOUBLE CROSSED refers to the two large crosses in the grid. This and ROCHESTER both were in Tees crossword in 2015 – is that coincidence?

10. Worth mentioning that the grid today is DOUBLE CROSSED – the black squares form two crosses. I also liked the EGO-CENTRICITY of thE GOds. New to me were NERVINE, which I eventually worked out, and NILOT which I didn’t. I liked ON THE FLAT and YOU NAME IT.
    I wonder if Pasquale has picked up “grotesque” from the Wikipedia description of Dick Emery that blaise@6 quoted – it doesn’t seem particularly appropriate to me.

11. Woody Guthrie is in the pantheon. Dick Emery, rather less so.
    An education as ever from the Don, so thanks to him and loonapick.

12. Yes I took ELITE to mean choice but I didn’t know the second bit. GUTHRIE and EMERY were first ones in, so I thought we were having a retro challenge (Wiggers @4: ‘you are awful’, my mum thought he was hilarious). New words were NERVINE and NILOT. I laughed at the irony of a very exciting Scottish football team although I do follow Glasgow Rangers. My favourites were ON THE FLAT, TONY BLAIR, STREAKERS RETURNEES and ROCHESTER. A lovely challenge all round.

    Ta Pasquale & loonapick for the great blog.

13. I parsed ELITE as minty@2 does.

14. I assumed the definition in 16 to be ‘hero’, ROCHESTER being that of Jane Eyre. Admittedly it would render ‘see’ redundant but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility

15. Spotted ‘ego’ like those above and find I am with yesyes @5 in nominating EGOCENTRICITY as COTD. The whole surface is pertinent – though I’m not sure it is a cad. My own take on the EMERY/grotesque was that grotesques, like gargoyles, tend to overstress physical deformity or ugliness and Dick Emery’s characters did that in a way that, say, Morecambe and Wise’s didn’t. (A modern day version would probably be the League of Gentlemen or possibly Little Britain where the same approach has been adopted.) Ooh, he was awful, but we liked him… (or didn’t)

    I was pleased to get NERVINE – a dnk – from the wordplay and then a Google check, smiled at YOU NAME IT and was lucky to have both end letters for CHAMBERED which confirmed it was probably Chad with a B and four letter lake in the middle. Lovely word and, yes to yesyes, – I believe chambered describes a bullet that has yet to be fired but is within the chamber. I liked SHIES though the ‘aboard ship’ gave me an easy start, WESTERN SAHARA is a neat anagram and DOGGO is superb. I rather liked ELITE and, funnily enough, discovered that grotesque was also a typeface!

    I suspected TRIBESMAN might turn out to be a hot potato – reminding me a little of the grass skirt debate. In itself, I think it’s probably OK – many aboriginal populations adopted the tribal system so, technically, there is correlation. But I suspect the word – probably both the words – are now associated with colonial expression. I’ll be interested to see if there are further comments

    Thanks Pasquale and loonapick

16. [Totally off topic, but ELITE reminded me of another of my favourite trick translations between French and English: “dix” is equivalent to “eleven” depending on whether you’re specifying a type size to a French printer (points Didot) or a UK printer (Pica points).]

17. Thanks for the explanation for DOUBLE CROSSED (DE and G @ 9 & 10). Now it makes sense.

18. As always Pasquale is educational (I didn’t know NILOT or the stenographic meaning of ELITE), but for the most part this was quite a straightforward solve.

    Thanks to Pasquale and loonapick

19. Thanks Pasquale and loonapick
    Some obscurities, as ever, but some cracking clues too. I liked the “extended definitions” of STREAKERS and TONY BLAIR.
    I also liked NERVINE, as I put together a word I didn’t know.
    When I checked a semi-parsed EYRIE for 21d and found it wrong, I revealed the answer – another DNK.
    “Physics” isn’t really needed in 25a. Yes, it is a basic unit in physics (though thd base unit is now the kilogram), but it is used in many other fields as well, cooking not least!

20. Thanks v much for the insightful blog loonapick but I think you will join me in also thanking those above who explained 8d. I knew v well I was missing something. No Guardian setter would ever give us a non-cryptic clue. I failed on this one – but I did spot the wordplay in the other “suspect” clue at 7d which is some consolation. I always enjoy my daily crossword fix, rejoice in the ingenuity of the setters, and never have cause to grumble. Some clues/setters might seem occasionally less brilliant than others but the day when I can set clues to The Guardian standard I will die happy.

21. All my doubts answered, particularly the double crosses. I was thinking it referred to there being two across clues, except that didn’t quite work. EGOCENTRICITY and ELITE also needed clarifying. A group effort today. Thanks to Pasquale, Loonapick and to eagle-eyed contributors to this site.

22. Auriga @11 Woody Guthrie is in the pantheon. Dick Emery was in the pantomime.

    loonapick – of course quizzes should have more questions about the 70s than modern stuff. There’s got to be some advantage to getting old. Thanks for the blog and to Pasquale for the puzzle.

23. Lots of nonparses in this: look at the layout…hence double-crossed; the nho nervine; the peri-Nile dweller (try a letter and check…would never have got NI+lot); the typewriter gk (and I’m 73!), and ego being the centre of the gods. Phew, it’s a wonder the grid got filled. Ta to the Don for the challenge and to loona (et al) for picking it apart.

24. Many quizzes are a bit monocultural (I’d never be able to answer all the modern film/song stuff on Mastermind). There are two good things about the Guardian crossword:1) you can work answers out from clear clues (often!), 2) the setters between them cover a large cultural range. I am happy to fill in some gaps now and then (in my own knowledge too when setting!) . The days of Benjamin Jowett ( ”what I don’t know isn’t knowledge” are gone! ). Solvability is key in the face of the ignorance that besets us all. Thanks for all feedback.

25. Got there in the end but it felt like hard work. (Sorry Pasquale). Nice to be reminded about Dick Emery. Funny at the time but would be very dated and non-pc today. A friend of mine has an outrageous tale as a young BT engineer of visiting Dick Emery’s house to fix his phone. Sorry but I can’t repeat it here!!
    Thanks Pasquale and loonapick.

26. Having DOUBLE-CROSSED as my LOI seemed like an appropriate punchline today. Thanks to Pasquale and loonapick for untangling RETINITIS for me.

27. In the pub quiz, I always laugh when students complain that “it’s a bit before my time”. Henry VIII and dinosaurs are a bit before my time, but I don’t complain when they come up.
    Perhaps pub quizzes should have no references older than 18 years?

28. Penfold@22 – Well put!

29. Many thanks to setter and parser for their respective thought-provoking contributions. It was interesting to see that without qualification Dick Emery is described as grotesque, and Tony Blair as a statesman, whereas Che Guevara is only ‘regarded as’ a revolutionary hero – I’d have thought that all three characterisations were merely arguable opinions.

30. Good point Robert @29 but I do think ‘grotesque’ is referring to Emery’s type of comedy rather than Emery himself.

31. Thanks to Pasquale and loonapick.

    1ac didn’t immediately spring to mind, so I solved this from the bottom up. I had to check AERIE and NERVINE, though the wordplay led me there, but NILOT was somewhere in a dusty corner of the mental lumber room. EGOCENTRICITY is clever, and RETURNEES a nice clue for a horrible word (shame on you Pasquale!).

    Woody GUTHRIE was an important figure in the evolution of folk music, and therefore probably more widely known worldwide than Dick EMERY (who, in my opinion, is best forgotten!).

32. Took a while and a technical DNF as there were a couple of DNKs – NERVINE, AERIE and DOGGO for starters.

    As a child of the 70s, I do remember Dick Emery vividly; it is quite amazing how tastes change and what seems really quite off-colour now was normal Saturday-evening TV back then. I wonder what the world will look like in another 50 years?

    Can’t say that I enjoyed this puzzle that much but extend my usual thanks to Pasquale and loonapick.

33. Robert@29: Indeed, the surface reading of any Guardian setters’ clue may (… usually does) provoke outrage, objections, uneasiness or delight, but it also has to work as cryptic wordplay. So the ‘one regarded as a revolutionary hero’ phrasing enhances the cryptic value of the clue because of the potential misdirections it contains. My sympathy goes out to Pasquale who must produce a surface that is not merely cryptically ingenious, but neutral enough to avoid giving offence to any Guardian readers. “One regarded by some as a statesman but by others as a traitor to the cause sees Libya torn apart” seems a much poorer clue to me than Pasquale’s.

34. Thank you Pasquale and loonapick.

    As a former quiz setter, I’m familiar with the argument that figures in 70s popular culture should not appear in quizzes because the younger generation haven’t heard of them…..and its an argument I never give credence to. After all, figures from 20’s, 30’s and 40’s popular culture predate us all, but still rightly appear regularly in quizzes.

    Seeing Che Guevara appear (yet) again in a crossword clue makes me wonder that if future generations had to rely entirely on crossword clues for their insight into the world of the 21st century, would they conclude that Che was the only revolutionary, Ernie Els was the only golfer and the Dee Exe and Ouse were the only rivers in the UK.

35. …..and yes I know Che was a 20th century figure.

36. Too many obscurities as usual with this setter, hence no fun for me and I suspect not much for the non-experts.

37. Thanks to all the commenters so far, especially those who put me right on the cryptic nature of EGOCENTRICITY and ELITE and pointed out the two crosses in the grid. These were pretty much write-ins for me, and in my haste, I just assumed there wasn’t anything clever going on. I have slapped my own wrists for this – don’t worry!

    To clarify my comment on quizzing – in one of the leagues that I play in, questions are set by other teams rather than professionals, and some of them make no attempt to consider the age range of those taking part. It is just as unfair to ask someone in their 20s who played Selwyn Froggatt as it is to ask someone in their 70s about TOWIE or Love Island, and that was the point I was trying to make. Some young people MAY have come across Woody Guthrie, although I doubt there are many, but I bet very few have ever heard of Dick Emery, especially as his brand of humour would never be shown on TV these days.

    When I am setting a quiz, I try to ensure that there’s a mix and that the “old codger” stuff is at least still part of the communal psyche – so Fawlty Towers, Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies are fine, but questions about Mind Your Language, Dick Emery and Benny Hill would have to be offset by questions about Family Guy, Big Bang Theory and BoJack Horseman.

    Pop music and movies are slightly different in that they are played and replayed all the time, but you still have to mix it up a bit – if there are six music questions, they can’t all be about pre-90s progressive rock – you need to cover modern as well as older music, and many younger people rarely watch black and white movies, even the classics, although my 25 year old son would count Arsenic and Old Lace among his favourites thanks to his cinephile father’s influence.

38. Well, I for one really enjoyed battling my way through this unpicking things bit by bit, but knew there’d be controversy on here about one or two of the clues. Like Bingy@14 I was wondering about the ROCHESTER in Jane Eyre, and not being quite happy to see him as a hero of the book. Until I realised that this clue was all about the See (not Ely for a welcome change). Last one in today was SHIES.
    Was a bit confused by TONY BLAIR and his involvement with Libya (nice clue nonetheless). For I remember driving to work in Ely along the A10 one April morning in 1986 and seeing the F111 U.S. planes returning almost lazily in the sky back to Lakenheath after their bombing mission that day. Another administration then, of course…

39. Postmark @ 15

    I think CHAMBERED is often used as a verb – as in “He chambered a round…” meaning he put a bullet into the firing position in the gun.

40. Off topic: why do people say RETURNEES/ATTENDEES when they mean RETURNERS/ATTENDERS?

41. Well, oofyprosser@36, the only areas of human life and culture on which I can really claim to be expert were entirely absent from this crossword – not a trace. Therefore, I was by definition a ‘non-expert’ in all of the matters that were deployed in the clues or required for their being solved successfully. Nevertheless, I did complete the puzzle and derived some pleasure from doing so, finding that all except one (NERVENE) lay within the compass of my GK – i.e. no specialist ‘expertise’ was called for. As other commenters (or should that be ‘commentees’, JNM@40?) testify, solving is often in part a learning process rather than just a reaffirmation of the value of what they already know. Members of the Drones Club can, I believe, claim exemption from being required to address themselves to crosswords set by non-members.

42. Very difficult puzzle. I gave up on 8 clues and could not parse some after seeing the answers. I guess I was not on the setter’s wavelength today.

    Did not parse HEART-STOPPING (I know zilch about football), ROCHESTER; DOUBLE-CROSSED (but got the def).

    Failed YOU NAME IT (and did not parse it – is it something biblical?); ELITE (& could not parse it); EMERY (could not parse, never heard of Dick Emery); NILOT; ON THE FLAT; AERIE; CHAMBERED; DOGGO (& did not parse).

    Favourites: EGOCENTRICITY, TERRACE.

43. I struggled with NILOT but when I saw it I thought it was a great clue. Not so ELITE-the def is fine but the parsing goes back a bit
    On the other hand Woody is such an important figure (I dont think “singer” really sums him up)
    He was a MAJOR influence on Dylan and at one time rented a place from Fred Trump-and it parsed OK
    Nice puzzle and blog
    Thank you

44. Michelle@42: Yes, it’s in the Bible:
    Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all  the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.  So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.

    I was vaguely aware of the adjective nilotic, possibly something to do with crocodiles, but NILOT was a new one.

45. Dick Emery, now that really is from another era…

46. Fiona Anne @39: fair point. Am I thinking of a/the passive sense of the verb?

47. Whence did CE become a roman church, which came into being during the Reformation in England of the 16th century. Thought a quizzer might have ‘questioned ‘ that?

48. Christopher Allen @47: As loonapick makes clear in the blog, the adjective ‘Roman’ applies to ‘world’ (TERRA) not to ‘church’ (CE).

49. I found that a much more engaging solve than yesterday’s Matilda; despite some nhos (NILOT, NERVINE), everything was fairly clued and therefore gettable. Dick Emery was of his time and his characters were certainly grotesques but my then-girlfriend’s family were avid viewers and amused each other for hours trading his catchphrases. Thanks to Pasquale for another top-notch challenge and to Loonapick for illumination.

50. I’m with copmus @43. When I saw “Singer Woody”, I thought that was too much of a giveaway, it was so obviously GUTHRIE. Just had to check that the rest of the clue worked. Enormously influential. He not only lived in Fred Trump’s tenement, he wrote a song about Old Man Trump.

51. I enjoyed this crossword enormously even though it was a DNF for me (couldn’t parse egocentricity and thought Rochester was the ‘hero’ with ‘see’ as just an exhortation).
    On ‘Elite’ – I would point out that ‘Special Elite’ is a Google font and ‘Prestige Elite’ is a downloadable font for use on websites etc. – so not just for old codgers like me.
    Thanks a lot both to Pasquale and Loonapick

52. Christopher @47, the Roman refers to the Latin word TERRA, which is how a Roman would (ages ago) have referred to the world (or Earth, as it was then). That leaves church on its own, often abbreviated to CE (for Church of England).
    It is a classic trick of cryptic crossword setters to place a really well known phrase in the clue but actually use each word completely separately for the parsing.

53. [Does anyone else here remember Elite as a space trading game, originally on the BBC computer?]

54. Well I got EMERY readily despite living in the States, but I’m an expat and old enough. Is it true or just my imagination that there were many fewer comedians in those days than now (or rather, fewer given airtime)? This is not just idle chat, but affects the choices of setters, and options of solvers.

55. [muffin @53; yes, I remember Elite, and it’s still going as ‘Elite Dangerous’ – see here.]

56. First I’ve heard of MAR = ruin: always thought it was to spoil rather than ruin. I have found it as a possible synonym though.

    [Most of my thoughts already been said but regarding the debate about age relevance, sadly I think younger people don’t tend to do crosswords these days, Therefore fair enough to use names from 60’s and 70’s for instance, Also, as pointed out – Woody very influential on Dylan. Remember Arlo?]

    I was more tuned into Pasquale than usual today so only a couple not managed (and you do expect a few unheard of words)

57. Lots to enjoy today – most points already made.

    14a – At the risk of becoming a bore on the subject, I’ll quote again from the Guardian and Observer style guide:

    —
    Northern Ireland
    Can be referred to as a country or region, but avoid referring to it as a province or as Ulster
    —

    A moratorium on cluing the letters NI with “Ulster” or “province” would be welcome.

58. PostMark @ 46

    Yes I think it can be used both ways.

59. Terrific Woody link, Tassie Tim @ 50, the best I’ve seen, and wouldn’t you just know it’d be in his creative arc to link forward to today via the slum landlords, Fred and his son.

60. Tassie Tim @50. Yes, Woody Guthrie the obvious singer for those of us who cope with the old man’s quizzes. But for younger striplings the more obvious reference might be Stuart “Woody” Wood of the Bay City Rollers.

61. As for Arlo, Pedro @56, he toured here not long ago and in an ABC interview that shot my eyebrows up he sounded like an NRA member… he owned an old ranch and for some reason was bitter about local by-laws infringing his individual rights. Hmm, kids, I thought, no telling where they’ll land.

62. loonapick — I’ve never heard of Dick Emery but got the word (scratching my head) from the definition. I would guess that more Americans under 50 than Brits are familiar with Woody Guthrie. I think you’re right about ELITE. I don’t think I ever heard about elite and pica type after my typing class as a teenager, and who uses typewriters now?

    And thanks for pointing out the double crosses!

    NERVINE was a new one for me (and a Jorum), as was NILOT. I can’t think of any other words ending in -ot except for Cypriot for a person who lives in a place. Are there other words for other riversiders? Come to think of it, have we a word for riversiders? The French do. I lived for a while in Maisons-Lafitte, a suburb of Paris, on a boat moored at a boatyard on a road closed “sauf aux riverains.”

    ON THE FLAT to mean “plainly” was new too, though decades of Dick Francis have taught me that you have two kinds of racing where we have one.

    CHAD is a lake as well as an African country — anybody else get tangled in that?

    STREAKERS has its definition, to the extent that “them” is one, in the middle of the clue, with the anagram fodder to the left of it and the “bit of exhibitionism” to the right. Isn’t that against the rule? It’s a help to solvers to know that there’s a dividing line.

    Eileen isn’t on so far to object to “returnees,” so I will. It’s a pointless word, since “returners” does the job and is grammatically correct. JNM@40, I think it’s influenced by words like “divorcees” and “employees,” which are legitimate words. Or maybe it’s plain cussedness.
    ,
    Nice to see a see in ROCHESTER that isn’t Ely, I’m with Ronald @38.

    Blaise @15 — would you explain your typefaces? I don’t think you’re saying that 10 = 11, but what corresponds to what?

    Thanks for a nice puzzle, Pasquale, and loonapick for clearing up some confusions.

63. Valentine @62
    That was what I liked about STREAKERS – “bit of exhibitionism” is needed to get rid of an E from the anagram, but it’s also what they are doing.

64. Thanks for the blog. I myself might be considered old-fashioned but was this crossword discovered in the caves of Lascaux ?

65. Thanks to all for the puzzle and the explanations. I agree that “North American” seems superfluous in AERIE–Lake Erie is a big enough (dare we say Great enough) lake that you should not need to be told what part of the map to look at. And it’s crosswordland’s favorite lake anyway, more ofte because of EERIE than AERIE. (And I’m surprised that that spelling strikes some as unusual–that’s the more common spelling here.)

    Woody Guthrie is a national treasure. I think all American schoolchildren learn of him at some point. And not just because of “This Land Is Your Land,” which so many classes of grade-schoolers have sung oblivious to the fact that it’s supposed to be (and is, if you’re paying attention) a protest song.

    As for Dick Emery–well, every nail salon has emery boards, so we had that route.

    I am in the last generation (I’m 46) who learned to type on a typewriter, so I got ELITE without trouble. I think we’re 20 years away from that being arcana. But you expect arcana from Pasquale (c.f. NILOT, NERVINE), so we’re good anyway.

66. mrpenney @65
    Chambers gives “aerie – see eyrie”

67. muffin@63 — I liked what you liked, the content of the clue. What I didn’t like was its arrangement, with bits of wordplay on both sides of the “definition.”

68. Muffin @66: Webster’s gives “eyrie–chiefly British spelling of aerie.” So there you have it.

69. The thing with figures from popular culture from the past being used in popular culture is that their work needs to be still fairly prominent and easily-available now for them to be valid, IMO. Whilst I’m old enough to find Guthrie and Emery easily-solvable, I think they both fall foul of that test. Dick Emery would be very hard to stumble across now for anyone not old enough to have seen his show on telly back in the day, and I’m guessing very few people recommend him as someone they might enjoy in a conversation about comedy or tv shows. He’s been virtually invisible for over 30 years. Guthrie is fairer, but still suffers from the same problems for me. Unless they end up talking to a fan of his, most younger folk are very unlikely to be exposed to his name much if at all, let alone his music. OK, his music is still there, but it needs to be discovered now, and most young folk won’t even know to look.

70. mrpenney @68
    Perhaps that’s why the clue had the superfluous “North American” – to point us towards the US spelling.

71. As an American, I would definitely say that Woody Guthrie is in the canon of major cultural figures I’d expect my compatriots to know about, even though he lived a long time ago. I don’t know how provincial that view is, though — that is, I don’t know whether I would say the same for people in the Guardian’s catchment area.

    [A few years ago, I went to an Arlo Guthrie concert, at which I was about the youngest person there, at about age 50. I overheard a fellow audience member saying, “Did you know that his father was a songwriter too?”]

72. MarkN @69. Despite my irritated riposte to oofyp above @41, I must say I am inclined to agree with you regarding Dick Emery. I made the point there that solving and, in so doing, grasping sometimes for the unfamiliar that lies beyond your GK is, for many setters, part of the challenge and the pleasure. But let us compare the Emery clue with the Guthrie clue. If I were too young to have first-hand memories of either, the Guthrie clue would alert me to the fact that there was probably a singer called ‘Woody’. If I then went to Wikipedia and typed ‘Woody’ into the search box, I would be offered Allen, Guthrie, Harrelson and Woodpecker. I would select Guthrie and find out about him. But with the grotesque comedian, the clue offers me absolutely nothing which I could use in order to arrive at the solution if I did not have first-hand knowledge of Emery.

73. I enjoyed this in spite of not finishing – NERVINE, NILOT, ELITE. I missed the subtlety of 1a and 8d so thanks to others for additional explanations. I had ROCHESTER as the hero so i did wonder what see was for. The clue for TERRACE reminded me of one of my favourite Italian words TERRAMOTO, earthquake, although of course the consequences are not good. I had SNIPS for 19a but couldn’t make it fit the definition. Thanks Pasquale and Loonapick

74. The only reason I got EMERY was that it has become such a crossword chestnut that I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen it. It does seem a little out of date and I’m hardly a youngster at 46.

    I think another Graun puzzle recently referred to the crosses formed by the black squares in the grid, but darned if I can think who set it. Nice device though.

75. Never have so many words been spoken about Woody Guthrie and Dick Emery in the same place.

    Tomorrow: the nexus between Melanie and Duncan Norvelle.

76. I listened to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” so many times in the late Sixties when at college I eventually knew all the words by heart, and the thing went on for about 15-18 minutes, depending on which version you listen to. A diatribe about the Vietnam War and The Draft, his father Woody died at about the time the record first came out…

77. Hi Valentine @62- if you’re still there …

    I’m late to the blog and wasn’t going to comment but you’ve given me two openings.

    I’m trying hard these days to resist flogging dead horses but since it’s been raised again (see JNM @40), as you say, divorcee and employee are fine and have been used for decades: the ‘ee’ ending indicates the passive – being/ having been divorced / employed. As I’ve said before, more than once, attendee is nonsense. As for RETURNEE: Chambers gives ‘someone who returns or is returned esp home from abroad’, which excuses it on grammatical grounds but smacks to me of deportation of ‘illegal’ immigrants, a concern of mine and so my hackles rise.

    On a lighter note, re ‘riversiders’: travelling through France on numerous holidays, we were always intrigued by the “sauf aux riverains” road signs until the penny dropped: we do have a word for ‘riversiders’ – riparians, from Latin ripa, a river bank, which must be the same derivation, I think – but I’ve never seen (or heard it used) – a clue for ‘The Wind in the Willows’ or ‘Tales of the Riverbank’, perhaps?

78. Like Michelle, I found this quite tough today. I failed on NILOT, ELITE and ON THE FLAT. With the latter, I thought we were in the hat world and went for ON THE HEAD (sort of like “plainly” as in hitting the nail on the head). NILOT is a nice word to learn. I had no idea about the typesetting part of ELITE.
    Was TERRA in Roman times used for “world” as we use earth for world? I was looking for a word with the MUND root (as in sic transit gloria mundi) in it, until I spotted the obvious with some crossers in.
    I also parsed ROCHESTER as the hero, not the see, with the “see” being just an imperative form in the wordplay to tell the solvers what to look for. I’m sure loonapick’s parsing is right, though.
    A challenge today, but a good one. Thanks, Pasquale and loonapick.

    Re: pub quizzes and topicality, can anyone explain why music of 60 years ago or more is still wildly popular now (if you don’t believe me, try playing Tutti Frutti to any teenager who hasn’t heard it) whereas music that old when I was a kid was never listened to?

79. Eileen @ 77 , riparian is a lovely word, think I have only seen it used by Jerome K Jerome in Three Men in a Boat, quite often as I recall.

80. [Phitonelly@78: possibly the vast improvement in recording technology since the 1950s has something to do with it. Someone mentioned that the young don’t watch “primitive” black and white films, let alone silent ones, and in the 60s any song more than 20 or so years old would be on a crackly 78rpm record that didn’t fit a modern player – so it was unlikely to be popular for purely technical reasons.]

81. Eileen @77
    Not so much still on as back on, popping in now and then. Amen to the hackles.

    Are people referred to as riparians? I think of it more as an ecological term. But I was one myself back in the 80’s in the boat on the Seine (which we had sailed from Boston). As for Wind in the Willows, I sort of remember trying to work “rat” into one of the answers, though now I don’t remember where.

82. phitonelly @78: can anyone explain why music of 60 years ago or more is still wildly popular now. I’m tempted to say simply because it was much better…! 😀 (Or maybe 50 years ago if I’m going to refer to personal taste). So speaketh the grumpy old man whose musical tastes haven’t developed much since 1979.

83. Very late to the show today but did anyone else settle on double braided (I fell the grid does seem to be braided) for 1ac?

84. Hi, Eileen again —

    Returnee nowadays just means someone who returns, I think. But thinking of someone who “is returned” brings to mind “deportee,” one of Woody Guthrie’s most powerful songs, whose actual title was “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos.” It is actually a poem of his in metric but unrhymed verse, set to music by Martin Hoffman. When a plane carrying Mexicans being deported across the border crashed, killing all aboard, the radio gave the names of all the crew but just the number of “deportees,” as if they had no names or identities.

    Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
    Adios mis amigos Jesus y Maria,
    You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane —
    All they will call you will be ‘deportee.’

85. Roz @79 – yes, of course!

86. Valentine @84
    That’s the Guthrie song that springs to mind first for me too, though I confess that I would struggle to think of any more beyond “This land is your land”.
    Dylan was inordinately proud of having visited Guthrie, more or less on his death bed. I’m not quite sure how to take that, though I have to say that Dylan seemed a much nicer person than I thought he was after I read the first part of his autobiography – much more generous about people that influenced him than I expected.

87. …as Eileen @77 says, deportees are having it done to them, rather than choosing to do it.

88. [muffin @53 – I still have a copy of Elite for the BBC computer – but no BBC computer to play it on! If anyone wants to buy it… 😉 ]

89. I found this very difficult and didn’t quite finish, but some of the clues gave very satisfying moments when I solved them after much puzzling, for example YOU NAME IT, ON THE FLAT. I also liked CZECH.

    yesyes @5, I think most Tribesmen are native to the area in which they live. The fact that “natives” have often referred to disparagingly shouldn’t prevent us using the word in a non-disparaging context.

90. [ Eileen@77, Roz@79, Valentine@81:

    Back in the early ’70s I and another law student wrote a manual for landowners and others on the subject of pollution and rights of ownership. A major issue was the rights and responsibilities of people who lived adjacent to the three major waterways in Ottawa, so one chapter was titled “Riparian Rights and Pollution Control”. The title of the publication was “Citizens’ Rights And Pollution” – and yes, we got away with that! ]

91. [“Riparian”, however, is an adjective describing the rights, not a noun for the owner of them.]

92. [ Yes, it is an adjective, but it means pertaining to property adjacent to water (specifically rivers), so the person whose property was situated on the riverbank would be a “riparian landowner”. We enjoyed calling them riparians back then – it had a nice ring to it (and it is not an uncommon practice to make nouns out of adjectives). ]

93. Thank you Cellomaniac @90, it is a word that needs to be recovered for daily use. Maybe one of our setters will use it in a grid. I have a vague idea that I may have seen it used in a biological sense somewhere.

94. Riparian woodland exclosures (against sheep and deer) have been all the recent rage along the upper tributaries of several Scottish rivers. They were established with EU money (so there may not be many more!) to lower water temperatures and to provide food (insects, leaves, etc.) for aquatic life, e.g. freshwater pearls and salmon.

95. muffin @86 if you come back
    Pastures of Plenty
    (If You Ain’t Got the) Do-Re-Mi
    Roll on Columbia
    So Long It’s Been Good to Know You
    Dust Bowl Blues

    are ones I’ve at least sung along with

96. Thank you ClacDian@94 very interesting. I did ask an expert about it today and she said riparian ecology is a field of study and the term riparian zones is widely used. The word is at least in use if only in specialist areas.

97. For the first time, even with the solver and comments, I still don’t get one of these – how is Rochester the solution if “see” is the definition? The comments above seem to understand without explanation! I’ve clearly missed something in my education…

98. A see is a religious term, Rochester is a diocese with a cathedral and is the seat of a bishop. The most common “see” used in crosswords is Ely.

99. Thank you Roz, appreciate that. Forgot to mention earlier that I was also baffled by the mid-sentence placement of the definition for STREAKERS – maybe I’m still too inexperienced, but I was taught they must either be at the beginning or the end, without exception. Anyway thanks for clearing things up.

100. You can ask anything on here, people are very kind, especially the bloggers who have the patience of saints We all remember being novices once.
     The definition nearly always appears at the start or the end but there is no rule saying it must, usually best to assume it does. Sometimes the whole clue is the definition.
     For STREAKERS it would be better if the part in brackets was attached to the anagram since it removes an E from SEEK ARREST.

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