Guardian Cryptic 28481 Paul

72 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28481 Paul”

1. I initially thought that 4 down must be ‘Sake’ but surely it must be ‘Shake’ since otherwise we’re missing an ‘h’?
   I really struggled with this one, but that was one of the few I managed to get 🙂

2. Sorry Lyran, my mistake. Blog corrected.

3. Found this a mixture of unconnected themes, but managed to battle my way through eventually. Except for IRAQI, which I simply couldn’t tease out. Loved IGUANODON and STINKING BISHOP, though there’s a mature Danish cheese that might run it close for strong niff. If we have it in the fridge we always warn visitors what’s causing the “bits between the toes” unpleasant smell…

4. I think you mean OR+TaCo in SHAKE for 4.

   Thanks, scchua and Paul, for an exceptionally challenging solve.

5. …Gamle Ole…

6. Sorry, crossed, but the blog is still not correct.

7. Thanks Ian SW3, both errors corrected.

8. Thanks Paul and scchua
   Very slow solve, with quite a lot of electronic help. Favouites were first 2 in, MALEFACTOR and IGUANODON.
   Why is a mine (presumably an explosive one?) a BOOBY TRAP? I associate the term with more “jokey” traps, like a bucket of water perched on a door.

9. You never expect Paul to be easy and this was no exception. Loved it. I think 8dn also included a classic bit of Paulian smut! Thanks P and S.

10. Tough enough for a Saturday, I’d say. Lots of good stuff: I liked “male factor” and was tickled by the notion of a bee-cam.

    Not so sure about tort = error. In French tort means wrong in pretty much every sense, but in English, I’d say, it’s restricted to wrongdoing. Maybe I’m splitting hairs. All in all, good fun.

11. Personally, I think of a keyboard as being separate from the computer (an accessory) and my iMac keyboard has no hash key.

12. Hovis @11 – I think it’s reasonable to call a keyboard part of a computer, especially since most personal computers are laptops, with the keyboard built in. But I take your point that PCs/Macs don’t have a dedicated hash key: maybe “… something on phone” would have worked better.

13. Thanks schhua, I just couldn’t see how LOI TRAGEDY worked, and thanks Lyran@1 as I couldn’t get past Sake for the drink and was confused about that H. ORANG is Indonesian etc for Man/Person (Orang Utan is “Man of the woods” i think). With a booby trap (maybe sort-of bomb – muffin@8 think eg of an abandoned house used by a terrorist cell and booby-trapped with explosives if anyone goes in unannounced), pet (goldfish), duck (I like the splitting of do+use but didn’t see much equivalence between the defn and soln) and PEE in 18A I did wonder if a theme might be things that one is not supposed to do at the swimming baths, but it’s probably too much of a stretch. This took a while to get started but I really enjoyed the challenge, thanks Paul.

14. Hobos @11, my computer is an iPad so the Hash key is definitely not separate so it wasn’t a problem for me.

15. Hovis@11/ Miche@12 I too have no dedicated # key on my pc laptop but luckily had my old flip phone charging from it and there is one on that so gave Paul the benefit of the doubt! I hope it wasn’t too much of a barrier for US solvers for whom I think it is a pound sign/key – maybe “hashtag” is used over there too so the UK version is now familiar?

16. Tough but not overly-so. I’m with JerryG @9 – that 8d was my COTD that had me laughing like the puerile schoolboy that under the 6’1″ hulk (errr… flab…) I remain.

    FOI was 2,7d followed by an inspired guess on 1a so I wondered if a cheese them was going to appear, Wisconsin seemingly the only state in the US that produce cheese

    [I remember hearing that so much dairy was processed in Wisconsin that cows from Hawaii are regularly flown there to be milked… Yes, flown. Madness thanks to the Jones Act]

    Never easy, but always a giggle for which I say thanks Paul (and scchua).

17. Sorry, should have been Hovis.

18. Although clever I found it somewhat humourless. If my memory serves me well HASH=drug not drugs.
    I liked PHOENICIAN
    MALEFACTOR might not be fresh out of the oven and PORTIA may be also be getting a bit cold
    I had SPEYED-havent checked the spelling.
    I did like BEECHAM
    The answer for 17 seemed to leap out(with a couple of crossers) but the wordplay is…. I spose OK
    So mixed bag for me but a juicy workout on a Friday
    Thanks scchua and Paul

19. Tough but fair. I smiled at PETER SELLERS, as I’m sure he would have done.

    Ta Paul & scchua for the great blog.

20. I liked the two pairs of clues RED ARMY and OH BOY, TORTE and BOOBY TRAP, where “my” and “mine” switch between definition and word play. As well as a food mini-theme, there are a few military references. [MB@16 I hope they don’t do the same thing with pigs for bacon. That would be really unexpected] Thanks Paul and scchua

21. Carelessly entered IRANI at 9a and having checked it realised it was IRAQI. Otherwise quite demanding but a welcome 2 hour distraction from the pain of a bad back. Thanks Paul and scchua.

22. For 9a I confidently entered IRANI (I=India, RANI=queen). It nearly works …
    A TORT is not an error but a “wrong, injury” or “any wrong, not arising out of contract, for which an action … may be brought (law)” (Chambers).

23. Wow – really tough. Was on the point of giving up, but BAKELITE popped up on Mr Google when I tried to get some clues about Azeri nobility, so I had a new lease of life. Loved BOOBY TRAP, MALEFACTOR and CHARYBDIS. Many thanks to Paul and scchua.

24. MaidenBartok @16 & Jerry G @9: in your enthusiasm for 8 down, your inner ‘puer’ seems to want ‘tool’ to refer to the penis – unless I am seriously missing the joke, which is possible. However, ‘spay’ refers exclusively to the ‘fixing’ of a female animal, so I think a spade is just being called a spade here.

25. My PC with its hash key solved most of this. My brain alone wouldn’t have stood a chance.

    I was going to object about fix = SPAY, but I see it’s in Chambers. Paul has already said that there is no theme to this one, so that might save people wasting time looking for one.

    I thought REMOTE was nicely hidden. The first word in 10 just had to be ‘belly’, although button didn’t fit in as the second one. Good misdirection in the clue. MALEFACTOR went almost straight in. I liked RED ARMY, PETER SELLERS and STINKING BISHOP.

    Thanks Paul and pictorial scchua.

26. It seems that several of the best puzzles – old and new – I’ve tackled of late have been attributed to Paul. WHAT’S MORE, when this first clue was immediately solved, I thought this would be at the easy end of his extensive range. But OH BOY how wrong I was, when this finally yielded after staring blankly at the grid for a further ten minutes. NAYSAY came next, and from then on it was an enjoyable brain-bending thing of beauty, right to LOI (STINKING BISHOP) – new-to-me but deduced from the excellent clue and verified later. Also unknown was IGUAUNODON (likewise fab clue). Otherwise enjoyed MALEFACTOR, PORTIA and PETER SELLERS among many others.
    Thanks very much Paul, you are still at the top of my setter hit-parade

27. [Spooner’s cat flip @24: I suspect that in Paul’s mind there is an element of double-entendre here…

    Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make the Zoom session this evening but I trust someone on here to ask the obvious question]

    Robi @25: The misuse of the ‘#’ symbol is one of life’s annoyances for me (yes, I know – I need to get out more). I refuse to call it the ‘hash, ‘pound’ or (heaven-forbid) ‘number’ symbol and will often feign deafness if someone uses these terms. Octothorpe it is for me.

    And… (I’m in grumpy-old-man mode today) it is NOT a ‘sharp’ symbol in music – a true sharp symbol has two non-slanted vertical lines with the two horizontal crossers with a slight incline up left-to-right whereas the octothorpe has perfectly horizontal lines with the verticals slanting left to right. Really gets-my-goat…

28. I assume I am the only person who read the surface of 25 which says “I poop on teacher…” and thought: whaaat?

29. Fairly tough this morning, but worth the effort. Thanks to P&S.

    [As one GOM to another, MB@27, # looks like a sharp sign to me, (the proper sharp, flat and natural symbols are hard to find) and is also the medical abbreviation for fracture. I am aware of the HASH terminology, but it is definitely not “number”, for which the abbreviation is “No.”]

30. Auriga @29; Chambers has this for hash:

    hash3 /hash/ or hashmark /hash?märk/
    noun1.The symbol #, used in particular to mean: (1) number, eg apartment number (esp N American)
    2.(2) space, eg in proofreading and marking up copy for printing

31. Thank you, scchua, for parsing BAKELITE.

    As ever, Paul has been challenging but, according to my mental wave-length, scrupulously fair.

    MaidenBartok @27: I dearly love “octothorpe” and use it exclusively, but it’s a 1970s coinage of doubtful parentage. My mother was calling it a “pound” sign well before that (her grocery list might refer to a “#10 can” of vegetables, and she’d call it a “pound” sign not indicating the weight of the can, which left and still leaves me mystified). As far as I’m concerned, a “hashtag” is what grocers once used to mark the price of a can of that comestible.

32. Wonderful to read the answers. Paul is master of his craft…
    The crossword? After a very good week so far, I did manage one answer to this, 26a, which is actually quite appropriate.
    Thanks both.

33. Enjoyed the cheese and the cheesehead. Didn’t realise I’d have to inspect a clue so carefully to come up with PETER SELLERS.

    Thanks Paul and scchua

34. Yes Paul had indicated on his email that there would be no theme. Found it quite challenging but got there in the end.Thanks to S and B.

35. Boy, that was a slog. I had to come here for the parsings of 22ac and 17dn, the latter of which I guessed but even Wikipedia couldn’t untangle the clue for me.

36. Wow that was quite a tussle and not helped by last night’s ill-advised attempt to self-medicate an ear ache with red wine and gin. So many excellent clues. My Mac keyboard has a key I can press to get a # so that’s close enough for me.

37. 9a IRAQI I don’t think I’ve ever come across Q in chess notation, though I’ve seen all or almost all of the others, so I didn’t think of either that or RAID.

    The “many creatures” for whom the Y chromosome promotes maleness are us mammals. In birds, it’s the females who have the distinctive chromosomes and males who have two of the same. In other species it may be the temperature of the eggs while they’re incubating (the warmer, the more males), or the animal may change sex from youth to maturity, or other even odder stories.

    gazzh@15 Yes, “hashtag” is also used in the US.

    27a Why “where goldfish bought” rather than “are bought”? It would seem to be saying “where goldfish were the customers.”

    Never having heard of Stinking Bishop I looked it up, and found that it’s a trade name of a cheese made from the milk of ” rare Gloucester cattle” — how niche!

    I love shortcake, but ours doesn’t look like your photo, scchua. That looks more like a nearly tasteless kind of cookie/biscuit sold (along with other excellent ones, I hasten to add) in Italian bakeries, of which there are several in my neighborhood.

    MB@16 Wisconsin is by no means the only state that produces cheese. Vermont and New York cheddar are famous. California and New York are among other high producers. Even my little state of Connecticut produces some excellent artisanal cheeses. Some of US cheese production, though, is the repellent substance called “American cheese,” whose production is so un-cheeselike that legally you can’t sell it as cheese. The packages have to say “pasteurized cheese product.”

    Nobody flies cows anywhere to be milked.

    npetrikov@31 #10 can reads to me as “number ten can” and refers to a size. I would doubt that there are many cans of ten pounds of anything, but if there were one it would be a 10# can.

    Enough for the trees. The forest was excellent, up to Paul’s usual high standard, and sccchua, thanks for the blog and the photos.

38. A terrific challenge, in which the check button played a significant part towards the end, but a very satisfying solve. SPAYED provoked a chuckle and when I eventually got BOOBY TRAP it became cotd for me, closely followed by BAKELITE. Many thanks to Paul and scchua.

39. Thanks Paul & scchua!
    I found myself between Scylla and CHARYBDIS this morning, and ended up dashed against the rocks like brittle BAKELITE (which I failed to parse despite its glaring if not transparent quality). INEPT? Yes.

    Penfold @33: brilliant!

40. [STINKING BISHOP was mentioned in one of the Wallace and Gromit films, and the tiny creamery (cheesery?) couldn’t meet the sudden demand.]

41. [Auriga @29: there is a font called ‘Bach’ that has all the musical symbols in including the ability to write time-signatures properly. Bliss.]

    [Bodycheetah @36: As a recent convert from PC to Mac (lovely new M1 MacBook Air that lasts 36 hours on battery!) I see the hash tag oh keyboard but after nearly 2 weeks of steadfastly refusing to search for the answer – I work in IT – I can’t work out HOW to get the thing to output said octothorpe symbol! Did you use a pipette to get the gin and red wine in?]

42. [MaidenBartok @41 – press option (alt) key and 3 together for #]

43. A toughie to end the week, but all do-able after much head scratching. COTD was 19a MALEFACTOR, also high praise for BOOBY TRAP, PHOENICIAN and IGUANADON.

    My only quibble is cultural references etc from an earlier age eg PETER SELLERS and BEECHAM. What hope for people in their twenties trying to learn solving cryptically?

    But a lovely puzzle so thanks to Paul and scchua

44. [Miche @42: Will you come and do my job for me now please? (thank you!)]

45. Many thanks to Paul and scchua – really enjoyed this and too many favourites to list them al. PETER SELLERS was just wonderful.

46. While I liked clues such as WISCONSINITE and TRAGEDY I found much of this crossword to be a tedious slog. I got about 2/3’s finished and quit. After a week of great puzzles I had enough anyway. Thanks to both.

47. Thanks for the blog. Bravo Penfold@33 , best bit of wordplay all week.
    Mirror image really spoils this, did our setter not do any physics at school ?

48. Penfold@33, wynsum@39 or Roz@47 — will one of you explain the joke? I’ve looked very carefully and can’t find it.

    For non-US readers, people from Wisconsin (which really does produce more cheese than any other state, just not all of it) are called cheeseheads.

49. [Valentine @48
    inspect a clue so is a (near) homophone of one of his most famous characters.]

50. I’m with Tony Santucci @46: the least enjoyable crossword so far this week, and the most difficult, though these are not necessarily linked. Got stuck on TORT(E), SPAYED (I had STAYED but it was obviously wrong), SHORTCAKE (‘drink’=SHAKE? I’d been looking at (or taco)* in SEA or SUP!) and MALEFACTOR (which I see was a write-in for some people!), and I couldn’t parse the BOOB (‘fluff’?) in BOOBY TRAP. Just not on Paul’s wavelength today.

    I had forgotten that orang utan means man of the woods (thanks Gazzh @13) but the clue still works, as it is ‘primate’=man=ORANG. Eventually pleased to get STINKING BISHOP from crossers and wordplay, having forgotten the cheese, and was slow to get PETER SELLERS, having only solved six clues on the first pass.

    Now off to do the last five clues of last Saturday’s Brendan – hope my brain speeds up a bit!

51. [MaidenBartok @41 I didn’t think of using a pipette! I prepared a solution using tonic water and ice with some citrus fruit segments for vitamin c and administered the mixture orally 🙂 ]

52. Enjoyed this but had three blanks when I finally came here. Now can’t understand why I couldn’t get BAKELITE, BEECHAM and REMOTE. Easy once you know!
    Paul is still top setter for me. Thanks scchua for tying up the loose ends.

53. Couto@53 – Why did you think it was dreadful? What was wrong with it for you?

54. trishincharente @54, do not rise to the bait – you will get no response. Couto offered pretty much the same assessment of Anto’s Tuesday cryptic, entering the fray at 5.53, three minutes earlier than today’s intervention. Couto is a pointless troll with seemingly nothing better to do with his or her life.

55. trishincharente @54 – er, please, its called a ‘troll’ in urban parlance, ignore him, and like Marley’s ghost, he will disappear

56. Aah, ok. I hadn’t come across him/her before and was genuinely interested in what caused the comment.
    Ignore all trolleys! That’s the way to un-man them!

57. By the sound of it, tool fixed.

58. Some brilliant touches. Hat’s off for “gathering fluff” to get PARTYBOOB, the superb misdirection of “behind walls in Germany” for REDAR, and MALEFACTOR.
    And despite being used to noun-based anagram indicators like “nuts” and “lunatic”, I somehow looked straight past “potty”.

59. Phew! I’m always amazed/amused by those whose comments tend towards “gentle workout” when I’ve taken 3 hours and have a headache.

    DNF, IRANI bunged unparsed, bleeding obvious in hindsight of course. Ta, s&b.

60. Oh my god. Sorry for the apostrophe in “Hat’s” (sic.) The shame ¦-D .

61. David Sullivan @61. It would work as a crossword clue: ‘Hat’s off for gathering fluff’ would be read as ‘hat is off’. (No idea what the solution is though…)

62. Couto@ @53 I couldn’t disagree more. I finished this puzzle, as is often the case with Paul’s puzzles, with a smile on my face – it was both challenging and funny. I particularly loved MALEFACTOR.

63. Wisconsin used to be so protective of its butter market that it passed a law that the substitute had to be labelled ” oleomargarine” and its colouring packaged separately.
    I know that The Guardian is trying to appeal to an international market but I think that 1a is going a bit far. As it happens I do know the names of the US of A in alphabetical order. As a result, having tried all the usual answers for American, when I decided it probably was à “statesman” I had to rule out 48 othe?s before the penny dropped.
    This took a long time but I happened to have it to spare.
    Thanks to Paul and scchua

64. Pino@64 I’m assuming the law was a Wisconsin law. But when I was a small child in New Jersey there must have been a federal law about margarine. At any rate, you bought it in a plastic package, dead white with a little orange pill in the center, and you had to massage and massage it until the pill distributed itself and its coloring through the pound or so of margarine. That was a long time ago!

65. For 20D REMOTE I had RETORT minus first and last letters for “rebuff not entirely” giving ETOR round ME, all in reverse, i.e. uplifted.

66. Liked: SPAYED, PHONEICIAN, CHARYBDIS, HASH KEY.

    Needed help from google for some GK such as Thomas Beecham (conductor, died 1961) and STINKING BISHOP cheese.

    Did not parse BOOBY TRAP, BAKELITE.

    Thanks, P + blogger

67. I was going with IRANI at first, but it’s not a word. -I as an indication of a person from… is an Arabic construct. I wanted to complain about SPAYED=fixed, as surely removing a bit from the animal is hardly fixing it, but, ho hum, it’s in Chambers. Discovered that Thomas BEECHAM is the grandson of the chemist of pills and powders fame. Don’t understand why the L in ORANGE PEEL is after the ORANG EPEE.

68. I suppose it is L on ( primate with sword ) . It is a mix of down and across entries which complicates matters. Using ON at the end of an across entry is just about okay really.

69. It took me a while to find my groove with this one, but after the SE fell before the Red Army and Charybdis, I found some form. I’m a techie, so I’m bound to except to Hash Key being “on” a computer, but it’s a small thing. Beecham and Bakelite almost defeated me but fell in at the end with a bit of a grunt.

70. Valentine@65
    Thank you for that. It must have been a federal law, lobbied for by the dairy industry. I heard of it in the 60s.

71. “Pet sellers”, “bee cam” and “Baku elite” all delightful.

72. I found this one very challenging, but lots of fun. As usual with Paul, plenty of delightful surfaces and clever clueing. Favorites were IGUANODON and MALEFACTOR, but great stuff all around. Thank you Paul!

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