Guardian Cryptic 28,483 by Fed

83 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,483 by Fed”

1. You’re right about Lego clues loonapick…think of a synonym for this, take off that, reverse it then insert it in something else, etc…my least favourite. That said, I didn’t find myself irritated by thus new Fed, enjoyed it in fact. Wouldn’t go as far as someone on the G-thread who said it was like an Arachne, but pretty good. Thanks Fred and welcome, and thanks loonapick.

2. I really enjoyed this. I would have said it was only slightly more difficult than a normal Monday puzzle especially once you picked up Fed’s style. Thanks loonapick, especially for explaining dewdrop. Thanks Fed.

3. This was a DNF for me, partly I think because of the use of a grid which Ximenes would have condemned as unfair – I only had three checked letters out of 7 in 28a, two out of 5 in 16a.
   I certainly agree that this was a lot tougher than the usual Monday fare; but there was some really fine material in here. The misdirection in the very neatly constructed charade in 19a; one of the more unusual definitions of BUBONIC PLAGUE in 9d, an excellent surface in 22a and a very well concealed “container” in 15a – this is a skilled compiler and I look forward to seeing more of their work.
   Thanks to loonapick for the explanations.

4. I enjoyed it too, but did not get 28a, possibly because it really is quite cryptic! Thanks to Fed and loonapick, let’s hope we see more of this setter.

5. It wasnt so much the difficulty level, more the sheer class and polish of every clue.
   I cant believe this is a rookie setter.
   Whoever it is-its great

6. It’s Dave Gorman. I.e. Bluth in the Indy

7. Yes, very enjoyable. Couldn’t get KIOSK; loved BUBONIC PLAGUE and INEPTITUDE in particular. I look forward to more from Fed.

8. Thanks Flashling@6: so only a “new” setter for Guardian solvers. I liked this and had ticks for 1a AMNESTY, 24a INSIST, 29a FEATHER, 15a GASTROPOD (great reverse hidden!) and 20d EVIL EYE (our border collie has heterachromia and I always say his blue eye is his EVIL EYE as opposed to his more “normal” and kindly brown one). Many thanks to Fed (yes, more please!) and loonapick.

9. V grateful, loonapick, for the explanation of 28ac. I could only come up with a dewdrop, being tiny, would require close focus. I loved the real meaning. V impressed by the accomplished setting – so thanks v much Fed – but sometimes I am too lazy to parse after solving (by using crossers and guessing the definition) but that’s my fault. (Having said that I did parse “ineptitude” properly – after entering it – but only did about 75% of “bubonic plague” having confused NCO with corporal and then ploughing on with the next clue instead of checking properly.) Wish I could do what you do, Fed. But that’s a bit like wishing I had written War and Peace.

10. [I meant 15 DOWN GASTROPOD, which I see NeilH@3 also mentioned as 15a!]

11. Fed is Dave Gorman, at least according to his Twitter feed…

    Took quite a while to get on the wavelength and it was certainly MUCH chewier than standard Monday fare (and the Quiptic is a walk in the park in comparison) but very well clued throughout although as-with grantinfreo @1 not my favourite type of cluing with too much construction work involved…

    KIOSK had me searching out ancient operating systems – went back as-far as BATCH-11, VMS/VAX and TSO before realising I was over-thinking it…

    Congrats to Fed and thanks to loonapick!

12. I was entirely with copmus @5 and then Flashling @6 explained it all. Congratulations and welcome to this side, Fed!

    I had ticks for 1ac AMNESTY – a great start – 5ac TRUDGES, 23ac UMBRELLA, 26ac INEPTITUDE, 8dn ENTITLE, 9dn BUBONIC PLAGUE and 15dn GASTROPOD. I failed on KIOSK – great clue!

    Many thanks to Fed (looking forward to the next one) and loonapick.

13. Unlike everyone else, it seems, I actually got on with this better than the Quiptic. A few did give me problems though – couldn’t parse 17ac KIOSK at all, and only partially parsed 26ac INEPTITUDE and 2dn MONITOR. Thanks, loonapick, for unravelling these.

    Favourites are 9dn BUBONIC PLAGUE, very well constructed with a neat surface, and 15dn GASTROPOD, a clever hidden reversal. Nicely done. Thanks, Fed.

14. Same favourites as those already mentioned and thanks for explaining DEWDROP. I concur with Copmus @5. Great challenge

    Ta Fed & loonapick

15. Welcome, Fed, and thanks to loonapick for unravelling KIOSK.

    To be truthful, this is all a little too clunky for my taste and I would prefer a little more attention to surfaces. “Nintendo ports a game over partially – it moves slowly” Wot?

    That aside, I also had ticks at TRUDGES, AMNESTY, & UMBRELLA.

16. I thought this crossword was different in style but fair.

17. I knew it had to be a setter with a bit of form. I’ve been enjoying Bluth puzzles .
    Thanks Flashling &co

18. Interesting but some wording seems in the wrong order to me, eg shouldn’t it be dropping’s entertaining name? I know it is because name dropping reads better but surprised its allowed.

19. I enjoyed solving this puzzle, though some of the parsing eluded me, so thanks to loonapick for the explanations.Very well done.

20. Thanks Flashling and MaidenBartok. Have been to here (sorry haven’t yet leaned how to do the hyperlink):
    https://www.theguardian.com/stage/crossword-blog/2021/may/24/crossword-blog-meet-the-setter-tvs-dave-gorman-standup-comic-with-a-cryptic-alter-ego
    Loved it and hopefully there’ll be more.

21. @William, “porting” a game means to transfer it to a different system (e.g. from PlayStation to XBox). It’s often a difficult process that results in buggy and slow software, so the surface is actually very convincing.

22. It’s not so much the Lego clues, but the fact that it’s important for a setter to provide variety. And this puzzle perhaps is a bit more Lego-bricky than most. That said, I thought it was a fine effort and there are already hints of Fed developing a trademark style. I look forward to more.

    GASTROPOD was very enterprising.

23. Thanks for that paddymelon@20. I had assumed it was a different Dave Gorman but that was an interesting article. He’s a clever guy!!

24. Thanks for the unpicking Loonapick. It was very helpful.
    I did not like this when I started as it was foreign and it is Monday, but I stuck with it and finished. Then I started really looking at the clues and became much more impressed. There were layers there that took me a while to appreciate but I eventually did. Never knew that DEWDROP though.
    When I sorted it out, I really enjoyed KIOSK.
    So, thanks for an ultimately enjoyable exercise Fed.

25. Now this was quite a refreshing change from the normal Monday fare. At first I found most of the clues rather fiddly in their complicated cryptic nature but after a while found my way in through the very precise definitions – sensible, stall, protection, stupidity and join to name but a few – and then I rather worked backwards from there to work out the cryptic bits. It’s also rather more of an effort to get onto the wavelength of an apparently new setter. My loi was AMNESTY, which I briefly wondered about on first reading, but hadn’t the confidence to plonk it in at that early juncture. A proper workout today, but a rewarding one…

26. Pedro@18: I think the word order is justified because one might consider a phrase like
    ‘the referendum that Sturgeon is promising’ –> ‘referendum Sturgeon’s promising’
    is analogous to
    ‘name that dropping is entertaining’ –> ‘name dropping’s entertaining’

27. Fiddly but fun: I enjoyed DAMP SQUIB and GASTROPOD (of which there are hundreds cruising slowly round my garden after last night’s rain). Thanks Fed: nice to have a good new setter to do battle with. I’m afraid I still don’t understand the explanation of how to parse KIOSK, but that’s just me.

28. Having been a fan of Dave Gorman’s comedy for years, it was a pleasure to solve his crossword this morning. I just struggled with DEWDROP and I’m not sure why ‘on vacation’ means to leave the middle bits out.
    Thanks Dave.

29. Perhaps for me there was an element of TGINV on a Monday but I enjoyed this Guardian debut. I’d agree that some of the clues were reminiscent of the old Everyman’s IKEA flat-pack furniture style where you can see what you’re trying to build but deciphering the instructions …
    And another win for the sequential solve strategy with all but three falling on the first pass 🙂

30. That was fun, thanks Fed (& loonapick for parsing KIOSK and DEWDROP).

31. Welcome to a new setter.

    Needed google for EE phone company – never heard of it.
    New: SCAT = ‘droppings, especially those of carnivorous mammals’.

    Failed to solve KIOSK.

    Thanks, both.

32. gladys@27

    I may not have explained KIOSK properly.

    Take KICK (definition “hack”) and replace the C (the first letter of “computer” with OS (abbreviation for “operation system and you get KI(OS)K rather than KI(c)K.

    Jeremy+Nicholas @28

    “On vacation” roughly equals “on emptying” so if you empty out IMPRESARIO, you are left with the first and last letters, I and O.

    Does that help?

33. Flashling @6 Now that I know it’s Dave Gorman, everything falls into place!

34. Who is Dave Gorman?

35. Good crossword with a somewhat unique style.

    I failed to parse INEPTITUDE, although it was a good clue. I liked TRUDGES, KIOSK, DEWDROP, DAMP SQUIB, ALBINO and SCANT.

    Thanks Fed and loonapick.

36. Why is ‘executive’ E? Is it Mercedes E Class, for example?
    Didn’t like all this construction stuff and ‘almost’ words and missing letters.
    Might rename myself to surly hilt.

37. Really wanted to enjoy this, but just couldn’t – too often found myself putting the answer in and deciding I really couldn’t be bothered with working out the parsing. It’s interesting that those who liked this knew the style from Gorman’s previous puzzles elsewhere – perhaps it’s just a case of getting used to his style?

    GASTROPOD was a thing of beauty though – I agree with David B @21 that for those of us gamers who are used to shoddy conversions from other systems the surface was all too familiar.

    I’d probably have felt rather different if it wasn’t a Monday – I think the editor has had one of their moments here.

38. Great fun, and the right level of difficulty for this Goldilocks. Yes, there were quite a few clues where the answer came from definition and crossers, with the wordplay having to be unpicked after entering the solution, but that’s still good exercise for the brain. Mat = felt a verb new to me. Thanks, loonapick, for explaining DEWDROP.

39. hilt @36 CEO = Chief Executive Officer? Or the last letters of “executive toy” give EY

40. Welcome aboard Fed!

    I found this fairly standard Monday fare, which I assume was the intention. Yes, there was quite a lot of construction to do, but you could say that about most puzzles. All the instructions were in there to be found.

    Like loonapick, I dallied a while on. KIOSK and INEPTITUDE, but the (neat) explanations suddenly appeared.

    Thanks to Fed and loonapick

41. Ronald @34 Dave Gordon is a comedian, writer and all-round good guy.

42. “Who is Dave Gorman?” is almost certainly the title of one of his shows.

    Ben+T @37 – I only do the Guardian so this is my first experience of his style, but I liked it. I’m familiar with his other work though, so maybe that helps. Unlike Ronald @25, AMNESTY went straight in for me, and then working sequentially, the next few came very quickly too. Got a bit more challenging after that.

43. pserve_p2 @26: Thanks for that – I do see what you mean. More importantly I suppose is that everyone else accepts it so must be OK 🙂

44. Personally I found a couple of definitions felt not quite right, e.g. stop=snub, but then I found some definitions I thought clever, e.g. droppings=scat. Overall a nice crossword.

45. Good puzzle, and welcome Fed.

    Does KICK = “hack”?

    Demand = “insist on,” not “insist,” or can anyone give an example where it works? Same for “all” and “every.”

    Never seen DEWDROP with that repellent meaning, and don’t think I’ll use it. Never heard of EE the phone company, perhaps that’s a UK thing.

    loonapick, state names are always abbreviated in all caps, so Missouri is MO, not Mo. (Tiny nitpick.)

    Clever hiding of GASTROPOD, almost my LOI!

    I should learn that really awkward words (like Nintendo ports) probably signal a reversal when it’s not an anagram.

    Thanks to Fed and loonapick.

46. Valentine @45

    In football, if you hack someone, you kick them instead of the ball.

    If you insist, I’ll give you an example of demand=insist.

    EE is the second-largest mobile company in the UK (Kevin Bacon appears in most of their ads).

    Thanks for the correction on MO (I’m fairly sure I’ve seen Mo. and Cal. but I may be mistaken)

47. Kick does equal hack, Valentine @45, if you’re a rubbish footballer.

    I failed on KIOSK and feel infinitely less bad about it as Eileen did too. I still don’t really see it. Surely it’s just a replacement of C by OS, but I don’t see how that’s indicated by ‘making’.

48. For some reason I find Fed/Bluth much easier than most setters – maybe I’m just on his wavelength – and slightly unsatisfying as a result. I like to be misled, and while these weren’t all write-ins (and DEWDROP was a dnp, having never heard that definition before), none of them led me down the garden path for long. Still, a variety of setters and styles is always appreciated.

49. Ah, knew sooner or later someone would explain kick=hack. Always happy to learn a bit more football gk 🙂 What about snub=stop.

50. Stumped by KIOSK, but a very enjoyable puzzle. The sense of DEWDROP was new to me, too. Thanks, Fed and loonapick.

51. grantinfreo @49 – Chambers has, among others, these definitions for snub (transitive verb):

    3. To check or stop
    4. To bring to a sudden stop, eg to bring (a boat, unbroken horse, etc) to a stop by means of a rope secured to a post or stake

52. grantinfreo@49 – Chambers has “to bring (a boat, unbroken horse, etc) to a sudden stop by means of a rope secured to a stake or post” as the second definition of snub. I’d never heard of it, but the common meaning of snub was enough in vaguely the same ballpark for me to write it in with confidence that it would be correct.

53. This would normally have been a mid-week offering. Looks like the Editor made the decision to introduce Fed on a Monday to encourage some dialogue, and it worked. Not a big fan of the bricks but loved GASTROPOD. Thanks and welcome Fed

54. Valentine @45, Trailman @47, gif @49 and, of course, loonapick: in rugby, whilst hacking did originally mean kicking another player’s shins as a form of tackle, the term developed and describes the kicking of a loose ball (as opposed to kicking from the hands, from a drop kick or from a kicking tee). Also known as a ‘fly hack’.

    I always enjoy Bluth in the Indy so am delighted to welcome Fed to the G. This occasionally felt like a Monday but with plenty of Mr G’s quirkiness and I found I coped with the LEGO. Good to see some defence of SCANT which was my clue of the day.

    Thanks Fed and loonapick

55. Nothing particularly stretching today: fine for that Monday feeling. But thanks to our blogger for parsing INEPTITUDE, which I wrote in but didn’t return to to see what was going on.

56. Thanks Fed and loonapick

    Trailman @ 47: if you make C OS you turn kick into kiosk.

57. Thanks for the blog . INEPTITUDE is very good and KIOSK is almost an Azed clue. Nice to see a new setter, let us hope he is encouraged to make his puzzles harder rather then easier.

58. Thanks Fed and loonapick.

    I think I set myself a new record here, for number of clues solved without any crossers. Not many instant write-ins, but mostly straightforward enough to crack on the first pass. Only SPEEDBOAT unparsed, plus the new (to me) definition of DEWDROP. LOI “KIOSK”, because I was overthinking Operating System (“iOs” and “BIOS”).

59. Don’t understand why kick is hack.

60. As someone a smidge younger than the target demographic of cryptics, I was pleased to see some more current references (and no cricket whatsoever!)

61. Thanks Fed and Loonapick. Enjoyed this despite going slightly awry on 25d. I had it as a kind of “reverse engineered” clue, where the answer (SCANT) would give you SCAT (= singing = entertaining?) if you dropped the N(ame). Very creative but missing the blindingly obvious! D’oh!

62. Enjoyed this puzzle. Hit the right level for me. More from this setter please. Thanks Fed and loonapic.

63. Thanks Miche @51 and Tom @52, I had no idea of that meaning and was thinking ‘.. well a putdown might give you pause, but stop ??…’. Otoh, musing, I spose a snub nose sort of stops 🙂

64. For me to fail only on 17a in a Guardian crossword ranks in the same canon as scaling the Matterhorn in a pair of flip-flops.
    Very enjoyable, 15d was best of a good bunch.
    I agree that the clues were a bit legoish at times, but particularly liked the BUBONIC PLAGUE anagram.
    Thanks Fed, come back soon, and Loonapick for filling in some gaps.

65. Oops wrong clue, I meant 23a for the anagram.

66. And thanks PM @54 for still more depth on the ‘hack’, this time in rugby.

67. Well! I started the day intrigued by this new setter, and by halfway through I was torn between admiration of his work and a creeping recognition of the style. TAPIOCA was an early one that seemed reminiscent of Bluth’s work, and BUBONIC PLAGUE also seemed to fit his style. I came here to see if I was going mad, but sure enough – thanks MaidenBartok et al – I might have struggled to complete a pretty chewy puzzle, but I was able to deduce the identity of the setter!

68. I’ve been a big fan of Mr Gorman since his early “Are You Dave Gorman?” days but, since I don’t subscribe to the other newspapers he sets for, this is the first time I have done one of his crosswords. I found it spot on in terms of difficulty and just about managed to complete it, but didn’t quite parse them all so thanks loonapick. Really enjoyable, especially INEPTITUDE, DEWDROP and DAMP SQUIB.

69. Thank you loonapick, I didn’t know the alternative DEWDROP and bunged in KIOSK as a guess based around I =(first) + OS, thanks to you now understand it, and am miffed not to have got it myself given “Ocker” Davies was a local hero in my youth!
    I have a little experience of Fed’s alter ego and have found his puzzles entertaining and fair but with plenty of misdirection and tricky in terms of definitions and wordplay, I think SCANT exemplifies this best here when for a long time I tried to think of a word meaning “Hardly any” that then meant “entertaining” when it lost an n.
    Good to see some up-to-date references in surfaces and wordplay too.
    Thanks Fed, I think SPEEDBOAT was my favourite.

70. I thought this a lot of fun and am looking forward to more Feds. I am in two minds over GASTROPOD, though. Defining it as something that moves slowly is a little like defining a camel as something brown – it happens to be true, but doesn’t have to be. On the other hand, there’s the well-known “snail’s pace”, and as far as I know, all gastropods do in fact move slowly.

71. A fun puzzle. Congrats to Fed. Always good to see a new setter. I can’t help but think there will be a lot of other wannabe, unpublished setters who have been on the editor’s “waiting list” for years who are rolling their eyes today though. I hope that some younger, female setters aren’t losing out, given that’s what the editor always claimed he wanted, “other things being equal”:

    https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2017/apr/30/on-setters-and-setting

72. Thanks for the blog, Loonapick and thanks for all the lovely comments so far.

    Others have already more than adequately answered queries that others had raised along the way, but amongst the definitions I’ve seen people query were HACK = KICK, ALL = EVERY and SNUB = STOP. Real world examples aside, each of them is, quite simply, supported by Chambers

    HACK
    Definition 5: To kick
    As others have said, I think it’s most commonly used in this context in rugby where you can read many a match report that contains mention of the ball being hacked upfield.

    ALL
    def 7: Every.
    If you want an example of the two being interchangeable, Valentine @45:
    “Ensure all/every sheep can access the water facilities”

    SNUB
    def 3: To check or stop
    def 4: To bring to a sudden stop

    Def 4 is often used with reference to boats. As a canal barge approaches a lock, boatmen wrap ropes around bollards to bring the boat to a halt and those bollards are called snubbing posts for this reason.
    “Because they failed to snub the boat, it crashed into and knocked out the downstream gates”

    I’ve changed my name to Fed for this post – my apologies to Gaufrid if I’m supposed to choose one name across the platform and commit to it!

    Shaun @60 – If there’s a target demographic for cryptics, it’s probably youngsters. Everyone I know that does crosswords has been doing them since childhood… if we want them to still exist many years from now, we’d better make the youngsters feel just as welcome as everyone else! Not that I am one… I’m 50. I’m not a gamer so while I was pretty sure that ‘Nintendo ports a game over’ was the correct terminology to use I did double and triple check it before submitting the puzzle and was delighted to find several examples of that exact phrase being used in the wild.

    Cheers all!

73. For some reason I found this more taxing than Saturday’s prize but maybe it was one of those “wavelength” things. There were several clues I just couldn’t get like KIOSK, GASTROPOD, and BUBONIC PLAGUE and others that I did not understand until Loonapick set me straight. Thanks to both.

74. Fed gets an A+ from me! I didn’t know the term but I guess I’m a fan of LEGO clues. And I’m glad they didn’t shove him into the Quiptic spot like they did with poor Anto.

75. Welcome Fed and thank you for an entertaining and challenging puzzle. I’ve got to admire the ingenuity of your “all” = “every” example @72! Of course in one, “sheep” is plural, and in the other it’s singular. Is that fair? I’m honestly not sure.

76. Managed to solve this while watching the Tour de France and then the Croatia v Spain game in the Euros, so it took quite a long time! I was held up in the SE for ages before I got ‘current’ = IN (rather than just I), which confirmed INSIST and thus SCANT, which I had solved but not parsed.

    I quite like the “Lego-style”, but it can be a bit tricky if you find out you’ve been playing with the wrong pieces.

    Thanks to Fed and loonapick.

77. I thought this was an excellent puzzle, with some really clever clues – AMNESTY, INEPTITUDE, BUBONIC PLAGUE were all very neat! I do admit that I was defeated by KIOSK…
    Thanks Fed, hope to see more from you.

78. Tony Santucci @73 – you are so right about “wavelength”. I found this fine bar KIOSK which was a DNF, yet last Saturday, which you found easier, being a Picaroon puzzle, like Paul, I could not even start.

79. [Fed @72: ‘Shaun @60 – If there’s a target demographic for cryptics, it’s probably youngsters. Everyone I know that does crosswords has been doing them since childhood… if we want them to still exist many years from now, we’d better make the youngsters feel just as welcome as everyone else! ‘

    Oh So Yes!

    This was a topic of discussion yesterday dodging the rain in a central London park. My first ‘outing’ with cryptics was aged 14 as the music teacher who took us to Llangollen every year solved the Torygraph in under 20 minutes under the amazed gaze of three of four rather geeky pupils. He explained each one as he did it, but to-be-honest, it wasn’t the sort of thing that most 14/15 years were going to go off and do on their own – yes, those same geeky kids did go and buy the Indy or the G as a paper but a) that ain’t happening today and b) you need to catch ’em with something that appeals.

    I believe the modern expression (picking up on the Nintendo link) is that you need to ‘gamify’ the learning – this is certainly what BBC BiteSize has done very well for GCSE so why wouldn’t it work for cryptics? But this is now horribly OT…]

80. Nice to welcome a “new” setter (since I don’t do the Indy’s), and I look forward to more from Fed.
    I needed the help from Loonapick and several commenters for the parsing of 17a KIOSK, 20d EVIL EYE (nho the telecom company EE) and 28a DEWDROP ( I guessed it was a reference to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but didn’t follow up). Also the gaming explanation of 15d GASTROPOD turned it from what I thought was a mediocre surface to a brilliant clue. It’s fun to learn new things through these puzzles.

    [ Geoff Down Under @59, kick = hack (in rugby and football) was explained in half a dozen posts before you posted. Reading the comments before posting can save some embarrassment. ]

81. Has anybody else noticed that the style is more like that of a North American cryptic crossword? It’s easier to think of what the answer might be and build it from the ground up, logically, rather than starting from the top and then figuring out how to parse it. I live in Canada and find this style much more familiar to me than the usual more punny, ‘quiptic’ crosswords. Thanks Fed! I loved it!

82. Lord Jim @75 – ha ha… it was going to be either fish or sheep.

83. KIOSK was LOI and a DNP. Otherwise an enjoyable solve. SW corner was last one in but rapidly filled in once UMBRELLA went in.

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