Guardian 28,498 – Picaroon

82 comments on “Guardian 28,498 – Picaroon”

1. I think 1d is “man metamorphosed” = GREGOR + “in a novel” = IAN (anagram of in IN A)

2. Once again, sheer class from Picaroon.

3. Talking of ‘coincidences’… we’ve also got GREGORIAN (EN)CHANT, and a MATCH and A VESTA.

   ALBINONI was helped along by the French habit of referring (I always think rather pleasurably) to the land of the rosbifs as ‘la perfide Albion’.

   Nice to see Tina Turner prancing – no quibbles about the anagrind this time. 😉

   Great stuff, thanks Picaroon and Andrew.

4. Thanks Andrew. I wonder if your coincidences relate to GROUNDHOG DAY in that these things occur again (NN in ANNE, too)? I took FIRST LIGHT to be when the next GHD started again, but I like your explanation better.

   Thanks Picaroon for the interesting puzzle

5. Concur with shirl @1: ‘novel’ is an anagrind. ‘IAN’, when he appears in crosswordland, is almost always specifically a Scotsman. (And technically, to be pedantic, Kafka ‘Metamorposis’ is a novella.)

6. Thanks Picaroon and Andrew
   I didn’t know AVESTA, so that was a guess. Favourite was BOTTOM.
   A pity that 27a could have been DESPOILATION (Chambers gives despoliation as “despoiling”, or something similar).

7. I wonder if I’ll be the only one to ‘solve’ 27a and come up with DESPOILATION? Threw me for a while. A dnk, along with EDOM. And I needed Andrew to parse the very clever ANNE (I spent ages playing with the names of US TV channels – most of which seem to be three letters long!)

   I loved the reference to Puck in the surface for BAFFLE, the definition of TIDAL WAVE, the simple construction of BOTTOM (I’m wondering if I might have seen that before), the assembly of EPISCOPATE and it’s nice to see Tina Turner again. THRASH tempted me to suggest earworms but, even for me, it’s still a bit early in the day to be choosing samples from that genre. Favourite was FOOTAGE which really made me laugh. Remember that donkey jacket???

   Thanks Picaroon and Andrew

8. There you go muffin @6: I wasn’t! And we can’t get more aligned in our crossing than that. Bang on 8.19. Rather fitting, given the coincidence theme!

9. PM @8
   🙂

10. PM @7: It wasn’t a donkey jacket!!!!! 😉

    Spooner catlap @5: you’ve been muphried

11. D deserted?? Give me a break

12. [essexboy @10. Indeed so, alas; it was no always so, but nowadays I own a majority shareholding in Muphry’s Law.]

13. Hooray, one I could finish!
    Didn’t know AVESTA or THRASH but the wordplay was clear enough to get me there. The cluing for FIRST LIGHT and ANNE was more subtle than I realised – thank you Andrew. And there was much else to enjoy – the prancing Tina Turner, the strippers posing in the lido, the crashing bore – even though I was sad at 11a to be reminded of the age of the gleeful destruction of so much. I agree with hilt @11 about D = deserted, but I think Picaroon gets excused that solitary one. (Given that Chambers defines “novella” as “a short novel”, i.e. a novella is a novel, I don’t think Spooner’s catflap @5 makes a pallid voint).
    Thanks Picaroon and Andrew

14. Shirl @1 parsed GREGORIAN the way I did. Metamorphosis is arguably a short story but the boundary between short story and novella has never been clearly defined. I am sure Picaroon knows it is not a full length novel.

    An enjoyable puzzle, and an educational one.

15. A very nice puzzle as always from Picaroon, but it took me some time. Got a bit stuck thinking of TT rather than AA for dry in 18d; hadn’t heard of EDOM; loved BAFFLE, PAINTER and EPISCOPATE in particular. Many thanks to P and A.

16. Well, THAT was more like it!

    After a couple of days of wondering if the old grey stuff had fallen out of my ears overnight or booked itself on a Red List holiday, that was doable!

    Very tempted to post a link to Albinoni’s ‘Adagio in G Minor’ as used in the film ‘Galipoli’ but I won’t because it’s not by Albinoni…

    Thanks Picaroon and Andrew!

17. Enjoyed FOOTAGE, the crashing bore and the word WALLOP.

    [I was trying to guess which Wishbone Ash track PM would pluck from their great ARGUS album, but he’s gone all THRASH. Never mind,
    PAINTBALL’s coming home.]

    Thanks Picaroon and Andrew

18. Good stuff from Picaroon. I parsed GREGORIAN as Shirl@1 did and failed to spot what kind of BALL 14d was. And DESPOILATION fits everything about 27a except one crosser – I did not know that t’other was a word. Surely invaders “spoiling” a city will strip it bare?

    Favourite was BOTTOM (a rude clue, as someone at the Guardian had it), closely followed by TIDAL WAVE, FOOTAGE and FIRST LIGHT, which took ages for the penny to drop.

19. I also wasn’t initially keen on D for deserted but did find the following justification.

    Thanks Picaroon and Andrew

20. I enjoyed this very much, although I too think that D for deserted is pushing it a bit.

21. PS: if you use Shirl’s parsing, “novel” no longer refers to “metamorphosed” at all, but is an anagrind for “in a”, so there is no need for any technical argument over what the Kafka work is.

22. Thanks, Andrew and Picaroon. This was definitely a lot easier going than the last two days, but with much to enjoy. COTD for me is 24ac – not difficult but a great surface with some nice misdirection.

    Penfold @17 – I think my ear worm of the day is the same as yours (as Steve Lamacq has often asserted, Half Man Half Biscuit have a song for every occasion)

    muffin @6 – it’s one of those catch-you-out words, granted, but only one variant is an accepted spelling, so not a valid complaint.

23. Liked ENCHANT, HERODOTUS, FOOTAGE, CADGE, ANNE.
    New: digitalin; BORE = a steep-fronted wave.
    Failed AVESTA.

24. hilt @11: I think the d for deserted is an abbreviation that appears in listings of military personell (though I’m not sure how they’d distinguish it from dead which, I suspect, they would use more frequently.) However, I haven’t found proof. But what I did find astonished me: here is a link to the official list of MOD – just MOD – abbreviations published by the government. It runs to 375 pages of 50+ entries per page. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it – in case a setter gets hold of it!

    eb @10: there’s probably a joke in there about sheep in wolves’ clothing or similar. Sums it all up really, spending a lot of money on something that didn’t suit the purpose.

    [Penfold @17: I’d struggle to pick one tbh. It’s an album I never treat to anything less than a full listen from start to finish. (Terrapin Station by the Grateful Dead is another that gets the same treatment). Although I’ve tried, I haven’t really found anything else by Wishbone Ash that quite hits the Argus heights. Splendid composition.]

25. Very enjoyable. I really liked FOOTAGE and PAINTBALL. I got ANNE from the “Frank or Stuart” bit but needed your explanation Andrew for the rest of it. My only slight quibble is that “naughty so-and-so” seems a bit odd for “cad” in 23d.

    Re LIGHT in 19a, Don Manley says in the Chambers Crossword Manual:

    … you may come across a word that denotes the answers as they appear in the diagram. That word is “lights”. Unfortunately this term is also used to refer to individual letters within words. The particular meaning is usually obvious from the context, but I now avoid using “lights” wherever possible.

    Many thanks Picaroon and Andrew.

26. [PM @24, re sheep. Same era, but more savage.
    Re Argus, definitely the best in their back catalogue.]

27. Thank you Andrew, I had American News = A+N+N and no idea where the E came from so glad you sorted that out, and no idea why BOTTOM was mechanical (apart from that rumour about a certain celebrity), also thanks for fleshing out some of the other obscurities.
    This was tough but very satisfying solve with many words only going in piecewise as I slowly figured out what was going on with the wordplay eg spent a while looking up Euripides to see what he might have written about – I blame it on a mild case of GRIPPE (is that term in common use in the UK? It is over here but recall something call gripewater which maybe has a similar root).
    I will refrain from inflicting my THRASH choices upon you all and thank Picaroon for another great puzzle with hidden heights.

28. No complaints here. Spick and Span from Top to BOTTOM (I loved that-just seeing “mechanical and bishop went “ping”
    Slowed up with 7 and 11 (IRON AGE is not one word ) so needed to get BAFFLE
    Then to finish the two 18s.TT didnt produce anything for staying dry so tried AA and eventually got the wicked 18a Great to finish with a tea tray
    Thank you Mr Pirate for continuing the fun this week

29. widdersbel@22: News to me that DESPOILATION is not a legitimate word, so I looked it up and alas, it is true. A linguistic historical accident: despoliation comes from the Latin despoliare , but despoil comes via Norman French which spelt it despouiller ,so we end up with the inconsistency of two words with the same original Latin root ending up with different spellings in English.

30. btw a bore is much more accurately a TIDAL WAVE than a tsunami is – the latter has nothing to do with tides.

    Here is the Severn bore.

31. George Clements sums it up @2. I loved it from start to finish.

    Many thanks to Picaroon and Andrew.

32. [gladys @29 – a bit like foil and exfoliate]

33. A lovely puzzle with clues almost all ‘ahas’ with few ‘grrs’, and a joy from start (GROUNDHOG DAY) to finish (TIDAL WAVE) – though I was another who initially fell into the DESPOILATION trap.
    Thanks very much Picaroon for restoring my faith in Guardian cryptics, after a miserable period. My feeling is not that recent puzzles have been difficult (I like difficult) but that that we have been subjected to some setters boorishly grandstanding their own intellectual superiority, rather than being concerned with providing a rewarding experience for the solver. Lets hope today’s puzzle sets a better example.

34. Much to admire but AVESTA defeated me as I was transfixed on TT rather than AA, like drole @15. Faves were PAINTER, PAINTBALL & FOOTAGE and good spots eb @3.

    Ta Picaroon & Andrew

35. Thanks for the blog . I was another with despoilation until paintball.
    Kafka and Euripides in the same crossword is really spoiling us, Euripides is my all time favourite answer to a crossword clue.
    D for deserted has been discussed here before and is a military term as PostMark @24.

36. Lots to enjoy, classy. Did not know Gregor = metamorphosis, (having not read Kafka) so needed the blog to parse that. Am annoyed at how long it took me to see EDOM. And I am another who has learnt the correct sp of DESPOLIATION, thanks to gladys@29 for the etymology and explanation Thanks to Picaroon and Andrew

37. I might be in the minority, but I found this harder than either Boatman’s or Vlad’s puzzles this week.

    Lots of customary Picaroon wit, though. I enjoyed BOTTOM, THRASH and FOOTAGE, although will forebear to try and make any sort of connection between those words.

38. ng@36 When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.
    It is a ( longish ) short story really. only about 50 pages.

39. [Just a quick shout out to those on here who occasionally venture onto the Indy. A very fine construction by Methuselah today. Superlatives already jostling for space on the blog – which is required reading once the puzzle has been completed!]

40. Top half slipped in cosily, but the BOTTOM (very nice misdirection) half took much longer to yield, despite the inviting long anagram for 27ac. Gnarliest bit was the SW corner, with AVESTA being particularly obscure. Liked BAFFLE and FOOTAGE, much else too…

41. Boffo @37: I also found this trickier than most of our fellow posters. Not helped by my being decoyed in to interpreting 1dn as *(APOPESMAN) with ‘metamorphosed’ as an anagrind and the solution being ‘a novel’. That held me up a long time. Anyone else tricked in this way?

    Great puzzle, though, full of subtleties. Some clever definitions (‘mechanical’ raised a smile) and excellent surfaces.

    Bravo Picaroon and thanks to Andrew for illuminating some of the cleverness which had passed me by.

42. Boffo @37 – I found this much harder than the Boatman, though in retrospect it’s hard to say why (two pieces of GK aside). Haven’t dared look at Vlad’s from yesterday…

    Particularly enjoyed crashing bore – once the penny dropped.

43. Gervase @41 – Yes!

44. [Pieta has evoked a faded-memories puzzle. Rome, St Peter’s, ’67, yes the Michelangelo one (later to be perspex-shielded), but then there was one whose foot was worn from years of touching by tourists (including me), which I remember as also being a pieta. Could be wrong]

45. Just wanted to echo Gervase’s thanks to Andrew for revealing the cleverness here. Super stuff, and so much more enjoyable than the mailing I took from The Impaler yesterday.

    Many thanks, both.

46. GREGORIAN was COTD for me working on multiple levels with misdirection and even a trap for the unwary pedant 🙂

47. It is good for the soul William@45, the crosswords we fail on teach us more. Never forget that the setter is the enemy, sometimes they will defeat us but we live to solve another day.

48. Enjoyed it all. Got only four words on first pass-through, but bit by bit got all but ANNE and AVESTA last night. They defeated me, all I could think of was CNN for the news agency with who knew what vowel stuck in? A touch or reveal and — ah! Anne Frank! Queen Anne! (Why is she deader than other monarchs?) AVESTA followd.

    Good fun, clever deception (thanks Picaroon) and undeception (thanks Andrew).

49. I meant a touch of check, try not to use reveal.

50. This was a relief after a difficult few days but the SW outsmarted me. Many thanks to setter and blogger. ( Delighted to discover a new, to me, HMHB track. Argus is a long-standing fave so I’m now going to see if Terrapin Station can change my view of the GD as rather boring.)

51. Gervase@41: me too.

52. [JerryG @50: with a moniker like yours, how can you commit such sacrilege??? 😉 To be fair, they are not everyone’s cup of tea, I know. But a combination of mindset, escapism, timing, memories etc do make them one of my all time loves and TS would be my desert island disc. … so don’t be too scathing 😀 ]

53. PM @24 – that is a brilliant find! Thanks for sharing.

54. Very dapper and quite enchanting in a mid-summery way. Lots of double letters too. Thanks Picaroon & Andrew

55. (SorryPM, despite the name it hasn’t changed my mind. It’s back to the Little Feat and Petty CD’s for me.)

56. Hi Valentine @48 – if that was a serious query, see here

57. Thanks Picaroon for another top-notched crossword. I was stumped by AVESTA and ALBINONI, didn’t understand fixture=match, couldn’t parse BOTTOM, and guessed d=deserted because I’ve come to the conclusion that nearly any word can be abbreviated by its first letter. My favourites included EPISCOPATE, ENCHANT, BAFFLE (great surface), and THRASH. Thanks Andrew for the blog.

58. PostMark @ 24: I don’t think the military use D = DEAD, it’s more usually K = KILLED (eg KIA).

    It always amuses me when folk complain about a supposed ‘random abbreviation’ without checking whether the usage is supported.

59. I still haven’t finished yesterday’s Vlad (put it down last night with only one solution entered!), so this was a spot of light relief. Nearly went wrong with FIRST CLASS at 19a, which I think works quite well, but ALBINONI put paid to that idea. Didn’t know EDOM but eventually got it from the reversed synonym. And finally got the Mechanical with rising bishop (ooh missus!).

    Is the complaint of ‘deserted’=D going to be the new repeat query on this site? As Roz @35 has pointed out, it was queried recently but is a standard abbreviation and *it’s in Chambers*.

    Thanks to Picaroon for a very witty and interesting puzzle, and to Andrew for blogging it.

60. [Eileen @56. Thanks for the link. I was thinking of the (slightly less factually based) Sellar & Yeatman version: Anne. A Dead Queen. (See Chapter XXXIX.) 🙂 ]

61. Eileen@56 Thank you for that. I really didn’t know why Queen Anne was so very, very dead, and I certainly had no inkling of the bizarre custom of death effigies. They must have been exhibited not only in the dead person’s own clothes but the clothes they died in, or Lord Nelson wouldn’t have had to wear his jacket with the bullet hole that had to be covered. But some would have died in bed, and they wouldn’t have been shown in night clothes. Perhaps Lord Nelson didn’t have another uniform jacket?

62. Simon S @58: interestingly, the National Museum of the Royal Navy also publishes a (much shorter) list of abbreviations which includes DD for discharged dead. The single D is just for discharged. But I think you’re right with KIA.

63. PM @62. Your list confirms the information I remembered from reading the works of CS Forester that ‘deserted’ in the Royal Navy was R for run.

64. I thought this was a great puzzle, a lot of fun and ahas.

    Regarding D for deserted and all the rest, I think the core issue is not whether there is a field of study or practice where it is used, but how mainstream it is. Chambers attests to the former, but solvers’ pleasure/grievance depends on the latter.

65. Personally the further from the mainstream the more pleasure for me, as long as it is in Chambers. I get fed up of all the standard abbreviations. I want to see strangeness used for s , that will really annoy people.

66. I agree that D for “deserted” is maybe a tad unfair for that large and growing subset of us with no time spent in Her Majesty’s service. And I had never heard of AVESTA. Other than that, great puzzle.

    [I’m posting, though, to weigh in on the novel/novella/story distinction: it’s really one made by the publishing industry, not the author. A short story is short enough to appear as an article in a magazine; a novel is long enough to be published profitably as a stand-alone book. A novella is in that ugly middle ground where it can’t profitably be printed in either format–most novellas, to be printed, have to be anthologized with other novellas or stories, though e-publishing has made a novella renaissance possible. (The average novella is roughly the length of an entire issue of a magazine–notably, “The Old Man and the Sea” appeared that way.) Because these are sliding targets, the definitions are necessarily fluid. But generally, if you’re over 50,000 words you’re in novel territory; if you’re under 10,000 you’re firmly in short-storyland; and taking into account the grey areas 20-40K words is definitely a novella. Anyway, the point is that we needn’t quibble over which one of these things a particular work is, since it wasn’t the author who chose which of these boxes to put their work in.]

67. mrpenney@66 how many pages roughly is 10,000 words ? Just checked my edition of Metamorphosis and it is 50 pages, longish short story for me. The Old Man and the Sea is 99 pages, novella.

68. Simon S @56: I never bother to check because I know the usage will be supported. Somewhere or other.

    Patrick O’Brian did his research: Jack Aubrey uses R(un) and Discharged Dead – but not Deserted. That must be an Army abbreviation.

69. I’m not sure why “D for ‘deserted’ is maybe a tad unfair” (mrpenny @66) or why “how mainstream it is” (Dr WhatsOn @64) should be a criterion that setters should bear in mind if they want to avoid complaints from solvers. Yes, it’s not in everyday use but when was that ever a problem in crossword land? And it has been used once before this year, just a few weeks ago (Guardian 28,454 – Vlad) and I have found another instance in 2019 (Guardian 27,757 – Maskarade) and that’s without looking at other newspapers.

    We are constantly assailed with obscurities, some of which I have railed against myself (‘worried’=ATE, ‘vomit’=CAT both spring to mind), but I have learned to bite my tongue. We are supposed to have familiarity with outmoded slang from the early 20th century, not to mention the layout of a cricket field.

    D for ‘deserted’ seems a comparatively odd hill to choose to die on – or perhaps just run away 😉 . Especially as in this case it is the initial letter of the answer, with 3d NUD(G)E providing an easy crosser too.

70. Thanks to Picaroon and Andrew (whose parsing raised ANNE to COD for me) (because I assumed there to be more than one Anne Stuart, none of whom I had heard of).

    OUTMATCH is a strange word – don’t recall meeting it, although online dictionaries give examples of its use which are credible. To me it seems internally oxymoronic – you match something and then trump it at the same time.

    And while I accept Andrew’s parsing of GREGORIAN (to wit the inclusion of the “‘s”) it does seem to render the word “A”, at the beginning of the clue, redundant. But I can think of no way to save it – the “A” just seems superfluous and could have been dropped without doing any damage.

    What an array of images: a prancing Tina Turner; nude jogging in Berlin; strippers in the lido (but not the one in Paris?); licentious alcohol and cocaine consumption, a twirling bum… Whew, I need a lie-down.

71. Roz, not all pages are created equal, but 300 words a page is a good rule of thumb. So 10,000 words is about 33-ish pages, putting Metamorphosis in that grey area between a long short story and a short novella.

72. Thank you very much, I know it is variable but nice to have a rough idea. Most short stories are in collections and seem to be about 20 pages. Most of Kafka’s stories are much shorter than Metamorphosis. The Old Man and the Sea must be pretty close to 30,000 words, classic novella.

73. Another cracker. Copmus@28 – I went with IRONAGE without thinking about it being two words which meant I came here without having got BAFFLE but I did once I saw FOOTAGE. Gervase@41 – me too. I think PM@7 covered everything I would have said. Thanks to Picaroon and Andrew for the blog and Kafka explanation and others for the stuff about Anne.

74. I found this puzzle a bit easier than the previous two, but not a walk in the park by any means.

    I didn’t know the required meaning of FIXTURE, and if I’ve ever heard of ALBINONI or AVESTA, I managed to forget them, but I managed to work out the solutions anyway, so I got to be a bit pleased with myself.

    The beautifully tricky definition of TIDAL WAVE has to be the highlight of the puzzle for me. [Incidentally, if you find yourself in maritime Canada, check out the tidal bore in the Bay of Fundy. We went rafting on it and had an amazing time.]

75. Roz @47: Ha-ha!! I do enjoy your posts!

76. I think 19a FIRST LIGHT may refer to the Pennsylvanians’ preferred method of weather forecasting being to ask a groundhog whether it has seen its shadow (or not), which led to weatherman Phil Connors covering the event in the film.
    From Wikipedia: “if a groundhog emerging from its burrow on this day sees its shadow due to clear weather, it will retreat to its den and winter will persist for six more weeks; if it does not see its shadow because of cloudiness, spring will arrive early.”

77. Alphalpha@70, I think the “A” at the start of Gregorian helps to indicate that we are looking for something specific to one pope (well one name, there have been many Gregorys) rather than any or all of them. It may not strictly be necessary but I found it useful! Agree on OUTMATCH, which did at least make me wonder if there is an equivalent antonym eg “England undermatched Italy on Sunday night” but I can’t find one.

78. Having not read Kafka, I failed to parse GREGORIAN. AVESTA, OUTMATCH and DESPOLIATION were searches in the Chambers app.

79. Gazzh@77: Don’t mention the you-know-what… But what a truly Shakespearean episode – gripping stuff.

80. In 10 across, the ‘D’ comes from ‘deserted.’ Is this an accepted abbreviation of this word in cryptics?

81. Saj @80 , it is from army records. D next to the name of a soldier means deserted. It is also in Chambers which settles any argument for me .

82. I still don’t like the D but a good puzzle. Had to guess a few harder ones.
    Thanks Picaroon and Andrew

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