Guardian Saturday (PRIZE!) Crossword 28,620 by Crucible (4 December 2021)

72 comments on “Guardian Saturday (PRIZE!) Crossword 28,620 by Crucible (4 December 2021)”

1. Thanks mc_rapper67.
   Lovely puzzle from Crucible. I had NINETY-NINE as the ice-cream.

2. The theme came early after SPLASHDOWN, GALACTIC and PLANETARY went in first but the theme was out of my comfort zone. (I imagine Roz rocketed through this). REAWAKENED, CYCLICALLY and EPICUREAN were superb, as was the daft but clever ONCE IN A BLUE MOON. I thought NINETY-NINE needed ‘cream’ at the end of the clue to make it work properly. Stuck on CORONA, MARE and NECESSARY for the rest of the week but got there in the end. Very enjoyable.

   Ta Crucible & mc_rapper67 for another super blog.

3. Enjoyed this.

   LEONINE made me smile

   Other favourites were GAGARIN (FOI), CYCLYCALLY, AURORAE, ACADEME.

   Thanks Crucible and mc_rapper67

4. Thanks for the blog, at last a theme for me and a great puzzle, going to add two more theme words, one a bit tenuous.
   AIRY discs and rings are important diffraction effects in the design of telescopes.
   CYCLICALLY applies to many astronomical processes including a blue moon. They occur seven times in every nineteen years, the Metonic cycle.

5. Same as you Gonzo, but now I see how it works. Thanks mc_

6. Bit of nostalgia.

7. [ Think I may have beaten you on theme words for once AlanC. I make that 17 – 1 to you but the comeback starts now ]

8. Roz @7: I wish I had a ninety-ninth of your intellect, nuff said. I’m glad you enjoyed it.

9. I liked this a lot especially SPLASHDOWN and LEONINE. I liked the theme and it seemed to me that the theme clues only required GK rather than specialized knowledge, but others may differ.

10. Me too, ICE as in the famous ice-cream with the flake, a 99

11. OK…so my parsing of 15D was a little flake-y…

12. LOLS

13. I had an unparsed CARINA for 20d… Well, it is a star.

14. Thanks rapper. MARE last in, research then revealing it as a large plain on the moon – new to me and I suppose many others.

15. Thanks rapper. MARE last in, research then revealing it as a large plain on the moon – new to me and I suppose many others. Mare being sea in Latin (and Italian).

16. MARE were once thought of as possible seas with early telescopes, the Sea of Tranquility was the landing site for Apollo 11. The term was also used for Mars but has now largely been replaced.

17. Thanks Crucible and mc_rapper67

    I completely missed this was an actual prize. Very nice theme.

    I knew the word CYNOSURE but (shame) had no idea of the meaning until this x-word. So a nice discovery. But topped by the input from Roz @4. The Metonic Cycle and the satisfyingly obscure 7 times every 19 years – I shall be bringing that fact up at dinner parties for years to come (if I ever get invited to any!)

    Thanks all. Stay safe.

18. Enjoyable and quick. Solved SW corner last.
    Favourite: CYGNUS, AURORAE.

    New for me: CYNOSURE; 99 = a cone of ice cream with a stick of flaky chocolate in it; NEREID (well-clued), MARE a large, level basalt plain on the surface of the moon.

    Thanks, both.

19. Quite a wide-ranging selection of space-related references from Crucible, making for a relatively straightforward and fun puzzle. I particularly liked the old Pope, LEO NINE, and MARE struck me as very clever once I finally worked it out for my LOI. I thought for a while 3d might be Leonid, as that meteor shower comes in November, but got the right answer eventually. I had exactly the same reaction to CYNOSURE as Epee Sharkey @ 17: knew the word, had never used it and had no idea what it meant. Thanks Crucible, thanks mc_rapper67.

20. Thanks Crucible, this was an absolute delight to solve. LEONINE, GAGARIN, CYCLICALLY, and CYGNUS were among my favourites. I would have entered the contest but I disqualified myself because I used a word finder to get SPLASHDOWN. Thanks mc_rapper67 for the detailed write-up.

21. Many thanks Crucible and mc_r. An interesting, friendly and welcome distraction. [Wish RECLUSION wasn’t so topical.]

22. I particularly enjoyed LEONINE and spotted the theme early on. All out and understood.
    Perhaps the restriction to post and fax is to dissuade people like me from halfway around the planet from submitting an entry. The postage in the unlikely event of winning would probably cost more than the prize so I don’t think I’ll be buying a fax machine (what are they?) anytime soon.

23. Bit of a grumble. Blog doesn’t fit on smart phone screen without moving the content from side to side.

24. Lovely crossie, great theme. LEONINE definitely my favorite amongst many other nice clues. I agree with the IC[E] interpretation of NINETY-NINE. Thanks, Crucible and mc_rapper67.

25. Thanks, Crucible, entertaining and not too hard, and thanks, mc_rapper.
    LEONINE featured in a Guardian crossword a while back, but then you had to identify the successor of Damasus II (who he?), which involved quick Wikipedia research. This clue was much more elegant.
    Research needed this time on Neptune’s moons, though the clueing led one to NEREID easily.
    CESS meaning tax was new to me. Anyone know its origin?

26. Thanks Crucible and mc. As others have said, this was lots of fun. NINETY-NINE was a lovely clue, I also enjoyed the ’local star’ and ‘catty old pontiff’. And much else besides.

    LOI for me was CYNOSURE – not a word I’m familiar with, and the fact that only the vowels (Y is effectively a vowel here) are crossed meant I had to try several combinations of the letters before finding one that checked out in the dictionary.

27. According to Chambers, cess is a sortened form of assess and is listed as an obsolete word although the clue doesn’t indicate this.

28. sjshart @25 – I believe it’s etymologically related to ‘assess’.

29. Tim C @27 – it’s one of those words that’s only kept alive by appearing in crosswords these days.

30. The puzzle was brilliant but my solving was hardly a stellar performance as I needed help with SPLASHDOWN and MARE, LEONINE was my favourite too. Could EPICUREAN also be thematic? Epicurus taught that the universe was infinite, as well as the (doubtless inimical to Roz) idea of “atomic swerve”.

31. Good crossword, which I found not too difficult. It’s strange what random items stick in the memory – I got CYNOSURE quckly because I remembered one single line from a poem studied at school 50+ years ago – “…the cycnosure of neighbouring eyes…”. I thought it was something by Keats – but I find it was Milton’s L’Allegro. Never seen the word anywhere else. Vaguely thought there seemed to be a lot of spacey answers, but themes aren’t really my thing.
    Favourite was the concise MARE, also liked LEONINE, PLANETARY, ORRERIES among others.
    Thanks Crucible and mc_rapper67.

32. widdersbel@29 – Yes indeed. Where would compilers be without all the obsolete words in Chambers (which also has “sess” as an equivalent to “cess”).

33. Thanks Crucible and mc_rapper67 (I omitted the underline first, and immediately saw why it was needed!)
    NINETY-NINE must be the ice cream, though what makes it one is the flake rather than the ice cream itself. It’s nearly a hundred. The IC doesn’t work, as its isn’t 99 in Roman numerals – 99 is XCIX.

34. Stellar crossword from Crucible.

    I liked the No 1’s ulcer, MARE and ONCE IN A BLUE MOON – thanks to Roz @4 for the Metonic cycle.

    Thanks Crucible and MC.

35. muffin @33 Regarding the Roman numerals, while you are, of course, correct, we met this issue only on Tuesday, when Qaos’s 24 across, ILLITERATE, relied on IL being accepted as 49. The latitude extended to Qaos in this matter must here be extended to Crucible, I feel. Certainly, I parsed the clue on this basis.

36. Appreciated the theme – although didn’t know CYNOSURE, but Google led me to it after laughing at my guess of SYNOCURE as a word. Ms W. pointed out that MARE was a better answer than LADY ( & ACADEMY) which understandably I couldn’t parse. Was slightly put out by local star as I thought a corona would exist on any star.

37. Although I parsed 15d as our blogger did, I wasn’t satisified with the wordplay as IC is wrong for Roman 99 and anyway ‘of ice’ requires a lot of stretching to make IC without any further indicator. So thanks to all the ice cream freaks who saw the correct way to solve this clue.

    Apart from that, this was a very enjoyable and smooth solve, and the theme was obvious enough for even me to see. I particularly liked CYNOSURE, as it’s such a lovely word; I didn’t know that it comes from Greek for the tail of a dog (from the star Polaris’s position in Ursa Minor?).

    Thanks to Crucible and mc underscore.

38. I remember a brief spell when a 99 with two flakes was called a Harvey Smith.
    Petert @30 I associate “atomic swerve” with Lucretius but I will check the references on Monday. Epicurus certainly had a cosmology so we can add to the theme list.
    CYGNUS is a somewhat neglected constellation, it does contain DENEB one of the brightest stars we know of intrinsically but very far away. CYGNUS X1 was the first generally accepted stellar black hole.

39. I often miss themes but spotted this one early and it helped. Good job there was nothing too obscure. I wasted a lot of time on 20d having convinced myself that smoke was “cure”. I tried mc_rapper67’s parsing of 15d but knew what Muffin would say and “Almost” would have to be doing double duty so tried again, successfully.
    Thanks to Tramp and mc_rapper67

40. Thanks for all the comments and feedback – much appreciated. Apologies for late response, but I have been out getting my booster jab – Moderna topping up Astra Zeneca…

    TassieTim at #25, and Spooner’s Catflap at 35 – thanks for your moral support, but the annotated solution gives the nod to the ice cream NINETY-NINE at 15D – I’ll update the parsing! I think I got carried away after getting the IX of LEO-NINE…

    Apart from my mangling of 15D, it looks like most people have enjoyed – and maybe even been educated by – this puzzle, and the further explications provided in the comments. I was aware of CYNOSURE from the phrase ‘the cynosure of all eyes’, but I wasn’t 100% what that meant, and didn’t know the astronomical/dog’s tail aspect until I looked it up.

    Thanks to Roz, and others, at various, for the suggestions of further thematic material, and the provision of more in depth explanations.

    Chris at #23 – apologies for the layout issues. I use this style for all my other blogs – Indy Saturday, EV, Genius and Cyclops – and haven’t had too many complaints. I think they just don’t get as many hits as the Grauniad blogs. I’ll have a look at adapting my parsing spreadsheet/HTML formulae to put things out in a more line-by-line way, in the style of some of the other bloggers.

41. Almost unprecedentedly, I didn’t do this puzzle last Saturday and, in fact, didn’t get round to it until yesterday, so it’s much fresher in my mind than usual – and wasn’t put out in the recycling bag.

    I thought it was quite delightful, with some lovely clues – most of my favourites have been mentioned – with top honours going to LEONINE and GAGARIN.

    Many thanks to Crucible for a great puzzle and to mc_rapper67 for a top blog.

42. I struggled with this somewhat last week, and only completed it today with help from the Check button, so a DNF for me.

    My favourites were the very popular LEONINE, AIRY which also made me laugh, and EPICUREAN for the image which immediately sprang to mind of a greetings card, which has been around for years. It shows a classic painting of the (probably) Victorian era depicting a working man sitting gloomily with a fair-haired child on his knee in a bare and shabby room. He’s saying to her something like “Ee lass, there’s nowt we can do about it, we’re Northern”. Does anyone recognise this and can tell me what the painting is?

43. I did know cynosure, but don’t understand what “center of attention” has to do with astronomy. Other than that, my GK saw me through the astronomy but gave up on the ice cream. We don’t have them in the US as far as I know.

    Roz@4, thanks for the Metonic cycle. The only other 19-year cycle I know of (assuming there aren’t any 19-year cicadas) is the Jewish calendar. It isn’t solar, like the Western one (I forget whether it’s Julian or Gregorian) has the solstices and equinoxes on the same date each year. It isn’t purely lunar either, like the Muslim one, which has the same number of 28-day months each 455-day year, which then slides around our calendar year, with a given date in different parts of the year at different times. (Difficult when Ramadan falls in midsummer with long periods of daylight.) The Jewish calendar is lunisolar, a mix of the two, keeping in synch with both the lunar and solar cycles, usually with twelve lunar months but with a thirteenth one added in certain years.

44. I found this one a fairly quick solve and for once I spotted the theme early which helped a lot. CYNOSURE was new to me as was this meaning of CESS.
    For what it’s worth the blog displayed fine on my phone screen.

45. I wonder if Crucible invited the (fallacious) Roman numeral parsing for NINETY NINE in order to incite discussion? Or possibly did he consider it a triple?

46. Valentine @43 fascinating information on calendars, I did not know about the 19 year cycle of the Jewish calendar but it must match the Metonic cycle.
    The lunar and solar cycles do not really match, 12 lunar months do not quite equal one solar year, so they gradually get out of step. After 19 years they are finally back in phase although even this is not quite exact.

47. Thanks Crucible and mc.
    Unfinished because I left 4d blank, convinced it was a quadruple definition, and there were just too many possibilities to fit *A*E. Well, that’s my excuse anyway.

48. Graham@47, I too was looking for the four definitions, until the penny dropped and I liked the clue.

    This was up to Crucible’s high standard, with lots of smiles along the way. Everyone loved 12a LEONINE (concise, witty and clever), which was also one of my two CODs.
    But hardly anyone – just our esteemed blogger and AlanC@2 – liked my other favourite, 14d REAWAKENS (amusing anagram and saucy, sensual, surface).

    Thanks, Crucible and mc_rapper67 for the fun and elucidation, and Roz for the Metonic cycle info that added to the enjoyment of the excellent anagram at 16a.

49. DNF, as I just couldn’t think how to parse 4dn and “_ A _ E” is not much help (although perhaps the theme should have been?).

    Got 16a, ONCE IN A BLUE MOON, from “rare” and the enumeration, with no crossers, and confirming the anagram afterwards.

    Can’t remember if I finally parsed 22ac. I definitely decided it was AURORAE before that in any case, from the definition and “golden” (although isn’t Au the chemical symbol for gold itself, rather than “golden”?).

    In 24ac, RANGE I felt unsure about craving = rage, but I suppose someone might throw a dictionary at me.

    25ac EPICUREAN had nice wordplay, although I noticed that Collins gives N as the abbreviation only for ‘North’, not ‘northern’. The American dictionaries at the same site do give it, though.

    In 1dn, “a drop in the ocean” was a brilliant definition that went right over my head and it took a wordfinder to get the answer. (Tony Santucci @20: there’s no rule against using reference books or other aids.)

    I’d forgotten the word ‘orrery’ (18dn), which I’m sure I once knew (from reading about the Antikythera mechanism I now recall), but I worked it out from the wordplay and looked it up, which helped with 9ac, PLANETARY.

    Chris@23, have you tried turning your phone to landscape orientation? Works for me.

    Valentine@43, The Pre-Islamic Arabs used intercalary months (extra months inserted in the calendar at certain times, to keep the months roughly aligned with the seasons), but Mohammad (speaking for God), held that there were only twelve (lunar) months and forbade the use of intercalaries (Quran, 9:36-7). This had a great deal of significance in the war between the early Muslims and the Meccans, because, by tradition, fighting and was forbidden in certain named months. As a result of only using twelve lunar months, Ramadan, the month of fasting, for example, moves by a couple of weeks or so each solar year, gradually moving through the seasons, although the original meaning of the name is something like ‘scorching hot’.

50. A wonderful puzzle – many thanks to Crucible and mc_rapper. Thanks to other contributors for an interesting discussion as well.

51. P.S. I didn’t fully understand the “ice” part of NINETY-NINE but not knowing about British ice creams didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the puzzle.

52. I recall enjoying this one a lot but struggled to parse MARE and RECLUSION. Also didn’t like the CARAT including R and A for “rare area”. Single letters like that don’t do it for me.
    Thanks Crucible and mc_rapper67

53. Roz@46 I think it’s not so much that the Jewish calendar matches the Metonic cycle as that both match the paths of the sun and the moon. There are complicated scriptural reasons (which the article I found alluded to, and which I didn’t follow) why this month must begin on that weekday and this holiday must not begin on that weekday. I doubt that Meton took any of that into consideration.

    I dunno about AURORAE being themish. You certainly have to look at the sky to see it, but it’s an atmospheric event rather than an astronomic one.

54. And since I don’t recall seeing your name before, mc_rapper67, welcome to our jovial band.

55. Sorry Valentine @53 , I did not explain myself very well. I only meant they matched because the solar and lunar calendars line up again after 19 years. As you say it is the orbits that lead to this not that the Jewish calendar followed Meton or vice versa. Astronomical inevitability.
    The moon’s orbit is moving slowly outwards and hence taking longer. There will be a future time when 12 lunar months exactly match 1 solar year.

56. Tony Collman @49: Thanks for your observation. While I know using references is allowed I would not feel right entering a contest having using outside sources to complete a puzzle. That’s just me, not the rules.

57. Tony C @49 – re 4d, I thought it was kind of obvious from ‘stable dam’ but only felt confident to enter it once I twigged the theme and remembered the ‘seas’ on the moon.

    ORRERY is a lovely word, and appeared just a few weeks ago in a Brendan puzzle. Named after Charles Boyle, the 4th Earl of Orrery, who invented it (notwithstanding that the Greeks had already invented it some years previously, as you say).

58. Thanks for the continuing comments…illuminating and educational as ever…and thanks to Valentine at #54 for your welcoming words. This is my third Grauniad blog, on a four-weekly rota, so see you in January!

    Tony Collman at #49 – yes, I did raise an eyebrow over gold/golden for Au in AURORAE, but forgot to mention it in the blog. I think I took it as Au = gold, and gold, adjectivally, could be golden. And if something is ‘all the rage’, then it is craved by many…(?) Chambers has ‘North’ and ‘Northern’ for N.

    I’m very impressed by Tony Saint-ucci’s noble self-disqualification at #20…if only some of those in the higher echelons had such morals at the moment! As a self-confessed prize puzzle tart, I will admit that I am not above the odd pattern match or outside help to finish off a ‘chewy’ prize cryptic before a deadline.

    Anyway, I will be firing up my fax machine this week…I bought a multi-function printer a few years ago which has a built-in fax facility, and the only thing it has ever been used for is to fax in the Grauniad and Everyman prize puzzles. However, given that it was saving me a stamp and an envelope every time, not to mention a couple of book token wins from the Everyman along the way, it has more than paid for itself already.

    (I’m beginning to think there might be a Metonic cycle involved in my Grauniad prize wins though – I can’t remember the last time I won this one!)

59. Apropos of nothing, in the world of railways, the cess is the ballast area extending from the outermost rail to the boundary of the railway itself. Rather quaintly the distance between the rails on which the train runs is known as the ‘four-foot’ and the distance between the outer rails of adjacent tracks is the ‘six-foot’. Therefore on a text-track railway the width of the railway land is:

    Cess – four-foot – six-foot – four-foot – cess. I wonder if that ‘cess’ is related to the one here?

60. This was very enjoyable.

    A DNF: I couldn’t make heads or tails of 4D clue (MARE).

    Thanks mc for the engaging blog and Crucible for an excellent puzzle.

61. Tony @56, as far as I’m aware, competitors in any event are allowed to handicap themselves as much as they like. In general, winners probably don’t. On the other hand, if you’re using the UK private postal service which continues to masquerade under the name of “the Royal Mail” and the value of the prize divided by the cost of entry is less than the number of correct entries received, you’re on poor odds anyway, so ultimately, by not entering you’re a winner!

    Widdersbel@57, indeed “stable dam” is blindingly obvious now that I know to join those two words of the four together, used in the particular sense which applies.

    Pdp11@60, I’ve never heard “can’t make head or tail of it” used in the plural like that but, investigating, I find that’s normal in America, and the MIT even seems to think it’s related to coin-tossing. They do, however, also refer to Cicero’s ne caput nec pedes (neither head nor feet), suggesting ‘can’t work out which end (of an animal) is the head and which the tail’, which definitely seems more relevant to me. But perhaps I’m biased?

62. Tony Collman @61: I seldom complete a crossword without some form of outside help. However, in 2019 I completed the FT prize by Rosa Klebb (Arachne) on my own. This was a first so I mailed it to London and as luck would have it I was chosen as one of three winners.

63. Mc_rapper@40 Ta very much. Look forward to your next blog.

64. Me @59 – “two-track”

65. Does it matter that the lunar mare in 4d is pronounced mahray? (i.e. different to the horse). I previously assumed double definitions would refer to the same word but it looks like homographs are allowed? (question from a long term lurker – hello all btw)
    Incidentally the plural maria is crying out to be used in a crossword clue!

66. Hello Jones the Guitar, Tim the Banjo here (Tim Phillips). In this rarefied world of (allegedly) ours, pronunciation doesn’t matter unless it matters. It’s the letters in the grid that count (except when they don’t). Keep that as your mantra and you’ll be fine.

67. Tony Santucci at #62 – nice work – that is some hit rate! I would retire while you are still ahead…

    jonestheguitar at #65 – welcome, and thanks for un-lurking yourself! A good point – I should probably have marked it as a homographic double defn. (except that I didn’t know what a homograph was – so I have learnt something new today!) And what Tim said at #66…

68. Loved this puzzle, maybe because it was more straightforward then many Prizes and so very accessible for once. Also the blog was excellent, and all the chit chat has been a lot of fun – entertaining and educational. Shall try to remember the Metonic cycle. Thanks, Roz.

69. Final point on blue moons, late enough now so I will not annoy many people and an astronomy theme is so rare.
    12 lunar cycles slightly less than a solar year so most years we get 12 full moons and sometimes 13 if first of the year is early January. When it is 13 we have 4 full moons in 1 season and 3 in each of the others.
    Traditionally the THIRD full moon in a season containing 4 was called a blue moon.
    In modern times a blue moon seems to have become just the SECOND full moon in the same calendar month. Either way there are always SEVEN per 19 years and then the cycle repeats, First noted by Meton from Athens about 2600 years ago.

70. TC @61 a bit late but thanks for the MIT link on “heads or tails”. I’ve used this expression for decades but never thought to consider its origin. I’m not American so at least one Brit uses that version 😉

71. Roz@69, Meton may have been the one to get his name attached to the nineteen-year cycle, but as a scientist, you will be aware that doesn’t make him the one who discovered it.

    “Three ancient civilizations (Babylonia, China and Israel) used lunisolar calendars and knew of the rule of the intercalation from as early as 2000 BC, about the time of the biblical Tower of Babel”

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonic_cycle

72. Thanks for the extra information Tony, I said first noted by METON not necessarily discovered, it is always the way with academic priority, just look at the HIGGS boson.
    If you can find a name ( Chinese etc ) from much earlier I will spread the word.

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