Guardian 28,764 / Vulcan

71 comments on “Guardian 28,764 / Vulcan”

1. I liked my LOI TRANSFORM. Better not say anything else 🙂

2. Yes it was a pleasant stroll, apart from initially putting in Pick Fault instead of FIND FAULT and then wondering what vestment ended in ‘K’ and not being able to spell PICCALILLI at first stab. 🙂

3. Kiss me, Hardy! Kiss me, quick!

   Thanks, Vulcan and Eileen!

4. KISS ME: Maybe CAD. Maybe CD!

5. I found this a straightforward romp with no problems parsing anything.

   Thank you to Eileen and Vulcan

6. A nice Monday crossword.
   “All” seems superfluous in 5d and made me think I hadn’t parsed it properly, leaving me two possible partially parsed solutions, tipple being the other.

7. Found this a bit unexciting – don’t really know why.

   Liked POST-OP, KISS ME, INCARNATION, MARSH

   Thanks Vulcan and Eileen.

8. Quite tough (esp upper half) but mostly enjoyable. Failed 19ac POST-OP.

   Did not understand the word ‘quick’ in 6ac – was it necessary?

   Liked MARSH.

   New for me: vizsla (dog breed); SOLO WHIST.

   Thanks, both.

9. Thanks to both. Confused by ‘off’ in 23d: would take lead -of- … not be more appropriate?

10. michelle@8

    ‘Kiss me’ followed by Hardy (and/or) quick leads to ‘Kiss me, Hardy! Kiss me, quick!’

    Both Hardy and quick are necessary parts of the clue, I think.

11. michelle @8 – see here https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/kiss-me-quick-hat.html for the hats referred to in the blog.

12. madman @9 – ‘take off’ the first letter of vizsla makes sense to me.

13. I had CROCKPOT with casserole as the definition (could see crock as eccentric, but less sure about pot for excellent! — for good reason, of course).

    Didn’t know SOLO WHIST or PICCALILLI, but pleased to have finished the rest of the puzzle quickly. Enjoyed PETULANT — nice to see Petula Clark.

    Thanks to Vulcan and Eileen

14. My mother grew up in Indiana which has many covered bridges. She told me that “kiss me quick” was what you did crossing one because no one else could see you stealing a kiss!

15. Eileen, I tend to agree with madman@9. The”off” made me try to do something with izsla i.e. Vizsla with the v off, at first. This would have been a very wierd word, so discarded that idea.

16. Thanks Vulcan and Eileen
    Several nice clues. I liked KISS ME and MYOPIC. I hadn’t heard of a vizsla, but after I discovered that it’s a dog, I added VITAL to my like-list.
    How old do you have to be to remember Petula Clark? I remember her in the film of Arnold Bennett’s The Card. (Along with Alec Guiness and Glynis Johns, as I recall.)

17. Thank you, Eileen @11

    Calgal @13 – I too thought of crockpot = casserole but could not really make it work so I switched to CRACKPOT

18. Eileen@blog. PETULANT, I also thought of superman, same letter count, but, earworm alert:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wulPDIG9Zs

    Is there a micro theme here? KISS ME.

19. Me @15. Wierd is also a weird word. How did that happen!

20. Crossbar@19, i before e, except after c, and heaps of exceptions. Cierd/ceird would be really weird.

21. Good Monday puzzle with clear clues.

    I liked OUT OF SORTS because of the anagram reference, POST-OP for the theatre, SOLO WHIST for the good charade with ‘very much’, and DEPEND for the part of pool, which I suppose in the surface was the game.

    Thanks Vulcan and Eileen.

22. I missed POST-OP off my like-list.

23. paddymelon@20 I can usually manage weird correctly 😉 Though I don’t think I’ve ever got PICCALILLI correct at first attempt, Tim C @2

24. [Crossbar @23
    To avoid missteps, I revealed PICCALILLI!]

25. Crossbar@23. I should have put a smiley face on my post@20.
    Speaking of PICCALILLI, don’t want to put a sour face on it, but I thought that clue was a bit overdone.
    ‘pickle’ was a bit too obvious, or was it because I had corned beef and pickles/piccalilli for lunch today?

26. A very nice start to the week provided by Vulcan and the usual clear and informative blog from Eileen; thank you both.

    @muffin16: “How old do you have to be to remember Petula Clark?”
    Well, my age, so jolly young…
    I was always very pleased when “Finian’s Rainbow” was on the television when I was a child.
    I wonder if it’s stood the test of time?

27. @Me26
    Oh! I put in a bashful “ahem” between two pointy brackets after “jolly young”. Don’t know where they went.

28. For 10ac, was thinking maybe something with Gable, but the crossers eventually cued Petula, and an earworm of Downtown, which was just about on a loop on the radio in its day, in the mid ’60s.
    Ta for puzzle and blog.

29. [Crossbar @23 and muffin @24, I long for a decent Piccalilli here in the only third world country where you can drink the water, but they just seem to sell something called sweet mustard pickles which have far too much sugar in them as do a lot of other “pickles”. I’ve made my own in the past, but maybe I need to order some online from over there.]

30. Another Monday where it felt like they swapped the cryptic and the quiptic… for quite a few the definition jumped out and suggested the answer before I’d even tried to deconstruct the rest of the clue (6a, 12, 18, 21).

    Liked OUT OF SORTS, SUPINE and MYOPIC, although maybe I just think they describe me on a Monday morning…

    Thanks both!

31. A brief Monday stroll. TRANSFORM was good.

    I agree wholeheartedly with muffin @16 about Petula Clark. It must so so dispiriting for anyone under 55 trying to learn cryptic crosswords to have woefully out of date popular culture references.

    Thanks Vulcan and Eileen

32. To all those of you who found this straightforward and, possibly, too easy PLEASE don’t knock it. I feel very pleased to have completed a puzzle. I normally get between 1/4 and 3/4 done myself.

    I, and I know others, find it very dispiriting (e.g. my daughter) to read comments equivalent to “I finished this while my coffee was cooling” having just spent some time getting (most of) it done.

    This blog should encourage all who try the crossword and not be the preserve of the super-solvers!

33. Excellent and most enjoyable. We had to check vizsla which was new to us – the only breed of dog beginning with V? – but the rest was all straightforward. Favourite was our first one in, CRACKPOT.
    Thanks, Vulcan and Eileen.

34. allan_c @32 – Volpino (Italiano) and Valley bulldog as a bit of a cheat.

35. … or even @33

36. KISS ME (didn’t understand the ‘quick’ bit) and KITE held me up and I ended up failing, with a “tipple” for TOPPLE at the end.

    I liked the PETULA Clark reminder. Muffin @16, I remember her in an even earlier film, “I Know Where I’m Going” from 1945 – brilliant film BTW.

    Thanks to Vulcan and Eileen

37. Another game of two halves for me. Set off like a train thinking it was going to be easy but had to have a break before getting much of the SW. Not sure why as it really doesn’t seem more difficult than the rest. Thanks to Vulcan for a good Monday challenge and Eileen for the blog.

38. [TimC@29 No larder should be without a jar of proper PICCALILLI. Too sharp for me, but Mr. C loves it.]

39. WynnD @32 -in saying ‘a pretty straightforward solve’ in my preamble, I had no intention of ‘knocking’ the puzzle. I simply meant that I wasn’t aware of any particularly tricky bits of wordplay or parsing that would be off-putting for or even unfair on less experienced solvers.
    I don’t think any of the commenters said, or implied, that the puzzle was too easy – most said they enjoyed it.

    I hope you (and your daughter) will continue to solve the daily puzzles and visit the site again. We do try to encourage newer solvers – that’s largely what we’re here for. 😉

40. Good fun. Hadn’t heard of piccalilli, but I’m in the same third world country as Tim C@29. 5a was the only one I didn’t get.

41. I thought it was a very nice puzzle. Muffin@16 does have a point, but there are not that many benefits to getting older, so maybe this is one of them.

42. Never heard of catmint, which is apparently another name for catnip. My computer feels the same way, it puts red wiggles under “catmint.” Never heard of “Kiss Me” hats either, though Idid know about Nelson and Hardy.

    SOLO WHIST was a jorum.

    This must be one of Eileen’s biennial (is that right?) weekends when she does Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I always enjoy those. (I assume that the other regular bloggers also have such weekends twice a year.)

    Thanks to Vulcan and Eileen.

43. ravenrider @6. I tend to agree with you that ‘all’ seems superfluous in 5d”, and my initial response would have been that the word was included for the sake of the surface. But then I was told yesterday (#58) that “a top setter like Imogen does not stick extra words into a clue for such reasons.” Since Vulcan is like Imogen (they are pseudonyms for the same setter), there must be another reason for ‘all’ being in the clue! But, joking aside, ‘Drink round the place and fall over’ just wouldn’t work, would it.

    I guess the purists would say if you can’t strip out the superfluous word then you must rewrite the clue. As an anything goes type, I like the clue as it stands.

    So perhaps I would argue that despite the initial impression, ‘all’ is not superfluous after all.

44. [Valentine @42. I think it’s once every 20 weeks, so it’s more like biannually than biennially! Eileen does Monday to Friday on a five week rotation, and every fourth Saturday. So on the fourth rotation (i.e. at the end of the 20th week), we are lucky enough to have her as our blogger on Friday and Saturday, and on the Monday of the 21st week too!]

45. Hi Valentine @42
    I think it’s twice a year – I can’t do the Maths! It happens because, as you may have noticed, our weekly blog slots advance by one day a week, so the Friday blogger blogs the following Monday – and I blog the Saturday Prize puzzle every four weeks.
    None of the other three Guardian Saturday bloggers does a weekday blog, so this pattern doesn’t apply to anyone else on the Guardian team.

46. You beat me to it, sheffield hatter. 😉

47. Pretty much a perfect Monday puzzle. Thanks Vulcan. Thanks Eileen for 3D – never heard the second use of COPED before.

48. Paul @47 – sorry, perhaps I should have explained the second definition: see here: https://www.britannica.com/topic/cope

49. Very relaxing after Picaroon’s prize, which I though was superb.
    Oh, that Hardy!! Not Oliver, Thomas, Tom or Jeremy.
    10a was a bit of a throw-back.
    Now to check some parsings…
    Thanks Vulcan and Eileen.

50. WynnD @32 – If you follow a crossword blog as a new solver you have to be prepared for the comments you mentioned. It’s not bragging, just a statement of fact.
    Many of the solvers have been solving for years.
    Keep at it…

51. ravenrider @6 and sheffield hatter @43: Brendan, who I hope we can agree is a “top setter”, said recently: “I don’t share the view sometimes expressed here that superfluous words in clues must be avoided at all costs” (comment 52 on his own puzzle 28,721). I would very humbly agree. It’s only when a superfluous word prevents a clue from working properly that it’s objectionable.

52. WynnD@32: there’s also that annoying
    subset of Murphy’s Law that ensures that the more you are struggling with a crossword, the fuller the comments will be of words like “easy” and “gentle”. On the last Guardian Cryptic I had problems with, one of the btl comments was a sneering “Nice Quiptic!”

53. Nice monday puzzle with plenty to enjoy. I got held up a little by entering Time for the bird that flies without flapping it’s wings. I guess time doesn’t have wings, but then neither do kites – they have sails. I prefer my answer, I think.

54. Somehow managed to change my name to “This goes in there.” for my last post. Random.

55. WynnD@32 – a large part of the problem is the number of people who feel a duty to contribute every day to the Guardian blog, even when they have nothing interesting to say. If they have found a particular crossword straightforward, there is not much to say other than to state this fact.

56. Ptolemy@55 – Yes. I often find that all I have to say is that I enjoyed the puzzle, and then mention a few of my favourite clues. So usually I don’t post anything. However, some folks like to analyse in detail, which is fine.

57. [WynnD@32,

    Congratulations for your success. Your accomplishment should be celebrated and appreciated by all aficionados of cryptics, whether it was a quiptic or Saturday prize makes no difference to that wonderful feeling of having matched wits with the setter and triumphed. The aim of the setter is to lose gracefully rather than beat the solver, so I’m quite sure Vulcan would be more than happy to admit defeat to you on this occasion. His pleasure on your success may well rival your own.]

58. [MarkN @54. It looks like you accidentally pasted that phrase into the name box below the comment #75 the other day, and the cookie monster remembered it!]

59. Thank goodness for Vulcan and Mondays. Some clues I solved quickly, others required a walk around the garden and a second go but got there in the end.
    As for those questioning whether Petula Clark is too ancient a reference – she’s still going strong playing the birdwoman (tuppence a bag) in Mary Poppins in the West End!

60. It took me an embarrassingly long time to get 3d; embarrassing since my surname is COPE and I do know it’s origin (a maker of nuns habits).

    StoneRose @27 – pointy brackets are special in the language of the www – you can see this if you press the button at the top of the comment form. I imagine the parser looked at them, went “huh?” and then chucked them out. I’m now going to type something techy … <ahem>

61. … which worked ! Tada!

    For my next trick I would like to thank Vulcan and Eileen, which I forgot to do above <ahem>

62. I got a bit stuck in the Northeast by having COOT in at 6d (SCOOTS without wings), so PETULANT and KISS ME were last in. Otherwise fun. I found 27 irritating 😉 . Oh, and I can’t spell Piccalilly.
    Thanks, V&E.

63. [sheffield hatter @ 58 – Haha – nice spot, and good memory. Thanks for shedding some light on it.]

64. As Rufus as a Monday is ever likely to get, I’d say. Over almost before I’d started.

    I did like the rather sad but true feel to 21.

65. …and that’s precisely the kind of comment that WynnD @32 was (understandably) complaining about.

66. My tough old heart refuses to bleed, and you are far too clever, Mr Essex, to have missed that all views here (within reason) ought to be welcome, mine just as much as Wynn’s, though I am inclined, to a degree, to sympathise with him as you do. However you have wrongly assumed that I have a negative view of Rufus or Rufus-style puzzles such as this Vulcan/ Imogen offering.

    Obviously not all solvers are of similar ability, but no-one should allow themselves to be put off by show-offs and super-solvers. I’m not sure I quite fall into that bracket, judging by the speeds at which some people manage to finish The Times Crossword these days, but I was pretty useless once, and (if this helps anyone) regularly pressed the cheat buttons to find out how the clues worked.

67. WynnD@32 — I long for the day when I manage to complete a puzzle and come here to find people say it was difficult!

68. Nice and straightforward. Certainly easier than the Quiptic. PETULANT gave me a chuckle, and I liked COPED.

    My sister had a couple of Vizslas some years ago. They’re excellent gundogs.

69. Thanks Eileen @48!

70. On the theme of beginners and improvers, I’m now at the stage where I get most of the quiptics and the Mondays, but my forays into the harder days of the week have usually been pretty unsuccessful. Any suggestions on which (Guardian) days or setters would make a manageable next step up? Many thanks to you all

71. Hi Alex @70

    I think it’s true to say that Monday’s cryptic is, usually, at the ‘easier’ end of the range – though not always ‘harder’ than the quiptic, as you’ll have found, but, as keeps being discussed, there’s no real evidence that the puzzles get progressively harder as the week goes by.

    You’ve obviously progressed quite a bit since you started, so I’d recommend that you persevere with the cryptics, taking advantage of the check button and the blogs, as necessary, and you’ll find which setters’ ‘wavelengths’ you generally find it easier to tune into.

    We all had to start somewhere and the more you do, the more you learn. I’ve been doing cryptics for decades, since University days, but I’ve learned a lot since finding 15².

    Have you tried today’s Nutmeg? It’s a very good example of her work: her clues are always meticulous and fair and the comments today are overwhelmingly complimentary.

    All the best for continuing progress. 😉

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