Guardian 28,804 / Picaroon

83 comments on “Guardian 28,804 / Picaroon”

1. Dazzling puzzle and very fine blog.
   The nina only hit me at the end (with Monk and Serpent I have my eyes out from the start)
   To have this and Tramp in the same week (not to mention cricket and Boris) gave me reason to live.
   Thanks all

2. I think that blaming a woman for letting sin into the world seems a little old fashioned to me.

3. Loved this from start to finish, with more than a passing hint at UK current affairs. My only tiny quibble is 9 – although I can see that it does work, wouldn’t ‘Unimportant person’ have been a better definition? ‘Important person’ = someone? Thank you Picaroon and Eileen.

4. A fine puzzle as ever from Picaroon. I see that Eileen has avoided mentioning that 6 down is exactly the opposite of what our setter has done to her…Btw I think 21d is ‘final goal’. Thanks to both.

5. The other Mark @3 – that was exactly my initial reaction, then I thought about ‘anybody who is anybody…’ and then found in Collins ‘a person of any importance: is he anyone in this town?‘

6. You’re right, Togo @4 – a last-minute careless slip. I’ll amend it now.

7. An enjoyable challenge. I didn’t know that sherry. I knew of idealists but not idealisers. I agree with The other Mark re 9a. Completely missed the nina — but I always do.

8. Lovely puzzle and helpful blog, thankyou. I also thought “final goal” was the definition in 22d as in “be-all and end-all”.

9. 21d!

10. Splendid stuff. The King Lear quotation (which I didn’t know) is of course a BORDER LINE (which was my last in and required all the crossers for BORDER). Didn’t know HYPERMEDIA which defeated me, and ANYONE=somebody important had a question mark. Favourites EEYORE, WATERLOO and DOLOROSO.

11. I loved this, and the more so that for once I managed to take Picaroon’s hint and worked out the quotation before I’d finished, so was helped by it in my last few solutions. There’s a first time for everything!

12. I’m glad Picaroon highlighted (highlit?) the nina at 15a (with the very clever reference to 17 10) otherwise I would probably have missed it. As it was, it provided lots of helpful first and last letters.

    A very enjoyable puzzle. The unfamiliar words were clearly clued, for example “inarm” meaning to embrace.

    I thought “important person” for ANYONE was fine, as in “anyone who is anyone”.

    Many thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

13. Simply couldn’t be any better.

14. Loved your neologism, Eileen: “wiord”.

    Thanks for the blog, and to Picaroon fro an enjoyable crossword

15. Lovely puzzle though I completely missed the Nina. Thanks Eileen & Picaroon.

16. Thank you Eileen, what a serendipitous blog swap indeed. I needed the crossers for 11a and could not parse it even then (tried jumbling “Honest the”…) and am still unsure about the one-word meaning of 22a – is there a famous poetic use of it or am i missing the point entirely (it is not in my online dictionary)?
    Agree with your highlights as blogged – I took far too long to spot EEYORE despite immediately thinking “what could possibly start with EE?” and was grateful for some clear clueing of the jorum. And while I had to look up the quote (everything I know about Lear, ie not much, comes from crosswords) it helped me to finish off the SE so like Sarah and Lord Jim I am very grateful for the hint at 15A. Thanks Picaroon.

17. Had to mention that I found EEYORE hilarious! A wonderful puzzle.

18. Since there’s already been discussion of ‘important person’, I’m surprised to find only the one reference to the important and beloved person given the shout out in 6d. You were, indeed, lucky to be blogging today, Eileen, even if the clue suggests an injustice 😀

    I loved this from start to finish and spotted the, then, incomplete nina early enough for it to help fill in some gaps enabling completion of the solve. Pure artistry with the same favourites as gladys @10 – WATERLOO, DOLOROSO and EEYORE – but just about any one could have made the podium.

    Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

19. I also had a question mark about ANYONE, thinking Someone, surely. Chambers didn’t help with “anyone… anyone at all….” but under anybody (has to be the same as anyone) it has “… a person of any account” which sort of clinched it for me.
    The Nina I got at the end which just helped to make sense of 17a/10a. That ended up being a favourite as well as WATERLOO.
    Nice to see you get a mention in ENDEAR Eileen. 🙂

20. Many thanks to Picaroon and Eileen. Didn’t complete today as I didn’t know 1d and had TUB for barrel.

21. Thanks, David Ellison @14 – will amend.

    Gazzh @16 – both Chambers and Collins give inarm = embrace (Collins adds ‘literary’).

22. Gazzh @16… one example is Walt Whitman in his poem The Sleepers with the line “The breath of the boy goes with the breath of the man, friend is inarm’d by friend”, although Chambers doesn’t mark “inarm” as necessarily poetic (or obsolete or archaic for that matter).

23. Right reverend bemitred chap snorts line … very Picaresque. Beaut fun puzzle. Being a bit dim as per, needed a g-thread hint to then get Pickers’s own hint and then the Nina… fab! Couple of newies … nho tunicate and nho inarming something/one (couple of g-threaders said Shouldn’t it be (2,4)? but another said No). All good fun, ta Pickers and nice to see you enclued, Eileen.

24. The more times I attempt a Picaroon puzzle, the better they seem to get! I loved the literary “border line” theme, as “King Lear” is one of my favourite Shakespearean plays. Clever Picaroon! Re 11a ON THE LEVEL – like Tom Hutton@2, I regret the ongoing bad press Eve the foremother gets as a “sinner”, but I am not about to get into an exegesis of the Genesis texts here – nevertheless I liked the clue! Unfamiliars like 1d TUNICATE and 5d HYPERMEDIA were tough for me but I managed to solve them from the wordplay – and then it was good to be able to confirm them via Chambers online. The already much-mentioned EEYORE was my pick for today, though 6d ENDEAR was a sentimental favourite too! Many thanks to Picaroon for a super puzzle (the pivotal quote from which definitely seemed very topical given the big news in the UK) and Eileen for a super blog.

25. Thanks Eileen and Tim C, hope it sticks in my brain, and commiserations Feliks, that is certainly a plausible enough alternative and I am lucky that it did not occur to me (for a while I tried with “Butt” instead – no sniggering).

26. Tom @2, I’ve always reckoned it was probably him who bit it first, but then the boys in the Scribe room did a cover-up.

27. Lovely puzzle although had to ask Google for the nina.

    Held up by entering the more familiar ninjutsu which mucks up SERIALISED but got there in the end.

    Many thanks both.

28. … @26 is for you too, JinA 🙂

29. Excellent puzzle. Bravo, Picaroon! This was a rare occasion when I spotted the developing Nina quite early and it helped me to get other answers.

    Thanks also to Eileen.

30. Excellent puzzle! The well advertised BORDER LINE was a great help. One of the best plays and one of the most famous lines.

    The rest was also a joy, though chewy in places.

    I particularly liked CALAMARI ( for the misdirection), IDEALISERS (for the well hidden anagram) and DOLOROSO (for the smooth surface).

    Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

31. Any crossword with (lucky) Eileen and Eeyore in it has to be a winner

    Thanks to Eileen and Picaroon

32. Mirabile dictu! I spotted the Nina, which made the last few entries fall into place ( I always find grids with all peripheral letters unchecked relatively tricky – unless there is a meaningful perimeter).

    Lots of good clues – too many to list. No unfamiliar words for me, as it happens, except HYPERMEDIA, for which I needed the Y to solve.

    I’m not sufficiently familiar with King Lear to recognise the source of the quotation, but it’s well known. [Linguistic aside: ‘is come’ rather than the modern ‘has come’ – intransitive verbs often used to take the verb ‘to be’ in the perfect, rather than ‘to have’, as they still do in many other European languages].

    Like PostMark @18 I enjoyed the reference at 6dn, which I am sure is not accidental.

    Thanks to the Pirate and (the beloved) Eileen

33. This was tough but fun. I completely missed the nina and simply shrugged as I filled in EDMUND and BORDERLINE. The misspelled ‘ninjitsu’ rankled with me, I’m sorry to say. The wordplay led us carefully to the arcane TUNICATE and INARMS. And I enjoyed the range of solutions: from the Shakespearean catharsis to A.A.Milne’s gloomy donkey. Lovely.

34. Yes, Eileen, splendid seeing you get a long overdue mention in despatches at last at 6d. In fact I must have been drawn to this clue as ENDEAR was my foi today. Found the top half really hard to break into, but loved both EEYORE and WATERLOO once the penny had dropped for both those. Though had wondered how a word beginning with Double EE would look. The last few in were ROMANISM, ITSELF and finally INARMS, which I wasn’t at all sure of as a single 6 letter word, rather than two shorter words. Needed the “beloved” (3 syllables, surely?) Eileen to explain the connection between EDMUND and BORDERLINE. A proper challenge today…

35. [Tom Hutton @2 and JulieinOz @24: That a benevolent and omniscient God could allow the Fall and all subsequent evils has always been a problem for philosophers of religion. Theodicy is the technical term for various explanations for this.

    One such, is that it was always intended to happen because it would lead to an ultimate restoration, as summarised in the Exsultet mass: ‘O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem’(O happy fault that earned for us so great and glorious a Redeemer).

    PS Modern genetics suggest that it was more likely that Adam was developed from Eve than vice versa 🙂 ]

36. An enjoyable puzzle; I was certainly helped by having the perimeter quotation pointed out by Picaroon. Thanks Eileen for the blog. Please could someone explain why ‘some coke’ leads to LINE in 17/10A. Thank you

37. Just been doing some research of my own and it seems LINE / Coke [in 17/10A] are both drug related terms. I wish this wasn’t an area setters expect us all to be well-versed in.

38. Doh, forgot to look for the NINA, although I did connect EDMUND and LEAR.

    I liked the EUROPEAN remainer, ON THE LEVEL for the ‘not rotten sinner’, and ENDEAR, which must have put a smile on Eileen’s face.

    Thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

39. [Nice point, Gervase @32 … est venu, e venuto, etc., I like the feel of ‘is come’. Unrelated, but I also prefer ‘…which art’ to ‘who’ in The prayer. As for the thesis @35 … hmmm … a huge price paid to set the stage for the rescuing Hero …]

40. 22a INARMS/EMPOISON A difference between the two words is that “empoison” (if there is such a word) doesn’t mean anything different from “poison,” while “inarms” is quite different from “arms.”

    Never having heard of “ninjutsu,” I wasn’t bothered by the misspelling. But when I realized that the anagram fodder put “jitsu” at the end of the word, and having heard of jujitsu, I figured that other martial arts might be some other kind of jitsu, and “nin” was what was left. I looked it up this morning and found, logically enough, that it’s the art of being a ninja.

    Gervase@32 and ginf@39 The “is come” usage persisted after Shakespeare to at least Jane Austen.

    Lovely puzzle. Thanks Picaroon for it and Eileen for the friendly accompaniment.

41. Delightful. On the rare occasions I get a Nina early enough to help, I am always torn between writing it in and using it or letting it appear naturally. [Thank goodness Edmund didn’t say “Them’s the breaks”]

42. Nice puzzle. I misdirected myself for a while by trying to find a speech by Edmund that had some of the clue entries (INARMS was leading candidate). Didn’t look at the BORDER till much too late.

    Given the political news and the subject’s frequent appearance here, and the supposed length of the puzzle editor’s incoming queue, I wonder how many puzzles will have to be sent back for a redo? We’ll never know.

43. Top notch puzzle from Picaroon. My only slight disappointment was needing the signposted Nina, the source of which was unknown to me, to help solve this, though I see I’m not alone. Same unknowns as others, with wordplay riding to the rescue, though I’m glad “tub” didn’t occur to me at 1d as it did (not unreasonably as pointed out) to Feliks @20.

    Loved the surface for BORDERLINE and the parsing of ON THE LEVEL.

    Thanks to Picaroon and the famous Eileen

44. Thanks for the blog. I don’t think I recall seeing Shakespeare in a puzzle before, must get crowded out by all the science references.

45. grantinfreo@26: quite likely, seeing that Adam’s first reaction on being found out is to blame Eve:

    “And God said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
    And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”

46. Didn’t know the quotation or notice Nina. Why wasn’t INARMS 2 words? No idea what the full circle is referring to….?
    Thanks both

47. Thanks Picaroon for another beauty and acknowledging one of your biggest fans, Eileen. I saw the nina thanks to BORDERLINE and I liked how Lear was contained in CLEARS. I was held up a bit by INARMS thinking it was two words but the presence of “poet’s” gives one license to make it one word I guess. Top choices were CALAMARI, BORDERLINE, DOLOROSO, ASCEND, and, of course, ENDEAR. Thanks Eileen for the blog. I was happy it was you today.

48. tim the toffee @46 – please see comments 21/21 re ‘inarms’.

    For the quotation, see here: https://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/full-circle

49. Tony @47 – we crossed: ‘inarm’ is a verb, ‘to embrace’.

50. Thanks Eileen. I put INARMS in OneLook.com and nothing came up. When I put INARM in the search I got 2 hits, Wordnik and Collins. Not common but certainly correct.

51. Yep that’d be right, gladys @45. Sorry God, I couldn’t help myself, it was the wicked seductress. (Pre-echoes of Salem et sequ.)

52. Just jumping in to the EVE discussion. My immediate thought was not that she got all the blame, but that both Adam and Eve were sinners – thus the Fall. She just happened to be the one who fitted the clue. It never occurred to me to consider any sexism in this case.

    Anyway, just finished. Very satisfying, although I forgot to go back and check what the extra information in 15a EDMUND was all about, so missed the nina. Face-palm! Thank you Eileen for pointing it out.

53. Ah thanks Eileen

54. I found this more challenging than usual with Picaroon’s puzzles, but none the worse for that. I completely missed the Nina until mentioned in the Grauniad blog: absolutely superb.

55. Hi Moth @52, if you’re still there (I’ve been absorbed in the tennis!) – that was my thought, too.
    We’ve had this discussion here more than once before, which is why I didn’t mention in the blog that, in the clue, EVE is not denoted as the only / first sinner. (I think I may previously have recalled my young son’s rendering in the first reading of the service of Nine Lessons and Carols: “And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”

    In Greek mythology, too, it was a woman, Pandora, who brought misery into the world
    Recalling Gervase @35
    (from Wikipedia) “The Pandora myth is a kind of theodicy, addressing the question of why there is evil in the world, according to which, Pandora opened a jar (pithos) (commonly referred to as “Pandora’s box”) releasing all the evils of humanity. It has been argued that Hesiod’s interpretation of Pandora’s story went on to influence both Jewish and Christian theology and so perpetuated her bad reputation into the Renaissance.”

56. Apologies – i missed this link for Pandora

57. A better effort today, not far from finishing at all.
    Lovely puzzle, I certainly needed a 12a on the golf course today!
    I don’t understand the hint for 22a at all, anyone help?
    Thanks both.

58. Hi HoofItYouDonkey
    Not really sure how to give a further hint: ‘up in arms’ means ‘protesting’ and INARMS = embraces – see me at 49.

59. I completely agree with the Eve comments (Tom Hutton @2 et numerous seq): her punishment merely consisted of banishment from the Garden, much less serious than being sent to HELL.

    Shakespeare himself coined “end all and be all” but that was in the Scottish play, not Lear.

    The first “of” of the two in 19D seems like a typo. Surely it should have read: “Mount a leader of cavalry wearing mail”

60. In @59, I meant “the be-all and the end-all” obviously

61. Eileen @58 – sorry, I’m very stupid, what’s the poet got to do with it?

62. Thanks PIcaroon and Eileen
    Sorry, what’s the point of discussing whether Eve is responsible for all evil when it’s all just a fairy story anyway?

    btw loved EEYORE.

63. Hi Hoofit – bless you! INARM is ‘poetic’ – or ‘literary’ as Collins has it – see me @21 😉

64. [muffin @62: Because it’s of anthropological/sociological importance. And because it’s impossible to understand the development of Western art and culture without a familiarity with Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian mythology (note my phraseology there – as an atheist myself I am amazed at the ignorance of many religious friends about the philosophy and contradictions of conventional belief systems)]

65. For once I saw the nina — someone a few weeks ago had pointed out that when you see the checkboard edges to the grid, look for a quote around the edges. Had most of them filled in, but it really helped on the NE corner (when I had enough of the rest of the quote to do a web search). And how appropriate that for a quote circling around the puzzle!

    Many thanks, Eileen, for the blog. Several of the parsings defeated me. (like I for Ipswich — oh! that’s what “heading for” is about! 🙂 )

66. Gervasec@64
    I see your point, but as the biblical Eve never existed, how could she be responsible for anything?

67. Eileen @63 – Ah thanks, and thanks for a super blog.
    See, I told you I was stupid!!

68. HoofitYouDonkey, you are not stupid – I love your comments! 😉

69. Calgal @ 65 – yes, that’s certainly one worth filing away.

70. Is that really a border-line? I suppose it will do. And is that misogynistic? I suppose it could be.

    A talented writer nonetheless.

71. Regarding Eve as a ‘sinner’ (and what about Pandora, btw?) – problem is that almost all the world’s religious tracts were written by men. End of…

    I had difficulty with NINJITSU – as did others here. The answer was a write-in from the fodder, OK. But when I tried to Google I merely got the message “did you mean NINJUTSU“? Attempts to google “NINJITSU” as spelt got nowhere.

    But in mitigation, transliterations from Japanese may well vary.

    My favourite, WATERLOO, without a doubt. I’d have preferred the surface to read ‘…appearing in court’ but no matter. So refreshing to see a clue to that word that makes no reference to the station, nor the battle (at least not literally), nor anything ‘lavatorial’….

    Thanks to Pickers and Eileen.

72. Distracted again by the Tour de France and couldn’t get going. Then got stuck with about eight or nine still unsolved. But when I came back to it after a spell doing other unimportant things, I immediately saw the nina, which helped me confirm TUNICATE (having discarded tubicate as both inelegant and likely to require only half a barrel!) and a few others.

    I should have realised much earlier that there would be a peripheral nina when SYNC was so meticulously clued, whereas SINK would appear to have been almost as good an answer. But I would never have got the LINE at that stage in the solve, as I don’t know Lear as well as some here appear to.

    INARMS was my last in, and I still find it unsatisfactory, but them’s the breaks, as we apparently all need to say now at every opportunity. (Thanks to Petert @41 for the idea.) I don’t know why Shakespeare didn’t give that line to Edmund, but Picaroon would certainly have struggled to fit it round the grid.

    Thanks to our brilliant setter, “beloved Eileen” and all commenters. (I especially enjoyed the plea from Roz @44 for fewer science references and more literature in crosswords in future. Editor please note.)

73. Surely in arms is 2 words.

74. TUNICATE animals are interesting as that they are rare examples of chordates that aren’t vertebrates.

75. Erik@73 : The definition in 22ac is “poet’s embraces”. The word INARM means “embrace”, but it is a rare word mostly used by poets. Hence INARMS, a word used by poets to mean “embraces”.

    For those who didn’t spot the perimeter phrase, what did you make of the last part of the clue to 15ac? I don’t usually spot ninas, but here the clue asks us to make sense of BORDER LINE as something an EDMUND could have spoken. Surely the only way to make sense of it is to find the nina?

76. [ muffin@66 : The story of Eve exists, and has had real-world impact over the course of its many centuries of existence. But I think you know this, and are trying to make a point about how we should ideally be able to detach from stories about fictional entities? My point is that we can’t, because we live in a world where stories about fictional entities influence people, and the actions of those people affect everyone else. The very first book in the bible tells a story in which a woman is blamed for causing the entirety of human suffering. There is a man in that story who fully participates in this act, of his own free will, but deflects the responsibility onto the woman. It matters not that these people never existed. Stories are powerful that way. ]

77. Thank you Sheffield Hatter@72, I would also add Greek letters and composers , we never see them.

78. Here you are folks – an example of a colony of TUNICATES. That these – thingys – er, ‘creatures’ – are in any way remotely related to us vertebrates, beggars belief …. but there you are! It’s the larval form, apparently, that possesses a primitive sort of backbone called a ‘notochord’ in its tail. Once it’s mature, it sheds the tail and settles down on a rock for the rest of its life.

    End of science lesson. Sorry, Roz et al.

79. Roz passim: Like you, as a scientist I would welcome more scientific terminology in crosswords, though I am entirely comfortable with the literary and musical stuff. But you clearly can’t please everyone – TUNICATE, a perfectly respectable scientific word (if you allow biology as a science 🙂 ) seems to have been unknown to many, and described by pserve_p2 as ‘arcane’.

    But I wouldn’t classify Greek letters in the humanities camp – practically all of them have been used in science.

80. Brilliant end to the week from Picaroon and beautifully blogged by Eileen. Eeyore was my LOI and also my favourite.

81. Girabra @75. A good point about the second part of the clue for 15a. It was a mystery for me because I couldn’t solve BORDER LINE until I had a (tentative) solution for 1d, with the I crossing with 10a, giving me _O_D_ _/_I_E. Of course I could have just looked up Edmund’s speech, but I try very hard not to rely on research tools when solving crosswords (I make an exception for the bank holiday specials), preferring to grind it out by (feeble) brain power and tapping into the very few memory stores I can still access. Once I’d solved BORDER LINE the reversered FULL in the SW became obvious, and everything quickly fell into place. Them’s the breaks. 🙂

82. I needed quite a bit of online help for new words and GK in this puzzle.

    I did not fully understand 17/10 Edmund/borderline (parsed as *MUD in END). I did not see the nina either.

    New: NINJITSU, TUNICATE, HYPERMEDIA, ROMANISM, oloroso sherry (for 26ac), INARMS.

    Thanks, both.

83. [Back to Eve. Wasn’t her punishment (and hence for all women) not just expulsion from the Garden of Eden but to bear children in pain, and also subservience to men? I’m with Lilith in this. In some mythologies she was Adam’s first wife, made from the same clay as he was. She refused to be subservient. ]

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