Guardian Cryptic 28,976 by Imogen

79 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,976 by Imogen”

1. Loved this from start to finish and was definitely on the setter’s wavelength today. Lots of ticks with SEE THE LIGHT, WITH CHILD and EARLY BATH being my favourites.

   Ta Imogen & loonapick

2. I also thought it a bit easier than Imogen’s usual puzzles.
   But it had some lovely clues and I enjoyed it.

   Favourites included: STEALTH, FADDIER, LUNAR COLONY, RESPITE

   Did not get ROE – so obvious now

   Thanks Imogen and loonapick

3. Slow start, but once I got going, it slotted into place nicely. Not entirely happy with the cluing for gored. Felt that it should have a question mark, and thought the same about stutter.

4. (F)LAWLESS = “perfect”.

5. I think 4D involves “flawless” (perfect) without the force.

6. Agree with Hovis & Sagittarius re LAWLESS.

7. I parsed LAWLESS in the same way as Hovis & Sagittarius.
   On first seeing 28A, I was convinced it would be BLOOD BATH. The crossers proved me wrong, of course, but I still quite like it…
   I wasn’t awfully impressed by FADDIER but appreciate that this is crosswordland, not real life – and POSTS felt rather weak. However, ROE made up for both of them, and GORED made me grin.
   Thank you Imogen and loonapick

8. I agree that Hovis’ and Sagittarius’ parsing of LAWLESS is probably what the setter intended but the syntax seems slightly odd to me.

   A grid of two halves here – the south went in smoothly but with only two connecting clues, getting a foothold in the north took a bit longer. I hadn’t parsed FADDIER (though definition was straightforward) and even reading the blog I took a few minutes to equate ADDER with ‘summer’, but then the penny did drop. I had a similar delay with SNAPPER and ‘pap’, which is ironic bearing mind I used to be a professional photographer!

   Liked LUNAR COLONY and SEE THE LIGHT.

   Cheers both.

9. And somewhere without the (police) force would be perfect for a criminal. Works on many levels, though I think the (F)lawless explanation – which I missed – was probably the intended one.

10. I nice challenge today with some interesting GK especially Roe vs Wade. Fortunately I listened to the Americast podcast on abortion yesterday! Thanks to Imogen and loonapick.

11. Am I the only one who first wrote in ‘blood bath’ for 28A?

12. A nice challenge….

13. No, Jake@11 but I did start with leper colony for 13dn.

14. I also prefer the Flawless interpretation. For once I finished this Imogen, so it must have been a bit easier than usual, but I love all her offerings so am content. I even parsed most of them! Thanks I and l

15. Enjoyed this and most went in relatively quickly. I was sufficiently misled by the surface to think that ROE must have been a famous tennis player I hadn’t heard of, and didn’t check…

    Revealed COLONY at the end after getting fixated on NOBODY from the crossers, and knowing it wasn’t right.

    Thanks to both.

16. Football jargon being standard cw fare (not to mention having UK rels, etc), thought I’d have known the ‘red card early bath’ one. But no, got early from the crossers, looked up the Latin, then bunged in bath with a shrug, hey ho. Elsewhere, took most crossers to twig chiaroscuro, which made me a bit cross with myself. Otherwise, pleasant enough, thanks Imogen, and loonapick (and condolences …).

17. All done except for 22a which I revealed. I know only two paintings, the Mona Lisa and Guernica, and the answer looked as though it had been pulled from a scrabble bag. I don’t like an anagram for a word that is relatively obscure. Much fairer to idiots like me if it can be a charade or something.
    The rest was good, I didn’t know the HAIRCUT or the SATELLITE COLONY, but fathomable from the clue.
    Fav was 26a as the Ring OUSEL is one of my favourite birds.
    Thanks both.

18. Sorry to be picky, loonapick, but I don’t think Lee Child has taken American citizenship yet!

19. Thanks for the heads up on WADE.
    Minesweeper…that takes me back to the ’80’s…at the time it felt like the forefront of technology. I have an old Windows 10 laptop, I wonder if it is still around.

20. Re 17 down: Is it superfluous to mention that a star=celebrity is a member of a/rhe a-list?
    Thanks to Imogen and lunatics, commiserations to the latter.

21. a/the… sorry.

22. lunapick! sorry again, autocorrect gone wild.

23. Finally, loonapick, sorry once again!!

24. I found this more like a Vulcan than an Imogen, with the bottom half mostly going in as write ins and a bit more work on the top half. I too wondered about blood bath instead of EARLY BATH, but left it until I got some crossers as I wasn’t certain.

    Thank you to loonapick and Imogen.

25. ION:
    Could not understand why ‘second-in-command’ is no.1.
    I was looking at two options. I am not fully convinced.
    No 2=NO II. NOI=NOII briefly.
    N=second iN. OIC=command at sea(officer-in-charge. Not sure if this can be used in the context). OI=OIC briefly.
    NOI returns.

    Maybe it is just as simple as No.1 reversing. Sorry if I have complicated a straightforward parsing.

26. No complaints from me; well – maybe a moan about the slightly unfriendly grid as noted by Rob T @8. But, like some others here, I found I was on Imogen’s wavelength today and everything went in smoothly. I didn’t quite get the cd for LUNAR COLONY and still feel I might be missing something clever there. But I had lots of ticks including FOOD MILES, CHIAROSCURO, INTERDICT, GORED, EARLY BATH, LAWLESS (parsed by removing the F), SATCHEL and the two &lits, STUTTER and BARISTA. Very enjoyable indeed.

    Thanks Imogen and loonapick

27. I always shudder a bit when I see Imogen’s name but this one went in comparatively easily for me.

    The top half pieced together first but then one or two in the bottom half needed a bit of pencil chewing. I liked the LUNAR COLONY, where I was a bit fixated on the first word being liner for a while.

    Not exactly a Vulcan but also not exactly a usual Imogen.

    Thanks Imogen and loonapick.

28. [SinCam @14: in case you were interested in contrasting the styles, Imogen is the alter ego of Vulcan. Both are Richard Browne, erstwhile crossword editor of the Times.]

29. Good fun. Ticks for SNAPPER, OUSEL and EARLY BATH for the Eric Cantona memories

    Definitely at the easier end of the Imogen scale but none the worse for that

    Crispy @3 Maybe the “like an” negates the need for a ? in GORED

    Cheers I&L

30. I didn’t find this at all Monday-ish. Nho FOOD MILES, pretty unhappy with FADDIER as ‘more particular’ (unlike ‘fussier’), and ‘pap’ only works if you’re familiar with a (faddish) term for paparazzo.

31. KVa @ 25 – have you never listened to “The Navy Lark”?
    The officer directly below the captain on a ship is called “number one”.

32. KVa@25 Yes it is just No.1. Afficionados of The Navy Lark will remember No.1 being used thus. I liked EARLY BATH.

33. Shirl @31 and Kva @25 – also used in much science fiction, in particular Star Trek: The Next Generation where it can frequently be heard uttered by Captain Picard. There seems to be a convention in sci-fi that starships follow terrestrial naval conventions.

34. GK failed me on Lee Child, not having heard of the author and being only vaguely aware of Jack Reacher as a movie. Fortunately the crossers and definition were enough to fill in the grid, although still it was LOI.

35. All’s well that ended well, though I thought as Loonapick did that this was not quite as tight in the clueing for an Imogen puzzle. The first few in were rather in hope than certitude, but I gradually warmed to this. Really liked EARLY BATH, though I wonder if that still happens to these multimillioned sports stars if they’re dismissed early from a game. Had bunged in LUNAR Module without really thinking about things properly, so that held me up in the SE corner. Strangely, found the three letter clues took a while each. Needed Loonapick to explain SEE THE LIGHT appropriately enough, though it simply had to be that. An interesting and ultimately rewarding journey today…

36. I was nutmegged by my favourite clue -I had EARTH BATH tentatively entered until I was stumped on 13.
    I finally decided to check the crossers then the tea tray hit hard-see red ! eejit!
    Lovely stuff.

37. Thanks, Shirl and Petert for explaining No.1 to me (I don’t listen to songs much).
    Jacob! I thought that won’t apply here due to ‘at sea’. Obviously, I was wrong.

38. Thanks Imogen and loonapick
    Loved EARLY BATH!
    I don’t think (I may have missed it) that anyone has explicitly said that “pap” in 16a is short for “paparazzo”.

39. I agree with previous comments on (F) LAWLESS but also with our blogger’s summary comment.
    A bit of a mixture of Vulcan and Imogen today whereas usually Imogen presents us with a far more consistent puzzle in terms of difficulty to distinguish him from his alter ego.
    With regard to ROE, given that the clue made the answer a bit of a gimme, I thought using a homophone for the definition was trying too hard to increase the difficulty level.
    Why not go the whole hog and say “sounds fishy “
    Thanks all

40. Thanks for the blog, some neat clues but I prefer Imogen in the tougher mode adopted last year. Did Eddie Waring use the term EARLY BATH first for Rugby League ? ION a bit ridiculous , so many words for three letters and the definition still very weak.
    MrPostMark@26 , if you are being serious, the moon is our only natural satellite .

    AlanC hits Number 1 twice in three days, we are not worthy.

41. Liked GORED

    New for me: OUSEL, writer Lee Child (for 10ac); SHINGLE hairstyle (even though I discover that my own hair is sort of cut that way, in what I think of as a bob); FADDIER.

    I did not parse
    11ac – still don’t get it, why is No. 1 the second in command?
    28ac did not understand the football connection (as is usual for me)

    Thanks, both.

42. muffin@38: I guessed that it must be, but it’s not an abbreviation I’ve ever seen in real life. Maybe I don’t read enough sleb magazines.

43. ignore my comment above, I see now that Shirl@31 explained:
    The officer directly below the captain on a ship is called “number one”.

44. gladys @42 you might also get “papped” if you were an A-LISTER

45. All fairly straight forward, but I’m sure there must be a better explanation for 11ac – ION, which I’m just not getting?

46. Roz@40 : I believe EARLY BATH was Eddie Waring’s 2nd most popular expression after. ‘”Up ‘n under”. Impressionists, particularly Mike Yarwood had scriptwriters include it by default.

    bodycheetah@29 : Emerging from a breakfast time interview at the Croydon Park Hotel, 31 Mar 1995 I believe, I found myself, filling in a post-i/v questionnaire, standing right alongside Cantona — what a massive frame of a man I thought, tall and broad. He was making a chain of mobile calls and was about to go into court to appeal his ban for the flying kick you have posted. It was his speech “when the seagulls follow the trawler” day. ( Google researchable ) .

    I loved EARLY BATH and I love Bath in Somerset. FADDIER struck me immediately as the type of word the contestants try to assemble on Countdown, to remove the most vowels possible from the rack.

    Thank you Imogen and loonapick.

47. I’ve never heard the phrase FOOD MILES. is that how you talk about what we here in the US call a “food desert”, a place where people live a long distance from the nearest supermarket? (Only recognized as a problem relatively recently, along with the fact that they tend to happen in high-poverty areas.)

    I was just talking about I wanna be SEDATED last night, so that was my earworm while solving this.

48. Mrpenney it is more the environmental damage from transporting food thousands of miles to be sold in supermarkets. Some foods have exremely high food miles.

    Fles@46 was Eddie Waring the first to say it ? There was not much live sport on TV in the 70s , Rugby League, Horse Racing and “Wrestling” .

49. MrP
    Food miles is more a case of factoring in how much it costs to bring the food to where you buy it.
    A friend has a related concept of “beer miles” – the less distance from the brewery, the more he is prepared to drink. We had a rather disastrou session once in a pub that adjoined its brewery (in Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire, in case anyone knows it!)

50. mrpenney @47 – FOOD MILES is a measure of the amount of carbon involved in getting food onto a plate, so for us avocados don’t grow in the UK so have a lot of food miles and high carbon cost, as does asparagus in January (we do get asparagus for a very small window in early summer). There was a fascinating BBC i-player show about the carbon cost of various foods, which looked at food miles and the carbon costs of production. It is available here

51. mrpenny @47; Chambers definition:

    food miles plural noun

    The distance travelled from the place where food is produced to the place where it is eaten, considered in terms of the environmental damage that transporting it entails

52. For those who have missed the announcement, Gaufrid has left us. Going to googling “fifteensquared guardian” will take you to a page of many tributes and remembrances.

    [Jacob@33 One of the naval conventions, or rather traditions, that Star Trek followed was that the chief engineer was very often a Scotsman. Scottie falls right in.]

    Roz has the right approach to “food miles,” it’s an environmental consideration. It’s also true that it’s harder to buy food from a farmer who lives within a few miles than to buy food at the supermarket that has traveled hundreds of miles to get there. I make grape jelly (not jam) from the grapes that grow on the arbor in the back yard, so I measure that distance in “food feet.”

    Enjoyed this puzzle, thanks to Imogen and loonapick (who is no lunatic).

53. Thanks for the explanations. Muffin @49: most craft brewers in the US now run brew-pubs adjacent to the brewery. But the winner-take-all: the Lagunitas brewery in Chicago has its pub literally inside the brewery–you have to walk down a long hall and up some stairs, and you’re in a pub with glass walls so you can see that you’re surrounded by beermaking.

54. Jake@11 yes, I too started with BLOOD BATH. Caused problems, and though I eventually got EARLY bath from the crossers I never understood this excellent clue until I came here.

55. 20ac and the use of “graduate” in the clueing. It’s only 5 days since we were discussing : graduate -> gradual -> CALIBRATE for “graduate’s” role in the clue. Today “graduate” was the pure “BA” of old.

    Roz@48 : I’m 95% sure, Eddie Waring was the first to use the “early bath” expression. Snooker was on the TV in 70’s along with the sports you list.

    Since the word RED is used in the solution for 27ac and the clueing for 28ac and RED is the principal ball in snooker, I fancy jotting down one more an famous sports phrase (in the gaffes galore category)

    … and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green ….

    The snooker commentator Ted Lowe I believe was the cousin of Arthur Lowe.
    ( Captain Mainwaring : Dad’s Army ).

    Also glad that LINSEED wasn’t clued around oil and cricket. Fifteensquared posters don’t seem enamoured with the willow on leather game !

56. Ah, the joys of being an ex-rugby player and the ‘EARLY BATH’. I am convinced that on one very cold day a player deliberately got himself sent off to have the bath to himself. The word ‘joys’ in the first sentence should be taken with a large pinch of salt. A communal bath after a wet and muddy game was horrible. Showers only nowadays thank goodness, although it has been 25 years since I last had to wash myself down.

57. Held up by Blood bath and Lunar module …..

58. Late to this today. Work does get in the way.

    A very gentle solve, impeded mostly by the very unfriendly grid, as has been mentioned.

    But I did like SEE THE LIGHT and SATCHEL, neat devices for both.

    Thanks Imogen and loonapick

59. [I showed my wife 28a as a great clue. To my surprise, she asked what Aquae Sulis was. When I said “Roman name for Bath”, she said “Oh, it’s BLOOD BATH then.” I suppose you need the sporting context for it to be obvious!]

60. Liked this, particularly FOOD MILES, SNAPPER and EARLY BATH.
    I initially parsed INTERDICT similarly to loonapick, but wasn’t happy with ”control” which didn’t seem to have a function.
    Then I saw an alternative, and to me more satisfactory parsing: anagram of INDIRECT containing/controlling T(temperature).

61. Great fun. Satchel was FOI and then bagged the rest quite quickly.

62. Flea @55

    Re 20ac: Did anyone else think the surface was a cheeky allusion to many BA graduates becoming Baristas..?

63. [DaveJ
    As in the riddle:
    “what does an arts graduate say in McDonalds?”
    “Do you want fries with that?”

    I saw a stat once that a ridiculously high % of McDonalds customers had previously worked in one.]

64. Muffin @63

    Oof, I’ll let you take the flak for that one 😉

65. Great puzzle and blog, thank you. Some clues definitely favour us older people. For example, I doubt whether many people – including hairdressers – under 70 would know what a shingle is!

66. Gillian @65 it works both ways. I got stuck thinking of Bruce LEE instead of LEE Child…

    I assumed POSTS referred to boardroom posts rather than posts on a message board.

67. DaveJ @62 yes BARISTA was my favourite clue 🙂

68. Dave J

    Yes – very much a cheeky allusion. When I look again, I think what a great surface 20ac is. Anagram detached, those barista machines do create a stir when forcing water through the tamped coffee.

    Sorry about my firm opinion but I think we have developed a culture where graduates are constantly “convinced” that they are very lucky to be a barista, a litter picker or something menial and unconnected with their 3 to 4 years of learning.

    This from a UK expert research organisation :

    “Recent graduates (2020 onwards) currently face an unemployment rate of 12%, which equates to over 96,000 unemployed graduates each academic year.”

    My 2nd born had a pretty crummy job at first before he got going.

69. Although knowing nothing of football I had heard of an ‘early bath’, so it’s rather disappointing that I convinced myself it had something to do with seeing the dawn if one bathed early enough in the open-air Roman Baths. Not that I’ve ever seen the dawn… or bathed, for that matter.

70. Thanks, Imogen & Loonapick. This did feel more like a “hard Vulcan” than an “easy Imogen” to me, but was enjoyable none the less.

    Roz @40 – is your comment about the definition of ION being weak a science joke?

71. Muffin@49 I was there in November. Wonderful cask ales at low very quaffable strengths.

72. I went with STEAM BATH and then BLOOD BATH for 28a. I got EARLY BATH from the crossers, but I had never hear the term before. Similarly, I’m still none the wiser how “pap” means “snapper”.

    I think that the clue to 12a was clumsy, made awkward by the unnecessary inclusion of “this clue”.

    With so many unparsed, I can’t say that I really enjoyed this much.

73. I never heard of a FOOD MILE or that a number 1 could be number 2!…..but of course guessable.
    Thanks both

74. 16a I think PAP means ‘post a picture’, for anyone 60 years younger than most of us. Hence snapper/photographer.

75. GfO@72 and RB@74. muffin has explained ”pap” @ 38
    The snapper is someone who takes snaps/photographs.

76. Lee Child lives in the US, but he’s still British for now, as far as I know.

77. Thanks paddy. No wonder I couldn’t parse it.

78. Muffin @63 You can change that riddle now. What do people who work in McDonald’s become later? University graduates. As my daughter and several of her friends did. The experience of working there is a great incentive to study hard.

79. I was pleased to complete a Wednesday before coming here and finding it was easier than usual! (I’m still stuck on the Tuesday)

    EARLY BATH tickled me and CHIAROSCURO is a lovely word.

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