Guardian Cryptic 29,006 by Brummie

75 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,006 by Brummie”

1. Loach too. Thanks to Loonapick and Brummie

2. Thanks loonapick – quite a few needed your explanation today. I spotted the theme quite early on and it helped with a few.

   Gave up on the bottom left corner. Missed JACK as I had golf in mind.

   Thanks Brummie, too

3. It took me a late-night and an early morning session to finish this. Didn’t look for or see the theme. Mostly fun, favourites include ENCLOISTER, UTAH (well-hidden), FLOUNDER. I thought RAY in RAYON a bit vaguely clued, and is TUFTY actually a word (I’m sure it’s in dictionaries, so not a real complaint)?
   loonapick, I think Br for brown is used in wiring diagrams (to distinguish from B (blue) and BK (black)). And to nit-pick, Roger for R is some old phonetic alphabets, but not the NATO one, where Romeo is used.
   Thanks both.

4. Thanks to Brummie and Loonapick. Another is DISCUS, as well as BASS , DRUM and JACK on their own.

5. Thanks Beaulieu @3 – you’re right about Roger of course

   Thanks also to anyone who has or will spot theme entries I missed.

6. Also, sorry for the formatting (I normally underline in red and make the solutions bold, but got distracted this morning). Hope everything is still clear.

7. RAY in 16D could be referring to Man Ray, the american photographer and artist

8. Really enjoyed this but did have to tentatively pencil in quite a few due to unfamiliarity with abbreviations for brown, ukelele, roger etc.

   I Thought FOUNDER for establishment figure was very neat and I liked the liberal use of descriptive definitions

   Totally missed the theme

   Cheers L&B

9. navdier@7 – thanks, I hadn’t thought of that, and I withdraw my criticism of the clue.

10. Perhaps I was on the wrong wavelength today. My favourite crosswords are often the ones where my list of “issues” down the side of the page remains short or even is non-existent, but it rivalled the height of the crossword this time. I couldn’t work out how SMELT, JACK, JELLY, RAMRODS or LOACH worked. Why is a skipper a boxer in training? Why is the Duke of York “perhaps a local”? I thought that 20a was asking for a noun (“a bit of a shock”) and was surprised that the solution was an adjective. I’d have been a little less mean in 23d and specified a Greek character, and I didn’t like “br” for brown in 2d. And in this part of the world I’d never heard of Bass beer nor director Loach.

    I typed this before reading the blog above (although, scrolling down, I noticed pretty colours to indicate a theme I missed, as always), so hopefully many of my head-scratches will be answered after I do, perhaps with a “D’oh!” or two, and I won’t be imposing too much on you good folk to elucidate to someone with an IQ of only 82.

    Despite this longer than usual list, I tried hard to enjoy this. There were a few smiles. No ROFL though, to use the parlance of the texters.

11. Fun crossword but I missed the theme. Like navidier, I thought that the clue for 26d alluded to Man Ray.

12. Brummie excels at leading me up the garden path. For example, having the C R and A crossers in CuRtAined I spent ages trying to find a synonym for “innovative” that was an anagram of ACT “ruined” with DRAPES.

13. Geoff Down Under – boxers spend a lot of their time during training using a skipping rope.
    The Duke of York is one of many pub names in the UK.
    Because of the scandals surrounding the current Duke of York apparently some of them are considering a change of name!

14. I first met the word TUFTY as a child; it was the nickname of “Philip”, the main character in the “Adventure” series of books by Enid Blyton. We’re not supposed to name this author any more because of attitudes put over and general non-PC writing but there’s an EB blue plaque five miles from my village. Funnily enough, it was another character JACK who penned that nickname.

    SACRED FISH also occur in Egypt, derivation that they are believed to have assimilated some of the body of the god Osiris.

    Thank you Brummie and loonapick.

15. BR = brown is in Chambers , so maybe you need another “go-to” to add to the other three loonapick. 😉 beaulieu’s comment @3 makes sense.

    I needed the blog to parse ALIGNMENT. Otherwise favourites were DISTRESS and BOWFELL which raised a memory of starting by ascending Lingmoor just before morning light and proceeding over Pike O’ Blisco, Crinkle Crags and Bowfell and descending by The Band in my early days. Bliss.

16. I should have been alert to the theme after yesterday’s castanet, but I missed it. Thanks to navidier for Man Ray, which I missed. ALSO was my favourite.

17. I never had occasion to consider the theme. I must have been up a blind alley, but I still enjoyed the solve, which I managed quite quickly (although I don’t want to carp about it.) No standout clues for me. I liked the brevity of 3d.

18. I thought for a while that the theme was beer and pubs, but then I forgot about it.

19. Flea @14, where does it say we can’t mention Enid Blyton? CBBC put out a Malory Towers series in 2020 and I hear much love for the Faraway Tree series. I think the pendulum has swung back on that one, as she’s no worse than Roald Dahl or David Walliams in many ways, and the current attitude seems to be if it gets children reading that’s not a bad thing. (I don’t find her any more trite than Jacqueline Wilson, whose bathos I find irritating. The children’s author I really rate is Anne Fine, who wrote Bill’s New Frock in 1989, Walliams’ version is from 2008.)

    I finished this after only solving three on first pass. Pretty much all parsed and understood, but usually after guessing and finding an answer. I was also surprised that I solved it faster than I thought I had, it just felt longer.

    Thank you to loonapick and Brummie.

20. Thanks Brummie and lonnapick
    No theme for me, of course. It seemed a bit like four separate puzzles, with the NE one by far the hardest. For some reason (too much like hard work?) I didn’t really enjoy the solve.
    Why is “switches” RODS?

21. Muffin @20: a switch and a rod are both sticks – as in “spare the rod, spoil the child” (horrible sentiment!) and the switch being used for corporal punishment (another gruesome path to follow).

    GeoffDownUnder@10: Bass is notable as being the oldest trademarked logo (a red triangle) in the UK. Not sure it helps bring it to mind any easier but at least it has greater logenvity than most of the trendy stuff the texters drink!

22. Clueless about the theme. Couldn’t parse MULLET. Spent ages in the top left trying to turn SEAR into the basis of a plan. Not my finest hour. Thanks for the helpful blog.

23. Tough! Got stuck in the NE and SW corners, and had to look up the US states and the meaning of UTH to get UTAH. LOACH was good. Needed help with RAMRODS, then realised it was JELLY rather than HONEY(baby). Missed the theme of course. Many thanks to B & l.

24. Well I did get the theme in the end, but too late to be of much help. A good challenge, with the NE corner the hardest for me – plus some “d’oh” moments when I finally got them. Liked ASUNDER, ALIGNMENT, and the two answers hidden in the wordplay, which I usually completely miss.
    Did not know that AMBER and BLEAK were fish.
    Thanks Brummie and loonapick and fellow bloggers.

25. UTAH is hidden in the wordplay, drofle @23

26. [Confession time: I mentally muddled up Enid Blyton with Beatrix Potter and have been racking my brains for sources of offence in the adventures of Peter Rabbit, Tom Kitten et al :)]

27. Shanne@19: I’m with you. Was just providing a balanced debate. English Heritage are the objectors.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/06/17/enid-blyton-books-racist/

    I regularly give Enid Blyton books to my grandchildren.

    You can get more fish by mixing words or taking ‘partials’ SKIPJACK, SUN ( from ASUNDER ) KIPPER ( from SKIPPER ) RAM ( but thinking that “cichlid” has to slot in as an extra word ). You can even mess around with aural wordplays ( our new homophone phrase ) LIGN within ALIGNMENT – the line that you cast, ROCH ( roach ) a snippet within BROCHURE. Just messing around, so will DISCUS some genuine DATA : DRUMS are so called because of the repetitive drumming sound their bodies make.

    Brummie has ROCKed this morning !

28. Failed at the final fence with RAMRODS and MULLET. Seemed to be on Brummie’s wavelength for the rest so a little frustrating to be a DNF.
    Started with ROCK MUSIC, BASS DRUM and MUD. Ah, I thought, the theme is music/bands perhaps? Wrong! The theme wasn’t apparent until I came here so thank you.

29. Something I always find interesting in this blog is how one person’s clue-meat is another’s clue-poison — different knowledge sets, and more interestingly different casts of mind and different tastes and preferences.

    I missed ALSO (because “too large” remained an indissoluble unit in my brain) and LOACH (though I know of three director). ENCLOISTER only emerged from the anagram, whereupon I thought “yeah I suppose that’s a word” (though my iPhone spell checker has other ideas). Anyone seen it in the wild? TUFTY I tumbled to, but I agree with Geoff Down Under‘s comment @10. Had to come here for parsing of MUD and MULLET. Hadn’t heard of BASS beer, so that part of the clue didn’t help.

    I thought the burials of UTAH and BLEAK were well done.

    As for the theme — for me, one that got away.

    Thanks B&l

30. PS: “Duke of York” might be a good name for a local pizzeria.

31. Tim C @15
    How does BOWFELL come into this?

32. Lizzy @31, in clue 13d

33. Thanks Ken @21

34. Is it too much of a stretch to say ‘your hair’s tufty/a bit of a shock today’ ?

35. Gave up, did not finish this one. Failed to solve 22ac, 23d.

    I could not parse 11ac or 15ac I parsed it as S+KIPPER but def = Boxer in training, possibly? Thanks Shirley@13 for explaining.

    Liked ALSO.

    New for me : JACK = a small white ball in bowls, at which the players aim; BASS beer (Surely there are hundreds if not thousands of brands of beer – isn’t this rather lazy clueing?)

    I did not see the theme.

    Thanks, both.

36. I made somewhat heavy weather of this but got there in the end.

    I missed the theme, of course. I liked ALIGNMENT for the surface and RAMRODS for the good definition. Now that I’ve read the blog, I would also commend UTAH, where I was about to complain that UTH for University Teaching Hospital was a non-standard abbreviation (like R = roger). ENCLOISTER is in Chambers and Collins where I thought the ‘will be’ was unnecessarily misleading; why not just ‘are’?

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick.

37. I forgot to say that I thought that “US state” for SD was a little unfair without indicating the abbreviation – after all, UTAH was given in full.

38. I’m another who thought it was Man Ray in 16D. I also dithered before putting in TUFTY, as it’s an adjective not a noun. The only Tufty I know of is a squirrel: the Tufty Club was a safety campaign, yonks back, to help small kiddies crossing the road (although I really can’t recall why a squirrel was considered a good role model for this…)
    I vaguely wondered about pubs or music as a theme – but never thought of fish. I know even fewer fish than rivers. Cod. Shark. That’s about all.
    Thanks Brummie and loonapick!

39. I always look forward to a Brummie puzzle. I found the bottom half of this much harder than the top. One of the toughest for a while, though very satisfying. I liked JELLY and DUKE OF YORK: though the less said about the current specimen, the better. With thanks to Brummie and loonapick.

40. Ach. Beaten fair and square today. Had to reveal RAMRODS to finish the SW with MULLET, and had to reveal DISCUS to crack the last three in the NE.

41. Phew. Made heavy weather of this but got there in the end with no help from the scaly creatures.

    Much to admire, but felt Charging aids pack and switches was a nonsensical sentence, and I still don’t see how rock is a synonym for roll other than the obvious musical juxtaposition.

    Bifd TUFTY but can’t really justify the differing parts of speech.

    ALSO was my COD.

    Many thanks both.

42. Clearly navidier@7 is right about Man Ray in 16d RAYON.
    It’s a clever clue, with the capital M deliberately hidden by being the leading character.
    And the RAY contributing to the theme,

43. Charging aids pack and switches — what kind of a surface is that? Does it say anything comprehensible? I’m with William@41.

    beaulieu@3 “Roger” is R in some phonetic alphabet, and was (may still be) used for “Recieved” after a message. I think “Roger” still means an affirmative in conversation.

    New to me was JACK in bowls.

    I only learned recently that JELLY is a dessert in the UK, the thing we call Jello in the US. This is my chance to say that “jelly” is NOT the American word for “jam.” The American word for jam is — wait for it — jam. Jelly is the American word for jelly, and both of them are sweetened fruit spreads, as are preserves, marmalade and fruit butter. Jelly is translucent and is made from the strained juice of cooked fruit (I make grape jelly from the vine in my back yard) and jam is made from crushed pureed fruit. “Preserves” is not a pretentious word for jam but means yet a different preparation, fruit spread where the fruit are left whole, so you can still see their shape. Fruit butter (usually apple) is fruit cooked slowly until it condenses to a spread. Marmalade you already know.

    We say “peanut butter and jelly” to save time. It was a law until 1978 that you had to say “peanut butter and jam or jelly or marmalade or preserves,” but the students rebelled and had the law revoked. A p b and J sandwich can have any of those ingredients and still qualify.

    Thanks to Brummie and loonapick.

44. I think the setter placed the “As” at the beginning of the def for TUFTY to indicate that the solution is substitutable for the phrase “as/like a piece of hair”.

45. The left half of this went in very quickly for me, but then the right half took almost twice as long. Failed to spot the theme, of course.

    For many years, Bass Ale was the only English beer widely available in the US. You see less of it these days. (American taste in beer has massively altered: most beer enthusiasts mostly drink local microbrews, and everybody else sticks to the cheap stuff (the tasteless Millers and Budweisers of the world), so the market for imported beer has shrunk tremendously in the last 20-ish years.) Anyway, surprised how many hadn’t heard of it.

46. Usually I’m one of the few who misses the theme entirely but I suspected this one immediately on my first entry: CHAR! This did help with a few, but I should have spotted MULLET much earlier – it was my LOI after the tricky RAMROD.

    navidier and Wellbeck’s suggestion of Man RAY escaped me, but I’m sure it was intended – it makes the clue much more precise. Bravi 🙂

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen (greater) AMBERJACK in the UK, but it’s an excellent fish, popular in Italy ( where it is known as ‘ricciola’). Certainly tastier than BLEAK and MUDSKIPPER 🙂

    Thanks to S&B

47. Did nobody else put in Nylon (Niall On) for 16d instead of RAYON? This held me up for some time until I realised nothing else fitted with it. Last to yield was the SW corner, with MULLET proving difficult to get my comb/brush through. Thought ALSO a tricky little clue. Liked the projectile at 5d, but this puzzle didn’t sparkle enough for me, I’m afraid. It’s York Minster rather than a Cathedral, though I suppose that’s much ado about nothing. Though yesterday I was in Ely Cathedral to see an art exhibition in the Lady Chapel on the Ukraine War. Humbling, and what a wonder of the world that Octagon is…

48. Ronald @47 “The Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Saint Peter in York, commonly known as York Minster, is the cathedral of York, North Yorkshire, England, and is one of the largest of its kind in Northern Europe”

    It’s on the internet so it must be true 🙂

49. Bodycheetah@48…many thanks for putting me right! And of course another quite stupendous building…

50. Thanks for the blog , great puzzle, a fight in every corner and almost lasted my whole journey home.
    Some of the small words were clued very well, this is unusual. JACK, ALSO, UTAH ,SMELT,MUD …
    I missed the theme but glad to see it did not affect the clues at all. Only ENCLOISTER awakened my ursine Peruvian .

51. bonangman@30 : No sweat, that, in naming a pizza place “The Duke of York”. As long as it succeeds and doesn’t have to be jeffed. Nuntius@39 : I’m violating your “say nothing” advice but I’m sure you’ll forgive my Tramp on your toes, when joking and invoking mentions of Woking.

52. Tough going but fun to complete. Didn’t spot the theme.
    Ta both

53. SinCam @ 25: re UTAH, thanks & see what you mean – I’d missed that. It can also be parsed as University Teaching Hospital (health centre) without (around) ‘a’ !

54. Thanks loonapick, RAMRODS a lucky guess as I had rams as a charging aid (if charging a locked door) and no idea otherwise except that Ramsons seemed unlikely. I thought the YORK of 14d might be a bit vague but scrolled through a long list and couldn’t see another tetragrammatical cathedral city so fair enough, got lucky that Brummie’s alter ego Cyclops clued MU similarly not long ago.
    Thanks Valentine for the jammy notes, mrpenney I think my most recent pint of Bass was in the States (but a few years ago), it was fairly common in the British Midlands of my youth and there can’t be many beers immortalised in proper art (Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère – trade mark as noted by Ken James@10 clearly visible)!
    Tough but 16d, 23d, 28d and more really good, thanks Brummie.

55. The Guardian has finally published a correction for the Maskarade puzzle from three weeks ago.
    Pompous dwarf’s question about his identity AND WINE (5) – Answer MEDOC

56. Roz @55: that fixes the problem but makes for a terrible clue!

57. It has just been cobbled together , the clue was used before in another puzzle where answer were types of wine without definition.

58. Types of alcoholic drink to be precise.

59. Thanks Brummie. I found this a mixed bag — I enjoyed some clues like RAYON (immediately thought of Man Ray), DISCUS, SACRED, and ALSO. Others I revealed when my patience ran out — JACK ( a target on the green was a mystery), JELLY (never heard of jelly babies), and TUFTY (a new word for me.) [ I remember the popularity of Bass Ale years ago; folks sometimes ordered a black-and-tan which was a blended pint of Guinness and Bass. Sacrilege to some, mixing something Irish with something English but tasty to others.] Thanks loonapick for the blog.

60. MrPenney@45: same experience – the left was tough enough, but I eventually gave up on the right and revealed several, which is why there will be no further comment from me as I haven’t earned the right.

61. Enjoyed this, despite what seemed like a prevalence of clues that needed the addition or subtraction of a single letter. Nice to get new info about bowls, rather than cricket, this time around. We suspected a triple def, with TAR (divided off from “target”), and “get on the green” being “to jack” in golf slang . . .

62. Tony Santucci@59, if you’ve never had a jelly baby in your mouth, you haven’t lived! A great weakness of mine still…

63. Ronald @47: I also started with nylon, thinking as you did.

64. Well that was tougher than the average Brummie, but very satisfying to finish – albeit oblivious to the theme.

    For some reason thinking about fish makes a cold day seem even colder.

    Flea @14, really chuffed about my blue plaque. Thanks B & L.

65. Nicely chewy today. Some very well crafted clues. I liked the cleverly hidden UTAH exactly in the middle of the fodder and the Founder as “establishment figure”.
    I spotted the theme but still failed to see AMBERJACK, BLEAK (not heard of either) and JELLY (boneheadedness). JACKfish is a small pike, I see from Collins, so that was good enough for me.
    Thanks for the Man Ray nuance, folks. William @41, rock/roll – what a ship does in rough seas?
    Thanks, Brum and loon.

66. [Ronald @62: Thanks for the tip. I see Amazon stocks these. Maybe the next time I need to add a few dollars to my order to qualify for free shipping I’ll order a bag or two.]

67. On the “rock = roll” issue, in Australia at least you can “rock up” or “roll up” to an event—which would satisfy the substitutability criterion. I’m not saying that removes all objections.

68. Ronald @47 – I did! But it didn’t quite feel right, and while I’ve never heard of Man Ray, the fact RAY is a man’s name together with crossers made me confident. Not the right route to get there, but never mind…

    I remained oblivious to the theme til the last, but found this all good fun & fair, with a slight grimace at being asked to find an abbreviation for one of the 50 US States.

    Especially liked DUKE OF YORK, BLEAK, and ALSO.

    Thanks Brummie and Loonapick.

69. EB@64: It’s a pleasure to write up EB plaques and forgot to mention yesterday, there’s a Springfield, in Essex – a district of Chelmsford, near where my cousin lives.
    And here’s another EB – patrick charles Eugene Boone with an earworm re his past activity to get his equivalent blue plaque – a 2nd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

    *EARWORM also covers puzzle theme today*

    https://youtu.be/-hW_6V1ffYg

    It’s World Compliment Day – today – so thank you, once more, Eddie and Blogger-loonapick.

70. Ronald@62: And Doctor Who as played by Tom Baker, as I recall. The last time I watched it.

71. 20a. To spell it out as some haven’t worked it out. The definition, as loonapick indicates, is “as a bit of a shock” with “as” = “like” indicating that the answer is an adjective. A tuft of hair can be part of a shock of hair. “As a bit of a shock” = “as a tuft” or TUFTY.

72. For some reason (personal taste, not a criticism) I find Brummie’s puzzles tough, and not all that satisfying – I think his sense of humour is at variance with mine. This was a DNF, with 22a RAMRODS the impenetrable holdout; it is a perfectly good clue – thanks loonapick for the explanation.

    The theme passed me by, and wouldn’t have helped much if I had twigged it.

    mrpenny@45, BASS (4d) used to be my favourite beer, until the owner of the distribution rights in Canada decided to stop importing it. Grumble, grumble.

    Thanks Brummie for the challenge, and loonapick for the much-needed blog.

73. There is a bottle of BASS on the bar in Maet’s A Bar At The Folies Bergere. Sorry, I can’t get dialectics to work here,

74. nicbach@73. Not surprising. There are no diacritics in dialectics. :- ) I cheat with a cut and paste from elsewhere on-line.

75. Nicbach @ 73…early product placement. Actually a bottle of BASS on each side

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