Guardian 29,101 / Qaos

97 comments on “Guardian 29,101 / Qaos”

1. E-lation:

   Ecstasy as in the name of the drug (E) and also a synonym for elation.

2. Thanks Eileen & Qaos. Always a treat I agree.

   I had ECSTASY as a double definition also, E (the drug) and Elation being the two definitions.

3. ATHENA whale ?

   This had me wishing that Sturgeon would go off and play a BUGLE rather than all the excuse making and fawning to the cameras that’s done at the moment. Was also reminded that, after 65 years, I could still remember “e” ( the base of natural logarithms ) to 10 dec places. 2.7182818285 ! Don’t know if it’s the crosswords I’m currently selecting but BEAK, SKI and rave ( = party ) seem to have come up a lot recently. ALLOSAUR was a jorum for me but knew REVERSI as I have it on my phone.

   I very much liked BLUESY, ATLANTIC, MINK, ECSTASY and WEEDKILLER.

   Here’s a clip from nearly 60 years ago

   https://youtu.be/45NtEXv7DZs

   Thank you Qaos and Eileen

4. I spotted the theme reasonably early and it helped me solve MINK and BLUESY. I liked WEEDKILLER, ECSTASY, EXIST and SUBWAY. Had no idea what was going on in Thailand.

   Ta Qaos & Eileen.

5. … and there’s humpback as well, all cetaceans except stingray, which is a bit odd …

6. It would have helped if I could spell Grat(t)itude properly. Doh!

7. . But HUMPBACK whale is the one I should really have added ATHENA was a specific name or an Icelandic orca I think.

8. In 28 how is “U” derived from posh?

9. Don’t forget HUMPBACK! Thanks Qaos and Eileen

10. Eileen, slight typo in explanation of BIOLOGICAL.

11. Thanks Qaos and Eileen
    I forgot even to look for a theme, but I enjoyed several clues; BELUGA and HUMP (apposite surface!) were favourites.
    I didn’t parse BLUESY – BLUE SKY never would have occurred to me.
    Related by blood is extremely loose for BIOLOGICAL, and sharp for ABRASIVE is a bit loose too, though I suppose could apply to people rather than materials.

12. As usual, didn’t look for a theme. Helped by an almost instantaneous realisation that GR had to leave GRATITUDE. Liked MINK, in particular. Thanks to Qaos and Eileen.

13. I also had Regular instead of GENERAL at first.

14. Thanks, Alan @10 – fixed now.

15. Good fun spotting all the cetacean creatures. There’s also the Southern RIGHT whale as part of RIGHTFUL.

    I liked the STINGRAY TV series reminder (thanks Flea @7, great stuff) and the impossible looking mathematical surface for MINK, with the first letter E in the clue immediately below it the icing on the cake.

    Thanks to Eileen and Qaos

16. rjg@8: Chambers defines U as (British colloquial) – acceptable to the upper classes. I think it’s more frequently seen in the phrase ‘non-U’.

17. rjg @8 – I don’t recognise your initials, so – if you’re new to the site – welcome!

    You may be new to cryptic crosswords, too: U =posh crops up very often and is worth remembering. See here for the origin:
    https://www.countrylife.co.uk/country-life/u-non-u-60-years-english-language-still-full-pitfalls-147591

18. Fun puzzle as usual from Qaos. The unfriendly grid meant that the last few entries took me as long as the rest of the puzzle (including the beautiful MINK – there are a lot of ‘beasts’!) but that’s not to be taken as a complaint. Otherwise I found this relatively gentle but with a good variety of constructions and cogent surfaces – those for PUNISHMENT and NUTS are clever.

    I didn’t know REVERSI (should stay in more? 🙂 ) but it was well clued – ‘Federer’s final’ gives R and the rest of the wordplay follows it, hence the ‘to conclude’.

    Thanks to Qaos and Eileen

19. rjg@8: See this Wikipedia entry:

    Nancy Mitford, posh celeb and writer from the 1950s, popularised the terminology: “U” for upper-class and “non-U” for not upper-class.

20. Sorry! The link wouldn’t enter properly. Aaaargh!

21. muffin @11 biological is an exact definition for related by blood in phrases like biological father
    I thought back=the other side was rather loose. I had bank instead, thinking you might be looking at the bank on the opposite side of the river. Not very satisfactory, but not much worse than the actual answer IMO.
    Other than that, very nice thankyou Qaos.

22. Oh, for goodness’ sake! Will this do it? …
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English

23. Gervase@18: yes, I too enjoyed the range of devices used in the clueing — nice!

24. gif@5. Yes, I wondered why STINGRAY was included. They’re often the prey of orcas.

    And there’s a RIGHT whale and a KILLER whale.

    When I first started looking for a theme I wondered Y there were 5 words ending in Y.

25. The surface for the ATHENA clue was very neat, eh? Not a thorny clue, but a very smooth one.

26. As , Wordplodder@ 15 had the RIGHT whale but I think the KILLER was still lurking.

27. Never heard of the 60s television series, nor blue-sky. Never heard of beak for a schoolmaster, but Collins tells me it’s British slang? Couldn’t equate hump/bear and ski/runner, but have found online how they work.

    All else under control. Thanks Qaos & Eileen.

28. Why is ‘on vacation’ a clue for deleting the inside letters (27a)?

29. I found this enjoyable and fairly straightforward. I even managed to spot the theme, for once. I wasn’t aware that BEAK (5D) can mean a schoolmaster. I’m familiar with the phrase: “Up before the beak”, meaning a judge or magistrate. With thanks to both.

30. Eileen re 13d I think it’s EXTRA (walk-on part) DI (I’d stumble) TES (over scenery

31. Dan@28: you vacate the two central letters of swim.

32. Dan @28 – a common cryptic device: the inside letters are ‘vacating’ / departing from the word.

33. I got a bit distracted by STINGRAY, thinking the TV series might have been the theme, doh!

    Lots to like; ATTITUDE ‘bearing thanks’, the trademark MINK mathematical clue, ATHENA, which was well-hidden, and the BLUES(k)Y.

    Good setting from Qaos and fine blog from Eileen.

34. And maybe Qaos was sending a message with MERCURY? The mercury level in whales can be very high due to their prey also having higher levels of mercury.

    Warning. Disturbing content.
    https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2362-extreme-mercury-levels-revealed-in-whalemeat/

35. There was me thinking it might be a pop music theme, with STEELY Dan, BLUE(SY) MINK, and Freddie MERCURY singing about the (WEED)KILLER Queen who I think kept a BOTTLE on ICE and consumed BELUGA caviar…

    Theme aside, this was good fun. Nice image of Nicola Sturgeon playing a bugle. Like ravenrider @21 I was a bit unsure about BACK = the other side, but I suppose it works as in the back or other side of a sheet of paper. And I was rather slow parsing 22d, initially wondering if there was such a word as “blukesy”, which on googling led me to bluesky!

    Many thanks Qaos and Eileen.

36. Dan @28. You “vacate” the word by removing all the inner letters

37. So REVERSI is a game? Should have bunged and googled, but DNF instead. Had a nice time otherwise. Thanks both.

38. Dan @28, ve is “vacate” vacated by most of its letters.

39. Oh dear, beaten to it by Eileen and Nuntius. Must type quicker

40. There is an ATLANTIC RIGHT whale.
    And I don’t think the BEAKed whale has been mentioned yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaked_whale

41. Oh never mind, my phone imagined that 28 was the last comment.

42. There’s a beaked whale too I think

43. Probably coincidental, but there’s a tenuous connection with Qaos’s last themed puzzle featuring artworks on the Fourth Plinth:

    London-based American harmonica player Larry Adler jokingly suggested erecting a statue of Moby-Dick, which would then be called the “Plinth of Whales”.

    Thanks Q & E (and LJ @35 for the alternative theme, and Flea @3 for Gerry Anderson. “Anything can happen in the next half hour”. Filmed in Supermario-nation, no less.)

44. snap Lord Jim@35. Steely Dan, Blue Mink and (Freddie) Mercury jumped out of the grid at me. We must be contemporaries. You may know …

    ….. today’s earworm. Hard to find live with good sound and/or good vision, so I settled for: T
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2PH-prm8M4

    and lyrics at: https://www.stlyrics.com/songs/c/crosbystillsnashandyoung16831/windonthewater2359276.html

45. REVERSI is better known in America as Othello, though the Web tells me that the Othello name (and rule-set) are of Japanese origin. Huh. The original Reversi is British, dating to the 19th century. It’s a game I’ve never been particularly good at, incidentally–I lack whatever spatial logic you need. I mean, I’m a better chess player than an Othello player, and I’m not even particularly good at chess.

    I failed to find the whales, despite remembering to look for a theme. Still, this was all the fun that Qaos, who has become my favorite setter, usually provides. Always good to see all the math. On that note, I wonder that E as Euler’s number doesn’t pop up more often in these things.

46. I could not parse:
    22d apart from BLUES = musical style. I never heard the phrase BLUE SKY = have no immediate use
    26d – I parsed NOS = numbers but I don’t get why E = natural base?

    Favourites: EXIST, SPERM, EXTRADITES, MINK, SUBWAY.

    New for me: STINGRAY TV series; Reversi  game.

    I saw the theme of whale types after I finished – minke, hump back, beluga, blue, bottle nose, beak[ed], right, sperm etc.

    Thanks, both.

47. [Of course, thinking about it, Othello/Reversi *feels* Japanese–it’s sort of like a faster version of Go in many ways.]

48. Ignore my query above – I just found this on wikipedia and I guess it is the explanation of E = natural base? Never heard of this before and I don’t have a clue what it means that “it is the limit of (1 + 1/n)n as n approaches infinity…”

    E (mathematical constant)
    It is the base of natural logarithms. It is the limit of (1 + 1/n)n as n approaches infinity, an expression that arises in the study of compound interest.

49. [michelle @48
    A logarithm is the power a base is raised to in order to get a number. For instance the logarithm of 100 to base 10 is 2, because 100 is 10^2.
    e (approx 2,718) is the base for “natural” logs. It derives from calculus.
    Incidentally I never cease to be amazed by this equation:
    e^(i pi) = -1
    where i is the (imaginary) square root of -1]

50. Michele @48: this is a bad format for a math lesson, but the basic idea is that e is the base of the natural logarithm. What makes it natural, in a nutshell, is that the derivative of the natural log of x is 1/x (in other words, the way calculus works makes it an important number). It’s called e because it was first discovered and played around with by Leonhard Euler.

51. I’d be very much in favour of the setters adopting a ‘retired list’ of antiquated or grossly overused clue-ings.

    Top of my list would be ‘posh’ for U – coined 60 years ago and used by absolutely no-one since, except by those wanting to show off that they know where it came from.

    It would be joined on the list by IT for ‘sex’ (we do not live in the 1950s) and the only ‘film’ setters appear to have ever seen, ET. Personally I’d add PET for ‘tantrum’ too, as no-one seems to be able to cite a realworld example.

52. Muffin @49: I’ve elsewhere expressed how cool it would be if the Edmonton Oilers had alternate game jerseys with e^(I pi) =-1 (Euler’s Equation) on them instead of “OILERS”. This of course depends on correct pronunciation of Euler. And on there being enough math geeks who are also hockey fans.

53. Ragged @51: add to the list the entire vocabulary of His Majesty’s Armed Forces from the Second World War: MO for medical officer (“doctor” or “medic), OR for other ranks (“men”), TA for Territorial Army (“reserves”), etc., etc.

54. I did wonder whether an ALLOSAUR might have been a whale-like marine predator, but I see it isn’t. I enjoyed the whale-watching, especially the MINK (E).

    Failed to spot the blue sky thinking in BLUESY; heard of Othello but not REVERSI; couldn’t parse EXTRADITES; though Thailand was TH not just T. But thoroughly enjoyed this anyway: favourites WEEDKILLER, the Rufus-worthy GENERAL and the neat EX-IST (and the surreal image of a fish playing the bugle).

55. mrpenney @53: quite. I’d also be surprised if anyone had referred to a schoolteacher as a ‘beak’ since the 19th century.

56. Essexboy@ 43, thanks for giving me a real laugh. I hadn’t heard the Larry Adler story, Plinth of Wales until now. Made my day.

57. For ragged’s list: Can I add r=take (from long-disused conventions for writing a doctor’s prescription: r(ecipe) being Latin for take) and the ancient public school slang pi=good? Both have to be explained every time they appear.

58. A puzzle of two halves for me today, the right hand side slipping in comfortably before I struggled to complete the left hand side. NW corner yielded last of all, as wasn’t entirely sure about BACK or ECSTASY. Couldn’t parse BLUESY. BELUGA made me smile…

59. mrpenney@45: it has always annoyed me that someone could take an existing game and market it for profit under a new name

60. [PeterM @59
    That’s why the ECB introduced the ridiculous “Hundred” competition – they forgot to patent Twenty20!]

61. Michelle@48
    Unfortunately your formula did not survive copy and paste: it should be limit (1+1/n)^n, where ^n means raise to the power of n. As n takes on the values 1, 2, 3… we find

    (1 + 1/1)^1 = 2
    (1 + 1/2)^2= 9/4=2.25
    (1 + 1/3)^3=(4/3)^3=2.37
    .
    (1+1/10)^10=2.6
    .
    (1+1/100)^100=2.704

    which is slowly converging to the value of e = 2.7182818284
    As n gets bigger and bigger the formula approaches the correct value for e
    [Sorry if this layout has not survived my copy and paste]

62. Like AlanC @4, I wondered what Thailand was doing in 8 across. Even realising that gratitude had only one t, I couldn’t understand the parsing. The fact that no one else has mentioned it would indicate I missing the obvious.

63. gladys@54, WearyB@62: I too queried Thailand=T – in fact that was the only real quibble I had about the whole puzzle which I thought was the best in the past couple of weeks at least. If being really picky I might also say I thought ICE and SKI a bit too simple compared to the rest.
    Apart from these I liked it all, favourite being MINK.
    Single letters must be very difficult to indicate in an original way, so I suppose we’ll continue to see clues which are either hackneyed such as posh=U, or a bit dubious like the aforementioned Thailand=T.
    Thanks Eileen and Qaos.

64. WearyB@62: It took a while for the penny to drop on 8A. At first I got fixated on Siam, but there is nothing that indicates the former name of the country (until 1939 I believe), so I moved on.

65. 21a – I was trying to incorporate “c” or “ct” for caught.

    All in all this was disastrous for me!

    3 clues solved before everything else was revealed.

    U = posh is a new one for me.

    When I don’t get any of the first half dozen clues it becomes a real struggle.

66. Am I the only one to quibble about a walk-on part being not quite the same thing as an extra?

67. Thanks to Qaos for clueing “e” as “natural base” rather than just “base”, which could be (almost) any number – and for the rest of an entertaining puzzle.
    Thanks too to Eileen for the blog.

68. michelle @48 and others – the mathematical definitions given are of course correct, but I always thought that the simplest way to understand why Euler’s number is special is to look at the shape of an exponential curve; hopefully most people have at least a vague understanding of what that looks like. They have the special property that the rate of increase at a given point is proportional to the value, with the proportion depending on the base of the exponential. When the base is Euler’s number, the rate of increase is exactly the same as the value.
    All the other special properties derive from that fact. Others have mentioned logarithms – these are just the reverse of the exponential function, hence the relationship. The definition that Wikipedia gave is a way of calculating the number, but not useful in understanding it’s meaning.

69. I think the theme is cetaceans, rather than whales, because bottle-noses are dolphins. Can we add ATLANTIC to the theme? Maybe STINGRAY if we’re being oceanic?

    Thanks for parsing ATTITUDE,

    I was trying to make the one day in seven be WED, but couldn’t bring in the other E.

    Thanks to Qaos and Eileen.

    Wordplodder@15 Why specifically a Southern right whale? There are still a few of the northern ones left in my neck of the ocean.

    I’ve never heard of REVERSI and now that I know what it is, it makes my brain ache just to think about it. Don’t think I’ve heard of that meaning of BLUE SKY.

    pserve@19 Thanks for this. I seem to use a mix of terms from the U and non-U columns. I notice that “preserve” for “jam’ is the non-U/pretentious choice, thinking of my ramble recently about words for “fruit spread.”

70. Steffan and Shanne, Itried to answer your queries yesredaythis morning. If you want , you can go back and look at the Quiptic blog.
    I completely forgot that Qaos always has a theme, but it it did not detract from the enjoyment.
    Thanks both.

71. mrpenney@53 ‘OR’ is still used to differentiate between officers and non-officers in the military. Used, for example, in the NATO comparative ranks table (see Wikipedia ‘NATO Ranks and Insignia’).

72. Can I just add that blue sky research is often hat is needed for more focused research, because most of the time we don’t know what we are looking for.

73. Silly me, I’d looked at 19 as being an &lit Just – right, then terrible losing crown – (aw)ful.
    Never heard of the Blue sky saying, so had to wait for all crossers to go in before the answer (and a subsequent trip here) became obvious to me.

74. Thanks Qaos for an entertaining crossword with an easy-to-spot theme. I had a few stumbles — I hadn’t heard of REVERSI, I needed a bit of help to get ABRASIVE, and I couldn’t begin to parse BLUESY. I liked EXIST, WEEDKILLER, SPERM, the clever MINK, and EXTRADITES. Thanks Eileen as always.

75. I’ll start by saying I enjoyed that very much indeed.

    But… I’m either being pedantic or overthinking (two of my hobbies) but the clue for ECSTASY still doesn’t really compute for me: yes, ‘E’ = ‘ecstasy’ and ‘elation’ = ecstasy but what does the ‘-lation’ component on its own denote? In one reading it’s required, in the other it’s not and just hangs there not making much sense. Just me? And anyway it’s a little same-sidey given that the drug was named for the elation it provides…

    Apart from that I loved it 🙂

    Cheers both!

76. Rob T – yes, that’s what I meant, really: as I said, I could see it was a double definition but just couldn’t make it work.

    Re Thailand: I routinely looked it up when writing the blog this morning and found T as the IVR in both Collins and Chambers.

    Re ‘blue-sky’: I recognised it as a phrase but had no idea of the meaning. Chambers gives ‘adj (of research etc) having no immediate practical application’ and Collins something very similar.

77. Ragged @55 I know people who have worked at places like Eton and Harrow where schoolmasters are still regularly referred to as “beaks”. However, I do not think this in any way contradicts your assertion that they have not been used since the 19th century, looking at the attitudes and behaviours of some notable alumni…

78. REVERSI
    Eileen! Have you missed what Gervase@18 said or are you not convinced with that explanation?

    ECSTASY
    I share your view Rob T@75 and Eileen@76.

79. Anything can happen in the next half hour…

80. Pb@79 hopefully a bit of REVERSI swing 🙂

81. Maybe the STINGRAY was to give the Gray Whale ?

82. CG @81
    That just looks odd to me. Are we the only English-speaking nation to spell it “grey”?

83. Jack of few trades @77.
    At my school in the fifties/sixties the teachers were routinely referred to as Beaks and the Head was the Archbeak. And, no, it was neither Eton nor Harrow thank goodness!

84. I didn’t agree with BLUE SKY meaning “no immediate use” as at least two others have also said. Imaginative I would say.
    But nice crossword so thanks QAOS and for the blog Eileen…901..?

85. Muffin @82: Both gray and grey look right to me, which has always caused problems–I can never remember which is the supposedly American spelling and which the British. I think you’ll see it spelled both ways here, but with the former more common than the latter.

86. ‘Blue sky’ is used in this sense in the phrase ‘blue sky research’ – fundamental scientific study rather than research focused on a defined practical application

87. I think CanberraGirl’s right – we’ve got the blue whale in BLUESY and the gray whale in STINGRAY. Here’s the Gray Whale (“also known as the grey whale” 🙂 )

    I understand the KILLER whale (orca) is actually a dolphin – but then, according to wiki, dolphins (and porpoises) themselves come under the parvorder odontocetes, or ‘toothed whales’.

88. Valentine @69, apparently there’s a bottlenose whale as whell 🙂

    I couldn’t find any STEELY whales, or whales of steel, but here’s a steel waler.

    And finally we have a NAR shared between 7 and 19d (whal, why not?)

89. I was disappointed when I couldn’t make APPINESS fit at 16a.

90. REVERSI took me a while, because that game is called Othello here. I also got held up by putting in REGULAR instead of GENERAL. Thanks Eileen and blog members for explaining ECSTASY, ABRASIVE, and WEEDKILLER, and thanks to Qaos for an excellent puzzle.

91. I liked Flea@3’s clip of 14a STINGRAY (Troy Tempest, 1963) from “nearly 60 years ago”.
    I knew its two immediate predecessors Supercar (Mike 18a MERCURY, 1961).
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFXcirSidnY
    and Fireball XL5 (Steve Zodiac, 1962)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXVkRy1HpKs
    All these drivers must be octogenarians by now.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Anderson
    refreshed my memory about Twizzle (1957). Torchy the Battery Boy (1960), and Four Feather Falls (1960).

92. 4d

    Believe both ‘conclude’ and ‘final’ are required as conclude indicates the ‘I serve” anagram comes after ‘R’ Federer’s ‘final’

93. A DNF for me but with this excuse: I’d never heard of REVERSI (I know the related game OTHELLO). I pencilled in REVERSE of course, but couldn’t make any sense of either wordplay or def. The other blank was BLUESY – I knew from the theme that BLUE[S] must be part of it but what exactly is meant by ‘Blue Sky Thinking’? I thought it meant “taking a fresh approach” or something like that. Horrible corporate jargon!

    And anyone else getting a bit fed up with the eternal E-for-‘ecstasy’ trope – a regular in so many puzzles? I could wish for the crossword community to be above constantly referring to illegal recreational drugs. Or is it I who am out of touch? I admit I may have used this device in the past, but I’d like to be shot of it.

    On the whole a nice theme, though I can’t visualise STINGRAY as a mammal, let alone a whale, so it seems out-of-place here.

    The trademark ‘numeric’ clue for MINK was excellent, as was the careful placing of an E below it to make MINKE. Probably my fave. Thanks to Qaos and Eileen.

94. Bit of maths digression – but, well, it’s Qaos so we have an excuse!
    Looking at the discussion about e – there is a simpler way to define it, based on the Taylor series:
    e = 1 + 1/1! + 1/2! + 1/3! + 1/4! + …. and so on.
    where the ! means factorial: multiply the number by all positive integers smaller than it. For example 4! = 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24.
    This can easily be worked through on a pocket calculator and converges very quickly, but never quite reaches, the transcendental number e.
    Have fun!

95. My first and my last..I’ve never fancied myself working with the M16.

96. Was anyone else looking for a Guys and Dolls theme after getting the interlinked 10ac and 2dn?

97. Thanks Eileen, i thought this was great (very varied as per Gervase@18) and found it harder than recent Qaos puzzles, maybe lack of sleep in the heatwave is behind that though. ragged@55 and others, I recall the Head in the Jennings books being known as the “Archbeako” so that helped me on 5d. And (sorry if mentioned above, I did read comments but quickly) I wonder why Qaos didn’t fit the SEI whale into 17d – maybe no way to clue it without giving the theme away? My last was my favourite, the Qaos trademark style MINK, thanks to him.

Comments are closed.