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To paraphrase an old slogan, ‘…p-p-p-pick up a Picaroon…’ – which I have done for a second Saturday prize slot in a row…not that I’m complaining…
…as it was a challenging and enjoyable solve, although I have to admit to having to resort to a little pattern-match at the end, as I was not familiar with ‘SLOUCH HAT’ at 14D.
BALLADMONGER was also new to me, as I’d always thought a xxx-monger dealt in physical things – fish-, iron-, cheese-, etc. But Chambers has 40-odd instances of xxx-monger, a lot of which are at the more conceptual end of things – gloom-, gossip-, etc. It doesn’t have ‘clue-monger‘, of which Picaroon is an excellent example – a word I propose we should use as much as possible to try and get it included in the next edition!
I enjoyed the rare quadruple definition at 1A for TREES, as well as the loyal Belgians in 20D LIEGE. It took me a while to get Geri from Ginger at 4D GERIATRIC, as I was trying to use ginger as some sort of subtractive anagram fodder.
Lots of other fun and games – 3D ST. EVE for ‘Jobs, perhaps’; the criminal ‘going straight’ in 8A AS THE CROW FLIES; the ‘furious row’ for CROSS WORDS at 18A; and the ‘bounder’ admitting to mortal sin at 1D.
I searched, briefly and in vain, for any theme or Nina – happy to be enlightened below.
It just remains to thank Picaroon – see you next month?! – and hopefully I will see some of you at the Nottingham get-together tomorrow (writing this up on the Friday evening!)
| Across | ||
|---|---|---|
| Clue No | Solution | Clue (definition underlined)
Logic/parsing |
| 1A | TREES | Ben may box Rowan? (5)
Quadruple definition – all types of tree! [a rare quadruple definition, BEN as a tree being the third definition of ‘ben’ in Chambers] |
| 4A | GIFT SHOP | Image files capturing tango dance in present location (4,4)
GIF_S (image files, Graphical Interchange Format files) around (capturing) T (tango, phonetic alphabet) + HOP (dance) |
| 8A | AS THE CROW FLIES | Going straight, criminal watches for dishonest acts (2,3,4,5)
AS THE CROW F (anag, i.e. criminal, of WATCHES FOR) + LIES (dishonest acts) |
| 10A | PLACE MAT | Clap cryptic setter about extremely adroit bit of setting (5,3)
PLAC (anag, i.e. cryptic, of CLAP) + E_M (me, the setter, about) + AT (extreme letters of AdroiT) |
| 11A | ODESSA | Rolling over, embarrassed oenophile’s drunk port (6)
reversed hidden word in, i.e. ‘rolling over’ and ‘drunk’ by, ’embarrASSED Oenophile’ |
| 12A | LOCK HORNS | Hair cut son’s delayed to create a row (4,5)
LOCK (hair) + ( |
| 15A | AVAIL | Benefit of a part of traditional wedding dress, we hear (5)
A + VAIL (homophone, i.e. we hear – VAIL can sound like VEIL, part of a wedding dress) |
| 17A | NADIR | Desperate guy rejected by girl essentially in worst moment (5)
NAD (Desperate Dan, comic character, rejected) + IR (middle, or essence, of gIRl) |
| 18A | CROSSWORD (SOLVER) | & 19 Furious row about taking latitude for you (9,6)
CROSSWORD_S (furious row) + O_VER (about) around (taking) L (latitude) |
| 19A | SOLVER | See 18A (6)
See 18A |
| 21A | ECCE HOMO | Devotional work protecting the environment around church dwelling, briefly (4,4)
EC_O (protecting the environment) around CE (Church of England) + HOM( |
| 24A | BELT-TIGHTENING | Managing with less wonderful housing wrecked centre of Kent (4-10)
BELT_ING (wonderful) around (housing) TIGHT (drunk, wrecked) + EN (centre of kENt) |
| 25A | DEAD HEAT | Husband comes in exhausted, removing black tie (4,4)
DEAD ( |
| 26A | TATAR | I’m leaving rupees for old Asian (5)
TATA (ta ta, I’m leaving) + R (rupees) [The Tatars being a Mongol tribe who swept over Asia and Europe in the 14th Century, or so, presumably pillaging and empire building as they went…] |
| Down | ||
| Clue No | Solution | Clue (definition underlined)
Logic/parsing |
| 1D | TRAMPOLINIST | Bounder quietly admitted to mortal sin — and it shocked (12)
TRAM_OLINIST (anag, i.e. shocked, of MORTAL SIN + IT) around P (piano, quietly) [Shurely a ‘bouncer’, on a trampoline? – but Chambers has ‘bound’ as to spring or leap…as the fourth definition] |
| 2D | ENTRANCED | Way in Germany to get transported (9)
ENTRANCE (way in) + D (Deutschland, Germany) |
| 3D | STEVE | Jobs perhaps of the first woman to get canonised? (5)
If Eve, the first lady (biblically), was canonised, she would become Saint Eve, or ST EVE! [the late Steve Jobs, of Apple fame] |
| 4D | GERIATRIC | Ginger cat and I travelling across river, getting on (9)
GERI (Geri Halliwell, Ginger Spice!) + AT_IC (anag, i.e. travelling, of CAT + I) around (across) R (river) |
| 5D | FAWN | Suck up whiskey in cooler (4)
FA_N (cooler) around W (whiskey, phonetic alphabet) |
| 6D | SALAD DAYS | Youth speaks about panto, dropping in (5,4)
S_AYS (speaks) around ALAD_D( |
| 7D | OWENS | Famous Olympian thus astride fresh mounts (5)
S_O (thus) around (astride) NEW (fresh), all mounted, or reversed = OWENS [the famous Olympian being Jesse Owens…] |
| 9D | BALLADMONGER | Party, wild do with German composer (12)
BALL (party) + ADMONGER (anag, i.e. wild, of DO + GERMAN |
| 13D | HARVESTED | Picked privileged people to entertain King Edward (9)
HA_VES (privileged people, as opposed to have-nots) around (entertaining) R (rex, king) + TED (Edward) |
| 14D | SLOUCH HAT | Accessory’s quiet about mostly disreputable case of assault (6,3)
S_H (quiet, interjection) around LOUCH( |
| 16D | APOLOGIST | Defender, one with heart saving game (9)
A (one) + GIST (heart, the pith of the matter) around (saving) POLO (game) |
| 20D | LIEGE | Loyal Belgians are here (5)
double defn. – a LIEGE is a loyal vassal; and Belgians can be found in LIEGE! |
| 22D | EVENT | Flush toilet? At last, this happens (5)
EVEN (flat, flush) + T (last letter of toileT) |
| 23D | WIRE | Compiler right to feature in the Guardian or Telegraph (4)
W_E (the Guardian, from the paper/setter’s point of view) around (featuring) I (the compiler/setter) + R (right) |
Took me quite a while but got there in the end.
Favourites included: GIFT SHOP, PLACE MAT, NADIR, FAWN, SLOUCH HAT, HARVESTED
Thanks Picaroon and mc_rapper67
Thank mc_rapper67. This was too hard for me to enjoy. We are all familiar and happy with finding the most probable answer to a clue without being able to explain why without further analysis and research but I think there was too much of a good thing here with some pretty obscure logic which took me some time to comprehend. 1d, 9, 12, 16, 18, 19, 21, 24 are examples. I’m a simple soul but I do like to solve a clue knowing without doubt that the answer is correct. At first pass I could fill in only very few and the rest came very slowly. I did like 1a and 23d though.
I struggled a bit on this and left it until just now (Friday midnight). Didn’t know SLOUCH HAT or BALLADMONGER where I was trying German composers as misdirected. Also held up by CROSSWORD SOLVER although I thought it was right I had furious = CROSS then ROW about giving CROSSWORD then ??
Thanks for the challenge Picaroon and the parsings Mr Rapper’s
Thanks Picaroon and thanks mc_rapper67 for the blog! I enjoyed this one and found it very fair though I had to seek help for DEAD HEAT. Like tim the toffee@3 I had “row about” = WOR and then was puzzled as to where the rest came from so I was happy for the blog here!
Nice puzzle, ta both. The ben tree was new, and I’ve always thought Tatars were Tartars, mixing races with sauces praps. Ecce homo was a jigsaw, thought it’d be Latin but I’m liturgically ignorant. Ginger Geri, otoh, was helped by having had girly London nieces (now in their 30s and very post-grad switched on). Slouch hat was a fave [as I’ve probly said before, since it’s one of my heart stories, it’s a reason I’m here. When Grandma Freidl, in Safed, north Israel, saw the Aussie boys in their slouch hats, one side pinned up by the rising son badge, marching down her main street, she was so overjoyed at being liberated she said to her young hubby “Jossel, that is where we are going”].
I was glad this was the Prize as it took more than one session to crack, and I found different clues took me longer: APOLOGIST – my head got stuck on advocate, although I could see it didn’t fit, ECCE HOMO and TATAR were my last in.
Thank you to Picaroon for the challenge and mc_rapper67 for the blog.
rising sun …
Thanks to Picaroon and mc_rapper67. I found this Prize Puzzle a tough challenge at times and couldn’t parse some answers (like the SOLVER part of 18,19a CROSSWORD SOLVER, for instance), so I was glad to see the blog appear today with such clear and thorough explanations. I liked many of the same clues as cited by the blogger, as well as GERIATRIC at 4a which also took me a while to spot. Some of the clues were real gems. Like grantinfreo I saw 14d SLOUCH HAT reasonably quickly, as my Dad is wearing one in my parents’ wedding photo in my hallway.
[I meant to say that I loved your story about the Aussie soldiers in Israel, gif@5]
I struggled towards the end of this, with three interlocking unsolved clues that only very slowly resolved themselves into LOCK HORNS, TRAMPOLINIST and, finally, TREES. I’d thought from the start the bouncer must be an anagram, and even got the fodder right, but couldn’t think of the answer, and went off course for quite a while trying to fit something like ‘cad’ into a mortal sin. I even looked at the Wikipedia page for ‘mortal sin’ at one point (which makes for slightly unsettling reading when you see the range of options available). Still, I got there once I had sorted out the row over the haircut, and was surprised to realise 1ac simply listed four trees! Even ‘box’. No complaints about the clueing, however, and lots that I enjoyed. As grantinfreo said @ 5, Australians would know SLOUCH HAT, although I had trouble seeing it as an ‘accessory’.
Thanks mc_rapper and Picaroon.
Thanks Picaroon for a solid prize. I failed with TREES and BALLADMONGER but all else fell into place bit by bit. My top choices included AS THE CROW FLIES, NADIR, TATAR, STEVE, OWENS, and APOLOGIST. Thanks mc_rapper67 for the blog.
Thanks for the blog , ODESSA was well hidden , especially in the paper where it is split across two lines. ECCE HOMO and BELT-TIGHTENING were neat constructions.
Gif@5 😀
Many thanks for the excellent cluemongering, Picaroon and mc_rapper67. I found this very tough and needed some aids. But I couldn’t fault the clueing. Some superb definitions. Bounder was a great mislead. Thanks for explaining the ginger.
Enjoy your S+B meet, mc_r and others.
Setters + Bloggers
After staring at them all week, gave up on DEAD HEAT/WIRE this morning and revealed them. I remember that it took ages to find ECCE HOMO and BALLADMONGER too. I didn’t know the ben tree but the other three were clear enough.
Favourites LIEGE and ST. EVE.
A puzzle that definitely required the brain to be firing on all cylinders with novel ideas and treatments all over the place, it seemed. Favourites – pruned from a long list – include AS THE CROW FLIES, NADIR, DEAD HEAT, STEVE, GERIATRIC, BALLADMONGER and APOLOGIST.
Pure coincidence but 23d gave me cause to smile on revisiting it this morning: I came here to comment having just completed WIRE’s puzzle in the Indy!
Thanks Picaroon and mc rapper
Thanks to Picaroon and mc_rapper. Couldn’t parse TREES, but it had to be. Thanks also to gif for the slouch hat story – I can picture the hat now.
Love the word BALLADMONGER – it sounds derogatory, andd I can think of a few singer-songwriters it could be applied to as such.
SE corner was most difficult for me.
New for me: Benjamin tree (1ac); BALLADMONGER; BELTING = wonderful.
Favourites: AS THE CROW FLIES, SALAD DAYS, OWENS, HARVESTED, LOCK HORNS, SLOUCH HAT.
Thanks, both.
An excellent Prize puzzle, with many gems that others have of course already highlighted. My favourite was DEAD HEAT, a relatively straightforward clue, but one with a clear cryptic content and a really good surface.
Thanks to Picaroon and mc_rapper.
Yet another belter from Picaroon. ginf@5 I like to imagine the Ta(r)tars arguing about rhotic pronunciation.
SLOUCH HAT’s cluing was no slouch. OWENS is insurmountable. 🙂
Excellent puzzle with a lot of cleverly disguised definitions. Many clues got a tick from me but special mention for the neat combination of construction and surface in PLACE MAT, NADIR, DEAD HEAT and GERIATRIC.
Only one tiny quibble (in no way did it spoil my enjoyment of the crossword): the TATARs are not ‘old’, though they have been around for a long time, as millions of them still live in various parts of the Russian Federation, including, not surprisingly, the Republic of Tatarstan 🙂
Thanks to Picaroon and mc_r
I’m still not sure about ben as a tree. Collins lists ben as ‘the seed of a tropical tree’ but not the tree itself. There’s something called a benjamin tree but it’s never referred to as a ‘ben tree’. Chambers online only gives two definitions for ben and neither is tree.
Mm@24 it must depend on your Chambers. The app has “Any of several tropical trees of the Moringa genus, esp the horseradish tree, its seed (ben?-nut) yielding ben?-oil or oil of ben, used as a lubricant and in the preparation of perfumes and cosmetics”
I love Picaroon but sometimes wish he’d turn the difficulty dial up a bit so this was a delight
Cheers mc&p
Thanks cluemonger Picaroon and blogmonger mc. I came here (like many others it seems) for the parsing of TREES, SOLVER and SLOUCH. Very enjoyable and tough.
Tough and satisfying as a Prize should be.
2a I didn’t know GIF as an IT term but it couldn’t be anything else. I’m much more familiar with it as an abbreviation for grantinfreo.
18,19a I would guess that most of us started off with ROW about = WOR and were left wondering where the DS came from.
19a When it cropped up fairly recently someone reasonably asked “If l=latitude what = longitude?”.
I’ve forgotten the answer.
4d Definitely a solve first, parse later clue. I wonder when “geriatric” (from the Greek words
for old and healing) came to refer to an old person in general. We don’t refer to a child as ao paediatric.
Thanks to Picaroon and mc_rapper67
I’m not that keen on single letters in the wordplay but at least Picaroon has found 4 different ways to clue R.
Not sure that a BALLADMONGER is a composer. Ballads would be verses sung to existing tunes.
Difficult but satisfying solve.
The ben TREE is in Collins as well as Chambers. 12A was surely ‘have words’, although it wasn’t. I liked the ‘bit of setting’ for PLACE MAT, the exhausted husband in DEAD HEAT, the GERI/ginger, and the privileged people in HARVESTED.
Thanks Picaroon and mcr.
AR@28, Chambers: A dealer in, or composer of, ballads
Beaten all ends up by this, but in an enjoyable way – no complaints. All the information I needed was there, I just couldn’t break through. I had forgotten about multiple definitions so TREES held out and blocked access to ENTRANCED, LOCK HORNS, HARVESTED and BELT TIGHTENING all or any of which I should have solved. Must try harder.
Thanks Picaroon and mc_rapper67.
I couldn’t see the trees for the forest. So missed the passing on that one. Thanks Pickers and mc.
This was a beauty, I thought. Like everyone else I had to check that Ben was a tree, and not merely a flowerpot man, but it seemed inevitable given the company it was keeping. A thoroughly enjoyable solve and hitting the sweet spot for me in terms of being challenging but tractable. Picaroon perhaps the most reliable setter around for consistent quality. Thanks to him and mc_rapper.
Excellent and challenging puzzle. Got very bogged down with DEAD HEAT by completely overthinking and looking for suitable anagrams of “exhausted” without the letters “tux” (ie with black tie removed)!
I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence but earlier this year I was a runner-up in the Guardian clue-writing competition with a clue for TREE that had five definitions. None of them repeated here but the similarity in the concept is notable 🙂
Good puzzle and thanks both!
I found this harder than the typical Picaroon, possibly due to less likely synonyms, like EVEN for flush. I did fill the grid correctly in the end with some notable parsing failures.
I read 18/19ac as CROSS (furious) WOR (row, about) then couldn’t, for the life of me, see how to get DSOLVER from the rest, even though that was obviously the answer (“you”).
25ac You’ve described what happens, in effect, (H replaces B in DEAD BEAT) but not what the clue tells you to do (insert an H into DEAD BEAT, then remove the B). There’s nothing in those instructions which guarantees that the H will be in the same place the B was, so it’s not a direction to replace.
26ac, TATAR: I was sure the clue was telling me to replace an O with an R in a five-letter valediction, so it took me ages to get.
2dn, ENTRANCED: D for Germany on car plates (to clarify)
3dn, STEVE: although Eve is often described as ‘first lady’ in crossword clues, I don’t think she really was a lady, just a woman, as described.
9dn Got BALL (party) but (unbelievably) failed to see the anagram, biffing BALLADMONGER.
14dn NHO a SLOUCH HAT, so had to resort to word search.
I think the Crimean Tatars (much-overlooked victims in the current Ukrainian troubles) would find it odd to see themselves described as “old Asians,” though I suppose at this point they’re current Europeans.
Gif@5
“When Grandma Freidl, in Safed, north Israel, saw the Aussie boys in their slouch hats”
When was this?
[Mr P and others – here’s Jamala, a Crimean Tatar, with her song 1944, commemorating the deportation of that year ordered by Stalin and Beria, and winner of the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest for Ukraine. The lyrics of the chorus are in Crimean Tatar.]
[EB@39, the lyrics of Jamala’s song 1944 seem to bear little relation to the actual events of the deportation of the Tatars since they refer (first verse) to the complete extermination of households, rather than their deportation, (followed by denial of guilt).
The second verse isn’t really an account of anything, but contains the line ‘everyone dies’ (which they didn’t, of course: they just got made to live somewhere else.)
The third verse seems to be Turkish and Google Translate’s shot at it doesn’t really make sense (to me).
So basically just anti-Soviet disinformation, designed to provoke an emotional response on the basis of lies. Or have I missed something?]
Tony @38. I’m guessing it was part of the campaign to capture Damascus in 1918.
[Tony Collman @40
It appears that you haven’t read my post properly, or indeed listened to the song properly. And to call a song that pays tribute to those who died in a mass killing event a ‘lie’, because ‘not everybody died’, I find offensive in the extreme.]
[EB@42, firstly let me say that the deportation of the Tatars was indeed a terrible event. I’m just saying that it was misrepresented in the song.
I didn’t listen to the song; I just read the lyrics. I didn’t call it a lie “because ‘not everybody died’”, but because it represented a campaign of mass deportation (in which a large number of people did indeed die) as a campaign of mass murder in which a whole population was exterminated. There’s no mention of deportation at all in the song as far as I can see.
I see that you actually identified the language of the third verse as Crimean Tatar. That’s clearly a language close enough to Turkish for Google Translate to be wrong-footed. Perhaps you can provide a better translation than “I didn’t get old to my age Men I didn’t live in this place”?]
[GreginSyd@41, thanks. One has to wonder about Grandma Friedl’s nationality and reason for wanting to emigrate (other than an admiration for slouch hats?).
Pino@27. I think it was me that queried ‘latitude’=L in a recent puzzle. I found out in Chambers that longitude is ‘lon’ or ‘long’, neither of which is as much of an abbreviation as L. 🙂
I was struggling for synonyms for ‘cut’ in 12a, and when I thought of (S)CORN I had to check if LOCK CORNS were a thing – a variant on corn rows, perhaps? They weren’t, but Google asked whether I had meant LOCK HORNS, so that’s a dnf for me. But a very enjoyable and challenging one.
Thanks to both mongers
Started this on Friday. Was making solid progress, but got stuck about half-way, so gave up just now Looking at earlier blogs, other solvers did find it hard, so I don’t feel so bad about late defeat. Thanks to mc_rapper67 for more complete answers than on Guardian site. I think that I would have got most of them in the end. No faults in the the setting logic. Varied trickery. Some pleasing solutions (8ac, 18/19 ac). I didn’t know slang word BELTING in 24ac. Too many small components in 21ac and 9d. Too bitty, I thought. I’m another one who couldn’t spell TATAR, but the Guardian site currently still has TARTAR as the 6-letter answer to the 5-letter clue.
[Sheffield Hatter@45, would “locking corns” be a step further than “going toe to toe “?]
Great prize puzzle and blog. Thanks Picaroon and mc. Some lovely clues as others have said.
SLOUCH HAT was new for me but will hopefully stick in the mind all the better after reading grant@5’s personal story.
[TimSee@47. Given the current state of my toes, that’s a bit near the bone. 🙂 ]
Sh@49, the toe bone?
Tony@44. I’m guessing she rather fancied moving to a land populated by tall, strong, handsome and brave young men, as opposed to war-torn Middle East (no record of whether her new husband shared this notion).
GreginSyd@51, we can only speculate …