Guardian 29,224 – Harpo

79 comments on “Guardian 29,224 – Harpo”

1. A quite pleasant outing from Harpo.

   The 2 problems were I don’t pronounce FREEZE like that and I don’t pronounce JAX like that. 😉

   Completely missed the pirs apart from the obviousle clued DYNAMOS MONDAYS.

2. Top marx! More fun than some of Harpo’s previous outings. COTD for me was MONDAYS

   Cheers A&H

3. UNA is beciming UNAvoidable 🙂

4. MONDAYS. Nuh, I just don’t get it. I get the Boom Town Rats. Came here to get the 5 sports? What am I missing?

5. Once again the crossword appeared on the Guardian app without the name of the setter. The style was unfamiliar to me (I hardly ever tackle any other organ’s puzzles) and I couldn’t place the compiler.

   Entertaining puzzle with clues varying widely in complexity – as Andrew says, quite mild with a few tricky moments. ORANGE PEEL and SET UP SHOP have particularly knotty constructions.

   Many good clues, including the long anagram, but PLANTAIN was my favourite: ‘to separate discarded’ is inspired and makes for a great surface.

   Thanks to Harpo and Andrew

6. Enjoyable puzzle, I appreciated the humour in some of the clues. I did not see the symmetry of the paired answers until I finished the puzzle and read the comments at the Guardian blog – very clever!

   Failed to solve 28ac and 22d.

   Favourites: YEOMAN, PHENOMENAL, PLANTAIN, ASININITY, TRAINEE (haha), and the amusing and risqué KNOB.

   New for me: AGENT NOUN, NOBBLED, NAAFI, BANJAX and ONION = head (for 18d).

   Thanks, both.

7. Missed the theme as always, but no less enjoyable (and perhaps more so with the extra challenge). MONDAYS was my last in, from familiarity with the Boomtown Rats song, and thanks Andrew for parsing it. Favourites were MARRIED, and, another one that I needed Andrew for, PLANTAIN. Not a fan of using the first letter of word as seen in ORATION and NAAFI. GALLANT as a noun is new to me, and is I believe about as archaic as ‘ye’ from YEOMAN, but without any indication as such. Took two sittings to get through, so a proper Friday in my ledger. Many thanks Harpo and Andrew.

8. As a roan is distinct from a bay, I don’t see how 17 works.

9. Very clever puzzle. MONDAYS is superb but please resist the earworm.
   I thought it was moving towards a pangram too but ran out of places for the Q. I also picked up on the consecutive UNA, bodycheetah 🙂

   Ta Harpo & Andrew.

10. Enjoyed it!
    Yes, I also noticed the reappearance of UNA in 15d UNADORNED.
    I really liked 1a MARRIED and 10a KNOB.
    Unfamiliar with 24a BANJAX and 25d NAAFI, which I only got from the wordplay – and then had to check online were real words.
    I loved it that MONDAYS was an anagram of DYNAMOS, which I saw. But as for Tim C@1, I didn’t see the same thing happening with 1a MARRIED/29a ADMIRER and 8d ORATION/18d ONTARIO. How clever!
    Thanks to Harpo (Marx!!! HaHa, Bodycheetah@2) and Andrew.

11. [paddymelon@4 – “sports” as an anagram of 5a]

12. This was rather more approachable than previous Harpos, but that doesn’t mean I found it easy. Missed the “sesh”; haven’t met an AGENT NOUN before; don’t spell RUBLE that way, and I didn’t know that a NOBBLED horse could be stolen as well as having its chances at AINTREE BANJAXED with drugs or other methods.

    I’m glad I didn’t see the matching anagrams until after I finished as it would have made things too easy.

    (Tim C@1: however do you pronounce frees and jacks?)

13. [paul@7, I think AT might be acceptable as an abbreviation of Alternative Technology (8d), while in 25d, N for “name”, AA for Alcoholics Anonymous and “f” for following (referring to the following page in research) are also abbreviations often found in Crosswordland]

14. I thought this was brilliant! Mondays kept me guessing till the very end. Only one NHO, AGENT NOUN – but I knew it was an anagram so got it reasonably early. Loads of wonderful clues and of course I didn’t spot the clever anagrams of pairs of clues. Lovely end to the week for me, thank you so much Harpo and Andrew

15. gladys @12: That meaning of NOBBLED was new to me also.

    Of course YE is not ‘long lost’ – it’s common or garden ‘the’ with Y as a substitute for the letter thorn which wasn’t in the typesetters’ case.

16. Very enjoyable. I sometimes find it hard to get on the wavelength of an unfamiliar setter, but something clicks with Harpo. Maybe the underlying humour?
    [I might have mentioned the same thing before, but on my most recent trip on LeShuttle, I was glad to see that the female apprentices in the duty-free shop at the French end no longer have to wear badges identifying them as a TRAINEE (“tart” or “slut” in French)]

17. Ed @8 ROAN as an adjective?

18. This got off to a great start with MARRIED – super clue – and they just kept coming, making for a most enjoyable puzzle.

    Having seen the trick with DYNAMOS / MONDAYS at 28ac, followed immediately by entering ADMIRER at 29 (my habit of chronological solving paid off today), being familiar with the ingenuity of this setter – but not always feeling up to tackling his Indy and FT puzzles – it occurred to me to look for other instances and I was chuffed at finding them.

    A host of ingenious clues, particularly PLANTAIN and ORANGE PEEL, which featured very recently in Paul’s crosSWORD puzzle. Too many others to list – there wasn’t a dud amongst them.

    Many thanks to Harpo for a lot of fun and to Andrew for a super blog.

19. @8 Ed and bodycheetah

    Iirc UK and Irish thoroughbreds do not have Roan as a colour (bay black brown gray) . What would be called Roan by non-Racing folks is a Bay for RHA etc.

    Never seen nobbled in that sense before.

    Thanks Setter and Blogger. Great crossword

20. ( gladys @12, I was pulling the ‘homophone’ police’s plonkers about freeze and jacks, hence the 😉 )

21. As has been noted (ahem), a full spectrum challenge today, from the fairly simple (AINTREE, KNOB, RUBLE) to the almost, to this solver at least, impenetrable (MONDAYS, a brilliant clue imo).

    Didn’t spot the cross-grid anagrams (how ingenious) till coming here. As ever, in awe of the setter’s and blogger’s skills. Bravo, and thanks, H & A

22. I reckon bodycheetah @17 has it. Though I didn’t know it, the first entry for ‘roan’ in Chambers is as an adjective meaning ‘bay’.

23. One of those puzzles with a lot of “hit and hope”, where I put in an answer without being able to parse.
    Never heard of ONION for head?
    New to me, agent noun, although I did the anagram.
    As ever, failed to spot any sort of theme.
    Exhausted.

24. Pretty gentle outing I felt. Didn’t spot the pairs though.

    NW corner went in almost immediately.

    MARRIED is a great clue, although MONDAYS took today’s prize.

    Thanks Harpo and Andrew

25. I enjoyed this, one reason being that it was in my Goldilocks zone. I saw the DYNAMOS/MONDAYS anagram, but missed the other pairings and hence the theme. Couldn’t parse PLANTAIN. Favourite clue: MARRIED.

    Thanks to Harpo and Andrew.

26. Thought this a simply sparkling offering to we solvers…right from the very beginning when I solved the first two across, MARRIED and DYNAMOS. And then right at the very end to discover how satisfyingly MONDAYS complemented 5ac. Several helpful anagrams along the way. Particularly liked ORANGE PEEL amongst several others. A delight this morning…

27. TimC @20: that’s very funny… well done!

    Loved this, which is more than I can say for some of this setter’s previous offerings.

    Failed to parse PLANTAIN, which I now see as an excellent clue. Grrr.

    Many thanks both.

28. … incidentally, with TimC’s FREEZE and BANJAX as early entries, spent ages trying to shoehorn the missing Q in.

29. Thanks Harpo and Andrew

    I thoroughly enjoyed this.

    AT = Alternative Technology is in Chambers, so fair game.

30. Is ATROPINE a poison? I thought it was a medicine. As with many medicines, it is possible to overdose, but does that make it a poison?

31. 1A made me smile

    Tricky but broadly doable. Though I’d NHO NAAFI so DNF by a whisker ????

32. TassieTim @30: ATROPINE is certainly very toxic, although it is useful medicinally. It’s the principal alkaloid in deadly nightshade, which is certainly not to be taken internally. The scientific name of the plant is Atropa belladonna: ‘Atropa’ from Atropos, the one of the three Fates of Greek mythology who cut the thread of life, and ‘belladonna’ because an extract dropped in the eye was used by women to enlarge their pupils to make them seem more attractive. This property is still used clinically.

33. Pleasant solve where I, too, was striving to put a Q in somewhere after seeing the Js etc.

    I liked PHENOMENAL, YEOMAN and ASININITY for the wordplay, the MONDAYS/DYNAMOS doublet, and the onion head. TILT is AGENT NOUN. Just to quibble, I thought the ‘one’ in 15 could have been omitted without affecting the surface.

    Thanks Harpo and Andrew.

34. For those who haven’t visited the NAAFI before…

    Anyone old enough to have done National Service in the UK should know all about it. Nice to know it’s still in operation.

35. I failed to finish, as I’d never heard of either NAAFI or BANJAX, and wound up using the cheat buttons on those two. Also new to me was NOBBLED, but that one I did manage to work out on my own. I swear, it sometimes seems like you guys just make up words as you go along. Maybe I should try: “The clue for NOBBLED had me completely chonkered, but I managed to faffle it out in the end.”

36. TassieTim@30, atropine saved my life when they gave me a shot of it when my heart rate dropped to zero under general anesthesia 20 years ago. But overdoses can indeed be poisonous. Dosis sola facit venenum.

    This USAnian found this tough, never having come across NAAFI, banjax, or nobbled in the sense “stolen”, and as always missing the theme.

37. Unlike Bob Gelding’s protagonist, I do like MONDAYS. I really enjoyed this, even though I often struggle with Monk, which shows that one shouldn’t have a do not attempt list.

38. This was good fun. I thought MONDAYS was great but failed to spot the other paired anagrams.

    In 1a MARRIED, the Guardian style doesn’t usually include a full stop after Mr. I think Harpo has deliberately introduced it to justify the upper case C for Mr Clumsy. Very clever.

    Many thanks both.

39. What Eileen said

    Many thanks to Harpo and Andrew

40. I especially liked BANJAX – a good !rish word, and older than I thought. Green’s Dictionary of Slang https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/3i6fgeq has
    ‘banjax n. – [semi-euph. for ballocks n. (3)] – (!rish) – a complete mess.’ and cites Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1925):
    “I’m tellin’ you the scholar, Bentham, made a banjax o’ the Will.”

41. Not too tricky mostly, but the final couple of crossing clues held me up – nho NAAFI and dnk ‘gallant’ as a noun. Couldn’t parse ASININITY, but it’s very good.

    Thanks Harpo & Andrew.

42. NHO BANJAX, AGENT NOUN (got it from the crossers and the anagram), ATROPINE (same), and did not parse ONTARIO (ty, Andrew). Also not heard of NOBBLED in that sense. And yet somehow still filled the grid. And like others, completely missed the anagrammatic pairs.

    Still and all, a fun outing for a Friday. TY Andrew and Harpo

43. Seem to be in a minoriry of 1 that didn’t enjoy this. Too clever by 3/4.

44. FrankieG @40: Thanks for that. I first came across BANJAX from the lips of Terry Wogan, who used it frequently.

45. Lovely puzzle even if I did not spot the matching pairs. Fun, clear cluing; some interesting devices and pretty accessible for a Friday. Favourites include PHENOMENAL, PLANTAIN, JOINT, BANJAX, MONDAYS, RUBLE and TRAINEE which made me laugh.

    Tim C @20: rarely have I been so relieved by a post. Earlier, I’d seen your original and the harrumphing could have been heard a mile away. I was wondering whether to come in in support of gladys @12 so it is nice to see you come clean.

    mrpenney @35: “The clue for NOBBLED had me completely chonkered, but I managed to faffle it out in the end.” You’re very brave to put that down in print: you will probably find that the Urban Dictionary or similar ascribes sexual or scatalogical meanings to those words with the potential for huge embarrassment 😉

    Thanks Harpo and Andrew

46. I seem to vaguely remember as a small boy going into the NAAFI on the School of Infantry base in Warminster with my threepenny bit to buy a packet of Smith’s crisps (with the magical blue twist of salt secreted within). Only to discover that the price had suddenly been upped to four old pennies. Cue embarrassed childlike tears….

47. I had no problem with ATROPINE as a poison as I immediately thought of deadly nightshade. One of the easier clues in any event. I thought from the NW that this was going to be finished very quickly, but the south really held me up. Worth everything for MONDAYS; a lovely clue. With thanks to Harpo and Andrew.

48. Didn’t know P=Positive, BANJAX., JOINT = nightclub, “I don’t like Mondays” or agent noun, though the wordplay for that was clear. I think I may have run across NAAFI, but it’s very British.

    A bay horse is a reddish-brown one with black mane and tail. (Same-colored main and tail is a chestnut.) A roan horse (says wiki) is one with a second color, usually white, mixed in with its main color, which may or may not be bay.

    YE is not now and never has been an article in English. It only appears in phony Olde Englisshe in the likes of Ye Olde Tea Shoppe. Somebody says this every tiime it comes up and this time it’s me.

    Anybody else try THUMBED at 1ac for “hitched a ride”? If you’re clumsy, you’re all thumbs. Well, it sort of works.

    Lovely puzzle. Thanks to Harpo and Andrew.

49. Very nice puzzle, not easy, MARRIED made it worth the struggle.

50. Valentine@48. That “phoney Olde Englisshe” (lovely way of putting it) has been a thorn in my side since I turned 18

51. Tough with several dodgy definitions. Failed due to the intersection of two fairly obscure slang words, nobbled and banjax. Also wasted a lot of time trying to complete the non-existant pangram. Ho hum.

52. Enjoyable.
    New meaning of NOBBLED for me.
    If you’re going to use BONK then please clue it with something other than ‘screw’, a singularly unpleasant term!

53. Valentine @48. From Chambers: “Ye: an archaic spelling for ‘the’ “

54. I always enjoy Andrew’s parsing, but I can’t see that ‘a train-ee might be someone who has been put on a train’. The word ‘entrain’ (despite its endless other ramifications) is I think still with us for this sort of activity – though it does rather conjure up elderly dowagers and station masters in gold braid. Thus ‘entrainee’ will do nicely for the dowager, leaving ‘trainee’ to do its obvious job.

55. Gladys @34: thanks. It looks like NAAFI is the rough equivalent of our USO (United Services Organization), an abbreviation which you’ll bump into semi-regularly if you ever take up American-style crosswords; it’s also commonly seen in American war films.

    PostMark @45: ?

56. Thanks both,
    I enjoyed this a lot. Valentine @48 I was another ‘thumbed’. Vaguely surprised this didn’t come up before comment 48. My hopes were raised that I might have something original to say.

57. Oops: PostMark, my smiley got lost in translation. I’ll do it the old-fashioned way. 🙂

58. Thanks Harpo and Andrew.

    I missed the symmetric anagrams. Brendan had 7 such pairs in his March 2007 crossword.

59. Thanks Andrew for spotting the anagram pairs, I will blame a sporadic solve for my failure to notice this. With a crosser or two I thought “Caroline” might be some slang for poison as it was clearly a pirate of the waves once, surprised my elders and betters did not fall for this. Has anyone ever seen NOBBLED in this sense in a crime novel or elsewhere? Anyway a lot of very enjoyable and creative clueing, thanks Harpo.

60. Peter @ 37 – as far as I know Bob G is an entire man.

61. Thanks Harpo, that was great. I loved clues like MARRIED, DYNAMOS, PHENOMENAL (great construction), PLANTAIN (another great construction), ORANGE PEEL (nice surface), and UNADORNED. I spotted the pairs of anagrams because Monk/Harpo always includes another layer to his already masterful work. I bombed in the SE with NOBBLED, BANJAX, and NAAFI but that didn’t spoil my satisfaction. Thanks Andrew for explaining AGENT NOUN as well as the blog in general.

62. [Eileen @18: Monk has become one of my favourite setters after I avoided him for years. Since he sets relative few crosswords in the FT/Indy please consider putting him on your “must do” list so I can read your always insightful comment on his remarkable work.]

63. I thought this was a very good puzzle indeed, even before Andrew explained the paired anagrams to me. The inclusion of those elevates it to the excellent level. MARRIED, PLANTAIN, MONDAYS and ASININITY all top drawer, KNOB made me smile, and no real clunkers to be found anywhere else. Thanks and warm appreciation to both setter and blogger.

64. “Onion” for “head” reminded me of an old song (sung by Al Jolson among others) about a man who has been jilted in favour of a toreador. The line as I remember it is “I’ll raise a bunion on his Spanish onion if I catch Don Carlos tonight”

65. Thanks for the blog, good puzzle but I do prefer Harpo being more challenging. PLANTATION was very precise , ASININITY a good spot for the subtraction.

66. (Still) NHO BANJAX or NAAFI. Annoyed to have missed ACNE.

    AINTREE took me a while; surely “Cockney is not” should be HAINT.

    “Merry” is not one of the 71 slang terms for “drunk” that I was aware of, but the solution was clear in context.

67. Jeceris@60 Oops that’s the most painful autocorrect yet.

68. Another THUMBED here for 1a. Valentine’s parsing @48 is exactly right, and it’s a good solution, only defeated by the crossers. But once I figured out the correct answer, MARRIED became my favourite clue among many excellent ones.

    Thanks, Harpo/Monk for the fun and Andrew for the much needed blog.

69. DonRogers@64: prepare for an earworm!
    The Spaniard That Blighted My Life

    My dad used to sing it.

70. (Thanks JiA@11. Only excuse I have for missing Andrew’s intro and the whole anagram thingy in the crossword is that I was doing this on my phone while 93 year old mother was in emergency surgery. All good this morning.)

71. DonRogers @64b (and gladys @69)
    Many thanks – I never understood that line!

72. [Tony Santucci @62, if you’re still there …

    … delayed by the long-standing Friday family soirée: it started decades ago as a post-work glass of wine or two but, as of this year, my daughter, too has retired – unbelievable!

    Thank you for your kind words. My ‘must do’ daily crossword is always the Guardian, whoever is the setter, because that’s always been my paper. I only became aware of others after discovering 15² and now I pick and choose, according to my schedule that day and whoever the setter is. There’s obviously some cross-over here and I know which Guardian favourites to look out for. (It’s a great regret that several of the more recent Indy setters have, by accident (for which I’m very grateful,) become firm favourites but have failed to make it at the Guardian.)

    I’ve always been wary of Monk: I know he’s greatly admired – and a lovely chap (I’ve met him at S and Bs!) – but, while admiring his excellent clues, I’ve so often failed at the last hurdle of seeing the icing on the cake. It actually fell to me to blog his first Harpo puzzle https://www.fifteensquared.net/2021/12/31/guardian-28642-harpo/
    a couple of years ago, which I really enjoyed (his identity became evident only during the comments) – but failed to parse completely. I’ve enjoyed all his subsequent puzzles and have concluded that his Guardian persona is perhaps rather kinder – and today’s offering perhaps even more so.

    Anyway, as I said above, most enjoyable – renewed thanks.

73. Very enjoyable, challenging puzzle: only found the full extent of the cleverness after finishing. Thank you Harpo and Andrew.

74. [Eileen @72: Thanks for the detailed response. I pick and choose among the Guardian, the FT, and the Indy, averaging two per day. I added Monk to the mix this past spring, my 5th year of attempting British crosswords. It’s taken me that long to make any progress with him but I feel it was worth the effort.]

75. [Tony @74 – thanks again.]

76. Seconding Ed above, roan usually indicates white hairs through another base colour in a horse’s coat, hence most commonly blue roan and strawberry roan, and one does also find bay roan, but roan is here a subset of bay, not a synonym.

77. I had a version of The Spaniard who Blighted My Life sung by Billy Merson who may have been the first. The Spaniard stole his girfriend at the bullfight while he nipped outside for some nuts and a programme. In this version “I’ll raise a bunion on his Spanish onion if I catch him bending tonight”, which I always think is anatomically improbable.
    Thanks to Harpo and Andrew.

78. Gervase @32, whenever I see Belladonna it reminds me of Ambrose Bierce’s definition… “In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the similarity of the two languages” or something like that.

79. Julie@13 – (sorry for the slow reply; just in case you look back at the previous day’s blog). I hope that I didn’t come across as complaining that the clues were unfair – absolutely not. I see this technique a lot in crosswords. It’s just that I personally find it a bit disappointing (unless there is an indicator such as ‘first of’ etc) that we don’t have a more ingenious way of parsing the clue. On reading 8D my first thought was “I really hope that Alternative Technology doesn’t turn out to be AT” and tried to think of alternative (no pun intended) parsings, but ended up having to accept what we got. Didn’t in any way spoil a fine crossword, but I know that I am not alone in hoping that compilers use this trick as sparingly as possible.

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