Guardian Cryptic 29,270 by Maskarade

78 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,270 by Maskarade”

1. Thanks Maskarade and manehi

   I took 2D to be L = 50 + AMP, but that would be measure of current, whereas a bulb’s brightness is measured in Watts (or lumens). I suppose putting a 50 amp current through a bulb would make it glow brighter (or explode!).

2. A DNF for me as I could not get FURIES. But very enjoyable across the board. READOPTS I took to mean run for office e.g. the constituency party chooses the same candidate to run again in the next election = readopts the candidate. No idea about LAMP. Thanks Maskerade and manehi.

3. READOPTS
   Chambers has under ADOPT
   ‘To choose formally (eg a candidate).’

4. No real problems but then I’m used to him as Doc.

5. Only spotted the theme when prompted by someone on the Guardian thread: very clever! Is there an allusion to it in the homophone PAIR-SHAPED of 6? And what a pity that there wasn’t a way to fit SCALES in 18D to go with PRUNELLA…

6. On the positive side there were no gimmicks. For me this was wandering into upmarket pub quiz territory in parts but it was all fairly clued. Maybe this would have been better on a Monday or Tuesday

   Cheers M&M

7. I didn’t understand SNOW. Breed of pig? Good grief. Lion/rugby international was a head scratcher for a not-terribly-sporting person in a land far away. I’m aware of some of Satie’s compositions, such as the well-known Gymnopedies, but it didn’t help me with PEAR-SHAPED. And I didn’t solve 3d.

   Thanks, Maskarade & Manehi.

8. Blaise@5
   PEAR-SHAPED
   No homophone, I think.
   If a plan goes pear-shaped, it fails….goes horribly wrong.
   (Or have I misunderstood your question?)

9. I think Blaise is on to something. Satie’s ‘trois pieces’ actually consists of seven pieces, and we have seven pairs here.
   Please forgive this comment from a long-time lurker!

10. 18dn is referring to running again in an election imo. The local party adopts or re-adopts the candidate

    This is an example from Camridge dictionary
    “Dr Kennedy has been adopted as the party’s candidate for South Cambridge”

    https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/adopt

    scrolling below numerous purple section dividers till “adopt candidate” comes up.

    This was a brilliant puzzle and I spotted the across word pairings. Thank you Maskarade and manehi.

11. No need for forgiveness Jill @9. That’s an interesting comment.

12. Beautifully clued puzzle (I liked the Indus trial and the car pets) with a wide range of GK required: botany, mourning dress, 20th century piano music and Acts of the Apostles.

    Lots of good clues – the anagrams are splendid.

    I have self-heal (PRUNELLA vulgaris) in my lawn (together with so many other species of moss and flowering plants that it ought to be declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest 🙁 )

    Satie is often said to have so named his piano work as a joke because Debussy criticised him for not paying attention to form, but this is probably apocryphal.

    Like Simon S @1 I interpreted LAMP AS 50 amp, but I agree that 40 watt would be more appropriate.

    Thanks to Maskerade and manehi

13. PS I failed to spot a theme….

14. Relatively easy but clever all the same. Also thought there was a sub-theme with ICY, SNAP, FREEZE and SNOW. INDIAN can also fit with PAVILION on the same line.

    Ta Maskarade & manehi.

15. Maskerade’s big holiday puzzles tend to have straightforward clues but require a wide range of GK (or a deep level, such as small towns of the UK) and this seemed to follow the same pattern. Nothing wrong with that and I enjoy the variety of cluing we get in the Grauniad.

    Lots to enjoy here – so thank you Maskerade and Manehi. I had everything parsed except 2D and remain unconvinced. Why 50 amps, which is an unrealistic current for a bulb? And, as the other scientists here will doubtless point out, amperes are a measure of current, not brightness. The brightness depends on several things – calling a 50A bulb bright would be like describing a 100kg man as tall – they may well be, but they might just be wide.

16. Felt like an old fashioned Monday ease-into-the-week. Most enjoyable – and like Gervase abv I managed to miss the theme. Anyone who didn’t know Satie as a person rather than just a name of a composer (I didn’t) might be interested in a quick read of his wikipedia entry or similar. He was quite a character.

    And a “light bulb” drawing 50 amps on a UK circuit (not sure it would be allowed or even feasible) would more of an indus-trial heater (and fire risk) than a lamp

    thanks Setter and Blogger

17. I very rarely spot a theme and doubt it would have helped today. Didn’t know the Satie reference at all, nor WEEPER as a hat band, but all fairly straightforward I think.

18. Simon S @1
    You have explained it all. AMP is not a unit of brightness. Still, the setter might have intended L +AMP as you say.
    Before we can manage to drive 50 AMP through a 100 w bulb, many other things might burn off 🙂

19. Sorry. JOFT and matthew newell! I didn’t check your comments before posting mine.

20. Enjoyable puzzle – so glad I could omplete it after my total failure yesterday.

    New for me: AMEN RA; WEEPERS = hatbands.

    Favourites: PEAR-SHAPED, SNAP.

    I could not parse 2d.

    Thanks, both.

    I did not see the theme – that’s very clever!

21. Re LAMP being 50 Amps – that would be a massive bulb on 240V house circuit (if my maths is correct that’s 12000W!). Not sure whether any light in a car running off 12V would be that high (600W). I agree it seems the best parsing explanation (and I failed to spot it) but seems plain wrong.

22. KVa @8. All I was thinking was that the crossword was SHAPED around PAIRs of answers.

23. Blaise@22
    Apologies. I was stuck at an elementary level.

24. Thanks Maskarade and manehi
    I avoid Maskarade’s holiday specials, but this was quite gentle, though I had no idea on parsings of PEAR SHAPED and WEEPERS.
    I had only heard of AMUN RA, but it had to be AMEN – I had difficulty in persuading Google to search for this rather than AMUN!
    Like Gervase I have self-heal in my grass, and rather like it.
    Favourites CARPETS (which I took as animals) and NEEDS BE for “Originally named” not giving N.

25. Thanks for the blog, do the LAMP first. A 50A current is possible, as SimpleS@21 says a 12kW bulb on the mains. I suspect that film sets have bulbs of this power.
    However current does not mean brightness, it is only a factor, brightness has many possible units, Lux , Lumen , Candela etc. For old-fashioned filament lamps the power in Watts was the easiest indicator, not so simple with modern LEDs .

26. I imagine there’s over a billion Indians in India who wouldn’t consider themselves foreigners.
    Weepers is a new one for me.
    Thanks Maskerade and manehi.

27. Reasonable puzzle , missed the theme which was nicely done and did not hamper the clues. The clue for PLAINS is ambiguous. For AMEN RA I needed all the letters first , it was fairly clued.
    Jill@9 an interesting point about Satie and the theme. No need to apologise and please comment whenever you feel like it.

28. Fairly straightforward solve, although I failed to notice the ‘pears’.

    I DNK the hatband or the reference to Satie. I liked the fellow travellers in CARPETS.

    Thanks Maskarade and manehi.

29. I had never heard of weepers. On looking it up, I concluded it must just be a funeral thing. Then I thought of the top hat I wear when playing melodeon for a clog dance side, complete with dangling ribbons that I now know are weepers. Just before Christmas, I had tinsel weepers. Who knew?
    I had never heard of Satie but solved it via the definition and a few crossers. Carpets beat me (pun not intended).
    Thanks to Maskarade and manehi.

30. I didn’t see the pairs/pears at all. Pity, as they elevated this puzzle to a whole different level of cleverness. Thanks to Maskarade and manehi, and to contributors for an enjoyable discussion.

31. This was a welcome success after yesterday’s complete failure. I did have to look up the allusion to Satie, of whose compositions I know only Gymnopedies.

32. I enjoyed this, and was able to complete the solve thanks to Maskarade’s gentle cluing, even where I didn’t know the definition explicitly, and found there was a lot more to this than met the eye. I liked the way that Maskarade signalled the pairs with the central CARPET SWEEPERS across the middle of the grid and left it to us to find the others.

    I’m happy to let 2d go with the question mark. Wonder what Maskarade had in mind. My attempt was lumens + amp. But the abbreviation for lumens is lm, and others have explained why 50 amps is theoretically explosive.

    Jill@9, without knowing anything about Satie until today, I like your idea for the 7 pairs.
    Like Blaise@5 I was looking for SCALES to go with Prunella, once I looked up Satie. The weed was a new one for me. Prunella comes from the Latin meaning small plum, but in the images I looked at I couldn’t see why the plant is called that.

    Not fond of Maskarade’s cluing of tribes in TRIBUNES as native American families. A bit old school book I thought.

33. 24d was my last one in, I completely missed the reference to the pig breed but made the (admittedly shaky) association with the Tamworth Snow Dome. Glad to have that one cleared up though, as well as 2d.

34. Is it Monday? For me, that’s where this puzzle belongs.

    The contrast with yesterday’s tour de force is clear.

    Ah well… thanks Maskarade and manehi (for the Satie insight)

35. scraggs@33. I do know Tamworth as a breed of pig, but I had to think of sow first to solve it, which helped with others in the SE. We have our own Tamworth town/city in NSW, copied as usual from the UK. Tamworth here does occasionally get snow.

36. paddymelon @32: One etymology for the genus PRUNELLA is that the plant was used as a cure for the throat infection once known as prunella. An alternative is that the sepals (not the petals, as you observe) are brown – both the disease and the plant seem originally to have been brunella. And I agree with muffin @24 – calling it a ‘weed’ is disrespectful to an attractive little plant.

37. And thank you manehi for your beautifully illustrated grid and blog.

38. paddymelon@35: noted, thanks. Sometimes the obvious references do elude me, but that’s all part of the process/fun of solving. Not *too* far from Tamworth (in the UK), there’s also a small and very lovely village called Melbourne.

39. Ah Gervase@36 Thank you for the etymology of prunella/brunella. The throat infection is one I know as quinsy, aka peritonsillar abcess. ‘
    This site said prunella was the German word for quinsy. Neither look very German to me! But it’s time I went to bed, I’ll leave it at that.

40. me@39. Link didn’t work. Try this.
    https://www.washcoll.edu/learn-by-doing/food/plants/lamiaceae/prunella-vulgaris.php

41. Just a thought, could quinsy/prunella be so named because of plum-like abcesses in the throat?
    Eek, looked up some images. Not a good idea heading for bed.

42. I enjoyed this and completed it but had to search for Satie’s compositions and like Muffin@24 could only get Google to find Amun Ra. Thanks Maskerade and thanks Manehi for the theme illustration. I hadn’t looked for it.

43. Thanks Maskarade. I expected a slow solve but this was a pleasant stroll. I should have known it wasn’t over when it was over, however; I totally missed the “pair-shaped” theme so that layer of cleverness went over my head. In any event, there was still much to like including COMFORTS, PRUNELLA, MIKADO, FURIES, and ANTIOCH. Thanks manhi for the blog.

44. I’m not sure this is it, but Chambers has LAMP as a verb to shine (Spenser).

45. Pete HA3@26
    I imagine there’s over a billion Indians in India who wouldn’t consider themselves foreigners.
    Tell me about it! 🙂

    On a serious note, I try to remind myself while solving these puzzles (Guardian, Indy and FT) that the reference point is the UK (‘this country’ etc.,).
    All joy and no complaints.

46. I didn’t find the clue for PLAINS ambiguous, although it could possibly be construed either way. With ‘for’ as one of the conventional equivalence words, ‘suggested’ is coupled with ‘aerial transport’, hinting strongly that it is wordplay rather than definition

47. Re AMEN RA, the deity is also more familiar to me as Amun-Ra. However, Ancient Egyptian, like other Semitic languages, transliterated only consonants (?mn r?, where ? Is a glottal stop) so the vowels are more or less conjectural.

48. Of course it’s not just a straightforward fun cryptic, as I had believed, albeit with the need to still parse PEAR-SHAPED and LAMP. After all it’s Maskarade who created the Christmas Prize that took me about a week to solve. I completely missed the theme of paired words which has taken the puzzle to a new level – pair shaped indeed as Blaise@5 pointed out. I liked FURIES, ICY SMILE, CARPETS, REVOLUTION, ANTIOCH, and now I understand it, especially PEAR-SHAPED.
    Thanks both Maskarade and Manehi.

49. I knew that a Tamworth is a pig (sow) so the clue wasn’t a problem, but I see there is also a series of children’s books by Gene Kemp about Tamworth, a golden pig with a big heart who advocates for meat-free living and the saving of trees (!)…PEAR-SHAPED took me longer than it should have done as I kept trying to fit Eric or Erik into the answer. I hadn’t heard of the specific piano piece before. All good fun. With thanks to Maskarade and manehi.

50. I agree with everyone on the 50 amp business – knowing only the current and not the voltage cannot tell you the power, and therefore in this instance the brightness of a bulb. And aside from that, the relatively recent introduction of a lumens figure on lightbulb packaging indicates brightness without referencing power consumption, because led lamps use so little power compared to the older tungsten filaments. A led bulb drawing 50 amps at 240 volts….wow, stand back!
    As for headwear for funerals, my dictionary source gave one of the definitions for “weepers” as exactly “hatbands for mourners”, so more of a quick-crossword “clue”.
    Great fun though. Thanks to Maskarade and manehi.

51. Thanks manehi as I didn’t know the Satie reference and failed to spot any of the pairs! Gervase@42 that must be why I was trying to fit Amon-Ra in there. And I always thought that Right-On was an 80s term (eg Rik in the Young Ones?) closer in meaning to today’s pc or woke than trendy, but presumably it has meant other things too. One slight quibble is that I’m not sure that a Lion has to be an international – if you play for the Lions in an international game then yes, but you could be a club player in a midweek “dirt tracker” game for example. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s a large enough overlap I suppose. Thanks Maskarade.

52. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQmuAr93OlI

    Satie was quite “playful” (read “took the piss”} especially when naming his compositions.

    So for “Three pieces in the form of a pear” to consist of seven pieces sounds like a typical Satie joke.

    Well spotted Jill@9

53. I liked 23 “Spin doctor live, on tour” as the anagram fodder could be “doctor live”, with a choice of indicators “spin” or “on tour”, or, as it turned out to be “live on tour” with the indicator “doctor”. Very neat.

54. Don’t have time to read every post, but this lamp business:
    As well as being a thing you might have in a room, a “standard lamp” is an archaic unit of brightness, more usually seen as “standard candle” which has long been superceded by the candela (for luminous intensity) and the lumen (for luminous flux).

55. I had just assumed that LAMP was a unit of brightness that was not used anymore, so it didn’t even occur to me to puzzle over 50 amp. Paul@54 seems to be confirming this, although a quick search of a few dictionaries didn’t help.

56. Enjoyable; notwithstanding LAMP and associated brouhaha

57. Nicely put, Monkey @53. I really like it when they misdirect like that.

58. Very elegantly and fairly clued, making it thoroughly enjoyable even without spotting the clever word pairs. SNAP, INDUSTRIAL and ANTIOCH were my top ticks.
    I hovered over BRIGHTON (though it could hardly be anything else) as I tend to think of “RIGHT ON” as meaning “sanctimoniously politically correct” rather than “trendy”.
    [My lawn has everything growing in it other than grass!]

59. Erik Satie gets a mention in the song ” I’m a mineralist ” . It is on the Nick Mason album “Fictitious Sports” but is written by Carla Bley and sung by Robert Wyatt . Should be a favourite for anyone who likes puns.
    I would put a link but the internet is too primitive for my advanced skills .

60. Monkey @53: I agree. I tried *(doctorlive) before realising the correct interpretation

61. Never heard of the AMEN-RA spelling and thought it must be a mistake, though dictionary.com has it as the primary spelling and offers only AMON-RA (not AMUN-RA) as alternatives.

62. Gervase @ 12 it ought to be declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest

    I liked your comment so much, I have made it my New Year’s resolution not to bother about our lawn again.

    I put TUNICS in 3d, only to be disabused by the reveal.

    Thanks Maskerade for an enjoyable outing and to maheni for the blog and its colourful grid: I missed the theme, chiefly because I wasn’t looking for one. We have so few Cryptic Maskerade’s I didn’t realise he is a themer.

63. DE @ 62 I don’t know if you do FT puzzles, but Maskarade in his Gozo guise over there often has puzzles with undefined themes (mainly) in the Across clues.

64. Not too deep in my memory bank I found mention of Tamworth pigs who captured the nation’s attention, admiration – (and even lovel by escaping the slaughterman’s electric stun gun and blade … and here’s a mention: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-13503690

    Tasty meat, apparently …

65. An added treat that there was a Gilbert & Sullivan reference in Guardian puzzles two days in a row. Bunthorne yesterday and Mikado today. (We start rehearsals for Utopia, Ltd on Monday.)

66. Also happy to see MIKADO. Thought the puzzle was rather easy for Maskarade, but I missed the theme so must revise the opinion.

67. All this talk about prunella reminded me of a clue from over 10 years ago – can’t remember the setter but it was on a Wednesday! It was a quadruple definition covering prunella as a plant, birds, material and name.

68. Lydia @61 – I agree. I’ve seen Amun Ra and Amon Ra (there’s even an American football player who rejoices in this name!), but never AmEn Ra. I think Gervase @47 has a nice explanation. I’ve seen this sort of ambiguity when words from Indian languages are transliterated into English.

69. [I was a bit lucky with Tamworth as I remembered that the Empress of Blandings was one – except Google tells me she wasn’t! (Apparently she was a Berkshire.) It must have been the escaped Tamworths that had stuck in my memory.]

70. Mandarin @58. You’re lucky to have no grass in your lawn… according to my book The Lawn Expert you can make non-grass lawns with Thyme, Chamomile, Yarrow, Pearlwort, Speedwell, Clover and Moss… but “fine-leaved grasses become common and highly undesirable weeds!”

71. This may be obvious to everyone, but I don’t think it’s been explicitly mentioned. (Sorry if it has, and I missed it.) In each of the seven pairs of across answers, the two answers in the pair are symmetrically placed in the grid. Quite elegant.

    There was a fair amount of general knowledge that I lacked in this puzzle (weepers, prunella — other than scales — the Satie composition, the breed of pig), but all so fairly clued that the puzzle was solvable anyway.

    The only weak spot to me is 2dn (LAMP). I have no doubt that the proposed explanation is right, but nonetheless it’s a pretty dodgy clue. But setting is no doubt a hard job, and they can’t all be gems.

72. I have only just looked at this, and it’s nearly midnight, so I am guessing nobody will be reading this.
    Another Egyptian clue! You wait for years and years, and then two come in close proximity.
    Yes, Gervase @ 47 is right about Amun. The vowels are unknown in Egyptian, and it is a matter of convention to transliterate them in a cerrtain way, which helps the pronunciation for modern (western!) )speakers.
    Amun is normally transliterated as imn (the i should have a ‘soft breathing’ on it) and would have the god determinator at the end. The Gardiner numbers are: M17-Y5-N35-A40.
    If anyone is interested, I can email you my notes with the relevant hieroglyphs, and also the info relating to pharaoh and big house.

73. Following on Ted’s comment@71 about the symmetry of the placing of the 7 pairs in the grid, is it possible that, just as PEAR-SHAPED is seen as a nudge towards PAIR-SHAPED, PRUNELLA’s association with SCALES could be a nod to the symmetry with the balance across the middle?

    In a 15×15 grid, there has to be/ can only be 7 pairs if you want to position them on lines 2 to 14? Manehi’s colouring illustrates that beautifully, and also highlights Maskarade’s brilliance in choosing this particular grid, and those particular words to fill those lines while maintaining the symmetry. A masterstroke of setting.

74. I think when Maskarade isn’t on one of his ‘bank holiday jumbo’ slots he’s reasonably approachable, and this was certainly easier than yesterday’s Paul.

    A spot of déjà vu when I got to AMEN-RA – thought I spelt it AMON-RA (should it be AMIN? AMUN?) in my version (Indy 24 October) – and of course totally different clueing and I made it harder by leaving out the ‘Egyptian’ bit… Oops sorry about the belated self-promo! But Maskarade’s version is splendid, with a nuance of Ozymandias about it…

    I missed the theme – failed to put 2+2 together. A shame because it’s really well done.

    WEEPERS was new to me: I guess we don’t go to such measures in today’s funerals. And I hadn’t heard of Satie’s composition: the only one I knew of was Gymnopédies which is his best-known work. But it was an obvious write-in.

    As for LAMP – putting 50 amps through a 230v bulb would certainly make it go bang! Even for car headlamp bulbs running at 12V it would be rather OTT – especially for any oncoming road user! Perhaps someone can suggest an application? Cinema projector?

    I’ll put a tick against REVOLUTION because of the ambiguity: was ‘doctor’ the anagrind, or ‘on tour’? This is the sort of thing that makes crosswords fun.

    Thanks to Maskarade and manehi.

75. A first for me – I finished both this and the Maskarade Christmas torture puzzle on the same day. Of the two this was much more enjoyable, especially once the paired words were pointed out.
    Thanks to Maskarade and manehi.

76. Laccaria@74 see me @25. Someone has now looked it up for me 12kW and even 18kW ( 75A) bulbs are common on studio sets , very expensive.
    Still does not make the clue work properly.

77. [Roz@76: your calculation of 75A for an 18kW studio lamp assumes it is supplied with domestic 240V (more like 230V) wiring but any such set-up would at least run off three-phase and possibly even require a separate transformer. Three phase gives both a higher current rating and a higher voltage supply between phases (415V).]

78. I never use the internet but someone checked this for me, 12kW or 18kW lamps running off normal mains 200-240V it simply requires a separate fuse box like a cooker or shower. It is not difficult , just requires an element of the right resistance and the shape needs to be right to dissipate the heat. The old car starter motors used to need 200A .

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