Guardian Prize 29,284 / Kite

80 comments on “Guardian Prize 29,284 / Kite”

1. Thanks Eileen. Completely missed the theme and the ninas but now applaud the ingenuity involved. A stern test I thought which needed some thinking from outside the usual box, not that I’m complaining about that, and recourse to Google for confirmations, not that I’m complaining about that either. It was that NW corner again, having missed the obvious hidden 9a I tried in vain to find a connection with bike and tot. LOI was 4d, I thought ‘hosting’ would make the single letter an E. I agree with you about UNIQUER, there can be no degree of uniqueness. I think it’s a bit inconsistent that both QU and Q are used as an abbreviation for queen.

2. I didn’t do very well on this. Finding that I had bunged in ROMAN (nose) at 9a goes a long way to explaining my problems in the NW! Thanks (I think) Kite, and (definitely) Eileen.

3. Arc sine is listed (as an example with arc tangent) under the headword arc in Chambers.

4. Thanks Eileen for a great blog

   TT@2 – I also wrote in ROMAN for nose at first. Luckily I was using the app, and (I was surprised when) the check button let me know that was wrong

   I have never done a Kite puzzle or a Guardian prize puzzle before. I did not mind so much the tricky parsing or the stretched English, as noted by Eileen. After all we are in crossword land. But when combined with answers such as UNIQUER, QWAQWA and YAKOWS, I doubt I will attempt another one very soon.

5. Thanks Kite. This was a masterful piece of setting but it wasn’t my cup of tea. I found it quite a struggle so I began using a word finder to help me along. When I discovered answers like QWAQWA, CHANAKYA, SOSTENUTO, and YAKOWS I abandoned ship. Thanks Eileen for the unenviable task of explaining everything. You deserve a pay raise!

6. I thought this was really difficult and was left with four down clues I just did not get – 1, 5, 7 and 26. Agree about UNIQUER.

   Liked: SOSTENUTO, BABE, T-SQUARES, BYRD (for once I remembered that caught signalled a homophone) CHANAKYA

   Thanks Kite and Eileen

7. Oops, silly of me @4. I just remembered the Prize puzzle did / does not have a check button in the app as I stated. So I must have worked out my mistake for 9 across from the crossers. I obviously do not remember clearly. Sorry TT@2

8. Agree, Eileen, uniquer is erk (had to type it 3 times before auto stopped knocking the r off…). Coupla esotericas, like Quaqua (che??) and the Indian chappie, but otherwise not too stressful, but I had no idea about the old rooks. Thanks both, now for this week’s.

9. Brilliant grid construction and theme. Yes, some obscurities but I enjoyed learning about them. SAC in the middle is also thematic (chess shorthand for sacrifice).
   The puzzle coincides with the annual Wijk aan Zee tournament, the so called chess Wimbledon, which ends this Sunday. So, well timed.
   I loved it. Thanks , Kite and Eileen.

10. Quite hard, and I could not parse BARS, so thanks for that clarification. I did see the ninas, which helped with completion.

11. Perhaps a stretch, but OPERA could be a thematic reference to one of the most famous chess games, the “Opera Game” (1858) between Paul Morphy and the Duke of Brunswick / Count Isoard.

12. Eileen, isn’t 8d BYRD the composer not the kite?
    I am pretty sure I got YAKOWS wrong. I remember thinking it was probably a crossbreed and having the OWS. But I’ve never heard of them and would have remembered.
    I also had ROMAN to start with, but nothing would fit round it , so I looked again
    I can count the times I have spotted a theme on the fingers of one foot, so that didn’t help. But with a lot of checking most of it fell into place.
    Thanks both.

13. When, despite a bunch of crossers, my brain fails – and with a touch of guilt – I use Crossword Solver. It rarely fails, but YAKOWS was beyond us both. It even had QWAQWA. Short by 3 letters but no matter: excellent puzzle, and blog, thanks.

14. Whoops, it didn’t have QWAQWA but Google did.

15. Missed the theme entirely, though to tell the truth I was a bit battered and bruised by the time I finished this one so I didn’t go looking. Well done to Kite; it was a clever theme.
    My experience wasn’t great. I found a lot of obscurities beyond my ken and had to google to find various answers. Learning new things is often enjoyable but I was left very dissatisfied to find myself having to cheat for such solutions as those cited by Toni Santucci@5. The clue for 7d HONEST felt a bit awkward in the way it was framed in the negative: “A rook is not so …”. Any suggestion of degrees of uniqueness (like UNIQUER at 13a) is one of my pet peeves too, similar to Eileen (must be the former English teachers in us).
    On the other hand, I did like 27a ANATOMIST and 26d ARSY.
    Thanks to Kite and Eileen.

16. nicbach @12
    Thanks – careless underlining amended now.

17. nicbach@12: I did get the equally wrong ARMS at 1d (arms are supports, if you ram someone, you stop them) so I was never going to get corrected with that lot in! Nor could I get ARSY despite both crossers, and also considering it. I would never dream it meant ‘irritable’ – to me (spelt ARSEY), it means ‘fortuitous’, especially when a good outcome happens despite lack of skill or even intent (e.g. an arsey goal from a miskick).

18. Hats off to Kite for a remarkable thematic achievement. Perhaps some of the solving pleasure was sacrificed in the process for I found this an odd mix of simple and really difficult clues. The few highlights along the way included T-SQUARES, STEAL AWAY and CUBE NUMBER but I only kept going through belligerence. UNIQUER is truly awful. Perhaps the definition is: “Like it literally never happens”.
    Thanks Eileen and Kite.

19. TassieTim@17 are you thinking tin-arse? Not sure where that comes from.

20. Thanks Kite and Eileen! Enjoyed the puzzle and the blog!
    Liked T-SQUARES and CUBE NUMBER.

    UNIQUER (wiktionary-definitely not in the same league Chambers and Collins)
    comparative form of unique: more unique
    Usage notes
    This word is proscribed by many, because unique implies that there is only one, and so a comparative form is logically inconsistent. It is typically used as hyperbole.

21. I completely missed the theme–didn’t even think to look–but when the contrived PRO-IRAQ crossed with the obscure QWAQWA, my main thought was, “yeesh!” Good to know that there was in fact method behind the madness.

    And yet…the clues were all perfectly fair, so I can’t quite bring myself to complain.

    I took the scare quotes around the definition of UNIQUER to be the setter’s acknowledgement that he was pushing the buttons of us pedants. Cheeky.

22. It took us all week – finally got there yesterday with some internet help.
    We didn’t help ourselves with 20 spelled Bored and bunging in Pan-Arab for 23.
    It was quite a slog but there were some pleasing ‘aha!’ moments along the way.
    As usual, thank you Eileen for clearing up some of our questions and to Kite for a really clever themed grid.

23. It’s a very clever theme, but for me too much had to be sacrificed to it, making for a set of clues that varied wildly in difficulty from the dead-easy BABE and AROMA to the obscure QWAQWA, PRO-IRAQ and CHANAKYA and the (for me) impossible YAKOWS, which even my reluctantly used wordfinders hadn’t met – I thought it must contain OW, but all my searches insisted there was no such word. I failed to complete this, missing BARS, ARSY and the aforesaid YAKOWS.

    I did enjoy SHUTTER, ABEAM, UNSCRAMBLE and BYRD, but UNIQUER made me wince.

24. I haven’t studied the blog yet, but I’m surprised that no-one seems to have mentioned the two rows that read RNBQKBNR – the symbols for the pieces that start on those squares. Spotting this proved quite useful in solving.
    Sorry, I see that Eileen has mentioned it. Was it there when I read the preamble? Totally missed it if it was!

25. Thanks Kite and Eileen
    Very clever puzzle, but a classic example of one that was more fun to set than to solve.

26. Another one off early on the wrong track with a ROMAN nose. A deliberate (but totally fair) booby trap laid by Kite?
    At the gristly end of the chewy spectrum for me. Still enjoyable though, as a contrast in toughness with those midweek.
    Thanks K&E

27. BOARD / “mount” as nouns eg in picture framing maybe?

    I got quite ARSY doing this but couldn’t put my finger on why. Now I know.

    Cheers E&K

28. Thanks Setter and Blogger

    To be honest I prefer an unthemed puzzle with less contrived cluing, fewer dodgy words, and less stretching of definitions. Agree with muffin @25 – seems to me that this puzzle was a little bit of a Setter’s indulgence.

    But still fun to solve

29. Thanks Eileen. YAKOWS beat me completely. I even wrote down every word I could think of that fitted the crossers (a list that did not include yakows – I feel little shame there) and I finally wrote in ‘kapows’ which at least had ‘ow’ in it and seemed in the spirit of the surface. I didn’t expect it to be correct, and I was right. Which is a shame, having got the rest – although I had to Google for QWAQWA. I picked the chess theme, but didn’t spot the two lines of pieces, unsurprisingly, perhaps, as I had a pawn instead of a king, given I missed yakows. Thanks, Kite, that was impressive – if too much so for me.

30. KeithS
    If it’s any consolation, OneLook didn’t know YAKOWS either.

31. Oh, and I agree BYRD was a gem, but for a while it misled me into thinking 6 down, with ‘maybe 8’ was looking for a single Byrd, and I spent a while trying to make ‘band member’ work, given it fitted the crossers from BOARD and AFRICAN.

32. Thank you to those whose comments expanded the theme: I had suspected that there are many words that are chess terms (as we sometimes say here re band names!).

    phitonelly @9 – I never thought to look up SAC – I did think it was a pity that it obstructed the CHESS BOARD! – and I’m afraid the tournament passed me by: the ‘Australian Wimbledon’ is much more my cup of tea. 😉
    geeker @11 – likewise for OPERA.
    Bodycheetah @27 – I’ll take that, as a feasible suggestion.

    I knew YAKOW rang a bell and I found it in Bluth’s Indy puzzle from January 11.
    ARTSY (‘artistic or affectedly aspiring to be so’) and ARSY (‘irritable, bad-tempered, argumentative’) are both in Chambers.

33. Many thanks to Eileen for a very comprehensive and well-informed blog and to all who have commented. I’ll add a bit more later but I feel I must give some support for the use of UNIQUER, although I realised it might lead to howls of protest, which is why I put it in inverted commas. UNIQUER is in fact in the electronic list of words from Chambers. There is a useful comment in Collins about usage under the word UNIQUE, and Merriam-Websters has this useful guide, which I’ll post in full:
    Many commentators have objected to the comparison or modification (as by somewhat or very) of unique, often asserting that a thing is either unique or it is not. Objections are based chiefly on the assumption that unique has but a single absolute sense, an assumption contradicted by information readily available in a dictionary. Unique dates back to the 17th century but was little used until the end of the 18th when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was reacquired from French. H. J. Todd entered it as a foreign word in his edition (1818) of Johnson’s Dictionary, characterizing it as “affected and useless.” Around the middle of the 19th century it ceased to be considered foreign and came into considerable popular use. With popular use came a broadening of application beyond the original two meanings (here numbered senses 1 and 2a). In modern use both comparison and modification are widespread and standard but are confined to the extended senses 2b and 3. When sense 1 or sense 2a is intended, unique is used without qualifying modifiers.

34. I agree with Muffin@25. An achievement for the setter, but the obscurities turn it into an irritating grind. Recipe for arsiness.

35. Loved this. Tough, sure, but kept me busy for the weekend!

36. I had to come back to this to get my last few: BARS, YAKOWS and HONEST, all of which I eventually parsed, the parsing being the problem for honest and bars. The yakows I remembered from solving the recent Bluth.

    However on my first session tackling this, I’d searched to find the Indian genius and QWAQWA.

    This was chewy, so chewy having solved it I wondered about entering it.
    I missed the chess theme because other than how to move and lay out the pieces, I’m useless at playing.

    Thank you to Kite and Eileen.

37. Another ROMAN here. I missed the theme. Is the repeated yak a tribute to the chess player, Vladimir Yak Akhtyamov? Probably not as I see he is 8 years old and ranked 201766 in the world. CUBE NUMBER was my favourite.

38. I gave up in the NE corner – failed to solve 10ac and 5,6 (only got as far as ???E NUMBER), 7d.

    I totally missed the theme – did not look for it, did not see it.

    Favourite: STEAL AWAY.

    New for me : QWAQWA, CHANAKYA, ARCSINES.

    I missed parsing the ES in 4d.
    16d I guessed it was RAD + ON but have never heard a radiator referred to as a RAD.

    Thanks, both.

39. Kite @33 – thank you for your comment: we’re always grateful when setters drop in.

    I pondered whether to reproduce Collins’ ‘Usage’ addendum but I don’t have the app and decided against copying it out. Likewise the entry in my SOED, noting the first appearance of ‘unique’ as 1602 (via French from Latin unicus, ‘one and only’) and including a number of quotations from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

40. Pizza Hut is uniquer than McDonalds. But not as unique as Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons

41. Zeedonk, liger, so why not YAKOWS. Never heard of it mind but this is the great long journey of discovery. I really enjoyed this puzzle and once QWAQWA went in was on alert for more at the quirk end of quirky. No problem with UNIQUER especially in a lexical world of jarring buzztalk and urban dictionaries. Loved PRO-IRAQ as a passion for words ending Q has been mine for ages. A brilliant theme and thanks Eileen, thought I was doing OK seeing TOWER and RECTOR but new to me was EARL. And thanks Kite, kept at it and nearly got there (as ever).

42. Just a little insight into the setting process. I generally use a theme because for me it gives me some incentive to start filling a grid. The Guardian has a restricted library of grids for the daily and Prize puzzles. Having found one that would accommodate the chess board, I noticed that luckily CHESS and BOARD would fit across the centre. With these constraints, it was difficult to avoid a few unusual words. The editor wisely put this in the Prize slot where solvers have more time to ponder, and obviously there is the wonder of the Web to check for unknown words. I had hoped that solvers might twig to the theme with all the chess references in clues and the PAWNS, but that would depend on the order in which answers were inserted in the grid.

    Yes, Eileen deserves a pay rise. I have to admit that I hadn’t noticed the old words for rook (except for castle); a classic case of serendipity!

43. Kite, thank you for commenting. I noticed the old words for rook after I started reading alternative synonyms and meanings of rook in the hope of solving HONEST. No knowledge lost, it’s National Backwards Day next week and I’m planning a backwards quiz for the afterschool youth work sessions.

44. I suppose words evolve and long after Kiies quotes UNIQUE became an absolute, but these days phrases like pretty unique crop up frequently. I’m with Eileen, it doesn’t make sense, but it’s usage that matter in the end. I still don’t understand why words in the USA ending in IT have lost all forms but the present tense .

45. [I’m reminded of the Murray Walker F1 quote:
    That car is unique, except for the one behind it, which is exactly the sane.]

46. I found this puzzle very tricky, partly because of the unfamiliar words. I missed the theme, unfortunately, but now I’m very impressed at how well it was implemented.

    Like others, I saw both ROMAN and AROMA as equally good answers to 9a. Unfortunately I entered ROMAN because I saw that first but was forced to change it.

    HONEST was my last in, as I was slow to think of the right word to be the opposite of the right word for a rook (in this instance a cheat).

    I don’t like the word UNIQUER, but, leaving that feeling aside, I understand and accept the explanations given here, with reference to the Collins usage note in particular.

    ARC SINES was tricky only because I would not think of pluralising this or indeed other trigonometric functions, but of course it’s valid to do so. In the singular it is usually written as either arcsin or sin-¹.

    Thanks to Kite and Eileen.

47. A very clever puzzle but with some obscurities. In particular I was not keen on the definition for STATUTORY (“having come to be expected”). As Eileen says, that meaning is in Chambers (but not other dictionaries) as “informal”. I can only imagine that what Chambers has in mind is people using it as a joke. (A few years ago we used to comment that it was the law that restaurants had to play Michael Bublé as background music.) But too obscure a meaning for my taste.

    (By the way Paul’s “deux oeufs” clue of a few days ago has sparked off some letters to the Guardian, including one today apparently from Johnny Rotten.)

    Thanks Kite and Eileen.

48. Thanks for the insights, Kite – very interesting. As I’ve said, I have little knowledge of – and therefore little interest in – chess but I’d gathered that there’s some snobbery about rook =castle and so googled ‘rook’ and found the Wiki entry with the other names.

    [If my Maths is correct, a percentage rise on nothing wouldn’t amount to much – but it’s a labour of love. 😉 Thanks again for the puzzle.]

49. If Eileen had blogged the recent Paul, would it have been a labour of l’oeuf?

    I’ll get my coat…

50. I’ll help you into it, gladys…

51. Thanks Kite and Eileen. NE corner was my sticking point, but one by one it filled up eventually. About three and a half jorums for me! I got the TEN in 11a from the last letter of SIX rather than from NUMBER. Noticed the chess pieces but missed the ninas.

52. Gladys @49: that’s the most commonly given explanation for the etymology of love=0 in tennis, incidentally.

53. I’m surprised I finished this and I can’t say I enjoyed it. I congratulate Kite on his ingenuity but at long last understand the expression “too clever by half”.

54. Thanks Kite and Eileen. I saw the PAWN nina and the several references to Queen and Rook but I was too tired to go digging out all the chess references although the theme was obvious. As everyone has observed, there were a few real obscurities required in order to complete the grid ! Fortunately I am one of those solvers who has absolutely no qualms about using Google, Word Wizard et. al. to assist with tricky clues and knowledge gaps – even Danword if all else fails. My objective always is to complete the puzzle and understand the parsing, although 225 is sometimes required for the latter !

55. Just saying, arc sines was my FOI.

    Kite blew me away with his theme – I didn’t spot it, of course.

    Thanks Eileen – bemused by your helping hand @ 50; and thanks, Kite, too.

56. The theme sailed way over my head and Eileen does indeed deserve praise, plaudits and a whacking great pay rise for the blog, which was a masterly piece of work.
    Thanks also to Kite for a fiendish creation. Horses for courses, and this one was just too much of a hard slog to be enjoyable, I’m afraid.
    It wasn’t until after getting AROMA and its subsequent crossers, that I noticed ROMAN – which strikes me as unfortunate, at best.
    I managed QWAQWA and the Indian polymath, but YAKOWS defeated me; having read the blog I now realise I would never have thought of it in a month of Sundays.
    (I agree with all those who are exasperated about UNIQUER.)
    Oh well. At least I now know for sure that my solver-status is “middling”…..

57. Not having spotted the theme I wondered if the use of uncommon words was needed to make a pangram but there’s no Z.
    If 6d had’nt been my LO I don’t think I would have bothered working through the alphabet for possible _ A_ words to preced OWS until I reached YAK.
    I thought “rook” at 7d was a misprint for “crook” as I only knew of “rook” as a verb in this context but I see that Chambers gives “a sharper” as a definition. I also wondered about New England = NE. In the States NE = Nebraska. Perhaps one of our American friends (or someone else) can cite a situation in which Kite’s usage has been used? I did think of lifting and separating New and England but then I think the “n” should be lower case and E to me = Espana (and English in OED but not England).
    Thanks to Kite and Eileen.

58. Thanks Eileen and Kite.
    Loved it, spotted the theme as well.

    I recall, I hope I am right, less than two years ago, there was another puzzle with RNBQKBNR in rows 1 and 15. Can’t remember the setter or the publication (Gdn, FT or Indy – I don’t do any other).

    This is not to minimise this puzzle in any way.

59. NE = New England is in Chambers, the ODE and Collins.

60. Popping in very late in the day to record my appreciation of both setter and blogger’s work. Nothing really to add to the preceding comments. I did eventually fill the grid with several resorts to Google for the unknown words. I know how a theme can force difficult words upon a setter; the odd one is something I can cope with as solver. Five made it pretty hard work. Worth it for T-SQUARES which was lovely.

61. UNIQUER – oed.com has one quotation: ‘1864 Though he may be a unique Englishman, others may be uniquer. Athenæum‘
    And what have you got against Wiktionary, KVA@20? The citations and usage notes there are helpful.
    I can imagine it used humorously in a Limerick, or in the lyrics of, say, Ian Dury.

62. FrankieG @61
    As Mr. Spock might have said, uniquer is illogical.

63. YAKOW was used by Bluth aka Fed (Dave Gorman) only nine days before this in https://www.fifteensquared.net/2024/01/11/independent-11623-bluth/
    “Wife agreed to return hybrid (5)” – It has a synonym – yattle – that, unlike cattle, is pluralised with an “s”.

64. FrankieG – please see my comment @32.

65. Pino@57. Even if New England=NE had not been in dictionaries, new=N (nothing wrong with capitalising it as far as I’m concerned) and England=E (for example, ECB is the England and Wales Cricket Board) would have produced the same result despite your objections.

66. sh @64
    E for England because that’s what it stands for in ECB is like B stands for broadcasting because of BBC?

67. Thanks Eileen and Kite! I noticed that there were an unusual number of Qs but completely missed the theme! Also failed to get BARS and BYRD which felt slightly obscurely clued to me, but this is truly an impressive construction.

    Like Graham @51 I thought TEN was the X that is the last letter of six.

68. [I see Eileen@32 has already mentioned the Bluth clue]
    [And that you’ve pointed that out to me @64 – this edit function is good, ‘innit? 🙂 ]

69. matt w @ 66 (and Graham @51, whose comment I had not really registered – my apologies).
    ‘Last part = last letter’ is a bit strange but I was not entirely happy with my parsing, either and I expected some comment. I now think I prefer yours!

70. Four NHOs for me – 5 YAKOWS, 19 CHANAKAYA, 21 ARC SINES, and 24 QWAQWA – but I managed them all from the wordplay and google, and more to the point, I enjoyed learning about all of them.

    The “to be expected” meaning of 10a STATUTORY was familiar to me – the connection to law is similar to “mandatory”, which I see as a metaphoric synonym.

    I didn’t wince at 13a UNIQUER, only because with the ‘ ‘, Kite was wincing for me. I’m a bit surprised that no one has mentioned Orwell’s use of ‘more equal’ in Animal Farm.

    I’m interested in words that use Q without U. QWAQWA does it twice, which makes it a truly useless word. 🙂

    Thanks, Kite and Eileen, for the enjoyable education.

71. Difficult puzzle, but I stuck at it after solving some clues which I thought rather clever (eg 15ac, 6d). Got it all correct except for YAKOWS which was a hopeless solve (time waster) if you didn’t know the word. I had RAZORS as a violent, possibly better alternative. Thanks Eileen for pointing out the theme which I forgot to look for.

72. Didn’t manage to finish this. 4dn, 5dn, 15ac not solved and (as usual) I completely missed the brilliantly-executed theme. Nho YAKOWS.

    13ac, UNIQUER. Using unique to mean just ‘very unusual’ also jars with me, but that is so widespread now that I think we just have to accept that’s what it can mean. Collins also has this usage note, which finally convinced me:

    “Unique is normally taken to describe an absolute state, i.e. one that cannot be qualified. Thus something is either unique or not unique; it cannot be rather unique or very unique. However, unique is sometimes used informally to mean very remarkable or unusual and this makes it possible to use comparatives or intensifiers with it, although many people object to this use.”

    I agree about the inverted commas, too.

    27ac, ANATOMIST: I don’t think the cryptic grammar works here: “stamina to be exercised” seems to indicate an anagram of just ‘stamina’. “To” is doing double duty as part of the fodder and part of the indication.

    14dn, UNSCRAMBLE: I agree “that’ shouldn’t be there.

    19dn, CHANAKYA: nho him, but found the name by googling “ancient Indian polymath”.

    24dn, QWAQWA: another nho, but put together from the wordplay and confirmed.

73. Kite@59
    Thank you. My apologies for being too lazy to go and get Chambers to check. I don’t suppose many Americans will be confused as to whether NE stands for Nebraska or New England. The context will indicate which.

74. Thanks, Tony Collman @72, for taking the time and trouble to reproduce Collins’ diplomatic comment re usage ( see me @39n, following Kite @33).
    I’m, of course, one of ‘the many people (who] object to this use’!

    I wasn’t entirely happy about 27ac either – puzzling about what to underline – and a bit surprised that no one else has queried it.

    I think I’m about ready for bed now, though. 😉

75. I was defeated by YAKOWS. I worked out the last three letters, but the rest baffled me. Even if I had spotted the “cross” device, it still would have defeated me as I never heard the word.

    I’m with others who think that “UNIQUER” is an abomination; something is either unique or it isn’t. You can’t have “unique, uniquer, uniquest”.

76. In awe of the theme. Thanks Kite. Got about 70% of this and spotted a chess theme but not how clever and complete it was. Am now feeling less despondent about the missing 30%!

77. Thanks Eileen as I spotted the Nina for once but not the former rooks, and to phitonelly for extra detail. Nearly failed with a speculative GABOWS but inspiration struck just in time. To be honest I would probably have given up on this in midweek but the extra time led to a very satisfactory solve eventually, thanks Kite( also for coming here to add detailed commentary). Also thanks to 15sqd in general as a skim through some previous blogs of Kite puzzles was very helpful in getting a feel for the style, including the vilified UNIQUER. But 15a wins my prize, for the surface and unexpected solution.

78. Gladys@49, some might say it should be called a labour of deux oeufs, but in this case one egg is definitely ‘un oeuf’ (enough). Could you pick my coat up while you’re there, please?

79. Late to post but we were chuffed by unusually for us, spotting the theme, which allowed ús to finish.
    Thank you to kite for an interesting and inspiring challenge, and to Eileen for the blog

80. For the two CHESS opponents: BLACK “Sabbath” is in 15a, and the “tower” in 2d must be WHITE.
    Thanks K&E

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