Guardian 29,370 / Qaos

90 comments on “Guardian 29,370 / Qaos”

1. Another generous offering after yesterday. I’m not technical, but I sussed the theme reasonably early, which made the solving even more fun. There’s also MICROSOFT, HACKS, CODE, SYSTEM and APPLE but like you Eileen, I’m sure there are a lot more. Favourites were CUT CORNERS, AFLUTTER, POWER POINT, YAHOO and the marvellous STRATOSPHERIC. Took a while to hack HACKS and I thought DAPPLE seemed be the wrong tense, but it’s OK as a noun.

   Ta Qaos & Eileen.

2. I didn’t like Dapple either. But see that was my error. Huge number of theme words which I noticed afterwards h but before being told which is an improvement for me.

   Thanks Qaos and Eileen

3. After 40 years working in the IT industry I should have seen the theme before I finished. But my clue of the day was CUT CORNERS: at this moment my computer is actually sitting on a round (well, elliptical) table that I made by HACKing (well, jigsawing) the corners off a rectangular one.

4. Also CLOUD, RUN and someone on the G thread told me SPORTS is something to do with routing, whatever that is

5. MICROS, HACKS, CODE, NETS, SYSTEM … it’s just highly populated with computing terms !

   I love the word “aflutter”.

   Thank you Qaos and Eileen.

6. Thanks Qaos and Eileen
   I haven’t enjoyed recent Qaos puzzles, but this one was much more to my taste. I didn’t see the theme, of course! Favourites SPORTS and POWER POINT.
   I wonder if overseas solvers will have heard of the Hay Festival?
   I raised an eyebrow at “coat” for FUR, but I suppose it’s a coat even before it has been turned into one!

7. I had CODE, SYSTEM and HACKS, too.

   I did wonder if the be of maybe had something to do with beware in 16a.

   Thanks Eileen and Qaos

8. What fun! A great theme that wasn’t intrusive. As an addition to the above, CLIENT goes with SERVERS. I really enjoyed how this crossword unfolded.

   Thanks Qaos and Eileen.

9. I think “dapple” works most clearly if you think of a “dapple grey horse” which might also be called a “dappled grey horse”, both meaning the same thing.

   I like the way Qaos has gradually embraced the idea that theme words need not be either the whole of a solution (“[d]apple”) nor confined to single solutions – “soft” + “ware” etc. It makes the entries far less forced and takes away the problem a lot of people have with these ghost themes, where the theme drives the puzzle. He started doing it bit by bit but now seems very happy to break the traditional theme rules, and his puzzles are (even) better for it.

   Thanks Qaos and Eileen – entertaining and original, and what more can I ask from the morning’s puzzle?

10. Some fine clues as noted and easygoing theme, including split words.
    For 1d it helps to be a little transatlantic.
    Excellent and speedy blog, Eileen – very minor issue in that 14 is better split as AI/RL/IN/E/RS?

    CLIENT, SOFT+WARE, MICROS, YAHOOS, CODE, POWERPOINT, SYSTEM, COOKIES, INTER+NETS, SERVERS, WINDOWS, HACKS, CLOUD(ED) I think covers the themed answers, nothing obvious in the clues and APPLE in the wordplay likely a lone fluke.

11. a typo: 8d should be STRATOSPHERIC.

12. Thanks, Eileen. I’ve always loved the way your personality shines through your opening comments!
    Minor typos: 151 is CLI, and the first T is missing in sTratospheric (brilliant anagram). Also, I think airliners parses better as AI_RS around RL (sides) IN E.

13. Some you see and some you cant miss it
    Nice grid fill from Q
    Thanks all.

14. In a bid to cure my theme-blindness I wrote the word THEME in big bold letters above this 🙂 It seemed to work (eventually)
    Top ticks for INDICATE, HACKS & COOKIES
    And an earworm from Denim’s classic “Novelty Rock” album INTERNET Curtains

    Being an IT nerd I was gobsmacked at the number of themers Qaos squeezed in – maybe not all intentional?

    CLIENT SERVER
    WINDOWS NT (Operating System / OS)
    PORT
    SOFTWARE
    MICROS
    INTERNET
    CAT (Network Cable)
    POWERPOINT
    SYSTEM
    CLOUD
    COOKIES
    APPLE
    APP
    SOFTWARE
    HACKS CODE
    FLUTTER (Programming Language)
    SCALA (Programming Language)
    CRYSTAL (OO design methodology)
    OO (Object Oriented)
    UTC (Universal Coordinated Time)
    INT (Integer)
    UNIT
    SPEC
    ACK

    Cheers Q&E

15. I couldn’t work out how WARE could mean “mind”. I managed to find through Wikipedia what William Hill was but the Hay festival eluded me. POORLY & HACKS I couldn’t parse.

    Still, this was a more approachable puzzle than I’ve found Qaos’s previously, and was quite enjoyable.

    Thanks, Qaos & Eileen.

16. My first venture outside the safety of the quiptic and Monday cryptic for a long time. Quite pleased with myself for getting over halfway there, even if I couldn’t parse some of them. Learned a new anagram indicator – pants – which is always useful. Loved cutting corners.

17. Thanks Qaos and Eileen!
    Liked CUT CORNERS and SYSTEM.

    AIRLINERS
    Thanks Roger GS@10
    A familiar trap. Still, fell into it.

18. I liked POWER POINT, WINDOWS and SYSTEM. I can’t get AIRLINERS to work, though I can see all the parts.

19. I agree with blaise @12 about ai (rl-in-e) rs

20. Thanks Qaos & Eileen for the PC fun
    bodycheetah@14 that is impressive!

21. My knack at spotting themes was never great – but it seems to grow ever weaker. I clocked the proximity of MICROS to SOFT, and the later appearance of WINDOWS – yet still didn’t make the connection!
    Many thanks Eileen for explaining the parsing to SERVERS (I’d not heard of R.V) and for untangling the mess I got myself into when trying to parse RUN ITSELF.
    INTER was a little cracker (though I did try Ibsen first) AFLUTTER was pleasing, as was the long anagram.
    Thank you Qaos

22. ISL ?

23. Thank you, John Wells @10 – fixed now – and thanks to blaise and others for spotting my carelessness at 14dn. I’ll amend the blog.

    And huge thanks, of course, to bodycheetah @14 – Phew!

24. bodycheetah @14: wow, that takes it to a whole new level. Re my comment @4, do you know why someone indicated SPORTS as part of the theme, or is it just PORT? Thanks.

25. Learnt the RV bible here (well, of it), and knew Hay as major book fair [probably via our Aunty’s artsy shows), but was was puzzled by mind=ware [there’s an album called Mind by a muso called Ware, just btw]. Nice relaxing potter from the Q, [with an easy numeric compared to one ii did the other day in Puck’s archive which was something like (300 + 10)/¼ = free music (9)]. Thanks to Qaos and Eileen.

26. I wondered that too wynsum@22. I know it stands for Irish Sign Language because I worked with the language for many years, but I’m unaware of a well-known IT meaning.

    I have decided that the random WRLCAKE Nina in the bottom row is “Want Real-Life Cake” in reference to the classic Portal video game. It almost certainly isn’t, but I’d like it to be 😁

27. I didn’t see the theme, even though I remembered to look about 1/3 of the way through. I looked at Bodycheeta’s list and don’t know half of them. Is UNIT a computer specific term? It didn’t matter, I enjoyed it anyway. I have met non Brits in Vietnam that have been or want to go to the Hay festival.
    Thanks both.

28. AlanC@24 I assumed it’s just PORT

    I was tempted to include CUT CORNERS 🙂

29. Re 7d, there is no Revised Version. There is a Revised Standard Version (RSV) and a New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) but no RV.

30. UNIT can refer to a block of code hence we have “unit tests”

31. Harry Brains@29 – OED and Wikipedia give RV as “Revised Version” published in England in 1881 and 1885. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Version

    The Revised Standard Version was published in the US in 1952.

32. Thank you, Harry Brains @29.
    Confusingly, the ‘Revised’ Version predates both the RSV and the NRSV – see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Version
    and several other online citations.

33. …and thanks to Lechien, too. 😉

34. Very enjoyable puzzle though not all the clues unfolded immediately for me. No luck with trying to connect those clues into a theme, sadly. I’m simply amazed at how many related references others found.
    I liked 1a CLIENT a lot. The HAY Literary Festival (referenced in 22a) sounds great!
    Thanks to Qaos and Eileen.

35. [@25, it was Puck 26790 and after the = sign it read “score from free play?”]

36. Like Eileen, I could see that there was a computing-related theme, but didn’t realise its full extent (it seems that, like bands, almost anything can turn out to be computing-related).

    I like Qaos’s style and enjoyed POWER POINT and CUT CORNERS and the silent treatment. Failed to parse HACKS, took ages to remember the RV to fit into SERVERS, could see all the bits of AIRLINERS but not quite how they fitted together, had FLUTTERY for AFLUTTER for some time.

    I wonder how well William Hill and the term “bookie” are known worldwide?

37. No theme for me, as per, but this all fell out surprisingly rapidly for a Qaotic puzzle.

    I had Eileen’s parsing for AIRLINERS, but Roger GS’s @10 is clearly correct. I also had qualms at first about DAPPLE, but it just about works.

    I particularly liked the doubly nautical SPORTS, AFLUTTER, YAHOOS, SYSTEM and the ‘shot glass’.

    Thanks to Qaos and Eileen

38. gladys @36, William Hill and the term “bookie” are known to this (UK expat) Australian domicile, but here they’re usually called bastards.

39. Amazing list, bodycheetah@14! And to think I forgot (as always) that there was a theme at all…
    Great fun, and genius puzzle.
    Thanks to Qaos and Eileen.

40. Nice puzzle. I forgot to look for the theme until after I had completed the puzzle – looked like it is internet related.

    Favourite: CLIENT.

    Thanks, both.

41. Lovely. Got stuck on WARE but couldn’t think of any other word that might be appropriate so it was a bung and (fulfilled) hope. Thanks Eileen for explaining and for the rest of your excellent blog. Thanks Qaos for a very enjoyable puzzle, even for those of us (me, anyway) who are perennially ‘theme-blind’.

42. AlanC@24 I think it is S-PORTS (serial ports)
    -edit and I have just noticed the pleasing symmetry of our post numbers

43. I like Qaos puzzles and this was no exception. Did find it more difficult than previous puzzles I have tried. Got off to a good start in the top then slowed right down and in the end DNF. And guessed that the theme had something to do with computers.

    Liked CLIENT (always look for the mathematical clue and try to do it first – and this time it was the first clue) CUT CORNERS, AFLUTTER, SPECIFICS

    Thanks Qaos and Eileen

44. Good Qaos with an impressive grid-fill.

    It seemed straightforward at the beginning until it wasn’t for the last few. I liked the surfaces of SPORTS and MICROS, the great anagram for STRATOSPHERIC, and the WINDOWS wordplay.

    Thanks Qaos and Eileen.

45. Ta bodycheetah @28 & ludd @42.

46. Late to this, but muffin @6 – kettles, pipes and tongues fur up and/or get covered with a coat or fur, so I didn’t have a problem with this.

    I parsed HACKS as lacks, with the L replaced by H. All in and parsed, Forgot to look for a theme, I usually do unless bludgeoned by one.

    Thank you to Eileen and Qaos for a clear blog and entertaining puzzle.

47. For the second day running, things went pretty quickly and I finished in good time. Sussed the theme halfway, though didn’t really need this knowledge thereafter. Liked “Nets”, was unaware RV = Revised Version and am more familiar with “Dappled”.
    Thank you to Qaos and Eileen.

48. Bodycheetah@14…many thanks for that exhaustive/exhausting list! I’m quite the opposite of an “IT nerd”, so sailed through this relatively friendly offering from the Theme King Qaos in my usual cluelesstoanytheme fashion. Even when I’d completed and had to refer to Eileen for the definition of WARE. Aware that it really couldn’t have anything at all to do with the town in Hertfordshire…

49. It’s the last day of the Guardian puzzles app – and a nice way to end. Only quibbles were both in HACKS, where I didn’t like the use of ‘tip-off’ nor ‘leading’. I somehow contrived to miss the theme, as is tradition, but it’s very well done.

    Got WARE via an assumed association with ‘wary’, which combined with the wordplay was enough for me to enter.

    Thanks Qaos and Eileen.

50. AlanC@24: sports are s(serial) ports – from the web: “S port is fully called serial interface, also known as high-speed asynchronous serial port. It is mainly used when connecting router and router. You can use commands to set bandwidth.”. If that helps at all …. .

51. Absolutely brilliant. I really loved it.
    Firstly CUT CORNERS was very funny. Then STRATOSHPERIC is a marvellous anagram. I very much enjoy clues like 16d (WINDOWS) where there are multiple facets to parse, and there were several of these. And, finally, the theme! Thanks to bodycheetah@14 – wow! That’s a fantastic number of themed words etc to get into a crossword – and yet never feel contrived.
    A big Thank You to Qaos for a super puzzle and to Eileen for an accessible and enjoyable blog.

52. Very late to comment so, as per, most has been said and I have nothing to add other than my voice to the praise for this very enjoyable puzzle. For once, even I spotted there was a theme even if my list was far shorter than bodycheetah’s.

    Thanks Qaos and to Eileen for another excellent blog

53. “Have you tried turning if off and on again?“

54. ronald@48 has expressed my thoughts beautifully. My favourites were BOOKIES, STRATOSPHERIC and CUT CORNERS. WARE was impossible for me to parse. Very many thanks to Qaos and Eileen.
    [Eileen – Hay is definitely worth a visit, so hope you manage to “tick” it off…]
    [FrankieG @53.🤣]

55. Wikipedia on ISL: ‘
    Integer set library (ISL), a programming library for manipulating integer sets
    Inter-Switch Link (disambiguation), a specially configured connection between network equipment.
    [ Inter-Switch Link can stand for:
    [ The link joining of two Fibre Channel switches through E_ports
    [ Cisco Inter-Switch Link (ISL) is a proprietary protocol that maintains VLAN information as traffic flows between switches and routers.
    Cisco Inter-Switch Link, a proprietary Cisco VLAN trunking protocol’
    Thanks Q&E

56. The side columns also contain:
    SR ‘(short for Synchronizing Resources) is a programming language designed for concurrent programming’…

57. …and IP ‘Internet Protocol’ – as in IP address.
    [end of IT gobbledygook]

58. I guess I could don my pedant’s hat over CUT CORNERS – if you did that literally you’d end up with an octagonal table, not round – but there’s a bit of DD going on here – idiomatic meaning of CUT CORNERS.

    Spotted the theme early on but nonetheless it needed all the crossers before I got SYSTEM. The acronym STEM sort of rang a bell, but not quite loud enough!

    Besides those two, likes for YAHOOS, POWERPOINT, AIRLINERS, HACKS, SERVERS, and STRATOSPHERIC (nice to see ‘Orchestra’ – with a bit of extra fodder – transmogrified into something other than that wretched overworked heavy draught-animal…)

    Thanks to Qaos and Eileen.

59. Pauline in Brum @54

    I know – I have a friend who goes every year and it’s been on my list for ages.

    [Incidentally, here’s Philistine on Radio 4 Hard Talk with Stephen Sackur from there in 2019.]

60. Thanks Qaos, that was very enjoyable. I spotted the theme early and I was impressed with how many answers were theme related. My top picks were SPORTS, SOFT, INDICATE, POWER POINT, 8d for the anagram, and CRYSTAL. I couldn’t fully parse AFLUTTER, not knowing the 2nd definition. Thanks Eileen for the blog.

61. Sorry – forgot the link! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/health-48561292

62. Third time lucky – I hope!
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SPpN38rksA

63. Laccaria @58 the clue doesn’t say you have to make a straight cut 🙂

64. PIB@54 and Eileen@59…I went just the once, a few years ago. Stayed in Clyro in Wales, just across the Wye, and walked over the bridge each day to England and Hay, and all its wonderful second hand bookshops. Someone in one of those had the Ashes Test Match cricket on the radio with at that moment Pietersen and Flintoff battering the Aussie attack. Therefore it must have been in the summer of 2005…

65. Lovely. Great crossword. Orchestra pits as an anagram of stratospheric – who knew? Not me, until now. Splendid stuff. Thanks Qaos and Eileen

66. Theme totally passed me by, as always. Thought this was very smartly clued throughout and therefore highly enjoyable. Didn’t know WARE in this sense, but it was fairly clued. Favourites were the neat and nicely surfaced SPECIFICS and the fine dd for NETS.

67. Laccaria@58,
    But if you cut corners ad Infinitum, you definitely get a round table 😉 .
    Fun puzzle. Thanks, Q&E.

68. [phitonelly @67
    A concept that has always puzzled me: if you have a square with one unit sides, to go from one corner to the opposite corner would take 2 units. You can make smaller and smaller paths with right angle corners to make the same journey, and the distance is still 2 units. However if you make the lengths in between the right angles increasingly small, and some point it will appear as a straight line. The straight line between the corners is 1.414… units. The question is – how can you tell when it has changed from 2 units to 1.414…?]

69. phitonelly@67 & Laccaria@58. If you check out my comment @3, there’s no reason for a cut to be straight. Especially if you have the most frustrating object in any DIYer’s toolkit.

70. Did anybody else notice that Ibsen contains the letters BSE for Bury St Edmunds. Most misleading!

71. DotInFrance @70… especially for cows (drives them crazy)

72. I am surprised that we haven’t had a comment from Roz. Not only does this puzzle have a theme but the topic is right up her alley. It’s like a double-dip ice cream for her. 🙂

    I didn’t see the theme, but the puzzle was fun without it. 8d STRATOSPHERIC was a brilliant anagram. Thanks to Qaos for the puzzle and Eileen for the always friendly and cheerful blog.

73. Minor point, but shouldn’t 14D have been CRAFTS rather than CRAFT if the answer is a plural?

74. Jay @73
    No. The plural of craft when referring to boats or planes is craft; crafts would mean woodworking, glass cutting, bricklaying etc.
    “There are a lot of craft in the harbour”.

75. [Bodycheetah@63 et al… you’re right of course – if you do it with a hand saw it could only be a straight cut, but with a jig saw it could be any curve. I was just being a bit flippant.

    For some reason this makes me think of Archimedes’ attempts to compute pi. What he did (in his imagination) was successively cut more and more corners off a polygon to get a closer and closer approximation. Yes – cutting the corners off a square table, however you do it will get you closer to a measurement for pi, than before you cut.

    But Archimedes’ results were not very accurate, it is true – all he got was somewhere between 3.1408 and 3.1429, Seeing as pi is now known to over 100 trillion digits, that’s pretty small beer. Perhaps he should have stayed in the bath…]

    Seeing as this is a Qaos puzzle, a bit of maths is not really out-of-place is it?

76. Muffin#68, what you think you see is not what you’ve got. No matter what your level of subdivision, each one is two sides of a square and you can always take the diagonal instead. The total distances by the two routes do not change – there is no convergence.
    If you want a really long route, try the Peano curve, which visits every point in the square.

77. TimSee @76
    …though, in the limit, when the lengths of the lines between the right angles becomes infinitesimal, doesn’t the 2 converge to 1.414?

78. Thank you Muffin!

79. Qaos would have been in his comfort zone cluing this crossie.
    From Meet the Setter 11 years ago:
    What do you do besides writing crosswords?
    I did an applied maths PhD on ice shelves and since then developed a Bayesian search engine for an IT company.

    I learned about the Hay Festival from a fairly recent cryptic. In fact, I get a lotta my mature age/ late life education from Guardian cryptics, an added bonus to very enjoyable crosswords, like today’s.

    Favourites CUT CORNERS and POWER POINT. Reminded me of living in a squat in London in the mid 70s when the electricity for heating needed coins to be inserted.

80. I imagine this is just a cryptic convention I don’t know, but why does ED = ‘man’, as in 19? Am I just too tired to understand anything today? (Googling ‘ED acronyms’ results in things like “explosive diarrhea” which isn’t especially helpful…)

81. Thanks for all the comments.

    Did anyone – if there’s anyone still there – follow the link to the Philistine interview that I (finally) gave @62?

82. Eileen@81
    Yes, I did.
    A humble, self-aware man (his alter-ego subtly revealed too).
    Thank you

83. Thanks, nametab @82 – the wit is certainly in evidence. 😉

84. Rhia@80 – must agree, I wasn’t took keen on ED = ‘man’ either. If I’d been curating this puzzle I’d have suggested ‘newspaperman’ or something of the sort. Wouldn’t have spoilt the surface.

    I’ve also been told that some editors – and plenty of solvers maybe – are getting a bit tired of ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘boy’, or ‘girl’ as the clue for a given name. Best not over-used.

85. Eileen — OWER isn’t around PP but the reverse — it stuffs the Ps, which are around it. And having made that tiny quibble, let me thank you for your delightful ramble around Hay and other places, as enjoyable as your blogs always are. I’ve just found the Hard Talk link, and will gladly follow it, though I often find Hard Talk too mean-spirited to enjoy. It seems as this is one of the pleasant ones.

    I’m with gdu@15 on both HAY and William Hill, never heard of either of ’em. Would love to go to the festival.

    Thanks also to Qaos.

86. Muffin#77, no it doesn’t. There are two sequences of numbers: the sum of the side lengths and the sum of the diagonal lengths as you take more and more steps. The first sum is always 2 (and so converges to 2) and the second is always 1.41… What does converge to zero is the maximum perpendicular distance from the diagonal to the zigzag line, so they look indistinguishable.

87. [Eileen, I did follow the link and very much enjoyed it. Many thanks. Pauline]

88. I thought it was tough until all of a sudden things started to fall into place. I finally remembered the ordinary rank men. The anagrams were brilliant although I had to write down the clued words in order to see them. Rhia@80 I think ED Is a man’s name, not a man. Are journalists happy to be called Hacks?
    Thanks Quaos and Eileen.

89. Valentine @85 – many thanks. How did I get away with such a glaring careless error for so long? For the sake of the archive, I’ve amended the blog.

90. In the archive the earliest use of ‘pants’ as an anagram indicator is in Independent 6701 by Nimrod April 8, 2008 blogged by John
    https://www.fifteensquared.net/2008/04/08/independent-6701nimrod/ ’17a INTELLIGENT LIFE – (little feeling in)*.’
    He says he’s “Not sure about” it “…but I suppose in the modern sense of ‘appalling’ it’s OK.”

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