Guardian Cryptic 29,413 by Pangakupu

74 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,413 by Pangakupu”

1. This went pretty smoothly for this typically tricky setter. I liked CASABLANCA, CICERONI, COINTREAU, OPINION POLL, GENEVA, GANDER and BELLY LAUGHS. I took Tom as Bell, the actor, who has featured in other puzzles. Didn’t know it’s a type of bell so thanks for that. The Māori Nina was easy to spot. All good fun.

   Ta Pangakupu & manehi.

2. Thanks manehi. I thought immediately of the bell for 12ac (had in mind “Old Tom” at Christchurch) but then thought it more likely to be Tom Bell the late actor? Any which way I thought this a terrific crossword with enough of a challenge to give the grey cells a good workout. Many thanks to you, Pangakupu,

3. Sorry AlanC, we crossed.

4. I liked it. I even remembered to look for Maori word and spotted it. NHO Ciceroni but well clued. Lots of well constructed clues. Agree about Tom Bell being a little tough for overseas solvers.

   Thanks Pangakupu and manehi

5. It took me a while to get into, but went smoothly after that. Thanks Pangakupu and manehi.

6. Thanks manehi. I think that gander needs the fact that parisienne refers to a woman so the French adjective grande takes the e on the end. Good, accurate cluing!

7. First time ever guessing the Maori word helped me (by suggesting the G in 25ac).

8. Is a belly laugh a guffaw, or a ricked neck necessarily twisted? Whatev, not too bothered. Reedy always reminds me of Henry Lawson’s poem Reedy River (1896) which became a folk song. Gander meaning look is almost as old. Nice associations via Aotearoa, thanks to Panga and likewise to manehi

9. I’m not normally a fan of this setter but I really enjoyed this.

10. I liked this a lot. A good variety of constructions, although some of the surfaces (for those of us who appreciate such things) are rather odd.

    ‘Hide’ is skin, surely, rather than hair – and ‘camel hair’ rather than CAMEL’S HAIR is the usual expression, though I find that Chambers also lists the latter 🙂

    I particularly enjoyed the anagram clues for NEURASTHENIA, COINTREAU and AGRIBUSINESS.

    There had to be a Polynesian Nina, of course, but it wouldn’t have helped to solve the puzzle, even if I had known the word!

    Thanks to S&B

11. The first few comments chime with my own experiences of this puzzle. I don’t find myself on Pangakupu’s wavelength terribly often but today’s crossword went very smoothly with everything falling neatly into place and barely a raised eyebrow. I even thought to look for the blessed Maori nina and found it. Some nice anagrams in here of which AGRIBUSINESS was the top. I was pleasantly surprised to be able to work out NEURASTHENIA.

    Thanks Panagkupu and manehi

12. Enjoyed this. Was going to raise an eyebrow at hungry = greedy but then thought of “hungry/greedy for knowledge”.

    Struggled to parse GENEVA but now think it’s rather good.

    Many thanks, both.

13. Well done manehi and the posters before me. I got most of it solved, but P is not my friend, today.
    Disagree about CAMEL’S HAIR. The hide of P to suggest that’s a hide, any more than wool is.

14. I had Tom as the actor, though I have heard of the other meaning (often as a name for the heaviest tenor bell, as here). Don’t think I have ever met the plural of cicerone before. Once I had stopped trying to make it be CARIBBEAN I liked CASABLANCA, along with COINTREAU and MERITOCRAT. The corners with the two split 4,4 clues held out the longest, and I gave up on GENEVA..

15. I found this straightforward, which I don’t always find for Pangakupu under any of their nom-de-plumes. Parisienne is a the feminine form, so takes grande (not grand, the masculine), so that was very neat.

    Thank you to manehi and Pangakupu.

16. Head for headache? New to me. Also tom/bell. Never heard of NEURASTHENIA nor CICERONI. Otherwise a satisfying solve — I wasn’t expecting to complete one of Pangakupu’s, as I’ve given up on them in the past.

    Thanks both.

17. PS: I agree with the quibble re CAMELS HAIR.

18. Tom Bell is also the name of a chain of chip shops in S E London and Kent. Now I’m hungry. Thanks, Pangakupu and manehi.

19. Hide meaning cheek, nerve. Another one that’s fading, pdm @13, can’t think when I last met it in the wild.

20. Goldilocks zone of difficulty for me. AGRIBUSINESS was Clue of the day for me.

21. Found a lot of enjoyment along the way with this, though held up at the very end by HEADLONG and ONE-WAY. Knew all about Cicero from my Latin O Level days. The only clue I wasn’t particularly enamoured by was the one for NATAL, which I thought was rather pedestrian. As I became just now when I walked up the road to buy a copy of the Racing Post before Day 2’s tussle with the bookies at Royal Ascot…

22. I guessed and could not parse 7d – duh, should have got that!

    New for me: ABH = actual bodily harm; CICERONI = tour guides; the fact that Natal was a province of South Africa, then a Boer republic, and then a British colony pre-1893. Also HEAD = localised pain (for 8/22).

    Thanks, both.

    btw there is an interesting article in today’s paper. I have also posted it in the General Discussion section.

    Less Elvis, more Taylor Swift: a clue for ‘dated’ cryptic crossword setters
    https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/19/less-elvis-more-taylor-swift-a-clue-for-dated-cryptic-crossword-setters

23. I don’t think hungry has anything to do with 2d. Quite the opposite. And hide isn’t helpful at all. I don’t enjoy these clues. Rather than a pleasant aaah when I get them, or reveal them, there’s just ugh! I can’t imagine ever getting some of these.

24. What is this Maori nina?

25. A fun solve – NHO a few parts of it, including POLL for parrot – is it a common shortening of Polly, or is Polly an affectionate lengthening of Poll as some old term for the bird?

26. Thank you Pangakupu and manehi.
    I liked ‘Russian begins transforming’, ‘a neurotic drunk’ and the (Moor?) ‘exotic place’.

27. IPURANGI also means ‘toadstool’, of course. Māori is very inventive at reusing old words for new concepts though toadstool => internet isn’t obvious.

    Would say more but I’ve got a bad head from COVID.

28. So ‘IPURANGI’ means internet in Maori. It seems they could teach the Academie Francaise a thing or two.

29. Kirsty@24: Pangakupu always includes a hidden Māori word in his grids – if you read down the 8ths column, ignoring the alternate black squares, you can read out the word “IPURANGI”. It’s never anything you need to know or find to solve the puzles, but it is a bit of fun for those who like to look for it.

30. Kirsty @24, if you read down in the 8th column from the left you will find the word IPURANGI in the unchecked letters. That is a Māori word for ‘toadstool’ as Pangakupu says @27. This is a Nina of a Māori word.

    The word Nina for this feature in a crossword is explained here. 🙂

31. It’s not PHI-day, but it is Pangakupu.

    Good to get started fairly easily, although I DNK CICERONI. I liked the anagrams for COINTREAU (although done before), AGRIBUSINESS and NEURASTHENIA (although technically indirect, but there are only three options for half of bare: ba, re and ar). I also liked the wordplay for GESTURES and GENEVA.

    Thanks Pangakapu and manehi (for those of us solving online, it’s easier to give the answers than the clue numbers, which involves ‘cross-tabbing’)

32. Hi Kirsty@23
    re 2d, I found a couple of examples in Collins online which are similar to the way I had approached greedy/hungry :

    – aggressively ambitious or competitive, as from a need to overcome poverty or past defeats
    a hungry investment firm looking for wealthy clients
    and
    – indicating, characteristic of, or characterized by hunger
    He approached the table with a hungry look

    I think greedy could be used in both examples above? I was thinking of greedy/hungry for success, recognition (or whatever)…

33. Many thanks to Manehi – I needed your help parsing a few. Thanks also to Pangakapu for the puzzle and for dropping in. I was hoping to hear what you’d say about CAMEL’S HAIR because I share the views of many of the above on that. In the circumstances it’s understandable you have not commented and I do hope you recover soon.
    Michelle @22, many thanks for the link. Very interesting, I’d like to hear more from our US solvers on the relative merits of a more contemporary Cryptic…

    Just because no one else has, the obvious earworm and one of my favourite clues today 😎.
    https://youtu.be/rRKFsc_jmHQ?si=nKBHuGEGi1dUPawt

34. Thanks for the blog, sound and neat wordplay throughout but I totally disagree with the definition for Casablanca. OPINION POLL is clever and very topical .
    Michelle@22 it may be new to you but I have read this article many times before, it appears in the Guardian every few years. Perhaps they need a feature on updating Guardian crossword articles.

35. I was halfway through the grid with only REEDY and Y LAUGH, but then as I moved lower, it started to click and I slowly worked my way back. A lot of fun and more than one chuckle
    Thanks both.

36. Unlike William @12 my eyebrow remains raised at greedy = hungry. I’d argue greedy for knowledge and hungry for knowledge are two different things, and that half the world goes hungry because the other half is greedy! Not the same thing at all imo. Otherwise a fun solve, thanks to both.

37. Roz@34 – OMG I had no idea this is a multiple repeat article in the Guardian. It is beyond sad that they do this, what a pathetic effort on their part! Looks like they need an editor for the crosswords section articles…

38. Good, well-pitched crossword. thanks to both. TerriBlislow@3: the bell is called Great Tom and is in the chapel of Christ Church which also serves as cathedral for the Oxford Diocese.

39. GESTURES, STERILISED and POLL(not Y) parrot beat me today. A couple of new words for me at 4d and 13d, which is something I appreciate more than just everything going in smoothly, so thanks Pangakupu.
    More exotic place? Maybe Morecambe would be exotic to a Casablanconian. Who can tell?
    Thanks too to manehi.

40. Michelle it is good when you see it for the first time , not an exact repeat but all the same cliches , even the Britney Spears , cricket and Eton.
    Watch out for other classics- Woman goes for swim outdoors . And the all-time favourite – Woman has a baby .

41. MikeB@38: Not actually in the chapel, of course; in Tom Tower over the college entrance. The hour bell at Lincoln Cathedral is also known as Great Tom.

42. PinB @33: I left that earworm for you to post 😉. Still one of my favourite black and whites.

43. A challenge. Is TOM the word that leads to the greatest number of possible answers? Cat, jewellery, thumb, for starters – plenty here for the nitpickers to get their teeth into.

44. Having grown up in the very untropical Melbourne outer suburb Ferntree Gully, I feel qualified to contest 7d’s definition. Is an ant a tropical insect?

45. Exposed as I am to US spellings everywhere, on the way to (g)REEDY I had (m)EAGER. Maybe the basis for some future clue.

46. Thought 1d was a little too obscure personally, couldn’t get it from the wordplay but once entered it could be justified. Everything else had a nice balance

47. I enjoyed this LOI was GESTURES, thanks for the explanation!

48. Pangakupu@27 Hope you get better soon! Toadstools are not a bad analogy for the internet – there was a paper in Science in about 1999 given the byline the ‘wood wide web’ which spoke about how the mycelial networks (whence toadstools) allow trees in a forest to communicate with each other. Suzanne Simard has written well about same (she also appears as a character in Richard Powers’ The Overstory). A recentish Star Trek series used mycelial networks for FTL travel … .

49. Polyphone@48 I do not wish to be a killjoy but the initial papers have been totally discredited and many now withdrawn by the journals they were in. Perhaps to put it kindly the claims made were grossly exaggerated.

50. An absolute delight – loved 15 across, 19 across, 1 down and 7/23. Great to see the brilliant Tom Bell get a nod – sadly missed great actor. The TV series ‘Out’ was a classic from the 1970’s – “Frank Ross is OUT” – ‘appy days! Thanks very much to Pangakupu and to manehi

51. Got all but Geneva. When I repay folks it’s usually Venmo not vengeance… 🙂

52. Polyphone@48 – there is some experimental basis for her ideas but she got carried away with now questionable extrapolations and generalisations https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00893-0

53. Roz@49. I guess you are referring to an article like this. There is a good argument against anthropomorphism. I think the issue of what ‘communication’ means is core – no ecologist would deny that that there is communication via mycelial networks. For a typical approach, see this article from Nature News. Sheldrake’s Entangled Life is a lovely popular account.

54. Angus@52 – Sorry, we crossed. I don’t think that Simard’s concept of the ‘mother tree’ being called into question really affects the issue of whether there is communication in mycelial networks, which are obligate parasites of most plants on earth. But I do agree re the extrapolations.

55. [Polyphone @48: I had understood that Suzanne Simard coined the term “wood wide web” so did more than write about it. Incidentally, one of the characters on that Star trek show was a mycologist named Paul Stamets, in honour of the famous mycologist and author of my favourite technical book on the subject, “Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms”) ]

56. polyphone@53 – to me, the sciam article does’t make sense using evolutionary theory without lots of ifs, buts and maybes … so how it can be generalisable, rather than just local, even in geological time? Your Nature article only refers to communication amongst fungi, based on the abstract.

57. Jack@55 – well, she didn’t quite coin it – it was a byline created by an editor (“That name was coined in an article in the journal Nature in 1997, based on research done by Canadian scientist, Dr. Suzanne Simard, into mycelium networks or mycorrhizal fungi.”) But that’s being picky :-). Angus@53 – generically agreed. Yes – communication among fungi was basically all I was talking about (hence ‘mycelial network’). Ho hum, will try to be more precise in the future – was bringing in the Simard coz she is well known.

58. Polyphone@53 I never use links or the internet but I do know experts in the field who were doing transfer measurements and getting results a tiny fraction of those claimed. It was a great story and the media loved it but it takes a long time to put it right.

59. This seemed quite hard work – I didn’t find too many gimmes. But satisfying to solve in the end, with the elusive GENEVA the LOI. I toyed with VENEZA at first.
    I enjoyed most of the parses but I found CICERONI a bit unsatisying, since the word CICERONE is derived from Cicero in the first place. So the clue’s a bit… incestuous??
    Spotted the Nina, but had to look it up to understand.
    All good fun.
    Thanks, manehi & Panga. Hope your recovery from COVID goes smoothly.

60. I guess the morel of this crossword is – don’t mention the fun guy. As it leaves too mush room for debate 😕

61. MB@60 Indeed :-).

62. [Polyphone I was not criticising your post@48 , it is a very interesting topic. It is just I remember the fuss when all this first came out, people will know the initial claims and not realise a large correction has taken place since then. It is a bit like cold fusion or MMR and autism . ]

63. Roz@62. Thank you … . Remember The Secret Life of Plants :-)?

64. Not really , was that the 70s one – talking plants ?
    It even happens in Particle Physics . We had the “Oops Leon” particle, announced far too early . 5 Sigma was brought in after that.

65. I am an erstwhile neurobiologist with physiology, behaviour and ecology as subsidiary domains of interest, including peripheral areas as and when have the time and opportunity. Based on a brief internet search, the top few papers in the attached look apposite. https://olemiss.edu/hoeksemalab/jdh_papers.html

66. Also anatomy and biochem, where relevant. For enquiring minds!

67. 8d – I was convinced this was SHINGLES.

    I still don’t understand the explanation but I had an absolute nightmare everywhere.

    Similar to yesterday…zero solutions found, and even the anagrams passed me by.

68. Steffen @67 —

    8dn goes like this:

    “Localised pain” = HEAD, because “head” can mean “headache”, which is a sort of localised pain.
    “ache” = LONG, taking them both as verbs. (“I ache / long to have you near me.”)
    “rash” = HEADLONG, both meaning “impetuous, heedless of consequences”.

    I hope this helps!

69. Got about two thirds done but struggled with NE and SW corners. Meritocrat and neurasthenia new to me. Found it a enjoyable challenge and hats off to Pangakupu for beating me. Thank you for blog explaining those clues beyond me.

70. Steffen@67: Take heart – this was a bit of a stinker.

71. Often the Fifteen Squared world has moved on by the time I have anything to say, but as a relative newbie I am always relieved when others post their challenges. I managed quite a few clues today but often by realising the answer from the definition and then seeing if it parsed. Am still thinking too narrowly about the wording at surface level. Also whether it’s me not being able to work it out or if it’s just a word i have never heard of, like neurasthenia. Thank you for the heloful blog and the challenging puzzle.

72. Amanda @71 and other relative newbies: “realising the answer from the definition and then seeing if it parsed” is a perfectly legitimate way to get an answer. As is the opposite: working out the bits and putting them together then seeing a word that fits the definition (and of course there are the other clue types). The point is to fill the grid accurately; how you get there is not all that important as long as you do. Of course, some techniques (e.g. checking that a word actually does exist with something like the required meaning; using a word search etc) are ones that most use in extremis (to varying degrees). Some people consider doing such things a variety of ‘cheating’, others are more relaxed. But it is for you to work out if that applies to you or not: nobody should be (or is!) looking over your shoulder to catch you out.

73. Enjoyed the crossword, but I never bother looking for the Maori terms.

74. Thanks for the encouragement TassieTim@72. 😊

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