Guardian 29,462 by Brummie

63 comments on “Guardian 29,462 by Brummie”

1. Not usually a Brummie fan but this one ticked a lot of boxes. Loved BEES KNEES, RIPEN & CHANTILLY LACE

   Cheers B&W

2. Like you Widdersbel it took an age for the penny to drop with RARE EARTH. I was a bit unsure about AVUNCULAR and IMPRECISE. Favourite for me was BEES KNEES for the assembled sewers.

3. I didn’t parse RARE EARTH either, but enjoyed the rest. (So was amused to see the phone a friend).

   I spent a while looking for a theme, but couldn’t see one.

   Thank you to Widdersbel and Brummie.

4. My “Huh?” list and NHO list were a little longer than my comfort threshold. Hadn’t heard of BLAGGER (apparently British slang?), HALMA, LAHAR, Legolas or the US wasps. I don’t understand not nice/imprecise, stretches/reaches and I knew not of that definition of “lag”. Are/breathe was a bit of a stretch, I thought.

   The clue that brought a smile was TAKE PART.

5. GDU @4 – I seem to recall from Terry Pratchett’s “Good Omens” that the original meaning of nice was precise.

6. GDU @4. And I agree with you about reaches / stretches and are / breathes.

7. Congrats on the blog, Widders, have enjoyed your comments over recent years. Nothing too 1ac from the Brum today, tho lahar was a ‘do what it says’ and shrug, and rare earth was an ‘obvious but not sure how’. Enjoyable anyway, ta both.

8. Favourites: WITNESS, BEES KNEES (loi).

   I did not parse 8d – I also got hung up on EAR = breathe? in *rather. ARE = breathe in the sense of live, exist seems a bit weird to me.

   New for me: BLAGGER (and also lagger = insulator).

   Thanks, both.

9. Thanks Brummie and Widdersbel
   Good blog. I didn’t parse RARE EARTH or MONTMARTRE – the latter is rather complicated. I did vaguely remember LAHAR. Favourite ULYSSES.
   Tolkien’s elves weren’t particularly ELFIN!

10. C@6 and GDU@4 Colloquially: “That’s a bit of a reach/stretch”
    I liked RARE EARTH as many of the solution elements were also in “breathe” which misled me – in a good way – for a while

11. The penny never did drop for RARE EARTH. Breathe=are? If Brummie says so… LAHAR was new but couldn’t be much else. Wasted time trying to force Tahiti into TONGS before the light dawned.

    Liked ULYSSES, AVUNCULAR, MONTMARTRE, the grave message and the assembled sewers for my last in, BEES KNEES.

    By the way, it’s an anagram, not a reversal of LOU in COULOMB.

12. b@10. I see your point but I still think it’s a bit of a reach – sorry, stretch.

13. Reach and stretch can both also mean a length of river (which might have a bridge reaching/stretching across it).

    Thanks to Brummie and Widdershel

14. muffin @9 Tolkien was very definite about the fact that Legolas and his kin were elvish, not elfin.

    A nice crossword, being both precise and pleasant. Putting “take away” in for 12,20 held me up in the SW. A bit of a stretch, but I thought of it as meaning “my take away from that discussion is ….”. “Take part” is of course much better.

15. The beach reaches/stretches as far as the next headland. I didn’t find this one a problem.

16. The expectation of a theme resulted in WASP suggesting BEES to me, only to discover this was serendipitous.
    REACH = STRETCH also works as words for a section of waterway. (Sorry, I see DuncT types faster)

17. The surface for 17a is one of the cleverest things I’ve seen for some time.
    Much else to enjoy, including ECCENTRIC, NATIONHOOD, MONTMARTRE, TONGS, and BEES’ KNEES.
    Didn’t know LAHAR, mildly wondered whether I’d have stood a chance of getting COULOMB if I hadn’t done A-level physics years ago, and didn’t work out the parsing of RARE EARTH, but hey.
    Good start to the day. Thanks, both.

18. A few were right under my nose, so to speak, but took a long time to solve. 1d being a prime example. I think I’ve been braced for some of the more impenetrable puzzles which ironically makes some of the more straightforward clues easier to miss.

    RAMSHACKLE was another example: perfectly good clueing, I just couldn’t quite get there until I enlisted a bit of help. I got RARE EARTH without the parsing, and paused at STORIED because STOREYED came to mind first.

    Great fun anyway.

19. 4d REACHES went in very fast, thanks to my memory of a clue from the very first cryptic puzzle I tackled, many decades ago, with a friend at school. “Shows how far the river can reach”, 7 letters. Probably the Telegraph, since it was that sort of school. Thanks to Brummie and Widdersbel, great work from both.

20. I’m another who happily justified reach/stretch as portions of a river and agree with gladys that LOU is anagrammed rather than reversed. I’d also stand with ravenrider @14 on Tolkien being very clear that ‘elvish’ rather than ‘elfin’ was the term for his elves. Overall, a nice puzzle – it did feel rather anagram heavy with 10 out of 29 clues.

    Thanks Brummie and Widdersbel

21. NeilH @17 – I got COULOMB and didn’t take A level physics. Not a word that’s part of my everyday usage (guessing I’m not on my own there), but in my case at least the clueing was enough to dredge it up from somewhere.

22. Good puzzle. Why the US in 18? Are high-rise buildings any different elsewhere?

23. STORIED
    Monkey@22
    STORIED vs storeyed?

24. Monkey @18 – no, but the spelling is.

25. As muffin, ravenrider and PostMark have pointed out, Tolkien was keen to “detrivialise” the mythology of elfs (and dwarfs), going as far as inventing new plural and adjectival forms of elf and dwarf. In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings you can see the process of making them more serious playing out, with quite a contrast between his portrayal of “elves” between the earlier children’s book and the later book which was clearly intended for adults. Interestingly, fantasy writers have followed his lead, and “elves” is arguably the standard plural now.

26. Thanks, KVa and Widdersbel.

27. @monkey #22

    I think us spelling Storied rather than more usual in UK Storeyed

    Thanks Brummie and Widdersbel

    Ok So 5 cross posts. Blog is busy at moment 🙂

28. Scraggs @21 – Good for you. My comment was more a musing about how many of the more obscure units I’d know if I hadn’t mis-spent my youth studying the sciences. Probably, like yourself, I’d be dredging them up from somewhere, as you do (particularly if, like both of us, you spend too much time doing the Graun crossword 😉 )

29. NeilH @21 – oh, absolutely. I’m chalking it up as a win since there are so many instances of not being able to dredge up such an answer. But as with LAHAR and HALMA, each a new word to me, the clueing really did point in the right direction.

    Doing the Graun crossword helps keep me out of trouble…

30. Ashamed to say I’ve never attempted Tolkien but I’m currently en route from Dublin to Doolin in County Clare, where I believe he based his stories around The Burren and the Cliffs of Moher.
    Anyway this was a great offering with lots of favourites. Now I know both meanings of AVUNCULAR. Armed robbers (a dying breed) in the UK are/were known as BLAGGERS so apposite to have BULLETS alongside. Agree with NeilH @17 that ULYSSES was very clever. COULOMB, LAHAR and HALMA were new but eminently gettable. Looked more difficult than it actually was.

    Ta Brummie & great substitution Widdersbel.

31. It’s possibly worth mentioning that a current of one amp(ere) is one coulomb of charge passing each second.

    [AlanC
    There’s a great music bar in Doolin, but I can’t remember what it’s called.]

32. muffin@31: “It’s possibly worth mentioning that…” — nah! I don’t think it is.

33. I think Tolkien would have frowned at ELFIN in relation to his elves, which are quite unlike the traditional diminutive creatures of folklore, his preferred term being ‘elven’.

34. Lovely puzzle, chewy in parts, enjoyable. Excellent blog.
    I agree ULYSSES is a great clue. ‘Laxity’ is one of the most original anagrinds I’ve come across, but meaning looseness, it’s perfect.
    Like some others, I hadn’t worked out the ‘breathe = ARE’ part of RARE EARTH.
    The Francophile in me loved MONTMARTRE and I was very amused by BEES KNEES.
    New to me were COULOMB, LAHAR and HALMA, worked out from clueing & crossers.
    BLAGGER – I was aware of ‘lagging’ used to insulate pipes and hw systems, so made the leap to lagger= insulator. It seemed close enough.
    Thanks to Brummie and Widdersbel

35. LAHAR was my first one in, straight from the definition. I guess there are benefits to having a Geology degree, and having worked as a volcanologist too… I’ll join the acclaim for the ULYSSES surface. I know BLAG, probably from time in the UK (and we also have our hot water pipes LAGGED), but I baulked at ‘bum’ as a person who blags. Yes, you can bum [verb] a cigarette, but to describe a person as a bum [noun] means something else (or one of several somethings else) to me. CHANTILLY LACE I know only from the Big Bopper. Thanks, Brummie and Widdersbel.

36. Agree that in 5d COULOMB “turned” has to be a misleading anagrind: C(OUL)OMB. Or could it be an unorthodox alternative to “cycled”: CO(ULO)MB?
    LOi – much later – 8d RARE-EARTH – ‘as i live and breathe!’
    COTD – 17a ULYSSES – a brilliant surface. [The UK equivalent’s latest sprog: Frank Odysseus Alfred…]
    Liked 24d, 26a BEES KNEES, too, but was uncertain where to put the apostrophe. Oed.com has an entry for a singular KNEE of a singular BEE:
    bee’s knee. with citations from 1797 to 1894, only becoming plural in US 1920s slang. [I always thought it was just an outrageous homophone of business.]
    And 25a IMPRECISE was nice.
    Thanks B&W

37. The surface for NARCOLEPSY made me laugh, although it’s no laughing matter if you suffer from it.
    I quite liked the laxity in the anagrind laxity in the clue for ULYSSES. . Less laxity was clever, although I know some frown on nounal anagrinds, whether preceding or following the fodder.

38. pserve @32
    I thought that people who hadn’t heard of coulombs would have heard of amps.

39. Enjoyable puzzle. The clear and precise definition makes LAHAR a write-in if you happen to know the word – a more cryptic definition would have been unfair for such a rarity. I did know it, which helped me to get HALMA, which was less familiar (the faint bell that rang when I solved it may just have been false memory syndrome).

    Count me in to the plaudits for ULYSSES, IMPRECISE was indeed nice, as FrankieG commented oxymoronically. And I thought BEES KNEES was the cat’s pyjamas.

    Thanks to S&B

40. Real doh moment for me at your explanation of BEES. Did not see that!

41. Apparently HALMA was also the ancient Greek long-jump in which the jumper had to carry weights in each hand

    COULOMB for me falls into that strange category of words which I recognise but am clueless about the meaning of. But once I realise the word falls into that category and identify its meaning it’s no longer in that category 🙂

42. Thanks for the blog, good set of clues , MONTMARTRE a very neat construction.
    Charles-Augustin de COULOMB a great pioneer in understanding the fundamental force between charges.
    I must remember to use ELFIN to annoy the Tolkien nerds along with talking trees , AlanC @30 you are very fortunate, I only wish that my students had not read Tolkien .

43. If this is your first blog Widdersbel, you did a great job and thank you for the earworm 😎. Thanks also to Brummie for an enjoyable and steady solve. I liked ECCENTRIC, ULYSSES, NARCOLEPSY and MONTMARTRE for the reasons identified by others.
    [Alan C – lucky you, have a lovely time ☀️]

44. I think there is enough difference between BUM and BLAG to make an interesting and trivial debate .
    BUM is to cadge something trifling, like a ciggie. BLAG is a sort of shameless minor fraud, based on a barefaced pretence to legitimate entitlement, such as admission to a VIP zone.
    Over to you.

45. I am another who gets that breathing suggests being, but can’t come up with a satisfactory sentence where “breathe” and “are” are substitutable. Anyone?

46. This started slowly and finished at a canter. FOI was 17A, one of only two I got on the first pass through the Across clues. The Down clues proved more productive, and then to my astonishment everything fell into place on the second pass. I was briefly held up by the intersecting LAHAR and HALMA, both NHOs, but got there with a little online verification.

    Thank you Brummie and Widdersbel

47. Good puzzle. Had to Google that HALMA was a thing and TONGS was LOI cos I didn’t twig the definition.
    Thanks both

48. We breathe, therefore we are…… 🤔

49. A very user friendly grid meant that with helpful crossers in place I was often able to guess the answers from the definitions then parse them at leisure. Wasn’t sure about the source of Wasp in WASPISH, nor knew LAHAR. And I expect someone has already told us that IMPRECISE will do for Not Nice.
    I wouldn’t have the energy to get into a discussion about bum or blah, but very much enjoyed this today…

50. In 14d, the ‘s’ in sprint runs off, with the latter doing double duty as an instruction (sPRINT)and a definition (PRINT).

51. like Jacobz@46 I’d NHO of LEHAR or HALMA but they were solvable ntl. It was good to see NICE being used in a more PRECISE way. I remember a band called Rare Earth bitd. There was a lot to like here, thanks Brummie and Widdersbel.

52. AlanC @30. The best music pubs in Doolin, if you are so inclined, are McGann’s, McDermott’s, and Gus O’Connor’s.

53. I remember playing HALMA when young – same as .Chinese checkers’ but on square board,

54. Thanks Brummie. The wonderfully constructed ECCENTRIC, one of my top picks, is the type of clue that I would use to explain cryptic crosswords to someone unfamiliar with the genre. Other favourites were TAKE PART, MONTMARTRE, NARCOLEPSY, and STORIED. I missed the nho HALMA and BLAGGER. I only knew LAHAR from previous crosswords. Thanks Widdersbel for the blog.

55. [muffin & Phil McHale, I’m having a swift pint or 6 of the black stuff in McGann’s with the river running at high speed at the rear of the beer garden. Sure you couldn’t beat it with a big stick].

56. Sir Walter to the rescue for me. I remembered “Breathes there a man with soul so dead . . . .”

57. Thanks for the blog.
    In London a BLAGGER is a burglar/thief

58. May be a coincidence, but many of the symbols of rare-earth elements are present in the grid – Ce, La, Y, Yb, Tm, Nd, Pr, Pm (backwards), Lu, Er, Ho. May have missed others.
    Good fun.
    Thanks, Brum and excellent blog, Widdersbel.

59. 18 Storied is in fact a triple definition: Like a US high rise building + celebrated + in fiction

60. Another who couldn’t parse the middle bit of RARE EARTH.

    I had to google to check that HALMA was what I thought it was and LAHAR was what I hoped it was.

    Those uncertainties aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this, so thanks to S&B alike.

61. An enjoyable and fair puzzle although a DNF for me as I had never heard of LAHAR, COULOMB and BLAGGER. My education continues. Thanks Brummie and widdersbel.

62. Pentyrch Monchengladbach @59 – Interesting thought. It did cross my mind while solving but I wasn’t sure if “in fiction” worked as a standalone definition for storied, and in any case I forgot about it by the time I wrote up the blog. But you could well be right that this was Brummie’s intention.

63. – I’m multitasking: I can listen, ignore, and forget at the same time.

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