Guardian 29,662 / Vulcan

66 comments on “Guardian 29,662 / Vulcan”

1. This was very good with only URNS a bit of a dud. Agree that DRAKE was particularly good and I agree with Eileen’s favourites. RETSINA was also neat, having suffered its after effects many years ago in Greece.

   Ta Vulcan & Eileen.

2. Thanks Vulcan and Eileen
   FOI and favourite was ABANDON SHIP.
   Not keen on IMMERSE, and I was baffled by BORROWED; having seen the explanation I don’t think the grammar works.
   I too agree about RETSINA! Why the Greeks thought that adding resin to wine was a good idea is beyond me.

3. Hi Eileen.

   For RAISINS you need monsoon to be RAINS, otherwise you’re an S short.

4. The whole solution is showing on the home page

5. Some nice, crisp, clean clues in here, as befits a Monday. DRAKE produced a laugh, for sure, and joins PROMONTORY, HEREDITY, UNREST and the little group at the end of the Downs, PUTSCH, TACHYON, RETSINA and SODDEN.

   Thanks Vulcan and Eileen

6. Phew… what a relief after the recent maulings I have taken from Ludvig and Enigmatist. I was beginning to think of a other hobby…

7. Very pleasant. ABANDON SHIP raised a smile, and I agree that BORROWED is a very neat cryptic definition.

   Many thanks both. (Eileen: I’m not sure if you’re aware but for some reason your entire blog is displayed on the home page.)

8. Thanks Vulcan and Eileen

   As an oenophile, in defence of retsina we had some very good examples on a Peloponnese wine-tasting tour a couple of years ago.

   The good stuff doesn’t generally reach this country, though (a bit like German Pinot Noir).

9. Lyssian @4 and Lord Jim @7- I am aware: I’ve somehow messed up and don’t know what to do about it!

   Thanks, crispy @3 – fixed now.

10. [Eileen @9
    I don’t think it’s you. This sort of thing has been happening from time to time for the last week or so. I think it’s something than KenMac is working on.]

11. I pencilled in LAKER for DRAKE, but I wasn’t convinced. ABANDON SHIP and PROMONTORY were my top two.

12. Lovely fun for a Monday. Thanks both.
    And the home page problem seems to be fixed now.

13. Agree with muffin@2 on BORROWED.
    Liked ABANDON SHIP, DRAKE, A FISH OUT OF WATER, PRIVATE PROPERTY, TACHYON and SODDEN.

    Thanks Vulcan and Eileen.

14. A lovely start to the week. I particularly liked ABANDON SHIP, PRIVATE PROPERTY and DRAKE. I couldn’t quite understand BORROWED, thank you for the explanation Eileen. Thanks also to Vulcan.

15. Don’t know if this has been moaned about already but am I alone in being slightly irked by the tab button on the guardian xwd site going from half working to not working at all?

16. I loved the way PROMONTORY fitted snugly together, and RETSINA made me smile nostalgically too – it always used to taste like paint stripper to my young palate when I spent nearly all my summers in Crete in the Seventies. Sipping it steadily as I played some of the locals at chess outside in those waterside cafes. Ah, yes…

17. Alan @15 -you are not alone!

18. IMMERSE: I think it’s other way around, that the N of immense needs to change to R to make IMMERSE, or ‘plunge’, the definition.

19. BORROWED works perfectly fine for me (past tense) as does the entire puzzle. 1a my favourite. Droll. Thanks for the blog Eileen and Vulcan for a very clever and entertaining Monday solve.

20. Alan @15 I saw in comments elsewhere that you can use the [ and ] keys to tab backwards and forwards (or the { and } keys on some keyboards). My fingers are still getting used to this change.

    Very nice puzzle today. I am another fan of ABANDON SHIP! Thanks Vulcan and Eileen.

21. I agree with you Eileen that ABANDON SHIP is a good one. I’m sure Roz will tell us all about TACHYONs. I’ll have to ask my mate Fabio about them as well.

22. A lovely puzzle to start the week. My favourites were ABANDONED SHIP, DRAKE, PROMONTORY, PUTSCH, BORROWED, CATNAPPED.
    I didn’t know what ‘Active’ was doing in 1d, AFOOW. Thank you Eileen for the explanation and for the lovely blog.
    Thank you to Vulcan and Eileen.

23. According to the Guardian app, I did this in 2 minutes 22 seconds. Well that’s 45 minutes of my life goyin a flash.
    Good Monday crossword and I agree with most of the comments above.
    Thanks both.

24. Thanks, SueM48 @18 – you’re right, of course – fixed now.

25. Lovely puzzle – agree that URNS was a bit weak, but greatly enjoyed the others already mentioned. And I agree with Simon S @8 that there absolutely is such a thing as good retsina! Thanks to Eileen and to Vulcan.

26. Thanks Eileen. My LOI was BORROWED and I parsed it as you did. Made me laugh, as it took a while.

27. Sue@18 and Eileen when you get back: I think the clue for IMMERSE works either way, given the convention that punctuation can be ignored. Yes, ‘plunge’ is the definition, but for the word play either a character in the solution would have to change to make ‘immense’ (R->N), or a character in ‘immense’ has to change to make ‘immense [become] plunge’ (N->R). The answer is the same because of the definition, but we can get there by either route. Whichever one you “see” first feels more comfortable, perhaps, but both work.

28. muffin@2. I think the grammar in BORROWED works if you consider the question mark and the sense of a while, as awhile. ie took for a short time. Is that a fission or a fusion?

29. This was a pleasant start to the week. Following a trend of marginally slower Monday solves, but nothing problematic and some very pleasing clues. Thanks to all concerned.

30. paddymelon @28
    I’m not seeing it. To me, BORROWED means took for a while. You used “for” in your example!

31. Drake’s sang froid in face of the Armada was like that other chap who, when told that his enemy’s myriad archers’ arrows blocked out the sun, said So much the better, we shall fight in the shade!
    I guess a borrower might say Can I borrow this a while ?, but … hmm.
    Fun puzzle, ta V and E.

32. Good to know, Simon S @8, I’m glad there’s better retsina than Vintage Athens YH ’67.

33. Re BORROWED, surely “a while” can mean “for a while”, as in “I think I’ll lie down a while”.

    [sheffield hatter @27: in case you’re interested I added a belated comment to Saturday’s Philistine blog on the question of double duty.]

34. muffin@30, awhile means for a short time. You don’t need the ”for” in the surface.
    (crossing with Lord Jim and Eileen now)

35. Lord Jim @33 – that’s what I was suggesting in the blog.

36. I managed it which made me happy. I loved the anagrams and ABANDON SHIP. I wasn’t super happy about PRIVATE PROPERTY, that is a notice but the soldier’s effects needs the possive apostrophy. Still, it is not a bad pun. I had never come across ‘a’ for ‘active’ so 1d made no sense to me. Definitely some neat clues and a good start to the week. Thanks Eileen and Vulcan

37. BORROWED
    Thanks Eileen, Lord Jim and paddymelon.
    It’s clear to me now.

38. [William@6 – but it wouldn’t be much of a hobby when it only takes up 3 or 4 minutes of one’s time! – this comment is aimed at William the second, an experienced solver, and emphatically not at newer solvers before anyone starts moaning; it’s the first Vulcan I’ve ‘tackled’ in a long time and I was genuinely shocked – should this not be a ‘quiptic’?! … Don’t get me wrong, this is a lovely example of elegant construction, and one I’d recommend to whet the appetite of potential newcomers. But, personally, I prefer a puzzle to ….. well, puzzle! I feel sure, my dear namesake, that if they were all like this you’d consider a more consuming hobby! 😇]

39. Borrowed time. A while?

40. Pleasant start to the week. I liked the BORROWED cd and the good charade for PROMONTORY (my LOI).

    Thanks Vulcan and Eileen.

41. Alan @15 IMO none of the changes to the online version of the puzzle were for the better. The anagram helper in particular is considerably less helpful, as well as being ugly.

42. For some reason I really struggled to get going with this, with only a handful going in on the first pass. I don’t know why, as almost everything was perfectly reasonable in hindsight.

    Mind you, I still don’t grok BORROWED, even with Eileen’s explanation and various comments.

    Thanks Vulcan and Eileen.

43. Time once again to mention that RETSINA is the best Scrabble rack. It can also make RETAINS, RETINAS, NASTIER, ANTSIER, STAINER, STEARIN, RATINES, and ANESTRI. Also, all of those letters anagram well with others, so if you’re in doubt about which letters to keep and which to play, retain the letters in RETAINS. (The one time I actually held that rack, I played RETSINA–the way the board was, I needed one of the ones with the S in the middle.)

44. Thanks for the blog , this seemed perfect for a Monday showing good variety and crisp wordplay throughout , I would have loved this when I was learning .

    TACHYON – the imagined refers to their rest mass which is an imaginary number , iMo , they travel faster than c so their relativistic mass , momentum and energy are “real” . Beloved by theorists , they go backwards in time . Subject of many stories concerning codes sent from the future , the Cuban Missile Crisis code being the most famous ( in my world anyway ) .

45. PDM@28 it is the rarer fusion , making it AWHILE solves all the problems as you explain .
    ( I have been waiting for a Gossard clue for ages and now I have stopped using the term ) .

46. Ronald@16 I almost agree , the best way to drink RETSINA is sitting outside , eating Greek meze and playing the locals at backgammon .

47. Roz@46, turn the chess board over, and there was the backgammon board on the flip side. Backgammon never my game, though the Greeks/Cretans seemed to prefer it, flicking their worry beads as they played…

48. I can’t make BORROWED work somehow, though I see Eileen’s blog has convinced many. I guess it must be me. NHO TACHYON, but as it was my LOI it couldn’t be anything else. Otherwise pretty well a straightforward top to bottom solve. Well, it’s Monday, isn’t it?

49. [Ronald @47: the best thing about backgammon is that in terms of actual game play, there’s only so good you can get at it, which means that the real art is knowing when to offer/accept a double. That also means that the element of luck is large enough that you can’t beat yourself up too badly when you lose. In chess, by contrast, if you lose, by definition you’ve been outsmarted. And they’ve been playing more chess than you have, so they’re going to win.]

50. Not thinking immediately of Sir Francis, I tried a Google for “Drake bowler” and came up with this chap. A bit obscure, I thought… And then the light dawned.

    Thanks Vulcan and Eileen.

51. [Further to the hoopoe discussion last week, see here.]

52. Very nice, thanks for the reference to Sir F. Drake, the clue didn’t make a lot more sense until explained.
    Thanks both

53. I thought “Took a while?” was one of the best cryptic definitions I’ve ever seen: absolutely brilliant… the penny dropping bust my clapometer.
    [mrpenney @47: backgammon and cribbage are probably my two favourite games. As you say, there’s a large element of luck, but knowing how to cash in on it when it’s good and cut your losses when it’s bad is what separates the winners from the losers.]

54. Roz @46 – now backgammon is a game I have not played since college. Supposed to be even older than chess.

55. HYD @54 yes much older then chess , but not as old as GO , never play GO with Far Eastern students .
    Blaise@ 53 my students are mad on cribbage , we have Cards Club four lunchtimes a week and I have been teaching them . I have promised to grant three wishes to anyone who gets 19 in a single hand .

56. Roz@54 – My grandad and I played lots of cribbage together, he never believed me that you could not get 19 points in hand, he spent ages trying.
    Needless to say, he couldn’t.

57. [HYD@56 it just seems strange , you can get every score up to 24 except 19 , I got 28 once but have never got 29 . ]

58. Is Shakespeare’s grammar good enough for us? “Absent thee from felicity a while.”

59. Enjoyed the crossword and blog, thanks Vulcan and Eileen. LOI BORROWED. Clearly a Marmite clue. Still – after the blog and several contributions about its greatness – don’t get how it’s cryptic, “awhile” was part of my initial reading. Loved ABANDON SHIP, SCHOOL BUS, PRIVATE PROPERTY, UNREST and many others.

60. A nice Monday cryptic for me.

    The clues had fewer components in each clue than the weekend quiptic (which seemed to have a lot for a quiptic). Does that make that quiptic necessarily more of a “cryptic” than this one? I don’t think so e.g. the quiptic does not have things like punning e.g. A BAND ON SHIP.

    I did not understand parsing to get to PROMONATORY and PRISON (PR = PAIR) – thanks for that. Unfortunately, I still don’t understand how A and FISH are covered by ACTIVE in a FISH out of water.

    Thanks Eileen and Vulcan.

61. AR @60
    Chambers gives ‘a’ as an abbreviation for active (presumably as in ‘active voice’).
    As in the blog, we need to take ‘fish’ in the surface reading as a verb – to fish something out of the water would be to drag it to the bank, whereas in the definition it is a noun – a fish.

62. AR@60

    A = Active
    Fish out of water = drag to the bank
    A fish out of water = one uncomfortably

63. Eileen @61
    Frogman @62

    Thank you. I did not read the blog correctly,

64. Took a while. Almost more Imogen than Vulcan? Most enjoyable though, and thank you Eileen for top hosting.

65. I liked it a lot so thanks to Vulcan and Eileen. A FISH OUT OF WATER at 1d was a favourite but there were several others that have already been well-canvassed, particularly the intelligence forbidden to Americans, NOUS (13a). Far too late to the party as I see today’s Imogen blog is already up!

66. Another Monday puzzle completed, thankfully, after a rough week

    Like many others, I enjoyed ABANDON SHIP (even if it’s a classic) and BORROWED (which makes perfect sense to me)

    [Roz@57, I did score a cribbage 29 once, in an informal tournament, so lots of witnesses. Very exciting!]

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