Cryptic crossword No 29,678 by Brockwell

59 comments on “Cryptic crossword No 29,678 by Brockwell”

1. This was a lot of fun, although I stared at the SW for longer than I should. I spotted the SQUARE theme after solving TRAFALGAR, LEICESTER and PIAZZA and then noticed that FOURS, UNCOOL and REFACE had already directed us to it. I also had SHAPE along with some of scchua’s selections. I didn’t know MATZO but it was fairly clued (another square?). For once, I was aware of the ARSENIC device as I think we had it earlier in the week. A very entertaining finish to a good week of puzzles.

   Ta Brockwell & scchua.

2. Thanks Brockwell and scchua
   I found the SW much harder than the rest, though I had never heard of the bet in 4d. Some clever clues. My favourite was PIAZZA.
   I wonder what overseas solvers will make of FOURS?
   I’m not happy with 22a. Isn’t the convention that if a clue refers to another one without specifying across or down, it means the one in the same direction?

3. I thought this was great fun – plenty of thematics helped – with some super surfaces. Loved BINARY, MADAMS, ARSENIC and EQUALISES. Thanks very much to Brockwell and to scchua for the ever-colourful blog!

4. I had an easier explanation of 1 down. I took the ellipsis to be referring to the clue number (1² = 1)
   …and there’s no final ellipsis on the clue to LEICESTER. Still, I suppose you can have it both ways.
   Oh and I thought the vehicle with the CROSSBAR was a bicycle.

5. Really enjoyed this, and even I was able to spot the theme today. Which helped, as I couldn’t see how exactly TRAFALGAR parsed. Last few took a bit of winkling out, especially loi PERFECT, which again I struggled to parse. Really liked PIAZZA and UNCOOL. MATZO simply had to be that even though that was a nho. Watched some racing from Tipperary yesterday, whenever I see that place name I have the earworm of that sad WW1 marching song where good old LEICESTER SQUARE appears. I digress, this puzzle very much on my perfect level…

6. Blaise @4. Me too.

7. I forgot to say that bike makes more sense as the “vehicle” in CROSSBAR.

   Sorry, I see that Blaise has added that to his post.

8. Ab fab from Brockwell cementing his position atop my setters league

   Top ticks for PLACED, PIAZZA and the splendidly simple ABC

   Muffin @2 I think many overseas solvers will be all to familiar with Joe (square) Root’s fours – certainly in cricket playing countries

   Cheers S&B

9. Early visit from me. Will say my thank yous later. Just to say that FOURS has a different parsing, although I was aware that JR’s appearance at 11 may give a helpful nudge in the right direction. B

10. Thanks scchua for your detailed blog, as always. Pardon my ignorance, but what is the significance of the green in LINDEN and RED? I only learned what a Magic Square was yesterday, as it was a Māori nina in Pangakupu. Not being a sudoku player or mathematician it was unfamiliar to me.

    The surface for LINDEN was amusing. BINARY’s surface was strange to visualise, and also funny because of that. PERFECT very clever.

11. Matzos often come as squares, as in the blog photo, and I think REFACE could mean Square OFF. One can also Square UP to someone. Unclear whether the turquoise colouring of LINDEN and RED has any significance.

12. There’s also (RE)MAIN and (MA)DAM(S) SQUARE. Grecian, is it FOUR is the SQUARE ROOT of sixteen?
    Ace @13: I took pie to be a bunch of ingredients, I didn’t know the printer thing.

13. I was thoroughly defeated by this. It’s been a rough week for me.

    I do quibble about “pie” though. This seems like the third (?) time this year that a clue has depended on knowing some obscure piece of printers’ slang. Maybe that is “GK” to people in the newspaper industry, but for the rest of us, not so much.

14. Lift and separate 11, AlanC @12

15. FOUR S four square?

16. 👍🏼 paddymelon @15

17. paddymelon @10; sagittarius @11 I too am wondering about the different shading for LINDEN and RED. scchua has maybe spotted something that I/we have not? The only link I can see is very tenuous. Living as I do in Suffolk, I know there is a LINDEN SQUARE in Bury St Edmunds, and RED SQUARE, of course, is in Moscow. They are therefore the only two named SQUAREs outside London … But I’m pretty sure that can’t be it.

18. Thx Grecian & paddymelon.

19. Saw 30a LEICESTER as Endless (secret[s] & lie[s])*.
    1d. … also indicating that “1 is one” (i.e. a square): 1^2 = 1.
    As are 29a FOURS: 2^2 = 4, which can be FOUR-SQUARE: robust, solid.
    [Why are Linden & Red in cyan?] — {Edit: some points have been made by others above. Took ages to get past “Error establishing database connection”}

20. I found this quite difficult; I didn’t catch on to the SQUARE theme until fairly far in, which probably didn’t help me.

    For those (surprisingly many) who don’t know of it, matzo is the unleavened cracker-like bread consumed during Passover (Pesach) in accordance with Jewish strictures regarding that holiday period. (Why is this night different from all other nights? Well, that’s one reason. See Ex. 12,15.) It’s a custom also honored in Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican traditions–the Eucharistic host is unleavened because the Last Supper was a seder. (But the host in most churches I’ve been to doesn’t resemble matzo especially closely.)

    Here in the US, you can buy matzo in your local grocery store during the appropriate period (which just ended). Some non-Jews also like it, though I’m not among them. But I do like a really good matzo ball soup.

21. Yet more brilliance from Brockwell – he certainly knows how to squeeze the last drop out of a theme!

    As usual, far too many ticks to single out favourites – always chuffed to see my home town in the grid, though.

    Many thanks to Brockwell and scchua.

22. [How Matzah Became Square: Manischewitz and the Development of Machine-Made Matzah in the United States]

23. FrankieG@19. Me too with the error messages. Have posted that on Site Feedback.

24. [Re error messages. KenMac/Admin has replied to my post on Site Feedback:
    “It looks like we’re under attack again. Pesky bots! I’ve put us on the highest alert for a while.”

25. A question: when using the online version and when a solution needs to be entered in two diferent parts of the grid I thought that once the first part was entered it automatically goes to the next postition in the grid? Did this not use to happen or am I misremembering? If it did and now it doesn’t why is that?

26. *different *position

27. Me too with the database error messages (and having to check that I’m human). I’m usually pleased to see Brockwell, though like Brendan I can’t usually keep up with all the twists and turns of his themes. I saw it (and it helped with TRAFALGAR) but not all the 1001 references.

    CROSSBAR isn’t the first, or even the 21st, part of a vehicle that comes to mind (yes, a bike is a likelier vehicle) but the clue is clear enough. The same could be said for Calgary (named after a bay on the Isle of Mull). Didn’t know about the PERFECTa bet, but Google confirms it. Pie as an anagrind is new – I thought of mud-pies rather than anything printer-related. Missed USURPER and couldn’t see why it was PLACED.

    Too many favourites to list, but BINARY is the perfect excuse for an earworm.

    Thanks Brockwell and scchua.

28. 30 across is interesting with Leicester having just been relegated from the football Premier League. Though I don’t know enough to decide whether the clue has topicality beyond being a nice surface.

29. Saw the theme for once.

    Favourites: PIAZZA, MATZO.

    I could not parse the ALGAR bit of 28ac.

30. [gladys @27
    I’ve been to Calgary….the one on Mull, that is. Lovely walk!]

31. LINDEN and RED.
    Does anyone know?
    Will you put me out of my misery?

32. I’ve been to Calgary – the one in Canada. I lived there for nine months in the 70’s.

33. The sign of a misspent adulthood is knowing what a perfecta is.
    Reader: I know what a perfecta is.

34. I didn’t see the theme until I had finished, although it should have been obvious. I liked the reverse clue PASSED OFF, the way that we can laugh off Trump as a FART, the definition of BAD SHAPE (my LOI), and the different SQUARE for UNCOOL. I agree with muffin @2 about 22A – it should have been 16D, and a slight quibble about essentially, which usually means the central letters. However, this was a very entertaining solve.

    Thanks Brockwell and scchua.

35. Perfecta seemed rather obscure. I’d certainly never heard of it.

36. Back in the 70s I spent summer vacations working in a bookies, and never came across a perfecta. Either it’s more recent, or it was exclusively american.
    (I did, however, know what a yankee bet was.)

37. Many thanks to scchua for the pretty blog and to everybody else for the nice comments. I’m hoping that the relatively low number of comments is a reflection of the site problems, rather than problems with the puzzle. Well done to AlanC for spotting DAM – I wondered if that might elude people. I’m counting scONE as well, of course. All the best, B

38. It seems like it’s been a hard week. Things looked promising when 1a and 1d went straight in, but no. I actually had the SW corner in quite quickly, but then it was a slog. I didn’t twig the theme until I’d finished, which seems dim on reflection. Good to see Root and his 4s so early in the season. I like a set of triple definitions too. Thanks Brockwell and scchua.

    PS. There’s been a lot of arsenic around here recently, should we tell Health and Safety?

39. Muffin@2 and Manhattan@25: You’re both correct. Both the online and the print version have changed for some reason. Quite annoying in fact.

    Mathematically, set and series are not synonymous. A set consists of zero or more discrete elements, while a series is an expression for a number.

    I liked PIAZZA, ARSENIC and BINARY, and couldn’t fully parse TRAFALGAR, though the answer was clear from the first part.

40. Echoing others who’ve found this a difficult week: third day in a row in which I revealed most of the answers, and I never normally struggle to this degree.

    I’m not picking fault with the puzzles, I should add, but it’s clearly not been my week.

41. What a lovely puzzle. Lured me into a false sense of security with 7a but it got significantly harder from there.

42. Thanks for the blog , great set of neat and concise clues , many on one line only . Most setters this week need a stern lecture on ink rationing .
    Find it hard to believe that nobody has mentioned ARSENIC (superb clue ) for the theme , the only stable isotope contains 225 quarks which of course is ………. ?

43. Yeah, Roz. I wasn’t expecting anyone to notice that one either 😂

44. [Roz @42: very funny. If sprog 3 looks at the red seats at the rear of the stand on his right, he will see me waving at him when KPR score in the 1st, 4th, 9th, 16th or 25th minute.]

45. [ AlanC I will not see him to tell him , he has gone down to London today with his friends , apparently they need to get there early as KPR like to announce crowd changes to the teams . My quark post is actually completely true . ]

46. I solved 30a. And I am SO proud that I figured it out.

    But that was all. The only clue I solved Tuesday through til today.

47. I agree with muffin @2 and Robi @34 that 22ac is a flawed clue. The 16 would normally mean 16ac, not 16dn. But other than that, I thought this puzzle was great.

48. I am not that brilliant, Roz 😂 i didn’t even catch the cricket part. I dud wander my way through and had a lot of fun doing it! Favorite was 23d

49. Steffen @46 well done – I had to reveal all of the SE. And I thought I was doing so well after most of the top half went in quickly. Not complaining, on reading the blog the clues are all fair.
    Not to self – “endlessly” can mean *both* ends of a word being removed!

50. These were nearly all parse-before-solve which for me is the sign of a great puzzle, thank you Brockwell! [Grecian@14 – quite a few of us on this site are trying to replace ‘lift and separate’ with a more accurate and inclusive alternative, ‘fission’ presently doing very nicely but your inventive mind might come up with another?]

51. muffin@2: I stared at _o_r_ for a while, then the lift and separate clicked for “FOURS” and I thought “why is that boundary though?” and then said out loud “Cricket!” Which I had to explain to my wife who fortunately knows enough to tune out after a bit. Joe Root keeps coming up but I never remember him, fortunately he was a bit of misdirection or perhaps a clue for those in the know.

    (Was also trying to remember the difference between a four and a six–it’s a ground-rule double versus a home run, apparently.)

    Very nicely done–thanks Brockwell and sschua!

    [Hadrian@50: somehow I think of “keming”–terrible kerning that makes two letters seem to merge when they should be separate?]

52. Could someone please explain the “lift-and-separate” for FOURS to me? I’m still not seeing anything other than the (obvious) scoring strokes by Joe ROOT. The “boundaries of ROOT are R and T, whereas the “boundaries” of ELEVEN are E and N. Neither suggests FOURS to me.

53. I took it as 11 with fission is 1 and 1 and clue 1 = SQUARE , also FOURS = FOUR and S , which are both SQUARE .
    Definition just boundaries .

54. Thanks Roz. I think the cricket version is better, if easier!

55. I suppose 11= SQUARESQUARE =FOURS , I suppose any wordplay that avoids cricket is better .

56. So here’s how I parsed 29a FOURS:

    11 is 1+1, which is 1 squared + 1 squared which is 2 which is the 1d 11d of FOUR. Also 29 (FOURS) – 11 (ROOT) is 18, which is 2 (1+1) times the 1d of three (11=1+1, plus 1 squared, equals 3). All this is easy as pie, which appears in clue 16a, and 16 is the 1d of 4, i.e. it is 4 squared which is FOUR + S (1d). So the answer is FOURS.

    As Roz@55 points out, none of this has anything to do with cricket (I would add “or rugby”), so I can’t understand why anyone had any difficulty seeing it.

    Thanks, Brockwell for the fun and scchua for the colourful blog. (scchua, we’re still looking for an explanation of the colours at 3 and 15, LINDEN and RED).

57. Tongue-in-cheek, I assume, Cellomaniac @56 🙂

58. Scchua – for SCONE, surely you mean last letter of “Christmas” rather than “cake”! It’s not like you to make a mistake, nor like others to spot it, clearly! Still, it proves that someone reads your blog properly!

59. I got off to a great start, completing the NW on the first pass, so expected to do better than I did. Gradually ground to a halt past the halfway mark. Some clever clues with great surfaces

    25a Finally got RU for “game”

    28a Nice to see cALGARy, second Canadian city in a row. We had another one yesterday

    24a, amazed that “digital system” didn’t have something to do with the fingers!

    29a held me up — choosing between FOURS and SIXES. I think Cellomaniac@56 finally nailed the right parsing! 🙂

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