Guardian 29,706 / Brummie

65 comments on “Guardian 29,706 / Brummie”

1. PERSEPOLIS
   Looks like PER SE POLIS (Polish virtually/almost Polish)
   Liked STYX, CRANIAL, CROSSHAIRS, MYRIAD and ALGIERS.

   Thanks Brummie and Eileen.

2. Lovely stuff from Brummie – lots of clues which were difficult until suddenly, somehow, they weren’t. I say the “y” in myriad and was convinced the milk producer was going to be a “yak” and then have a rant about yaks being male (naks are the females) but I was spared that bit of pedantry!

   In “thrice”, that is also the number of times that “t” (i.e. “time”) appears in the rest of the phrase “see the heartless grasping filthy rich” which is probably an unintended benefit.

   I enjoyed the cleverly hidden “Persepolis” and the imaginative anagrind for “integral” and the definition in “crosshairs” which was my last one in.

   Many thanks Brummie and Eileen.

3. The FOHN wind is a warm, dry wind that blows off the Alps and across Bavaria, giving that area it’s particularly mild climate. It gives it’s name to similar warm mountain winds elsewhere, such as the chinook wind that blows off the Rockies and across the Great Plains of America.

4. Thanks, KVa – that was my first thought for PERSEPOLIS. I’m not sure why I changed it when writing up the blog (it’s hardly ‘hidden’!) I’ll restore it now.

5. That was enjoyable. I’m wondering whether 4d originally had a different first letter to make a word of the very top row. If so, why was it changed? That will keep me pondering for at least, oh, 5 minutes!

6. The SW corner was last to yield, with CRASS unparsed, so many thanks for the elucidation, Eileen. FOHN had to be that, but an unknown. As was SECANT.
   Didn’t really know that ETHEREAL meant Fine, but all part of the learning process. A good challenge from Brummie today, I thought.

7. ronald @6 – fine = delicate = ethereal?

8. A Munich girl once told me that in Fohn seasons of old morés relaxed and people were excused for going a bit wild; sounded like fun. Meanwhile, Persepolis was new, but I remembered secant from school Geom. Couldn’t quite think how to swap bear with hold (bear with/hold with something …?), and took ages twigging randy for hot (sigh). All good fun, ta Brum and Eileen.

9. I needed to bung-and-check a couple of letters to finally get the CROSSHAIRS/ALGIERS pairing. This was a stop-start solve – once the easy early ones were in, I kept leaving it to do something else, coming back and solving a couple more, and so on. Some nice penny drop moments for MYRIAD, SECAN’T, UNROMANTIC, GINGERSNAP and SEABORNE. FOHN brought back memories of long-ago geography lessons.

   Brummie sometimes has a theme, but I can’t see one here.

10. Like MartinRadon @5, I wondered why Brummie ignored the easy Nina on the top row. This seemed tricky at first, but even the obscure words were largely guessable, as Eileen states. Favourites were SEABORNE, CRANIAL, ETHEREAL, CROSSHAIRS, MYRIAD and GINGERSNAP.

    Ta Brummie & Eileen.

11. Ginf @8: that does sound like fun. I believe there are also some winds, the Sharav might be one, which may be cited in court in mitigation for even quite serious crimes.

12. New for me: föhn wind, SECANT, SISKIN.

    I couldn’t quite parse 19d although I had ER = ex-queen in A + L=large and could not work out out to do with my remaining GIS letters!

    Thanks, both.

13. JOFT@2 describes the solving experience very well. THRICE was my favourite.

14. A DNF for ne, defeated in the SW corner, but what I got, I enjoyed.
    Didn’t know FOHN but I don’t mind unfamiliar words where the wordplay is clear.
    SECANT (derived, apparently from the Latin meaning “to cut”) is an odd word. I never did understand why mathematicians use it for several unrelated things; thus “a line that intersects a circle at two points” (the sense in which it’s used here) but also the reciprocal of a cosine (and, according to Wikipedia, two or three other things as well).
    We haven’t had an argument about Ximenes for a few days; but 8a offers a nice point. Using it as an anagram indicator, the word is “dicky” not “Dicky”. Is the gratuitous capital, necessary to make the surface work, permissible? X would be unhappy with it. I don’t think the definition is contrary to the surface, btw; there’s no beer ‘cos Dicky has drunk it all.
    Thanks to Brummie and Eileen.

15. NeilH @14 – thanks for that: of course! I couldn’t see beyond there’s no beer because Dicky is off the drink. (There are none so blind …)

16. grantinfreo @8: bear (as a verb) = hold = carry, as in “they arrived bearing gifts”.

17. Thanks Quirister, yes. Or, The chairperson will bear/hold/carry the responsibility for…

18. I thought of holding/bearing up, as in coping with the strain.

19. Thanks for the parsing of Normandy, Eileen. I just couldn’t see it. Apart from that one, we had the same list of favourites.

20. grantinfreo@8 (and Quirister @16, AlanC @18): I didn’t see any need to equate “bear” with “hold” – one’s carriage is one’s bearing or deportment i.e the way one moves.

21. JOFT @20: I believe ginf @8 was referring to the clue for HANDHOLD.

22. Chambers gives lg and lge as abbreviations for large, so I’m still puzzled as to why it’s ‘large cut’. Where else do abbreviations get indicated by cut or short?
    I too puzzled a bit over why hold was equal to bear, so thanks to Eileen and the blog for confirming my suspicions.
    Despite the above it was a pleasant outing.

23. Nothing unknown today. There are British fohns, Cross fell with its Helm wind, for example.

    Thanks Eileen and Brummie

24. INTEGRAL
    Is there some mismatch between the def and the solution?
    INTEGRAL as an adjective is ‘entire/whole’ or ‘being an essential part of the whole’.
    INTEGRAL, as a noun, means ‘the whole’.
    ‘Part of the whole’: Does this define INTEGRAL correctly?
    I was tempted to split it into ‘part’ and ‘of the whole’. Dunno if it works.
    Overthinking?

25. Grant@8 , the lintel will bear/hold a weight of 50MN .

26. Thanks for the blog , very good puzzle as usual , NORMANDY and ETHEREAL flowed very neatly .
    The theme relates to Ernst Bettler , famous designer of posters using different types of innovative typography , each of which he named .

27. JOFT @20 – I took grant’s comment as AlanC @21 did but my take on the double definition in 4dn was carriage = deportment / bearing and direction = (compass) bearing. My apologies for not making that clear.

    Thanks for the tip-off re the theme, Roz @26 – never in a month of Sundays!

28. I enjoyed this one and only had to Google finches and FÖHN. MYRIAD is lovely.

    Do you sometimes find, on the threshold of sleep, that these clues just unjumble themselves and fly in? This was the case for me for most of the South West and a good swathe of the North East, which, on reflection, was probably a bit of luck – although solving at 4 am may not be best practice for general wellbeing.

    Anyway, very good. Thanks, Brummie and Eileen.

29. For those of you wishing to pursue the fascinating theme spotted by Roz @26, here is all you need to know about Ernst Bettler.

30. Dave Ellison@23. The Helm Wind is not a fohn wind as it is a cold wind (it is a ‘standing wave’ wind). We do have fohn winds in Britain, although none is named. They are caused by the difference in the change of temperature between moist and dry air as it rises/falls due to topography (the ‘adiabatic lapse rate’ for the scientifically minded).

    Essentially, it requires energy to hold water vapour as clouds in any air mass. When that air mass hits a mountain barrier, it rises and cools. This causes the moisture to condense and fall as rain/snow. When the now drier air mass starts to descend on the other side of the mountain, it warms up again. However, the energy originally needed to hold that moisture is no longer required, so it warms the air mass a bit more instead. The air descending the mountain is therefore warmer than it was when approaching.

    In large ranges like the Alps, this can change the temperature by 5 degrees or more. But even in Britain’s lower mountains, it can produce a degree or two of difference. This is particularly noticeable when there is a southerly wind in springtime. In these conditions, areas immediately north of mountains, such as the coast of North Wales, the Solway Plain in Cumbria or the Moray Firth in Scotland, routinely record the highest temperatures in Britain.

31. It seems I’m a bit of a contrarian today. I found FOHN but got no satisfaction from googling* for an apparently random set of consecutive letters to find it an alternative spelling of a peculiar wind. IMO we’re in “Bolivian poet” territory there. There is a fine line between “gettable” and “guessable”, and I prefer to be on the former side of it.

    SISKIN was also new to me, although I’m sure familiar to the twitchers among us.

    Other than that I had the necessary GK even if I couldn’t remember enough O level maths to recall exactly what a secant was. We’ve seen the SE thing before, and it’s starting to stick in my brain.

    *Other search engines are available.

32. Great puzzle, thanks, Brummie and Eileen.
    The Föhn in Austria is generated when the wind goes up one side of the Alps and comes down the other side, releasing the energy as heat. Temperature rises of 15°C or more degrees are not uncommon. The changes can be very unpleasant, causing headaches and circulation problems. Some say that the doctors in Innsbruck do not operate on Föhn daysbecause it impairs their skills!

33. A pleasant solve with some nice touches. I liked the randy Frenchman in NORMANDY, the surface for ETHEREAL, and the AMETHYST wordplay. I couldn’t parse ALGIERS because my ‘large’ was L, presumably the ‘large cut’ is for the surface and/or to distinguish LG from L. My jorum was FÖHN.

    Thanks Brummie and Eileen.

34. Thank to Brummie for a lovely midweek workout. A few headscratchers and two new words @24A FOHN and @22A SECANT.
    Favoutites were 7dn MYRIAD;
    16dn AMETHYST; 21dn THRICE;
    22dn SISKIN;
    10ac STYX; 20ac ETHEREAL;
    Thx to Eileen for the blog

35. The FOEHN spelling found in English dictionaries is there to account for there being no umlaut in English to change the pronunciation of FOHN from (approximately) an incorrect “phone” to a correct “fern”.

36. I concur with the general consensus that this was quite some puzzle. Quite a few gimmes which allowed me to get a foothold and then the steadily more chewy ones, now aided by having crossers. Fohn and siskin were two that I knew (for a pleasant change). Secant left me scratching my head a bit as to its parsing, thanks Eileen. Loved Persepolis when it finally leapt out and and many others too.
    As for the ‘theme’, I seem to have one leg that is now considerably longer than the other. Having wasted an inordinate amount of time researching the fictitious Ad Man, I conclude that nowhere were newly minted typesetting words mentioned, it was a fictitious Swiss Company cast in the role of I.G. Farben, two swiss towns with suffixes juxtaposed and 4 posters supposedly spelling NAZI subversively, although only A was shown. Nice one Roz, rascal.

    Thanks very much Brummie and Eileen.

    No doubt a huge portion of humble pie heading my way.

37. [ This is the actual article (pure fiction) that got this ball rolling https://ethicsofdesign.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/christopher-wilson.pdf ]

38. This was enjoyable. Like Martin@5, I was really pleased I’d spotted that the top row spelled out L-I-T-H-I-U-M – and so spent a goodly while trying to make 5D start with an H, until the real answer to the pleasingly succinct clue hit me.
    I also liked the surfaces for STYX, THRICE and SEABORNE.
    Thank you for the blog, Eileen – especially for the help parsing LECTURER: I always find it tricky when one has to find a synonym and then make an anagram of the thing…
    Thanks to Brummie for the fun

39. [Thanks AlanC@21 – my mistake]

40. Thanks Brummie. I found this to have the right amount of challenge for me & I managed to come up with everything except SISKIN. Favourites included CRANIAL, CRASS, TRIPOD, BEARING, & RAINFALL. Thanks Eileen for the blog.

41. Taffy @37 “Bettler” is the German word for beggar, so I think the author was hinting to the expression “beggars belief”.

42. In France you have the expression “une réponse de Normand”, which can be translated as “an answer given by someone from Normandy.”

    This means an answer that will leave you non the wiser as it will be neither ‘no” or “yes” but “maybe yes maybe no.”

43. “Neglectfully” (ETHEREAL) is a good example imo of how anagram indicators have drifted in recent years from simple synonyms of “bad” or “rearranged”.

44. After 10 minutes I wasn’t optimistic I’d get anywhere with this.

    However, it turned out to be an enjoyable mix of unlikely obscurities and well-concealed anagrams.

    I went for SECOND rather than SECANT. I had a recollection it was a mathematical/topographical line of some sort and, as it was my LOI, I couldnt be bothered to parse it.

    Thanks to Eileen for the blog.

45. [Frogman @42
    You have reminded me of a description of a diplomat:
    If he says yes, he means maybe
    If he says maybe, he means no
    If he says no, he’s not a diplomat…]

46. NeilH @14: Apparently false capitals are currently acceptable in the cryptic world. I personally think they should be avoided. Setters sometimes deal with this by beginning a clue with the word in question. For example, ‘Dicky has no beer, husband out on the drink’ would work in my view.

47. I agree with Tony@46 , fake capitals “allowed” , fake non-capitals frowned upon . I would prefer not to see either and as Tony shows , they can be “hidden” at the front .

    My spoof theme was mainly for Lord Jim who would get the inference . I hope nobody was too put out by it . Advance warning – my next spoof theme will concern Jonathan Swift and Gullible’s Travels .

48. Roz@47 [Gullible’s Travels, very droll. Please don’t stop though.]

49. Good fun. Thought it was going to be a write in after the top left went in easily, but some much stickier stuff awaited. Needed the blog to parse NORMANDY, couldn’t see what was going on there at all. Thought BEARING was a nice dd, and a helpful reminder of the bear/carry/hold synonym. Favourite was THRICE.

50. [Last year, from New Year to Easter, siskins were by far the commonest birds coming to our feeders in our town-edge garden – nearly always there would be at least 4 or 5 there. This year, only a few tens over the same period, though. Difficult to explain!]

51. Muffin it depends on the weather and natural food supplies both here and in Northern Europe . Siskins do move about a lot , both within the UK and to us from elsewhere .

52. [Not sure about the real target of Roz’s upcoming spoof, but I don’t have to tell ya who we nimble folk suspect.]

53. The point about Ernst Bettler is that he wasn’t a daft beggar, but a serious one

54. Roz @26 I looked up Ernst Bettler — what does he have to do with a theme in this puzzle? Or is mentioning the theme the spoof?

    We’ve had a good bit about Foehn winds in various parts of the UK and the problems they may or may not have caused. My experience of them comes from the Canadian prairie when I lived for most of a year in Calgary. Alberta winters are cold, let me tell you, and the occasional Chinook wind (in January and March, I was told, but not in February) was very welcome. For a day or two it was t-shirt weather and a lovely relief. You’d know a Chinook was coming tomorrow if you looked at the mountains to the westward and saw a “Chinook arch,” an arch of the cloud formations over the Rockies.

    Thanks, Brummie and Eileen.

55. A DNF for me having solved 4 clues.

    9a – I might be missing the obvious, but why does NEWS = N N? Is it something to do with Newsnight?

    13d – why does Gingers = Sandy’s?

56. Steffen @55
    N is “new”, so NN is “news”. I rather liked that.

    Ginger=Sandy for hair colour. Less convinced about that!

57. Ty muffin.

58. Muffin @45. Then no doubt you will have heard the description of a lady…

59. That took several sittings, SW especially resistant, I’m in awe of the pre-elevenses solvers, Brummie on great form and thank you Eileen

60. Ronald@6 and Eileen @7: I don’t see fine = delicate = ethereal. Sliding synonyms tend to go off the rails. But what if the clue has a “crypticism” built into it? That is, you look at each equals sign separately without trying to link the first and the last. A second order one. Guess I’m learning too.

61. Why is “NN” news?

62. KT @ 61 see comment 56

63. Crosshairs, concentrated on prey? I don’t understand.

64. Mark , the sights on a rifle have crosshairs for aiming . You see them in films sometimes .

65. All correct, but couldn’t parse NORMANDY, SECANT, or ALGIERS, so thank you Eileen

    11a PERSEPOLIS[h] was audacious in that the answer was essentially given in the clue, with only one letter added on the end. Amazed that no one else commented on that!

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