Guardian Prize 29,763 / Fed

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I’m always pleased to see Fed’s name on a puzzle and he’s on top form here.

I really enjoyed this clever and witty puzzle, with its characteristically elusive definitions and ingenious constructions, giving rise to a few groans and chortles along the way, with neat story-telling surfaces throughout. I particularly liked 5ac ASHTRAY, 10ac PAELLA, 26ac ABRUPT, 28ac MISSOURI, 3dn HELVETICA, 6dn SPONGERS, 9dn PRAYING MANTIS, 17dn DIARRHOEA and 2dn STUDIED.

Many thanks to Fed for the fun.

Definitions are underlined in the clues.

 

Across

1 Idiot’s mind on song (7)
AIRHEAD
AIR (song) + HEAD (mind)

5 Somewhere to put cigarettes and a pipe down – crack addict’s heading inside (7)
ASHTRAY
A (from the clue) + SH (pipe down) + A[ddict] in TRY (crack) – I loved ‘pipe down’

10 Dish that’s the opposite of T-bone (6)
PAELLA
PA[t]ELLA (bone) – as in Rufus’ classic clue ‘Two girls, one on each knee’
We have to read T-bone as ‘T minus bone’, then reverse it (opposite) to give ‘bone minus t’

11 Golfer was regularly stopping mid-swing – it helps one pack more … (4,4)
ROOF RACK
Alternate letters (regularly) of gOlFeRwAs in the middle of ROCK (swing)

12 … power initially, easily approaching greens – well, one of them (3)
PEA
P (power) + Easily Approaching, initially – it’s good to see a meaningful ellipsis, along with a cleverly allusive  surface

13 What gets barrister going during a trial assuming all goes well (2,4)
AT BEST
B (what gets Barrister going) in A TEST (a trial)

14 Character from cartoon strip voiced by unknown old soldier (4,4)
YOGI BEAR
O (old) + GI (soldier) in Y (unknown) + BEAR – sounds like (voiced) ‘bare’ (strip – I can’t quite make this work: ‘strip’ surely means to lay bare?)

15 Wrong to cuddle with a young man (5)
SWAIN
SIN (wrong) round (to cuddle) W (with) + A, from the clue

16 Found fantastic reduction (9)
INTRODUCE
An anagram (fantastic) of REDUCTION

19 It makes things sweeter in Cheers since Norm first arrived wanting company (9)
ASPARTAME
AS (since) + PAR (norm) + TA (cheers) + [co]ME (arrived, minus co (company) – this initially looked like a mismatch of tenses but ‘come’ is the past participle here: ‘has come’ = ‘has arrived’
I have never watched ‘Cheers’ but googling it, with ‘Norm’, revealed the aptness of the surface

21 Godless old man with new silver piercing (5)
PAGAN
PA (old man) + N (new) round AG (silver)
An attempt to forestall prolonged discussion re the definition:
PAGAN
Collins: 1 a member of a group professing a polytheistic religion or any religion other than Christianity, Judaism or Islam;
2 a person without any religion; heathen
Chambers: a person following any (esp polytheistic) pre-Christian religion; (with cap – ITALICS) a person following a polytheistic nature-worshipping religion; a person who is not a Christian, Jew or Muslim, regarded as uncultured or unenlightened, a heathen; more recently, someone who has no religion

24 Tom Hanks’ character into dancing – makes sense (8)
GUMPTION
(Forrest) GUMP (Tom Hanks’ character) + an anagram (dancing) of INTO

26 Short game between a bishop and priest on vacation (6)
ABRUPT
RU (Rugby Union (game) between A B ( a bishop) and P[ries]T

27 Jack volunteers once, right (3)
TAR
TA (Territorial Army – volunteers once – renamed the Army Reserve in 2012) + R (right)

28 State tourism is affected after temperature dropped (8)
MISSOURI
An anagram (affected) of [t]OURISM, minus t (temperature) IS

29 Smells grim in house occasionally (6)
ODOURS
DOUR (grim) in alternate letters of hOuSe

30 Tot wrapping present gets stuck (7)
ADHERED
ADD (tot) round HERE (present)

31 Pleasant article following story (7)
AFFABLE
A (article) + F (following) + FABLE (story)

 

Down

2 Twins are extremely upset and agitated (2,1,4)
IN A STEW
An anagram (upset) of TWINS + A[r]E

3 Face banks to haggle – rejecting a quote under 55 (9)
HELVETICA
H[aggl]E + a reversal (rejecting) of A CITE (a quote) under LV (55)

4 Alternatively set up bandsaw on the counter to make changes (6)
ADAPTS
A reversal (on the counter) of alternate letters (which does not mean the same as ‘alternatively’  – see here of SeT uP bAnDsAw)

6 Freeloaders and wife-swappers making group of women pose half-cut (8)
SPONGERS
WI (Women’s Institute – group of women) is replaced in S[wi]NGERS (wife-swappers) by PO[se]

7 Rattle mostly using tip of baton for beat (5)
THROB
THRO[w] (rattle, mostly) + B[aton] – neat positioning of Rattle at the beginning of the clue for an allusion to Sir Simon

8 Old-fashioned chief turning some spies (7)
ARCHAIC
ARCH (chief) + a reversal (turning) of CIA (some spies)

9 Six-footer quietly trains in a gym after work (7,6)
PRAYING MANTIS
P (quietly) + an anagram (after work) of TRAINS IN A GYM) – a lovely surface

17 Complaint from 1 or 2 (9)
DIARRHOEA
An anagram (in a stew, from 2dn) of AIRHEAD (1 ac) + OR, from the clue

18 With no starters required, he’d put pitta back in position (8)
ATTITUDE
A reversal (back) of [h]E’D [p]UT [p]ITTA

20 Well-read boss takes Peter out (7)
STUDIED
STUD (boss) round DIE (peter out)
I loved this one for the misleading ‘takes Peter out’ but I looked askance at the definition and consulted Chambers, to find ‘well considered; deliberately contrived, designed; over-elaborated with loss of spontaneity – all as I confidently expected – but then ‘well prepared by study; well read; versed’
Collins has, simply,
1. carefully practised, designed or premeditated: a studied reply;
2. an archaic word for learned
which lets Fed off the hook: I wouldn’t expect him to go for the first available definition!

22 Shock on cutting clothes (7)
APPAREL
RE (on) in APPAL (shock)

23 Remote Portuguese city essentially bluffing (3-3)
FAR-OFF
FARO (Portuguese city) + [blu]FF[ing]

25 Spinning record about a class tourist ultimately makes Pulp (5)
PASTE
A reversal (spinning) of EP (record) round A [clas]S [touris[T

41 comments on “Guardian Prize 29,763 / Fed”

  1. I made notes for once so I could check what I couldn’t parse, so thanks, Eileen, for several explanations.

    Mostly a fun puzzle, and, as you say, with good surfaces generally.

    Thanks Fed

  2. Thanks for the comprehensive blog, Eileen

    I found this very difficult and you helped me with several parsings I was not able to see. I liked the variety, but felt differently about the surfaces – I did not see very many. No favourites today.

    Thanks too to Fed for the challenge

  3. Thanks Eileen. I found this hard but that added to the sense of accomplishment when I entered my LOI, 3d for which admittedly I had to seek Google assistance having never encountered the answer. Surely one of the most convoluted clues I can remember. 6 and 20d also took some serious thought.

  4. Really enjoyed this, but was glad for the blog. I ran into the same temporary holdup at the end of ASPARTAME as Eileen did, but all was well in the end. Also guessed PAELLA but didn’t get the T-bone bit.

    Some of the clues were quite intricate (but not in a bad way). About 3/4 of the way through I was wondering why the mindset was familiar, and had an inspiration that Fed too studied maths at university: I checked and he did!

    PITA (peetah) is how the word is used in the US, but the PITTA spelling (and pronunciation) might be familiar to those who know Amy Winehouse’s You Know I’m No Good (here, with lyrics)

  5. Some great surfaces, I enjoyed this a lot, agree that ‘strip’ and ‘bare’ are not quite synonyms, ‘cartoon strip’ is a lovely ‘divide and conquer’ though. Thank you Fed and Eileen!

  7. I wrote this last week and have pasted in without reading the blog or comments yet.

    I was optimistic when ASHTRAY went in fully parsed and things remained mostly steady from there, although this was a difficulty level up from the previous two Prizes.

    I felt either lucky or in tune to spot PRAYING MANTIS, YOGI BEAR and ASPARTAME quickly. Between the FT and Guardian there had already been at least 3 THROBs this year, 2 very recently, so that became a write-in.

    I finished up in the NW with PAELLA (bone – T) last one in.

    I really enjoyed this and Fed is one of my favourites now I’ve tuned in.

    Thanks Fed and Eileen, I will, of course, read your blog.

  8. T-bone? Quite the opposite; it’s a rice dish (Everyman 4029)

    Liked ASHTRAY, PEA, PRAYING MANTIS, DIARRHOEA and STUDIED (someone may have a word or two to say about Peter!)

    Thanks Fed (nice puzzle) and Eileen (great blog).

  9. Thanks, Eileen. As Dr WhatsOn@4 said, some ‘intricate’ wordplay that I admired when I worked it out, but which also left me needing your explanations for some, like ASPARTAME. It didn’t help that I’ve never watched Cheers (although I did once have lunch in the Boston bar that inspired it – that was a while ago, and Google says it’s now changed its name to include ‘Cheers’). I particularly liked ASHTRAY, HELVETICA, PAELLA – the intricate ones that I worked out! And, yet again, I had to look up DIARRHOEA to make sure of the spelling. A very enjoyable puzzle. Thanks both.

  10. Quite a hard puzzle, though I got there in the end, and am pleased the several I could not parse are now clarified. I still have to think hard about how Cheers fits the order in ASPARTAME, but I realise ‘since Norm’ is first.

    No problem with bare=strip for me. Though strip is often intransitive, and bare usually is not, it can be used reflexively, so when I strip, I bare myself.
    Thanks, Eileen (in 20 the solution has been underlined instead of the definition, BTW). Thanks also to Fed.

  12. Many thanks, Fed, and Eileen. A fair challenge but not quite my cup of tea. I found quite a few of the definitions … with the letters I had already entered … enough to crack quite a number of clues, so I kept being left to parse/diagnose/unravel the cryptic part of the clue. I agree that the SH in ASHTRAY was neat but rather lost the will with SPONGERS.

  13. I couldn’t parse 5ac, 6d.
    I had a feeling that 10ac (loi) had something to do with patella less the T so thank you for explaining it, Eileen 🙂

    Favourites: HELVETICA, STUDIED.

  14. A really great puzzle, thanks Fed. And thanks Eileen for fully explaining PAELLA – I twigged it must be patella without the T but missed the subtlety of T-bone becoming ‘bone minus T’. Lovely!
    [KVa @8 – isn’t Peter/peter a standard capitalisation misdirection? The same trick is used here in Norm/norm. But I’m never entirely sure what the rules are around these things – I mean, I don’t think setters would get away with doing it the other way around, eg using ‘peter’ to clue someone called Peter? But I may, as ever, be entirely wrong!]

  15. When I saw it was FED my heart sank a little but I persevered and did complete it albeit with some help and a few down clues unparsed.

    My favourites were: ASHTRAY, YOGI BEAR, AFFABLE, DIARRHOEA, HELVETICA (though I didn’t fully parse it – but did get the LV)

    Thanks Fed and Eileen

  16. MOH@14
    I liked the clue (it was in my faves list). However, I have earlier seen some commenters object to such capitalisation misdirection. That’s what I meant @8.


    I don’t think setters would get away with doing it the other way around, eg using ‘peter’ to clue someone called Peter
    Agree.

  19. MOH & KVa: I think solvers expect a word that necessarily has a capital will not have it downgraded, but adding a capital to a word that doesn’t usually have one is considered fair. Setters will often disguise what they have done, as Eileen has mentioned with regard to Rattle in 7d, but this is not just fair – it’s appreciated.

    Edit: Apologies, Eileen. I might have expected you to be on the ball!

  21. My last two in were PAELLA and ADAPTS. I was pleased to get the former, as the word play was very clever, but I had the latter pencilled in for ages without seeing how it works. Like Eileen, I queried the use of ‘alternatively’ to denote letters taken alternately from the fodder.

    I think Chambers may have a smidgen of a get out for Fed: alternative either of a pair; alternatively by way of alternative. This is still awkward, since there is nothing to denote which of each pair is chosen; plus the fodder in this case is split 3,2,7 – meaning that the chosen letters are first and third in the first word, and so on, which isn’t much like taking one of a pair! We’d be required to imagine regrouping ‘get up bandsaw’ into pairs, which is not at all what the clue tells us to do.

    I enjoyed SPONGERS, having casually written SWINGERS in at first, and then parsing the clue properly. Good clue, good crossword.

    Thanks to Fed and Eileen.

  23. Chambers defined bare as a transitive verb as “strip, uncover”. So Fed has support there. I really enjoyed this puzzle. SPONGERS was a delight.

  26. Thanks for that link, Eileen @18 – interesting reading. Of course we also allow an implied false capitalisation from the first word of a clue. Nice work becoming travail… [btw, apologies if I’ve been rehashing an old and well-worn discussion]

  27. Good fun solve. I couldn’t disentangle the ‘opposite of T-bone’ although I realised that the T was missing from PA(t)ELLA. I also was beaten by the ‘takes Peter out’ in the clue for STUDIED. I liked ROOF RACK, HELVETICA, ADAPTS, and DIARRHOEA.

    Thanks Fed and Eileen.

  28. Enjoyed this puzzle and got most of the solutions but PAELLA, STUDIED, ASPARTAME, HELVETICA, and SPONGERS not only proved to be beyond me but, having seen Eileen’s excellent parsing, would never have fallen given a week of my staring at them.

  29. We find ourselves in almost complete agreement with Eileen and the bloggers thus far. We started the crossword late one evening when we were tired, but just seemed to keep popping up with answers after our first THROB! We struggled with with a few explanations, but still ‘finished’, at HELVETICA, but with eight incomplete parsings! Further thought next day and some pennies from heaven proudly gave us a complete sweep.

    Our favourites were very similar to other solvers. So, thanks to Fed for a most imaginative and entertaining puzzle and to Eileen for the customary super blog.

  30. Thanks Fed for a splendid prize. I solved this in bits & pieces and I managed everything except for the full parsing of PAELLA (I got the ‘patella’ part but failed to see the ‘minus sign’) and ASPARTAME (I guessed that from the definition.) My top picks were AIRHEAD, YOGI BEAR, ABRUPT, MISSOURI, IN A STEW and DIARRHOEA. Thanks Eileen for the blog.

  31. I thought this was excellent and good to see a properly tricky Prize for once. Also rather pleasing to have some three-letter entries.

    Loved ASHTRAY, DIARRHOEA and PEA.

    ADAPTS was last one in.

  32. An enjoyable puzzle with clever wordplay (e.g. 9a has 4 elements in a 9 letter clue) and excellent surfaces. I parsed 10a as T-bone, literally though not physically, = bone with a T whereas PAELLA = bone without a T – the opposite. I think it works but Eileen’s parsing is neater and undoubtedly what Fed had in mind. It reminded me too of Rufus’s classic; did he once say it was his favourite?
    Thanks to Fed and Eileen

  33. Lovely blog and top class puzzle.

    Thanks for the deconstruction of the cluing for PAELLA and ASPARTAME.

    My favourite was ROOFRACK.

  34. I almost completed this last week with just 10 across not solved. I came back to the puzzle today to find that the Guardian’s claim that crosswords are saved automatically to be untrue now, as the grid had been wiped clean. So I had to start again, which was annoying. Has any one else suffered from this? I entered PAELLA as last one in, but without being able to parse it, so thanks for the explanation, Eileen. Thanks, too, to Fed for the challenge.
    (I’ve just noticed that my name, email address and “Remember me” tick have also been erased. Am I being punished for not buying the paper?)

  36. Gumption means grit or courage, doesn’t it? (Hence, eg, the cleaning product, which is gritty and meant for the tough jobs).

  37. I may have the “prize”
    Of being the last one to finish this as HELVETICA and PAELLA were put in at about 1830 this evening !

    An excellent puzzle yielding its charms slowly, at least for me

    Thanks Eileen for the precise and helpful parsing (some had eluded me even over the week long solving span!) and to all the other contributors to the learned discourse.

  38. Like many others here, managed to complete the crossword but needed help with the parsing.
    Thanks Eileen
    .

  39. I finished it yesterday. I enjoyed it until about half way, but the rest of the clues had too many disconnected bits for direct solving. I note that others also had problems parsing. Anyway, I found answers that fitted the remaining gaps, and worked back from some of them to match the clues, but I couldn’t be bothered to do that for the last few. Thanks to Eileen for the other explanations.

  40. I did this puzzle late last Saturday evening after a very long drive from the south of France to Paris. I must have been on Fed’s wavelength or overstimulated by the journey, as unusually I didn’t find completing it in the least bit difficult. The parsing was an entirely different matter, so very grateful for the blog!

  41. So people who love to make up rules say that Capitalizing an uncapitalized word is fair, but uncapitalizing a Capitalized word is unfair (or is it the other way around?). Go figure.

    The surface of 7d THROB is brilliant, as Eileen points out. Sir Simon sometimes doesn’t use a baton at all, so “mostly” in the clue has added meaning.

    Fed’s puzzles are always full of humour – is that any surprise? And Eileen’s blogs are always helpful and friendly. This was an excellent example of both.

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