Guardian 29796 / Paul

90 comments on “Guardian 29796 / Paul”

1. On opening the puzzle and seeing the long multi-light ‘almost-certain-to-be-a-massive-anagram’ clue, my first thought was “we are back in the realms of classic Paul”. Then the poos and farts starting turning up and my suspicion was confirmed. In the light of which, it seems quite fitting that LOI was SCATOLOGY. I’m afraid I did not combine all my Scrabble sets to play around with the anagram fodder in the long ‘un. Left it til last-but-one and then filled it in from crossers and enumeration. I guess I am left feeling flushed with success.

   Thanks both

2. I thought that HANDSAW was an anagram of SHAW outside the word AND (‘with in’).

   Fabulous puzzle. Thanks Paul and duncanshiell

3. Once the big beast went in, I found this reasonably straightforward last night and had a lot of fun with the wind behind my sails. Flushed indeed PM @1. I liked MAGNIFICAT, NOTWITHSTANDING, CATACOMB and NINCONPOOP. daja57 @2: that was my parsing as well but Duncan’s works as well.

   Ta Paul @ duncanshiell.

4. Paul at his best and a real challenge for Duncan’s colour palette!
   Thanks to both.

5. Oooh, sociology fits there, that is an investigation, and there’s SO for thus and LOG for record, now what’s this prowler? Oh no, wait, this is Paul of course it’s SCATOLOGY.

   I guessed 3d was going to be a massive anagram. Thanks for doing the leg work and confirming. The plan was to leave that and get it from the crossers. Unfortunately, I filled in all the righthand side without even a dent in the left. Slowly worked my way into it by trying different options for the shorter words and it slowly revealed itself which just left the prementioned ology and CASANOVA to then put in. Helped a bit by knowing Paul’s style and assuming business and wind were going to be some schoolboy humour.

   Enjoyed TRANSFER, SPIDERMAN and CATACOMB

   For what it’s worth I parsed HANDSAW as per Duncan

   Something I learnt from crosswords but SPIDER-MAN should be hyphenated.

   This one was a tough second half.

   Thanks Duncan and Paul

6. The trouble with monsters like 4d et al is that you either spot them immediately and the puzzle’s half over before you start, or you can’t see them and half the puzzle is inaccessible for ages. In this case, I needed to have solved most of the rest before 4d appeared: obviously a massive anagram and very wittily done, but did anybody actually work it out cold?

   The rest was fun: I liked SUNLIT, OBOE, MAGNIFICAT, TEARFUL, SPRUCES, NOTWITHSTANDING. Couldn’t see either synonym for NEEDLE, and SCATOLOGY was last in (I should have guessed, this being Paul after all).

   Staticman@1: your M.O. and solving experience was almost exactly the same as mine. And can anyone explain why SPIDERMAN “must” be hyphenated?

7. Liked SCATOLOGY, HANDSAW, NINCOMPOOP, AIR SAC and NOTWITHSTANDING.
   Thanks Paul and duncan.

8. Liked SCATOLOGY, HANDSAW, NINCOMPOOP, AIR SAC and NOTWITHSTANDING.
   HANDSAW: Parsed it as deja57@2
   Thanks Paul and duncan.

9. The only disappointing thing about this puzzle was that I worked out the long anagram fairly early on and then had plenty of crossers, making the rest of the puzzle easier! Great fun – I enjoyed NOTWITHSTANDING especially.

   Thanks Paul and Duncan

10. Sorry. I tried to edit my post@7, but it has resulted in two separate posts.

11. YOUR CALL … was my FOI which was a massive help in what was without doubt my fastest Paul solve ever

    Agree with D@2 about WITH IN

    Ticks for almost every clue

    Cheers D&P

12. Gladys@6 Spider-man is hyphenated, just because that’s how Marvel Comics do it – see

15. Durn! The link won’t post. Anyway, see the Wikipedia page for the web-slinging photojournalist

16. It’s oddly satisfying to see the phrase YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US PLEASE HOLD THE LINE repeated so often through the blog! Thanks for sorting out the anagram, Duncan. Like many others, I suspect, I saw the answer from the crossers and didn’t bother with the working out.

17. Gladys@6: Stan Lee the creator of SPIDER-MAN added the hyphen to distinguish that comic book hero from Superman (not hyphenated). If you Google the comic books and movie posters you will see the hyphenation.

    I did think afterwards that HYPHEN was in the grid and was it doing something clever? Is the SPIDER/predator referred to in the clue for hyphen being cut? But I think that’s a bit of a stretch.

18. I saw the long anagram from the numeration almost immediately and that helped enormously. I rarely finish a Paul cryptic but I did today. Couldn’t parse all of them but still a win for me. I liked 17a – clever.

19. The long anagram put me off. It takes up so much space in the grid that the intersecting answers are given less help. Usually a fan of Paul and perhaps just needed to give this more time.

20. I’m happy to accept that he’s Spider-man if that’s his official name (though Bruce Wayne appears to be BATMAN not BAT-MAN). I have vague personal rules about the use of hyphens (“when needed to avoid ambiguity”) but often get reprimanded by people who insist that a hyphen must, or must not, be used for reasons that are unclear to me.

21. The idle thought occurred to me that if Wilfred Owen were writing today he might have another target for the line “The Old Lie…”
    Like duncanshiell, I saw the possibility of IMPORTANT, the crossers from OBOE and TEARFUL being easy to get, and it went nicely from there. Possibly the fact that I had spent about four hours yesterday dealing with an IT helpdesk had me in the necessary frame of mind.
    And yes, gladys @6 and others, I was sad enough to work it out; but I wasn’t quite sure what the fodder would be, so wrote out PITY A LOUT AND MISANTHROPE COULDN’T [C]ARE LESS and checked letters off from there, revealing that the AND wasn’t actually part of the fodder but that HELLO I had to be.
    I’m another with ticks for virtually all of it. Just a little Paul schoolboy humour, but a great deal of Paul the very skilful setter.
    Thanks, both.

22. Great invention on display yet again.
    I liked ‘dropping investigation’ for SCATOLOGY, the use of ‘within’ for HANDSAW, the neatness of ENTICED and the surface for SPIDERMAN.
    Thanks to Paul and duncanshiell

23. I baulk when I see Paul’s name at the top of a crossword, especially when the fist clue you look at seems impossible. But on occasion he throws up a fun, do-able puzzle. This was really enjoyable, I finally cottoned on to the long one with “customer initially cut off – ‘Hello? I …”.

    And when they say “All of our operators are busy helping other customers”, it really means there’s only one there and they’ve gone for lunch!

24. I’ll level with you, if you’re going to burn 41 characters on a stupidly long anagram; I would want it to be an actual reference and not something an automated call centre program might say. Otherwise you might compromise the quality of your crossword more than drawing from the well of ‘fart’ and ‘poop’ jokes again does. FWIW, a lot of the rest of the puzzle I thought relatively good by Paul’s standards.

    Thanks duncanshiell for making sense of it all.

25. I am another who had all the right-hand side in and the other crossers before working out the long anagram. And no, other than working out it had to be an anagram I didn’t work it through.

    Thank you to Paul and duncanshiell

26. Loved the def of dropping investigation for the Pauline SCATOLOGY.

    Agree with others re HANDSAW construction using the separated WITH + IN.

    The whopper went in as soon as important emerged from the murk. Didn’t bother to unravel the anagram but it was quite clever nonetheless.

    Failed to spot the hand in NEEDLE, but otherwise reasonably straightforward.

    First class blog, many thanks duncanshiel.

27. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: does anyone actually work out these long anagrams from first principles rather than using the crossers?

    I question the equivalence between spleen and NEEDLE (20d). Spleen in its non-medical sense means (cf. Chambers) “spite, boredom, ill-humour, …”, i.e. reactions or attitudes, whereas needle is “to goad, heckle, …) i.e. an active verb. Not the same in my view.

28. If I am ever tempted to volunteer as a blogger, I shall remember the 41-letter anagram covering five lights with a 16-word clue and let the thought perish. My sympathies and thanks go to Duncan S.

29. poc @27 “needle” can be a noun meaning ill-humour, as in the sentence: “there’s always a bit of needle when Millwall play West Ham”.

30. Duncan, thanks for deciphering the big anagram, although I took the definition to be the recorded message implied by the final ellipsis, rather than the part of the clue you underlined. For once, an enjoyable Paul.

31. Don’t at all mind Paul’s nether-regions humour, but transfer was a bung — totally missed the fart. Comics were banned chez the young ginf by the high-art zealots in charge, so no idea about Spider-man’s distinguishing hyphen [still making up for the deprivation, just streamed all 200+ eps of Smallville 🙂 ] Enjoyed this, thanks as ever Paul, and thanks duncan.

32. Otoh, thanked said zealots for JS Bach, without whose 14ac on the turntable chez young ginf, this hymn would have been a mystery. Slings and roundabouts …

33. Gladys @6 et al.: the accepted story within the comics industry is that Stan Lee added the hyphen to Spider-Man to forestall legal action by DC over any similarities to Superman. Most observers would say that similarities do not extend beyond both being superheroes, but DC was famously litigious, having already halted – and then acquired – rival comic Captain Marvel (the Shazam! one, not the Marvel one) despite minimal similarities.

34. Looked daunting but the RHS went in pretty readily. Like others I had almost completed when the long phrase just came to me.

    I thought SPRUCES and NINCOMPOOP were great.

    Thanks Paul and duncanshiel

35. Oh dear, Paul. You spend ages working out your humongous anagram with too obvious an answer. Like many, I didn’t bother reversing it.
    Can I raise a pet quibble? Love is not nothing, it is a state of zero points. It can reasonably be word play for O but otherwise it annoys me.
    Never heard of RHINO as money and had to look up STOA. Otherwise, easy for a Paul.

36. Plenty of people here with more time than I have today. Saw the clue at 4D, thought ‘nuts to it’ and went to do something more useful. Paul is a setter who occasionally pleases and often frustrates. Today it was the latter, I’m afraid. Well done to all who managed it. I’ll wait for tomorrow’s paper.

37. Paul as good as usual. Loved the smut! The biggy was clever. Favorite was nincompoop. Super blog too .

38. Similar to others, I didn’t even entertain unravelling the big anagram and IMPORTANT was the key about ¾ of the way through the solve. I was amused by LOI SCATOLOGY. I liked quite a few, but didn’t parse UNLIT.

    Thanks Paul, Duncan et al.

39. Staticman@5 I had the RHS filled in too,, and TEARFUL (FOI) alone on the left. Anybody else similarly one-sided?

    I didn’t even try to decide which parts of the 4d clue went into the anagram. I just filled in some bits using the check button. Didn’t catch on until much too late.

    Needle as a verb is sort of spleen-ish, but spleen is a noun, and needle as a noun doesn’t work.

    Thanks, Paul and duncanshiell.

40. I was anaground down and ran aground.

    Beastly puzzle but I very much enjoyed the torture. Thank you Paul and Duncanshiell

41. Remember the old joke: There are 10 kinds of people – those who know binary and those who don’t?

    Well it seems from reading the comments this puzzle was pretty binary – those who got the long clue right away and breezed through the rest, or those (like me) who slowly put the complement together, and got it much later. En route I was afraid I wouldn’t see it, but happily at some point it just clicked. Funny how that happens.

42. Valentine@39: Yes indeed! I always try to work from the crossers I have anyway, so it was all the RHS, and then when I scanned the LH side all I could get right away was OBOE. Did work out a couple of others but it was NINCOMPOOP (helped by my morning routine)/FLORISTS that broke the dam. In the US I more often hear “please stay on the line” so the big anagram didn’t come from the enumeration, and like some others I didn’t check the letters but bunged it in and trusted it would work out.

    When finally entering the big one I double-tapped the R key and turned 15ac into REARFUL. I think Paul would appreciate that.

    [Gladys@20: You do see “Bat-man” occasionally, or maybe more likely “The Bat-man,” but DC seems to mostly have gone for no hyphen. In the very first story it was spelled with a hyphen in the story and no hyphen on the cover, unless that’s a later addition. I guess it makes some sense to use a hyphen to denote a hybrid, where Superman isn’t a hybrid of a man and a super. But I may be inventing that principle out of whole cloth.]

    Thanks Paul and duncanshiel!

43. Gladys @6 sums up perfectly the issue with this kind of very long clue. Looked very daunting at first, but CASANOVA, then SCATOLOGY, then MEANDER went in quickly at the start giving me YOUR CALL for 4d, then the enumeration of the rest of the long clue gave it away (as the only alternative – “is being recorded for training purposes” – doesn’t fit). That was more than half the battle over very rapidly, which is a pity as there were lots of fine clues elsewhere that would have offered a sterner challenge in different circumstances. But, as others have said, also an enjoyable smug feeling from doing a Paul in quick time. Favourites today NOTWITHSTANDING and UNLIT.

44. Oddly enough the mega-anagram came fairly early in the process – I had the A in 4D from MAGNIFICAT (because I vaguely remember reading a book in which a character had a cat with this name) and started musing on what might follow A as the second letter of four in a word. Tried a double-L, saw the R from MEANDER at the end of the first word, and it triggered memories of far too many calls to customer service centres! I must admit to not bothering to parse it as I thought that the chances of hitting that pattern of word lengths with the two or three crossers that I already had were too remote for it to be anything else.

    The first Paul I’ve been able to solve with no reveals or checks.

45. Pity the psychologies of those of us for whom the monster clue hit early on – of whom I was one. Slogged through the acrosses, getting two until I hit the multi-parter. Read the clue, counted the letters, and all at once…

    Lucky me, is what I’d say if I didn’t suspect that meant quite the opposite in the past. Thanks to Paul and Duncan.

46. I thought that was a marvelous crossword! All kinds of goodies in it.
    I understand why people may not bother to work out the fodder of the anagram once the solution has become apparent, but it’s really worth it in this case IMHO to appreciate the beauty of using ‘customer initially cut off’ to lose the otherwise redundant C. It may be the setter showing off, but why shouldn’t they when they’ve discovered such a marvellous device.
    Thanks to Paul and D

47. Another fabulous offering from Paul: cheeky and challenging, as always.
    And thanks to duncanshiell for clearing up a couple of puzzling solves.

48. Like others had a full right hand side and almost empty left. Then somehow I got THE LINE which gave me PLEASE and HOLD and the rest fell into place. I didn’t bother trying to figure out the anagram fodder. Getting used to Paul now, which helped with TRANSFER though it’s still a long slow solve for me. One or two unparsed (e.g. NEEDLE – really?) so thanks to duncanshiell, and Paul of course.

49. My habit is to tackle the across clues in order and then the down clues in reverse order (don’t ask me why) so I didn’t encounter the long ‘un until near the end of my first pass through. From crossers, I suspected the second word was CALL and when I considered PLEASE for the seventh, I immediately thought “please hold the line”! – quickly followed by “what’s that thing they say? – your call is…”. Thanks to Paul and Duncan.

50. Easier to do than to parse. Often the case with Paul I find. Dropping investigations is clever.

51. A cracker from the Maestro

52. Very satisfying to complete this tricky puzzle. The final two took forever. 25d TEES (how many rivers are there in the world?) and 10a RHINO (how many lists of currencies did I look through?). Like staticman1@5 and others the R side came first (except for the aforementioned), then when YOUR CALL… fell, the rest of it opened up. Thank you duncanshiell for parsing that one — I couldn’t be bothered !

    Favourites 9a SCATOLOGY (for “dropping investigation”), 17a SPRUCES (for “poplar removed from popular”, even though it was obvious)

    Yes, I agree with daja67@2 that 12a HANDSAW is “with…” = AND “…in SHAW*

53. Tachi@24 – the phrase is familiar as the archetypical automated answer, whether or not it is actually used in exactly that form (I think it has been in the past, but is now often modified to try unsuccessfully to appear more genuine).
    Favourites HYPHEN and SCATOLOGY, but liked them all with slight reservations about NEEDLE as noted by others.
    Thanks Paul and duncanshiell

54. Thanks Paul and duncanshiell
    Paul really knows how to irritate me. I’m another that saw IMPORTANT and guessed about half of the puzzle.
    I would classify HYENAs as scavengers rather than predators.
    I did rather like the definition for SCATOLOGY.
    Mig @ 50
    RHINO was actually my FOI.

55. muffin@52 that’s funny! I didn’t know (or didn’t remember?) that RHINO was slang for money (does anyone know why?). Once I looked for something other than a vowel in the second spot, I got it. And it was my very last one in! 🙂

56. [Mig @53
    I seem to remember a joke about rhino-sore-ass meaning “piles of money”]

57. Re. 16d – won’t “bunch of five items” be FIST (singular, since it’s “bunch” and not “bunches”) and not FISTS?

    With this one slight quibble, I thoroughly enjoyed this puzzle. Thanks a ton to Paul and duncanshiell!

58. Mig@53 – No one knows where it comes from (there are many theories), although the OED has citations dating all the way back to the 1600s.

59. Thoroughly enjoyed this and all went in very quickly for us … obviously on the right wavelength today. Favourites are NOTWITHSTANDING and HYPHEN. Thanks to Paul and Duncanshiell.

60. Muffin@52 I did google hyenas to check that, as we thought the same … turns out that most of their food comes from hunting and they scavenge only opportunistically.

61. I was getting nowhere with this puzzle, when, by divine afflatus, 4/1/21/3/23 came to me in a flash, although I had no more than about five lights. I certainly would never have solved the anagram! From then on, it was pretty plain sailing, but I needed this blog to explain NEEDLE, which I filled in last with a Hail Mary.

    Thanks, as ever, to Paul, my favorite setter, and to duncanshiell.

62. Despite the explanation, I still don’t understand the parsing of 18 down. Can someone please enlighten me?
    What an enjoyable puzzle. My wife and I do these together, printed out daily but often we are a few days behind. We have currently caught up though. We have found we are far greater than the sum of our parts; often one of us will say “that could mean…” and the other gets the answer from there.

63. Robruss25@60
    18D Where a corpse originally buried in a crypt beneath surface of chamber? (8)

    Where (definition, referring to the rest of the clue) a corpse originally (gives A + C – first letter of Corpse) buried in (inserted into) a crypt (A TOMB) – so far we have A T AC OMB – beneath surface of chamber (says to put a C {surface of chamber} on top of everything in the down clue)

64. Robruss24@60, I think the whole clue is the definition as well as wordplay. Or the definition might simply be “Where”…

    [A (from the surface) + C (“corpse originally”)] contained in (“buried in”) [A (from the surface) TOMB (“crypt”). That gives ATACOMB, which is below C (“beneath surface of chamber”), for CATACOMB

    Hope that makes sense!

65. Balfour@28 and npetrikov@59 – what does ‘five lights’ mean?

66. And can someone tell me what’s the difference between ‘numeration’ and ‘enumeration’? I don’t use either of these in everyday life.

67. I seem to be in a minority: I got the long YOUR CALL IS etc quickly, but didn’t breeze through the rest. I got the left hand side sewn up without much trouble, but ended up revealing most of the right side as I just didn’t get any further: including coming back for another go this evening and still drawing a blank.

68. Wonderful. What other form of puzzle could leave you feeling better about life? Next time I hear ‘Your call is important…” I’ll remember this crossword and think of the bunch of misanthropes who had the message recorded. Thanks, Paul.
    And thanks to Duncan for the blog – the parsing of CATACOMB eluded me.

69. poc@27: are you saying that all clues should be solved from first principles? 4d etc was the first clue that caught my eye, because of its length, and by a process that I can neither understand nor explain I thought of the answer almost before I had finished reading it. If that hadn’t happened then I would have waited until I had some crossers and I wouldn’t have felt guilty about using them. It is, after all, called a crossword, and I see crossing words as an additional source of information about the answer to the clue.

70. Glad to see Paul’s SCATOLOGical excellence in view again! – what with POOP and FART both represented. Indeed I’d regard the long one starting at 4d as a prime example of telephonic ordure. How many callers actually wait until the music stops?

    Having said that, I couldn’t quite pin down the fodder for 4d etc. until the very end – it took time to click that “Hello I…” was part of it. But is it a record? Certainly leaves Araucaria’s THE OLD VICARAGE GRANTCHESTER standing. But I – for my sins – once contrived a 54-letter one:

    Good punctuation could make sense of this: foolishly, in fear, Ada tackled a hundred horses with a half-full sack of wheat (7,1,6,3,6,4,2,4,5,3,4,3,3,3)

    I concede that Paul’s far better at this sort of thing than I’ll ever be… 🙁

    Liked SCATOLOGY, RHINO (“If you ever meet a rhinoceros, do not linger but flee up the very next tree”), NOTWITHSTANDING; CATACOMB; MAGNIFICAT; SLOVENIA. But there’s always much to like in a ‘Paul’.

    Thanks to Paul and Duncan.

71. Laccaria: ” Charles I walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off”. Add punctuation to taste! No of course I haven’t bothered checking the anagram. But very good!

72. Laccaria @68,
    There was Araucaria’s 59-letter one for O hark! the herald angels sing the Boy’s descent which lifted up the world.

73. Amma@63/64
    Enumeration means to list, not necessary in any order, numeration (number) means to specifically list by numbering them in some specific order, like what comes first in time or required in steps to do, make, achieve something. Often used in planning
    Lights are the white squares in the grid so the anagram covered 5 series of white squares, 1d, 3d, 4d, 21d 23a

74. Cliveinfrance@71 – thank you, very helpful.

75. We started off thinking 4 down was some continuation of DON‘T CALL US…. and it took some time to be abused of that notion. Loved the ‘dropping investigation’ and much more – definitely Paul at his best. Just hope some company phone interface advisors have also read the clue for 4 down and might start a move to banish all such 4 downs from the lines!
    Really liked the blog too – full of zip and interest – thank you.

76. Mig@53
    Rhino = nose (Greek) = paying through the nose = paying more than a reasonable price. Simply old British, not Cockney, slang, goes back centuries but I used it to refer to money in the 1960s in SE London

77. I don’t think anyone has mentioned that Chambers give HYEN as an alternative (from Shakespeare) for HYENA. I know, because I ignored part of the clue, so checked it.

78. Cliveinfrance@74 Thanks!

79. As always with Paul, some very good clues and some rather average ones.

80. Great stuff. Panicked at the long one, ran to the RHS and got NEVERTHELESS as my FOI. I was in the camp of doing the whole RHS first, then making small inroads into the LHS (including SCATOLOGY just from the Y; it’s Paul, of course it’s “dropping investigation”), enough to get the checkers for YOUR CALL which made the rest fall. Didn’t check the fodder, anf indeed one can appreciate the skill without needing to.

    Lots of inventiveness here, especially in HANDSAW, SPRUCES and UNLIT. Too many ticks to list.

    Agree about FISTS needing to be bunches (plural), about NEEDLE/spleen and I’d add “Red” for sea (the topic came up just the other day and this an example.. Atlantic for ocean would be to my taste but Red for sea not so much). But I enjoyed the puzzle too much for me to take my own quibbles seriously.

    Thanks both

81. I have begun to see crosswords as works of art. So no nits to pick. 4d was of course a classic! How long can I actually stretch an anagram? What are the limits? A mad human endeavour – like, can I climb K2 without dying? Or ride a bike at 500 km an hour?

    Between tough and the easy, classic Wednesday.

    Thanks both.

82. Late to the party here as I didn’t crack it yesterday evening – stuck on the huge anagram. It didn’t help that I’d bunged in MEANING (catch my drift?) at 11 and couldn’t work out why GNI was a sea…
    Then this morning, with some breakfast and all the crossers for IMPORTANT, the penny dropped and the remaining clues came fairly easily.
    Slightly taken aback at first reading when 26 didn’t have 7 letters for SUNLESS (S+UNLESS).
    Thanks Paul for a classic and duncanshiell for the blog including working through that big old anagram so I didn’t have to!

83. With YOUR CALL.. I only had a couple of crossers but with the pattern of letter counts with just the O of IMPORTANT and the S of PLEASE, the phrase sprang to mind. Then came the slog of working out which words in the clue contributed or subtracted from the anagram fodder.

    LOI was NEEDLE, as to me NEEDLE is an irritation but SPLEEN is outright anger. Looking at Chambers’ definition of spleen, though, it could be any emotion.

84. Hector@67: no, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that the effort the setter makes to invent such a long acronym is largely wasted on most solvers, and in this case the anagrist is not particularly amusing (other opinions are available). Even after spotting the solution, I couldn’t be bothered trying to justify it. My sympathies are with the blogger.

    A notable exception is Araucaria’s famous “O hark the herald angels sing the boy’s descent which lifted up the world”, which resolves to “While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground”.

85. poc: fair enough. Apologies for misinterpreting you.

86. Belated thanks to Shanne and Mig for clarifying the parsing of catacomb.

87. Robruss24@84 you’re welcome, and my apologies to Shanne@61 for the duplication!

88. [Laccaria@68 – and the solution is …? 😇]

89. Did anyone else feel certain 13 was NOSE? Fitted so well…but held me back from ‘IMPORTANT’ in the giant solution!

90. Well, I’m late getting here, but as nobody seems to have complained about this, I’ll have to mention it. Hyphens and dashes are two different punctuation marks. (Well, actually, they’re three, as there are two different types of dashes, neither of which is a hyphen.)

    Favorite clue: 9ac (SCATOLOGY) for the clever definition.

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