Thanks to Paul for the puzzle…
…with a theme around 22dn MONKEY. While blogging 22dn I searched for a link to share about the Guardian crossword setter Araucaria [wiki] and saw that today is the 12 year anniversary of his death.
| ACROSS | ||
| 7 | BATH SOAP |
English city’s oldie, slippery customer? (4,4)
|
|
BATH'S="English city's" (as in the city of Bath); OAP (Old Age Pensioner, "oldie") |
||
| 9 | ADORED |
Trouble burning in our hearts (6)
|
|
ADO="Trouble" + RED="burning" (perhaps as in flushed with emotion) |
||
| 10, 24 | FACE CARD |
Vogue having captured leader in corset, shoot backfiring for Queen, say? (4,4)
|
|
definition: a face card is a playing card that is a Queen, King, or Jack FAD="Vogue" around: the leading letter of C-[orset] + RACE=move quickly="shoot" reversed/"backfiring" |
||
| 11 | LOCOMOTIVE |
Cuckoo with reason for travelling (10)
|
|
definition: locomotive as in relating to travel/locomotion LOCO=crazy="Cuckoo" + MOTIVE="reason" |
||
| 12 | LANGUR |
22 down’s drowsiness when starved of oxygen (6)
|
|
definition: a type of MONKEY LANGU-[O]-R="drowsiness" without O (symbol for oxygen) |
||
| 14 | INSULATE |
Protect where roofer might work around you (8)
|
|
IN SLATE="where roofer might work" as in slate roofing, around U=letter pronounced as "you" |
||
| 15 | IN TOTO |
Completely new draught with moon in orbit? (2,4)
|
|
N (new) + TOT="draught" of a drink; with IO="moon" of Jupiter going around i.e. "in orbit" |
||
| 17 | ATRIUM |
Hall in university toured by a groom (6)
|
|
U="university", with A (from surface) + TRIM as a verb="groom" touring around |
||
| 20 | BECHAMEL |
Get the hump, perhaps, about hot sauce (8)
|
|
BE CAMEL=have a hump like a camel="Get the hump, perhaps"; around H (hot) |
||
| 22 | MANANA |
A parting gift in the near future (6)
|
|
definition: soon, some time in the future A (from surface) inside ("parting" the letters of) MANNA="gift" as in 'manna from heaven' |
||
| 23 | FOR CERTAIN |
Clearly, power shower blocked by dirt in the end (3,7)
|
|
FORCE="power" + RAIN="shower" with "end" of [dir]-T inside |
||
| 24 | FACE CARD |
See 10
|
| 25 | BABOON |
22 down taking bait in silence (6)
|
|
definition: a type of MONKEY BOO="bait"=to harass; in BAN="silence" (e.g to ban or silence discussion/dissent etc) |
||
| 26 | THESSALY |
That community welcomes girl back in Greek region (8)
|
|
THEY="That community" around LASS="girl" reversed/"back" |
||
| DOWN | ||
| 1 | NAGASAKI |
Badger and a 22 down somewhere in the Far East (8)
|
|
NAG="Badger" as in to pester; plus A (from surface) + SAKI=type of MONKEY (22 down) |
||
| 2 | SHOE |
Trainer for example putting weed under stress, ultimately (4)
|
|
definition as in a pair of trainers HOE=to "weed" a garden; after ultimate/last letter of [stres]-S |
||
| 3 | HOWLER |
22 down dropped brick? (6)
|
|
double definition: a type of MONKEY; and to drop a brick means to make an embarrassing mistake, a HOWLER |
||
| 4 | MARMOSET |
Rodent pinching skin of some 22 down (8)
|
|
definition: a type of MONKEY MARMOT=type of "Rodent"; around the outer letters/"skin" of S-[om]-E |
||
| 5 | POSTILLION |
Horse rider spoilt excited animal (10)
|
|
definition: someone riding a posthorse or riding a horse drawing a carriage anagram/"excited" of (spoilt)*; plus LION="animal" |
||
| 6 | VERVET |
22 down with spirit taking lid off tequila (6)
|
|
definition: a type of MONKEY VERVE="spirit" with the top letter/"lid" of T-[equila] |
||
| 8 | PECTIN |
Egg and mushroom served up for setter (6)
|
|
definition: a powder used as a gelling or setting NIT=a louse "Egg"; plus CEP=type of "mushroom"; all reversed/"served up" |
||
| 13 | GET THE CHOP |
Go and visit butcher? (3,3,4)
|
|
definition: to be let go from a job the phrase could also be read as getting a chop (slice of meat) from a butcher |
||
| 16 | TAMARIND |
22 down on top of deciduous tree (8)
|
|
a TAMARIN is a type of MONKEY (22 down), plus the top/first letter of D-[eciduous] |
||
| 18 | MANDRILL |
22 down with couple of primates (8)
|
|
definition: a type of MONKEY two primates: MAN=a "primate" + DRILL=another type of monkey, a primate |
||
| 19 | PLIANT |
Elastic works, one held (6)
|
|
PLANT="works" (e.g. a steel plant / a steelworks), around/holding I="one" |
||
| 21 | ECOTAX |
Exact forms filled by Oxford’s principal, environmental duty (6)
|
|
definition: duty as in a type of tax anagram/"forms" of (Exact)*, around the first/principal letter of O-[xford] |
||
| 22 | MONKEY |
Mischief maker in Araucaria with puzzle? (6)
|
|
MONKEY combined "with puzzle" gives monkey-puzzle, a name for the Araucaria tree |
||
| 24 | CASH |
Silver 2 down paired with this for nut, reportedly? (4)
|
|
answer to 2 down is SHOE CASH paired with SHOE sounds like (reportedly) 'cashew'="nut" |
I love Paul’s crosswords but I do miss Araucaria.
Thanks Paul and Manehi
Top picks: FACE CARD, HOWLER, MONKEY and CASH.
Thanks Paul and manehi.
I must say I thought this a better ‘monkey puzzle’ in tribute to Araucaria than the one that Enigmatist and Soup devised for the centenary of his birth back in February 2021, although I know the latter had its admirers..
BE CAMEL – brilliant
Thanks manehi and Paul
Good fun – and who remembers Toto (from 15 across) https://share.google/3seozYZnHQmQtBPZG
Thanks Paul and Manehi.
Multiple MONKEY JORUMs for me. NAGASAKI FOI so the keystone clue fell almost immediately which was a big help. Top of the troop; BECHAMEL, MANANA and MARMOSET for the Umbongo memories
Cheers M&P
Very much helped by the theme although there were quite a few new words for me including SAKI = a tropical American monkey (for 1d); TAMARIN monkey (for 16d); DRILL = type of baboon (for 18d); MANDRILL, VERVET.
Loved the puzzle with my favorite being Nagasaki. That said, didn’t Paul do a similarly themed puzzle (Monkeys) a few years ago?
When MONKEY flew in first, I thought I was going to struggle, however the wordplay in the unknown HOWLER and VERVET made them perfectly gettable. I thought that FOR CERTAIN was sublime, laughed out loud at BECHAMEL and CASH SHOE and I also enjoyed NAGASAKI and MANANA. I had RACE CARD for a while but couldn’t parse RAD and then the penny dropped. For me, this was Paul at the top of his game.
Ta Paul & manehi.
Yes, leaving aside the merest quibbletinissimi — that manna is a ‘stuff’ (‘mass noun’ dyu call it?); and the Physics nit that force ≈? power — a nice tribute to The Rev. Much enjoyed, ta Paul and manehi
Beaten by a couple of nho/forgotten MONKEYs at the end – VERVET and LANGUR. Had all the crossers but couldn’t make sense of the wordplay. COTD – MANANA for the lovely use of ‘parting gift’.
Thanks both
22 down was a write-in so I just plodded through by referring to a list of monkey species pulled up from the web. And because that process steadily sapped all my initial goodwill towards the setter, by the time I got BABOON (penultimate solve) I was really irritated by the dubious semantics of BOO = ‘bait’ and BAN=’silence’. The non-monkey clues were.. um… well, they were reasonably straightforward cryptic crossword clues.
Thanks to Paul for this Araucaria tribute puzzle and to our blogger today.
12 years already! How can that be?
🙁
Enjoyed this, although to begin with I did think it was going to be a slog through the list of monkeys. Smiled at BECHAMEL. Another quiblet for grantinfreo#10’s collection: to me, a TOT is a teeny amount of alcohol (usually rum) whereas a draught is a whopping great slurp (usually ale/beer). But obviously not in Crosswordland. So INTOTO was my last one in.
FOR CERTAIN (tick!) a less esoteric group of MONKEYs than the previous one – the only one I needed to check was SAKI. However, I did need to look up Greek regions to find THESSALY, and couldn’t equate BOO=bait so BABOON stayed unparsed. This took a while but was worth the effort for BECHAMEL, INSULATE, LOCO-MOTIVE (though I had LOCOMOTION for a while), PECTIN and CASH SHOE (Ouch!)
Thanks Paul and manehi.
PS: Thanks for the UmBongo ad: some clever juggling with words there, though probably politically incorrect now (isn’t everything?)
This was a challenge, but one that we could ultimately meet. Pleased to crack what felt, at times, to be an impossible egg. A pleasure doing business with you Paul.
Typical puzzle from Paul, with much inventiveness sometimes at the expense of surface: ‘Completely new draught with moon in orbit’ is a classic. As someone remarked recently (who?), thematic puzzles can force the setter into repetitive constructions – this crossword has only one anagram and no fewer than 13 clues with single letter insertions.
Good fun nevertheless – fortunately MONKEY was a write-in and I managed to drag up all the simians from the mental lumber room. BECHAMEL and MANANA were my pick of the bunch.
Thanks to Paul, manehi and Araucaria, of happy memory: the master of ingenious constructions, also sometimes with bizarre surfaces 🙂
Some decent clues and a nice tribute to Araucaria, which luckily I sussed early on. However I got fed up when I realised I’d have to remember or look up a lot of types of monkey and just filled them in.
I also strongly dislike the non-existent word MANANA. If setters and editors can’t accommodate the ñ I wish they’d just avoid words that require it.
I was just about able to retrieve the requisite gk in order to complete this monkey puzzle with the NW holding out longest. I liked ‘power shower’.
A nice tribute to Araucaria, thanks to Paul and manehi
I’m another whose first solve was MONKEY, but thought there were bound to be a few obscure ones. So when I came to 6d with just a V in place I unashamedly Googled monkeys with V as their fourth letter. Up came Grivet, which I bunged in, wondering how on earth that parsed. With further crossers in place I soon realised my impetuosity. However, although VERVET was a nho, that was the only one in that category for me. And I do love the word POSTILLION.
Lots to amuse and entertain this morning, many thanks Paul and Manehi…
Not being the sort of purist who tackles the clues in order, I noticed the references to 22d and got that one first, so that was a good way in. Having said that, I hadn’t heard of all the MONKEYs in question so had to cheat a bit.
The word POSTILLION is of course most associated with the phrase “My postillion has been struck by lightning”, the origin of which is explained here.
Many thanks Paul and manehi.
It was good that MONKEY was such a giveaway: sometimes with this sort of puzzle I have to start by dancing around the central issue until crossers, etc., finally push the penny into dropping. Even so… a steady business, with the last half dozen being especially obdurate. In many cases, parsing followed “well, only this will fit” (shamefully I resorted to “morewords” a couple of times when going up and down and sideways through the alphabet in my head dredged nothing suitable up). BABOON remained unparsed until I came here, and I’m still not completely swayed by it. But overall, as usual with Paul, solutions that were very pleasingly neat once you’d got there.
MANANA and BECHAMAL, especially, raised smiles.
None of Paul’s characteristic mild scatology- or did I miss something?
Many thanks to Paul for some entertaining head-scratching and manehi for the blog.
(My spellchecker swapped that into “…for the boogie’ – well,why not?)
Good tribute to Araucaria. I should have got the keystone clue earlier but my way in was via MARMOSET. I liked the LANGUR with drowsiness, the BECHAMEL hump, the nice surface for ATRIUM, the power shower that’s FOR CERTAIN, the POSTILLION excited animal, and the MONKEY puzzle. Is the THINK AI in the third from bottom row relevant?
Thanks Paul and manehi.
Robi, I also saw DOUR AS in the 11th column, which I would certainly not use to describe this excellent tribute.
[Lord Jim @21. Cold-solving the clues in order always strikes me as somewhat puritanical, but I would not describe it as ‘purist’, because it actually runs counter to the intrinsic nature of a crossword, where solutions intersect with each other. A purist would therefore fan out from a first cold-solved clue using the crossers as far as possible to assist.]
Pace poc @18, I agree with PM @11 – 22a is my CotD too!
Lovely tribute. Thanks Paul for a cracking puzzle, and manehi for the blog.
I liked it all, except for BABOON. Not sure about BOO, but pretty sure BAN=silence is a bridge too far, even for Paul, for two reasons. I would more agree with “ban discussion”=”stop discussion” so ban=stop, but in “silence discussion” the “silence” is redundantly (but stylishly) repeating the talking semantics, which doesn’t carry over to ban. The second reason is that to me, “ban discussion” implies not letting the discussion even start, while “silence discussion” implies it’s already started. Altogether, just a bit too stretchy for me.
[poc@18: re MANANA. I’d, politely of course, disagree. There must be many previous instances of foreign words that have found common use in English being used in crosswords with their accents necessarily absent. I recall an ETUDE just recently, and DEJA VU a while back, I think. I guess one could argue that the French often leave the accents off upper-case letters: I don’t know what the Spanish convention is. If there are French crosswords, do they take note of accents on crossers where one word would have it, and the other not? Likewise in other fairly heavily accented languages like German and Danish… if anyone set a metal – themed puzzle (music, not materials) where would we be with MOTORHEAD, SPINAL TAP, et al.?
Opinions may vary, but I’d plead for tolerance. ]
Great fun. Didn’t know a lot of the rarer monkeys, I think only BABOON, saki, MARMOSET and TAMARIN were in my vocabulary bank.
HOWLER was last one in slightly worried about what Paul had in mind for drop brick followed by a question mark.
I did like the simple MONKEY connecting clue and tribute.
Thanks Manehi and Paul
MAÑANA clue of the day on principal. Thanks to Paul, manehi and most of the commenters.
I’d distinguish between languages like French, German and Spanish, where the various accented letters may be pronounced differently but are still essentially the same letter, and (for instance) Norwegian where what look like accented a’s and o’s are actually different letters with different places in the alphabet and the dictionary. But since we don’t have Norwegian to contend with, I’m happy to ignore tildes, umlauts and so on.
I started doing crosswords after Araucania stopped. I had a vague recollection that the word meant tree, but no idea what type and I had never heard of a monkey-puzzle. So, while I made sure I got MONKEY early, it took some research.
I then had little idea of most monkey names, so much of what I was solving were NHOs and it was taking way too much time. I gave up halfway through, although looking at the blog I managed to solve the more difficult clues before halting
Nice idea, but lost on me
Thanks Paul and manehi
Robi @23, I also spotted your Nina, but I can’t see that it would have helped me. Didn’t get MAÑANA, but it’s not unusual for me to be beaten by Paul. TTS&B.
Robi @ 23. Steppie @34. Don’t you mean niña?
I loved this thanks to the relative ease of the theme-setting clue which made it much more straightforward than many of Paul’s. As regards MANANA, I think standard convention in typed English is to omit all accents. Unusually for PauI found almost nothing to quibble with on the parsing. Least favourite was GO for GET THE CHOP. I’d prefer LET GO or SEND OFF
Always good to be reminded of the dear old monkey puzzler. I didn’t know this was a significant date.
A nice chewy puzzle, with lots to enjoy. The only 22d I hadn’t heard of was saki (I wonder whether that was where HH Munro got his pseudonym).
We loved this. Paul is one of our favourite setters, and this didn’t disappoint. We had a top afternoon of looking up pictures of cuddly monkeys. Top clues for us today included the marvellous 7A, 20A and 13D.
With regard to the debate about MAÑANA (POC18, DerekTheSheep29, Gladys32, Peter36 and others), I am a translator and there is a distinction. Ñ is not an N with an accent in Spanish: it is a separate letter with its own entry in the dictionary. MANANA (with N rather than Ñ) is a valid word in itself in (Cuban) Spanish, meaning something like deeply felt, as epitomised by the marvellous Papucho y Su Manana Club (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvAKVgE_yhI). Saying that, I don’t think the distinction matters much for an English-speaking crossword though as it is easily understood.
Thanks to manehi and Paul
The letters in the third bottom row spell “THINK AI”, presumably coincidentally. I thought this was a bit tricky, mainly due to knowing fewer species of MONKEY than necessary. Favourite was BECHAMEL.
I like Paul.
Today: DNF
I trotted through the whole thing fairly comfortably in a couple of sittings – except for ADORED – I just didn’t see it. I even got as far as checking if AILRED is a word.
D’oh
Oo, oo-oodles of fun. I didn’t know drills, sakis or vervets, so some nice tilts today. MANANA was cheated and unparsed because I had it in my head that “parting” meant departing.
Excellent tribute to the master.
Thanks, Paul and manehi.
I’m sure I didn’t dream this up, but some time soon after 1968 a woman called Christine Snook wrote a kind of travel book based in the Amazonian rainforests of South America called The Magic Saki. Wherein I get a tiny mention as I was part of something she had previously organised. But no amount of Googling recently has turned this book title up. I definitely remember having the volume in my hands when it first came out.
A very roundabout way of saying that this memory was a great help in solving 1d today…
ronald @42,
I found The Magic Sakis by Christina Wood on Amazon. Is that it?
Saki is also the nom de plume of an author who wrote a series of short stories just before WW1 poking fun at Edwardian society. Worth a look if you like that sort of satire.
[Kandy@38 – Thanks for that clarification: interesting to know. I did look up French and German dictionaries on our shelves and found that the accented letters were lumped in with the plain ones, alphabetical with no ordering by accent type (even “ç”, so it didn’t appear to be just a vowel/consonant thing). But I couldn’t find my Spanish dictionary – I think it went to Oxfam some while back.]
[Davey @35 – very droll ;-)]
Only solved four, with the keystone 22d MONKEY not being one of them. I hope that paying tribute to Araucaria with a puzzle featuring various brands of monkey doesn’t become a trend. For 2d SHOE I initially had SPOT (as a trainer might be the one to spot a gymnast), but fixed it when I got 24d CASH
Mig@47 It is worth committing Araucaria/Monkey puzzle/setter to memory. You will probably see some version in future.
Lovely Araucaria! I went to visit him before he died and he made me a cup of coffee. Never forgotten!
Thanks Kandy@48. Yes, I’ve already done so — long ago! Araucaria often comes up in clues and answers. What’s less common is for the setter to use the moniker as inspiration to pepper the puzzle with varieties of monkeys. As Balfour mentioned @3 it was done before by Enigmatist and Soup in February 2021. Though the puzzle was brilliantly composed, tour de force even, it received mixed reviews. You can read some of the comments here to get the gist. Admittedly, Paul’s puzzle today went over much better!
Phitonelly@43…very well done with that! Have been out, just seen your almost instant response. The author used her maiden name then, so glad I hadn’t dreamed this up….
Mig#50. Great response.
DerekTheSheep@29: Not the first time this has come up, but the ñ in Spanish is not an n with an accent but an entirely separate letter with its own place in the Spanish alphabet. It’s not legitimate to just bung in a N with a wink and a nod.
poc@53 (and Kandy@38): noted – and thank you !
Had to reveal 9a. Still couldn’t parse it. I didn’t spot “in our hearts” as the definition.