Guardian Cryptic 26,996 by Vlad

by

Found this tough to get into and then was stuck for a long time with 12ac and 1dn last in. Many great clues – particular favourites were both 22s, 2dn, 5dn and 16dn. Thanks, Vlad.

Across
8 HONOLULU Hotel singer keeps working round island capital (8)
=Hawaiian capital. H[otel] plus LULU=”singer”; keeping ON=”working” and O=”round”
9   See 17
10 ADEN Port knocked back in one day (4)
=a port in Yemen. Hidden reversed/”knocked back in” [o]NE DA[y]
11 UP THE CREEK Expression of support for Native American in trouble (2,3,5)
‘up the Creek’ could also be an “Expression of support” for the CREEK Native Americans [wiki]
12 SLUMPS Sun puts up with 26s (6)
=LOW POINTs. S[un] plus LUMPS=”puts up with”
14 UNEASIER More worried counterfeits are in use (8)
(are in use)*
15 TOCCATA Musical piece‘s so long — over two hundred involved (7)
TA-TA=goodbye=”so long”; around O[ver] plus CC=”two hundred” in Roman numerals
17, 9 MARIANA TRENCH Aren’t working with chairman at sea — 26 (7,6)
=the deepest part of the world’s oceans. (Aren’t chairman)*
20 HARRIDAN Nag hurt (tail lost) — 26 recalled (8)
HAR[m]=”hurt” with its tail letter lost; plus reversal of NADIR=”26 [LOW POINT] recalled”
22 URNFUL Dismal way of working out how much vase may hold? (6)
[mo]URNFUL=”Dismal”, with M[odus] O[perandi]=”way of working” taken out
23 ROCK BOTTOM Astonish with last 26 (4,6)
=LOW POINT. ROCK=”Astonish”, plus BOTTOM=”last”
24 TORT Youngster grasping right and wrong (4)
TOT=”Youngster”, around R[ight]
25 ORANGE Like an Oompa-Loompa‘s house (6)
double definition – the colour of an Oompa-Loompa; the Dutch dynastic house
26 LOW POINT Look to win easily — Portugal going through bad patch (3,5)
LO=behold=”Look”, plus (to win)*, with P[ortugal] going through the middle
Down
1 BORDELLO “No way!” — sound angry with lack of women around this establishment (8)
O R[oa]D=zero road=”No way”; with BELLO[w]=”sound angry with lack of w[omen]” around it
2 MOON Get 4 – 26 (4)
=Get BUTT OUT. MOO=”LOW” plus N[orth]=”POINT”
3 QUEUES Prompt’s read out lines (6)
Sounds like ‘cue’s’=”Prompt’s read out”
4 BUTT OUT Bar to promote in America that’s not your business (4,3)
=an American expression for “that’s not your business”. BUT=”Bar”, plus TOUT=”promote”
5 ST HELENA One clubber picked up going round the island (2,6)
AN [Ernie] ELS=”One clubber”/golfer [wiki]; all reversed/”picked up” and going round THE
6 DEPRESSION Getting upset my boss and I keep going over 26 (10)
=LOW POINT. Reversal/”Getting upset” of ED[itor]=”my boss”; plus I with PRESS ON=”keep going” over it
7 ACCEDE Master presenter about to be engaged — agree? (6)
ACE=”Master”; with DEC=TV “presenter” [wiki] reversed and inside/”about” and “engaged”
13 MUCKRAKING Looking for scandal? Reverend Spooner’s causing punch-up (10)
Spoonerism of ‘Making Ruck’=”causing punch-up”
16 TADPOLES Water Babies fan sold tape (8)
(sold tape)*
18 NEUTRINO Arranged tour in north-east — it’s free of charge (8)
=a particle with no electric charge. (tour in N[orth] E[ast])*
19 INSTALL Set up home with a little stunner? Unlikely (7)
IN=”home”, plus a little of S[tunner], plus TALL=”Unlikely” as in ‘tall story’
21 ABOARD Notice swine’s been kept on (6)
AD=”Notice”, with BOAR=”swine” kept inside
22 UNMOWN I’m thinking hedges close to garden have yet to be cut (6)
UM=”I’m thinking”, around the close to [garde]N, plus OWN=”have”
24 TOOL Someone used rifle during uprising (4)
Reversal/”uprising” of LOOT=”rifle”

48 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 26,996 by Vlad”

  1. Supreme clue for MARIANA TRENCH and very clever and witty use of the “low point” idea. Great puzzle and thanks to manehi to whom I needed to turn for the parsing of INSTALL.
    I wonder if Ernie does any UK cryptics in between tournaments?

  2. Thanks to manehi and Jim the Great. As always after a good Vlad I feel invigorated (make of that what you will). Had to retrofit the gateway after Mariana Trench made it clear what it was.

    2 down is real ROFL stuff.

    This is turning into a splendid day n’est-ce pas, with the Indy and the FT both having notably good puzzles too?

  3. Thanks Vlad and Manehi.

    I especially liked TADPOLES, and MOON made me laugh out loud when it eventually clicked.

    I couldn’t parse a couple of clues which refer to people I’m not familiar with (Els and Dec), but just failed outright to understand URNFUL, so thanks for the explanation. Very clever.

  4. Thanks Vlad and manehi.

    Hope Vlad is not suffering from DEPRESSION. Very tricky I thought with BORDELLO and ST HELENA unparsed by me.

    MOON has to be my favourite.

  5. Enjoyed this but still had a couple to parse. Thanks Klingsor for DEC in ACCEDE. Took a stab at the island and got ELS from google which fitted with the ‘clubber’.

    Two singers (depending on your taste) in HONOLULU – or one without a middle name? 🙂

    NW last in. With a couple of crossers I was going for ‘seraglio’ in 1D, which seems to keep coming up in crosswords and I could define but not parse.

    2D was a hoot.

    I started off thinking the key 26, was the last letter in the alphabet, and was looking for Zs. But given the position of 26, as last clue,the lowest number, and the lowest clue for those of us who read from left to right, I’m wondering if Vlad was giving us a nudge towards the theme.

  7. Thank you Vlad and manehi.

    Great puzzle, I was getting along fine, then thought I had better solve 26a, so started with the down clues that cross it, depression set in on reading 22d, “I’m thinking hedges close to garden have yet to be cut” – I was hoping to forget this while doing the crossword, 30m long, 2m high, by hand with hedge clippers…

    I could not fully parse ACCEDE. SLUMPS, URNFUL, HARRIDAN, BORDELLO and MUCKRAKING were my favourites.

  9. Thanks to Vlad and manehi. I usually have great trouble with this setter and did have trouble getting started, but this time I got HARRIDAN and nadir early on so LOW POINT and other bits fell into place. I needed help parsing BORDELLO and had to dredge up “Dec” for presenter from previous puzzles (and also the often invoked Ernie Els for ST HELENA), but I much enjoyed MOON and BUTT OUT.

  10. Far too many biffed in (is that the expression?) clues for me. I knew the CREE Native Americans but not the CREEK so did not trust myself on 11a and had no idea what was going on with BORDELLO, DEPRESSION and URNFUL. I’ve never liked the ‘little stunner’ = S device though at least I now know what to expect. Did at least use the theme to help; once LOW POINT was in, immediately looked for a TRENCH and an anagram for what was left, etc. And so all the right letters went in all the right places.

    Tick for UNMOWN and a clever device for MOON.

  13. Thanks Vlad and manehi

    A mixture of entertaining and irritating for me. I had to “Reveal” MOON, but it then became my favourite clue; BORDELLO and NEUTRINO also amused me.

    I was delayed by LOW POINT, as it was referred to in several others, most of which I had got before solving it. I didn’t see “easily” as an anagram indicator, so wasted a lot of time trying to construct a “win easily” content.

    “UP THE CREEK” doesn’t mean “in trouble”. You need the full expression “up the creek without a paddle”.

    Clueing ELS as “clubber” was just silly. There was no reasonable way of solving ORANGE unless you knew the colour of Oopa-Loompas.

  14. A terrific puzzle but a very tough challenge – too tough for me – I must admit to copious use of the Check button and several of them went unparsed, but there’s no excuse for not seeing my last in QUEUES earlier.

    Thanks to Vlad and manehi

  16. Wonderful puzzle but I was impaled by MOON, BUTT OUT and HONOLULU. Great clues included HARRIDAN, URNFUL, MARIANA TRENCH (wow!) and UNMOWN. Many thanks to Vlad and manehi.

  17. muffin @13, I have only heard people say “Up the creek”, the dictionaries usually put the “without a paddle” bit in brackets – pretty stupid saying, you wouldn’t need a paddle if you were “up” the creek, there is the current to take you down…

  19. Well, I found this crossword completely joyless. Feel like someone through a party and I wasn’t invited.
    If a crossword is going to depend on a particular clue (26a) it ought to be a good one. But “easily” for an anagrind? “Going through” to mean “put in the middle of”? And “bad patch” (period of time) to mean “low point” (point in time). Harrumph!
    Good luck to those that did enjoy it, but Vlad joins Enigmatist on the list of setters that are not for me.

  21. I found this hard but carried on until once again being foxed completely by Roald Dahl. Surely his influence on the Guardian crossword of late, far out-ways his worth as a writer?! Rant over!! Like others I loved MOON. A candidate for clue of the year?
    Thanks Vlad and manehi for helping with several I could not parse, such as UNMOWN and URNFUL!!

  22. Good fun and not too difficult for Thursday lunchtime. Last in was tool but only because we forgot it was there. Didn’t like urnful and neither does the spellchecker on this phone. Thanks to everyone.

  23. muffin @18, it is only a creek, but for you I am not quite sure what that means, for me, a NZer, it is just a little stream, you could use your hands…

  24. Cookie @23
    Interesting! For me a creek is a narrow sea-inlet, often in a saltmarsh. “Frenchman’s Creek” Daphne du Maurier) for example.

  28. Bloody hard but one has to admire this. I regret to say I was defeated by MOON which,in retrospect, was the best clue of the lot. I liked UP THE CREEK,ORANGE-once I’d sorted out what an oompa loompa was-ROCK BOTTOM and URNFUL.HARRIDAN was very clever but I really couldn’t parse BORDELLO. I needed the aid of Mrs PA to finish.
    Thanks Vlad.

  29. slipstream @27, yes, in the US creek can mean a river tributary, what with “Up the creek” and “Sold down the river” there is not much hope…

  32. I nearly didn’t bother with this, mainly because of 26a LOW POINT and the fact that parts of the grid depended on it. I got lucky, though, getting this key answer with only the ‘N’ to help me. I still think 26a is rather a weak clue, as already noted, but I’m glad I got going because I thought this was another cracker (after yesterday’s).

    I admired Vlad’s ingenuity and cunning and loved 2d MOON, 4d BUTT OUT and 17/9a MARIANA TRENCH especially. Not having reference aids to hand, I had to take some words and meanings on trust, notably BUTT OUT, CREEK, URNFUL and ORANGE [the colour of Oompa-Loompas, apparently], but these answers had to be right, and fortunately I was never stuck. 7d ACCEDE was another relatively weak clue, I thought, but others like 1d BORDELLO and 20a HARRIDAN made up for it, not to mention my three favourites.

    Many thanks to Vlad, and to manehi for the blog.

  34. I’m glad so many people enjoyed it, but I’m with Van Winkle @19 and jeceris @25. I gave up with the puzzle almost half done, mainly because of annoyance over the dubious anagrinds. I thought getting 26a might make the puzzle less frustrating, but when I eventually did get it (with quite a lot of prompting from my DH once he had read the blog entry for it) and found that the anagrind for that was “easily”, I knew it was time to stop trying and come to the blog instead.

    Thanks, manehi – at least reading the solutions here scratched the itch with less frustration and time wasted than ploughing on through the puzzle would have caused me.

  35. I enjoyed this, especially MOON. Thanks to Vlad and manehi.

    I would like to add my support to the “ridiculous anagrinds” campaign. Time to call it a day on some of these?

    I understand that there are only so many explicit anagram indicators and poetic licence needs to be employed, but we have reached the point now where almost any phrase that does not explicitly exclude rearrangement will pass muster. Time to stop flogging the dead horse and try something else.

  36. You make a good point, PeeDee.

    I referred in my earlier comment to the luck I had in getting started. I started to get LOW POINT by guessing LO then WO (for walkover – win easily) then P inside: LOWPO–––. That lucky turn-up was obviously enough for the intended answer to show itself. I solved it in spite of the ‘anagram indicator’.

    If it wasn’t for that little piece of luck I wouldn’t have bothered with this crossword. Another non-anagrind was ‘fan’, as others have pointed out, but that was in a clue that was much more straightforward (but you still had to look askance at the word ‘fan’ after solving the clue).

    Vlad is not the only liberty-taker – he just got caught in the headlights (or headlamps) today).

  37. I really can’t see what’s wrong with ‘fan’ as an anagrind. It clearly suggests ‘moving around’ and is in the Crossword Dictionary list of indicators.

  38. To me fan is to spread out, or to blow some air at. These both cause moving around but don’t directly suggest rearrangement to me. One has to take a double interpretation to get this to work:

    1) fan suggests movement
    2) movement suggest rearrangement

    but that does not mean that fan suggests rearrangement. I don’t think meaning is transitive, A may mean B, and B may mean C, but that does not imply A means C.

    It feels to me that anagram indicators have become detached from their meanings. It seems that just about anything that suggests any sort of movement will do.

  39. Pee Dee,

    Thanks for responding.

    If you fan eg pieces of paper or fallen flower petals, won’t this inevitably rearrange them?

    Would you not accept ‘moving’, ‘travelling’ etc as anagrinds? And what about other staples such as ‘fancy’, ‘desperate’ ‘crazy’=, ‘lax’? There’s a very long list.

  40. Hello Vlad,

    I’m not saying that I don’t accept fan as an anagram indicator, or any other word. In my view it is up to the setter and editor to decide what to put in a puzzle, the solvers variously find the content more or less satisfying.

    For me there is a continuum from an indicator literally meaning rearrange through to “possible to construct a scenario where with liberal use of metaphor rearrangement could happen”. All of these can be justified, but for me they get less satisfying the further away the literal meaning they get.

    For some anagrinds I get a clear intuitive implication of rearrangement. For others I have to get out my mental toolbox and come up with a scenario that justifies its use. The former are satisfying, the latter I find contrived.

    I can see that avoiding cliches is a problem, but it feels to me that in the effort to avoid this we end up with a different problem of contrived anagrinds instead.

    In a clue would you write “fan” as the definition for the word “rearrange”? To me that would not be close enough. But it seems for anagram indicators there is another rule, anything that can be contrived to mean rearrange some way will do. Not unacceptable, just not very satisfying*.

    I’m not sure that fan is the ideal example, but it illustrates the general feeling involved.

    *Though not nearly unsatisfying enough to spoil the overall enjoyment of a super puzzle you understand…

  41. I find that a great many verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs can be made to indicate a change in the order of letters, given a good enough explanation or defence, which is often facilitated with some suitable mental imagery (as with ‘fan’).

    The presence of ‘fan’ as an anagrind in the Crossword Dictionary is a factor I didn’t taken into account, not knowing that dictionary. That must count for something. The mental imagery required in this case was certainly not easy for me to conjure up, and I don’t think it could have been a surprise for myself and others to query this.

    The other anagrind that’s been mentioned (‘easily’) is the one that nearly sent me away! That one may also be defensible – and in the Crossword Dictionary – but again I didn’t come up with any mental imagery for an anagram, and perhaps it was no surprise that that one was queried as well.

    I appreciated Vlad’s input to this.

    I was about to post this comment when I saw PeeDee’s contribution @40. His view as a solver is pretty much the same as mine – including his last sentiment!

  42. To me, to fan a hand of cards or a sheaf of papers is to spread them in a curved shape, not to rearrange the order of them. I’d use “shuffle” if I was rearranging them. If I use a fan to cool myself, I don’t expect things to be disorganised by it. That would mean the fan is on too high a setting or at the wrong angle. When a fan is intentionally used to move things in a random way (petals, leaves), I would say “blow”, not “fan”. Shops sell “leaf blowers”, not “leaf fans”.

    Although “fan” grated, it was “easily” which was the most problematic anagrind and in my case was the last straw. Like Alan B @41, I can’t come up with any imagery for its use in that way.

    The majority of posters here apparently didn’t find the use of either word a major problem, though, and the puzzle has been highly praised, so just put it down to “you can’t please everyone all the time”.

  43. Yes, ‘easily’ is there as well, Alan, in the sense of ‘in a relaxed manner’, I imagine. Chambers Crossword Dictionary has six pages of anagrinds and I’m sure the list isn’t exhaustive.

    I’d argue that these are a legitimate part of the setter’s armoury and (within the realms of fairness, of course) we’re likely to choose those which give the best surfaces. As I said, I thought yesterday’s were fine. I understand different solvers will have different preferences but I would take issue with the terms ‘ridiculous’ and ‘dubious’.

    Anyway, thanks to you and Pee Dee for your comments and I’m glad you both enjoyed the puzzle.

  44. Thanks Vlad and manehi. After feeling flushed with success from yesterday’s FT I gave this a shot, and managed about half of it. Clearly I need more Guardian practice!

    “Easily” didn’t suggest an anagram to me when solving, but having reached the answer I was happy enough with it in retrospect.

    I was pleased to see Dec (“presenter” is always ANT or DEC!) and Oompa Loompas (orange in the Gene Wilder film but not in the Roald Dahl book) — it makes a change from composers, operas and cricket terms (although I see one cricket item still snuck in here…).

    Cheers

  45. I do hope Vlad will read this. He is one of my favourite setters and I thoroughly enjoyed this. Though I didn’t find this difficult to complete, it was challenging enough (in a fun way) to justify it’s Thursday spot (I get a little grumpy when a Thursday puzzle turns out to be a write-in). Mind you, I couldn’t parse ORANGE though it was clearly correct; I know little of these Oompa folk, least of all their colour!
    As for the moaning about anagrinds, I had no concerns and rather like the creative use displayed here.
    Great puzzle and Vlad – if you do read this please don’t be swayed by the quibblers – honourable people though they be. Don’t go changing….. I like you just the way you are! (There should be a song….?)
    Thanks again – and to manehi for educating me about the hue of Oompa-Loompas (not that I really know what they are – or want to!)

  47. William @45

    Well done for completing without difficulty a clever puzle that many of us found more challenging. Well done also for writing an exemplary comment, which I’m sure is enough to persuade Vlad not to change his ways.

    I was going to take issue with two sentences in your post, but I decided not to as that might have appeared to belittle your overall comment.

    This is so late that you will probably not see it, but if you do see it and want to have the last word be my guest (so to speak).

  48. Vlad – glad my comment not wasted!
    Alan – if there’s one person by whom I’d hate to be belittled …… I always respect your posts ….. so thanks for your kind forbearance!
    I’m just happy that Vlad got the message….
    😉

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