Guardian 27,089 / Chifonie

43 comments on “Guardian 27,089 / Chifonie”

1. Thank you Eileen and Chifonie. The only thing I noticed is that 24 across is TEMPERAMENTALLY. Good luck with the cold and the decorator.

2. Thank you, Judy – fixed now.

3. Thanks Eileen – I appreciate the dedication to duty! And thanks Chifonie for an easy start to the week. As a relative newbie I hadn’t seen pen for female swan before so that was my learning for the day.

4. Thanks, Eileen, and Chifonie.

   I thought it quite straightforward, and without a single CD, un-Rufuslike for me.

   Couldn’t explain SATRAP and BRIDGE but so obvious now.

5. I found this easier than today’s Quiptic, which has plenty of CDs.

   I learnt two new terms: SATRAP and SEA FRET.

   EXCRETE provoked a smile.

   Thanks Eileen and Chifonie.

6. Nice surfaces as always from Chifonie. Favourites were TEMPERAMENTALLY, HOSANNA and PENCHANT. Hadn’t heard of SEA FRET. Many thanks to Eileen and Chifonie.

7. Sorry that you’re under fhe weather Eileen. Get well soon.

8. Thank you, George, @7 – but I’m no worse than many people I know: no wonder, with all these drastic fluctuations in temperature.

9. Got stuck into this quite early-for me- because the decorators are back for phase two. So snap, Eileen. I haven’t got a cold though. Rather a good puzzle,if distinctly Monday-ish. I didn’t know SEA FRET so that was solved by a process of elimination. My favorite was PENCHANT which raised a smile.
   Thanks Chifonie

10. Get well soon, Eileen. Thank you for your (as always) interesting blog, your third in a row! Hope your dedication to crossword duties is not wearing you out.

    Once I got started with the anagram at 11a CLARINET, everything unfolded reasonably smoothly, but oddly enough, despite having all the fodder, 24a TEMPERAMENTALLY was my LOI.

    It’s only a small achievement I know but I managed to complete the puzzle without any reference help – I usually use a thesaurus reasonably readily to solve most crosswords. So will make that my challenge for this week, to minimise use of the online dictionary/thesaurus or google.

    I think we may have encountered FRET for sea mist in a puzzle not so long ago?

    My favourites were 7d EXCRETE and and 19d HOSANNA.

    THanks to Chifonie.

11. Very enjoyable if not too testing. A straightforward complete without any assistance: as far as unusual solutions go, I’d heard of SATRAP (probably in a crossword; I can think of no other reason) and 17d had to be SEA FRET, given the anagram and the checkers.

    Some very nicely constructed clues: SINCERE, TEHRAN, ACHIEVER and DALLIANCE all got ticks from me. Two neck-and-neck favourites – PENCHANT and HOSANNA, both of which are very neat and made me laugh.

    A couple of minor gripes: I’m not sure about ‘evaluation’ = ‘try’ in 25a (perhaps in the sense of “give it a try/evaluation” but it’s stretching it for me) and ‘a bit of sausage’ being ‘s’ is weak in my book.

    Thanks Chifonie and to Eileen for battling through.

12. Thanks Chifonie and Eileen.

    Hope the cold improves. Seemed to be very straightforward, but that’s good for a Monday.

    I liked the temperamental prima donna and the BRIDGE.

13. Thank you Chifonie and Eileen – do hope you get a good night’s sleep tonight.

    I enjoyed this crossword, even though I failed to “parse” BRIDGE, but I did remember FRET for “sea mist” (Brummie last May).
    I loved the clues for PENCHANT and SATRAP.

14. Julie in Australia @10: Don’t be too hard on yourself for using a dictionary/thesaurus – online or otherwise. I know this comes up regularly on sites such as this. It’s all about how you use such sources. I suspect that, other than in a competition environment, solvers have always had such tools to hand to check the accuracy/validity of solutions found through the wordplay. I certainly checked SATRAP. In my view it’s scouring such sources for inspiration that should count as ‘seeking assistance’ – and even that’s OK if all else has failed and the alternative is an unfinished grid. Just chalk it up as a victory to the setter and then freely turn to Google.

15. A nice gentle start to the week.

    Re 23d: I know some people don’t like “a bit of” meaning the first letter of a word, but it’s a well-established crossword convention and I don’t have a problem with it.

    SEA FRET is something I’m very familiar with, having spent many holidays on the Northumberland coast!

16. JimS @15: given my own recollections of holidays in Northumbria, SEA FRET could also describe the frustrating time spent waiting for the rain/haar to blow over so we could visit the beach!

17. A lucid and elegant analysis, as always, Eileen – despite your heavy cold. I always enjoy Chifonie’s puzzles and it was nice to see one this morning, as a change from dear old Rufus.
    Hope you soon feel better.

18. No real problems, as you would expect from Chifonie: many old chestnuts, eg ‘of French’ and ‘the German’ both make an appearance. TEHRAN caused a slight delay, convinced that ‘Eastern time’ was ET.

19. Hope your cold is over soon.

    Thanks for the parsing of 4A, which I simply could not see — loud cries of “duh!” now you’ve explained it.

    Although SATRAP was obvious for 22A, my eyebrows raised at the parsing: surely it’s the “a” being worn by the “strap,” not the other way round?

20. realthog @19

    “…surely it’s the “a” being worn by the “strap,” not the other way round?” – yes, that’s what the clue says but I didn’t express the answer very well. I’ll amend it.

21. Eileen @20

    It wasn’t your parsing of this one that puzzled me but the clue’s, which seemed to me flawed. But thanks for the shoutout anyway! 🙂

22. Nice gentle start to the week that Felt more like an Everyman than yesterday’s Everyman.

23. realthog @19 and 21: I think the clue and Eileen’s original explanation are correct. If a belt is being worn by me, then I am inside and the belt goes around me. Similarly, “belt worn by a” means that the “a” is inside, and the belt, or strap, goes around it.

24. I seem to be the only one here who didn’t find this easy. I got there in the end, and with much enjoyment. Get better soon Eileen and thanks for the blog. I’d heard of Sea Drift because of the Delius symphonic poem but not Sea Fret. A lovely term. Like Julie loi for me was the long one. Preceded by Sea Fret.

25. Thanks to Chifonie and Eileen. I look forward to this setter’s puzzles and this one was no exception. I did parse SEA FRET but had only a vague memory of the term from a previous puzzle and did not know the BRIDGE-potter-snooker connection (cricket and other games are among my weakness).

26. It was news to me that a snooker player is a potter, so while “bridge” is a game and seemed a plausible answer, the rest made no sense. Thanks for the explanation. Snooker is an alien language to me, even more unfathomable than cricket.

    I’d never heard of sea fret, but what else could it be? So i googled it and there it was.

    Happy New Year to all and a happy recovery to you, Eileen, and I hope the decorators don’t raise too much dust and make you cough more!

    And thanks to Chifonie.

27. I enjoyed this, but that was probably because I managed to complete it easily, an almost unheard-of occurrence for me. Favourites were PENCHANT and EXCRETE. My one quibble is with 5d: does ‘retract’ really mean ‘repudiate’?

    Thanks to Chifonie and Eileen.

28. Happy New Year all!

29. Christa@27: I’d say it’s a one-way correspondence between RETRACT and REPUDIATE.
    If you retract a statement you necessarily repudiate it, but if you repudiate someone else’s belief or statement, that does not involve a retraction.
    My personal quibble was with ‘trace’=’element’. Can anyone supply a better example than
    ‘His motives contained a trace/element of malice’? For me ‘element’ doesn’t have the same connotation of smallness.
    Good puzzle though – thanks Chifonie and Eileen.

30. Like others I really enjoyed this. SEA FRET was new to me but once the crossers were in it was the only viable option.

    Like Mark, I’m not convinced by try=evaluation. And I’m also iffy on defence=vindication. Vindication is something I’ve always thought of as happening after a (successful) defence. But I’m sure it’s in the dictionary.

    My favourite today was TINDER for the elegant surface and the use of not one but two hoary old cryptic chestnuts. I also smiled to wonder how Paul would have clued it given its modern use as the name of a dating/hook up app!

    Thanks to Eileen and Chifonie.

31. Thanks Chifonie and Eileen (get well soon!)
    Pleasant enough, but I didn’t like “a bit of sausage” for S either, and I thought “old Penny” in 6d would have been fairer, without affecting the surface (sorry if someone has already said this – I’ve only done a quick scan through the comments).

32. A pleasant enough Rufus substitute – nothing too taxing and no problems with SEA FRET.

    Thanks to Chifonie, thanks and hope you’re feeling better soon to Eileen

33. 4A – no-one beset by rheum and decorators should have to suffer pedantry as well, but this must be said: to play a snooker shot, you have to raise the cue above the surface of the table. Normally, this is done with the hand, which is then called the bridge. When you can’t reach, you use a stick with a metal or plastic bit on the end, which is called a rest. (When a rest wouldn’t work because of the proximity of other balls, you use more exotic bits of apparatus such as the ‘spider’, but this eventuality does not concern us here.) This clue would only work if a rest were a sort of bridge, or a bridge were a sort of rest. Neither of these is true – they are both sorts of support. ‘Potter has support in game’ would be something like a clue, but not one up to Chifonie’s standard.

34. Mark @ 16: Good word, haar. I don’t think I have heard it before.

    “In meteorology, haar is a cold sea fog. It usually occurs on the east coast of England or Scotland between April and September, when warm air passes over the cold North Sea.”

    And Eileen, sorry you caught my cold.

35. Thanks, all, for your sympathy – not really deserved: as I said above, I’m no worse than lots of other people I know. I was simply offering an excuse / explanation for any potential stupid mistakes in a hurried blog.

    I wasn’t very happy about repudiate/retract but didn’t search for equivalence, as I normally would.
    Re element / trace: I did look up ‘element’ in Chambers and found ‘a small amount’, which seemed fine for ‘trace’, which I didn’t pursue. As for bridge/rest, I did google ‘bridge, rest, snooker’ and found this http://www.myfreeinventions.com/snooker/snooker-rest/ but didn’t read it carefully enough, so many thanks to Robert Methuen @33 for the elucidation.

36. I know nothing about snooker, but wiki gives this

    “An entire class of different mechanical bridges exist for snooker, called rests (see that entry for details), also commonly used in blackball and English billiards.”

37. Apologies, Eileen, we crossed, but I think 4a is all right…

38. I had the same quibbles rightly or wrongly as others about BRIDGE, a bit of sausage for S, trace/element, and retract/repudiate but they were only quibbles and didn’t slow me down or detract from enjoyment of the puzzle. Thanks to Chifonie and Eileen.

39. @JimS 23

    You may well be right! I’ve been sitting here for some minutes, eyes crossing, trying to work it out. Oh, jibber.

40. thank you Eileen and Chifonie

    I was unable to parse 1d and 4a

    This was an enjoyable puzzle for me to do after having had a break from crosswords for several months

41. Welcome back, Michelle! 😉

42. Thanks for your patience with my snooker-based pernicketyness. I love the idea of the ‘mechanical bridge’ – though it does imply moving parts (cf. ‘mechanical digger’), so maybe ‘artificial bridge’ would be better; either would make a rest into a sort of bridge, and save the clue. I think the people I play snooker with would become a bit ribald if I asked them to ‘pass the mechanical bridge, please’!

43. I enjoyed it as I could do most of it.

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