A fairly hard Azed this time — with more than its fair share of heraldic terms, intricate wordplays and one very nice “follow-on” clue.
| Across | ||
| 4 | SASQUATCH | ‘Bigfoot’ crouching low in school ((9) |
| S(ASQUAT)CH – Canadian yeti type of abominable snowman type of creature. | ||
| 10 | ARICEPT | Dementia treatment? Power limited, it’s administered with care (7) |
| P in (it, care) * – Can’t quite remember but I think this is a medicine for… what’s it. | ||
| 12 | SELAH | Pause in psalms? High note pierces silence (5) |
| S(e-la)H – e-la is highest note in old church music. | ||
| 13 | RATTLER | Old coach, a humdinger (7) |
| Two means — a type of carriage and something Most Excellent. | ||
| 14 | HEALD | Bit of loom in front to draw through as weaver does (5) |
| HEA(L[oom])D – “draw through heddle-eyes” where heddle is part of a loom. | ||
| 15 | GIRONS | Heraldic charges, wavy rings round ordinary (6) |
| O in rings*. | ||
| 17 | DIAMANTE | Glittering composition once a fellow penned (8) |
| DI(A,MAN)TE – where “dite” is obs. composition. | ||
| 18 | OMENED | Foreboding the author introduced in One Day … (6) |
| O(ME)NE,D – the author is in this case “me” — namely, Azed himself. And “omened” can be an adjective: “affording or attended by omens” thus “foreboding”. | ||
| 19 | WEBCAM | ABC scribbled in matrix? Its images are electronic (6) |
| abc* in WEM where wem=obs. womb/belyl and matrix is obs. womb. So it all fits together — a modern hi-tech term with obsolete components. | ||
| 22 | BASICS | What is another way of expressing this? ABC is (singular) (6) |
| (ABC is s)* where s=abbrev(singular). Where ABC is deifned as “… the basics”. So this is an anag &lit. Basically. | ||
| 24 | PERONE | A singular part of the skeleton (6) |
| a=PER,singular=ONE – fiibula. So two consecutive “singular” with different cryptic contributions. | ||
| 25 | BIG BOARD | NY stock exchange offering plenty to get stuck into? (8, 2 words) |
| Not quite happy with wordplay parsing yet — unless “plenty to get stuck into” is cryptic definition? | ||
| 28 | ILLITE | Clayey mineral to work round, that is forming frame (6) |
| rev(till=work) in i.e.=”that is”. | ||
| 29 | ESTRO | Extract from noblest Roman that inspired Dante? (5) |
| hidden. Italian “poetic inspiration. | ||
| 31 | NEUSTON | Tiny swimmers nuts on swimming round centre of ocean (7) |
| [oc]e[an] in (nuts on)* – “minute organisms that float…” | ||
| 32 | SKEIN | English hidebound, in a tangle? (5) |
| SK(E)IN – hide=skin and bound is the containment indicator. | ||
| 33 | SCLERAL | Optical covering’s cells are repaired, saving eye’s opening (7) |
| e[ye] in (cells,a=are)* – adjective | ||
| 34 | TRENDIEST | Being in before the others, maybe drowns in river (9) |
| dies (“maybe drowns”) in Trent (the river). To be “in” is to be hip, fashionable, trendy. | ||
| Down | ||
| 1 | GASH | Score extra (4) |
| Two meanings – second is waste=extra. | ||
| 2 | GREENMAILER | Eco-friendly US author, aggressive operator in local business (11) |
| GREEN=eco-friendly,MAILER=Norman Mailer (“The Naked and the Dead” — good WWII novel I read when I was quite a big younger. Fug it! the best novel I read). Greenmailing is a form of business blackmail (probably will become legal in the Trump era). | ||
| 3 | PILATES | Had meals cutting beer – it’s good for your … (7) |
| PIL(ATE)S – ref. Pilsner beer… this is a good follow-on clue since the definition includes the first word of 4D. | ||
| 4 | SCALENI | … Muscles, and cans lie neglected (7) |
| (cans lie)* – neck muscles. | ||
| 5 | SPRAID | Dialect roughened, spoken with Provençal intruding (6) |
| S(PR)AID* – pr=abbrev(provencal). “Roughened” in dialect. | ||
| 6 | UPTIME | When computer’s working I put out message cutting central part (6) |
| (I put)*,M[essag]E | ||
| 7 | ANTRA | Body cavities found in ruminant? Rarely (5) |
| Hidden. Anatomical cavities. | ||
| 8 | TALON | Stock, not quite completely in fashion (5) |
| T(AL[l])ON – some more fashion=TON. “Cards remaining after the deal, the stock” — didn’t know that. | ||
| 9 | HORSEMEN | Are they scattered around, brought in by huntsman’s signal? (8) |
| Not sure about “are they scattered around?” unless it’s ref. carrier pigeons (another definition of “horseman”). Pelham notes that it’s seme=scattered in horn=huntsman’s signal so HOR(SEME)N for containment &lit. | ||
| 11 | PENTANDRIAN | Confined pope takes in name of Linnaean classification (11) |
| PENT=confined,(A(N)DRIAN – ref. many Pope Adrians. | ||
| 16 | BOBBINET | Below knot of hair girl grips English lace (8) |
| BOB=knot of hair,BIN(E)T where bint=girl (from the Arabic). | ||
| 20 | BRISKET | Cut game involving some danger (7) |
| B(RISK)ET where game=gamble=bet. Ref. cut of meat. | ||
| 21 | COTTERS | Wedges cut short and put under camp bed (7) |
| COT,TERS[e] | ||
| 23 | COTTID | One fish or another – after time it’s hauled up on board (6) |
| CO(T,TI)D – any fish of genus Cottus. And COD=another fish so (t, rev(it)) in cod. | ||
| 24 | PRANCE | Form of caper (n) (6) |
| (caper, n)* – anag. &lit. | ||
| 26 | GLUME | Grass bract? Sounds like something that’s pretty dull (5) |
| Sounds like “gloom” which is pretty dull. It’s a “sterile bract”. | ||
| 27 | BISON | Wild creature? One turns to spur possibly if –– (5) |
| I suspect that wordplay is “B is ON” and thus we are meant to convert “one” to “be” but I don’t see how it comes together. Pelham completed the parsing: if B is ON then “one” become BONE which is a spur. | ||
| 30 | ONLY | Just herald reapportioning parts (4) |
| Take Lyon who’s the chief herald of Scotland and just invert its two halves. | ||
*anagram
Thanks Azed and Ilancaron.
I think you are right that the second part of 25ac is a cryptic definition, taking “board” in the sense used in “board and lodgings.
9dn: I think this is SEME in HORN & lit.
27dn: If B is on, “one” becomes “bone”.
Warning about today’s AZED: It’s a “right and left” and the instructions say “entered in the two similarly numbered spaces… either side of the central vertical line”.
The diagram numbering is completely wrong: it’s shown as as a normal diagram, and there are not “two similarly numbered spaces”.
I have not yet set about solving the puzzle, but based on preious puzzles of this kind, I think the solver needs to renumber the diagram as two separate twin puzzles identically numbered, so the frist row becomes 1,2,3,4,5,1,2,3,4,5 the second row (currently 11 & 12) becomes 6,6, the third 7,7 and so on.
Experience AZEDers will probably know this, but anyone fairly new to the puzzles may not.
Was given the Chambers Dictionary for Christmas so finally able to have a proper crack at Azed. After years of looking at it and seeing an utterly impenetrable form of crossword voodoo. Great to be actually finishing (some of) them. Especially this week when Ilancaron bills it as ‘fairly hard’. So many thanks to Azed and Ilancaron. The blog is especially appreciated in these early days.
thanks Pelham for the horsemen wordplay… should have been able to figure that out! And for 27D…
Isn’t the problem with 18a not that OMENED can be an adjective (think of ill-OMENED), but that FOREBODING is a noun? However, I see in Chambers that there’s a verb to forebode, so Azed must be using the participle in the clue.
Thanks Goujeers. Your analysis is spot on. I imagine the crossword will not be admitted as a competition entry but it doesn’t spoil the task of trying to solve it. I’m looking at the online but I guess the paper copy is the same
It was the SW corner I struggled with in particular, but definitely on the harder side.
I came here to see if anybody else could make sense of today’s grid, so thanks! 🙂
Yes, Goujeers is right, and it does solve that way. And keith crook is right to guess that the paper copy is the same as online, but is maybe wrong to guess that the competition will be annulled: wasn’t there a similar case a few weeks ago, and the competition went ahead? and with a lack of any explanation or apology! Will any be forthcoming today? Don’t hold your breath. The two words to be clued for the competition thus appear at the squares numbered 29 and 30 in the grid as published, not at 15 as twice stated. Well, it all adds a bit of extra challenge to a Sunday morning.
Indeed this was quite hard, and an excellent challenge to while away a freezing Sunday afternoon. Thanks as always to Azed.
As I’ve said ad nauseam, how sad that this excellent series only generates a few comments, and most of those are about the Guardian’s incompetence rather than the puzzle itself. After today’s mess (Don Manley has confirmed that Azed sent a correct grid) the overwhelming impression I get is that neither the Guardian staff nor most of those who solve the daily puzzle give a shit about Azed. Perhaps it’s time to move the puzzle to somewhere it would be more appreciated, like the “i”? After all, the IQ has been a roaring success there, thanks to His Nimrodness.
Sorry for the negativity, but such sloppiness really annoys me.
I think the number of comments is more a reflection of the fact that there are hundreds of times more solvers of the daily puzzle than of Azed.
Following on from 9 and 10: the paucity of comments also reflects the inevitable one-week time-lag. You have to remember to click on to the Azed part of the site after the week’s gap, and then try to remember the puzzle and how you got on with it. Whereas with the Guardian it can become more of a daily routine, and the Saturday setters are familiar from weekdays, so despite the week’s time-lag it is natural that comments on the Prize one flow more easily. Look at how very few comments the Telegraphs’s Enigmatic Variations habitually gets, with its gap of more than one week. And Azed does attract a lot of loyalty from Observer readers and (despite the misprints) the Observer itself, so let’s keep him there! And hope that the sloppiness gets sorted.
Fair enough about the relative number of comments – I guess I got a little carried away with my rant. Sorry!
I still am annoyed about the sloppy presentation of the Azed puzzle though. He puts a lot of work intio his puzzles and deserves better from the Guardian/Observer.
Fortunately I’d seen the Left and Right umpteen times before- it was a Ximenes invention going back to the 1950s. A subeditor looks to have “corrected” the numbering. A real shame for Azed. Do hope newcomers weren’t put off as the puzzle is a treat, with some really weird words.
At the dinner, held at the Café Royal, celebrating Ximenes’s 1000th there was a Left/Right mini crossword in the menu and my wife, Sybil, with my help won a small bottle of cherry brandy, someone else getting green chartreuse. We still have the bottle!
I can assure you all that The Observer is concerned and values Azed highly, but there has been far too large a spate of problems recently, for reasons which I will not attempt to analyse in detail. A new protocol for checking the puzzles and pdfs at each stage is being worked out and I am trying to play a part in this. The correctly numbered grid for the Right and Left is already on GU and will be shown in miniature in tomorrow’s solution panel (I have negotiated this in Azed’s absence). The deadline for submissions is being put back a week.