Guardian 27,388 / Maskarade

57 comments on “Guardian 27,388 / Maskarade”

1. Thanks, mhl.
   Pleased to see that my solution accords with yours. As you say, 1B down must be an enumeration error, which is all the more unhelpful when it’s one of the ‘special instruction’ clues. You’d think the editor would make doubly sure that everything was in order for a special prize crossword, but…no.
   ‘Cow-pilot’ is not in any resource available to me, but it couldn’t be anything else.
   All in all, I agree with you. I have no problem with a very hard crossword, but I just didn’t enjoy this slog, and really didn’t appreciate being held up by the error.

2. Hard, but eventually completed- with a little help from Mrs PA to be fair. THREWAT was either very careless or an obscurity of which I’ve never heard and put in because I couldn’t think of any thing else!
   Quite a workout.
   Thanks Maskarade.

3. I enjoyed this bonus Genius-like offering, until I found myself with three blank squares remaining, all special solutions – two of which were ambiguous (7A [V/G]ALLEYS, 12B [W/G]AGE) and so depended on the seemingly impossible third (1B THRE[G/V/W]AT). The correct enumeration of 5,2 would’ve cleared it up in a flash.

   Rog @1, you can find cow-pilot in both Wiktionary and The Free Dictionary, both of which cite Webster’s as the source.

4. Certainly very hard – I think Maskarade makes the hardest Bank Holiday puzzles I have encountered.
   Thanks to him and mhl. Glad to have CHIAN explained in 9dA, I puzzled over whether Achian was a variant of Achain.
   I too tried for a long time to work DOH in for the Homeric expression of surprise, then when the crossers ruled it out was convinced it was COO (as a ‘homer’ might utter 🙂 ). What a shock the cor-homer equivalence was, since I knew neither word as a measure.
   Speaking of which, a perch is a square rod, which gives another side to 6dA.
   Happy New Year.

5. Thanks mhl.  I really liked this, most of the time, with lots of pleasant light bulb moments.  But I failed at THREWAT, having a couple of spare letters to put into this nonsenical seven letter word, and also on BETA-RAY, thinking the last letters must be cam or max.  So can’t give unalloyed praise, despite the very good aspects.

6. I found this harder than I really enjoy, and somehow much harder than Maskerade’s previous holiday puzzles. I might feel differently if it hadn’t actually beaten me, of course! I feel better about not getting THREW AT on discovering the enumeration error, though. Once I got PEORIA and THREAT – and realised THEREAT wasn’t going to work –  I felt there must be something wrong, and became fairly sure I wasn’t going to finish, which took the edge off things a bit. But I ploughed on until I had only that and RECOUNT (oddly, I couldn’t parse it, although it seemed plausible, but  by then I’d realised I was going to have one blank, so two didn’t seem much worse). By the end I’d even thrown a couple of wordfinders at it but of course even that didn’t help – CHEETAH fitted, they said, which sounded appropriate, but didn’t help. Along the way, I had a number of false starts – DOH, of course, and I tried very hard to make the 3,7 Flighty lady AMY JOHNSON.

   Still, a really impressive construction, Maskerade, and an impressive blog, mhl.

7. And looking more closely at my heavily scribbled-on copy of the puzzle, I see that although I parsed COW-PILOT properly, I carelessly noted that out-of-place looking W as the missing letter, rather than the T at the end of TEA CHEST which meant I ended up trying to fit a T instead of a W into _H_E_A_. I’m beginning to feel this really wasn’t my kind of puzzle…

8. Many thanks for this blog mhl. I didn’t finish this one, and agree that it is at the hard end of the scale – even for Maskerade. Lots of enjoyable clues though and I hadn’t completely given up on it yet!
   But in some cases, I was misled or distracted by the conjunctive word, such as “causing” in 9D and “providing” in 22A, which I see you have just discarded. That’s quite annoying! I wouldn’t usually expect to get away with ignoring words of such apparent weight.

9. I found this fiddly but fun until coming up against the brick wall of 1 down (B). I reluctantly went for THREW AT with the assumption of an enumeration error, even though this is an arbitrary phrase not really acceptable as a crossword answer (THREW UP would have been OK). I looked at some online forums and one poster had reported that he’d contacted the editor and been told there was no error, only to receive an apology and confirmation later on that it should have been (5,2) after all! As I write this the online version of the puzzle has not been corrected.

   Given the tough constraints Maskarade sets himself with these puzzles I don’t mind the occasional non-dictionary phrase, so long as it makes some sense, but as already been said here it is incumbent on the editor to check the final version of the puzzle extra thoroughly when the entries have no definition or wordplay. Such sloppiness lets down both setter and solver.

   Still, this was enjoyable for the most part and thanks to Maskarade for the huge amount of effort that creating this must have required.

10. Extraordinary achievement by Maskarade. Like everyone else, I was thrown by “threw at”. Otherwise, a brilliant effort!

11. I usually tackle puzzles solo, but attempted this one with a friend who is much brighter than I am, but we still failed to crack ‘threw at’. While I found it frustrating, and somewhat irritating – especially now that I know that there is an enumeration error – it did fill a number of hours over the holiday period, so I suppose I must be grateful for that.

12. Many thanks to Maskarade for the challenging puzzle and to Mhl for the much-needed blog. You’ve put my mind at rest on some of the ones I was fretting over, like 1B down. But I’m still not sure about 24B across – LADLES. Did anyone else get thrown by ’empties’ in the clue? It seems too close to the definition of the new word, as although LADE can mean to empty, it means to empty as with a ladle. I found it all a bit confusing, even before the Christmas sherry.

13. I found this just right for a holiday puzzle, though it was a long slog to complete and I was rather surprised to come here and find that I had got everything right.

    As has been said, one can forgive Maskarade a few contortions to complete his clever plan, but I don’t think THREW AT would have been acceptable even without the numeration error, which was a bad slip.

    With no definitions for the extended answers there was scope for alternatives: I was delayed on the way by DOHA, CORK, GALLEY and ORAL, but got there in the end.

    And can I suggest that there is a mistake in 6A dn – the plural of the fish is surely PERCH, not PERCHES?

    But overall an amazing and enjoyable tour de force.

14. Thanks mhl. I wasn’t bothered about MOFO as I had never heard of it and still don’t know what it means. I did find it hard that all the extra letters that I found were unchecked, which made it difficult (in the absence of a definition) to be sure of having got the right answer. When I got coNvey I actually doubted that it could be correct, because the extra letter was checked. I know it wasn’t in the rubric, but I had convinced myself that the setter had gone for this as an extra layer of fiendishness. For the same reason, I never considered the A in bArathea as the extra letter in betAray, or the S in air hosteSs in retSina.

    The main thing that stopped me completing (apart from THREW AT, of course) was having HORNLESS for 4a. Works as an instruction from the conductor (“Hey, you over there, not so much horn, if you please”) and much better than the actual answer for “lacking authority”.

     

15. I have a couple of years’ experience now of Maskarade’s ‘special alphabeticals’, and I admire his inventiveness in finding different ways of implementing the basic idea of using all the letters of the alphabet in the answers.

    I enjoyed getting FUNCTION (which might have been JUNCTION), PEACEMAKER (PLACEMAKER), THREW AT (THEREAT), VALLEYS (GALLEYS), TALLISH (TALLIES) and INSECTS (INSERTS).  Also, COUNTY DOWN from ‘Countdown’ was very neat, as was BETA RAY from ‘betray’.

    I didn’t spot the possibility of the alternative pair JUNCTION/MOFO, but this was one of the hazards of the design, in which none of the extended answers had an indication or definition.  I agree THREW AT should have been enumerated properly.

    I thought a couple of the clues were a bit clunky, but on the whole there was a great variety of cryptic devices on display here, and it was both a challenging and a rewarding experience to solve this special puzzle.  COR [CORM] was a great clue.

    Thanks to Maskarade and mhl.

     

16. swatty @3: belated thanks. A google of cow-pilot threw up (sic) neither wiktionary nor the FD, oddly (unless my Christmas sherry-addled eyes missed them).

17. Yes, I agree that this was tough and I was grateful that it wasn’t my turn to blog the Christmas special this year.  The enumeration error was particularly annoying: I look forward to reading a contrite apology from Hugh in his next circular.

    One particular gripe: the last sentence of the special instructions read as follows: “The word lengths indicated refer to their respective pair of solutions”.  Eh?  It was obvious that the word lengths indicated must refer to the left hand and right hand grids respectively; what was not said (but perhaps should have been) was that the enumerations included the additional letter where appropriate.

18. I agree with mhl on this.

    I got to within 5 clues on this but finally lost the will to live. Just a slog with absolutely no humour or enjoyment. (Like all past Maskerade puzzles)

    Now I see that the enumeration actually makes the puzzle impossible to complete anyway as the published form is not solvable.

    Can we have a new Bank Holiday setter please. (Or perhaps that will co9me with our new editor 😉 )

19. I don’t leave many Guardian puzzles unfinished but I abandoned this one having done about half of it after two days. I always struggle with run together clues but some of the ones I missed should have been gettable. Might have persisted longer but after Christmas day I couldn’t face it. As always with Maskarade the gridfill is brilliant.

    Thanks to Maskarade and mhl

    (This new comment box doesn’t work very well on the Android phone if the comments get too long)

20. beery hiker @19

    “(This new comment box doesn’t work very well on the Android phone if the comments get too long)”

    Which view are you using, desktop or mobile? The mobile view comment editor hasn’t changed. The size of the desktop comment box can be increased/decreased by dragging the bottom right hand corner of the box.

21. Amazed that I managed to solve this correctly, although I did look online to see if 1B was an enumeration error as THREW AT did seem to be the only solution. It was a very tough challenge though and the CORM was my LOI.

22. Just want to echo all the comments above, in particular with relation to 1dB. I was wondering if I’d made a mistake, and went round in my head countless times until I realised the mistake wasn’t with me. Regarding Cow-Pilot, I eventually tracked it down here…

    https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/cow-pilot

    All that aside, a great puzzle, and a tremendous achievement. I remember Maskarade being at Boatman and Paul’s event (at which Hugh Stevenson was also present), and he gave a little talk about how complex this holiday bumper puzzles could be, and when pulled up by someone about an obscure answer, he asked to be cut a little slack, as the rest of the puzzle was such a brute to compile.

    Anyway, thanks to Maskarade and MHL.

23. Where is LADE defined as ’empty’? I could only find refs to loading ships.

24. To Jane @23, Chambers has definition no.5 of LADE as “To empty or drain, as with a ladle“

25. I love Maskerade puzzles and always look forward to wasting a complete bank holiday weekend. I almost completed but was thrown by 23d(B). I thought the homer was a pigeon, so the expression of surprise was COO resulting in the answer CORO which I found in a music dictionary meaning “chorus”.

26. Thanks to Maskarade for a distracting offering over the festive season and to mhl for blogging the, from my perspective, near impossible.

    Glad to see that in many instances the fails were not my fault, what with enumeration problems and obscurities (CHIAN, CONTACTORS, ORA, BARATHEA, UNCTION (in these contexts) and COR) (all these forgiveable of course – one person’s obscurity is another’s um, well FIAT caused some ripples the other day whereas I know the word from the edge of my experience) as well as some somewhat recondite clueing (DOWNBEAT and TELEPATHIC imho).  But I don’t expect to whizz through a holiday prize and there were a few I should have got for all that.

    It’s a pastime and it certainly passed some time, most of it pleasantly. And as usual, totally impressed by the task set by Maskarade, both for himself and his audience.

    A new editor? And Rufus retired? All is changed, changed utterly…. hopefully not.

27. A very tough puzzle I was very pleased to have completed correctly, despite what I guessed (hoped) was an enumeration error.

    COW-PILOT is where I found it: under COW in the old BRB.

    What’s a MOFO, if it’s not too rude to write here?

    12aB (AGE): “on” time?

    21aA (ORA) “Mouths” had me puzzled for a long time, despite thinking “oral” immediately. Fifth declension, I think?

    24aB (NOTICE): Ha! With a T in 3rd posn, I spent ages trying to make it start with WET. Technically, anything that’s not water is “what water isn’t”, isn’t it? Big doh! when I got it. (Why do people put an apostrophe in that?)

    25aA (YEAR DOT): Seen that anag somewhere else recently. Which helped.

    4dA (DOWNBEAT): Chambers has (coll.) relaxed. Does that cover it?

    4dB Thought many might not know about RESTARTS and impressed M did. Ugh! The memories!

    6dA (PERCHES):g larsen, either or (perch). Same with most fish/wild animals: “The lion on the savannah…”

    What’s this about a new editor?

28. 24aB I mean anything that’s not ice isn’t ice. Water is something that ice IS, actually (in solid phase)! Still works well as a clue of course, just not good science

29. Thanks to Maskarade (I guess) and mhl. This puzzle defeated me, even after repeated tries. I could not get any traction, but I did appreciate mhl’s blog and the comments above. Live and learn? At least I cold still handle the captcha.

30. I’ll also ask the question at the end of 27 – what’s this about a new editor?

31. sheffield hatter / Tony: “mofo” (in dictionaries as “vulgar slang”) is an abbreviation for the very offensive oedipal epithet.

    I hadn’t heard anything about a new crossword editor either. Do explain, Alphalpha!

32. Agree totally with the comments about THREWAT. I spent a long time on this puzzle and found it VERY frustrating not to be able to finish because of the error. A real shame and a plea for tighter editing please. Otherwise am in total awe of Maskerade’s abilities to conjure up these fiendish yet (usually) achievable masterpieces.

33. I don’t enjoy maskarade I’m afraid, so superficially like Araucaria but without the rigor, and without the fun.

34. I have enjoyed Maskarade puzzles before (I thought Paul, Shed and Enigmatist comprise Maskarade?) but this was an absolute pig. Some of the clues had superfluous words, for example 6 down B was “rather fashionable before transaction”. I get the INDEED but what is the transaction? A real slog and not very enjoyable.

35. I was delighted that I almost completed this but struggled using the last few extra letters. I knew 1B was THREAT but the only word I could make was THREATS and I’d already used the S…

    I thought 24B was LADIES (never heard of LADES) so couldn’t use an extra letter…

    Nevertheless a good mental exercise over the Christmas break

36. Thanks to MHL and Maskarade. I must be some kind of masochist as I actually enjoyed working through this one – however I will admit I have a lot of time on my hands at Christmas. Incidentally ROD, PERCH and POLE are all alternate names for an old unit of measurement,I’m sure that’s what Maskarade was alluding to in 6 down.

37. I found this really tough, and it took a long time to even get started. In the end, with help from daughter who was visiting post Christmas, we managed everything except 1B, 12B and 24B. This left 3 letters, G, L and W, which could make WAGE/GAGE, LADLES/LODGES/LEDGES but then I was totally thrown by the incorrect enumeration for THREW AT. Didn’t see it at all so couldn’t fill in the 2 others. I know LODGES/LEDGES doesn’t make sense, but by this point I was losing my sanity. 😀

    Nevertheless, I like a challenge, so thank you Maskarade for the workout and Mhl for the explanations.

    BTW I particularly liked DECREE NISI.

38. Thanks Maskarade, MHL

    I enjoyed it.  I liked that it was hard, and liked lots of the unclued solutions (BETA-RAY, COUNTY-DOWN, REDSTART, PENZANCE in particular).  I had trouble with LADLES, finding ‘left one out’ a bit iffy, but am surprised at the level of fuss over THREW AT.

39. Thanks mhl. Loved the Greek mince! Still doesn’t quite add up. I get MO(m) but is FO a ref to German WWI planes?

    Managra, you’re thinking of Biggles. See:
    http://bestforpuzzles.com/people/

40. Another one thwarted / exasperated by the 2d enumeration oversight – and I only had  the W to fit somewhere, but never considered an enumeration error. Apart from that, it took about two days to solve, and then I put it aside.

    I’m full of admiration for Maskerade’s compilations, but somehow I feel rather detached during solving (spoiled by the wit of the unreachable Araucaria really)

    As regards LADE – a lading can was in twice-daily use to transfer milk between cooler and churns on our Westmorland farm.

    Many thanks to mhl for the extensive blog.

     

41. Well I’m sorry – but I gave this up pretty quickly. I got the answer Luke to 12A a but it flies in the face of the preamble which states: “the new words formed are not defined in the clues”. Well I’m sorry but Luke is certainly a Star Wars hero so what the **** was this puzzle all about? Lost interest immediately. Duh.

42. I usually look forward to the Xmas bumper crossword but , for the first time ever , gave up very quickly after getting a few clues . It was not enjoyable and I had better things to do . Really miss Araucaria !

43. Too hard for me !
    Apart from messing up by having CORO rather than than CORM (still think COO is a better answer than COR) and not noticing that the extra R was already deployed in CONTRACTORS (doh) I just flat out missed DECREE NISI CHEETAH/VALLEYS (v diff clues for both side sides ) LADLES and never made up my mind between CAGE/WAGE/GAGE. I spotted the J / F ambiguity and erred on the side of civility..

    Like other the enumeration error was a stumble, but even if (5,2) had been there is it really acceptable to use a random phrase esp for an undefined solution ? For something complicating like this puzzle I really think the setter should have a very clear guideline like ‘all solutions and supporting words (e,g, Chian) will be found in Chambers (or other single reference point that is widely available) just too frustrating to be fun otherwise,

44. FRIGHT and took FLIGHT having no FIGHT and too many mince pies!!

45. Thanks Maskarade and mhl. This was hard but was, of course, meant to be and I enjoyed the challenge. I didn’t expect to finish in one session and each time I came back to it, more answers fell into place. I had to do this on paper first before trying to enter into the respective grids. Fortunately, the first half of the clue always went into the left-hand grid and the second half into the right hand grid – it would have been even harder if this had not been the case.

    I note that the online solution for the right hand grid is wrong – it gives ‘restores’ for 11A when it is clearly, as mhl confirms, ‘restored’. I can’t actually find an online solution for the left-hand grid so thank you fifteensquared!

46. Anybody else put ‘roister’ as the solution to 8A?

    Threw me for an age until chair woman became obvious

47. Couln’t be bothered. It looked too time consuming and potentially with too much trial and error.

48. Epee Sharkey @43

    I agree with you about the ‘phrase’ (or non-phrase) THREW AT.  The wrong enumeration in a sense diverted attention from this other problem, although the liberal in me recognises that the setter was probably forced into THREW AT because it was the only way to complete the grid with a ‘W’!  It was my last in because of this problem as much as because of the wrong enumeration.  (For a while I could only think of THEREAT for this word, but it didn’t fit, and the ‘E’ was used elsewhere.)

49. JAYDEE,

    Luke is not a “new word formed”; that’s GAGE (G + AGE) in the B grid, as blogged.

50. I’m so relieved to see that most of the regular expert contributors above found this a difficult puzzle. I now feel less of an idiot. I always look forward to the Maskarade offering at holiday time but found this one impossible. Don’t laugh but, after multiple visits to the newspaper, I had made no entries in the grid at all. It is true that I did have one answer in my head but thought that NELSON was much too obvious for 20D on the right and so couldn’t be right!

    BTW, Jaydee@41, the words of the preamble you quote are part of the sentence referring to the doctored word in each of the pairs of solutions. Having now seen the solution, it is clear that, in the case of 12A, that is GAGE not LUKE.

51. Like many others here, I would have enjoyed this much more – and I did enjoy it a lot – without the THREW AT double problem. I posted the enumeration problem early on on the Guardian site but no notice was taken and still hasn’t been. If I were Maskarade I’d be furious.

52. Alan 4above,

    That’s exactly the same experience I had. I parsed THREAT on sight, actually, and eventually THEREAT didn’t fit the crossers and it finally had to be THREGAT/WAGE or THREWAT/GAGE. I bet I wasn’t the only one who looked for a threwat in the dictionary. I think the lack of “dictionary nature” of THREW AT is forgivable as a final filler, but the faulty enumeration was a poor show. Mind you, you’d have to laugh if someone came on now with the OED def of a threwat. Especially if the definition was “an unjustified criticism”.

    Xjpotter 1above. It seems unlikely the editor would have changed 5,2 to 7, so if M is furious, it’ll be with himself presumably.

53. Thank you mhl and thank you Maskarade.

    Well done mhl for writing this blog. It can’t have been easy.

54. Ann (42), Mike (50) and others say more politely what I wanted to say on the Wednesday after Christmas after still only getting a handful of answers.

    Ah well, maybe next year (or Easter)

     

55. I think MHL’s comments are spot on. It was an unrelenting slog that felt more like an exam for MENSA than a bit of festive fun. Like other respondents above, I came within a whisker of finishing it (with a few misplaced letters), only to be floored by the balls-up over “Threw-at”. “Threat” was one of the first ones I got, but after mucking around with various options, I simply could not work out how you could make another word by adding a letter. So I gave up on it and came back to it at the death, in the end putting in another speculative word (atheral….eek!) out of desperation. That mucked up “Cheetah” as well, although even with MHL’s explanation, I still don’t understand that one! Overall, I have so many bones to pick with the cluing, the definitions used and the overall concept of adding letters when you have no definition against which to check the answer (eg, like others, I put in WAGE….I’ve never heard of “GAGE”, presumably it’s a fruit, and also put in TALLISM, missing the correct TALLISH, which meant a few letters going in the wrong places, but which screwed up the whole thing. And the Doh red herring was awful…when struggling to get started on something like this, DOHA or DOSH seemed dead certs, and I think that deception went beyond fair). Maskarade has done some enjoyable monsters in the past….I recall one with pop bands as a theme, and another with cars. But I think this one was a bridge too far….way too complex. One or two of his other ones I’ve simply abandoned early on because they’re so intractable…life’s too short! Overall message to Maskarade (and to Guardian crossword editors)…..remember crosswords are meant to be fun…challenging, yes, but not impossibly complex and ultimately frustrating.

56. Thanks for the puzzle, and for the blog.

    J, F, and M could be rotated.
    Junction instead of Function
    CorF instead of CorM
    MoMo instead of MoJo

57. Coming very late to this, but when I printed out this puzzle some time ago, I got only one grid. Also, if I go to “Prize crossword 27,388” now, it says it’s “by x”, and there’s still only one grid. Clues are the same as before, though. Strange!

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