Guardian 27,395 / Picaroon

55 comments on “Guardian 27,395 / Picaroon”

1. For some reason this absolutely flew in, particularly liked 16 Down…

2. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

   Great fun, with COCK-A-HOOP, SHERBET and GARIBALDI my favourites.

   I was puzzled about the “undress” in 6a too. I don’t think I’ve seen “school” as an anagram indicator before.

3. Loved sherbet! Thank you.

4. Happy New Year Eileen.
   I parsed 6a the same way as you: perhaps we are both missing something – if so, someone will tell us.
   Another excellent puzzle from one of my favourite setters. If I were to be really picky, I would say that I am not too keen on the &lit at 8d, but that’s a very small and personal quibble.
   Best wishes for 2018 for everyone else too.

5. 17a: One to remember.

   Question marks for me on ‘Almost out of new’ = early (27a) and touching = re (18d)

    

6. Hi pex @5

   27ac: if a shopkeeper says; We’re out of …’, s/he means, ‘We have no…’

   18dn: Chambers –  touching: prep. concerning;

   Chambers – re: prep. concerning, with reference to.

    

7. Not particularly happy with an abbreviation as part of an anagram in 3d – if it’s an anagram of “had Serbo-Croat” around S(ociety) then that should be indicated in some way.  Otherwise, twisty but very enjoyable.

8. Same issue with 6a. Taking ‘undress’ to mean ‘remove outer layers’ just about works as an inclusion indicator, but I don’t particularly like it. Some wonderful anagrams at 14a, 17a and 3d. Thanks to Eileen and Picaroon.

9. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

   Happy New Year to everyone. I forgot about the submarine rolls.

   Nice anagram for BREAST-FEEDING. I didn’t know that Stefan Edberg did such a thing!

10. Eileen and George
    I saw it as ‘headline’ English; as in: QUEEN[is]TO VISIT BAFFINLAND.
    I don’t quite understand your misgivings.

11. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

    This was a slow start with only two filled in on the first pass. Does that mean the setter has succeeded in making a god crossword?
    Those of you who like reading/listening in on interviews with setters might like to look at the following links. David Astle is arguably Australia’s best/most well known/most devious crossword setter. His cryptic and quick(?) puzzles appear in the Sydney Morning Herald/Melbourne Age on Friday.
    My view is that his “quick” crosswords are bordering on cryptic.
    The first URL is for the interview, the second is for his own website.

    http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/lunch-with-david-astle-20171221-h08m4x.html

    http://davidastle.com/

    two apologies may be necessary:
    one, if the URLs don’t show up as links (cut and paste to your browser)
    two, if this appears twice.

12. Hi il principe dell’oscurità  @10 – if ‘undress’ means ‘remove letters from either end’, we’d usually expect it to mean an equal number of letters from either end. I don’t quite understand your comment. 😉

13. apparently a third apology is necessary. I don’t know where the first umpteen lines of myn post @11came from. After I clicked on “submit” I was taken to a page I’ve never seen before asking me to click on another captcha. Has the system changed?

14. Eileen – Thanks for he explanation. I thought your uneasiness might be about the verb form. I was unaware of the convention about shedding letters usually being evenly done. Thanks for clearing that up.

15. kevin @13

    The extraneous text/lines (now removed) were in your original comment because you copied/pasted from a word processor document rather than a simple text file.

16. [Gaufrid @15

    That’s interesting. I’ve copied and pasted from a Word document several times in the past without encountering this problem.]

17. Hi Eileen,
    Happy New Year to you too, and to everyone else here!
    My intended parsing of AGES was as you suggest. “Undress” = “remove outer layer(s) from” – I’d say that could conceivably mean one layer or several from each end. A person who got undressed might, for example, remove more layers from the top half than the bottom, mightn’t they?! (If the letters to be “undressed” weren’t given in the clue, but required the solver first to think of a synonym, I think I’d certainly expect it to mean “remove one letter from each end” though, otherwise the possible permutations are too numerous to be fair.) Sorry if that caused any undue head-scratching!
    As for 3 down, I agree that needing to make a standard single-letter abbreviation before anagramming isn’t as neat as a pure anagram, but it’s been widely used for as long as I’ve been solving crosswords, and I prefer it to “X initially”, or “Y finally”, say, to derive the last letter, once again purely for reasons of neatness.
     
    Happy solving in 2018!

18. Thanks Gaufrid

19. It is not mentioned that fiat means a decree or order rather than the car. This is new to me.

20. Robert Nixon @19

    It’s Latin. “Fiat lux” means “Let there be light”, for example.

    FIAT, on the other hand, is an acronym – Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (meaning “Italian auto factory in Turin”)

21. Many thanks for clearing that up, Picaroon – I was just afraid that I’d not interpreted the wordplay correctly. I’ve no objection to removing an unequal number of letters – and I had no problem at all with 3dn. 😉

    Hi Robert Nixon @19 – as I said in the blog, I underlined the definitions in the clues and FIAT is in all the dictionaries. [It’s Latin for ‘Let it be done’.] I’m sorry if it wasn’t clear.

22. I crossed with muffin [checking the dictionaries]. Just for the record, FIAT can also mean ‘Let it be made’, as in muffin’s example.

23. S means Society as in eg FRS so I’ve no problem with what Picaroon has done. Equally, though I would normally expect ‘undress’ to mean the same number of letters from either end, there’s no reason other than convention as to why it should.

    That said, I was a bit slow today. And I bet I was the only person to have TWISTY as last in. I kept looking for culinary things, thanks to Jamie.

24. muffin @16

    The site used to have a simple text editor for adding comments and this ignored/stripped out any formatting generated when copying from a word processor document. The comment editor was replaced just over two weeks ago with the current WYSIWYG editor in order to make up for the loss of the comment preview option and to remove the need for using HTML tags when adding embellishments and links.

    It would appear that the new comment editor displays the formatting information generated by the word processor by treating it as part of the comment content. Not a desirable situation so I will investigate further to see if this can be rectified.

25. [Thanks for the clarification, Gaufrid – I don’t think I’ve done copy-and-paste since you changed the interface.]

26. Thanks Eileen and Pickers. i had no problem with any of this-or rather  i did have problems as Pickers’ cluing is uber-devious. but totally fair.So difficult to pick a favourite but PASS THE PARCEL was pretty damn fine.

27. Thanks both,

    This fairly quick for me, but very witty with some splendid anagrams. The only hold up was 1d, for some reason.

28. Lovely puzzle: not a doddle but fair and solvable with a nice variety of clues.  I had no problem with the asymmetrical undressing in 6a, or with the abbreviation added to the clear anagram in 3d, though would ‘Comprehensive school had Serbo-Croats’ have worked, incorporating the ‘s’ into the anagram?  Probably not as good as a surface.  Thanks anyway to Picaroon @17 for coming along and expanding on the logic of them.

    Lots to admire, but SPEARHEAD, PASS THE PARCEL and ACROSS THE BOARD probably the pic of the bunch!

29. Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen – most enjoyable. Helped to get me through the morning of my fifth day in bed with flu… Loved 17a. Just one note – I don’t much like the useful distinction between jealousy and envy being ignored, though I know it is very common.

30. Forgot my manners, what a CAD: thanks as always to Picaroon and Eileen!

31. Good puzzle, much enjoyed, but I’m no fan of the asymmetry in undress. Actually I’m not a fan of that one even when it’s symmetrical, to mean ‘take the outside letters away from’. Even discovered I find irksome however, so maybe I’m not cut out, so to speak, for the complexities of The Guardian’s crossword style sheet!

32. As usual a straightforward Monday followed by something tougher. As always Picaroon provided an entertaining challenge. CADGE was last in.

    Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen

33. Took me quite a while to get going but I’m glad I persevered as I did enjoy myself

    Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen

34. Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen. Lots of fun. From previous puzzles I did know PASS THE PARCEL and the bird-porridge-prison connection, but STRETCHER PARTY was new to me and I needed help parsing COCK-A-HOOP.

35. re “undress”

    Logically, if we are taking away “outside letters” of “stage scared”, then that is being regarded as a single unit, in which case the space can’t be ignored; hence the clue gives “age s” rather than “ages”.

36. Not the toughest from Picar’s but I missed several parsings, or else got them wrong.  I was trying to finish off SE[DATE] but concluded it was just a double def.  And I took OFFENCE as just a cryptic def.  And a few others.  But none of this really matters!  A good start to 2018!

    Thanks to picaroon and eileen.

37. Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen, whose help I needed extensively; no fault of Picaroon – just me being a bit thick/lazy after all the festivities.  Do I detect an amount of clothing removal  and liquid intake pervading the whole?  Just me probably…

     

     

38. Thanks Eileen @6 quite clear now you’ve pointed them out.

    I was also surprised at the uneven undressing but as Picaroon (@17) rightly points out, its not always done evenly from either end.

    Does muffin have a point @35? I think not as embeddings usually cover two words.

39. Picaroon@13;

    A little late in the day, with new year fuzziness not only my excuse, thank you for taking the time and trouble to explain two of your clues. Far be it from me to query what you intended (the parsing to be) when you composed 6 ac, but my simple mind took “undress” to mean here “extract from”, in other words I thought it was a “hidden in” clue as Eileen suggests, with no worries about letters to be discarded on either side.

    Thank you for the lovely crossword, thank you to Eileen for the clarity of the explanations (because of course I couldn’t parse everything) and a Happy New Year to all.

40. With apologies to muffin @20 and all present owners, my father-in-law used to tell me frequently – when I was a member of that band – that FIAT actually stood for “Fix It Again Tony”.

41. I was another who’s wits seemed to be dulled by the festivities as I too only managed two on the first pass. However I persisted and eventually got there, and it was well worthwhile. Lots of Picaroon’s usual excellent clueing as has been mentioned by many. I needed Eileen’s help to parse SHERBET, and it is now my cod.
    Thanks to P&E and I hope things happen in 2018 for the members of 225 community as we want them to.

42. penzephyr @40

    By co-incidence, about 20 minutes after my post I came across “Fix it again Tony” in the book of Tom Hanks short stories I was given for Christmas!

43. I thought the use of undress in 6 was fine. Envoi was a new word for me and I didn’t see steady as date for ages! Really enjoyed this even though it took me rather longer to complete that I care to admit.

44. This was a great crossword, and I had no real problem with any of it, but I’m glad the setter popped in to explain a couple of things.  The only other thing I could mention (first pointed out here by muffin @2) is the use of ‘school’ to indicate an anagram.  This sort of thing happens to me quite often, and I suspect that most of you would have come up with a suitable mental image to explain it!

    I really enjoyed solving the four long answers (ACROSS-THE-BOARD being the last of these to go in) and some other clues in particular: 7d GARIBALDI, 13d SHERBET (in which giving two examples of ‘herb’ perhaps did away with the need for a ‘?’ at the end), 22a UMPTEEN and 27a EARLY BIRD.

    Thanks to Picaroon for a great start (for me) to the new year and to Eileen for such a clear blog (and for explaining SUBALTERN).

     

45. I got stuck with about 2/3 done and laid it aside. I managed to complete the balance on my return and, as usual, couldn’t see why I’d had a problem. SPEARHEAD and TWISTY were last in. The latter seems to owe something to Barry Cryer and I’ve noticed other setters using this device. Nothing wrong with it of course!
    Thanks Picaroon.

46. Peter Aspinwall @45

    If there are clues that give me first letters, I always look at them first, so TWISTY was my FOI, in fact!

47. Late post. Very enjoyable puzzle. Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen. All my favourites mentioned. Interesting blog.

    I only got SPEARHEAD in 24a from the crossers and wordplay, thinking it must be a make of automobile. I am unfamiliar with the use of “van” meaning “spearhead” (like a “forward party” I suppose?), but now I am assuming it is an abbreviation of “vanguard”? Is it a Britishism?

48. Julie @47

    Yes, “van” as short for “vanguard” is a common expression over here.

49. Really enjoyed the puzzle. None of the quibbles above.  I had a different take on 3D. Had S for school as part of the fodder, and ‘society’ as the anagram indicator. I quite enjoyed that, and don’t mind nouns as indicators, but that would have caused even more quibbles!

50. Being a novice to proper cryptic crosswords this is a real eye opener and am not ashamed to admit I got about 2 without any help, go to start somewhere thanks.

51. Nice to hear from you, Cosmo @50. Stick at it – it really is worth it ! 😉

52. Solved 23d through partial parsing but had no idea ‘envoi’ was author’s concluding words! Ta for enlarging my lexicon!

53. What a delight this was. Picaroon has become one of my favourite compilers. And many thanks Eileen. I needed your help. Query: is a date a steady? I know to go steady and to date but that doesn’t quite work.

54. It would have been nice if stcared had been some kind of dress!

55. Hi Xjpotter @53, if you’re still there – I wondered about that, too, thinking of a date as a one-off, but found ‘to date’ = ‘to go out with a [potential] romantic or sexual partner, esp regularly’, in Chambers and realised that we do say ‘X is dating Y’ to mean that they’re ‘going steady’, don’t we?

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