Guardian 28,020 / Pasquale

51 comments on “Guardian 28,020 / Pasquale”

1. Thanks Pasquale, and for stepping in again, Gaufrid

   Enjoyable puzzle. Some solvers may not be old enough to remember PC49 in the Eagle comic, who justifies the “49 + 1” construction to give the L in PLOD.

   Shouldn’t 23d have a question mark for definition by example? After all, Ely is a place where there is a cathedral, not a cathedral itself.

2. A bit on the easy side for Pasquale, with whom I often have trouble. No obscure words, although I don’t recall ever hearing anyone use PRAYERLESS in conversation. I thought that ‘character finally’ to clue Z was uncharacteristically weak for the Don, but otherwise all good. FOLK SINGER and RUSHDIE were among my favourites.

   Thanks to Pasquale and to Gaufrid for stepping in on short notice once more.

3. A pleasant steady solve, though PRAYERLESS is the sort of word which setters resort to when desperate to finish filling in a grid, IMHO.

   Kicking myself for not being able to parse ASTI, and relieved at Gaufrid’s stepping in to put me out of my misery.

4. Another very easy solve, although the old duke held me in battle for a few moments, thanks to his crafty clue.

5. PC = plod (=cop) was not on my radar this morning–not a slang term we have over here–so this was a DNF for me.  Otherwise very enjoyable, and as others have said, on the more straightforward side for Pasquale.  Thanks for the last-second blog.

6. I guess it must have been one of Pasquale’s easier offerings, as we actually finished it the same day – well, all but 7d because we put TITI in for 12a (yes, it is a drink!).

   Can anyone explain why tot=finger in 11a?

   I’m guessing TAP_IN is an easy putt in golf, but if so, is it a ‘feature’ of the green?

   As for ‘no obscure words’, I hadn’t met YESHIVA , so Pasquale is keeping to his educational form, for me!

7. An enjoyable solve. My app. edition says the setter is Don manley, not Pasquale. One and the same? Thanks to the setter, whoever they are, and to Gaufrid.

8. I agree that PRAYERLESS doesn’t feel like a real word. But, as usual with Pasquale, I had to get the dictionary out, having not heard of a YESHIVA. I used to get the Eagle & Boys’ World, a successor of the Eagle, and don’t remember PC49, so found that construction puzzling.

   Thanks, Gaufrid, for stepping in.

9. Mr Beaver

   Some whisky drinkers measure their drinks in “fingers” – i.e. how many fingers against the glass the whisky comes up to. “One finger” would be a “tot”.

10. Thanks for ASTI parsing. On Googling I found TITI as a(n) (obscure) melon-based cocktail …

    Muffin@1 – synecdoche?for ELY, as in No 10=UK government etc?

    Thanks for the blog.

11. Thank you, Gaufrid, for stepping in! I couldn’t completely parse ASTI, FOLK SINGER (“tot” in a drinks-sense never occurred to me) – nor ENDEARMENT, which still feels a tad clunky, to me. A failing on my part, I’m sure. As is my lack of comprehension of TAP IN: is it a golfing term? Fortunately there are few anagrams of “paint”, but this was a wild guess.
    I agree with NeilH about PRAYERLESS, and have to confess to DaveinNCarolina that I’ve never heard anyone saying YESHIVA in conversation either (that was another wild guess).
    On the plus side, I thoroughly enjoyed POSTURING, MARLBOROUGH, EZRA, HELEN OF TROY and RUSHDIE. I now find myself picturing them all at a dinner party (along with AJ Ayer) and wondering if they’d get along….
    Thanks to Pasquale for a fine puzzle.

12. A pleasant solve, not too taxing – for once I knew all the words Pasquale chose for his grid. (PRAYERLESS is unfamiliar, but it’s the sort of word that our language permits even if it hasn’t been used before!). I liked the clues that took a bit longer to solve: POP OFF, ASTI, SPINS OUT and MARLBOROUGH.
    muffin @1
    Ely is an example of a cathedral (and of a city, although we don’t need to know that here). As the example is in the answer and not the clue, no ‘?’ is needed.
    Thanks to Pasquale for the crossword and to Gaufrid for stepping in – much appreciated.

13. Alan B @12

    Mmm, I suppose so. I remember having a similar argument some time ago when “Arlington” was defined as a cemetery (rather than a place where a cemetery is situated). Possibly Andy Smith’s synedoche explains it.

14. …though isn’t synedoche the other way round – a part standing for the whole, rather than the whole standing for a part?

15. Actually it can be either way round (confuusingly!)

16. Many thanks to Pasquale and Gaufrid. Could someone explain the parsing of 12ac, please? And it seems very odd to call Delphi a city.

17. Plotinus @16

    Sex (SA) is sometimes referred to as “it”, so you have “it it” going backwards (knocked over).

18. Thanks Pasquale and Gaufrid

    Mr Beaver @ 6: as a tap-in is a putt, it features/occurs *on* the green, as per the clue.

19. Somehow “appeal” disappeared from my post @17 – very odd (I’m pretty sure I typed it!)

20. @1, 8.  PC 49 was not in the Eagle, but was a radio programme. See https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/adventure/adventures-of-pc-49/adventures-of-pc-49-480806-03-the-case-of-the-beginners-luck-pt-23

21. Many thanks, Muffin. That sense of ‘it’ fools me every time!

22. Sorry Grim and Dim; PC49 featured in several media, including the Eagle, where I first came across him. See here.

23. muffin @13
    In the clue for ELEGY, Pasquale is not using a synecdoche. He is simply giving a clue by way of definition for the word you need: either the name of a cathedral or a word for ‘cathedral’. Only Ely fits.
    [But I’m glad you looked into ‘synecdoche’. I had no idea it could be used either way (the part for the whole or the whole for the part), but Chambers, Collins and Brewer all say it can.]

24. Thanks Alan. I don’t like that construction, but I’ll accept it. As a registered pedant, I think “Ely Cathedral” is a cathedral, but “Ely” is a town on a hill in the fens. (I once walked there from Cambridge – you could see the cathedral from miles and miles away.)

25. Thanks Gaufrid for stepping in and blogging at short notice, much appreciated :).

    I enjoyed the puzzle in the most part and particularly enjoyed FOLK SINGER. If I’d known what MARL meant I’d have really liked that clue too. My only minor gripe was that DOGFIGHT seemed barely cryptic.

    Thanks as ever for setting, Pasquale.

26. COD for me was 1d. Purists might argue about Ezra’s status. He was a scribe. The biblical book is history, not prophecy.

27. @22 Fair enough. I remembered it from the radio where it originated. It must have appeared in the Eagle after I gave up on it – pretentious Christian brainwashing. I much preferred Hotspur and Rover.

28. [Grim and Dim: Me too! I loved Alf Tupper. My parents encouraged me to read Eagle, but I gave up when I could buy my own comics.]

29. Yes Ezra was a priest — apologies. Pasquale ( who as Church Times crossword editor should ahve known better!)

30. I was delayed by having HALL for 24d (HAL + L: PC and 49+1 – I know that it’s a bit of an insult to HAL to compare it to a PC). I also spent ages trying to find a two letter word for sandy, start g with a P, to fit upwards in T_POFF for 1d.
    Despite these, a fun solve. Many thanks to Pasquale and Gaufrid.

31. “dandy”, not “sandy”. “starting”, not “start g”.

32. Thanks to Pasquale and to Gaufrid (and to whom (both but mainly Gaufrid) a big HNY and the faint hope that the other things Gaufrid had to do this afternoon included clearing drains and dealing with car mechanics: these were among my personal agenda for today and I could cheerfully have done without.)

    I thought POP OFF was great.  And ASTI too.

    Bear of little vrai@31: I see what you did there do I?

33. How interesting – now I can have arguments with myself…. Hmmmm

34. Maybe not that interesting……

35. Perhaps unwisely, I checked to see it today’s crossword had become available online just after midnight…  it proved to be of the standard where apart from a few fairly easy starters, each clue needed a bit of puzzling but on the whole not too much. So I got to bed at a bit after 1am (I’m not very fast…); and I had nothing to spin out breakfast with this morning. That’ll learn me! Or maybe not. I was puzzled to justify TAP-IN; thanks to Mr Beaver @6 and others for pointing out the golf connection. My father described golf as “a good walk spoilt”, and I’ve seen no reason to disagree with him since. I’d not come across SA=IT before – one to bear in mind. I was a bit too late for The Eagle, but had Ranger (which failed as a stand-alone and then became Look&Learn with Ranger), which had the splendid “Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire”. LOI was YESHIVA, a word I only vaguely recalled existing. Thanks to Pasquale for keeping me up entertainingly past my bedtime, and Gaufrid for the blog.

36. Elinor Glynn wrote a novel “It” about sex appeal.  In her review (New Yorker, 26 November 1927) Dorothy Parker describes one of the characters of the novel, “And she had It. It, hell; she had those.”

    On another note, having read your comments here before alphalpha@34 (and alphalpha1@33) I was looking forward to your arguments with yourself as I was certain they would be more entertaining than mine (with myself).

37. Paulus @36

    You’ve reminded me of thiS “poem”:

    Would you like to sin

    On a tiger skin

    With Elinor Glynn

    Or would you prefer

    To err with her

    On some other fur

    I don’t know exactly ho w libellous thta is!

38. I remembered PC 49 from the comic but it wasn’t neceessary to solve the clue. My favourite comic chatacter was Wilson, whose improbable sporting achievements appeared in the Wizard but I spent my pocket money on Champion because each story stood on its own and you didn’t have to wait for a week for the next episode. Does anyone else remember Ginger Nutt,the Boy who takes the Biscuit?
    Thanks to Pasquale and Gaufrid and apologies for the diversion.

39. I was too tired to finish this last night Aussie time, so came back to it with a fresher brain today and managed to complete it. I enjoyed solving all the clues, although I needed the blog to help me with some parsing (PC49 and TAP-IN, for instance, both of which have now been discussed). Many thanks to Pasquale and Gaufrid.

40. muffin @17

    Sorry, I don’t understand. Why is sex = SA?

41. Thanks for stepping up to the grid Gaufrid. Asti foxed us and we went for Titi. We hadn’t heard of SA for IT before.

42. Anna@40 – Muffin corrected himself two posts later; he had omitted the (sex) appeal.

43. Muffin@37 … I know the poem, it’s quoted in the collected Dorothy Parker in an explanation of the book review of “It” … I cannot believe that I have stumbled across it again … though as a Canadian I cannot force err to rhyme with her and fur. Thank you for jogging my memory.

44. Finished and felt the need to blog – we get the physical paper so we don’t start until everyone else has completed it. This was somewhat simpler than an old Everyman (surprisingly). Thanks muffin @ 19 for explaining ASTI – I toyed with TITI For a while.
    Pino @ 38 – Wilson the goalkeeper also made it to the Hornet. The 149 issues we have are unearthed regularly but infrequently to entertain 10-year-olds all over again….
    And Elinor Glynn’s tiger skin is in a NT property somewhere in England and can be viewed….
    Thanks Gaufrid and Pasquale!
    And my other half thinks it’s embarassing to blog so late but I don’t care!

45. Thanks to Gaufrid and Pasquale

    I take it “suggesting” in 7d is the homophone indicator – a new one to me I think.

    The cathedral at Ely is “The Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity”, but that doesn’t fit.

46. @Muffin I’m a pedant too, which is why I feel compelled to point out that Ely is a city, not a town.
    I was born in the Isle of Ely, and gaining city status in the seventies was a proud moment; almost as much as winning the Jeux Sans Frontières Grand Final in 1973.

47. Keynote@46

    Yes, a city, as it has a cathedral. I would think that you would have to admit, that, as cities go, it’s quite a small one, though (St Davids is even smaller).

48. I have just cancelled my Times subscription (because I could no longer stomach the high cost allied with the appallingly low quality of the journalism just to get access to their daily cryptic) and so I’ve also abandoned “Times for the Times”. Hunting for an equivalent to TftT for the Grauniad crosswords I was delighted to stumble across 15^2. I really enjoyed this Pasquale offering. Karen @7: I was also intrigued to see the setter unmasked as Don Manley: I remember him from 30 years ago at Walton Street when we were both lunchtime habitués of the staff canteen there — along with Mr J Crowther who, I believe, went under the moniker “Mephisto”.

49. … hmmm, or was it Beelzebub?

50. Re ASTI. There was a famous movie with Clara Bow in the \’20s called, \”The It Girl\” — meaning she\’s got *it*, as in sex appeal. So that\’s another example. But SA does not strongly suggest sex appeal where I live. I\’ve heard it, but rarely. That\’s my excuse for missing this one 🙁

51. Karen@7  At the top of this page you’ll see HOME ABOUTFIFTEENSQUARED SETTERS BLOGGERS and some more.  If you click on SETTERS you’ll find a list of setters’ names grouped by newspaper, and if you click on Pasquale in the Guardian list you’ll see his real name (Don Manley) and other pseudonyms he uses.

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