Guardian 28,574 – Qaos

71 comments on “Guardian 28,574 – Qaos”

1. A very enjoyable challenge from Qaos this morning. I’m not particularly familiar with the franchise but the theme became apparent. Well done Andrew as I only got to ten. I liked APOCRYPHAL, ANDERSON, WHOOP IT UP and INSWINGER.

   Ta Qaos & Andrew

2. I’ve never seen Matrix, but managed to complete the puzzle regardless, and with much pleasure.

3. Thanks Qaos and Andrew
   The matrix references entirely passed me by – never seen it. It was all a bit GK heavy – Alison Moyet, Whoopi Goldberg, Morph, James Anderson. Don’t know what overseas solvers will make of the last two!
   10a is a “ghost subtractive” – hate it!
   MAGENTA is purple rather than crimson.
   Post modernism started in the 60s and peaked in the 80s and 90s, so is hardly “latest style”.
   “Cambridge” is helpful for 19d, but there’s a probably more famous one in Dublin.
   Favourites were NOIR and, despite my GK quibble, WHOOP IT UP.

4. Re 20d Enigma was the coding machine used by Germany, so DE code was the product

5. Took me a while to figure out the theme (Qaos – there had to be one), but it was very helpful when I did (just before entering MATRIX, in fact). I know the early part of the film very well, because I used to show it to my students when we were studying Descartes’ Meditations – but I had only once seen the full film, so I had to work at the other characters’ names. I liked APOCRYPHAL, SMITHS, POST MODERN, LIAISON, MORALE BOOSTER. Never would have parsed NOIR – a biff and shrug – so thanks, Andrew, for that, and also to Qaos for the crossie.

6. Excellent puzzle that I felt was testing my skill but doable. I made it harder than necessary by entering PIMENTO at 19d rather than 18d. Then was very puzzled why COOPERATE would not fit across at 17. I looked for a theme early but had no luck but later (after May tricks) I saw it and that helped with TANK. Also gave me confidence in ANDERSON even though I could not parse it.
   Thank you Qaos and Andrew

7. Nice puzzle, not too hard despite a lack of familiarity with the films. LOI was ORACLE, by which time I’d twigged the theme and was looking it up on Wikipedia, and the solution jumped out at me. Favourites were MORALE-BOOSTER and INSWINGER. Thanks to Q & A. (ho ho)

8. Tough puzzle, helped slightly by the theme. Solved NE corner last. Needed online help for some GK. I think I might have seen the first Matrix movie but could not understand it so I skipped the rest of the series.

   I guessed some of my non-themed answers without parsing them, and I also solved/parsed some themed answers without realising they related to the Matrix movies until I googled a list if characters.

   Favourites: WORLDS, APOCRYPHAL (loi).

   New for me: MORPHEUS.

   It took me a while to parse: 25ac = NO IR (I suspected something to do with infrared vs ultraviolet light. After googling, it looked very complicated to me but that is to be expected in a crossword with Matrix theme LOL). And I failed to parse 2d and 20d.

   Thanks, both.

9. I’m not a MATRIX aficionado but I googled post-solve. Like AlanC, I didn’t find as many as Andrew!

   After Qaos’s last ‘Prize’ one commenter here pointed out that the two clue-persons (Jodie Kidd and Will Self) had birthdays on the weekend the puzzle was published. So today I confidently expected a triple birthday celebration for Whoopi Goldberg/Alison Moyet/Jimmy Anderson… ‘twas not to be 🙁

   I agree with Andrew that this was a little trickier than Qaos has been of late, especially in the NE. Thanks both – very enjoyable. No ’trademark’ mathematical clue, though?

10. muffin @3 – there are many overseas solvers who know James Anderson only too well (and Morph, by the way) – you probably meant Americans.

11. Unlike Andrew I found this easier than most Qaos crosswords. The theme passed me by, I’m afraid. But having to shoehorn in so many references might explain why I found this puzzle a rather disappointing offer from someone whom I consider a fine setter – some rather off-centre definitions and surfaces which are beyond surreal.

    Nevertheless it was not without enjoyment. I liked POST MODERN, NOIR and NEOZOIC.

    PS 19dn could equally well apply to the other place. But we don’t want to mention that, do we? 🙂

    Thanks to S&B.

12. Don’t think DECODE needs any other parsing but that ENIGMA produced code and unscrambling this gives the answer.

13. I always thought it was a shame that Whoopi Goldberg never married Peter Cushing 🙂

14. A DNF or pehaps a finish with a little cheating, it would have been a lot of cheating if I hadn’t twigged the theme early, I had no hope of getting inswinger at all and only got Anderson from the theme.

    Rather difficult for a Tuesday I thought but all fairly clued.

    I did like POST-MODERN a lot.

    Thanks Qaos and Andrew.

15. Good puzzle, no idea of the theme or the film, but clues enabled fair solving anyway. Did not know inswinger. Loved May Tricks and Morpheus and Apocryphal (even though last one in) and as my husband is a cricket fan I had heard of Anderson! Thanks to Qaos and to Andrew for proper parsing (although I knew the enigma code)!

16. Thanks Andrew as I didn’t parse NOIR (having confidently entered BLUE at first!) plus Russtoo@4 for the full story on DECODE, previously I had thought that one a bit weak but not now.
    Picking up muffin’s point on GK, I thought it odd that Moyet was specified as a singer – is there another famous Moyet? – whereas for Goldberg we had to work out exactly which one to go for – and I only got MORPHEUS from the theme and worked backwards to see why Qaos used “Animated” vs Cartoon, the potential list of animated characters being rather large.
    Thanks Qaos, i thought OTTOMAN and COOPERATE were out of the 6D today.

17. A cricketer I don’t know and a theme about a film series I’ve never seen, and I failed to solve MATRIX, NOIR or MOUSEY, or to parse TOP DRAWER. Oh well, at least I’d heard of Morph!
    I frowned at WORLDS=classes, though I’m sure it’s officially justifiable somewhere, and I smiled at WHOOP IT UP.

18. Set off like a train and then it got tricky. I didn’t spot the theme but it wouldn’t have helped much if I did. So, overall, this was quite a challenge. Thanks A&Q.

19. I always thought of MATRIX as a test of a surround sound system (same as Jurassic Park)-dont expect me to know about such things
    I loved the puzzle as there were such puzzle-like answers and the temptation to anagram ENIGMA -like a great striker running up for a spot kick then pausing and waiting for the goalie to move before casually planting it in the opposite corner.
    In other words a fine a fine collection from Qaos and great fun
    Thanks Q and Andrew

20. Many thanks Qaos for a delightful crossword which led me up the garden path, looking at first for a cricket then a Bletchley Park theme. Only with a paradigm shift did the matrix reveal itself.
    Thanks too, Andrew for the blog & help with NOIR. ‘The Matrix’ is probably more cyberpunk than sf-noir.

21. Like a batsman facing ANDERSON I was bamboozled by INSWINGER. So often a cricketing term is part of the word play, so I missed it when it was the definition. I never know when “crossing a river” is going to be an insertion or outside the river. I am afraid I googled Shiamy to see if it was a river I had never heard of.

22. Patrice Macmahon (Président of France in the 1870’s) was given the title Duc de Magenta after leading the French troops at the battle of that name. During a visit to the Chateau de Sully, owned by the Macmahon family, the tour guide told us that the colour magenta related to the blood covered fields after the battle. A nice story, but seemingly at odds with muffin @3 ‘s correct description of the colour.

23. Thanks to both Qaos and Andrew. By the end I knew the theme was “The Matrix” even though it didn’t help me with the puzzle as I couldn’t recall much about the film. Enjoyable nevertheless. Lots of ticks especially for the afore-mentioned 10a APOCRYPHAL and 8d MORALE- BOOSTER. The latter solution led me to appreciate that particular role that cryptic puzzles have played for many on this forum, including yours truly, during these strange COVID times.

24. Thanks Andrew: like you, zero interest/knowledge in cricket, and I often wonder why the sort of people who like crosswords are assumed to do so (likelier to appreciate more cerebral or bookish pursuits?). That perennial grumble apart, a typically enjoyable challenge from Qaos.

25. Yes, also failed on the theme. I thought it was something to do with Bletchley Park. Good setting to get in all the themed answers

    I don’t really understand the parsing of INSWINGER. To me, it seems like ‘Everton’s last’ is doing the blocking (?) I do like NOIR, now it has been explained.

    Thanks Qaos and Andrew.

26. Julie @23 – I’d like to echo that sentiment, and why I came to 225 in the first place was to express my appreciation to all crossword setters for their creativity, a much needed balm.

27. Know more of cricket than Matrix (which, at the time, I found a bit to hum), but even so, inswinger was my loi. Anderson, though, was no problem [wee Jimmy will be out here again soon I hear]. [First heard “top drawer” in ref to a daughter of one of our old money settler families, whom the speaker was shocked to hear had been my (a ‘commoner’s’) girlfriend]. Hey ho, all part of the fun, thanks both.

28. I’m very glad that we had the luxury of Andrew parsing all the clues today, as although I managed to solve everything correctly, there were several I simply couldn’t parse myself. APOCRYPHAL and England’s eternally young cricketer for two…

29. Thanks to Qaos and Andrew.

    All has been said. For my own part I thought I saw a cricket theme before solving any clue and relaxed about that – should have known better but the actual theme would never have stuck me nor have been of any help. That being said I liked MATRIX and the wonderful TOP DRAWER.

    Can’t say (Gervase@11) that I found the surfaces any more surreal than the norm but to each one’s own.

    Robi@25: If something is blocking my drains then fair enough Everton’s last is doing the blocking. But if I (with my lemming aides) am blocking someone’s progress then I might be on either side of them as they try to push through – no? There’s a better thought out there somewhere.

30. [BenW @22: muffin is quite right – magenta is a purplish red (familiar, with yellow and cyan, as one of the standard printing colours) whereas crimson is a more orangey red. This is like clueing ‘chihuahua’ as ‘Labrador’ although they are both dogs, just as these shades are both ‘red’.

    Magenta was a synthetic dye invented by Verguin in 1859 and originally called fuchsine. He renamed it, patriotically, after the French/Piedmontese victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Magenta in the same year. ]

31. BenW @22 and muffin earlier. What is imagined by ‘purple’ and its alignment or non-alignment with what is imagined by ‘crimson’ is, shall we say, negotiable. I recently watched a contemporary French crime series called ‘Les Rivieres Pourpres’, referring to the colour of blood, which was translated as ‘The Crimson Rivers’. Going back to the 1590s, there is a passage in Shakespeare’s Richard the Second (Act III, scene 3) where Bolingbroke and Richard have a terse exchange about the possibility of Bolingbroke’s rebellion tumbling into full civil war. Bolingbroke at one point says this:

    … I’ll use the advantage of my power
    And lay the summer’s dust with showers of blood
    Rain’d from the wounds of slaughter’d Englishmen:
    The which, how far off from the mind of Bolingbroke
    It is, such CRIMSON tempest should bedrench
    The fresh green lap of fair King Richard’s land,
    My stooping duty tenderly shall show.

    Later, in the passage, Richard remarks to Northumberland:

    … every stride he makes upon my land
    Is dangerous treason: he is come to open
    The PURPLE testament of bleeding war …

    Therefore, here purple and crimson are interchangeable as descriptors of the colour of blood. Interestingly (or possibly not), the phrase, ‘the purple testament’ served as the title for an early episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’.

32. Rarely for me, the theme helped; in this case in time for – wait for it – MATRIX.

    I can’t agree with Muffin@3 re: Trinity Cambridge. It is associated with, amongst others, 34 Nobel Prizes, Newton, Maxwell, Rutherford, Byron, Tennyson, Bohr, Wittgenstein, Russell and, er, me.

33. Thank you Qaos for an enjoyable puzzle and thank you Andrew for the explanatory blog which revealed to me the existence of a theme. I dislike nugatory themes and since it can’t get more nugatory than the Matrix series of films I would have been disappointed by this. But since, as I say, I had no idea of the theme and I can hardly complain!!
    My favourite was 12a because it mentions the great Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy ANDERSON. Sorry Andrew!!

34. The theme completely passed me by as not my kind of film but enjoyed the puzzle nevertheless. WHOOP IT UP & MATRIX were my picks

35. Matrix shmatrix. Struggled with this, and finished without understanding ANDERSON.

36. Dr. WhatsOn @32
    Trinity Dublin does have the Book of Kells though 🙂 We visited to see it (at least the double page it was opened at).
    I wonder if you took a poll of “where do you think of when you hear Trinity College”, which would come out on top?
    [When were you up at Cambridge? I was at Churchill from 1970-74 (including Cert. Ed.).]

37. Made a reasonably good start, then slowed considerably. Didn’t spot the theme whilst completing the grid, but enjoyed seeing the results afterwards courtesy of Andrew.
    Thanks to Qaos
    [Loved Hovis’s matchmaking @13]

38. Muffin@3 and Dr Whatson@32. I hope we’re not going to get a bonus round of University Challenge…!

39. I’m with SPanza on his negatory theme. Solved the puzzle without its assistance or hindrance.

    Not sure younger solvers would consider email to be “modern”. A bit dated, I’d have thought, what with WhatsApp etc available.

    Enjoyable crossword though, many thanks, both.

40. ShropshireLass @37: You reminded me…I loved Hovis’s contribution, too!

41. [Ronald@38 no not from me, but I did see the College team compete live in 71 or 2 – the only time I’ve been to Manchester, where it was filmed. Which partially answers muffin@36 – you were one year ahead of me. I (we) missed John Cleese completely, but coincided with Douglas Adams.]

42. I do get annoyed with cricket terms and abbreviations turning up so often. Everything I know about cricket I learned from crosswords. Had to Google famous bowlers. Football comes up too with “Best” for “footballer” the other day. Ho hum.

43. [S’s cf @31: Thanks for the literary input. A combination of artistic licence and the evolution of colour nomenclature here, the latter driven by synthetic dyes and the availability of a much wider range of shades. I don’t advise replacing magenta with crimson in your colour printer. For example, in Shakespeare’s day ‘orange’ was just a fruit – its colour would have been described as red. Egg yolks are still called in Italian ‘rossi d’uova’ – ‘reds of eggs’. And as for Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’, that has provoked much musing as to what he meant by the expression. Some scientists even postulated that, as the ancient Greeks diluted their wine, the mildly alkaline water they used made it turn blue!]

44. [Gervase @43
    “Orange” is also one of several words where the initial “n” has been transferred to the indefinite article – it was originally “norange” (or similar, as in the Spanish “naranja”). “Apron” is another example. I’m not sure about “apple”.
    As you pointed out at 30, “magenta” is a very specific dye, so there’s no room for dispute of its colour (which I would describe as a light reddish-purple). Also as you say, a component of the CMYK inks for printing.]

45. William @ 39 there is a word ‘nugatory’ which is defined as having no value or importance. Since I am a dreadful speller I was sure you had picked me up on a mistake, but was relieved to find for once I had not erred. Negatory – marked by having the nature of negation – is just as apt here and I am not a fan of these types of theme. Trouble is, if the crossword is based on a serious theme, it gets accused of requiring special GK. So, setters why not ease up on themes. A few maybe to distinguish The Guardian from The Times but not every other day!!

46. [Me @44
    There are several more – uncle and adder, apparently – but apple isn’t one.]

47. SPanza@45: I agree that themes should be relegated to the occasional – it has always struck me that themed puzzles tend to be more impenetrable often with bizarre/arcane solutions and surfaces bordering betimes on the surreal (although in this puzzle that seems to me to apply only to the strange picture painted by that for the off-theme MORALE BOOSTER).

48. muffin@46: an echo of “nadder” survives in the Irish for snake: “nathar nimhe”. Of course there would have to be an imported word involved given that snakes don’t feature among the indigenous fauna. I wonder what Icelanders call a snake….

49. [Alphalpha@48, muffin@46: thanks for your interesting digressions on the evolution and origin of “adder” which set me off down a rabbit hole – the source appears to be an old Germanic word for serpent, curiously enough this survives in modern German with the “Ringelnatter” which is the humble grass snake, the viper is called something completely different (Kreuzotter, according to the almighty wikipedia).]

50. SPanza @45: it’s the wretched predictive text again I’m afraid. I’m sure I copied your excellent word nugatory </em but it got “corrected” to negatory. Your point is well made nonetheless.

51. Thanks for the blog, totally missed the theme as usual but it did not seem to affect the clues.
    A few nice original ideas here.
    For one brief moment I thought that at last b=barn was being used but not quite. Maybe one day.

52. Loved the theme. Not my favourite film by a long chalk, but anything a bit more contemporary gets my vote. Ran out of time, so had to cheat on a few, but thought it was a belter. As a cricket fan, and with knowledge of the film, “Anderson” was a favourite. One daft little thing about the film that was pointed out to me afterwards is that “Neo” is obviously an anagram of “one” (in the film he is “the one”).

    Gervase @30: As someone who has spent a lot of their life working as a video game artist, I like to think of myself as quite familiar with colours. But apparently not. I’d have put “Crimson” evr-so-slightly towards the blue side of the reds, but it can apparently be much more purple than that. It absolutely isn’t toward the yellow/orange side. To quote Wikipedia: “Crimson is a rich, deep red color, inclining to purple.”

    Given my job, magenta has only ever had one meaning – absolute maximum red and blue, and no green at all (255, 0, 255). It’s the colour we used to use to be transparent when making pixel art (the code told the computer to ignore pixels with those colour values, so they’d be see-through. (If I see anything magenta in real-life I still occasionally wonder why it’s not invisible…). But “magenta” is broader than that and encompasses purplish reds. So crimson can be reddish purple, and magenta can be purplish red. I reckon that’s fine.

53. MarkN @52
    As I said earlier “magenta” isn’t a vague indication of a colour; it’s a specific dyestuff (like Chrome yellow or Prussian blue), so there can be no uncertainty over what colour it is. As you said, 255,0,255.

54. [Gazzh @49 et al: Confusingly, (n)adder is cognate with the Latin ‘Natrix’ which is the scientific name for the grass snake genus. Semantic drift. And back to colours, the (Germanic) English word ‘blue’ is cognate with the Latin ‘flavus’ (yellow!), probably because they descend from a more basic Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘bright’. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet” (and be red/crimson/vermilion, if perhaps not magenta).

55. …and Welsh does not distinguish between green and blue, using “glas” for many shades of both, and some greys as well.

    Whoever originally wanted to call magenta fuchsine would have hit the right tone: it’s just that colour of the outer petals of the usual magenta-and-purple fuchsia.

56. Agreed, gladys, on fuchsine.
    I don’t think there;s a word for “blue” in Greek either.

57. [muffin @56 – modern Greek actually has quite a few words for blue (see here) including ‘sky colour’ and ‘sea colour’, but the most commonly used is μπλε – derived from French bleu. The Ancient Greek is κύανος – same word as ‘cyan’, which is what it now means in modern Greek.]

58. Thanks both,
    [Tangential to the discussion of whether magenta and crimson overlap (to me they do) and the colour of blood, blood can be of different colours depending on whether it comes from a vein or an artery and how long it has been exposed to air, or so I am told.]

    Liked the puzzle but defeated by ‘inswinger’.

59. muffin @52: Isn’t this the difference between technical terms, and common terms all over again though. I know Magenta is very specifically 255, 0, 255 on the RGB scale. But My chambers lists it as an adjective as “reddish-purple”, which leaves plenty of wiggle-room. Unless there are names for colours that are 254, 0, 255 and 255, 0, 254, and so on, then I think Magenta fits the bill on either side until something else takes up the baton.

    (FWIW, in my old job as a pixel artist anything other than absolute pure magenta was instantly visible as an ugly outline of purplish pixels on whatever we were drawing (which is why that very specific colour is used to be invisible – it sticks out like a sore thumb when you’ve not quite nailed it, and you very rarely actually want to use it on purpose)).

60. [Gazzh @49 – quite right! – but the Ringelnatter and the Kreuzotter, or at least the second parts of the words, have the same origin. Exactly the same thing has happened with Natter/Otter in German as nadder/adder in English. It’s generally known as ‘rebracketing’ or ‘metanalysis’.

    The result is that Otter is one of those words in German where the gender really matters: der Otter is an otter, die Otter is an adder/viper.

    See for example Matthew 23:33, which in the Lutherbibel is Ihr Schlangen und Otterngezücht! Contrary to what you might think, the Scribes and Pharisees are not being compared to a bevy/lodge/raft/romp (!) of otters. The King James version has ‘Ye serpents! Ye generation of vipers!’]

61. Certainly harder than a normal Qaos, and took me forever to figure out INSWINGER and NOIR(LOI).

    I thought the theme was the 80s and 90s as there were so many dated references – Morph, Moyet, Matrix The Smiths, Oracle, Laurie Anderson, Whoopi Goldberg – certainly not very POST-MODERN.

    Thanks Qaos and Andrew

62. [i am enjoying this discussion on the finer points of colour/shades – gladys@55 your post reminds me of something I read about how different cultures/languages can classify the same shade differently if forced to place it into a ‘major’ colour group, I think blue/green was the example I saw but can’t remember where. And I remember some debate about fuchsia being purple vs pink not long ago. I’m happy to class everything as primary or secondary and leave the finer detail to the Richie Benauds of the world.
    Gervase and essexboy, thanks as always for scholarly detail however I remain unconvinced that allocating arbitrary genders is a better way to differentiate two completely separate things than, for example, just using completely different words! I think this will always prevent me from mastering the local tongue. And I still wonder why English ditched the old serpent word for the relatively common grass snake but kept it for the scarcer viper.]

63. [I may have misremembered, but wasn’t Magenta also in the Rocky Horror Show?]

64. [muffin – Oh yes! (with some helpful hints from Blofeld 😉 )]

65. Roz@51: Surely b denoting the barn unit was being used at 8d…?

    Enjoyed the puzzle.
    Thanks Qaos & Andrew

66. I wish it was . It could have been – ale , on top of barn=b etc
    But I suspect the setter meant – ale on ( top of barn ) etc where b is the top letter of barn for a down clue.

67. Roz @66
    Yes, I see.
    I thought of the barn unit straightaway, so didn’t tune in to the more prosaic option.

68. Only the setter will know for sure, b=barn is not in my Chambers 93 but it just might be in later editions.

69. Whether what Roz says @66 is what the setter meant or what nametab suggests, both options lead without any problem to the right answer.
    Live and let live, I would say.
    Robi @25 (and others), for me ‘to block’ is one of those crossword devices that can work in either direction, just like ‘to tackle’ and ‘to obstruct’.
    I admit, I too did raise an eyebrow but, ultimately, it’s OK, I think.
    I hardly ever comment on Qaos’ puzzles but today I do after my solving partner, at the very end, said something about 2dn.
    Not about the colour that is magenta but actually about what the clue really tells us.
    She thought (and I agree) that this clue lets us get a word for ‘kind of crimson’ after ‘spy’ is uncovered.
    So, the other way round.
    In my opinion, the problem lies in the choice of the verb (‘gets’).
    However, of course, I see what Qaos wanted me to do.

    Enjoyable puzzle, splendid grid fill.
    Didn’t really like 24ac and 20dn (I still can’t make much of ‘DE code’) but there’s always something to moan about.
    While the surface of 8dn is rather surreal, I also quite liked it for the very same reason.
    Like others, I had a suspicion of ‘The Matrix’ being the theme but there it stopped, pre-Wikipedia.
    Many thanks to Andrew for his blog & Qaos for today’s entertainment.

70. Loved NOIR but WORLDS plus the recondite sports-themed clues made this a DNF for me, possibly a DNPE as well (did not particularly enjoy).

71. Sil@69 agree with you about that “gets”, I solved that one from definition and a couple of crossers and only then it became clear that I had to reverse the polarity of the connecting word in the sense that I had understood it – “is” would have worked more clearly I think – a shame, and TANKS is clued in a clearer way using a similar method.
    I have only just thought and maybe it has already been noted but is all this crimson/magenta discussion just some strange shadow of the blue/red pill choice in the film?

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