Guardian Cryptic 28,641 by Vlad

76 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,641 by Vlad”

1. I never find Vlad easy, but I found this one more straightforward than most of his.
   I thought the mour part of AMOUR was half of paramour, also a special one; I know who Mourinho is, but didn’t know he was called that.
   A lot of clever clues here – maybe some a bit too clever – but I enjoyed it. Maybe my faves are the same as Manehi’s, but I’m about to go to sleep (it’s midnight here) and I’m just too tired to decipher the clue numbers, sorry. I’ll look again in the morning.

2. Dr. WhatsOn @ 1

   I was considering ‘paramour’ too. Mourinho fits better, I think.

   TRIUMPH, BOTCH-UP, LOCAL….many lovely ones.

3. Thank you manehi for filling in some of my gaps today.
   And thanks to Vlad for being kind with the definitions of the ones I ‘got’ but couldn’t fully parse. eg AMOUR.
   Vlad in a funny mood, lots of humour. eg the surface and the definition in ROLL IN THE HAY, OGLER, PARTY POOPER, IN ADVANCE, and EAT INTO, one of my faves, along with BOTCH-UP.
   Not convinced of PLATINUM BLONDE. The clue has to be read as a whole, and a good find in the fodder, but does pulling your tummy in and going platinum blonde, indicate one who’s trying to look sexy?

4. I ‘spose some might say that two ‘pulls’ (one shortened) in the fodder of two clues is one too many, but I did like ‘a lot of charm’ in PULVERISE.
   Novel cluing for (Donald) Trump as a ‘sore loser’ , although hopefully this won’t stand the test of time, and no-one will recognise it one day going back to the Guardian archives.
   I love a crossword that keeps on giving. 23 and 25 with the ellipses very good. THE LIFE OF RILEY , can’t fault it.

5. Thanks Vlad. What a great crossword! Some wonderful anagrams with great surfaces eg PLATINUM BLONDE and ROLL IN THE HAY, some lovely hints such as the roger in OGLER and the both up in BOTCH UP and the late in METAL and some great misdirection: I spent ages trying to fit ‘angel’ in HO for the theatrical friend! As for trump as ‘sore loser’. Brilliant!

   And thank you also to manehi for parsing YEREVAN for me. I had VA for state and YEN for for wish but couldn’t find where the ‘er’ came from.

6. I breezed through this after yesterday’s disaster. I could see many of the answers from the definitions and then parsed later. Another paramour, like Dr WhatsOn and Kva. Many ticks but all covered by others above. Loved it (and confidence restored).

   Ta Vlad & manehi

7. manehi, I parsed YEREVAN with ‘keep’ being the envelope rather than ‘going round’ which was used for the reversal of AVER.

8. …which I’m sure is how you parsed it.

9. I liked LOCAL, TRIUMPH (haha), METAL.

   New for me: FANCY DAN.

   I did not parse:
   8ac (I guessed it might be something to do with a Welsh valley I have not heard of)
   15ac apart from super bowl = big game – I see now it is a great clue, ditto 6d (apart from OGLER = he’d get an eyeful, and L = liberal) – nice!
   2d never would have known about this ref to Mourinho.

   Thanks, both.

   DrWhatson@1 – I was also thinking of A + paraMOUR for 1ac

10. Tough but satisfying. I rather liked the use of ‘the Special One’, as a Tottenham follower who was disappointed that his appointment at the Club did not work out well.

11. The Special One meant Mourinho to me straight away, but still took me a while to get to AMOUR. I found this tough with only a handful of answers across the grid at first. Initially entered RHONA for the girl and thought there was a mistake until I read the clue again more carefully. Guessed a couple of the long ones ‘ROLL IN THE HAY’ and ‘LIFE OF RILEY’ from the enumeration and then worked out the parsing. Another one of those crosswords where I slowly chipped away at the clues until I was surprised to find I’d finished, with 16 and 20 the last ones in. Thanks Vlad and Manehi.

12. Another AparaMOUR here.
    Shouldn’t it be REMINDER=”Nudge” around A=”one” for 16 down?
    I found this hard and struggled with the parsing of YEREVAN. I enjoyed TRIUMPH. Thanks all.

13. Very enjoyable, not too taxing on the Vlad scale, favourite SUPERBOWL.

    Fond memories of “My name is RHODA Morgenstern…”

    If we were going by the original French, then naïf is masculine and ingénue is feminine, but once these words get imported into English they tend to lose the grammatical niceties of the exporter language. All Filipinos get called Filipinos even though at least half of them are Filipinas. There’s a quote on Wiktionary calling Taylor Swift a ‘savvy naïf’.

    [Actually, I think English may be taking the French masc./fem. distinction between naïf and naïve, and re-purposing it. So we now have naïve as the adjective, irrespective of gender, and naïf as the noun, though sometimes with the plural naïves, by analogy with knife/knives.]

    Thanks V & m

14. I thought this was Vlad on top form, being funny and devious, but not too devious.
    The first time through, I couldn’t make head or tail of anything until I worked out THE LIFE OF RILEY (brilliant surface!), after which it came together steadily. Particular favourites SUPER BOWL (why do I always get hoodwinked by references to Parliament?), MASON (another brilliant surface, and a neat definition), PARTY POOPER, AMOUR (I will forgive Vlad for reminding me of The Conceited One), ROLL IN THE HAY (another great surface) and IN AID OF.
    I didn’t know of LEONE, but Vlad had the right balance here – the wordplay meant that you could solve the clue fairly confidently even if you hadn’t heard of the director in question.
    And while I agree with paddymelon @3 that pulling your tummy in and bleaching your hair doesn’t necessarily mean you’re trying to look sexy (resists temptation to insert link to picture of Culture Secretary), this is surely one of those clues where the “?” is doing some useful work (resists temptation to insert reference to Culture Secretary). Wish I shared the confidence of paddymelon @4 about history’s view of The Orange One, though.
    Thanks to Vlad for a lovely puzzle and manehi for the blog.

15. This seemed to take me far too long to solve, contrary to some others who found it “more straightforward than usual”, “not too taxing” etc. There were some gems here especially the longer ones in which I was helped by the letter counts, and I really liked 12a HORATIO, but I couldn’t parse at least seven of the clues (NHO José Mourinho, the fodder for 2d AMOUR, for instance). This left me feeling less than happy with my performance. Thanks to Vlad and manehi.

16. Started slow and ended up with the SE half of the grid complete and the NW almost empty. Which was odd. And then PLATINUM BLONDE finally resolved and everything else followed swiftly. Which was nice. (paddymelon @3: I am told I am definitely at my sexiest when bleached blonde and pulling in my tum so, if it works for me… 😀 )

    Many of my ticks have already had a mention (esp OGLER, AMOUR (Jose came straight to mind but the ‘A’ didn’t!), METAL, BOTCH UP and PULVERISE) so I shall just post a favourite short clip prompted by SUPER BOWL.

    Thanks Vlad and manehi

17. Fabulous puzzle, many thanks Vlad and manehi. So many great clues, but 15a top for me.

18. My personal faith is restored. Found the last couple of days difficult especially Boatman but managed to work out some clever clues today. Loved TRIUMPH!!

19. Thanks Vlad and manehi. Vlad in very playful mood today, quite tricksy in places but all fell into place eventually. SUPER BOWL, HORATIO, TRIUMPH among favourites.

    eb @13 – I think you might be right about the noun/adjective thing.

20. Enjoyed the challenge. Vlad is usually too tough for me, but in this one the helpful grid and a few clearly signposted anagrams provided just enough of a foothold that I was able to make some progress, and ended up with a better appreciation of his skill.

21. Super puzzle!

    I enjoyed reading NeilH’s comment @14: it pretty well says it all for me.

    Many thanks to Vlad and manehi.

    [Now for Buccaneer in the FT: I feel spoilt today.]

22. I don’t know how the ‘each clue independently’ solvers will find this, but by my method this all fell out surprisingly easily for a Vlad.

    I particularly liked HORATIO, SUPER BOWL and IN AID OF (despite the transgendering as essexboy has elaborated well). The surface of 10d was the only low point for me – Vlad is usually excellent at devising cogent ones, but the ‘spades’ stick out uncomfortably.

    The etymology of DUTCH = wife is debatable. I have seen ‘Dutch plate’ offered as the rhyming slang origin, but it may just be a contraction of ‘duchess’ without any rhyming component.

    LOI for me was FANCY DAN because I hadn’t come across the expression. The DAN was obvious, but I was looking for a martial arts connection… [The solution reminded me of ‘Dapper Dan’, George Clooney’s favoured pomade in the Coens’ wonderful ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’].

    Many thanks to Jim and manehi

23. Although I finished this early for me, I needed help from manehi to parse AMOUR and OGLER. Like others, it was a slow start – I had visions of another dnf like yesterday, but got there in the end while still enjoying the journey. Thanks Vlad and manehi.

24. Very chewy but great fun. Failed on AMOUR and OGLER (was getting a bit towards the end – the rest of the day beckons!). Loved PARTY POOPERS in particular. Many thanks to Vlad and manehi.

25. Thanks manehi for SUPERB which unusually was the sole parsing element to elude me today I think. Maybe, as expressed above, it wasn’t one of Vlad’s toughest but I also like to think that perhaps my brain has been sharpened by practice earlier in the week, would be interested in knowing if anyone else feels like they get ‘in the zone’ after a few days of steady solving.
    Gervase@22 I thought of ruddy-featured sons/daughters of the soil chucking their implements to one side before getting down to it, but agree that pitchforks are more likely tools in that scenario.
    essexboy@13 thanks for the extra detail of naif, though my favourite clue brought a different RHODA to mind:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc0xGZlanLI
    Thanks Vlad, this was great.

26. Thanks Vlad and manehi
    I too spent some time scratching my head over the equivalence of “reserve” with SUPERB! I didn’t parse AMOUR either, of course.
    Favourite REGALIA – I don’t think I’ve seen it before.

27. I thought for a moment we were going to get a post-Christmas excess exercise and diet theme, but it was more fun than that. essexboy@13 and it seems you can only be faux-naif and not fausse-naive, or would the faux be an adverb? I, too, was thinking of the French sense of superbe for reserve remembered from Racine’s Phedre.

28. Thank you Vlad and manehi. Change of subject.. have I missed the blog on Maskarade’s Xmas bumper puzzle? Doesn’t seem to be listed against 18 December (or any date since), unless I am missing something obvious.

29. Dr W @1. Mourinho is called “the special one” but only ironically as it was he who so named himself before the shine wore off.

30. Mark (the other one) @28
    The closing date for entries is today so the Maskarade blog will appear early tomorrow morning.

31. Petert @27: Je vous présente…

    Sara Giraudeau, fausse naïve (Le Monde) 😉

    [Gazzh @25 – lovely stuff from Rhoda. Can’t beat a Hammond (B-3?)]

32. Damn, impaled at the last, putting RHONA instead of RHODA at 8a. My solution works perfectly well, so long as you are too lazy to look up how to spell Rhondda.

33. Thanks for the blog and all the others this year, another excellent puzzle continuing the best week of the year , so many neat and elegant clues. I have one cross and eleven circles and I am being harsh really.
    Very minor quibble first, MASON ends on a word in the clue, it is not actually wrong but I prefer hidden words to be totally hidden.
    Out of a long list I will just pick ROLL IN THE HAY, it should really be tedders for hay-making but the use of spades does add to the rustic ambience.

34. Roughtrade@29, to be fair to Mourinho, I beleive he actually said something like “There are different kinds of coaches. Since I won the Champions League, perhaps I am a special one.” The Special One thus became an ironic nickname even in his glory Chelsea days, but I don’t think he ever called himself that directly.

35. My first attempt at this was the online version, and I filled in only a very few. However when it arrived the paper version seemed much easier. Why is that? Solved them all, but couldn’t parse SUPERBOWL and AMOUR, so thanks for those manehi.

    Favourites were PULVERISE and LOCAL. FANCY DAN was new to me. I wanted to enter fancy man, but it was obviously Desperate Dan. Overall enjoyed it a lot (and no theme!).

    New Year Resolution is to read the football pages. Maybe then I’ll get the footballer clues more easily. 😀

    Thanks Vlad and manehi.

36. Crossbar@35 someone may correct me later but I rather think FANCY DAN is a football term from the past ?? . Used derisively about more skilful players and “foreigners” , perhaps not so much these days.
    Please correct me anybody.

37. Platinum blonde stars of the cinema, such as Marilyn, would often be photographed with their abdominals pulled in and their chests pushed out in order to show off their curves.
    Thanks to maneh and Vlad.

38. Gazzh @25: ‘hay’ is definitely an agricultural product, whereas spades are horticultural (not being a plain speaker, I always call a spade a horticultural implement). But I’m really being too pernickety about a splendid crossword.

39. It was actually Mourinho himself who coined the “special one” moniker – when first coming to Chelsea he said words to the effect of: you get a lot of foreign managers coming to England but I am the special one …

40. Roz@36 My Chambers, 2014 vintage, has FANCY DAN as “a stylish rather than effective performer” so quite possibly applied to footballers at some point. This strengthens my resolve to follow more football news in the future.

41. I think if it hadn’t been for the helpful way in with the long anagrams at 1 and 27 across I would have found it difficult to make any kind of impression today. I’ve rarely had to check so many clues for the parsing as today on here – thanks very much for those explanations, Manehi. Had FANCY man instead of DAN in at 25ac, so IN AID OF was the very last one in once I’d realised the error of my ways. And I was trying to convince myself for some time that the Welsh word Afon for river somehow would offer up Fiona as the girl’s name at 8ac instead of RHODA. Struggled throughout, relying on the definitions within the clues for much of this. Happy to have completed the course, however…

42. Anyone any idea of the supposed inference of the … between 23 and 25?

43. Roz @36 you’re spot on – it’s definitely the kind of thing Brian Clough (the original special one?) might have said when he wasn’t coming out with gems like “I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one”. See also

44. egsw@42 Isn’t that just to make the two clues together have a smoother surface?

45. 😐 I hate the pretence that the clues are supposed to read as pleasant prose.

46. With all due respect to the Beach Boys, this is the first time Rhondda has helped me.

47. Roz @36: slowly being converted to the beautiful game, I see. Well-observed, and I have used it in that very context.

48. Thank you bodycheetah and AlanC, vague memories of boys talking endlessly about football, although cricket was even worse .

49. I had most of the bottom half done before the top, but got the upstairs done leventually, which I often don’t with Vlad. I also assumed MOUR was half of paramour (well, the other one’s football, innit, though I do know of him). Quite a lot bunged in from def and not fully parsed: a=per gets me every time, though I did spot the OWL. I got REGALIA from the (irrelevant) ‘ale’ sound in the middle and never did parse it properly.

    Favourites the sore loser in TRIUMPH, ROLL IN THE HAY and PARTY POOPERS.

50. PS: who was it who was taken to 15a and was disappointed not to have seen the Superb Owl?

51. Sorry esgw@45. I see I got your name wrong in @44.
    I rather like a good witty surface. It often adds to the misdirection in the clue too, which makes for more fun imho. I think Arachne is particularly good at those, but we don’t see her in the Graun now. 🙁

52. gladys@50 there is a superb starling and superb bird of paradise. I did wonder about the owl.

53. I knew nothing about Mourinho, but satisfied myself with para-MOUR. Neither did I know of YEREVAN, and for a while I was horrified by the thought that Vlad was using an indirect anagram with ‘yearn’=wish and a US state possibly (Vermont???) — but then I came here and saw that all is well.
    Chewy and fun puzzle.

54. pserve_p2@53 That was my first thought for Yerevan too. Unfortunately Vermont is VT.

55. A tough, slow solve, but all the more satisfying for it – my first completed (if not entirely parsed) Vlad, I think.

    I eventually got 1D but it remained unparsed. I was thinking of ‘do exercises’ as being POO + PE, which certainly brought a smile, but also a complete failure to work out how PARTYER could derive from ‘bad shape’. And upon reflection I suppose it’d be do (as in ‘dog doo/doo-doo’).

    Thanks manehi for the blog, and Vlad for the puzzle.

56. Last night I filled in the whole bottom half and almost none of the top. This morning a few clever ploys revealed themselves and I inched my way to done. LOI was the superb SUPERBOWL.

    I’m with paddymelon@3, in a different way. If your hair happens to be platinum blonde, does that mean that you’re trying to be sexy or anything else in particular? Maybe it’s just your hair color.

    yesyes@5 I had VA too, plus “yearn” for “wish,” but that gave too many A’s and was short an E. I put in “yeravan,” thinking maybe I had been spelling it wrong . Pserve and crossbar, the state would be Virginia, not Vermont. But why would it be an indirect anagram?

    Loved TRUMP as “sore loser”! Couldn’t parse TRIUMPH, loved it when manehi explained it. Thanks to paddymelon@4 for pointing out the connection with the next clue. esgw@42,l the ellipsis is because 25a tells you more about the sore loser in 23.

    essexboy@13, I was going to write about the gender ambiguity of the naif ingenue, but you beat me to it.

    Roz@36 I looked up Fancy Dan. It does have that football connotation, and also a baseball one: “A Fancy Dan was a baseball player who put an extra flourish on his movements while making a play in hopes of gaining the approval of the spectators.” Who knows which came first?

    esgw@42 The clue at 25a gives you more about the sore loser in 23.

57. Didn’t get 25a, and 2d had to be AMOUR, though the reference was lost on me. Look like this week’s high standard is continuing though.

58. As a commenter above remarked, I was pleased to get through this after some tough days. A satisfying challenge for me. Pace Manehi, some people argue that Dutch wasn’t a reference to the Duchess of Fife, as there had never been such a lady until a few years after AC Chevalier’s song about “My dear old Dutch” came out. So, it’s just a jocular abbreviation of duchess, not rhyming slang. Thanks to Manehi (especially for parsing ‘superbowl’) and to Vlad.

59. Thanks all for the background on Mourinho. Even if it was a toss-up between Mourinho and paramour (it’s not, but if) then I’d now choose Mourinho for an additional reason. I get the feeling that if setters use the half of (part of) construction, as here, then almost always they are referring to the front half (part) of the affected word. It’s not logically required, but I think this is the most common practice.

    Another shout-out for TRIUMPH, btw.

60. Thanks both,

    I got there in the end, although I was somewhat held up by toying with ‘balls-up’ for 5d.

61. Valentine@56 When barking up the wrong YEREVAN tree, I knew it couldn’t be Virginia which I knew was VA, but I needed a VE which I hoped erroneously might be Vermont.
    Indirect anagram because the actual letters for the anagram fodder aren’t in the clue.

62. A great, funny and clever puzzle. Not Vlad at his hardest by any means. Like others I had the bottom half completed well before making progress at the top.

    Loved the witty surfaces at 10d, 18d and 19d in particular.

    Only mild reservation is the platinum blonde = trying to look sexy. I don’t think the ? is enough.

    Favourites SUPER BOWL and PARTY POOPERS.

    Thanks Vlad and manehi

63. Today’s puzzle looked quite impenetrable at first but once 1ac, 27, 1dn and 10 were in, enjoyed completing the grid. Favourites: PLATINUM BLONDE, LET ALONE, SUPERBOWL, PULVERISE, AMOUR, & OLGER
    Many thanks to Vlad and manehi for some excellent puzzles and blogs throughout 2021.

64. I immediately thought of Mourinho – when I saw the clue about sore loser.

65. Ian @64 🙂

66. I thought Wife referred to a Dutch Wife: a kind of long pillow.

67. I knew Yerevan from the occasional appearance of the football club Ararat Yerevan in the early rounds of European club competitions alongside Ludogorets Razgrad, Shakhtyor Soligorsk and the like. Once encountered they tend to stick.

68. Brigster@67 I look forward to seeing them in a themed crossword! 😀

69. @Peaceprof 66

    There’s an old English music hall song :

    We’ve been together now for forty years
    And it don’t seem a day too much.
    There ain’t a lady living in this land
    As I’d swap for my dear old Dutch.

70. Phew! A slog, but a very satisfying one. Thanks both.

71. I finished a Vlad, probably for the first time, and almost within my 8:30 pm deadline, after much word searching and failure to parse some of the answers. So, progress of a sort?

72. Many thanks to manehi and others who commented.

    Re 18dn, the naif ingenue clearly identifies as non-binary. Remember this is the Guardian

73. Valentine@56 Platinum blonde only comes from a bottle. To my late mother, any hair dyeing was “fast”.

74. I heard (on TV)(perhaps obviously) Bob Willis call the England Ashes team a (collective noun) of FANCY DANs. If memory serves they went on to win.

75. Vlad@72 what a nice touch.

76. Thanks Vlad for a great puzzle, and (I’m with Roz) for your comment @72. Favourite for me was 17a PULVERISE, for the surface and the great misdirection. But I had many other ticks as well.
    Thanks Gazzh@25 for the Rhonda Scott link. Who knew that Richard Strauss was a bluesman.

    Happy New Year everyone.

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