Guardian Cryptic 28,662 by Brummie

71 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,662 by Brummie”

1. Thanks loonapick. A fun solve. I couldn’t see the point of the ‘(introduction missing)’ in 17ac, as I was reading ‘printing’ = ‘running’, as in a newspaper story. Sprinting never occurred to me.

2. Thanks loonapick.

   I forgot to check the wordplay for TRIVIAL PURSUIT and ISOLATED as they were quite obvious from the crossing letters.

   A much more enjoyable Brummie for being slightly easier than usual.

   I didn’t know NAMASTE

3. It was only after finding the across clues a bit trickier than normal for a Monday that I checked who the setter was. But I agree it was on the easy end of Brummie’s spectrum. Once again, the down clues were the way in for me. Liked MAFIOSI and TIDINGS. I think I only know NAMASTE from previous crosswords. Thanks loonapick and Brummie.

4. Thanks for a fun solve Brummie. And thanks loonapick: I failed to parse INFORMANT and VESTMENTS. They’re obvious when you see them.

5. A fairly straightforward solve. I’m still getting used to the Guardian setters, but from the comments it seems that Brummie can be more difficult than this.
   I liked VESTMENTS (when the penny finally dropped) and TRIVIAL PURSUIT for the deceptive surface. MAFIOSI had me worried a bit until I realised that the definition was the plural “hoods” rather than “one providing hoods”.

6. This seemed slightly more difficult than a normal Monday but slightly easier than a normal Brummie. A fast start was followed by a period of head scratching and then it all came together. Nothing too obscure other than taler and disaffirm is a word unlikely to be used in real life.
   Good start to the week. Thank you Brummie and loonapick.

7. Yes, a nice puzzle. I knew TALER but missed the TAR = salt link. Like Tim C I liked VESTMENTS; hadn’t heard of SEA BREEZE cocktail, so needed some crossers to get it. Thanks to Brummie and loonapick.

8. Most agreeable, which is not always the case for me with this setter.

   Had to look up TALER & NAMASTE and didn’t fully parse the -ant part of INFORMANT but otherwise all very smooth with satisfying surfaces.

   A pleasant relief after the mauling I took on Saturday.

   Many thanks, both.

9. Lovely puzzle. Ticks for 3d FASHION VICTIMS, 8d POTTER, 18d TIDINGS (as cited already by Tomsdad@3) and 19d NAMASTE. I didn’t understand some of the parses fully (e.g. TALER at 23d as mentioned by others above incl. drofle@7), so I appreciated the blog. Thanks to Brummie and loonapick.

10. Same likes as those mentioned already. I know NAMASTE from doing extra hot yoga, when that parting word mercifully meant that the torture was over. TALER was new of course.

    Ta Brummie & loonapick

11. A fun solve. Perhaps worth mentioning that TALER is the origin of “dollar”. I forget which valley (Tal) the coin came from.
    Thanks to Brummie and loonapick.

12. Auriga @11: it was the Joachimst(h)al

13. Thanks EB@12. I’ll remember that now.

14. AlanC – I’d heard of NAMASTE, but alas never ‘extra hot yoga’. The mind boggles.

    We also have a WELLS of this parish, who is responsible for several enlightening works (on phonetics) but I guess HG was the intended one.

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick.

15. I’m more than happy to see a bit more variety in the Monday slot and, for me, this Brummie made for a pleasant start to the week. I’m with JinA @9 in liking FASHION VICTIMS and with Tim C @5 with a tick for TRIVIAL PURSUIT. PROGNOSTICATE is a splendid anagram. As a Tolkien fan, I’ve never been completely happy with the equation of orc and ogre but I’ve seen it often enough in puzzles not to make a fuss.

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick

16. Trickier than one might expect on a Monday but an enjoyable test of the cryptic grey matter

    Thanks to Brummie and loonapick

17. Thanks Brummie and loonapick

    “A rare Monday appearance from Brummie.”

    According to statto moaljodad on the graun thread, of the 257 puzzles Brummie has set since his 2003 debut, this is the first on a Monday.

18. I always thought the derivation for “dollar” is the taler (or thaler) so found 23d easy. Just checked and seems that is so. Agree with others it was good to have a bit more of a challenge on a Monday – thanks Brummie and loonapick.

19. liked FASHION VICTIMS, PRINTING PRESS.

    new BRIAR pipe (1d); SEA BREEZE cocktail.

    I could not parse 18D, 9D, 26ac.

    Thanks, both.

20. Thanks TB@18 for the reminder about t[h]aler/dollar. And yep, agree with y’all about the fun of a Brummie to start the week, cheers to him and loonapick.

21. Lovely to see NAMASTE. I really like this form of greeting with the hands together action. Wouldn’t it have been so much better to adopt that instead of the awkward elbow and fist bumps in these Covid times?

    Very enjoyable, and great surfaces. Took me a little while to get on the same wavelength, not sure why. Possibly expected it to be harder.
    Very lazily gooogled for SEA BREEZE.

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick.

22. That was a good start to the week.

    I didn’t parse INFORMANT or ISOLATED and also had to look up TALER

    Like others I liked TIDINGS, VESTMENTS. Also liked SHELTERED, OBVERSE

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick

23. A couple of strange – or at least unusual – negatives here: DISAFFIRM and UNLET. Like drofle @7, my only way into SEA BREEZE was through the crossers: who drinks (or even knows about) cocktails when you can have beer? All in all, though, I thought this a very suitable Monday offering. Thanks, Brummie and loonapick.

24. Thanks loonapick. I felt the same as PostMark@15 re orc vs ogre for the same reason, but after a quick dip into the derivation of the words it seems like a fair equivalence. A while back Paul (I think) used two mythical creatures in a way that I found incongruous, maybe a D+D handbook or Fighting Fantasy’s “Out of the Pit” should become the Chambers of that field? Luckily they don’t pop up too much. Anyway, very enjoyable thanks Brummie.

25. I solved 10A as a cryptic definition referring to ink wells. I then realized it’s also a double definition. I guess that makes it also an @lit?

    Or maybe I’m giving too much credit for a simple clue?!

    Thank you Brummie and lunapick

26. Refreshing change for a Monday.

    I did like the linking of Game of Thrones and TRIVIAL PURSUIT, also MAFIOSI. Strangely enough, I didn’t see that PROGNOSTICATE was an anagram, doh! MWD @25; traditionally, an &lit would have to have some wordplay. Good idea about ink WELLS, however.

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick.

27. Very welcome change for a Monday puzzle. Well constructed clues with plausible surfaces – good variety of devices. I didn’t find anything too difficult and there weren’t any unfamiliar words (though I can’t tell you the composition of a SEA BREEZE or the exchange rate of the TALER 🙂 ).

    PM @15: loonapick’s reference to Tolkien re ORC is misleading. As Gazzh @24 acknowledges, JRRT – Old English scholar, of course – simply reused an old word for an ogre or demon for the creatures he called ‘goblins’ in The Hobbit.

    NAMASTE to S&B

28. As others have said, a pleasant variation. Sometimes the solution was easier to find than parse. I bow to greater expertise on ogres as I don’t know an orc from an ‘andsaw.

29. Agree with loonapick. The only pause for thought was TALER, which I’d nho.

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick

30. Thanks to Brummie for a slightly tougher than normal Monday puzzle with some very good wordplay and a new word for me at 23d. Thx also to loonapick for help in parsing 17 and 24ac.

31. Quite pleasant. I didn’t find RARE at all obvious.

32. Like Crossbar @21, it “took me a little while to get on the same wavelength”, which may have had something to do with the smooth surfaces. My first breakthroughs came with the two long down clues, with only one crosser apiece, so I started to feel pleased with myself and this fed my confidence for the rest of the puzzle.

    I plumped for TALER (rather than TALAR), just because the word looked more likely, but when I found it in Chambers under “thaler” I suddenly remembered that it’s the name of a rugby league referee (as well as a silver coin).

    DENVER and RARE were among my last in, because I hadn’t spotted ‘city’ as the definition in the former (I’d been looking at RECTOR or DEACON as possibles), and because ‘appearance’ in the latter was, as it turned out, extraneous – unless we take ‘last appearance’ as an indicator for the final letter of ‘singer’?

    Thanks to Brummie and loonapick.

33. I had slightly different parses for 26A and 5D.
    26A: R+ARE, with R=last of singer, and ARE (as pronounced in RARE)=homophone of “air” (appearance live).
    For 5D I had (aims of)* + I, rather than (aims of +I)*. Not that it makes much difference.
    Thanks Brummie and loonapick.

34. A pleasant solve, apart from the unusual and ambiguously-clued TALER. I wonder why TILER wasn’t plumped for here? With RARE, I think ‘last appearance’ is a stretch too, and the definition for ARE a bit, well, rare, but you could, as they say.

    Thanks Brummie and Loonapick.

35. TALER is one of those words which I knew, but couldn’t figure out how I knew it. My first thought was that it had to have showed up in earlier puzzles here, but not according to a site search. So I must have looked up the etymology of dollar at some time, but don’t remember doing that. Oh well.

    While not the right answer, it seems that ALOE might be a good fit for 6a. It is extracted from a plant, hence essence, is used in skin care, and here’s the fun part – it is made of the central letters (hence essence again) of the words in “A clot speed”.

36. Thanks for the blog, what a treat for a Monday , many clever and elegant clues .
    I had 5D as an anagram of AIMS OF and then one=I at the end so I did not need to frown at it.
    PROGNOSTICATE was my favourite out of many.

    [ MrPostMark if you pop back, there was a nice article in Saturday’s paper about an old cinema in Birmingham, the Electric I think, it has been totally restored and is re-opening ]

37. This one did seem a little tricksy for a Monday, but some good things in there. As a GOT freak I’m more than happy to be reminded of same, naturally, so there were some nice moments for me here. Ach, if only I could watch it all again without prior knowledge!

    TALER I had to look up, tbh, and in looking back over the gird and seeing OBVERSE, I did wonder if I’d missed a theme, but there doesn’t seem to be anything.

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick for some chewy entertainment.

38. Dr W @35: I also toyed with ALOE for 6ac, with the same parsing as you. I wasn’t convinced that it was an essence though…

39. … strictly speaking, the enumeration for ASAP should be 1,1,1,1 as the abbreviation is only ever enunciated as the four individual letters.

40. Gervase @39 except round our way where ASAP is often pronounced as a whole word

41. Gervase @39: I wondered about that (I suspect it’s come up before) but unlike, say, RSVP which is always enunciated as four separate letters, asap does get used as a standalone word – a-sap. Whether rightly or wrongly, I couldn’t say. 😉

42. [Roz @36: how kind of you to alert me. I’ve just tracked it down and what a nice story. Fingers crossed for them. It’s good to see some independents making a go of it: we have two within a short distance of us in Worcestershire. One with more casual seating and a dining option, the other with a strong local community vibe.]

43. [PM@42 . I wonder if the PPP still exists ? It was very run down in the 90s when I was going, great films though and extremely cheap even then ]

44. [Roz @43: we’ve discussed it before, I recall, but it still exists as the Ultimate Picture Palace, is exploring a move to community ownership, charges £5 to student aged customers (if you buy a £5 Membership Pass) and they’re showing The Wicker Man for Burns Night. So, much the same as we knew it albeit about five times the price. You probably can’t go in with a beer and a bag of chips, though 🙂 ]

45. Thanks Brummie for making an unexpectedly pleasant Monday appearance.I was able to solve and parse most of this but I fail to see how grass = INFORMANT. PRINTING PRESS was obvious from the definition but its cleverness escaped me. My favourites were VESTMENTS, TRIVIAL PURSUIT, and TIDINGS. Thanks loonapick for the blog.

46. Tony Santucci: “The grass grassed him up to the fuzz.”

47. Tony @45: A grass is a British term for a stoolie. It shows up in these crosswords with some regularity, so store it up for future use. It’s Cockney rhyming slang: grass -> grasshopper -> copper.

48. [PM@44, high inflation. Used to be 99p per film but they never gave change . One term I saved up 99 1p coins to pay with. Cheap and wonderful but you could genuinely catch fleas. ]

49. Thanks Bear+of+little+brain and mrpenny. I’m slowly picking up some Cockney rhyming slang; if it’s grass->grasshopper->copper then where does stoolie come in? Isn’t copper a policeman?

50. Oh dear. Everyone proclaiming how easy, easy, easy this was, and I struggled. Apart from not knowing the cocktail, I don’t.know why: just an off day. Perhaps people are comparing it to a normal Brummie, rather than a normal Monday. Liked POTTER.

    Perhaps it’s grasshopper to rhyme with shopper: one who shops you to the coppers… but I think there’s also an association with the song “Whispering Grass”
    Just listen to the lyrics.

51. Tony S @ 49 – I think grass as an informer comes from an old music hall song: ‘Why do you whisper green grass . . . Whispering grass don’t tell the trees, ‘cos the trees don’t need to know’. So you’re right, not rhyming slang.

    Nice puzzle. We were ink-WELLS too. RARE we were very unsure of. Ta each to setter and blogger.

52. Didn’t get far with this Monday puzzle but did crack top left. @47 – I always thought grass was shor
    t for”snake in the grass.” Never heard of it as rhyming slang – but I’m no Cockney!

53. Thanks gladys and Irishman. Grass is making sense now.

54. In re herbae, wiki gives both the rhyming slang and the ‘snake in the grass’ theories. The latter has the virtue (for the classically inclined) of going back to Virgil – latet anguis in herba

55. For a long time I was looking at a desert of white, with just a couple of entries. Then I took a stab at TRIVIAL PURSUIT, and suddenly everything clicked into place.

    @28 petert: is that how you pronounce it in the north-north-west?
    @39/40/41 I’ve heard ‘ae-ess-ae-pee’ and ‘ae-sap’ interchangeably, and ‘ruh-suh-vup’ for RSVP.

56. My nitpick for today is from 18D: I am not convinced that the ID is the same as “unconscious forces”. Instead, it is my understanding that the ID is the name for that part of the psyche where unconscious forces reside. Perhaps a shrink belongs to this estimable group who can set me straight, a super ego, as it were.

57. [me @54 – having delved a little deeper into the long grass, I find that ‘Whispering Grass’ has an even more ancient pedigree. The Ink Spots song (for which gladys kindly provided the link @50) was first recorded in 1940, so it would seem it can’t be the immediate source for grass = informant, since that usage goes back at least as far as a 1932 crime novel (Tinker’s Kitchen by Arthur Gardner).

    However, ‘whispering grass’ as a literary trope is found in the myth of Midas, and maybe much earlier – here are the Sumerian (3rd millennium B.C.) Instructions of Shuruppak.]

58. Just an observation: I have never heard either ASAP nor RSVP pronounced in any way other than as distinct letters, round here. I winced at the enumeration, but then thought that I have heard that this is Grauniad style.

59. I hadn’t heard of the SEA BREEZE cocktail either, but a few crossers suggested the answer as something sunbathers on a beach might like.

    When I was in Nepal in 2017, I found that NAMASTE is a common greeting even to strangers you pass on the street. It felt lovely.

    Petert@28 Nice one!

    Tony@49 and gladys@50 I’d always wondered about grass being copper too, for the reasons Tony expresses. I like gladys’s explanation better.

    Thanks to Brummie and loonapick.

60. TassieTim, ASAP is one of those words you hear in tedious cop/military movies. RSVP is one one of those words you hear when falling asleep through same..

61. Valentine@59: a grass is definitely not a copper himself: he’s the informer who tells the coppers all about what you’ve been doing

62. gladys@61 That’s exactly why grass=copper seems a dubious derivation to me.

63. Postmark@44 we hope to launch the UPP community share offer shortly.

64. We had INFORMANT and ISOLATED in last few days which made them easier.
    Thanks both

65. Darkstarcrashes @63: I doubt you’ll see this reply, given the timing (Roz might as she sometimes looks at the previous day’s posts early on) Thanks for picking up on our exchange and for letting me know. Good luck with the venture. And, btw, as a Deadhead of old, what a great moniker you’ve chosen!

66. [PostMark @44: Wicker Man on Burns Night made me chuckle]

67. Apt in so many ways, AlanC

68. They should show The Wicker Man on Mayday, although Burns night is funny and it is a very Scottish film, it always used to be Marx Brothers films all night , no idea why. Wonder if ti still has Al Jolson’s hands and Pearl and Dean ?

69. Postmark@65 surely once a Deadhead always a Deadhead !

70. Roz@68 Al Jolson’s hands went ages ago. I think the loos are still Pearl and Dean.

71. An enjoyable exercise (2 days late!). Never heard of NAMASTE or the phrase FASHION VICTIMS. I put in TALER, even though I thought the spelling was THALER, and never having read Tolkien, didn’t know ORC = ogre. Still, it’s good to learn. Thanks Brummie (and loonapick, even though I didn’t need you this time).

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