Guardian Cryptic 28,964 by Qaos

63 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,964 by Qaos”

1. Missed theme of course but all straightforward. Don’t like G for “bit of gardening” but hey ho.
   Thanks Qaos and manehi

2. Noticed Sleeping Beauty, maleficent curse and spindle, but dnk the movie and its characters. And also dnk, or had forgotten, Fauna the godess. But yes, a one cuppa job, quick for this bear of plodding brain. Fun though, thx Q and manehi.

3. Another “theme” wasted on me. Oh, well.

   I wasn’t aware of aurora meaning dawn. But I am now.

   12a relies on “over” as an anagrind — I think it works better when used as reversal indicator or position indicator.

   I wasn’t aware of Lewis’s Lucy, nor Fauna as a goddess. The “bit of gardening” for “g” phenomenon seems to be happening more these days — I’m not a fan.

   Otherwise enjoyable, with quite a few smiles. Thanks Qaos & manehi.

4. “Over” works as a reversal indicator if it is taken to apply only to the first three letters of TONES. Or is that too much of a stretch?

5. Thanks Qaos. I liked much of this — LATER, BUFFALO, SAVOUR, SMUT, FRENETIC, EYES, and TRIAL RUN, for example but I found much of the SW corner beyond my patience. I was alerted to the SLEEPING BEAUTY theme by a poster on the G thread but I only saw SPINDLE as part of it. Thanks manehi for filling in the blanks.

6. Thank you manehi, especially for the parsing of EDEN. And good spot with the surface of FLAT. Thank you for the link, a TILT for me. I couldn’t make heads nor tails with 25D. Qaos theory on the Sleeping Beauty Problem!

   Interesting that the ‘African-American’ divide should appear twice in one week.
   The brand names POLYFILLA and FLORA were fairly clued.
   Qaos was kind to clue FAUNA as a goddess, as before that I only had FLORA and FAUNA and a couple of animals for a possible theme, but with AURORA and SLEEPING BEAUTY, I slowly awakened. .
   It may be coincidence, or further pointers to the theme, that we also have ‘cinema’ and ‘Oscar’ in the clues.

   After reading up on the original Grimms’ story, I’m reminded of how gruesome so many of our nursery rhymes and fairy tales are. Maybe kids were better prepared in those days for being made aware of some of the grim realities of life, and not wrapped in cotton wool.

   Chuckled at PEERLESS, SAVOUR, and HOUSE CALL. Favourites.

7. Oh, and POLYFILLA was a cracker!

8. Thanks, Qaos & manehi. This was most enjoyable. With Aurora and Fauna being among my first in, I spotted the theme very quickly – and it proved helpful with some the trickier clues. SET ON FIRE was my LOI and my favourite once I finally rumbled the cleverly misleading construction. Lovely clue.

   Lost patience trying to fathom EDEN, though the solution was obvious enough from the def and crossers. Thanks for the explanation there, manehi.

   Paddymelon @7 – I loved POLYFILLA too, but it’s an old, old gag. Pretty sure I first came across a variant of it in the classic Crack-A-Joke book as a kid in the 70s. (I’m not complaining, mind – clues based on/inspired by children’s jokes are often my favourites.)

9. PUFF was one of those double definitions that seemed more like a single definition twice! Am I missing something?
   And I had a broader set of tableaux for BEAUTY in my mind’s eye, envisaging an archetypal larrikin pronouncing as “a beauty” almost anything that may otherwise be termed “a knockout”?!
   Nice puzzle
   Many thanks Qaos and manehi

10. Steady solve with some trouble unpacking the SE corner – SET ON FIRE and EDEN were satisfying to parse correctly. Spent too long trying to work with Attlee disembowelled in some way and I always enjoy being misdirected.

    POLYFILLA more of a groan than a chuckle but to each their own. TRIAL RUN – I really dislike “about” as a reversal coming before what’s affected – does anyone use “about”, “around” or “over” in that way in real English? It reminds me of the Scots wiki debacle where that American lad replaced every instance of “also” with “an aw”, even at the start of sentences.

    Thanks all.

11. Small point. Just wondering about BUFFALO definition – is it not just city – “in New York” indicating, as you say, “in New York state”.

    Couldn’t get the theme today.

    Thanks manehi and Qaos

12. [Widdersbel@8. POLLYFILLA Don’t know about the old, old gag. Were you referring to the clue, or my gag? 🙂 ]

13. One mistake as I misspelled ‘maleficent’ (I try to work out anagrams without writing out the letters of the anagrist and frequently come unstuck). Failed to see the theme though I thought that ‘Flora’ and ‘Fauna’ must lead somewhere.

14. Anyone else try UMA for 19?

15. Nuh, Auriga@14, but I imagine that would have occurred to you more readily than me. While I haven’t seen the film, (does anyone say film anymore? PG here is a film classification) I did know the answer as it was filmed not very far away from here in NSW.

16. paddymelon@15, I was thinking of Uma Thurman being a “babe” in a film. Nho the film Babe. (I never refer to “movies”.)

17. Oh, that’s clever Auriga@16. I thought you were only speaking linguistically. I had to look her up to see what you meant.

18. I twigged the theme after solving MALEFICENT and thinking of the Angeline Jolie film, but didn’t know the various characters as mentioned by manehi. I thought SET ON FIRE was the standout and also liked the clever OVERTONES.

    Ta Qaos & manehi.

19. Found this fairly gentle. Knew there’d be a theme, but missed it.

    William F P@9 – I had the same sort of thought about PUFF.

    I didn’t bother to parse EDEN. SET ON FIRE took a while, but appreciated it once the penny dropped, and I liked WILTS too.

    Thanks to Qaos and manehi.

20. POLYFILLA should have a homophone indicator (even ignoring the non-rhoticism). I think strength=BEAUTY is very loose.

21. Missed the theme but what’s new! Otherwise this was a fun solve with the SW corner proving the last to crack. Wilts was a doh! moment and loved the misdirection in Set on fire. Thanks to Qaos and manehi.

22. paddymelon @12 – well, I was thinking of the clue, but your gag was also noted and appreciated! 🙂

23. poc @20 – perhaps “the strength/beauty of this approach is that…”

24. Liked CURSE, FLAT (loi).

    I did not parse 27d and I forgot to look for a theme.

    Thanks, both.

25. Concise and witty clues always welcome round here
    I saw Sleeping Beauty but didnt see or remember seeing the film
    But I also thought Beauty and the Beast what with Pig and Buffalo
    very nice
    Thanks Q and manehi

26. The SPINDLE and SLEEPING gave us a hint for the theme, and helped to confirm BEAUTY, which (quite right, poc @20) was not very certain from the clue alone. But we didn’t know the characters from the film, so the only other theme related word we found was CURSE. [Our middle son delights in recalling that Anna – unthinkingly – cooked roast pork for the evening meal the day we took the kids to Babe.] FLAT was devious and POLYFILLA a real PDM (NHO the joke before). Thanks, Qaos and manehi.

27. Thanks for the blog , missed the theme of course although I did see SLEEPING BEAUTY right at the end when I put beauty in.
    Some clever word play here , especially for shorter answers EDEN and FLAT.
    SLEEPING, TRIAL RUN and ADROIT nice to put together.

    BLOW = breathe heavily = PUFF
    SMOKE = draw on a cigarette = PUFF

28. [AlanC I note your caution@18 , you have the Cheerios Derby to worry about soon }

    Quick plug for the FT , a spectacular IO puzzle today .

29. I’d see OVER as a reversal rather than an anagram indicator, so OVERTONES doesn’t quite work for me. Some fiddly parsing in the smallest clues (CHEF, FLAT and particularly EDEN) and I’m not sure about strength=BEAUTY, though as I had the theme by then it obviously had to be that. Qaos has taken his themers from the Disney film: I didn’t know the names of the three good fairies. Do not read up the original plot of SLEEPING BEAUTY if you are of a delicate disposition: Disney it isnae!

    Polly-filler jokes were everywhere when I was at school and the stuff was new, but it’s nice to see it again.

    Auriga@14: UMA=babe would never get past the Guardian censors!

30. Thanks Qaos and manehi

    McBeak @ 10 “does anyone use “about”, “around” or “over” in that way in real English?”

    The military do – “About turn”, “About face” etc.

31. A nice romp today today, for the most part, especially compared to yesterday’s struggle.

    The parsing of 27D (EDEN) far exceeded the capabilities of my poor brain, although I filled in the answer from the definition and crossers. References to former PMs seem to be EDEN quite often!

32. Auriga #14. Uma was my 1st, 2nd and 3rd instinct for 19a. Cryptic definition, wordplay: it had to be that 🙂

33. Gladys@29 I put UMA to start with , then quickly got PEERLESS and then PIG, but Sarah Sengupta looked very young in the film, but I was dubious.

34. Enjoyed this, but nowhere near twigging the theme, perhaps because BEAUTY was LOI. Struggled latterly with the SW corner, even though POLYFILLA is a bit of an old chestnut in terms of homophonic jokes (battled with predictive text there, wanting a b instead of an n). Very much liked MALEFICENT. Used to ride on the Wilts and Dorsets red double deckers to school many many moons ago…

35. Thanks to Qaos for this enjoyable puzzle full of playful but, tricky wordplay, with a mention of our old friend the old city of ‘UR’ in 18dn
    Didn’t spot the theme, favourites are:
    SAVOUR; SPINDLE; EDEN and ADROIT
    Thx also to manehi for his blog.

36. [Roz @28: love it. I hope to be doing the hula at 5pm on Saturday]

37. I got the solution with lots of checks, but there were many I never got near parsing.

    Well done Manehi , I thought Qaos would beat 15² , but I was wrong.

    Thanks to both of you.

38. Desperate bloke to the foreman on a building maintenance site : “I’ve come for the job of POLYFILLA-ING all the fencing buttresses”. Retort from the foreman : “Sorry mate but all those posts are already filled” – that’s one of those CURSEd. WILTing jokes.

    ( “Boom Boom” you might say and for ‘ancients’ like me Basil Brush was indeed a regular on Crackerjack ! )

    I have to admit that I had UMA at first for 19.
    Very nice puzzle, today. Most enjoyable.

    Thank you Qaos and manehi.

39. Well for once knowing there was going to be a theme, even not knowing what it was going to be, helped: after entering SLEEPING I looked to see if I could find a BEAUTY.

    However, I do join with others who are not so happy with equating it with strength. They are both positive attributes, to be sure, and can occupy the same position in sentences, but that is not imo enough to say they are synonymous. They can be viewed as objective and subjective takes on a situation – mutually supportive but different.

40. Dave Ellison @11: I see nothing wrong with that definition. Buffalo is a New York city, just as Walla Walla is a Washington city. And until you notice that the C isn’t capitalized, it’ll misdirect you to NYC, so a fair crossword trick.

    Because the word BUFFALO is also a verb meaning “to flummox”, and because the relative pronoun “that” is sometimes optional, you can make (grammatically correct but inane) sentences of arbitrary length using just the word BUFFALO. For example, “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” means “Bison from upstate New York flummox bison from upstate New York,” whereas “Buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” might be “The bison that upstate New York bison flummox in turn flummox New York bison.”

    I had never heard of POLYFILLA–not a thing here, to my knowledge–and the parsing of EDEN was a bridge too far. So the bottom third was much slower for me than the rest of the puzzle. Hadn’t seen Sleeping Beauty since I was a child, so no luck with the theme.

41. Just a thought. My way into the theme was not the 1959 film but the two Angelina Jolie films, Maleficent from 2014 and it’s 2019 sequel. Obvious reworking of and extrapolation from the fairy tale/59 film but a more current reference for younger folk.

    Not that I am younger folk.

42. The BEAUTY (/strength?) of tackling a puzzle later in the day is that most of the queries I had in mind have been answered by you good people before I get here 🙂

    Although it all makes sense now, I think I was off-wavelength for about a quarter of this, and resorted to a few bung-and-checks to get to the end. FLORA and POLYFILLA went in early and had me looking for a brand names theme, so I neglected to notice the actual theme.

    Thanks both, one for scrambling and the other for unscrambling my brain today.

43. A footnote on 24a.

    Years ago, when I was a wee lad at school (early 1960s), one day the Maths master, having drawn a polygon on the blackboard, muttered “all right, call it a dead parrot if you must”. Yep, he was a a treat, that master! (I should explain that this was long before Monty Python came on the scene).

    Whereupon one of my classmates chimed in: “Sir, when that parrot’s dead, can you stuff it with POLYFILLA.”

    So my classmate (not Qaos) should get the credit… 🙂

44. Thanks manehi, I had BEAUTY last in as a bit of a punt, as the strength aspect never occurred to me but now I think it’s fine: a list of a person’s (not mine however) Strengths = Assets could include Beauty as I am sure it must be a valuable asset in some circumstances. EG for an aspiring Uma Thurman (perhaps I am getting old because I thought of ‘PIG’ without even considering her). My favourites chime with Roz’s (except PUFF) and because of that I will attempt the mighty IO next, but thanks Qaos for the enjoyment today so far…

45. [ AlanC@36 , will it be 15-a-side ? ]

46. Gazzh @44 , Puff was not on my favourites list , I was just showing how it can be two opposite definitions.
    The main STRENGTH of the Dirac equation is its BEAUTY .

47. Enjoyable crossword. Late to the party today, though I tackled the puzzle early this morning – too early, probably, because the theme escaped me yet again, and like Gazzh @44 BEAUTY was my LOI. I’m not convinced that this is synonymous with strength – both admirable attributes but not the same

    There is no excellent beauty (bottom?) which hath not some strangeness in the proportion, as Francis Bacon charmingly remarked.

    Thanks to S&B

48. …and this of course:
    “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all
    Ye need to know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
    Ode on a Grecian Urn – John Keats

49. I’m another who never sees themes. Didn’t even know Fauna was a goddess.

    EDEN was a bung-and-shrug.

    Scenes from my wretched life: I was once called upon to second a motion proposed by Clement Attlee in the London students union, “this house would legalize homosexual activity between consenting adults”. I don’t think I was much good but I got a lovely girlfriend out of it.

50. Brigster @41: I had the same thought @18! [Roz @45: you’ve got me there?].

51. [ AlanC a week or two ago you said that Reading Royals play in rugby shirts like KPR ]

52. [SD Brit @ 49: amazing to think we’ve gone, in the space of half a lifetime, from gay *sex* being illegal almost everywhere to gay *marriage* being legal in almost all of the West. I am a man with a husband, a fact I’ve not had occasion to mention here in a few years; in nearly a decade of marriage it’s already become too easy to take for granted, but gosh the world has changed for us.]

53. [oh aye Roz 🙂 ]

54. A Kare Born @37: same with me. This was Biff Central with so many answers obviously correct and so many parsings equally elusive: OVERTONES, EDEN, FLAT, BEAUTY, ADROIT, FAUNA. However, I was on the same page as Mr Penney @40 for BUFFALO, noting the clever lack of a capital “C”. [Buffalo is ubiquitous in the headlines, the hometown of the state’s governor, the site a racist supermarket rampage, a record snowstorm and a collapsing NFL player. It’s a beautiful metropolis with elm-lined boulevards and a stunning City Hall, which is the apotheosis of art deco architecture]

55. mrpenney@40, AT@54 I was really implying the “in” in the clue is at a loose end with manehi’s take on it, but the one I gave absorbs the “in” into the definition.

    [My only experience with Buffalo City was in November 1970 when my ancient VW Beatle (bug) suddenly stopped. Despite seeing fuel in the tank, this was misleading. Being so cold the breather hole for the fuel tank cap had frozen up, the engine sucked all air out and the tank collapsed into a W cross-section, wherein lay my fuel. Luckily it was outside a garage and they quickly solve it by blowing the tank up with compressed air]

56. Sorry not into the definition. but into the “in New York”

57. mrpenny@40

    Your multiple buffalos reminded me of The Story Of Esau Wood

58. Thanks Manehi, just failed on the dd in 22d, still not sure I get STRENGTH = BEAUTY.
    Did 24a need a homophone indicator?
    Thanks Qaos.

59. [Roz @46, John Polkinghorn said that watching Dirac work stuff out in real time on the blackboard was an experience of great beauty, like watching Bach compose …]

60. Mrpenney@40
    There’s a difference between a bison and a buffalo as any Cockney will tell you – you can’t wash your hands in a buffalo. Even older than the polygon and Polyfilla jokes.

61. HIYD @58, I thought “recommended” was the sounds like indicator for 24a

62. [Roz and others,
    I once had a college tutor who proposed the Dirac as a new SI unit = 1 word/month for the famously taciturn genius!]
    Fun puzzle but I botched SET ON FIRE for no good reason. A little trickier than the average Q and all the better for it. Loved LATER with its topical surface.
    Thanks, Q and m.

63. BINGO = HOUSE was new to me.

    What a polymath a blogger has to be! Imagine being knowledgeable about both the Disney version (I assume) of Sleeping Beauty and the Sleeping Beauty paradox, which I could barely begin to wade through.

    Dave Ellison@57 How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? (To be sung to the tune of “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

    When my great-uncle Harold was a toddler (some time in the 1880s, probably) he was fascinated with his father’s top hat. I don’t know whether it was an opera hat or not, but when Harold put it at the bottom of a few stairs and jumped on it, it did not survive the experience. When asked what had happened to the hat, Harold famously (in our family) said, “A big torm truck it.”

    Thanks to Qaos, whose theme I missed because I missed the Disney film, and to manehi for being there when I needed him.

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