Guardian Cryptic 29,172 by Vulcan

59 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,172 by Vulcan”

1. CANCAN
   ANC-ANC-ANC holds, I think

2. TARTAN
   Is it referring to the woolen material (sported by?)?

3. KVa @1- thanks, that’s probably right although the ANC are a party, rather than the government itself, in my opinion.

   @2 – yes, but is it worn by sailors, sunburnt or otherwise?

4. Nice one KVa. Otherwise I was along the same lines as Loonapick. Thought this was one of Vulcan’s clunkier offerings.
   Thanks to Vulcan and Loonapick

5. Never having heard of the Gotha almanac, I failed to parse GOTCHA. Didn’t parse CANCAN either. Everything else was tickety boo.

   Most enjoyable, thank you Vulcan & Loonapick.

6. GOTCHA
   loonapick’s parsing seems all right. Of course, someone may come up with a simpler explanation.

7. TARTAN
   I think it’s just a cryptic def.

8. A tan is sunburn – it’s a sign of sun damage, so I didn’t quibble that bit. Is the TARTAN definition to do with “sporting the tartan”?

   I completed this but I’m never brilliantly on Vulcan’s wavelength, so it’s never that smooth for me.

   Thank you to Vulcan and loonapick.

9. TARTAN
   Looks like there is a sailboat too called TARTAN. A sports vessel? As sported by…
   Or the ? just tells us that a TARTAN (the garb) isn’t actually worn by a sailor.

10. Enjoyable, although I too had never heard of the Gotha almanac?

11. @KVa 9. I think that Scotsmen who wear a kilt are ‘sporting the tartan’.

12. Wasn’t it Chambers which had the jokey definition of an eclair as a cake “long in length and short in duration”?

13. I found this a little loose generally, and not helped by the unfriendly grid.

    Searching for one of a couple of hundred words that fit _I_N_ for example, a little tedious.

    Odd to see the same device used at SLIPPERY and also STINGY.

    Many thanks, both.

14. Agree with KVa@7 TARTAN double def. Sporting is probably taken care of by the question mark. As for TAN. It is sunburnt. Skin damage. Aussies who aspire to tans or work outdoors have the highest rate of skin cancer in the world, especially in Queensland, with many of us from Anglo/Celtic origins. Even the first Australians, with more melatonin, stay out of the sun, sensibly.

15. Cryptic def I meant to say.

16. Quite tough. Failed to solve 24ac and 1d.

    Favourite: SLIPPERY.

    Thanks, both.

    I parsed CANCAN the same way as KVa@1.

17. Strange solve for me, completely filling the right side before the left could be breached.
    [PDM@14 as it happens my wife and I are visiting the Sunshine Coast for some much needed vitimin D and today’s highlight was meeting our first pademelon near Maleny. We just assumed it was a joey until we noticed it had a joey of its own and were later enlightened by a local.]
    Thanks Vulcan and loonapick.

18. Thanks Vulcan and loonapick
    I knew the almanac so GOTCHA was FOI. I also parsed CANCAN as anCANCANc, but thought that “repeatedly” was a bit insufficient.
    I expect our US solvers will have trouble wit SURGERIES, as I remember that they don’t use that term for clinics.
    Favourite CENTAUR, though I’ve seen the “horseman” definition elswhere quite recently.

19. I found the NE tricky and thought there might be a Scottish theme with BONNY (Scotland), MULL, TARTAN and the stereotypical rep of being STINGY. However I don’t think they were BLASTED by the South AfriCANCANs in the rugby (sorry to bring it up, after last week’s Brendan). I like your parsing of CANCAN, KVa. Much tougher solve today than the usual from this setter.

    Ta Vulcan & loonapick.

20. Sorry, I’m rubbish at Geography-the NW.

21. (Ohh, Paul @7. I’ ve never seen a pademelon in nature. Lucky you. )

22. [paddymelon @21: nho of the species but is this where your handle comes from?]

23. Alan C, a pademelon is like a wallaby only cuter. You should never try to put one in a fruit salad.

24. GDU @23: I’ll keep that in mind 🙂

25. I remembered the Alamanac(h) de Gotha, so 1d wasn’t a problem, but I agree about the general clunkiness. A TAN is not the same as a sunburn. I lived many years in the the tropics and once had quite serious sunburn (after only 20 minutes of unprotected exposure in a boat), but in common with many Irish people have never had the slightest hint of a tan.

26. [PDM@21 it was in the stunning rainforest of Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve, not sure if that’s near you. After the first encounter we saw a mob of them in the bush, so we assumed they were common. Very cute and seemingly untroubled by our presence.]

27. I also found the NW quite hard to penetrate. I started in the SE and found that to be mostly a write-in. There were a few clues that required more thought. A couple of words were new to me but easy to work out: LIANA and HOUSETOP. It could only have been CANCAN (I think) but I doubt I’d have cottoned on to the ANC repeated . I especially liked GOTCHA, CORNICHE and ALCOPOP (the last is a word that seems to come up fairly regularly…). Anyway, a fun start to the week. With thanks to Vulcan and loonapick.

28. Another one not knowing GOTHA, so I BIFD GOTCHA. I spent ages with trying to get an anagram of alarm into SCARECROW, but to no avail. I liked the STINGY surface. I would have thought that Yale is more like the lock than the key?

    Thanks Vulcan and loonapick.

29. (AlanC@22. Yes partly. Bit of a long story starting off with riffing on PDM penny drop moment which I encountered for the first time here on 15sq . As GDU says pademelons are cute and I come from Irish stock.)
    (Paul@26 I grew up in SE QLD but Julie in Australia is not that far away from you. Only she’s very quiet here at the moment celebrating her Ruby Anniversary on the weekend.
    And I don’t want to cast a shadow on your holiday so I won’t mention the Rah Rah and wish you better luck next round. 🙂 )

30. Very similar experience to Loonapick this morning. Couldn’t for the life of me parse CANCAN or GOTCHA at the very end, though had Gotha buried in my memory somewhere. CORNICHE I had no idea was a coastal feature, thought it was something to do with ornate plastering – maybe that’s a Cornice. Otherwise some lovely smooth clueing as always from our very own Monday Roman god of fire and metalworking…

31. [PDM@29 after Friday night’s opening I’m claiming my Irish stock too.]

32. An unfriendly grid: I understood that it’s bad form to have lights with fewer than 50% crossing letters, and this grid had 12 of them. I agree on sunburn and TAN not really being equivalent. GOTCHA was obvious from the def but the almanac was an obscurity for me. CANCAN would parse better with ‘party’ instead of ‘government’, and it would have suited the surface meaning too.

    Plenty of good clues too though, so despite those grumbles I did generally find it quite diverting 🙂

    Thanks both.

33. Struggled with 5d as eclairs are middle sized and Una didn’t fit.

34. Looks like I’m joining the crowd in a) finding this trickier than a typical Monday and b) finding that most evident in the NW. Both CANCAN and GOTCHA were bungs for me. CORNICHE is a lovely word to encounter occasionally (and a lovely road to drive) – trust the French to come up with a word for something like that.

    [Small snippet re roads that are delightful to drive: the late Iain Banks, the Scottish author, wrote about driving in the Highlands on GWRs – Great Wee Roads. And confessed that he had been known to so enjoy driving one that he would stop at the end of the really good bit, turn around and do it again in the opposite direction. And then turn around once more and do it a third time before continuing with his journey.]

    Thanks Vulcan and loonapick

35. Needed to sleep on CANCAN before spotting as KVa@1 the ANCANCANC trick. In 2019 the ANC won 230/400 seats so they are the current government.
    Other Chambers jokes like ECLAIR can be found here:
    https://web.archive.org/web/20161225042520/http://www.crosswordman.com/wgbooks.html#chambers

36. Just to add that I agree with those above who say that SUNBURNT or SUBURNED can mean the same thing as TANNED, though it can also mean something much more unpleasant. I cannot understand why, when I was much younger, I thought that roasting myself on a beach was a good idea…

37. Completely bamboozled by 1d as I appear to be one of the very few people who have never heard of the Gotha Almanac. I saw HA as ‘fooled you’ so was stuck in a blind alley. (I can almost hear Vulcan: “Ha, fooled you Sheffield Hatter!”)

    I was trying to make SPIKEY work in 22a but the combination of an obscure alternative spelling, a slightly off definition of ‘mean’, and 23d not beginning with E eventually defeated me, and in the end I got STINGY and GOPHER virtually simultaneously.

    The clue for 12a is a bit of a hybrid, isn’t it? If it’s just a cryptic definition for TAR TAN then a) it’s not a proper word or expression, and b) if it were, it would be (3,3) not (6). So is ‘sported’ doing double duty, in an allusive definition – ‘as sported’, i.e. clothing or material =TARTAN – and also as cryptic word play: tanned skin being ‘sported by the sunburnt sailor’?

    Thanks to Vulcan and loonapick.

38. Fun puzzle. Thanks, Vulcan and loonapick.

39. sheffield hatter @37 One of few (we happy few?) but not alone. It didn’t help that I failed on POLE VAULT also.

    In general, a bit challenging for a Monday.

40. Surprised one of our cw archivists hasn’t turned up a previous Gotha — faintly familiar. [Haven’t seen Beery Hiker for an age … anyone know …?]

41. Pretty much standard Monday fare except for the two oddities GOTCHA and CANCAN. Both guessable but I’d never heard of the almanac and just thought it’s something to do with the ANC, and left it at that.

    Thanks Vulcan and loonapick

42. [Re Paul@17’s mention of a pademelon and the varied responses, I’m surprised none of the Aussies have mentioned that paddy melons are a common, much less attractive, feature of the Australian bush, albeit an invasive species from Africa. And while they are indeed melons you shouldn’t add them to a fruit salad either, they’re poisonous.]

43. I remembered the almanac from gloomy lines in TS Eliot:

    O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
    The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
    The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
    The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
    Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
    Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
    And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
    And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
    And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

44. To me the Yale in 24a RELAY is the lock, not the key that opens it. As for 12a TARTAN, anyone who has suffered from a sunburn would not equate it to a tan. As another who hadn’t heard of the almanac, 1d GOTCHA was beyond me. I also didn’t get 10a LIANA (but I should have from the wordplay), so this was not a success for me.

    The parsing of CANCAN was a bit tough for the beginners that the Monday puzzle is aimed at, but I loved it when KVa @1 pointed it out.

    Thanks all for the Monday diversion.

45. Cellomaniac @44
    You use a Yale key to open a Yale lock, so they are equally “yales”. I don’t like metonymy, though, so I don’t think it works for either!

46. Thanks for the blog ,perhaps a little tricky for a Monday , mainly good clues but a few dodgy ones already mentioned. I think ANC is fine for government, the ruling party is the government.
    Gotha did seem likely for a royal almanac, the current “Windsor” scroungers are really Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Battenberg .

47. [ AlanC@19 ,very cautious today , I was hoping for your third consecutive Number 1 leading to administration and the loss of 25 points. As a reward I will refrain from mentioning Kazakhstan . ]

48. I gave up on this halfway through as the grid type made me want to launch the laptop across the room. It got me wondering if this type of grid is more suited to more complex setters as there’s more to go on in their clues.

    Thanks to the setter and the blogger. Much appreciated.

49. muffin @45, yes, lock and key can be equally metonymic, but to me lock is more equal than key.

    I normally don’t object to metonymy, as it is just another cryptic device for setters to use to deceive us.

50. [Roz @47: you giveth and you taketh away].

51. Thanks both and more or less what Forest Fan@48 says. But I didn’t have the time for a luxuriate anyway, so perhaps a bit unfair of me.

    However I was pleased to notice an appearance of LIANA – I think this was the first word I ever learnt directly from a cryptic crossword so many years ago. My juvenile protest of obscurity was silenced by the elders pointing out that they were what Tarzan swung (swang?) from.

52. [And thanks to FrankieG@35 for the (as usual) entertaining link.]

53. [You’re welcome]

54. Even a light tan is classed as sun damage ie sunburn by skin cancer specialists. Thanks for the explanation of GOTCHA – I was totally non-plussed by that not-very-Mondayish clue!

55. Came on here to see if anyone else had tried Marsh at 8A but only me by the looks …

56. Stuart D @55, you were not the only one – I put in MARSH on my first pass through, only to realise it was wrong when I got CORNICHE at 6D.

    This was ultimately a fail for me, with most problems in the NW as others have said – I had to reveal GOTCHA, POLE VAULT and CLAIRE (despite gaving a sister with that name!)

57. It’s always a good alternate Monday for me, when Vulcan does the puzzle. He seems funnier than most.

58. I cringed at learnt even though I learned that it was the correct answer. Vulcan is my favourite setter.

59. I cringed at the word learnt, even though I learned that it was the correct answer. Vulcan is my favourite setter. Thanks for the brain exercise.

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