Guardian 29,214 / Brendan

95 comments on “Guardian 29,214 / Brendan”

1. What a pleasant surprise to see Brendan so soon after last week’s marvellous puzzle, after a seven-week absence as noted by Eileen. This was quite a straightforward Monday solve and only held up for a while in the SW. Looking for a theme, I thought there was something going on with NOTED EXCEPTION, ODDNESS and ODD ONE OUT but it’s probably something more clever. Favourites were ANON, HAND-ME-DOWN, MEMORISING and WILD GOOSE CHASE. Like Eileen didn’t understand LIKE AS NOT.

   Ta Brendan & Eileen

2. 9 across I had as LIKE A SNOT

3. 9ac Like a snot?

4. 9ac can also be read as ‘like a snot’

5. As I said on Friday, there’s always something going on in a Brendan puzzle, and amazingly that’s even the case when there isn’t. This is the ODD ONE OUT, and the theme is that there is NO THEME as stated a couple of times in the grid. So this is the EXCEPTION that proves the rule, and a PARADOX. Brilliant.

   Many thanks Brendan and Eileen.

6. Like as not – Like a snot

7. In 9A, could ‘contemptible’ be ‘like a snot’?

8. LIKE AS NOT – I think a pun on LIKE AS NOT / LIKE A SNOT ; SNOT – slang for a lousy person ; a contemptible person.

   Thank you Brendan and Eileen.

9. Not all that much easier than Friday’s puzzle I thought, but just as enjoyable. Thanks Eileen for parsing the one that I couldn’t: LLANO (I think of this as very much a crossword word; I don’t recall seeing it outside these puzzles). Thanks Brendan.

10. Well put Lord Jim @5.

11. Thanks Brendan and Eileen
    Very nice, not too difficult. Favourite ENGELS.
    I wasn’t convinced by SMACK. When I just had the S, there were several other apparently equally likely possibilities – I favoured SPIKE.
    I don’t see why “not so” gives LESS in 14a. Could anyone elucidate, please?

12. In 26ac SMACK as an adverb could be sharply.

13. muffin @11 – I’m not so (less) sure of this?

    Thanks, all, for LIKE A SNOT – blog amended now.

14. Thanks, Lord Jim @5 – I missed the other NO THEME in row 2. I just knew there’d be something else!

15. Thank you, Eileen. Re. 18 Down, the AURELIAN Walls, substantial stretches of which are still visible in Rome, were built during the reign of the less well-known Aurelian. His name thus serves as an adjective as well as a proper noun, vindicating the clue.

16. As usual, thrilled to have an unexpected Brendan. One never knows what Monday may bring.
    Thanks to both Brendan and Eileen – it’s always a satisfying practice to solve a puzzle and then to have a great blog to read in order to reflect on all the enjoyable bits. Sometimes sitting with a puzzle and looking at it as a whole after one has completed it really adds to the enjoyment – even if in this case my search for a theme was “a futile quest”. I have to admit that I had a lot of trouble getting GREY (my LOI) at 25d but think I was just being a bit thick today. Eileen, I also didn’t get why there were full stops in ODD.ONE.OUT}

17. Clutching at straws, I thought the defensive blunder in 13d was “to go back”; I was unfamiliar with OG for own goal.

    Didn’t parse KITE or SMACK, the latter a lot simpler than I imagined.

    Didn’t know ENGELS, LLANO or WICK (the town).

18. Thanks Eileen @14

19. A bravura performance to make a theme out of not having a theme. Top setting!

20. Having sat through the latest John Wick film, it was nice to see WICK & DRAG ON next to each other.

21. Regarding 15 down, could someone explain why MO = tick? Thanks.

22. scraggs
    both can mean a short interval of time.

23. @22 muffin

    Ah! Of course, thank you.

24. scraggs @21 – short for ‘moment’.

25. @24 Eileen – yes, I think muffin just pipped you at the post, but thanks anyway 🙂

26. Failed 27d and 26ac.

    I did not parse 13ac, 14ac, 4d but guessed it had something to do with Angela Merkel – whoops I got this one wrong as I entered ANGELS; ADE bit of 5d, 6d, 13d.

    Favourite: PSEUDO.

    New for me: WICK = town in Scotland.

    Thanks, both.

27. Another not to be convinced by SMACK though there is the sense of “That smacks/ strikes one as…”. But even with that I’m struggling. Am I missing something?

28. scraggs@21: mo=minute (just a mo), hence tick.

    The dots in 29a are readily explained by this being the Grauniad. Ditto the lack of proper numbering for 24,28 (at least in the on-line version). This has been going on for a few weeks now and I’ve no confidence that the editors have even noticed.

29. @28 Thanks to you too, poc.

30. poc @28
    I’ve had the follow-on numbers missing for a week or two, but today the 28 was there onscreen and also on the printout.

31. I’m sure David @12 is right about smack as sharply – “it landed smack on my head”, or something is “smack on the money”. I’d agonised over spank and spark as well, and picked wrong. A wild goose chase, like seeking a theme in this puzzle.

32. Ah, Brendan on a Monday, I need to be on my toes for this. But I managed to impetuously insert Odd Man Out For ODD ONE OUT, Aurelius for AURELIAN, Oddment for ODDNESS, so I was in a bit of a mess. Had Spark instead of SMACK, rather a litany of errors from me this morning, I’m afraid. Not too clear about NOTED, either, or exactly how LLANO worked. Eventually fell over the finishing line with IMMINENT. Enjoyed this, though…

33. ODDNESS also works mathematically; for any integer, if you take out (subtract) a pair of integers, you still have an odd number. Repeating the process till you can do it no more is bound to result in one.

34. (The pair of integers I referred to was meant to say a pair of identical integers.)

35. Thanks for that, Monkey – beyond my ken, I’m afraid.

36. Thanks Eileen, though I didn’t express myself precisely enough. I should have said “for any odd integer”. If the number was even, the process would result in zero. And negative integers have to be ruled out. It’s a long time since I could describe myself as any sort of a mathematician.

37. It’s quite normal for me to fail to spot themes but on this occasion I failed to spot the lack of a theme! Great puzzle, very enjoyable, thanks Brendan and Eileen.

    Monkey @33 – yes indeed, a quite brilliant bit of clueing.

38. FWIW, the phrase that I found to justify SMACK = SHARPLY is “Smack dab in the middle,” with an earworm. Ray Charles sang it too.

39. Thanks, Brendan and Eileen!

    Liked a lot many of them. NO THEME, NO THEME and PARADOX combo being the crowning glory.
    Saw the mathematical beauty of ODDNESS. Wonderful.
    Found it interesting that the surface clueing EXCEPTION was a PARADOX!

    A couple of views/inputs:
    AURELIAN (wiki)
    Characteristic of the Roman emperor Aurelius (Sorry if already mentioned)

    CHIP
    Could it be a triple def?
    piece, (a) knocked off e.g. marble, counter

40. Yep, KVa @39, I too thought “e.g. marble” qualified as a chip, hence a triple.

41. Monkey, Widdersbel and KVa – I’ve amended the blog re 13ac. Many thanks.

42. Thanks to those who made sense of the NO THEME. It certainly makes more sense than LLANO THE METRO to which I was trying to ascribe some importance. It’s doubly delightful that Brendan managed something clever whilst producing a puzzle that is still broadly Monday-ish. EXCEPTION, ODDNESS, PARADOX, ANON and KITE were my favourites.

    Thanks Brendan and Eileen

43. As a maths fan, I loved ODDNESS. Great Monday fare. Thanks both.

44. I liked the paradox of the theme with no theme, and the many good clues. MEMORISING, TREMOLOS among them. I’m not sure if I wanted to be reminded of Brian Poole who had a Dan Quayle like e in his Tremoloes.

45. Nice seeing Brendan on a Monday with a Monday style puzxle.

    Wick is where the Far North line ends, travelling several hours north from Inverness. Going to Orkney, one route is from a couple of stops before the end, Thurso, walk/bus to Scrabster and ferry to Stromness. All recommended, not so good are replacement minibuses.

    Thank you to Eileen and Brendan.

46. Good, ‘no theme’ trick from Brendan.

    Aurelian as ‘the less well-known one’ is in Collins and the ODE. I liked the tick and wordplay in MEMORISING, also the wordplays in ODDNESS and IMMINENT, and the surfaces for OGLED and WICK.

    Thanks Brendan and Eileen.

47. …and in the 2000 film Gladiator, the role of Marcus Aurelius was one of the last film parts played by the late great Richard Harris, whom I imagine fellow Irishman Brendan might have admired…

48. Enjoyable although for some reason I found 25dn irritating?

49. I’ve only been doing these puzzles for a couple of years or so and I thought there was a tradition of having an easyish puzzle to start the week; but I haven’t found that to be so in practice. This took me a while, and there were three I couldn’t get. I had never heard of LLANO. I got AURELIAN, but by way of Marcus as I wasn’t aware of the other Emperor (I thought there was something odd about the spelling…!). Reading the full explanation of ODDNESS (with help from Monkey@33) I am filled with admiration. Not so keen on LIKE AS NOT. With thanks to Brendan and Eileen.

50. Engels, as it happens, was Marx’s financial “angel” – yet another layer to the clue.

    Fair play for 25d, juts a change of mindset needed – I was solving along the lines of G – RE (note) – Y but couldn’t see how G and Y are chess opponents. That would be BREW I guess.

51. Hi there . i’m not a regular on this site but was interested to see what solvers made of 26 across. My instinct was to enter ‘spank’, which seemed to fit as a Monday morning cryptic definition. I take the point made above that there could be a case for a double definition with smack, but it does seem arguable either way. Maybe in cases like these there is a system of grading of analyses similar to poker hands, maybe a dd beats a cd. I know nowt about poker though! Thanks.

52. The surface of 18d feels very clunky with ‘in a concerning Roman emperor’ .
    Why not ‘in a Roman emperor’s style’ to avoid the clumsy syntax?

53. Regarding ODDNESS, the comment about it being more “mathematical” is really nothing more than saying an odd number is odd. An odd is defined as an even number + 1 so subtracting even numbers (they don’t need to be pairs) leave 1 eventually.
    Thanks Brendan and Eileen

54. tim @53
    True, but if numbers are removed in pairs it works for odd ones too – any two same numbers added together give an even number.

55. Hello to everyone I saw at York and to those I didn’t get to chat with…see you next time. I look forward to tackling all those puzzles.
    Well done John… great weekend.

56. Muffin @54 I have no idea what you are suggesting “works” after the “true”!
    We can generalise about adding pairs or subtracting pairs but it just goes back to the definition of an odd number.

57. Muffin@30: the numbers appear on the screen, but not in the printout (unless you mean the PDF version, which I don’t use).

58. tim
    a pair of odd numbers is even, so you don’t have to restrict the removal to even numbers if you remove them in pairs
    poc
    odd, it’s there on my printout

59. Re 26a, could the answer be ‘shank’, meaning to stab someone.

60. me @58
    i mean a pair of odd numbers added together is even…

61. Muffin@x and y
    Yes an even number (which is being subtracted) must (because it’s even) be the sum of either two odd or two even numbers.
    It’s still just about the definition of odd.
    No more maths from me unless goaded I promise.

62. Thanks Brendan. I was happily surprised to see Brendan today so soon after his last crossword. (I remember Brendan saying that he submits crosswords to the Guardian and the editor chooses when to run them.) In any event I liked this with EXCEPTION, DERANGE (with its double wordplay), HAND-ME-DOWN, ENGELS, TREMOLOS, and DRAGON being my favourites. Brendan always has a theme and I failed to spot the theme/NO THEME overlay. This reminded me of a Serpent (Jack) crossword where the diagonal letters read, “this is not a nina.” [Serpent always has a nina.] These guys are brilliant in my opinion. Thanks Eileen for great blog.

63. Thanks, Eileen and Brendan. Good stuff. All fine with me except for 26a. I had SPANK, which seems equally valid. Am I missing something?

64. Fun puzzle and a real pdm seeing the brilliant no-theme device spotted by Lord Jim@5.

    Another impetuous ODD MAN OUT out here, and still not convinced by SMACK, could have been SPANK or SHANK as others (and indeed Mrs KJ) have pointed out.

    Nevertheless, bravo and thanks to both Brendan and Eileen.

65. KewJumper @64 – I did point out the NO THEME theme in my preamble. 😉

66. Oh yes, sorry Eileen. Yet another thing I failed to spot today!

67. No problem, KJ – I didn’t manage to spot Row 2!

68. I thought that the clue for 26a SMACK was weak. There, I’ve done it. I’ve criticised a Brendan clue. At long last I can cross that off my bucket list.

    Since Brendan is my favourite setter*, I think the above comment somehow fits the theme/non-theme of this (yet another) great puzzle.

    Lucky Eileen, how do you get to blog so many of his crosswords? And lucky us, getting Brendan and Eileen on the same day.

    [ * To be precise, he’s one of a triumvirate of favourites, along with Arachne and Philistine. Is there a theme there? ]

69. muffin and poc@various, I can confirm poc’s experience. The numbering (24,28) appeared on screen and on the PDF version, but when I printed straight from the on-screen version, the “,28” wasn’t there.

70. cellomaniac @69
    Very odd. I’ve just looked again on a different computer and the 28 is there in the straight print version. I’m using Chrome on both computers.

71. To clarify mine @70, I mean that clue 24 is labelled 24,28

72. I got ODDNESS instantly from the mathematical definition, and didn’t notice the pairs-of-letters thing at all until I read this blog. Dear Brendan, that is absolutely brilliant! Thanks E+B.

73. poc@28 and muffin@71 – I emailed The Guardian to point out this problem with clue numbering. I received a swift reply from someone who passed my query on to someone else then a reply from the second person who passed my query on to a third person!

74. Eileen: thank you twice. I had the “mo” in MEMORISING as the setter’s “modus operandi” (what makes him tick) but I couldn’t justify the “me” instead of the “my”. Also I had “ockade” as being a homophone for “okayed”, which is a statement of support, but that made “statement” do double duty both as wordplay and indicator…plus I was not sure that “st” was a legitimate abbreviation for standard.

    Apart from that…I concur with so many others. I took AURELIAN to refer to the great Marcus Aurelius, who was not only played by Richard Harris (Ronald @47) but also by Alec Guinness in Anthony Mann’s masterful The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)…and neither could I make LESS mean “not so”…and neither could I find the double definition in SMACK.

    So, actually, Eileen saves the day four times, not twice.

75. Monkey @36: Proof of how detrimental my laziness is! I only read the first two of the comments that Eileen pointed out and was totally confused! If I had just taken an extra two seconds to see your insertion of “odd integer”, I would have been right on board.

76. Like 14 across, I am lacking direction. I am having a nightmare.

    I have managed 1d and 24d.

    Can anyone throw me a bone please?

    Are there any anagrams?

77. Try 12ac Steffen

78. Impressed you got WICK btw. One of my loi.

79. Steffen @76 – for 24/28 you have two starting letters, definition is a futile quest. For 16d a Native American, who happens to be a homophone of to take someone to court for recompense, and that would give you some juicy end letters.

80. cellomaniac @69 (just in from choir practice, hence the delay)

    To be honest, I’m still not really happy with 26ac myself. 😉

    To answer your question: I don’t really think I do get ‘so many’ of Brendan’s puzzles to blog. I think we were all surprised to see his name so very soon this morning and the reason I blogged it was because our weekly rota advances by one day a week and the blogger who blogs on Friday blogs the following Monday, so I was really lucky this time!

81. LLANO eluded me, I don’t know the word and the parsing is tricky. So, a confidence-shredding Monday DNF to start the week! Much to enjoy, however, I liked DERANGE and DRAGON best. It’s a shame that it seems the dots in ODD MAN OUT are just a typo.

82. Andrew Tyndall @74

    I love your interpretation of MO for what makes Brendan tick – what a pity it didn’t quite work!

    It took me a minute or two to fathom ‘not so’ – but I really liked it.

83. Mandarin @81

    I learned LLANO from crosswords and it has cropped up a number of times since – I’ve just searched for it in the archive – so worth filing away.
    I rather like the most recent clue, from Picaroon:
    ‘Plain Welsh seaside resort, no dud’.

84. 78 & 79. Thank you.

    Still staring blankly at 24/28. I can’t find the 14 letters for an anagram.

85. Steffen @84 – for 24/28 – 9 letters are anagrammed with a well known writer around them.

86. LLANO is singular, the plural llanos maybe better known. I knew of this because I lived in Cali, Colombia teaching English for a while in 1969.

    Thanks Eileen and Brendan

87. Finally finished reading the blog, late start and a nap or two. Relevant comments mostly already made.

    Is there something in the clue for HAND-ME-DOWN that indicates the definition implied in “this”?

    Thanks, Brendan and Eileen.

88. This was an excellent puzzle, as others have noted. My LOI was LLANO. I knew what it was, I knew it was one of those Crypticland specialities, but I could not seem to summon it out of my memory banks, so I ended up going to Google to complete the puzzle.

89. Did anyone notice that the Cryptic and the Quiptic today are on the same grid?

90. Steffen@76 if you haven’t moved to today’s puzzle yet – there are a couple of nice anagrams at 3d and 12a that might get you started. 24a/28a is also *partly* an anagram and you already have a couple of crossers for this.
    Great puzzle and blog as always from Brendan and Eileen; I didn’t spot either of the NO THEMEs and was wondering what the theme could be…

91. Muffin@70,71: I normally use Firefox but checked with Chrome, Brave and Edge, all on the same computer and all had the same error (they’re probably all using the same print library). This is on Linux (Fedora). The paired numbers do not appear in the printout, nor in the print preview.

    Jellyroll@73: I think I’ll complain to the editor. Maybe if enough people do they’ll take notice.

92. I had ‘spank’ instead of SMACK, and couldn’t find LLANO even though I wiki’d plains. The theme/not-theme sailed way over my head.

93. I’m a little late to this – on the off chance that there’s anyone left still reading this could someone please explain 3d? Like @87 I’m stumped as to how you get HAND-ME-DOWN from the definition “this”.

94. @93, @87: It may help to read the clue as “[Is it] odd when [a] man changes into [a] hand-me-down?” (Considering hand-me-downs are usually worn by children.)

95. @94 ahhh thank you. A bit too cryptic for me!

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