Guardian 29,301 / Pangakupu

79 comments on “Guardian 29,301 / Pangakupu”

1. TE WHANGANUI-A-TARA is the M?ori name for Wellington Harbour (Wiki)

   Liked LATVIA, MEMORY, TRIPOD and ROGATION.

   Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen!

2. Thought there might be a Nina in the perimeter, but wouldn’t need to try to ignore it while solving, because it would be in Maori, on double Phi Friday.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Whanganui-a-Tara – ‘… the Maori name for Wellington (Harbour).’
   Beat me to it, KVa – GeneratePress doesn’t like the A in Maori

3. MEMORY
   An &lit clue or so intended by the setter, I think.
   TRIPOD
   Can it be …
   (possible) consequences of taking drugs TRIP and OD? Or is that what the blog says?

4. Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen
   Tricky in places, also a bit loose – I;ve never heard INSECT used like that, and THREAT isn’t the same as ultimatum.
   I didn’t parse LATVIA – thanks for that. I have mades phos, though!
   Favourite an early one, CAT BURGLARS.

5. I’ve not heard of insect for a wretched person. Nor steal/whip.

   Reasonably slow going but satisfying. My favourite was TRIPOD.

6. MEMORY – I can’t see any double duty, Eileen

7. GDU @5 I’ve heard whip meaning steal – Didn’t you see him whip (steal) that from under your nose?

   INSECT did surface, but from not modern usage, either an old book or one using a historical setting. I’ve also seen beetles used that way.

   I didn’t look for a Nina either, or parse LATVIA, but otherwise satisfying.

   Thank you to Eileen and Pangakupu.

8. INSECT – oed.com has ‘… 3. 1684– figurative. Applied contemptuously to a person, as insignificant or despicable (sometimes also as annoying, like an insect persistently buzzing around or settling upon one).’

9. “But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people” (Psalm 22, v 6) – it’s not too much of a stretch to take the metaphor a bit further. The “?” at the end of the clue for INSECT is doing some pretty heavy lifting, though.
   [There is an apocryphal tale of a railway guard dealing with a passenger who wished to take his small menagerie with him declaring “Dogs is dogs, and cats is dogs; but that there tortoise is a hinseck and it will have to go in the guard’s van”].
   I don’t have a problem with ultimatum as threat. Surely an ultimatum is a conditional threat? “Unless we hear from you by noon a state of war will exist…” rather than “A state of war will exist…”
   Particularly liked EUPHORIA, CAT BURGLARS, GONG, LATVIA, TIA MARIA, TRIPOD, TEA STRAINER.
   Pleasantly challenging puzzle which I actually managed to complete, and even remembered to look for Pangakupu’s trademark Nina. And it says something for Google’s search engine that the very approximate word-breaks I put in got me to the answer.
   Thanks, Pangakupu and Eileen.

10. NeilH @9
    “Ultimatum” carries the implication of last chance, which “threat” by itself lacks.

11. FrankieG @6 – reflection? KVa @3 – I did wonder about &lit.
    And re TRIPOD – yes, my parsing was a little succinct – thanks for clarifying. 😉
    NeilH @9 – the biblical quotation sprang to my mind, too – thanks for the story!

12. Eileen@11 – Ah yes, I was taking “this” as the def, with “on reflection” as the reversal indicator, and the “?” signalling something unusual was happening. It’s &littish

13. I found this a bit easier than most puzzles by this setter, and very enjoyable. I had no hope of identifying the nina, and failed to parse ‘Latvia’, but it was the only country I could think of that would fit.

14. Thankyou Eileen, esp for LATVIA which I didn’t get. Good clue. GONG had to be that , but I still don’t understand why going is information for the racing fraternity.

    KVa I think TRIPOD is alluding to hallucinations or lack of coordination when tripping or ODing (or is that what you were saying? 🙂 )

    I like Pangakupu’s wordy style. It’s fun going looking for the logical break or caesura, and either finding it, or not.

    CAT BURGLARS was entertaining, and I found ASTHMA amusing as it required no maths or algebra. The whole crossword was GK lite, just good wordplay, apart from the Nina which is always worth looking up. . I noticed quite a few words relating to strong emotions, ANIMUS, ANTAGONISM, ENMITY, EUPHORIA, THREAT, TUMULT and the converse, DISPASSION.

15. Paddy @14 – “Soft going”, “going is good”. You may want to know this before backing a particular horse that, e.g., struggles on soft going.

16. paddymelon @14 – ‘going’ is a horse racing term (see here: https://www.sportinglife.com/racing/going
    Collins: ‘the condition of a surface such as a road or field with regard to walking, riding, etc’ – presumably the origin of the phrase ‘go while the going’s good’.

17. The intersecting WHIPTAIL and THREAT were last in. Like others above, the latter didn’t obv fit with ultimatum in my head and I had not heard of the former. I didn’t help when I hesitantly tried WHIPTAIL in Chambers (as well as sliptail and knaptail): the word is given but as an adjective referring to a thin tail, rather than a lizard. I liked PRIORY, CAT BURGLARS and TRIPOD. HEROES does work as two separate elements but felt awkward. I know there will be a Maori nina but am more than happy for others to find it and tell me about it.
    Thanks both

18. paddymelon@14

    TRIPOD
    (Thanks Eileen for your response@11)
    I considered TRIP and OD as two possible consequences of taking drugs. Is that what you are saying? 🙂

    MEMORY
    FrankieG and Eileen
    To make it work as an &lit, we have to stretch a bit.
    Option1: ROM or supplementary ROM will certainly have MEMORY (storage) and if I forget it in a weak moment, then on reflection, I will get it back. 🙂
    Option 2: If ‘reflection’ can work as a def, then the first part upto the ‘this’ can work as another def. Two defs and a wordplay utilising the complete clue. There was a case of an &lit clue recently with two defs and one wordplay. I don’t recall the setter or the publication.

19. It’s a shame Dean Martin couldn’t fit supplementary ROM eminently into this . I thought it was an &lit too. Nice puzzle.

20. NeilH @15 – the one drawback that I can see of the welcome edit facility: there was no sign of your comment when I began my search for a link, wrote my comment, then waited for the three minutes’ grace – apologies for the crossing. 😉

21. This very much a solve of four distinct quarters, with the SE the last to fall. One or two definitions I found a little less than obvious, such as INSECT and THREAT. And although I was aware that the Going prediction for Kempton was too heavy for the horse I have a very small share in, and therefore the reason it did not run today, withdrawn, after being declared a couple of days ago, GONG was last to yield…

22. Me @20 – and while I was writing that comment, comments 18 and 19 crept in during the three minutes!
    Ken, is there a way of disabling the Edit facility if we need to? (I’m usually very grateful for the option!)

23. I’m doing a bit better with Pangakupu these days, but all the wheels fell off in the SE corner, with MILIEU, ENMITY and GONG unsolved and LATVIA (the only country that fitted) unparsed. I also missed the substitution in DISPASSION which caused some problems.

    However, I enjoyed CAT BURGLARS, TIA MARIA, TEA STRAINER, TRIPOD and INSECT, and the lovely natural-sounding surface of PRIORY. The tent ace made me smile. I even spotted the nina: how to spell Wellington when your language lacks some of the necessary letters!

24. Top ticks for CAT BURGLARS, TRIPOD, and EUPHORIA

    The camping expert made me chuckle

    Cheers E&P

25. Thanks Eileen and Neil for the horse racing in GONG. I’m very familiar with the phrase the ”going is good” etc but I didn’t realise it came from horse racing. How pervasive is that phrase in everyday speech. I’ll never use it again.

26. Back to KVa @18!

    TRIPOD: many thanks. I confess I hadn’t fully appreciated the plural ‘consequences’ – you’re right, of course. I’ll amend the blog.

    Re MEMORY – thanks again. You’ll see why I’m usually reluctant to specify &lit!

27. Very much enjoyed that and agree with Eileen that this has been a good week in the Guardian. The new editor has made an excellent start, in my view, we seem to be seeing a greater spread in the degree of difficulty.
    WHIPTAIL was new to me too, but readily gettable. I had to guess that PHO was a soup and dredge my recesses for ROGATION. Too many nice clues to list but TRIPOD, while not the trickiest, made me smile.
    Thanks to Pangakupu and Eileen.

28. A tad easier than this setter’s previous offerings, but nonetheless enjoyable.

    SE corner resisted longest. Having only
    _ _ _ _ I _ for the country, tried Serbia, Russia, & Zambia before ROGATION came to the rescue.

    Many thanks for the blog, Eileen.

29. I’m a bit amazed that so many haven’t encountered INSECT as a term for a contemptible person. It was commonplace in my youth, I’m pretty sure I’ve come across it in nineteenth and early twentieth century English lit and I still use it frequently, usually when referring to prominent politicians.

30. Wonderful way to end the week. I came here to find the parsings for EUPHORIA and DISPASSION and was not disappointed by either. Thanks Eileen for the excellent blog. I too thought that Pangakupu was a bit wordy when I first saw his/ her puzzles in the Guardian, but I am sure that they have become more concise over time – the last one was outstanding in my view – and I very much enjoyed this one.

31. Very good, and DISPASSION completely floored me. I had an completely unparsed DISCUSSION pencilled in until the final crosser, then thought it just had to be DISPASSION, but even after that mental leap I couldn’t parse it for the life of me. 1-0 to the setter.

32. Not heard of “Maori Nina” before. Can someone enlighten me?

33. I didn’t know WHIPTAIL, and if I’ve ever heard “whip” used to mean “steal” I’ve managed to forget it, but I managed to puzzle it out and check with a dictionary.

    I also didn’t understand “going” in 21ac, but that had to be the answer.

    I did well with 3/4 of this puzzle, but I came to a grinding halt in the SE for quite a while, until MILIEU dropped into place. Then the country had to be LATVIA, although the parsing didn’t come until later, and the rest came along.

34. Well, it’s always nice to have a Maori Nina. Such things can lead to obscure entries, but the harbour-master has avoided anything too chewy in a fine puzzle.

    Thanks Phi and Eileen. Hopefully we’ll see blogs for other puzzles at some point today!

35. This is a test. Posted at 11.35 precisely

36. Chemist @32, a NINA is a word or phrase written in the “in-between” letters of a completed crossword. And Pangakupu is today’s setter’s chosen Maori name as he is a New Zealander (otherwise known as Neil and Phi and possibly more).
    I was brought up in Wellington but so long ago that any Maori words I was taught have long disappeared, apart from a few folk songs and dances. I miss NZ very much but have only returned twice alas. It is a long and expensive way away.
    Thank you Pangakupu – even the surfaces made me smile! And thanks Eileen and other wonderful bloggers for all your parsing skills.

37. Hi Chemist @32 – not sure if you’re asking about Ninas in general (if so, see here: https://www.crosswordunclued.com/2009/10/what-is-nina.html#:~:text=A%20Nina%20is%20a%20special%20feature%20of%20the,a%20pattern%20of%20cells%20in%20the%20completed%20grid.
    Re Maori Nina: as I said in the blog, Pangakupu, being in New Zealand, always includes a Maori Nina in his puzzles. Today’s is in the perimeter unchecked squares, as explained in comments 1 and 2.

38. SinCam @37
    Drat!!

39. This is another test. Posted at 11.50 precisely

40. Eileen @20 – No apologies whatever are called for. Your explanation @16 was a lot fuller and more informative than mine @15, so doesn’t really count as a crossing in my book. And there are far more important things to worry about than the occasional reinvention of the wheel, anyway.
    When I originally posted, I found that I’d left out the second set of quote marks at the end of the alleged remark by the guard. I am fussy enough to be rather glad to be able to go back in and correct things. The Guardian comment blogs allow you to preview, but don’t allow you to edit, and that has been a continual source of complaint for years.

41. If it’s Phiday it must be close to the weekend …

    Enjoyable solve where I liked the wordplays of TENTACLE and TIA MARIA. The anagram for TEA-STRAINER was also good. I hadn’t come across the ‘pho’ noodle soup before, so I failed to parse EUPHORIA.

    Thanks Eileen and Pan.

42. Enjoyable cw but annoyed with myself for failing on GONG. I was stuck trying to find something with “gen”.
    Nga mihi both

43. Re Admin’s tests @35 and 39 – sorry folks: all my fault, misunderstanding exactly how the Edit facility works! 🙁

    Thanks for that, Neil @40.

44. Thank you Eileen for explaining LATVIA. I hadn’t a clue how to parse it.
    And thanks to Kva and others for revealing the nina.
    Lovely puzzle, so many great clues. TRIPOD and TENTACLE made me smile. I also liked TEA STRAINER, CAT BURGLARS, EUPHORIA and MILIEU.
    Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen

45. Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen. That was a satisfying solve, although several clues remained unparsed. Specifically: LATVIA, MILIEU and GONG. Although I kicked myself when I saw the parsing for GONG. For some reason, my brain hadn’t thought of horse racing.

    There were some lovely, humorous clues – I really liked TRIPOD and HEROES, and I loved the wordplay in TENTACLE and ERASED.

    I’ve enjoyed this week. As I said before, I’m fairly new to the daily cryptics, and this is my first week without a DNF. Thanks to the knowledgeable bloggers and community here too for clarifying clues that had remained murky!

46. Antagonism, animus, enmity, threat…was this compiled on the day tax returns were due?

47. Gladys @23: Ditto on the SE.

48. Nice puzzle, TEA STRAINER the most amusing.

    TRIPOD I think could have done with a maybe or something similar.

    Since it’s been established (NeilH@9, muffin@10) that an ultimatum is a kind of THREAT, doesn’t it need a dba indicator, just as cluing animal by dog would?

49. Eileen@26
    MEMORY
    You’ll see why I’m usually reluctant to specify &lit!
    Yes.

    paddymelon@14
    Missed your comment regarding various emotions in the grid. Good spot.

    Sandman@46 LOL

50. Lechien @45 congratulations – I thought this was a pretty tough week overall

51. Great puzzle. Held up a bit by putting FRIARY at 5a, against which I wrote Cryptic? in the margin. All my favourites have been mentioned.
    I needed help to untangle a few clues I didn’t quite piece together, so thank you to Eileen for the blog. Sorry if I’ve missed something or am just a bit thick, but I still don’t understand how the AI reversed in 10a EUPHORIA means “unparalleled” – although I see Eileen has typed it as A1 in the blog, so I am wondering if it’s something to do with the motorway?
    Thanks of course to Pangakupu for the challenge.

52. Nice one. I’ll go with Eileen’s selection.

    The NE corner gave me a bit of trouble. THREAT for ‘ultimatum’ is a bit of a stretch, as others have remarked. I knew the Vietnamese soup but ‘unparalleled’ puzzled me for a while. And the lizard was unknown to me – and there are so many synonyms for ‘steal’….

    For once I spotted the Nina – the perimeter was the only possibility as all the others contained letters missing from Polynesian alphabets – and I realised it started TE WH…, but I didn’t bother to check it.

    Thanks to the pakeha and Eileen

53. JinA @ 51 – re EUPHORIA: I was taking AI as ‘A1 (A-1 or A-one – Collins: 1 in good health; physically fit, 2 informal first class; excellent’ = unparalleled.

54. JiA@51 – I think that A1 means top grade, the best and so by extension ‘unparalleled’. Glad not to have disagreed with Eileen who got in ahead of me, and glad for the edit function!

55. 29294 JACK
    Jack@43:
    NEW ENGLAND was intended to work in three different ways: NE as an abbreviation of New England is one definition; area of united states (as in joined together) is a second definition; and the whole thing is a third. So it’s a sort of double definition &lit.
    I was trying to recall this @18.

56. KVa @55 – your comment @18 stirred a MEMORY for me, too. I’m glad you found it: it was just last week – and I blogged that one, too!

57. Absolutely splendid crossword. Exactly the right degree of difficulty for me, though didn’t quite finish because I could not parse EUPHORIA.
    I thought TENTACLE was brilliant and very funny.

58. Too many trips o the check button not to call it a dnf.

    Thanks to Eileen and Pangakapu.

59. Held up with incult at 16, better solution I think as person not double duty.

60. Neilh 9 The railway guard is not apocryphal but an old Punch cartoon

61. Just for info. Panga = puzzle, kupu = word in Maori.

62. I really enjoyed this. Some new devices for me but just the right level of difficulty. Favourite was TEA STRAINER. I missed the Nina, not thinking to look around the perimeter, even though I was born there and hear ‘Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington’ every day on the weather forecast.
    Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen.

63. Ticks for 8d and 13a. Defeated by SE corner despite naming the university correctly. Would never describe a tentacle as flapping about but a smile and a groan when it went in. Good fun still. Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen.

64. What a lovely crossword. As Eileen says in the blog, it took a while to get into the swing, but lots of pleasing moments, too many to list. Sadly, a dnf for this solver, lazily biffing GENE for GONG.

    Many thanks to Pangakupu and Eileen for the excellent blog.

    I’m sure I saw INSECT used as an insult somewhere in PG Wodehouse or Frank Richards (Billy Bunter) in my yoof

65. 1d, 2d & 7d were my solved clues today.

    In 3d, why does TAIL mean “dog”?

66. Steffen: I think it’s using dog as a verb meaning to follow someone i.e. to tail them. My chambers thesaurus has “dog” as alternative to tail. Maybe more commonly used as dogging but I urge caution before googling that…

67. Thanks Pangakupu and thanks Eileen, especially for the LATVIAha!

    I (seem to) recall that in the (now very antique) cartoon strip ‘Jiggs and Maggie‘ Maggie regularly referred to the unfortunate Jiggs as ‘Insect!’.

68. Thanks for the explanation of “going”. I thought it must be the name of a magazine for people into running. Can anyone tell me if there is some significance to the odd use of “fraternity” in the clue or is it just a fancy way of saying “aficionados”?

69. Bluedot@68 I would have thought “aficionados” was a fancy way of saying “fraternity” when “set” would suffice.

70. Paul @69 – I came late to BlueDot’s post and to your reply.
    I had drafted ‘I saw nothing ‘odd’ in the expression ‘Racing fraternity’, which is a recognised phrase – see here for an example: https://www.racing.com/news/2020-10-31/news-racing-fraternity-mass-live-on-racingcom.
    ‘Aficianados’ actually seems to me rather ‘fancy’. 😉 ‘…

    … and thought I might as well post it anyway, to throw in my two penn’orth in support of Paul, along with my thanks to all today’s helpful posters.

71. Steffen @65 – would a weekly zoom call to talk through a crossword help?

72. @66 thank you. I have a story about dogging that I can’t possibly do justice to on this platform.

    @71 I have been looking for something like that but I can’t find anything online (unless I’m looking in the wrong place).

    I’ve tried to find some colleagues to solve crosswords with but no luck.

73. Thanks for the blog, too tired to read it all yesterday, very enjoyable puzzle , many fine clever clues.
    INSECT – see Kafka’s Metamorphorsis , he foretold a time when people would be treated as vermin.
    GOING – every race meeting has an official going, for an important meeting people will look for this during the week and it may change with the weather , affecting the chances of various horses and the betting odds.
    EUPHORIA – minor quibble , if AIRUE reverses AFTER eating the soup then PHO should reverse with it, Should reverse BEFORE eating noodle soup.

74. Coming in rather late to this one (yesterday was a ‘problem’ day for me) but much to like. As usual I sought in vain for Panga’s Maori Nina without success (“IAEATEP”? “IRAOE”?).

    The one I failed to parse, silly me!, was LATVIA, I just didn’t make the link ‘set’ = TV. But I believe the word ‘set’ has more definitions in the OED than any other English word.

    I wasn’t quite sure about ‘term’ as a last-letter indicator, ‘terminal’ is in Chambers but not ‘term’. Ah well, I know the vocabulary of indicators is forever expanding… And INSECT as a wretched person was new to me, though synonyms abound.

    Liked practically everything else, but special ticks for DISPASSION; CAT BURGLARS (can’t be an easy anagram with only three vowels); GONG (yes I knew the horse-racing term, though I’m fortunate in never having put anything on a horse, whether it have three legs or five); ENMITY; and MILIEU.

    Oh and just a minor moan about BROCCOLI. I’ve been ticked off for having [wordplay] from [def.] in a clue – should be ]def.] from [wordplay]. But – oh well – the Graun is a bit more libertarian than the Indy.

    Thanks as always to Pangakupu and Eileen.

75. [Just another thought about GONG and my quip about the 5-legged horse.

    It appears, according to Wiki, that a horse can have nine legs! Two observations:
    1. How would such an animal cope if the GOING were soft?
    2. How would Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneer of motion photography, have dealt with such a situation?

    No – don’t answer!
    ]

76. Really enjoyed this, especially as we are in Whanganui a Tara. Tea strainer was brilluant

77. Many are/were to post “M?ori” in the comments section but when I tried to post it, a question mark appeared in place of the ?.
    I see that Ken has been working on this matter about special characters.
    Let me check if this comment gets posted ‘fully’.

78. Māori;

79. Solidly constructed, yet elegant as ever with this setter. Many thanks both and all

    [I do hope the suggestion that the quotidian phrase “while the going is good” comes from the similar phrase used by the racing fraternity was made with a tongue firmly cheeked! After all, if I say “let’s leave while the going’s good” then that is what I mean – literally; let us get going now while it’s good to get going, without being in the least concerned about the hardness, or otherwise, of the ground! For some years, many decades ago, I bred bloodstock – including two of Nijinsky’s grandsons out of our brood mare who herself was out of Northern Dancer. I was a crossword fanatic back then and sure I’d have known had there been any philological connection! My worry is that some will have taken this humorous ‘fact’ as gospel given its source here! One only has to glance at Quora, or similar, to see how people believe this – and promulgate it – no matter how absurd. I hope 15² is better than that….. ? ]

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