Guardian Prize 29,326 / Imogen

48 comments on “Guardian Prize 29,326 / Imogen”

1. Usually find Imogen tough and this was no exception but managed to get all but two

   Favourites were: MYCROFT (FOI) PASTEURISE , RH POSITIVE with the latter two helping me get NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

   Also liked: MUMPS, RING TRUE, FREE VOTE, JANITOR

   Thanks Imogen and duncanshiell

2. No idea about UK bank holidays, so I was never going to entirely solve this. Oh well, I did get all but JANITOR and NAME-DROP, so I’m happy with that. A variant of GET THE BIRD appeared in another puzzle recently, which helped there.

3. Very enjoyable puzzle, with a couple solved but unparsed, including 12a, which is patiently explained here. Thanks Imogen. More thanks to duncanshell for the painstaking explanations. learnt PR=pair, today!

4. Thanks duncanshiell. The longer solutions fell into place reasonably early and together with a few write-ins that helped. It took me a while to recognise the fourth space in 1 and 17d was a number. It was the SW corner this time that was the last, I had spent some time flirting with ‘oyster’ for 21a.

5. Thank you duncanshiell.
   I must have really enjoyed this at the time, as my comment last week was that it had me laughing out loud, with ticks for 5D, 10A, 13D, 14D, 15A, 17D, 19D, 21A, 23A, 25A, 26A.

   RH POSITIVE was FOI with a big chuckle, and KIPPER LOI with a big groan for not having twigged earlier. PASTEURISE was resoundingly funny.

6. Enjoyed the puzzle. Thanks Imogen!
   Such a lovely blog. As neat as ever. Thanks duncan!

   Loved NOBEL PEACE PRIZE (the surface alludes to two people getting it in a particular year or a married couple getting
   NOBEL a few years ago…or something else. A beautiful surface for sure), FREE VOTE (A great surface again. More like a CAD) and PASTEURISE (punny-Tim C, thanks).

   A minor observation:
   VACUITY
   the opposite of ‘incisive state of mind’

7. Enjoyed this, particularly NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, the Jan 1 Bank holiday, and “PASTEURISE”, but fell at the very last hurdle, completely unable to see GET THE BIRD. It’s obvious now, but I really needed to step further back and forget about wordplay – I kept thinking ‘grouse’ must be ‘seethe’ but couldn’t get how the rest must work. Ah well, there’s always this week’s one, and I’ve printed that out already. Thanks Imogen and duncanshiell.

8. I’m sure there were childhood jokes about past your eyes … too long ago. No joke, though, about chicken pox, measles and mumps; they were de riguer, mumps especially (which for serious reasons boys needed to get pre-puberty). More recently, think I pottered happily through this, as usual lazily bunging in the long ones like the Nobel. Thanks both, now for another coffee and today’s.

9. {gif@8 And girls needed to contract rubella/German measles before childbearing age. When I was young, before the vaccine came in, mothers of a girl with rubella would invite the neighbouring girls for a street party or sleepover. Very effective, and good fun! I wonder if they did they do that with boys and mumps?]

10. I think I did too many crosswords last weekend, because I do not have many memories of this.

    I do remember not parsing JANITOR so thank you for that. it struck me that a lot of clues were not something you would find in an ordinary sentence. So my favourites were those with nice surfaces, such as CRAB NEBULA, RING TRUE, AVON and MUMPS. I am sure there are more.

    Thanks Imogen and duncanshiell

11. He said do you want it pasteurise,
    Cos pasteurise is best,
    She said Ernie I’d be happy if it comes up to my chest,
    Ernie… and he drove the fastest milk cart in the West.

12. LOI’S were JANITOR and JUNIPER, I was half expecting a pangram so was looking for a word with Q in, but settled for the two J’s.
    Nicbach@11 well spotted!
    Plus a very neat blog!

13. gif@8 and pdm@9
    MUMPS
    Is it all science or just some old pongling’ological stuff?

14. (KVa@13
    MUMPS and males after puberty
    “Pain and swelling of the testicle (orchitis) affects up to 1 in 3 males who get mumps after puberty. The swelling is usually sudden and affects only one testicle. The testicle may also feel warm and tender.”
    https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/mumps/complications/#:~:text=Pain%20and%20swelling%20of%20the,also%20feel%20warm%20and%20tender.)

15. Oh! Science in it! Thanks.

16. [Yes, pdm @9, I remember the anxiety surrounding rubella. Didn’t go to any mumps parties tho 🙁 .And @13 and 14, I seem to recall that as well as the testicular swelling there was some concern about fertility]

17. Thanks for the blog, good set of clues, my favourite has to be CRAB NEBULA, the first nebula to be associated with a supernova , the Chinese one of 1054, It was studied by Messier and prompted him to start his famous catalogue , it is M1 , setters could use this instead of the motorway . Jocelyn Bell discovered the pulsar at the centre in 1968 , a year after first finding pulsars, she did not get a Nobel Prize , I wonder why ?

    Nicbach@11 has beaten me to the Benny Hill reference.

18. [ For fans of Arachne, she sets as Rosa Klebb in the FT today, ]

19. Enjoyable puzzle and I was happy that I could parse all my answers 🙂

    Favourites: KIPPER, PAIN (loi).

    Thanks, both.

20. Thanks Imogen and Duncanshiell
    Mainly very enjoyable, but I didn’t like the clue for PASTEURISE; not the “sound alike” this time – more that the surface doesn’t make any sense, and the “make to” seems completely superfluous.
    Also not as keen as some on NOBEL PEACE PRIZE – you aren’t going to guess BELIZE from “tropical land” (there are lots to choose from), so it’s very much a guess the answer, then parse clue.
    However there were lots of other good clues to make up for these.

21. This was all in and solved reasonably quickly last week.

    [We had MUMPS as children when my father was working away from home during the week, and because we weren’t sure whether he’d had it or not he didn’t get to come home until we were no longer infectious. Rubella we only confirmed when my mother caught it, because I had all these old childhood diseases so mildly they weren’t easy to confirm until my middle sister caught them*. She got sick. Kids die of measles, and having seen how sick my sister was, I’m not surprised. We knew several children with particularly hearing impairments from in utero rubella.

    I think part of the problem of vaccination take up is those of us who remembered the childhood illnesses made sure our kids didn’t get them. The current parents never saw them and don’t see the urgency.

    *Except whooping cough, even vaccinated whooping cough was vile, one child I knew caught it from her siblings too young for the vaccine and had brain damage, with speech and language difficulties.]

    Thank you to Duncan Shiell and Imogen.

22. GETTING THE BIRD had been in the previous day’s Grauniad so that was an early one to go in.
    It made us wonder if the crossword editor missed it or was there something interesting going on – but we didn’t notice anything else as we progressed.
    Thank you both Imogen and duncanshiell

23. I failed to see genius, probably because with all the crossers I couldn’t unsee the obviously incorrect series, which could at a stretch mean class.
    The parsing of mumps doesn’t make sense to me because the clue doesn’t suggest we need the partner of papa. I guessed the answer but didn’t like it.
    Otherwise I enjoyed it. Thanks to duncanshiell and Imogen.

24. I have never in 60 years heard “get the bird”, until it also came up in the week before this. My family have also never heard it. I guessed it from the American expression “flip the bird”, which I think means the two fingered salute, though I’m not entirely certain.
    Roz @17 I think Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a graduate student at the time, so her supervisor was entitled to take the credit. Being a very modest person she has chosen to not make a fuss about it. That doesn’t prevent me pointing out the injustice on her behalf when the subject arises.

25. Many thanks Imogen and duncanshiell. I really enjoyed this and nearly all solved and parsed: a decent result for a grid that I instinctively dislike. The clues for MINSK and MUMPS compensated for their ?*?*? structure, and the many ?*?*?*? clues seemed neat too.

    Is sack a fair synonym for DROP?

26. Ravenrider@24 , yes a graduate student but all her own work , She discovered the “scruffy” signal and modified the apparatus to investigate it. Her supervisor said it was just human-made interference and told her to ignore it. He deserved none of the credit.

27. Nice one, give or take the occasional odd surface. Favourites were RH POSITIVE, GENIUS (though ‘class’ has a specific taxonomic meaning, three levels higher than ‘genus’) and especially CRAB NEBULA.

    Thanks to S&B

28. I remember being annoyed, in the clue for JUNIPER, that June 1 was described as early summer–it’s technically late spring here, late autumn for our friends in Australia, and not summer anywhere. But pedantry wins no friends, so hey.

    [I am not young, but still young enough that everyone in my cohort received the MMR vaccine, so I have no fun MUMPS stories. I did still hear about chicken pox parties, though. It is sad that measles in particular is making a comeback because of flaky parents who refuse to get their kids immunized.]

29. mrpenney@28
    In the UK, the meteorological summer starts on Jun1 and ends on Aug 31.

30. Thanks Imogen and Duncan. Impatiently cheated on GENIUS and VACUITY. I claim I would have got one eventually but not the other. I suppose I must lie somewhere between the two!

31. Muffin@20. When solving NOBEL PEACE PRIZE I already had the crossing Z from 7d, so ‘tropical land’ almost screamed Belize at me. This helped me to see Nobel and it all fell into place. So I got the answer from the wordplay and a crosser. 🙂

    Thanks to Imogen and Duncan.

32. Nicbach@11 and Roz@17 – I can’t hear the word PASTEURISE without thinking of Ernie. is it just me? 🙂

33. Did anyone else start racking their brains for ancient mathematicians on seeing “early summer”? The version of the pasteurized joke I remember involved (anachronistically) Cleopatra and her asses milk.

34. Thanks to Imogen and duncanshiell. I enjoyed this but I have doubts about the construction of NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: the “to” in the clue seems to do nothing, and doesn’t “on” generally indicate that the letters in question precede what they are “on”, rather than following as they do here?

    Also, I was all set to complain about how June 1 isn’t in summer, but according to Chambers, one definition of “summer” is “the warm season of the year, lasting approximately from June to August in the northern hemisphere…”

35. ginf@20 Surely even in faraway Australia, banks are closed on New Year’s Day!

    Ravenrider@24 “Flipping the bird” is raising the middle finger. Its meaning is too crude to post xere.

    As Gervase@27 says, taxonomically speaking, genus does not = class. My calico friend Zoe reminds me that she is a member of the phylum “vertebrates:”, the class “mammals” (well, so am I), the order “carnivores”, the family “felidae” (lins and tigers included), the genus “felis” (small cats, mostly North African) and the species “cattus.” So genus is way smaller than class.

    Shanne@21 I had chicken pox, measles and mumps as a child before there were vaccines. When I had measles, I wasn’t allowed to read, because (I suppose) of some perceived danger to the eyes. Does anybody else remember this?

    Thanks to Imogen for lots of fun and duncansheill for pleasant accompaniment, and for relieving my anxiety about JUNIPER and the HUNDRED YEARS WAR.

36. I took genus as a class (small c), though I agree that it is some way below a Class (large C).

37. [Shanne @21 yes, whooping cough, serious 3yo memories, home visits from the GP with large hypodermic. And an uncle with a ‘cast’ eye from the severity of the whoops]

38. Muffin@36. Exactly my thoughts on reading Valentine@35.

    [One of my earliest memories is being in bed with measles and the curtains drawn, though I was too young for reading anyway.]

39. [ Crossbar @32 , it is very dated but I still love- You’ll have hot rolls every morning , and crumpet every night ]

40. VictIM@22: not only the same answer but a virtually identical clue. Poor editing I thought.

    I agree with the blogger’s view of MUM + Papa.

41. Re: MUM(PS) and Papa, I assumed that Duncan’s comment was on the humorous juxtaposition of different terms for parents. With setters routinely disguising nouns as verbs (and vice versa) there’s surely no problem with mixing up our many and varying parental noun substitutes? Perhaps poc@40 merely intended to agree with the humour rather than the potential grouse. 🙂

42. I thought the JANI clue on top of the JUNI clue was very neat.

    I didn’t think of the NATO alphabet at 16a so I failed to parse MUMPS.

    Favourites included 15a MINSK (I just like the sound of the word) and the excellent construction and surface of 20a HUNDRED YEARS WAR.

    Thanks Imogen for the fun and duncanshiell for the colourful blog.

43. Thanks both.

    This kept me entertained for my many visits through the week. I buy the Guardian on Saturday so the prize is the only puzzle which takes up physical space – the rest I solve online. And I am ever pleased to see it sitting unfinished for several dinner-time visits. (It always intrigues me that a clue which yesterday was impenetrable yields itself today – is there a little part of the brain that idles away in the background at all times?) For me Imogen seems to set just the right level for a lengthy ponder, without erecting barricades to reason.

    LOI MINSK took a lot of staring over some few days. (Me too Cellomaniac:42: Minsk, Minsk, Minsk…. glad I’m not a supporter of their soccer team though.)

    Childhood diseases – indeed very silly to ignore the experience of the forebears, most of whom would have lost siblings to them. (But the Rubella sleepovers made me chuckle.)

    Roz@18: Thanks for the heads up re Arachne. You’re an oul’ star yourself.

44. muffin and sheffield hatter: Chambers has ‘class’ (NB lower case)…. a scientific division or arrangement in biological classification, a division above an order. This is also confusing, because ‘division’ in botany is the traditional name for the taxonomic rank equivalent to ‘phylum’ in zoology! However, I was only pointing out the obvious – it didn’t stop me from listing GENIUS as one of my favourite clues 🙂

45. MrPenny @28: 1 June is technically the start of winter here – but not, as you say, summer. I find it is Americans who are the biggest practitioners of hemispheric chauvanism on the seasons – I get sick of invitations to “summer” schools, or promises to get something to me by “spring”, when month names would be much more inclusive of an international audience. Valentine @35: banks, along with lots of other things, are closed in Oz on 1 January, but this is never called a bank holiday here – that’s a purely Pommy term, as far as I know. It’s a public holiday. Thanks, Imogen and duncanshiell.

46. This was a nice puzzle. Just hard enough for me. One quibble about Jan 1 explanation. There’s probably no need to say that it’s a public holiday 🙂

47. Also can we take it as read that we are grateful for these explanations. Or is that just me being a grumpy Sheffield Blade?

48. Valentine@35
    When I got measles at 5 or 6 I looked at the spots and said, “I don’t like these Mummy, take them away”. She failed to so. It was the first indication that there was something that she couldn’t do.

Comments are closed.