Guardian Cryptic 29,383 by Vlad

77 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,383 by Vlad”

1. Crikey. I expect a challenge from Vlad but several remained unparsed today – notably the reverse clue in HARRY AND MEGHAN – and unknowns included both birds – the SAP SUCKER and the DARTER. Together with some challenging word ordering, a typically tough Vlad. Worth it for GARRISONS though – what a lovely spot. HAMSTER and TUNIC make up my podium. SACRE BLEU is rather close to an indirect anagram for me.

   Thanks Vlad and manehi

2. Well that was tricky! Some I didn’t know eg sapsucker and several I failed to parse. Thanks Vlad and manehi

3. Edith makes another visit!

4. Mamas boy was a bung, although sure to have heard ASBO in a cop show or somewhere. Cringingly 😳 to admit I thought Garrison must be a guitarist a hotel had banned for bad behaviour, idiot! And I’ll probably br risking more of the same by asking Why cheek? Are hamsters known to have big bottoms? Anyway, a nice bit of gnarl from the Vladster, enjoyed it nwst.

5. I’m kicking myself for not getting the parsing for GARRISONS and I’m sure SACRE BLEU will get a Paddington stare from Roz. Favourite which took me a long while to get is the reverse anagram in HARRY AND MEGHAN.

6. gif – believe it or not, hamsters are simply known to have big … cheeks!

7. No ginf @4, Hamsters are known to have big cheek pouches for storing food

8. Ta PM and TC, now I know 🙂

9. TOP BANANA
   The whole clue whimsically means ‘the best banana in a bunch’ (the blog indicates that).
   I find that there is a card game named TOP BANANA. The one with the most impressive ‘hand’
   in one such game becomes the TOP BANANA?
   Of course, the idiomatic meaning which is not that exciting is there.

   Thanks Vlad and manehi!

10. Chewy, but all parsed except for GARRISONS which I looked at blankly, even when that’s what it had to be. I forget that trick of using an initial plus surname, except for Mr Hanks.

    HARRY AND MEGHAN was a pdm when I had the crossers for Meghan, as were TOP BANANA and SACRE BLEU.

    Thank you to Vlad and manehi.

11. Thanks Vlad and manehi
    Not particularly difficult to fill in the ansers, but the parsings were a different matter! No idea on 8, 25, 27, 3, 16, or 18.

12. Thanks Manehi and Vlad. A real work out with some cracking clues. Would have been a total struggle without the easier long anagrams.

13. Pretty straightforward grid fill and like muffin @11 a fair bit of retro-parsing

    The question mark in HARRY AND MEGHAN is definitely earning its keep. A hefty helping of irony?

    Another day another French answer – or two? No complaints here

    SAPSUCKER was new – coincidentally there was a woodpecker joke in the Guardian at the weekend: woodpecker goes into a bar, looks around and says “Is the bartender here”

    Cheers V&M

14. 27A seems like a double definition:

    Harry “and Meghan” is Man hanged
    Harry and Meghan is Those seeking privacy

15. Bodycheetah@13
    SACRE BLEU
    No complaints (looks like it’s acceptable to have a French word as a solution).
    As PostMark@1 says, it’s an indirect anagram.
    ADIEU
    It’s an English word. So can’t complain.

16. Wow that was tough! Luckily there were enough ticks to offset a couple of clues that annoyed me. I didn’t like the “woman” AMY in MAMA’S BOY in 9a nor the “woman” EDITH as the answer to 24d (which yes, colm mckeogh@3, I knew I had seen somewhere recently). “Woman” is so vague as a clue for a woman’s first name, as we’ve all said before. Similarly I didn’t like the two birds, SAPSUCKER at 17a and DARTER as the fodder for 19d, but only because like PostMark@1 and daja57@2, I hadn’t heard of them, so that’s really just sour grapes on my behalf. But I did like HARRY AND MEGHAN (cf. Tim C@5), A BIT ON THE SIDE and HAMSTER a lot – and wondered if the first two were linked – and so perhaps a bit tongue in cheek (see what I did there?)? I needed help to parse some guesses/solves by definition – 8a TUNIC, 25a ADIEU and 16d IN PRIVATE – some of which I think muffin has mentioned in his list of numbers. So I’m very grateful to manehi for the elucidation and of course to Vlad for the level of difficulty.
    [KVa@9; if you win at the game called Bananagrams (played with scrabble-type tiles), you are also handed (!) the 14a “TOP BANANA” crown]

17. Bodycheetah@13. I give up. What’s the woodpecker joke?

18. [Sorry not to reference Posts 13-15; I took so long to type my thoughts and am multi-tasking with dinner preparations on the go here too.]

19. [Maybe – “Only if you have a sharp beak”?, PDM@17 referencing Bodycheetah@13]

20. More mental gymnastics required this morning. Feeling satisfyingly impaled.
    Thanks V & M

21. Woodpecker walks into a bar, asks “Is the bartender here?”
    “No”, says the man. “It’s mahogany”
    (Expanding on what JiA@19 said)

22. [Very good, KVa@21! I liked it!]

23. BUMPS IN THE ROAD went in straight away which was a good start. After that it was a different story! Very tricky but with some satisfying penny-drop moments. I should have seen HARRY AND MEGHAN sooner because we have of course had HARRY as an anagram indicator before (often with Harry Kane if I remember rightly).

    Favourite was GARRISONS, very clever. (manehi, did you mean to say that George Harrison was the lead guitarist in the Beatles? There were other guitarists in the band – and even they played lead sometimes 🙂 )

    Many thanks Vlad and manehi.

24. Just like everyone else, filled the grid but struggled with the parsings.

25. Tough indeed! I agree with manehi’s (and others’) assessment and with his favourites, with the addition of GARRISONS, HARRY AND MEGHAN and HAMSTER.

    I dredged SAPSUCKER up from the depths, having met it in several crosswords, with similar clues.

    I can never see ASBO without thinking of the still-missed Linda Smith’s joke, which I’ve quoted here more than once. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jan/04/asbos-antisocial-behaviour-orders (worth reading for those unfamiliar with these orders).

    Re 3dn: it’s the cryptic grammar (‘are’) that I’m not comfortable with: it’s the whole phrase that is ‘wrong’. I did like the idea, though.

    We’ve seen a number of clues along the lines of 6dn but this must be the most succinct!

    Many thanks to Vlad for the challenge and manehi for a great blog.

26. JiA@16
    TOP BANANA
    So there is more…Thanks. Always happy to see an additional layer (doesn’t matter if the setter’s intention was different).
    [JiA@22! Just a copy+paste job. Lowly placed in the pecking order of pun-dits. Aspiring to make my bill act…]

27. Don’t like ADIEU for ‘see you later’, let alone just ‘later’. Is that an accepted use of the word in English?
    I have never heard a French person say ‘sacré bleu’ though I know it is thought of as architypically French.
    Don’t think that RULER works very well, as there is only 1 L. The clue has 50’s. And the apostrophe s can’t mean ‘is’ or ‘has’ in the context. To my mind the wordplay gives RULSER.

28. I liked a few of these, notably HARRY AND MEGHAN, GARRISONS and SAPSUCKER. Could not parse CRASH AND BURN, so thanks for the explanation. I did better on this that usual for Vlad; was he a bit more user-friendly this time?

29. I’m always chuffed to bits if I complete a Vlad without tearing my hair out.
    But as for the parsing: hoo boy I needed the blog! Lots of inspired guesses followed by half-parses – so a big hug for manehi, especially for the semi-parsed CRASH AND BURN (shandy is very very far from the first drink that comes to my mind) and IN PRIVATE (which I doubt I would ever have worked out).
    Like Julie@16, I’m no fan of random names clued as “man” “woman” etc – but at least there was some wit in EDITH, and both she and AMY were heaps better than the infuriating use of Scotsman to clue “Ian”, (rather than Iain)!
    NASCENT, 1D and the escaped royals were satisfying too.
    Thanks Vlad

30. Found this extremely tough, particularly the SW corner, which took longer than the rest of the puzzle put together. For a while thought that Bet rather than BIT might be the first word in the long 1d. and with crossers in place I made tentative guesses for SAPSUCKER, PALLIATE, KAMPALA, and very much needed Manehi then to explain the parsing of all of them. And I only solved HARRY AND MEGHAN at first thanks to having all the crossers in place for Ms Markle.
    Last one in was the rather sleazy sounding 19d. But phew! I somehow managed to complete this Vlad challenge. Did like GARRISONS and PASTA, however…

31. Like others the birds had me stumped. Had to read the blog twice to work out that George H wasn’t in fact banned from a hotel. Did manage to solve it all. Thanks to Vlad for a real challenge and to Manehi for the much needed explanations. Favourite HARRY AND MEGHAN. Have found all of them difficult this week, so it’s probably me… Jay @14. Like it 😎.

32. …and Eileen@25…as for Asbo, a few years ago we had a very bad tempered swan on the River Cam here in Cambridge that terrorised people in or on boats for quite a while with its aggressive behaviour. That bird was nicknamed (Mr) Asbo too…

33. Anna @27, apparently “later” for bye bye or see you later is acceptable newspeak for people a lot younger than me, as is K for all right.

    I’m not sure if we have ASBOs in Australia although we have plenty of AVOs and ADVOs at the moment. In the past Australia has had a different approach to antisocial behaviour

34. Julie in Australia @14: I too found ‘woman’ for ‘Amy’ in 9 a tad lame. Perhaps ‘little woman’ would have served better – that’s an Alcott reference, before anyone takes umbrage.

35. After a few 1a and thinking I might 10d, I completed this chewy challenge, albeit with some retro-parsing.
    Thanks Vlad & manehi.

36. I expect Vlad to be tricky, and indeed he was. Lots not fully parsed here: TUNIC, AMY in MAMAS BOY, CRASH AND BURN apart from the stream, and I didn’t get the PALLIATE/RETREAD pair at all – it didn’t help that I was looking for two Es for the drugs in RETREAD. But I loved KAMPALA, ADIEU, the reverse anagram in HARRY AND MEGHAN, PASTA, SACRE BLEU, GARRISONS and TOP BANANA.

    I thought SAPSUCKER was going to be two gulls of the avian kind giving SEA-something, but it wasn’t, so no howls of “no such bird as a seagull” from the ornithological purists.

37. RULER
    Anna@27
    In the cryptic reading ‘(RUE about L) has R’ seems to work all right.
    (‘s=has is a much-discussed topic but I am fine with it)

38. Generally in agreement with others, it being the case with many clues of ‘fill in first, parse later’, which is why I’m here of course. But amidst the mental gymnastics I found it fun, which is the main thing.

    6 and 24 have both been seen very recently – I didn’t fill them in straight away for that reason, which might have been a bit counterintuitive. MAMAS BOY also took longer than it should as my brain couldn’t get beyond MUMMY’S BOY which would be the default for me.

39. Tim C @ 33
    Thanks for that.
    I’m still not happy with adieu for ‘see you later’ though.

    KVa @ 37
    Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, I’m a happy bunny now.

    Still no Pangakupu and here I am with my Māori all raring to go …

40. Tricky and enjoyable challenge.

    I could not parse 8ac or 10d apart from BURN=stream. Also did not fully parse 26ac ‘as straight as a die’ – for some reason got stuck thinking about die cuts being straight.

    Favourite: SACRE BLEU (parsed after solving).

    New for me: SAPSUCKER; darter = a long-necked fish-eating bird (for 19d).

    Thanks, both.

41. Re 27: I think sacré bleu is about as commonly used in modern French as gadzooks is in English. It is, however, possible that de Gaulle, who was given to rather old-fashioned language, might have used it.

42. Maybe just me but my favourite clue was 12 across as it seemed like a reference to Raith Rovers, and the fact that despite the team name, Raith is, indeed, ‘nowhere’, as the team comes from Kirkcaldy. If so, respect to Vlad for their excellent Scottish football knowledge

43. We’ve had a few foreign birds in recent crosswords – it’s in a British paper and I think expecting locals to identify birds from around the world that the setter’s word search app has found is a bit much. And Mama’s boy is not in Chambers; again the British usage is Mummy’s boy.

44. [Gallus @42
    There’s that famous quote “They’ll be dancing in the streets of Raith tonight”! See here.]

45. Overall a chewy and enjoyable solve, especially in the SW, and the reverse anagram once again escaped me. One day… I failed to see where the G in 15A was coming from even though the rest of the parsing was clear. The trick of first initial+name is new to me, although clearly familiar to more seasoned (or simply wiser) solvers here. Also 23A stumped me for a while as I assumed that EN by itself was the nurse in question.

    However, one gripe from me: “adieu” is not really “later”, at least in French; that would be “au revoir” which, along with its equivalents in other European languages, is literally “till we see each other again”. “Adieu” is much more of a final goodbye with no such expectation. I wrote it in anyway while grumbling under my breath.

46. Thank you Vlad, manehi and all contributors.
    My favourite clue was the one for THIN AIR, for the reasons mentioned by Gallus@42 and muffin@44. The quote raises many an affectionate smile to this day.

47. Agree with copland @43 re Americanisms.

48. I would love to see either Mark Goodliffe or Simon Anthony take a stab at this excruciatingly difficult cryptic crossword.

49. Strange one; at first glance I could not see a thing, then, it all fell in to place.
    Excellent thank you.

50. Anna@27 Or perhaps it give RULLER?

    Plenty of fun last night and this morning. I had to reveal HARRY AND MEGHAN, and I almost never reveal things. Then I smote my brow!

    Thanks to Vlad and manehi — I needed your help parsing a lot today.

51. Tough one but completed with a lot unparsed. Don’t like meta clues like H&M when the definition is so vague. Anyway, just glad to have finished one this week.

52. Thanks for the blog, good set of neat and clever clues , not so many cold solving but the grid was very helpful once I put in the Downs I had solved.
    SACRE BLEU incurred the wrath of the ursine Peruvian . This provoked resistance (8,7) .

53. Who are all these people who have never heard of a yellow-bellied sapsucker? Oh, I see–it’s a New World bird. Anyway, the bird’s full name is so evocative of cowardice that it’s hard to forget, so don’t y’all go forgetting it again. He’s right up there with the loon and the booby on the Birds With Unfortunate Names list.

54. Such an enjoyable puzzle with tricky clues and trickier parsings. And an excellent blog, to put us out of our misery. While all were solved, I needed explanations for TUNIC, CRASH AND BURN (having only got the BURN) and HARRY. The reverse anagram was a brilliant devise, I hope I remember that for the future.
    My favourite was HARRY AND MEGHAN. I also loved SACRE BLEU, GARRISONS, KAMPALA, MAMA’S BOY, ADIEU.
    Many thanks Vlad and manehi.

55. Also, the sapsucker is a British bird. It’s on the list because one turned up in Cornwall many years ago 1975 to be precise.

56. Thanks both,
    I felt getting as far as I did was an enjoyable achievement despite being banjaxed by 19d. I had, IMHO, a totally justifiable ‘revised’ being ‘Es’ in ‘diver’ all inverted. Using a rubber (eraser) is something one might do when revising a pencil-written draft. Rubbers are, of course, something else on the other side of the pond.

57. Liked this, found it pretty easy, but DNF due to “Top Banana”… couldn’t parse “Kampala”, “Retread” or the “Ha” in “Hamster. Spent a few minutes on 25a vainly anagramming “Vlad” and “Gone”
    Thank you to Vlad and Manehi

58. I’m pleased to say I parsed all my entries, but sad to say that I failed completely on RETREAD and PALLIATE (not knowing either word, and I couldn’t guess from the clue).
    Absolutely my favourite was HAMSTER … having owned several “a lot of cheek” was a hilarious and accurate description!
    I also liked SAPSUCKER, once I’d stopped trying to fit in sea(gull).
    Very clever constructions in a super puzzle, thanks Vlad.

59. Up to the Impaler’s usual level of toughness I soon discovered! I stumbled on SAPSUCKER (couldn’t he have helped us a bit by saying “American bird”? Related species in Europe are called woodpeckers…). Also DARTER was an unknown species to me, though once I had the crossers RETREAD went in smoothly (so long as you don’t drive too fast!…)

    Learning French at school, I’m sure we were taught that ADIEU means ‘goodbye for ever’ – not a sniff of “see you later, alligator”, for which the correct words are “au revoir” or (as most French folk say), “à bientôt!”. So I’m another one not too happy with ‘later’.

    I failed to parse TUNIC but that was just a case of ‘silly me!’.

    All the rest was fine – classic Vlad at his best. Had a good laugh at MAMA’S BOY, HARRY AND MEGHAN, and BIT ON THE SIDE; also liked the other long ones BUMPS IN THE ROAD and CRASH AND BURN. Ticks besides those for THIN AIR, DIAGRAM, GARRISONS.

    Not sure whether CdG (or any other legendary Francophone) ever actually said “SACRE BLEU”. It’s a phrase which English-speakers like to think of as a French expletive, but I believe real French people are far more likely to say ‘merde!’ or ‘putain!’ Correct me if I’m wrong about this: I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

    Thanks to the sanguinary Count and to manehi.

60. Thanks manehi, needed your help with MAMA’S BOY and CRASH AND BURN

    MAMA’S BOY Wimp married woman served with court order (5,3)
    My best guess was M AMA alternative spelling of Amah, a woman who served in India, and S for ”served” (without checking if that was a valid abbreviation), served doing triple duty, also alluding to the (tennis) court order, BOY! Do/did they call out ”Boy” to the ball boys when needed (before there were ball girls as well.)
    I thought the only problem with the clue, in the way I parsed it, was the sexism. 🙁

    A BIT ON THE SIDE Didn’t know the term ”fancy woman” referring to the female participant in adulterous relations. I thought it must mean the woman the male fancies. I had all sorts of problems with agency there in the grammar.

61. Tough. Very tough. But happy to have completed. Couldn’t parse H&M – but it had to go in as they have unfortunately even created a tiny blip on my radar. If privacy is their goal then maybe stop making TV programmes about themselves and publishing books about themselves – too, too tiresome. Thanks manehi and The Impaler.

62. Ouch!!
    Thanks both…

63. Laccaria @59: Ah, but in English–which language ADIEU entered a long time ago–it doesn’t necessarily have any connotation of “farewell forever.” Think of the song from The Sound of Music, where the second (or is it third?) verse goes: “So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu / Adieu, adieu, to you and you and you!”

    Also, we have woodpeckers here too. The red-headed woodpecker is the most recognizable North American woodpecker.

    PDM @60: You see the phrase “fancy man” more often, and that would have worked fine in the clue, but maybe Vlad thought “fancy woman” would be more misleading. Both phrases are in the dated-to-archaic category.

64. Best puzzle in a long while. Too many peaches to mention them all.
    Muffin@44, pity Vlad didn’t use “dancing” as the anagrind in the clue. I always thought it was a Bill McClaren quote, but he’d probably have known better.
    Eileen@25, I justify the SACRE BLEU cryptic grammar by thinking of the fodder not as [this phrase] but as [these letters].
    Thanks, manehi & Vlad. Come back soon!

65. Tyngewick@56: glad to see I wasn’t the only one with REVISED though I quickly used the check button on it!

66. I finished it (with the exception of SAPSUCKER), but found the parsing on too many to be too difficult to enjoy. Also, the US V.P. is never referred to as “deputy” – “Vice with president in capital” would have been a fun clue!
    Thanks, manehi.

67. Re SACRE BLEU: I believe Ximenean rules say that if abbreviations are part of the fodder, the initial letters comprising the fodder must be present: in this case that means ‘left’ and ‘right’ should have been present in the clue.

    But of course not all Grauniad puzzles follow Ximenes to the letter.

    [MrP@63: I can’t recall much if anything of Sound of Music – but I reckon ADIEU was only put in that song because it rhymes with ‘you’ … well, in Anglo-American mispronunciation it does, anyway…]

68. phitonelly @64
    Missed opportunity indeed! “Dancing in Raith…” would have been a contender for Clue of the Year!

69. [Laccaria@67: in the movie version, the actor playing Friedrich actually mispronounces “you” to rhyme with “adieu” rather than the other way round!]

70. [Laccaria and mrpenney
    In the 60s my father was on an adult viewing panel for children’s Saturday morning cinema. In return the cinema gave him have two free tickets to use each week. He was incensed that, as a holiday destination, the cinema screened The sound of music every other week during the summer, as he didn’t like musicals, and in particular couldn’t stand that one!]

71. Did about two thirds and admitted defeat with rest. Gull meaning “fool” new to me as was darter as a bird. 26a reminds me of Ade Edmondson line from “Bottom” (I think) saying goodbye to people: ‘Adieu, adieu, to you and you and you.’ I’ll get my coat. Thanks Manehi and Vlad

72. muffin@70: Your father had excellent musical taste.

    The thing with Vlad, for me, is that when I dnf (as today) there are no recriminations -those clues that I failed on I would never have got. Just beyond my capacities but I still tilt at his windmills and there is always some entertaining payback. I just loved ANOMALOUS, for instance – made me chuckle while reminding me of Henri Charriere’s description of practices among the inmates of Devil’s Island (how grim) in his book Papillon.

    Inward and upward. Ooops – onward….

73. Think the friendly grid help with this one, as I had to retro to parse at least six answers. HARRY AND MEGHAN is a clever clue, and I did spot the reverse but only after guessing from crossers. “Comparatively straight” for DIE yielded a murmur of approval. Good tough challenge that occupied long intervals of a dull tired afternoon on trains and planes.

74. What Postmark@1 wrote.

    Plenty I did not know – the birds and fool in SAPSUCKER, “straight as a die” in ADIEU, that ADIEU is “see you later rather” and not “goodbye for ever”, the parsing for HARRY and MEGHAN (I did not know how she spells her name, so I never had a chance), and so on. Favourites were GARRISON (although it took me ages to parse) and I do not think anyone mentioned CRASH AND BURN, which I liked for its surface.

    Thanks Vlad and manehi

75. “ADIEU and farewell to you fair Spanish ladies …
    We may never see you fair ladies again.”

    I thought a couple of clues verged on unfair, but overall this was a very good puzzle.

76. Thanks to manehi for a fine blog and to others for their comments.

77. Getting fed up with 6d RISH! being referred to as a “sage”. (But at least the setters have given up cycling !RISH. That was really annoying.)
    For 8a TUNIC, cycling the letters of UNIT from the front to the back: UNIT > NITU > ITUN > TUNI.
    Wouldn’t it be quicker to cycle them from the back to the front: UNIT > TUNI? – Or is that not allowed?
    Thanks V&M

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