Guardian Cryptic 29,406 by Paul

76 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,406 by Paul”

1. Very tough going indeed. Enjoyed but maybe a bit less than normal for Paul

   Loved Oscar Peterson and For Crying out Loud. Still getting Manehi’s parsings for quite a few though.

   Thanks Paul and Manehi

2. Still very unsure of Rotten to the Core.

   Seems a bit lacking even after Manehi’s explanation.

   Oh, Pensacola is brilliant too.

3. The pommy David Astle continues to delight and annoy me. FELL(a)=Butcher?!!!

4. Thanks manehi.
   Shame about the ”up” in the clue for PIN-UPS.
   Went down quite a few rabbit holes. ROTTEN TO THE CORE, I thought was ten to the (s)core and couldn’t justify the ‘s’ in score.
   LARYNX was a fav. I did know the voice box. And liked the megaphone frustration in FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.
   BREEZE was a Paul homophone that I have no problem with, and it was funny.
   PENSACOLA clever, as was the surface and wordplay for ROSTRAL.

5. Failed to parse PIN-UPS and TT. But as a compensation I now know what to call the piles of branches that infest our local forest. What a delightful word!

6. Thanks Paul and manehi
   I saw ROTTEN TO THE CORE quite quickly from the enumeration, but think it’s a bit of a cop-out of a clue. I also couldn’t get the right number of letters for the anagram at 8d, so that went in from definition and enumeration too.
   I didn’t parse NOEL, RECOILED, PIN-UPS, or OSCAR PETERSON..
   Not impressed by “bug” for ANT!
   I needed a wordsearch for TWIGLOO, but rather like the concept and the clue!

7. a (pedantic) issue with Breeze. The French don’t pronounce the ‘s’ in “les bries” and not sure the English would or should, if the word is ever used.
   otherwise excellent, DNF, didn’t twig fella 😒

8. Quite gentle for a Paul I think, but the last few still took quite a while to get and NOEL defeated me in the end. Very clever now that Manehi has explained it. Liked quite a few, with PIN UPS and LARYNX worth a special mention for the clever use of pi and the smooth surfaces for both. Thanks Manehi and Paul

9. COTD
   ROTTEN TO THE CORE (Sorry Mathew Newell@2).
   Other faves: BREEZE, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD and PIN-UPS.

   HUMBUG
   Cuddle when knelt before (someone who is standing)? Is that what it is?

   Thanks Paul and manehi!

10. Have found some beautiful graphics for TWIGLOO. Didn’t know the word, and thought it was a portmanteau of twig – loo, rather than tw/igloo.

11. Paul on top form. ROTTEN TO THE CORE and THIS IS SPINAL TAP (for the surface) are genius. One of the funniest scenes in the film –
    https://youtu.be/zg5Ovdu6bOE?si=YeZ21-1REUzjmYs-
    KVa @9: that was my interpretation of HUMBUG.

    Ta Paul & manehi.

12. Liked the “hide in plain sight” style of PENSACOLA & HELICOPTER

    I was also unfamiliar with the TWIGLOO but you see them a lot in the woods and from some of the unsavoury contents, it’s not clear whether it’s TW-IGLOO or TWIG-LOO 🙂

    Cheers P&M

13. siputih@7. BREEZE/bries (sans s). Quite right. A soundnotalike that I should have picked up, and that Paul shouldn’t have attempted.

14. Twigloo is twee and fun as was eleven with no el. Cant imagine you’d ever actually use rostral (and it sounds a bit dental, like distal). And Spinal Tap was far in the archival recesses ( not my thing), so the west side was a bit sticky. The anomalous expansion of water (why ice floats) is school science. Crosswords are very associative, part of their charm. All good fun, ta Paul and manehi.

15. I don’t agree about the English pronunciation of “bries”. I can imagine asking in a supermarket “where are the bries?”, pronouncing the S.

16. BREEZE
    I liked the clue assuming bries is a real word. After reading siputih’s @7, looked up bries (Edit: paddymelon@13. Just seen your post)
    from wordhippo.com:
    What’s the plural form of brie? Here’s the word you’re looking for.
    The noun brie is uncountable. The plural form of brie is also brie.

    Now I have found an alternative reason to like it. The question mark!

    HUMBUG
    Thanks Alan C@11

17. Some absolutely brilliant stuff – I particularly liked TWIGLOO, ALCOPOP, RECOILED, THIS IS SPINAL TAP, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, OSCAR PETERSON.
    A bit of the Paul of old, as with the whiffy wiped rear and the bum-hug (really?).
    And a few which I thought were a bit too-clever-by-half, the sort of thing that’s more entertaining for the setter than the solver – NOEL, ROTTEN TO THE CORE, PIN-UPS.
    But overall, a pleasant start to the morning. Thanks to Paul and manehi.

18. [Alcopop was cynical capitalism … making cheap surplus plonk into lolly drink for teens]

19. Such a tough journey this morning. For a very long time I only had eight clues solved, and without much of an idea about how PIN-UPS and PENSACOLA deserved to be there. But once the HELICOPTER landed I made better progress, with the long idioms helping to fill the grid nicely. Was TWIGLOO an actual thing? Apparently so. Didn’t much like ROSTRAL as a word, or Fell meaning Butcher as part of FELLA. But ah, well, it’s Paul isn’t it, and I usually feel forgiving. Loi was STRIDENT, (foi was THIS IS SPINAL TAP btw, but I’ve just seen the film again). I had no idea about the parsing of NOEL either, but I’m off to see his brother Liam strut his stuff at the O2, Greenwich, this evening. Now, that’s quite enough from me today…

20. I failed to solve 3d and I could not parse 26ac (the approach bit), 1d, 21d.

    New for me: the fact that Pensacola is the westernmost city in the Florida Panhandle; TWIGLOO.

    Thanks, both.

21. I’d nitpick over the odd thing if the whole had not been so much fun – clever, original and disguised anagrams, new types of wordplay and overall silliness made my morning. Compared to some of the elements of yesterday, which felt like a rebus crossed with pictionary, this was somehow much more of a crossword puzzle.

    “Rostrum” takes me straight to the magnificent remains of the Forum in Rome. At one end (where Marc Antony delivered his funeral oration) is the original rostrum, named for the beaks or prows (“rostra” in Latin) of defeated enemy ships which were displayed there. In spite of the tourists and the traffic around it is still an amazing place to stand and absorb history.

22. For me Brie is countable/uncountable in exactly the same way as cheese, so the plural would refer either to different sorts of Brie or just possibly, whole rounds of Brie. Once we accept that a plural is possible, it also seems fine to anglicise the pronunciation. I really enjoyed this.

23. Great fun as ever.
    The surface for SPINAL TAP is inspired.
    Is there an oblique reference to ‘these go to eleven’ in NOEL?
    Thanks Paul & manehi.

24. There are a number of different Cheddars, so, even though they are all the same, there can be many bries, or even, if there can be cheeses, brieses.

25. And another thing: how come Americans get away with ‘cities’ that have neither cathedral nor royal charter?

26. Might be worth pointing to the medical meaning of rostral. Rostral (from Latin rostrum ‘beak, nose’) describes something situated toward the oral or nasal region, or in the case of the brain, toward the tip of the frontal lobe. The rostral ventromedial medulla is a group of neurones belonging to the upper part of the spinal cord. Presumably this is a coincidence with 8d and doesn’t constitute a “theme”, even from Paul!!

27. [hi Alec@25
    as someone who has lived in various cities in Australia (born and raised in Melbourne) and Asia (eg Singapore and Jakarta), I have often found it strange that what I think of as towns (and even small towns) in the UK are called cities. Yes, I get that they have cathedrals but many of them only have a low population of 100,000 people or less. That does not even class as a ‘large town’ to me. Birmingham and London are the only 2 cities in the UK with population over 1 million.
    I think it is fine for cities in other parts of the world to be called cities, even if they do not have a cathedral nor royal charter.]

28. 8d THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984) – celebrating a 40th (Ruby) anniversary.

29. Fairly evenly divided between the ones I couldn’t fathom and the ones that made me laugh (FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!) Nho a TWIGLOO – I know the thing it describes but didn’t know there was a name for those: nice jorum. Some truly mind-bending parsings: NOEL and ROTTEN TO THE CORE defeated me. Gave up on OSCAR PETERSON thinking he was going to be a sportsman: I shouldn’t have done.

    I have no problem with the s in bries – it’s both a French word pronounced sans S and an English word whose plural does have one. “Paris” works on similar lines.

30. wynsum @23
    Good spot!

31. Tough going for me with only a handful solved on first pass.

    I liked the well-hidden BADNESS, the wordplays for NOEL and FOR CRYING OUT LOUD and the good reverse clue to give ROTTEN TO THE CORE. Bries is in Collins and bries in Wiktionary, so I think they’re allowable.

    Thanks Paul and manehi.

32. The SW corner held me up for a while, never having heard of either 25A or 23/18D. The parsing of 1D makes my head spin even with manehi’s explanation.

    Other than that, I found this pretty straightforward for a Paul. A nice relief after yesterday.

33. me again ( I don’t come here often). The point of bries is that it’s not an English word as such as was pointed out in comment 16. Would you shop for camemberts or roqueforts pronouncing the t and the s?!

34. With fewer interconnected clues than often appear in a Paul puzzle, this felt comparatively easy — but it still took a while for me to get into his mindset. Looking forward to building tiny twigloos whenever the opportunity presents.

35. AlanC@11 – I knew what that clip was going to be – 😀

36. Siputh @23 I’m a descriptivist when it comes to language, i.e. I go with common usage. With a relatively rare word meaning “more than one type of Brie”, common usage is hard to define though. It comes down to personal opinion and to me “There were several Bries in the cheese section” sounds natural. I would expect a capital B, even though it seems inconsistent with claiming it to now be an English word.
    For me, the origin of the word doesn’t matter if it has arguably become an English word.

37. Alec@25: assuming this is not tongue in cheek, the UK does not own the definition of “city”. Given that the US was founded on the rejection of royalty and has enshrined separation of church and state, it would be quite remarkable if it required either a royal charter or a cathedral for a town to become a city. In the US, a city is an incorporated area with a state charter and local government. Elsewhere, “city” may not have a formal distinction at all.

38. AARGH, ROTTEN TO THE CORE, HUMBUG, BADNESS, ABERRANT, CARRY ON – has Paul been reading election manifestos again?
    This was a leisurely solve over a long breakfast.
    Thanks Manehi and thanks to Paul for that image of a “special” cuddle.

39. michelle@27: The idea that a cathedral makes a British town into a city is an urban [sic] myth, although before the 19thC it was more true-ish than it is now. Manchester became the seat of a diocese with its own cathedral six years before it was granted city status. Conversely, Birmingham became a city 16 years before gaining a cathedral.

    Similarly, a quite small town can also be a city even without a cathedral; all that is required is a royal charter or letters patent. Some cathedral-less cities have populations of less than 50,000.

    And if you think 100,000 is small for a city, the population of St. Davids, a historic cathedral city, is around 2000!

40. “Goûtez tous les bries à la Foire aux fromages” – Do the French pronounce the “s” before a vowel?

41. Michelle@27, Jacobz@39 – the Map Men on YouTube did a very interesting episode on what constitutes a city in England. TL;DW – it makes no sense!

    I enjoyed today’s Paul. Some groans as usual (bum hug > HUMBUG, BREEZE, STUN), and some I got from the crossers but failed to parse properly (NOEL and ROTTEN TO THE CORE). I’m kicking myself how long it took me to get PENSACOLA since a close friend’s family are from there. All good fun, though, and completed in a couple of sittings.

    Thanks Paul & Manehi

42. Thanks for the blog, NOEL was clever and ROSTRAL had neat wordplay , FELLA goes straight in at Number 1 for worst clue of the year. PENSACOLA was somewhat over-defined .
    I agree with Alec@25 , they do not even have sports teams named ……. City .

43. I’ve never heard of PENSACOLA – perhaps unsurprisingly given its population – so that came down to a test of small US conurbations. Combined with the various other plausible arrangements of those letters even with crossers (one of which I picked), it’s a rather poor candidate for an anagram IMO.

    Other than that grumble, I enjoyed this, with NOEL a particularly satisfying parse.

    Thanks both.

44. Frankie@40 – as an expat in France for over 30 years I’ve witnessed that there are no strict rules on this. Generally they elide where they can, and it’s often seen as a sign of good-speaking, but in your example I don’t think they would. One word never connected : “et”(and) where the t is never pronounced even when followed by a vowel.
    And the country is divided on whether “not yet” should be “pas encore” or “pasencore”, always a good one for dinner conversations.

    Voilà, 3 posts in one day. I must take a rest.

45. wynsum@23 – Nice one! – 😉 – Non-UK solvers may be interested to know that the volume control on the BBC iPlayer goes up to elEVEN in tribute to 8d.

46. When I lived in Massachusetts many years ago, I learned that what distinguished cities from towns there was the form of local government – whether it was by mayor or town meeting. So it seems any region can make up its own definition of city.

    I’m not sure the use of ROSTRAL is right. Sure, both rostral and rostrum come from the Latin rostrum, but dictionaries seem to be saying that rostral only refers to the anatomical sense, not the podium sense. Not 100% sure about this, but for comparison, we don’t have adjectival forms of floor, wall, ceiling, roof etc., so why should a podium have one?

47. ROSTRAL
    Dr. WhatsOn@46
    Chambers says ‘of or like a rostrum’.
    Collins says ‘of, in, or on a rostrum’
    (American English though!)
    In both these cases, ‘anatomy’ is not mentioned.

    Dictionaries talk about ROSTRAL columns but that sense isn’t contextual.

48. KVa@47 Ok, thanks, then probably legit, but still seems a bit weird. Maybe it means “of a podium”, in the architectural sense, rather than “on a podium”. Dunno.

49. Apart from a short time in North America I have lived in London for my whole life. I’m 75. I have never heard the expression Bluebottle used to mean a Cop.

50. In ’74 (a 50th anniversary) David Bowie had 6 albums in the charts concurrently: PIN UPS, Aladdin Sane, Ziggy Stardust, Hunky Dory, Diamond Dogs, and David Live.
    The only one I didn’t buy was 21d. The B-side of the only single Sorrow was an English version of Jacques Brel’s Amsterdam.

51. regarding 1 down
    “dou[ble t]ime”

    blet is rotten wheat

52. E. Foster@49 – Green’s Dictionary of Slang has ‘bluebottle n. …2. (also bottle, Mr Bluebottle) a police officer; thus bluebottle mob, the police force; also attrib.’,
    with plenty of citations including N. Marsh, (P.G.) Wodehouse, and S. Berkoff.

53. Peter@51 very clever idea but I think blet is rotten fruit, in particular the famous medlar. Your reasoning still works.

54. I thought that was more enjoyable than usual for Paul. Noël and rotten to the core are the kind of clues he uses that I don’t like and, as an ex police officer, I think blue bottle is very outdated, I didn’t know it. But more fun than usual for Paul.

55. 22ac is simply wrong. ‘Was whiffy’ must be stank. Stunk is a past participle.

56. Cb @55; all the main dictionaries give stunk as a variant of stank as the past tense of stink as well as the past participle.

57. ROTTEN T T C
    PeterH@51
    Impressive!

    ROSTRAL
    Was looking at how manehi dealt with ROSTRAL.
    ‘a rostrum can be a podium, so ‘rostral’ can describe something with a connection to a podium’
    The ‘On the podium’ was interpreted more like what DrWhatsOn@48 said.

58. Nice to have a well constructed crossword from Mr H after yesterday’s torture. I went back to Yank’s after a stiff drink and still didn’t get 7d despite some kind responses on the blog. How this crossword ever got past the editor is a mystery to me. Nice today to have reference to the great Oscar P. Saw him many times with his trio: sheer musicality. Nice blog too

59. Trust Paul to get away with using “anagram of” as an anagram indicator!

60. This was as pleasing a Paul puzzle as I have done in a long time, full of fun, frivolity and finesse. Thanks to Paul, and manehi for the excellent blog.

    My favourite clue was 23/18 OSCAR PETERSON. The OS component of the clue – big, oversized – is doing double or triple duty in the best sense. He had an oversized presence, physicality, technique and musicality. My earworm for today – sorry, I don’t do lynx 😉 – is OP playing Sweet Georgia Brown (or practically anything else he recorded).

    Besides that one, I had several other ticks. 15/16 FOR CRYING OUT LOUD had me laughing out loud. I didn’t get 13 NOEL – shame on me – which was brilliant. 11 TWIGLOO is a great word, very nicely clued. And 17 ALCOPOP is a horrible word/concept, as ginf@18 has said, but equally cleverly clued.

61. I know someone who was in Frankfurt some years ago who was in the hotel bar before dinner when a man came in, got a drink and started playing the piano. When the chap finished he went up to him and said how much he’d enjoyed the music. “You ought to do that professionally.” “I do. I’m Oscar Peterson.”
    It’s nice to meet some other jazz fans on here.

62. Thanks both and worth it all for the wonderful HUMBUG – I was wondering when it would ever turn up. I’ve never had the nerve to exercise the Spoonerism at NOEL accompanied by appropriate graspings, although it occurs to me every year.

63. I found this puzzle tiresome, with some really far-fetched clues. The reasons have already been mentioned. HUMBUG, for one.

    As Dr W says @46, it’s in style of government. I wondered what gets to be called a city in Connecticut, and I find that there are 21 of them, with populations ranging from 150,000 to about 9,000, with five over 100,000, including Hartford, where I live. (It’s the capital, but not the largest city in the state, which is Bridgeport.) In New England overall we don’t go in for big cities — the largest, Boston, is some 600,000, and that’s three times larger than No. 2.

    What’s with NOEL? I know it’s Christmas with presents, but there seems to be more.

    Thanks Paul and manehi.

64. I’m posting very late today but wanted to thank Paul and Manehi very much. My favourites were OSCAR PETERSON, NOEL and THIS IS SPINAL TAP. Alan C@11 I hoped someone would post that clip and you did not disappoint 😎.
    [Just finished yesterday’s now. I found it very difficult, but thank you William for the wonderful earworm]

65. Here is my misreading of 11A: “present” is NOW; “time” is T. A number that turns an odd number into an even number is zero (by putting it afterwards). Therefore “with that” is NOWT, meaning nought or zero.

66. Alec @25: Thanks for the laugh! I needed it today! And I think we absolutely need more royal charters in these parts. I’m going to look into that.

    siputih @33: I absolutely would pronounce the final consonants in roqueforts and bries. They may be loanwords but they are ones that have been completely, irrevocably assimilated into English. Camembert has been only partially assimilated so I don’t give it the same treatment but I might say “camemberz”. And I would not capitalize any of them obviously.

67. Too hard for me. I saw how several of the clues were going to work but couldn’t find the solution – eg berry in aberrant; lop in alcopop. That said not getting aargh was appalling on my part. I did three but that’s pretty poor. Hats off to all who did better and thanks to blogger and Paul who clearly turned it up to eleven today in my humble view…

68. 13a – I am completely lost with this(no laughing at the back). How does THAT = NOEL?

    1d – where does RO + EN in “rotten” come from? Also “to the” from the clue answer…where does this originate from?

69. Hi steffen
    I didn’t understand 11, but I now think it is clever, but not good. If there is NO EL (i.e.L), ELEVEN becomes EVEN – as wynsum suggested, the eleven might be a reference to the amplifiers of Spinal Tap.
    Some have appreciated 1d, but I thought it was very poor. roTTen has two Ts (times) in the middle; the rest is just decoration.

70. 69. I will nod my head and pretend I understand.🤣

    Thank you

71. NOEL (Adding to what muffin@69 said)
    odd number=ELEVEN (for the purposes of this clue, we need not think of any reference to amplifiers etc.,). 11 is an odd number. The ‘With that’ just implies that ‘with the solution’/’with NOEL’. And elEVEN becomes EVEN with NO EL/if there is NO EL (as already explained).

    ROTTEN TO THE CORE
    I liked it. Many didn’t. ROTTEN TO THE CORE should be interpreted as THE CORE OF the word ‘ROTTEN’ i.e. TT (The conventional meaning of ‘to the core’ doesn’t apply here).

72. Thanks both and all.

    1d: I suggest the double T at the core of ROTTEN is an unfortunate misdirecting coincidence.

    As PeterH cleverly spotted @51, if you go TO THE CORE of DOUBLE TIME you find BLET, which is fermenting fruit in storage and thus is (seemingly) ROTTEN.

73. FrankieG@52
    There may well be lots of references. 8besid I had never heard the expression. Maybe if I had associated with the characters who would have used the term, I might have heard it

74. Great puzzle – I still can’t tell why BRACE=TWO though and no dictionary is helping! Any advice?

75. I enjoyed most of this. I DNF as I had NOWT for 13ac. Honestly! I got the present was NOW with T added on for time. And if you add a 0 (nowt) to any odd number you make it even. Am I the only one who thought in this convoluted way?

76. Brace is a pair , often used in the hideous sport of shooting innocent birds.
    Our market sometimes has a brace of pheasants on sale.

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