Guardian 26,408 / Otterden

38 comments on “Guardian 26,408 / Otterden”

1. Thanks Eileen and welcome back.

   1ac STILTED = elevated on stilts = ‘up in the air’.

   5ac is a reversal of ‘space’ rather than an anagram, which I think is just about indicated by ‘re-lay’.

2. Thanks Eileen and Otterden (good trip to Majorca, Eileen?)

   On the whole I found this a satisfying challenge, though I had the same question marks as Eileen. FETOR and SWART were new words for me, but easy enough – I know “swarthy” of course.

   I got GNASHER fairly quickly, so DENNIS THE MENACE became a write-in, though I wondered about “support” too.
   I liked the misdirection in 8d of “South America”.

   Pedants’ corner: the “ice caps” of Mars are probably carbon dioxide rather than water; however as this is often referred to as “dry ice” I suppose he gets away with it.

3. Thanks, Gaufrid – as I said, a bit rusty!

4. If it’s a reversal, relay (to send back) is perhaps better than re-lay.

   I finished, but needed some of the wordplays explaining, so thanks Eileen.

   I felt 11a a little week, if the answer is at the beginning of the wordplay fodder rather than in the middle.

5. Thanks Otterden and Eileen

   You can buy tares at your local garden centre: they’re part of a range of plants called green manures. You sow them in your veg patch around now, they grow over winter suppressing weeds, and you dig them in as a manure/fertiliser in the spring.

   I do try to get out, honest 😉

6. Thanks Otterden and Eileen (do hope you enjoyed your walking holiday in Mallorca).

   Needed Eileen’s help with EUROTUNNEL
   TWEEDLE is to play a musical instrument casually. John Byrom used it in the names TWEEDLEdum and TWEEDLEdee for his satire on the rival composers Handel and Bononcini whose music is virtually indistinguishable. One version is

   Some say that, Signor Bononcini,
   Compared to Handle’s a mere ninny;
   Others aver, to him, that Handle
   Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.
   Strange! that such high dispute should be
   ‘Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

7. Thanks for that, cookie!

   And yes, thanks – and to muffin, too – I had a super time walking in the mountains of Mallorca. [Pretty strenuous, though, compared with my usual Wednesday rambles. 😉 ]

8. Simon S @5, tares are vetches and, in addition to being green manure, nodules on the roots contain bacteria that fix nitrogen.

9. Thanks Otterden & Eileen.

   Some nice clues but others that were a little vague. ‘End of robotic’ would surely usually be ‘c?’
   I didn’t much like TILTED=one-sided. I thought EURO=kangaroo was unnecessary, given the currency.

   I couldn’t parse LAVA – perhaps something like: ‘last four remaining’ or some such might have been better. Maybe seraglio maiden is OK for ‘s,’ but I didn’t much like it either. I wasn’t helped by my poor knowledge of Tennyson but an anagram solver sorted it out.

   Anyone know why we’ve got espousal as well as SPOUSAL? Is there much difference between ABERRANCY and aberration?

10. (Basalt) Isn’t the Baltic off Northern, not Eastern, Europe?
    (Ennui) Doesn’t the middle of Lent come before dark in France, not after it? You could punctuate it as “after, dark in France,” but isn’t that more overwrought than it needs to be?

11. Disappointing. Too many anagrams, misleading definitions and crossword clichés. And Swart, Fetor, Tweedle, Air letters & Spousal!

12. Along with the complaints above, I thought “seemingly feminist novel” seemed like an odd (and rather non-specific) description of “She”, unless there’s something clever that I’m missing here.

    But I don’t want to be too negative, so I will say that I found ENTENTE really smashing. LAVA was perfectly acceptable to me – it’s an unusual way to use “termination”, but it seems sound in terms of Cryptic grammar and personally I was quite glad to have something a bit new.

13. Scroduck @12
    Well, “She” is a novel (Rider Haggard – short for “She, who must be obeyed”) and the title implies that it might be feminist………..?

14. Absolutely awful for style in my opinion, but to add to that the ideas are so simplistic.

    Unlike Shroduck I think the ENTENTE clue leaves much to be desired. And if that is supposed to be a ‘good one’, well!

15. Found this a lot more difficult and full of obscurities than any previous Otterden puzzle, on the whole a fair challenge, though I couldn’t parse EUROTUNNEL. Last in was ART DECO after ICECAPS. TWEEDLE, SWART and FETOR were unfamiliar but guessable, and I have to admit that so was IDYLLS OF THE KING, though that probably makes me a philistine.

    Thanks (and welcome back) to Eileen and Otterden

16. The tunnel has been open for 20 years, and Eurotunnel (the company) was founded in 1986, so “quite recently” is at best debatable.

17. Valentine @10 – I see nobody has answered your questions.

    On the Baltic – if anything North East describes it better, but I don’t think anyone would argue with placing the Baltic states (i.e. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) in Eastern Europe.

    As for ennui – I read “after dark in France” as the definition of NUIT, so there is no need for any reversal.

18. Thanks, beery hiker @17 – that’s just what I’d have said, on both counts, but I’ve been out to lunch!

19. Thanks, Eileen, and welcome back.

    Not my cup of tea I’m afraid.

    A few decent clues…I liked the BASALT & LAVA links and OWN GOAL was fair enough. On the whole, though, a bit like drawing teeth.

    Can someone kindly explain CLEF, please. I thought the staff was the 5-line stave and the clef was the sign that attributes the pitch, eg treble, bass, tenor, alto etc. No doubt I’ve got this wrong.

    Nice week all.

20. I’m a great fan of Bunthorne’s puzzles, and this one reminded me of his style with its quirkiness, Victoriana, recondite vocabulary and a kind of looseness that is more in the breach than the observance. Less like pulling teeth to me than successfully rewriting a paragraph you don’t quite understand when you come to revise your work.

    Well done, Eileen, and thumbs up to Otterden.

21. Well said ulaca @20. Each to his own and I’m glad you liked it. Just not for me on this occasion. Any thoughts on my musical question?

22. As a musician, I make an excellent drummer, ahem, so … whatever. But I think the definition is meant to be nounal, with a CLEF being some kind of a ‘staff starting’ (i.e. it appears at the beginning of the stave).

    I’m sure we’ll get the verified version from Conrad or someone truly musical. Deano?

23. Thanks, Eileen.

    My experience was much as many others have noted.

    ICE CAPS should be two words, surely, or, at worst, hyphenated. I also thought it should be FEATURES (plural) too?

    muffin @ 3 NASA JPL uses the term “ice caps” in reference to Mars, and says “Mars has permanent polar caps composed of water ice, and seasonal polar caps composed of carbon dioxide ice (dry ice)”

24. Hi William

    I meant to comment on this: I underlined ‘staff starting’ as the definition, because the clef is found at the beginning of the stave or staff. [I hope that’s right.]

25. Sorry, Paul B – we crossed. [I’ve been out again!]

26. Thanks Dave Ellison – something I’ve learned today.

27. 1a, Up in the air as start of seminar’s one-sided. For the clue ‘up in the air’ means undecided, ‘one-sided’ means tilted in the sense of a tendency to favour one side in a dispute (dicussion, seminar), e.g. ‘the courts tilt toward conservative rulings’. For the answer ‘up in the air’ means stilted. Not sure if this is any clearer.

    I am with ulaca @20, really enjoyed this puzzle. My cup of tea despite the solvers tilt toward another brew.

    Thanks again Otterden and Eileen.

28. I agree with Eileen and others who found this disappointing and rather loosely clued. Examples have already been quoted so I won’t repeat them.I even find myself in agreement with hedgehogs!
    I didn’t start this until late in the day and it wasn’t worth waiting for!
    Oh well.

29. I had a very stressful day and wasn’t in the best of moods when I started this. I can’t say I enjoyed it very much but on another day I may have done. I was running out of time so I used aids at the end to get EUROTUNNEL.

30. Hmm…I’m with the naysayers I’m afraid (even, for once, our erinaceous friend!). Definitions seemed a bit clumsy and vague, and if you are going to introduce an idea like ‘seraglio maiden’, I would have thought it better to do so with a word more familiar than SWART.

    On the plus side, it’s lovely to see Eileen back.   🙂

31. Americans may be confused (laugh if you must). Two different comic strips, by the same name, beginning five days apart.

    The US comic strip, “Dennis the Menace,” debuted on 12 March 1951. The British strip originally titled “Dennis the Menace” debuted 17 March 1951. The British strip was later called “Dennis and the Gnasher” (or simply “Dennis”) and included a large dog called “Gnasher.”

    Being on the west side of the Atlantic, I attempted to fit in “Ruff” (the dog associated with the US Dennis)at 27. Then I had to figure out who “Gnasher” is . . .

    , and is the longest-running strip in the comic. From issue 1678 onwards (dated 14 September 1974) Dennis the Menace replaced Biffo the Bear on the front cover, and has been there ever since.

    Coincidentally, on 12 March 1951, another comic strip named Dennis the Menace debuted in the United States.

32. Please ignore the last two paragraphs in my comment at 31. Some extra cut-and-paste which I failed to edit out.

33. I agree that this one was a bit spotty. I liked SWART in the end and the surface in 19, but overall, there seemed to be rather a lot of anagrams. Talking of which, I had RELAY as an anagrind too and I quite like it. If you relay a course of bricks, say, you take them down and build up them up again, which is a good description of an anagram.
    Like, Dave Ellison @23, I wondered about the plural/singular anomaly in 5a, but decided it’s fine as is. A phrase such as “mountains are a feature of northern India” sounds right to my ears.

    Thanks, Otterden, and Eileen for the blog.

    PS Thanks also to Limeni for my new word for the day – “erinaceous” – and what a lovely word it is!

34. I must agree with most of the criticisms above.

    Very loose cluing IMHO.

    Obviously the “editor” disagrees with us 😉

    Thanks to Otterden and E|ileen

35. Thanks Eileen, hope you had a good time on/in Mallorca.
    I fully agree with your verdict on this puzzle.

    While there are quite a few good clues (e.g. 15ac, 5d, 8d), some clues were woolly (too wordy (6d) or whatever). In the end it was just a bit uninspiring.

    We failed on getting 1d.
    The use of “maiden” as a first letter indicator may indeed be novel (and if so, praise to Otterden) but then he, preferably, should have said ‘seraglio’s maiden’ which is more Ximenean (oops) and just as good within the surface.

    In your blog, Eileen, you say about 11ac (“Carry into temptation”): we need to separate ‘in to’. Perhaps, that was Otterden’s idea and I am not against this kind of device but I am not sure whether this was Otterden’s idea. If it was indeed not, then this clue is faulty. And if it was, then TOTE is not really ‘inside’ to/temptation, which makes it for me an example of a very inelegant use of the device.

    Finally, I am quite shocked [well, sort of] by ulaca’s post @20.
    I am someone who discovered crosswords long after the years of Bunthorpe. But from what I’ve heard he was one of the very best. However, if Otterden’s style is really close to Bunthorpe’s (as ulaca suggests) then I am very happy to have missed that era.

36. Every time I attempt this setter’s work I am reminded of that odd time on a Sunday afternoon when visiting distant relatives, the dishes have been done and tea is a distant thought, all that is available is the local daily, you leaf through in hope but find the crossword has been composed by an enthusiastic amateur. You yearn earnestly for The Observer on your doormat with its twin pleasures of Everyman and Azed. Ho hum, possibly a tilted opinion.

37. Mmmm….. I’m undecided as to whether I rather liked this or found it a little too wordy, ‘anagrammatic’ and loose. I think it’s the kind of puzzle that one might adore on one day but hate on another according to one’s prevailing mood or taste.
    I certainly found it diverting and, as I spent almost a whole hour completing it (a large slice of which trying to find a kangaroo mole, or mole kangaroo, since the Eurotunnel was “established” with a mole – the mechanical one), most definitely good value!
    My parsing of 5ac was as Phitonelly (slightly different from either Eileen or Gaufrid)
    I thought the LAVA clue was fine, even good. After all, few words end that way – certainly only one springs to mind when considering conflicts with Russia!
    Why am I gladdened to have Eileen back? Just one reason could be the pleasure I felt on reading her state (@7) …”compared with” rather than “compared to”. Such proprieties matter to me (perhaps they shouldn’t?!) Welcome back.
    And on balance, and reflection, Bravo to Otterden!

38. Thanks Otterden and Eileen

    Didn’t get to this until very late last night after a big day in the garden!! Took about an hour, and although there were some quirky clues, they were not inhibitors to getting it completed!! Finished in the SE corner with DULLISH and CLEF the last two in.

    Enjoyed it – for that time of day.

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