Guardian 26,684 / Picaroon

32 comments on “Guardian 26,684 / Picaroon”

1. This was indeed “a gem of a puzzle”. Too many good clues to list, but favourites were Pangloss, patina & digitalis. Many thanks to Picaroon.

   Thank you too for the blog, Eileen. Enjoy your walk – it’s a beautifully sunny day here in Leeds so far, hope it’s the same for you in Derbyshire.

2. Thanks, Eileen. This is quite a week so far! Unlike you I wasted time, based on the enumeration, looking for something to go with knock rather SHOOT – since it’s also quite common for England to exit at the knockout stage!

   (You forgot to underline “when taking off” as well in your definition of RUNWAY – it’s too good a bit of misdirection (well it was to me) to miss out.)

3. Thanks, NeilW: quite right – sorted now.

   Sunny here in Leicester, too, June – fingers crossed!

4. I failed to solve 8d, and new words for me were PANGLOSS & DIGITALIS as well as ‘anorak’ = GEEK but they were clearly clued and all I had to do was check in the dictionary that my solutions actually existed.

   My favourites were REDECORATE & COVERAGE.

   Thanks Eileen and Picaroon.

5. I missed 13A. I had ARIS – ARIS(E)- almost stand up, with cockney rhyming slang ARIS – Aristotle – bottle – bottle and glass – arse. Rough on non-UJ solvers, but so what!

   I prefer that to the “right” amswer

6. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen. Another good puzzle.
   Slightly confused by the “almost” in 13a. Also, in 19d, perhaps worth mentioning that “horse” is (old) slang for heroin, hence USER.

7. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

   OUTSET was a good start. I was confused by ABUSER, had to check and was reminded that ‘horse’ is slang for heroin. PANGLOSS, CINNAMON, CHILL CABINET, BEHEMOTH, HORS DE COMBAT, SINE CURVE, SHARE INDEX and so many others were fun.

8. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

   I got off to a slightly grumpy start as first one in was GEEK, in which I didn’t like the “in” in the clue (I’m going for the record for the most number of “ins” in one sentence!). I then BIFD DHOTI for 7d and STET (“stay in”) for 22d, which didn’t help either.

   Things picked up after that, with particular favourites being CINNAMON, OBSOLETE, SINECURE, SHARE INDEX (COD for me) and DIGITALIS. However I didn’t like the grid, which seemed almost to make it into four separate puzzles, the NW being the one I finished last.

9. I find the harder the start, the greater the satisfaction when it eventually yielded. Lots of fun surfaces, which I always enjoy.
   One minor technical point of information: digitalis (15) is used to slow and regularise a fast and erratic heartbeat, not to ‘get the pulse racing’.

10. I agree with Roger@9 that persistence was recorded by a sense of satisfaction in having eventually completed a difficult puzzle. 11 was my favourite among many excellent clues. Even though digitalis or digoxin is given to slow the pulse for certain cardiac arrhythmias it is also notorious for inducing arrhythmias at toxic blood levels, which can develop very easily, so I think ‘to get the pulse racing’ is acceptable.

    Thanks to S&B.

11. Good puzzle, but I was held up for a long time by having ARIS for 13A.

12. Another treat, as we have come to expect from Picaroon. The longer solutions went in early, so it didn’t hold me up for too long, with REAR holding out longest. Liked CINNAMON, BEHEMOTH, SINE CURVE and especially PENALTY SHOOT-OUT

    Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen

13. PS if the weather is anything like it is here in Notts, Derbyshire should be a treat too – enjoy!

14. A slow start for me, but got there in the end. As usual, Picaroon delivered the goods in an elegant way. Favourites were HORS DE COMBAT (after much musing about what the middle two-letter word ending in E could be), REDECORATE and SINE CURVE. Many thanks to Picaroon, and to Eileen – I hope you had a lovely walk.

15. Even more so than yesterday, this was a puzzle on which I thought I was going to get nowhere, but steadily yielded, mostly from the bottom up. Useful little hints came in: pretty sure that 20a was an anagram, the middle word could not be OF as there was no F, so what could it be?

    Liked CHILL CABINET – bit of a shame there couldn’t be a reference to Mr Cameron’s ability to ‘chillax’, as he puts it, but maybe it’s better to convey the frosty nature of what they’re actually doing to this country – SINE CURVE and RUNWAY. Last in was COVERAGE, the all-vowel *O*E*A*E crossers not giving me much for a while.

16. I cheated on CHILL CABINET since the upper left corner wasn’t yielding (I had only OUTSET, which I got right at the outset) and I needed something more to get me rolling up there.

    We do not call them that, by the way. Refrigerator case, maybe? (Or is it a freezer case? How cold is a chill cabinet?)

    Other than that, everything eventually came in. I didn’t parse RUNWAY correctly, though. CINNAMON is of course yet another homophone that doesn’t work in my dialect (for the same reason as usual), but having figured out the “mon” at the end, it went in okay.

17. mrpenney @16
    I haven’t heard “chill cabinet” before either – “chiller cabinet” possibly?

18. I managed about 2/3 of this before getting stuck in the NW, eventually CINNAMON- great clue as it happens- unblocked the log jam. I don’t usually get on with this setter but I rather liked this. Too many good clues to list but I was particularly pleased to get PENALTY SHOOT OUT as my antipathy towards football is legendary.
    Thanks Picaroon.

19. I thought 8dn was thoroughly brilliant. And 5dn too I suppose, for those that love sports more than I do! Excellent and challenging puzzle.

20. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

    e-Collins gives CHILL CABINET as ‘another name for chiller cabinet’, which seems fair enough.

    mrpenney @ 16: A quick look online says that in a pub in England Wales & Northern Ireland food in a fridge must be between 1 and 5 C, and in a display cabinet between 1 and 8, so I guess those are reasonable ranges.

    hth

21. Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen. Thanks also to muffin @8 for the DHOTI admission. Thought I might be the only one to try that loincloth. LUNGI and CHILL CABINET
    were new to me.

    Cheers…

22. Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen. Like others I had trouble getting started but then much enjoyed the process. I had come across the anorak = geek connection once before but took a while to remember it and needed help parsing ABUSER. Re CHILL CABINET, I’m not sure it’s an exact equivalent, but many US supermarkets have a “cold room” (to which people have been known to retreat in the event of a severe storm).

23. I thought 8 down was stretching it a bit. A share index is what city workers look at, not where (the FT, I suppose)

24. Not quite up to yesterday’s standard, mainly with regard to the general quality of the clueing, but I had to laugh when I saw the correct answer to 13 across: REAR. The word ARIS (rhyming slang) happens also to fit the clue exactly and is if anything a better fit – check it out!

    Alan Browne

25. I can see your argument re 13 across, which I presume to be something to do with ARISe, but there’s no indicator for rhyming slang in the other half of the equation, and thus your reinterpretation is somewhat undermined. You will also know, I take it, that ARIS arises (yes, sorry already) as the result of a doubled trope, where Aristotle = bottle, and bottle & glass = arse.

    Regarding your assertion as to clueing quality, I’m afraid that for a great many enthusiasts this would far surpass ‘yesterday’s standard’, the author of which in my view could learn one helluva lot from the clever and succinct representations we find today (and which, by and large, have the advantage of being grammatically correct).

    Regards
    PB

26. I’m afraid I got the less elegant ‘arse’ for 13 across. Almost ‘arise’ and you definitely sit on it.

27. Intrigued, are indicators given for rhyming slang? We see ‘china’ quite often in clues, but I do not remember any hint being given for the rhyming slang meaning. For instance,

    26,655, Puck, 5d Herbal remedy in tablet? Mate takes one (9). Is ‘mate’ an indicator since it is colloquial?

    26,624, Qaos, 25a Couple from China (4). Surely no indicator here.

28. I’m with Cookie (at 27) on not having to indicate at least the more common examples of rhyming slang (although it didn’t actually arise, because we were discussing a wrong answer!).

    I now regret coming out with my subjective view of the crossword as a whole without explanation or examples (at 24, commented on by Paul B in 25). I can give some examples, but there will be counter-examples, and this blog has already had its day. I should have simply stated my preference in a less dismissive and more informed way (but I was taken aback by the gushing praise for this day’s puzzle).

    Alan Browne

29. I got 1a right off the bat, but had to cheat on the entire upper left corner except for 6d. And of course, I’m far too virtuous to have divined the meaning of ‘one on horse’.

    The parsing of 25a appears to be off. DIME is beside, but not in SE, but I have no idea what the answer might be.

30. BlueDot @29

    The parsing shown above is slightly ambiguous. Eileen was not saying DIME is in SE. She was indicating that DIME is in SENT, which itself is made up of SE (SafE) and NT (National Trust). The answer is as given in the blog.

31. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

    Agree with most that this was a ripper puzzle. Only got to start this on the weekend and worked at it on and off until first thing this morning.
    Needed help to find the unusual words – PANGLOSS, HORS DE COMBAT, CHILL CABINET, GEEK (as a synonym to anorak) and LUNGI (and yes struggled to get ‘dhoti’ out of my thinking as well – but just couldn’t make it work).
    Loved the misdirection of whole clues (20a, 25a) , definitions (‘go for another look’ , ‘detail’) and bits of clues (‘one on horse’).
    Finished in the SE where initially entering an unparsed HEARTBEAT at 15d caused issues – last few in were GEEK, ABUSER and STEM.

32. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

    Good stuff, well clued.

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