Guardian 26,707 / Tramp

55 comments on “Guardian 26,707 / Tramp”

1. Thanks Tramp and Eileen

   Great crossword, with some lovely clues – BOTANICAL GARDENS and FLATULENT were the standouts amongst many worthy of mention.

   My only doubt is over several parochial “generl knowledgy” ones. I’m not sure what overseas solvers will make of SHOWERED, and MOIETY, TYSON and CLIO alos required fairly local knowledge.

   btw “Nicole” starred with “Papa” in adverts for the Renault Clio, I think.

2. For example:
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgBGDvgYekA

3. I read BURGEONING and TYSON as you did, Eileen, but don’t really see why it’s the “rk” that goes in the former. “Dyson” for “sucker” is fine, but parochial, as I said before.

   Sorry about the typos. For some reason, “also” comes out as “alos” more often than not!

4. There is a space between “Burger” and “King”, which is grabbed by the couple of letters R and K.

5. Thanks Tramp and Eileen.

   Great crossword and blog. So many favourites, HYPHENATION, RAISE HELL, SELL-OUTS, ESCALLOP, BURGEONING…

6. I like Muffyword’s obvious explanation @4 for BURGEONING; I was making things really complicated by trying to get the Rook and the King to ‘castle’ out of the way.

7. Thanks both. Great crossword.

   Muffin #1 – while I appreciate your point about parochial clues, this is a British newspaper that happens (very generously, in my opinion) to allow free access to the crossword on the internet. I don’t think that there should be any pressure to make the puzzle “international “

8. Lovely puzzle but I was completely misled by putting in LASH for 6d: Tie up and hit hard. A perfect double meaning!! Surprised no one else has come up with this so far. Favourites were the long anagrams plus MOIETY, SELL-OUTS, HYPHENATION and TACHOGRAPH. Many thanks to Tramp and Eileen.

9. Thanks, everyone.

   Muffin @1: MOIETY was actually my first one in (I’m not such a philistine that I don’t know Moet). And Mike Tyson is an American, after all. CLIO as a car was unfamiliar to me, and the existence of Mr. Howe was a fact I was only dimly aware of, but both those clues were clear enough that they went in without difficulty.

   And no one’s even commented on the appearance of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the Hollywood couple with the stormy past, appearing in 10-28 ac. Local knowledge for this side of the pond!

10. Thanks Tramp and Eileen.

    Difficult one but my computer gave me a helping hand. I like Muffyword @4’s explanation of the derivation of ‘r’ and ‘k.’

    I liked the FLATULENT SPIN DOCTOR. Wets (21) would have seemed to have gone nicely with Thatcher (16.)

11. Usually I post something here if I have a bit of constructive criticism to offer, along with praise where it’s due, but today I have only praise. I thought this puzzle had wit as well as ingenuity and precision.

    I had thought at first of suggesting that ESCALLOP (7D) was not an alternative to SCALLOP as a verb (‘cut into curves’). However, Collins allows this usage even though Chambers does not. If ESCALLOP was only a noun the nice smooth surface would not have been good enough!

    There was a similar instance yesterday, where MANSE was defined by the phrase ‘to accommodate a minister’, where my criticism would stick, but on that occasion many other points were made and I wasn’t inclined to add to them.

12. Tiresome technical pedantry – 13d … Doctor Who is the name of the programme, not the timelord.

13. I don’t mind British references. (New Englander here.) If they’re ones I don’t recognize I learn something and am occasionally entertained if the blog includes a link to a YouTube clip for a British TV show I’m not familiar with – actually, British TV is the category of refernce that most often defeats me, along with cricket. If they’re ones I do recognize I get to feel smug.

    mrpenney — you do have to know something about the American Mike Tyson to know he’s a boxer, but you could do the Brad and Angelina clue without knowing a thing about them — they could be pandas in the zoo. But I’m often surprised about the knowledge of US culture and geography that are assumed in this puzzle, as compared with that of any other non-UK country.

14. Thanks to Tramp and Eileen. I needed help parsing the “spin” in SPIN DOCTOR, TYSON (I knew the UK “hoover” but not “dyson”), TACHOGRAPH, and SELL-OUTS, but managed to get through. Very enjoyable.

15. Didn’t anyone else put in LASH for 6d (Tie up and hit hard)?

16. This one gave me quite a mental workout, but an enjoyable one. I didn’t see “Dyson” so I couldn’t fully parse TYSON, and like muffin @3 I was playing with chess pieces to explain the R and K removed from BURGEONING (thanks to Muffyword for a better explanation). I hadn’t heard of ICE in that context, but it seemed plausible that it would be a slang term for an illegal drug. TONK meaning “hit hard” was new to me, but it could only be that.

    Favourites were HYPHENATION and LIFE-SUPPORT MACHINE, SPIN DOCTOR and SHOWERED.

    Thanks to Tramp and Eileen.

17. This was great with really nice surfaces. Especially liked SPIN DOCTOR, SELL-OUTS, LIFE-SUPPORT MACHINE, CLIO and CHANGE.

18. I first logged in when there were only a couple of entries in the blog and really hoped that returning to it this afternoon I would find that Tramp had dropped in (as he often does and is so welcome).

    Today I am hoping for a good explanation to Tyson.

    Reading the second part of the clue you are led to believe that you replace F (F resh START) with T for Time)

    Boxer and sucker: time for fresh start

    Alas, no Fyson in the dictionary so ok Dyson must be the correct sucker but to identify D as the fresh start is too weak in an otherwise excellent puzzle.

19. gsol @ 18 – Yes, good point about Tyson / Dyson. I couldn’t parse it, and was also wondering about Fyson.

20. gsol @18
    I just took “fresh start” as meaning “different first letter”, with Time indicating that it should be T. Not as rigorous as Fyson to Tyson, I agree.

21. gsol @18 et al
    Try thinking of “fresh” as “new”. It’s just indicating a change, with “time” telling you what the change is. I think that’s fair enough, even though I didn’t see it myself.

22. [Sorry, muffin – if I’d refreshed before posting I’d have seen that you’d already made that point.]

23. Hi Muffyword @4

    I’m sorry, I seem to be the only one who doesn’t understand your explanation of 22ac. How is the space between Burger and King ‘grabbed by the couple of letters R and K’?

    drofle @8 and 15 – I agree that LASH is a reasonable answer for 6dn but, as I boringly [try to] solve the clues in order, I already had the crossers, so it didn’t occur to me at the time. It’s quite surprising now that no one else seems to have thought of it.

    gsol @18 – I was going to make a similar comment to those above but wasn’t quick enough!

24. Eileen @23
    I think that Muffyword is saying that the space in “Burger King” has R and K on either side, so these letters are “grabbing the space”.

    (Apologies if that isn’t what you meant, Muffyword.)

25. ACD @14: In my neck of the woods (Chicago) Dyson has been advertising on TV for what feels like, oh, a decade now. They unfailingly use a voiceover with a posh British accent.

    Eileen @23: “Going Large | {on} for {couple grabbing space} in Burger King.” The couple (of letters) grabbing the space in Burger King are “r K.” So the clue asks you to sub in “on” for that couple. That’s how I parsed it anyway.

26. Perhaps like people bagging places with towels on the beach, and if it is a couple, r&K, no-one else will feel free to put their towel in the space, suppose the same argument could go for seats at Burger King.

27. Enjoyable but pretty tough in places, and my last two ESCALLOP and BURGEONING went in unchecked. Liked CLIO.

    Thanks to Tramp and Eileen

28. Valentine @ 13: yup, I’ve commented before on how interesting it is to see which elements of British culture have made it to these shores and which haven’t (and vice versa). We seem to have entirely different children’s TV, for example, but we freely share each other’s post-1965-ish popular music. Other bits of culture are somewhere in between.

    TV is the worst for me too; it may not help that I don’t watch much TV to begin with, and rarely tune to the BBC when I do. Cricket references–as long as they’re not to specific cricketers–I’ve learned over the years, but that’s because I’m a sports nut. (Note that I’ve never seen even one baseball reference in a British crossword, even though they might come in handy. Think of “walk” for BB, “strike out” for K, and “pitcher” for P, with the wonderful misdirection possible with crockery references in that last one. Of course, this tells you that the British know as little about baseball as we do about cricket.)

29. Re 22ac: Thanks, folks – I must be being particularly dim today: I still can’t really see it. As I said in the blog, I could see that ON had to replace rk but …
    I only mentioned it because I hadn’t responded to Muffyword’s suggestion – I’d really like to leave it there now!

    And, to lighten things: Cookie’s latest comment reminded me of my friends’ daughter’s wedding, where the best man was German. In his speech at the reception, he said that we might be wondering how he’d got a seat in the front row in the church: “I went down at 6.00 am and put my towel on the pew.”. And they say Germans have no sense of humour …

    …which, in turn, reminds me of a line by the late lamented Willie Rushton on the brilliant ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue’: ‘…. and where would we be without a sense of humour? … [perfectly timed pause] … Germany’.

30. Re drofle @15: Didn’t anyone else put in LASH for 6d (Tie up and hit hard)?

    Guilty as charged.

31. Well, I liked most of this, but I wasn’t at all sure of MOIETY,which I’ve never heard of,TONK,which I didn’t know could be used as a synonym for HIT, and both ESCALLOP and CLIO. Both of the latter needed the check button- and took me longer to get than the rest of the puzzle.
    Rather a curates egg for me.
    Still, thanks Tramp.

32. Lovely from start to finish, Thanks.

33. My poor dear students will be reading this tonight:

    Lear I.i.:

    KENT: I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.
    GLOUCESTER: It did always seem so to us: but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most; for equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety.

34. Thanks Eileen for the kind words and the blog.

    The “r K” are, in a cryptic sense, “a couple grabbing space in Burger
    King”; I figured if a setter can use “grabbing” as a containment indicator
    then why not use it in this way? I think it works.

    Thanks all

    Neil

35. Thanks, mrpenney – you might convert them to crosswords. 😉

    Peter Aspinwall @31

    Are your reservations re MOIETY et al [all impeccably clued] due to your never having heard of them? – if so, is that fair comment?

36. Hi Tramp @34

    Your comment, for which much thanks, crept in while I was writing mine.

    A real doh moment! I see it all now – I’d been put off by Muffyword’s ‘space between Burger and King’ [not his/her fault].

    Thanks so much for dropping in – you know we’re always glad to see you. 🙂

37. A great crossword which seemed impenetrable at first. However the precise cluing slowly revealed all.

    I was only really held up by 7D. But 30 plus years of marriage means that I have had to learn to identify items of clothing from descriptions using strange words such as taupe, aquamarine, cerise etc. I suddenly had a vague memory of the aubergine dress with a “scalloped hem” and voila!

    Thanks to Eileen and Tramp

38. mrpenney @28: (paucity of baseball references) You obviously weren’t solving in 2012 – Picaroon:

    Old swinger who scored with temptress — it ends in remorse (4,4)

    BR is possibly the only BB star any of here in the UK has ever heard of.

39. Very difficult. How does chance mean break? (2d)

40. JohnM @39

    Give Tramp a chance / break! 😉

41. mrpenney@28

    I wondered a while ago about a puzzle specifically designed to use baseball instead of cricket terms. As an English solver living in the US, I’m quite familiar with the required abbreviations, but I’ll bet those not so familiar would still find the puzzle interesting.
    I can’t think of any particular examples in puzzles in the UK either, but I do remember Enigmatist using the phrase “out of left field” (Guardian 26,549 / Enigmatist). I don’t remember any howls of anguish at the time, so perhaps baseball terminology is more widespread than you’d think.

42. Eileen @35 My comments expressed my reaction to this particular puzzle -which obviously wasn’t the same as yours. Perhaps you think that my reaction was somehow the wrong one?

43. Lovely stuff. I particularly enjoyed “tonk” because I’d stared at it blankly for a long while knowing what I was after, and then a couple of hours later whilst doing something else entirely the word “tonk” just popped into my head (and I happened to remember the clue was a reversal so knew it was right). And what a lovely word it is.

    Tonk!

    Tonk!*

    *I like it better now that I see it’s being flagged as a potential misspelling by my browser. I’ll “tonk” with or without your approval Firefox, I’ll have you know.

44. phitonelly @41
    As an English solver who has never been outside the British Isles, I knew that phrase, though not its baseball origin. I think once a US term becomes so widely used out of its original context, anyone who has much exposure to US TV and/or films becomes familiar with it even if we don’t know its background or use it ourselves. If we don’t hear it directly, other Brits are likely to start using it so we come across it through them.

45. Thanks all
    Taxing but enjoyable.I did not see the dyson= sucker parsing.
    Favourite was 22across
    Last in was ice lollies!

46. Lovely puzzle – my first unaided Tramp solve, ever.
    Thanks for the blog, Eileen.
    I’d missed the sucker – and, although you’ve had more than enough of `Burger King`, I really enjoyed the conversation. [Good to see I’m not a lone interloper, too.]

47. Any puzzle I manage to finish, even with a little help is a good one. Sometimes I feel so thick I can’t answer more than one or two.

    Valentine @#13 & Mr Penney @#23. Sadly or otherwise and I’m staying firmly on the fence, it’s amazing how much US culture makes its way into crosswords and quizzes over here. Baseball,American “football” (do they actually ever kick it), basketball,US geography, politics (presidents, secretaries of state)as well as entertainment all feature regularly. In fact I probably think there are more questions about presidents than UK prime ministers.As for geography some know more about American states than UK counties.

48. cholecyst @38

    I think we also have to thank Simon & Garfunkel and Marilyn Monroe for placing Joe Dimaggio in the UK consciousness.

    However I personally come to a halt with this list of two! I would simlarly being at a loss to explain the rules of BB.

    It’s probably apocryphal but I also “know” that the first world champions of BB were the UK.

49. dirkybee @ 26

    Some of us are here under different names…

50. @ 46, not 26!

51. mrpenney@28 and phitonelly@41 — I have a pretty good general knowledge about baseball, but I haven’t a clue about abbreviations. Walk for BB? Strike out for K?

    As well as “out of left field,” solvers may know “ball park estimate” (a very approximate one, as in ‘well, at least you’re in the right ball park’), “strike out” (fail at an attempt), “three strikes [and you’re out]” (a third bad mark against you, possibly having some particular unfortunate consequence), “home run” (a successful achievement) or “knock it out of the field” (a spectacular achievement, a particularly good home run).

    And yes, American football players do kick the ball, just not nearly as often as football/soccer players.

    I think I’ve just quadrupled my lifetime total of writing about sports.

52. Thanks Tramp and Eileen

    Great puzzle, but annoyed at myself for writing in an unparsed OUTGROWING rather than the quite brilliant BURGEONING. A lot of very interestingly-put together clues which were a real pleasure to try and unravel. I wonder if Mr Henderson will have some type of payback at a time down the track !!! 🙂 It was a very witty surface, all the same.

    Finished up with TACHOGRAPH (which I had not seen before), MOIETY (which I had) and the wayward BURGEONING / ‘outgoing’ as the last one in.

    It would be disappointing if there were no ‘home ground clues’ in this paper. I just think of it as a privilege that I can have the opportunity to participate in these crosswords on a daily basis now. Can remember having to pay $AUD7-8 for a 2-3 day old Brit paper to get the occasional fix back a few years ago – typically when about to hop on to an aeroplane.

53. Ta, S&B!

    Despite the high praise for 22ac, the surface reading is very poor. ‘On’ and ‘for’ juxtaposed in this way render the surface almost meaningless.

    Also, the ‘couple grabbing space’ could be coupled in the sense of R (Regina = queen) and K (king).

54. Thanks Eileen and Tramp.

    Excellent puzzle this when you unravel all of the substitutional constructions (such as the A for M in mph at the end of TACHOGRAPH).

    Delighted to have completed this one – even though I failed to parse TYSON.

    Too many favourites to mention.

    More like this please.

55. Got this puzzle in the GW, where I managed to fill in ember, feta, and actress. Then it just sat there, taunting me. Eventually I was reduced to working it out online, making frequent use of the Check button.

    But for 6d, at first I had TINK instead of TONK, because I saw KNIT as being the equivalent of tie. And I wanted to shove HOOVER in the place of DOCTOR in 13d, because he was a vacuum cleaner brand who had managed to get elected President.

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