Guardian Prize 26,555 / Picaroon

37 comments on “Guardian Prize 26,555 / Picaroon”

1. Thanks Eileen. I was enjoying this until the last two, struggling with SEERSUCKER, and having to look up TARAMA whose first half I still could not fathom. Now you reveal it, it does sound Liverpudlian, and familiar.

2. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

   A rare time when I do the Prize puzzle on the day – and what a joy! Thought that the clever misdirection in many of the clues was a highlight.

   Had not heard of the Latin phrase (nothing new with that) nor the fictional pirate at 21a. Also had to look up the footballer in 5a.

   Finished in the SW with CHINA SEA, ENTANGLE and ENERGISED as the last few in.

3. Thanks Eileen and Picaroon. I struggled to finish but got there in the end.
   I just wonder about 5A; It would be nice to think that some younger people are doing these puzzles and it must be decades since Jimmy Greaves was in the news.

4. Many thanks Eileen & Picaroon

   Like Bruce @2, I had not heard of the Latin phrase nor the fictional pirate at 21a.

   However, I did get there in the end.

   Very enjoyable & PERFECT for a Prize Puzzle.

5. A typically entertaining Picaroon puzzle. Very varied in its scope.

   LOI was TARAMA which although I’m very familiar with taramasalata I’d never heard of the abbreviation. It was gettable from the wordplay eventually.

   A nice prize puzzle.

   No doubt there’s a theme I haven’t spotted and it’s a double pangram but I don’t care. 😉

   Thanks to Eileen and Picaroon

6. Thanks Eileen and Picaroon

   A very enjoyable puzzle which I did on Sunday..

   Like Molonglo, I particularly associate Tara with Liverpool and suspect, perhaps wrongly, that it spread from there via radio and TV. On the other hand, Tommy Handley’s famous TTFN seems either to predate this or suggest otherwise.

7. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

   Brendan (not that one) has made the emoticons shrink and sulk again, at least he was spared a
   D’Oyly Carte menu.

   I did not manage to complete this last Saturday. INDISCREET was the first in. Put in GRIEVES guessing it must be some Greaves who was a footballer, Robbie Savage also unknown but the clue was solvable.
   Failed on SPONDIAC, what a good clue! I also liked HARD CHEESE, ENERGISED, TESSERA and TARAMA.

8. Any puzzle that includes CAPTAIN PUGWASH gets my vote. very enjoyable.

9. 3d: I’d spell it TARRA. That keeps the A short. Liked VD @ d.

10. 7d

11. This was fun. As always with prize puzzles, I get a sense of accomplishment when I finish them. I didn’t parse KEATS, and I had to google to confirm that TARAMA was a thing, that Jimmy Greaves was a footballer, and that the captain was PUGWASH. That latter one made me remark again how interesting it is that American mass culture is broadly known in Britain, but that the reverse isn’t anywhere near as true.

    At this point when I see “northerners” in one of these things, I start thinking of Geordies or some such, so even I was misled a bit by YANKEES. It’s is an odd word–it’s used in the South to describe Northerners, but no longer used by Northerners (except possibly while in the South) to describe themselves.

    In fact, most people around here (the north), on hearing “Yankees” think of baseball players in pinstripes.

12. 3d: Tim Brooke-Taylor’s Uxbridge English Dictionary definition of taramasalata in I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue many years back was ‘Scouser saying goodbye to his mother’ (Ta-ra, Maa, S’yu Larter). Audience mostly didn’t get it and I seem to recall Tim saying something like ‘and I wish I wasn’t here’.

    Salata is, of course, ‘salad’, for which read ‘mixture’ rather than leaves. Tarama is the fish roe paste part, salata is the addition of (usually) breadcrumbs and lemon juice.

13. Thanks, Eileen.

    I was one of those whom you exhorted not to divulge the solutions last Saturday!

    Enjoyed this a lot for its constructions and surfaces, favourites being VENEREAL DISEASE and O TEMPORA O MORES (translated by Flanders and Swann as ‘O Times, O Daily Mirror!’)

    As Tim P implies @12, I thought TARAMA was the smoked roe and not the paste made from it, which is ‘taramasalata’; certainly neither Chambers not the SOED give the short form (with either meaning, as it happens). Fun clue, though.

14. Thanks Eileen and Picaroon

    Overall a difficult but fair puzzle.

    Can anyone tell me where the x2 comes from in 4d?

15. Hi Kevin

    The clue read ‘EnglishMEN abroad’.

16. Kevin @14. It’s just a doubling up of POM as in multiplying by 2.

17. thanks Eileen@15

    Sorry Davy@16, your answer did not clarify it for me.

18. Davy@16

    I hope my response to your answer was not too harsh. I had already worked out the x2. Eileen’s response seemed to home in on my stumbling block, the repetition due to the plural.

    Once again thanks to Eileen and thanks to Davy for your response.
    Kevin

19. Loved this: I got O Tempora O Mores first. Just shows that I could have been a judge, Eileen.

    Am I the only one to have sensed a slightly Pauline link between 2dn and 7dn? Or is my schoolboy humour getting the better of me?

    One complaint: Captain Pugwash was a Pirate, not a Buccaneer! (Though Picaroon could have clued it as “setter”)

    Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen.

20. After being baffled by the previous prize (Enigmatist), I coasted through this very enjoyable one, though I needed Eileen’s parsing to explain KEATS (I did not know Kea-parrot) or Jimmy Greaves and did not catch EA(R) as almost another feature (though in all three the solution was clear). As to O tempera O mores, the phrase was so well known that Ben Jonson could send it up by putting it in the mouth of the foolish Justice Adam Overdo in Act 2 of Bartholomew Fair. Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen.

21. Marienkafer @ 16: in case you appreciate Peter Cook, who lamented that he couldn’t become a judge because he “didn’t have the Latin”, and so became a miner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofUZNynYXzM

    Great puzzle: favourites were CAPTAIN PUGWASH, TARAMA, GASLAMPS and VD. Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen.

22. Marienkaefer@19

    I’m impressed that you got O Tempora O Mores first. I did Latin at school ( to year 10 (form 4)at least) and I had to work at it even when I got a couple of crossers.

    Can you explain the difference between a buccaneer and a pirate. (I’ll refrain from crude jokes at this point.)

23. Hi drofle @21

    You’re a step or two behind – see Andrew’s blog of yesterday’s puzzle. 😉

24. Eileen – Oh dear – business as usual! Or I’m losing my memory . . . I thought it rang a bell.

25. Marienkaefer@19

    I may have answered my own question

    From quora.com and wikipedia

    Pirates were lawless scavengers of the sea who pillaged and sacked for anything they could get. It’s the catch-all term in this case.

    Privateers were essentially pirates with government protection in order to pursue less than legal goals in wealth, dominance, and control of the seas. Being a privateer was only legal in relation to the countries you had papers for. IE, if you were a privateer for the British Empire, you could basically do whatever you wanted until a Spanish ship found you, and then you were screwed. Unless you also had a friend in Spain.

    Buccaneer is a term that is basically the French/Cajun slang term for privateer. Buccaneer is derivated from “boucanier” which is French for “one who smokes meat” and is a derivative of Arawak native American “bukan” meaning smoked meat

26. Kevin – indeed. Captain Pugwash was no lily-livered Buccaneer. He was a true Pirate.

    There is a folk myth by the way that all Captain Pugwash’s crew had names with double meanings worthy of Paul – not true at all.

    Drofle – I was indeed picking up the reference to Peter Cook, though my mistake was that I thought that Eileen had referenced the link. It was Andrew. Eileen’s role was to have laughed for ten minutes.

27. Thanks, Picaroon (and Eileen), I enjoyed that. I particularly like CAPTAIN PUGWASH (childhood memories), SEERSUCKER, ENERGISED (nice surface), LIKE THE CLAPPERS, INDISCREET and AWOKEN.

    I didn’t parse KEETS correctly, thinking that in some way it was a homonym for KEETS as in PARAKEETS. I should have seen it as I do remember seeing keas on wildlife programmes.

    INHUMANE and MISCHANCE were my LOI. I spent far too long trying to find an actual cheese which fitted the crossers even though I’d already realised that the definition might be “hard cheese” (the expression) rather than just “cheese” (suggesting a specific variety). Once I had the H from INHUMANE, the penny dropped.

28. Marienkaefer @19, no you are not the only one, we are very unfortunate here, wedding limousines tend to be from Vaud (a Swiss Canton) and have VD number plates.

29. Cookie – I assume they are driven sedately, not like the clappers?

30. No, They are driven sedately but are not clapped out, nothing in Switzerland is, that is why I live just over the border in France. (Don’t hear that term for VD nowadays.)

31. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen for entertaining puzzle and blog.

    Marienkaefer@26 -if you follow Eileen’s Wikipedia link for Pugwash you’ll see that the Guardian fell foul of this urban myth. I’ve met people who have sworn blind it’s true and that they remember the names themselves from childhood.

32. DuncT @31, just been looking through the 1976 “Pugwash and the Sea Monster”. There is a character in it called Willy and he spends a lot of time running around stuck under the detached cone-like tail of the
    Sea Monster. There are three other characters also under monster parts, Pugwash under the head and the Mate and Barnabas under the hump…

33. Cookie@32 – you’ve got me worried about what happened to the poor dismembered (?) sea monster now.

34. Thanks drofle for the link to the Peter Cook sketch. Brilliant stuff and I laughed through it all. I remember Peter Cook actually appearing as a judge in a later sketch where he was supposedly impartial. He spoke to the black defendant in the dock as follows:

    “You look like the type, may I say the type, to boil up poisonous birianis in the middle of the night and keep the neighbours awake with your pagan limbo dancing.”

35. Peter Cook was sheer genius.

36. Eileen @ 35

    I’ll second that. I loved the title of the book on his comedy “Sadly I Was An Only Twin”.

37. Last Friday I enjoyed watching Peter Cook in ‘Yellowbeard’. Next up, probably, Terry Johnson’s tribute to Pete & Dud ‘Not Only But Always’.

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