Araucaria was the main Guardian man. Compared with his the Times’s were easy. 
The main reason I sometimes acquire a copy of Games magazine is to do the cryptic crosswords. I’ll do the regular crosswords, but only the three star ones are worth my time.
1 Like
26 of Araucaria’s best…
A
We start, appropriately, with one from 1 Across, the the monthly crossword magazine co-founded by Araucaria in 1984.
22d Preserving jelly so pretty? (5)
The playfulness is in play…
B
And here’s one from the Financial Times which reflects the political undercurrent which meshes with the erudition and wordplay in Graham’s work:
14d/24d Consequence of gripe led into Nye’s basis for the welfare state (9,4)
In that paper, Graham set under another name …
C
…as clued in a special puzzle for Newsnight. In this, “2” refers to the answer at two down, GUARDIAN, and “10” to ten across, ARAUCARIA.
29ac Film lover’s FT version of the 2′s 10 (9)
The answer is also, ticklingly, an anagram of “Chile pine”, the tree otherwise known as … Araucaria araucana.
D
Now, here’s a clue from a puzzle by Paul, one of Araucaria’s proteges.
24ac A lesser figure in Jude the Obscure – have you read this somewhere before? (4,2)
Except it was also the exact same clue as had appeared the day before, also at 24 across, in an Araucaria puzzle.
E
For many readers, Araucaria was their Steve Bell: the reason they bought the Guardian; a sense of humour which helped form the identity of the paper. And his clues which made reference to the Guardian were always fondly amusing:
12ac Hair swept back? Mr Rusbridger must be in love (9)
F
Time for a colloquial answer, with deft misdirection:
21ac Squashed? Accommodation urgently needed with an easy lot of pieces (4,2,1,7)
G
And a miniature masterclass in concision:
13ac Rise and fall in subsidy (8)
H
Sandy Balfour’s book Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) is a love letter to the crossword, as well as a kind of autobiography. Araucaria is one of its heroes, and it ends with a Guardian puzzle by Araucaria that retells the book in cryptic form. The levels of affection are mutual, overlapping and touching. It also contains this gag:
19d It isn’t so funny to be given the elbow (7)
I
We’re already at I and we haven’t yet had one of those distinctive incredibly long answers. Let’s put that right:
6d Funny thing afoot – shy vernal youths go contemplating girls: Thus (in catalectic trochees) poem by 19 unfurls (2,3,6,1,5,4,5,7,5,2,8,2,4)
Nineteen across is, by the way, TENNYSON.
J
And let’s also see one from the many occasions – April Fool’s Day, anniversaries – marked with themed clues and puzzles:
9ac/7d Dickensian whisky makes Christmas music (6,5)
K
Of course, the imagery in an Araucaria puzzle is not always so wholesome:
12ac Prevent passing of legislation to reduce police numbers? (4,3,4)
L
1d Crave drug from receiver of kicks? (4,5)
M
It’s impossible not to lose some time pleasurably pondering Bayreuth, when the feast in question here …
8d Traditional feast of Wagner’s work gets us up into its sequel (9,6)
… is quite different and a lot more fun.
N
Now, I don’t believe we’ve yet had an excruciating pun:
23ac Bike burnt by Eliot makes line for the Irish (6)
O
Today would be a good time to listen to Araucaria’s Desert Island Discs, although Kirsty Young appeared to find this superb early clue …
Correcting sets in the North? O don’t! I can’t bear it (11)
… a little like pulling teeth.
P
When the solver imagined Araucaria’s working environment, the imagery tended to be calm: the retired churchman assembling anagrams with Scrabble tiles and checking the Oxford Book of English Verse. It’s instructive, then, to learn …
7ac For first option there’s no end — keep going! (5,2)
… that Graham, like all of us, spent more time than can ever be justified waiting for the correct department in a call centre.
Q
It’s the Guardian – so, the reader wonders, is this a typo?
11ac Lady’s man? (5)
It is not.
R
Even with a cryptic device as established as the spoonerism, Araucaria played fast and loose, swapping the middles of words or whatever seemed most likely to raise a smile. Here’s one which works more conventionally, while cunningly exploiting two different senses of “fast”:
24ac Embarrassed Spooner broke fast and went fast (3-5)
S
Sometimes the answer would yield easily enough from the definition …
16ac People like Lolita — it’s a difficult thing to do (3,7)
… but it would take a while for the wordplay to become apparent and raise a smile.
T
Devoted to health, no? Word is, antiphlogistine will be needed (3,4,2,4,2,5,4,4,10)
For T, of course, there is also that famous other long one.
U
The GNU is, like the EMU and the ORCA a word much beloved of crossword setters. Here, Araucaria uses it as a frame for some odd zoological imagery:
14d Not red and not quite blue bone in antelope’s back (10)
V
Araucaria’s themed puzzles are underrepresented here because the intricacies of the related words are designed to work in a puzzle as a whole. Here’s a flavour, though, of how one about Alfred Hitchcock, the answer to its 25 across, begins:
1ac I turn green in front of 25’s work (7)
W
Having omitted that one, we must include this one:
O hark the herald angels sing the Boy’s descent which lifted up the world? (5,9,7,5,6,2,5,3,6,2,3,6)
X
And we’ll close with three from those alphabetical jigsaws. First:
X Return from fraud, an axed scheme for site of dome (6)
Y
Y Farmers’ circle in Middle Eastern country (6)
Z
And, alas, the end:
Z Figure God not quite good parent? (6)
There will always be more - many more - in the Araucaria archive.
The answers
A : ASPIC
B : BEVERIDGE PLAN
C : CINEPHILE
D : DEJA VU
E : ENAMOURED
F : FLAT AS A PANCAKE
G : GRADIENT
H : HUMERUS
I : IN THE SPRING A YOUNG MAN’S FANCY LIGHTLY TURNS TO THOUGHTS OF LOVE
J : JINGLE BELLS
K : KILL THE BILL
L : LONG GRASS
M : MOTHERING SUNDAY
N : NORTON
O : ORTHODONTIC
P : PRESS ON
Q : QUEEN
R : RED-FACED
S : SEX KITTENS
T : THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS
U : UNBLUSHING
V : VERTIGO
W : WHILE SHEPHERDS WATCHED THEIR FLOCKS BY NIGHT ALL SEATED ON THE GROUND
X : XANADU
Y : YEOMEN
Z : ZEUGMA
3 Likes
We haven’t even gotten into the gaelic fada yet. My daughter has an Irish name and my phone’s autocorrect wouldn’t let me write that last sentence. Took me three tries to fix the autocorrect away from “garlic dada”.
Never watched any Morse, but I remember enough of the fuss over the reveal to get Endeavour.
1 Like
Linking for vid, not the tweet. Watch the vid.
https://twitter.com/Reza_Zadeh/status/1344009123004747778?s=19
This is to the terminator what a 1940s car is to a Tesla.
3 Likes
What the dancing started out as ^
How it will turn out:
3 Likes
Ban that shit, what the fuck are we doing.
1 Like
OK, I checked, and it was the Listener puzzle, which is published on Saturdays in the Times. Supposedly the hardest puzzle in the English language. He was the editor, not a setter. They often or always start with a blank grid, and always have one or more meta features involving structure, in addition to the theme and dastardly clues.
So unintimidating and completely not dangerous at all that the people who built, programmed and operate these things are hiding behind multiple layers of safety barriers.
3 Likes
That’s a great scene and a great song from a great movie but I’m too squeamish to watch that shit.
We gave humanity a shot. We got Donald Trump. Robots on deck.
4 Likes
This is somewhat, unfortunately, my attitude to the world at this point. Not completely, but it shades my point of view.
That’s somewhat an overreaction, in that there is the entirety of human history before Trump to inform a basic skepticism toward humanity and whether and how it can be organized for peace and general prosperity. However, the idea was that the US and other first world nations had, to at least some extent “gotten it right”, at least in terms of much longer life expectancy and general quality of life than at any stage in human history. (And yes, much of this has been trickling down to the “third world” in fits and starts–the last 20 years have probably had more human progress than any other 20 year span, thanks to things improving in China.) Since the 1930s we’ve done a lot of great things and have been making progress on many fronts.
However, I think what Trump has done is make real the idea that 50% of humanity is against general progress and their leaders are prone to vanity, stupidity, demagogry, brain washing, etc. (A source of optimism is that they are disproportionately represented in the “tail end” of current humans in the US/EU.)
We’ve made wayyy to much progress since the start of the Enlightenment to consider humanity a lost cause, but Trump has demonstrated that we need to redouble our efforts, and if we have to break a few thigns to get humanity back on track, then I’m all for breaking a few things.
2 Likes
Isn’t someone on this forum involved in shipping/trucking? I can’t remember who it is, but I’d like to chat with them privately if someone can point me to who it is. Unless I’m misremembering and it’s someone on 2+2?
BoredSocial.
Thanks
Didn’t he change his username? Maybe not, but the old name may not work.
My view is that the Enlightenment does not provide a good plan for the onward progress of humanity.
Objectively speaking, it’s had a pretty damn good 300 years in the 2500 or so of recorded history. Show Rene Descartes that video of robots dancing and he’d be ecstatic. Show any doctor in 1700 how long people live or any bureaucrat average calorie consumption. The world’s knowledge is now more or less immediately available for free with a relatively cheap device. The Enlightenment isn’t over, it’s continuing and evolving, as one would expect. In fact, you skepticism is nothing more than an aspect of enlightenment.