Phi Crosswords

Hello, if you’re visiting from the link in The Inquisitor (and if you’re not, of course).  Welcome to the site, and please feel free to follow the various links to puzzles and setter’s blogs and so on.  The specific link to the Posthum(or)ous puzzle is here.

I update more or less fortnightly, and this (wouldn’t you just know it?)  is one of the non-update weeks, so come back in a week to see a new puzzle from my archive, and possibly some comment on matters cruciverbal.  The 40th anniversary of my first published crossword is on the horizon, and I will have an unpublished puzzle for the occasion.

It’s a busy weekend so not much time to squeeze in the update.  I was almost grateful to have an attack of pleurisy, which kept me at home but not too incommoded, and allowed me to get this week’s puzzle prepared.  There isn’t much else to recommend about the condition though, other than it leads you to reflect how few English words end in -ISY.  (We’ve just planted some kohlrabi, so if a puzzle turns up with KOHLRABI and PLEURISY symmetrically arranged, then you can be sure I am turning experience to use in clues.)

This time around there’s a Church Times puzzle from 2013.  Another Church Times puzzle from 2013, I should say, since I very nearly alighted upon the last Church Times puzzle I gave you for a repeat performance.  This one is that one’s predecessor, if anyone’s counting.

I see that a new BBC Music Magazine is out, with a colourised Elgar on the cover, which is nice, as there’s an Elgarian slant to my puzzle inside it.  Elsewhere we’re back to Friday-as-usual in The Independent, with, in addition, a Times puzzle on 13 August closely followed by a Telegraph Toughie on the 15th.  And, in case I don’t update the page as early in the weekend next time around, there’s a Times Jumbo on 24 August.

(Before we get on to business, isn’t ‘extirpating’ a wonderful word?)

We visited the Wellington suburb of Eastbourne this week.  It’s quite a gentrified place and its streets are lined with trees, specifically this sort:

That is a Norfolk Island pine.  Quite big, isn’t it?  Good for lining roads, though.  Eastbourne has a few avenues of them, but they also pop up in odd corners like weeds – a row of trees, all of a kind, carefully planted by the council, will have a Norfolk Island pine protruding above them, sprouting from a cone dropped by a bird, I suppose.

We had one in our front garden, presumably also bird-delivered, and we realised it might get a little tall.  Indeed, it had already outpaced our plum trees when we had it removed the other week.  Extirpation might be too strong a term – the stump is left and we have zapped it with weed killer.  The stump was still only about a third the size of the one in the picture.

Eastbourne has ‘notable trees’, it turns out.  They get labelled.  I think the label below belongs to the tree in the middle distance of the photo above:

Wikipedia has a page, of course.   (I’m a bit worried about the photo of it as a pot plant.)  They are a bit different from my experience of the monkey puzzle trees that used to sit quite tamely in suburban gardens.

We also popped up to Upper Hutt, where the local second-hand bookshop had its rack of puzzle and game related volumes near the front door, and who should we see but:

(That does look like Dean Martin on the third shelf.  Perhaps it was a film quiz book.)  I actually bought the third book back on the top row, a list book of names arranged by forename(s) and then by surname, very good for solving US type clues like ‘Baseball great Splong’ referencing Arvid Splong, who played for the Montpelier Grunters for three months in 1952.  I always feel like Brits should retaliate with obscure cricketers to boost overseas sales of Wisden.  (Upon checking, I discovered that there was a baseball player called Arvid Hamilton active in 1952.  Not him, honest, and he was active nowhere near Montpelier, anyway.)

The puzzle this time is an Independent daily from 2013, with a fairly blatant theme, and a link to another page on the site with the solution.

Forthcoming puzzles.  Well, my July of absentee Fridays comes to en end on Wednesday 31 (with an Independent puzzle, for a centenary that day).  I have a Times Quick cryptic the day before, and there’s an IQ (and I’m grateful to the editor for allowing me an outrageous bit of self-indulgence) on Saturday 3 August.  Friday service in the Independent resumes from 9 August. 

This isn’t really about picking up general knowledge, but more the strange things that emerge as a result of setting and solving puzzles.  Last week I popped up in The Independent on Sunday with a puzzle marking the centenary of the birth of Jon Pertwee, who I met once.  The circumstances were the recording of the panel game Whodunnit, in which a short drama was performed, generally involving a murder, and the celebrity panel had to identify the perpetrator.  Implausibly enough, I was on the celebrity panel (aged 16 going on 17) having won a competition in TV Times.  The other celebrities were Patrick Mower, Magnus Pyke and Lindsay Wagner (the Bionic Woman).

This situation seems to be different from being merely a contestant on a quiz show such as Mastermind.  As a result, I learned this week, I have a page on IMDb.  Clicking through to the episode’s page reveals me second in the cast list to Pertwee himself (and ahead of the other celebrities).  I am grateful (I think) to gwep on the fifteensquared blog for bringing this to my attention.

The puzzle I have just put up is from 2013, about a year after the Inquisitor finally settled on a numbering system.  My source for the quotations used was a reminiscence of the last Mastermind ever hosted by Magnus Magnusson, in which one of the specialist subjects led to (perfectly justified) laughter from the audience as the questions were asked.  It seemed a good idea to try the same trick in a crossword.  This puzzle has both a fifteensquared blog and a setter’s blog on this site, and you can click through to them from the solution page (you know, at least make a show of doing the puzzle first…).

A quietish month on the puzzle front, with the most exciting thing being my absence from The Independent on Fridays.  I am still appearing once a week in July, as long as you define week as Saturday to Friday.  But it makes for some odd gaps between appearances.  And why am I doing this?  There’s a five-word phrase in the first paragraph that provides the connection, a connection which leads back to New Zealand for one puzzle…