Let’s herald Spring with a puzzle that couldn’t now appear (though it’s only from 2011).  The new one is an Independent daily with a brief preamble.  This currently isn’t achievable with the software, which is an interesting state of affairs to be mentioned when your local IT bore gets up to drone on about how much added flexibility recent developments in technology have given the printing industry.  Or any other industry – any other stories of what you can’t do now they’ve ‘improved’ the app or the package?  A little more to come on this at the end of the month.

Wednesday 10 October gives those of you who liked the ‘compare and contrast’ questions in exams an opportunity.  I have a Times daily and a Kcit Toughie in the Daily Telegraph.  See if you can work out the interactions of constant personal and varying house styles.

Now to continue recovering from gardening…

I was musing in an email about not remembering how your own clues work after about – oh – two weeks, shall we say.  On a larger scale is entirely forgetting puzzle themes.  I’m not sure, if I hadn’t found it in my own files, I would have claimed the new one this time as my own.  It doesn’t quite feel like an idea I would have had, though I do like the way I did it.  From my own standpoint I was intrigued to see that I had kept an erroneous copy.  At some point I had made a change – minor, but necessitating two new words at 1 across and down, and I had retained the old grid.  That has been rectified.

It’s an Enigmatic Variations from 2011 this time, and I must admit I have a new EV grid hankering to be composed, as well as an IQ, so this will be a brief update. 

I regularly recommend the Wall Street Journal puzzle site usually for the monthly Cox and Rathvon cryptic.  But it’s worth looking at some of the other offerings.  This week saw the Saturday US-style puzzle themed around cartoons (safe to say that, as the thematic clues gave it away), with the byline Gary Larson.  Hmm – I knew he’d given up The Far Side, so is this a new departure.  Or perhaps an over-confident pseudonym user?

What have we coming up?  There’s a Church Times on Friday 28 September, as well as the usual Independent daily, and Pedro appears in the Times Quick Cryptic slot on 2 October.  There’ll also be a setter’s blog on Phase Shift appearing in the course of this week.

I missed an update due to a busy weekend followed by a bad attack of some viral thing or other (I can recommend not fainting from a standing position, btw).  You end up spending time writing clues, which opens you up to the odd things that are the dictionaries we use.

It’s fair to say that they are characters in themselves – while much is made of Chambers’ fondness for archaic Scottish words and eccentric definitions, you shouldn’t overlook the styles of ODE and Collins (however much my iPad apps for these tend to iron out differences).  It is often useful  to cross-refer, particularly if you suspect Chambers may be ploughing its own furrow.  Editors suggest this but it doesn’t always resolve matters.  Here’s what I stumbled on this week, trying to clue PIPPIN:

Chambers:

1. Something or someone especially nice, attractive, good, etc (old slang)

Now what one person considers old slang another may still use – no one dictionary, ultimately, can be the arbiter.  What does ODE say?

ODE:

I was under the impression it was quite specifically English, though it seems to have graduated to current, at least, so this sent me scurrying to Collins:

Collins: 

Nothing in this line at all.  I went with the original clue in the end.  It does make it hard to resort to the dictionary on occasions, but I suppose we must.  There was the tale that C once misprinted the definition for ‘tutelary’ as ‘projecting’ but in only in some copies of the edition – at which point it turned up in a Misprints puzzle.  And was it ‘identify’ where the whole head-word was mislaid a few editions ago? This was before the furore the other year when highlighted words were erased through an unfortunate application of cut-and-not-paste.

We seemed to be happy to agree Chambers nods in those cases.  Other idiosyncrasies are more pernicious: I remember an editor who declined to accept S=small (Chambers had only M=medium at the time) though it was in both Collins and ODE (as was L=large) – in this instance, Chambers however perverse, was the rule.  Yet here was an everyday usage that the dictionary wasn’t capturing.  The Americans aren’t quite so precise and are readier to extract E and F from their dashboards, as well as a whole range of baseball abbreviations.  The Brits seem happier to argue that “Well, yes, it is used that way, but it’s not in my dictionary”.    

Anyway, missing an update meant I missed telling you of a Times puzzle earlier this week, but there’s a Times Quick Cryptic on 19 September (I don’t believe it is particularly dominated by the letter ar), and there’s also an Inquisitor coming up next weekend (15 September). The new puzzle this time round is from the Church Times and if you enjoy that one there’s a new one due on 28 September.

I found myself wondering about commenting on puzzles this week.  The immediate prompt was an email from another setter thanking me for my comments on their recent Listener puzzle, followed the next day by an email from yet another setter thanking me for my comments on their recent Listener puzzle, followed the next day by an email from still another setter thanking me for my comments on their recent Listener puzzle.  That brought the grand total of such responses this year to – er – three.

What to make of this?  Are Listener setters being crossbred with buses?  Did the inestimable John Green send out the responses to three weeks’ puzzles all in one go?  It still doesn’t quite explain how he managed to select the three who were all going to email me.

John Green, who is indefatigable as well, collates the entries for each Listener puzzle each week.  If a solver appends comments, he either includes them, or transcribes them, adding the solver’s name and (email) address.  If a setter wishes to reply and keep the conversation going then they can.  (I’m not exactly good at that…)

So what we had here were three consecutive Listener puzzles on which I had commented (a hand-written sheet of notepaper from this company), to which JG had appended my email address (though two of the three would already have had it – and yes, I suppose I could append it myself…).  And all three wrote back.  The joys of coincidence.

I always comment on Listener puzzles I’ve solved, and rarely miss the Crossword Club – Magpie puzzles get comments scarcely at all.  The fifteensquared blogs on EV and IQ are also generally unfrequented by myself.  I’ve never quite worked out why there’s such a variation in my responses, though time clearly plays a factor.

I try to be appreciative (honest) though I do find setterly considerations creeping in when I see something that, well, I wouldn’t quite have done it that way…  That sort of comment should really be for a vetter, not a setter.  At the same time, that thought can spark an idea of my own – if that way hasn’t been used, then it’s still open for me.  The ‘Why on earth did they ever think that?’ response tends not to get a comment.  (If you fail to get a comment from me, and you expected one, then of course it’s been lost in the post…)

If you wish to comment on the Times Quick Cryptic on 14 August, or its senior cousin six days later, then you can direct them here.  There might be a Telegraph Toughie before the next formal update as well, but the warning I get of those has always been shorter than my fortnightly schedule, so I can’t always guarantee to let you know of a Pedro.

And finally the new puzzle this week is from 1990: I suddenly found myself thinking about it, and persuaded Brian Head (more inestimability and indefatigability)  of the Crossword Club to let me reprint it.  It’s Dux, from March 1990, but was actually completed three years earlier, so we’re back in the 30-year-old regime.  I will revert to the 2010-11 box next time.

When I started putting puzzles up on this site, I went through my files and extracted the first example of all puzzle series I have contributed to, and put those up over a few months.  And I missed one.

Looking today at my planned addition to the Church Times page, I realised that I have a new one in that sequence coming up just next week (advt – 3 August, to be precise) and it wouldn’t do to tread on its toes.  So I scoured the lists and I discovered that, in my intent to put up cryptic puzzles, I’d entirely overlooked the Independent Concise puzzles I did for about a year back in the mid-Nineties.  So, here is the first of those, No. 2666, from 5 May, 1995.

I doubt I’ll put many of them up, but they are an interesting sideline.  The Independent follows the pattern wherein the first two across entries form a pun.  Puns are notoriously difficult to bring off convincingly for everyone; the concise puzzles syndicated in the local paper have puns which seem to have been constructed by someone who has recently had – or who urgently needs – substantial dental work.

More annoyingly, these puzzles tended to have stipulated grid patterns.  So it was no use coming up with a pun whose components were (7,3) if there were no grids where the first two across entries were seven then three letters.  Jot down pun, flick through grid designs, swear – that was often the way things worked.

Puns are infamously considered petty in the scheme of things, but a good pun is often sublime.  Flann O’Brien’s observation about why policeman keep looking younger – ‘A thing of duty is a boy forever’ – should rock anyone’s boat.  Among the chestnuts in the concise crossword lists, my favourite is ICE AGE – EAVES.  What it must have felt like to spot that…

Beyond the top row, there are other concerns in concise puzzles.  Precision is even more valued – if your entry is _A_E, then the clue must be pretty on the button – while at the same time not being a ‘write-in’.  There should be a leavening of ‘old favourites’ (I always felt) to give the solver some gentle entry points.  Habitues of the heavily checked plain puzzles (in, say, The Puzzler magazine) will recall that such favourites were how you learned of ELEMI, and hobnobbed with EMUs on a regular basis.

US puzzles, being fully checked, offer a range of similar old friends.  I’m beginning to get some of the baseball ones (Mel Ott, anyone), and even Bobby Orr of ice-hockey fame is known to me, and that’s only the ones beginning with O.

Back to a cryptic next time.

So I have resorted to a puzzle I can add to the site quickly – another unpublished Beelzebub (there are still quite a few to come).

It has been a weekend when I have wanted to settle down and work on a forthcoming puzzle, one that employs a theme I have had in mind for decades but which I can only now see taking shape.  It’s a very different mindset from sitting in front of the screen transcribing an old puzzle.  With luck I’ll have worked through that for the next time.

This time sees the appearance of a double setter’s blog, addressing both puzzles that appeared a couple of weekends ago.  I don’t know whether it works, but it probably won’t be an option very often!  There’s also a new puzzle from the Independent, with a theme.

I’ve opened my file for 2011, which means that I suppose there’s a chance I might pick a puzzle that is being or has been recycled for the i.  I don’t get any information on these, and it can be a bit tricky working out when they initially appeared unless there happens to be a blog on fifteensquared.  Having relinquished the copyright, I get no further payment for these.

If you ever thought that the winners’ lists attached to puzzles were compiled from death records for Leominster in 1875, and thus no-one ever really won…  Well, I managed to win the recent Sabre Listener puzzle after a fair tussle.  The dictionary hasn’t arrived yet – I don’t know whether there’s a Hodder & Stoughton NZ set-up (there is for Penguin and Random House) – but I suppose the general ‘allow six weeks for delivery’ applies more than somewhat to me.

Of course, this raises one of my bugbears.  The Listener recommends Chambers as a more-or-less required reference, so it is reasonable to assume that solvers possess one (or these days,one or more apps) – thus it’s not obviously the most appropriate prize, surely?  OK, the hardbacks wear out, but you don’t enter crossword competitions just on the off-chance you’ll win a new copy just as the covers fall off the old one.  Chambers have a neat range of other references (I could do with a new Crossword Lists…) and something else from the range would be a welcome alternative (and perhaps cheaper).  Maybe it’s the logistics of the thing.

Well, I had a day off, and, in any case, the reason I need to get things up early provides a topic to discuss.

The new puzzle is a BBC Music Magazine puzzle from May 2011.  My thanks to them for their continuing agreement for me to republish puzzles here.  And get out and buy the July issue which is emerging on to British shop shelves even as I type.  Rachmaninov’s Second this month, plus all you need to know about the Proms.  All that and a crossword as well.

I do try to give advance warning of my puzzles as they appear.  This is easy enough for the regular Friday Independent slot – I tend to be told in good time when it isn’t regular for some reason, and I can pass that on.  But there are times when you have to live with the short notice – even the note you get with Listener proofs has a disclaimer about unlikely circumstances in which a puzzle has to be swapped for some reason.  (I wonder if it has ever happened, and, if so, what the unlikely circumstances were.)

In this case I got word only a week ago about another puzzle this coming weekend, and it makes for a crowded weekend for me.  Friday 15 June sees the usual Independent puzzle, but nip out and buy the Church Times, and you’ll find me there as well.  Relax overnight for you have a Phi Inquisitor (Northern Lights) in the i on Saturday, and relax again before tackling Kcit’s Treasure Hunt (there’s an underused concept…) in the Sunday Telegraph Enigmatic Variations series.  (And will it be a hard Listener, when I will have all this extra time for solving…? Might it be Hex in the WSJ?  At least the new edition of GAMES magazine – for August, no less – arrived electronically this week.)

Training the binoculars further ahead I can give you, in compensation, slightly longer notice of this month’s Kcit Toughie – 27 June – which still predates my next planned update.

Well, it’s nice to be published, of course, but I do sometimes wonder about the poor solver.  I was always reluctant to have both the IQ and the Saturday prize (as it was) puzzle in The Independent, for I thought of someone saying: “Well, at least I can try the IQ” only to find it was me again.  (Come to think of it, I believe it is often one of my daily puzzles reused in the Saturday edition of the i, so it may still happen this weekend.)

This weekend sees two pseudonyms plus my real name, so it is less obvious.  But I don’t hide the fact that Phi=Kcit – it’s published on various websites, and in the A-Z of Crosswords, and so on.  Presumably there will be some who will groan on Sunday morning, and my apologies to them (though they probably aren’t reading this).  There are lots of setters out there which means it should be easy enough to stagger rather than to hog. 

It goes without saying that they’re both nice puzzles, of course.  Blogs for them both will follow – probably more or less simultaneously – later in the month, giving me a chance to remind you about the Toughie.  I’d better start drafting them.

Sometimes a word seems to hog puzzles for a while. Quite a few years ago I recall solving daily Independent puzzles over a period of about a month, and finding three occurrences of LOCH NESS MONSTER in that time.  Not just a short word cropping up, you notice, but a full 15-letter grid-spanning entry.  This was of particular interest to me as a puzzle I was completing for later publication in The Independent contained – well, you guessed it.

May seems to have been the month for PURITANISM.  It was Azed’s competition word, and I finished the puzzle and recalled that I had written a clue for it some years ago which stuck in the mind.  Something about being ‘madly up in arms about sex’ (it in anag.) – I could remember it quite plainly, with its alternating consonants providing good word endings down the ten-letter on the right of Independent grid 17.  And the clue was a neat one – anything that unearths a common phrase like ‘up in arms’ from the fodder looks good.  So I sent it in, and I got a VHC.

As, of course, did something like three other competitors who had spotted the same thing.  I had wondered if that would occur – one should never assume you will be the only person to spot something and the trick can be how you use the thing you spotted.  What I hadn’t expected was something very close to my clue turning up in a Hoskins puzzle in The Independent later in the month.  This set me thinking, and I took recourse to fifteensquared to see when I’d written my memorable clue.  The search function readily threw up a Phi puzzle with PURITANISM – but the note was up (rev.) + martinis* – which certainly looks like a credible treatment (I didn’t track down the actual clue) – but it wasn’t my remembered clue.  I’ve been setting puzzles for The Independent from before the advent of fifteensquared, however, so maybe this clue has simply lodged in my mind for a long time.

Quite why these little constellations of word appearances should occur remains a mystery.  However, should the Wee Frees suddenly loom in an attempt to combine Nessie and a puritan attitude, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.

The puzzle today is a real, live published Beelzebub from2010- I’ll get back to the unpublished sequence next time it’s a Beelzebub’s turn.  Thanks as always to The Independent for permission to re-publish.

Puritanism aside (I don’t think it’s coming up in a puzzle soon), my Independent appearances continue as usual.  There’s a Times daily this Wednesday (6 June), a Church Times puzzle on 15 June and, hot on its heels an Inquisitor on 16 June.  Which is about when I should be back.

My approach to finding puzzles to use here has been to select one of my box-files covering a given period and select a few puzzles from different outlets over a few weeks.  It saves me having to heft too many box-files around too often.  I think I shall abandon the 1998 box after this puzzle as it seems I keep finding it again.  Something 21st century next.

It’s a good reminder, however, of how much you need reminding.  Do I recall ever setting the IQ puzzle I’ve put up this week (Algebra)?  Not remotely, but I’m actually quite pleased with it.  It manages a fairly sizable amount of thematic material in a reasonably standard 12×12 grid.  And the vocabulary is also surprisingly ‘standard’ – not many words that you wouldn’t find in an everyday puzzle.  (Indeed – digression here – I’m surprised how often definition-only puzzles, with substantial checking end up with things like ELEMI.)

The clues also struck me as friendly, though I’m generally hopeless at assessing that.  But I’d happily recommend it as an introduction to barred thematic puzzles.

It’s also a numerical of sorts – probably about as near as you’re going to get for an IQ numerical puzzle, given the IQ editor’s comments the other week.  In the weekend when The Listener has its quarterly numerical, it seems a good idea to have one that shows how words and numbers can coexist.

There’s a Kcit Toughie coming up next Wednesday (23 May).