Phi Crosswords

It’s always baffled me that left-wing is red in the UK and right-wing blue and quite the reverse in the US.  I suppose it goes to show the irrelevance of colours, or possibly that politicians are basically politicians everywhere and it doesn’t really matter what colours they drape themselves in.  I come from a part of the UK where Labour used green (and occasionally green-and-yellow) because the Tories had bagged red.  I never did work out who had blue (Whigs?), but it felt a bit like Roderick Spode having to form a political group called the Blackshorts because the shop had sold out of the shirts.

This is all to avoid talking about any party or person having post-election blues.  Here we are in a brave new world where it can now be demonstrated that proportional representation processes can deliver majority governments, at least post-pandemics.  Curiously the world seems not terribly braver than before, and looks about as used as it always has.  There was still cat food to be bought and tree boughs to be cut down, though making lemon curd was a novel experience (we’ll use up those lemons yet).  While it cools I can get on with the website.

The puzzle this week is an Independent daily from 2014.  My schedule says I was due to put up a Church Times puzzle, but there’s an actual live Church Times puzzle in the actual Church Times that you can go out and purchase.  I’ll put one from there up next time, so you can compare how my style has changed.  The daily has a hidden theme, which may be timely (though pandemic considerations may yet prevail).

A quiet fortnight – beyond the Friday Independent puzzles, there a Times cryptic on 27 October, and (just in case I’m late blogging next time round) a puzzle for the Crossword Club at the start of November.

You can’t let a date like today’s go by without some acknowledgement.

It also means that the closing date for my September Crossword Centre puzzle Minor Variations is well and truly past, so I can now share the setter’s blog for it.

I went to vote today, even though the New Zealand general election is technically next Saturday.  This year early voting has been extended to rather more venues than previous elections – some opened last Saturday, in fact, though the school hall a couple of hundred metres down our road only got going this weekend.  It was noticeably busier than previous times, and it remains to be seen (another week or so, that would be) whether turnout is affected by the change.  It certainly felt more relaxed, and more likely to encourage people to turn up.  Whether many will turn up with a cat, as we did, is more moot.

Also this week I finished the latest Robert Galbraith thriller Troubled Blood.  There has been a lot in the press and elsewhere about the sexual politics of the book, but it’s a little hard to see what’s going on.  The character in question (who may as well be wearing a red herring suit as fancy dress given the conventions of the genre) is a nasty piece of work for sure (and based on a real American case), but sadly definitely a male heterosexual.  There’s a lot reminiscent of The Satanic Verses in the to and fro of “The book says this” and “Actually, no it doesn’t”.

However, JK has reached into the Lazy Box compartment marked ‘evil genius’ and made him – guess what?  That’s right, a crossword solver.  What has she got against cruciverbalists? 

And I can follow up my hypothesis of a forthcoming Toughie with a date: 15 October.

This is a perennial problem for this blog, but it’s also the case for puzzles. 

The new puzzle I’ve put up today is an exception, as it happens.  It’s an Inquisitor from 2014, and it’s been up on my schedule for future use for quite a while.  The prompt for it came from a message from another setter who had done a neat puzzle on a related theme.  By delaying it so long, I have also managed to coincide with starting work on a new puzzle on another related theme, so it feels timely.  

It’s a reasonably recent puzzle, so it has its own setter’s blog on the site, as well as a blog on the fifteensquared site.  I have put links to both of those on the solution page (try the puzzle first, people…).  Rereading my setter’s blog I note that I said it was a puzzle that was driven by the title which came right at the outset.

Would that were always so.  I am currently working on a puzzle where the theme is straightforward enough, but I don’t want it revealed too early.  So I need a relatively cryptic reference in the title.  I thought I had it, too, using a lyric from a song, but I’ve since realised the lyric repeats in different contexts, so I shall have to try again.  There’s a simple fallback position which I’d rather avoid, but I suppose at least it’s there.

If you early puzzles are all variants of The Labours of Hercules N then you can put off the title hunting for quite some time!  Sometimes it’s obvious – a puzzle where the entries included jumbled diseases had to be called Disorders.  As for ones that took a bit longer to land, my favourite was The Consequences of Being Mortal – I doubt anyone started that expecting it to be themed on hangovers.

A sort of reverse process is also encountered – if the title was not distinctive enough, then scanning my list of published puzzles leaves me wondering why on earth I would give a puzzle that title?  It’s then a voyage of discovery through the box-files to find out – and sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised.  Then again sometimes it’s clearly a resigned shrug at making the best of a bad job.  Most annoying of course is the why-oh-why didn’t I think of this back then?

Nothing titled, neatly or otherwise, coming up in the next fortnight.  It’s sort of the time of month for a Toughie, but I haven’t yet heard if so – keep your eyes peeled.  There’s the usual Independent Friday appearances on 9 and 16 October, with the latter being joined by a Times Quick Cryptic and a Church Times puzzle for a busy day.  Some time over the next week I shall put up the blog on my September Crossword Centre puzzle but the closing date is not yet past – you still have time to enter!

Not here – it’s not so long that I did something along those lines.  But I was looking at the Wall Street Journal site.  If you like US-style puzzles it’s among the best, under the editorship of Mike Shenk.  It also runs an extra ‘variety’ puzzle on Saturdays.  Every four weeks this is a cryptic by Cox and Rathvon, every four weeks it is an acrostic by Michael Ashley, both prime examples of their type.  In between, a lot of the variety puzzles are by Patrick Berry (who is also a fine cryptic setter) – I try these from time to time but the reliance on obscure popular Americana makes them unduly taxing (curiously that’s much less of a problem with Berry’s standard US-style grids).

Shenk contributes a puzzle from time to time – usually one of three particular types he favours.  This week it’s a Spell Weaving puzzle, for instance, and very nice too.  But it’s the relaunch of the puzzle page itself that really caught my eye.  Last week, there was a special with a video (which I didn’t manage to see, alas) and this week there’s a new layout with icons for each puzzle rather than just a list.

It’s the icons that are interesting.  The smaller ones, which are clearly meant to be representing smartphone app versions, are not US style grids (they’re not even Cox/Rathvon cryptic style grids), but effectively UK cryptic style.  Not only that, they’re not actually symmetrical (though I think I’ve noted before that asymmetry is a tendency among non-crossword solvers redesigning crossword-related material).  Look up to the main puzzle-of-the-day icon and that is more of a US style grid, though there’s an unchecked cell (in fact, it looks like there’s a double unch), and, yep, it’s not symmetrical.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t worth a row of beans, except that it teaches you to wonder about the design contribution to items you aren’t familiar with.

The new puzzle this time round is a Beelzebub from 2012 – I see it is consecutive to another Beelzebub already on the site, which is a good indication to me to get another box out of the archive.  There’s also a new addition to the cat page, and later in the week, a blog on Codenames, my recent IQ, will go live.  In terms of forthcoming puzzles, there will be a Times Jumbo on 26 September (I really must finish the one currently on the production line…) and a Times Quick Cryptic on 30 September.  All alongside the usual Friday Independent slots.