Phi Crosswords

We went to our local second-hand book fair the other week. It was larger than ever, because they had accrued so many books over the two years since the preceding one. As usual, I came away with something slightly out of the common run.

Das Große Kreuzwort Rätsel Lexikon (published by Duden) to be exact. Or (it’s German, after all) Das Große Kreuzworträtsellexikon, as it says on the spine. It contains more than 160 000 Rätselwörtern, as it says once on the front and twice on the back making it “das umfassende und kompetente Nachschlagewerk”. Certainly the back cover contains the highest density of German polysyllables I’ve seen for a while.

I have acquired the 1990 and perhaps only edition – Duden no longer list it on their website, though they have a range of children’s puzzle books, as well as a lot of general language references. A lot is made of their collaboration with the Rätselagentur (or puzzle agency) Lackner + von Berg who are very much still around.  

The layout of the book is very similar to that in Bradford (especially the electronic Bradford). You start with:

Aa: 8 – Bergbach

and end 831 pages later with:

Zytosom: 5 – Zelle; 11 – Zellkoerper

My German is not what you would call good – indeed, it struggles to be what you would call bad. I can make out Hillbrook and the Aa is a river, so maybe it’s an alternative name. At the other end of the alphabet I’m fairly confident about ‘cytosome’ and things cellular.

In between you find several splendid lists. The birthplaces of famous people, for instance – or, at least, of Bach, Beethoven, Dürer, Einstein, Jesus, Luther, Mohammed, Mozart and Schiller, which is a pretty eclectic grouping. If you wish to offer any of them Geburtstagsgruß then you can try 13 – Happy birthday.

There’s quite a lot of English in there, in fact. Even the cover has the answer CAR. What, I thought, was that the German for? “engl.: Auto” (sic) said the clue. Crossing it was “olivgrüner Papagei”, three letters, ending in A. Kea gets everywhere…

This time around we have a Church Times puzzle from 2011. It was No. 1,114 on its appearance, and ten years on the sequence has rolled around to the low 1,600s. 1611 will be a special, and I’ll say more about that nearer the time (July 2).

But there’s another, more significant milestone before that, and I’ll say more about that in the next blog.

And even before that: the Inquisitor has a puzzle of mine this weekend (An Alternative Guide to Wonderland). That is No. 1,699 in the series, and elementary arithmetic will tell you that 1,700 must be hot on its heels. So you’ll get me back again as part of the PINK team.

 

Feijoas have nothing to do with crosswords, really – though the word is in one of the Apex puzzles if you want to work your way through them. But we’re at the time of year when every day seems to bring a dozen or so more feijoas off the trees, and they pile up waiting to be eaten or stuffed into cakes and jams.  Or muffins, which is my next target for the day, so I must be brief.

This time there’s a puzzle from the Inquisitor series – there is a solver’s blog for it on the fifteensquared site, and the link is with the solution.

The choice of an Inquisitor puzzle is sort of timely: May is a quiet month for me outside the regular Friday slot in the Independent (and that Friday slot moves to a Tuesday mid-month – you have been warned), but there is an Inquisitor coming up on 15 May. It is number 1699 in the series, and if anyone is wondering whether the succeeding double-zeroed puzzle will throw up a reappearance of PINK – well, you’ll have to buy the i on 22 May! I have had a lot of proofs to check this week, mind…

There’s also a Times Quick Cryptic from Pedro very soon – Monday 3 May, no less. And the BBC Music Magazine puzzle appearing later this month will have a slightly different theme, befitting its number.

This site was set up to provide a home for the ongoing series of APEX Christmas puzzles I have been setting for over a decade. It’s now time for the annual update that puts the latest puzzle online.

If you want the background to the series try here. Once you’re there, you can scroll down and head over the puzzle – or you can get the direct link here.

As always, the solution page lists the three clues judged best, and their authors.

Some other action on the site since the last update:

A setter’s blog on the Listener puzzle 8×8

(there are solving blogs on Listen with Others here; you will have to scroll down or search if you come here a week or more afterwards)

A setter’s blog on the Enigmatic Variations puzzle Spoiler Alert

(the fifteensquared solver’s blog is here)

A piece about the role of reference books in current solving practice

A quiet period for puzzles other than the Friday Independent appearances, and even one of those moves to a Saturday before the next update: the Independent puzzle due for 30 April will now appear on 1 May. But if you really want something from me on 30 April, do turn to the Church Times.

The puzzle for Easter is a Beelzebub puzzle from July 2011.

We have just had a flurry of reports about the various anniversaries of lockdowns and other aspects of the pandemic. One thing that I do now that I didn’t then is to consult Google Discover in my smartphone app. I cannot recall when I started  doing this regularly and I don’t think I’m too obsessive about it – at least, it’s not directing me to sites about obsessive use of apps yet. And it does throw up some oddities that I would not otherwise encounter.

I found this week that I had received a passing mention on a New Zealand news site, back in July 2020. The article is here. I’m delighted to note that David Tossman is back in charge of things cruciverbal at The Listener (NZ). There was a curious period in the middle of lockdown when the overseas owner (German, I think) decamped like a startled hare leaving a number of going-concern titles in the lurch. There was a hiatus while new owners were acquired, and the presses restarted, and all is now good (or as good as anything is in print journalism these days). David mentions meeting me (the late Rex Benson was also of the party) and in my rather lackadaisical way I have never followed through.

He is posed beside the UCL Jeremy Bentham exhibit (well, what do you call it?). I have passed it a few times and there was always Bentham’s skull in a sort of bell jar between his feet. There were rumours that multiple thefts of the skull – often for the purposes of rugby – had led to it being removed, and even its replica being withheld from display. I wonder if it was there then.

Once you start thinking about the oddities of lockdown, other possibilities come to mind. I have largely stopped using cash – New Zealand always had a focus on electronic payment methods, but I kept coins and notes around for buying coffee and so on. But no longer – it still seems odd not to hand over money for small purchases, but I’ve just stopped.

The other odd thing lies in a couple of subscriptions I have, both to BBC monthly magazines. These are both published by the same not-quite-BBC company, distributed by the same distributor, and even come in almost identical envelopes. Last week, both The Sky at Night and BBC Music arrived on the same day at the end of March. The music magazine was the April issue (with an excellent couple of Malcolm Arnold symphonies on the cover disc), but The Sky at Night was the February edition full of conjunctions past their sell-by date. Obviously there was still plenty of interest (astronomy doesn’t move that quickly), but the two month gap is curious for two horses from the same stable.

I have just sent out the Apex 2020 results to the regular participants. The puzzle itself will go up in a fortnight’s time, along with the winning clues to – well, that would be telling just now. Between now and then, apart from the usual Friday appearances in The Independent, you get a full range of my Times puzzles: a daily cryptic on 8 April, a Jumbo on 10 April, and a Quick Cryptic on 15 April.

There’ll be a couple of setter’s blogs added to the site in the course of the next week, covering 8×8 from The Listener and Spoiler Alert from the Enigmatic Variations series. Just got to write them now…