Phi Crosswords

I’ve taken quite a few tests for coronavirus over the past few weeks, as I’m one of those people who tends to run a mild sniffle throughout the winter months (exacerbated this year by some unseasonal pollen and the need to have round some pittosporum saplings). 

But Monday’s was finally positive, and what I thought was a bad cold, if not influenza, turned into everyone’s favourite bugbear. As far as I’m concerned, anyone advocating catching the thing so as to develop herd immunity should be required to do so, possibly repeatedly. It has not been a splendid week, and I’m still very tired a lot of the time. Most of the symptoms are abating, though the cough is threatening to hang around (rather like the 100-day cough I had in late 2019), and I’m working through my usual constellation of stuff that goes with the end of a ‘normal’ ‘flu. 

The tiredness and aching remain irksome, and so there won’t be a full update today. I have added a blog on Run to Seed (LIstener 4714) now that the solution is up. It’s also a quiet fortnight in terms of puzzles – there are just the usual Friday appearances in the Independent on 1 and 8 July. (Regulars will recall that the first in the month very definitely has a theme at present.)

The theme today was prompted by the return this week of an old, failed hard drive from which the data had been rescued. Lots of stuff I thought I’d lost was restored. Plenty of music files, but not least was a set of photographs of the Azed Cup on its visit to Wellington a few years ago. Here’s a few – Wellington in the background in the first; the Beehive (a main Government building) in the last, and in between a shot in front of one of our flax plants that is itself no more.

 

 

 

The cup itself is now lost, alas – having made it around the world and back, it went astray somewhere within England. I have heard that a replacement is on its way, aligning with the recent celebratory lunch to mark Azed’s 50 year run in The Observer.

It certainly would not do at present to risk sending the new cup out here should I be fortunate enough to win again. Post is haphazard at best, and it remains difficult even to buy stamps to send things outwards. This is mostly pandemic related, and has some odd effects. I have gone on too often here about the curious behaviour of BBC publications: 2021 saw sporadic and intermittent receipt of the Sky at Night magazine, while BBC Music sailed through unaffected. In 2022, I have had just the one BBC Music magazine back in January, while Sky at Night has flourished. Admittedly the order of receipt has been January…long pause…March, April, and February, but it’s more encouraging than zero. Given that the two magazines originate from the same distributors and are close to identically packaged, the difference in delivery patterns is bizarre.

Mind you, you would not have wished anything to arrive in the mailbox this week, where it would have needed rescuing promptly before being saturated. The first significant winter storm has seen floods and downpours and three consecutive nights of thunderstorms to keep us (and the cats) awake. We had new trees planted just last weekend, but they seem to have survived, while our late-producing feijoa has thrown off a few monster fruits.

The puzzle this week is an Independent daily from early 2019, which means there is a fifteensquared blog about it. For some reason, the line spacing has gone skew-whiff – not sure why, but I hope to rectify before the next update. The onlie begetter of fifteensquared is stepping back – a little – due to eye problems, which is very sad, but I urge you to visit (after solving, of course), and marvel at what he has produced for the cruciverbalist.

After a first weekend flurry, the rest of June is quiet, though I’ve just got word of a Telegraph Toughie on 23 June to interrupt the regular Friday sequence in The Independent. There’ll also be blogs on that first weekend’s puzzles appearing here in the course of this week.

When I was on Mastermind, one of the questions I was asked was ‘What is the phase of the moon between half and full?’  I answered (confidently and correctly) ‘gibbous’. After the recording, one of the production team commented that she’d never heard that. She thought the word meant a kind of top hat. At the time I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was on about, though my awareness of implausible headgear has improved since.

General knowledge is a wonderful and treacherous thing. ‘Gibbous’ is certainly a word I’d consider for a daily puzzle, but it’s one of those hovering at the edge of many vocabularies, so I would expect a few scratched heads on the solving blog. ‘Gibus’ (to use its correct spelling – and it’s M. Gibus to you, if you don’t mind) wouldn’t make the grade – though ‘opera hat’, which is essentially the same thing, would be fair game. 

And yet that would be counter to the general knowledge of the Mastermind production team member. (I do wonder whether she had ever heard the word pronounced – ‘gibbous’ is hard g, short i; ‘gibus’ is soft g, long i.) It also means that complaining about answers being within or beyond one’s general knowledge isn’t really a strong criticism. Here was someone with the more obscure meaning at the front of her mind.

So if a puzzle includes the names of two half-backs in League One, a drummer from a band popular in the 90s, and almost any senior figure in UKIP, I’m going to look askance and say ‘Not my general knowledge, squire’. There again, I could include ‘Sergeyevich’ in a grid, expecting you to recognise Prokofiev’s patronymic. Did someone say ‘What’s a patronymic?’ – or perhaps even ‘Who’s Prokofiev?’ (And let’s leave aside the possibility that Pat Ronymic is a half-back in League One…)

But it’s all general knowledge , of course. We assume that the Venn diagrams of our knowledge overlap generously, and they generally do (otherwise I couldn’t use the analogy), but it’s not perfect.

It’s only really worth grumbling if the wordplay in the clue does not assist. This might be an anagram with a sequence of unchecked vowels, and the order can only be determined if you know the spelling of the answer (been there, done that…). Or perhaps the clue starts ‘gentle touch’ and you have _A_R_N_M_C – TAPRONYMIC, obviously…

It is probably now general knowledge that the Enigmatic Variations puzzle will be continuing beyond the end of July, though only in the paper, not online, and with no downloadable PDF. While this aligns it with the way the Inquisitor is presented, it actually highlights that puzzles are not handled optimally, nor in a way that maximises the number of solvers.  (Overseas news, perhaps, but not overseas access.) Both Inquisitor and Enigmatic Variations generate PDFs as part of their proofing processes, and it seems odd that these cannot be made readily available to solvers.

Here, of course, there’s certainly a PDF of the new puzzle this week – a Church Times puzzle from 2019 – and there’s an interactive version too.  

There’s a Times puzzle from me to kick off the month on June 1st, followed by a Listener puzzle on June 4th. No doubt that will send some of you scurrying to the Inquisitor for respite – hard luck, I’m there too that day (what am I going to solve?), with a Pedro coming up in The Times Quick slot on Monday 6th June. The Friday Independents continue amidst all this.

The continuation of a barred grid series should never be taken for granted. A couple of years ago The Telegraph proposed to stop the Enigmatic Variations (EV) series on the grounds of lack of space in the paper version. So much for the new horizons and possibilities offered by cyberspace. Indeed you still hear the old line trotted out about how you cannot do things online because not everyone has access to the internet.  I can see that this might be an argument about (say) online banking, but it hardly seems appropriate for a more techno-savvy group like crossword solvers. Even some of us oldies have been using computers for 40+ years now. (And no-one seems to stop TV advertising because not everyone has a television.)

In any case, despite dodging that last bullet, the EV is to be discontinued (from the end of July) so that things can go online only – The Telegraph’s puzzles, if accessed online, will have to be solved interactively only – no PDFs allowed. The EV apparently cannot be presented in an online form, and it is not viable purely in its ‘dead-tree’ version.

Let’s unpack this.

Most EVs have entries you just write in, exactly like a Toughie. They may be jumbled, they may later need overwriting, but it’s still only letters in cells. You need a facility to revisit and adjust even when solving the daily, and most EVs require no more. There will be puzzles with complications that render them impossible to solve online (I’m looking at you, hexagons), and highlighting may have to go by the board, but there’s not enough in those considerations to invalidate the basic argument that an EV is just a daily puzzle without black squares.

The reluctance to include PDFs is bizarre. As I write this I can see the blog for Guardian 28,755 on fifteensquared, and the blogger was only able to access the puzzle because they tracked down the PDF. This looks like The Telegraph committing to 100% uploading success without a failsafe or back-up. Good luck with that.

Even allowing for that, you have to wonder whether much thought has been given to how people solve. There will be many who want to do so on paper – indeed, I’m writing the first draft of this rant with a fountain-pen (though it is a retractable one, and a fascinating technological mesh of springs and clips it is too). A blanket adoption of ‘online only’ might turn into a ‘Here, foot – meet bullet’ moment. Indeed there has already been a suggestion that some of the puzzles will continue to have printable options – so why not all? If it’s not a fiddle to include a piece of software for some things, then why not standardise it? It really isn’t hard (and all the other papers manage it).

Anyway, no new puzzle this week, but I have converted one of the EVs already on the site to an interactive format. One of my first choices turned out to be one of the impossible ones (it required inverted letters in cells), but Full Marks only ever required you to write answers into the grid. The puzzle even sidestepped the highlighting element by getting you to fill in an otherwise barred-off cell.  What has defeated me so far is the inclusion of the preamble, but I think that may still prove doable. (Suggestions welcome.)

What has been added to the site is a blog on my recent EV, Additive, and some of the comments there relate to the announcement.

The next fortnight sees the appearance of the usual Friday Independent puzzles, plus a Times daily on 16 May and a Pedro in the Times Quick Cryptic series on 24 May. These will be available to solve online and with print options, and two can even be found on paper (in a specific geographical region).