Phi Crosswords

This is the blog where I put up the annual APEX puzzle. The puzzle is sent out to participants in December, clues are submitted by the end of January, and this year votes for the best clue were received by mid-March (next year it could be even earlier). The puzzle is here, and you can link through to the solution from the puzzle.  The winning clues are at the end of the solution notes.

Several odds and ends this time round.  I was struck by a blog comment on one of my puzzles: “I didn’t know famous setters solved other puzzles”. I did wonder about a prompt and perhaps even brusque reply, but then I thought about being grateful for that ‘famous’ and decided to think it over.

There’s a case about plagiarism in the UK courts at the moment. I can’t honestly say I’ve ever knowingly heard any music by Ed Sheeran, but he seems to be popular (and is coming to New Zealand next year – people are getting excited, I am told). The issue in the case is whether a particular theme is derived from another artist’s recording, and there’s much discussion about what is original and what is common to popular music as a genre.

But there was never any doubt that Mr Sheeran (and also the plaintiff) both listened to lots of music. I grew up reading reviews by Anthony Burgess in The Observer, so it was also clear that novelists read novels.  I imagine sculptors go round Henry Moore and Anthony Caro exhibitions. It’s at least a little surprising to find someone thinking that crossword setters might not also solve puzzles.

I suspect that, unlike Anthony Burgess, crossword creators don’t comment so much on other setters’ work. At least not on blogs – I do write comments with Listener and Crossword Club entries, but they’re direct to the setter, and not public. Hence it appears that setters don’t solve.  But we do.

References to crosswords turn up in the most unusual places. I was reading some letters of Shostakovich earlier this week, and there was one to his secretary asking her to forward several newspapers and magazines (including the Russian equivalent of Radio Times). I won’t list the eight of them (Moskovskiy Komsomolets, anyone?), but the list was terminated by “Only send the newspapers that have crosswords in them. This doesn’t apply to Sovietskiy Sport.”

That was 1971. Five decades on we have a rather different situation. One of my recent puzzles contained the answer CHICKEN WIRE. The entry had originally been CHICKEN KIEV, which was certainly an inappropriate conjunction of adjective and city (and no longer correctly transliterated). So I changed it, displaying some RATTINESS (with wordplay ‘resistant to change’). There has been something of a wider scramble to remove references to conflict and ordnance, with editors defending the moves as ensuring that crosswords remain a place where the worst parts of the news don’t surface (though this never seems to relate to Boris Johnson). 

I’m not planning to release mayhem and worse in my clues. But I don’t recall this delicacy extending to puzzles during, say, the Rwandan genocide, nor yet to puzzles during the assault on Aleppo (some fellow called Putin behind that, I believe).  This week saw the third anniversary of the attack on the mosque in Christchurch; certainly no-one here has referenced or will reference it, but I don’t recall a let-up in the military terminology elsewhere, and puzzles are syndicated worldwide. 

So a bit of a Eurocentric response, perhaps, though, in fact, I don’t even recall the attitude much during The Troubles.  We seem to be content with using our more belligerent references during most outbursts of military activity around the world, even ones where our own RE and RA are involved (and I can’t see us doing without those abbreviations for long).  But perhaps most of these issues – even, eventually, The Troubles, alas – didn’t monopolise the front pages quite as much and so continuously and I suspect it’s that that is currently driving the decisions. In a week when I’ve put up a setter’s blog on a Tom Lehrer puzzle, I should quote him about how ‘one day we’ll gather round the piano, and sing the songs to remind us how much we enjoyed the war.’

 

This blog is going up on 5 March 2022.  Fifty years ago, to the day, Azed Crossword No. 1 appeared, and tomorrow Azed Crossword No. 2,595 will be published. It’s a complete run – the only weeks the puzzle has failed to appear, The Observer has as well. (“Help! We’ve lost the Azed puzzle!” “Quick, call a strike!”)  There’ll also be a competition tomorrow (first Sunday of the month) – the 650^th – one a month plus Christmas.

It’s not a track record you see often, and hearty congratulations are in order. There have been all sorts of events en route to the milestone – I recall a competition where The Observer carefully printed the solution grid adjacent to the puzzle itself, which certainly lowered the error rate that month.  There have been words which Chambers seems to have invented (BOOKSIE, anyone?) and misplaced asterisks, and very few plurals. We’ve clued the gamut of gimmicks, including some new ones, so it’s been quite a ride.

There was the Superbrain competition in December 1984, which saw competitors lined up, exam-style, each with piles of volumes of the full Oxford English Dictionary for reference. The competition was sponsored by OUP, and the puzzles deliberately stepped outside Chambers to use the full vocabulary of the 20-odd volumes. (These days you would have to have a computer terminal and searching would not be quite so manual an activity. Much quicker, too.) That was won by Michael Macdonald-Cooper, who walked off with a new leather-bound set of the dictionary, conveniently replacing items lost in a recent fire in his library, if I remember rightly. I was second, and my set was not leather-bound – but it’s the same plot, isn’t it? (A couple of years later Michael’s appearance in the Mastermind chair – in a kilt, no less – led me to apply for and appear on the show in 1987.)

Such an event immediately prompts you to think of your own engagement with the series over the years.  For what follows, I’m indebted to John Tozer’s site andlit.org.uk. This allows anyone to see who won what and when, and to read the Azed slip, and covers the puzzles of Azed’s predecessor, Ximenes, as well.  In terms of slips, it also covers those of my memory…

There are some still entering today who appeared on the slip for the first competition puzzle (ORGIAST) – my own record is less extended though it goes back to May 1978 (PODESTA), which, John’s site kindly reminds me, is close on 44 years. My first contest was actually the preceding November (HUMECT) and it took me a while to get out of the also-rans. My first prize was a Third for GINGER, and my first First was for PROSAICAL in May 1988, which I wrote while largely confined to bed with a ripped back muscle. I managed to land a First for No. 1,500 (always nice to bag a round number), and the cup has made it out to New Zealand (SCANT (SNEAP) – a Wrong Number puzzle in 2009), which must be its furthest journey. The photos I took of its sojourn here have been lost in a hard disk crash, alas.

And sadly the cup itself was lost between London and Lancashire last year, though it would not surprise me if plans were afoot to replace it sooner or later. The booklets of clues handwritten by the contest winners are harder to replace, however.

For over twenty of those fifty years (1995-2016) I was privileged enough to be a rival to Azed, regularly setting the Beelzebub puzzles in The Independent on Sunday (and, of course, there are examples of them on this website). It’s a very different experience from setting a daily blocked puzzle – just getting the grid pattern right without boxing yourself into a corner was sometimes the prize. There is a greater range of words to choose from and a greater degree of freedom with clue types (composite anagrams being the most notorious). It is a stimulating mental exercise, though, and some of the pleasantest moments were when I would work through a sequence of Beelzebub clues on a sort of wave of inspiration.

So, once again, congratulations to Azed on the anniversary tomorrow.

No new puzzle this time round – you need to focus on Azed.  (Though if you have a moment today, you may want to take a quick look at Schindler’s List in the Inquisitor series in the i.)  Apart from the regular Friday appearances in The Independent, there’s also a Times Quick puzzle from Pedro on 15 March.

Next time round I hope to report on the latest APEX results and provide the puzzle. Any APEX voters who have yet to do their duty (there’s still a tie for third place to resolve) are reminded the closing date in March 11.

Well, it’s been a funny old week, with a cavalcade of the peculiar and uninformed descending on Wellington. They appear to be demanding the right to circulate freely while helping spread Covid. Their rights appear to be in danger (while the rights of anyone unfortunate to catch the disease are not to be considered), and mandates restricting movement are autocratic.  They have set up camp on Parliament’s lawn.  I imagine they are in favour of people doing so on their lawns.

Likewise I anticipate their campaign extending to the removal of the mandate that takes burglars out of circulation because they’re a risk. And I certainly don’t expect they’ll complain about the health system being overloaded once the disease spreads, and there isn’t an ambulance to cater to their emergency call. (Or perhaps they are more likely to be, to snaffle a line I noticed in C K McDonnell’s new novel this week, merely the sort of zealots who use the word ‘sheeple’ on social media. They certainly arrived herded in a convoy, so ‘sheeple’ seems appropriate.)

Meanwhile they block the roads in the cause of freedom, hurl eggs at people who have the audacity to wear masks in public, and harass pedestrians to the extent that the University and my place of work are both closed. Last time I saw a photo there were several in black shorts so I assume Roderick Spode has been busy. More seriously, there are white supremacists and threats to overthrow (and even murder) government figures.

There’s also an interview in today’s paper where they claim they’re being ignored by politicians and are despised by the local population. Gobsmacked, I was… Ah, well, there’s a heavy rain warning overnight.

OK, vent over, but it’s a nerve-wracking time. The puzzle this week is an Independent daily from 2018. As such, it is covered by the good people at fifteensquared. I’ll risk putting that link here, but you really should try the puzzle first.

Back here at the start of March (Omicron permitting), by which time there will have been an appearance by Pedro in the Magpie, and a Times 15×15 on 3 March. You probably already have a new BBC Music Magazine puzzle over there in the UK as well. Apex participants: thank you for your votes, or get your votes in, as appropriate – deadline 11 March. I’ll aim to get the 2021 puzzle up on the site soon afterwards – 19 March is possible, but more probably the first weekend in April.

This weekend includes 6 February, Waitangi Day, New Zealand’s national day. After a lot of wrangling about how the economy would collapse if there were any additional holidays (the inefficient are always suspicious of relaxation), it was eventually decided that the holiday could be ‘Mondayised’ – so Monday 7 February is a public holiday. It sits at the end of a little rush of local Monday holidays – January 31st was a holiday in Auckland, January 24th the one in Wellington, and so forth.  A full week at work is something of a rarity before mid-February, even without the trend towards working from home as Omicron takes hold.

This gives me a good long weekend to focus on the APEX clues for circulation, so this will be a short update. The fact that there has been more-or-less non-stop rain today has helped (though February came in with more excessive heat warnings, and some of the muggiest weather I can recall).

The puzzle I’ve put up today is one from the Church Times in 2016.  I have started experimenting with an interactive version (there are a couple elsewhere), particularly with the more straightforward blocked puzzles. But there’s still a PDF, and still a solution page, as I work my way through the possibilities. 

Upcoming puzzles: a bit more this time round. In addition to the usual Friday Independents (with a particularly nice Nina on 18 February, if I do say so myself), there’s a Times puzzle on 8 February, and one of its quick cousins a week later. There’s also a Telegraph Toughie from Kcit  on 17 February, nullifying last time’s statement.