Comments on: Guardian 24618 / Rufus

By: Derek Lazenby

Derek Lazenby — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:38:58 +0000

Late on parade and yes even the dunce of the class had his fastest ever finish. Entertaining fun rather than exhausting fun. I think we all agree on that. Just goes to show that it doesn’t have to be hard to be enjoyable.

I was late ‘cos of visit to hospital. Bandages off, stitches out! The quack rather took the shine off it by saying that although it’s been 3 months, tibia’s usually take 6 and I’m on schedule. But at least I’m allowed to put a bit of weight on it now, still can’t drive though, wouldn’t be insured until I’m at full load bearing. Bye bye pub, sigh.

Last week a query about the weekly online Quiptic produced the response “did I want to blog it”? There also was a warning that weekly blogs don’t really take off too. I don’t mind doing it if it’s wanted. I suspect, despite the rarified solving level on this blog, I’m not the only one here who does that puzzle. My e-mail is an ntlworld of the com variety and my first name is replaced by “d dot”. Send me some mails and if I get a few I’ll think more seriously about doing it.

I have my bit of crossword software that I mentiond working, just doing the help file and installation wrapper. Watch this space for news.

By: Phaedrus

Phaedrus — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 21:39:36 +0000

Nice to see Rufus work his trademark nautical clue in again, old sea dog that he is…!

By: steven

steven — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:29:16 +0000

Jim, in the U.K when we have soft boiled eggs we cut bread into dip sized slices which we call soldiers .

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:14:05 +0000

Toast reference not so obvious to us in the States. Never did work out the cryptic part.

By: ray

ray — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:43:37 +0000

Worked through most of this fairly quickly (I think I must be getting tunned to Rufus) – but had to fill in 13d from the crossing letters. Then spent nearly an hour trying to work out why ? Eventually my better half (who hates cryptics) took one look and pointed out the blindingly obvious toast reference — doh!!

By: Geoff

Geoff — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:16:52 +0000

24ac is definitely the connoisseurs’ clue in today’s puzzle: two words and only nine letters, with a perfectly respectable but utterly misleading surface reading, is a triumph of the art.

Two-word double defs, though not easy to come up with, are certainly the best way to get one’s word count down in crossword compilation. However, my personal preference as a solver is not for crosswords which have a high proportion of such clues. To solve them, you need to trawl through your mental thesaurus looking for coincident alternative meanings of the two parts. Then it comes! (Single crpytic defs are worse in this sense – they rely on a sudden flash of recognition). Other types of clue – anagrams, containers, charades – at least allow the solver to work the answer out by degrees.

By: smutchin

smutchin — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:58:28 +0000

And talking of elegant double definitions, today’s 24a is a perfect example of the art.

By: smutchin

smutchin — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:56:35 +0000

Thanks, Mhl, that’s really interesting. Not to mention reassuring – I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s insanely obsessive enough to conduct that kind of survey!

Following on from earlier comments, for those whose appetite for Rufus wasn’t fully satisfied by today’s Guardian puzzle, note that today’s FT prize puzzle is by Dante. I’m printing it off from the FT website for the train journey home.

By: mhl

mhl — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:38:00 +0000

smutchin: looking at word lengths in clues is a nice idea. It sounds as if this is very similar to your results:

http://mythic-beasts.com/~mark/random/guardian-crossword-trivia/word-lengths.png

When I try to set crosswords, I tend to find that the hardest clues to write are elegant double definitions…

By: Geoff

Geoff — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:31:22 +0000

The case of fort/fought is even more fraught – in the richer Scots accents, the ‘gh’ of ‘fought’ is also pronounced as a guttural (as in loch)!

The rhotic/non-rhotic problem often seems to crop up. It strikes me that a very large proportion of the homophones in non-rhotic English accents arise precisely because of the loss of ‘r’ after vowels in the middle of words.