Comments on: Guardian 24,623/Paul

By: Geoff

Geoff — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 18:02:58 +0000

Unusually, I got the theme almost immediately – seeing FAMOUS easily and getting BELGIAN straight after. However, it was still quite a slog to get though the rest of the puzzle, though very pleasurable! I found this much more difficult than his previous outings in the Guardian – the word play in the clues was tight and not very transparent. That’s an observation, not a criticism – I may just not have been at the top of my form…

(By comparison, I raced through this Saturday’s Araucaria faster than the average Rufus!)

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 20:45:26 +0000

Eileen, I suppose I read “every third character” as “one character in three”, not caring about where the sequence starts, so it could be LGI, AET or RCY, but I can see that under a strict interpretation only the last of these
I suppose the problem is that there’s no equivalent expression to “every other” when you’re picking one in three instead of one in two without actually mentioning the number three in some way.

Of course, to be ultra-pedantic there’s only one “third character”, namely R, and the next one is the sixth…

(This all reminds me of Alice’s discussion with the Red Queen about having jam “every other day”.)

By: Eileen

Eileen — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:46:33 +0000

Thanks, Andrew, and, also, thanks for the blog, which I omitted earlier, but how can LGI be ‘every third character’, when it begins with L? The only way to make it work, as I said before, is to include the ‘in’, which your explanatory example does not do. Am I being extraordinarily dim? [This is only a little niggle ]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:24:39 +0000

Eileen – I see what you mean, but I think “every third character in large city” is fine for LGI, just as “every other character in large city” could (less helpfully) give LREIY.

Richard – I also found the famous Belgians site you mention, though I suspect some of the 259 are not even all that famous in Belgium itself..

(Another famous, though fictional, Belgian that no one has mentioned so far is Hercule Poirot. )

By: Eileen

Eileen — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:36:23 +0000

I’m sorry: I meant the *surface* was excellent

By: Eileen

Eileen — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:12:16 +0000

I found this puzzle totally absorbing. I was completely led up the garden here, by getting Van Dyck and Magritte first and so, like Smutchin, being led to believe we were looking for artists [especially after getting Rubens, although that came later, to add to the confusion]. I was further misled by the fact that the theme answers were, unusually, separated and, in 17ac, LGI are not ‘every third character’, are they? – unless we start from ‘in’ and then it works? It took me a long time to be confident enough to put in the answer and then it all began to fall into place.

8ac: the golden arches of McDonalds – no problem

9ac: ‘homophone’?: again, my late Scottish husband and my present choirmaster [and, I have to say, I] would disagree!

I hope this is not going ‘off-comment’ but my explanation for 15ac was: ‘Me? No!’ inside SIN: typical me, not seeing the wood for the trees – a simple reversal!

20ac: for me, the last to go in and the ultimate jaw-dropping moment. Others might argue about this [mis]use of the theme but I thought it was brilliant. I’d been wondering all along about the absence of Tintin.

19dn: I’d never heard of this bird but the wordplay was impeccable and the wordplay excellent

Brilliant puzzle!

By: mhl

mhl — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:03:45 +0000

This was wonderfully rich puzzle, I thought – very enjoyable. Thanks for the post, Andrew – particularly for the example Brindisi from La Traviata. There’s a very minor typo in 13d, missing the “I +” before ARIES.

I really liked the M for McDonalds, from the instantly recognizable “golden arches” logo. It’s nice to see some new bits of crossword code being introduced.

There’s a nice page on suggestions for the “famous belgians” dinner party game here.

By: Richard Heald

Richard Heald — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:55:58 +0000

A good fun solve, helped enormously by my discovery of the website http://www.famousbelgians.net, which lists no fewer than 259 such! Even so, I was tripped up by HERITAGE, despite thinking early on that Herge must feature somewhere. Shame there was no room for Jean-Claude Van Damme though …

By: Brendan

Brendan — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:22:51 +0000

I conjecture that Paul has been reading “Love etc.” by one of my favorite authors, Julian Barnes, where there is a conversation about a dinner-party challenge to name six famous Belgians (apart from Simenon). Says Oliver: “Six, apart from Simenon? Easy-peasy. Magritte, Cesar Franck, Maeterlinck, Jacques Brel, Delvaux and Herge, creator of Tintin. Plus fifty percent of Johnny Hallyday, I add as a pourboire”.

By: smutchin

smutchin — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:42:39 +0000

I thought this was an outstanding effort from Paul – not one of his most difficult but brilliantly witty and lots of fun, not to mention extraordinarily economical with words.

I got 4d and 5d before I’d worked out the theme, and was looking for names of artists for a while until it clicked. It’s been said before that knowing the theme can make the rest of the puzzle too easy, but I didn’t think that was the case here – especially the very clever 20a (Eileen, if you’re reading, to answer your question last week: I got there in the end!)

On the other hand, all the names are well-enough-known (to the average Guardian reader, I’d argue) for reference sources not to be necessary – in fact, the only answers I had to check were non-themed ones: 1d BRINDISI (not familiar with the drinking song), 19d SERIEMA (got it from the wordplay but it’s a new word for me).

The only disappointment for me is that my personal favourite Belgians didn’t get a mention – Eddy Merckx, Jacques Brel and Audrey Hepburn. But I’m also a big fan of the Maigret and Tintin books, so glad Simenon and Herge got a mention.

Thanks for the blog, Andrew – couple of queries resolved. I’m still not sure about 8a – M=McDonald’s is perhaps a liberty too far. And I put FEMURS for 22d without understanding the wordplay… You’re right that sign=ARIES does seem to have cropped up a fair bit recently.