Guardian Genius 186 / Soup

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The Instructions:

Five solutions, not further defined, each suggest a literal substitution. All the clues are normal, but other solutions must have one of these five substitutions applied to them before entry in the grid. All grid entries are real words.

 

As usual, we were baffled by the instructions, so dived in and started to tackle the clues. It was obviously crucial to solve the five clues with no definition in order to begin to understand what the ‘substitutions’ were likely to be.

We quickly realised that 2d was one of the five, but had solved it as LINT (L – left – IN – T (‘lead’ of ‘the’) which clearly did not help.

In the end, we found the five clues, realised our mistake, and discovered the instruction as to how the other entries were to be altered:

12ac: MIST – ‘M is T’

21ac: GIST – ‘G is T’

2d: LIST – ‘L is T’

3d: STOP – ‘S to P’

26d: DISC – ‘D is C’

In the explanations below, we have listed the solutions as determined from the clues and the final entries following application of one of the five substitutions.

Thanks to Soup for the challenge – we enjoyed it!

 

Across  
  Solution Entry
5 IDEALISM IDEALIST Moving aside, I’m restraining student’s quest for perfection (8)
      An anagram of ASIDE I’M (anagrind is ‘moving’) round L (student)
8 LACKED TACKED Missed being cold, diving into water on 1st December (6)
      C (cold) ‘diving into’ LAKE (water) + D (first letter of December)
10 GAZELLES GAZETTES Detailed look at women’s mag’s horny beasts (8)
      GAZe (look) without the last letter or ‘de-tailed’ ELLE’S (women’s mag’s)
11 SLAYER PLAYER Metal band’s put on hen (6)
      ‘S LAYER (hen)
12 MIST MIST Switched T-mobile phone card (4)
      T SIM (mobile phone card) all reversed or ‘switched’
13 CREST CREPT At the apex, crown, ridge, edge, summit, top, peak (5)
      First letters or ‘apexes’ of Crown, Ridge, Edge, Summit and Top
15 GIGS TITS Broadcast Welsh footballer’s performances (4)
      A homophone (‘broadcast’) of GIGGS (Ryan Giggs – Welsh footballer)
16 GABLES TABLES Parts of houses start to be overcome by strong winds (6)
      B (first letter or ‘start’ of ‘be’) in or ‘overcome by’ GALES (strong winds)
18 MINDER TINDER Dislike TV show, Bodyguard (6)
      MIND (dislike) ER (TV show)
21 GIST GIST Corgi’s toenail clipping (4)
      Hidden in (‘clipping’) corGI’S Toenail
23 SLING STING In which gin is shaken with little drops of lime and soda? (5)
      Clue-as-definition: An anagram of GIN and L S (first letter or ‘little drops’ of Lime and Soda) – anagrind is ‘shaken’
24 PEGS PETS Margaret’s short nails (4)
      Double definition
25 MILLED TILLED Rolled and moved confusedly (6)
      Double definition
27 MARRYING TARRYING Joining merciless one culling badger, being heartless (8)
      MING (‘merciless one’ – as in the Flash Gordon comic strip) round or ‘culling’ hARRY (badger) without the ‘h’ or ‘heartless’
29 ELUDES ETUDES Avoids introductions, avoiding introductions? (6)
      prELUDES (introductions) without the first two letters or ‘introductions’
30 LAMENESS LATENESS Travelling salesmen’s injury (8)
      An anagram of SALESMEN – anagrind is ‘travelling’
 
Down
1 GAMEST TAMEST With the greatest willingness, having destroyed core, reinstalled magnets (6)
      An anagram of MAGnETS without the middle letter or ‘core’ – anagrind is ‘reinstalled’
2 LIST LIST Left in the lead…(4)
      L (left) IST (first – ‘in the lead’)
3 STOP STOP …second best (4)
      S (second) TOP (best)
4 RESENT REPENT Take umbrage with “No Parking Here!” (6)
      pRESENT (here) without the ‘p’ (parking)
6 DUALISM DUALIST Guildsman discovered unusual belief in good and evil (7)
      An anagram of gUILDSMAn without the first and last letters or ‘dis-covered’ – anagrind is ‘unusual’
7 MOSSES TOSSES Prophet holding stem of sacred plants (6)
      MOSES (prophet) round or ‘holding’ first letter or ‘stem’ of Sacred
9 CHARMED CHARTED As if by magic, protected church with guns (7)
      CH (church) ARMED (protected with guns). Thanks to Tony and Soup.
13 DRESS CRESS Ursula, not a new frock (5)
      anDRESS (Ursula Andress, the actress) without ‘a’ and ‘n’ (new)
14 LYING TYING Flat out false (5)
      Double definition
17 BOGGLED BOTTLED Couldn’t imagine John Glenn’s chief was in charge (7)
      BOG (John – as in toilet) G (first or ‘chief’ letter of Glenn) LED (was in charge)
19 REGINAS RETINAS Queens (not queen) broke earrings (7)
      An anagram of EARrINGS without one ‘r’ (queen) – anagrind is ‘broke’
20 DISMAL DISTAL Gloomy sergeant major’s about-face? On the contrary (6)
      SM (sergeant major) in DIAL (face) – the wording of the clue suggests that SM should go round DIAL, but this is reversed by ‘on the contrary’
22 IDIOMS IDIOTS One turns down eating duck, hot potato or a piece of cake? (6)
      I (one) DIMS (turns down) round or ‘eating’ O (duck)
24 SAYING PAYING Convincing, but not with expression (6)
      SwAYING (convincing) without the ‘w’ (with)
26 DISC DISC Two police officers: one paid, one voluntary (4)
      DI (detective inspector – paid) SC (special constable – voluntary)
28 RUGS RUTS Covers uncovered wooden baskets (4)
    tRUGS (wooden baskets) without the first letter or ‘cover’ (in a down clue)

 

22 comments on “Guardian Genius 186 / Soup”

  1. Thanks Bertandjoyce and Soup. I liked this a lot. It all came together at just the right place, with some inventive clueing along the way.

  2. Thanks Bertandjoyce and Soup for an enjoyable puzzle and good blog.

    I believe that this is the third Soup genius.  The first was very clever with couplets of identical across clues, which made the solution not too difficult though, although brilliantly conceived.  The second was also very interesting but not too hard either, although more so than the first. This was both interesting and quite difficult, so I hope Soup continues in this vein.

    I wonder if he realised that there were two possible substitutions for the answer for 18a.  I originally put in MINCER which was equally valid as an answer until it did not fit with other solutions.  That threw me quite a bit.

    If I have any very very slight gripes they would be that three of the five changes were from L, G,and M to a T.  It would have been nice if other letters other that T could have appeared.  Also if two letters are to be changed as in Gazelles, I think that the possibility of double changes should have been explained.  This was also the case in a slightly different way for 15A.

    Finally having the same letter changed for the across and down clues , as in 5A/7D and 24D/27A was a little disappointing.

    However i am being VERY nit picky as I could not have created a puzzle half as good.

    A great and enjoyable puzzle.

  5. Very enjoyable, and solved a bit quicker than some. I guessed how the device would work and started looking for a clue for ATOM. Although that wasn’t there I got MIST quite soon, which confirmed the principle.

    In 19a REGINAS, “broke” seems a bit iffy. Maybe ‘broken’ or ‘break’ better? The surface, which isn’t great anyway, would suffer. Maybe “Queen’s broken earring” with R removed some other way?

    @B&J, for CHARMED, I think the def includes “protected” (a charmed life: one protected as if by magic); armed = “with guns”.

    @Gordon, how do you get MINCER?

  6. I completed this in dribs and drabs over several days. I got the general idea fairly quickly, but in the end SLAYER/PLAYER defeated me, as metalbands are not my thing, and I didn’t feel like googling.

    Very enjoyable, anyway. I like a Genius to last a while. Thank you Soup, and B&J for the explanations. What will the next one bring?

  7. I hadn’t spotted the possibility of MINCER (D to C in Minder, which incidentally is also a TV program) but I did hold-off filling in 15a as I wondered if it might be GITS or TIGS.

  8. Hi Tony @5

    Just as DuncT explained.

    When I was a youngish teenager, without much success with girls, my mates and I used to call the actress Ursula Undress.  Wishful thinking.

  9. Many thanks to Soup for persisting with the idea we took to Boatman’s Masterclass earlier this year – it was lovely to see the finished product.

    While we had a headstart in knowing how the theme would work (although not the actual five substitutions required), we very much enjoyed working through the crossword and it still took us a few hours over a few sessions to complete it!

    Now to start thinking about our next theme…

  10. Thanks for the review, B&J (only correction being as Tony@5 has mentioned with ‘protected’ being part of the definition) – very glad you enjoyed it.

    Carriage: thank you for the idea! (‘What can be done with the word ‘AFORE’ – ie A for E’?)

    MINDER->MINCER: yes, this (and SLAYER->STAYER, LAMENESS->TAMENESS, and various others which I discarded when I was setting) was sort of intentional. My red line was ‘is it gettable once the whole puzzle’s done?’. If there were two options for an unchecked letter, then that wasn’t fair; if they were for checked letters (or one unchecked and one checked) then that was fair game. It’s also why I said ‘solutions must have one of these five substitutions applied to them’ rather than ‘substitutions should be applied to solutions’: one and exactly one of the five applied (even if it was twice, which I admit was possibly a little sneaky, but then this is a Genius after all, and I don’t want to have the instructions *too* clear!).

    Gordon@2: this is my fourth. The first was the double-clue one, which in hindsight was a weird one to have as a Genius, but the wretched thing took so long to set that I wanted to get it out there. The second was a bit harder, the third had extra letters in solutions which had to be removed and used to resolve clashes. The next will, I think, be about as easy as this one, if not a bit easier.

    Tony@5: REGINAS is a horrible word, both in English and to clue. (REGINAE would be better. I spent at least an hour trying to rework that corner of the grid but it just wasn’t having it, and given this was the 20th grid which I started for this puzzle I knew that there were likely to be very few valid fills.)

    Gordon@2: the substitutions to Ts. My first instinct was to make the puzzle so just the across clues were modified, and I did a grid for that which had seven modifiers. But that only took an hour to make and I felt it was a bit of a cop-out: Geniuses need to have that aura of mystery about them. Surely, surely there was a way to make all words modified? I started out having as many changers as possible in, but I was sorely limited. Grid-filling’s hard at the best of times, and I only had 4150 words in my list of potentially changeable ones (compared to about 55k in my ‘normal’ word list). It meant that I very quickly ran into problems. So, after probably about ten or fifteen hours of fruitless messing about, I started to narrow it down to a handful of changers which gave me the most options. Single-letter substitutions were the way forward (I’d spent ages trying to use ABATTOIR to clue ABATE to IRE!) and the five I chose made up were the ‘top five’ of the substitutes, making up about 1300 of the 4150. There are probably more I could’ve found using a better word list, but this is the one I had to hand. Doing a grid fill with just 1300 words when five of the words are fixed is nigh impossible; Crossword Compiler just gave up and cried at me, hence the weird grid (my only slight sadness about the whole thing – I wish the SW and NE were tied in with another block).

    Right, that’s enough procrastinating from me – I’m supposed to be writing my first year report for my PhD!

    H/S

  11. Thanks to Soup for the puzzle and origin story.

    We got 2d, and hence the mechanism, quite soon, but were intially looking for xTOy answers (especially ATOM, Tony!) so took a while to get the other substitutions.  It also didn’t occur to us to replace all occurrences of the target letter, so 15a held us up, but it was fair enough.

    All in all, good fun, and kept us busy for a few days before Christmas!

     

  12. When Hamish/Soup mentioned AFORE it reminded me of an old Genius puzzle which I couldn’t find on the Guardian website or on fifteensquared, so I wasted some time looking through an pile of old crosswords before remembering that I had some even older crosswords in another place, and it was there that I found my printed copy of Genius 56 by Brummie. This puzzle had special instructions “The answers to twelve of the clues should be changed, in accordance with either 12 across or 14 down, before entry in the grid. Each of these clues contains a superfluous word which hints at the grid entry.” and 14 down was AFORE meaning A for E.

  13. Hamish, thanks for a fascinating account of the struggle to set a Genius. I wonder how you produced the candidate lists. I was reminded of a clue in an alphabetical of yours where the definition was something like “How much more I get for setting a Prize puzzle”, answer: Z??? Hopefully, the fee for a Genius was a little more, even if it could never really compensate for those long hours sweating over a hot grid!

    @Gordon, DuncT, I see: MINDER = TV show & bodyguard. Of course that doesn’t take into account “dislike”, does it?

  14. Hey Tony –

    The candidate lists were pretty straightforward, given I used to write software! It’s a couple of programs; the first says ‘Look at the word list and tell me all the words which are of the format XisY, XtoY, XforY, where X<>Y, the length of X and Y is >0’. Then, for each of those, ‘For each changer word, look at the whole word list; for each word within the word list, make the change, and if the result is a word which is within the word list and which isn’t the same as the original word, then make a note of it’.

    For the alpha puzzle, it was ‘O how much more I’m paid to clue in rhyme’ – I make sure the pairs of clues are rhyming pentameter couplets, because hey, that’s how Araucaria did it! I don’t think I’m allowed to say how much I get paid, but I do it for the fun of it and the payment’s a nice bonus.

  15. Hi Tony @13

    You are making this far too difficult for yourself.

    You are usually so much on the ball, I wonder if you are just teasing me?

    As per the blog by Bertandjoyce.  Dislike = Mind; TV program = ER.  The answer is therefore Minder, which is slang for a bodyguard.  Now through nothing more than complete coincidence we have the appearance of two other TV programs.  Firstly ‘Minder’ [which was an enjoyable TV program with Dennis Waterman and George Cole – at least in the early seasons].  Also, by similar coincidence ‘Bodyguard’ is also a current British TV show watched here in USA by my wife on Netflix.  Neither have anything to do with the wordplay or the answer.

    Now, as per Soup’s instructions, we need to change a letter before entry to the grid.  Instead of changing the M to a T to get TINDER, I originally changed the D to a C to get ‘MINCER’.  Both are valid, but only one fits the other grid crossing entry.  As Hamish points out @10, and to be frank I had not noticed, there were two other double possibilities as well at 11A and 30A.

    I charge you with having too many mince pies and whiskies over the Christmas and New Year period!

     

  16. Gordon, I plead ‘Not Guilty’ to both charges! (I’m teetotal for alcohol and sugar!). However, I was obviously talking bolleaux for whatever reason. Thanks for humouring an old duffer.

  17. Hi Tony

    Didn’t you have a quick drink when you won the prize about a year ago?

    By the way, I’m 67 – so hardly a spring chicken!

  18. @Hamish

    Aha! Now you mention it, I believe I could (at one time, certainly) have written a little program like that. Nice!

    Yes, that was the one! Thoroughly enjoyable! I still have it in the back of my mind that I will try and do one of those one day, but still in the shallow end for now.

    Good luck with the report. I wrote this clue once for an answer in a puzzle I had to scrap in the end:

    Green gas released in all growing algae (9)

    Can’t guarantee that’s a scientifically accurate statement, mind.

    @Gordon, make that “young duffer”, then (65)

    Quick drink? Nah! I did celebrate though, a little

  20. Hi Tony and/or Soup, [or Gaufrid too] if any of you are still around to answer this.

    I have never understood why many commentators/bloggers today talk about across clues and down clues as being any different from each other.  I regularly see a negative comment about an across clue that “this really only works for a down clue”.  I never heard any of my contemporaries at University mention this is the 1970s, nor any of my work friends when we would often compete to do the Guardian in the quickest time at lunchtime, in the 1980s or 1990s.  It is only in the past 5-10 years that people have seemingly complained about this.

    I always treat any solution to a clue as if it were written on a piece of paper in a normal across fashion.  I take left, up, first, north etc. in exactly the same way and opposite of right, down, last, south etc.  It is obvious what the compiler means.  Can they not use a bit of trickery?  Isn’t that what compiling is about?

    Anyone complaining that this ‘confusion’ is unfair is being ridiculously picky in my view.  What do they want – indicators after each clue stating whether the answer is an anagram, a hidden word, a double meaning etc?

    If so then stick to American cryptic crosswords which are available, albeit rarely, but are as boring as f***

    Rant over.

    Gordon

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