Guardian Genius 197 / Soup

32 comments on “Guardian Genius 197 / Soup”

1. Thanks to Gaufrid and Soup

   I liked this a lot.

   As the blog says, there are one or two places where the vowels are not definite ( exacting in 10a, using in 28a are possible alternatives ), but none that detract from “knowing” the answer.

   Lots of work went into compiling this.

2. I wish I could say I enjoyed this! Let’s say I relished the challenge. A few went in easily enough but I found this very hard going. And unfortunately I now see I got 23a wrong (I put HEAD-HUNTING for some silly reason).

   Thanks Soup for an excellent challenge! I hope you enjoyed compiling it. There were some very good ones in there: 21a, 4d, 5d and 18d were lovely.

   I really struggled with 24d (don’t think of wretch as being a synonym for rogue, and retch=strain is a bit of a stretch isn’t it?) and eventually basically guessed it.

3. Wow – to both Soup and Gaufrid.  Fantastic puzzle and fantastic blog.

   Unlike Gaufrid, I took a little longer – actually finishing at 5.30 pm today!  I was stuck on 6D for 2-3 days as explained below.

   I have two differences with Gaufrid’s excellent blog.  For the DD in 2D I had “Like Black Stone”/”Jetty”, i.e. three words then one.

   For 26A I had the answer, but could not parse it fully.  It may be that Gaufrid is correct but it does not work for me.  The ‘T’ in Baccarat is silent in both French and English.  So ‘RAT’ cannot be seen a the same as the spoken ending of Baccarat which is “Rah”.  I also was not aware of the PEACH meaning and thought PCH was EPOCH.  So I had my ‘support one epoch’  AS BACH AN EPOCH, that is BACK ERA, much closer to the pronunciation for our ‘auditor’ of BACCARAT.

   My absolute nightmare with 6D came from me finding the spacing on the printed grid almost impossible to discern on occasions.  For example it is very difficult to see that there is a space between ‘MRK’ and ‘N’ in 27D.  Similar difficulties apply elsewhere.  I blame the editor and not SOUP of course.

   I had -S-Y for 6D fairly early on, but could not make sense of the clue.  I thought STRT was possibly STRUT as the definition, so decided the answer could be SASHAY, based upon the Force being the SAS and that there is a famous Canadian chef called HAY, but the rest of the wordplay did not work.  I then had ideas of PESKY or RISKY for the definition of ‘SUSPECT’ since CHIEF could be KEY and FORCE could be ‘P’ in Physics anyhow.  I could not see how RISKY worked though so got nowhere with that either.  Finally I noticed that all the across clues started with a capital letter as did most, but not all, of the down clues.  It dawned on me [only today!] that those with a capitalised consonant were the start of the clue, but 3D must be like 1D, 6D, 12D, 15D, 16D and 24D in that they needed at least one vowel before the initial letter which, although a consonant, was not capitalised.  The only word I could find like this was the archaic ‘ASTRUT’.  That did not help much.  I then noticed that the start of the clue in 6D also was slightly to the right of all the other down clues from their number so the penny finally dropped that there was a whole word mising before STRT.  That had to be ‘A’ or I’.  For some reason that helped me over the line, even if I am not sure how [perhaps it was the Bowmore 10 year I was drinking].  A very close call.  Maybe everyone else saw this much earlier than I did.

   My other problem of my own making was jumping to conclusions about the missing letters and often inadvertently adding phantom consonants that I then failed to check for some time.  For example I immediately took FRC’S in 6D as being FRANCE’s.

   Each puzzle by SOUP has got progressively more difficult and I shudder to think what might come next, perhaps “A UE I O OOA” [A Puzzle with no consonants!].  On a serious note I wonder whether the Guardian would allow a ‘Skeleton type puzzle’ like the Sunday Express used to do [and may still do as I have not looked at one for 40 odd years] in the 1960s.

   By the way I know a slightly risque joke, from my school days in the late 1950s about Cockaleekie soup.  I’m sure SOUP knows it!

   Thanks again SOUP for keeping me awake at night – particularly last night over 6D.

   Gordon

4. By the way I see that Genius 198 came out a week ago.  I thought it always came out the Monday after the close of the prior one.  Does anyone know the reason for this?

5. Hello –

   Thank for the blog, Gaufrid!

   A couple of comments:

   My answer to 24a was ’round the clock’ not ‘around the clock’ but there’s no way of knowing that.
   2d: I had ‘Like a black stone / pier’
   16d: I had ‘song’ not ‘snog’ but I like yours better!
   23d: I had an ‘a’ before ‘little’, which is unnecessary, but makes a slightly better surface
   27d: Again, I had an ‘a’ before ‘mark’.

   For these single-letter words I asked Hugh to make sure that there was a double space where necessary. It’s subtle but (as Gordon found!) important.

   For 26a, it was ‘Game for the auditor to support one peach’. That was actually one of the few that was edited before it went in; it was ‘support a whistleblower’ before, but Hugh pointed out that RATs tend to be telling when they shouldn’t be, and whistleblowers when they should be. The clue works ok; the homophone is just for BACK and then ‘A RAT’ is straight; it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t sound the same.

   The puzzle was surprisingly easy to set. I generated a list of potential words by taking the ‘normal’ word list and removing all vowels, then used grid-filling software to compile a sensible one. I had to use an unusual grid with more short words because otherwise I’d have had a surfeit of 11+-letter words which are much harder to clue. I knew I wanted CONSONANTS and RHYTHMS in there, and the rest were essentially random. Clues were straightforward – I just wrote normal ones then removed the vowels!

   My next puzzle will be easier; I’m nearly finished on it!

   As for 198, I guess that puzzles come out on the first Monday of the month, and the deadline for the month is the first Saturday of the next month. In occasional cases, like this month, the two overlap; perhaps the release should be ‘the Monday after the first Saturday in the month’.

   Hope I haven’t caused people *too* much of a headache with this one 🙂

   H/S

6. Oh, and re a vowel-only one – I don’t think so!

   https://twitter.com/HamishSymington/status/1191422596778221568/photo/1

7. Don’t always do the Genius puzzles, but I do the Soup ones and this was a belter, even though all the clues were ‘normal’.

   I wondered if there was much checking, after writing the clues, that there were not possible alternative ways of putting the vowels back.  People always bang on about cryptic clues being defective if there’s more than one possible solution, when actually it’s not realistic to check (and would be a terrible waste of time anyway) because knowing the correct answer blinds you to anything else.  These would be more likely to suffer from ambiguity, but I expect the checking would be just as impossible.

   Thanks Soup, well done Gaufrid

8. James @7: No, no checking at all, merely hope 🙂

   Thank you so much for your kind comments – it means a lot!

9. Hamish @5

   Thanks for providing the corrections and background. I can explain the missing ‘a’ in my interpretation of 2dn, 23dn and 27dn. Due to advancing years and cataracts, I always copy the text in pdf versions of puzzles and then paste it into Word so that I can increase the font size to make it easier to read with my failing eyesight. Unfortunately this process stripped out the double spaces and so I never saw them.

10. Gaufrid @9: Yes, Word is ‘helpful’ like that and often just removes them without asking. It made the proofing and editing process somewhat tricky, as I had to keep checking every time that they hadn’t been removed!

    I wish I had thought of ‘snog’.

11. A unique experience! The instruction was clear enough, but some of the clues were very difficult to read successfully and solve, mostly because so many of the smaller consonant clusters could represent many different words, but also because we were not given the word lengths of the answers (only of the entries).

    After struggling to solve 15 of these clues I put the puzzle aside for a while. An opportunity to compare notes with someone similarly placed couldn’t be turned down, and I benefited by getting four more answers in different parts of the grid. I eventually brought this to a successful conclusion – an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

    i was impressed with the overall quality of this puzzle, and in awe that a vowelless puzzle as good as this was achievable. The clues were excellent and pitched just right, allowing for the inevitable difficulties created by the design, although I now see (from Soup’s own comment) that it’s possible to achieve this just by writing good clues in the first place!

    I’d like to highlight 9a DOTTED LINES (my favourite clue) for its neat ‘double misdirection’ – in the vowelless shorthand and in the full cryptic clue. First, ‘yng’ looked like ‘young’ but was really ‘eyeing’; second, ‘extreme’ looked like part of ‘far-right group’ (defining EDL) but was in fact a separate component (‘OTT’).

    Mny thnks t Sp fr n xcllnt Nvmbr pzzl nd t Gfrd fr th vry clr blg.

12. Thanks Soup for a real challenge, and Gaufrid for the blog (particularly the explanation of GRUDGE – I knew it had to be the answer but had no idea why).

    The spaces and offsets were important and, as has been mentioned, they were not always obvious on the printout. But this is a problem with printing, not editing. The online clues were clear and I found it helpful to refer back to them a few times to check I was getting things right.

13. Oh this was such a brilliant puzzle, it totally fried our brains! We spent the whole month going backwards and forwards with it, still getting the occasional breakthrough really late on and having that wonderful feeling of clarity and ‘how did I not see that!’ moments. By the end there were only 6 left to do and we were stumped. Couldn’t wait for the blog (thanks clever Gaufrid), and what a pleasure and a treat to have Soup joining in the conversation. It’s been one of our all time favourites, fun to do, beaten at the end but not by much. Win, win!

14. Working from a print-out of the pdf, I found it quite hard to determine where all the spaces and double spaces were, but it was actually possible to do so in every case.  What might have helped is that there were remarkably few instances of the words ‘a’ and ‘I’:  there were four ‘a’s and only one ‘I’ [beginning a clue].

    Using a fixed-space typeface would have made the spacing 100% clear, but that would have been non-standard, and the result would not have ‘looked’ so good.

15. Thankyou Gaufrid for putting us out of our misery!  After 2 weeks or so,we’d only got 12 answers.

    I liked the idea, but for certain clues, there are multiple possibilities for several words, making it hard to say if one has not yet found the right question, or is just being slow getting the answer!  For example, with 2d, I couldn’t get past “Like black satin pair” (maybe it’s just me?).

    And I noticed the space before “strt” in 6d, but failed to grasp its significance, so wrestled with it being Astarte, which admittedly meant an unlikely clue…

    My salutations to anyone who finished it – I’d be interested to know how may correct entries were received.

16. Mr Beaver @15, no, not just you! I had ‘Like black satin’ for a long time. I also had ‘song’ where Gaufrid has ‘snog’ and despite Soup preferring that interpretation I feel pleased I had the ‘right’ one. As for ‘one peach’, I decoded that as ‘an apache’ (“a lawless ruffian or hooligan in Paris or elsewhere”, Chambers) which seemed fair enough for ‘A RAT’ (I’d already guessed BACCARAT). Mch bttr, dn’t y thnk, Hmsh? 🙂

17. I mean ‘Like black satin pair’.

18. Clearly Mr. Beaver @15 as well as Tony @16 and 17 have dirty minds.

    It must be the Guides they were thinking of!

    I am surprised that nobody else has problems with inserting additional ‘phantom’ consonants which I managed to do for about a half dozen clues before noticing this and taking more care.

    I also see that  Hamish [who looks about 30-40 years younger than I had imagined him to be] didn’t take up my request to tell the puerile joke that I found funny when I was about 9 years old.

19. Rlly njyd ths pzzl.  kpt pttng t dwn nd pckng t bck p thrght th mnth.  ddnt thnk   ws gng t fnsh t t n stg.

    Thnks sp nd Gfrd.

20. Tony@16: That’s three potential and valid readings for that clue now…! Others: Thanks for kind words. Gordon@18 – You didn’t request to tell it! 🙂 But do go ahead…! I’m 40 next year, and being run into the ground by a) a 4-year-old daughter and b) studying for a PhD in botany…

21. Hamish @20.  OK you twisted my arm!

    A waiter sees a diner, who has an empty soup dish in front of him, mopping up some liquid with his napkin from his knees that are soaking wet.  The waiter remarks “Cockaleekie”.  The diner says …no no… I just spilled my soup.

    I told you it was puerile.

    As for Botany.  Why was the cactus so smug?  It was an arrogant prick.

    Gaufrid will probably ban me now.

22. 🙂

23. Hamish @22.  If you are still there, what do you think of my idea of a ‘Skeleton’ style genius puzzle?

24. Turns out I need vowels a lot more than they need me. That was the hardest Genius I can remember

25. Gordon@23: I don’t know whether Hugh would publish it, but I’ve certainly set and published some in 1 Across. I don’t find them particularly hard to solve – I don’t know whether that’s because I’m a compiler, though.

26. Hi Hamish @25

    I am surprised that Hugh might not publish that form of crossword.  He has, for example, allowed Auracaria in the past to publish a Genius called ‘Printer’s Devilry [from memory] which was not even a cryptic crossword at all.  It simply expected someone to work out missing letters/words from text.  Difficult?, yes: cryptic? absolutely not.  From memory it got totally panned which it should have been.  So Hugh would possibly baulk at a good cryptic crossword using a different grid more than baulk at a crossword form that goes against all convention of being cryptic, but using a regular grid?

    On the point of difficulty, if a compiler developed a Genius puzzle, to fit a normal Guardian crossword grid, with a certain amount of difficulty – but then removed most of the numbers and black squares [is there a name for these?] from the grid then surely it would become more difficult?  I am not suggesting the Sunday Express skeletons were hard but that is because the clues were fairly easy to begin with.  The difficulty must lie in a mix of tough clues and hard grid?

    Just a thought.

27. Gordon, if I’ve understood rightly what it is you’re talking about, puzzles like that are known in some quarters as ‘carte blanche’. The black squares which are in normal (non-barred) puzzles are known as ‘blocks’ and such a puzzle as a ‘blocked’ crossword.

28. Hi Tony

    Thanks for the enlightenment about blocks etc, and also introducing the word ‘apache’ to me.

29. A pleasure, @Gordon. ‘Apache’ was new to me too, and having thought of the possibility of so expanding ‘pch’, I was delighted to find the entry in Chambers which seemed to justify it. Note that the pronunciation is French style: apash.

30. Just been looking at the Guardian’s annotated solutions and I notice 15d (eYePaTCH) is parsed as a Spoonerism, “pie ‘atch”. Late change?

    Also, ABH is explained as “aggravated bodily harm”, whereas in fact the offence is (assault occasioning) ‘actual bodily harm'(Offences Against the Person Act, 1861, section 47).

31. Tony@30: Yes, late change – this was deemed too hard!

    Gordon@26: I don’t know whether it would be deemed ‘not a crossword’ or anything like that. I’ll ask! Printer’s Devilry puzzles have a long history; they are an absolute pig to set, and I have not enjoyed solving any.

     

32. Araucaria’s Printer’s Devilry was a nightmare. It was in a normal blocked grid so didn’t have crossing letters building up in the same way as a barred grid.

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