Guardian Genius 201

21 comments on “Guardian Genius 201”

1. Well and truly beaten by this one. Rather impressed by it now it’s been explained. Wish I’d persevered.

   Thanks to Paul and Duncanshiell.

2. Well done to duncanshiell – and anyone else who got there – for finishing this…

   I finally gave up yesterday afternoon – three short, after chipping away at it all month…I had all the ‘conventional’ ones (if anything about this puzzle is conventional!), but failed to think outside the box with numbers being split over other words. Still trying to get my head round the Trinidad and Tobago one!

   Just hoping that tomorrow’s puzzle is more tractable, as it is my turn to blog next…

3. Thanks to Paul and duncanshiell

   1a TWIN (double) goes around O (rounds ordered primarily) by PH (establishment serving drinks)

4. Yes a toughie, and I too had many attempts through the month. Ended up with 4 unsolved, but 3 of those were inflationary, including the 2 splits. And I took external help with the Lenin one. When told what the Caribbean answer is, Mrs Lippi’s response in broad Scottish was ‘a load of sh**e’. Nevertheless thanks to setter and blogger, and stay safe everyone.

5. Very much in the same boat as McRapper – chipped away at this for ages, was fairly smug about eventually getting the double substitution in 5d (although with it being Paul, I immediately thought of sex for ‘have relations’ :))

   And we did think of Trinidad & Tobago in the context of neighbouring states, but it never occurred to us to replace split ‘numbers’ (or backward ones for 20d).

   Congrats to Duncan for finishing this – and furnishing the explanations – I wonder how many did finish it ?

   I suppose you’re right – the Genius is meant to be hard, but I did feel this verged on the insoluble, well it was for me 🙁

6. Thanks Duncan. Another failure here. I thought I was doing well getting the double substitution, but I couldn’t crack the key long answer. Mind you, I’m not keen on Paul’s “sounds like” clues at the best of times, so I was put off from the start with “for=four” example in the instructions. No excuses though, as has been said, it’s not meant to be easy.

7. I was a DNF – beaten by BOAT RACE and with West Indians.
   I agree with much of what has been already said (including Mrs Lippi’s thoughtful response!).

   I think that Victor Borge would have turned Fortitude into Fortythreede (I can even hear him saying it my head, but the voices have been getting worse lately).

   Thanks and congratulations to duncanshiell for unravelling it all.

8. I detested this puzzle and for only the second time since I started doing the geniuses, about 12 years ago could not be bothered to continue after giving it my all for 2-3 days.  It is not that I could not have done more, it is that I found the whole process contrived, uninteresting, and unsatisfying from a setter who can be excellent but increasingly too ‘clever’ for his own good.  The other time I stopped bothering was with the Printers’ Devilry by Auracaria which in hindsight and comparison to this from Paul was wonderful.

   I was not impressed by Victor Borge when he introduced this concept either.  Perhaps my sense of humour is different than others.

   I was that I had had Tony’s recent problems of not having had a printer.

   I accept that some, including Duncanshiell liked this.  Each to their own.

9. Sadly not for me; too many ‘non-standard’ answers (I’d have preferred all of them to be of the kind ‘FORT WORTH -> FORTHREERTH’; with containments and split homophones it’s an exercise in working back from a solution rather than working forward from the clue. I usually like Paul’s puzzles, but this one felt a bit too far.

   I test solved tomorrow’s puzzle; it’s a lot easier than this one (thank goodness!) and, in my view, an absolute corker.

10. I really struggled over this, in particular with 9a and 17,14,8.
    I thought they were a bit unfair.
    I’d only given up on two Genius before, Boatman’s Directions and Soup’s Missing Vowels, but this was a 3rd.

11. Extremely dissatisfied. The instructions say that solutions contain ‘numbers (or homophones of numbers).’ In my world, BRACE, TRIO, and FOURSOME are neither numbers nor homophones of numbers, and the ‘to’ in TObago is not a homophone of ‘two.’ I vaguely remember the Borge routine, and splitting up the numbers would have made complete nonsense of his hokey aural wordplay. These instructions blow right past clever misdirection over to being flat-out wrong.

12. I loved Victor Borge and I loved his inflationary language.

    i hated this puzzle and now that I’ve seen the solution, I hate it even more.

    The whole point of the language was to make us laugh as we heard the stories of Goldilocks and the Four Bears and Sleeping Beauty who was, “three twoderful five words”. Tonight would become threenight but Tobago would be unchanged as it’s pronounced toe-bago rather than two-bago.

    Well done Duncan for persevering but poor VB must be rotnineing in his threemb.

13. Sorry, more cavils. I just listened to the Borge routine again. ‘Fivenicnine’ would have fit right in. Borge did expand the inflationary possibilities to include single/double, double/triple, once/twice, second/third, and forth/fourth/fifth. So I guess trio/foursome might have worked in this puzzle, if undivided. Borge also inflated ‘wonderful’ to ‘twoderful,’ but by that principle, I do not find the inflations of the non-homophonic ‘phone-in’ or ‘Capone’ really to be within the spirit of the exercise either.

14. I didn’t mind the synonyms too much, but splitting them was for me a step too far, as was the reversal. My last two in were the modified BOAT RACE and TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO, which I solved by lucky guesses rather than help from the clues. Not convinced about “case” to indicate middle letters either. These things are supposed to be difficult but not to the point of being practically unsolvable!

15. Like many I had completed all but 9a, 17d et al and 20d. No wonder, I can see now. Perhaps I’m angry with myself for not thinking laterally enough, but agree with all the grumbles re the split synonyms and synonyms substituted sometimes by numbers sometimes by other synonyms and homophones not substituted and one number delivered in reverse. But surprised no one has mentioned the fact that, as far as I can tell, the university contest is two words, so surely 9a should be enumerated as (6, 2)? There might be an argument for saying that the split number joins the two words together, but by that logic 17, 14, 8 ought to have been enumerated not as (7, 3, 14) but (24). That would have really flummoxed us…

    Had felt the recent vowelless genius to be the hardest I’d come across, but this is close. I suppose if the measure is clues left unanswered, the vowelless one still wins it in my world. But I do love these puzzles. Thanks, Paul. You b*st*rd

16. Sorry, posted the above on another, spoiler-averse site. ‘University contest’ is of course the boat race

17. Well, so far this blog has generated more venom than any other blog I have wiritten.  Yes, I realise the venom is directed at the puzzle rather than the blog (well I hope it is)

    If I’d had only a day to solve the puizzle, I would probably have felt the same way.  With a month, and the spur of having to blog it, I persevered a lot longer than I would normally do.

    As Gordon says, each to his own.  We can move on now to April’s Genius and use this March puzzle as a comparision for anything that generates discussions on difficulty and fairness in future.

18. Did about 75% then gave up, for the first time ever. Difficult is expected, this was all a bit contrived and not really fun. Next!

19. Like John@18 we gave up for the first time with 4 left unsolved, We also didn’t particularly enjoy what we did solve and were frustrated by the fact that some words did not ‘inflate’. For example 19acas we had HUTU with the TU not being inflated to THREE when ZULU and at least 5 other common words would have fitted into the grid.

    Wrapping one of the words which needed to be inflated around the rest of the entry (as at 9ac) would not have been a device used by Victor Borge and a completely unnecessary contrivance.

    During the solve, we kept on thinking that we were so pleased that we weren’t blogging this one.

    Sorry Paul, you have set far better better puzzles than this one. Thanks Duncan for the blog – you really drew the short straw this month as far we are concerned.

20. Some harsh judgement here I think.

    I didn’t mind the toughness. but I have a couple of quibbles:

    The preamble states “the wordplay in their clues is also post-inflationary”. This is gobbledegook. The wordplay is perfectly ordinary – the preamble need only say that it refers to the entry, not the definition.

    9a I can’t see “case” = “contents”. I think this is a mistake.

    With the misleading preamble I briefly wondered if we were to view “crop” as appearing twice but I suspect there are one or two words missing.

    Unless, and this really would be contrived, we are to read the comma in its original Greek meaning of “cut off”.

21. Well, someone kindly printed this one off for me but they really should have saved their ink. I did get CAPONE, EDEN, INCAS and ALE when I looked at it, but then I got busy and forgot all about it. I don’t think I would have finished it though!

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