[If you’re attending York S&B please see comments 32&33] - here
A commenter on the blog for Genius 201 revealed that they had test-solved this puzzle, and we were in for ‘an absolute corker‘. Time will tell!
The preamble/special instructions state:
“Fill in the blanks with a word (or, in two cases, a two-word phrase) that enables you to solve the clue. The words inserted are all also solutions to clues.”
NB. On a cosmetic note, I should say that I liked the layout of the PDF for this puzzle – it was landscape, and had a bigger/clearer grid than most recent Genius PDFs. I am guessing that circumstances didn’t lend themselves to it being processed into the ‘usual’ format, so it was published as it came in, or maybe this is a new format. Either way, it has my vote…although maybe a slightly bigger grid still…?
Anyway, on to the preamble and the solving…so, if I read that right, every answer is going to fill a blank in another clue? Wow – that made my head spin just thinking about it! How do you begin to go about devising and setting something like that?
Without further ado I went to 1A – ‘Swiss <something> taking census regularly without grounds’ (8). Which turned out to be a relatively gentle lead-in…’without grounds’ could be BASELESS, cEnSuS regularly is ESS, and BASEL is a Swiss city – or town. So the blank is most probably CITY, or TOWN?
I then looked for a 4-letter clue, and the first one I came across was 12A – which looked as though ‘metropolis’ could be a definition for CITY, and the wordplay had C (about, circa) and the last letters of <blank> ghosT storY…which could well be C_TY. So 12A is probably CITY, and its blank is probably a word ending in I?
And so things proceeded. That particular sequence dried up on me, but I managed to solve quite a few clues on my first couple of passes, making guesses what the blanks might be. And once a few crossing letters appeared this helped with further iterations, and so on, in a virtuous cycle. And in some cases, guessing at the blanks helped with deducing/confirming an answer elsewhere. It took a fair amount of mental agility, a bit like trying to eat peas with a knife without any gravy to make them stick, but I think I got there in the end.
Having struggled all last month to an eventual DNF with Genius 201, I managed to grid-fill this puzzle on Day 1, with a few leaps of faith and educated guesses…
As it turned out, that was the easy bit, and reconciling all the answers to their blanks took a whole lot longer! As I was due to blog this one, I had copy/pasted the whole thing into a spreadsheet anyway, so I used this to do a cross-reference of answers and blanks, whittling them down until I got to either the clever bit, or my downfall… 28A.
I had managed to pair everything up except 28A, which could only be CHAMELEON from crossing letters and the wordplay. But my only unused answer was 28A! So either the blank is also ‘Chameleon’, meaning the solution is in the clue itself – a cruciverbal no-no – or the blank is ‘Setter’, i.e. ‘me’ from Chameleon’s point of view) and the answer is Cha-Me-leon. I am tending towards the latter, but then it breaks the convention of all the other clues, where the solution replaces the blank space verbatim…
Or maybe I messed up in my reconciliation, and there is something I have missed?! Anyway, to submit your prize entry you don’t need to have reconciled everything, just have all the right answers in the right places!
In the end, apart from the fact that I spent ages re-re-doing my cross-referencing to try and allocate ‘Chameleon’ elsewhere, I have to agree with the assessment of the test setter, whose full comment was that ‘it’s a lot easier than <Genius 201> (thank goodness!) and, in my view, an absolute corker.’
It was a lot easier – as I solved it on the day of publication, a rare occurrence for me with Genius-es – and it was a corker. Quite a feat to have made every solution a part of another clue – as part of the wordplay or as anagram/homophone indicator.
Hats off to Chameleon for achieving this, and also for blending himself into the picture as well!
(NB. I believe this is Chameleon’s Genius debut, and a quick search of the site didn’t seem to find any other puzzles by him, so maybe a ‘mainstream’ puzzle debut as well – in which case, a pretty grand entrance! I did stalk him down to his own site, if people are interested in seeing more of his work – hopefully he will be OK with me putting the link here.)
One last thing – I don’t want to ‘spin this out’ for too long(!), but the preamble refers to two two-word phrases…however in the enumerations and grid entries I can only see one – NERVE CELL, and two hyphenated words – SCI-FI and SPIN-OUT. Chambers gives SPIN OUT without the hyphen, so maybe it is just that the enumeration is wrong for 4D?
| ACROSS | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clue No | Solution | Blanks = | From | Clue (definition underlined) / Logic/Parsing |
| 1 | BASELESS | CITY | 12A | Swiss ____ taking census regularly without grounds (8) / BASEL (Swiss city) + ESS (regular letters of cEnSuS) |
| 5 | WASTED | SEIZE | 24D | Guardian setters had to ____ assets oddly thrown away (6) / W_ED (Chameleon, and other Guardian setters, had) around (seizing) AST (odd letters of AsSeT) |
| 10 | ANIMATION | ECLIPSES | 18D | Movement in which an atom ____ iodine mass (9) / AN + ION (atom) around (eclipsing) I (iodine) + MAT (tangled mass) |
| 11 | CHINA | BRANCH | 1D | Material from ____ in Amazon (5) / hidden word in ‘branCH IN Amazon’ |
| 12 | CITY | SCI-FI | 27A | Metropolis is about ____ ghost story, ultimately (4) / C (circa, about) + ITY (ultimate letters of sci-fI ghosT storY) |
| 13 | MONTENEGRO | HERB | 26D | Love for one ____ bursting green round the country (10) / M( |
| 15 | ALMOST | MONTENEGRO | 13A | Close to a large street on the outskirts of ____ (6) / A + L (large) + ST (street), around MO (the outskirts, or outer letters, of MontenegrO) |
| 16 | DRAINED | DIAMONDS | 8D | Spent ____ fell from the sky (7) / D (diamonds) + RAINED (fell from the sky) |
| 19 | CHAOTIC | TRENDY | 22D | American books ____ clothing all over the shop (7) / CH_IC (trendy) around (clothing) A (American) + OT (Old Testament, books) |
| 21 | OSCARS | SPIN-OUT | 4D | Rejecting premieres, star resents agent churning ____ for awards (6) / reversed (rejecting) first letters (premieres) of ‘Star Resents Agent Churning Spin Out’ |
| 23 | INSTITUTES | THING | 7D | Fashionable society ____ recalled by half-hearted trainees in schools (10) / IN (fashionable) + S (society) + TI (it, or thing, recalled?) + TUT( |
| 25 | HEAR | SCINTILLA | 23D | Try a ____ of horseradish with some corn? (4) / H (first letter, or a scintilla, of Horseradish) + EAR (some corn) |
| 27 | SCI-FI | INSTITUTES | 23A | Sort of film shown by extremely scholastic ____ around France (3-2) / SC (extreme letters of ScholastiC) + IFI (two I’s, institutes, around F – France) |
| 28 | CHAMELEON | ?SETTER? | 28A? | ____ whose surroundings could be virtually cloned — ha! (9) / &lit-ish – CHA_LEON (anag, i.e. could be, of virtually all of CLONE( |
| 29 | SLEIGH | ALMOST | 15A | Vehicle leads to Santa leaving with ____ all the reindeer, traditionally (6) / SL (leading letters of Santa Leaving) + EIGH( |
| 30 | VERBALLY | LEAP | 3D | Labour minister backed the introduction of ____ years in speech (8) / VERBAL (LAB – Labour- plus REV – reverend, minister – all backed) + L (introduction of Leap) + Y (years) |
| Down | ||||
| Clue No | Solution | Blanks = | From | Clue (definition underlined) / Logic/Parsing |
| 1 | BRANCH | DRAINED | 16A | Arm supporter with ____ Nordic bomb? (6) / BRA (supporter!) + NC (NordiC, drained) + H (H-bomb) |
| 2 | SCINTILLA | CHAOTIC | 19A | Just a little bit evil to join ____ antics (9) / SCINT_A (anag, i.e. chaotic – or wasted? – of ANTICS) around (joined by) ILL (evil) |
| 3 | LEAP | CHINA | 11A | Revolutionary ____ maintains eastern spring (4) / L_AP (pal, or china, mate, revolutionary) around (maintaining) E (eastern) |
| 4 | SPIN-OUT | UNITED | 9D | ____ lost points over skid (4-3) / SPIN-O_T (anag, i.e. lost, of POINTS) around (over) U (United) |
| 6 | ASCENDANCY | NERVE CELL | 17D | Active ____ starts to get overwhelmed by a poorly synced command (10) / A + SCEND_Y (anag, i.e. poorly, of SYNCED) around A (active) + NC (starting letters of Nerve Cell) |
| 7 | THING | BASELESS | 1A | Object to judge’s ____ dogma, essentially (5) / THIN( |
| 8 | DIAMONDS | ASCENDANCY | 6D | Servant’s in the ____ on the inside of BDSM suit (8) / DIAM (maid, or servant, rising, in the ascendancy, again for a down entry) + ON + DS (the inside letters of bDSm) |
| 9 | UNITED | VERBALLY | 30A | As one has solver given courtly title, ____ (6) / double homophone – if YOU (the solver) were KNIGHTED (given courtly title) then it might sound like U-NITED! |
| 14 | CONTAINING | WASTED | 5A | Having gin and tonic to forget about day and get ____ (10) / anag, i.e. wasted (or chaotic?) of GIN AN( |
| 17 | NERVE CELL | CHURCH | 20D | ____ students supporting spirit’s corporeal messenger? (5,4) / NERVE (spirit) + CE (Church of England) + LL (Learners, or students) |
| 18 | ECLIPSES | ANIMATION | 10A | Astronomical events are less epic in ____ (8) / anag, i.e. in animation, of LESS EPIC |
| 20 | CHURCH | SLEIGH | 29A | Short friend and Roman Catholic jump on end of ____ to reach temple (6) / CHU( |
| 21 | OPERATE | CONTAINING | 14D | Use drug ____ ecstasy, right, when leaving island (7) / OP( |
| 22 | TRENDY | OSCARS | 21A | Stylish fan dismissing the ____: too nerdy? (6) / anag, i.e. fan, of T( |
| 24 | SEIZE | HEAR | 25A | Apprehend what’s left of vacuous cryptic, we ____ (5) / homophone – if you ‘evacuate’ C |
| 26 | HERB | OPERATE | 21D | Nuclei from lithium converter ____ urban plant (4) / middle letters, or nuclei, from ‘litHium convErter opeRate urBan’ |
Hi mc_rapper67
Great blog and I have to agree with you that it was a tour-de-force both in the setting and in the enjoyment of solving. Soup [Hamish] was correct, as usual!
I had 4 of the missing words different than you had, for example I had chaotic for 14D, but overall yours made more sense than mine. For example I had to put CHINA in for 10A which obviously did not make for a good surface reading in any way, yet worked, sort of. I had Iodine mass as IM and China as being ‘A nation’. I knew it was correct but disinclined to properly parse it or work out where China should go instead. As usual the science of calling an ION an ATOM is of course totally wrong, yet seemingly ubiquitous now in Guardian cryptics. I originally had ‘capital’ as the missing word for 1A until I finally remembered my schoolboy geography.
Like you I had either Chameleon or Setter as the missing word for 28A. As you say a bit naughty that the instructions failed to mention that one clue did not meet all the others in the formation. I also agree about the incorrect details about the two-word phrases and also the very nice grid.
Cheers to Chameleon and you.
I\’m 51 years old. I have done prize crosswords all my adult life. Never won. Not once. Never.
Thanks for the blog – which probably needed more work to compile than usual!
Another vote for the landscape format, much easier to read when printed for those of us with imperfect vision.
I agree that the crossword itself was on the easy side for a Genius – ie we managed it in under a week! I originally thought the same as you – that each solution fills a blank in another clue – but first concluded that as this is not stated explicitly, some solutions might be used in more than one blank, in the end gave up trying to match solutions to blanks altogether. As you say, the reconciliation was much harder than the crossword.
OD – I’m even older than you, and neither have I. Good job we don’t do it for the money, eh?
I’m sure the missing word in 28a is CHAMELEON. That fits with the preamble, which might otherwise have said that the words were solutions to other clues. And the solution isn’t quite included in the clue as it’s been left out. All in all great fun and a huge relief after the previous month.
Thanks all.
I thought this a brilliant genius. It took me a few days and every time I returned I chipped away a little more, either by solving a bit more wordplay or working harder at the reconciliation. I kept track as I went along, noting where I needed a word for a homophone (yet to find) or which matched up with what and then scribbling it out as I changed my mind. Every bit of the clever instructions helped which, to me, makes the whole thing a stroke of genius.
I had “chameleon” as the missing word – it fits the instructions, being an answer and fitting in the clue and so what if it breaks the rule of the answer being in the clue – it was a blank so gave nothing away. I thought it a very clever variant on the theme.
Roll on Monday and something else I can get close to solving, unlike 201 where I got about 10% of the way in!
I too thought this was a brilliant crossword, challenging but doable, and extraordinarily clever. Chameleon was a lovely touch to finish with. Congratulations to the setter and thanks to the blogger.
Thanks for all the comments so far – a much gentler reception for this one than 201!
We can debate the reconciliation of solutions to blanks and the Chameleon/setter dichotomy until the cows come home – a few viable alternatives and opinions suggested above – but hopefully the annotated version will be out tomorrow/soon, so we can see the setter’s/editor’s official take on it.
Gordon at #1 – I did have a big ?? next to atom/ion at 10A, and considered mentioning it in the blog, but my A-level Physics was nearly 40 years ago, and I thought it would just trigger a heated philosophical debate amongst people better qualified than myself – at which point I would have to ‘get my coat’, like that Fast Show character! Chambers doesn’t seem to equate the two, but my recently purchased Collins app has ‘ion‘ as ‘an electrically charged atom or group of atoms formed by the loss or gain of one or more electrons”…so maybe a hint of justification there.
OD at #2 – I’m not sure of the relevance of your cri-de-couer to this particular puzzle?! I’m am a little older than you, and sorry to report that I have won a pile of dictionaries, book tokens, cheques from Mr Murdoch/Private Eye, Telegraph pens in my time – and many a bottle of Champagne/Prosecco from the IQ! But then again, before the great ‘Covid-19 prize puzzle drought’ of 2020 I was submitting upwards of 15 prize puzzles a week…thankfully most are now online/e-mail – used to cost me a fortune in stamps! You have to be ‘in it to win it’, as they say, so my only advice would be to persevere, and hopefully the gods of chance will pick your and/or Mr Beaver’s name out sometime soon…
Like others, once I’d filled the grid to my satisfaction, I didn’t bother with filling in all the blanks, and where I did, I seem to have gone wrong! Glad it wasn’t my turn to blog! I wasn’t troubled by 28a, which seemed to me to satisfy the wording in the instructions. Agree it was considerably easier than the previous month’s Genius.
Hi mc_rapper67 @ #7 I should have been more specific about ion/atom.
Not only did I also do A-Level Physics 50 years ago, I also did ‘Elementary Particle Physics’ at Liverpool University 1970-73 [upper second!], so I ought to be less cavalier. An ion is ‘a charged atom or group of atoms’, but the reverse is NOT automatic. An atom is not necessarily an ion as it may not be charged. So they are not synonymous. So using ion to get atom, in a crossword, would just about be OK, but not the reverse as used in 10A.
I would always be hesitant to take definitions of anything related to science in a dictionary to be necessarily accurate though. I have a Collins, Chambers, American Heritage by Houghton Mifflin, Merriam Webster and an OED at home. Every one defines the operation of the word ‘siphon’ as ‘working by atmospheric pressure forcing water through a tube’. That is absolute bol*****. A siphon works by gravity and nothing else. I do check dictionaries in stores here in Connecticut from time to time and did see that the latest OED has corrected that – so someone must have finally educated them. There are several other examples I could give as well. It makes you wonder how every older dictionary made the same mistake though [copying definitions from each other?].
OD @#2 I won the Genius once, about 5 or 6 years ago. It was one of Tramp’s but I cannot recall which. I kept it as a memento which is now somewhere so safe I have forgotten where!
Gordon @9 I am with you on ion vs atom. There are not only not the same thing, the reason we have two different words is to distinguish two very specifically different things. At atom is neutral (no net electric charge) – anything that is charged is not an atom. An ion must be charged one way or the other. So neither can be the other. Going from a dictionary which says an ion is an atom which has gained or lost an electron, therefore an ion is an atom is like saying that a tree is a seedling which has grown, therefore a tree *is* a seed. The logic does not work. And as Gordon says, dictionaries and science are not good lab mates – my Chambers describes a loudspeaker as a device for amplifying sound, which is a loudhailer not a speaker. Mind you, it also defines an eclair as a cake long in length and short in eating, which I find to be true…
Crosswords rely on ambiguity, vagueness and other wonderful frailties of the (English) language. Scientific terms are rarely so, although they are occasionally adopted from or into everyday speech. Paul did a very good job in the Prize this weekend using astronomical terms in his clues in this way, without offending my scientific notions which are pretty honed after a life in the subject.
I’ll get my coat! (;+>)
Thanks mc_rapper67 for a welcoming and detailed blog. Your insertion column has identified all the intended insertions, except 28 should have CHAMELEON itself in the blank. I thought a sinfully tautologous clue fitted nicely with the fact you sort of end up with two concentric CHAMELEONS, plus I liked the joke of the solution hiding in plain sight like a real chameleon! (I think the rubric’s tight-lipped rather than unfair on that point; it never specifies that the solutions go in other clues’ blanks.)
Re: ion/atom, I’m no scientist, but based on Gordon’s explanation that some but not all atoms are ions, how is atom–>ION any different from insect–>ANT, metal–>TIN or journalist–>ED? Such susbtitutions don’t have to be strictly synonymous, do they? It’s normally okay for word X in a clue to indicate a type or example of X in the solution.
Thanks again to the MC for the blog, and thanks to those who have solved or commented. I’m very pleased that people seem to have enjoyed this, as I had a lot of fun setting it!
Thanks for dropping by chameleon – I am sure the setters are divided into those who “read the reviews” and those who don’t…glad you got good ones which were well deserved. I did think at the time of solving how the name chameleon fitted well in the last solution, so was pleased it was intended.
Re the atom vs ion point – there is a subtle distinction between an object which is further specified by some other point (e.g. mercury is a metal which is liquid at room temperature) and an object which is modified by another point e.g. a salt is a metal which has been reacted with an acid (and produces hydrogen as a result). A salt cannot, therefore, be called a metal. It is derived from one. In the same way an ion is derived from an atom in such a way as to fundamentally be changed from an atom. But without a scientific training it is near impossible to disentangle these things, so it’d be insane to expect setters to be exactly right on every aspect of language. You rely on the dictionary, the dictionary is wrong or misleading and a few scientists get grumpy. Hey ho.
Chameleon at #12 – thanks for the confirmation of 28A, but for your sinfulness you must say three ‘Hail Araucaria’s and go back and solve Genius 201 three times…from scratch…
Gordon and TheZed – I refer you to the late great Bob Marley – ‘Ion like a lion, in Zion’…’no Atom, no cry’…CORRESPONDENCE CLOSED!
An excellent puzzle. I could not parse 10a, and even with the solution, I do not see how mass = mat. There is a near-anagram in the clue, too, (an-atom-i-in) which of course I also could not make work, since nothing in it = “in.”
Cineraria at #15. One of the (many) definitions of MAT in Chambers is ‘a closely-interwoven or tangled mass, esp of hair or vegetation…’
Thanks to Chameleon, mc_rapper67
Congrats on the puzzle. An impressive trick, but sadly wasted as I managed to solve the whole puzzle fairly quickly without filling in any of the blanks, save for a search for the two letters to complete **INA at 11a. There was a lot of very straightforward wordplay, initial letters, outside letters, middle letters etc. and having made a good start it seemed easier just to carry on without cross-referencing.
I just completed and loved this. Chameleon as the blank and the answer was the perfect last piece of the jigsaw. On reflection, I agree that an ion isn’t an atom, although I didn’t notice at the time. From the same word play, I don’t really understand why mass = mat but Chambers tells me it is so that’s good enough for me.