Azed 2534

27 comments on “Azed 2534”

1. The competition deadline has been extended to next Saturday, so best to delete the blog for now.

2. Thanks, Duncanshiell, for clearing up a few lingering parsing questions for me.

3. Surely the only competition is the clue-writing one? No spoilers for that.
   Thanks duncanshiell for the definition for ETNA – I just assumed it was a volcano reference.
   Had an unparsed CONTUMELY for a while.
   Thanks as ever to Azed.

4. Gonzo @3, you need to send in a completed grid with your clue for it to be considered (and the clue word manifests itself as part of the completed grid, of course).

   It’s not really fair to entrants who’ve already solved it and sent in a clue.

5. It would be interesting to hear from other overseas solvers in light of Blorenge’s comment @4. Our puzzles come as .pdf downloads. I suppose I could convert it to text but last time I tried it came out a mess. Or I could print it off, fill it in, scan it and insert the scan into an email. It seems easier to me just to list the clues clearly. If this is not acceptable to Azed or puzzlemeister at the Grauniad, it should be made clear to us. There have been a few errors (misprints?) or things unclear in the online puzzle over the last year or two—instructions perhaps, a miscopied Chambers reference. Azed himself might be responsible for a couple but surely not all. I can find no update to the online puzzles indicating the extension.

   It’s notable that Dr Watson has published his solution on & lit even though he makes reference to the extension of one week.

   As it happens this is the first clue-writing competition I’ve entered in many years. I’m not going to bother again if I have to mess about with formats.

   I agree that the blog should be withdrawn for a week.

   Stefan

6. The announcement of the extension is lower on
   here, it’s because the address etc was omitted from the puzzle originally.
   Personally I wouldn’t sweat it.

7. Thanks, Stefan @5.

   The &lit Twitter feed was also mentioned the extension a few days ago, but surprisingly it’s also tweeted links to Dr Watson’s review and Duncan’s blog above(!), so maybe it’s neither here nor there to most.

   Gonzo @6, no one’s sweating it (is that your way of saying you were wrong?!), but what’s to stop anyone who doesn’t normally do Azeds from copying the solution and entering the competition in the next few days? Might as well publish every competition solution on the same Sunday as the puzzle!

8. I sent my clue in to Azed noting the absence of the instructions this time around – never occurred to me that there might be an extension and I wouldn’t be entirely sure where to look for one. (For submission purposes, what I do is recreate the final grid in Sympathy and paste that into the email.)

   Publishing the solution alongside the competition puzzle has been known to occur, and it was surprising how many didn’t notice.

9. On the assumption that the blog isn’t going to be withdrawn, can I raise an issue with the clue to JEREEDS? Now I admit that this must have been a pig of a word to clue, but am I alone in finding the Fagin reference a little distasteful? (Full disclosure – I am Jewish). I can see that it enables a connection of a kind with Oliver Reed (who played Bill Sykes in the film Oliver!), but Fagin was a stereotypical characterisation of a kind that would certainly be recognised as anti-Semitic today. I was surprised to see Azed use it.

10. I would like to thank Mrs Yesyes for my Christmas present of a new Chambers dictionary, enabling me to finish an Azed. I would like to thank Azed for extending my vocabulary (I’m hoping to pass the linguistic component of the Scottish Citizenship test after Scexit) and the many fine clues (I think SASS was my favourite). And I would like to thank duncanshiell for parsing OBSTACLERACE for me. I got the anagram of Casrle but totally missed the brace.

11. I too had trouble with OBSTACLE RACE because Azed frequently uses “support” = BRA and “contest” = RACE and I spent some time wondering how “in contest” could be parsed as CE. I really thought it was one of Azed’s rare lapses until I gave myself a good bderrrr. I’m sure Azed does this deliberately.

    bridgesong, I don’t have trouble with Fagin, it’s just that the whole clue is weak, unless there’s something that I’m missing. But I’m doing a much longer post shortly.

    Stefan

12. Thanks for the parsing, duncansheill.

    For 13a, I had “ECOZONE”: C (closed) in EOZ (city in Bangladesh) + ONE (unit). On double-checking, I can only find “Eoz” via a single news-scraping site, but I still prefer it to the postcode of part of a city.

    I’m not sure that these are improving my vocabulary, so much as teaching me how to solve more of the same. I saw “hemlock extract”, remembered that coming up before, but couldn’t remember the actual sub-word – so I went and checked my solved pile, rather than going off to read about hemlock. “CLEW” was another I’d seen recently, though possibly while barking up the wrong tree.

13. @bridgesong (9)

    I winced at that clue, when I finally got it. I know that Azed likes to throw outdated definitions into the mix, but I wasn’t expecting the accompanying stereotypes. Combined with a grid that has /that/ symbol at the centre, it looks almost like a dog-whistle.

14. bridgesong

    You might not have noticed the grid is one of Azed’s templates (symmetrical through 90º too, although sometimes he does minor tweaks for the purpose of filling in words, cf 2412). But notice at centre the bars form a swastika. Azed referred in one of his slips a few years ago to a complaint he’d had from a solver who’d didn’t like his grid because it involved the swastika. I think Azed was more mystified than mortified but he apologized anyway. I’m sure the conjunction of swastika and Fagin would have passed Azed by entirely and there is not an insensitive bone in his body. (Nor mine).

    I think he had other templates he no longer uses. 2374 (symmetrical through 180º had two swastikas!) Check also 2443 and 2450, in which he goes close to having huge swastikas quartering the grid. But the masterpiece is 2369, in which he has no fewer than four! All right: they’re fylfots so presumably they’re all right. May I point out that, for most of its life, the swastika was merely a motif of good fortune, especially for Central Asian peoples.

    May I also point out that, because we’re all crossworders, we know we’re clever with words. I do not use “anti-Semitic”. Some Semitic people are Arab and speak Arabic and other languages. Weak (descriptive) dictionaries accept the meaning of “anti-Jewish”. No dig at you, bridgesong, but if we ourselves become so weak and PC to adopt use of “anti-Semitic” because we are afraid to say what we mean, dictionaries will become so loose that crossword-setters will have a field day with “touring Northern Ireland” and we won’t bother doing crosswords any more.

    I note Dr Watson has been pulled off & lit. I still think this should be pulled but there are some excellent posts and I hope they don’t just get deleted if it does come back.

    Stefan

15. Marmite smuggler @14: no, I didn’t notice the swastika in the grid and very much doubt if I would have imputed any significance to it if I had. As you say, they crop up fairly often in Azed grids.

    I did use “anti-Semitic” (the capital S was unintentional, and was inserted by my text editor) to mean anti-Jewish. I think that sense is widely understood.

16. Stefan, what do you mean “Dr Watson has been pulled off…”? What for and where did you find this news?

17. Nick @15: it was announced on the &lit Twitter feed.

18. Hello Nick

    Dr Watson reviews Azed 2534 was a link on

    http://www.andlit.org.uk/azed/slip_search.php

    until about no more than a few hours ago. Other posters above have noted it. It won’t make any “news” because the people responsible do not like it known they’ve made mistakes. Dr Watson was, surely, pulled because the Azed competition is running for another six days, so you’re giving the answers to people who might not know them. Same with this blog.

    Stefan

19. Oh, OK. I thought you meant it was pulled due to the grid shape and the Fagin clue…

20. None of us, Nick, are so politically correct as to dispute Azed’s right to his grid shape and Fagin clue.

    Dr Watson reviews Azed 2534 will be back next Sunday. Do check it. Dr Watson usually entertains and informs. Erudition seeps. He has a memory so deep it makes us suspicious. We think, in fact, that Dr Watson may really be a she. Those in the know aren’t telling.

    Stefan

21. my third ever crack at an Azed and my god i completed it! raised an eyebrow at Fagin (last one in) all right. what a lovely word SNOWBROTH is.

22. I don’t know who Dr Watson is, but I’ve read the review and there was no criticism of the clue for JEREEDS.

23. What has Azed done which anyone could possibly regard as anti-semitic or even insensitive? He has simply equated ‘Such as Fagin’ with ‘Jews’. And that equation is a simple fact. In Oliver Twist Fagin is Jewish. If there is to be any criticism, it should be of Dickens, not of Azed.

    I suspected the closing date would be extended by a week because of the omission last week. Regulars would know the address but nobody else and The Observer wants new competitors.

    Actually it has always struck me as rather silly that we have to send in a completed crossword: Azed has to spend ages perusing them all, and what has getting the crossword right got to do with writing a good clue? This reliance on snail mail seems unnecessary.

24. I agree with Wil @23 about the “controversial” clue. I don’t know if anyone objected to Azed personally, but I see from the Slip that he hasn’t mentioned it, rightly in my view.
    As for sending a completed grid in with the clue-writing competition, I’m sure Azed is a dab hand at scanning them quickly, and the solutions are probably soon memorised. Compare the time it spends to scan roughly 150 grids with the time that would have to be spent judging clues from all the extra people sending a clue in, who never do Azed puzzles in the first place.

25. ^ Sorry, I messed that up! All the blue type is a hyperlink to the Azed slip I mentioned. I must have misplaced the tags.

26. And there’s also the point that if we could submit the clues by email a moderator could present Azed with a list of unnamed clues, which would remove the doubts some people feel about ‘the regulars’ getting favourable treatment. All right, there’s a good reason for this: it saves Azed time because he knows that clues from certain people are bound to be worth their place, and indeed they usually are. But they aren’t always. They can be fairly pedestrian and yet they still make the lists.

27. I often make the C for Commended list – that’s the one below VHC and HC – so I’ve no complaints. 😀

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