Guardian Genius 255 / Soup

11 comments on “Guardian Genius 255 / Soup”

1. Thanks Soup and duncanshiell.
   I found this hard and took three sittings each of long duration.
   Yet, completing it was satisfying.
   Single possible anagram – like GOAT/TOGA helped making entry, and the others with multiple anagrams required the crossers to emerge.
   ASIDES and DOWNLOAD were last two in.
   Had to convince myself that CALLS = NOISES, and that there is a plural called DAISES!

   Liked PEERLESS/SLEEPERS and HARPISTS/STARSHIP.

2. Very thorough job on the blog.

   In general, I have found Soup’s clues to be clever but fair, so if I give myself a moment, the solutions come pretty readily.

   It is probably purely accidental, but (I noticed that) there are a number of double-letter occurrences in the unches. For instance, across the middle appear SSNNYY. Altogether, these double-letter combinations happen to be an anagram of SEMINARY.

3. Excellent blog. Very detailed and neat. Thanks duncan.
   Nice puzzle. Thanks Soup.

   LESION
   I revised for one second Is the cryptic reading okay to convey ‘one S revised to I’? Agree with the blog about the ‘second second’.
   STAYED
   Thought of ‘Kept/STAYED’ in touch/off/close etc.,
   TRELLIS (my reading-essentially the same as what duncan says)
   After (R in TELL) IS.

   DAISES (ilippu@1)
   noise=call out loud (Chambers) –looks like it works better as a verb than a noun.

4. Thanks Soup and Duncan

   Two (long) solving sessions and a consolidation – so at the harder end of spectrum for me too.

   Very enjoyable; never felt impossible but never reached that point of just writing the remainder in. Perfect balance.

   Re Old Goat/Man. I’m not sure if it is defined so, but I would only use “old goat” to describe a randy old man, Never goat to describe a randy man

5. On reading the instructions, and after the first few solutions, I thought, “this is fun”, but as it went on, it became more of a grind. As Duncan says, the combination of no crossers, multiple anagrams, a fair sprinkling of obscurities and convoluted constructions made this very tough. In the end, we got all except 5a, which we bunged in as TREATS (anag of ARRETS, unparsed). Chambers Word Wizard had 45 possibilities for _R_A_S, and although GROANS/ORGANS was one, I’d forgotten about newspapers being organs.
   The last half-dozen in before that also leant heavily on CWW, which felt like cheating, but we would have had to give up far sooner without its assistance.

6. Morning, all. Thanks for the blog, Duncan! I rather liked TRELLIS – a little convoluted, sure, but everything’s in there… I was disappointed that for WOODLAND the editor wouldn’t let me define WOODLOUSE as ‘Cheesy Bob from Guildford’ – apparently that was just too odd. Olivier Latry is a very fine organist – I went to his recital for his Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Organists, at the Albert Hall, and it was exceptional.

   As for how I set it: my usual recourse to writing computer programs. I wanted as many anagrams as possible to be proper mixes of letters (GREAT to GRETA, for example, not being interesting enough) so for that I used the approach detailed at https://blog.plover.com/lang/anagram-scoring.html to score the ‘mixedness’ and aimed to only use words at the top end. My favourite anagram is DOWNLOAD to WOODLAND – I didn’t know that one. Then I started using grid filling software, directing it in particular areas when things looked tricksy.

   See you again sometime soon, I hope – I don’t have a puzzle on the go at the moment as work’s been pretty busy, but I’ll try to get back to it soon!

7. Thanks Duncan and Soup. I found this the toughest Genius for a long time, but very much enjoyed the challenge.

   Cineraria@2 – there are also quite a few words dotted around in the unchecked letters (isle, rage, ..) I think the nature of the puzzle has led to the grid being largely filled with commonly used letters, which has increased the chances of words and patterns appearing.

8. Very impressive setting, so chapeau to Soup.

   Yes, this was made more difficult by the inevitable, multiple possibilities for some of the anagrams. The rail/lair/liar one held me up for a while. I am relieved to see that my solution is correct.

   Thanks ds and Soup.

9. I too found this quite challenging, and actually difficult in the SE corner, where I got stuck until I finally understood the clue to WOODLAND – and what an unexpected anagram (DOWNLOAD) that was. DAISES and LESION (or rather ASIDES and INSOLE) quickly followed.

   An excellent puzzle for this series.

   Thanks to Soup and duncanshiell.

10. “the more challenging end of the Guardian Genius spectrum”
    Maybe, but it’s the first time I’ve ever completed a genius…
    I was possibly helped by having recently battled with Maskarade’s recent prize, which I found equally delightful, and clearly sparked my anagram-specific grey cells out of dormancy.

11. I enjoyed this a lot though it was, as many have said, quite challenging in parts. In fact I liked it so much I took the liberty of attempting the same challenge and am in the midst of producing my own tribute to this which will up on MyCrossword in the near future (I will of course credit Soup for the inspiration).

    Many thanks both.

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