Gemelo No. 5 – Special mentions

7 comments on “Gemelo No. 5 – Special mentions”

1. I was glad I didn’t have to know anything about the films, and just had to ignore that some words are capitalised and italicised. This constraint obviously makes things harder for the setter but not the solver, and I can’t really complain about Gemelo “cheating” by omitting the first word of The English Patient. I wondered if Gemelo is going to have one special puzzle every month.

   I think 9a is just ALL about EVE, and for 15a I had ‘to save The Last’ = T(o) and ’emperor’ = EMP.

   Chambers gives ‘burning’ under live^2, and I think it’s the meaning in the phrase ‘live embers’.

   Even when I knew the answer to 27a was E’ER, I couldn’t immediately get past thinking that ‘Characters beyond the first three in Rebecca‘ must be ECCA.

   Thanks, Gemelo and bridgesong.

2. LARE is in my Chambers app. Somehow the italics in the titles make it slightly harder to deconstruct the words, so this was a nice challenge.

3. Agree with Matthew@1 on all points. I’d thought at first that 15ac was contained in “Las(t Emp)eror”, but then the clue might have been “appears in” rather than “to save”. I thought 9a “AL(EVE)L” was clever. Re burning in 33ac, I guess the expression “live embers” (or “live coals”) doesn’t get much use these days!
   Like Petert@2, I found the italics made it harder to focus on the words, so I was slower, but I did it entirely without reference to Chambers, so I guess I found the wordplay clear enough to be confident of answers I wasn’t familiar with.

4. I enjoyed this and thought it somewhat easier than the previous week. A friendly grid with perimeter clues that yielded early on and so presented a variety of ways into the puzzle. I did wonder if Gemelo needed to tell us that each clue contained a best picture Oscar winner or perhaps we could have discovered this for ourselves. The title of the puzzle “Special Mentions” would have been a clue that something was there to be discovered.

   The Clue Clinic difficulty “G-rating” was 3.5 out of 5 based on 43 votes, that compares to 4.2 the week before (with 45 votes), which seems about right.

5. Compared to other Gemelo (and Azed) puzzles, this one at least seemed doable to me, although I used internet heavily, NHO about half of words in the grid, and incorrectly put LORE instead of LARE. Thanks Gemelo, and bridgesong for the explanations (quite a few were needed!)

   I guess this kind of puzzles is not really appropriate for foreigners like me; though they may help stretch my muscles every once in a while, they largely become an exercise in discovering new words, which is somewhat tedious and not that interesting…

6. Thanks for the blog, bridgesong. I think I’m slowly getting into Gemelo’s mind, or the crosswords are getting easier. It’s clear that familiarity with Azed’s way of thinking was helpful – possibly we’ll never have to remember again that SOAK in a clue means RET in the answer! – and no doubt G will have similar tics. As others have said, the theme was neither help nor hindrance, but a bit of harmless fun.

7. Yes, this was quite a bit easier than previous Gemelo puzzles, but still more of a challenge than Azed. Unlike Layman @5, I enjoy the process of discovering new words. With Azed, once you spot what appears to be the definition, you can concentrate on the wordplay, which often leads to the thought “That looks like (e.g.) KOMBU. I wonder if such a word exists.” When reference to Chambers shows that it does, I get a sense of achievement much greater than when I solve a clue that leads to a word that I know. I think Gemelo is more astute at hiding which part of the clue is the definition, which makes the process of solving harder and (regrettably for me) less rewarding.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.