Guardian Genius 200 – Kite

by

Spoiler alert: harsh words ahead.

I found this very hard, and not in a good way. It took a while for me to realise that the “themed elements to be removed” were various COMPASS POINTS (giving the unclued 19,13), but even then the lack of definitions for either the full answers or the modified entries made the whole thing a struggle. There is definite ambiguity in the answer to 10a, and quite possibly elsewhere: there were similar problems in Kite’s previous contribution to the series (number 191). There was a totally definition-free puzzle some years ago at Genius 126, which again I found a very unsatisfactory solve.

I’m sorry to be so negative, but this was a disappointment for one of my biannual blogs of the Genius, especially for the landmark of number 200.

In the explanations below, I’ve shown the unmodified answers, with the compass points to be removed in lower case, so the remaining upper-case letters give the diagram entry.

 
Across
8. DEFInABLE Gave what is necessary to retire at home fit (8)
Reverse of FED (gave what is necessary) + IN (at home) + ABLE (fit)
9. VEneERS Even awful queen has son … (5)
EVEN* + ER + S
10. DANeS … and awkward earl has another one (4)
My best guess at this is AND* + E[arl] + S[on], but another possibility is EARL* + S (son), giving the obscure LARES as the answer and LARS (Scandinavian name) as the entry; both assume that BIAS is correct for 2d
11. CHEwER Guardian enthralled by pop star (5)
WE (The Guardian) in CHER
12. DOneES Joints of deer are articulated (4)
Homophone (“articulated”) of “doe knees”; pity that the entry could just be the plural of doe
15. sTRAINING Pipe outside school (8)
TRAIN (to school) in SING (pipe)
17. BACKswING Crooner accepts unexpected sack with … (7)
SACK* + W in BING (Crosby, crooner)
19,13. COMPASS POINTS (See special instructions) (7,6)
Giving the theme
22. UNADORnED … end around broadcast (8)
(END AROUND)*
24. TOWnwARD Navy tug is first to move backwards (6)
TOW (to tug) + N[avy] + reverse of DRAW (to move, in a similar sense to tow/tug). Chambers doesn’t give townward, but other sources do, and it’s not an unreasonable word
25. STARe Eastern grasses rejected … (4)
Reverse of E + RATS (grasses, as in informs on); so the E is clued by the thematic “eastern”, and then removed to give the entry: hmmm
26. GREEneD … on the subject of cutting dope by journalist (5)
RE in GEN (information, dope) + ED
27. CLOseT Block the start of triathlon (4)
CLOSE (to block) + T[riathlon]
28. sLATER King Edward’s confusingly last at the beginning (5)
ER preceded by LAST*
29. BEseECHING Landing reportedly around the Home Counties (8)
SE in homophone of “beaching”; again it seems unsatisfactory that the entry is used in full as an element of the wordplay
Down
1. MELANOMA Excited male briefly moans, making complaint (8)
Anagram of MALE + MOAN[s]
2. BIAS What helps bowlers hit their mark? (4)
A bit of a stab in the dark: I think this refers to the bias in the balls in the game of bowls, which either helps or hinders hitting the jack, depending on the player’s skill level. Not very helpful to have a rather vague crptic defnitiion whose last letter is crucial to the ambiguous 10a
3. ABACUS Count on this to put muscle on since boxing copper (6)
AB[dominal] + CU in AS (since)
4. DÉTENTE Accommodation in camp protected by river (7)
TENT in DEE
5. OVER Set of six dogs out of bounds (4)
[r]OVER[s]; Rover is (or was) a stereotypical dog’s name, but this could do with a question mark as “Rovers” isn’t really a definition of “dogs”. The “set of six” is an over in cricket
6. READING PEW Old preacher’s lectern made from Wilde’s cooler seat? (7,3)
READING (Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in Readin Gaol) + PEW (seat)
7. ASTERN Behind and acting tough (6)
A[cting] + STERN
14. NAKED TRUTH Rut results from this — it’s the plain fact (5,5)
If you remove the “clothes” or outer letters of TRUTH then you get RUT
16. AGO Missing the first cereal — gone … (3)
[s]AGO
18. NOR … and not one of those here lacking finales (3)
NORTH less its last two letters, “those here” being the compass points; an irrelevant bugbear of mine: as NOR does indeed mean “and not”, it annoys me when people say or write “and nor..”
20. SURROUND Fence in field ignored at the outset after stable unfinished (8)
SUR[e] + [g]ROUND
21. ADVERBS Maybe noisily and repeatedly engineer raved when given tripe (7)
Anagram (indicated by “engineer”) of RAVED + BS (bullshit, rubbish, tripe); noisily and repeatedly are examples of advebs
23. NETTLE Plant gall (6)
Double definition
24. TIDIED Note passed on to groom in the past (6)
TI (not, in sol-fa) + DIED (passed on) – “in the past” indicating that the answer is the past tense of “tidy” (= groom)
26. GERM Serving up — about to feed genetically modified root (4)
Reverse of RE (about) in GM
27. COHO Fish and calamari originally hard to see through glasses (4)
C[alamari] + H in OO (representing a pair of glasses); the coho is a type of salmon found in the Pacific

23 comments on “Guardian Genius 200 – Kite”

  1. Andrew

    I agree with you that this was a totally unsatisfactory puzzle.  I also think that the combination of 10a and 2d is wholly unacceptable and the crossword editor should never have allowed this.  Both clues are vague and I found MANY possible solutions, including the two you have for 10a.  I agree with how you got to DANES for 10a but then removed the ‘S’ leaving DANE.  That is because my answer for 2d is ‘LINE’.  A line can be a mark and the expression that is what makes a bowel in cricket good is ‘Line and length’. It actually does not matter if I am correct, you are correct or whether it is some other combination, it makes a mockery of having answers that can be one of many others.  How about PINS for 2d to go with DANS or LARS.  Absolute b*******.

    I am sorry for you that your twice yearly Genius is so atrocious.  That must be a big disappointment.  Any ‘winner’ this month of the puzzle got there by sheer dumb luck.

    On a separate subject if Tony writes in again complaining about his lack of a printer, then I shall be annoyed at him.  Does he not have a friend with one, or a local library to print one off?  Heaven’s sake let him give me his address and I shall mail him one from here in USA.  I hope I have shamed him into action!  I miss the monthly banter with him.

    Thanks to Andrew, but not to Kite on this occasion

    .

  3. Andrew, I think your comments are fully justified.  Although it didn’t take very long for me to guess the theme, the fact that some answers required removal of two letters (e.g. backSWing) but others only one (e.g. starE) meant that the process was more of a lottery than should be acceptable.  The down clues needed to be completely fair for this device to work, but sadly they weren’t.  As an aside, I can’t find READING PEW in Chambers, although it is in the OED.

  4. I went for BIAS at 2d – one of the definitions of “mark” in Collins online is specifically “(bowling) another name for the jack”. I can’t see any reason to choose between LARS and DANE at 10a. Lares is more obscure than Danes (but there are other obscure answers), while Dane requires the S to be added just to be taken away again (but that also happens elsewhere in the puzzle). I went for LARS myself, but I half expected to come here to find that I’d missed a much more obvious pair of solutions.

  5. I had LARS and PINS for the 10/2 combination, but DANE/LINE or DANS/BIAS are of course equally valid. In fairness unforeseen ambiguities can crop up in even the best puzzles, but there’s a far greater risk of it when you have clues without definitions coupled with no fixed system for the removal of letters. Add a weak CD into the mix and you’ve got anarchy.

    At the risk of sounding like a former poster who was always making nasty jibes at the editor, I have to wonder if anyone actually looked at this between the submission and publishing stages. It certainly doesn’t look like it, and with a puzzle of this complexity that’s disgraceful.

  6. Another disappointed customer.  The penny about compass points dropped quite early, and we made slow progress but had to give up with several left blank, including 10a, 2d.  Didn’t get 8a: though it obviously finished ABLE, the lack of a definition made it hard to find among the many possibilities.  Thus I leant towards SPIN for 2d, though this meant I couldn’t find 8a and 10a.

    In a crossword of this type, obscurities are somewhat unfair – we realised 6d was READING P?? but were unable to find a valid word to complete it.

    A pity, the original idea was quite appealing.

  7. Thanks to Andrew for an honest appraisal. The Genius crosswords should be hard, but in a good way.

    It is difficult as a setter to find acceptable grids to accommodate ‘tricks’ and to avoid ambiguities and obscurities. The decision to allow both single letter and double letter removals was conscious and to make the resolution less trivial.

    I hadn’t realised the possible ambiguity in the 10A/2D couplet. I nearly rewrote 10A because I thought the clue was too easy, and it didn’t strike me that earl could be used as the fodder. Don’t blame the editor, the setter should notice these things! (And the editor did make several useful suggestions to improve some clues.) I thought 2D was reasonably cryptic in that on first reading it might have appeared to be related to cricket, but was intended to refer to bowls, as Andrew explained.  ‘To begin a leg, the players take turns to roll the jack but the roll of the jack is only counted if it achieves a “mark” …’ I don’t think ‘pins’ is an acceptable answer because the clue says ‘helps’ and therefore refers to a singular answer. I accept that lares would be a possible solution for the 10A clue. However, in my opinion, I don’t think that Lars, as a slightly obscure forename, would have provided a good answer for an undefined clue. I suppose that ‘line’ and ‘dane’ might have been possible, although ‘line’ doesn’t seem to be a very cryptic answer to me. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to make 2D a cd.

    I think as READING PEW is in the OED, it is an acceptable answer. Not all words are in Chambers; especially proper nouns, like Beeching.

    It is the opinions of solvers that matter most. Hopefully, I can produce something more enjoyable next time around!

  9. I spotted the idea early on and thought there were some very good clues and some that were almost total guesses. I suppose it is very difficult indeed to set clues that have unambiguous wordplay with no definition and this fell foul of that as others have commented. I do think that a mechanism of removing the very letters you’ve added in the wordplay is weak and I was hesitant to put in “beeching” for that reason and because it was a proper noun – again, absent definition it’s not something I’d expect to see.

    In the end I rolled the dice on “dane” and “line” for the national lottery 10A 2D combo. I also thought of lars and dans as others have commented. With absolutely nothing in 2D to point you away from cricket towards the much more obscure use of the word mark I see no way anyone could solve this to their satisfaction. Yes the setter carries some of the blame but when setting a puzzle you have to have others look and see if they can follow your reasoning and assess the suitability. That this clearly didn’t happen here spoiled an otherwise decent monthly bit of fun.

    Thank you Andrew for the very honest blog, and Kite for owning up to the issue of ambiguity.

  10. In retrospect I think I have been a bit harsh with my earlier comments.  Compilers do their best and while we may not like one puzzle or compiler as much as we like another we should remember what they are trying to do, which is to give us some entertainment and enjoyment.  Looking at the clues again there was much to like, as TheZed @10 says.  I also looked at Genius puzzles 126 and 191 mentioned by Andrew.  I actually liked both of them and was perhaps in the minority for having done so.  Yet recently I did a daily Guardian puzzle which got rave reviews by just about everyone, yet I found it boring and horrible to do.  I never raved about Araucaria for instance, preferring Bunthorne by a long chalk.  I found that Araucaria did not bother or care to make good surface readings for many of his clues which reduced the pleasure of doing his puzzles for me.  Yet I know that will be seen as heritage and I know that others may have hated Bunthorne.

    I hear what Kite says about taking responsibility, but surely there should be a mechanism for a couple of people to be given the job of looking at the puzzles before publication to spot possible issues.  Maybe the other compilers could take turns at that?

  12. Gordon, thanks for coming back. This was looked at by another compiler as well as the editor, but I’m afraid we all managed to overlook the ambiguity. Such is life!

  13. Hi Bridgesong@11 Mea culpa – I meant heresy; while admitting that Auracaria was also considered a great heritage for the Grauniad also.

    Thanks for the information Robi @12 – how do you know this?

  15. Happily, I haven’t got a working printer yet. Thank goodness some helpful soul didn’t print this out for me, or I would have wasted far more time on it! I did manage to get 1d, 3d, 6d (!), 14d and 24d in the little time I spent working on it. It’s not actually fatal not to get a printout of this one, because I have Crossword Compiler, which I can use to duplicate the grid which I (try and) fill. If I succeed, I can fill in the form online. The only benefit of having paper is I can take it anywhere and it’s more restful on the eyes. I can only look at screens for so long and there are lots of other reasons I have to.

    Regarding Andrew’s bugbear of ‘and nor’, it’s quite normal in an expression like “I didn’t like this puzzle and nor did they”. It would be a bit odd to leave out the ‘and’, in speech at least. Collins COBUILD gives the example sentence “I don’t want to see him go and nor do the fans.”

    Gordon, I think the clue to the source of Robi’s supernatural powers is in the use of the word “we” in his original comment.

  16. Hi Tony

    Yes, I had already sussed that out.  I was just hoping Robi might let on who he actually was at the Guardian [or perhaps one of the setters].  I looked online today but could find no reference to Kite’s real name either.

    I think your use of ‘and nor’ sounds ‘right’.  I cannot say ‘Jack is taller than I’ even though I know that is grammatically correct.  I sometimes say ‘than I am’ but more frequently ‘than me’.  We know that ‘feet’ is the plural of ‘foot’, but I say I am 6 foot 3.  ‘Nor’ can be used where it does not mean ‘and not’ as well.  Consider ‘I like neither apples nor oranges’.

    Also what is the use this past couple of months of using your surname.  Are you trying to sound posh?

    And get yourself a printer for god sake man.

    Gordon

  17. [Gordon, glad you think my name sounds posh! A crosswording friend wrote recently to ask me if I was the author of a comment made under the name Tony on the fifteensquared blogpost of an Inquisitor, which I wasn’t, so I thought it would be better to remove the ambiguity and also to let people know that I’m the same person who comments on the Guardian crossword blog under my full name. Elsewhere, of course, I am Whynot]

  18. There were some nice clues here and the idea was fair, so it was a shame about the ambiguity ( and the rather unsatisfying +E -E at 25a ), but even worse is choosing the wrong option for entry .. when there`s no possible way to confirm there`s a point where you just pick an option and be done with it. So I won`t win, but then I have won in the past, has anyone won more than once?

  19. I always look at the Genius but as often as not decide not to bother quite early on. I decided not to here, largely based on the clash between 10a /2d.

    My favourite for 2d was KISS, comprising either 2 or 3 defs, but I wasn’t convinced so I gave up.

    Much of the rest seems quite good so it’s a shame the editing process isn’t more robust. For a monthly puzzle which by its nature is different, I think at least two (devil’s advocate type), test solvers might be advisable.

  20. I’ve just downloaded Genius 201 and I notice the pdf is ‘Genius201v2’, so if anyone is using a download not marked as v2, may I suggest they start again.

  21. I’m a bit late to the party, but am I the only one who found LASER at 10A, from EARL + S, then took out the S to give LAER – a common-enough cruciverbal word, variation of LAAGER, or Afrikaans corral, given there was no definition…messed me up with 2D though! I eventually put LARS and BIAS, so no prize for me this month (;+<)

    Tony Collman at #20 – thanks for that advice – will check my beautifully LASER-printed copy of 201 before getting in to it!

    John at #18 – I won recently (196), and I think I won a couple in the very early days…a long hard slog in between…

  23. Thanks mc at #21, good to know a repeat win is possible .. though it is done mainly for “fun”. Haven`t looked at 201 yet, can`t remember which of the printers I sent it to.

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