Hello – I’m a new blogger, assigned to the Genius. I’ve solved every one of the Geniuses since their creation (and never won the prize!) I hope I’ve got this one right …
I found it a toughie. The intro told us: clues are normal but all solutions must be treated thematically before entry in the grid; confirmation that this has been correctly executed will then appear in the first and last columns.
“Treated thematically” is thin gruel for what amounted to fairly major changes. It soon became clear that some sort of shifting was necessary, so I started experimenting with different starting places, in the hope – which proved justified – that the letter-order didn’t need to be changed. The confirmatory Nina in the first and last down columns – CYCLICAL SOLUTION – arrived too late to be of help. As each solution had a different starting- point for re-cycling, no crossers could be relied upon, so each clue had to be solved without the help of crossers – until near the end where I became more confident of some placements. And there was some difficult clueing along the way.
But Geniuses are not meant to be a walk in the park (though I often find a walk in the park helps with tricky solutions) … and this certainly exercised the brain-cells. If it was a job to solve, it must have been a real test to set, so kudos to Harpo, for creating a fine challenge.
| ACROSS | ||
| 1 | CTPI |
Caught best Scot a while back (4)
|
| Cycled from PICT: homonym (caught) of PICKED (= best) | ||
| 4 | TEERSOVERS |
Superintendent crossing Junction 6 initially turns too much (10)
|
| from OVERSTEERS; OVERSEER (superintendent) crossing (containing) T (junction), then 6 initially = S | ||
| 9 | YORKNE |
Islands in New York with abandoned ground (6)
|
| from ORKNEY; anagram (ground) of NEW YORK missing (abandoned) W (with) | ||
| 10 | SSIESGLO |
Explanations about independent magazines (8)
|
| from GLOSSIES: GLOSSES (explanations) around I (independent) | ||
| 11 | CITEXPLI |
Cross when breaking plastic tie clip, that’s clear (8)
|
| from EXPLICIT: anagram (plastic) of TIE CLIP containing X (cross) | ||
| 12 | LCAVEL |
Beware limits of legal tender in time of war (6)
|
| from CAVELL: CAVE (beware) followed by LL (limits of legal). Edith Cavell, executed in 1915, was a British nurse (TENDER) who helped save lives of British and German soldiers during the First World War. | ||
| 13 | LLYROGERJO |
Main thief’s standard party stuff (5,5)
|
| from JOLLY ROGER, the flag of pirates (thieves on the main): JOLLY = party + ROGER = stuff | ||
| 16 | ODQU |
Note dropped in cited prison (4)
|
| from QUOD (a prison): TE (note) dropped from QUOTED (cited) | ||
| 17 | IERT |
Bond and Goldfinger’s ultimate row (4)
|
| from TIER (a row): TIE (bond) followed by R (the ultimate letter in Goldfinger) | ||
| 19 | EDANTIQUAT |
Passé adult quit date, sadly without note (10)
|
| from ANTIQUATED; anagram (sadly) of A (adult) + QUIT DATE outside (without) N (note) | ||
| 22 | CTSEXA |
Forces out Old Bill more than once? (6)
|
| from EXACTS: EX (old) ACT (bill) more than once indicating plural – S | ||
| 23 | TFIRESPI |
Model of plane — mine is kept in small sack (8)
|
| from SPITFIRE: PIT (mine) within (kept in) S (small) + FIRE (sack) | ||
| 26 | ARASITEP |
Tough troops located without cover — drone, perhaps (8)
|
| from PARASITE: PARAS (tough troops) followed by ITE – sited without first and last letters – (cover) | ||
| 27 | NSALMO |
Colour film finally accepted by an annual Parisian exhibition (6)
|
| from SALMON: M (film finally) inside (accepted by) SALON (an annual Parisian exhibition) | ||
| 28 | LSSCHNITZE |
Cutlets in unusually thin slices, unknown ingredient initially missing (10)
|
| from SCHNITZELS: anagram (unusually) of THIN SLICES + Z (unknown) minus (missing) I (ingredient initially) | ||
| 29 | OBRN |
European city service cutting 50% of security (4)
|
| from BRNO: RN (Royal Navy – service) inside (cutting) BO (50% of BOND – security) | ||
| DOWN | ||
| 2 | TTOWI |
Viz is tense, going after curtailed reality TV show (2,3)
|
| from TO WIT (namely = viz): T (tense) following TOWI – letter at end missing (curtailed) from TOWIE – acronym of The Only Way Is Essex (reality TV show) | ||
| 3 | ICKIEBR |
Craftsman‘s mostly unpleasant cheese sandwiches (7)
|
| from BRICKIE: ICK (ICKY = unpleasant, without last letter – curtailed) inside (sandwiches) BRIE – cheese | ||
| 4 | TYEMP |
Thus hungry bully gets by (5)
|
| from EMPTY (hungry): if you were to empty bully (thus), you’d get BY | ||
| 5 | ESSEIVR |
Finish in seedy bar, both topless in a drunken state (7)
|
| from IVRESSE: RESS (dress = finish, topless – without first letter) in IVE (dive = seedy bar – also topless) | ||
| 6 | SHILLFORT |
Thrills of crumbling prehistoric strongholds (4,5)
|
| from HILL FORTS – anagram (crumbling) of THRILLS OF | ||
| 7 | VESEADO |
Little auk in America plunged after tailless marine mammal (3,4)
|
| from SEA DOVE (little auk): DOVE (plunged – past tense of dive in American usage) after SEA (SEAL without last letter – tailless) | ||
| 8 | RELLEAQUA |
Painting it from equilateral fragments (9)
|
| from AQUARELLE: anagram (fragments) of EQUILATERAL minus (from) IT | ||
| 14 | LIESTGRIS |
Most frightful old king first to scoff pork pies (9)
|
| from GRISLIEST: GR (old king) + IST (first) containing (to scoff) LIES (pork pies) | ||
| 15 | GREDACTIN |
Editing department responding to stimuli, externally (9)
|
| from REDACTING: D (department) with REACTING (responding to stimuli) outside (externally) | ||
| 18 | TRESSAC |
Assert case, partly over player (7)
|
| from ACTRESS: anagram (over) of ASSERT + C (case) | ||
| 20 | ARTUPST |
Revolting celeb essentially a little social climber (7)
|
| from UPSTART: charade of UP (revolting) + STAR (celeb) + T- middle letter (essentially) of A LITTLE | ||
| 21 | QUEBARO |
Flamboyant sailing vessel vacated? (7)
|
| from BAROQUE; BARQUE with O inside it (vacated) | ||
| 24 | IGNDE |
Scandi said to stoop (5)
|
| from DEIGN: homonym of DANE (Scandinavian) | ||
| 25 | PHMOR |
Seamlessly change a little over half of painkiller (5)
|
| from MORPH – to change without sign: 5/8ths of MORPHINE |
Welcome prospero. And thanks for the blog.
I think this was the toughest Genius I’ve ever attempted. Not only was the grid fill difficult, the wordplay was tough and the definitions were often well-hidden.
Still, I got there in the end. Thanks to Harpo too.
Welcome Prospero. You summed this up nicely.
The Ninas of course would not appear unless you’d already worked out that a cyclic rearrangement of the answers was necessary. That just made it a bit of a slog for me but I got there in the end.
As you say, prospero, tricky, but i think a very enjoyable challenge. I realised what the device was fairly quickly. Picaroon’s Genius 223 a few months ago was similar in that it had cyclical solutions, but in that case it was all explained very clearly in the preamble. I must have had that in the back of my mind. I was held up by having to guess AQUARELLE (fairly obvious) and then really stuck on IVRESSE (nho) for ages. Piecing it all together was fun.
Well that was a baptism of fire for you, prospero. Thanks for the blog. And thanks Harpo for the fun.
Hard luck drawing this for a first blog!
We never arrived at the ‘thematic treatment’, so spent hours in frustrated bafflement, even after having solve over half of the clues blind. Bah!
*solved
Forgot to thank you, Prospero, for the solutions to those we didn’t get.
Looking at 4d, this seems a bit naughty, as it breaks the rule about having the definition at one end of the clue – I think “Hungry, thus bully gets by” would have been ok, though.
This was not my cup of tea. I enjoyed trying to cold-solve the first eight Across clues and the first seven Down clues (only 1a and 5d turning out to be unsolvable in that way), and I really hoped and expected by then that I would be able to discover or work out the thematic treatment required, but as that didn’t happen I decided to call it a day. (I didn’t fancy trying to cold-solve another batch of clues just to collect more data!)
Welcome to the fold Prospero that’s was some tough first gig.
Me @3 I should add that I didn’t find this easy at all and did it in bits over about 3 weeks with many rest stops.
Thank you Prospero and Harpo. I didn’t get the theme and I’d never heard of ivresse. I have one question, why is ‘note’, ‘te’ in 16A?
BrianG@9 It’s the sol-fa musical scale notation, do re me fa so la te do (other spellings are available)
Crossbar@10, so it is. Thanks. Ah well.
Welcome Prospero, and I hope this month’s Genius (due to be published tomorrow – which I am down to blog) is a bit easier than this was. Although I guessed what the thematic treatment would be pretty quickly, it was still difficult because of the quantity of cold solving required before being able to start filling the grid. IVRESSE proved particularly difficult, partly because there was no indication in the clue that it was a French word.
Welcome to the Genius Blogging Team Prospero and thanks for offering to take over our blog as your first introduction. We found it a tough solve too but had completed the puzzle although we weren’t looking forward to writing up the blog. Partly because we were exceptionally busy and also because we didn’t enjoy solving the puzzle as much as we normally do. Every clue had to be solved from scratch which made it a bit of a slog. Still – as you say, it’s a Genius so one can expect a challenge.
Thanks to Prospero and Harpo.
many thanks to you all for your encouragement – now for 229!
Thanks prospero and Harpo.
I suspected the cycling, like a recent Picaroon(?) Genius which involved cycling the two down answers together…..didn’t think of cycling only one answer at a time. Even with several solutions in hand, gave up.
Thanks for the helpful blog Prospero. As per others posting here, the ‘thematic treatment’ was guessed at quite early on – a benefit reaped from having worked through the backlog of Genius crosswords during lockdown! – but the final solve still came hard and slow. It can be fun to slowly chip away and reveal each answer, although I was still unconfident of Ivresse even at the point of submission, so thanks also to Harpo. Satisfaction on completion was somewhat diminished though, as I felt baffled as to how the entry form was to be completed – were we supposed to enter the answers as they appeared before or after the thematic treatment?? I could not see anyone refer to it on any blog site, and I even emailed the Guardian to ask but no reply, so in the end I put the ‘normal’ answer in, with the cycled answer in brackets. Does anyone have any helpful hints on that?
manjax @16 I wondered that too, but opted just to put in the answers as they appear in the grid, i.e. after thematic treatment. Otherwise, I think it wouldn’t be clear if the solver had actually figured out what the thematic treatment was.
I also often wonder in the case of solutions with more than one word whether to put in spaces between the words. I think I read somewhere that the solution(s) “pulled out of the bag” are checked by a person so it probably doesn’t matter. If checked automatically by some code it would depend how cleverly the code had been written. And then of course do you put upper or lower case?
Aaagh! I fell short on ‘ivresse’, and can’t now understand why I didn’t get it. Still, I’m proud of myself for having solved everything else after gazing at it in despair for some time initially. I enjoyed the struggle; thanks to Harpo and Prospero.
Mr Beaver – I think you could argue that THUS HUNGRY is all definition, with the THUS serving a double function. I should perhaps have underlined the THUS as well. Thank you for the comments – an enjoyable blog – and 229 has not caused so much sweat!
Bejabbers.
Thanks Harpo, and welcome Prospero. I must have got lucky here but I honestly found other recent puzzles far more difficult. I guessed early on that thematic treatment would likely mean either reversing or cycling the answers and having got a couple of answers on the left hand side that seemed to cross I then made a further lucky stab at ‘CYCLICAL’ featuring in the 1st column. The right hand side was slower to fill and it was certainly not easy to finish (JOLLY ROGER took ages and IVRESSE was new to me as well).
I finished this very quickly, but I may have been aided by some intuitive leaps that might just as well have led me down a blind alley. I figured early on that a nina must be involved, there being no other hint to the thematic treatment. And fortunately the theme was not “craters on Mars” or some other wild bit of arcana. Guessing at the theme locked in quite a few solutions right away. But for some luck on the GK required, though, (IVRESSE and CAVELL in particular–I studied a lot of French, and I was a WWI nerd), this might have been well-nigh uncompletable. It also somehow helped with the quasi-jigsaw construction to realize that the solution entered in the grid could not begin with the first letter of the untreated solution, so some intersections were ruled out. I thought that apart from a few gimmes, the clues were hard but ultimately fair. Thanks for a good puzzle and a clear blog.
Thanks Crossbar. Nice to know that I was not alone in my confusion, although perhaps I chose the wrong way to complete the entry form in the end. My reasoning was that it said that “all solutions must be treated thematically before entry in the grid” so this meant that the ‘proper’ solution was the word that you had before it was cycled around…if you catch my drift! Guess it’s a moot point but it would be nice if there were clearer instructions for submission. Looking forward to tackling 229 tonight
manxjax@16 and Crossbar@17: See a helpful note in the Comments to Genius 162 on the 225 blog for an explanation about entries.
I am also grinding through the “old” Genius puzzles, getting through maybe 3 or 4 a week, although a few have me completely stymied so far, and on a few others I am down to one or two final undecipherable clues. The oldest blogged solution on 225 is around Genius 50, so some of the solutions may be eternal mysteries. Even the failures are instructive, though.
Thanks Cineraria@24. That makes it clear. The Graun should put that on the preamble each time for any new solvers. Anyway here it is manjax @23 and anyone else who might be interested
” The solution to be entered in the solution form is the word or sequence of letters that is required for entry in the grid. It matters not if hyphens and spaces are included or left out. Nor does upper or lower case lettering matter.
And you are right. A small selection of potential winners is randomly selected from the file where they are all stored and then the solutions are manually checked until the first correct one emerges. “
You are right to feel aggrieved re your prize Comrade P. Way back when the GG was subscription-only I remember correct entries numbered under 50. The number 34 sticks in my mind. So, numerically, you were chizzed or unlucky if you reached 100.
I’m not sure when things opened up to the Perioikoi. I had to take some time off around GG 150 due to an unfortunate marriage.
BTW. I won it once at 51 or 52. Got my cheque from Hugh for £100, with a letter saying that, in his opinion, it was the easiest Genius to date. That was fair, I think. It was a Rufus after all. But c’mon.
And I forgot to bank the cheque.
My son and I were stymied from the start because we thought “the first and last down columns” meant “the first and last columns in which down solutions are written”. Is that an entirely unreasonable interpretation of “down columns”?
What is Nina? We do the Cryptic every day and the GG every month but don’t know nina.
We enjoyed solving the clues, and even enjoyed the impossible challenge for a few hours.
If the theme was CYCLICAL SOLUTIONS, how were we meant to know that, since those words wouldn’t appear until we had cycled a few? Aren’t we in Catch 22 territory here? ASEPLE PHEL!
Hi Geoff – yes, I’d made the mistake you made – thought it was columns 2 and 14 – until I’d finished solving and saw 1 and 15 … so, as the rubric says, it was confirmation rather than help .. or PHEL. For NINA, I’d refer you to https://www.crosswordunclued.com/2009/10/what-is-nina.html – supposedly named after Al Hirschfield who would hide things in his paintings for his daughter Nina to find – though this may well be apocryphal.