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Jigsaw-style puzzles are becoming quite a regular feature of Genius puzzles – this is the third such in a row. I do enjoy them, but perhaps some more variety would be in order.
This one had no special gimmick apart being a jigsaw, with the slightly-unusual hint that “each letter of the alphabet appears at least once at the end of the solutions”, so as usual my approach was to cold-solve as many clues as I could and hope that I’d be able to start fitting some answers into the grid before too long.
The pairing of SPIV and TEL AVIV made me guess they might go together in the lower left corner, along with HADJ and HASHTAG in the upper right, and luckily both guesses turned out to be correct, enabling me to fill in some more and use the letters in the grid to solve the more recalcitrant clues.
Thanks to Kite for an entertaining puzzle.
Update: blimey, I’ve just had an email from the Guardian telling me I’ve won the £100 prize, after I don’t know how many years of doing the Genius.
| 1. | SIOUX | American sextet entertaining university (5) OU (Open University) in SIX |
| 2. | ALCATRAZ | A mostly idle pet runs inside an old prison (8) CAT R in A LAZ[y] |
| 3. | NEXT YEAR | Approaching cycle close, crossing over old unoccupied tramway (4,4) EX (old) T[ramwa]Y in NEAR (close) |
| 4. | OASIS | Band’s retreat (5) Double definition |
| 5. | OXTAIL | Beginning to go, brush animal’s behind (6) [F]OXTAIL |
| 6. | BALLISTA | Bullet first found by an old weapon (8) BALL (bullet) + 1ST + A (=an) |
| 7. | AVERAGE UP | Calculate that this shortly might be represented by V&A? (7,2) VA is reversed AV, which is an abbreviation of “average”; the UP implies that the answer is entered in a down slot, which might have been helpful in the grid-filling, though in fact I didn’t use it |
| 8. | SPIV | Celebrities rejected one with dodgy dealings (4) Reverse of VIPS |
| 9. | PERDU | Concealed Danes’ leader in country (5) D[anes] in PERU |
| 10. | MELODIC | Content of rancid old Emmenthal one daughter cut, served up as sweet (7) Hidden in reverse of ranCID OLD Emental, less one of the Ds |
| 11. | SHRUG OFF | Dismiss evolving figure of speech, not English piece (5,3) Anagram of FIGURE OF SPEECH less E PIECE |
| 12. | TEL AVIV | Exam permit having turned up in Mediterranean city (3,4) Reverse of VIVA (viva voce, an oral exam) + LET (to permit) |
| 13. | NASDAQ | Exchange lively Q&As (6) (Q AND AS)* |
| 14. | REACH TO | Extend in the direction of toe with arch bent (5,2) (TOE ARCH)* |
| 15. | OUTWARD | Exterior not in good condition to paint over (7) OUT (not in good condition) + reverse of DRAW (paint?) |
| 16. | QUEASIEST | Extremely nauseous from quiet seas being whipped up (9) (QUIET SEAS)* |
| 17. | MEAT CURRY | Half-heartedly glad to admit retired volunteers with dog to make hot food (4,5) Reverse of TA (volunteers) + CUR (dog) in a “half-hearted” MERrY |
| 18. | OXHEADS | Idiots show love with kiss and man notices (7) O (love) + X (kiss) + HE (man) + ADS (adverts, notices) |
| 19. | HARD DISK | It might contain instructions to listen to clergyman’s inside (4,4) DD IS in HARK. The hard disk in a computer (nowadays more likely a solid-state drive) contains program files, which contain instructions to the computer |
| 20. | SNOWSTORM | Mr O. Eliot won something to start with, having returned a toy or ornament (9) Reverse of MR O TS (TS Eliot) WON S[omething]. The “toy or ornament” is what also called a snow globe |
| 21. | OEUVRE | Old English light engineers find work (6) OE + UV (light) + RE (Royal Engineers) |
| 22. | HASHTAG | Owns hotel, given title and key (7) HAS + H[otel] + TAG (title) |
| 23. | PILLOW | Prisoner not well, cutting rest (6) ILL (not well) in POW |
| 24. | ABSORB | Pull in muscles or top of buttocks (6) ABS + OR + B[uttocks] |
| 25. | HADJ | Religious trip arranged, the one after India (4) HAD (arranged) + J (which follows I = India). I think HADJ (also spelt haj or hajj), the muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, should be familiar to most “advanced” solvers |
| 26. | YEMENI | Republican enemy I assassinated (6) (ENEMY I)* |
| 27. | FOOTPATH | Some oldish tap too frail to be turned around in rough way (8) Hidden in reverse of oldisH TAP TOO Frail |
| 28. | DORSAL FIN | Swimmer’s guide for island resort (6,3) (FOR ISLAND)* |
| 29. | SMALL | Unimportant painful practice everyone follows (5) SM (Sado-masochism) + ALL |
| 30. | TWO OUNCES | We soon cut cocktail liquor measure in New York (3,6) (WE SOON CUT)* |
My first Genius DNF for a while.
I managed to cold solve about one third but couldn’t really get going.
Though I did manage to stick NASDAQ and QUEASIEST into the grid.
Well done Andrew and anyone else who finished
Thanks Andrew and Kite.
What? No poems, no missing letters and words? Without these frills, I thought this was a solid puzzle.
Had my side sheet with cold solutions counted and grouped by their size, and also a tracking by end letter in place.
When I had HADJ and SPIV, looked for a v or j ending 7 letter word; TEL AVIV settled SPIV to be at home at SW, and, therefore, HADJ took NE corner. From there many solutions found their placement.
The last four or five end letters having been.identified, it was easy to pair them with missing solutions and their lengths. PILLOW was one of them, don’t recall the other three or four stragglers.
All done, and as usual entry of solutions didn’t check whether grid is filled correctly or not. Well…
Quite happy to complete another GENIUS.
I had a similar approach. HADJ had to go top right as the other 4 letter slot would have required another word ending in J. Even at an early stage that seemed unlikely. That meant SPIV had to go bottom left and be partnered with TEL AVIV the clue of which also indicates it as a down clue (turned up). As does MELODIC (served up).
Good fun, thanks to Kite and Andrew for the blog.
typo 10. MELODIC – Hidden in reverse of ranCID OL[d] EMmenthal, less one of the Ds
“DRAW (paint?)”
‘…7 To represent.
….7.5 (transitive) To produce a visual representation of (a person or thing) by lines and marks with pencil, pen, paints etc. [from 16th c.] ‘
We eventually finished with a feeling of triumph, though I agree with Andrew that a change from jigsaws would be welcome. The clues were mostly fair though I thought Oasis as a definition for ‘retreat’ and Republican for ‘Yemeni’ were a bit of a stretch – there must be scores of countries that are republics. And AV as an abbreviation for Average is new to me, I thought AVG or AVE more likely.
My loi OUTWARD
TWO OUNCES – not in any dictionary as an entry, but: A US Pint is 16 oz. A UK Pint is 20 oz. The ounces aren’t even equivalent. 1 US oz = 1.041 UK oz.
In my youth a UK pub measure was 1/6 gill or 5/6 fl oz – these days it can be 25ml or 35ml. A UK punter could get 40% drunker than expected.
But TWO OUNCES US is almost 2.5 UK measures – and they drink them down in one from shot glasses. A UK tourist could get 25% drunker than expected.
But those hard-boiled detectives in US fiction, drinking pints of bourbon, were only 80% as tough as I originally thought.
FrankieG @8, 83.28% surely? Assuming they finished their pints.
AVERAGE UP, REACH TO and MEAT CURRY go with TWO OUNCES as being entries suggested by Crossword Compiler’s ‘compounds and phrases’ list, a list that is riddled with mistakes, misspelled names and any old rubbish. I can’t find any source that thinks REACH TO deserves defining. When solving, I tried looking up ‘average up’ and found on-line that it can mean to buy more shares at a higher price. I’ve just found ‘to calculate an average or rough figure’ in Wiktionary, but don’t find plucking just ‘calculate’ out of that very satisfactory. I had more problems with that clue: can’t see how ‘that this ..’ works cryptically; V&A is not VA; V&A, being in the clue, is not up, so the reversed clue structure doesn’t work.
Having grumbled in a couple of previous puzzles that they could be completed without discovering the theme, I was surprised to find this one preempted any such complaint by not having any special features at all. Fill a grid, jumble the clues, and bingo.
Finished all but oeuvre. Had all the crossers but I just couldn’t think of a word that fit. Had all other words in the right place using similar methods as mentioned in this thread. I only got hadj because I knew it had to end in j. Looked up meaning afterwards. Could someone please tell me how ‘arranged’ is a synonym of ‘had’?
With jigsaws, I often try to cold-solve at least half of the clues first, but with this one I managed only ten (of 30). It helped that I had collected J, Z, Q and F. I took a chance by pencilling in HADJ in the top right of the grid, after which I found that I could enter HASHTAG, ALCATRAZ, DORSAL FIN and SHRUG OFF, and this was hardly guesswork any more. The puzzle progressed steadily from there – an exercise in which the depletion of the available ‘last letters’ became more and more helpful.
It was satisfying to complete this puzzle, as I failed to complete my only other Kite puzzle in this series (from two years ago). I enjoyed this one, and I had to admire the way it was designed and put together, but, like others, I did have an issue with some definitions, in particular:
‘arranged’ for HAD (in HADJ),
‘calculate’ for AVERAGE UP and
‘It might contain instructions’ for HARD DISK
Also, I think the ‘Bullet …’ clue should perhaps have read (for example) “Bullet first found by a weapon of old (8)”, so that BALLIST is followed by A and not AN.
Thanks anyway to Kite, and to Andrew for the blog.
Many thanks to Andrew for an excellent blog and to all the posters above for some interesting points. Just to clarify somewhat, many idioms do not necessarily appear in the main dictionaries. REACH TO can be found here, MEAT CURRY is often seen on the menus at Indian restaurants, and TWO OUNCES is a familiar liquor measurement in the US. I think cryptically V&A (together) could be seen as VA. The equivalence of HAD and arranged might be seen in such as: he had/arranged a party. Hope that is helpful to the posters above.
Kite @12 V&A of course could be seen as VA, but going in reverse, you’re asking the solver to come up with a cryptic indication for a cryptic/indirect indication of an abbreviation of a word there is no hint of in the clue.
TWO OUNCES, familiar to who? A quick search suggests that’s simply not true.
The same Crossword Compiler list also includes ONE OUNCE, …, THREE OUNCES, FOUR OUNCES, up to SIXTEEN OUNCES.
James @13 – well, if you’re wearing your Pedanticus hat, you should say TWO OUNCES, familiar to whom 😉
Can I blame autocorrect?
Thanks Kite and Andrew. Looking back at my comments on this one, l wrote –
Over too quickly.
I didn’t use the end letter device at all, so it was just a normal jigsaw crossword.
I solved half the clues and then tried fitting them into the grid.
Well done anyway to Kite for getting all the end letters!
And well done (through gritted teeth) Andrew for winning this month!