Another “constrained” puzzle, where Gemelo has enforced a rule that makes the setting harder for himself without making the solver’s job harder (or easier)…
… or so I thought! The rubric states: Here we go! In this puzzle, one specific letter is omitted from the clues (likewise, it is omitted from these instructions) – but you never know, you might stumble ‘cross it in the grid. The aphetic ‘cross immediately made me suspect that the missing letter is A, and so it proved. There are no As in the clue, though every other letter appears at least once; the instructions (apart from “constrained”) also contain no As, but also no Js, Qs or Xs.
There are indeed As in the solutions, but there’s more to it than that, as they occur only on the main diagonals, thus creating a cross, as promised. Unfortunately I noticed this too late for it to be much help in solving.
Constraint aside, I found this puzzle on the tough side, with a number of clues proving hard to parse to my satisfaction, though I think I got there in the end, with the possible exception of 31. Thanks to Gemelo for the challenge.
| Across | ||||||||
| 1 | AFFECTIVE | Voice filled with very loud energy of emotion (9) FF (very loud) + E[nergy] in ACTIVE (grammatical voice) |
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| 11 | PALM | Quickly lift the prize (4) Double definition |
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| 12 | NENUPHAR | Lily, runner-up, dropping sport in distress – I’m surprised to go into it (8) HA (I’m surprised!) in anagram of RUNNER-UP less RU (sport) |
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| 13 | SCABIES | Infection, in other words, hidden by ongoing workers? (7) I.E. (in other words) in SCABS (those who continue to work during a strike) |
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| 14 | CHART | Scott’s to do tense plot (5) CHAR (to do, as used by Sir Walter Scott) + T[ense] |
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| 15 | SISAL | Fibre of girl returning to seize independence (5) I in reverse of LASS |
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| 18 | TEHRAN | Muslim city then struggling to host god from Egypt (6) RA (Egyptian sun god) in THEN* |
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| 19 | LAPSUS | Slip round with knowledge (6) LAP (round) + SUS |
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| 20 | BAATHIST | Lingo circling before someone phoned ME reformer (8) A (ante – before) + THIS (as in “who is this?”) in BAT (“the informal speech of a foreign language, lingo”) |
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| 21 | SKOKIAAN | Bushmen winning three points, drinking one Joburg home-brew (8) I in KOKA (three points in judo) in SAN (Bushman). Skokiaan is a South African home-brewed drink |
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| 26 | SERIAL | Episodic Porridge possibly picked up (6) Sounds like “cereal” |
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| 27 | PAUSES | DVD controls providing kicks for some (6) Double definition – pause is a dialect word for “kick” |
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| 30 | PANSY | Silly to vent with difficulty on betel flower (5) PAN (betel) + SILLY less ILL (with difficulty) |
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| 31 | LLANO | Reversing very little short of the whole steppe (5) Reverse of ON[e] (very little, as in a small amount?) + ALL (the whole) |
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| 32 | EBRIATE | Drunk, 29, briefly consumed by current (7) EBR[o] + I (current) + ATE |
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| 33 | LARMIERS | Luxembourg hosts over 80 dripstones (8) L[uxembourg] + R (mediaeval Roman numeral for 80) in ARMIES (hosts) |
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| 34 | G-MAN | Fed executioner (but not Chinese) (4) HANGMAN less HAN |
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| 35 | OENOTHERA | Love cycling off from evening primrose (9) O (love) + NOT HERE (off) “cycled” by one letter, plus A (from, as in Thomas à Kempis; also incorrectly in Thomas à Beckett) |
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| Down | ||||||||
| 2 | FACIES | Likes putting out new expressions on mugs (6) FANCIES less N, with the mugs being faces |
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| 3 | FLASH-FORWARD | Vision of the future from Liechtenstein, so hot with respect to defensive position (12, 2 words) FL (Fürstentum Liechtenstein) + AS H + FOR WARD |
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| 4 | EMBARK | Begin retrospective Gemelo report (6) Reverse of ME (Gemelo) + BARK (report) |
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| 5 | TEEN | Youngster’s grief no longer in evidence (4) Double definition – it’s an archaic word for grief |
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| 6 | INSULA | Old block of buildings put down, not quite the best of its kind (6) INSUL[t] + A (best of its kind) |
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| 7 | EPHA | Volume of Hebrews to copy over, including ending of Ruth (4) [rut]H in reverse of APE |
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| 8 | WHAT’S‑ITS‑NAME | Thingummy with e.g. trilby is tested in Northern Soul (12) W[ith] + HAT (e.g. a trilby) + SIT (be tested in, as in an exam) + N + AME (soul) |
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| 9 | SARGUS | Police officer not finishing one’s fish (6) SARG[e] + US (dialect form of me = one) |
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| 10 | ARTISTES | Greek god receiving income support secured by dry performers (8) IS in TT (teetotal, dry), all in ARES |
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| 16 | LABIAL | Behold! Unevenness shortened line of the lips (6) LA (behold!) + BIA[s] + L[ine] |
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| 17 | CATNAP | More or less blow up rest (6) CA (circa, more or less) + reverse of PANT |
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| 18 | TESSELLA | Two girls in little tile (8) TESS + ELLA |
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| 22 | KEVLAR | Bow’s cut in two, lifted into hem of knicker’s synthetic fibre (6) Reverse of [h]ALVE in K[nicke]R |
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| 23 | ALPEEN | Cudgel’s power restricted by sheltered knight (6) P in ALEE + N |
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| 24 | QUAIGH | Queen covering lid of sunken drinking cup in Holyrood (6) LAIGH (Scots “sunken”) with its “lid” replaced by QU; “in Holyrood” indicating a Scottish word |
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| 25 | BESTAR | Possibly put EU emblem on shoulder when crossing street (6) ST in BEAR |
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| 28 | AN MO | One second in Chinese remedy system (4, 2 words) AN (one) + MO (moment, second) |
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| 29 | EBRO | River bore moved violently (4) BORE* – the Ebro is the longest river lying entirely in Spain, the name being cognate with “Iberia” |
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I guessed that the As would occupy both diagonals early enough for it to be helpful, but I still found the puzzle a little tricky and I ended up hunting in Chambers for the last few answers. I didn’t have a hope of working out SKOKIAAN since I didn’t know that word or KOKA, but I might have worked out NENUPHAR if I had thought of ‘sport’ being RU. I also couldn’t think of the second letter of OENOTHERA and I often have trouble with clues where a short word like ‘off’ indicates a phrase NOT HERE. I managed to guess QUIAGH despite the only part of the clue I understood being ‘queen’ is QU, and even then it might have been Q but I thought R was less likely.
For 31a, Chambers gives ‘very little short of’ as a meaning of ON.
Thanks, Andrew and Gemelo.
Thanks for the blog , I initially thought each answer would contain A until I got TEEN , a quick scan then showed the pattern . I wonder if this is a tribute to Azed ? He often used the diagonals for special puzzles and I have read he used this for tributes to Ximenes .
LARMIERS , think it is the first time I have seen R=80 but fair enough .
SCABIES , does ongoing workers really mean strike-breakers ?
FLASHFORWARD is one word in Chambers93 .
Very minor glitch in the blog – it is SITS ( is tested in ) for WHATSITSNAME , just to show I am paying attention .
I thought perhaps the hardest Gemelo to date.
That said, had I spotted the full extent of the gimmick earlier, and in particular relevance of the inferred “A-cross” in the preamble, it would have been a great help. The only entries that aren’t crossed by the diagonals are 5d and 29d.
18d reminded me of the oft quoted clue by Rufus which also starts “Two girls…” and which Alan Conor used for the title of his book.
Thanks to Andrew and Gemelo.
A number of clues here I wasn’t keen on. 12ac: “sport” indicating RU – not hard, but definitely indirect. 22dn: “hem” can mean border, but here it’s used to refer to borders in the plural (K and R) and I can’t see justification for that. 35ac: too complex; I think cycling is fine when it’s the whole of the answer, but am less keen when it’s partial, as here. 10dn: also a bit over-complicated and the surface makes no sense. 13ac: I would echo Roz@2’s comment.
Two questions: re KOKA, as used in 21ac, nothing in my ancient Chambers, but online it appears to be an obsolete judo term which referred to an award that was worth much less than a waza-ari, which is a half-point – so where does three points come in? And 19ac, SUS: I can’t find support for this meaning knowledge (only “supect” or “suspicion”), but maybe the latest Chambers says so?
Roz@2: in C98, FLASH FORWARD is given as two words (but Flashback is one).
MunroMaiden@4: Chambers(2016) defines KOKA as “the lowest score awarded for a throw or hold in judo, worth three points”. It also has an entry for SUS (or SUSS), meaning suspect or suspicion. But it then has a separate entry for SUSS (or SUS), defined (as a noun) as “knowledge, awareness”.
Thanks, Hector@5. The only reference to koka=3 points I can find is in a pamphlet for amateur judo. In international competitions, the scoring seems to be quite different and the koka was apparently removed in 2009.
I’m afraid I dislike clues where the answer is obscure (or fairly obscure) and the wordplay elements are also obscure words. Here we have San, Koka and Skokiaan – none of them in most people’s everyday vocabulary. ‘Nuff said!
I thought this was very hard, but compensated for by a lovely imaginative thing (not sure if it’s a Nina or a theme). How nice that we are now having to do something instead of just admiring Gemelo’s self-inflicted cleverness. But some of the clues were tortuously difficult and I had marks against nine of them because I couldn’t understand the parsing. In the BAATHIST clue I think ‘someone phoned’ = ‘this’ is absurd. And how do we get ‘[h]alve’ in the KEVLAR clue? ‘Halve’ = ‘cut in two’, but where is the indication that the first letter of ‘halve’ is removed? It can’t be ‘cut’ because this is needed for ‘cut in two’. If it is, then ‘in two’ doesn’t equal ‘halve’.
Wil@7: the removal of the H comes from “Bow’s” – which refers to Bow in London, ie Cockney pronunciation (‘alve for halve). It took me a little while to parse that one. It comes, I think, into the category of clues where you can make little sense of the wordplay until you’ve got the answer (instead of the wordplay leading you to the answer which, to me, is the point of having it!).
Thanks MunroMaiden@8. I missed that. Also was thinking of ‘halved’ rather than ‘halve’, ‘cut’ in the present tense.