Times Crossword Championship 2009 – Grand Final Puzzle No. 3

19 comments on “Times Crossword Championship 2009 – Grand Final Puzzle No. 3”

1. Unless I am mistaken this was the only one in the actual physical paper yesterday. I have to say it was mildly encouraging for me, as whilst it took about 45 mins with GAMBOGE as a complete guess, nothing struck me as outrageous – it was just good quality hard cluing, no obscure references to plays or operas or unknown vocab. I remember reading last year (??) about the BERNESE OBERLAND clue and thinking that the puzzles would be chock with obscurity, but this seemed to disprove that. Bear in mind I haven’t looked at the other two yet, so i may yet cry!
2. Thanks for the excellent (and so rapid) blogs on these, Peter.

   The three puzzles from the final took me one hour and nine minutes, with one wrong answer in #2, so I wouldn’t have been troubling the scorers, even if I’d got that far (haven’t yet tried the prelims).

   No question that this year’s final was played on a championship course – ‘hit and hope’ solving wasn’t going to cut it. And that’s how it should be. Congratulations again to all who went the distance, or even came close.

3. Ihad a day of crosswords yesterday. I did all 6 of the preliminary puzzles in lunch and while waiting for an hour in a coffee shop for a meeting with a lawyer. Then I did the regular crossword when it came up at midnight (I’m in California so this is at 4pm). Then in the evening I did the 3 grand final puzzles. I probably beat 30 mins on the preliminary ones on average. 45 mins for the first grand final, about an hour for the second, and the third I failed to finish. I’d put in WINDLASS instead of WIRELESS and never went back to check. I’d not heard of GAMBOGE so I guess GARGOGE (RAG for the organ) leaving me O-R-R for the seafood.

   I was actually pretty pleased that I finished all 9 out of ten crosswords and only fell at the very final fence, as it were. I have to say that you guys doing 6 of these in a row under championship conditions is harder than doing 10 during a 12 hour period.

   Some absolutely excellent stuff with some very smooth surface readings that had nothing whatsoever to do with the answer, and some great lift-and-separates.

   Congratulations to all of you who did well, and also to the setters.

4. My attempt has numerous crossings out, as I leapt to what were later revealed to be wrong conclusions. In the end I couldn’t make any sense of GAMBOGE and put GEMLODE, hoping a Dolmeg might be a well known make of harmonica. Another excellent and difficult puzzle.

   My admiration of those who can complete these puzzles in the allotted time and under competition conditions is boundless.

5. Solved in the paper yesterday before attempting the daily puzzle (probably unwise to dive in at the deep end like that), and took 25:48. Great clueing, and I thought I’d detected Anax’s touch before it was confirmed. Took a long time to see how GLASGOW worked, and had to come here to find out how WIRELESS worked. The rest was slow but steady progress, although it took a while to get a start – AUDIO BOOK was the first one I put in.
6. It has taken me more than 27 minutes to not understand all the answers to this one! Still don’t understand 14a. Sure a flying fortress is a type of bomber but how does flying =keep and fortress=up?
   7d How does mag =organ , please?
   Thanks
   1. A flying fortress is a “keep” that is “up” – it’s just a cryptic def.
      An “organ” in this sense is a publication, therefore a mag.
      I was solving this in the audience and had to stop myself laughing out loud when I got “ENFANT TERRIBLE”. Great stuff!
7. After giving up for a while on final #2, this was pint #6 and the start of pint #7. Bottom half filled in rather quickly, took a while to see ANTIVIRUS (though the letters were written in a couple of orders on the paper to try to make something of them), and then at the end I was stuck with 7D and 8D unfilled and nothing coming so I went back for a final crack at #2.
8. Bummer! There I was thinking that I was going to solve all three when old Harold Larwood raised his ugly head. Other than that this was a really, really difficult but very enjoyable one.

   So three puzzles, one missing answer and a little over two hours in all. Would I have won?

   I think I’ll try George’s approach next year.

9. EUROFIGHTER (and FLYING FORTRESS) should certainly have helped me, but (solving in the audience) I had CANTATA (‘Does “cheer”‘ = CAN + TATA the flimsy reasoning) so had the wrong initial letter for ages!

   Although a great puzzle I did have a couple of queries – I’m not sure what part of speech ‘Bugs’ is in the cryptic reading of 9ac, wasn’t convinced by ‘feeding’ in 22dn and thought the question marks seemed unfair to the cryptic readings of 7dn and 16dn – but 1ac, 5ac, 14ac, 23ac, 4dn, 8dn and 19dn were all brilliant. Thanks Anax.

   1. Thanks Talbinho

      Just to sweep up the scraps:
      9Ac “Bugs” = crazy. The cartoon character Bugs Bunny was named for that reason.
      22Dn “feeding”. The feeding/filling link probably isn’t the first to spring to mind, but there are plenty of usage examples.
      7Dn “finale?”. It was a difficult choice whether or not to include the QM. Left out, I felt “finale” wasn’t quite bang on as defining the last letter, and that there would be more complaints if it wasn’t there.
      16Dn “bombs?”. I had to put in a warning about how to read the word, as the anagrind interpretation relies on a contemporary colloquialism that isn’t immediately apparent and could even be unfamiliar. Just a case of playing safe.

      1. Thanks very much for the clarifications.

         I see what you mean about ‘bombs’, although I would have thought ‘to bomb’ in the sense of ‘to fail’ was common enough parlance – and perhaps more so than ‘Bugs’ as an adjective (which I didn’t know – thanks, & great clue!). On reflection, I agree ‘feeding’ in 7dn is fine, though I can see no problem with ‘finale’ to mean ‘last letter’.

         Maybe my real unease with 16dn (and possibly 15dn also) was something more subtle, namely the juxtaposition of a verbal phrase and a standalone indicator in the wordplay (‘Defuses bombs?’ + ‘Pressure’). My puristic view is that wordplay can consist lots of indicators strung together (as in ‘A’ + ‘completely empty’ = A + VOID or ‘day’s opening’ + ‘turned bad’ = D + rev. of POOR), or a phrase with a finite verb (e.g. ‘Four jockeys among crew on monarch’ = (FOUR)* in EIGHT + ER), but not a mishmash of the two without an intermediary preposition, such as ‘before’. But this is probably just a question of taste.

         1. That last paragraph is actually rather interesting in a “How to solve cryptic crosswords” sort of way.

            While it’s tempting to look at a clue and try to justify its grammatical correctness as a whole, it’s something the solver should avoid. As far as the setter is concerned, the answer and wordplay components are just bunches of letters and they’re treated as such. So words which appear to be verbs, adverbs, adjectives blah blah may well be no more than illusion.

            One of the generous gifts bestowed on setters is the right to not announce separations between clue components, and – within limits – to incorporate “unexpected” punctuation (provided that punctuation doesn’t interrupt wordplay components). If that sounds a bit arcane, to help explain it I’ve just looked at 11Ac:

            The clue as it stands is “Neighbour of Iraq is finally open to the West (5)”

            There might have been another treatment – maybe based on rearranging the same components – in which that end bit somehow got written as “…finally open to, the West…”. That would be wrong, as the comma breaks down the reversal indicator.

            Examples such as intermediary prepositions are there to use if the setter chooses to do so, but Ximenean rules also allow them to be omitted. The cryptic clue is a sequence of blocks of information, and the setter is allowed to just string them together.

            1. Thanks Anax. I certainly agree with your remarks on punctuation. There’s a very interesting (I thought so, anyway!) discussion on the concatenation issue at:

               http://crosswordcentre.barcombe.net/archive/list.php?formdata%5Btitle_val%5D=%25bone+of+contention&SubmitFilter=Search&order=date

               Richard Heald raises (much more clearly than me) the issue in his initial post; Roger Phillips’ comment near the bottom is particularly well-explained, but most of the thread is worth a read. There seems to be rather a dichotomy of opinion amongst the commenters, but I’m with Richard and Roger on this.

               (This link comes with thanks to Mark Thakkar who mentioned it elsewhere recently, hence my returning to this thread.)

            2. Everyone agrees that setters needn’t signal a join between concatenated components of a clue.  The contentious question is, what sorts of thing can count as a component of a clue?  Here’s a thought: a component of a clue is a phrase that can (and indeed should) be read as denoting certain letters in the answer.  I don’t want to fetishize this as a definition, but it lets me illustrate the crucial point with a simple observation: the words “defuses bombs” cannot be read as denoting the letters FESSEDU.  Why not?  Because “DEFUSES bombs” is a piece of narrative, just like “man bites dog” or “I have a dream”.  Subject-predicate sentences are in the wrong grammatical category to be denoting anything (indeed, they’re too complex to be doing something that simple).  By contrast, “DEFUSES bananas” can be read as denoting the letters FESSEDU: “bananas” can be read as an adjective, so that the whole thing is read as a noun phrase denoting a mad version of DEFUSES.

               Narrative does actually have a place in crossword grammar, but that place is elsewhere.  I think most clues fall into three types: (1) concatenations, like “X [[+]Y] [=] DEF”, which are the most common; (2) instructions to the solver to produce the answer, like “Put X in Y for DEF”, which used to be more common; and (3) narratives describing a production of the answer, like “X hides in Y for DEF”.  The reason why I see attempted clues like “X hides in Y DEF” as gibberish is because they can be read neither as concatenations (for the reason given in the previous paragraph) nor as narratives (obviously), despite looking a little bit like clues of either type.

               Of course, as Neil says, these things are a matter of taste.  But setters who fall on the other side of the divide should at least be able to appreciate the point at issue.  If further elaboration is needed, I suggest we discuss the alternative clues for NASE+BY given in the Crossword Centre thread: “Sean works near battleground” (boo!) and “Sean worked near battleground” (hooray!).  And I’d like to re-recommend Roger Phillips’ musings on the matter.

               NB.  Nothing that I’ve just said has anything to do with surface readings, which are irrelevant.

10. Where’s QYRIA then? It’s actually “Neighbor of Iraq is finally …”.

    I don’t think the gift is really generous – if setters couldn’t use “unannounced separations”, clues would be too transparent. If you look at the recent book of Afrit puzzles, he seems to use some separations that today’s setters would omit.

    1. Well spotted Pete – thanks. Amended. Something seems to have thrown the order of posts around though!
11. The hardest of the final puzzles for me, as the only one I got properly stuck on though taking lots of time for each.

    I put ‘HAH’ in for 5 down (i.e. the other way round) which held me up pretty thoroughly.

    Will

12. Only one of the three that I could not do.

    ‘Larwood’ was a guess, and a good one, but I came up short on ‘gamboge’, and had ‘handless’ instead of ‘wireless’, i.e. ‘handle’ on ‘S.S’, making ‘Glasgow’ and ‘ormer’ unsolvable.

    I did appreciate the parts I did get, but I think Anax should take it easy on obscure cryptics to even more obscure answers. Of course, this was the championship.

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