Sunday 29 August 2021

Jumbo General Knowledge Crossword (28 August)

Sunday's post will usually start with some comments on the previous day's Jumbo General Knowledge Crossword, which I normally solve in the morning.  Unlike all the other crosswords, I have a fixed routine for solving this one: I go through all the clues in strict order, Across followed by Down, and then do a second pass in the same order.  If I can't get any more Across clues after that then I look them up, fill them in and have one more go at the Down clues.

 

This is the first time I've kept statistics, so I'll use this week's puzzle as a benchmark:

1st pass: 12 of the Across and 18 of the Down clues solved (plus first half of 2d).

2nd pass: 6 more Across and 2 more Down clues solved.

3rd pass (after looking up Across answers): 1 more Down clue solved.

I was astonished by the number of obvious answers I failed to remember: ALAN ARKIN, (JEROME) FLYNN, PATRICIA HAYES and GSTAAD were all names I should have known.  Hope my memory isn't starting to go!  As for missing RAQUEL WELCH at 63a... well my excuse is that SOPHIA LOREN fitted the enumeration and threw me off the scent.

 

A couple of errors which were quickly corrected: 17a changed from NAVE to APSE as soon as I had the crossers; 26d initially entered as BEAT YOUR NEIGHBOUR before I checked the enumeration.

 

As usual, there were plenty of answers I didn't know and had no way of guessing (which is why I find these puzzles a bit unsatisfactory): amongst them were ELWY, EARLY MIST and BLUELINER.  Seemed to do better on the Downs than the Acrosses today for some reason.

Cryptic by Crosophile (#3294, 28 August)

On Sundays I'll also usually be presenting the solution to an unsolved puzzle - either one that I didn't have time to complete during the week, or one from my backlog of puzzles from February and March, when I was taking a break from cryptics.  Today I'll be doing yesterday's puzzle, for which I ran out of time while I was setting up the blog.  I had planned to solve #3289 (Monday 23 August) today, but that'll have to wait for another time.

 

This puzzle first appeared in the Independent in June 2017 and was blogged on Fifteensquared by bertandjoyce.  It was blogged on idothei by jonofwales, who gave it three out of five stars for difficulty.

Link to idothei

Link to Fifteensquared (June 2017)

At first I thought this was going to be a two-star puzzle rather than a three-star one - I got going quickly in the NW corner with 9a CIDER followed by 1d ALCOHOL, which set up the theme for the rest of the puzzle!  I'm pretty bad at spotting themes in puzzles but I noticed there were quite a few drinks in this one, though not all of them were alcoholic.

1d immediately got a tick from me as an ingenious "&lit" clue - it can be read entirely as definition (alcohol being a compound of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen) or as wordplay (anagram of O + C + H + O + ALL).  It's a bit of a shame that "ordinary" had to be included to get it to work, although as Hovis points out on Fifteensquared (comment #4), "ordinary hydrogen" might be considered as distinguishing the standard isotope of hydrogen from deuterium and tritium, which are comparatively rare.

I worked through most of the puzzle without any great difficulty.  I was puzzled by 20d, as I didn't know that meaning of NUTMEG, but otherwise most of the clues seemed straightforward.  The enumeration misled me at 23a; I'd have considered it (5,1,3) because D'ART are two separate words in French, but I think there must be a "house rule" concerning apostrophes in foreign words (there was a similar issue with COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE in another recent puzzle).  Once I'd twigged that, I thought it was a delightful clue, which I'd nominate as Clue of the Day.

My main hold-ups were in the NE corner, where I couldn't remember Hubble's first name for ages, and in the SW corner and particularly 25a, where I didn't think of the supernatural Raphael - I needed Crossword Solver to sort that one out.  My last one in was 7d, which I thought was rather poor.  It may have been an attempt to mislead the solver into thinking it was a reversal, but it didn't really work for me.

Only quibble was "hack" = NAG in 23d; Fifteensquared doesn't explain it and none of the commenters seem to mention it, although I note they're both informal terms for a horse, so maybe that's it.

 

Overall, jolly good for a Sunday - even though it wasn't intended for one!