ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ CRYPTIC WEDNESDAY]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ CRYPTIC WEDNESDAY]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
Whenever we go back to the Old World, Liz cannot resist buying the Guardian. She’s a news junkie, and I’m pretty sure that’s her favorite newspaper. After thumbing through the articles, I give the cryptic crossword a crack. Granted I’m at a serious disadvantage with these puzzles for a myriad of reasons:
- Brits use colours and tyres, and it takes me a while to realise they do that.
- Typically there’s like one or two stunningly funny jokes about an MP or a Premiership player in the surface meaning of one of the clues and/or the answer. Stunningly funny only if you know who they’re talking about.
- They occassionally ignore the basic rules of cryptic clue writing altogether. I’m talking having extra words in the clue or just not cluing the answer straight at all.
And, of course, I solve substantially more American-style puzzles than cryptics. Don’t get me wrong, American cryptics are out there: Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon pretty much own the market on these puzzles. Their work is so amazingly clean and funny and, well, effortless, it just looks like they just happened. (Click here for just a sampling of their Atlantic Monthly Puzzler). Trip Payne also makes some fantastic cryptics as well.
I think the notion for me to make a cryptic came about a couple New Year’s Eves ago, when Liz and I were in New York City. We just randomly picked some Italian restaurant to have dinner on the West Side, and it wasn’t too long into the dinner that Liz realized that the couple to the table immediately next to us were from England. And from their accents, sounded like they were from York as well. We struck up a conversation with them and found a few overlaps: they were indeed from York, both women were psychologists, they were also planning a wedding, and that our new friend’s father constructed puzzles for the London Times. (This gentlemen would be Smokey for those who pay attention to British puzzles).
Since that chance encounter, I’ve had the notion to try and make a cryptic, but never really got around to it. It seemed like the blog would be a good format to give it a shot. This was damn hard to make. I wanted to make sure 1-Across really zinged. I also spent way too long filling and refilling the grid to try and make it full of fun stuff (and with entries that could be clued). As with all cryptics, the artistry is in the clues, and I resisted the temptation to rely too heavily on anagrams. I think it’s inevitable, though. I want to take the time to thank Nancy Schuster who helped me tighten up the clues. Although some of the clues were fine, I made a lot of rookie mistakes with verb tenses and false indicators. She helped immensely. Also, thanks to Trip for giving it another quick polish. Just for kicks, I sent it off to Patrick Berry (as well as my other test solvers), and when Patrick sill offered suggestions, I realized that pretty much no two people were going to agree whether a cryptic clue works or not.
Okay, hope you enjoyed it. Share the puzzle, folks. New one on Friday.
I was never much good at these. I just LOVE puns, but just can’t seem to get along with anagrams. Nonetheless, the puzzle was well constructed. Nicely done!
Felt very, very easy. There were some real gems, cluewise (MARIJUANA and AXL ROSE). BASTE was toughest for me, and the last thing to fall. Fell over myself a bit at LAW BOOK because I thought “How cute!” was signaling “AW, LOOK!” and couldn’t figure at first out how the “L” was supposed to get to the front of LAW BOOK.
I hope you do more of these, because I think you could be Great at them — and they give you much more opportunity to unleash the BEQ sense of humor than std. Amer. crosswords do.
Thank you. And really, thanks to all who assisted me with this one.
Patrick and Joon thought it was easy too, but I was unsure how to rate it difficulty-wise? I mean, cryptics are, just by their nature, hard to do if you’ve never done them before. But, then again, all the cryptic-heads probably saw through all these tricks easy. I debated over the difficulty and eventually went with “medium” for the reasons stated.
Well, we’ll see if there’s a second in the series. Let’s see how the rest enjoy it first.
More cryptics please – this was great…
.. and yes, this was easy. I usually struggle over the Guardian for at least half hour. This one fell in 9 minutes. One reason may be that the anagrams were too transparent?
Okay… good to know. I mean, shit, I have a long way to go. This was my first-ever attempt at a crpytic.
Forgot to rate – let’s say 4 stars out of five for a first effort. Good mix of clue-types, good surface meanings and clues whose cryptic readings work. It’s annoying that CYMBALS=”symbols” still catches me out after all these years, but that’s my problem! Some of the good points: Real names in the anag fodder in 5 and 24 – made-up names are really cheesy. Juan rather than Ev(it)a is a nice change at 16. Good anagram at 1A.
Only significant criticisms:
8 pure anagrams is probably a bit much – some UK papers limit themselves to about 5. That’s probably one reason why the puzzle was fairly easy.
Surface readings: “convincing surface meanings every time” is the sign of the best cryptic setters – and achieving it without spoiling the cryptic reading is really hard. Convincing surface meanings can also help to make clues more difficult. Examples: 27’s surface was a bit weird – gannets and magazines don’t really go together – maybe the “periodical” could have been something like “periodical possibly featuring Blue Jays [or Eagles]” (though the proper names are hard to disguise and should keep their capital letters). Similar issues with the snake and the “Ocean State instrument” at 20, and whether a card game can sit at 12 (maybe this started out as something like “Quietly sat after card game without any competition.”, but lost its surface meaning in editing? 21, 6, and 19 tell the kind of surface stories we’re after.
I’m sure you can improve next time so I’d encourage you to write a second cryptic.
Damn, what are all those people doing ahead of me on the leaderboard?
I’ll echo the others and ask you to keep making cryptics. This was a fun one. Thanks for not leaning heavily on anagram clues—too many of those makes for an uninteresting cryptic.
The British ones from the Times take me 45 minutes…at best…with a few blank squares left. The harder ones, I can’t finish without peeking at the answers after noodling around at the puzzle for an hour or two. There are some British idioms and place names I simply don’t know.
Thanks… I realized the surface meaning was the hardest part of this. Kudos, again, to Nancy and Trip for really helping me find that right word.
Also, just throwing it out there: Andrei Kirilenko is most definitely a real person, and anybody who watched the NBA post-season would have known that: http://is.gd/1c6HU
Maybe that’s the US version of the MP/Premiership clue?
As I was making this and I thought: Christ, another goddamned anagram? I considered scrapping it entirely for a Puns and Anagrams instead. What’s the verdict on those? Too cheesy? Should I even bother making one of those? For some inexplicable reason I enjoy them.
Oops, I misread that you said it was a finer point to have proper names in the clues. My bad. Still: thanks for the good criticism. Send it on to your British mates and let them see how lousy us Yanks are at setting.
I’ll throw in another vote for more cryptics…I can’t get enough of them. I also agree it was easy; my suggestions for making it harder (expert that I’m not) would be to have both ends of clues be plausible definitions and to throw in decoy words when possible so there seem to be several possibilities for how to construct the answer from the words in the clue. Great first puzzle!
i’m not sure if i should even have posted my time, since before actually opening up the full puzzle, i’d helped brendan hash out some of the clues. so i breezed through some of them, and you can ignore my time. i don’t think i’ve ever done a cryptic in under about 9 minutes.
That was excellent. 1-Across got it off to a nice start, and the rest was a lot of fun. BORDELLOS was very well put together, and the chain of excellence that was 16-20 down blew me away. Kept your personal touch while doing the knew form in style.
I would definitely love another one. Probably not so much a Puns and Anagrams puzzle; they always seem a little like “Remedial Cryptics” when they show up in the NYT.
One niggling point: why is “Candlemas” in quotes in 17-down? It seems like it would read fine without it, and the quotations seem just to mark off the word, like a large arrow reading “LOOK FOR ANAGRAM HERE!”
Nice puzzle! My favorite clue was 25-Across.
I got about 2/3 and cheated on the rest. Is there anywhere where all the answers are explained, for the dummies? Some of these I guessed right but I’m not sure exactly why they’re correct.
And don’t ask me to list the ones I don’t get … I just think all the answers should be explained somewhere for history’s sake!
The clue for 2-down is awesome. Took me a minute to understand.
Decoys: okay. Will shoot for that next time.
P&A are kinda remedial cryptics.
Thanks Jangler.
Anyone care to do this?
Nice.
FWIW, this is the first cryptic i’ve ever attempted, so my perspective on it the experience is definitely a newbie’s. i read the Wikipedia page on the puzzle style before diving in, and that helped me to get the general gist: what to look for in terms of operators, keywords, etc. i gave myself two handicaps (EXCEL and BASTE), chosen more or less at random, just to give me some kind of a way in and to help me grok your cluing style a little bit, although the real way in ended up being over in the NE quadrant, where i got TOKER, STRAD, and SYMBOLS in rapid succession, leading to the fall of that area and setting up my path of progress (ie, clockwise from there). the hardest clues for me were the ones that i would guess other commenters who are more seasoned cryptic solvers appreciated most (13A, 3D), and even after getting them i still can’t quite parse the clues for THE OLYMPIC GAMES and ESPN THE MAGAZINE completely. all of that said, i had a lot of fun doing this puzzle (thanks, Brendan!) and look forward to more from you and also to seeking them out from other sources. can someone recommend a good entry-level source, ideally AcrossLite-ready?
I second Scooper’s request for a good entry-level source for cryptics (and yes, AcrossLite-ready!). I’ve always hated the Sundays when the second puzzle in the NYT is a cryptic since I seem congenitally incapable of doing them. However, if I could work my way up the difficulty ladder, maybe I’d start liking them. I agree that P&A are rather simple…
Yo, this was a great puzzle. Course that’s coming from someone who has done maybe four, five cryptics in his life. I still don’t get the clue for BASTE, sort of confused about BORDELLOS (all I get is the Whorehouses part), and I was lost on LAWBOOK till Rex explained it.
Word, make more of these.
– Natan
I thought this was an excellent puzzle, just the right level of difficulty with many fun clues and clever misdirections (Beats me, Slides over, Dope!, egg drop, the nice Axl Rose anagram find). Good mix of clue types. I didn’t notice an excess of anagrams as someone mentioned–it seemed about right for a North American style cryptic. As a confirmed cryptic-head, I hope you’ll do lots more!!
The Random House Guide to Cryptic Crosswords, by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon is the way to get started on cryptics. They’ve made it fun reading as you learn, the book is easily understood, and contains progressively harder puzzles. By the time you’re through with it, you’ll all be writing expert clues and puzzles!
Marg
I’ve been cutting my teeth on the NYT Second Sunday cryptics from the archives. There are about 4 per year (and of course you have to be an online subscriber). The book “101 Cryptic Crosswords” is also highly recommended (by others, and now by me) for excellent easyish cryptics.
Well, thanks for helping me pop my cryptic ch– er, this is the first cryptic I’ve ever done. Wow, I must’ve been similarly befuddled when I began to do crosswords, but this really was a struggle. It’s new territory as a reasonably fast crossword solver no matter the difficulty level that most of the comments rate this cryptic as easy. Couldn’t have been that easy to create, though. Well, I’ve got to start doing these things now.
Best,
Mark
Nice puzzle, Brendan, but wow, I suck at cryptics. The timer won’t go to how much time I spent on this. Oh well, I guess I can only get better. More, please.
Fun! Definitely make another one at some point so I can make a better showing on the leaderboard… 🙂 Only been doing cryptics for a couple months, and this seemed comparably difficult to recent NYT Second Sunday cryptics… well maybe a little easier. My only beef during the solve was not thinking LAWBOOK or WATERDROP was one word.
I enjoyed this puzzle–but then again, I always love cryptic ones (stay away from puns & anagrams!). So far as clues go, you had highs and lows–often literally, as with THE OLYMPIC GAMES–great anagram and surface–and ESPN THE MAGAZINE–poor surface and a stretch of a clue.
NATAS+HA {rev. all} felt strained from an overlong surface (someone once told me to avoid putting more words in a clue than there were letters in the answer) and yet [-s]TOKER was great. BASTE took me forever (BASED hom. is too similar to PLACED, I guess), but EXCEL {XL hom.} was terrific all around.
What was neat about this puzzle was that you used your “nerd-hip” clues in a couple of ways that were fresh, for me, in a cryptic. BOR(DELL)OS threw me–old school and new. You hit a sweet spot with MOLL+[-h]USK[-y], too. L(AW+B)OOK, on the other hand, was right at home for me. “Hammond offering,” however, killed me–considered ATLAS[-t] but just never made the connection.
By the way, goofy was it was, I loved OV(UL)ATION. Same thing with TEN(GALL)ON.
Best clues, in my opinion: GET UP {double def.} and MES(HUG)A (with the nice decoy that had me trying to anagram EMBRACE). If “top fiddle” actually means something, then STRAD {rev} deserves note, as does UNO+P+POSED, if a card game can be said to do things.
As the HTML template I use for blog reports works (roughly) here …
Clues analysed in the same style as on a couple of the cryptic xwd blogs in the UK …
CAPS indicate the answer, other notation is explained below on first use. Points like SATAN=”Old Harry” are explained when it seems necessary. I haven’t given the solutions for the anagrams as they’re available in the AcrossLite file.
Across
1-(Some place mighty)* – * means an anagram
9-(lock in ten)*
10-(s)TOKER – lower case stuff in brackets is subtracted – the author being Bram Stoker.
11-AT LAS(t) – I’ve just confirmed that Hammond is an atlas publisher. Punctuation (including spaces) usually indicates the version in the wordplay.
12-UNO=card game,P=piano=quietly,POSED=sat
13-L(AW=How cute,B=bishop)OOK – the stuff in brackets is inserted into LOOK
15-SYMBOLS=”cymbals” – quotes indicate a “sounds like” clue
18-NATASHA = rev. of (AH,SATAN=”Old Harry”) – rev. = reversal
20-MA(R.I.)MBA
21-BOR(DELL)O’S
23-JAR,ED – I assume Ed is a character in Mad magazine … (ditto Jared/Subway mascot)
25-hidden in ScottiSH RUGby
26-OV(U.L.)ATION – U.L. = Univ. of Louisiana I assume
27-(emphasize gannet)*
Down
1-TEN(GALL)ON – tenon as in mortise & tenon
2-EXCEL = “XL”
3-LONGS=desires,HOTS=sexual attraction
4-MOLL,(h)USK(y)
5-(PepsiCo)*
6-2 definitions – get-up=dress (noun)
7-(moose mark)*
8-STRAD = rev. of DARTS
14-(top drawer)*
16-MARI(JUAN)A – M. Callas, J. Peron
17-(Candlemas)*
19-(oral sex)*
20-MES(HUG)A
21-BASTE=pound=bash – “based”=placed
22-(h)EIGHT – the H would be the top of HEIGHT as written in the grid, this being a down clue
24-hidden in AndREI KIrilenko.
Thanks for this!
I have been doing this puzzle on and off all day and making notes. Being a novice, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had agreed with your comments on surface meanings.
Brendan, it was a joy to have this puzzle in my head all day. I look forward to more!
I’ve been doing crosswords a long time. In ink. (With crossovers, sure.) This Kicked My Ass. Even the grid looked prisonish. I surrender. Hail to thee, BEQ!
I never time myself on cryptics; I enjoy them but can’t work them for speed. Axl Rose was hysterical, and I happen to enjoy the anagrams. Funny thing? Last one to drop was ESPN on the bottm – I couldn’t parse that thing out forever.
Thanks! I really enjoyed this puzzle. I am a budding cryptic solver and this one took me about 30 minutes. This is about the same amount of time it takes me to do the second sunday cryptics in the NYT.
My only beef: Too bad the UL in ovulation was for the Univ. of Louisiana and not my current school the University of Louisville. Go CARDS!
Guardian xwds and cryptic clue-writing rules: This depends very much on the setter. Pasquale and a few other Guardian setters follow similar rules to US cryptics, but the dominant style at the Guardian is “libertarian”, after their star setter Araucaria. That said, even the strictest Brit setters do a few things that C&R would never do.
Scooper: Try Trip Payne’s site. He has, what looks like eight 15x15s available in Across Lite. Link is here: http://is.gd/1cYz0 (Scroll down a bit)
Hey Lorraine: That link (again) to Trip’s site is: http://is.gd/1cYz0 (scroll down a bit).
Jeez. I had no idea I’d get this kind of a response. I’ve got some cryptic puzzles I’m bringing with me on vacation next week. I think I personally need to get a few more (hundred?) under my belt before diving back into the constructing thing. But methinks more will be coming.
You know, I had a copy of that book, but I seem to have lost it somewhere down the line. Okay, that’s it. Goin’ to Amazon now.
I heard it was easy on the cryptic side of things, but since I wasn’t entirely sure how many people had solved a cryptic before, I bumped it up to a Medium. Glad you liked it though. Really do Henry/Emily’s stuff. Their’s blows me out of the water.
You got it, Lisa.
Yeah, had to double and triple check that those were one worders. Seemed odd to me. And yeah, wow, this marks the first time Dan F. has appeared in the DOUBLE DIGITS on the Leaderboard. The “F” in Dan F. really stands for “WTF?”
Nerd hip… I guess I like that.
But, seriously. I figured, if I’m gonna make a cryptic, might as well put those BEQ style words in there. Thanks for the long post!
Wonderful. Thanks!
Stop it, you guys are making me blush.
The AXL ROSE ==> ORAL SEX joke is older than dirt, by the way. If you honestly thought I made that one up myself …
The ESPN one seemed better in my head. Probably should have shitcanned that entry.
I think the puzzle’s formatted like a Magic Eye. If you stare it long enough, the words University of Louisville pop out hidden among the clues. At least, I hope it does.
I just got a private e-mail saying pretty much the same thing. Fascinating.
One thing I have noticed about cryptics is that no two human beings are going to agree over the rules/quality/good clues/bad clues. It’s amazing. Really, really crazy.
I wasn’t going to say anything, but it seems that people are voting, so I vote for less cryptics. I personally don’t find them very fun and missed having a BEQ crossword today.
Peter Biddecombe pointed me at your site – I’ve enjoyed your NYT crosswords for a while and it’s interesting to see your take on a cryptic crossword. Reminds me a lot of what you’ll see in Australian newspapers (The Age in particular) – reinventing and relaxing the rules for the audience. I really liked the clue for OVULATION and LONG SHOTS, and the use of words you’re not likely to see outside the US (MESHUGA, SLAM DANCE).
It is common for the NYT to contain proper names, logos, brand names and acronyms that are not indicated as such. However having every letter checked means that general knowledge is not so important (by Friday and Saturday I’m usually heading to google to find out who a bunch of entries are) – it becomes trickier, even with the wordplay, when there’s so many unchecked letters.
I’ll be back!
I agree – I’d never done a cryptic and had to wikipedia it to even get started.
Love cryptics, but I’ve been off ’em for a while, so kind of embarrassed about my solve time (32 minutes, ack!). Can’t get a lot of headway with the Brit ones just because too many of the references are totally opaque. But this was overall a hoot. My usual technique for these is to identify the anagram clues first, so thanks for 1A, which was almost a gimme, then “sounds like” clues which run a close second, then settling down to puzzle out the more obscure ones.
Actually 16D gave me one of the hardest times in this one. I knew what the method was, but my brain totally refused to acknowledge there was a Peron other than Eva. Sheesh. Lots of nice witty stuff here though, Brendan. I particularly liked 18D. 23A was a total “huh?” after I got it–had to Google it to know what the reference was. But of course 19D takes the blue ribbon. A Quintessential Quigley Qlue!
Well, new to me. But you are surely familiar then with Dick Cavett’s anagram for SPIRO AGNEW? One for the ages.
I don’t usually do cryptics but since my mind is usually in the same gutter as BEQ I thought I would give it a go. The first clue that looked somewhat promising was 11A HAMMOND OFFERING IS FINALLY COMING UP SHORT (5). Naturally I put myself in BEQ’s frame of thinking and confidently entered ORGAN. It went down hill from there. I’m now 6:19 into the puzzle and have sussed out the NE corner and 1D where I found the error of my ways. Onward and upward to find the correct 11A.
Not bad for a first cryptic. (I prefer variety cryptics to straight ones, but…) Ms. Henstridge meant nothing to me, and the first part of 27A took me longer than it should have.
My only nitpick would be the occurrence of “the” in both 1A and 27A.
Quick note on “Smokey”: this is Dave Crosland, now most easily visible as Dac (most Wednesdays in the Independent), though he’s also (anonymously) one of the (London) Times setters. He Smokey for some Listener puzzles in the past but this pseudonym is on a sabbatical at present.
I’ll throw in another request for more Cryptics, and to stay away from Puns & Anagrams. It seems as if the P&A puzzles are a free excuse to write sloppy clues.
Excellent first effort, I’d like to see what happens when you add some polish.
Well done, Brendan. I took my time, enjoyed the (as always) saltiness of your clues and eventually solved it. Sorry that I am not as technically-minded as many seasoned constructors. I have been doing cryptics since the first issue of Games was published…and rarely bothered to dissect clues. I just figured if I couldn’t get it, the constructor was smarter than I. Thanks for sharing…really ;-). And keep ’em coming.
Nice work, BEQ. My favorite clue was the one for MESHUGA. I hope to see more cryptics on your site in the future.