Puzzled

by David Astle

  Sharp will solve the day’s puzzle as it appears online, usually beating delivery of the hard copy. He’ll then crank out his clue-by-clue appraisal the next morning before heading out the door to play professor. But this is no dry analysis or grammatical soapboxing – Rex Parker is the love child of quipster Dorothy Parker and a deadpan Raymond Chandler character. Any given puzzle will inspire a welter of images cropped from photo banks and personal collections, adding colour to Rex’s critique. A gallery of Cartesian maps, say, will honour the answer MERIDIAN, or links to a Superman fanzine will recognise XRAY VISION.

  Yet ironically, back in those first timid weeks, the blog’s initial post tried to jinx the project: ‘Please do not comment on puzzles the day they are printed. This blog is just a bad idea. Signed, grandpamike.’

  Amy Reynaldo, a Chicago book editor, had encountered this kind of attitude a year before Rex set up shop. Reynaldo once went to the New York Times crossword forum, keen to discuss the day’s puzzles, only to find others who thought like grandpamike. Everywhere she looked a spoiler rule applied, where users were free to debate a clue’s merits but forbidden to blab its answer. The edict cramped Reynaldo’s style. How can you really rant or rhapsodise, if a puzzle’s solution is off-limits? It’s like trying to discuss kayaking without using the words water or paddle. Amy’s response? She set up Diary of a Crossword Fiend, the first crog of its kind in the United States, paving the way for Rex and many others to follow.

  The sober twin of Rex’s delirium, Crossword Fiend is the site for solvers who take puzzling to heart. Reynaldo is an omnivore, solving and discussing puzzles from New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Philadelphia across the week. Crucially too, editors surf Amy’s site to see how their puzzles are being received, creating an ongoing feedback loop that keeps all players honest, and the puzzle quality high.

  You could say the blog craze is the Tower of Babel in reverse. Before chat rooms, a compiler could only guess how a puzzle was received. Fun or foul, good or bad: a setter could only speculate about what solvers thought. Stray letters would give you hints, but it was random clamour in a lot of ways. Great clue! Bad clue! Boo, yay, etc. But thanks to new media, responses are now constant and orchestrated. Much like village greens, crogs are places for solvers to assemble and compare notes, single out flaws and strengths, declare a verdict. While debate seldom reaches a consensus, the combined wisdom is there for anyone listening.

  In Australia the online trend is accelerating. Two active blogs chew over Fairfax puzzles most days, the first a long-running forum called Deef (or Feedback), the Web annex of the Australian Crossword Club. The second, I discovered, is The DA Trippers, a site mounted in 2008 by three Melbourne solvers who go by the aliases of AS, RC and TH. (Do I know their real names? No. Are Mashup and Rex Parker any relation? Possibly.)

  Holding my own puzzles to the light, the DA brigade debates fairness or ambiguity. Clues are divided into Gold, Confusion and Bullshit. Dropping by either blog I feel like a pastry chef seeing how his latest confection went down – too much glaze? Not enough honey? Did those nougat snails work out?

  In the UK there are several standout crogs. One of the earliest is Fifteen Squared. This grand-scale meeting of minds is run by a team of erudite solvers who review under such Net-names as Uncle Yap, Rightback and Holy Ghost. The volume of puzzles it handles is what distinguishes the site. Every week, multiple forums will slide some ten UK puzzles under the microscope, plucked from as many different newspapers.

  Smaller in scope, but zestier for images and with a playful tone, is the crog newcomer nestled within the Guardian website. The forum was established in August 2011. Its curator is Alan Connor, a self-confessed lover of cribbage and asparagus, who also has a flair for unpacking puzzles. A random week will see all manner of dispatches uploaded, from setter profiles to clue round-ups, or even live web-chats, regularly drawing a legion of responses. The same crog offers mini-tutorials, picking out recipes like anagrams, or charades, and explaining how the formulas operate. Which sounds a lot like my job at hand. So let’s inspect the next recipe on our roster. That’s right – time to get stuck into containers.

  PANDORA’S CONTAINER – nesting names and container clues

  Sally Heath is a former editor with the Age in Melbourne, as well as being a friend in a condom. You’re not following? Nor was Sally when I happened to let slip the condom thing over the phone.

  Heath ran the arts pages of the Saturday paper, the A2 supplement that carries reviews, profiles and puzzles. One day she needed my proof notes, and that’s when I shot myself in the foot. I couldn’t stop my tongue from obeying my brain, as I said, ‘You realise your name is a friend in a condom?’

  Worryingly, Heath’s end of the phone fell quiet. Either the line had dropped out or I’d just alienated the Age’s arts boss. ‘Your letters,’ I added, desperate now. ‘They’re a perfect container clue: ALLY inside SHEATH, which I’d clue as friend in condom.’

  By now in my late forties, I should have stopped saying this sort of stuff aloud, a thought that must have occurred to Sally as the conversation returned to the business in hand. What was she meant to say?

  ‘You bastard,’ is what Bill Leak said when I pulled a similar stunt on his name. Perhaps Australia’s greatest living cartoonist, Leak is also a puzzle addict and happened to be solving the Herald crossword one day when his gaze fell a few centimetres to read a Wordwit rhyme:

  Despite thousands laughing at him

  This cartoonist is sick in grim.

  Who is he?

  ILL in BLEAK is who, another container, and Bill rang Rebecca Taylor, the puzzle editor, saying he had a message to pass on to Wordwit. Rebecca grabbed a pen. ‘Sure, what would you like to say?’

  ‘You bastard.’ And Bill hung up.

  Momentarily Rebecca and I feared that the cartoonist was genuine, and I rang the Australian to douse the flames. I didn’t mean to cause offence, I said. ‘What offence?’ he asked, ‘It’s what I’ve always suspected. I’m sick and grim all wrapped into one. Took a bastard like you to show me.’

  And now the same bastard wishes to show you something, this time how container clues work. Let’s try these two examples. The first is from Virgilius, alias Brian Greer of the Independent, while the other stems from my own batch:

  Doctor binds a fracture (3)

  Greek island confiscates a coin (6)

  Doctor is common shorthand for such abbreviations as DR, MD, MO (medical officer), or, as here in the first clue, GP. When GP binds A, you create GAP (or fracture).

  CREATE is your second answer, this time using the idea of seizure. Here we have CRETE (Greek island) detaining A, making coin (the verb) your definition. Verbs of enveloping are integral to containers. Think grab, swallow, hug, accommodate.

  Alternatively, in our CREATE example, rather than make CRETE do all the holding, you can just as easily angle the clue to suggest the A is entering CRETE. (So a variation for CREATE could be: Make army leader occupy island.) Containers can function either way – evoking capture, or injection, depending on which action the setter selects.

  Prepositions play a big part in the container recipe, words like in or around. Though watch out for without, in the word’s quainter sense, where furniture can be found within or without the house. In other words, many without a hog could give you MAHOGANY. You’ll be glad to learn, though, that our current clue is without without:

  Sucker pens article for website guide (4,3)

  Now that we know containers will suggest surrounding, or being surrounded, where is that signal? Look twice at pens. As a reflex, most will think of biros, the impulse encouraged by the surface sense. Just don’t forget that hogs are as like to be penned as novels – so what pens what? We need a word for sucker to enclose either a word for article, or article for website, depending on what remaining chunk is the answer’s definition.

  Sucker can be a vacuum cleaner or the victim of a scam. What else? We need a smaller word to double for sucker
– PATSY, GULL? What about SAP? If SAP is doing the penning, can you conjure a word for guide that starts with S and ends with P?

  Ask these sorts of questions when tackling containers. The tactic is called bookending, speculating on the answer’s edges to fill out its inner space. Or speculating the other way – imagining what word might own certain innards, and filling out the fringes.

  If SAP is the outer shell, then SNOWCAP or SUNTRAP are possible solutions. Though in the domain of bloggers, of forums and avatars, a browser can’t cope without a SITE MAP. That’s right, SITE MAP – where SAP pens ITEM – and 2-Down is done.

  Yet to grasp containers more tightly, we should set our watches to 1500 AD, packing our bags for Renaissance Italy, our next clue’s destination.

  RECIPE PRECIS: CONTAINERS

  The giveaway of most container clues is the hint of holding, or being held. Wrong to swallow gird’s first hint, for example, is SIGN, with SIN (wrong) to swallow G (grid’s first) making SIGN (hint). Here’s a loose A to Z of other common container signs:

  about, absorb, accept, around, blocks, boring, boxes, bury, captive, carrying, clothing, cover, cut into, disconnect, disrupts, eat, feeding, fencing, grab, hold, in, interrupting, keeping, out, pocket, retained, ring, settle in, stocking, stops, surround, swallow, without

  QUIZLING 9.1

  Bizarrely, what word meaning empty is a container containing

  a container?

  QUIZLING 9.2

  We want two Muppets, please.

  Each lodged inside a type of cheese.

  QUIZLING 9.3

  If LLAMA lies inside Cinderella Man, what ten other films enfold the words below? In each case the hidden word bridges at least two other words in the title.

  bygone

  tyre

  braid

  wove

  Koran

  yell

  Keith

  glee

  temper

  grit

  CHAPTER 10

  Women’s mag covers one Italian

  painter (6)

  ‘Oh my god,’ says the flight attendant. ‘Are you Jimmy Barnes as in the rock star Jimmy Barnes?’ Jimmy shrugs. Sure. It’s 9 a.m. Not a good time for icons. But the attendant can’t let the moment rest. ‘Maybe if you sign your boarding pass …’

  That’s how I opened my profile on James Dixon Swan – better known as Jimmy Barnes, best known as Barnesy, the former lead singer of Australia’s biggest pub-rock combo, Cold Chisel. Touching down in Rockhampton I saw first-hand the glow of fame radiate on to others. Age meant nothing – teens, Gen-Xers, retirees. Everyone wanted their little piece of Barnesy. Here he was in living colour.

  Which was my end of the deal – the colour. I’d been writing for ten years for Sunday Life magazine, Fairfax’s feature supplement. It would be hard to put the stories into one neat pile – my first entailed jumping into a pool with ten lobstermen. This was 1997, the exercise part of a sea-survival course. After that, I dived into pop psychology, chef profiles, health stories, the chemistry of love. Whatever the topic, from biker clubs to gigolos, I added my brand of humour and colour, with a few incidental insights. With two young kids and one large mortgage, freelance writing and puzzle-making kept our heads above water.

  OK, so the mag never covered an Italian painter, but I did get to meet a blind mother of five. And the guy who lost his memory thanks to a tick bite. And Barnesy, of course, when I shadowed him to a coal town called Moura in remote Queensland. I have to tell you, ghoulishly, that six months earlier in May 2007, surgeons had opened the singer’s chest to insert a bovine valve into his heart. Plane-hopping, sound-checking, I felt like the post-op observer assigned to see if the implant was a success, or whether the explosive last chorus of Jimmy’s hit song ‘Khe Sanh’ would see the rocker himself explode.

  Thankfully, he survived. In many ways, at 51, Jimmy treated his zipper scar as a reminder to live wisely. No smokes, no booze. The only liquid to pass his lips was bottled water to wash down a regimen of co-enzymes. Come show time, the ballads were ballistic. Vein-popping. The miners loved it. Jimmy loved it. He sang two encores and came offstage in a sheen of sweat.

  I loitered near the cattle chute backstage, eager to ask how Jimmy was feeling, how the ticker felt, but he fired first, ‘So you make crosswords, yeah?’

  ‘Um,’ I said. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Like the cryptic one, yeah? Can never bloody do them, you know.’

  ‘There’s a formula,’ I said. ‘Each clue has a recipe –’

  But Barnesy was after a favour. A crazy idea, he said, but maybe I was the guy to ask.

  Moura was in October, the comeback concert. My feature ran as November’s cover story, and closer to Christmas, a crossword appeared that seemed like any other – unless you were Jane Mahoney, the Thai-Australian wife of Jimmy Barnes.

  Fluent in several languages, Jane was an ardent crossword fan. She was also approaching her forty-ninth birthday and the couple intended to fly off to Bali for a romantic getaway with a twist. The twist was the reason Jimmy bolted left and right at Sydney Airport, raiding every newsstand in the departure lounge, ensuring that Jane would have the Herald in perpetuity.

  The reason was simple. Almost every clue that day, every solution, was a reference to the couple’s life: from their first meeting place (CANBERRA) to the city of TOKYO, where Jane fled to escape the rock ’n’ roll chaos. The puzzle also swaddled a daughter (ELIZA-JANE), a mate (NEIL FINN of Crowded House), and ARIZONA, where Jimmy hit the wall in 2001, flushing out the drug and booze in a desert detox centre.

  A time of equal darkness was captured at 32-Across in the shape of a container clue:

  Operating pusher in Sydney fringes? (7)

  Despite pusher lying in the clue, the reference isn’t addiction. Here the word translates as URGER, being one who pushes. The question mark alerts the solver to this unorthodox reading, telling you that one part of the clue has a playful slant. As for Sydney’s fringes, forget the outer suburbs, and think S and Y, the literal margins. Put URGER in SY and you have one more answer for Ms Mahoney to negotiate.

  So that’s how SURGERY works, but how does our current clue operate? Could the women’s mag be Sunday Life? Is the Italian painter Da Vinci, or do we have another code to crack?

  GYPROCK AND ROLL – magazines and clue mix

  When not writing articles for magazines, I’ve also helped to enliven their pages with puzzles, and my client base takes in anything from computer zines to Inside Sport. The briefest dabble would have to be my stint for Club Gyprock, a trade newsletter for fibro-cement workers, not a sector you readily link to crosswords, as my two-issue tenure proved.

  That’s the way it rolls in Magland. No matter the title, the latest issue is tomorrow’s kitty litter. Fame, you could argue, has similar limitations. Jimmy Barnes may be a household name in Australia, but try testing a Cleveland household or a village in Mogadishu. A certain Italian painter may have made the signori swoon in the 1500s, but is he bathing in the same glow half a millennium later? Building a crossword, you need to ask yourself those questions. Dizzy Gillespie is a trumpet-blowing legend, but what about Herb Alpert or Chet Baker? How deep does our consensus of fame extend?

  If you had to name as many Italian painters as you could, I’d wager that you wouldn’t snare our man in question. That’s no crime; he was famous once. But is once enough, if the same artist has slipped into oblivion? Tough as the challenge sounds, at least you have wordplay to help you unmask Signor X:

  Women’s mag covers one Italian painter (6)

  Covers looks like it could be a container signpost. One is prone to be I or A, either vowel liable to be covered by a women’s mag. Hang on, mag. Why not magazine? Your detective skills are sharpening. Thanks to mag (versus magazine), you are more than likely after a title in its shortened form. Just as Tele is a nickname for the Telegraph, mag is your warning to make a matching chop.

  We can surmise that the title is five lett
ers long (since only one letter needs to be contained). We can also guess the mag will include an S, owing to SITE MAP’s initial. So what women’s mag obeys the pattern of __ __ S __ __?

  While you rummage around, let me confess to a Seinfeld temptation. When clueing 1-Across I’d almost recruited Kramer into the fray, as I relished the collision of Renaissance art and a modern sitcom. But I reneged. Too much, I thought. The solver has enough leaps to make, so I left Cosmo Kramer on the bench and opted for a magazine like Cosmopolitan, better known as Cosmo.

  Art history books will tell you that the Italian Renaissance included two painters with the designation ‘Cosimo’ – Agnolo di Cosimo (better known as Bronzino) and Piero di Cosimo. Both hang in the Uffizi. Both had a thing for nudes and died in Florence amid a horde of protégés. So which one did I mean here? Cosimo A or Cosimo B? Non importa, as the Romans say. Either can double as our 1-Across solution.

  Yet fame, we know, can fade like Titian blue. For ten seconds, as I contemplated this puzzle on the drawing board, ADAMANT almost ran as singer ADAM ANT, but I figured New Wave was candyfloss compared to Perseus Rescuing Andromeda, the famous painting by one or other Cosimo. Or maybe I wanted to balance the centuries. After so much OUTSOURCING and SITE MAPS, why not an ounce of archaic Italy?