Puzzled
Page 18
The other reason that Hirschfeld quit the habit was linked to a military rumour. With Vietnam shaping into a full-scale conflict, defence academies were teaching pilots to look for ‘Ninas’ on the ground, their slang for hidden targets to be bombed. Hirschfeld found this idea repugnant. His adoring public spoke the louder, however, and after a brief pause, the word-game was restored.
Years on, in 1991, the US Postal Service asked the 88-year-old Al to illustrate the century’s great comedians for a series of stamps. The artist agreed so long as the NINA message could be embedded. Al knew the storm he’d inherit if he thwarted his followers. Philatelists still claim that this series was the first and only occasion on which American stamps have carried a secret message.
Possibly so, though the practice has spread in the crossword realm, with setters planting messages inside their work. And the subterfuge’s name? A Nina, of course.
In typical Hirschfeld fashion, the smuggled word or name lacks any indicator to declare its presence. Merl Reagle met that challenge in his Simpsons gig, since the diagonal message was there for a girl like Lisa to find. No shaded squares. No signposts. Just a secret seam in the cloth.
That said, Reagle tackled the task with trademark pizzazz. Keeping to the rules of restraint, Merl opted for another route to whisper the extra layer. Not the grid this time, but the clues, using the initial letters to intimate the diagonal Nina. From 1-Across to 109-Down, in Homeric style, those initials spelt DEAR LISA, YOU MAKE ME SO HAPPY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY HAPPY. SORRY, HE TOLD ME I NEEDED A HUNDRED-FORTY-FOUR LETTERS … WHAT WAS MY POINT AGAIN? OH RIGHT – BOUVIER OR SIMPSON, I CHERISH YOU.
NINAS AGOGO – hidden entries and alternate clues
As a solver I love a good Nina, though I don’t always see them. Solvers in general seldom take time to seek any covert entry. Ninas in fact are commonly unveiled in chat rooms by those clever enough to spot them. An Independent setter named Mordred, for instance, whose real name is Derek Knight, once stood STALACTITE and STALAGMITE in parallel unches. Even sneakier, the first Nina hung down, the second thrust upward, imitating the limestone masses.
John Henderson, who crafts puzzles for the Guardian under the guise of Enigmatist, pulled off a neat stunt in May 2009. The answer to the central axis was WAITING FOR GODOT, flanked by parallel Ninas revealing VLADIMIR and ESTRAGON, the two tramps who did just that.
But if prizes are being handed out for ingenious interlocks, the Americans enjoy a stranglehold. Visually and verbally, the New York Times and its fallen cousin, the New York Sun, have dished out some dazzlers this millennium. Although these are not authentic Ninas, as they take the form of a set of instructions, or the clues themselves will flag the trick, it still takes nothing from the execution.
In August 2008, Kevin G. Der presented New York Timers with a dotted line around the crossword’s border. Solvers were bamboozled for a while, before realising that the pivotal answers to the grid – entitled Come Fly With Me – told you how to convert the crossword into a paper aeroplane.
Elizabeth Gorski, the queen of the visual surprise, has arranged her squares to emulate Frosty the Snowman, the Empire State Building and the vortex spiral of the Guggenheim Museum, each time with theme words as the vital axes and visible Ninas inbuilt.
Patrick Blindauer, another giant of the clandestine art, has made his patterns mimic rope ladders, dollar bills and the Frogger video game, to name but three. Rather than bury a Nina, in the English vein, the American puzzle may carry a key entry which transforms the puzzle once the clues are solved. At the height of one summer, for example, Blindauer had his solver turn the final grid into a blazing sun, getting you to colour in every I, the resultant sketch a central circle with six jutting rays. The entry lying at the operation’s hub said it best: SHADE YOUR EYES.
But now let’s turn our gaze to the Master clue, as the formula has a Nina quality. Just as shrewd solvers will notice messages lying in unches, the alternate recipe requires you to look between the spaces. Here we go:
After boomers it regularly goes next! (3–1)
Exclamation marks, you may recall, often indicate the &lit style, that rare case of wordplay serving as the definition. (Think of a clue like Awfully enraged! for ANGERED and you’ll start to get the picture.) Or cast your mind back to ETC, the hidden &lit that read: Partial set closer! So how do we read the current wordplay? Right now our surest friend is the word regularly.
Like few other words, regularly is a reliable signpost for alternation. If not regularly, then its synonyms, as seen in these two clues here:
Twitch regularly?! (3)
What’s this? Oddly coloured (4)
The first stems from Monk, an Independent setter. The dual punctuation warns you of a skewed perspective, as well as the &lit dimension. The answer is TIC, since the regular letters of twitch, counting just the odds, spell TIC, a twitch synonym.
Oddness is sustained in Orlando’s jewel from the Guardian. Reading the odd letters of coloured will give you CLUE, which this piece of work decidedly is.
Time to revisit the current clue:
After boomers it regularly goes next! (3–1)
So much easier with an instruction manual, yes? The enumeration of (3–1) is also a major leg-up. As soon as we turn the alternate signpost onto goes next, the phrase GEN-X appears, the generation to follow the baby boomers.
Alternation clues are scarcer than mainstream recipes since longer words don’t readily splay into new combinations. When they do, however, like GOAT in IGNORANT or the ARSES planted in BARRISTERS, the matter warrants sharing.
More common is the case where an alternation task makes up part of a longer answer. Rather than uncover CLUE in COLOURED, for example, a denser clue may ask you to ransack a word’s alternate letters and mix them, or place them beside another word in the charade mode, such as this clue I ran in 2006:
A second membrane’s regularly seen as simple life-form = A + MO (second) + EBAE (membrane’s regular letters)
A tough clue, but a clear demonstration of how Alternate thinking can permeate a clue. Don’t worry, though. The AMOEBAE specimen lies at the harder end of the crossword range. That said, all the signposts are intact, and every piece is detachable as long as you have the nerve to isolate them.
Deep as we are in the book, it’s helpful to restate W. H. Auden’s truth. Peculiar as cryptic clues may seem to outsiders, their nature is precise. Compared to their quick cousins, cryptics are generous, despite all the neural acrobatics. Though occasionally, a clue can be too generous. Now and then the pairing of wordplay and definition can point to several solutions, even if intended to indicate just one. This alternate chapter, then, seems the right moment to meet those cryptic rarities that offer alternative answers.
A BOB EACH WAY – ambiguous clues
Double meaning clues are the prime culprits. If all you get are two definitions, without any added wordplay, then occasionally a dilemma occurs. Smaller words in particular own a wardrobe of different masks, as the next ambiguous duo shows:
Drug blow = CRACK or SMACK?
Runs lots of steps = FLIGHTS or LADDERS (think of a run in a pair of tights)?
Rarer still are ambiguous examples of other formulas, such as the next three clues, involving anagram, homophone and charade respectively. The first two stem from the American cryptic duo Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon. The other hails from Mercury of the Guardian. Take a look:
Number there is wrong = THREE or ETHER (thinking of a numbing agent)?
Seabird heard change of direction = TERN or SKUA (turn or skewer)?
Problem parking by reservoir = DAM+P or SUM+P?
Auden would turn in his grave. Where’s that famous precision? I ran into ambiguity when publishing this next clue in November 2008:
Cast with or without one? (5)
The recipe is deletion, where the answer is SHIED, a quaint term for cast, shown in a phrase like coconut shy. As the clue observes, SHIED means cast – just as SHED (SHIED without o
ne) also means cast. The clue was designed to celebrate that peculiarity, with a single answer, I thought.
Wrong. An email arrived that same afternoon, alerting me to the word THROW, which also obeys the clue. No it doesn’t, I first reacted. THROW doesn’t even own an I to lose, so how could it play the game?
Easily, the email pointed out, for when with or sheds one, this new combo of WTHRO can be cast into an equally satisfying answer. The accidental anagram is freakier for the clue having cast as definition, a verb that needs no changing from past to present tense, so reinforcing the alternative view.
I’d presumed the fluke complete when a second email lobbed. Another point of view, from another solver. Couldn’t the answer be SLING, this solver asked.
SLING? How? Well, went the email, the writer of which was an intern at a Sydney hospital who saw the wounded every week, ‘a sling is still a sling whether or not a plaster cast is within it’. By that stage I was ready to jump from a great height. The only deterrent was the idea of being admitted to a particular ER wing of a Sydney hospital, where the argument would likely resume on a corridor trolley.
RECIPE PRECIS: ALTERNATIONS
The vital word in most alternation clues is regularly, or any term suggesting every second letter such as intermittent, periodic, evenly or defying odds. Depending on nuance, these letters may need to be dumped or retained, so spelling the solution. Just as common is where the alternation formula plays a small part in a larger piece of wordplay, where the principle is the same.
HALL OF FAME: ALTERNATIONS
Perplexed as odds dropped in Olympic event (4) [Times 7940]
Railways subject to regular cuts, unfortunately (4) [Times 8649]
Good years regularly yielding flowing water (4) [Times 8374]
Drew as lots alternately? (5) [Phssthpok, FT]
Regulars in store aid new business (5) [Sleuth, FT]
Horse, seal, chimp evenly rendered in retro by cubist (7) [DA]
SOLUTIONS: épée, alas, Oder, dealt, trade, Picasso
QUIZLING 19.1
CUT hides in the alternate letters of COURT (or ACQUIT), depending on whether you opt for odd or even letters. Now cutting to objects that cut, can you find two words (including a remarkably appropriate word) that alternately hide the swords FOIL and SABRE?
QUIZLING 19.2
Slash every even letter from the alphabet, and you’ll discover that all five vowels, plus the Y, are among the survivors. Using no letter twice, what’s the longest word you can make out of this group?
QUIZLING 19.3
This American actress spells a word for automobile with her first name’s odd letters, while her surname can be scrambled into a more particular style of the same vehicle. Name her.
Codes
CHAPTER 20
Koran avidly studied by Arab holy leaders here! (6)
Got up.
Had a shave.
Did Times crossword.
Had another shave.
Roger McGough, the Liverpool poet behind this doggerel, was only half-joking, I’d say. Solving a cryptic can make an hour vanish, and still you haven’t fixed that last corner. The good news? The better you get, the breezier the endgame. The bad? If one setter gets too easy, you move up the ladder and tackle the harder one – and there goes the morning again.
In the early 1920s, when the crossword craze hit England, a ghost-story writer called M. R. James took pride in the fact that he could undo The Times while boiling an egg for breakfast. ‘And he did not like a hard-boiled egg,’ joked Adrian Bell – that paper’s first setter.
Twenty years on, a London club called the Eccentrics set a challenge to all Telegraph solvers. The club’s chairman, W. A. J. Gavin, promised to donate £100 to the Minesweepers Fund if anyone could crack the puzzle in under twelve minutes.
There was a catch, of course. The feat had to be done under strict conditions. Hence a posse of twenty-five hopefuls dropped in to Fleet Street on a Saturday in January, including an accounting clerk named Stanley Sedgwick.
The room was set out in exam fashion, as Stanley described, with tables lined up in rows. Supervisors occupied a podium. Rules were explained and the crosswords unveiled. First to finish was Vere Chance from Kent in a touch over six minutes, but a spelling blunder disqualified him. Four others blitzed the puzzle, the winner managing close to eight minutes – and scoring a cigarette lighter. As for Stanley, he hit the wall at the last clue, the answer to which goes unrecorded.
What we do know, however, thanks to an interview Sedgwick granted the Daily Telegraph in 1998, is the skulduggery that came after this contest and perhaps revealed the true reason for the event being staged.
‘Imagine my surprise,’ said Stanley, ‘when several weeks later I received a letter marked “Confidential” inviting me … to make an appointment to see Col. Nichols of the General Staff who “would very much like to see you on a matter of national importance”.’
Nichols headed MI8, the defence department in charge of a shadowy facility named Station X. In other memos the location was labelled BP, or Bletchley Park, located an hour north-west of London. Assembled there in secret were some of the foremost English minds of the time, including Alan Turing, the father of the computer. The team’s task was to intercept and unravel German codes. But as the war escalated, and staff numbers wavered, fresh blood was needed. ‘Chaps with twisted brains like mine,’ as Sedgwick recalls. After a spell at spy school in Bedford, the best and brightest were then dispatched to Station X.
Tony Carson (TC), a Wiltshire lad, was among them, and he met two recruitment officers on campus one morning. As Sydney Morning Herald journalist Harriet Veitch puts it, ‘These defence types were handing out crosswords, asking people to solve them as quickly as possible, when Tony came up and said that he did crosswords as a hobby.’
‘What’s your best time?’ quizzed the officer.
‘Solving, you mean, or making them?’
‘I’m sorry. You mean you make crosswords?’
‘Yes,’ said Tony.
‘Cryptic?’
‘Yes.’
The rest was a blur, Harriet laughs, as Tony was hoisted off his feet and marched to a room for immediate enlistment. TC’s brief was cracking Italian codes, while other word-types and number whizzes did similar work at Bletchley. (The film Enigma captures the spirit of the time and place.) Thanks to the code-breakers, British Command secured key data about the Battle of the Atlantic, Rommel’s campaign in Africa and of course D-Day, where the Daily Tele had something of a karmic debt to pay. Prime Minister Winston Churchill described the decoding team as ‘the geese that laid the golden egg but never cackled’.
Tony Carson carried those words through life. In the few times I met TC, a graceful Herald compiler who began his role in 1986, he seldom discussed his ‘contribution to the war effort’. Code-breaking was a chapter in a book pretty much closed. I do know that his Italian assignment soon became a crash course in Japanese, and TC was relocated to Brisbane as part of General Macarthur’s Intelligence Unit. He also took part in the Allied landing in Borneo, and when he wasn’t foiling Emperor Tojo he turned his mind to crosswords.
After the war, when he moved to Perth with a young family, Tony had a go at farming (just like the first Times setter, Adrian Bell), before getting involved in health review and joining the board of Sydney Hospital. He made a variety of cryptics for the Listener back in the UK, under the alias of Swan, in honour of Perth’s river, and later plied his trade at the Herald, where we first met in a Chinese restaurant.
Our editor, Harriet, selected the venue due to its chequered decor. We met at the table, the full roster of Fairfax compilers, and almost needed to introduce ourselves, despite being long-time colleagues. A monkish pursuit, crossword-making is not the path to take if you aspire to the sociability of office life.
We talked about favourite clues, the screw-ups and inspirations. TC was urbane and handsome, with a nonchalant warmth. His voice still retained a
Wiltshire lilt. Perhaps in his mid-sixties then, a spring chicken compared to our patriarch LB, Tony would live for only another five years, succumbing to illness in 1994. But that night was a blithe get-together, a blue moon on the crossword calendar, and Harriet started speculating on the collective noun. If lions have a pride, what is a group of cruciverbalists? A distraction? A mesh? A crypt?
DP, or David Plomley, the civic engineer and Wednesday’s stalwart, came up with abomination.
‘Scan a kebab clue,’ said LB, and we all presumed he’d lost his mind.
‘What kebab?’ I asked.
‘Black bean sauce,’ said Tony, studying the same menu and solving the anagram. The habits of code-breaking die hard.
Though every solver needs that Bletchley reflex. If random kebabs and German sea reports make no sense, then persevere. By definition, all codes, all cryptics, must crack eventually.
CRETAN TRANCE – ciphers and acronyms
Sir Arthur Evans was pottering about the ruins of Crete in the early 1900s when he came upon a series of clay tablets, each one bearing a list of strange letters. Neither Greek nor any other language Evans knew, the symbols earned the name of Linear B, and presented one of the great decoding challenges of the day.
Michael Ventris, an English architect who spoke six languages as well as reading classical Greek and Latin, became intrigued by the tablets. To him they represented ancient inventories. But listing what? To deepen the riddle, Linear B comprised strings of coupled symbols rather than whole words, yet after two years of scrutiny, Ventris noticed recurring patterns. Four in particular. Could they be gods, or keywords, or perhaps the major towns of Crete? He followed this last hunch, replacing the most frequent cluster with AMNISOS, the island’s port, and slowly the enigma gave way. Linear B in fact was found to be an ancient form of Greek, a revelation that caused much of Mediterranean history to be rewritten.