Crossword News June 2021

 Crossword News June 2021

The May Prize Puzzle was Confusion Down Under by Flowerman. This was probably the toughest puzzle of the year. Clashes could give either ARTHUR or MARTHA, a phrase used in Australia to show a state of confusion. Letters extracted gave ALLOSOMES IN GRID. Allosomes are sex chromosomes. Males are XY and females XX. There is already one X in the grid and ENACTED can be changed to EXACTED, thus resolving the grid as female and MARTHA to be the resolution of the clashes. There is nowhere that a Y can be used.

Here are some of the comments from solvers.

This crossword has kept me entertained for nearly 3 weeks!  I repeatedly got stuck but after a break more progress was made.  My ideal crossword - difficult but always offering encouragement.  I had to google to discover the Australian phrase and with SHE and MRS in the grid I was pretty certain that I was looking for another X to go with the one in AAXES.  When I lighted upon ENACTED that easily changed to EXACTED I could not help but feel a bit of an anti-climax.  Or, have I picked the wrong entry to change?  I certainly had no need to check it out in Chambers, so maybe I have.  Apart from that final doubt, this was a superb puzzle. Thank you Flowerman.

The puzzle's end-game took a long time to resolve. The Arthur/Martha 'confusion' was revealed part of the way through the grid-fill. The instruction that 'five sets [of three consecutive letters] can be arranged' set me off seeking 9,2,4 anagrams the 15 letters - about 20000+ possibilities.... ! Realisation dawned a week or so after the grid-fill and ALLOSOMES IN GRID emerged, but then I couldn't find 'ALLOSOME' in Chambers either as a separate entry or under 'ALLO-'. Googling produced the word as an alternative to 'Chromosome'. So........ I hope that by changing 'ENACTED' to 'EXACTED', giving me two 'X's in the grid has allowed MARTHA to emerge triumphant.......Clever stuff indeed! Thanks to Flowerman and the Crossword Centre for a challenging puzzle.

Well, I waited until the last minute to submit this entry, hoping that a more satisfactory solution might occur to me, but no!!  The phrase I identified was "allosomes in grid" (is that even correct?).  Besides my eventual entry, I also considered various other possibilities that might indicate Male (Arthur) or Female (Martha) or perhaps a bit of both, including some that seemed to be hinted at, but I couldn't discern anything else that was remotely feasible!  In the end, changing 21D ENACTED to EXACTED to give two X's in the grid (indicating XX = female = MARTHA) was the best I could come up with!  Many thanks to Flowerman for a great workout, and I look forward to finding out the real solution soon.

There were 29 entries, of which 8 were marked incorrect. The lucky winner, picked from the electronic hat, was Philip Wood, who will be receiving a prize of Chambers Crossword Dictionary.

A full solution with notes is available at https://crosswordcentre.blogspot.com/2021/06/solution-to-confusion-down-under-by.html

You still have until 8 July to send an entry to this month’s puzzle, June Journey by eXternal.

The July Prize Puzzle will be one of mine. I hope you will enjoy Map by Urchin.
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I am sure you will enjoy this Indie puzzle by Rodriguez as solved by Simon Anthony on Cracking the Cryptic. A fantastic grid!
https://youtu.be/NEMRKMA1vLA
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I have mentioned the puzzles compiled by Dave Gorman in earlier newsletters. You can find out much more about the setter, Bluth, in this interview with Alan Conor.
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I have been alerted to this letter in Private Eye complaining about a clue in the Cyclops crossword.

Sir,
Having fondled a few scrotums in my time, I dispute the answer to 15 ac in Eye crossword No. 701. They are WRINKLY not CRINKLY. Crinkly can only be used to describe crepe paper. I would get out more but the country has gone nuts.
Danielle
London

Cyclops writes: The dictionaries I use (Chambers and Collins) have crinkly and wrinkly as more or less interchangeable. They also show both as meaning “an old person” . Sadly, “scrotum” is not cited as an example, so I based my secondary definition on personal observation. (OK, maybe my skin in that particular location is like crepe paper.) I hadn’t noticed when clueing that the first letter of the answer did not cross with another answer – so, I have to concede that either CRINKLY or WRINKLY would have fitted.

In the next issue there was this comment in Pedantry Corner.

...I don’t get out much, so my sheltered life has never required me to use the plural form of “scrotum”. However, surely it should be “scrota” rather than “scrotums”?
John Swan, Whitley Bay.
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On the Clue-Writing Competition the results are in for the April task, a clue to ODYSSEY. This was a resounding win for Don Manley with a neat anagram and extraction clue which echoes current government advice.

Do say yes to travel, but not a long journey (7)

Voting is about to end for clues to TOERAG. What are the odds on Azed choosing the same word for his June competition! It will be interesting to compare the winning clues.

The June challenge is for a Right & Left clue to NELSON/PRINCE. Entries close on 30 June.
http://www.andlit.org.uk/cccwc/main.php

There are now 234 members on the Google mailing list.

Best wishes

Derek