Crossword News August 2021

 

Crossword News August 2021

 The July Prize Puzzle was Map by Urchin. The grid represented a map of Newcastle-on-Tyne and clashes could be rearranged as stations on the Tyne and Wear metro. The initial letters of redundant words read NETWORK LOGO, and the logo of the Metro is an upper-case M on a yellow background. Lines drawn to link the stations were the two lines that cross the city centre. The next destination south is Gateshead, which is the town where Urchin was born.

Here are some of the comments from solvers.

I found this tough going.  Lots of clever but tricky clues, lots of dictionary referencing, and lots of gratification as each answer slowly but surely fell.  But solving the clues was the easy part, unscrambling the 'cryptic' instructions took more time, was left staring at an almost filled grid without knowing how to proceed.  Maybe it's just me, but I would hardly have expected resolving clashes would involve removing chunks of letters and anagramming them to find names of stations I've never heard of! Not sure how I stumbled on to that, but once a couple got revealed, it was smooth sailing the rest of the way.  A fantastic puzzle, had me quite absorbed, and an oh-so satisfying solve, many thanks.

This was a challenging and entertaining puzzle in which the PDM took a while to arrive! Though by no means 'London-centric' (I'm from The Black Country originally) the appearance of St James, Haymarket and Monument from the clashes had me scouring London street and tubes maps for far too long! Happily, with my yellow highlighting pen I think I've incorporated the requisite logo! Howay!  Once again, thanks to both Urchin and the Crossword Centre for such a good quality puzzle.

Thanks, and kudos, to Urchin, not only for finding answers to produce clashes which could produce station names, but also for avoiding any other Ms in the grid. For a little added touch, I did my two lines in the appropriate colours.

We Geordies have been lucky these last couple of months following June's Blaydon Races themed crossword.  My first to drop in this one was Central Station. Well, of course there are a few of those around the world and I never thought we'd be focusing on one I've used countless times. As a former resident of Jesmond for nearly 20 years within a stone's throw of the Metro station. I've done many a crossword over that time and I've never seen Jesmond as a crossword puzzle answer, and doubtless never will again.  Hats off to Urchin, is he/she a fellow North Easterner I wonder? I now live in Tynemouth, 5 minutes away from the Metro station. Anyway, I hope my Metro Logos are legible.  Many thanks Urchin for a cracking puzzle. Dead canny!

There were 42 entries, of which 8 were marked incorrect. The lucky winner, picked from the electronic hat, was Peter Smith of Faringdon, who will soon be receiving his prize of Chambers Crossword Dictionary, which is donated by Chambers.

There is a full solution at https://crosswordcentre.blogspot.com/2021/08/solution-to-map-by-urchin.html

You still have lots of time to email your solution to Diet by Curmudgeon. As has been announced on the message board, an error in the grid will be spotted by solvers. If they wish, they may enter two letters in one cell.

The September prize puzzle will be Juggling Jellyfish by Chiffchaff.

We would welcome submissions for a puzzle for November.
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Since the 90s, subscribers to the New York Times crosswords have had the option to open the puzzle as a .puz file in Across Lite. The NYT have announced that they will stop supporting these files on the 9 August and will replace it with their own in-house software. This has infuriated many crossword fans. https://kotaku.com/crossword-fans-are-mad-at-the-new-york-times-1847417645

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/crosswords/nyt-games-no-longer-available-on-across-lite-as-of-aug-9.html
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Our March Prize Puzzle was Cracking by Soup. There is a very interesting interview with Soup in the Guardian blog. It is fascinating to see his research with bees and to find out how he chose his pseudonym.
https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2021/aug/02/crossword-blog-meet-the-setter-soup
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The death has been announced of Maki Kaji, the man credited as the creator and father of the sudoku.
One day in 1984, Maki Kaji came across a drably named game called “Number Place” in an obscure American magazine and spent an enjoyable half an hour placing numbers in the boxes of the puzzle’s geometrical grid.

“It was a very interesting puzzle, fun to solve and I fell in love with it,” he recalled. As the publisher of the Japanese puzzle magazine Tsushin Nikoli, which he had founded four years earlier, he set about adapting it for his own readers.

Kaji made a number of significant adjustments and came up with a grid of 81 squares, divided into nine blocks of nine squares, some of which already contained a figure, leaving the puzzler to fill in the empty spaces so that the numbers one to nine appear once — and only once — in every row, column and block.

He named it “Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru”, meaning “numbers should be single and unmarried” and it first appeared in his magazine in 1984. The puzzle swiftly became known by the abbreviation, sudoku, and Kaji as its “godfather”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/17/maki-kaji-godfather-of-sudoku-dies-aged-69-in-japan
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On the CC Clue Writing Competition, the August challenge is to write a clue to BIBLIOMANIA. http://www.andlit.org.uk/cccwc/main.php

The June challenge was a Right/Left clue to NELSON/PRINCE. The winner was Tom Borland with this fine clue.

Hold lens trained on Royal pair, finding nice shot
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Someone has pointed out that the counter on the Crossword Centre clicked over 3 million earlier this year.

Best wishes
Derek