The World Is Lovely Sporadic trivialities aimed to please

Apis Clue-Writing Competition: APOLLO

This week’s submissions were so good I felt I had to do something special in celebration. So here it is.

Across

3. Paps follow undressed Muse frontman (6)
5. God who fathered a confused @apisclues? (6)
7. Rocky’s opponent has absence of faith in God (6)
8. Learner in a Volkswagen killed the python (6)

Down

1. naked greek bumlord is extremely lustful, covered in a poo (6)
2. A survey? O God! (6)
4. Parallel parking in a waste of space was this programme’s objective (6)
6. Last of ambrosia dollop finally licked off upstanding, gorgeous young man (6)

I’ll give you five or ten minutes to run off a copy and solve those delightful and varied clues.

All done? Lovely. The first completed grid drawn on Friday 13th November will win a nonagon. I don’t know quite how you draw a grid on a date. Answers on a week, please.

Let’s begin with the disqualified ones. @ndrew_Taylor’s 1 down snatched the opportunity to use the phrase ‘naked greek bumlord’ again. I would complain that he’s proving to be something of a one-trick pony, but as that’s the whole purpose of his existence it would seem a little harsh. Still, as there was a slot to fill in the grid I thought I’d better show that you can be A Bit Rude without resorting to poo jokes and homophobic slurs. 6 down is disqualified because it really wouldn’t be appropriate for me to award myself the prize even if I thought I deserved it.

Disappointingly – and I say ‘disappointingly’ because Ann Widdecombe would approve – not all of the clues were so sex-obsessed. In fact, they revealed either a very wide knowledge of Apollo or a dogged persistence with Wikipedia.

My dad pitched in with 8 across, recording both Apollo’s bold slaying of Python and as his own bold slaying of a Polo driver who once cut him up. He must have passed on his love of Greek legend, because my brothers had titbits of their own. @Andrew_Taylor (5 across) pushed the boundaries of Twitter-based cryptic cluing by producing a lovely anagram of Apollo’s son Asclepius which assumed we would ignore the @. His uncouth namesake would not approve. @apaultaylor’s entry (3 across) took a more conventional approach, and with great success, but much to Widdecombe’s chagrin I was unable to get the image of a naked Matt Bellamy being pursued by disembodied breasts. You can’t give that a prize. Besides, I still haven’t posted off his Parma Violets.

@stecks apparently didn’t feel the need to show off fancy-pants mythical minutiae, giving us a 2 down that concisely captures the feeling evoked by an approaching clipboard and tops it off by cryptically directing its readers to the Greek god Apollo. Kilbey (4 down), on the other hand, has only the faintest idea of who the Ancient Greeks were but really likes Tom Hanks films. Trust me, I lived next to him for a year. He used to talk to a volleyball. More to the point, he spotted the same scatological opportunity that served @ndrew_Taylor so well: truly, he walks among giants.

But even when it goes down to points, there can only be one winner. @frizfrizzle’s 7 across might have been phrased more elegantly, but it was clever and it made me chuckle to myself on two separate occasions. This week, that’s apparently what was required; who know what my whimsical tastes may demand for your clues for PROPELLING? One thing we can be sure of is that unless some of you start making the effort to be a bit more rubbish, it’ll be a sticky one to judge.

Friz wins a natty Apollo 11 patch and the right to make a tedious ‘One small step...’ joke in the comments.