Apis Clue-Writing Competition: WASTELAND
This week’s clues ranged from sci-fi/fantasy romps to ecological musings to zen koans. One thing they didn’t include was groundbreaking Modernist poetry, and rightly so.
Last week’s winner, having nothing to prove and doubtless filled with reckless bravery after watching The 300 Spartans, went a bit nuts:
Desert semi-educated Gibbons to wander around unmajestically
Luckily, this week sees the introduction of concealed explanations in the Apis clue-writing competition writeup, so the bafflement all sensible people will have felt on reading that can be swiftly dealt with. The feeling that Paul’s clue was silly and he is a silly man will probably linger on.
@ndrew_taylor also put in a second showing that failed to match up to his first:
stoned with my mate alan in bush
Last week’s clue and abuse were both stronger. Disappointing.
@frizfrizzle was being silly again.
Alien craft arrives in derelict area. Nobody notices
It was a neat idea but I don’t think the cryptic definition was clear enough to be fair . Either way, the straight definition is sat slap in the middle rather than at one end, and that’s just not cricket.
Friz’s earlier clue was one of a pair describing magical shenanigans:
Magical implement surrounds robbery gone wrong resulting in derelict area (@frizfrizzle)
Barren patch - Let's get back into a bit of magical equipment (@njhamer)
Nathan’s clue seemed essentially a vision of a very boring episode of Doctor Who, which tickled me. However, tickling me isn’t enough to make me overlook wordplay problems (see spoiler). Except maybe if it’s literal tickling, but that's really a form of torture.
That leaves us with siblings and their significant others. If this were a competition on a packet of crisps they wouldn’t be eligible, but of course it isn’t – and let’s face it, if I disqualified everyone I could be accused of unfairly favouring there’d be very few competitors left.
My dear brother @apaultaylor took the environmentalist angle.
Waterless region used to be source for thirsty antelope
A lovely clue, but the slightly contrived surface reading and a definition I’m not sure is quite fair gave me all the opportunity I needed to deny it the top spot. And at this point, I am looking for excuses. Besides, who ever heard of an eland? (Probably a great many people less ignorant than myself.)
Speaking of excuses...
Can you hear part of trunk hit ground in empty place? (@stecks)
I really did want to give this the prize, but I don’t think it would have been quite fair. ‘Can you hear’ is a bit indirect for a soundalike, and ‘in’ is doing nothing at all. The surface reading of the clue conflicts too much with its solution, which is a shame, because the surface reading is brilliant.
Which leaves us with our winner. In a way, it’s turned out nicely insofar as I don’t wish to appear nepotistic – if I was going to pick a non-meritorious winner among the final three it wouldn’t be the one who tormented me as a child.
Before end of world, make new atlas for desolate terrain (@Andrew_Taylor)
Andrew’s clue doesn’t have the wit of some of the other ones, but personally I thought it conjured up a post-apocalyptic vision that was at once desperate and adventurous (and the wordplay’s nice and tight, too.). It's almost poetic, in its way, which is highly appropriate and which I suspect may be wholly accidental, if only because I assume he Googled the week’s connection.
Andrew wins a digital copy of The Who’s ‘Baba O’ Riley’. I would have extended the disconnection a step further but I suspect CSI: New York not to be as entertaining as the song itself.
This weeks clue-writing competition word is VIOLET.
Too Many Twits: Outrageous Flirts
LovePast40: I need some dating tips - any suggestions?
It’s really only natural that even a divorced mother of three should come to me for microblog-based dating advice. Whether it's my witty and insightful personal tweets or the fantastically clever clues of my alter ego, my Twitter presence is incomparably alluring. If the sheer weight of evidence at those two links doesn’t convince you, just check out these little love notes, each of them clearly hand-crafted and sealed with a loving kiss before being launched – nervously, pleadingly – at my heart.
webtrepreneur: Hi, thanks for following, looking forward to connecting.
cristinamunoz8: Thx for following me. Why don't we connect on Facebook? Write on my wall at: http://eCa.sh/fbook Hope to cu there.
Sweet and, except for the embrace of social networking, old-fashioned. Its good to see that these two are happy with a slow pursuit, and it will make it easier to let them down gently. I particularly appreciate the friendliness of Cristina’s little smiley; webtrepreneur was trying to play it a little bit too cool. Still, that’s better than a lunge straight towards codependency:
WorthyIdeals: Thank you for following & let me know how I can support u.
These certainly are worthy ideals, but such a bond of trust really has to be built up gradually.
Alas, Twitter is no caring utopia, and some people are only interested in one thing.
jeregabbert: Hey thanks for the follow, check my blog, I would love to talk if we are niche compatible
Yes, that’s how it is. He’ll talk to me, sure, but really all he cares about is whether we’re ‘niche compatible’. And I think we all know what that means.
KennyBoykin: Thanks..Email me&tell me about your company and I will tell you about mine..WE will see how we can help each other out.Kboykin04@yahoo.com
He’ll show me his if I show him mine, and we’ll ‘help each other out’. I’m sorry, but that’s not what I thought I was getting into when I started my little cruciverbalist venture. I’m a happily engaged man. But it could be worse.
wishnie: As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. God bless!
I really don’t know what these means, but I’m quite sure it’s disgusting.
Too Many Twats: Tom O’Halloran
The first spammy direct message I ever got on Twitter was this delight from scary right-winger Tom O’Halloran:
Thank you for the Follow ! Please take a moment to look at my plan to take America back: http://digg.com/u1BkxQ Thanks again, and God Bless!
I’m sure that if you're a Republican whose favoured tit has recently lost the presidential election you’d take delight in the chance to ‘take America back’. Sadly, I come from the country that sent bucketfuls of Redcoats to put down the colonies’ noble press for independence, so a ‘plan to take America back’ sounds to me more like a desperate attempt to cling on to the status of superpower.
Looking at this fellow’s delightful website, you’re likely to think him an easy target. In the grand old style of early personal pages, he happily puts up his poetry, and of course mocking poetry is a great deal easier than writing it. Fortunately for my credibility, his poetry page crashes Firefox every time I try to load it, so I can’t engage in the kind of snobbish criticism which – let’s face it – is all my degree really qualified me for. Instead, I’m all but forced to make this post all about his politics.
Tommy’s pride and joy appears to be the plan he so small-mindedly invited me to endorse in his initial message. The first thing I noticed about A Bold Step Back was its advertising.¹ As you read Tom’s unremarkable small-goverment spiel, a little counter ticks upwards, claiming to count how many ‘babies have died from abortion’ since the page was opened. All very exploitatively emotive, you might to think, but wait! This counter counts up in tenths! Clearly, it’s nonsensical to say that you’ve one-tenth killed somebody. I can only assume that this little splinter of the US religious right has realised that the bundle of cells living in a woman’s womb isn’t the same as a full-on person, whatever potential to become one it might have. This is progress: all we have to do now is convince them of the fairly simple logical point that you can’t add up ten of them to make a real baby, as though they were Yorkshire Tea tokens, and maybe we can get a guarantee of bodily autonomy in what are supposedly the most advanced democracies on the planet.
Of course, TPO (I have yet to work out why he uses this initialism) is quite capable of being objectionable without any help from his advertisers. He doesn’t even gesture towards a neutral, reasoned view of the world. He describes himself as ‘hard Core Anti Obama’. Not against his policies, not against the things he’s done in office. Just against him, because he’s not horribly right-wing. He also runs a foul little blog which declares:
As I set up this blog, I am taking a rather unusual route, building an outline, a framework of as yet empty posts
Which is to say, he is constructing a list of people under his headline and hoping that some evidence he can use might just emerge, which would be a despicable enough strategy even if the ideology behind it was all tickety-boo. Of course, if his ideology wasn’t horribly messed up, he wouldn’t have a page dedicated to implying that the Clintons arrange murders faster than his silly, ignorant brain can keep track of.
Tom boasts about being a ‘married’ ‘child of God’ but has an animated GIF of a neon stripper on his website. He runs ‘pro-life’ adverts but is apparently proud to be a ‘Gun carrying NRA Conservative’. His website won’t let me make fun of his poetry, he posts Glenn Beck videos on his unapologetically prejudiced blog, and he maintains a page featuring nothing but an uncontextualised list of words. I am not ashamed to say that he is the only Twitter spammer I have ever bothered to block.
[1] I really mean this. Cynically, before I looked at any of the content, I had a quick search in the hope I could find some anti-immigration stuff that would be nicely incongruent alongside the proudly Irish feel of his Twitter page. I know, I know. I’m terrible. But the upshot is that before I saw any actual content, I saw his horrid adverts.
Too Many Twits: An Introduction
All the things that make Twitter so powerful – brevity, volume, instantaneousness and so on – also make it the perfect tool to help lever one’s foot into one’s mouth. Thus far, I think I’ve managed to avoid it, but there has been one tweet I’ve sorely regretted:
apisclues: Apparently @ezyhelper is looking forward to sharing creative internet marketing ideas with me. I have a feeling she'll be disappointed.
Since then, my poor, innocent little cryptic-clue account, which autofollows only for the good of its participants, has been flooded with messages exhorting me to become a disgustingly rich born-again Christian conservative American social networking guru. I’m sure there are less savoury prospects, but short of actual criminal activity my mind is blank.
My original blueprint for this post was to run through a few of the more amusing messages I’ve been spammed with, but on further inspection it seems some of these accounts have real people behind them – people far too objectionable to let off so easily. So consider this the first post in a series, titled in dishonour of David Cameron, whose painfully contentless remark about Twitter was sadly never properly laid into because everyone was too busy worrying about which words he’d used to make it. Sacrificing meaningful thought in the attempt to make a snappy joke is an affliction that Twitter spammers and David Cameron share, as the frequency with which I've received this titbit demonstrates:
Why did the chicken cross the social media road? to tweet of course!!!
Chickens don’t tweet.
Apis Clue-Writing Competition: SPARTAN
First, a little context. For the last few weeks I’ve been running cryptic crossword shenanigans on Twitter @apisclues. Last week, I added a clue-writing competition to the mix, but tweeting the results was clearly not going to be practical, so I'm doing it here.
This week’s word was SPARTAN, which, like all the week’s solutions, is a variety of apple. No submissions chose to make use of that fact, but I never really expected them to.
The standard was of course very high; after all, only extremely intelligent and witty sorts follow the Apis account (as long as you ignore the tsunami of spammy followers I got after I foolishly used the word ‘marketing’ in a tweet.) The biggest problem people seemed to have was with definitions. @VCrisis seemed to have forgotten hers (something I’ve done many times myself), although her ‘Skill or craft within a certain extent’ certainly had an air of austerity to it which I hope was intentional. @frizfrizzle’s final submission, ‘Spartan is the answer to this clue’, might have intended something similar, but had the disadvantage of being stupid.
Often, ‘austerity’ was just what was defined:
Laurel conceals the usual amount for austerity (@Xadoc)
It's part and parcel of frugal living (@apaultaylor)
These definitions didn’t quite fit: ‘spartan’ means ‘austere/frugal’ or ‘one who is austere/frugal’, but not ‘austerity’ or ‘frugality’. A shame, because they were otherwise very nice clues. Paul’s was probably the tidiest of any submission, and
Similarly, those entrants who prefer their S captalised didn’t quite manage spartan rigour in their definitions. @Andrew_Taylor’s deliciously tongue-in-cheek ‘Fight, then trigonometry: a lifestyle reminiscent of ancient Greece’ was right at the edge, and would have had a good chance at the top spot if he’d left his definition at ‘reminiscent of ancient Greece.’ @frizfrizzle’s much less stupid earlier clues seemed to be defining SPARTANS
Tin-plated item a military force
Why remove nasty rapport with Greek Army?
(I’m not quite sure about the wordplay for the second one. Normally I’d seek clarification from the entrant but Friz opted for his stupid clue instead.)
Three entrants offered more accurate definitions. @ndrew_taylor’s frankly glorious ‘half an arse in crazy pants for naked greek bumlord’ was disqualified, partly because it was a spoof from @Andrew_Taylor and partly because he called me a ‘cryptic fuck’. @miche kept his defnition appropriately simple with ‘Ancient citizen talks back, confusing Dec's pal’, and conjured up a fairly bemusing image while he was doing so. But this weeks winner – and, for all sorts of reasons, I say this reluctantly – is Paul Kilbey, whose stubborn refusal to get a Twitter account has ruined the consistency of this post. (He participated through @pleasurenotes for a while, until I pointed out that I’d have to disqualify him if he kept it up.)
Extra requirement never ends up within reach under such conditions
Paul said ‘i fear in my efforts to dazzle i have created something meaningless’, but I have a suspicion that the slight vagueness of the whole-clue definition saved him from the traps so many of the entries have fallen into. More to the point, he concocted a neat clue that doesn’t give up its wordplay or definition easily. It even perplexed me, and I chose the answer for it.
The judge’s decision is final, but feel free to tell me I’m too picky or just plain wrong in the comments thread. Thank you to all who took part; thinking about these will probably work wonders for the quality of my own clues. The next competition will open tomorrow, after the week’s solutions have been tweeted.
Paul wins a DVD of ‘The 300 Spartans’. Yes, that's right. There are prizes.
Covered In Bees!
Dreadful laxity! I have just discovered that I never completed and posted an entry offering the splendour of Covered In Bees! to the world. A hasty correction is in order.
Covered In Bees! is a bee-avoiding card game for three or more beekeepers, devised by the capable hands and exhausted minds of Bagpuss, Beans, Ginner, Hans and Spatchcock. It will bring a glory and a grace to your life that the tired trappings of professional success and spiritual enlightenment cannot hope to match.
In case you missed them above, here are the rules. Covered In Bees! is best involved in a slightly degraded mental state, in the company of people you like but have no scruples about roundly abusing.
Psychoanalysis Time
Last night I dreamed I was unexpectedly taking part in some kind of bizarre improv show. The rounds were arcane and unexplained, and everybody I knew was there. I was making an idiot of myself trying to keep up.
Then came the ‘Reasoning’ round, which even in my sleep sounded like it'd be more at home on The Krypton Factor. This was apparently the big draw, the main event, because we moved from the usual stage to one at the side of the road so that the gathered throng – apparently everyone I didn't know was there as well – could enjoy the spectacle. Three of us (one from each team) were selected to take part. We were to connect two things supplied by audience members; it was unclear whether our efforts would be judged on their intellectual merit, comedy value or cheese-pun content. My turn came, and the audience demanded that I connect ‘an Albert donkey’ to ‘pear cider’.
A note may be necessary at this point. There is no such thing as an Albert donkey. The Albert donkey is entirely the product of my dreaming mind, which also came up with a little popular ditty about this particular breed. The audience sung it with great pleasure and familiarity.
I made my apologies for not knowing anything about Albert donkeys – because apparently it would have been too kind of my brain to make something up for the occasion – and offered the following connection:
The Albert donkey is so called because it has a large, white, bushy beard, in the style of Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses.
(This got a big laugh, so I assume it's not true.)
Throughout Only Fools and Horses, Del and Rodney set out on a series of business ventures which inevitably crash and burn, a model which has now been adopted by the world at large. But in these hard economic times, the cheering effects of incredibly sweet booze are just what everyone needs, so pear cider companies are doing quite well.
Now given that I was dreaming, that was actually quite elegant. Nonetheless, I really don't think it deserved the five minute ovation that it provoked from the adoring onlookers. In that moment, with my stale recession joke and fictitious etymology, I was an object-connecting rock-star god. Women wanted me, men wanted to be me, everyone wanted me to connect things to other things.
A little later, after a cup of tea, I woke up. And to tell you the truth, I felt like a bit of a tit.
Little-Read Blogger Mark Taylor Staggered Through The Derivative Observations Of The World Is Lovely’s Latest Update
By this point, there are a number of facts which don't bear repeating, but for clarification:
- Dan Brown writes awful, awful prose.
- Lots of people buy Dan Brown's novels.
- Most of the people who buy Dan Brown's novels enjoy them.
My first experience of The Da Vinci Code illustrated this nicely. I found it on a friend's table, only there because someone was thoroughly enjoying reading it, opened it at random and read this:
Standard ATM machines allowed users three attempts to type a PIN before confiscating their bank card. This was obviously no ordinary cash machine.
Factually accurate, utterly pointless and clumsily included, this little aside at least achieves one quality that Brown often misses. But it was still terrible enough that I didn't bother to read on to the gloriously dreadful passage that follows.
Sophie deleted everything she had just typed in and looked up at Langdon, her gaze self-assured. "It's far too coincidental that this supposedly random account number could be rearranged to form the Fibonacci sequence."
OK, a little heavy-handed, but we know what you mean.
Langdon realized she had a point. Earlier, Sophie had rearranged this account number into the Fibonacci sequence. What were the odds of being able to do that?
That... that's what you just said, isn't it?
Sophie was at the keypad again, entering a different number, as if from memory. "Moreover, with my grandfather's love of symbolism and codes, it seems to follow that he would have chosen an account number that had meaning to him, something he could easily remember." She finished typing the entry and gave a sly smile. "Something that appeared random... but was not." Langdon looked at the screen.
ACCOUNT NUMBER: 1123581321
Do you know, that looks oddly familiar, but without some kind of clue I just can't pin it down.
It took him an instant, but when Langdon spotted it, he knew she was right.
The Fibonacci sequence.
At this point, he's even trying the patience of the imaginary alter-ego who's been playing along for comic effect.
1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21
[...]
But I didn't start this post to bash Brown, and I didn't even intend to include that longer extract. What this little exercise shows us is how fantastically dissectable Brown's prose is. There are a huge number of bad writers, and plenty of successful ones to boot, but Brown manages to write novels that invite entertaining, accessible investigations of what makes bad writing. This probably won't alter what people enjoy reading, and nor should it, but it provides a valuable resource for learning writers (that is to say, all writers) who don't want to be caught writing "The famous man looked at the red cup." So thank you, Dan Brown, for entertaining those who love you and hate you alike, but mostly for producing a better style guide than Strunk and White ever did.
Mummy, Where Do Atheists Come From?
According to Ed West at the Telegraph:
...atheists are a dying breed. Austria is the only country which records the religious belief of parents but their figure, of 0.85 children per atheist woman, is far below replacement rate (2.1) and below even the most barren European country’s average rate, which is about 1.2. And since most people inherit their parents’ political and religious world views, this is bad news for Team Dawkins.
The unarguable sense of this statement is demonstrated by the incredible shrinking of cities we've seen over the past decades. People who live in cities have fewer children than those who don't, and of course people are more likely to live where they were born, so it's no wonder the urban centres of the world are shrivelling like a drying plum. As you might expect from a minor contribution to an increasingly tedious debate, West takes the opportunity to tag a few patronising remarks to his slightly-evidenced wild hypothesising:
...this is bad news for Team Dawkins.
Team Dawkins? What a perfect combination of naffness, childishness and the pointless implication of confrontation! Even if he'd bothered to spend more time thinking about his article than most teams get in the Crystal Dome, I don't think he could have done better.
Personally I find the New Atheists’ anti-Christian aggression tedious: criticising people for their privately-held religious beliefs shows a lack of class and maturity
Ed West is writing for a national newspaper but hasn't yet learned that colons imply pretty direct connections between what's on either side of them. A sad state of affairs.
...this sudden outpouring of bile against Christianity seems clearly motivated by a secret fear of another Abrahamic religion
Clearly, Mr West, and if I may say so it's a very astute case you make for your broad-brush accusation of Islamophobia. If there's one uniting reason to dislike, say, having an established church, crippling children's education, withholding reproductive rights or scuppering efforts to combat HIV, it's because of all those dreadful foreigners.
Of course, this is all pretty standard in the land of comment pieces. I wouldn't normally write about it, but the first comment on the article really riled me:
They can’t die off fast enough. What an annoying lot they are!
It's just sat there, right at the top, gently combining an affably reactionary remark with a borderline endorsement of genocide. Nearly 24 hours have passed, West has made three comments in the thread, and still it sits there, unedited and unchallenged. I've reported the comment, and I'll be interested to see if the Telegraph really does think it's OK for someone to use its website to wish death on me and everyone else who shares one tiny component of my view of the universe.
Writing Tools I Love
I write often for recreation and, far less often than I'd like, for money. Like many before me, I have become a master of procrastination. The best kinds of procrastination are of course those that carry the illusion of productivity, so over the years I've collected a host of tools to help with the arduous task of putting words in an order. In a cruel mockery of those blog posts that offer genuinely useful productivity tips, three of the best are detailed below.
My Typewriter
Neal Stephenson's first book was reportedly helped along in an unusual way: his typewriter had a cellulose ribbon, and he was writing in the hot Iowa summer. The only way to keep the softened ribbon from sticking was to keep typing, quickly and relentlessly.
The benefit of my typewriter, a little portable Smith Corona still living in Yorkshire, is just about the opposite: its mechanics slow my typing down quite substantially. Not the most obvious productivity tool, but sometimes a computer can be too fast, and I find my thoughts can't keep up with my fingers. Every sentence is followed by a long, dispiriting pause to think. Writing by hand goes too far the other way: the brain far outruns the pen. A mechanical typewriter is Baby Bear's choice of writing equipment (or was, until that vandal Goldilocks snapped the ribbon.)
PyRoom
One thing typewriters have going for them even for those less dreadfully picky than me is that you can't e-mail, read your feeds or tweet from them. For the same escape without being made fun of by your friends for being backwards, there's PyRoom (or, for Windows users, Dark Room, and for Mac users with money to spare – that is, Mac users – the original Write Room.)
OK, maybe they will still think you're stuck in the past.
PyRoom leaves nothing on your screen except a black background, a green box and a cursor. You can write, you can save, you can check your wordcount, and other than fiddling with the settings, that's really it. You might find yourself having to go back over the typesetting later, but it's a small price to pay for finally getting some work done. Of course, it doesn't have the satisfying typewriter ding! to celebrate your progress, but there's always...
Pop-up Pirate
He's smiling because he's helping!
Teaching the little plastic chap in the barrel to proof-read is a long and trying process, but I have no doubt I'll get there in the end. In the mean time, my Pop-up Pirate USB hub serves as a fantastic motivational tool. I used to use a bottle of beads for the same purpose; every hundred words was a bead in the bottle. When I need the same kind of boost these days, a sword in the barrel at each landmark is much more satisfying. When the pirate pops, I reward myself with something: a cup of tea, a break, a £3000 silver watch. Little things. Never knowing quite when the next one's coming makes the whole business much more exciting. And, of course, the hub serves a still more important job for the writer: it gives me somewhere to plug my keyboard in.