The World Is Lovely Sporadic trivialities aimed to please

Apis Clue-Writing Competition: ASSASSIN

Hot on the heels of PROPELLING, it’s ASSASSIN! You don’t want an assassin hot on your heels. Luckily this isn’t actually hot on anything’s heels.

I’m not even going to bother with @ndrew_Taylor this week. His entry was insipid and uninspired and you can look it up for yourself. His namesake compensated with a bit of surrealism and some unusual wordplay:

A swan’s standing at the north pole, in Booth

Spoiler

‘A’ is A. At the north pole, all directions are south, so SWANS becomes SSASS. ‘In’ is IN, and Booth is the bloke who shot Lincoln.

@frizfrizzle was a little more down to earth:

Top assistant doubles in fatal fashion

Spoiler

ASS (‘Top assistant’) doubles, giving ASSASS. ‘In’ clues IN, and the definition is a bit vague in classic Friz fashion.

Kilbey just went for all-out literalism. He’s a busy man and he doesn’t have time for your nonsense.

Villain who is, at heart, classed as evil

Spoiler

ASS is the heart of ‘classed’; ‘as’ is AS; ‘evil’ is SIN. The definition is ‘Villain’.

Elegant! But perhaps not as elegant as @apaultaylor’s fine effort:

Ignoring initial pass, a spade is returned by North – ‘one down’ is usually the result of his contracts

Spoiler

‘Ignoring initial pass’ clues ASS, ‘a spade’ is AS, ‘is returned’ is SI and North is N. An assassin is contracted to take someone down.

That’s a pretty good clue even if you don’t love bridge as much as Paul does. But it hasn’t taken the prize, and only partly because I wanted to punish his disgusting self-assurance. Mainly, it’s because another cleverly-defined clue, simple though it was, tickled me more:

First ask setter’s sister’s approval; second, send Interflora narcissi: he might take you out (@miche)

Spoiler

It’s a straightforward acronym, the indicator being ‘First’ and the definition ‘he might take you out’.

I assume, given it’s in the third person, that the setter in question is supposed to be me rather than Miche, which means it’s slightly flawed – I don’t have a sister and I’m not available – but also raises the interesting point that this clue wouldn’t work nearly as well in a different context. Miche wins a copy of Day of the Jackal, just as soon as I’ve found one cheap enough or got a job.

Apis Clue-Writing Competition: PROPELLING

It seems nobody has bothered to complete the last round-up’s very special crossword. I suppose I’ll keep my nonagons to myself.

Entries from spurious accounts are really starting to rival real ones. @Andrew_Taylor suggested a possible reason:

I think that's because 'propelling' is a ridiculous word to clue.

The nail is suffering from severe concussion. But of course, those of you dedicated enough to participate overcame that problem admirably. And because cryptic crosswords naturally attract people who follow a certain kind of lifestyle, this week’s entries were all about sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

Sex

Leg and lip involved in dirty porn? Encouraging! (@extraperson)

Spoiler

LEG, LIP and PORN anagram to become PROPELLING, ‘encouraging’.

ejaculating head of penis, thrust with love inside arsehole (@ndrew_taylor)

Spoiler

I’m not really sure, to be honest. I’m getting a bit bored of @ndrew_taylor.

As is apparently traditional, the filthy clues came from Fake People.

Drugs

Pushing proposition 50, about ecstasy, with endless jargon (@Andrew_Taylor)

Spoiler

‘Proposition’ is PROP and ‘fifty’ is L in Roman numerals; they’re around E for ecstasy. ‘Endless jargon’ is LINGO without its last letter. The definition is ‘pushing’.

Topical! Sort of.

Rock ’n’ Roll

Pushing for sound, keeping measure (@stecks)

Spoiler

‘for’ = PRO, ‘sound’ = PING, keeping ELL, ‘a varying measure of length originally taken from the arm’ if you trust Chambers.

Alas, Katie was determined to ruin my already slightly strained presentation and offered a different final submission:

Sending for pin, left leg broken

Spoiler

PRO is ‘for’ again, followed by an anagram of PIN L LEG. ‘Sending’ is the definintion.

Apparently it came to her in a dream. That’s how much she hates effective competition round-up paradigms. It’s a sickness. But at least she tried! Not like these jokers.

Driving forwards with two consecutive changes of direction could make decent circle (@apaultaylor)

Spoiler

‘Driving forwards’ is PROPELLING; if the two L(eft)s changed to R(ight)s, it’d be PROPER RING, ‘decent circle’.

Paul passed his driving test not long ago. I assume this was a celebration.

US currency taken out of support for literacy? Onwards! @frizfrizzle

Spoiler

S ($) is taken out of PRO SPELLING. The definition is ‘Onwards!’, which is a bit dodgy.

A noble sentiment, perhaps, but even if I had wanted to give Friz the prize two weeks in a row his definition was a bit dodgy.

Taking off string lines in table (as in, not tennis?) (Kilbey)

Spoiler

‘String’ = ROPE and LL, ‘lines’, inside PING. I think Paul’s under the impression that ‘ping’ means table and ‘pong’ means tennis. The definition is ‘taking off’.

And so, with a somewhat ropey connection, we come to our winner, nobly submitted by my dad:

Pushing or pulling? Sounds like you should go for rope

Spoiler

The U of PULLING (‘Sounds like you’) is replaced with ROPE, giving PROPELLING, defined as ‘Pushing’.

Dad’s tidy clue also offers valuable advice to all of us, although I’m not really sure how a rope helps with pushing. He wins a mechanical pencil. He might feel a bit shortchanged, but frankly you shouldn’t expect a decent prize in a week when the theme is ‘pencils’.

This week’s competition word – by which, thanks to my laxity, I mean ‘last week’s competition word’, is ASSASSIN, but you don’t really need to know that because it’s far too late to do anything about it. More usefully, this week’s is MARRY. And that’s much nicer.

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.

Apis Clue-Writing Competition: VIOLET

An interesting note on the distinction between violet and purple: in the strictest sense, ‘violet’ refers only to the shades we perceive at the short extreme of the visible spectrum, while ‘purple’ refers to shades produced by a mixture of red and blue (or, indeed, red and violet) light. As such, I immediately disqualified all entries which used ‘purple’ as their definition.

That’s a half-truth. I did disqualify all those entries, but only because there was only one of them and it was from the fragile and fictional mind of @ndrew_taylor:

cattle-person bumming trannie turns purple

Spoiler

‘cattle-person’ is ELOI, in an unexpectedly erudite reference to The  Time Machine. It’s in TV (transvestite), and the whole thing is reversed (‘turns’).

Kilbey kept things spectral with his first contribution:

Duck wearing disgusting shirt found at rainbow's end?

Spoiler

‘Duck’ is O, wearing VILE T (‘disgusting shirt’). If you don’t know the definition you haven't been paying attention.

It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it? But apparently the joys of absurdity just don’t do it for Paul, so he settled on this rather elegant number:

A shade agressive, having forgotten name

Spoiler

‘Agressive’ (sic) clues VIOLENT; removing the N for ‘name’ leaves VIOLET, ‘a shade’.

I think this clue stems from the time I called him Vincent and then punched him in the gut.

The most colourful creation was @miche’s:

Olive, the original blended hue

Spoiler

OLIVE anagrammed with T (‘the original’) gives VIOLET, a hue.

I’m not sure Miche’s history of Dulux is strictly accurate, but it certainly makes for a nice, taut clue.

Of course, there are more exciting ways to clue VIOLET as a colour. @frizfrizzle snatched up the one I was hoping someone would go for:

Royalty takes colourful detour through rented house, we hear

Spoiler

VIOLET sounds like ‘via let’, for ‘detour through rented house’. Purples and violets are associated with royalty.

There’s a lot to like about this clue, but it doesn’t follow the rules. The definition part isn’t really a definition: ‘Royalty takes colourful’ gestures towards VIOLET but it isn’t explicit enough to be fair. Essentially, the problem is that Friz hasn’t wasted enough of his life solving cryptic crosswords to internalise the conventions properly. Of course, the ALL-POWERFUL SPREADSHEET will have him in its grasp soon enough, and then he’ll be a force to be reckoned with.

@Andrew_Taylor’s definition was a little more obscure. Or, possibly, less obscure but also less well established.

I love T-Mobile for their brand colour

Spoiler

‘I love T’ is ‘mobile’; VIOLET is an anagram of I LOVE T. T-Mobile’s logo is violet – or possibly purple. It’s hard to say.

That’s pretty excellent. But I slightly preferred my other brother’s faintly wistful offering:

Is it vain to remember this girl?

Spoiler

In the classic mnemonic ‘Richard of York gave battle in vain’, ‘vain’ is a reminder of VIOLET, which is also a girl’s name.

I have to admit, I couldn’t work this one out, but that, too, was @apaultaylor’s fault: he long ago replaced that old mnemonic in my head with the far superior ‘Rake out your garden before invading Venus’ – which I genuinely used to recall the order of the spectrum when composing the week’s clues. This is the sort of clue I love – utterly confounding until you solve it, and thereafter fantastically satisfying.

Paul wins a packet of Parma Violets from the very exciting new sweetshop in Cambridge.

This week’s competition word is APOLLO, and I really hope someone I know less well wins because this is starting to look a bit dodgy.

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.