NTSPP 686

20 comments on “NTSPP 686”

1. I wondered what might be going on when I saw that our vertically-challenged setter had changed his alias and then read the title of the crossword.

   The effort and time that must have gone into making the clues/solutions not quite right is quite something.

   Thank you and well done to Starhorse and, in advance to Prolixic

2. Clever in the manner of Les Dawson’s piano playing and Tommy Cooper’s magic, though I’m glad that this could only appear on one day of the year so we’re unlikely to get a repeat for some time. Thanks to Starhorse.
   There are a couple of clues (11a and 27a) where I can’t see much wrong.
   My favourite clue was the explanatory 5d.

   1. 11a I think it depends how you ‘see’ the one. To match 1a in the grid, I think 27a should be a four letter word

3. Not for me, I’m afraid. I gave up after finding errors in the first few clues I solved. What a waste of time.

   Sorry to be a curmudgeon but April Fool’s jokes stop at noon.

   👎👎👎

   1. Apologies I thought Mr K had made an error scheduling this for 11 instead of 12 so I changed it, only realising why I shouldn’t have done so when I solved the crossword

      1. I’ll forgive you if you can have some Simnel cake ready for me in the naughty corner in case I need it next weekend. :wink:

         1. I will probably have some hot cross buns – I’m one of those traditional people who only eats them at Easter 🐣

            1. Me too. 👍

4. OK – I fell for it! Started out by thinking that Mr K had posted this week’s Rookie instead of the NTSPP and had all manner of scribbled notes alongside various clues until I lit upon 5d and the light slowly began to dawn.
   Nice one, Starhorse, hope I get the chance to exact some revenge…………….

5. Well I’m sorry it didn’t quite appeal to everyone, but as Gazza says it will be a few years before April 1st is on a Saturday again. And it is true that writing erroneous clues which you’ve still got a reasonable chance of solving is harder than you expect! Still, I’m just relieved that nobody has demanded I be banned for good, so far.

6. I was hoping to like this. The concept is a strong one and well worth constructing a puzzle with.

   But if you’re going require people to enter things which don’t fit the clue, you need more than “Most of the answers are wrong”, which is about all one can actually say of this set of clues and answers. They need to be wrong in a consistent way, or in a limited list of different ways, and the erroneous text or the letters displaced, possibly treated differently for each different type of error, to form some sort of identifiable thing with which the solver can use to check that they’ve correctly identified where the tricky bit is and thus that their entry is what was required. Without some thread running through the deviations, all you end up with is a crossword with a lot of bad clues. Being able to say “Well, I’ve filled it in with vaguely plausible answers, but I’ve got no real idea whether I’ve successfully solved it” isn’t a satisfying outcome.

   Bravo for trying, but you need to plan the next one better.

7. Well, that was…interesting. I wonder what Brian would have made of it.

8. Well I finished it (I think) but I can’t say I enjoyed it. Fair play to shortarse for setting themselves such a difficult task though. I look forward to the review from Prolixic.

9. I don’t often pick up an Nys op these days but somehow looked at this one and thought wtf? Standards are slipping. Then I remembered date and recognised setter. I’m sorry I didn’t pursue beyond halfway – too painful! But a very good joke, well done.

10. Well done, Prolixic, that must have taken almost as long as it took Starhorse to construct the puzzle!

    1. Starhorse provided me with notes in advance that I used to produce the review so it did not take too long!

11. When I sent this to Mr K and Prolixic (I felt it was only fair to provide the “parsings” table for this one!) I wasn’t sure whether it would actually see the light of day as I thought someone such as Alchemi might have come up with a properly themed puzzle around jokes, pranks etc. I don’t do themed puzzles as such, this is definitely a one-off, but can see where Alchemi is coming from in his (I assume it’s “his”, apologies if not) comments.

    As far as constructing it, I tried to make it reasonably solvable from definitions/crossers. I deliberately made the first couple of across clues both fairly easy but clearly not quite right. I also picked Crosswordland’s favourite boxer in 7d to give the correct crosser. After that I just tried to get in as many possible types of error as I could.

    I guessed that many people’s experience would be similar to Jane’s and Dutch’s, so fair enough. Guilty as charged.

    PS A quick check suggests that the next occurrence is 01/04/28, so if anyone fancies it you’ve got 5 years to come up with something….

12. Only just got around to this so failed to spot the ‘obvious’ April 1st connection, although I did correctly identify the culprit as Starhorse! Shall we just say it was novel? It didn’t take long to recognise the ‘deliberate mistake’ theme, as eventually confirmed by 5d, although I failed to spot the 27a grid error and couldn’t see what was wrong with it. My favourite clue element (perhaps the only favourite!) was calling the secretive French ‘Les sly’, although I’m not sure this bit of Franglais was even intended…
    Thank goodness it is 5 years to the next one, but we’ll be ready and waiting for it now!
    Thank you :scratch: for entertaining us with this novel, interesting but somewhat weird puzzle, Shorerats!

    1. PS The title was not included in the PDF file, so I didn’t note the ‘Timely Puzzle’ hint until reading CS’s comment.

13. Just got to this puzzle and completed it with the help of some letters revealed. As it’s past April 1st and we didn’t have a title on our sheet we missed the reason for the ‘mistakes’ and wondered who the setter was – doh moment when we read the comments! Well done Starhorse, very clever. Thank you.

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