When talented cinematographer Arvind Kannabiran is not busy shooting, he dabbles in cryptic crosswords (now there can’t be many Bollywood celebs who pursue this niche hobby, but then every rule has an exception). I had been hinting to him for some time now, that he should put together his own grid and boy, am I glad that he listened this time.
I was delighted to host his first ever grid at 1ACross and even more happy to see that “Whatever Works” – worked pretty well. It was a pleasant surprise that he even managed to pull off a theme and that too on a Hollywood film maker, close to his heart.
Arvind had used the pseudonym “Sideswipe” and many of you had been really curious about who this new setter was. Several solvers had commented on how the bar had been raised by a debut setter. Congrats on a cracking debut “Sideswipe” (Arvind) and we are looking forward to hosting your future grids as well.
Stats – We had a good response to this grid with 28 submissions, although it had been posted on a “not for competition” basis. Of those who submitted, 25 managed to complete the grid with zero errors, but of that, only 18 went on to get the maximum possible score of 151. Here’s the completed grid.
The following questions had to be answered by the solvers..
There are 5 themed entries. Some of these are in two parts appearing in two separate solutions. List these – A: ALICE, ANNIE HALL, SEPTEMBER, MANHATTAN, HOLLYWOOD ENDING
Which clue is a question to which the answers can be the themed entries?A: 16D (How Woody Allen transformed a new industry?)
You can access the Grid with solutions Here – Clicking Reveal ALL will show you the solutions, annotations and the answers to the bonus questions.
The Solvers who got all correct answers were Venkatraghavan Sahasranaman, Ramki Krishnan, Bhalchandra Pasupathy, Suresh Dorbala, Himanshu Rajurkar, K.Williams, Ian VanderSchee, Akshay Bhandarkar, Lakshmi Prakash, Krittibas Dasgupta, Mona Sogal, Narayan R., Col. Deepak Gopinath, Prakash Arumugam, Vinoo S., N. Anantakrishhnan, Viresh Ratnakar and Max Jackson. Our Hearty congratulations to all of you and commiserations to those who tried but just missed.
Grid Rating: The puzzle got a superb score of 8.3. It got 5 perfect 10s. The minimum score was 6.
Top 3 Clues: The most popular clues were “WAGON”, “HOLLYWOOD” and “ABACUS” with 7 votes each.
Comments from solvers:
1. Nice light puzzle
2. Very nice!
3. Nice puzzle, well thought out clues and theme. Some issues with syntax and punctuation in the clues, else my rating would be higher, but these are matters easily fixed. Nice debut
4. Really enjoyed solving
5. Very interesting
6. Generally very good – pity that ‘Mighty’ didn’t make it having got ‘Aphrodite’ in, or the rather unsightly connected blocks, but otherwise much to like here.
7. Loved this one!!
8. High quality clues and elegantly executed theme
9. Very nice puzzle
10. Good and subtle theme words from the work of Woody Allen
11. GOOD
12. Very enjoyable grid
13. Very clean and crisp cluing.
14. DELIGHTFUL PUZZLE WITH THE THEME PLAYING BEAUTIFULLY/ GREAT DEBUT/
15. Enjoyed the grid, super short and clean surfaces with great wordplay
16. Good one
17. Good
18. Enjoyable grid with a good theme
19. Nice
20. NICE THEMED PUZZLE
21. Perhaps an earlier draft also had MIGHTY as a solution word but that grid-fill did not work out?
22. Some nice clues; some otherwise.
23. Very nice puzzle. Looking forward to more from Sideswipe.
24. Excellent
25. Lovely
Three of the solvers did not comment. Hope you all enjoyed this entertaining puzzle from Sideswipe. Thanks for taking time to solve and also give some valuable feedback. Did you like the puzzle? Please leave your comments in the blog.
Enjoyed it very much! This blog is turning me into much more of a regular solver than I was, thank you 🙂
I loved the mislead with “Saw nothing…” [for ‘Cliche’]; the use of “Mr Brown” for ‘man’ and ‘tan’ [in ‘Manhattan’]; the news headline quality of “ABN-AMRO mess” [for ‘Abnormal’]; and, of course, “…without AC this summer” [for ‘Abacus’] was divine!