Alan Connor finds that all is not as it seems in his pick of the week's best – and most foolish – cryptic clues
The news in clues
When I started out solving crosswords, I would sometimes look away from the puzzle and inspect the words in the answers to a previous puzzle printed elsewhere on the page to see whether the newspaper in question tended to demand pieces of vocabulary that were beyond me.
The more experienced setter, of course, ignores the answer grid, as a recent puzzle is of no help with the one you're supposed to be solving. Except, that is, in yesterday's Times, where the answer grid contained all the words you were looking for in yesterday's puzzle.
If you were tempted to huff and puff about declining standards and the crossword world going to heck in a handbasket, it's worth noting that the answer grid did contain, as it claimed, the solution to a recent Saturday prize puzzle in the Times– yesterday's happened to have the same entries with completely different clues.
Coincidence? More likely an elaborate and subtle April fool. Bravo. If you're a dedicated solver, it also provided a test of whether puzzles stay in your mind or quietly evaporate as you move on to the next one.
Also a print-only fool was yesterday's Independent from Quixote, where the answers to the across clues numbered one and four had been swapped with those for 26 and 27, the latter being:
27ac WCFields originallytaken the wrong way as twit misplaced (4)
26ac ExceptionallypeculiarEnglishcopperdoing a bunknow not here (5)
Once you'd twigged what the non-wordplay, non-definition bits of those were doing, you knew where to put APRIL and FOOL.
It's reassuring to see the crossword finding fresh ways of fooling, even as it approaches its centenary; 13 years in and already the Google April fools have a tired, routine feel about them. Corporate tomfoolery is always a little iffy, but there's something about Google's that especially fails to convince: like a Dalek claiming to have done a fart, you don't so much giggle as shudder and wonder what they're really up to.
Blue clues
I was surprised to see, in Wednesday's Times...
18d Who might be held up asacedrinker? (7)
... a clue for TOSSPOT, since I'd always taken the word to be fairly obscene. But Oxford tells me otherwise, giving the definition as...
One accustomed to toss off his pot of drink; a heavy drinker; a toper, drunkard
... citing the character Tom Tospot from the 1568 play Like Will To Like by Renaissance man Ulpian Fulwell, and the newer sense of "a contemptible person" only in the 2008 draft additions. Kudos to the setter for spotting that you can't spell TOSSPOT without SOT, or at least not backwards.
For me, it was the reverse of the experience of wondering why, in 2006, the New York Times received complaints - including some from the paper's staff - for including in a puzzle the word SCUMBAG, clued as "scoundrel". In fact, the original sense of the word is not far from how I tended to interpret TOSSPOT: it's a condom. Which brings us to this week's challenge: reader, how would you clue SCUMBAG?
Cluing competition
Thanks for your clues for MACARONIC, especially those with little snippets of non-English wordplay. Of the durum-wheat-based clues, my favourite was LeSange's "Pasta and cold salad sometimes served by polyglots".
It was impossible not to overlook the questionable taste of yungylek's "Speaking in tongues following coma in car accident" and HipsterPriest's "Disturbed necromaniac loses head for moribund paramour?", given the cluing. And three cheers for Middlebro's audacity in remixing the elusive PG Wodehouse clue we've been trying to crack to make "No see here, it's related to a church with a chapter, pointlessly housing vehicle for multilingual expression".
The runners-up are the wonderfully misleading surfaces of Shenguin's "Air con and cam break leaving speaker straddling countries" and mojoseeker's "Acorn and iMac compile code in multiple languages"; the winner could only be steveran's majestic "Rocky Marciano beginning to croon That's Amore perhaps".
Kudos to steveran – please leave this week's entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.
Clue of the Week
Given Paul's recent happy family announcement, there was an extra vividness to his clue in Thursday's Guardian...
22ac Kitchen implementkeepingoneonseat, baby calmer? (5,5)
...for the colic combatant GRIPE WATER. Let's hope the dill dispels the ills.