Stats – We had 36 solvers completing and submitting the grid. Of those who submitted 14 managed to get the maximum possible score of 165.
Click Here for the Puzzle Post
The Grid title “Fix Hot Messes” was in fact a charade – which translates to RIG H TANGLES or RIGHT ANGLES. After solvers had completed the grid, they had to solve for this and also identify the apprropriate locations in the grid. The word ANGLE literally turns right in 4 locations in the grid, These were the intersection between (a) 4d and 9 ac (b)6d and 12 ac (c)18d and 17 ac (d)23d ans 26 ac.
Here is the solution grid:
Annotations:
| Across | Answer | Explanation |
| 1 Hot searing oil to melt things normally found on a plane (15) | orthogonalities | HOTSEARINGOILTO* |
| 8 Can come back, however (3) | tub | BUT< |
| 9 Jumping fish carry it back (7) | atingle | A(TI<)NGLE |
| 10 Atmosphere in central Cairo (3) | air | Hidden |
| 11 Stretched round back of the head (7) | cranial | LAIN ARC<< |
| 12 Musk, say gets good elevation in Africa (5) | elgon | EL(G)ON |
| 13 Hearing of rank character in Athens (3) | rho | HP Row |
| 14 Nuclear physicist sets fire – no crime (6,5) | Enrico Fermi | FIRENOCRIME* |
| 17 Charitable small publication meets in agreement to remove union (11) | magnanimous | MAG+(-U)NANIMOUS |
| 21 Runner, perhaps is returning with weak back (3) | ski | S(K)I< |
| 22 Surprise ending in pleasant relation (5) | niece | NI(e)CE |
| 24 French girl wearing sticker showing Broderick character from the ’80s (7) | Bueller | BU(ELLE)R |
| 25 Pin down central theme (3) | hem | Hidden |
| 26 Moaned and cursed about fumble being returned (7) | gnarred | GNA(RRE<)D<< |
| 27 Start to protest! We object to the discharge (3) | pus | P US |
| 28 How to cut corners the right way? (15) | perpendicularly. | CD. |
| Down | Answer | Explanation |
| 1 So, “purist manhood” movement gives an affinity for the wilderness (15) | outdoorsmanship | SOPURISTMANHOOD |
| 2 Leaves to taxi back to company (7) | tobacco | TO BAC< CO |
| 3 Musical with one actor (7) | olivier | OLIV(I)ER |
| 4 Change license components? Splendid (7) | angelic | LICENSE* |
| 5 Her generic attributes return (5) | irene | REV HIDDEN |
| 6 Rage-induced and sillier with middle age (2,5) | in anger | INAN(G)ER |
| 7 Endlessly calm, swim with it off, and in the end, you will be playful, with any luck (15) | serendipitously | SEREN(-e) DIP IT* OU SLY |
| 9 Wanting to be in commercial with a California locale (7) | alameda | A(LAME)DA |
| 15 Misconstructed belief system? (3) | ism | ISM* |
| 16 Fought when brought together with time left (7) | fustled | FUS(T) LED |
| 18 Fortnite player, say, has the French makeup (7) | gleamer | G(LE)AMER |
| 19 Built-in propeller in a terrible bind (7) | inboard | INB(OAR)D* |
| 20 Alone, I richen part of my imagination (7) | oneiric | Hidden |
| 21 Entertainer quietly leaves to fish (7) | striper | STRIP(-P)ER |
| 23 Chelsea Glenn holds an American icon (5) | eagle | Hidden. |
Results:
| Fix Hot Messes – Scorecard | |||
| S.No. | Name | Score | |
| 1 | Anantakrishnan N. | 165 | |
| 2 | Anicha Reuban | 165 | |
| 3 | Arvind Kannabiran | 165 | |
| 4 | Dean | 165 | |
| 5 | Himanshu Rajurkar | 165 | |
| 6 | Keith Williams | 165 | |
| 7 | Lakshmi Prakash | 165 | |
| 8 | Madhup Tewari | 165 | |
| 9 | Madhusudan Hanumantha Rao | 165 | |
| 10 | Mona Sogal | 165 | |
| 11 | Narayanan R | 165 | |
| 12 | Prakash Arumugam | 165 | |
| 13 | Raghavan S V | 165 | |
| 14 | Venkatraghavan S. | 165 | |
| 15 | Anirudh Sahni | 164 | |
| 16 | Priya Shyam | 163 | |
| 17 | Tejas Siddharth | 163 | |
| 18 | Vasant Srinivasan | 162 | |
| 19 | Viveca Bhatkal | 162 | |
| 20 | Ashit Hegde | 161 | |
| 21 | Kumaresh K R | 161 | |
| 22 | Max Jackson | 161 | |
| 23 | Ramki Krishnan | 161 | |
| 24 | Venkatesan P. | 160 | |
| 25 | Bhalchandra Pasupathy | 159 | |
| 26 | Dr S Venkatesh | 159 | |
| 27 | Ganesh Nayak | 159 | |
| 28 | Krittibas Dasgupta | 159 | |
| 29 | Nagendra Prasad R. | 159 | |
| 30 | Nick Loader | 159 | |
| 31 | Rengaswamy N. | 159 | |
| 32 | Sree Sree | 159 | |
| 33 | Nilesh Parmar | 157 | |
| 34 | Prasad RV | 157 | |
| 35 | Meera | 156 | |
| 36 | Ranjani Srikanth | 155 | |
Congrats to the 14 solvers who maxed the score and to every one who participated. Very well tried.
Grid Rating: The puzzle got a good score of 8.49. It got 17 perfect 10s – i.e 27% of those who submitted thought it was perfect. The minimum score was 6.
Top 3 Clues: The most favorited clues were those for “Enrico Fermi” (10 votes), Magnanimous (10 votes) and Perpendicularly (9 votes). 26 clues in the grid got atleast 1 vote each.
Thanks for the interesting challenge Mathrix. Certainly it had Math and tricks too, Looking forward to more grids from you that nicely fall in the iintersection of math and cryptics.
Comments on the Puzzle
1. The idea is sound enough but the triple unching in the perimeter, the slightly strange choice of non-thematic grid entries and some of the general clueing did not make this a favourite I’m afraid.
2. A standard puzzle fairly well put together. Can’t figure out the connections between the grid title, thematic entries and rest of the grid, so just taking a shot in the dark and will await solution
3. Great grid. Was challenging but satisfying to solve.
4. Easy grid but difficult bonus questions
5. Nice and challenging
6. VERY FINE PUZZLE. TOOK SOME TIME CRACKING THE BONUS QUESTION.
7. Well crafted grid. Had to google for some of the answers. Very interesting to solve
8. Just the right difficulty level. I needed to sleep on this one…twice, before unlocking the puzzle title. It took me longer than it should have given the HUGE lights of 1A and 28A. Once I had that, I had to really open my mind to find the 4 instances of the puzzle title. Very satisfying. Well played
9. Particularly liked some of the definitons (totally kosher) which led me astray for sometime. Found the bonus questions vague. But that’s me.
10. interesting
11. good fun..
12. Interesting puzzle. Bonus took very much longer than the puzzle itself 😛
13. Very nice grid, construction and clues
14. Satisfying to crack bonus questions as they seem to be difficult
15. Nice idea but the puzzle heading could have been clearer. Nevertheless enjoyed the moment when I spotted the 4 words.
16. 15 letter words made it easy
17. Excellent clues.
18. Solving the title was the hardest part
19. nicely hidden bonus questions
20. Difficult one
21. Very clever! Nice puzzle.
22. Lovely grid, got stuck in few places
23. fun puzzle
24. Excellent Puzzle. Wish the grid design was better as there were 3 consecutive unches for a few clues.
25. Was a good puzzle but I found some of the definitions a bit obscure
26. Found bonus questions part difficult. Otherwise a nice grid.
27. Spent far more time on the bonus questions than on the actual grid, which sort of takes away the satisfaction of solving some really good clues 🙁
28. No comments
29. The title is a guess, but I could only find two relevant instances, apart from the black square combinations.
30. Really nice! Found some of the clues kinda difficult, but were solvable. The bonus questions baffled me for a long time, especially the second one. I first saw the 6 blocks of dark squares which form a right angle but the question asked for 4. I even thought of just saying “the four corners of the grid” but after a lot of staring at the grid and looking for ninas it finally struck me. A really creative math-oriented puzzle.
31. Great clues overall, but stuck on 2 of them
32. will wait for anno but some things that seem dodgy: ‘to fish’, ‘cursed’ to mean ‘dang’, ‘sticker’ to mean ‘bur’, 7d is too long, ‘to the discharge’, ‘come back’ before the word being reversed, surfaces mostly fine except 4 and 7 down. really like 1a and 28a too actually. Lots of things I liked … will post about them later haha.”
33. Loved the math theme. Some unusual words, which were a welcome challenge. Some stretchy defs/synonyms (atingle=jumping, lain=stretched, gnarred=moaned, 7d O=off?). Finding the answers to the bonus questions was a delightful surprise!”
34. Very nice puzzle, struggled with the bonus questions
35. good fun
36. Pleasant solve, liked the 3-word clues! Unable to crack the theme.
Note: Post edited on 5th April to correct an inadvertent error in the leaderboard.