#john halpern

[icphoto]

This summer, we’re offering FREE exhibition tours at the #ICPMuseum on Fridays at 2 PM. Join us for an in-depth look at #MagnumManifesto. The tour is included with museum admission. http://bit.ly/2tVsimB 📷 John Halpern

[tedxalbertopolis]

Crossword Setting with John Halpern

Why did the chicken god cross the Exhibition Road? If you picked up London’s Metro newspaper last Wednesday you may have a clue - or 30 of them.

For 20 years TEDxAlbertopolis speaker John Halpern has set cryptic crosswords for UK newspapers under various aliases. Maybe you know him as ‘Paul’ in the Guardian, ‘Dada’ in the Daily Telegraph, ‘Mudd’ in the Financial Times, or ‘Punk’  in the Independent. In the Times he sets anonymously and in Viz, well, we’ll leave that one as an exercise for the reader. It’s a fun but lonely job, he says.  But this year crosswords turn 100 and John’s hitting the road in celebration.

In our build-up to the 23 September event, the Royal Albert Hall hosted a crossword setting evening. With John’s generous encouragement, the TEDxAlbertopolis committee joined forces with representatives from the Royal Albert Hall itself, the Royal Geographical Society, the Natural History Museum, and the V&A to distil the essence of Albertopolis into a 15-by-15-letter grid. Hence “A chicken god! (6).” No? Have a go. The crossword is below! (Or click here for the .jpg of the grid)

  The Metro published the result a few days later alongside an interview with John, in which he makes a compelling case for the power of puzzles: “I want to get crosswords on the school curriculum. Lots of teaching is about success and failure. Playing puzzles is a great way of saying failure is okay actually, failure is just the next step on the way to success.”

Here's what John had to say on the night itself: 

TEDxAlbertopolis crossword evening with John Halpern from TEDxAlbertopolis on Vimeo.

Word play and puzzles perfectly embody our human love of mixing up logical rationality with free-form creativity. In September John will be speaking about the power of words and what words can do to bring communities together - a truly Albertopolan ideal.

By Douglas Heaven

@strwbilly is the Storyteller for TEDxAlbertopolis and a reporter for New Scientist.

Images: Natascha Mehrabi

Video: James Mossahebi

Clues

Across

1 Science and Natural History, for example (7)

5 Harmonious connection (7)

10 Faint streak (of smoke?) (4)

11 Resident dinosaur in one of the 1 acrosses (10)

12 A one-liner? (8) [Cryptic]

13 Sheltered (in prison?) (6)

14 Second Greek letter (4)

16 Church keyboard musician (8)

19 Mickey Rourke grappling role (8)

21 Talks with Tibetan animals? (4) [Cryptic]

23 Haphazardly (6)

25 Naive romantic quality - Bowie's Ziggy? (8)

27 Parseltongue pond in Hyde Park? (10) [Cryptic]

28 __ and flows, moves like the tide (4)

29 Composer in this country, did you say? (7) [Cryptic]

30 Some art moving for 7 down conductor (7) [Cryptic]

Down

2 Only boy child, in harmony (6) [Cryptic]

3 Shackleton and Livingstone, for instance (9)

4 Newspapers, TV etc (5)

6 Yo darling (anag) - how V & A shared their affections? (9)

7 Last Night of the ___ (5)

8 Shaped a bit like the Royal Albert Hall? (8)

9 A chicken god! (6) [Cryptic]

15 Pocket money (9)

17 Nudity (9)

18 Impressive or awesome quality (8)

20 John __, art critic (1819-1900) - ski-run (anag) (6)

22 Weather map line connecting points of equal pressure (6)

24 Get lost! (3,2)

26 Near a ruined auditorium (5) [Cryptic]

[tedxalbertopolis]

Two new speakers announced!

The TEDxAlbertopolis team is excited to announce our next two speakers. Nicholas McCarthy (pictured) and John Halpern join David Braben and Sally Davies adding inspirational piano-playing and cryptic wordplay to the mix. 

Nicholas McCarthy is a concert pianist and the only one-handed pianist to graduate from the Royal College of Music. Born without his right hand, at 14 he started to play the piano. Three years later he won a place at the Junior Department of the Guildhall School of Music. Now, 10 years after he started playing, he is the youngest one-handed concert pianist in the world.

McCarthy has performed in major venues throughout the world. Last year he played with the British Paraorchestra alongside Coldplay at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Paralympic games to an audience of 86,000 people and half a billion worldwide viewers. He was recently awarded the prestigious international AMI Award for his creative excellence in music. 

John Halpern -- or “Paul” to many -- is a cryptic crossword setter for The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph. 

2013 is the Crossword Centenary year and Halpern is its public face. An author and public speaker, he is currently touring the country facilitating crossword-based events, and creating community based crosswords with those who share a love of words and wordplay.

John believes words have a largely undiscovered magic. “We have tapped the resources of the earth and of the oceans,” he says. “But as yet, we have not fully harnessed the power of words.”


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