Fifteensquared

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Archive for December 20th, 2006

Independent 6296/Dac

Posted by neildubya on 20th December 2006

neildubya.

More quality cluemanship from Dac.

Across
6 hidden in “riCE REAlly”.
10 O,I,GIRL<
11 YO,SEMITE - I guess this is a reference to George Bush’s infamous “Yo Blair!” comment.
12 (EACH HIPS)*
13 MEDICK - “medic”. I’d never heard of this plant but with M?D?C? I had a guess.
15 HEN in ACE
23 A in ACHE,N or ACHE in A,N - not sure which. Does “visit” indicate going in something or around something? Answers on a postcard please?
24 SERGEANT - (GETS NEAR)*. A reference to the character in the Hardy novel, “Far from the Madding Crowd”. I’ve read this, but ages ago now so I couldn’t have told you which novel it was from but I had a vague recollection of a Sergeant Troy from somewhere or other.
Down
2 T(wit),OFFISH - nice clue with a good surface reading.
3 (REFER A CAT)*
4 N in (PLACE FOREIGNER)*
5 DIP, “tick”
7 HE in RUM
16 LAUD in CIA - CIA is an abbreviation worth remembering as it often proves very useful to setters.
17 CREDITS - double definition.

Posted in Independent | 1 Comment »

Guardian 23,954/Quantum - CD hits a sour note

Posted by loonapick on 20th December 2006

loonapick.

Solving time - 10 minutes - would have been under 5 if I’d realised what what was going on in the middle “column” of the grid.

I started well with this one - easy clues, straightforward words, an over-reliance on clues where you have to remove parts of words in order to get anagram fodder, but generally OK.  Then I came across a couple of clues that made me 23dn, and when I finally worked out 4d and 19dn, my lasting impression of the crossword was tainted.

 ACROSS

9 - RECTO (Hidden)

11 - PENPUSHER - I assume the scratching refers to the olden days of quills?

12 - KEBAB - Nice wordplay

13 - BRISTOL - I’ve seen “Bristol fashion” come up a lot in recent crosswords, so got this immediately.

18 - SEN - a far eastern small value coin and South, East, North

25 - CURTAIN - C(U-RT)AIN where U = “universal” and “RT” = right, and CAIN is the murderer.

DOWN

3 - NON-U - Nu is a greek letter roughly equivalent to “N”.  Also worth looking out for a host of other Greek characters which pop up regularly - ETA, MU, PI, CHI, PHI etc

4 and 19 - NICHOLAS NICKLEBY - Just not fair! Once you have all of the checked letters, it is fairly obvious, but I just can’t accept “CD” as a definition or indicator for Charles Dickens.  I even checked to see if this was a valid abbreviation for him, but was unable to find anything.

7 - STABLE - “Good man” ALWAYS leads to ST (short for “saint”)

16 TITAN - TITIAN (Venetian artist) with the I (”one”) uplifted i.e.taken away

21 ANACONDA - A(N-AC-ON)DA - “Ada” holds “N A/C on”.  What would setters do without people like Ada, Eve, Hal, Al or Ed?

23 - CRINGE - “ring” in “CE” (Church of England)

26 - RANK - double definition, but both from the same root, which I think many editors would find unacceptable.

28 - IFFY - “sniffy”without its first and second letters.

Posted in Guardian | 7 Comments »