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Archive for September 4th, 2007

Guardian 24,173/Pasquale - Tuesday toughie

Posted by loonapick on 4th September 2007

loonapick.

(Apologies for the late post - solved the puzzle earlier today, and forgot to write the blog!!)

This was a toughie, especially after the usual Rufus romp yesterday.  Some very unusual words and difficult wordplay.   There are a couple of examples below where I can’t quite explain the wordplay.

Took me a good half an hour to solve, possibly more - I wasn’t counting and it was several hours ago. 

ACROSS

1 V(1)-SAGE

9 M-ALLEE - a small eucalyptus tree

10 ANNE-(L)-IDA - segmented worms

11 RECOMBINANT DNA - reverse cryptic - “and” is an anagram of DNA, and recombinant would be the anagrind

13 SP-ILL-I(KIN)S - another name for jackstraws - SP (sine prole) is appearing a lot in crosswords just now

14 S-PIT

16 OR(i)B(i)S - ORIBIS are small African antelopes

18 F-RATERNIS-(desir)E - where RATERNIS = (restrain)*

21 GAVE UP THE GHOST - as in, sacked the ghost writer

23 A-R.R.-ANGER

25 SEA-L-ANTS

26 O-STEAL

DOWN

2 SA(LIE)RI - Antonio Salieri, the “baddie” in the play and movie, “Amadeus”

3 GRENOBLE - not altogether sure of the wordplay, something to do with GREY and NOBLE?

5 NO(<=TEN ANON)TE - NO NO NANETTE is a musical comedy, first produced in 1925, filmed as “Tea for Two” in 1950

6 EXE-’UNT - stage instruction meaning “they exit”

8 GUARAN(i)-TEE - the guarani is the unit of currency in Paraguay

12 BAKER STREET - again haven’t had time to work out the wordplay

13 SHOTG-LASS - SHOTG = (ghost)*

15 ARCH-IVES - Charles Ives (1874-1954), more famous in Crosswordland than in the real world?

17 BA-VARIA(tions)

20 QUANT-A

22 WELL(ie)

Posted in Guardian | 7 Comments »

Independent 6516/Virgilius

Posted by neildubya on 4th September 2007

neildubya.

Something of a rarity for me: a Virgilius puzzle I didn’t enjoy all that much. I got the three thematic clues fairly quickly, probably because they’re not all that cryptic and I knew the quote from Shaw; I did think briefly that the puzzle would make use of US and British words for the same thing (e.g PAVEMENT/SIDEWALK, TAP/FAUCET) but it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t the case, although many of the clues mention variations on 13A and 20A.

Across
12 (W LORE)* - a ROWEL is a small spiked wheel attached to a spur.
13 GREAT BRITAIN - the theme of the puzzle is the quote from George Bernard Shaw that GB and the US are “two nations divided by 18A”. Neatly enough, this is replicated in the grid entries.
24 (EARTH)* - I’d never heard of Bret HARTE but the wordplay was easy enough to get this.
26 (TITANIC SO)* - CITATIONS.
27 ART,MEN in APT
28 TABLE - I didn’t know the US meaning so this was a bit of a guess, although there’s not much else that could fit.
 
Down
1 SLUGS - I filled this in without really getting the “used in strikes” bit but I’ve just realised that to slug someone can mean to hit them.
2 hiddein in “drivING EARlier”
3 (YOU AN ANGST)* - AGONY AUNTS. Very nice &lit clue.
6 N,G in E,LANDER - LANDER is the plural of Land.
10 (RAIN)* in ENG - “getting ready” (as in money) is the deceptive definition here.
16 BUSH in B,K,AS
17 HOP,I - I panicked a bit when confronted with ?O?I but then I saw that HOP=dance. A HOPI is a member of the Pueblo Indian people of Northern Arizona.
19 MAE WEST - something of a crossword staple (some might say cliche). As well being an actress, a Mae West was an inflatable lifejacket worn by WWII pilots. You can probably work out why it was called that but if not, it’s explained here.
23 USHER - a reference to the Poe story, The Fall of the House of Usher.
26 CREE(d)

Posted in Independent | 2 Comments »