Fifteensquared

Never knowingly undersolved.

Archive for November 20th, 2007

Independent 6582/Virgilius - All Square-d!

Posted by neildubya on 20th November 2007

neildubya.

A couple of weeks ago I had an email from someone - let’s call him E - advising me to make sure I was blogging today’s puzzle. “How intriguing”, I thought at the time, and now I see why: it’s a puzzle all about things being SQUARED, including FIFTEEN. A lovely touch, and a great puzzle, so thanks to Virgilius for thinking of us. I usually throw puzzles away when I’ve solved them, but I’ll definitely be keeping this one.

Across
1 FIFTEEN - the 14 of NINE x NINE + TWELVE x TWELVE = 225.
5 RE in SQUAD - when you run a crossword blog with SQUARED in the title, and you see the same word in a crossword, you might start to wonder what’s going on. Actually, as soon as I saw this I thought “I wonder if one across is FIFTEEN”.
9 GAME,M in ANON
11/16 TWENTY-FIVE - the 14 of TWENTY x TWENTY + FIFTEEN x FIFTEEN = 625.
14 SQUARE ROOT - sounds like “route”. “Get a score of 400″ does the deceiving here as a score is 20, which is the SQUARE ROOT of 400.
16 FIVE - the 14 of FOUR x FOUR + THREE x THREE = 25. This answer is part of 11/16 of course, so I’m not sure why it has its own clue; perhaps to help people with the maths?
20 (GRAPH SAY)* - in a maths-themed puzzle, it seems appropriate to have a reference to PYTHAGORAS. Even more so, given that the Pythagorean theorem is all about squares: “the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides”
22 THIRTEEN - the 14 of TWELVE x TWELVE + FIVE x FIVE = 169.
23 TWELVE - the 14 of TWENTY x TWENTY - (FOUR x FOUR) x FOUR = 144. Probably the trickiest maths clue to parse as it required squaring a number twice and deducting rather than adding. [Edit: as Hihoba points out in the comments I wrote out the sum incorrectly here. It should be TWENTY x TWENTY - (FOUR x FOUR) x (FOUR x FOUR) or 400-256=144)
 
Down
1 (SUIT[-e])* in FLATS - FLAUTISTS. Excellent clue.
2 FLARE - I liked this too as it required separating the phrase “red light”.
4 NINE - THREE x THREE or FIVE + FOUR.
5 COD (going up) in (CHENEYS)* - SYNECDOCHE. Probably the toughest word of the puzzle, so it was lucky I knew it.
7 (TERRIFIC E)* - RECTIFIER. This was a guess, although not a hard one with R?C?I?I?R and the remaining anagram fodder.
13 TROY-WEIGHT - Paris was the King of TROY. I’d never heard of the phrase before but the clue made it easy enough to get, once you got past the deceiving “City of Paris”.
15 UN,(DEALING)*
17 E,AS,TENDER
18 EG,(WEIGHT)* - EGG WHITE.
22 THREE - I liked this: “oddly depleted militia”. Take the odd letters from “militia” to leave “iii” - “Number seen, in Rome”.
24 LOIRE - not completely sure I understand what’s going on here. The full clue is “Tours in France could be threatened by this rising”. Perhaps something to do with “tour” being French for “tower”, which would be threatened if a river rose?
25 FOUR - not positive about this either. “By itself, it’s a vehicle for crew”. A FOUR is a crew in a rowing boat; is the rest  of the clue something to do with 4 by 4 cars?

Posted in Independent | 9 Comments »

Guardian 24239/Gordius - tough but fair?

Posted by linxit on 20th November 2007

linxit.

I see that a lot of you took advantage of the chance to comment on this beforehand, so I’m glad I left the placeholder message this morning. As it turned out, I was able to finish it inside the 15 minutes I was able to snatch at lunchtime, and now have half an hour to spare to post it before facing the M40 tonight.

Quite a few ‘difficult’ words combined with some groan-inducing wordplay, but nothing really unfair unless you’re strictly Ximenean.

Across
5 I,BERIA - the Soviet cop is Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, responsible for the death of tens of thousands during Stalin’s rule.
6 ALL,ICE - another name for the European shad. I just knew it was a fish.
9 (c)YCLE,PT - I already had the C and the T when I first looked at this clue, so the answer came to me quickly. I didn’t know it meant “called” before but I knew it was a word.
10 EARL(GRE=erg rev)Y - “About to” seems to be superfluous here, unless I’m missing something. [ Which I worked out eventually - see comment 16 below. ]
12 MA(SON)RY,BIT - great wordplay here, pregnant woman = SON inside MARY.
13 BROKEN HEART - reverse cryptic, OK being the heart (i.e. middle) of “broken”.
18 BRA(INST,OR)M - INST = “this month”, BRAM is Stoker’s christian name.
23 GLINKA (alking*) - Mikhail Glinka, the Russian composer.
25 L(IN)EAR - I suppose the play’s well-known enough to be referred to by only half its name.

Down
1 B(E.G.)ETTER
3 CLARE,N(unnery),CE - CLARE is a poor girl because the Poor Clares are an order of nuns. Duke of Clarence is an extinct title first created in 1362.
5 IN,CO,ME - “infirm” = IN,CO. Many would disapprove, but you get used to it…
7 E, LEG IT - never heard of the word, but LEG IT for “run” has been used a lot lately, and I had both crossing E’s which gave me enough confirmation to be fairly confident.
8 NESSUN DORMA - apparently a homophone for “Nissan Dormer” - i.e. Dormobile, made by Bedford in the 1960’s. Quite possibly the worst homophone clue I’ve ever seen, but maybe the idea is that tributes don’t always sound like the real thing!
14 KE(STEVE)N - mayor for KEN (Livingstone) is quite common lately. I’d heard of the town, now I know what county it’s in!
16 DRY,ADS
20 ME,GRIM - is a severe headache.

Posted in Guardian | 26 Comments »