Azed 1870
Posted by petebiddlecombe on 10th April 2008
Solving time 27 mins without books, then about 20 mins with Chambers to clear up the resulting mess.
Doing Azed without books is an interesting challenge but sometimes you invent a word that doesn’t exist and get yourself in a real mess. This happened at 1A where I put the cute-sounding HUGBED - GB in HUED, rather than the correct PIGBED. This messed up the H in plume * at 1D where I had HELPUM (help me!), and 11A where I put in EFLORAGIA in ‘hit and hope’ mode. I’d also made two careless slips - TORSET for TORSES at 10D, which messed up 19A, and leaving a blank square in 29A.
This is a stand-in blog for linxit who’s busy with real life, so I’ll just write about the clues I found hardest or which included new material for me - in the wordplay in particular, as working out new answer words like URETHROSCOPE is pretty routine. Ask if something else caused you trouble.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | PI(GB)ED as in pig-iron - I’m sure I thought of pig-iron briefly, though before I thought of inserting GB. Oh well… |
| 11 | HALO(RAGI)S - it’s some plant genus. ragi/raggy/ragee/raggee for millet is worth remembering |
| 13 | ONAGER = orange* - a perrier (stoner, he just realises from his own name!) is a medieval gizmo for flinging stones. So is an onager. |
| 19 | RUNS - this one is still a bit hit and hope - I checked the other R?NS possibities that I could think of and found nothing. I haven’t found all the necessary meanings for ‘runs’. |
| 20 | STYE - tyes are troughs for washing minerals |
| 22 | P(RIM)ED - a ped is a pannier/hamper |
| 29 | S.I.,LANE - “system that includes mole” is very good for SI |
| Down | |
| 1 | PHLEUM - H in plume* |
| 4 | ERYTHROPENIA - I knew that the blood-doper’s drug EPO = erythropoietin, so had the ERYTH end straight away as a very likely shared word-chunk. |
| 6 | A,GO,ROT - pl. of agora = 1/100th of a shekel |
| 9 | SWEEPNETS - “ten p” rev. in swees which I assume must be swings. Much time wasted trying to fit in POI = “10 p” rev. |
| 10 | TORSES - hidden word - file under heraldry … |
| 17 | C(age),RICE,T.I.D. - t.i.d. = ter in die = three times daily, on prescriptions. I knew CRICET- would be at the start, from a daft nickname for a business acquaintance years ago - a toothy and bearded gent from Argentina who got called “cricetus argentinus” = “silver hamster” - I’d thought this was a real biological name, but apparently not on Googling. The things that help with xwds … |
| 21 | (e)PICENE - epicene = common to both sexes |
| 27 | BLUR(bed) - I didn’t know about the verb ‘to blurb’ - a bit of poetry to end with. |
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