Apologies for the late-ish blog.  I was hoping to do this last night before going to bed but the puzzle was not posted on the website at the usual time. Read the rest of this entry »

Was it just me being tired from having stayed up late watching The Wire last night, or was some of this quite hard for a Dac puzzle? The middle of the grid didn’t cause me too much bother, but I spent a fair while trying to fill out the bottom corners. Nevertheless, reliably excellent clueing from Dac.

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dd = double definition
cd = cryptic definition
rev = reversed or reversal
ins = insertion
cha = charade
ha = hidden answer
*(fodder) = anagram

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*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, CD=cryptic def
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A rare Monday outing for Araucaria, and a puzzle that was mostly fairly easy, though with a couple of shaky definitions and some dubious wordplay. The grid is a bit strange, being almost cut in two horizontally, with only the two long Downs breaking it up. Read the rest of this entry »

I enjoyed this and didn’t find it as hard as last time. How hard anyone finds a puzzle must vary not just from puzzle to puzzle and person to person but also depends upon other factors such as your comfort, worries, tiredness, how many pints you are to the good, how many pints you haven’t had, and so on. Last time I did have a struggle, for whatever reason, but looking back at that puzzle now I can understand some of the comments suggesting it was easier than I described. Looking at this one, I’m unsure whether to describe it as easy. It was certainly enjoyable and there are some suitably rude and funny surface readings helped by another clutch of inventive anagram indicators. And I did finish it in one sitting. This time there were no nasty tail-enders hanging on with no score, sometimes overnight, till eventually stumped.
This was under quite idyllic solving conditions – quietly in the garden with the blossom out on an afternoon of a beautiful spring day after with a well earned pint (and another bottle to hand) after giving a couple of hours to turning over the vegetable patch.
This may not be everyone’s experience, and I can well believe there are a couple of clues here that would normally have resisted my attentions longer.

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The scheduled blogger is unavailable, so I’m acting as sub with this rather brief effort. The “Eightsome Reels” idea was invented by Azed and pops up from time to time. Peter has again given some excellent advice in a previous post, this time specifically on how to fit the words into the grid. Of course, you first have to solve some adjacent clues, and my first success came in the 8/9/14/15 block. Once you get a few answers in the puzzle becomes distinctly easier, with the generous checking. However, it’s noticeable that the answers tend to use the more common letters – I did a little analysis and found the ten letters EILASNTMRO provide over 80% of the 288 letters of the answers, and H, J, K. X and Z aren’t used at all. This tends to make solving the clues harder as there are fewer unusual patterns to catch on to.

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Solving time: 11:08

A rare Saturday outing for Gordius, which I think was of about the same level of difficulty as his occasional weekday puzzles. Some clever stuff here with a good sprinkling of Araucarian looseness. I struggled the most on 20ac (FLAPPED), 17dn (CAPRICCIO) and finally 16ac (SPLICER).

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Quite an easy puzzle from Phi, I thought, getting quite a bit from definitions, verifying wordplay later.    Solving time, 15 mins.

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A fitting theme for a puzzle that appeared the day before 4. A couple of clues make reference to “ladies of tomorrow”, or “ladies celebrated on Sunday”, and there are a number of MUMs, MAs and MAMs scattered through the grid. Finally, the unchecked letters in the first and last columns of the grid spell out PATRICIA MARGARET. If I was to guess, I’d say that may be the name of Math’s Mum. Bless.

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I found this puzzle tough to start with but it got better when then the anagrams fell into place. 9A and 21A were my favourites, also enjoyed the reversals at 28A and 31A.

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*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, cd=cryptic definition, dd=double definition.

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Mostly quite a straightforward puzzle today, with some extremely easy clues, though there are a few obscurities that could cause hold-ups. I also seem to have found quite a few nits to pick about some of the clueing. Read the rest of this entry »

A very enjoyable journey from Salamander I was well chuffed with it! The theme turned out to the the SETTLE-CARLISLE LINE, a beautiful and dramatic railway line linking the two towns and travelling along the edge of the Yorkshire Dales passing some of the National Park’s most glorious scenery.

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I think Ploy must have a fetish for anagrams, or at least that’s the way it seemed to me when I was solving this puzzle. However, having said that, there were some pleasing surfaces, my favourite being 28d. An easy EV which took over twice as long to blog as it did to solve.

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A well-balanced smattering of general knowledge categories (and at the Trivial Pursuit, rather than Mastermind, level). A couple of Oxbridge college names cropped up early on while solving, which lured me briefly into a wild goose chase for a non-existent theme.

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I found this pretty tough going, though Thursdays are generally the hardest weekday. I made a flying start with some of the across clues, but then slowed up, mainly because I thought that 25A was SNAILED and therefore talked myself out of 7D being an anagram! Nevertheless, some very nice clues here and I enjoyed the challenge.

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Quite easy for a thursday I thought, but I was left with a couple of quibbles and uncertainties. These were balanced by the highly enjoyable 9ac, 11ac and 25ac.

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Some excellent misdirection in the definition parts in this puzzle. Solving time, 22 mins.

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Monday Prize Crossword on 16 March 2009
dd = double definition
cd = cryptic definition
rev = reversed or reversal
ins = insertion
cha = charade
ha = hidden answer
*(fodder) = anagram

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Prize puzzle from the Weekend FT of March 14
Cincinnus gives us some particularly splendid double definitions this week (20D, 24D) and a generally excellent puzzle as usual.

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A belligerent puzzle from Cinephile today or, perhaps, not so much a puzzle as a lesson in military history. This post is a little later than usual because I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to resolve 31a and 7d. The puzzle itself was somewhat of a ‘battle’ in places, particularly the more obscure thematic entries, but overall quite enjoyable.

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Everything typically elegant and natural today.

Across
1	FEAT HERB RAINED — One of the signs of a good charade clue is that the long word is split into components that are not themselves suggested by the word. At first I wasn’t sure about ‘on’ and it looked like one of those rather cumbersome link-words that is there only for the wordplay, but in fact I think it’s just ‘rained’ = ‘poured water on’ — just
8	DR OP I N
9	ARMY ANTS — (many rats)*
10	FA(L LSO)FF
11	IN CANS
12	REP ENT{r}ANCE — this film‘s English title
14	B ASH
16	laST YEar
17	CO(L LATER)AL
19	FA(THE)R
21	CHARTIST — refers to Da Vinci’s Mappamundi
23	WIND DOWN — 2 defs
24	A STRID{e}
25	THE WEAKEST LINK — (he{c}k Kate Winslet)*, ‘being’ a noun
Down
1	FIRM A (MEN) T
2	APPAL — “a Paul”
3	HANG-OUT — 2 defs I think — seems a bit loose and perhaps I’m missing something
4	ROAD-FUND LICENCE — (red could finance)*
5	R O MAINE
6	IRASCIBLE — (Blair sic {on}e)*
7	ELTON — L in (note)rev, ref Ben Elton and Elton John
13	EYE SHADOW — “I” S(HAD)OW
15	SLAPSTICK — (pals)rev stick
17	CORDOBA — (cab door)*
18	ADAM ANT
20	chAP IS Handling
22	T{a}U{n}T{s} TI{me}

A fun puzzle from Brendan with a theme of name changes. I’m afraid I’m not likely to be able to update this post with any corrections until much later today.

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*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, cd=cryptic definition, dd=double definition.

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