Never knowingly undersolved
Hieroglyph is not seen very often in the Independent. A quick scan of the clues showed very quickly that there was a theme in the across clues given that each … Read more >>
As usual of course. When is Dac ever anything but as usual? Such simply-constructed clues, nothing remotely tortuous.
Definitions underlined.
Thanks to Scorpion for an an enjoyable solve today! When we saw that it was Scorpion we were on the lookout for a theme but we still missed it until we guessed … Read more >>
I usually recommend the Monday Indy to anyone who’s getting into the Dark Arts, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this one. If I hadn’t been blogging this, I might have given up and … Read more >>
Plenty to wrestle with this week, and whilst I haven’t counted, there seem to be a relatively high number of clues squeezed in. This took me two or three sittings, with 6 down … Read more >>
A bit of a last minute rush with this, and apologies for maybe not doing it justice. I did the parsing below earlier in the week, but am now in the depths of Swaledale in … Read more >>
Phi continues to tease on Fridays Only 25 clues in the puzzle today which is at the low end of numbers of clues in a national daily. Of course, many of … Read more >>
This is getting silly. Monk is a mathematician and so is no doubt well aware of the probabilities, but his last four Independent crosswords have all been blogged by me. How likely was that? He’s probably getting rather tired of this, but I’m not, for his crosswords are always good. Tough, though, especially this one, where I had to admit defeat on one clue.
The letters around the outside suggest a Nina of some sort, but I can find nothing except the word ‘orgy’ on the right, which is perhaps a coincidence. But I did find ‘Placebo’ in the second row of unches, then further down ‘Brian Molko’. I imagined that Monk had a friend called Brian Molko who was involved in medical research, but a little Googling quickly revealed my disgraceful ignorance. Evidently they are a group and BM is their lead vocalist and guitarist. No doubt their songs are placed around the answers, but I leave that to you since I can’t find any album names or singles there.
Definitions underlined (except for one of them (5dn, which is fortunately obvious) which I forgot when doing the blog and can’t now recover).
We found this a bit tougher than your average Dac, but no less enjoyable – all the usual excellent surfaces were there, but for some reason we had difficulty getting round the misdirections. … Read more >>
It’s Tuesday today, with its typical pot pourri of compilers, and today it falls for me to do battle with Hob. I found solving and blogging this puzzle involved quite a lot of … Read more >>
Still not back to normal for Quixote, but a rare Indy weekday appearance from Commoner.
Hypnos must be getting fed up with me blogging his IoS puzzles, since this is the third in a row that has come up on my shift. Generally I enjoyed it, and this … Read more >>
We enjoyed this challenging puzzle from Tyrus – some very good clues and plenty of crafty misdirection. Was Tyrus anticipating the outcome in Brazil when he wrote the clue for 15ac? 4/25! Let’s … Read more >>
Phi’s usual sound and pleasant crossword. I found this slightly harder than usual for him, which explains the rather late posting. Also there were a few parsings which only became clear once I actually wrote up the blog.
All the loose ends round the outside suggest a Nina, but apparently not. No doubt there is something subtle and for me quite undiscoverable.
Definitions underlined. At least so far as I can see.
A Thursday Klingsor! We anticipated a good challenge and we weren’t disappointed. As expected, some excellent surfaces and well constructed clues – we particularly liked 16d, 23ac and 13ac (our LOI). We’ve looked … Read more >>