Never knowingly undersolved
Because the closing date for entries has been extended by a week, the blog for this puzzle has been rescheduled and will now appear next Sunday (19th Feb).
A fairly hard Azed this time — with more than its fair share of heraldic terms, intricate wordplays and one very nice “follow-on” clue.
The usual Azed. All pretty sound so far as I can see. You really need to have Chambers by your side; it would be an endless task for me to explain everything everywhere.
As always the definitions are underlined and in maroon.
A medium-strength Azed, with a fairly high proportion of unfamilar words, in the wordplay as well as the answers. My solving pattern turned out to be more or less from top left to … Read more >>
No printing errors! At least none that I can see, thank you to whoever has taken up the challenge. I found this pretty hard, especially the top half of the grid. I would be interested to hear how others found it. Thank you Azed for a great puzzle with some very interesting words.
Only one printing error, and the correct rubric, for this month’s competition puzzle.
So playfair puzzles aren’t my favourite cup of tea. Fortunately, my colleague Frank Yellin doesn’t mind them and has a bunch of python code to prove it (we are both Jewish so had plenty of time on our hands this week). So he helped me no end figuring out the actual magic square — which this time had no Q rather than the more usual I/J merging (to produce 25 letters of the alphabet in a 5×5 grid).
It gets worse. It’s very likely no fault of Azed’s, more The Observer being incompetent, but there are lots of mistakes here. There is a general cock-up (which is of no real concern to the solver) which is a repeat in reverse of last week: last week they printed the ‘three prizes’ version of the preamble and said nothing about any asterisked clue or where to send it; this week they printed what they should have printed last week when it isn’t a competition clue-setting week.
But more serious is the large number of little mistakes, so many that in some places one can’t be quite sure what is going on. 26ac is given as 24ac. Is 32ac of five letters or six? 18dn doesn’t have the number 18 in the right place in the grid (it is, meaninglessly, in the square above where it should be). 28dn seems to be of five letters although it is given as (4). There should be a line between the D of PARDAL and the N of AVANTI.
I downloaded the crossword from the website on Sunday morning and one would have hoped that by now things would have been corrected. I looked again just now (late on Sunday) but nothing has been done. I didn’t see the paper copy and wonder if that one contained the same mistakes. My bet is that it does and I base this on the obvious disdain of the staff at The Observer for a crossword that continues a tradition of many years. Time they started to treat its crossword with a bit of respect.
Still, I got there, more or less, and it was the usual enjoyable experience. Is it me or are the words becoming more and more obscure? At least the clues are structurally pretty straightforward.
As is quite common, there are a couple of minor typos in the clues. More seriously, that fact that this is a competition puzzle was not mentioned (at least initially) on the website, … Read more >>
Another enjoyable and educational tour of the forgotten corners of the English language with Azed as the guide.
A plain 12 x 12 grid, this week, with some very generous checking.
A standard plain puzzle from Azed today. I made steady progress through this one with the usual help from Chambers dictionary. As usual I learnt an obscure meaning of an … Read more >>
A fun but hard variant of the typical Azed — we ended up solving as a team (thanks Jutta, Martin, Frank!) — given the title, at first thought that likely theme is Armistice Day (Nov 11) or Guy Fawkes day (Nov 5) — turned out to be the latter — “remember, remember, the fifth of November” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_Night. To be clear, the theme was basically replace male names in answers with female names (“penny for the guy”) as exemplified by 1A.
There are two typos in this crossword: Edinburgh is spelled Edinburg at 11ac, and 34ac is numbered as 24ac. Obvious mistakes of course, not likely to detain anyone, but when the standard of proof-reading falls like this, if you can’t at first solve a clue then you begin to wonder if there is a typo in it. Not something one normally sees in Azed’s crosswords — how he generally maintains such high standards of accuracy without so far as I know having any sort of crossword editor to pick up on things is impressive.
(I wrote this before discovering that there is a third typo: The first word of the clue for 4dn is meant to be Chain not Cain. And here at last we have a mistake which does actually cause a waste of time (in my case, because I was doing the blog, considerable).)
The usual: sound clueing, impossibly difficult words whose very existence keeps surprising me, one or two excellent clues, and as so often one (4dn) whose explanation is beyond me (at least it was, until the typo was pointed out).
Definitions underlined and in maroon.
Apologies for the late posting: I went off to the Sloggers and Betters event in York having forgotten to finish and post the blog (and despite reminding myself numerous times that I needed … Read more >>