Comments on: Guardian 24917 – Paul

By: Neil

Neil — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:22:37 +0000

Trench Adviser …

Check out pub and restaurant ads (and even some food writers in the press). “Sunday Lunch” (even “Christmas Lunch”) is constantly used to mean a midday roast meal with all the trimmings, followed by afters. That’s a main meal so it’s “Dinner”, whatever the time of day. Ask any dictionary!

By: Trench Adviser

Trench Adviser — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:28:56 +0000

Neil, how is “lunch” misused?

By: Neil

Neil — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:44:24 +0000

Lovely stuff throughout! And thanks Uncle Yap for your usual clarity.

Sorry Ian @9 but I suspect your comment to Uncle Yap might not be quite what you meant once you’ve looked up “fulsome” in your dictionary, unless, of course, you were complimenting him on his figure! But then, it is one of the most misused words, perhaps only challenged by “lunch”.

By: Dave Ellison

Dave Ellison — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:51:32 +0000

Actually, I had pencilled in THREE at 4d, giving an E for the I of ECONOMICAL which is why that word took longer than it should to spot.

By: Dave Ellison

Dave Ellison — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:47:39 +0000

Gareth @ 26: I eyeballed the letters for inspiration, rather than writing them out randomly – but to no avail. THE was a good guess for the three letter word, and ING for the end of 26a, but they didn’t help. It wasn’t till I got the E from METIER of 1d (quite a hard clue) that I got ECONOMICAL (I already had all the other crossing letters), then the rest of the solution was instantaneous – I didn’t bother checking the fodder.

By: Sil van den Hoek

Sil van den Hoek — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:15:10 +0000

Hi, Mr Beaver (#30).
Although we did like the (indeed) vague definition of 25ac, making the clue as a whole rather, um, cryptic, I can imagine that some people, like you, didn’t think too much of it.
FLAT can be ‘dead’, when one thinks of ‘discharged’ (like a battery).

By: Mr Beaver

Mr Beaver — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:48:56 +0000

To go against the grain, I didn’t think much of 25a and 24,12 (mainly because we didn’t get them).
‘Was the star’ doesn’t define HEADLINED very well, and I don’t really see how dead = FLAT, well only very tangentially …

By: sidey

sidey — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:42:53 +0000

Long anagrams, well long answers however clued are often spottable simply from the word pattern unfortunately. When the Milligan clue was used I shared the crossword with a friend, it took me about ten seconds to work it out so I didn’t tell him. He took about four hours because he didn’t know the poem.

Azed used a long anagram in his Christmas 1998 competition. This http://www.andlit.org.uk/azed/slip.php?comp_no=1387 list some of the possibilities.

By: Sil van den Hoek

Sil van den Hoek — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:37:36 +0000

Well, Gareth (#26), normally we do but this time we did …
Which means: normally we wait just like you (and I do agree, long anagrams can be very annoying, though some are rather good), but today we wrote out the remaining letters to see if we could complete “Bring (must of course be ‘being’, but this was what we had initially) … with the …”. We saw the solution relatively late, which slowed us down a bit because the words were spread around different parts of the grid.

By: stiofain

stiofain — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:36:06 +0000

Another fan here I thought this was great, especially “does river run”.
Gareth I dislike long anagrams too but my main beef is that they cut down the number of clues in an xword I also rarely solve them other than by crossing letters.
I remember the milligan clue well nice one from Rob digging that up.
I also spent some time thinking about the Beatles Sil.
My only complaint is the lack of Pauls usual smut , no bums, bras, bowels or bogs.