There are photos of our wedding — Jane Teather and John Henderson (aka Enigmatist, Nimrod, Io, Elgar) — on my Facebook page. They include one of Araucaria speaking and proposing a toast.

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A typically straightforward Rufus, with the usual generous sprinkling of double and cryptic definitions and anagrams, with some nice touches. Nothing too controversial, I think.

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*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, CD=cryptic def, DD=double def, sp=spoonerism
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I found this easier than some recent Genius puzzles. There was only one obscure word and most of the clues were fairly straightforward.
The requirement here was to identify how the answers to ten clues should be shortened. I fairly soon identified that we were talking about cards, as king ten and queen were to be omitted, but it took far too long for me (a bridge player!) to work out that 10 across was Yarborough, a hand of 13 cards containing no cards higher than the nine. In fact, although the instructions do not say so, there were two of each kind of card omitted (shown in brackets). Read the rest of this entry »

Woah! Cyclops revealing his Republican tendancies in his central down answers,
and possibly extolling the virtues of early applications of antibiotics in the central across answers: Preempt anthrax.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this . Read the rest of this entry »