Comments on: Enigmatic Variations 946: Message by Rustic

By: stephen

stephen — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 09:00:16 +0000

i think “linacre” at 18 across refers to gary and is another mistake. i could also make no sense of the construction of 29 down – it turns out not surprisingly as the clue in the telegraph puzzle site version has “lugworms” instead of “lobworms”.

By: Bob Sage

Bob Sage — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:56:44 +0000

Agree Tony, as exemplified yet again in EV 950 this week where some unclued ‘resident joker’ failed to get the grid quite right and held me up a little while until I realised there should have been a bar line after the 5th letter of 10d. I’d been looking for answers that had an extra letter added before I realised…

By: Tony

Tony — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 13:07:26 +0000

Thanks, Dave. This explains why 18/23 across were the only answers I couldn’t get. This is by no means the first time there have been errors in an EV crossword and they really should get a better proof reader. I don’t know of any other crossword that is so prone to typos. Next time I can’t solve a clue, I shall start to expect such an error.

By: Dave Hennings

Dave Hennings — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 17:12:45 +0000

You are quite right about the wordplay for CABLE TV, thanks. I believe it only appears in Chambers as cable television, unhyphenated. Without being too hard on Rustic, who has set some good puzzles in the EV series, I agree with your take on this.

Dave.

By: twencelas

twencelas — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:02:01 +0000

Dave

Interestingly the online version of the clue for 18,23 had the correct spelling i.e. eclair. My parsing of the other part of that clue was a definition of bleak (ablet) followed by v to get CABLE TV. That leads to the question could this be hyphenated to make it a single word?

In my humble opinion, it felt a hard slog, this crossword, especially with Christmas and its many distractions looming. Personally, something a little easier and more humourous would have been appreciated. As you say the double clues made good surface readings difficult and this, certainly for me, reduced the “fun factor”.