Comments on: Financial Times 13,604 by Mudd

By: bamberger

bamberger — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 07:43:33 +0000

Only got about half out despite it being a weekend crossword when I have much more time.
12a Guessed that amp had to fit in somewhere but hadn’t heard of samphire and didn’t have enough checking letters to have a stab at what it might be.
17a Never thought of this definition of blue
23a Aster did for me
14d How many have heard of Sennett? Not me.

Thanks for the blog

By: Pete Maclean

Pete Maclean — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:04:45 +0000

Sil, I neglected the backwardness of ELM in 19A just in the blog and have corrected it, thanks. I thought first of SCAN for 17A and took a while to convince myself that it had to be ICON.

jmac, thanks for commenting. I did this puzzle a long way from home!

By: jmac

jmac — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:16:26 +0000

Thanks for the blog Pete. I’m a long way from home (and my copy of the puzzle) so can’t really contribute anything, but remember enjoying it enormously. I failed on TASTER (never was one for botanicals) so I’m grateful for your explanation.

By: Sil van den Hoek

Sil van den Hoek — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:14:49 +0000

Either it wasn’t my day or this was indeed a slightly harder Mudd than usual.
In any case, I thought this was a very good puzzle.

My first entry was STYE (27ac), a familiar word in crosswords, but nicely clued this time.
After that it took me a while to get going, having only five solutions after half an hour.
Three of them I rewarded a ’plus’, all of them in the SE corner:
WESTWARD HO, SUPER and the splendid HEATHROW.
Surely, the latter – (once) a topical one, &Lit – must have been a leftover from a Paul puzzle, but because it was too good to bin, Mr H let it crop up here – well, that’s what I think that happened.

And there were more contestants for Clue of the Day.
Like PEARL DIVER [with its apt surface] and STEMLESS [another great surface (with btw, Pete, 'elm' backwards in the solution)], to name two.

On the other hand there were also some cheapish clues, like 7ac, 9ac [sorry, Pete ] and 21d.
I didn’t understand TENNESSEE (14d), so thanks for enlightening me, Pete.
And I have to admit, I made one mistake: in 17ac I entered SCAN without knowing why.

All in all, in my opinion, as good as a Mudd can get.
As you say, Pete, perhaps one of his best.
Many smiles along the way – very enjoyable to solve.