Comments on: Financial Times 13,620 / Styx

By: bamberger

bamberger — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:51:00 +0000

I was not on the setters wavelength and/or having an off day as 90 minutes of effort yielded only 23& 27a and 3,4,7 & 20d. Of course the more clues you solve, the more checking letters you have and the more chance you have of getting further clues out. Sometimes I look at the answers and think “Good grief-how did I fail to get that?” but not today.
15a was an unknown
26a Wouldn’t have got bank =lean -kept on thinking of savings bank or river bank.
1d I’m with Tony here. He was a star player isn’t quite the same as he was a major player.
2d tart =curt?
6d Not heard of this.
14d Best I could come up with for coated metalware was “plate”.
21d Never heard of this.
Thanks for the blog

By: Tony Welsh

Tony Welsh — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:16:45 +0000

Thanks, Smiffy. I failed to get 15a and 21d. Never heard of KEIRIN but maybe should have guessed RING IN. Never heard of PASSERINE either but got it anyway. Also got TOLERATED though I had never heard of TOLE and nor had my Chambers’s in that sense. Got STARTING POINT but had absolutely no idea why! Not sure that major is a good synonym for star, btw. Nor do I really think routine a good synonym for DREARY, but never mind.

By: ACP

ACP — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 04:15:14 +0000

Thanks Smiffy.

I found it a really neat puzzle. It was neither unintelligible nor simple. I think Styx is developing his own little niche among the setters.

‘hot’ may be unadventurous in its definition but it worked nicely in the surface.