Comments on: Guardian 25,314 / Shed

By: Daniel Miller

Daniel Miller — Fri, 06 May 2011 10:34:39 +0000

Curmudgeon – great surface.

By: Geoff

Geoff — Fri, 06 May 2011 10:12:49 +0000

Shed: Agree entirely with my good friend Robi. Great crossword, and we all enjoyed 14a despite my nit-pickings. These pedantic little spats are generally light-hearted and all part of the fun of the blog.

By: Robi

Robi — Fri, 06 May 2011 08:25:08 +0000

Shed; look what happened indeed. Never mind, it was all good fun and the crossword was very enjoyable.

By: Stella

Stella — Thu, 05 May 2011 23:56:43 +0000

Thanks for dropping in, Shed. It just goes to show you can’t please everyone!

By: Shed

Shed — Thu, 05 May 2011 23:38:36 +0000

Thanks all. I could have done with Geoff’s advice when compiling this, as my original clue for 14ac was ‘Seed not beginning to precede fruit? Correct!’ – which is much snappier. But when I was double-checking and read the Chambers definition of semen, I thought ‘oh dear, I’ll get pedants complaining about that’, so I added ‘carrier’. And look what happened.

By: Jan

Jan — Thu, 05 May 2011 22:16:46 +0000

Thanks, mhl and Shed. How lovely to see an all-too-rare Shed puzzle. Many, many years ago I used to groan, “Oh, sh**, it’s Shed!” I could never finish them.

Andrew@9 and Dave@14&15 – my Biology O and A levels were more than 50 years ago – also NUJMB, Dave. I had never heard of EPINASTY, but I could tell you about the very large polymorphonucleocytes in Pseudotsuga taxipholia.

By: Martin P

Martin P — Thu, 05 May 2011 20:47:41 +0000

I was thrown by “curmudgeon”, simply because, for no good reason, I had “sourpuss” as female and “curmudgeon” as male, so not equivalents in my mind…

Enjoyable, I found though, so thanks to Shed.

By: slipstream

slipstream — Thu, 05 May 2011 17:33:04 +0000

Re 20 across: I live in Alaska, so I attempted to use PALIN (instead of PASHA) for “former governor.”

By: otter

otter — Thu, 05 May 2011 16:56:16 +0000

Thanks for the blog, mhl.

I enjoyed this puzzle for the most part. Eventually caved in with just one to go: PELT. Went through all the combinations I could think of and just couldn’t come up with the right double definition. Knew it would be simple.

Like Duncan in message 2, I couldn’t understand how ‘On the contrary’ fitted into 25a, but reading the way mhl analysed the clue, it’s suddenly come to me. A ‘figure of eight’ is not the type of figure/shape a woman who lost weight would have. If you see what I mean. (Not sure this is actually true, but I think that’s what the clue’s getting at.)

By: riccardo

riccardo — Thu, 05 May 2011 16:51:09 +0000

Re.9ac – surely to court is to try to win affection, rather than to actually win it… so still an overlapping DD in my book. I spent a while stuck on pesthole for 8ac, and was scratching my head trying to connect pesto and glossy. Finally, I thought howe was a perfectly good answer for 10ac, which three me even more in the NW corner.