Comments on: Independent 7656 by Phi (Saturday Prize Puzzle 30 April 2011)

By: Allan_C

Allan_C — Sat, 07 May 2011 09:22:20 +0000

Don’t give up bamberger. You did as well as some of us if you got 1d, and it took me a while to get 11a. Keep reading the blogs and you’ll find your success rate improving as you see how the clues work. You do need to do a bit of second-guessing sometimes, though, to sort the clue into definition and wordplay etc.

By: bamberger

bamberger — Sat, 07 May 2011 08:16:55 +0000

Hours of solving yielded only 1a,1d,11a,17a & 18d.
1a was my first in and 1d was my second in.
Simply too hard for me.
15mins to all bar one is Olympic standard!

By: caretman

caretman — Sat, 07 May 2011 06:33:26 +0000

Thanks, mc_rapper67 for the blog. I think my experience was similar to yours, I found most of it straightforward but then stalled in the upper left and lower right corners, since I also was unfamiliar with KETTLING and it took a while for me to work it out. With you, I had never encountered FACEPALM, which seems quite a useful word now that I know it. I also had to look up 8d, which I had parsed correctly but was in an area of knowledge I’m lacking.

By: Allan_C

Allan_C — Sat, 07 May 2011 06:25:46 +0000

Thanks, mc_rapper67, for the blog and phi for the puzzle. Facepalm also took me ages to discover but I eventually got there after recourse to Roget’s Thesaurus which gave me ‘face’ and ‘palm’, then googling led me to Wikipedia. btw this is the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facepalm
CALGARY STAMPEDE was my first to go in; ‘Canadian show’ gave it without even unscrambling the anagram. Similarly ‘Duke’s aria’ for LA DONNA E MOBILE.
Not sure about the equivalence of SO THERE and ‘hard cheese’. I think of the former more as equivalent to ‘Yah, boo, sucks!’ Just a co-incidence but ‘hard cheese’ was an answer in Another Newspaper’s crossword the previous day.
Liked PANCREAS and BAR MAGNET.