Comments on: Guardian Quiptic 611 Beale

By: scchua

scchua — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 23:50:03 +0000

Thanks for your comments.
Agree with Robi re 5D surface; sorry Stella, had overlooked your comment first time round.

By: Derek Lazenby

Derek Lazenby — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 22:38:25 +0000

Der? Failed on Rufus now I failed on this. I finished one of Araucaria’s harder ones the other week. Hmmm.

By: pommers

pommers — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:53:25 +0000

Hello Scchua and thanks for a good review.
This was too hard for a Quiptic IMO. At least, I solved the Rufus cryptic plus his DT offering together in less time than it took me to do this one! That’s 2 hard Quiptics in a row – are they raising the bar? Don’t mind personally but I thought the Quiptic was supposed to be on the gentle side?
Thanks to Beale for a bit of fun first thing this morning – a nice start to the week!

By: Robi

Robi — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:29:29 +0000

Thanks scchua for a great blog (I’m making up the numbers). I didn’t get LES in STRAGGLERS, so thanks for the parsing – too difficult for a Quiptic methinks.

Like you, I tried to get VA into CREEPER, but it wouldn’t go!

Stella; I guess ‘return per share’ in 5 relates to amounts received from sales or dividends of stocks and shares.

By: scchua

scchua — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 15:28:14 +0000

Hi Stella, thanks for commenting…sure is lonely here today!

1D NARRATOR is also slightly awkward. I have the {} brackets round both ARRAN and ROT, ie. both to be reversed. I know…that should make TORNARRA, strictly speaking.

By: Stella Heath

Stella Heath — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:29:45 +0000

Another great blog, scchua, but there are a couple of clues here I find a bit iffy for beginner level:

23ac, as you say, has a very awkward parsing – we’ve only just started getting split words (‘horse+man’) in normal cryptics;

In 5d, the surface reading means nothing, at least to me;

‘After’ in 16d could be taken as an (American) adverb, equivalent to “afterwards”, but it’s dubious.

Also, there’s a slight error in your parsing of 1d, in that ROT is reversed as well as ARRAN.