Comments on: Guardian Cryptic N° 25,459 by Boatman

By: ernie

ernie — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:39:31 +0000

Huw Powell @31 sums up my thoughts also. Slow, with aids, but good fun. Did not get CORNER or ONE-LINERS. ANABASIS was okay (though could not parse it – nor SAUNA): I’m a classicist turned scientist. As for US spellings, I keep an open mind. In fact I don’t object to slight imprecisions if the answer (whether I got it or not) seems justified.

By: Huw Powell

Huw Powell — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 21:10:42 +0000

Lots of fun with this one. Completed, slowly, with a few aids (mostly onelook to get 1A and 25A, and wikipedia to verify 10A and 19A). Enjoyed the theme, it’s so rare to see sciencey ones. Loved CHAOS, very sneaky; I almost fell off my chair when I got SIDEREAL because the starry theme had me thinking of days and years and how they are observed/measured.

My only tiny miff is that there was no clue which yielded a starry answer without mentioning them directly. No big deal though.

Thanks for the nice Friday workout, Boatman – and for dropping by the blog, and thanks PeterO for fighting your way through the blog – it’s always nice to remember that even the “experts sruggle at times!

By: Keith in Catalunya

Keith in Catalunya — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 19:30:30 +0000

I thought the solution to 1 ac pretty well described the clue.

By: RCWhiting

RCWhiting — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 17:25:26 +0000

Thanks all
I did this at the coast without a dictionary so I failed to get ‘anabasis’,a new word to me. I was pretty certain I had remembered ‘matzot’correctly which meant I could write in ‘sauna’ but I was quite unable to parse it. Thanks for the explanation, PeterO, and much admiration for the ‘dry sweat’.
In fact admiration for the whole thing,a delightful challenge and so much better than today’s ‘prize’ effort.

By: Paul B

Paul B — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:20:07 +0000

Those foreigners the Americans? True indeed.

By: chas

chas — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:44:27 +0000

Thanks to PeterO for the blog.

I am definitely one who thinks that in a British crossword foreign words should be indicated such as ‘remodeled’!!

By: Allan_C

Allan_C — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:29:55 +0000

Thanks PeterO for the blog, especially the parsing of ANABASIS which I put in as a guess.

By: Stella Heath

Stella Heath — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:23:45 +0000

PaulB, there’s one word in your argument which, IMO, sums up the question: “unindicated” is probably the source of so many objections to the American spelling

By: PeterO

PeterO — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:56:28 +0000

Stumped – In case you miss this, I will repeat it in an email: to get an archived Indy, go to http://www.crosswordsolver.info/, and download their puzzle solver software. Fire it up,click on File, and then Download puzzle. Enter the URL
“http://independent.co.uk/independent.co.uk/editorial/xword/c_201011.bin”
(the quotes are there only to prevent the URL from appearing as a hyperlink).
That should bring up Arachne’s puzzle. For another puzzle, the date of which you know, change the 201011 to the appropriate date (note the British style ordering DDMMYY). The other complication is that prize puzzles are put up on the web a week late, so you would need the date it goes on the web, not when it appears in the paper.
I hope you are not stumped by all this.

By: stumped

stumped — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:56:06 +0000

Paul B: point taken. For my part I entered remodeled without a second thought. However my accent still elicits comment, so all is not lost.

Meanwhile back to Phi in Indy. Does anyone know how to retrieve archived cryptics there? I’d like to tackle Anarche from Thursday. I’ll ask on the appropriate blog when I’m done with Phi.

Rediscovering cryptics is great fun, I’m hooked.