Comments on: Financial Times 13,928 by Cinephile

By: crosser

crosser — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 06:58:36 +0000

Thanks, PeeDee.
I was held up at 20d because I already had the X from BETELGEUX and took it to be the “unknown”.
I confirm what Thomas99 says @1 – “sage” still means “good” in the sense of “well-behaved” in France, where I live.
By the way, there’s a typo at 1a: there’s a “C” too many!

By: scchua

scchua — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:30:59 +0000

Thanks PeeDee, and Cinephile for an enjoyable crossword

This was not as difficult as some Chinephiles. Got the RS early on, and this helped. Like you liked the defn for ETNA.

And the ellipses between 13A and 15A did serve a purpose as MARS is the Roman equivalent of the Greek ARES.

By: PeeDee

PeeDee — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:28:32 +0000

I spent a lot of time trying to place Red Star Belgrade into the grid somewhere. I was convinced they would be there somewhere.

By: Wanderer

Wanderer — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:09:12 +0000

Easy but hard sums it up perfectly. I got APPARATCHIK, GULAG and the USSR clue before I cracked RS, so I was duped into expecting some kind of Soviet theme. The first of the themed clues which seemed possible was ANTARES — when I looked it up, wiki describes it as a ‘red supergiant star’ and for a while I thought The Rev was going to be testing our knowledge of supergiants… thank goodness I was wrong.

Thoroughly enjoyable, thanks for blog and puzzle.

By: Thomas99

Thomas99 — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:55:34 +0000

Thanks for the blog. I had a similar experience to you – overall time taken wasn’t that long but a lot of it was spent wondering if I was ever going to finish, and in particular what RS was. After getting CHINA I wondered about “Rhyming Slang”. Some people disapprove of bringing in foreign languages but I would like to put in a word for PASSAGE – when you tell a child in France to be good you say “Sois sage” rather than “Sois bon”, or you did when I was learning French, so it works very nicely.

I took “original” in 17d much as you did – it’s the original “RS” in that we don’t have to replace it with a synonym/equivalent.

The only thing the puzzle was missing was a red-haired movie star (Woody Allen? Damian Lewis? Rita Hayworth?) but you can’t have everything.