Apologies that this one seemed to fall through the cracks. Whilst interest may have passed, here it is for completeness.

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This is the second time in a row that I’ve drawn Hypnos on a Sunday, and no complaints about that from me. I sometimes find Hypnos to be on the tougher side compared to the other IoS setters, and that seemed to be true today, though maybe I was simply having a slow week. 18ac still baffles me a little.

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Lorraine:  Good morning Everyman lovers,

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This is my six-monthly venture into the world of Genius blogging.  Seeing Enigmatist’s name as the setter made me think that this puzzle would be a mite challenging.  So it proved to be.

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This seemed to be a standard Azed puzzle with excellent clues and the usual mix of everyday and obscure vocabulary in the grid.

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‘And’, so it goes on – if you read last week’s rant from Mister Sting… This week’s preamble tells us to replace ‘parts of’ 14 clue answers – as ‘forms’ of 26A. All very well but, unless I am much mistaken, it was 14 cells/squares, involving 21 CLUES. Which sort of detracts from what was actually, in my opinion, just 28D as an EV puzzle.

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A change in format for me this week as I experiment with PeeDee‘s rather nifty blog post maker. I’ll have to try out the various options, but so far I like it as it looks like I’ve put far more effort into the post than I have! Many thanks to PeeDee for making this tool available to us.

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If there was any doubt that Araucaria is king of the alphabetical jigsaw then surely it has now gone , or nearly…

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Another smasher from Alberich

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An enjoyable puzzle with a mini-theme that was up my street, making it mostly an easy stroll for me, except that I can’t fully explain the crucial 3,12 (though getting the answer was no problem from the enumeration and the link to 17dn). No doubt help will soon be at hand.

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I made steady progress through this puzzle from Phi.  There were a couple of words that I only come across in crosswords, but overall this was a puzzle that did not dip into obscurity.

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A fairly rare Thursday outing for Flimsy, and a solid, well-rounded puzzle. There are some fantastic surfaces and quite a few &lits and quasi-&lits (usually involving a word doing double duty), which always adds to the fun. One or two synonyms seemed to me to be stretched rather close to breaking point, but, other than that, good stuff.

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A very pleasantly-constructed crossword from Mordred today. The fact that at times here I’m not quite sure doesn’t detract from what seems to be a good tight efficient display of clueing. I remarked the other day about looseness and Ximenean clueing and this led to much discussion, much of which was making the good point that we mustn’t appear to be hidebound and must appeal to the young, but also some of which was saying that as a result we don’t need to be too careful to abide by the rules and regulations. This crossword shows that it is perfectly possible to set good clues without compromising ‘standards’ — and many others in the Indy stable set similarly good crosswords.

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Found this quite tricky to start with, but fairly enjoyable. Favourite clue 11ac.

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Monday Prize Crossword/ Sep 17

Although this Crux crossword (which can be found here) was full of very familiar devices and less ‘devious’ than this excellent setter potentially can be, I did have quite some trouble with it. As ever I presume, it was just me. What else can one conclude when perhaps the chestnut of all chestnuts was my very last entry? 

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