Comments on: Financial Times 14,122 by Bradman

By: Wil Ransome

Wil Ransome — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 16:47:17 +0000

Many thanks, Pete. Quite obvious really.

By: Pete Maclean

Pete Maclean — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 18:38:31 +0000

Wil, That is interesting! I know well that Don has multiple guises but I have never tackled any puzzles from his other personas and I had not realized that each maintained different levels of difficulty.

Regarding 27ac, the word ‘sheep’ can be either singular or plural — so, it may or may not be singular!

By: Wil Ransome

Wil Ransome — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 17:29:52 +0000

Well I’m sorry, the 27ac penny hasn’t dropped yet. I can’t see what on earth sheep have to do with being singular. Please could you put me out of my misery.

How the Don manages in his various guises to get the level of difficulty just right is very clever: as Quixote or Giovanni he’s on the easy side, here as Bradman he’s middlingly difficult, as Duck he’s hard. Perhaps I’ve missed one of them.

By: Pete Maclean

Pete Maclean — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 19:30:58 +0000

Some people may well take the view that finding an unknown word is a good part of the challenge of a crossword. One has a mystery to solve and something new to learn at the same time. I do think though that clues for obscure words should be fairly easy in their wordplay, as this one is. At worst one could try looking up all seven-letter words beginning with THE in a dictionary or find a list of old musical instruments. One might even guess (wrongly!) that the first circular thing is simply an O and look up all seven-letter words starting THEO and get the answer more quickly!

By: Bamberger

Bamberger — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 17:53:10 +0000

I failed on 16a, 17d and 27a.
16a seems nigh on impossible unless you have heard of it.
17d I hadn’t heard of and it has taken 5 minutes for the penny to drop on 27a.
Still I’d take the Don over Cinephile anytime.

By: Pete Maclean

Pete Maclean — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 15:44:10 +0000

Thanks, Bradman. And sorry for thinking there was a problem with ADDLE. I should have checked further as I see now that my OED makes this clear. Indeed its first definition for addle as a verb is “to make addle”.

By: Paul B

Paul B — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 06:29:34 +0000

And it wasn’t ‘cash lost in ‘em’ either!

By: Bradman

Bradman — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 06:08:58 +0000

Thanks for being so nice. No worries though — ADDLE can be an adjective and SCARECROW is SCARE+C+ROW (crops being sown in rows). I was rather pleased with myself at finding the & lit. for SLOT MACHINE, I must admit!

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 04:48:00 +0000

Many thanks Pete & Bradman

I was particularly pleased that my home town of OLDHAM was featured.

More of the same please Bradman!

By: Sil van den Hoek

Sil van den Hoek — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 23:41:05 +0000

Thanks, Pete.

Agree that this Bradman was certainly harder than the average Saturday stuff. But I am a fan of Bradman (ie the Don, particularly in this disguise), so no complaints.

2d left me thinking and thinking all over again.
Could it be that it’s not SCARE for ‘worry’, but the apostrophe S + CARE (worry)?
Meanwhile, I opted for CRO as ‘crop section’, but couldn’t connect it to the rest of the clue.
Therefore still not completely sure about this clue.