Never knowingly undersolved
A very entertaining challenge from GOLIATH which required several sittings to fully crack the grid. Frankly, this was a very educational outing where I learnt several new words/phrases (e.g. 16,17ac ; 15d; part of 1d) after having deduced the solution from successfully breaking down the clue. Googling helped with 15d.
Thoroughly enjoyed this !! Thanks Goliath for getting my Friday off to a great start.
The puzzle may be found at http://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/cryptic/26303. I found this a bear, with several parsings which I have either misread or are to my mind stretched to breaking point.. I am generally impressed by … Read more >>
This is getting silly. Monk is a mathematician and so is no doubt well aware of the probabilities, but his last four Independent crosswords have all been blogged by me. How likely was that? He’s probably getting rather tired of this, but I’m not, for his crosswords are always good. Tough, though, especially this one, where I had to admit defeat on one clue.
The letters around the outside suggest a Nina of some sort, but I can find nothing except the word ‘orgy’ on the right, which is perhaps a coincidence. But I did find ‘Placebo’ in the second row of unches, then further down ‘Brian Molko’. I imagined that Monk had a friend called Brian Molko who was involved in medical research, but a little Googling quickly revealed my disgraceful ignorance. Evidently they are a group and BM is their lead vocalist and guitarist. No doubt their songs are placed around the answers, but I leave that to you since I can’t find any album names or singles there.
Definitions underlined (except for one of them (5dn, which is fortunately obvious) which I forgot when doing the blog and can’t now recover).
I enjoyed this puzzle, despite my being in a foul mood. Praise indeed.
I’ve been chewing my pen, as it were, trying to compose a preamble for this puzzle and have decided to say simply that it’s a fairly typical Chifonie puzzle, I think – but, … Read more >>
Monday Prize Crossword/Jun 23 Dante in his familiar style? Well, he left most of his cryptic definitions at home this time! However, to compensate that plenty of double definitions and anagrams. Definitions are … Read more >>
Prize puzzle from the Weekend FT of June 21, 2014 I found this puzzle to be a good and satisfying challenge. My top clue by far is 4a (MISPRINT) and I also especially … Read more >>
I always enjoy getting to solve and blog a Gozo puzzle, I hope you all enjoyed it too. Thanks Gozo.
We found this a bit tougher than your average Dac, but no less enjoyable – all the usual excellent surfaces were there, but for some reason we had difficulty getting round the misdirections. … Read more >>
I found this tough to get into, but rewarding once I did. Favourites were 1, 7 and 8 down.
Preamble: Crossing answers make 18 down appear a non-word – it must be replaced by the acronym given by the longer down answers (five words in total), while retaining real words in the … Read more >>
I made pretty quick work of this: there are quite a few clues that either had giveaway definitions or made their cryptic structure rather too obvious (a common feature of Brummie’s clues). I … Read more >>
It’s Tuesday today, with its typical pot pourri of compilers, and today it falls for me to do battle with Hob. I found solving and blogging this puzzle involved quite a lot of … Read more >>
Looks like my honeymoon period of blogging is over. This was a monumental struggle which had me scrambling all over Chambers and Wikipedia.