Azed 2369 – Jigsaw

12 comments on “Azed 2369 – Jigsaw”

1. One of my fastest times with an Azed (I completed it on Sunday, typically I am solving well into the week). Thought it was Epigrams initially as well, and I had a few other wrong answers that fixed themselves when putting them in.
   Overall I found the puzzle good fun!

2. Conversely, I usually take about an hour or two to do Azed on Sunday evening but this time, by Wednesday I still didn’t have enough answers to feel confident to start entering them into the grid. I made a guess, which turned out to be wrong, ground to a halt and left it at that.

3. Completing the grid was a bit of a struggle until I got Ostrichism as my second 10 letter answer.

   However, before that I placed NALOXONE and EXIGENT by assuming that they crossed at the X, and then having solved all the eight 4-letter clues, which AZED kindly and possibly deliberately made not too difficult, I then placed PRESENT-DAY, using the fact that all of the 10-letter answers had to butt against 2 of the 4-letter answers.

4. 10ac was almost certainly FINANCES, but how is N = ‘what’s current in Nigeria’? I have never equated ‘what’s first’ with ‘what’s current’.

5. Yes, the alphabetical is always a welcome variation, especially this time with the compare-and-contrast of Paul and Azed on successive days. Not that one would want them every week. On this one, I took a long time to parse TRIPE even after it emerged as the likely answer, because of the clever mislead, causing me to look for dance/anagram of TRY (?) + the very common PE. Like Andrew I started by trying OSTRICHISM down the left, and it went smoothly but satisfyingly after that. Many thanks for fine blog and to Azed for the fine puzzle. Someone wrote here a week or two ago that it was a pity not to have more discussion of the weekly Azed; I agree, and will try to keep doing my bit.

6. Replying to Wil @4: Chambers gives Naira (Nigerian currency) as one of the many words that get abbreviated as N. Not trying to be clever – I too wondered about it at the time, and pedantically checked.

7. I was so confident that PRESENT-DAY went along the top with PROJECT going down from it that I used a pen… cue the wasted ink of another print-out. Duh.

   Very enjoyable and not as hard as it looked despite my initial stupidity. Thanks Azed.

   Thanks also for the explanation of FINANCES @6. I managed to find a rough correlation between “current” and “first” but was never convinced. The Naira version is much better.

8. Thanks Andrew. Am sure there were a fair few who regretted deciding on the PRESENT-DAY/PROJECT coincidence and the regretted it My eventual route in was like yours, via OSTRICHISM/PRESENTDAY plus the good luck to find all the four-letters which meant only left and right respectively fitted. Thereafter there was (or do we now have to say were?) a fair number of Chambers visits to verify the existence of CREEPIE, LOME etc. Having done Saturday’s Paul jigsaw in the Guardian it was a bumper weekend.

9. Thanks to Azed and Andrew

   Two alphabeticals made for a great weekend. My experience was the same as many – present day and project went in, another print out followed, and then the left side started to fill in from ostrichism.

10. +1 for thanks to Azed and Andrew.

    I fell for EPIGRAMS at first, and then foolishly had REMANENT in place of RETICENT for a while.

    But my first attempt at Azed so yay! and I submitted an entry:-)

11. I made both the REMANENT and PRESENTDAY/PROJECT mistakes and also I entered NOLOXONE as a typo instead of NALOXONE. It took me a couple of days to finally sort it all out.

12. Just to add that the i inquisitor also had a recent alpha/jigsaw style crossword. One wonders if some of these setters network! I ‘failed’ on this due to creepie never being solved. This meant that I never really quite got the bottom right hand side completed. Maybe that should have been a warning that there was an error lurking in the vicinity.

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