Quiptic 947 by Anto

18 comments on “Quiptic 947 by Anto”

1. Thanks Anto and nms

   A quirky puzzle from Anto, with some seriously non-Ximenean clues. I rather enjoyed it, though (and it took about twice as long as the Pan in the paper – puzzles the wrong way round again) Favourites were REOCCUR and BLINK.

   6d would have been a better clue as “It could be….” rather than “It’s…”; reads better, and more factually correct (light is “radiation”, after all).

2. Thanks both. Anto has improved greatly on his early offerings, but still perhaps a little tough for a Quiptic. But no complaints from me

3. This gave me a lot more trouble than Pan’s Cryptic.

4. I stared blankly at the NW quadrant before getting going in the NE. I have never heard the phrases ‘fall between two stools’ or ‘put the mockers on’ (we put the moz on in my neighbourhood). Favourite was CONSTABLE.

5. Thanks for the blog.

   Personally I liked the puzzle, generally elegant surfaces throughout and generally well compatible with the Quiptic brief.

   Wikipedia gives that “A strain is a series of musical phrases that create a distinct melody of a piece” – so “variety of music” as a def is not such a stretch.

   “(s)he’s a blank page” aka tabula rasa?

   A “collar cuff” is a sling around the neck supporting the arm in its cuff.

   Oxford dictionary gives “in a blink” as a colloquial alternative to the full version.

   “Two stools” is unambiguously the correct and mlldly entertaining answer

    

   I have seen much further fetched synonyms/clues from the more established setters.

6. 19a is a shocker.

7. copmus @6

   I rather liked it. What do you see as the problem?

8. I found this hard and needed some help, though I liked 19a. Felt like I was working backwards for a quite few here. Struggled with two stools, reoccur and debut. Thanks both.

    

9. I read well over half the clues before one dropped in then pretty straightforward from there on in. I agree it was harder than the cryptic but hey-ho!

10. Anto appears to be a very capable setter but I’m still flabbergasted that his/her puzzles are classified as quiptics. I found this puzzle extremely difficult and I was unable to fill in several answers and unable to parse a few of the ones I could.  I wasn’t helped by the introduction of the stools and mockers phrases that I’ve never heard. I still don’t get TRAMP – is “down and out” being used as a noun or is “tramp” an adjective?

11. BlueDot @10

    “Down-and-out” is a noun, “march” is a verb; both could be “tramp”.

12. I enjoyed this too — Anto is becoming one of my favorite setters — but the definition part of 6D is a stinker. I assume the setter thought radiation = radioactivity, but even radioactivity isn’t necessarily or even commonly “really dangerous”; it’s all around us, after all, in our daily lives.

13. This took longer than the Daily Telegraph cryptic…so quiptic, probably not. An interesting solve though.

14. About a quarter of the way through, I erroneously thought there was a medical theme – and so tried to work that into several remaining solutions. This slowed me down horrendously! I did find this one easier than the same day’s cryptic though. I have a question for the seasoned Fifteen-Squarers: is there any significance when some clue ends in three dots, and the following one starts with three dots? There’s a similarity in the solutions to 7D & 8D, but that doesn’t seem sufficient reason for the dots – & anyway, the same cannot be said for 23D & 25D, or 10A & 11A…

15. Wellbeck@15 – the dots are just to make the surface make “sense”, e.g. the surface of 11a doesn’t work without them. Generally I ignore them to solve the clue.

16. The really good setters see ellipses as a way to link two clues cryptically.  Most setters indeed just use them, as Shirl says, for reasons of improving the ‘surface reading’. At least two of the three ellipses on offer here, do not need to be linked. The really good setters wouldn’t, therefore, do it.

    I am not going to comment on Anto’s puzzles in depth anymore – but, yes, (s)he’s become better. But after Carpathian’s pitch-perfect Quiptic last week, we’re back into the World of Inconsistency. Let’s face it, there’s no real vision behind what a Quiptic should really look like. It’s more or less like this country’s politics.

    23d (TRAMP) is exactly as muffin made clear @11. However, our beloved commenter used hyphens, rightly so. Anto didn’t. And while punctuation often can be ignored, ignoring it here is unfair IMO.

    Anyway, thanks for the blog nms – I hope one day your crosswords will see the light of day, they deserve a place here!

     

17. Thanks Shirl and Sil!

18. Intrigued, I went and solved Monday’s Pan. It was indeed easier than Anto. I felt that the problem was not a deficiency in Anto, but an excellence. Anto’s surfaces are so good, it is often hard to know where to begin. The puzzle itself may not be hard, but discovering the simplicity is the challenge. ANTONYM and THEMORGUE were almost trivial, but the surfaces gave so little hint as to how to begin to parse.

    The question remains, should Anto do quiptics. That’s up to the editor. But I don’t mind my quiptic being an occasional stretch.

Comments are closed.