Financial Times 16,436 by BRADMAN

10 comments on “Financial Times 16,436 by BRADMAN”

1. I liked this and found it more than a gentle workout in places.  My favourites were the &littish 1a, the surface for 1b (pity that the present tense couldn’t be used) and the BRAILLE cryptic def. The ‘loose erne’ homophone wasn’t bad either.  Spent a while at the end on FUSTIC and MONOCEROS, a couple of words I’d never come across before, but happened to be lucky with the consonant and vowel lotteries respectively.

   Thanks to Bradman and Turbolegs

2. Never heard of FUSTIC, LACEY or MONOCEROS. I believe HE is High Explosive.

   Harder than usual for a Bradman although easier than a typical Pasquale.

   Thanks to Bradman and Turbolegs.

    

3. thanks B and T for a tidy puzzle and an excellent blog!  I find it hard to think of any town in Switzerland as being a city — especially Lucerne.   Disagree with the “slightly” qualification in the topical 1d.

4. understandable typo in the anagram fodder for 1a, turbolegs – i first thought the clue had a typo.

   my favourite is HANDIEST

   wasn’t keen on girl=toni for the usual reasons, and do atemporal and immortal really have the same meaning?

   hadn’t come across lacey, motocross, fustic before.

    

   many thanks bradman & TL

5. Several new words and not especially gentle for this solver – harder than his normal fare.

   But finished at that’s satisfying.

    

6. I’m now doing 3 puzzles a day, having been self-isolating for the last 12 days. The Guardian in the morning, the Independent in the afternoon, and now the FT in the evening.
   Monoceros, Lacey, and Fustic were all new to me. Thought of ARCANE for OLD in 15a, but couldn’t parse it. Didn’t like TONI for GIRL either.

7. For me this puzzle was great fun (and not too difficult since even I was able to finish in one session!).

   I found BRAILLE excellent, as Wordplodder already said.

   My parsing of 1d was a bit different from Turbolegs’ because, suspiciously, the clue had ‘materiel’ instead of material. Therefore the only letter in excess (after the DEMILITARISED anagram) was H, and therefore I thought the explosive was the H bomb.

   Thanks to B and T

8. On a somewhat unrelated topic, are others here running into Captcha problems when trying to access fifteensquared.net — I get repeated requests to identify cats and bikes and trains… sometimes multiple times until it believes me.  Maybe I’m just a guinea pig for their training algorithm.

9. Ilan @8

   I have sent you an email regarding this issue.

10. Thanks Bradman and Turbolegs

    This one took an elapsed couple of hours to do, done whilst getting another PM address on this dastardly disease – so not fully concentrating on it.  A lot of nice clues and thought that the &lit 1a was probably the best until it was noted that only the H needed to be extracted from the fodder rather than the HE that I had taken out.

    Passed a comment to my partner that when GREASE is classified as ‘an old film’, it certainly puts ones age into perspective !

    Always thought that MONOCEROS was a mythical animal but see that it is only listed as the constellation.  It was my third to last in followed by DEROGATE and FUSTIC, that were both new to me.

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