Independent on Sunday 1,631 by Tees

13 comments on “Independent on Sunday 1,631 by Tees”

1. I agree PD very tough in places though with hindsight you wonder why. What made that so tricky. Not sure tbh

2. Tough indeed. Failed to get TRITE and needed help to get ORANGEMAN. A few typos in blog: in 13a, need removal of I + LOB; in 21 it is TU not TUC; in 8d, it is PETS<.

   Took me a while to see how “lap” equated to “wash” in 22a. I assume it is as in waves against the shore. Yet again, I forgot the cricket term in 9a and wondered why OO equated to “pair”.

3. I felt this was the usual blend of Tees… from tricky to straightforward… the tricky ones for me were ORANGEMAN, FOREGATHER, n OFF-BALANCE.. plenty of straightforwards which meant steady progress… fortunately there’s a film title of 16ac…
   Loved the rest..
   Thanks Tees n PeeDee

4. I’d agree with tricky in places but the usual Tees enjoyment

   Thanks to him and PeeDee

5. A tricky little number for me with the parsing of TRITE holding out until the end – I was just trying to remove ‘one’ from a fossil instead of registering ‘to throw’ as a separate entity.

   Thanks to Tees for the workout and to PD for the review.

6. Thanks Hovis for you excellent proof reading, as usual! Fixed now.

7. Very enjoyable, though I have a quibble with 3D, which seemed clumsy to me; wouldn’t it have been better as “Swimmer’s (= swimmer is) position restricting current”? At 21A I was trying to work reversed IN into TUC, but clearly it must be as PeeDee has it. Strange that dinosaurs are considered reptiles when their only remaining descendants are birds, which aren’t reptiles. Thanks Tees and PeeDee.

8. Jane @5. That was my problem with TRITE as well. Well done in getting it in the end – more than I managed.

9. #7 tatrasman re 3d what you suggest works, and I think it does read well.

   For some reason I have in recent years shied away slightly from sticking apostrophes (for ‘is’ or ‘has’ e.g.) on definition words, probably because one of my eds doesn’t really like it, and I can see the point he makes. So today you were given ‘takes’ as a link word, in the sense (I suppose) that ‘what it takes to get PLAICE is I in PLACE’. Having that word in there can make it look like the part of speech (‘takes position’ = ‘place’?) is wrong when it isn’t, but there we are: these are the things that keep one awake at night.

   ‘Deep Purple drummer eating large fish’ would have been my preference, naturally.

10. Quite hard for me too with more than the usual number of unparsed ones here, including the two shortened words – NIC(k) in TUNIC and VALI(d) in CHEVALIER. I was fortunate in that the first ‘fossil’ to come to mind was ‘trilobite’ so 13a went in early, though it was very much a case of bung in answer first, parse later.

    I remember my Mum had the “NOEL COWARD at LAS VEGAS” LP back in the 1960’s. Apparently he was a big hit there.

    Thanks to Tees and PeeDee

11. Is the “old crown dependency” o + Man, rather than Oman? I don’t think Oman was ever formally a dependency. I am ashamed to admit that I only finally got Rigoletto by testing whether Rigan would be an envelope for some kind of “fit pair”

12. Petert @11
    You are correct. Oman was never a dependency. The parsing is O (old) MAN (a dependency).

13. Thank you petert @11 – lazy of me not to look up Oman in a reference somewhere, I just assumed it was going to be an ex-crown dependency. The blog is fixed now.

Comments are closed.