Mister Sting

‘Down Under’? Is it – finally – a ‘Neighbours’ themed EV? Will the clues include phrases such as ‘a bit of a barbie’ and ‘Ramsay Street’?

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When I was solving this puzzle, I wasn’t sure whether it was my turn to blog or not. I was happy to find out that it was, since I found it a lovely diversion: a pleasant decoration of time, as I think someone* said of music.

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Sorry I’m a little late in publishing this.

I thought we’d had a Raich offering relatively recently, but a quick check tells me we haven’t had one for around 15 months. In any case, there’s been a common feature in the themes of the last few Raichs – what about this one?

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There are two errors in the first sentence of this EV’s preamble. There are dots rather than commas separating some of the numbers giving word lengths for the quotation, which is described as “running clockwise IN THE MOST of the perimeter”. I appreciate that these are small mistakes (and not the setter’s fault), but they irk me.

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An ominous title to this EV. Will Chalicea leave me in the Dark?

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Recently, there have been a number of EVs that have left me staring blankly at a filled grid, unclear as to how to proceed. Although it shouldn’t have been, this was one of those.

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First of all, let’s have a rant. The editing was shoddy. Again. There was a missing bar in the grid (making 47ac appear to have 7 letters), ‘for’ was written as ‘fo’ in 7dn, while ‘or’ replaced ‘of’ in 30ac. Only the 7ac mistake was innocuous. I’m sure that the puzzles could be proof read by some enthusiastic amateur if there’s no one willing to do the job properly at the newspaper. At the very least, they could be fixed in the online version. But I digress…

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An abundance of missing and added letters and words this week. To be precise, 15 omitted letters, 21 extra letters and 4 extra words. But a ‘single shot’. What could it all mean?

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A simple enough preamble introduces ‘Small Change’. All clues have an extra letter in their subsidiary indication, and these letters spell out an instruction. All well and good, but will the small change prove to be a big headache?

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Hopefully I’ve got the right puzzle this time. Let’s check… 1027. Yes. Good.
Many apologies for posting the wrong one earlier.

Shark’s ‘Checkmate’ has extra letters and highlighting galore, which I’d like. I’d also like it if ‘Checkmate’ was a reference to the Wu-Tang Clan (warning: link contains rap music), but I doubt it will be. (It’s not.)

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I’ll get my grumble out of the way first: the crossword editor should be hanged. There were FIVE length errors (46 across and 2, 16, 32, 42 down). These didn’t make solving harder, but such mistakes can do so, and are in any case unacceptably sloppy. Also, 38dn should have been hyphenated, and this did affect the difficulty. Furthermore, speaking of affects, 31ac read ‘AFTER AFFECTS’, rather than ‘AFTEREFFECTS’.

No one who solves the Enigmatic Variations with any regularity will be inclined to the opinion that perhaps the editor had an off day, as errors are far too common. In summary, next time I suggest that the editor uses the time-honoured technique of actually looking at the puzzle. With their eyes.

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A standard format this week: missing letters form a message that will hopefully give enough information about the theme to allow the grid to be filled in without too much difficulty.

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