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Introducing "The Crossword and i"

This is a new blog documenting the crosswords and some of the other word puzzles in the daily i newspaper.  Each day from Monday to Saturday I'll be giving my thoughts on the Five-Clue Cryptic, Concise, Codeword and main Cryptic, along with any other puzzles I think are worth commenting on.  They'll probably appear by mid-afternoon, depending on my other commitments and on how tough the puzzles are that day. On Sundays, when the paper isn't published, I'll be going through some unsolved Cryptic puzzles, either ones I was unable to complete during the week, or older ones from my backlog (accumulated during February and March).  This week only, I'll be attempting Saturday's puzzle on Sunday because of lack of time today; in reserve I also have #3289 from last Monday, when I was away. There's not normally much to say about the Saturday Jumbo General Knowledge Crossword - either you know the answers or you don't - but if I have any comments I'll be incl...
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Thursday 9 September 2021

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3368) "Males do get drunk repetitively; that's nothing new" (4,3,4,3).  Answer: SAME OLD SAME OLD. This would be a worthy winner of Clue of the Day if it were in the main puzzle: but it goes uncommented on at idothei, as they don't concern themselves with the Five-Clue.  Shame really!  The other clues were all pretty good as well, although I didn't know FED = "G-man" and had to fill in 2d partly by guesswork. Concise (#3368) The three-word puns are usually even more painful than the two-word ones.  I had CAT and OLD but couldn't get the middle word for "evade" for some time, thinking it must be SKIVE; CAT-SHIRK-OLD eventually revealed itself as "catch a cold", but it took a certain amount of straining.  Other clues that held me up were 11a, BESIEGE (I had DELIMIT until getting 5d) and 10a, which I didn't know at all; Crossword Solver led me to BOUGAINVILLEA, "any of several South American ornamental wo...
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