The crossword and "i"

 My last few posts have only had one or two views, so I'm putting this blog on hold for now.  I may return once I've worked out how I can get people to read it!

Jumbo General Knowledge Crossword (11 Sep) First pass: Across 7, Down 17 Second pass: Across 5, Down 3 Third pass (with Across entered): Down 4 Did rather better on the Down clues than the Across today.  Answers I should really have known included TOPEKA, MONTPELLIER, EPSOM SALTS and HONSHU.  Entered WHITE HOUSE (a guess) instead of WHITE NOISE for 8/3d, and managed to put FUCHSIA for 21d even though it didn't fit most of the crossers! Cryptic by Hypnos (#3118, Thu 4 Feb) Link to idothei (February 2021, blogged by jonofwales) Link to fifteensquared (December 2016, blogged by Pierre) First dip into my personal archive for a Sunday.  These are puzzles that accumulated while I was taking a break from cryptic crosswords earlier this year. Idothei wasn't doing star ratings back then, but I echo jonofwales' comments that "any expectations of a quick finish evaporated as a slow trudge through the grid ensued instead".  I started off fairly confidently but ground to a h

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3370) A few quibbles in this one.  What's the meaning of GONE FOR A BURTON (3/5)?  I thought it meant "dead", or maybe "broken beyond repair" - not "lost" or "getting beaten" (one of which is intended as the anagram indicator, but I'm not sure which).  It was quite a good anagram though.   1d needed UB = "benefit"; presumably a reference to unemployment benefit, which was replaced by Jobseeker's Allowance in the 1990s (and the latter has itself largely been superseded by Universal Credit).  And 6d was one of those double homophone clues: "smell" = "reek", "cable" = "wire", and REQUIRE sounds (approximately) like "reek wire".  However "reek wire" doesn't mean "smell cable", so aren't two homophone indicators needed again?  I can't work out the conventions on this. Concise (#3370) FILL + LATTERLY = "philately", which

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3369) Good, in all respects, and just what a Five-Clue should be.  No more to say. Concise (#3369) Pretty good as well, but I had to "back-solve" 5a from the pun ("place mat") because I hadn't heard of MATTE, "a mask used to obscure part of a image in a film and allow another image to be substituted" (COED).  I suppose there's a small quibble over whether 3d and 5d are dictionary phrases, but they were both obvious enough to cause no difficulty. Codeword (#3047) Q, L and U given; normally when you're given the Q you've got the U for free, but no such luck today!  Didn't have much trouble identifying 22 = E and then 25 had to be I, after which the rest mostly followed easily.  I did wonder whether 17 = K for LOCK and KERB, rather than LOCH and HERB, but then ASKEW forced K = 12.   Cryptic by Klingsor (#3305) Link to idothei (blogged by Saboteur) Link to Fifteensquared (June 2017, blogged by bertandjoyce)   Two stars

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

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3367) Just right today!  GDANSK was my favourite. Concise (#3367) Also just right.  HOLE + SAILOR for "wholesaler" was the pun.  Codeword (#3045) G, H and V given.  Very little to say about this either, but I enjoyed it. Cryptic by Dutch (#3303) Link to idothei (blogged by Borodin) Link to Fifteensquared (July 2017, blogged by RatjokaRiku)   Apart from one clue, solved in about my average time.  I'd agree with Borodin, the new blogger on idothei, who gave it three stars.  Favourite clue was maybe 13d for the clever way it split up the phrase; other contenders were the anagrams at 15a and 11d, and the hidden at 22d.  Sadly, I had to resort to Crossword Solver for 3d, where I should really have spotted the anagram; also for 8d, where I was misled into thinking that "store" was the definition. I didn't like 9a for two reasons; firstly it can hardly be said to be a dictionary phrase, and secondly it's surely two homophones rather than o

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3366) I struggled with this one quite a bit.  After working out SCATTER for 2d I ground to a halt, and had to look up 6d (ROCKER) to get going again.  I eventually realized that 4d had to be LILAC, even though the wordplay doesn't seem to work properly; it's LLAC (= "ring" up, a Down clue) about I, so the word order seems to be wrong.  1d came next; STAR in MUD for MUSTARD (I'd been sidetracked by Abba!).  That left 3/5, which had to be PUBLIC UTILITY, although since the electricity companies have all been privatised, I'm not sure if the definition quite works.  It also uses "up" as a reversal indicator even though it's an Across clue.  Not one of my favourites.   Concise (#3366) Struggled with this as well!  The pun was quite clever (CREWS + AWAIT for "cruiserweight"), but I was slow getting several of the answers like CUPOLA, MUCUS and LEES.  TRAMMEL for "hinder" wasn't at all obvious, and I only work

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3365) Most of this was straightforward, although 1d required knowledge of ENS, a term from metaphysics meaning "being or existence in the most general abstract sense" (Collins online).  It's not in the Concise Oxford, and although I've come across it in the wordplay in a couple of full-size cryptics, it seems rather obscure for the Five-Clue.  I thought 4d had the best surface, and I liked the anagram at 3/5.   Concise (#3365) I momentarily thought of BASIL for 1a before realizing that THYME was more likely for the pun, and indeed it proved so, combining with STABLE for "times table".  8a looked as though it might be A LOT, but the crosser from 6d revealed it to be A FEW; which is the better synonym for "several"?  I got stuck for a while in the SE corner because I could see that 11d started OVER- but couldn't get the rest, and I didn't know that PECAN could be a tree as well as a nut.  Once I'd sorted those out the

Jumbo General Knowledge Crossword (4 Sept) 1st pass: Across 10, Down 18 2nd pass: Across 6, Down 2 3rd pass (after checking Across answers): Down 2 This wasn't too bad an effort, helped by an astonishingly good run of Down answers on the first pass, although at 6d I was surprised that I'd never come across Botticelli's first name (SANDRO, as it turned out).  The only one I got wrong first time was 18a, which I assumed was TOM DALEY from the enumeration but turned out to be SKY BROWN.  15a had to be ETON something, but DORNEY escaped me.  At 27d I got CINCINNATI from the crossers but BENGALS was a total surprise.   The ones that I really should have known were MATTERHORN (32a) and CASANOVA (56a); the one I was most surprised to get was RICHARD SCARRY (53/48d).  It's amazing what's lurking at the back of one's mind sometimes! Cryptic by Hoskins (#3289, 23 Aug) Link to idothei (blogged by Saboteur) Link to Fifteensquared (May 2017, blogged by Simon Harding) "

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3364) Some really elegant clues today.  The one I particularly liked was 3a, PALAVER (PAL + AVER), for which one needs to know the well-used rhyming slang reference "China (plate)" = "mate".  Also nicely done was 5a, which had TREND in HEARING to give HEART-RENDING; as an aside, I'm slightly annoyed by the modern habit of saying "heart-wrenching" instead, presumably by confusion with "gut-wrenching".  I doubt whether anything much can be done about it though. 2d had (E + ST) in WEND to give WEST END.  I suppose non-London readers might have reason to complain that in other cities the West End isn't usually the theatre district, but London's West End is so well known that I think this slight metropolitan bias can be forgiven.  AWARD (A + WARD) for 4d was straightforward, but 1d was slightly more convoluted: (A + PH) in a reversal of LEAR to give RAPHAEL.  For this I needed to remember the Ordnance Survey abbreviati

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3363) I began with the cleverly concealed (Malcolm) SARGENT (2d); he died in 1967, and was a distinguished conductor in his day, but I'm not sure how many other people remember him now.  Next in was LEGAL TENDER (5/6), guessed mainly from the crossers and the definition.  Two fairly standard charades followed: REPLIES (3d) and CURATE (4a).  This left only 1d, which had to be QUALITY; I paused a bit over the definition of QUAY as "seaside", since a quay can be on a river as well, but it's good enough I suppose. Concise (#3363) I almost wrote ELBOW as the answer to 1a before realizing it was unlikely to be the first half of the top-line pun; instead WRIST and then REIGN led me to "restrain".  No problems after that until I got to 16a, which I originally misread as "militaria"; not knowing the actual word, I simply had to wait until the crossers gave me something plausible for the answer.  A trip to the dictionary confirmed that &q

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3362) 4/5 was my first one attempted but last one in; it clearly had to be an anagram, but I could only think of SEARCH SWEET, which meant nothing to me.  So I started with 1d, which appeared to be a homophone; I correctly guessed PHASE IN even though the homophone (FEY SIN) didn't work for me, since I pronounce "phase" identically to "faze".  (Does anyone pronounce it like "face", as the clue suggests?) The wading bird in 2d couldn't be a HERON, so it had to be an EGRET, leading to REGRETS.  Another bird in 3d, which was explicitly "hiding" in "Mr Edwin Gagiano" (a South African actor I'd never heard of), and so had to be REDWING.  (How often do we see "hiding" to indicate a hidden answer?  Perhaps the compiler was being deliberately kind today.)  6a was the fairly well-worn charade of IN-TENT, and now I had all the crossers to solve the anagram at 4/5: CHEESE STRAW.  Oddly satisfying. Concise

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3361) Polished off quickly, but much appreciated.  The main cryptic, being a four-year-old reprint, doesn't usually include topical references, but today we had two references to the time of year in 3/5 and 1d.  The cryptic definition in the former made me smile, and I thought 4d was cleverly put together as well.  Sometimes I think it's a shame that these clues don't get the level of attention given to the main puzzle. Concise (#3361) I fell into a trap with this one - not sure if it was intentional.  I wrote in HELTER SKELTER for 3d, which fitted the definition, and also fitted perfectly with the crossers at 8a, 10a, 19a and 21a.  However it left me with H?K?H for 1a (which looked like an Arabic word), I?T?S? for 12a and ?R?E?H?A?I?G for 15a, none of which suggested anything.  Fortunately the top-line pun came to my rescue - 1a had to be HIKER for "high commission" and I then realized my error.  Even then it took me a while to work out 15a as