This is a weekly unofficial contest based on your times for the Times cryptic crossword from Saturday to Friday. In July 2007, someone commenting on Tony Sever’s Times 2 RTC blog suggested a competition like … Read more “Unofficial Times cryptic RTC No. 7 – your times please”
Month: August 2007
23,694 – Showboating
Nothing too challenging today – a couple of unusual words that were easy to guess from the wordplay. Solving time – 8m22s ACROSS 1 SHOW-B(lue)OAT – The word length for this should have been (4,4) … Read more “23,694 – Showboating”
23,693 – a maze of twisty little passages, all different
Solving time: 12:18 I enjoyed this puzzle. Interesting words but no particularly obscure ones, and good surfaces. Annoyingly, it took me a long time to get two easy-looking ones: the long anagram at 3D (BE … Read more “23,693 – a maze of twisty little passages, all different”
23,692 – easy enough
Solving time 6:20 Started this at high speed, filling in most of the NW and hoping for a clean sweep until I got to 6D, where I (a) looked for “catches up” to match ???S … Read more “23,692 – easy enough”
Times Jumbo 712 – Author, author
Solving time: 1:05:24 Apologies for the late arrival of incoming Flight Number Jumbo 712 – I decided to take advantage of the very pleasant Bank Holiday weather and shot away at very short notice before … Read more “Times Jumbo 712 – Author, author”
Times 23691/mixed results
Solving time: 41:30 I was doing quite well on this for the NE, SE, SW quadrants only to spend 20 minutes on the NW. And I’m from the Pacific NW – very embarrassing. Some fix-ups … Read more “Times 23691/mixed results”
23690 – eh?
Solving time of 51 minutes Quite a straightforward start to the week. There were a few things that annoyed me slightly, such as the apostrophes in 21A and 26A, but it was all pretty soluble. … Read more “23690 – eh?”
Unofficial Times cryptic RTC contest No. 6 – results
After the fireworks of last week, we get back to that hard fact about competitive solving: speed is irrelevant if you make mistakes, so accurate solving at say 10 minutes a puzzle will beat just … Read more “Unofficial Times cryptic RTC contest No. 6 – results”
ST 4238 (Sun 19 Aug) – Chicken pox
Solving time: 20:44, one mistake (9ac) A disaster, mostly because 5dn (“An improvement on medical attention” (10)) took me nearly 15 minutes but also because having finally got there, and correctly guessed 24dn after some … Read more “ST 4238 (Sun 19 Aug) – Chicken pox”
Mephisto 2451 – Chris Feetenby – an extra H?
Straightforward enough, although I can’t quite see the wordplay in 1ac, and 11ac doesn’t appear in Chambers. Some excellent clues, especially 16ac, 27ac and 13dn. My only criticism, and it is very minor, is that … Read more “Mephisto 2451 – Chris Feetenby – an extra H?”