17:34 for this one – mostly not too hard but I got into difficulties with 17D/29A, as I had 17 ending in D which left 29 as an unlikely-looking set of checking letters ?D?N?N?E?E. Worked … Read more “Saturday Times 25029 (Dec 10th)”
Month: December 2011
Times 25034 – No Sweatsville…
31 minutes for this one so on a non-blogging day I would definitely have beaten the 30 minute barrier that is the best I can hope to achieve fairly regularly. Absolutely no quibbles today (hooray!). … Read more “Times 25034 – No Sweatsville…”
Times 25033 – cats and snakes and naked ladies (oh my!)
Solving time : 20 minutes, 48 seconds on my handy-dandy smartassphone timer, but a full 10 minutes of that was spent on the top left corner which decided to evade my probing forever. Funny thing … Read more “Times 25033 – cats and snakes and naked ladies (oh my!)”
Times 25032: Chin-chin!
Solving time: 36:12 Another Finals puzzle (No.1, I’m told) and I hope there’ll be a further analysis from Mark G. (via linxit) to go with my bare-bones blog. I tried doing this under competition conditions: … Read more “Times 25032: Chin-chin!”
Times 25,031 A Bit Corny In Parts
Solving time 15 minutes Very straightforward puzzle with some corny cryptic definitions and a couple of slightly questionable definitions but overall no problem I would think. Across 1 FATHOMED – F(AT-HOME)D; an AT-HOME is a … Read more “Times 25,031 A Bit Corny In Parts”
Times 25030 – Up in Xanadu, diamonds fell like rain…..
Solving time: 22 minutes Music: Dvorak, New World Symphony, Horenstein/RPO A rather simple puzzle that should result in some fast times among our crew. There is virtually no attempt to conceal the literals, making it … Read more “Times 25030 – Up in Xanadu, diamonds fell like rain…..”
Mephisto 2675 – Paul McKenna
I remember getting about half of this out sitting in the sun sipping on coffee, my ususal position for starting to tackle the Sunday offerings. The left hand side went in almost immediately and I … Read more “Mephisto 2675 – Paul McKenna”
Sunday Times 4462 (4 Dec 2011)
Solving time: 42:35 A tough, but entertaining crossword, but with some fairly obscure words like ASTARTE & BILK made up for by some clever wordplay. Pretty standard Tim Moorey fare, in other words. cd = … Read more “Sunday Times 4462 (4 Dec 2011)”
Saturday Times 25023 (Dec 3rd)
Solving time 13:20 – a bit of a relief to have an easier one after the previous two monsters. There was a bit of tricky vocabulary and some GK required for this one, but the … Read more “Saturday Times 25023 (Dec 3rd)”
Jumbo 953
Nothing particularly special in this, a steady solve. I don’t have a time recorded, but probably around 30 minutes. A couple of solutions (25A, 2D) took a bit of working out for the wordplay, but … Read more “Jumbo 953”