Hello again. This Jumbo I thought was rather more straightforward than average, with no unknowns and only one spelling issue (at 34dn). Certainly a great deal easier than the beast that was 1548, the last one I blogged. There seemed to be a lot of girls (Ena, Esther, Lucy, Susie) and quite a lot of extremely long single words clued with anagrams. What did you think?
Month: May 2022
Quick Cryptic 2134 by Teazel
This took a while to get going, and I stared for ages at 15dn until it twigged, so an above-par time of 9 minutes for me. Nice surfaces generally. My COD has to be 16ac.
Times 28,289: Friday the Sans Teeth
Well, if you can’t count on an absolute stinker of a tough Friday puzzle on Friday 13th, when can you count on one, I ask you? This was all pretty gentle stuff, add or insert a letter into something and match to a not-remotely-deceitful synonym of the desired answer at the clue’s beginning or end. More Man Friday than Freddy Krueger, really.
Times Quick Cryptic No 2133 by Mara
A plethora of anagrams and double definitions from Mara today, my second consecutive blog of a Mara puzzle. I like the dd at 1d, and the device used to drop letters from 16d, and give clues of the day jointly to them. 1a was FOI. Hopefully you will all find this one satisfyingly doable. I don’t have an accurate time as busy doing other things, but I feel this was certainly within my target.
Times 28288 – all welly, no wanging
Time taken: 8:59. Parts of this were tricky, and there were two that I had my fingers crossed for when I hit submit, but they both turned out to be OK.
Times Quick Cryptic 2132 by Izetti
5:56, for what felt like a decent workout. There were a handful of words here I didn’t quite know, so writing this blog will be an education! Speaking of which, I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’ve been enrol(l)ed in a Master’s program here in New York City. I’ve just finished my last assignment of the semester, so I hope to return to daily puzzling after I finish my finals!
Times 28287 – two kinds of firsts.
My first time blogging for the new site then copied here, as opposed to last week’s when that process was reversed. As it happened, I found this puzzle an easy one and set a new PB by completing it in 10 minutes and a few seconds. Afterwards I looked up 17a on Wikipedia, it was a word I’d heard of in a calendar context but didn’t know what or when it was. Not much else to add about this one.
Times Cryptic 28286
Solving time: 33 minutes. An interesting and mostly enjoyable puzzle that seemed to take longer to solve than the time recorded on the clock.
Times Quick Cryptic 2131 by Breadman
I made something of a meal of this, finishing in 12 minutes. Some good, fun clues to enjoy – thanks Breadman.
Meetup at The George
On Saturday we had a meet-up of a few folk from here at The George, our traditional watering hole in London in Borough High St, close to The Times offices.