Author: ilanc

My last two clues were 16D/21A — and I still wonder about the latter. Had to guess that ORATORIAN was yet another priest (after yesterday’s flamen somewhere). Not sure about PERON’s wordplay yet either. Peter … Read more “Times 23739 – Ian Eddy”

NE corner held me up for quite some time — not sure of overall timing since had many interrupts but total elapsed time <1h. I found 9A, 11A and 13A to be rather fiendish or … Read more “Times 23733 – wipers”

Solving time: 40:10 A bit of a challenge that had me looking a thing or two up – note that my time for this is more than Peter’s cumulative time at the recent championship. I … Read more “Times 23727/almost completely die”

Solving time: untimed but pretty rapid (with one undone clue). Not a hard puzzle – I went through it at a clip last night after a long hard day at work while eating Thai food … Read more “Times 23721 – it was a near thing”

Sorry I’m late with this – I’m in a new job and had to interleave solving this with a million other things. None of which I managed to finish at work. Had to wrap this … Read more “Times 23715/it’s Tuesday again”

Solving time: 35’ I think the Tuesday curse has been lifted. I got about half of the clues in my first “cold solve” sweep which is a very high percentage for me. Heraldry not being … Read more “Times 23709/only one trouble spot”

Solving time: 1h10 I seem to have got myself into a series of hard Tuesdays. Had to resort to online help for a couple here – partly because I made a couple of bad initial … Read more “Times 23703/if it’s Tuesday, it must be hard”

Solving time: 43:30 A lot easier than last week’s Tuesday and a lot harder than yesterday’s. I made quite good progress at first, so good that I thought another sub-30’ was in the cards, but … Read more “Times 23697/tough birds”

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”

Solving time: 37:50 Pretty straightforward pour moi – though had to defer to refs for a couple (couldn’t place the two Dickens refs: Jarndyce and Miss Pecksniff). Other than STOT, vocab was all pretty familiar … Read more “Times 23685/mercy!”