11 comments on “Bonus Puzzle #007”

  1. This is a difficult puzzle that I had to work hard at. As usual with Anax he leads you down lots of blind alleys before you finally sort the often well concealed definition from the crafty wordplay. There might be a typo at 2D – demoted rather than promoted?Even the homophone is good – and that is praise indeed coming from this quarter! Well done Anax and thanks.
    1. Oh I don’t know, Jimbo. Reading the clue again, I’m inclined towards the “You made a pig’s ear of that one mate” school of thought.

      For the past few months I’ve been using MS Word in a very basic fashion to work out wordplay; just type the answer, look at it, then type in any ideas that spring to mind. Entering both answer and wordplay fodder for this one, I suspect I may have forgotten which was which and latched on to “promoted” as it sounded more convincing in the surface reading.

      I’m not getting too old for this, honest I’m not.

      1. Its a bit like an Escher drawing. The more you look at it the more it messes with your brain!
        1. I agree. The more you read it the more you convince yourself it could be a case of “The answer would be this if you do this with the wordplay”. I’m almost tempted to think it becomes more acceptable, but I’ve changed it anyway. Even if a second reading makes the wordplay apparently fit, the original isn’t specific enough to pass muster.
  2. Just over 3 minutes….sorry days. Ended up missing 9a and 4d. With 9a I thought of the correct answer on first read through but couldn’t justify it – I still can’t. 4d I have no excuse for other than my brain has been frazzled.
    As usual a real battle with Anax. Really difficult but really satisfying.
  3. A slow 43 minutes late last night. I was going to quibble about 10A’s die=cast but both have the “mould” meaning in Collins. Two quibbles left: At 17A, a polka is Bohemian rather than Russian, and at 21D I think the first word needs to be “Whose” rather than “Who’s”.

    The rest is very hard but fair – I liked the upper class fish, though my initial guess was that the pun would be something like trout=trite from house=”hice”. 14D was also a gem. Good selection of vocab-stretching answer words, At 27A I was quite surprised not to have the soldiers changing one letter in a shoe.

  4. No-one will find this as I’m so late, but glad to find everyone else found it difficult. It was a monster, spatchcock going in last.

    I wasn’t quite sure what the ‘lab counter’ was in CONDESCENDING, and didn’t understand 20ac fully, though it may not be the type of clue that’d be allowed into The Times. 6ac held me up for ages.

    1. ;o)
      “Lab counter” = CON (Labour/Conservative). “Lab counter” could thus equally be LibDem but in crosswordland Con would be the more likely.

      I wondered if someone would pick up on 20A. The answer is of course SUCK-IT-AND-SEE and it works thus:

      Blow witness away after trial (4-2-3-3)
      Contrary to first reading, BLOW=SUCK isn’t an, er, distasteful reference. In US slang, to suck is to be rubbish, useless etc., as in “This job sucks”. “Blow” is used to mean precisely the same thing. The “witness away after” part sees “away” used in the sense of an invitation, in the same way that in inviting someone to ask questions one might say “Fire/ask away”.

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