Solved in 33 mins, which I was pretty pleased with. I didn’t have a very good time last week – three puzzles which I didn’t finish without resorting to dictionary or web.I thought this might … Read more “23845 – doctors and actors”
Category: Daily Cryptic
ST 4264 (Sun 17 Feb) – Bowled out
Solving time: 15 mins I had a bit of a shocker on this, especially on 27dn (BOWL) and in the top left where I got stuck on 1ac (STALWART), 2dn (ANIMAL) and 9ac (DRIFTERS?). Clarification … Read more “ST 4264 (Sun 17 Feb) – Bowled out”
23,843 – floundered
Solving time – 16:35 (with one answer missing). Well, I managed to fill the grid reasonably quickly (except for 27a) but a lot of answers went in as semi-confident guesses as I didn’t understand some … Read more “23,843 – floundered”
Times 23,842
Solving time: 17:44 Found this rather tricky. Some odd words cropping up. I don’t know if I have come across ETCHANT before, so having such interesting wordplay was a challenge. And LOGE (box) and PETER … Read more “Times 23,842”
23,841 – pangrammatic poser
Solving time:23 minutes when unwisely solved late last night. I thnk it should have taken about 15. Lots of fiendish clues – it was quite hard to find a few to miss out. Given the … Read more “23,841 – pangrammatic poser”
Times 23,840 – A late Valentine
Across 1 SCATTERBRAINED – how do you make it? You ‘scatter’ BREADIN* is how. 12 WATERMARK – W(ith) A TERM ARK. 13 ESCARGOT – true, not much is slower than a snail – CARGO in … Read more “Times 23,840 – A late Valentine”
23839 – Testing
I did this in a few installments over the day. Probably about an hour altogether – I never really got going.I did really enjoy it, although I think it was one of the harder Mondays … Read more “23839 – Testing”
ST 4263 (Sun 10 Feb) – Pro errata
Solving time: 6:30 Some good clues in this. As usual, this puzzle contained ERRATA, but for once only as a clue answer (15ac) – there were no editorial howlers this week (that I spotted, anyway). … Read more “ST 4263 (Sun 10 Feb) – Pro errata”
Times 23837 – Phew!
This took me a good hour but I probably spent longer working out the clues whilst solving than I normally would. There was some lovely stuff along the way and only a couple of queries or … Read more “Times 23837 – Phew!”
Times 23,836
Solving time: 9:44 Good fun. I filled in about three quarters of it pretty quickly but slowed for the north-east corner. If only I had been able to solve the anagram at 6 (ORCHESTRATE) on … Read more “Times 23,836”