Solving time: 5’04” I had a bad start, making a pig’s ear of the top left and working ‘up and left’ through the grid which is always much slower, so I expect others to have … Read more “23,511 – The name game”
Category: Daily Cryptic
23,510 – and all that jazz?
Solving time: about 1 hour 20 minutes Enjoyable enough – decent wordplay (difficult in places) but quite a few smiles to be had. Apologies for today’s brevity (and lack of my usual hypertextuality) – a … Read more “23,510 – and all that jazz?”
23,508 – Stupider and stupider
Solving time : 9m04s – Feels like a fairly feeble time for a puzzle that didn’t in retrospect have anything monstrous (except perhaps GILLRAY, which was well-checked and well-clued), but I really got a bit … Read more “23,508 – Stupider and stupider”
23507 – parse mildly livid
Solving time : 15:24 A very enjoyable crossword. Clever surfaces (eg 1A, 1D, 14) and mainly economic cluing – by my counting only ten of the clues have linkwords. I don’t object to linkwords, but … Read more “23507 – parse mildly livid”
23,506 – A mistake made stupIDLY
Solving time 7:45, but one wrong answer. Calming down from my irritation with myself, there’s some good stuff here, with interesting steps like “unfortunate lot of chickens” => FOWL PEST. Beginner’s notebook entries: O.R. = … Read more “23,506 – A mistake made stupIDLY”
23,505 – Corridor of uncertainty
Solving time: 23’40” (last 14 mins on 1ac and 2dn) I didn’t solve the first few clues I looked at, but after that seemed to get on pretty well with what felt a trickyish puzzle. … Read more “23,505 – Corridor of uncertainty”
23,504 – An enjoyable caper
Solving time : 41 minutesA pretty quick time for me today – a mix of standard wordplay that I am quite used to now, and some good surface readings that weren’t too confusing. I particularly … Read more “23,504 – An enjoyable caper”
23,502 – I’m grinding MY teeth
Solving time : 9m54s – this crossword frustratingly kept me at bay – a lot of the answers, when I eventually got them, showed no reason why they should have taken so long from the … Read more “23,502 – I’m grinding MY teeth”
23501 – 9A
Solving time : 9:52 Apologies if my review seems a bit liverish. Last night was excellent fun, and my head is suffering slightly this morning from the beer, Rioja and puzzles. I have a suspicion … Read more “23501 – 9A”
23,500 – time to sort out a couple of points
Solving time 6:44 I enjoyed this puzzle, although there were a couple of clues I didn’t fully understand until writing up these notes. Left side was fairly empty until a lucky quick bit of anagram-spotting … Read more “23,500 – time to sort out a couple of points”