Category: Weekend Cryptic

Another fine Bob creation that garners nothing but praise from me. For a time, the surface of 1A seemed rather opaque, which isn’t his style, but that was my own fault.

An easy Saturday for me. Luckily the unfamiliar native American had come up earlier this month, generously spelled out on that occasion.

13:51, but with one silly error. I know perfectly well how to spell the town on the Isle of Wight but somehow allowed my false assumption about how to spell the golf tournament override that knowledge. Drat.

This was a struggle, full of clues that needed careful examination and littered with unfamiliar things like the racehorse and the Polish statesman, and some very long IKEA assembly clues like 9A and 12D. It all came out in the end, with a little help from a friend and more than one “aha” moment.

After spotting the two-letter definition, I wasn’t expecting the single-letter one! This was challenging and enlightening. I learned things, never having heard of the jacket at 10 or the culinary mixture at 25 or encountered the idiom at 26 or the pejorative expression at 13…

Straightforward vocabulary here, except perhaps for the musical instruction at 25A and the slightly unfamiliar answer at 1D. My last few solved were in the NW corner, but yielded to thought.

11:13. I really enjoyed this puzzle, and writing the blog up it was striking how simple many of the clues are. It’s a real model of concise elegance.

I spy with my little eye … many things starting with “i”: islands, the “i” newspaper, i=electrical current and maybe more. We also had some literary references. Some challenging vocabulary. Overall, not harder than your usual Saturday, I thought.

Another excellent offering from Dean. The surfaces are mostly deadpan, though 20 is pretty funny and 4 seems at first a somewhat nasty joke. The most fun this time may have been had from the CDs and the brilliant (semi-)&lit 12.

A cocktail, a light novel, a tropical island or Spanish dance. I definitely got the impression the setter might be thinking of a summer getaway. My LOI was 4A, which jumped out when I found the right French city. Overall, good fun!