What a blissful week of British crosswords. Have you been indulging? I’d rate this week’s Arachne and Loroso (FT) as being two of the finest tussles for quite a stretch. In case you’ve lacked the time – or tipoff – then here are X divine clues (to solve) and a handful of spoiler huhs from Arachne (and others) to answer.
ARACHNE
Marvellous Madoff? (5-5)
Transform an annoying person into a B-lister? (9)
Two English animals on the loose in Pacific region (9)
Diplomat’s encouragement of revolutionary? (7)
Altogether fascinated by muscle reflex (2,5)
LOROSO
Moving? What, moving walls? (9)
Plug fitted in upright base (8)
Wicket taken by present bowler? Well? (4,4)
Entering temple, hostage turns as I swear (2,4,2)
Perhaps stripper, fighting back, has to get rid off going topless (3,6)
HUHS
Removing meat from menu, serves exceptional seafood = MUSSEL
Ban is such as to make one fearful = UNMAN
Cap in hand over foreign money, a beast picking over carcasses = HYENA
Relating to heart and – say – club correlation? = CARDIAC
Boring with Mandela in charge? = PROSAIC
Can you answer the golden clues? Can you explain the opaque clues? Can you draft snazzy clues for any of these 15 answers? We shall see.
Remember that film-maker, the one seeking a visual clue for his movie? We had a Storm toying with the shapes of letters, dreaming up some ingenious stuff. Still can’t say for sure whether our auteur used any of the podium material…however: do you feel like one more reel challenge?
The film-maker has only now dropped a line with a very particular question for a very ambiguous pathway. Why not let Dilan explain:
“I’m at that point where I need to determine a clue whose solution is ‘cryptic’. Do you have any suggestions for what that clue could be? Preferably it is one where there are a few potentially viable alternatives…”
No promises, no Oscars, but if you’d like to take up the challenge, the forum is open. I’ll be having a dip as well. (Just ensure you don’t betray your cover names from the Storm, as I’ve done before.) May the best clue win the limelight.
To mark the start of a new financial year, we look at some of the weirder-arsed coinage of the world. (I swear only bankers without frontiers know these twelve.) Our challenge is to choose a currency per continent – Asia, Africa, Europe – and make a clue involving wordplay only.
Play all you like, coining clues for all twelve of course, but come ‘deposit’ time on Thursday afternoon, only one per continent can be nominated.
Use a monetary alias, please, and offer financial advice if you see an opportunity. Bank your three clues between 1-5 on Thursday, by declaring your final 3-coin shortlist in the forum. Then on Friday, we assess the market and vote 3/1 for each continent, emailing to DAMail a total of six votes.
Clear as krona? Let’s meet the moolah:
ASIA
ngultrum (Bhutan)
ringgit (Malaysia)
rufiyaa (Maldives)
togrog (Mongolia)
AFRICA
ekwele (Eq Guinea)
kwacha (Zambia)
lilangeni (Swaziland)
nakfa (Eritrea)
EUROPE
dinheiro (Portugal)
hryvnia (Ukraine)
markka (Finland)
perper (Montenegro)
Happy conversion, and may the best merchant banker win.
Planetary bikes. Beatnik players. Payable stinker. (At least Tanya Plibersek has plenty of anagram potential.) But the rest of the new Rudd team are pretty frugal with their pliable letters. If you don’t believe me, see if you can make any cogent combo out of these new (or recycled) ministers:
Jenny Macklin
Penny Wong
Jacinta Collins
Brendan O'Connor
Warren Snowdon
Five names, with 14 bloody Ns. (It’s just as well Neil Finn, Nene King and Anna Karenina kept their distance from Canberra.) See if anyone can reweave these stubborn strings.
You’ll be cheered to learn I have regained my voice, and my tranquil desk reign, this week, after a stormy patch of work and poor health has robbed us of our usual Storm games.
That said, ‘voting’ Storms will be a little less frequent in this new FY – more like once or twice a month – in tandem with regular clue/wordplay games where winners are not determined. Think this keeps us all a tad fresher, and frees up CL, and my Saturday mornings. Don’t worry. DA Central will always offer plenty of mind-gum to chew, and chances to vaunt your devious stuff.
Have a great week, and don’t forget Wednesay’s Times (tips Athony) is a lollapalooza. Here’s hoping the Guardian gang are equally evasive.
All 12 answers use I, and only I as their vowel. IMPLICIT in these instructions, I should add, is that no Y appears either.
BRICK KILN, for example, should warm you up. As would a STIFF DRINK! Happy DISTILLING – and can you add to this I-RICH-LIST?
- Christ’s origin (6,5)
- Movie mutt (3,3,3)
- Cohabiting? (6,2,3)
- Hazy (10)
- Tron, eg (3-2,4)
- Dickensian hero (6,6)
- Archaeopteryx (7,4)
- Main (5-6)
- Elation (4,7)
- Gum gripe (10)
- Gadgeteer (4,5)
- Maersk, say (8,4)
SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB418 SOLUTION: Dustin/g, aspirin/g, muffin/g, Scullin/g, jerkin/g, tiffin/g, gamin/g, matin/g
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Two head-scratchers for your solving pleasure this morning. (I’ve also posted the first puzzle on Twitter at the same time – to see who’s smarter: tweeps or dabblers.) And just to lighten your load, the day’s bulletin concludes on a fun idea, with some gag potential to lead into the weekend. Here we go:
Conundrum #1: I have in mind a four-syllable word. The first two syllables relate to music. The last two syllables spell something you eat. Yet the whole word has no connection to music or food. So what’s the word?
Conundrum #2: This time I’m musing a six-letter noun that is named after the object that created it. Perhaps such an oddity is not so rare, but I can’t think of another example. What am I pondering?
Folly: Many books and films have poor openers, but improve as the story develops. So let’s make a list of some infamous false starts like:
Zone with the Wind – nursing home
Girt Music – our national anthem
Fission Impossible – the story of aluminium
Can of Steel – see above
Can you add to our false-start folly? Just first word’s initial only.
Love this nifty puzzle from Graham Hanlon, a maths teacher with a dangerous flair for wordplay. I wish I could say I’ve nailed the solution, though I’ve yet to examine the patterns in closer detail. Before I do, I thought I’d share Graham’s devilry in the meantime.
Beware all browsers, if you wish to figure out the code on you lonesome, then I suggest you resist the Comments, as all comers are welcome to identify the group. (And can you construct your own encoded list?)
In Graham’s own words: “I’m thinking of a set of 9 objects, where each 1 stands for the same letter and similarly for 2 and 3.” Meanwhile zero stands for any other letter. What’s the set?
1 2 3
0 0 0 0 2 0 0
0 0 3 2 1
0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 1
0 2 0 0 0 0 0
1 0 0 2 0 3
0 0 0 3 2 1
3 0 0 0 2 3 0
Thanks to GH for the puzzle. A deft roll-call. And if you have a puzzle to share, send it in. These teasers are the mental callisthenics we love here.
After 36 hours of tiptoeing amid lapsed leases, old cookies, faulty DNS reroutes and a guy called Raj in Manila, I’m back, baby. Without a voice, thanks to laryngitis, but with a forum at least. Thanks everyone for your patience.
So let’s have some fun with the Origin players, where you have to devise some devious wordplay for any Queensland star (Group 1), any NSW star (Group 2), and any one of the debutantes (3). A prize of gladiatorial glory to the best trio, without formal votes needed.
Group 1: Greg Inglis, Billy Slater, Cooper Cronk, Johnathon Thurston, Cameron Smith, Mal Meninga
Group 2: Paul Gallen, Josh Morris, Robbie Farah, Luke Lewis, Greg Bird, Mitchell Pearce, Laurie Daley
Group 3: Nathan Merritt, Aaron Woods, Andrew Fifita, Chris McQueen, Daly Cherry-Evans, Josh Papalii
And may the best combo win – tonight, and in the next few days here.
So where was the DA website for 12 hours? No idea, good people. I thought the problem was failing to renew my domain lease. I still don’t know. We may yet turn into a pumpkin by the close of business. But let me roll out a Salon post before that eventuates.
Google Poems – have you seen these things? Once you start this search quest, an hour can whiz by. All you have to do is key in a sentence opener, and see what the great good Google suggests. For example, WHY DO WE…opens up YAWN, DREAM, CRY, HICCUP. While I’M…renders BORED, ON A BOAT, DIFFERENT, YOURS. Who can find the best one this week – I DARE YOU TO…
Solved Paul last night – a few Albion phrases I didn’t know, but fun. And cracked today’s Times over lunch, despite my laryngitis, loving the deletion technnique of 1dn, and the bilingual chic of 11ac. It’s a fine puzzle, and worth your coin.
By the way, the winter solstice event in Albury was momentous, drawing a crowd of some 800 people, with a real sense of the event being replicated in other places to keep the vital conversation about suicide alive. Here’s more if the matter interests you. I was honoured to take part
Have a great week, whether or not you can speak…
If bird dressing is robin robing, and lifting dried fruit is raising raisin, how will you go at solving our other pairs? (And if you’re willin', can you add to this elite set of pairs?)
- Mr Hoffman cleaning
- Pill-wishing
- Roll bungling
- Ex-PM rowing
- Waving jacket
- Lunch spat
- Waif at casino?
- Sex service
SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB417 SOLUTION: India, Nepal, China; Peru, Ecuador, Colombia; Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan; Bulgaria, Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia; Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Sudan; Hungary, Austria, Italy, Liechtenstein
To keep your clue craft honed over the weekend, who can concoct the best clues for these recent headline grabbers? (James Gandolfini has already been anagrammed into a dozen phrases, most of them enlisting MAFIA, DON, NJ or DIES.) Good luck, and go you Wallabies.
- Irish and British Lions
- Michelle de Kretser
- Holgier Osieck (Socceroos coach)
- Tony Soprano
- Dolce and Gabbana (done for tax fraud)
- Edward Snowden (PRISM whistleblower)
By the time you’re reading this post, the prize-winners may have been selected on 702 ABC. (Check out Adam Spencer’s ABC blog to see the lowdown, if the clock has passed 8am.) The game is part of the #daplay series, toying with a theme inspired by a Socceroo headline.
Can you combine celebrity with geography? Just like the burghers of Sydney renamed the quay’s overpass as the Tim Cahill Expressway, after our team’s main striker, the challenge is to name other celebs (sport, film, politics, anywhere) who can be honoured by a place on the map.
What about Manhattenborough? Or Nelson Mandelaware? Then there’s the tinsel-town precinct of eastern Sydney, stretching from The Roxburgh to Geoffrey Rushcutters Bay, onto Edgertoncliff, Rose Byrne Bay and Wattson Bay. Pick anywhere in the atlas, or any hero in your heart, and see if you can splice the two strands in homage.
Gandolfiniland? Manly Beachley? It’s addictive.
It came. It sputtered. It went. Twitter can be dimissive like that, the hashtag challenge of ‘spoodfoonerisms’ attracting a grand total of one entry: not poodle.
Not my tweet, I hasten to add, but a gentleman who goes by the avatar of Lexiconman101. So rather than doubling his paltry list, I thought I’d duplicate the challenge here on the blog.
But can we fill a supermarket aisle with these concoctions? And who will Kraft the Pedigree example among Equals? My openers:
lack of ram
Seeger bingles
ninja jut
B-tone
pasty hooding
sop chewy
moat eel
Nothing brilliant, yet. But I do like the combo – tucker and letter twisting. To hell with too many cooks: let’s make a premium range of spoodfoonerisms.
This week’s freewheel Storm – no votes, but untold glory – is a challenge inspired by an RK crossword in the latest Big Issue. (At last your chance to buy the magazine with a selfish motive!) The key clue was this:
Rich change spouse to get well? (7)
The answer is HEALTHY, where WEALTHY swaps its wife (W) for husband (H). A neat & new trick, and one that provokes the question: what other words can get the same treatment?
I see this Storm as two-tier. The first is to create two clues for both words (HALLOWED and WALLOWED) in order to win the best-clue pairing. The other tier is the comical, where you swap a spouse for a droll makeover, such as:
S.H.A.T. TEAM – Nervous police commandoes
IF THERE’S A HILL, THERE’S A HAY – Farmer’s logic stacking up
HITCH DOCTOR – marriage counsellor
This is a perfect Storm for votes, but my week is too ragged. And besides, there’s something appealing about jousting without a jury for a change. Wave fun with this, and hell done RK on a clever idea.
Slow but steady this week, with a delayed Salon, and a vote-free Storm a bit later. The key reason lies in an event I’m hosting this Friday, as part of winter solstice, the same get-together I was helping to promote on 774ABC this morning.
You may have read my Wordplay column last week – all about the language of suicide. The topic is in league with my MC duties in Albury on Friday, where I will be hosting speakers and performers to help break the silence surrounding this social taboo. My link is a personal one, having lost a dear family friend when she was only 15, back in 2011. If you wish to learn more, listen here.
I’m sure you’ll excuse the haphazard week, and I hope you enjoy the best of Brit crosswords (today’s Times looks sublime), and the diversions here at DA Central. For example, I can think of at least four one-word movies that also happen to be brand names. Zodiac (makers of surf boats) and Tootsie (as in Tootsie Roll chocolates) aren’t on the list. So what titles are there?
Happy puzzling. Have a great light-lite week.
BURK – I’ve just discovered – represents the combined economies of Belarus, Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan. If that’s the case, then what other adjacent clusters of nations can claim these acronyms?
(You may need your atlas if you’re no student of geography. And while the book’s open, is there any other adjacent acronym to engineer?)
- INC
- PEC
- PITA
- BUMS
- TURKS
- HAIL
SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB416 SOLUTION: TV SHOWS: The Nanny, Insiders, Lateline, Star Trek (Iron Chef)
Well, well – quite the bookie-breaker this Storm, a fitting oddity in terms of unplaced favourites. (I for one will be licking my wounds this week.) But let’s get to the numbers, and which players made the best fist of clueing words with odd letters only.
The top six in the open clue section were all five-star contrivances, each deserving its own fanzine. Here’s the tally in ascending order:
MAGI = Coma gimmick masks wise guys [Hidden hoodlums snare 12 points from 4 votes for Cameo Mask.]
YAW = Zigzag railway [Rating high in my appraisal, this subtle trick from Awesome also bags a dozen, from 5 votes.]
COY = Modest charity case accepts nothing [Adroit use of case – one of my new wordplay toys – by Wise Guy, for a 15/6 dividend.]
MICKEY MOUSE = Melodramatic tone in ghastly emo music [Great name, and splendid story, Squeegee does this biz with 16/4.]
COCKAMAMIE = Make a comic – Goofy! [Succinct & sensational, earning the selfsame Squeegee an additional 18/5.]
SWAY = Shorten’s foremost means to power [No less triumphant, Wise Guy dips doubly with his timely ACT dig, getting 23/8 in return.]
At this point, added up, we see Wise Guy shading Squeegee by 4 points, however…. Part of the same contest lay in the calibre of word choice, and here the porous one poured on the pressure. The results for best word, in rising order, were ego sum qui sum (5), Mickey Mouse (10), acquiesce (20), cockamamie (20).
Which sees Squeegee pounce with a massive 64 points. Next comes Wise Guy on the sheer strength of stellar clueing, with 38, then Kim K 27 (thanks to a brilliant acquiesce), Moose 20, Cameo Mask 17, Awesome 17, Game 15, Quasimogo 14, Smoky (moi) on 8 and ACE keeping a clean sheet. (Don’t worry ACE, we can plot our revenge for next time.)
A moral win to Wise Guy if clues were the lone yardstick, but Squeegee played the system best – just like those annoying guys at the traffic lights. Thanks for the oddball. Gotta dash. Have a great weekend.
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