Putting the words to lights – crossword clues explained in plain English
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment **
I couldn’t work up a great deal of enthusiasm for this puzzle – if you could then do please try to convince me that I’m wrong. It does seem to require an awful lot of abbreviations and insertions/deletions of individual letters.… Continue reading >
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BD Rating – Difficulty ***– Enjoyment ****
Kia ora from Aotearoa.
This time next week we will be on our way to Australia so there will be someone else doing the Wednesday Hints and Tips for the next three weeks.… Continue reading >
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BD Rating – Difficulty **/*** – Enjoyment **/***
Hi. I hope you all had an enjoyable bank holiday weekend. We return to normality with this pleasant puzzle from MynoT. I was underwhelmed by a few of the surfaces and generally inclined to be grumpy today – but perhaps I’m just suffering from the after effects of being spun around on the back page blog!… Continue reading >
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BD Rating - Difficulty ** - Enjoyment **/***
Hello, everyone. For me, learning new words is one of the pleasures of solving cryptics. Over the weekend I learned a new word, but in a different way, namely through meeting this impressive creature while hiking [Click for a bigger version]:
She’s an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. Curiously, many of them had arranged themselves in clusters on an area of moist sand, like this:
After a little research I learned that this butterfly behaviour has a name – it’s called mud-puddling, an amusing word that I had never heard before. Sadly, it’s not in Chambers, so I expect that we won’t be seeing it on the back page anytime soon.… Continue reading >
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BD’s Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ****
Happy bank holiday Monday to you all. It is carnival day here in Downtown LI. Traditionally carnival day begins by releasing a pig and chasing it through the village before stringing it upside down on the village green ready for this year’s carnival queen to slit its throat and daub her two attendants with its blood.… Continue reading >
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Good Sunday morning from Winnipeg where Mother Nature is still being very kind to us – and a very Happy Birthday to Mary.
Another very enjoyable, but perhaps not so typical, Sunday offering that is probably the trickiest Virgilius puzzle that I have had to solve and blog since I took over the Sunday spot from BD back in February, with a handful of anagrams (including partials), a couple of lurkers, and what I thought was a slightly odd homophone element to one of the answers.… Continue reading >
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As is usual for the weekend prize crosswords, an assortment of clues, including some of the more difficult ones, have been selected and hints provided for them.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *****
A slightly gentler offering from Elgar with a few easier clues to give you a foothold – so do 19d. This is Elgar’s 118th toughie, and there is an appropriate Nina.… Continue reading >