The life of a crossword compiler is a mild kind of existence. You clock into the office most weekday mornings.
(By office I mean the made-over chook shed out the backyard with PC, dictionaries and reams of graph paper.)
You sharpen your pencils, and you begin to weave. Or compose. Or thatch. Or whatever the craft analogy [...]
You won’t expect any film rights to apply to the Commonwealth Sewerage Act of 1928. “No Harry Potter there,” jokes the Federal cop, played by Simon King.
But anti-terrorism is a different septic tank altogether. As dry as the Senate paper may be, playwright Graham Pitts has applied his highlighter to the document, mixing its language [...]
Political correctness, or PC as it’s widely dubbed, has filtered into most streams of life, from schools to boardrooms, from TV to PR, from art to crosswords.
ACTRESS may be a handy anagram of RECASTS, but the term is growing moribund, in league with the other trashed gender-roles like POETESS or COMEDIENNE or AVIATRIX. (Though we [...]
Here are the answers to last week’s Breakfast Flunkers – crossword clues that push the limits of good taste. You may need to have safely downed your Weet-Bix before proceeding, or at least be sitting down.
In order, the answers are diarrhoea, oldie, spotty, death squad, scurries and Dutch elms. Gross you reckon? Which is grosser?
Rating [...]
At the risk of hurling stones in a glass house, I list six clues below that push the boundaries of taste and good citizenry.
Answers will appear early next week – so treat this batch as a cryptic workout if you like. And while you’re musing, feel free to rate them for shock-value.
Their order here obeys [...]
Margaret Farrar, the first crossword editor at the New York Times, called it the Sunday Breakfast Test. You’re sitting down with fresh-cut kiwis and Swedish muesli and the first clue you read points to ENEMA or EMPHYSEMA.
Not a good look.
Same applies to areas of smut. Most solvers blanch at the idea of cocktailing Nutri-Grain with [...]
All morning the radio bulletins blared warnings about the westerlies due to strike the state. Gales, they say, topping 100 clicks per hour were coming. Fasten your wheelie bins. Batten your pets. Lock up the patio furniture.
And the radio was right. Zephyrs turned to gusts turned to gales. Whole branches blew across the Monash. Yachts [...]