In Puzzle-ville, will a hire get a prize? (No, but the same sentence can hide a Spice Girl backwards.)
Who will get prizes are the best boxers from last week. First to the funny:
JACK IN THE BOX
Robskee tried to swing the jury of one by including a crossword maker named David Astle in a reversal of ‘…felt sad Iva [...]
Do a sudoku if you must, or read an airport novel. Just don’t expect to finger the culprit in a police line-up if you’ve recently indulged in a cryptic crossword.
Quicks are kosher, says research psychologist Michael B Lewis from Cardiff Uni. Anyone can tackle basic synonyms and still have the acuity to recall a crime’s details, [...]
I eat generic banana.
Which is one way to stow Eric Bana in a sentence. Can you find the Australian singer in the next example?
Men in Argentina are naturally macho.
Peer into the pampas long enough and you’ll see Tina Arena. Meanwhile another Tina – Tina Fey – hides backwards in this wonky specimen:
Goldeneye fan I tease with [...]
Waltzing Matilda’s Winton museum in central Queensland holds Banjo Paterson relics, jumbuck fleece, trooper mannequins and a well-known Hollywood actress.
(Without needing to go outback, or know any far-flung fact beyond our opening sentence, can you name the star? And no, she’s not Naomi Watts. After last week, I’m not game to take use her name in vain. [...]
Fittingly, Secret Sects attracted an elite coterie of brainstormers. Across the week the likes of Mr X, Robskee and yours truly uncovered natural actors, babbling comedians, covert motorists and a clandestine breakfast club, but there can only be one winner per category.
For downright smart, not to say quick, as well as nominating the perfect Olympic field of [...]
Douglas Adams is releasing a new book this month – not bad going for a dead bloke. To be pedantic, the Douglas Adams Franchise is doing the releasing, under the cultish Hitchhiker banner, but that’s still a fair effort for a soul long gone and dearly missed.
Not that Adams believed in souls. Life, he wrote, [...]
If Dan Brown can earn zillions claiming all sorts of secret sects within the Vatican or the Masons, then why can’t we? This week we’re looking for people whose names share a strange ‘puzzle logic’, allowing us to claim the discovery of a secret society.
The challenge won’t be easy. Don’t expect these shadowy cartels to jump up and expose themselves! [...]
Using only end letters (first and last of each name) and a simple clue, can you ID all eight people? PATS swimmer, say, is Petria Thomas.
Singer PACK
RYDE novelist
AIRY novelist
HISS actor
Stateswoman CARE
REDS thinker
BALI ghoul
DIME judge
SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB229 SOLUTION: Elvis Presley, Billy Thorpe, Serena Williams, Paula Yates, Petria Thomas, Miranda Devine, Steve Elkington, Stuart Appleby
You lot don’t make it easy. The quality of Autologue entries was up there with Everest (in those mOunTAiNoUS parts), obliging me to divide the trinkets into two categories – FOOTNOTED and BAREFOOT.
Put simply, if a postscript was either handy or needed, that belongs in the Footnote Divi sion. If the autologue stands on its own [...]
The autologue way to write egomaniac is egomanIac, with I the most prominent letter.
Just as esrever is the autologue for reverse, and dyslxeic explains itself.
That’s the crunch: to write a word in a way that goes to define what the word means. Here’s a few more samples, with the more subtle specimens coming with a clue to [...]