To help those solvers going cold turkey with a DA shortage on the streets, here’s your chance to grab a fix on the sly. Though a word of warning, the puzzle is not 100% Columbian Cryptic, but a homegrown imitation called Rubicon. Decent gear nonetheless.
I make the puzzle twice a year for Australian Style, the word-mag issued by the good [...]
Our final Brainstorm of 2009 is to make a roll-call – but there’s a catch. See if we can nominate 26 VIPs who share the same verbal quirk, where their first name’s last letter matches their surname’s initial.
Jack Kerouac, say, is good for K. So is Mark Knopfler.
Allowing names of fiction, Uriah Heep can fill the H slot.
Working [...]
You’ll be finding Nemo in today’s nine specimens. ANEMONE, say, is your first answer. Now dive in.
Sea creature
Memory jingle
Deaver thriller
Wind gauge
Clarice Starling II
Stoic
UK sea resort
M’s PA
Dylan ballad
SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB237 SOLUTION: Priest, iciest
Cassowary Crossing
Was idly tossing
Around the idea of clerihew contest,
And these are the best:
BRONZE LEAR: MR X
Silvio Berlusconi
Tycoon, playboy & show pony
Art or politics ? It seems that you
can engage in both with a well aimed statue
[Must have tempting to use phony as the rhyme, exscpecially in light of the bogus bloodshed murmurs.]
SILVER BELLOC: JD
Mrs. Simone Warne,
a cricket [...]
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Apparently
Had nothing better to do
Than invent a verse form called the clerihew.
That’s how they go – four lines with an AABB rhyme scheme. The clerihew is a mini-bio, where the name of the featured person serves as the opening line.
Scanning, like the above example, is usually ragged. And bonus points for an inventive [...]
What six-letter word, ending in EST, has only one syllable? By contrast, what six-letter word, ending in EST, has three syllables? (PS – can I suggest all the best for this year’s Fest.)
SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB236 SOLUTION: Scarab, hornet, cicada, EARWIG; agouti, marmot, nutria: RODENT
Lapland is alive with lassoes and yee-has for the annual reindeer muster. Below are the nine selected after a heart-rending cull.
Ignoring the definition element of each clue, and just looking at the wordplay, here are the winning clues attached to both relevant deer and the dear compiler. While some may still need a little tune, [...]
For the last few months I’ve been writing a column in the Sydney Morning Herald called Wordplay – a weekly soapbox about puzzles and lingo. An earlier piece touched on The Rule of Two, a principle of clue-making, and clue-solving.
So to help those locked in the reindeer challenge [see previous post], or anyone confronting a cryptic puzzle, here’s [...]
Tis the season to be cryptic, tra-la-la-yada-yada. This week’s Brainstorm is a clue-making challenge, where we need to muster the best nine clues, one for each of Santa’s reindeers.
DASHER, for one, could be Reindeer shared crackers
DONNER? Try: Reindeer and I leave meal for doughnut
RUDOLPH? Nauru dolphin bit reindeer
Pick a deer, any deer. Pick three or [...]
A two-way challenge this week. The instructions are the same, just the degree of difficulty climbs between the first and second puzzle. Here we go:
Reading left to right, taking a letter per word, can you spell three related words? Your six leftover letters can be jumbled to spell a fourth member of the same set.
CASH, COIR, CARE, RANG, WADE, BAIT
MOAN, [...]