‘My name is Garson Hampfield, and I’m a crossword inker.’
With a smoky sax below the words, so begins an inspired mockumentary about the dying art of puzzle-inking. Created by Michael A Charles, the seven-minute animation is so finely infused with humour you can’t help but wish that inkers existed. As imaginary dinosaurs go, Garson seems […]
Extraordinary really. Almost philanthropic.
How often do you hear of a company waiving a client’s payments in order to provide the same desired product (in this case crosswords) for nada?
You’ll have to go trawling through corporate arcana for a precedent. Coz I’m stumped.
But that’s the miracle wrought by The Manchester Guardian this week, unlocking their […]
To quote Shakespeare (or was it Homer?) – d’oh.
My efforts to unravel a Lear clue from this week’s Times crossword had me barking, like a dog of war, up the wrong tree.
For those new to Grid-gate, the clue read as follows:
Lines from Lear don’t show fate, sadly, protecting a king (3,5,2,4)
Sniffing anagram, […]
A quote, a quote, my kingdom for a King Lear quote.
Every day I unravel the Times crossword in The Australian, by and large filling the grid without too much apoplexy.
My personal best – cracking puzzles as they appear – is 76 in a row. The last word to trip me up is MUNRO BAGGER, […]
Crossword making is an art, though a New York artist called Emily Jo Cureton is taking the whole art idea to heart. Check out her website http://www.emilyjocureton.com/follies/index.html and you’ll see how two or three words from the paper’s daily grid will see her pencil out-Magritte Magritte. Possibly the most contrary illustration of the phrase: thinking […]
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 […]
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 […]
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? […]
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 […]
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 […]