You have three weeks and counting if you want to crack the Meanjin puzzle(s) I crafted for Meanjin last month. A cryptic and a quick, both sets of clues embedded in dashes of flippant literature.
This second heads-up is due to the good souls of Grattan Street posting the puzzles, and entry details, on the Meanjin blogsite. [...]
Who knew? Crosswords and fashion can appear in the same sentence. Thanks to a post by flipsockgrrl, we can see how the kingdom of Across and Down combines with the closet.
Nobody said anything about stylish, but Yves Saint Laurent was always firm believer in the timeless qualities of black on white, ne pas
After her devoted catwalk [...]
Next week sometime, you can meet the Dalai Lama, take a trip to the Arctic and hear about the charisma of men in lab coats. You can also do a peculiar crossword.
Sophie Cunningham, the editor of Meanjin, inspired the idea. To help celebrate the 70th birthday of this literary quarterly, she wanted a puzzle, and [...]
Stumbled across two more You Tube clips this week, both with a crossword flavour.
The first is Mastermind contestant, Dave Tilley. The guy goes two minutes, answering questions on the history of the crossword, and fares pretty well.
(Mind you, researching a puzzle manuscript of my own at the moment, finishing the draft this month, I also managed [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Got up.
Had a shave.
Did Times crossword.
Had another shave.
That’s a doggerel from Roger McGough, a Liverpool performance poet with whom I share a birthday. As droll as his verse may be, it does evoke a key question in the solving stakes: how long do you take?
Americans as a race, race. They’re obsessed by speed-solving. Amy Reynaldo, [...]
Asymmetrical but mercurial, this is an ad created for IKEA to help flog a Benno CD/DVD Tower. Squint and you’ll see a crossword swim out of the furniture, with movie and CD clusters creating the black squares. Not sure if you can read the clues that hang below the creation, but they all share a musical [...]
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, [...]
It’s a word. I checked. ASYNCHRONISM. Not to be confused with ATSIC cronyism, or asynchronicity, which surprisingly isn’t a word.
Melbourne crossword fans are still wondering when The Age will fall into step with its northern cousin, and switch my cryptics back to a Friday. (As you probably realise, the SMH is running the DA puzzle on [...]