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 […]
No offence to DAVENTRY, a God-fearing town of 22,000 Poms, but what the hell is it doing in today’s Times crossword, published in The Australian? COVENTRY – fine. At least that has a critical mass, a Lady Godiva, a Peeping Tom, a Clive Owen, a postcard cathedral and a place in worldwide idiom on its […]
Neck-deep in crossword research at the minute, gleaning for a forthcoming magazine story about the mystic origins of the cryptic.
One book I came across is ‘A-Z Of Crosswords’ by Jonathan Crowther, alias Azed in The Observer. Much like a chatty Who’s Who, the volume lets us meet Dumpynose, Schadenfreude, Bunthorne, Shed and 50 other crossword […]
Sorry, make that Weird.
Repeat after me: I before E except after C, I before E except after C…
Last week I committed a mortal sin. Two in fact if you count the road-rage incident where I murdered a myopic Volvo driver for his failure to indicate, but the main blue was professional.
In a mainstream cryptic, […]