Category Archives: General Cryptic Talk

DA has been immortalised on canvas. Amanda Marburg has painted him up, and the portrait is in the running for the Archibald Prize.

And a while ago now, DA appeared at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne. A video was taken, and the Wheeler Centre website has it available.

Jonathan, a frequent commenter on this blog and the supplier of the scanned crosswords each week, is wanting to organise a meet up in Sydney with any of you fine DA fans.

Comment below to organise something, perhaps over a beer or a coffee, and rejoice in anagrams, puns, pangrams, lipograms and what-have-you together.

I’ve asked this question before, but there’s a whole bunch of other people around these traps these days, so I thought I’d ask again: how do you rate the other cryptic compilers in the SMH or The Age?

Maybe once every couple of months I’ll do an NS and a DP, mostly because I find NP a nice, quick romp and DP an amusing bit of fun (although I think DP’s crosswords have dropped in quality recently).

I know a DS is a better-quality crossword than an NS or DP, but I find the DS requires too much thinking without enough joy and I rarely get around to looking at it. DP has the jokes, NS the ease; DS has neither.

RM and EP on the Monday I almost never do — the clues always seem very messy.

DH I find an abomination — obscure words and simple wordplay that only serves to annoy.

GAT has kindly sent me the following snippet from The Week. It features DA’s word-obsessed book recommendations that would surely be of interest to many of you:

And we DA Trippers have also made a list of recommendations, a list that everyone is welcome to add to, as I will do forthwith: Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language by Douglas Hofstadter is an ridiculously erudite book well worth reading, even if skimming over certain sections is well advised.

I might have published the DA Pantheon post one week too early: DA has already forewarned us that this week’s cryptic will be a mind-bending doozie.

When DA himself is worried about its impact, then we have every right to be intimidated.

One person who perhaps wouldn’t be intimidated (if indeed he does do cryptics rather than NY Times crosswords) is Dan Feyer. Dan is the fastest crossword solver in the business and does about ten a day.

I’d love to see him tackle a cryptic and see him knock one over in a few minutes, although I have a sneaking suspicion that a carefully crafted cryptic is very unlikely to be solved in five minutes flat.

For those of you who couldn’t make it, DA’s session at the Wheeler Centre is available online and in full.

Enjoy.

Here’s a short snippet from DA’s talk at the Wheeler Centre on Facebook.

Apparently the full video will appear on the Wheeler Centre website shortly.

Peter, a frequent commenter, is off overseas shortly and asks how to access DA crosswords from far away on the last post.

RV and Ian chimed in with a very handy suggestion, something I’d never heard of before and might be of interest to any one of you, and here they are in their own words:

RV
Peter, if you can access the SMH smart edition you can see online the newspaper as it is in print, including the crossword. If you have a subscription to the SMH the smart edition access comes with it. you can also subscribe directly to the smart edition for a fee. any other way to see DA when away?

Ian
Yes, SMH Smart edition is what I do. Being a Melburnian but wanting the crossie on Friday like it always was, I buy a single edition every Friday ($2 a pop), navigate to the right page, and there is an option to print a selected area of the page. $2 is less than the coffee I drink while doing it.

I thought we Melbournians had the best of it by being able to bask in DA’s divine glow at the Wheeler Centre a couple of weeks ago. But, no, it’s the Sydneysiders who should feel most privileged: DA will appear in Sydney on Friday signing books, and on Saturday he will be doing a clue clinic, which sounds like all sorts of wonderful!

More details available from DA’s own website.

Keep your receipt if you’ve gone out and purchased a copy of DA’s Puzzled!

By doing so, you’ve got a chance of winning this competition that DA’s publishers, Allen & Unwin, have running.

$500 worth of reference books is indeed an excellent prize.