After a week of apathy and then a week of server issues, I’m back on the blog, although it appears that AS has been keeping everyone happy from Indonesia in my absence. I grabbed the paper on Friday morning and made a flying start on this DA on the way to work – by the time the junkie express ground to halt at Victoria St, about half of the puzzle was done and I was feeling confident about being able to knock it off over the weekend and post triumphantly here this evening.
Unfortunately, as seems often to be the case, real life intervened, in the form of a busy Saturday afternoon, a ruinously drunken evening at the Curtin Bandroom on Saturday night and the vague blur that constituted Sunday. The lesson that the last coupla weeks has taught me is that if I don’t post on this blog by Monday, I don’t post at all, so rather than hanging on in the vague hope of being able to finish this puzzle, I’m posting the nearly finished article here for discussion. Next week, I’m hoping to stay on the straight and narrow and have a proper solution by Monday.
But then, I’ve said that before.
Oh, and does anyone have the solution?
– TH
Managed all but two :-) 23 Across was one of these that had me stumped – Good lord, what kind of word is “rhumb”???
A rum word, indeed! :)
Remaining clues as per your graphic (although I think most of these have been done in the comments).
5A: Hawker
12A: Repairperson
15A: Taiwanese
16A: Strut
25A: Rhumb (???)
7D: Kite Surfer
8D: Raring to go
16D: Sentience
20D: Sibyl
PS I got Kite Surfer, so was reasonably pleased, but it’s a bit of a stretch. Rhumb is OK now that I’ve googled it, but pretty darn obscure … in the context of “At the helm”, it’s actually quite clever.
> Good lord, what kind of word is “rhumb”???
Clearly, you neglected to waste your childhood reading Arthur Ransome, C.J. Forester, Alexander Kent, Patrick O’Brian, … after you sail through your first 20-odd novels about the Napoleonic Wars, etc., words like “rhumb” will become commonplace. :-^)
Sadly, that leaves me struggling when it comes to recognizing the names of artists, sculptors, poets … I mean, who knew Rodin even had a first name?!
Ah, thanks. I figured that RALLY was probably wrong, but couldn’t think of an alternative.
REPAIRPERSON? Pshaw.
The nice bit about 12A ‘repairperson’ is the ‘PC’, here meaning ‘politically correct’ (and so ‘person’ rather than ‘man’), and not ‘personal computer’.
Don’t want this to sound like a boast – even though it will – but the Cheese and I got the whole thing out in under an hour while watching Hawthorn v Geelong.
Whenever we do DA together we zoom through it. Must be a chemistry thing. For instance, she only needed to look at “estiMAte” for about half a second to suss the answer. She also got “kite surfer” although neither of us could work out the tell. Whereas I’m more likely to get clues like “approaching clues doffing armour”.
Overall, last Friday’s DA was chock full of clues that we knew the answer well before we’d worked out why because there were plenty of obvious tells: Asian, sculptor, number, approaching, ban, professional soldier, president, old comic.
I also knew Rhumb because of Bolitho/Hornblower/Aubrey/Drinkwater/Ramage/etc. And Sibyl because of McCulloch/Scarrow/Saylor/Sidebottom/etc.
The Cheese knew Rodin. She arty.
Ahem… “approaching Galahad doffing armour”
Nice work. I find that AS and I are similarly compatible when approaching a crossword – he tends to work more methodically and logically, whereas I tend to rely more on instinct. We complement one another well. Indonesia’s gain is Saturday morning’s loss!