I especially enjoyed last week’s crossword, and without the Richmond Tigers distracting me (they have a bye), this week should be full steam ahead DA.
Your general thoughts on the crossword on this thread.
Update: Far too hard for me:
Struggled greatly with this one. Only got a few in the top-left corner and some other strays before succumbing to cheating — I just had to see what the theme was.
Another very clever theme. Regrettably, I didn’t even get close to finding it (although I did think there were some devilishly difficult clues in there).
I hear that there were connections or at least parallels between the cryptic and the quick. Anyone able to give the full story?
Excellent puzzle this week. Only 1D to go. But I still have no idea what the theme/rule is and how it is supposed to help.
I particularly liked 18A, 23A, 24A,14D, 17D and 20D.
A far better puzzle than the others of recent times!!!
I have most of the answers but no idea yet what the theme is. The fact that RobT can get all but one without knowing it is interesting.
1D was one of the easier ones, I thought. Still 3 to go, and a few I’m not confident of…
Good fun and good clues this week.
And the Quick’s fun too once the secret’s been revealed.
Yes, finally worked it all out – I think this deserves pool room membership. Thanks DA!
AS, re the Quick. Friday’s SMH’s quick, also set by DA, had an identical grid to the cryptic and hidden between the unchecked letters were the words EMU, WREN, WAGTAIL, PELICAN, SEAGULL.
There were a couple of birds in the main grid but no direction .. that I could see .. to find hidden birds in particular. 14A on the quick, in the same position as 13A on the cryptic, was clued as ‘sprinkle amid’ , answer INTERSPERSE.
I couldn’t crack this one, too hard. Also The Age is out of sync so no DA quick either.
Now that I see the colour coding I see the secret message.
To my mind it was an extremely banal addition that no doubt took a long time to engineer but without a more abvious clue as to their whereabouts was of no use to this little brown duck. Unecessary, too, because it provided me with no help at all as I successfully solved his puzzle.
I successfully solved this puzzle on the day it was printed. However, I could not get the theme, which was not needed to fill the grid. It’s now a week later and I still can’t crack the theme, although I’ve had no trouble with today’s crossword.