Tuesday, May 12, 2009 (DT 25820)

Originally published Thursday, January 8, 2009 in the Daily Telegraph

Introduction

I found the puzzle today to be fairly challenging, even though it seemed to be free of "Briticisms". By the way, I may have been a little overzealous yesterday in assuming that any term with which I was unfamiliar was a "quirky" British expression. For instance, consider sidepath, for which the only source I could find was Wikipedia. However, on closer examination, I can find nothing in the Wikipedia article (or the linked articles) to explicitly identify this as a specifically British term. Thank you, xwd_fiend for your comments. They are always very much appreciated.

Today's Tip

I have added a couple of tools to the Tool Chest, viz., WordNavigator Crossword Solver and CWords Crossword Solver. Both tools do pretty much the same thing. You type in a partial solution and the tool provides a list of candidate words that fit the pattern of letters that you have entered. These are but two of many such tools available on the Internet. If you type "crossword solver" into a search engine, you will be presented with a host of other such tools. The procedure for entering information differs from tool to tool. For some tools, you enter a "wildcard" in place of missing letters; for others, you leave blank spaces; and for others, you select letters using drop-down menus. Undoubtedly, there are other data entry methods as well. I do not recommend any particular tool. I suggest you try various tools to see which one appeals to you.

You can also perform a similar function with OneLook Dictionary Search. If you type in a partial solution using "?" as a wildcard (e.g., "I?O?A?"), OneLook will return a list of words matching the pattern entered. OneLook usually returns a much longer list of candidate words than the other tools (which can be good or bad). On the negative side, the list returned can be very long (sometimes several hundred items) many of which are total garbage as far as being possible crossword solutions. Other tools return a much shorter list, of which all items are usually valid candidate words. On the positive side, OneLook will return hyphenated words, multi-word phrases (I guess that is a bit redundant!), and proper nouns (names of people and places) which other tools sometimes don't return. I use one tool or the other depending on the situation and will sometimes first try one of the Crossword Solvers, and if I don't find a solution with it, move on to OneLook.

Today's Links

Crossword Ends in Violence (5) [DT 25820] is the lone source today for a solution. Boaz, the author of the Cryptics.co.uk blog was still sick and his buddy, Sphinx, apparently did not dare step up to the plate after his humbling experience with yesterday's puzzle. There were no questions on AnswerBank concerning this puzzle.

A few clues are perhaps worthy of comment:

12ac Savage and disgusting noisy birds (8)

Savage [WILD] and {disgusting [FOUL] noisy (sounds like) = [FOWL~]} /\ birds [WILD|FOWL~]

19ac What an editors do with regular free labour (6)

I presume the obvious grammatical error is intended as an example of "unedited text". I thought there might be some other connotation implied, but - if one exists - it escapes me.

5d People from Serbia in trouble (8)

IBERIANS seems like an awfully specific solution to such a non-specific clue as "People".

Signing off for today.