Tuesday, July 14, 2009 (DT 25871)

This puzzle was originally published Monday, March 9, 2009 in The Daily Telegraph

Introduction

While not overly difficult, this puzzle did require a bit of time to solve due to the need to track down a fair number of unfamiliar terms. A wrong solution held me up for some time as well.

Today's Glossary

Some possibly unfamiliar abbreviations, people, places, words and expressions used in today's puzzle

Bakewell tart - Brit. a baked open tart

break off - the first shot in most types of billiards games (alternate form of break)

(football) strip - uniform (shirt, shorts and socks) worn by a football (soccer) player

hoy - a type of boat

murphy - a potato (defn. 2)

strip lighting - tubular fluorescent lights

Today's Links

I found only a single question on AnswerBank discussing today's puzzle. It (together with the clue to which it relates) is:

• AnswerBank [DT 25871]-a: 16d

Big Dave's review of today's puzzle may be found at Big Dave's Telegraph Crossword Blog [DT 25871].

Commentary on Today's Puzzle

30ac Show how to repeat changes (8)

I suspected that this might be an anagram, but the wordplay threw me off for a while. I was looking for a word meaning "show how", not "show". The word "how" seems to be extraneous to the cryptic wordplay and is likely inserted solely to enhance the surface reading. I'm tempted to gripe about this, but I see that it did not raise any hackles on the British blogs - so I suppose this bit of deviousness must be par for the course.

6d Remove a film sequence (4)

Incorrectly thinking that the solution to this clue was CLIP initially caused me all kinds of problems in the upper right-hand corner. Once I had discovered my error, I was able to complete the puzzle successfully.

7d North American Indian medicine man gets the bird (6)

When I read this clue, SHAMAN ("North American Indian medicine man") immediately came to mind. However, I was pretty skeptical since I could see no way to get SHAMAN from the remainder of the clue ("gets the bird").

Signing off for today - Falcon