Tuesday, September 22, 2009 (DT 25924)

This puzzle was originally published Saturday, May 9, 2009 in The Daily Telegraph

Introduction

This was one of the easiest puzzles that I can remember. I had most of it complete in well under an hour without aids of any kind, although the final two clues did require that I open the Tool Chest. However, yet again I find myself out of sync with the Brits - many of whom seemed to find this puzzle rather difficult.

Today's Glossary

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

DE - former British Department of Employment (ref: Peter Biddlecombe)

Today's Links

As is usual when it is a Saturday prize puzzle in the U.K., there were a lot of questions pertaining to it on AnswerBank - in fact, I found nineteen of them. For some time, I have been seriously considering dropping the links to AnswerBank as I find the site adds very little - if anything - to what is available on Big Dave's blog. Despite these misgivings, I have continued to include these links, primarily out of habit, so long as the volume of questions was not too onerous. However, the large number of questions today is the straw that broke the camel's back (actually, it is more like a bale of straw). So, from today forward, no more links to AnswerBank.

In case anyone wishes to perform their own search of AnswerBank, the search page is located here. Since questioners on AnswerBank use a number of variants of the puzzle number in their queries, to find "all" of the questions related to a puzzle, one must perform multiple searches. For example, for today's puzzle, I searched on the following terms (without the quotation marks): "DT 25924", "DT 25,924", "DT25924", and "DT25,924" - which respectively produced eight, eight, two and one questions - for a total of nineteen. When performing a search on AnswerBank, make sure that "Site" is selected, rather than "Web".

You may find Big Dave's day-of-publication hints at Big Dave's Telegraph Crossword Blog [DT 25924]-Hints and Peter Biddlecombe's review at Big Dave's Telegraph Crossword Blog [DT 25924]-Review.

Commentary on Today's Puzzle

5a Worker spotted cutter (7)

I made the solution of 6d difficult by initially entering HACKSAW here. I see from Big Dave's blog that I was not alone in making this error.

21a River mud broadcast (4)

This was the last clue to be solved. I was totally fixated on "broadcast" being an anagram indicator. It is not, rather it is a homophone (sounds like) indicator.

27a Willingly left (7)

This was the second last clue to be solved. I was hung up on thinking that this must be a double definition. However, it turned out to be a cryptic definition which I only discovered when a search on the checking letters turned up only one possible solution.

6d Disagreement at employment department on swelling (4)

I initially got the solution based on the definition and checking letters, and then attempted to reverse engineer the wordplay. The only explanation that I could come up with was E (employment) D (department) ON all reversed. I must say that I was somewhat skeptical of "disagreement" as a reversal indicator and E and D as abbreviations for "employment"and "department". As it turns out, the correct explanation (see Peter Biddlecombe's review) is somewhat different. However, it relies on a department of the British government that (based on Peter's comments) no longer exists.

20d Fellow goes to one island (not Madagascar initially) capital (7)

Peter provided a fine explanation of this clue until he said "Managua is capital of Guatemala". Of course, Managua is the capital of Nicaragua. The capital of Guatemala is Guatemala City. I think this lapse can be excused, as (a couple of clues earlier) Peter had stated that it was getting late.

And, likewise, it is getting late here.

Signing off for today - Falcon