Saturday 27 August 2011

Mitzicryptic August 27

3 clues from yesterday, and a couple from the day before. Many activities in meat-space have prevented me attended to the blogging part of the challenge, but I find it's good to prioritise 3-D activities and not become a slave drone to technology (said daucer-eyed with itching typing fingers.)

I am curious about how much cryptic crosswords rely on one's general knowledge beyond the vocab-knowledge that is concealed in the actual clue.

My recent reliance on Aussie slang was incorrect. While a "terrible blue" is related to fury', the clue simply needed me to mix up the letters in 'blue', at it to the letter "c", and think of a word related to 'cell'...the answer was CUBICLE (not 'century'...): it was not a cricket question.

Either way, from 'cubicle', I worked out another answer.

Q Bloke has right to be concealed (6)
A Covers
('cove' is old-fashioned cockney word for bloke)

Q Lubricates tablets in tanker's mishaps (3, 6)
A Oil Spills
(the tanker mishap was a bit of a giveaway, but the "tablets" reference is a synonym for 'pills'.)

Q Omen Sean misplaced for windflowers (8)
A Anemones
(my friend T used to have Japanese windflowers in a pot; it took me a while, and I would not have known anemones were the nerd name for windflowers, but I went with a gut instinct, seeing as the letters were 'misplaced', as you can see.)

Q Model in sleep ruined grinding tool (6)
A Pestle

2 comments:

dinahmow said...

You're getting the hang of these, aren't you!
Mitzi, I'd like to do the same ones, but don't know where to find them.I tried the SMH on-line and they all seem to be the Guardian (tough) and The Times(ouch!)
Are they on-line, or only the next day for the answers?

Anonymous said...

Wow. These blew me away. Really tough. You're brilliant! =)