I was musing in an email about not remembering how your own clues work after about – oh – two weeks, shall we say. On a larger scale is entirely forgetting puzzle themes. I’m not sure, if I hadn’t found it in my own files, I would have claimed the new one this time as my own. It doesn’t quite feel like an idea I would have had, though I do like the way I did it. From my own standpoint I was intrigued to see that I had kept an erroneous copy. At some point I had made a change – minor, but necessitating two new words at 1 across and down, and I had retained the old grid. That has been rectified.
It’s an Enigmatic Variations from 2011 this time, and I must admit I have a new EV grid hankering to be composed, as well as an IQ, so this will be a brief update.
I regularly recommend the Wall Street Journal puzzle site usually for the monthly Cox and Rathvon cryptic. But it’s worth looking at some of the other offerings. This week saw the Saturday US-style puzzle themed around cartoons (safe to say that, as the thematic clues gave it away), with the byline Gary Larson. Hmm – I knew he’d given up The Far Side, so is this a new departure. Or perhaps an over-confident pseudonym user?
What have we coming up? There’s a Church Times on Friday 28 September, as well as the usual Independent daily, and Pedro appears in the Times Quick Cryptic slot on 2 October. There’ll also be a setter’s blog on Phase Shift appearing in the course of this week.
