I received an email the other week asking (a) whether I was actively updating my blogroll, and, (b) if so, whether they could be on it.  The answers were perhaps slightly contradictory: (a) no, not really (with a bit of a guilty start); (b) yes.  And then I had another email asking the same thing. 

So I had to rethink my attitude to my blogroll – not least, I need to find how to update it! It has been infrequently attended to and I confess to having forgotten which widget is which.  So the actual updating may be a while away, but that doesn’t stop me introducing the two new entries here.

The first is Unscramblerer.  It’s one of those useful sites where you can enter partial words and undertake a search to find solutions to fit the letters you currently have.  The dictionary in use has over half a million entries, and includes proper nouns, so it’s pretty comprehensive.  A further feature is that the ‘Crossword Solver’ isn’t the only element – there’s an anagram solver, and a few useful Scrabble utilities as well, so you don’t have to switch between sites if you have a variety of items to check.  It’s the brainchild of Randoh Sallihall.

The second site contains puzzles by a new setter trying to make his mark. The pseudonym Hubble was always likely to go down well with an old astrophysicist like myself.  There are four puzzles there to date, with the promise of more to come.  From what Hubble told me in an email, it’s still quite a painstaking process to craft and create clues, and I can sympathise with that, thinking back to my own early days.  It does get smoother, and certain facilities slot into place.  But it’s useful to get something out there and to feel encouraged – the internet provides that in a way that wasn’t possible forty years ago.  The site is Hubble Crosswords, and Hubble is William Kenny.

I’m assuming both William and Randoh will be happy for feedback – I tried things out on both sites, and made comments, and they didn’t hurl e-abuse at me!

I will try and maintain (and update) the blogroll on a more regular basis in future, though I am very aware that a long blogroll has the potential to be off-putting. At the very least, it will keep me more in touch with my own site.

Meanwhile, there’s new puzzle up on the site – an Inquisitor from 2014. That’s recent enough for there to be both a fifteensquared review and a setter’s blog – links to both from the solution page (solve the puzzle first…). I can use this announcement to note that there’s a new Inquisitor coming up at the end of the month (27 February).  The other puzzle on the horizon is a Times Quick on 19 February.

I intend to collate the APEX entries on Monday 8 February, so any participants who still have not submitted a clue have a few hours yet to remedy the fact.

 
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I think this may be the first post I’ve written while sitting outside.  Summer has kicked in here in Wellington, and while it hasn’t quite zapped the infamous wind, it has turned it northerly, and reasonably warm.  All the more surprising as it is a public holiday weekend.

The puzzle this time is one from the very end of the Beelzebub series – indeed, for a while we thought it would be the last.  I took the opportunity to work in a Nina, which I didn’t do very often in Beelzebub.  But I was running out of time to do it, so in it went.  In the end, there was a request for a very final puzzle the following week, which, as a result, also included a Nina, this time commemorating the whole series (and which was turned round in double quick time).

As noted last time, it’s a bit of a quiet period for me since a flurry of puzzles at the start of the year.  So you have mainly my Friday appearances in the Independent to look forward to, though there will be a Times cryptic on 4 February.  I should be back a couple of days after that.

Having had a post up a few days early, I now have one a week late.  Holidays do get in the way.

I hope everyone has had a good time solving all the extra puzzles that come around at the festive season.  I think I’m now through most of them, so its safe to put up another one for you.  It’s an Enigmatic Variations puzzle from 2014, which means it’s covered by fifteensquared, as well as the subject of a setter’s blog here.  Links to those blogs are given with the solution.

I spent part of the holiday reading through Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style: The UK Edition.  Benjamin Dreyer is a leading copy-editor at Random House and an entertaining guide to style and grammatical issues.  And he likes the semicolon, always a reassuring trait in an editor.  He has even revised his book to acknowledge that, just occasionally, UK and US usages differ.  Giving the reader laugh-out-loud moments in a treatise on something as potentially dry as grammar is a recommendation at any time.  

It is definitely building to summer here, and we have had a few days of high 20s temperatures.  As yet New Zealand is secure against the latest mutations, but there’s a renewed pressure to log visits to offices, shops and so on, to ensure that movements are traced and contacts are confirmed.  While I’m not yet planning to revert to more frequent updates on the site (for one thing I’m regularly out at work), I am certainly going to get back on schedule with an update next week (it will be an old Beelzebub puzzle).  

There’s nothing unexpected in the published puzzle line before then – indeed, most of my January puzzles have now occurred, and you’ll have only the regular Friday Independent puzzles to tackle.

This is the blog due next Saturday, and I felt the title was premature for Christmas 2021.  And I can also give you a last-minute alert for the Christmas Eve Toughie, which is by Kcit, giving me two that day, as Pedro turns up in the Times Quick slot.  Phi is absent this week as the Friday slot in The Independent falls on Christmas Day.  And, since I won’t be blogging again for over a fortnight: I have the New Year’s day Jumbo in the Times, and Pedro reappears on 8 January.  Both days should see me restored to The Independent as well.

There’s a new blog on the site, for Commonality, in the November edition of One Across magazine (that link is so you can go off and subscribe).  The powers-that-be at the magazine have kindly agreed to let me put the whole puzzle up on the site very quickly after the solution has been published.  So you could have a go at it before reading the blog – after would be a bit underhand…

I’ve also put up What’s in a Name?  This is a puzzle I completed a few years ago, but I don’t recall it ever making it into the intended publication.  So here it is as a sort of Christmas present.  If you’re missing Phiday on Christmas Day, you can turn to these two puzzles.

My phone regularly sends me alerts about ‘things I might have missed’ which seems a bit of an understatement given the amount of stuff out there on the internet.  But occasionally there’s an item of interest.  One appeared this week that linked back to a post put up by Auckland Libraries at the height of the first wave of the pandemic.  There have been a number of attempts to describe the craze for crosswords that swept various countries in the 1920s, but I think this is the first to round up the New Zealand contribution to it.

Keep safe and well.  See you in the New Year.