The official bored-at-work cryptic crossword pass it on thread.

Yes, "Music of the Spheres".

Yes, love Araucaria and the mechanics of the clue are excellent but strained surface sense = bad clue.

Telegraph has always been the easiest broadsheet as far as I remember, tho the early weekdays in the Graun used to be pretty dull too.

"tyre problem - the same" = tyre problem tyre problem = flat tery = flattery

i.e. I took "the same" to mean "tyre problem" is repeated, the first time as flat the second as an anagram of tyre.

i missed that detail krakow, nice one.

ailsa i was close to agreeing with you, but it didn't sound right with 'everywhere'

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,360,000 for flattery will get you anywhere
Results 1 - 10 of about 219,000 for flattery will get you everywhere

Is that different from what I posted because you didn't use quote marks, therefore not searching for the quote? Which was by Mae West, and quite famous?

could be. i didn't use quotes and my browser fills up with suggestions along the way. everywhere comes in way below anywhere. but 'everything' comes in at only slightly less than anywhere.

didn't know it was a mae west quote.

Should read your google results then :-)

(also where I mentioned it already upthread)

I think we're getting bogged down with this and need to move on. More clues!

Detective without hesitation takes a year to find moneylender (7)

investor

sorry, that's totally wrong, isn't it

you didn't think it through

Shylock

ok if that's right i'm completely nonplussed.

sherlock less 'er' plus y

i was too hung up on trying to make investigator -> investor work : |

One day i'll write a tough clue.

is mine so bad no one's going to attempt it? :(

repost pls thomp

single father (spooner's) used to be horse made of fruitcake (4,3,1,6,5)

jeez sorry i asked

papa was a rollin stone, on a whim

yerp

BUT I DON'T KNOW WHY

it's stollen roan, isn't it

o_O

:D

yeah sometimes genius is very close to just bein a smartarse imo, so there.

you are both correct. whose turn is it?

Sold stolen goods electronically around protection system (7)

defence? e-fenced?

got as far as fence.

defence is correct - anagram of e-fenced. Figured you could say electronically and add an e onto any transaction in this day and age.

yeah no problem with that.

Connected to onimo's, from Azed on Sunday:

Abandoned electrical equipment sat decomposing in sheep's gut (1-5)

e-haggis

First letter CORRECT

derren brown method is working

e-waste

i should give more azeds a go but they always look so daunting.

E-waste correct.

Azed isn't as hard as it looks. I mean some part of it tends to involve sitting around making up words ('rusa?') and then looking them up in the dictionary ('It is a horse!'), but this is pretty much my ideal bedtime activity tbh.

It's v. fairly clued. The barred grid is a bit of a psychological obstacle at first, but it means you get masses of checked letters to make up for the obscure words.

just looking at this weeks, first three (and others) are all 'unclued answer', thanks a bunch.

Haha. Yeah. Plain weeks are a better intro. It was a bit of a slog till I got one of the unclued ones, which gave the rest almost immediately.

My university alumni magazine (quarterly, only ever look at the crossword and skim the obituaries for anyone my age) includes a barred-grid crossword with several unclued answers and a twist, e.g. ignore one word of each clue or remove one letter from each answer, use these to spell unclued answers, that kind of thing.

I can never get anywhere with them, except one time when I got the whole thing except one letter and thought "now I am elite crossword demon and am tuned into the art of these things and will demolish the next one", only to find next issue that, uh, I wasn't.

Azeds seem much the same.

Nah, Azed only pulls something weird (like this one) once every couple of months. It's not like The Listener (king of insane rubrics).

i am a noob: what on earth is an 'unclued answer'?

Space in the grid for which there's no clue at all. So 1ac will be marked, and take up seven squares, but there's no clue. They turn up in barred grid crosswords mostly, and are gettable via checked letters and/or a theme and/or jammy stab in the dark.

what's the point of that, then?

Beast chasing loud predator (3)
NEA head after delinquent Op Art supporter (6)

(although y'all probably don't know what the NEA is)

Naughty Erotic Adventures.

First is FOX

No.
Yes.

Thomp: they only really make sense when in a theme or scheme. It's quite nice to crack the heart of a puzzle and open up a load of answers at once after crawling along. And it makes a change from straight solving. The Azed one mentioned is a bit meh, but in a really neat themed puzzle there's an exciting seeing-the-light moment (Slightly embarrassed to be using the word 'exciting' there).

#2 = Patron (nice).