OsteoSynth
Black Country, England
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Black Country, England
Really pleased to have set my best time for a Thursday puzzle this year!
As a Brit, I was caught out by AERIES for a while, as that is spelled EYRIES here in my experience. PSIS though hurts my eyes: feels deeply wrong to pluralise a plural even worse than an Oxford, sorry, SERIAL COMMA. Overall though enjoyable Wednesday
Enjoyed this, and very smooth for a Wednesday. Serendipitously, I got PIT by an alternative definition in British English: a slang word for "bed". A perfect way to retire (and never re-tyre)
Tough puzzle especially the bottom half as a couple of the spanners aren't common British English idioms. However, I always smile when I hear the clue to 43A to think of one of the few newspaper headlines to have its own Wikipedia page: "Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious", referring to a famous soccer match upset
@Matt cranium is the latin word for skull and the official anatomical term for the part of the skull that isn't the face/jaw is the neurocranium (i.e. braincase) so I think this clue is fair enough
Found this hard work in an enjoyable way. Always nice to learn something: "howcatchem" was a new one for me. Never seen the squirrels in our garden sploot, though as we have hotter weather now that might change. One nit: had to hold my nose entering DATA POINTS. A trend line is fitted to data points which rarely lie on it because of variability. In fact, a trend line that passes through all data points would be overfitted and have less predictive value
@Tim I had used the word in Scrabble without knowing its meaning. Some small islands in the Thames are called aits apparently, but I was more familiar with the variation "eyot" (also a Scrabble word for me!)
Well, I wish I could say I enjoyed that but alas, no I found it a tedious slog. Finished faster than my average but that was only because I was forced into lookups for trivia crossings that I stood no chance of educated guessing. Plus for me the 24K being rebussed as TWO FOUR is a nit. No one I know says that. They say "twenty-four".
@Mojo the Gibson Les Paul pickup selector is marked RHYTHM or TREBLE which is what I imagine is being referred to as that is a major guitar type. In my mind though a knob on a guitar is something you turn rather than a switch so I had VOLUME for ages
Enjoyed that. Got held up NW for a while with Akela instead of ALPHA. I was only a cub scout for a while but clearly something stuck!
Sometimes, in fact usually, a solve is a joy, but apart from SECURITY BLANKET which was a lovely revelation, today was a tedious slog for me. Just never felt remotely on the same wavelength as the constructor: like radio vis-à-vis gamma
@Helen Wright We're sunning ourselves in Mallorca currently, but I'm sure they are at half mast for Ozzy, in spirit if not in reality (as most Brits aren't ones for flag flying).
@Steve L I'm in agreement that the clue is perfectly reasonable. However, as I understand it B# is not necessarily the same pitch as C. On a piano or other equally-tempered instrument they are the same by necessity, but in just intonation where the intervals are based on nice frequency ratios in the harmonic series there will be a difference as I understand it. String instruments without frets are more flexible in this regard. So, a violinist playing a piece in C# major would probably finger B# in a slightly different place on a string to where they would finger C in a C major piece, for example, because it would sound more harmonious to their ear. Apologies to any string players out there if I have misunderstood this!
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