Your subscription is slated for renewal!
Your 1 Year Sustaining Recurring subscription will automatically renew soon. To ensure that your subscription is not interrupted, please make sure that your PayPal billing information is current and up-to-date.
If you'd like to manage your recurring subscription, you can do so at: https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/settings/payments
Hello, friends! First we must take care of some housecleaning, namely a couple of errata. I'll let Stella jump in for the first one:
Hi solvers, Stella here with a mea culpa. As several solvers wrote in to let us know, there was an error in the clue for 7D (MAGNOLIA) in the last puzzle: NIA LONG does not, in fact, anagram to AGNOLIA. We put our puzzles through multiple rounds of editing, plus test solving. This error still managed to escape detection, and I take full responsibility as the editor. My sincerest apologies!As for the other, that's partly the responsibility of both myself and Stella, as neither of us realized that the text of the email didn't actually say what we both thought it was saying. As many of you pointed out, there are still indie cryptics out there posting great stuff of their own on the regular: Out of Left Field, The Rackenfracker, our own Steve Mossberg's Square Chase, and others. What we were trying to say is that there's a dearth of places where outside contributors can submit cryptics and get paid for their work. (But even with that correction of intent, we were still wrong that there aren't any others left! We forgot about The Gnomon ... and maybe others? I would be delighted to learn about more.)
OKAY! With that out of the way, I'm happy to be sharing this week's puzzle from Andrew McCarroll, visiting us from a land across the sea where he publishes cryptics in The Guardian under the alias of Eccles; you can read an interview with him here. (And of course if you wish to solve the puzzle online, you can do so here, with a login.)
See you in two weeks!
-- Francis (and the AVCX Cryptic crew)