Spooner!

Your spoonerism for the day:

Chai Tea

Should be good for any crossword compilers out there.

Talking of which, the latest edition of the Atlantic Monthly warns me that "the puzzler" (Cox and Rathvon's decennial(?) cryptic crossword) will no longer be available in the magazine, and you'll have to go to their website to get it. Except that everything on the website is locked down behind an impenetrable barrier, requiring a subscription to access [OK then, not strictly impenetrable, but you gather my meaning]. Thus my carefully constructed plan to get the crossword, (see this old post that details the method in full) will no longer work. What am I to do? I don't really want to subscribe just to get access to the puzzle (since I can never be bothered reading the rest of the magazine) -- that would set me back about $2.50 per puzzle. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind paying a nominal fee just for the puzzle---$0.50 to $1 say--- since I probably get that much value from it. But TheAtlantic has no facility for micropayments for a single article as yet (EDIT: this is of course total garbage as even a tiny amount of research would demonstrate. In fact they do allow complete access to their archives for a fee schedule; unfortunately, this is no help at all. Either I have to pay $2.95 for each puzzle as it comes out, or else time my accesses carefully and buy them in blocks of five for $1.19 each, which is not ideal since it severly affects the regular stream of new puzzles). So what am I to do? I might just have to wait till march and see if things improve at all by then.

Still, it could be worse: at least Private Eye still has the full crossword online, even as the rest of the magazine sinks deeper behind a subscriber only barrier.