deanjones

The different styles of the setters is one of the nice things about the cryptics. I could usually complete an Araucaria puzzle (admittedly after more time that I'm prepared to admit here :-) but show me a puzzle by Puck and I'll probably just sit there staring blankly at it. Different setters suit different people.

Apart from Rufus, everyone should be able to solve a Rufus puzzle ...

I will miss his puzzles enormously. One of my life goals was to get drawn as one of the winners of one of his Saturday puzzles. Despite submitting a few hundred completed puzzles over the years, I was never drawn out of the hat (perhaps there's a moral here about making your goals dependent on random events over which you have no control). There were clearly lots of other people who also enjoyed completing his puzzles.

This is just a re-hash of Microsoft's Scroogled campaign (http://www.scroogled.com). Just as with scroogled, the comparison of a human reading your mail with a machine analysing the contents in order to provide focussed advertising results in a complete loss of credibility.

To anybody saying this is disappointing, please watch this:

http://youtu.be/grxL5umOE6g

It might be a load of Qwaszx:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3829