Wearin' o' the green (Sunday brunch: March 17, 2013)

Below the fold is the solution to the 3/16/13 Wall Street Journal variety puzzle: Cloverleaves by Patrick Berry.  Thanks to Hople and all who noted an error in the grid (a line in the wrong place).  The grid has been updated.

St. Patrick's on a Sunday?  The Phillies will be wearing their popular green uniforms for their spring training game in Clearwater, and Joe Conyers played Danny Boy as an encore with the Main Line Symphony Friday night (showing how much he learned from Edgar Meyer as well as from Hal Robinson).  Puzzlers?  We get the pot of gold.

The Wall Street Journal has a Patrick Berry "Cloverleaves."  These are hard puzzles to get a toehold on, since the winding "clover" answers are not enumerated and the row clues are given in random order.  The only place you can start (unless you guessed the theme answer before anything else, which I did) is with the first or last entries of each "clover."  If you're really stuck, I have posted a hint grid with the breaks between answers marked.

The New York Times has a diagramless by Fred Piscop, behind the paywall.  Wonder if it's a themed grid?  A shamrock would make a nice diagramless  I won't be able to get it until Sunday afternoon, but I'll post a solution as soon as I finish it.  Meanwhile, Deb Amlen will have her comments (spoiler warning) at Wordplay.

On the cryptic side, we have our regular Hex puzzle in the National Post which of course is themed  (and I see Falcon was thinking the same as I was).

We also have the new Richard Maltby puzzle in Harpers which has been reported to be "diabolical."  Publication of the April Harpers means that Eric should have the March Harper's solution and commentary posted soon at her blog Tacky Harper's Cryptic Clues.  In the meantime, she's been having a go at the Guardian, which means she's smarter or more persistent than me, or both.

Update: And indeed Erica has found time to blog the Harper's (her verdict: meh grid, with some nifty clues amid the cruft) and also introduce us to Blogjob, her new video series.  Episode 1 features her friend Emily, a manual typewriter, and a carrot...

Wall Street Journal hint grid

Below the fold is a grid you can use if you're having trouble with the Cloverleaves puzzle by Patrick Berry in today's Wall Street Journal.  The red lines mark breaks between words in the "clovers."

editor's note: thanks to Hople and all who noted an error in the grid (a line in the wrong place).  The grid has been updated.

Whoops, missed the National Post this weekend (Sunday brunch: December 30, 2012)

I was a little too distracted by the debate in Word Salad (and by a long weekend out at hockey games and promoting DVARP), and as a result I left out this weekend's Hex cryptic from our Sunday brunch.  It's a capital effort on Hex's part.  Falcon was there as usual, so go visit his blog for the puzzle.