Puzzle Notes

Oh my goodness, is it week 2 of the expanded AVCX already? It's true what they say: Time flies when you have a bunch of stuff to do! One thing we did do is set up an email account that will get you in touch with the entire cryptic wing of the operation: cryptic@avxwords.com. That's the address to write to if you want to tell us how much you enjoyed a puzzle, or if my attempt to write clear answer explanations has failed disastrously and you'd really like to know how one of the clues worked, or for some other purposes which we will be talking about further in the future!

In the meanwhile, here is a puzzle by me, featuring Stella Zawistowski in the editor's chair this time around. You may notice that we have been indicating puzzle difficulty levels a little differently than the standard 0.5-incremented 5-point system that the AVCX Classic uses. I don't know, I just feel the difficulty level of a cryptic is so subjective that it deserves a more subjective system. For instance, the difficulty level of this cryptic is "Yes." Is there difficulty? Indeed there is some amount thereof. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy it to the max.

Gotta go with strange idea at university (5) --

-- Francis (and the AVCX Cryptic crew)