Comments on: Inquisitor #3 – CAST ASIDE by Phi

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petebiddlecombe — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 23:51:46 +0000

I’m with you on Cordova as a variant, but can understand that if it’s hard to find a definitive statement, you’d be wary of using it.

Forgot to mention that I once went to the Lewes bonfire night celebrations. So long ago that the centrepiece of the bonfire society display we went to was Idi Amin in the guise of a gorilla, with exploding banana.

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Florrie — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 21:44:03 +0000

Have a look at the website and support those of us in Lewes (bonfire or not)!

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Phi — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 19:37:06 +0000

Cordova – went in without thinking, as I assumed it was a variant of CORDOBA. While I found some support for this on checking, it wasn’t in my Gazetteer (which does list alternate and other-language spellings, generally), so I Googled, and ended up Wiki-ing. From what I recall, it’s a good guess to the population…

I recall that a former Listener setter (who abandoned the puzzle when it went over to Murdoch) is actually a member of one of the Lewes bonfire societies.

And I think you’d find the sound of a tui (there’s one clicking and tootling away outside my window as I type) even more remarkable.

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petebiddlecombe — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:38:33 +0000

I think what it shows is the variability in the difficulty of barred-grid puzzles. My current diet of BGPs is Azed most weeks, Mephisto when blogging it (one in 3), Inquisitor every other week. Listener: maybe 15-20 a year in patches of having the time. I’ve been tackling Azed on and off for over 20 years and had my best Listener years around 1991, so the experience should be there! I’ve certainly had times when I’ve done a Listener without too much struggle, then seen some others saying it was really tough (Dimitry’s 10×20 was an example). I claim best times of about 18 minutes for Azed, 50-odd for the Listener – (very easy sieve-shaped one about Lear’s Jumblies), and 8:30 for No. 18 in the Mephisto book (slightly assisted by the multi-puzzle gimmick for the first couple of dozen in the book). So now the pressure is on for me to say “easy-peasy” and have others reporting slowness…

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Quixote — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 08:36:38 +0000

I thought this was a splendid puzzle – hard but for me not excessively so. I think this may just go to show the big leap in difficulty between everyday cryptics and barred puzzles. Stick at it – you’ll speed up!