Comments on: Independent 7,784 / Scorpion

By: RatkojaRiku

RatkojaRiku — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:27:45 +0000

Sorry, nmsindy – Sir Cliff Richard’s year of birth has been duly added, and he’ll be 71 in just over a week, as you say!

Am reassured to read that I was not the only one to be distracted by ERSE at 2.

By: Allan_C

Allan_C — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 06:16:41 +0000

25/21 gave away the theme, which was fortunate as I’d have had little idea otherwise. So then I’m afraid it was a case of googling the other names. Which then left a few tricky clues. Like Lenny I stuck with ERSE. Stuck on 22a, a word finder came up with ‘Kowalski’ and I discovered Bernard Kowalski, director of ‘Krakatoa, East of Java’; no wonder I couldn’t see how the clue worked when the answer was really POLANSKI – which for some reason never occurred to me.

By: Lenny

Lenny — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 22:20:33 +0000

About a year ago, I started watching Later With Jools Holland, just so that I would be able to do the Independent crossword. Well it certainly paid off today although I sometimes wish that my brain had something better to do than remember the real names of pop stars. One wrong today, like RR I went for Erse and did not revisit it. I imagined that Perse was probably a member of Yes. I shall look forward to Quixote’s Italian architects puzzle. At least it will be an easy grid fill with all those names ending in vowels.

By: nmsindy

nmsindy — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:10:38 +0000

Don’t forget Voice in the Wilderness, Quixote… Not sure why, but the blogger omitted Cliff’s age, may have just forgotten, 71 next month, I think…

By: Quixote

Quixote — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:58:00 +0000

Ah well — more old pops eh? Well loved in the Indy (note to my editor and colleagues — maybe we could have Italian architects for a change!). This old rocker recognised a significant number of the real names so Congratulations! Maybe it’ll be harder THe Next Time (Nine Times Out OF Ten the pop stuff night have floored me, but not this time!!) (That’s enough Harry Webb, Ed)

By: ChrisP

ChrisP — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:54:51 +0000

Astonishing amount of thematic material crammed in, I thought. Almost half the cells were thematic, which is amazing grid construction. A delight to solve, Scorpion.

By: flashling

flashling — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:51:15 +0000

Fun and quite easy here too, knowing all the artists certainly helped and just ended putting answers in without checking the wordplay (lazy I know)

Thanks RR and Scorpion for your hard work.

By: nmsindy

nmsindy — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:51:11 +0000

Thanks, RatkojaRiku, and Scorpion. I’d agree with those comments – the names that I’d to guess were easy enough to work out from the wordplay. A little easier than usual from Scorpion who is to be praised for including only very well known artists that I guess most people would have heard of even if they were not big pop music fans.

By: Simon Harris

Simon Harris — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:43:07 +0000

Thanks, RatkojaRiku. I thought this was good fun, and relatively easy for a Scorpion. Luckily enough it was a bit of a specialist subject for me, so the names came easily, except for LADY GAGA which is perhaps after my time.

By: NealH

NealH — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:39:45 +0000

I found this easier than I expected. When I saw it was real names (of which I only knew Cliff Richard, Elton John and Boy George), I thought it was going to be very tricky, but the generally straightforward wordplay meant I was able to progress quite quickly. Nevertheless, it took me a while to work out the parsing of Behan and norm, and damn required going through combinations of letters before the answer struck me

The cleverness of some of the wordplay rather escaped me, so thanks for pointing it out. I just associated “towering face of rock” with a cliff face and didn’t think of the music connotation. I also hadn’t noticed that Oklahoma was in italics and therefore was meant to refer to the musical.

I remember some joke about Prince Philip having an immediate topic of conversation if he met Lady Gaga, because he’d be able to talk about all the German otters he’d shot.