Inquisitor 1351: How to spell CAT by Phi

17 comments on “Inquisitor 1351: How to spell CAT by Phi”

1. 17D
   COD= ‘take-off’. In chambers.

2. I enjoyed the puzzle as a whole – the thematic parts were nicely satisfying, dropping out bit by bit giving a series of PDMs for me. However, I did find that the many short clues were a bit fiddly and in the end I didn’t finish the bottom left corner. Looking at it now I see why – I had I-SPY at 28A, ISP apparently being an Incentive Savings Plan, and had pencilled in HASTEN at 43A but, unsurprisingly, couldn’t see how it worked. Thanks for explaining all the niggling details kenmac and thanks to Phi, for all but the South West corner!

3. As the blog I’ve just put up (http://phionline.net.nz/setters-blogs/how-to-spell-cat/) narrates, kenmac’s hopes have to be – ah – dashed.

4. I was held up a little at the end as I thought that the whole row had to be converted into a letter. I was encouraged in this belief by the same two characters RO appearing either side of CONFOUND in the top row and wondered if this were a cryptic way of indicating dots and therefore the letter S in Morse code. However, since SOM didn’t mean anything I soon realised TOM was what was required.

   In 40a I think it should be BOLSHIE losing HIE – neither BOLSHI nor HI (for dash) appear in Chambers

   Thanks kenmac and Phi, and my sympathies to Phi for the sad loss of Dash

5. Whoops – that should have been R and ROM in my previous entry @4

6. @4 Thanks Howard – fixed now.

7. Another relatively easy puzzle, I thought, but still enjoyable all the same, and thanks to Phi for turning a sad loss into a fine crossword.

8. When will Nimrod let us enter by email?
   I’m sure we’d all appreciate that.
   I’ve asked him a couple of times but no response.
   Should we start a petition?

9. @8 Geoff, go to York on October 25th and (try to) fill him full of beer.
   http://www.fifteensquared.net/2014/08/27/sloggers-betters-york-weekend-of-24-25-26-october-2014/

   Seriously though, I don’t think he has much control over the physical entries, unfortunately 🙁 as I’d love to be able to enter by email.

10. Apparently it is not down to Nimrod but someone else at the Indy. Some sub-editor or similar. I don’t know how newspapers work but email entry is surely not some impossible dream like World Peace.
    Also I don’t understand why this pesky Indy person cannot just be side-stepped.
    Anyone else got any thoughts?

11. Being a cat lover I must pass my sympathy to the setter. One of ours is quite ill at the moment and we are both upset about it as he is part of the family, so I have some idea how it must feel.

    The gimmick in this puzzle didn’t work for me I am afraid. It seemed odd to me to be told to delete CAT* from the clues before starting and just seemed to undo the setter’s work.

12. I enjoyed the gimmick very much, once I’d worked out what it was.

    Just the right level of difficulty for me.

    Like OPatrick, but for different reasons, I failed to finish the bottom left corner.

    So – reely – thanks to kenmac for the blog.

13. Sorry, I don’t think that I put that very well, it wasn’t so much the gimmick, which I thought was good, it was being told what it was before we started, so that I just crossed them all out. I haven’t come across that before and would rather have had to work it out.

14. Geoff, you ask why the Indy can’t be sidestepped … there have been so many weird anomalies in the weekly draw over the last five years that both Mike Laws and his successor, John H, offered to take the draw over, but the offer has always been rejected. Some of you may have noticed that the same name has come up as a winner four times in the last eight Inquisitors … compared with an expected strike rate of about one in a hundred, or maybe one in seventy, given the recent surge in IQ difficulty. This may be nothing to do with Derry Street, but it is a minor anomaly compared with some of those on my list!

    I too loved Phi’s puzzle, but had no idea it was an “in mewmoriam”

    Sympathy, accordingly.

15. We’re late to the party having just returned from holiday. Thanks for the blog kenmac – we couldn’t parse 40ac and had a box around 28ac too indicating we had a problem with that clue too. Having looked at it again, we are sure we must have sorted it out at some point during the solve!!

    We enjoyed the puzzle and liked the theme.

    Thanks Phi – we are sorry to hear about TOM.

16. #14 – I have not won since the number of winners went from 5 to 3, but going back a bit I was getting a bottle a year on average. I am pretty certain that once, when I got two prizes on the trot, I had not sent off the second solution at all! I still drank the contents, and am just now coming clean …

17. Enjoyable puzzle. What a pity it’s the outcome of a sad demise. I found the grid interesting since I don’t recall seeing a barred grid with vertical mirror symmetry before. I’ve only recently returned to IQ solving, so maybe such grids are more common than I thought. I agree with Nick that the title and preamble did make the clue gimmick very transparent, so it was obvious from the start what to do. The puzzle was fairly easy on the whole, so giving the solver a bit more puzzling to do wouldn’t have added greatly to the difficulty and would have added to the PDM factor. As it was, the CAT* clues were generally easier than some of the normal ones.
    I had a complete blind spot with 24a. I didn’t see the wordplay for a while and wondered if the answer was BLOT (with S disappearing from ‘lost’). Chambers has ‘blotch’ as one of the meanings of ‘dash’, and ‘blot’ is pretty close. A self-kicking moment when I eventually saw the wordplay.

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