Inquisitor 1502: Improvements in Bed by Schadenfreude

12 comments on “Inquisitor 1502: Improvements in Bed by Schadenfreude”

1. Hard but fair would be my assessment of this puzzle as well. The grid fill took an absolute age. The end game I found on the easier side – though I must admit to employing the services of a word searcher to find the flowers, which many would consider to be cheating. 43d I never did manage to parse, but it couldn’t be anything else…

2. The usual thanks. Another one I didn’t finish — the interlocking anagrams with multiple possibilities (BIDING, DINING, NIDING?) sort of wore me down, and I never even saw let alone solved the endgame. Must try harder.

3. I normally like Schadenfreude’s puzzle and up to a point I enjoyed this one too – however, I have a particular antipathy for puzzles where the endgame consists of spending ages trying to work out which words (in this case flowers, of which there are literally hundreds if not thousands of possibilities!) will replace the others. Though my social diary is hardly on a par with Truman Capote’s back in the day, I do think life may be a teensy bit short for that.

   Thanks anyway to setter and blogger

4. If I hadn’t stubbornly stuck to ‘dining’, I might have deduced a third flower. What unlocked this very tricky puzzle for me was looking at the nearly-filled grid for 4 things… and thistle and nettle rather shouted out. Which hugely helped deduce the three words. Agree with hard but fair, but I also thought it rather brilliant, this one got under my skin (just as well, given the labour involved). Thanks to Schadenfreude and Hihoba.

5. I started this on the plane to northern Tuscany. I read the preamble, and before looking at the clues I wrote down GARDEN WEED FLOWER – pretty close – but some of the advantage gained was given up trying to remove the letters GArdeN from 7a, 18a & 49a instead of the letters BOrdeR. I only realised that my initial guess was wrong when I woke in the middle of a night and thought “SURINAM”!

   Yes, it was a bit of a slog at the end to replace all the weeds with flowers … and I too have doubts about MOSS being a weed. (I did toy with the possibility of SEA MOSS – seaweed – being replaced by SEA LILY, bit that’s not a flower.)

   Thanks to Sch… & Hi(hoba).

6. PS I’m not sure that “money” is used twice in the clue for 17d (Quantities of money necessary in Tashkent and Sweden!); “necessary” also means money so it’s that that’s used in the wordplay for SUM, the monetary unit in Uzbekistan.

7. HG @ 6 Good point. Ho and I missed that.

8. I agree with the general feeling that the grid fill took absolutely ages and it just wasn’t worth it to then sit and leaf (a thank you) through lists of flowers to find words that would fit. I got Dahlia and Iberis by employing the general principle that the more obscure words would become less so after the final change, but that doesnt hold for the other two so never finished them. Quite frustrating, but thanks nevertheless.

9. I began by thinking this was the easiest Schadenfreude I’d ever tackled, but it became much harder later on. I also found the endgame a bit of a slog since so many of the candidates for a change of letter offered multiple possibilities. Like HolyGhost I had initial doubts about moss being a weed, but if it appears where it’s not wanted I suppose it’s a weed.

10. Unusually for me, I got most of it fairly straightforwardly, including the “flower for weed substitution in borders” … DAHLIA, ANEMONE and LILY came easily, but I was then stuck with hours of frustrating letter-logic-wrangling, over about three days, before I finally came across IBERIS, which I’d never heard of before, with an audible sigh of relief. Thus finally allowing me to grade it as yet another fine Schadenfreude puzzle.

    Jon@1, I feel no guilt whatsoever these days in using outside aids … but my Bradford didn’t have IBERIS under “flowers”. Respect to Trebor @8 for knowing about it. As a boy, I was forced to “dig for victory”, and thus hated anything to do with gardens and gardening thereafter, hence my floral ignorance.

11. I had mostly filled the grid but had made a couple of wrong guesses at which letters to omit. I didn’t manage to find the three words from the missing letters and eventually ground to a complete halt. I continued to look at it off and on for a couple of days hoping for a breakthrough but sadly I did not make any further progress.

    I found the main difficulty was that even after having solved a clue there were many possible entries one could make. Without a definition for the grid entry how to know which to enter? This meant a much higher proportion of “cold solving” than normal. The bottom left corner was especially bad: 47ac was the only normal clue, if you didn’t manage to cold-solve that one then you were stuck.

    Thanks to Hihoba and Schadenfreude.

12. I concur with many of the above comments: I made a fairly rapid start, but found entering the final few clues very difficult and after resorting to a few blogs for hints, I gave up. Similar to PeeDee @11, I found the top right corner particularly difficult with the multiple, interacting jumbled entries. Entering ALPINI at 36d didn’t help either – while it turns out that was what was required for the flower, it prevented me from seeing MOSS 🙁

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