14 comments on “Inquisitor 1507 – Shift Work II: Confessions by Ifor”

1. Thank you very much for the blog. There are puzzles you solve, puzzles you look at and abandon, and then there are ones like this, where you give up, then go back, give up again, think you’ll be damned if you let it beat you and then, minus the cavorting daughter in my case, have a few PDMs and claw your way across the finish line exhausted but triumphant. I could well have been the author of this blog, since your solve mirrored mine. Robert Zimmerman has a middle name which makes him a perfect fit, so he had to be it as far as I was concerned, but couldn’t find a song that worked. Joni Mitchell was a very late find. Not much wiser about the title, though. Finally, I of all people shouldn’t have had 4d as LOI.

2. I had an empty grid for as long as it takes me to solve some Inquisitors, and then one answer that turned out to be wrong, and then by the end of the day seven answers, two of which were wrong as it turned out. Yes, it was one of those solves. Engagingly infuriating is probably the best way to describe this puzzle. 🙂 Google saved me in the end, when I’d managed to get bits and pieces of the songwriter’s name, and from that point on I had something to work with. I know nothing at all about Joni Mitchell, but luckily Wikipedia does… Am I glad I persisted? Most certainly. Would I want a puzzle this taxing every week, or even every month? Probably not. 🙂

3. Jon @2,
   Thanks for the comments. And, as usual, you’re too modest to advertise your own offerings.
   Anyone else looking in might want to take a look either by clicking “Jon says” in his comment (above) or by clicking here https://idothei.wordpress.com

4. Many thanks, Kenmac. 🙂

5. I thought this was a really tough workout.

   Helpfully (and somewhat randomly) I actually managed to rumble the name of the song from the preamble when I saw the lengths of the words in the phrase (Something’s lost…etc)

   Though it made it a lot easier to work out what to do with the down clues, it didn’t make solving any easier.

   One small quibble: the title of the song is ‘Both Sides Now’; being pedantic, one would have to say that the word ‘now’ is irrelevant and I think it would have been more accurate (and fairer) to say in the preamble that “PART of a song’s title suggests how…”. I kept wondering how the ‘NOW’ fitted in, bearing in mind barred puzzles usually require rigorous accuracy

   Thanks to setter and blogger

6. I had one comment on my completed grid: “Wow!”, so a common reaction, it seems. I think I wrote this at the PDM when I realised that every across answer was formed from another word using such a restrictive rule – how is that even possible?

   An extraordinary construction. The only thing that might stop it being in my top 3 was that I found parsing the last few clue a bit frustrating. I gave up with 24A, MAS, which does seem on the tenuous side.

7. I needed elmac.

   My parsing of 32A, incidentally, was that the ‘h’ at the end of pitch was departing from ‘hand’, as in right hand side.

8. Not quite as hard for me as it seems to have been for others. When I had to enter FRET at 28a as EGRET I could see how across answers worked. And for a while I was removing one letter from the down clues (unsatisfactorily) until I realised I should be ‘moving’ not ‘removing’ them.

   Wasn’t aware of the “birth name” but the song and the lyrics were familiar to me.

   As so often, I agree with OPatrick (see #6) – all across answers real words both before and after the switch, how did he do it? And parsing the last couple of clues was a bit of a drag: 24a MAS (not a good clue), 1a BORN (brilliant).

   Can’t agree with bingybing‘s quibble @5; the relevant letter in an across answer has, before entry, become both sides, now. (And if you really want to be pedantic, the song title has a comma before “now”.)

   Thanks to kenmac for the blog and to Ifor for another cracker.

9. Another WOW from us!

   We started this on the train from Nottingham to Moreton in the Marsh as we were walking the Cotswold Way during the following week. By the end of the journey we only had one answer pencilled in as we were still not sure about it.

   We are not ones to give up on an IQ, so over the next few evenings we revisited the puzzle and gradually the grid was partially filled in.

   It was a joint effort in working out the process – Bert suggested taking one letter out completely and substituting two and Joyce figured out which two. Thankfully this helped tease out some tricky clues.

   Our friends who were walking with us asked us each day how things were progressing and when we had finally googled the name and completed the grid they were amazed! The construction really was incredible.

   So glad that we persevered. Thanks Ifor for a super solve.

   Many thanks kenmac – another comprehensive blog.

10. Coming in late, I have to add noises of general agreement and appreciation. I worked out what was going on in the down clues before the across clues, but ultimately had to resort to furtive consultation of an online list of Real Names of Rock Stars, looking for ROB something with just a few other known letters. When, as a tone-deaf non-music-appreciator, I finally got to the song title and told my wife, she looked on me with pity and sang it to me.

    Red herring time: after the across PDM I persuaded myself there must be a song called BEFORE AND AFTER, and gorblimey there was, in fact more than one, but none of them the right one. Oh dearie me.

11. Boy, I wouldn’t want to be the setter who has to follow the week after this doozy! 😮 😮 😮

    I was away, so didn’t get to have a crack at this, but clearly an absolutely brilliant one all round. The grid construction alone is mind-bogglingly good, and the down clues are very impressive. Surely a top 3 contender come year-end.

    Huge congrats to Ifor and thanks to kenmac for the write-up

12. My thanks for all the generous comments, and of course to the bloggers. Having had the pleasure of meeting the macs, I can confirm that it’s el rather than ken who takes responsibility for any jumping up and down that needs doing.

    Anticipating how solvers might tackle a circularity (can’t understand the clues without the theme, can’t find the theme without some answers) is not something I find easy, but I was hopeful that the hiddens might provide a way in; this seems to have been the case for some, at any rate. Anyway, thanks again for the appreciative remarks.

    Ifor

13. I’d like to belatedly join the chorus of approval for this one. We were on the brink of giving up after a frustrating series of false starts, but when we finally worked out what was going on (Thursday!) the grid filled relatively quickly.

    It’s certainly a Top 3 contender, my only reservation being that it was possible to complete the puzzle without fully understanding what the theme is, which is presumably why we were asked to write a key word below the grid. We managed to fill most of the top half by solving a block of crossing clues and fitting them in, which enabled us to deduce how the modifications worked. By this point ROBERT was starting to emerge beside the early Down clues and I immediately started to write ALLEN ZIMMERMAN beside the rest before running out of clues! Once we’d identified A as the mobile letter in 8d it had to be Joni Mitchell, but although we’re both fans the relevant song was not immediately obvious. We worked it out eventually, but even if we’d known from the outset that it was “Both Sides, Now” (hadn’t realised before now that there is a comma) I think it would have taken us a while to deduce what to do with the across answers as the song title is a very subtle hint.

    Congratulations and thanks to Ifor on a masterly puzzle and also (even more belatedly) to Encota for his very impressive debut the week before.

14. A marvelous puzzle, and given that I had no entries in the grid at all after my first two attempts it is a wonder that I made it to a 100% complete finish. Took much of the week but well worth the effort. Many thanks kenmac and Ifor.

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