Inquisitor 1638: Remedial Action by eXternal

14 comments on “Inquisitor 1638: Remedial Action by eXternal”

1. A fine puzzle indeed, and a welcome bit of light relief. Fairly straightforward overall, though I did seem to spend a lot of time making trips to the BRB.

2. Enjoyed the puzzle but utterly failed on the last step. I’m not sure how fair it is for us to have to know the expression about the sun being over the yardarm when there is no reference to it or direction towards it in the clues, rubric, song or grid – you either know it or you don’t.

3. This was a nicely-paced solve, like a treasure hunt with little snippets being picked up along the way. Firstly, the undefined entries started to reveal a nautical theme. Then as some of the extra words were examined, it became clear that these gave anagrams of seafarers. Soon, there were enough of the extra letters to guess EARLY IN THE MORNING/EVENING and a bit of reverse engineering then allowed me to complete the remaining entries. The title then confirmed the theme but I needed Wiki to confirm the details of the shanty. The final step took me longer than it should as I could not think of the expression! I guessed that moving the letters would lead to an anagram of SAILOR so I searched for possibilities. When I found the correct move everything made sense.

   Very satisfying and much preferred to the type of Inquisitor where a straightforward grid solve then leads to a long and arduous web search or word search for the denouement.

   Thanks to eXternal and Hihoba for a fine puzzle and blog respectively.

4. Jon_S @1. Sorry to be dense, Jon but BRB= ?

5. Dave_W @4 “Big Red Book” – Chambers. 🙂

6. I very much enjoyed ‘chasing the theme’ of this puzzle. While solving the clues I readily found the six definition-only ones, giving me a flavour of the subject of the theme, although not the theme itself. It was harder to find all the ‘titular characters’, but I persevered with them mainly in order to get the 17-letter phrase. When the letters gave me parts of EARLY and MORNING with a few letters/queries in between it was easy to guess, and the Drunken Sailor ditty came to mind – not immediately but eventually.

   I scanned the grid cursorily for a ‘drunken’ SAILOR, not expecting to find it, because I assumed it would turn up only after the exchange of the triplets. Looking first in the three central columns I saw SUN and the letters OSA next to it. Realising that I needed a permutation of ILR to complete the set of letters for SAILOR I looked further up those columns and there it was: LIR. An excellent denouement. (I vaguely knew about the sun being ‘over the yardarm’ but wasn’t sure if it was part of the song.)

   Thanks to eXternal for a quality puzzle with good clues and a well-executed theme. And thanks to Hihoba for  the blog and all the thematic (and nautical) information.

7. This was one of the most satisfying puzzles that I can remember.  Like Alan B, I managed without too much difficulty to identify the parts of the ship, and also found most of the sailor anagrams.  However, I got completely stuck for a long time on the end game, thinking that I was required to place a drunken sailor over the yardarm.  I even wondered if the three adjacent cells might be diagonally adjacent, but could find nothing that fitted.  Eventually I spotted SUN and the penny finally dropped.

   At present, this puzzle is a clear early leader in the annual competition, so far as my vote is concerned.  A bit of a shame that the closing date published in the paper was two days before the puzzle was even published, but we can’t blame the setter for that!

8. Jon_S@5.  Thanks, Jon – I should have guessed!

9. Manitoba -> Boatman was what put me on the right track. The end game held me up because I was originally only looking at the higher up of the two amended rows for the drunken SAILOR. Failed to spot the SUN over the YARDARM – I thought it was just something to do with SUN up ie early in the morning.

10. Others have said it already – satisfying, enjoyable, nicely paced – but we certainly don’t mind repeating them. Definitely a quality IQ and blog.

    Thanks to both Hihoba and eXternal.

11. Thanks to Hihoba and eXternal

    Marvellous puzzle, great blog.

    For 12d I used the full “Po-faced King (Lear fronted by “Po”)”, and the dispatching of the lowermost occurrence of “athletic”= “a”

12. I seem to remember googling three of the themed clues( SCUPPERS, LONGBOAT,YARDARM) and I heard the sound of a squeezebox playing the shanty. For 4d I had POTMAN rather than TOPMAN but I usually fail on the last lap so many thanks for explaining the shifting of the SUN to over the YARDARM

    Hic, thanks Hihoba and eXternal.

13. I didn’t even try for the anagrams (although they turned out not to be so hard, once you knew the missing letters). Instead, the locations led, via search engine, to the shanty. But I’m afraid I too failed to see the sun and the yardarm, a very pleasing joke.

    Thanks to eXternal and Hihoba.

14. Much enjoyed — thanks all round. Having found a fair number of generic sailors beginning with SHIPMAN, I had some difficulty making the switch to the specific SINBAD and DRAKE. The ARGONAUT in ORANGUTAN gave the biggest smile. Strangely enough I hadn’t solved 43A when the SUN and the YARDARM came to mind, which was a helpful hint.

    The only “remedial action” I could remember from the song was “Put him in the roundhouse ’til he sobers down”, leading to some fruitless searches until at last the grid was full with never a ROUNDHOUSE in sight. Oh well. Also I got distracted by memories of Beachcomber’s long-ago newspaper version: “What shall we do with the young reporter?” with such responses as “Let him ask a bishop what he thinks of baldness” and other crucial issues of the day.

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