22 comments on “Inquisitor 1643: Two’s Company by P I N K”

1. As you say, surprisingly straightforward, most enjoyable, and with a good message for us all. Phi spilled the beans earlier in the week that there was a special PINK in the offing, and with that title it wasn’t much a leap to guess the theme from the outset. 🙂

2. My experience was slightly different from Kenmac’s. I filled the grid, found that there were only two Is (by an alphabetical count, letter by letter – a good thing it wasn’t Y or Z!) and only then listed the letter pairs to find the message. I must say that the PDM was remarkable! Another excellent Inquisitor, not as hard as last week’s thank goodness. Thanks PINK and Kenmac.

3. This was an interesting way of generating the letters towards a message, and far less fiddly than I feared. Kudos to whichever member(s) of the PINK team spotted the similarity between the two contrasting phrases.

   Crosswords like IQ and the Listener have been a welcome distraction from the current situation, and in all honesty I wasn’t too pleased when I realised what the theme was. It was a fine puzzle in its own right though, as you’d expect from this collaboration of top-notch setters.

4. Yes, a straightforward gridfill for a change.  I also had SWOLN but can’t now remember how I justified it.  I made no attempt to find out which letter appeared only twice until I had filled the grid: I was expecting something relatively uncommon (except of course that would have made the clues even harder to write) but it wasn’t difficult to discover that I was the letter in question.  Congratulations to all the setters involved for what must have been a very fast piece of work, bearing in mind the topicality of the theme.

5. I parsed SWOLN as LOW (base) switching ends then replacing the I in SIN (error). The def is a rare spelling, hence “every so often”.

6. Cruciverbophile @5

   You’re almost certainly right. I feel that not going for a degree in astronautical physics has failed me here.
   Note to 18-year-old self. Don’t stay in Edinburgh, go to Houston, Texas.

7. A delightful puzzle as others of said, with a denouement that was ‘simple’ and minimal but not at all obvious.

   I enjoyed the high-quality clues – I found it possible to attack any part of the grid and not be ‘forced’ into a route through it following clues that would yield.

   Fortunately I filled the grid and therefore had a full and correct set of letters from which to identify the ‘i’ (appropriately) as the key letter. The unusual instruction to pick two letters from each clue and then pick just one of them to spell out a new instruction was a nice touch: the nine instances of either two identical letters or just one letter helped to reveal the message.

   I admired the thematic design of this puzzle very much, and the unexpected transformation of the message down the diagonal made for a very satsifying finish.

   Unlike last year, this is a patchy year for me and the Inquisitor, and I was pleased to experience a puzzle like this. Congratulations to the collaborators for putting this fine puzzle together. And thanks to kenmac for an interesting blog – I never thought to search for the universal letter at the outset.

   Thanks to P I N K and kenmac.

8. Thanks for explaining P I N K  and for blogging a very positive puzzle with a message,

   Many thanks all,

9. It didn’t occur to me either – just got on with the grid fill, which was surprisingly easy (those asking for easier solves will have been gratified by this one – as was my friend who is dipping his toe into these waters).

   But the PDM was very nice, making complete (and witty) sense of what had seemed a very finicky way of generating the instruction. I don’t think anyone has pointed out that the extra bars, caused by the self-isolation, created new short words.

   Normally, such clever constructions are associated with difficult puzzles; here a lot of thought and effort has gone towards a rather easy puzzle.

   Many thanks to setters and knnmac.

10. Another fine puzzle. Not too tricky to solve, but it looks like a lot of hard work went into it, so well done to the setters. I did try to be clever by trying to work out the “letter” half way through with the false logic that it couldn’t be any of the letters that the clues began with as well as the entered ones, but 29A threw a spanner in the works. Thanks to Kenmac for the blog as well.

11. So I guess my solving partner and I were the only team who decided the final message was NO TO NHS FEES?

    Having found SELFISH NATION, and wondering what to do, we noticed that if you read the same diagonal backwards, you get NOITANHSIFLES, and if you bar off the I’s (and decide that makes them invisible) you get NOTANHSFLES. Well you only need to change two cells, as instructed, to get NO TO NHS FEES, with the barred off I’s sitting nicely on spaces to boot.

    It seemed like a great solution, because NO TO NHS FEES is a slogan against charging fees (to non-UK residents) for using the NHS, which would help to avoid being a SELFISH NATION. We were impressed by the surprising use of reading the original message backwards. So of course we didn’t look any further. Thanks to Kenmac for putting us right …

12. I worked out the instruction prior to solving any of the clues. Chose a short clue, wrote down all the letters, then crossed out most of them in turn by going through the clues. This left me with A, E, I, and O. The elimination didn’t take long.

    However, this didn’t help with the grid fill, which I thought was a lot easier than usual, as I’d finished it before lunch on the Saturday. Makes a change.

13. A great puzzle throughout and the NO TO NGS FEES from WritingHawk is genius.

    I thought the taking of letters next but one from the Is was a nod towards social distancing (I must be 2m away).

14. NHS*

15. @Writinghawk

    Did you by any chance used to write the clues for 3-2-1?

16. I too was amazed at Writinghawk’s discovery of that alternative topical slogan, obtained by following the same instructions. If we need a criterion on which to decide between the two outcomes, we could use Neil Hunter’s observation about real words being left in the final grid as blogged.

17. As others have said, this was slightly easier than expected given the setters who were involved.

    Very enjoyable though. During the lockdown, crosswords are relished even more than usual and are a way of reminding you what day it is too!

    We waited until the grid was complete before checking letter counts. We never thought about checking the letters in the clues.

    Thanks to kenmac and all the setters. Our thoughts also go to the missing member of the team – we still have fond memories of Schadenfreude’s puzzles.

18. SPINK on their previous outings reserved key numbers for themselves IQ 1500 and IQ 1600 so PINK and 1643, must be something significant. And so it proved. As many have said straightforward solving although the bottom right corner proved testing for me. Maybe the N of PINK. Revealing the instructions was different and good fun and the two cell changes were soon evident. So topicality was the significance. This must have been on a very fast track from conception to appearance.

19. I thought we were due for a toughie and when I saw the PINK acronym, I thought this was it. Not so, however, and a very gentle solve apart from the bottom right, as Mang @18 has observed. A very neat finish with the isolated Is and highly relevant change of diagonal.

    I too could not parse SWOLN and it is not in my 2006 Chambers.

    I see that the lock-down seems to have brought some new names to this forum. Welcome to them and thanks to Kenmac and to P, I, N & K for their quick thinking.

20. Surely the spaced P I N K is another pointer to that 2m gap.

21. Just a quick word of thanks to Ken and commenters. Between you you’ve covered all aspects of the puzzle.  As has been said, this was put together quickly, so it’s good to see that solvers enjoyed it and welcomed its relevance.  Should PINK meet again under more auspicious circumstances we may aim to stretch you a little more!

    P I N K

22. All thanks to the PINK quadrumvirate for a nifty distraction (with a very pleasing finale) in tough times, and for Kenmac for careful explication. I fretted for ages over 46A — STOLN kept coming to mind, but unjustiifably — and eventually got to SWOLN, whose “sometimes” qualification in my oldish Chambers made a good match to “Every so often expanded”. The wordplay was harder to see, but I ended up in the same place as Cruciverbophile @5 and am furtively pleased that even our blogger found this one tough.

Comments are closed.