Independent 11,007 by Methuselah (Saturday Puzzle 22 January 2021)

14 comments on “Independent 11,007 by Methuselah (Saturday Puzzle 22 January 2021)”

1. What an absolute delight solving this was. Very tough but doable with a lot of head-scratching. Couldn’t remember at first who London’s mayor was, so SHANKS was one of my last to parse. Took a while to parse MUSCLES (the popeye link made it an easy guess though) and the NOTARISE clue is something the like of which I have never seen – brilliant. Loved the KEIR, A KNIGHT idea. Didn’t bother trying to find the BEN??? film, so congrats to to our blogger for getting BEN-HUR.

2. As Hovis says, a very tough but doable delight.

   Thanks very much to Methuselah and mc_rapper67

3. It is difficult. I would plump for KEIRA etc as an example. Once you’re there it’s clear enough, but cottoning on to the gag is a very tough call. Thank goodness for checking!

4. Loved this. As has been said, tough but doable, and also immensely satisfying to finish.

   Thanks Methuselah and mc_rapper67

5. What everyone else has said about both the quality and degree of difficulty of this one. I ended up not getting DOT COM or MACARTHUR, but plenty of others unparsed. Good to see all explained by our very switched on blogger.

   Thanks to Methuselah and to mc_rapper67

6. Having got several clues in the first couple of minutes I thought this was unusually easy. It didn’t take long to change my mind, and I didn’t get everything unaided, but I loved it. The Kier Starmer / Kiera Knightley combo and 19A particularly stood out.

7. An excellent puzzle, I found less tricky than his previous outings – maybe I’m just getting used to his style. 30a and the Keirs outstanding for me. Cheers MCr for blogging this – not easy.

8. Clever stuff, though I didn’t quite finish as has happened before with Methuselah’s puzzles.
   A couple of eyebrow-raisers: the SON in SEASON is a homophone that does not actually come out when you say the solution, not sure what I think of that, and getting the ‘after dropping trendy’ to apply to SINK rather than SKIN is quite awkward.
   DOT COM was one I didn’t get, mainly because I was in a hurry and couldn’t think of Dot Cotton. But what made it extra hard was the use of the catch-all question mark to mean ‘Twitter’s just an example of a website’. Sometimes a question mark seems like not enough. It’s also a particularly unhelpful example, as there are plenty of websites for which one does say the dot com after the name, but never Twitter.
   MACARTHUR and TUNER were my favourites.
   Thanks S&B

9. Thanks MC, a few here I couldn’t fully parse – eg MUSCLES, KEIRA KNIGHTLEY – so blog very useful. And I didn’t get the full cleverness of NOTARISE (just took “quarters” as an odd anagram indicator, much more satisfying now I can see properly how it works).

   Some very inventive and devious clueing, good fun and rewarding to solve.

   After this and Vlad today, I need a lie down.

10. widdersbel, I know what you mean. Loved the Vlad crossword (as always) but found that even tougher to complete than this. James @8, the homophone for SEASON works fine for me but I did raise an eyebrow a little with the other points you mention.

11. A bit too tough to be enjoyable, with wordfinder help needed several times. And having put ‘golf [driving] range’ for 17dn we had some not very convincing answers for the rest of the SE corner. But seeing GOLF LINKS in the preamble to the blog we went back to the puzzle before reading further and were able to complete.
    But we liked OBELI, INGLE and -for the delightfully misleading surface allusion to The Merchant of Venice – STORAGE.
    So thamks anyway to Methuselah and mc_rapper67.

12. Well, this odd. Early evening I started this and got about a third done. Then I made dinner and afterward started reading New Scientist, meaning to come back to this later. But I totally forgot and watched the NFL instead and only remembered this this morning.

13. Lovely crossword. As Flashling @7, I thought it less tricky than expected. Maybe it was that it was unusually generous with its crossers, once you’d got going (which took a couple of read-throughs). I loved STORAGE (natch) and INANER, PADDLER, STARMER/KNIGHTLEY. I think I agree with James @8 that SEASON isn’t quite fair. But I’d say it was OK anyway: nifty clue.

14. Thanks for all the comments and feedback. Apologies for the slow response, but I was out and about most of the day yesterday…

    James at #8 – I took the ‘?’ at the end of 19A as an indication that there was something clever going on in the clue – a twinkle in the setter’s eye – rather than it suggesting that the Twitter reference was to a generic website. (To be fair, I can’t imagine anyone usually gets as far as putting the whole URL in to anything but the more obscure websites these days, with hyperlinks everywhere, and most browsers/search engines with their predictive texting getting there well before the speed of the average human typist…)

    WordPlodder at #5 – I may not be as ‘switched on’ as you think – spoiler alert, but the Indy bloggers do get advance sight of the puzzles, so I hadn’t solved it, written it up, created the grid and published it all in a matter of hours yesterday morning! (I don’t think the daily Grauniad bloggers have the same luxury, but I am lucky in that I do the Saturday prize one there once a month, so I get a whole week to do that…)

    allan_c at #11 – I’d never heard of the ‘casket scene’ in MoV, so thanks for that little nugget of education on a Sunday morning!

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