Enigmatic Variations No.1530 – Bare Necessities by Check

11 comments on “Enigmatic Variations No.1530 – Bare Necessities by Check”

1. Another good crossword by a setter that I have encountered only twice before (here and elsewhere). Of several very good clues I liked 45a SCHNAPS especially – it was one of my last few in, and it helped me to get JAMS, another witty clue.

   As for the endgame, I understood the first part of the collected letters (LENNON MCCARTNEY) clearly enough, but the other part made no more sense than the second half of the preamble. Knowing so little about the subject, and wishing to do some justice to the theme, I decided to ask a friend who knows a lot about the subject what OOOOOOOOO might represent given only LENNON MCCARTNEY as a clue. She duly came back with the intro and the song title!

   The completed grid is a pangram, by the way.

   Thanks to Check for another good crossword, which I found quite meaty. If I try another puzzle by this setter I would hope to get a lot further with the endgame and theme than I did here. And thanks to Mister Sting for the blog.

2. Thanks, Mister Sting, and Check… I wasn’t sure whether ‘some’ might mean ‘most of’, and we were supposed to only leave the L-O-V-E letters, giving a heart, as opposed to a heart-shaped hole? I compromised by pasting two copies of the grid onto a piece of A4 and taking LOVE out of one, leaving LOVE in the other and scanning that for submission…time will tell!

3. Time has told…the ‘official’ solution on the BD site says to leave only L-O-V-E…which means the use of ‘some’ was a little misleading!…

4. All filled in but the instructions for the endgame baffled me.

5. I enjoyed the solve and for once actually knew the theme. A neat piece of construction – filling the grid outside the thematic shape without using E or O, for a start. Interesting that many of the entries after letters were deleted were still real words: I wonder if the setter was aiming to do that throughout. If so, that would have been some achievement! I went for deleting the wrong thing too: on reflection, “all you need is love” should have given me the idea! Thanks Check and Mister Sting.

6. Either way of depicting the heart – with blanks or with the letters – would be consistent with the instructions as written. My preference was for only the letters of the heart shape to show, but I could equally have chosen to reveal the same thematic item the other way (as shown above). It would be disappointing if either way of doing it is marked wrong, because the preamble is ambiguous.

7. I enjoyed the puzzle and didn’t think beyond leaving LOVE in, on the grounds that it’s “all you need”, which seemed unambiguous to me. But playing devil’s advocate (and just taking pleasure in being perverse) – “some” in Chambers is broadly defined as a selected minority (UK) or a majority (US), so you have the delightful possibility of different interpretations depending on which side of the pond you are.

8. I had to think about this one, but I decided to delete most of the grid.
   It felt wrong – I might have failed to solve any of a number of clues – but I decided the song title made it clear.

   Another good EV from Check – after the Nemean Lion at EV 1484

9. Ifor @7
   I too thought of ‘all you need’ in that way, but it can point the other way too! When your completed grid has blanks to outline the heart, all the grid lacks or needs is L-O-V-E to make it whole. (Which, you might say, is what the song is about!)

10. I suppose we’d have had to ask L and M at the time whether the implication of LIAYN is “you don’t need anything else” or “life / the world isn’t complete without love”. My money’s on the former, but who knows? It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve amicably disagreed!

11. Ifor
    Well said. I was of course aware of those two contrasting meanings of ‘all you need is love’.

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