Independent 11,305 by Bluth

19 comments on “Independent 11,305 by Bluth”

1. By golly, this was a struggle from start to finish, with much online help needed to complete, and even then nine answers were not fully understood. Certainly got my brain working but a bit much for 5 a.m! Anyway, thanks Bluth and Quirister.

2. Thanks, Bluth & Quirister. I’m another who tackled this at stupid o’clock – thought I might as well, after being woken early by the dog, but it was hard going in places with my brain not fully in gear yet. All good fun though – lots of typically elaborate constructions but precisely assembled so everything was parsable if you stared at it long enough, even the ingeniously tortured LET IT ALL HANG OUT. Liked all of it but BEATEN TO IT was my favourite – very clever. Also particularly enjoyed the resting place for soldiers.

   Thanks for the explanation of the draughts terminology – a new one on me too. It had to be that from the anagram though.

3. The usual enjoyable Bluth challenge with some very complex parsings to unravel.

   I had forgotten about the LIV golf tour but found it via Google while struggling to parse my answer to 12a. I didn’t fully parse 15a; I got the FLUE but the rest escaped me. 2d was new to me.

   My top picks were BEATEN TO IT, BODY SCRUB and HEN DO.

   Many thanks to Bluth and to Quirister.

4. I lost count of the ones I couldn’t parse here, but somehow managed to finish thanks to the usual combination of def, crossers and guesswork. Maybe I should have been able to work out some like FLUORESCE (didn’t see FLUE for ‘pipe’), but I wouldn’t have had a hope with others like PLIERS and CROWN-HEAD. Of the ones I could work out, HEN DO, TOAST RACK and the surface for FILL LIGHT were my favourites.

   Thanks to Bluth – you’re getting harder as you get older! – and Quirister

5. My faves:
   OF LATE, HEN DO, LET IT…OUT, SFORZANDO and FILL LIGHT.
   Liked STILL as well.

   Thanks, B and Q!

6. I am really pleased to discover that others found this crossword difficult, although as usual, the challenge was most enjoyable

   Thanks to both Bluth and Quirister

7. Thanks both. Very similar experience to others here, whereby this trod a fine line between an enjoyable tussle and a brain-numbing defeat for a while. I would add specifically re SFORZANDO which did beat me, that it represents my nemesis being a musical term derived from a foreign language, which made solving then parsing an impossibility

8. Well, we got there in the end, and without help, apart from checking CROWN-HEAD in Chambers (never heard of it either, although we’ve played draughts ofen enough). Never heard of the Michael Jackson song, either, but NEBULAR was easily got from the wordplay. But we only got OF LATE from definition and enumeration – the rest of the clue made no sense to us, but then we share the opinion of golf attributed to Mark Twain. There were other answers which were obvious but which we couldn’t parse, such as HEN DO. Last two in were PLIERS, once we remembered Jeremy’s brother’s name, and TOAST RACK – a real groan when we got it and remebered being caught out by a very similar clue once before.
   A worthwhile challenge, though. Thanks, Bluth and Quirister.

9. Having got a lot of the NW corner quickly I spent more than half the puzzle thinking “either Bluth’s getting easier or I’m getting better”. It didn’t stay that way for the tougher ones I then faced, where there was a lot of head scratching, bunging things in partially parsed and a few uses of “reveal” but overall I found it a really enjoyable challenge.

10. allan_c @ 8 The MJ song was actually sung to a rat in an eponymous movie (a spin off of Willard which featured a killer rat).
    To my enduring shame I have the single.
    Enjoyed this despite sforzando – did anyone just know that word?
    Thanks to Bluth and Quirister

11. reddevil @10: I did “just know” sforzando, but then I spend a lot of time singing in choirs. It’s probably not common knowledge for those who aren’t classical musicians (or perhaps speakers of Italian, the standard language for musical terminology).

12. reddevil @ 10

    Yes, learned it somewhere years ago.

    It was also a solution in Phi 10570 on 28/8/20.

13. Another who just got there by hook or by crook. BEATEN TO IT was my favourite. Among the many things that held me up was putting in BODY BRUSH. instead of SCRUB.

14. Came here to check some parsing – for example LIV breakaway golf tour was beating me. Some other wordplay was quite contrived/tricky, suitable for Thursday but committed to unravel. Loved FILL LIGHT, the idea of TOAST RACK as the resting place for something with the potential to be cut into soldiers. And being a rational skeptical sort, I loved URBAN MYTH with it’s amusing surface which also reminded me of something in Dave Gorman’s recent stage show.

15. Meant to add my thanks to both setter and bloggr but submitted too soon.
    Also, as someone who learned piano and music theory SFORZANDO did jump out at me quickly. I think I’ve very rarely seen its abbreviation sf clued with words along the lines of forceful note ..

16. Hard work but very good fun. I loved ‘toast rack’ – made me laugh out loud!

17. Thanks Quirister and thanks all.

    If memory serves, I filled this grid ages ago but didn’t write any clues for it at the time. Probably because I couldn’t face Sforzando. (Add me to the list of people who’d never heard of it.)

    I rediscovered the unclued but filled grid in my files a few weeks later. Sometimes, having painted yourself into a corner it’s fun to find a way out and I was more inclined to have a go at it at that point.

    Fun discovery along the way – the original meaning of ingenuity is ingenuousness – it’s come to mean ingeniousness through confusion. Which is obvious when you think about it, but had never occurred to me before.

    Happy new year.

18. Certainly a brainbuster! Mostly enjoyed the struggle though – BEATEN TO IT, URBAN MYTH and BODY SCRUB particular favourites. Had to work backwards to get LVI, and PIERS Corbyn was unknown to me too.

    Thanks for the puzzle!

19. Thanks Bluth. I worked on this bit by bit throughout the day. I needed a word finder for SFORZANDO and I couldn’t parse 1d (Joan was a mystery), 28a, and HEN DO. Favourites were 1a, MONTBLANC, NETIZEN, INGENUITY, and URBAN MYTH. Thanks Quirister for the blog.

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