After what has been a pretty wild summer with the young guns on the Inquisitor scene showing off their talents, Kruger demonstrates that there’s life in the old-timers yet. The preamble is what I like to think of as good, solid fare:
Nine answers must be modified, in ways to be deduced, before entry. In half of the remaining clues to normally entered answers, wordplay provides an extra letter that is not to be entered in the grid. In clue order, these letters give a hint as to the methods of modification. Letter counts in brackets refer to grid entries, which are all real words or proper nouns.
Older hands will have spotted the bit about letter counts and guessed straight off that grid entries were going to be longer or shorter than the answer given by the clues. That didn’t deter me from staring stubbornly at a few for too long, though, before kicking myself for what will not have been the first or last time in my solving career.
With the dubious merits of the Reading festival rumbling away in the background, and the intermittent drizzle that has been the constant this summer not helping with the mundane business of getting washing dry, the solve proceeded in a slow, fairly steady fashion, this being one of those reasonably tough solves that reward patience, otherwise known as a grim determination not to give up, interspersed with trips to the BRB.
At the close I had a couple of the adjusted entries to complete, being DOCUMENT and SKEWBALD, and no real idea of what the extra letters were supposed to mean until I corrected a bit of my parsing and stumbled upon:
MESSITER PANEL GAME
That will have meant something to many, but as for myself I had to Google to find the rather well known panel game show Just A Minute, and then utilise the “without hesitation, repetition or deviation” required by the format to work out what had been staring me in the face all along and complete the last two. The very satisfying equal number of each, needless to say, as well as lifting the spirits, had the merit of helping the poor, beleaguered solver know which they were missing.
Which raised a smile. Hope it was as good for you as it was for me. And, oh yeah, that title. Presumably referencing the decade of origin. Well, duh, it’s all to do with the 60 seconds referenced, of course! See comments below…
For reference, the amended entries, by category, are:
| Without Hesitation | |
|---|---|
| SURPLICE | SPLICE |
| COVERING | COVING |
| DOCUMENT | DOCENT |
| Without Repetition | |
|---|---|
| GARBAGE | GARBE |
| TORRET | TORE |
| GNOMONIC | GNOMIC |
| Without Deviation | |
|---|---|
| SUCKET FORK | SUCKET |
| SKEWBALD | BALD |
| SATURNIC | SAIC |
There’s one bit of parsing I’m less than 100% sure of, so feel free to interject with a better one.
| Clue | Answer | Entry, if different | Extra Letter | Wordplay | |
| ACROSS | |||||
| 1 | Vestment certainly includes short fold (6) | SURPLICE | SPLICE | SUR(PLICa)E | |
| 6 | Shelter Aussie man leading band (6) | COVERING | COVING | COVE (surprisingly Aussie, given how fond Wooster was of the term) + RING | |
| 11 | Muslim theologian’s universal proposition (5) | ULEMA | M | U + LEMMA | |
| 13 | Cross sleeper on Trans-American railway almost beyond help (5) | TIGON | E | TIE + GONe | |
| 14 | Smoke damaged GI’s car (5) | CIGAR | S | An anagram of “GI’s car” | |
| 15 | Money exchanges slowly excluding dinar and schilling (5) | AGIOS | AdaGIO without the DA for dinar + S | ||
| 17 | Rhetorically speak about medical (7) | DECLAIM | An anagram of “medical” | ||
| 18 | Wrong mark since recessive in mutant mice by union of disparate germ cells (8) | EXOGAMIC | X + a reversal of AGO contained by an anagram of “mice” | ||
| 21 | Electric saloon wheels making use of parts of the body (4) | ASCI | A hidden. Yes, it took me ages to spot it too. | ||
| 22 | Moves easily from meat market – that’s not hard (6) | AMBLES | S | In the plural as well as singular a ShAMBLES is a meat market | |
| 23 | Level cairn in the Cheviots (4) | RASE | I | A double definition – RAISE is the second | |
| 25 | “Remain still and tense” in Polish (5) | STAND | S(T)AND | ||
| 27 | Uranium extracted from very small tunnel (4) | MINE | T | MINuTE | |
| 31 | Lover once composed song for gypsies (8) | FLAMENCO | E | FLAME + an anagram of “once” | |
| 33 | Flights ignoring accepted landing strips (7) | RUNWAYS | RUNaWAYS | ||
| 35 | Superb Listener engrossing Nick (5) | EBLIS | R | A hidden Muslim name for the Devil | |
| 36 | Refuse quantity of fish caught by greedy Scots (5) | GARBAGE | GARBE | GAR(BAG)E. We all love a Scottish word | |
| 37 | He is cute when intoxicated (6) | CESTUI | A anagram of “is cute” to give a term used in law | ||
| 38 | Simple idea to engage unofficial detective (5) | PLAIN | P | PLA(PI – Private Investigator)N | |
| 39 | Rotter bent ring on collar (4) | TORRET | TORE | An anagram of “Rotter” | |
| 40 | Court detains offensive customer (6) | CLIENT | A | C(ALIEN)T | |
| DOWN | |||||
| 1 | Instrument in faulty UK rocket starts to seriously fail (6, 2 words) | SUCKET FORK | SUCKET | An anagram of “UK rocket” and S F | |
| 2 | Worked steadily at detailed dance movement (4) | PLIE | PLIEd | ||
| 3 | One reports on tails (8) | LEG-WOMAN | A leg-woman is a reporter, and the tails are presumable “[t]he back, lower, rear, latter, downstream, weaker or inferior part or prolongation of anything, often opp to head” + “woman (offensive sl)”, though I’m not sure about the first | ||
| 4 | Cinema presentation primarily involving Celtic language (4) | IMAX | N | I + MANX, IMAX cinemas usually having more leg room and generally being more sparsely populated due to the price, leading to a better viewing experience all round | |
| 5 | Curse Genoese magistrate rising before supplanting head of officials (4) | EGAD | Doge reversed with A (before) replacing the O | ||
| 7 | Regularly lost pitch of organ (4) | OTIC | Regular letters from lOsT pItCh | ||
| 8 | Break timeless instrument (5) | VIOLA | E | VIOLAtE without the T | |
| 9 | Observed how roads are hoped to be in winter? (7) | NOTICED | I always like my roads to be NOT ICED | ||
| 10 | Coming on abusively (in jest) describing nose (6) | GNOMONIC | GNOMIC | An anagram of “Coming on” | |
| 12 | Islam mistakenly adopts, for example, uprising, being against vets (6) | AGEISM | L | An anagram of “Islam” with EG reversed included | |
| 16 | Poet entertaining partners with black horse (4) | SKEWBALD | BALD | You went looking for the other BALD horse too, didn’t you? This one is an obscure term for poet – SKALD – with a couple of the usual Bridge partners included and B | |
| 19 | Without looking, initially blame ugly foreign hothouse pest (8, 2 words) | MEALY BUG | An anagram of “blame ugly” with the L from “looking” included | ||
| 20 | Ingrained dirt covers top of cabinet – that’s something deplorable (5) | CRIME | G | GRIME around the C from “cabinet” | |
| 24 | Dropping front of insouciance, elderly person beginning to admire lady (6) | SENORA | SENiOR + A | ||
| 25 | Previously sprinkled juice over split (6) | SPRENT | A | SAP + RENT | |
| 26 | Present happens to be European? Emphatically not! (6) | NOWISE | NOW IS E | ||
| 28 | Himalayan friend visiting NE Italy (6) | NEPALI | NE(PAL)I | ||
| 29 | Arrange pieces in abridged report (6) | DOCUMENT | DOCENT | DO CU(MEN)T | |
| 30 | Strike upset county operator of chain of taverns (5) | PUBCO | M | BUMP reversed + CO for county | |
| 31 | Annals of fortified island (5) | FASTI | FAST + I | ||
| 32 | Killer to live inside signal box (5) | CABIN | E | CA(BE)IN | |
| 34 | Rested on ballot box essentially sick (poisoned by lead) (4) | SATURNIC | SAIC | SAT URN IC. You didn’t know the answer or that URN can be a ballot box either, I presume? |
This was in the end a very satisfying puzzle to complete. The theme remained hidden until I had got all but two of the extra letters and all but two of the nine thematic answers. I had the name MESSITER in full a long time before that, but I didn’t recognise it.
I was barely familiar with the theme, and reading about it obviously helped with understanding the sets of letters that I had removed in order to make the modified answers. As Jon_S says, it was nice to find three of each type of modification (Hesitation, Repetition and Deviation). In fact, the most difficult one, 39a TORRET, was helped by assuming that there would be three Repetitions. That clue caused me particular difficulty because I first had SPREDD at 25d (as it also fits that clue), leaving DOODLE as possibly the only thematic word of the Repetition type that would go in at 39a. As that clearly did not fit the clue I had to rethink that corner, coming up eventually with SPRENT then TORRET.
It was a good set of clues, and I enjoyed solving them as well as discovering and learning a bit about the theme.
Many thanks to Kruger, and to Jon_S for the thorough and entertaining blog.
title to be parsed as “a 60 second trial” i presume!
title = 60 seconds, ie Just a Minute
3d: under woman in Chambers there is “the reverse or Britannia side of a coin”.
Thanks Bees@2 and HG@3 – a case of not being able to see for looking! I’ve now updated the blog.
Enjoyed and eventually finished this one: all thanks to Kruger and Jon_S. We too had “the dubious merits of the Reading festival rumbling away in the background”, which I was deafly able to ignore except that SWMBO kept telling me how awful it was. I never heard the radio programme but had the tiny advantage of having seen the game played at science fiction conventions with victims required to improvise on SF themes without H, R or D.
Thanks Jon and HS.I got a bit lost on this(still a bit of a rookie)
I got a few clues and even a few with the extra letterS but had to wait for this blog.
I do remember the show.
I solved this in the middle of the night, when I realised, if the panel game was Just a Minute, that would explain the fork, turn, er and ur (I never did ‘get’ the repetitions, though clearly I should have). I once had a villa holiday ruined by a fiercely competitive guest, never subsequently invited, who insisted we played numerous rounds each evening, and pounced on every error. Thanks to Kruger for an entertaining and fair puzzle, and to Jon_S, whose predictions of where I struggled are uncannily accurate (though not comprehensive).
Tough but satisfying in the end, as expected for a Kruger puzzle.
It took me forever to get the phrase as I had a couple of rogue letters notably an extra A giving me MESASITE__ which just didn’t get me anywhere.
One I finally twigged the principle I quickly assumed there would be 3 of each – perhaps proof that I’ve been doing the Inquisitor for too long.
My last one was also TORRET especially as the “repetition of letters” device took me a while to understand vs the (for me) more obvious deviations and hesitations.
Thank you all.
PS: Just A Minute was invented in the Sixties so while the primary reason for the title must have been the minute, it pleasingly also works as a decade.
@9 If you had the extra a from AGIOS, I did too. I don’t know where da=dinar comes from, certainly not my Chambers, which does however have d=dinar.
Really enjoyed it though. The title, “panel game” and bewildering subtractions led to a good triple penny-drop. Not easy for non-Brits though?
That was a bit stupid of me. I don’t think they read the i abroad!
Chambers does have DA as dinar, though.
@12 Yes, apologies, I see now I was looking for da, separate from DA in my old edition. When I was solving I probably just saw dinar under D first and mistakenly assumed there wouldn’t be an alternative. DA is rather a surprising abbreviation for dinar but I guess it’s probably the official one.
Yes, I only checked because I thought exactly as you did.
A big DNF from me this week – partly due to lack of time but mainly because I couldn’t seem to get in to this one for some reason, only solving around 50% of the clues … a serious case of ‘word blindness’ set in for me. Note to self – must try harder. Judging by the blog, some nice clueing in this one.
I got the theme and generally enjoyed this one but hit a roadblock with 4 clues and finally threw in the towel yesterday. I had the first three letters of 1D SUC.. and 4D IMA. I guessed the first was an anagram but had not heard of it. I am not a cinema buff so the only real word I could find for the second was IMAM, which made no sense. I clearly had enough to just (just?) plough through Chambers to find the answers – I wish I had! Then 3D scuppered me with 25A as I had ..WOMEN not ..WOMAN. Tail is the offensive word so tails surely means the plural and “One” seemed to imply “One of the answer to the wordplay reports” – I suppose it depends how you read it. Then SKEWBALD defeated me although I might have got it if I’d had the D from 25A. I seem to remember an old song “Old Skewbald was a racehorse and I wish he were mine..”
Thanks to Kruger for an entertaining theme and to Jon S for putting me right.
Me @16. Tut-tut, it was Stewball not Skewball! Another senior moment.