Independent 11,891 by Filbert

9 comments on “Independent 11,891 by Filbert”

1. Superb! Put a smile on my face and a worm in my ear.

2. Gosh, well spotted Quirister! One of the cleverest lyrics of any song in my opinion (I believe Cole Porter unusually both composed the music and wrote the lyrics) though I regret to say I didn’t spot the theme and needed a lot of help from a word list to complete. Thanks to Filbert and Quirister.

3. Remember to never mix up ‘pieces of two-by-four’ with ‘pieces of eight’. 🙂

4. Well this was fun, though I made somewhat heavy weather of it. People like to say, when they find a puzzle hard, that they weren’t on the setter’s wavelength; with this puzzle I was on the setter’s wavelength but had to chew to solve some of the more conventional clues. I RELISHED each of “beats me”, “what”, “hey” and the Hanoverian (each clue got a tick), but was significantly held up by BOG, SWEENEY and BOODLES (none of which I’d heard of); and whilst I SUPPOSE was mentally my FOI I had to wait a while to ink it since I couldn’t parse it and was blocked by EXPOS which I had convinced myself was EUROS. (OS for operating system is standard, but it was cheeky to use XP and OS together for the plural!)

   I also enjoyed RESPONSE, BANKROLL and CLICKBAIT.

   Thanks both

5. I’ve certainly heard the song plenty of times but I am unfamiliar with the verses so could not be confident that it constituted a theme. I did spot the title in the bottom two lines and recognised that there were plenty of rhymes but did not get around to looking up the lyrics. Nicely done.

   Thanks Filbert and Quirister

6. This was quite hard. As the blogger expected, this American was held up by the many Anglocentric references here, but it wasn’t just that–there were a lot of tricky and well-disguised constructions here. I did get there in the end, but I did not spot the theme. Pity, because Cole Porter is a favorite of mine. Anything Goes (the show) is still regularly performed by theatres large and small–it has a thin plot involving various goings-on on an ocean liner, but a ton of great songs–so I’m not actually surprised the setter thought of it.

   GOB (in the BOG clue) I have only ever heard in the lyrics to a different Cole Porter song:

   But when the thermometer goes way up
   And the weather is sizzling hot,
   Mister gob, for his squab,
   A marine, for his queen,
   A GI, for his cutie pie, is not.
   Cause it’s too darn hot!
   It’s too darn hot!
   It’s too, too, too darn hot!

   …from which you can deduce that a gob is a sailor.

   And yes, Tatrasman @2: Cole Porter was one of the relatively rare Broadway composers (see also Stephen Sondheim and Frank Loesser) who always wrote his own lyrics.

7. Thanks Filbert. I spotted I SUPPOSE ANYTHING GOES but my knowledge of the musical/song was too limited to go further. Nonetheless I liked this with my top picks being TWO-BY-FOUR, SOLO, GOD KNOWS, RYE, BOODLES, and RELISHED. Thanks Quirister for the detailed blog.

8. Thanks Quirister for elucidating the theme, which had flown right by me. The surface for 26a gains elegance when one considers that the 60s hit “Hey! Baby” was recorded (and co-written) by one Bruce Channel. The surface for 18 is spectacular. Thank Filbert for this gem.

9. Got there in the end. I did suspect an Anything Goes theme half way through, but then it disappeared from my mind so wasn’t of any use to me. Remembered after I had “finished”. Inverted commas because I failed on BOG having forgotten that head was a name for a convenience on a ship and having never heard of a GOB for a US sailor.

   Thanks to Quirister for filling in my knowledge gaps there and to Filbert for a treat of a puzzle.

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