Is it a bird? Is it a plane? What has Apt got in store for us this time …
It’s Paul Taylor’s sixth Listener, and his last two puzzles have asked us to make a spice-rack and solve a Bank Job involving a wolf, goat and baggage, so no one big theme but we can look foward to an accessible and perhaps amusing puzzle.
The preamble invites us to identify six entries as misidentifications, one with a cell containing two letters and the rest jumbled. Extra letters in the wordplay to non-jumbled entries are to spell out the opening line and author of a “narration of events”. Correcting the misidentifications will reveal the subject, which must be highlighted.
So – a narrative, presumably fairly well-known, involving six misidentifications. A few came to mind, but we’d had the Mad Gardener’s Song recently and others didn’t seem right (AI offered The Comedy of Errors …) so we plunged in.
The clues were a fine Goldilocks set (not too hard, not too easy…) and the grid fill proceeded without too much angst, th0ugh parts of the NW and SE corners (where as we discovered the jumbles were close to each other) delayed us. A few clues are worth a comment – and noting that when proper names are used there is an argument for more generous clueing than usual:
- 32a “Garland Sixtus IIIs successor (3)” for LEI from LE[O] I – fun for the ecclesiastical half of Dash
- 33a “Cameron’s blockbuster tax breaks a long way away (6) for AVATAR – also fun when we realised it was film not politics
- 1d “Fred’s wife’s mother supporting decision mostly (5)” for WILMA – thankfully we are old enough to remember the Flintstones. Younger solvers might have needed a bit more help
- 9d “Junior’s to go home without a first prize (5)” for LEVER from LE(a)VE in [J]R – a clever misdirection from “prize”
- 21d “Guitarist Paul touring health centre in retirement does not achieve renewal? (6)” for LAPSES from SPA< in LES. Les Paul the guitarist wasn’t in our address book so that one was reverse-engineered – trickily because of the jumble
- 28d “What requires doses of reptile antivenom in supply? (5)” for KRAIT (a poisonous snake) an &lit from R(eptile) A(ntivenom) in KIT that like so many of that type of clue ends up with definitions that we might otherwise query in order to pull off the &lit
- 29d “Find oneself 40-plus (4)” for LAND from [X]L AND – which only made sense (and gave a nice PDM) when we did the due diligence and worked out that the extra letter was X, and could put the red-herring of FAND (Scots “found”) back in its box
- 30d “Engaged in a task, put away electronic devices (4, two words)” for AT IT from [E]AT IT – a very neat and new-to-us treatment of quite a common phrase in crosswords (the letter-pattern I suppose)
So – an enjoyable solve that revealed the message IT WAS SIX MEN OF INDOSTAN JOHN SAXE, which of course gave away the elephant in the room and led to the following subsitutions:
If there is anyone out there who hasn’t come across The Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant in Saxe’s verse form, you can look it up online at https://allpoetry.com/The-Blind-Man-And-The-Elephant. The ecclesiastically-qualified member of Dash likes its conclusion
So, oft in theologic wars, the disputants, I ween,
tread on in utter ignorance, of what each other mean,
and prate about the elephant, not one of them has seen!
Oh – the Oenophile Club. Well, 1a took us to a charming (we’re sure) Sicilian restaurant, and ours will be a nice Montepulciano. Cheers Apt!