Independent 9538 / Hoskins

16 comments on “Independent 9538 / Hoskins”

1. That seems correct- Pete Seeger (according to footage) was less than impressed by the Newport gig. It has been said that his main objection was the mix where he could not properly hear Bob’s lyrics.
   I liked the nina and the other themers and a few that could be arguably included-LOUDENING etc.
   Nice puzzle from Hoskins.

2. And Seeger wanted to take a(n) 5D to the microphone cable!

   I completely missed the theme, despite having checked the right hand column once it was completed (before the left hand one was!). I should have looked harder. It is Tuesday after all.

   Didn’t distract from a characteristically good puzzle though. ROOTS MUSIC was especially good.

   Thanks to H-Dog for the puzzle and B&J for the blog

3. An ace puzzle with so many good moments from the Freewheelin’ Hoskins, but I agree that LOLITA and ROOTS MUSIC stood out.

   Along the same lines as the theme (although it was a year later), 18d might be an oblique reference to the “Judas!” incident. I also don’t recall seeing a thematic solution repeated in a Nina before.

   Hearty handclasps to Hoskins and Bertandjoyce!

4. I enjoyed this fractionally less than recent Hoskins puzzles … but that is mainly because the previous ones were so much fun.

   With its 11a-ness, it was also the wrong one to send to Jane!

   21a was clever. It was also my last one in, which I was just about to give up on when I spotted the left hand nina. That led me nicely to the other nina and gist of the theme.

   I particularly liked 19a and 27a, and 8d produced a big smile too, which is not something I’d ever say about the answer.

   Thanks to the incenser of society for the puzzle and to B&J for the blog.

5. I bunged in NAGS at 17a so no clean kill. Missed the theme.
   Dylan to Nobel committee “thanks for the award; would you like me to sing?” “Christ no; send Patti Smith”
   Thanks to H&B&J

6. Thanks Harry and B+J

   I loved this, being a huge Bobfan. Great stuff!

7. Good to have a theme and a Nina (repeated for good measure) and fun trying to spot the relevant clues. Quite apart from what Pete Seeger might have wanted to do with the mike cable, I thought AXE also qualified as a thematic clue as an American term for ‘guitar’. Favourites were LOLITA (I won’t buy into an argument as to whether it’s an &lit), NEUTERED and the surface for ACOUSTIC.

   A big thanks to Hoskins and to B&J.

8. We’re sitting in Feren’s Gallery in this year’s City of Culture eating lunch discussing &lits!

   Joyce has persuaded Bert that LOLITA is one.

   If you are near Hull the gallery is well worth a visit.

9. A literary &lit is literally the best type, especially when in a certain literary supplement.

10. Kitty didn’t need to worry as, apart from 11a and the right-hand side Nina, the theme floated over my head!
    I was surprised to see 19a as an accepted stand-alone phrase and thought 16d was an absolutely dire word but no real problems to report.
    Thanks to Hoskins and to B&J for the review.

11. Jane @10, re 16d, a pity there’s no such word as Loudoning* after Loudon Wainwright! 🙂 Dylan was his inspiration, as he relates in his very funny ‘Talking New Bob Dylan’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWmtMp9oaEU

    * if 23a could be Teahouse

12. Many thanks to B&J for the super blog and to everyone who solved and especially those who commented.

    I’m very happy the theme brought some happiness and hope it didn’t annoy others too much – bit Marmite is our Bob, I reckons. All thematic stuff has been nailed and, if anyone is interested, the theme was When Bob Dylan turned Electric – hence the upside-down right hand side Nina.

    Great to see Jane on this side of the interwebs [hiya] and also to get B&J in &lit conversations in such nice environs (I thought that clue an &lit meself, so you are either in good or bad company dependent on how you see things there). And I likes your link, Michael – I also did a Loudon puzzle in September or October of last year which is available in the Indy archive – along with all Indy puzzles from the middle of 2015 – for free if anyone is looking for something crosswordy to do.

    Very much to looking forward to seeing everyone at the Nottingham do this weekend – looks like it’ll be a good ‘un and I look forward to cadging drinks off anyone with a name that starts in K and ends in ittezeh.

    Right, enough from me … well, I say enough but let’s face it there hasn’t been mention of the fabled FifteenSquared drinks trolley yet and that won’t do at all.

    Long-time readers who haven’t yet been bored to death will know that last time out good old Mrs Jalopy of the drinks trolley had run off with a bloke from accounts and I told a long and rambling story in their absence. Since then, I have come to realise that such fiction is not appropriate here and so have turned historical detective and found some very interesting information about the fifteen squared drinks trolley – all of which is true and not fictional at all – and I shall now, in brief, recount for your edificition, though not for your delight (sorry Gaufrid, please don’t hit me as I’m only little!) …

    I first found the fabled FifteenSquared drinks trolley alluded to, according to the well-reputed Cleave’s Registry of Historical Inaccuracies, in an oft mistranslated snatch of a census entry from the Doomsday book of 1086 that read:

    “… Missus Jalopy of Little Bottom – unknownst of age, though’st shakery of jowells in phizzog – who, by professions, be a puller of the carriage of enlivening liquids for the sportary game of Cross-swording (a sportife invented, and philanthropised, by his eminence the Lord of Squifdeen Aired) …”

    For this modern crossword historian, my eyes had just heard nothing less than the first recorded mention of the Jalopy family – since then still quaintly called ‘the keeper of the trolley’ – and though my breath was taken away for more time than I, though less time than most, would’ve liked, I knew I had to push on further and find out more.

    With all six of my interest glands tumescent at the thought of what it could all mean, my mind was a morass of question upon question: who was this mysterious Lord of Squifdeen Aired? How can people vote for a Conservative government? Could the game of Cross-swording be some arcane forerunner of the humble crossword we solve today; and what did the drinks trolley have to do with it all anyway?

    Exhausted but excited, the faint notion that the very Saint of Crosswords, Arthur Wynne himself, might well’ve come across the same information as I and reinvented the form himself in 1913 spurred me on to look further and dig deeper. I knew a discovery of this size would surely change the course of crosswords and, I didn’t think it too far-fetched to say, it could very well change absolutely nothing itself.

    I submerged myself in the records with a fervour of such magnitude that Mrs Frottage from downstairs banged on her ceiling in discontent. Even though my floor rumbled with her remonstrations I wasn’t to be put off and searched the records with a fast thumb, but, finding only ABBA and The Bay City Rollers, I sighed and turned back to my bookcase to pull Puffin’s well-respected fifteen-edition of Bundell’s Miscellany of Flatulent Sporting Cads as my new reference work and began a frantic search as night fell quick and quiet outside the window of my cell.

    As fate would have it, on the first turn of the work’s yellowed pages I realised I had picked up a phone directory by mistake. Quickly, and with a care not to use an adverb in a piece of creative writing, I grabbed the correct book and, after no small search, found the following entry on the rules of Cross-swording – written by The Lord of Squifdeen Aired himself in 1090:

    “Tis but a simple game. One party, knownest as the settee, shalst be sat on by the creatorizor of the game – knownst from the henceforth as the dog or the no-so-bad dependent on the curlivising of the gameage – until further notice.”

    Well – I couldn’t believe it. No particular rules but these? Surely there was more to it? With the scent of old paper in my nostril cavities and held in the present by the pressure of what had once been and what was to come, I turned more pages with shaking fingers until finally coming across something of interest. Twenty pages on and five years hence in the documentation of gaseous sportsfolk I saw a new entry. The revised version of the game and its rules that I now quote for you:

    “Drunkards shall be employed at wages lest than that of a collector of the nightsoil and etch with swordtip and great love upon a woodbark strip a grid of crossing squares. Into thus squares will wordicals go. These wordicals shall be thus hinted at in such a way that folk with torturous bents and the brightest, but twistedest, minds of all of Christendom shall, for the part of most, be led to the aforementioned wordicals in a way that there shall be resultant face-smiling or brain-moolating of such a degree that the greatest physicians of our day will be able to see the affected body parts [specific areas redacted to spare the sensibilities of the modern-day reader] of the humorous and cerebral.”

    And that was it! In this very document I’d found the very foundation of the modern crossword laid out in such a way that even an idiot of my own sweet measure couldn’t fail to grasp it and so I could now, and with less pomp than my pomposity would like, inform the good folk of crossworld that Arthur Wynne was not the originator of the crossword but a chancer and a cad who came across the works of the Lord of Squifdeen Aired and adapted them all those years ago …

    … further to this shocking revelation, I thought it safe to assume – nay not assume, but unmask the Lord of Squifdeen Aired as none other than our very own Gaufrid of the Eagle and Fifteen Squared [as if you didn’t see that one coming what with doing Spoonerisms for a living, eh solvers?] though I do believe our current curator a less flatulent relation of his ancestor, the original Lord of Squifdeen Aired and actually rather a fragrant man.

    And yet … and yet it was not yet enough! Despite my success and the great discoveries thus far related to you, there were things still to be tied up tighter than a tightly tied thing. What of the drinks trolley and Mrs Jalopy? How was it and – more importantly – why was it she and her family have been the keeper of the trolley since the very seminal stages of the crossword game and what purpose does that famous trolley serve?

    I went back to my bookcase with tremors of excitement, there was one more book to try that lay between my well-thumbed copy of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and my untouched copy of The Sensible Man’s guide to Living Successfully. I’d been led to it by a faint, time-worn entry written in a spidery hand in the appendix of ‘Bawkles Book of Things Best Forgotten’ which made me, with sweated paws, pull my final work. It was Droodle’s Almanac of Sporting Enablers’ and there, on the very last page a heading which read: An Essential Companion to the Lord of Squifdeen Aired’s game of cross-swords, greeted my hungry ears.

    I drunk it in with my knees. It was a statement so profoundly correct I couldn’t take my shoulders from it. I was transfixed and glad of it for, should there be more payment or non payment in beer by Mrs Jalopy’s trolley then far smarted folk than I would be setting and folks as dumb as would would set not … But I digress, the statement of fact, the philosophical truth was this:

    “You pay small beer and you’ll get small drunkards”

    And below that, in smaller print was:

    “… and the small drunkard must have small beer”.

    And below that, in very small print, small print almost too small to read was:

    “To this role, the Jalopy family must be of employ for the duration of their lineage for there is no money in this crossword lark but beer.”

    And below that, in print so small that I had to get a person with very small eyes to read it was:

    “And this is how it was and always shall be”

    And below that, in print that frankly could’ve said anything, but was truer than anything I’d ever seen written before was:

    “Tomorrow in thoust Independent crossword shall be a toppest quality cross-sword from the man known as Eccles and in it thou shalst find more fun than one can shakest a stick at and ye nicest solvest so far this week so, if it pleaseth you, get thy arse there in a directest of manners.”

    And with that, and a promise to Gaufrid that I’ll never do this sort of thing again, this crossword historian is Bedfordshire bound … ish.

    Good night to all. 🙂

13. 😮 If that all turns out to be a dream, your fans may well turn against you. 🙂 (I wondered whether “an oft mistranslated snatch” was one of your adults-only clues, but I’m not typing “fanto” into Google for anyone.)

    Thanks for the tip on the old Loudon crossword etc – that one, and many in 2016, passed me by.

14. Ach, never a dream, Michael – that’s well-researched stuff and all the books can be found in the library of the very famous place whose name escapes me but surely must exist someplace somewhere at sometime.

    As for the mistranslated … well, I’d never put such naughtiness in anything on purpose as I’m far too sophisticated for that as you know. Though might I direct you and anyone still up again in the direction of the marvellous Eccles who is bringing a bucketful of fun on the morrow – he’s one of my fave Indy setters as has loads of fun surfaces, nicely constructed stuff and is very solvable, too.

    Glad to have been of help for the Loudon tip. I looked it up and its #9358, 11.10.16. – more importantly, glad to have let you know its a resource for crosswordless times. Great puzzles from a great series and all for free at the click (well, a click and a bit of a wait with the advertising) of a button.

15. Thanks for pinpointing it – it’s now bookmarked for when I’m released on parole after being locked up for whatever it is I’m going to do if I don’t finish this week’s Azed Printer’s Devilry. 🙂

16. Pleasure and good luck with the Azedian devilry – sure you’ll nail it.

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