Inquisitor 1634: Desperation by Kruger

28 comments on “Inquisitor 1634: Desperation by Kruger”

1. Hihoba, thanks for the comprehensive blog on this enjoyable puzzle. ‘Menudo’ is in my  ODE,  the 3rd edition.

2. Hihoba, I’ve just realised that you mentioned, in relation to Menudo,  the OED and my comment referenced the ODE -sorry!

3. No problem Caran. In my ignorance I wasn’t aware of the fine distinction between the ODE and the OED until a few days ago. I have the ODE and Chambers on my phone. Very handy!

4. I filled in all the clued answers but didn’t get anywhere with the endgame. I too thought the preamble could have been more helpfully presented.

5. Hi, thanks for a very fair assessment of what was a very challenging puzzle.  I agree that 1 ac is an indirect anagram; I only got it because it is fully checked and then reverse engineered it once I’d worked out the misprint.

   One advantage of competing on Countdown is that you get a free copy of the Oxford Dictionary of English (and a free bag to carry it away with).  Unfortunately I don’t always remember to check it so I never got MENUDO.

6. I didn’t get the top and bottom rows because I couldn’t work out who Gregory was and people were saying all sorts of things to avoid the middle word on the Youtube clips I saw.

7. Some of the preamble didn’t make sense at first, but I dived into the puzzle anyway and got a long way with it. I collected the letters of [THE] LIFE OF and GREGORY from the clues and formed the word CRUCIFIXION across the middle. I knew enough about the theme to connect those items.

   Clearly the task of the endgame was to fill the 20 blank cells, using eight given letters and 12 others that I had to find or work out. I too found that part of the preamble instructing us to do this somewhat confusing.

   I pencilled in some possible letters that could make valid longer words, but after studying the grid, the available letters and the preamble again I could guess only BRIAN AND along the top and nothing anywhere else. I gave up at that point.

   Much later, I found the script of the film online, and luckily it didn’t take long to find what I needed – a quote that fitted the empty cells perfectly (subject only to expanding “so’s” into SO IS).

   This was a well-clued, well-designed puzzle, probably best suited to fans of the film, but I enjoyed it a lot. A few of the clues were very tough, and DEN and ERS were my last two also. The setter was at pains not to indicate directly the number or location of the blank cells, but the text ICY BIN FIXES neatly gave the minimal information needed, the letter count being as important as the letters in it.

   I too noted the two words not in Chambers and think they should have been indicated.

   Instead of ‘several’ and ‘some’ in the preamble I would have liked to see specific numbers, which I thought was now best practice for Inquisitors (on the basis that they are an aid to solvers while giving nothing away). Perhaps there was a good reason why the setter chose those vague indications, but while solving the puzzle, and afterwards, I could not see it.

   It was from Kruger in previous puzzles that I learned the word ‘preposterous’ meaning ‘inverted’, used to indicate a reversal [not an anagram]. This less common meaning of the word is in fact closer to the Latin root than what is now its primary meaning (‘absurd’).

   Thanks to Kruger and Hihoba.

8. A minor quibble – are adders not venomous snakes, rather than poisonous? Chambers, the Wildlife Trusts and the wider internet would seem to agree, the rule of thumb being: if you bite it and you die, it’s poisonous – if it bites you and you die, it’s venomous (I lift these words from a joke that proceeds through various other permutations to great effect). Granted, I’m not sure that straight-up eating an adder would do much for your health, but being aware of the distinction was enough to confuse me away from putting ADDER into 4d for most of my solve…

9. Good point Pantera #8.

   Alan B #7 I didn’t look for the specific meaning of preposterous, so thanks for the information. That clue is still unsafe as it refers to a word (ned) indirectly.

10. Panthera @8

    That definition/indication of ADDER as a ‘poisonous creature’ troubled me in the same way.

    An adder is both non-poisonous and venomous.  [Some adders are not venomous, but there’s no need to go there.]  But (1) dictionaries seem to imply that ‘poisonous’ is the more general term, one meaning of it being ‘venomous’, and (2) I note that the NHS website gives (very clear) advice on what to do when someone is bitten by a ‘poisonous snake’, and it uses that description consistently, also using the word ‘venom’ many times.

    I believe it’s not incorrect to refer to a venomous snake as poisonous.  It’s just confusing, and I can’t imagine slipping into describing an adder in that way myself.  Dictionaries (and zoos) use the word venomous to describe these creatures, and that term is surely much to be preferred.

11. Thanks to Hihoba and Kruger

    I think 1a is difficult rather than unfair – “obol” for instance is also a reversal of a synonym.

    For 44a I had t ERS e

12. I agree with Dansar. Reversals don’t require a direct indication of the word to be reversed. Among the Chambers definitions of PREPOSTEROUS are: literally inverted, having or putting the last first. The trouble is that every time a setter uses PREPOSTEROUS to indicate a reversal or the last letter of a word going to the front, there are always some solvers who don’t see beyond the more common meaning of PREPOSTEROUS and complain that it’s an indirect anagram. In fairness it’s an easy mistake to make, but setters are probably best advised to avoid this device if they don’t want such misunderstandings to occur.

    I enjoyed the puzzle and despite being something of a Python nerd, I didn’t know the name of the character who speaks the relevant line (in fact I didn’t know he had a name at all). I didn’t mind the expansion of “so’s” to “so is” even though it threw me for a while when trying to fill the blanks.

    Thanks Kruger, and RIP Terry Jones.

13. A very minor character I didn’t know the name of and a line I’d forgotten in a film I know very well left me both bemused and amused. It was obvious it seemed where the blank cells were going to lie, though it took far too long to spot that, yes, they also fell in the clues to the left and right of the obvious ones. Did it seem a bit unfair the two unclued entries not being real words – perhaps, and it caused me some difficulty – but as it all worked out in the end I’ll forgive Kruger. 🙂

14. I’m afraid I found the this a little on the irritating side for reasons others have already set out. The Preamble seemed designed to confuse rather than elucidate and even after I’d Googled LIFE OF BRIAN GREGORY I wasn’t able to locate the quote (even though I’m a fan of the film itself)

    I only got MENUDO as I know if from the title of a Raymond Carver short story I read about 30 years go (jesus, where did that time go…!) bit I tend to agree that words not in Chambers should really be cited as such. I know John doesn’t agree with this so I’m fighting a losing battle but one can hope

15. Apologies for the typos, I really need to learn to proof-read

16. Thanks to Kruger and Hihoba for IQ and blog. I found this one fairly tough despite seeing CRUCIFIXION early on and guessing Life of Brian from that. It is a favourite film, but I don’t know the script that well. Eventually remembered there was a copy lurking in the special shelf of hugely oversized book in our spare room; even then it was strangely difficult to spot the line. I’d forgotten the name GREGORY altogether and as luck would have it first saw REG, who is another character — nice trap there!

    I had to google to confirm MENUDO. Like Hihoba I wondered “Why distinguish between filling 5A and 43A and filling in the blank squares?”: presumably to hint that those squares weren’t the only blanks, but as noted at @7 above this was deducible from ICY BIN FIXES.

17. A very satisfying solve in the end, but I agree with others the instructions were a bit opaque. I too found 1a and 44a the most elusive, and agree with Dansar@11 about the parsing of 44a. Is “up” a legitimate anagram indicator in 28d?  Many thanks to Kruger for some hours of challenging enjoyment, and of course to Hihoba.

18. I managed to complete this puzzle without too much effort other than searching for definitions that weren’t in my dictionary. Like comment 7, I only got 1ac because all the letters were checked. Given that neither 5 nor 43 are real words, I don’t understand why the other two pairs of letters were separated from them. I enjoyed it though, because it gave me an excuse to watch clips of the film on youtube.

19. I thought that this was a stinker (take that how you will) – the first one I haven’t finished for about 18 months. The rubric was rather vague; I don’t normally mind being told that misprints are in “some” or “several clues” but here the number would have helped me – I missed the H in “hot” at 13a MENUDO (not in Chambers), didn’t find the F for the “r” in “rat” at 32a (having “rag” or “rap” instead, both small coins), and feel that SERIAL at 41a defined by “in a file” is rather iffy. I took the sense of “an abridged context” to be “a summary” rather than merely “a truncation”, so ended up trying to make sense of TELIGEO or TELIPEO, maybe with an additional letter.

    The quote by Gregory (a minor character indeed) was previously unknown by me – and Google doesn’t come up any connection between “Gregory crucifixion” and Life of Brian within the first 100 page hits. A day and a half spent fiddling around with the barred-off letters not used in CRUCIFIXION led nowhere and left me frustrated.

    In 7d, how does “room” give you BOARD?
    Thanks for the blog, but the final grid does NOT contain real words: 43a SOISMYWI … unless you count two-letter abbreviations.

    PS The clue at 1a was fine by me.

20. @HolyGhost

    I’d forgotten about BOARD. That did irritate me I have to say. BOARD and ‘lodging’ are two different things.

21. Solved a fair bit of this, did work out that CRUCIFIXION would be 24a. Also realised that BALSA would end up as BALSAM. Haven’t seen the movie, so it was wasted on me. Thanks for the blog, Hihoba!

22. HG #19. You have my sympathy and I agree with all your comments. I didn’t even bother to  look up board/room – I thought it was reasonable, but perhaps you are right. The F in fat was about the last misprint I confirmed. The definition is the last definition in the noun list in the dictionary. I take your point about SOISMYWI etc. I meant in the blog that the intersected down answers all made proper words. Also DENIM and FEERS. The remainder of the split words in the quote may explain why the phrase “all grid entries are real words” did NOT appear in the rubric! But to get the quote you had to start somewhere, and DENIM seemed a good starting point. In my previous life as a computer scientist I was familiar with serial files, so again didn’t bother to look it up.

23. Thank you for the fair blog. I agree that the rubric was rather opaque and that the end game was very hard to complete via google without watching a You Tube clip of a scene I’d never wanted to see.

     

24. I saw CRUCIFIXION early on and “phoned a friend” suggesting Life of Brian- I thinkl it was only in the closing scenes that the line “I’M BRIAN AND SO IS MY WIFE”appears. My friend sussed it.But it was a good opportunity to watch the appalling Muggeridge and the bishop point their fingers at JC and MP

25. agree wrt MENDUO comments — I’ve found https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ to be an excellent online supplement more and more recently.

26. After reading the preamble several times I still had no idea how to proceed, so I didn’t! I wonder if many others also gave up at this point…. Congratulations to those who did, and who got somewhere with it – and actually enjoyed it!

27. Amateur #26, your bloggers often have the same problem. The solution is to solve as many clues as you can. The preamble normally becomes clear when you have a basic grid!

28. I didn’t enjoy this one as much as usual. A lot of hard work to fill the grid then a dead end.  I guess if you are big fan of the Pythons then any obscure quote is great fun, but otherwise I’m glad I didn’t spend too much time on (failing) the end game.  Unlike many other IQs the quote didn’t seem to have any relevance to the puzzle: none of BRIAN, WIFE nor GREGORY seemed to matter, other than filling up empty spaces.  A treat for geeky Python fans but otherwise why choose this?

    I don’t have any problems with the clues, especially 1 across which just seems to be a standard reversal clue.  I think it is better to say you don’t understand something in the first instance.  One can say it is badly constructed once no-one else has been able to come up with a good explanation either.

    Thanks to all.

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