Inquisitor 1335: Clue Two by eXternal

20 comments on “Inquisitor 1335: Clue Two by eXternal”

1. Thank you kenmac for a brilliant blog and animation. ( But I can’t see the red bars that you have added. This might be because of my poor laptop, or the fact that I am colour-blindish to red. This hasn’t spoiled my understanding of your explanation though.

   And thank you for your parsing of WESER. I realised it had to be the answer, but not quite how arrived at.

   I think the puzzle itself was nicely challenging as far as the entries and extra words went – and, like quite a few people I think, was a little bit baffled by LOFTUS for a while.

   Finished all of that reasonably quickly, but could not see the labyrinth. So, I feel a bit of an Icarus.
   (Not strictly on theme, but best I can do).

   Thank you again kenmac – and thank you eXternal.

2. Oh . . . and I would slightly quibble at the definition ‘unemployed people’ for RETIREES.

3. Wow. Until I read your explanation I was going to say I was irritated by the puzzle, but that has all washed away in my admiration for its construction. I had the grid virtually finished but there were several clues I was unsure of and hence I wasn’t confident of my selection of five missing words. As it happens I had the right choice but with a few possible alternatives (FORK, which I thought might have been part of an instruction involving ‘…for k…’). I kept reading LOFTUS as ‘loft us’ and was looking to write US upwards in the grid where it occurred.

   A few too many obscure words and clueing meant that even taking it on holiday I didn’t finish it, though I didn’t have any aids so that may also have contributed, but I’m just happy now to have participated in the experience!

   Congratulations kenmac for completing it and especially eXternal for devising it.

4. Boy was that tough! I struggled for hours and although I got the extra words I wasn’t able to make any sense of them – so eventually conceded defeat.

   My admiration to Kenmac for managing to complete it and (having seen the solution) to eXternal for the construction.

5. A fantastic blog kenmac – we’re viewing this on an ipad and your added red lines are clearly visible when the grid is enlarged.

   We completed the grid, added the bars etc but were completely stuck with finding the message. After a couple of days, we started looking at alternate letters but after coming across L A B Y we gave up and cheated by looking on the internet for hints. DOH! If only we had perservered!

   We thought this was an amazing construction too and do hope that eXternal drops in. Many, many thanks!

6. Quite an experience – many thanks to eXternal and kenmac for the blog. This was one I had to put away and come back to the next day – I’m glad I did. I needed all the different parts of the instructions to work out what was going on – in the end I think it was the combination of letters that finally allowed “Daedalus” to jump out. Fortunately I’m a Joyce fan so I think of him as the builder of labyrinths rather than the flyer (though come to think of it JJ must have been implying both – Ulysses just seems more like a labyrinth to me…) and that chimed with “find a path” in the instructions. But I wonder if it got the level 5 difficulty score from Nimrod? I certainly thought it was full-strength, but I’ve so often been wrong…

7. For the first time in weeks (if not months), I actually answered all the clues. Alas, like Opatrick@3, I was unsure about several of the clues and only got three of the extra words: Add, Overawe and Loftus. This was not enough to go the next step.

8. Thanks, kenmac for the great blog, your experience of starting, stopping and revisiting this puzzle sounds identical to my own.

   I got the four suprlus words quite quickly but, like others, tried lofting US, to no avail: to where and how ? The giveaway for me was that I had EDADA from the barred-off letters so I realised the person had to be DAEDALUS. I tried various routes across the grid but none made sense so that was my stopping point.

   Mulling over the meaning of life and LOFTUS, as one does in bed in the middle of the night, I kicked myself, literally and metaphorically, when I eventually realised it meant L of US. Job done, the barred-off letters L-U-S came into play and by trial and error I got the route across and the description.

   Great puzzle for a holiday, thanks eXternal.

9. I did get to have a look at this. Easy grid-fill, tricky endgame. “Loftus” as an extra word?! I’d say it’s a little too cryptic, really, to interpret it as such a broken-up word L of T, U [and] S. But that aside the resulting labyrinth and the two separate messages were presented very well, so a fine construction.

10. A great puzzle and a wonderful grid construction. I filled the grid reasonably straightforwardly and then methodically parsed each clue to identify the extra words but got no further. Where was I supposed to add the bars?

    The following day I looked again at the title – Clue Two. Was this a reference to 2d? What if there is another meaning for clue?

    A quick look on my electronic version of Chambers told me that the second definition of ‘Clew or clue’ is “A thread that guides through a labyrinth.” My Greek mythology is a bit sketchy but from there things fell into place.

11. What a great crossword and a great blog to go with it – thanks eXternal and kenmac. I was so pleased with myself for solving the puzzle I even forked out on a stamp and posted it in.

    For a long time I had OLD in 15a as an extra surplus word before remembering that it is now the FCO. For some reason I also found it difficult to find all the barred off cells for DAEDALUS, but eventually found enough for the name to become apparent and to look more closely for the remaining ones. All that remained was to find the path through the grid, but that in itself provided quite a challenge.

12. A real challenge this one. L OF T U S took me forever to see. Probably because of my own dimness I didn’t finally find it a pleasure, more of a slog. But an indication nonetheless if any were needed that the IQ CAN outListener the Listener for complexity on occasion. If I have my dates right, this was also the week of the most frustrating numerical Listener ever (again innate dimness is to blame)

13. Yes, a tough one indeed. (Away in Hay-on-Wye with limited aids.) My experience has bits & pieces of many other commenters: grid fill OK but not fast, tumbled to the interpretation of over-AWE, under-SOLD & L-of-TUS whilst queuing at the Literary Festival some time later, and located the eight ‘cells with identical characteristics’ – but unjumbling caused me a problem. Took ages (& help from a friend) to find the entry to the maze, but got out the other side quickly.

    I tend to agree with PTM @10 regarding the title being a reference to “clue” in Chambers. (And, maybe by coincidence, the title is an anagram of CLEW OUT.)

    But marvellous stuff from eXternal & kenmac – thanks to both. (Does John H select grids suitable for grand animation especially for Ken?)

14. Many thanks for the comments and special thanks to kenmac, it is a joy to have my grid so delightfully pimped.

    This was an ambitious design. I had an Inquisitor published last year where the grid became a chessboard, this led me to thinking of what else I could turn a grid into. My thought processes turned to a maze and how the insertion of more bars could lead to such a design. The only way I could see it working was to give the instructions to add bars over, under, left or right of letters. OVER- and UNDER- seemed to give good opportunities as they can prefix shorter words, however I would also need an instruction for either left/right or before/after. I think I may have tinkered with using FORE-, FOREARM or some such, but I don’t think I could make a satisfactory maze using that instruction. In the end I settled for LOFTUS, unfortunately it seems this was a bit too cryptic for some solvers.

    As I was testing out various grids, I noticed that a by-product of making a maze was that certain cells became completely barred off. I had originally intended to have DAEDALUS hidden in the grid with the letters side-by-side, but using the barred off cells seemed so much more elegant. Obviously, though, this made for a much more difficult gridfill.

    The gridfill did certainly take a lot longer than any I have done before or since. The original one I sent out for test-solving had OVERAWE in but no W in the grid, which was a weakness. Also more letters were barred of than the required eight and the solver was required to shade the required letters. After feedback, I decided to change the grid so that only the letters of DAEDALUS would become barred off and put at least one W in the grid. Hence, ETWEE.

    The title, as some have commented, does allude to the second entry in Chambers for CLUE. Solvers really should be mindful that setters deceptively use lesser known meanings of common words. I believe the word as we now use it derives from ‘clew’, the ball of string that Theseus used in the labyrinth to help him get out. Perhaps, also it is why we sometimes talk about unravelling a clue.

    The next one will be easier, promise!

15. I should also mention that the path left to right was intended to indicate the message starts at L and ends at R.

16. I got that last bit and thought it was a nice touch, as it was both figuratively and literally true. Thanks for the comments eXternal. I suppose it’s hard to another way of indicating “left of” in another way. Leftover with o= o’ = of? A bit awful really. I daresay LOFTUS was better really, just something of a stretch. Thanks for a fine puzzle though!

17. I very nearly completed this one — I was fairly sure of “farm team” but not confident enough to enter it — and never got Screed (I still can’t see how “SC” is “he sculpted” — can someone explain? My plebeian ignorance again), but completely foxed by the theme. I got “over awe” and “under sold” but was looking too hard for words that *meant* “awe” and “sold” in the grid … and never did cotton onto Loftus.

    Some gorgeous clues here: my favourite by a long way was “Tabby” which made me laugh loudly. Also liked “Weser”, for which I did (eventually) get the derivation and it made me go “D’oh!” I was also very proud of myself for getting Murices — despite having come across the word “Murex” in the past (did it at school) its plural hadn’t made itself known to me until now, where it became clear. And it took me too long to get the beautifully obvious “Tellus”.

    Great fun — thanks.

18. Matt @17: SC is in Chambers; the fifth definition (at least in WordWeb – I haven’t opened my paper Chambers for many years!) I’ve reproduced the definition, below:
    abbrev: scilicet (), namely; sculpsit (), he/she sculpted (this work).

    H___G____ @13: Re your last point in brackets. Yes, I’ve been wondering the same for some time. I nearly didn’t bother with it this time but The Speckled Hen insisted I should. They don’t really take that long to do, it’s the preciseness that can be a problem like when Excel suddenly decides that a row needs to be one pixel deeper than all the others, for example.

19. Kenmac @ 18: is product placement allowed in these blogs?
    I ask on behalf of my old friend, John Jameson, who often sits up late into the night helping me.

20. @kenmac: Oh of course yes — now I know. Many thanks. Interestingly, I’ve never seen this indicator for “sc” used in a xword before. Now I expect I’ll see it over and over again, like etui/etwee.

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