Inquisitor 1330: Ninety Four by Schadenfreude

23 comments on “Inquisitor 1330: Ninety Four by Schadenfreude”

1. Great puzzle, and great blog.

   I struggled to find the lower case letters – I should have read the preamble more carefully, because it says that the cells to be highlighted were in four blocks, making it obvious that the two letters must appear somewhere in the name and dates.

   This is where I often fall down. So I have written a hundred lines. “I must always go back and read the preamble because I am stupid”.

   Another thing I often have a problem with is hyphenated words such as 11D (13). Yes, grammatically the answer is a single letter word of thirteen letters . . . but, I can’t help feeling there should be some indication that the answer is hyphenated.
   Maybe this is naive of me and in crosswording it’s something everyone else watches out for.

   Anyway, very entertaining. Loved Pete Seeger. Bit sobering to think he was 94. I can’t quite remember what we wanted to overcome. I sang it as earnestly as everyone else and would like some reassurance that we eventually did.

2. Enjoyed this a lot. But must second what Jonsurdy says about reading the preamble properly. I identified the lower case letters and the dates and highlighted pete seeger, but for some reason thought that there were 10 other letters to be highlighted and wasted hours searching for other relevant words/names which weren’t there!

3. I managed to identify the wrong extra letter in 22d (B from DEBS for “females”) and spotted alternatives for 35d (S omitted from SEN) and 38a (A omitted from BAY with THE “empty”). Fortunately these didn’t hold me up for long although it took rather longer for me to change 8d from EISEL to the correct entry ESILE.

   Like smokey@2 I interpreted the preamble as implying other cells to be highlighted – 20 cells not including the numerical entries for dates so 10 more in addition to PETE SEEGER – but the penny dropped eventually.

   Thanks Schadenfraude and Hihoba.

4. I was exactly the same as smokeythebandit; that is I spent a lot of time looking for 10 more cells to hightlight. That’s because we normally have to highlight things that are otherwise not obvious, whereas the two dates stood out so much that they did not need highlighting, it seemed to me. I did read the preamble carefully but I think it would have been better if it had just asked for the top 10 cells to be highlighted.

5. Surely anyone who lives in London could easily copy these answers, deliver their Inquisitor by hand to the Independent and win the prize. Couldn’t the blog come out every THURSDAY instead? (I know from experience that you can win even if your entry arrives on the Wednesday itself.)

   Thanks for an excellent blog though.

6. Herb #5. We (the bloggers) had some discussion about this in the past, and the editor assured us that publishing first thing on Wednesday was safe, though I did have the same reservations as you at the time. One thing worth considering is that it is difficult to imagine anyone being bothered to copy the answers from the blog and walk it round on the off chance of getting a bottle of champers! Most of us have paid for our occasional champagne many times over in postage over the years.

7. I, too, was looking for 20 other squares to highlight, & was searching for ‘roses’ etc as in ‘Where have all the Flowers gone?’

8. I should have mentioned in the blog that the rubric says highlight 20 CELLS, not characters. That is what saved me looking for the extra 10 mentioned by several comments above.

9. I wasn’t too stumped by this as I had already prepared a grid myself to pay homage to the man! I scrapped it because I found (using Dave’s brilliant database) that Schadenfreude had already used ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’ – he must be a fan!

   I too was looking for other letters but it didn’t hold me up for long.

   Thank to setter and blogger.

   PS second grid that I have scrapped this year having found out that Schadenfreude beat me to it!

10. BIt nit-picking, but in 8A is ‘stale’ redundant?

11. I took ‘stale’ as an archaic indicator.

12. Thanks Nick.

13. As often happens, I failed to make any headway in anything east of the numbers. Schadenfreude uses a far wider vocabulary than I possess so many of his clues are utterly insoluble to me.

    That said, I wonder how “pryer” can equal “nosy” — does not “pryer” mean “one who is nosy” rather than just “nosy”?

    9d misled me — I eventually entered “rillnet”, it not having twigged that a “gill” is a stream, which lost me 9a and thence any chance of catching the “Pete Seeger” across the top.

    I caught the theme after I found what appeared to be “Rhymney” and at that point the penny dropped. The too-long clues seemed to be numbers, and all dropped in short order. But then, didn’t “subzero” appear in a crossword a couple of weeks back?

14. … sorry, in the above: anything *west* of the numbers — that is, all of the left hand side of the grid.

15. Matt, ‘nosy’ as a noun does mean ‘one who is nosy’. Words in common use which have also a meaning less well known are gold to setters.

16. Matt @13: SUBZERO was an answer in the previous weekend’s Inquisitor (by Augeas). There, the wordplay was essentially S+UB+0 (the last character being the numeral 0 not the letter O).

    For those with longer memories, SUBZERO being entered as SUB0 was used in exactly the same way by Schadenfreude himself in Inquisitor 100, way back in November 2008.

    (Matt again: for similar queries, you might find the ‘Site Search’ box, just under the ‘Calendar’ in the TR corner, useful.)

17. I thought a little easier than Schadenfreude’s usual difficulty level (unless I’m just getting better at understanding him).

    Having seen sub-zero the previous week, the clue clicked straight away, and that led me to the number replacement, so this probably helped.

    Thanks to setter and blogger. ‘Nose’ was informer…never heard of that one before.

18. According to Chambers and the ODE, “nosy” is an adjective and not a noun, so I’m with Matt on this one and I don’t think 12a works properly.

19. In Chambers online and 12th editions there is nosey or nosy ; adj. . . n (inf) a nickname for a person who pries, so I think that Matt and Tony have misread thier dictionaries.

20. I don’t use a dictionary — I do crosswords strictly bareback.

21. Crumbs! That is so impressive. I don’t think I would get anywhere with the Inquisitor without aids!! “Normal” crosswords, OK, but not the IQ. And the dictionary is essential reading when blogging, for things like nosy. Your objection to nosy is like mine to her being clued as she in a previous crossword – in the dictionary but not normal usage. How do you cope with my pet hate, mediaeval Roman numerals, and Spenserian words – photographic memory?

22. Late to the party we’re afraid but had to comment that we would be lost without our electronic dictionary! We find the Inquisitor puzzles often need a search to break a deadlock. We still have memories of trawling through pages in the dictionary which took up hand baggage allowance when on holiday!

    Enjoyable puzzle – we remembered CAT from earlier crosswords.

    Thanks to Hihoba for the great blog and Schadenfreude for the crossword. We are always pleased to see your name on an Inquisitor.

23. “How do you cope with my pet hate, mediaeval Roman numerals, and Spenserian words – photographic memory?” If I don’t know it, I don’t complete the crossword — but then when I read the solution, I remember it for when it occurs next time. Because, mark my words, it will.

Comments are closed.