Inquisitor 1730: Selection Box by Skylark

14 comments on “Inquisitor 1730: Selection Box by Skylark”

1. It’s a relief to know I wasn’t the only one to discount the Ella Fitzgerald references for far too long when searching for “eight song books”. Once I saw sense it all fell into place nicely. One of those puzzles which involved a stage of complete bafflement, which made the enlightenment all the more satisfying when it came. Thank you Skylark for a lovely puzzle.

2. Forty six clues in a 13×13 grid, with plenty of old and obsolete words used once again, which I always appreciate. Answers went in nice and smoothly, this was a fun solve – until I got to about ten answers from the finish, when things slowed to a crawl – all clues parsed acceptably in the end though. Endgame was a bit confusing, as I went for eight composers in the ‘Great American Songbook’, and missed the Ella Fitzgerald angle totally, so only found eight of ten (ELLA and HART being missing for me).

   I just couldn’t understand why the rubric mentioned ten items and the ‘instruction’ only talked of eight, so in the end I opted for CHARTS (to adjust 19A to CLOT)and COMPELLATION (giving LETTERS and DAILIES and requiring the final three misprints) to get across the line – more by accident that by design. Odd thing was, in the clue at 24A, DAISIES originally came from DAILIES by swapping the L for an S! All a little unsatisfactory really. So sadly another DNF recorded for me in the end.

   Thanks, as always, to both setter and blogger – and a Happy New Year to one and all.

3. Filling the grid was quite hard going, mainly (like Hihoba’s experience) because some clues took a long time both to unravel and to solve, but eventually I got there and secured all the letters of the message.

   The message strongly hinted that a lot of grid-gazing would be needed, the most off-putting part of it being the ‘twelve misprints’. Looking for names is one thing, but looking for names with a misprint or two is quite another.

   After a few scans of the grid all I came up with was Gershwin (from GERSHMIN). However, by searching online I too found the ‘Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books’, in which there were exactly ‘eight song books’ and exactly ten leading songwriters, including both Gershwins. In the grid I found the nine distinct names, with (altogether) ten misprints, but not the tenth name nor the last two misprints.

   I guessed the ‘familiar name’ would be Ella (there being no chance that Fitzgerald could be accommodated in the grid), but it took me a few scans of the grid to find it, and I had to check that COMPELLATIONS was a real word.

   It was a very satisfying and rewarding finish. I was familiar with all the songwriters’ names despite not knowing most of the songs.

   Thanks to Skylark for a fine puzzle, and to Hihoba for the interesting blog.

4. ‘Laetrile’ is in Chambers, but you have to look under ‘amygdalin’, so it should have been mentioned in the preamble.
   Still, a nice puzzle.
   Thanks to all.

5. A good puzzle that fell together very nicely at the close. Was I the only solver to make a rash guess at OTTO for the Roman Emperor and end up with one correction too many?

6. Way above my pay grade but I love the the subject and thoroughly appreciated the blog
   Thanks Hihoba and Skylark

7. Jon_S
   No, you were not the only one! Soon mended, though.

8. An excellent puzzle, as the discord between the eight songbooks and ten items satisfyingly resolved. Two or three obvious songbooks – Gershwin, Berlin (initially replacing Beltin’), Porter – presented themselves, and I think it was on the third that a search engine recommended Ella (I won’t say how long I spent looking for Fitzgerald, before noticing that Hart might want to be in as well as Rodgers). Unfortunately, I rested content with altering “niello” to ‘Niella’, just assuming it must exist.

   A terrific end to the year, thanks to Skylark and Hihoba.

9. Started late, grid fill OK, then ran out of time having got nowhere with the endgame. (Maybe I needed a shove in the right direction – or a stab at Googling “eight songbooks” …)
   Thanks anyway.

10. Hard work but enjoyable – I actually had ELLA in NIELLO corrected to NIELLA (rather than as you’ve shown) and I wondered why that was an acceptable word (it is a name though.)

    I used the extra misprint on HART where I’d got the answer slightly wrong – why is tea “CHAR” not “CHA” and Cambodia “K” not “KH” ?

    If Google hadn’t shown Ella as the first answer I would have never got there…

11. Arnold @10
    CHA and CHAR both mean tea, Chambers saying that ‘char’ is a Cockney spelling of ‘cha’.
    In crosswords, I have found from experience that both the ISO country codes and the UN’s IVR codes are both used freely. Some countries have different codes.for these, The country code for Cambodia is definitely KH, but I found two different IVR codes for that country from two different sources: K and KH. (Wikipedia gives K but says ‘[citation needed]’.)

12. Chambers has K for Cambodia. That’s a good citation.

13. Thank you. Note to self: Must buy Chambers.

14. I too thought of NIELLA, but I knew it must be wrong, because that would have been eleven misprints, not twelve. Also, NIELLA is not in Chambers’ list of names. But I searched in vain for ELLA with two misprints, and so I fell at the final hurdle. Consider me vext.

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