Inquisitor 1740: Wry by Botox

19 comments on “Inquisitor 1740: Wry by Botox”

1. I found this a lot easier than I should have, since the exact same theme with the exact same Row 1 was in a recent Magpie.
   Enjoyed nonetheless.

2. I agree with Holy Ghost’s final observation: this was well worth the effort for the impressive grid construction, but I found the grid fill something of a slog. Is there anything more to the title than it being a description of the inscription?

3. Despite being a Spike Milligan fan and living in Ireland and knowing what is on his gravestone, I gave up. I got 20d but not 25a or 28d. It got to be too much like hard work.
   Well done H___G____ for persevering and thanks, I guess, to Botox.

4. A relatively stiff challenge again this week, but worth the effort. A grid of two barely connected halves – with the western almost completed before the eastern had really got started, but then logjam and very slow progress – it took me a few days to finally drag this one over the line. Endgame was very neatly done, with positioning of characters in the shaded cells closely matching those on SM’s headstone. I assumed that the title of the puzzle must allude to Milligan’s wry sense of humour in his choice of epitaph.

   Many thanks to Botox for an excellent puzzle, to HolyGhost for the blog and to fellow commenters for sharing their thoughts.

5. Pretty tough going indeed, though all that lovely thematic material at the close made it worthwhile. I didn’t dig deep enough to spot why we had both a C and K sharing the one box (I should have really!), only spotting the KBE shown on Google. I also wanted the parentheses to be quotes, as that seems to be how his name is more frequently presented, but a parenthesis is a parenthesis, so in they both went.

6. Lord knows I tried, and I managed 95% of the grid and 15 extra letters, but never got to the end despite countless hours invested. Boo.

   In addition to the very hard clues, I was surprised that neither my 15 extra letters nor having 4 of 7 silvered ones yielded any patterns, as they normally would. I didn’t factor in the fact it might be Irish…

   I also didn’t think clues would have both extra letters and misprints, to make it even harder.

   It’s certainly a good thing to mix up harder and easy, but for me this was one step too far to be enjoyable in terms of mix of hard clues, misprints, extra letters and Irish all jumbled together. But horses for courses.

7. I was greatly impressed by the originality and ingenuity that went into this set of clues, which were to a high standard. As always, the familiar single-letter manipulations added spice to the clue-solving process, the only downside being the (considerable) extra time it took to unravel each clue while solving it.

   It proved difficult to find a way into the theme. However, although I had only 18 of the 20 misprinted letters, I was certain that the last 9 of them (GORAIBHME, all from the Down clues) were correct, and I threw them into a search engine. I was both surprised and delighted to find a match (GO RAIBH ME BREOITE) that led me to the theme – which I recognised, although I never knew the Gaeilc words. Naturally, I then looked for an image of the gravestone.

   The clues for BIOPARENT and MOCKADO were tough, although I made the first of these tough for myself by not expecting it to have so many letters! Getting LACHESIS helped me to get it, and the pair of parentheses then went in. MOCKADO was an excellent clue.

   The conversion of ALIAS to SPIKE was a nice touch. The back-story was interesting, featuring a family dispute over the gravestone.

   Thanks to Botox [I never thought I would say that!] for an excellent puzzle and to HolyGhost for the blog.

8. Is Wry perhaps something to do with Rye, where he lived?
   It is not clear from the blog what the change is to go from MICHIGAN to MILLIGAN. I take it that you are changing ICH to ILL, as in ‘I told you I was ill’. That, in its entirety, was the last word (epitaph) originally proposed, the Irish version going on the stone because the English was thought inappropriate.

9. I abandoned this one three times, returning to it twice because, off-duty, I somehow solved two clues. But with the bottom right corner still unblemished, and the discovery that the message must be in a language, or code, unknown to me, I gave up for the third time. Despite filling three quarters of the grid including the brackets.

   I think I’m with arnold@6: less like a challenge, more like combat. But thanks to all anyway.

10. Although I completed it I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy this at all. I really don’t mind a tough challenge but there was something about the style of some of the clueing which really irked me for some reason

11. The concurrence with a recent Magpie was – given the anniversary – not so surprising, but it did give an ‘in’ to a hard puzzle (never did get the parenthesis). Though my actual ‘in’ was BREOITE. Some of us have also set a Spike Milligan gravestone puzzle, you know (it’s an excellent joke), and there was something about the letters I had that just whispered it.

12. I didn’t know famous setters solved other setters’ crosswords ?

13. I am afraid I am with Arnold @6 on this one. For me, it passed the boundary from being a difficult but worthwhile challenge to being a disappointing waste of time. I feel it is one where the setter(s) got more of a kick out of it than the solvers. An incredible grid but the clues needed to be kinder.

14. Well, we struggled with this one too. We don’t give up on an IQ though and we slowly chipped away at the clues. Despite being fans of Spike Milligan (one of Bert’s early presents to Joyce was Puckoon) we needed a nudge to uncover the theme. We were pushed for time later in the week and unfortunately never managed to solve 25ac so missed PARENTHESIS. We see from the comments though that we were in good company.
    Thanks to S&B.

15. I enjoyed the grid fill. I am generally a slow solver and often don’t notice that much difference between the harder difficulty levels, they all feel the same to me. I am prepared to spend the whole week to solve the clues if necessary, so difficult clues are fine by me. In contrast I run out of enthusiasm very quickly on word searches, so finding most of the content was a good result for me this time. Thanks to all.

16. Miserable failure here although I’m another Milligan fan. Just couldn’t crack enough clues to get far: it’s a relief to read that others also found them tough. But yes, a very impressive endgame.

17. Arnold @12
    I think you’ll find that all setters are also solvers.

18. A thoroughly enjoyable solve. Relatively quickly got _reo_te for the silvered word and after a brief interval where I thought (with an extra letter) Mr Creosote might be making an appearance it became clear that another language was needed. After a few more wild goose chases all became clear. I was tickled by the backstory and also discovered the existence of the book “Indefinite Articles and Scunthorpe”: an ideal gift for an imminent family birthday.

19. A fail for me, in spite of a half-completed grid. Self-doubt started creeping in when the misprint letters I had found spelt DUI_TM and I assumed I had gone wrong somewhere!

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