Inquisitor 1756: Spreadsheet by Ifor

15 comments on “Inquisitor 1756: Spreadsheet by Ifor”

1. I’m afraid that, without a copy of ODQ, this proved to be rather more difficult. A fairly straightforward grid fill, followed by several days of scouring the internet for an appropriate poem. I’ve now read rather more poems about butterflies than I care to remember!

2. Sadly I have to report another DNF again this week – this time a much more serious failure, with 27 of the 50 clues remaining unanswered! – a very poor performance indeed. I got utterly bogged down up in the NW quarter … word blindness set in, that was the end for me. Perhaps I need to take a break from the Inquisitor for a few weeks, come back fighting fit and all mentally refreshed. Judging from the blog, a really nicely worked puzzle – just a shame that I couldn’t do it justice.

   Thanks to Ifor for the puzzle, to HolyGhost for the blog and to fellow commenters for sharing their thoughts.

3. My thanks to Ifor and HolyGhost. Another tough but eventually satisfying challenge. Oddly enough Pope came to mind early on, just from the “no respecter of reputations” aside, but at that time I have to admit that Dylan Thomas was also in the frame here because my first guess for the prefix was PAPER (knife, cut, clip, and weren’t paper flowers once a thing?) and one famous poem starts “The hand that signed the paper …” However, it was a delight to read PAEAN EXPLODER as a description of the actual poet that was also (cued by “loosely”) an anagram. The turning-wheel transformations are also very neat: I particularly liked SHOOTER to SHOOFLY.

   When it was all over and I’d collapsed with a large drink to hand, I thought of the Michael Innes mystery novel that’s riddled with Pope quotations from various characters, until on about the third day of investigation the detective Appleby announces firmly that today’s motto is “No Popery.”

4. Filled the grid (except ‘orra’); identified Pope, then spent too long looking for a Pope poem featuring the word ‘ground’ (perhaps one of HG’s abandoned ten?), and then not very long looking for a plausible cryptic closed loop before deciding to wait for this blog.

   For which thanks to HolyGhost, and to Ifor, who won. And I like the Michael Innes story…

5. Excuse my ignorance but does spinning the wheel really change the fact that BUTTERFLY broken up by the WHO still remain the same with a couple of word changes after a spin of the wheel
   But if there was a butterfly guitar……you know what would happen

6. My main gripe with this one was the use of the word “suffix” in the preamble, which I took to mean “a combined word” such as butternut or breaststroke, as opposed to “a two word phrase” such as butterfly orchid.

   So I needed to phone a friend who helped me out with the word, and also the poet while they were at it.

   After that it still took a while to find both the wheel and the column, but got there in the end and felt very satisfied!

7. As always, my thanks to blogger and commenters. A few minor observations about HG’s excellent blog (even down to penetrating the rather oblique thinking behind the title!); in the clue to STILBS “units” is part of the definition; and VASSAL as a verb is in Chambers, albeit lurking at the end of the entry.

   Arnold – that’s a fair point, for which I can only apologise. I should have worded it differently.

   And it’s pleasing to see that others share my enthusiasm for Michael Innes. His earlier work in particular is as good as anything from detective fiction’s golden age. He has a wonderful way with words.

8. Ifor @7: thanks for pointing out that “units” goes with the definition of STILBS not the wordplay. Regarding VASSALED, I wasn’t clear: my trouble wasn’t its use as a verb but with the spelling – my understanding from Michael Dummett’s excellent Grammar and Style is that the past tense of such verbs should be formed by doubling the terminal L.

9. Ifor @7 & HolyGhost @8 : I have to say, that although I failed miserably on this one (see Me @2), I did opt for VASSALED for 42A, but was not comfortable with it, as when I checked using the Chambers Word Wizard : VASSAL?? only returned VASSALRY, whereas VASSALL?? did indeed only return VASSALLED.

   That said, my personal performance was so dreadfully poor, so who exactly am I to cast the first, or even the second (after HolyGhost) stone?

   Still a really nice puzzle, Ifor … but I think that HolyGhost does makes a fair point.

   By the way – whilst I’m here, I’ll raise a pet peeve of mine with respect to the Inquisitor … (also raised by Jon_S @1) : I can’t stand it when we read that ‘A N Other dictionary’ will confirm the entry at 2D, 5A, 17A, whatever etc … the Independent Magazine crossword (forerunner to the Inquisitor) always used to state (I paraphrase here) that Chambers English Dictionary , Ed. X (20xx) is recommended. A N Other dictionary is over used, the ODQ is really overly used as well. Exactly how many reference volumes are we expected to have access to? Cost is important, particularly under the current financial circumstances.

   If the Editor can see fit to reject puzzles based upon content being out of touch with current thinking with regards to ‘acceptable social concepts’, as mentioned in the end of year blog, then why can the Editor not also reject puzzles that require too many reference sources? I’d suggest only the following to be used : Chambers Dictionary, Chambers Crossword Dictionary & Chambers Word Wizard (the latter of which is free online). If a word / definition / meaning is not in that little lot, then frankly it’s not acceptable within the Inquisitor grid.

   I appreciate that the Inquisitor must be a tough one to set, I myself have described the Inquisitor previously as a work of art, but there has to be a limit.

   Perhaps the Inquisitor community can discuss and advise the Editor.

   Many thanks.

10. HG – thanks for the clarification. The pronunciation notes in Chambers speak of “generally” doubling a terminal L, for what that’s worth; but indicate that this isn’t the case in US English where the syllable is unstressed, as here. So the spelling seems to exist, but it’s ironic to have to admit the point after your kind words regarding my painstaking use of indicators; especially as something suitable could have been readily appended. To use your phrase – noted and appreciated.

11. I enjoyed filling the grid and got butterfly, and spent a while trying to make Robert Graves’ lovely butterfly poem fit:

    The butterfly, the cabbage white,
    (His honest idiocy of flight)
    Will never now, it is too late,
    Master the art of flying straight,
    Yet has — who knows so well as I? —
    A just sense of how not to fly:
    He lurches here and here by guess
    And God and hope and hopelessness.
    Even the aerobatic swift
    Has not his flying-crooked gift.

    The letters STRAIGHT are all there crookedly around the middle of the grid. I then spent an hour trawling the internet reading butterfly poems and I gave up. My God there are some awful butterfly poems out there!

    I am going to have to go out and buy myself an Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

    Many thanks to Ifor and HG

12. As is usual with an Ifor puzzle, I enjoyed solving the clues and filling the grid but then went skidding off in the wrong direction. I examined the 8 butterfly references in ODQ and totally missed the Pope option, as the penny dropped down the wrong hole and I went for Ali (well, he claimed to be a poet!). As it happened, I managed to make this work for the first step as follows. The first line of the ‘verse’ is “FLOAT like a butterfly”, which we all know flutters here and there in a seemingly random way. The letters of FLOAT may be seen fluttering around the middle part of the grid, with the F appearing only once. I found just one selection where they could be contained by a closed loop of exactly 12 contiguous cells (*) , assuming diagonal contact is acceptable. The arrangement is:
    —*
    –*L**
    —*OT*
    —–**A*
    ——*F*
    ——-*
    “Okay so far”, I said to myself smugly – but what next? It now seemed that I needed to re-jig this somehow to represent “Sting like a bee”. Unsurprisingly, as I now see, I got nowhere. Oh well!
    I wonder if anyone else went down this blind alley? No-one has owned up to it so far.

13. My second successful Ifor puzzle!

    Tough, but got there in the end. I’m another who thought that GROUND was the “suffix” until I got the real one. Cue a load of butterfly poems on the internet – this led to Spike Milligan (another paean exploder) until I visited my local library for the first time in years for the ODQ. Got the poet, but not the anagram. Very neat!

    So, I guess that this is “easier Ifor” for this year…unless I might actually be finally getting the hang of this and am able to tune in on his wavelength?

14. MeSatAtHome @9 – I think you would have a very good point if the daily puzzles required one to access multiple reference works to definitively confirm all the solutions, but these puzzles are at the top of the heap, difficulty wise. It is not unreasonable that one has to go out of ones way to find such resources. Either use the public library and the free references on the Internet, or pay for these services if you want the luxury and convenience of having everything to hand in one’s home.

    The National Library of Scotland provides me a free online access to the OED and many other reference works (sadly not the ODQ!) I expect there are similar library services in other countries. Even the ODQ is accessible free online, though it is not very easy to use compared with the paper edition.

15. I really enjoyed this, despite spending a lot of time thinking the thematic word was “board” because I had misread the preamble (plasterboard and clipboard make sense, but I must have imagined that stroke-board and bow-board existed!).
    I put the puzzle down for a bit, paid more attention to the actual wording of the preamble and came up with butterfly. The line from the Pope poem is the only one I could think of with “butterfly” in it, and I was delighted when I found the representation of it in the grid. I didn’t work out the title of the puzzle, though.
    Huge thanks to Ifor – this was challenging and enjoyable in just the right proportions ?

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