Inquisitor 1649: On Bosworth Field by Chalicea

26 comments on “Inquisitor 1649: On Bosworth Field by Chalicea”

1. Colouring the arcs correctly proved to be the biggest challenge here. As seems to be becoming a habit with the IQ, I used a spreadsheet to avoid completely destroying my paper copy. As expected from Chalicea this was on the easy side, but given the difficulty of some recent offerings, a welcome change of pace, and a most enjoyable one too.

2. Well, I filled the grid, deciphered the hidden message (LINK THE LETTERS IN ARCS AND SHADE TO DEPICT THIRTEEN – you’ve omitted this from the introduction, Duncan), spotted the acronym and understood what it represented: but I couldn’t work out how to do the colouring.� Mainly I think that this was because I was expecting the arcs to be complete semi-circles, not just quadrants.� I tried turning the grid through 90 degrees, but that didn’t help.� I even saw RANG in the diagonal but didn’t twig that it represented the middle letters of orange.� So it goes down as my first DNF of the year – not what I had expected when I saw Chalicea’s name!� Congratulations to her on a very well-designed puzzle.

3. Another gem from Chalicea. It was a bit of a struggle at times, but worth it in the end. I’m still unsure about the Bloomingdales reference, though. Spotted the ROYGBIV and RAINBOW early on, but it took a frustrating amount of time to find the thematically significant letter, but then it was downhill all the way. Having RED staring out at me in the first three clues didn’t help!

   It was the 7th letter as for the colours of the rainbow. It did make me think of the last Chalicea about Mozart’s Magic Flute, where the third letter was used in each clue…I only realised then how the number 3 is thematically significant in that opera too – this wasn’t picked up by other solvers at the time. Very neat!

   CHRISTMAS CARD did make me smile as it was a warm sunny day when I solved it. I’m not sure if there is a significance to the Shakespeare clues book ending the Across clues.

   I also used a spreadsheet for the colouring in the final grid. A little bit of art therapy in these strange times!

   Thanks to Duncanshiell for the blog and to Chalicea for another fine puzzle.

4. Another fine Chalicea puzzle … without RAINBOW at 23a I would have been pretty well stumped, but fairly quickly twigged the relevance of the ROYGBIV mnemonic. Failed to spot what the significant number positions were, and spent some time trying to link clue letters by their rainbow rankings, i.e R=1, O=2 , Y=3 etc. No luck, but the kind gift of the silvered cells in the grid, plus discovering the end letters of the colours vertically at top right, showed exactly what had to be done, though I saw the cells as semi-arcs, rather than complete arcs.

   If we had been sending entries in, I had the means to do the colouring … in 1986 the till-then highly successful London advertising agency I had worked for for 27 years was blown out of the water when Robert Maxwell made an unsuccessful bid for our parent company, and our major clients all defected in fear of what might have ensued. Over 100 of us were made redundant with the minimum legal compensation.� I “liberated” some useful items, such as� a projector screen and my office desk, as well as a tin box of 40 coloured pens, by the German firm SCHWAN STABILO.� Thirty four years later at least 30 of them still work perfectly, with inks flowing freely !� My Tesco magic markers dry out within six months, regardless of whether you’ve ever uncapped them or not !

   Thanks again to Chalicea for reminding us what fun crosswords can be, compared with the horrible “redundant letters giving an instruction” format which demands far more cold solving time than many of can really afford, (unless we have very tolerant spouses,) before a horribly obscure end game can be attempted.

   Thanks too to DS for blog, and in particular showing us what glory my miracle pens would have revealed, had we been sending entries in.

   Has anyone ever marketed an indigestion remedy called “INDIGO” ?

    

5. Hi, I’m coming in rather early to explain a deliberate ‘manipulation’ that only one solver on TSTMNBM (the site that must not be mentioned) noticed and duncanshiell merely glances at without complaining. As a Yorkshire Dales person, I am well aware that Richard III who died at Bosworth – our last Yorkist king – did ‘give battle in vain’ and he was of the York family – so ‘of York’, but his principal title was Gloucester and the Richard of York who died at Wakefield in 1460 is generally considered to be the one of the ROYGBIV. John, the editor, pointed this out but agreed that most people think the mnemonic refers to the Richard who is buried under the Leicester carpark and ‘On Wakefield Field’ would have been a poor title – so he went along with the slight fiddle.

   The helpful silver cells were also an editorial adjustment as the very able IQ test-solvers, like bridgesong (sorry, bridgesong) also had trouble with the colouring where I was probably initially expecting too much.

6. I think my colleague Louise in Melbourne has a better version of Excel!

   Very colourful puzzle-probably mostly claret on the battlefield

   Thanks Chal and dunc

7. Without the silver cells I would have been lost – even after spotting ROYGBIV. As it was, I still failed to locate the end of the rainbow.

   I wish I knew how a spreadsheet might have helped.

   Thanks to Chalicea for a gentler outing, and to duncanshiell.

    

    

    

8. Neil @7 – It meant I could experiment with filling the cells with different colours, and as it turns out still come up with a rainbow that looked pretty different to the one above. 🙂

9. Neil Hunter @ 7

   Depending on how keen your were to detect the message and your enthusiasm for typing out the clues, there are some built in text functions in Excel, one of which will tell you the nth character in a text string.

   Jon_S @ 8

   The colours I used were added in a graphics package using hexadecimal strings for the Red, Green, Blue components to generate the designated colours.� There are websites that give you the relevant hex strings but they don’t all agree, particularly for indigo and violet.

10. Unlike Murray I don’t possess an impressive set of coloured pens, and I got in a mess with the colouring and gave up. I knew which squares were supposed to be coloured though so I consider this a moral finish, if not a technical finish. Great puzzle as ever from Chalicea, and I’d be happy if we had one of her puzzles once a month!

    I’m in awe of those who use Excel spreadsheets to solve crosswords. I have enough difficulty using the things to create a simple data table 🙁

     

11. Chalicea @ 5

    Thanks for the comment and thanks for the puzzle.� I’m afraid I’m not remotely clever enough to know the difference between Richard of Gloucester and Richard of York.� As far as I was concerned, the guy was called Richard, he was from the House of York and he was killed at Bosworth Field.� That was good enough for me.

    Like you, I look at TSTMNBM, but only after I have solved the puzzle.� There is often reference to some little nuance that I never notice when solving the puzzles.

12. I thoroughly enjoyed completing an inquisitor for the first time; including colouring the cells in an approximation of the colours of the rainbow (I had to resort to a graphite pencil in place of violet). However, I failed to spot the instruction hidden in the clues – so maybe not fully complete after all! As with others, I was distracted by the RED provided at the start of the first 3 clues.
    Two clues had me stumped for some time: 1 across and 40 across. The latter caused a considerable delay in deducing the colouring of the cells as I was missing ROY for the ROYGBIV. I ended up deducing it backwards from the colouring in.
    Thank you Chalicea and to all that comment to explain the solutions.

13. 1a. The quotation is from The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 1 Scene 4

    Simple. No, forsooth: he hath but a little wee face, with a little yellow beard-a Cain-coloured beard.

    The first edition of Breweer confirms this.

    Cain-coloured Beard. Yellow, symbolic of treason. In the ancient tapestries Cain and Judas are represented with yellow beards.

14. The title remained a mystery until I looked it up and found the mnemonic that I have never needed. (I learned ROYGBIV as a pronounceable and therefore a memorable word.)

    I was rather slow to hit upon the number 7 as the key to finding the message, but it had to be that. I noticed that there were enough letters in the grid to make the names of all the colours, but I didn’t think to look for broken-up words. They were easy to find, though, with the help of the message, and the stated number of shaded cells (84) tallied with my grid.

    I do like the variety of themes and the different ways of executing then that I get with this setter. This was a refreshing and enjoyable puzzle and I admired the smooth reading of the clues, bearing in mind that every one of which had to accommodate a particular 7th letter.

15. trenodia @ 13

    I think this a case where the word cain-coloured is defined differently in different reference books.� Indeed, the word itself is spelled differently in different books.� On the web I have seen reference to cain-coloured, cane-coloured and caine-coloured.� My copy of the works of Shakespeare uses cane-coloured in the quote you give.

    I have seen your Brewer’s reference to yellow, but I have also seen Shakespeare glossaries referring to red or sandy.

    Chambers Dictionary favours red

     

16. DNF. Never rumbled the hidden message in the clues and gave up out of sheer irritation at having to basically guess. First? Last? 23rd? No hints. No inclination to spend hours testing each. My bad no doubt

17. Completed the grid and spotted the mnemonic but had trouble with the colouring in. Don’t have coloured pencils, and couldn’t visit the grandkids, but found a few highlighters. Used yellow on top of blue to give me green, red on top of yellow to give me orange, but couldn’t do anything with indigo and violet. Only when doing the colouring did I spot the letters of the colours in each arc, the icing on the cake. Brilliant.

18. Filled it all in, worked things out from rainbow and mentally coloured it in without seeing either ROYGBIV or the final letters. I find the references to Excel more puzzling than most of the clues, although some were rather more crunchy than usual for Chakicea, to whom thanks.

19. *Chalicea

20. There’s another York connection: an alternative mnemonic I learnt as a child is “Round Old York’s Great Bars I View”, referring to the city’s ancient stone gateways rather than its public houses. As with the better known mnemonic, I think it’s just as easy to memorize the seven colours.

21. Many thanks to all, I loved those appreciative comments and especially liked duncanshiell’s beautifully coloured illustration of how it worked. It was a lot better than my solution grid.

22. Bit late to add my comments this week. Biggest problem was identifying which clue letters to choose to get the instruction. Once I twigged number 7 letter the rest followed and a very pretty end final grid ensued. A cracker by Chalicea.

23. Like Murray @4, I worked for an agency that collapsed – with no compensation at all – and my solicitor advised me to take what I could; this included some Pantone colour pens which still work after nearly 40 years. As well as a Uchida cutting mat and items of furniture but nothing compared to the loss of notice and my car.

    There may not be an indigestion remedy called INDIGO but the old joke was that there was an Italian suppository called INNUENDO. Nudge-nudge.

    Struggled with one or two, needed help to get CAIN-COLOURED and couldn’t parse ISLE from HOLM, but got there in the end. Didn’t fill in the colours but knew where they were so, like Cruciverbophile @10, a moral victory.

    Many thanks to Chalicea and Duncan.

24. BTW: a small hitch at 33D – when I was in advertising (not the agency that folded) I had National Savings as a Client and it was drummed into me that ERNIE was NOT a computer but, as its acronym signified, Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment.� It simply generated random numbers in the Premium Bond format which were then matched gainst the actual computer that held the Bond numbers and their owners (to simplify a complex process).

    The view was that, even in 1956, people may have thought that you could programme a computer to favour certain numbers or regions.� ERNIE did not even use algorithms, so it was truly random.� It was designed by Tommy Flowers of Colossus and Bletchley Park fame and was a descendant of the enigma-cracking machine.

25. Certainly the easiest so far this year. Top half pretty much filled in 30 mins, short break, and then the rest polished off in just another 35-40 mins. Clues into spreadsheet and extracted relevant letters ala Duncan @9. Luckily for me, the grid colouring clicked very quickly.
    Thanks to S&B.

    A box of 12 coloured pencils bought as a present for self a number of Christmases ago seemed a �10 extravagance at the time but they’re great – even if I had to generate indigo = blue + violet.

26. Just a comment to Colin Standfield. We are in ‘Computers’ as a field and are well aware of what you say at 23, but (as Jane Teather sometimes says of scientific things) Chambers’ definitions are often flawed. When that is the case, we, as setters, accept the faulty definition – a crossword rule – unless we can define convincingly with a correct and recognisable set of words. The same appllies for the ODQ – we use that even if it misquotes.

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