The nine hidden words in this puzzle spell out, I think, the beginning of a well-known early problem in algebra, namely: “The square root of half a number of bees...”, perhaps made more famous in the Scheherazade series of puzzles.
In the original, it goes on to say that, ‘The square root of half a number of bees in a swarm leave a jasmine bush, as do two others (I paraphrase); 8/9ths of the swarm of bees have remained in the bush. What is the total number of bees in the swarm?’
As many of us will have had drilled into us in maths at school when converting word-based questions into algebra, “First let the number of bees be ‘b’ ” (of course, what else would you choose?)
Then the above translates into: 8b/9 + sqrt(b/2) + 2 = b Equation (1)
Re-arrange with the square root by itself on one side, such that both sides can be squared without pain: sqrt(b/2)=b/9 – 2. Whether it is that squaring process itself has introduced an additional solution is another matter!
So it leads to (b – 72)(2b – 9) = 0. To make such a product of two numbers =0 then clearly either the left hand or right hand bracket must be zero, so b=72 (or b = 4 and a 1/2, hence Sabre’s Title with the QM, a somewhat strange number of bees in a swarm – especially as it requires minus 1.5 bees to leave the jasmine bush originally – apart from the obvious Monty Python reference – see below).
To check your answers, you might now have tried putting each answer back into equation (1): b = 72 slots in easily, as 64+6+2 does equal 72. However, putting b = 9/2 back in only works when you recall that the square root of a number can be + or -, such that (1) becomes 8/9 * 9/2 – 3/2 + 2 = 4 1/2.
Other Monty Python fans might mention the new role for ‘Eric the Half A Bee’ in the alternative solution. [Aside: how does anyone think to write a song called ‘Eric the Half A Bee’?]
But wait a minute. Has Sabre been reading our site’s ‘About The Bloggers’ section to note that I am an avid Steven Wilson fan? Coincidence that SW’s most recent release (at the time of writing: roll on 18th August!) is the mini-album 4 1/2 ? Surely not…
[Steven Wilson: 4 1/2.]
So we’re after 72 bees in the final puzzle. Or, literally, should I say Bs. I can find 21 definitive Bs and 51 cells where the clashing letters are two apart – and if one squints a bit then B=2 – so perhaps I should be changing each of those to a letter B, too – that would end up with 72 of them in place. It feels like it must be the right thing to do, especially given the quantities of each, but I am sure I’m missing something subtle in the Preamble. And is the ambiguous entry 6a’s BOBBLY /BLOBBY for L in BOBBY, or have I missed something else entirely (very likely). Hmm.
My choice of clue for the week is 11 across, the superb all-in-one clue [with extra word bracketed out]:
11. Disease in parts of [the] garden, tips of each turnip affected (12)
…reveals the disease of turnips, FINGER-AND-TOE, that affects the taproot, combined with the wordplay including ‘parts’ as a Container-and-Contents indicator (as in ‘parting the Red Sea’), ‘tip’ as a first letter indicator and ‘affected’ as an anagram indicator. In all,
putting IN inside {OF GARDEN E(ach) T(urnip)}* Delightful.
This clue got me thinking: I wonder how often a clue has all the hallmarks of a serious convoluted (I’m hesitating in using the word cryptic) clue but is all a bluff and is actually a near-enough straight clue? A simple example would be the above clue but with ‘each’ changed to ‘any’, for example. We’d all be scrabbling around trying to make the wordplay work, when actually it was all definition. Perhaps they should be encouraged just a little more by crossword editors? Or would that simply help those who favour the ‘bung in from definition’ approach, rather than savour every intricacy of each clue? I may have answered my own question!
cheers all,
Tim / Encota
). He retired to bed muttering imprecations about Bs and left me working out how my grid was going to contain 72 of the things.
Poat’s HARE appeared gloriously in Serpent’s grid last week so I thought my desperate hunt for him was over BUT IT WAS NOT TO BE! “What is a malkin?” I asked Chambers and he replied, of course, “A cat (as in Greymalkin in Macbeth), a haggard old crone, a scarecrow (the SEWEL in this case) and a HARE”. Now that really was devious! The hare was not even crouching in the preamble just below the grid but lurking half way down the clues. There has to be a limit to these aberrations – any self-respecting hare would present itself properly in the grid!
I have a tiny suspicion that there has been some collusion between Serpent and Poat as YES, that elusive HARE in four letters in a straight line has finally climbed prominently to a glorious place at the top of Serpent’s grid. I’ve been saving my best HARE for this long-awaited event and here he is. Thank you Serpent (BOA – BOAT – POAT?) Not just a HARE but a stripey horse too. He has long been the Numpty bloggers’ favourite – ‘Stripey horse (5)’, though Serpent’s clue was rather more complex, ‘Foreign football official hounded Zagreb (5)’ as we had to remove a letter from the wordplay ‘hounded Zagreb’ (with that rather lovely anagram indicator ‘hounded’) and place it at the top of the ‘Upper down’ clues instead of whatever jumble that clue produced. This was the first clue we solved and we hooted with delight as the ZEBRA was slotted in. We took the C to the top of the column and at once opted for GREAT (or GRATE) as the unjumbled entry of ‘Find time to compete (5)’ T + RACE as GRACE would involve no unjumbling. That put a C above our grid.
This was very clever and very meaty compiling wasn’t it? The lower half of our grid filled fairly quickly and we had taken enough letters to the top of the grid to see the humour of the title. WIG, TOUPEE and HAIRPIECE were slotted in, so that solving could speed up, though we took far too long to work out what the condition was, as usual because of our careless reading of the preamble. It had to be, and of course was, a form of ALOPECIA but I had overlooked those words ‘(starting at a point to be determined)’ and our solve was almost complete before we nudged ourselves and saw that ANDROGE…NIC was split.