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Sondheim’s last movie

November 25, 2022 By Phixwd Leave a Comment

Well, that’s what I’m going to see tomorrow, which is going to make the rest of the weekend a bit of a juggling act. The weather, after a week when every day brought warnings of thunderstorms and tornados from Metservice, and lots of sunshine (with some courteously overnight showers) from the weather itself, has put the garden into a state of riot, and we’re having to fight back the verdancy, and harvest the beans we were meant to pick at Christmas. So that’s Sunday gone.

The film is Glass Onion, a follow-up to the wonderful Knives Out (with its unexpected use of projectile vomiting as a means of delivering the solution). The new one is clearly partly a homage to The Last of Sheila, and Sondheim himself makes a cameo appearance (as does Angela Lansbury: the next film in the series may find it hard to attract cameos). So that, and the chance to do a recce of the Christmas shops, takes Saturday out of consideration, and here’s the blog on Friday as a result.

The puzzle is one produced after the passing of one of our many cats, and is called In Memoriam – II.  I suppose I shall have to dig out the first one in due course. You can, of course, get a hint from the Cats page, but where’s the fun in that? Likewise, steer away from the blog at fifteensquared until you’ve had a go.

A quick follow-up to the comment from last time: ‘blaggard’ is clearly a phonetic spelling of the word, and it’s a comment on the slovenly pronunciation that has developed of the original. There again, English really struggles with clusters of consonants. We tend to pile them up and ignore some of them (Knightsbridge has the record at six, I think). There’s a regular puzzle type that asks you to come up with common English words given only the strange concatenation of letters lurking within them. It even inspired an article by the great James Thurber (Do You Want To Make Something Out Of It? from a 1951 New Yorker), which reveals that -SGR- can build to ‘grosgrain’.

I’m currently working through the book Why is This a Question? by Paul Anthony Jones of the Haggard Hawks website, and can heartily recommend it.

As for forthcoming puzzles – no fewer than six before the next update:

Pedro with a Times Quick (28 November)

Phi’s Friday slot (2 December)

Inquisitor (3 December)

Kcit with a Telegraph Toughie (8 December)

Pedro with another Times Quick (9 December) (look for a double reference)

Phi’s Friday slot (9 December)

Things quieten after that, which will allow me to get the annual Apex puzzle out, and also to prepare the unpublished puzzle I plan for Christmas Eve.

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About me

This is the website of Paul Henderson, who sets crosswords for The Independent (London) under the pseudonyms Phi, for the Daily Telegraph (London) under the pseudonym Kcit, and anonymously for The Times (London) amongst many other outlets. For a more detailed biography see the About Me page.

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