Akond of What?
To quote Shakespeare (or was it Homer?) – d’oh.
My efforts to unravel a Lear clue from this week’s Times crossword had me barking, like a dog of war, up the wrong tree.
For those new to Grid-gate, the clue read as follows:
Lines from Lear don’t show fate, sadly, protecting a king (3,5,2,4)
Sniffing anagram, I swirled the phrase DON’T SHOW FATE around AK and got precisely nowhere. My hunch leant towards an answer like THE SKINS OF SEAL, or THE SKINK OF SHAW….at least these stabs obeyed the grid’s pattern, if not the clue’s wordplay.
Only remedy, I thought, was to skim King Lear in search of those elusive lines, a kinda half-cheat reliance of supplementary texts to boost my growing tally of solved Times puzzles.
So anyhow, as Big Love played on the teev, and the dog scratched his jowls, and the son clacking frantic in his chatroom, I fast-tracked the mad monarch, looking for a matching phrase.
While I never found paydirt, I did locate some Elizabethan jewels in the playscript, including several skink-ish insults. Namely:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!
A base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave.
Draw, you rogue, or I’ll so carbonado your shanks [oooh so close to skinks…]
I am a very foolish, fond, old man –
… I’m a prize turkey of twoscore years and upward myself. I waved the white flag in the morning light, only to discover the answer was an anagram of DON’T SHOW FATE around AK, and the ‘lines from Lear’ were not the King, but the Irish bunkologist, Edward.
His poem, THE AKOND OF SWAT, is a vague after-image of reading time in Grade 1, sitting on scratchy mats, the smell of band-aids, armpits and stewed urine in the air. You can read the damnable claptrap here http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/akond.html and take a certain Schadenfreude in my own wild-goose capers.
Back to 1-Across, Puzzle #1, and please, no more red Irish herrings.