Isn’t everyone just texting on the train now?

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, your weekly home for unqualified musings and ramblings.  It’s a happy time of the year here, this upcoming week is Asheville Beer Week, which means I should probably try solving today’s Listener today, as my lucid moments will be few and far between.

Nutmeg time!  We last saw nutmeg late last year with a fairly gentle take on the “Grand old Duke of York” in A Noted Performance, a visit to the Hundred-Acre wood in An Unsettled Spell (both of which I finished) and words that have different meanings in French and English in Franglais (nearly got it).  So I’m thinking I may have Nutmeg’s number – let’s find out.

Ten entries need alteration, wordplay contains extra letters, and a phrase hidden in the grid.  Okeydokey…

There is a 1 across and the wordplay looks like IONAM – check of Google and IONA works as where Columbus landed, so that’s a pass on the 1 across test and the message begins with M.  That crosses what looks like OMB,RAH – Chambers this time to find OMRAH, and one I can solve without diving straight into aids – NEONATAL with an extra Y in the anagram.  4 down looks like it should be an anagram of NOHELP inside something, but that won’t fit in the space.  Hmmm… Bradfords has ANOPHELINE which could be the anagram of NO HELP in A FINE giving an extra F.  So I’ve got to take some letters out of that one.

OMELET, CANNAE and SENATES later something is emerging – that main diagonal could read I’M ON T??????? – probably I’M ON THE something with 5 letters.  Phone maybe?  Working my way down to the bottom right of the grid, it’s not phone, but ARDEA, BIRDCALL and JAGIR make I’M ON THE TRAIN a likely candidate.

I only had two of the answers to be modified – ANOPHELINE and COPENHAGEN, and all but one letter checked in ANOPHELINE – looks like NOPHE has to be removed.  ARSENAL suggested OPENH has to be removed from COPENHAGEN…  aaaaaah! Funny I thought phone earlier – it’s anagrams of PHONE that have to be removed!

If that’s true, 16 across is probably an anagram of a compound + PHONE + another letter – THIOPHENES!  Aha!

So now it should be a pretty easy crawl to the finish – I believe at that point I’d solved all but about 8 clues, and most of the rest of them needed extra PHONES in them – I had to go to Word Matcher and put PHONE + the letters I knew in to get NEPHOLOGY and STANHOPE PRESS, but eventually I had a complete grid.

Those extra letters weren’t a lot of help in solving as I went along, but I wondered what their significance was – took a bit more googlyling to hunt down that someone actually composed that annoying ringtone!  Yikes!

I’m a little slow in posting this, so I think I can claim a Victory to George, and a rather fun puzzle, Nutmeg.  2013 tally:  13-3-2

Feel free to tell me that people do say that on trains, and I’ll see you next week when Ifor has a puzzle presumably about jumping rope.

 

I guess children’s lit has come a long way since “Bleak House”

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, your home for sometimes solved, sometimes not crosswords.  Now this week it’s Wasp, and I’m three in a row on Wasp puzzles – with SPAD, Phoney, and Symbolism all falling without too much trouble.  Maybe a calm before a storm?  Let’s see what is in Laureate?

Every answer is missing a letter, indicated by wordplay, and there’s some more thematic stuff, and a grid that’s missing bits in the corners.   Ooooh.. means I won’t be able to liberally cheat using electroaids.  Might as well get cracking right?  There’s no sign of a 1 across, 2 across is thematic so we have to go all the way to an 8 across test – fortunately it’s RETINA with the E not given in wordplay… me being me, I still wrote in RETINA and wondered why I ran out of spaces… way to go George!  RTINA crosses something thematic at 8, and that clue for 1 down looks like it should really give wordplay of BTTA or TTAX… BATTA is subsistence money and we are well and truly on our way!

Even with my usual online dictionary hunt-and-pecking I was making pretty good progress with the grid.  The unindicated letters appeared to be spelling out ENTERED WITH A SQUASH AND A SQUEEZE… which if I had Googled at the time, I would have saved myself a fair bit of time and effort.

So about two hours later, here I was – a complete grid, except for the thematic stuff, and none of those empty spaces were making any sense at all, and FRELFCH as the letters of someone’s name.

FRELFCH?  FFLER something?  CHFFLER?

Illustrative surname?  Let’s Google “chffler illustrator”… don’t you mean “Scheffler Illustrator” – well that’s one more letter than I was planning to have in those circles, but why not?  Scheffler is apparently the illustrator of choice for a book called “The Gruffalo” which looks like it might go at 10 down.  This is when I learned that he also illustrated “A Squash and a Squeeze” (whoops).

Julia Donaldson appears to be our author, and we have MONKEY PUZZLE, THE SNAIL (and) THE WHALE, ROOM ON THE BROOM, (the) GRUFFALO, STICKMAN and TIDDLER.  Not all of those letters are going to fit into the gaps, hence squashing and sqeezing.

Glad this is not taking very long, because I cannot identify with this theme at all, sorry Wasp.  The books look pretty uninspiring.

Now what do I do with these letters…  I’ve got a list of letters that ultimately end up in the spaces, so maybe the others get squashed and squeezed out?  Well, there’s some O’s and Z’s that look obvious… I started with the letters that were the same, and the ones that didn’t appear in the extra letter list to see if that sorted out the squashing and squeezings…

At this point I had a problem… with an N,T,I,L and O unaccounted for, I saw two ways to squash and squeeze the letters.  Grrrr… this is not going to be a single session solve!

I happened to be near a local independent bookstore the next day, so I popped in and asked if they had any of the titles listed.  Nobody had heard of Julia Donaldson, but about three of her books were in their system as available for special order.  So I wonder if we have a theme that (unless you are in the UK), absolutely requires the use of the internet?

Next day, fresh eyes… maybe the letters are squashed or flattened – so an O could become the bottom line of an L or an E could become an I?  That doesn’t seem to help anything.

New approach – write all the names of the books down and start again with the letter that stays… M( )KE( )U( )LE – has to be a P and a Z

TH( )SNA( ) – has to be an S

R( )MO( )H( )R( )M – has to be O’s, and the B, the other could be anything.

G( )FFA( )  - has to be the U

So far I’ve been circling the second of the two letters for all the choices…

George you idiot!

No letters are being lost – I’ve just got to put both letters in the one cell, and it’s the second letter that is indicated by that set… yes, that works… it also gives me the last two letters of SCHEFFLER’s name.

My working grid was a mess by this point, so here’s the one I submitted.  Wow – I hope I put that last M in at the end of NEUM(E) before mailing it off… that would be very much like me.

Perseverance!  Not sure what it says when the endgame took three times as long as filling in the non-thematic part of the grid, but I think I can call this one a Victory to George!

2013 tally:  12-3-2

Feel free to tell me I have no respect for children’s literature, and see you next week when Nutmeg gives us a choice of F or L or…

 

 

Gogito Ego Sum?

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword – your home for grids with scribble all over them and terrible jokes.

Want to vote for something that means a lot to my friends?  There’s a rather bizarre informal poll called “Beer City USA” – my little town of Asheville, North Carolina has won or shared it for the last four years.  This has actually gotten me rather a lot of work, as when people drink beer they want jokes told to them, so in the upcoming Asheville Beer Week I have a number of shows.

So go vote for Asheville NC (or if you don’t like this column, vote for Grand Rapids, MI)

OK, back to the Listener – Jaques today, who according to the Listener site is the word-puzzle alterego of Arden, which means I’ve really done two Jaques/Arden puzzles – Body of Evidence with the moving earth and the Galileo quote and the sidey-sidey numerical Square-Bashing.  Both of those I managed to solve, but they each put up a fight.  So what have we here?

Brief preamble – extra words, first letters spelling out an instruction, and down jumblies.  The dreaded jumblies!

Well let’s try it, shall we – there is a 1 across for a change, and with G(LAD)E we are away, with a Q at the start of the instruction (and one of those “undeservedlys” in the second clue looking suspicious.  It’s not my usual approach to the Listener (I try to match checking letters as soon as possible), but since there was the threat of jumbling, I went on and worked on the rest of the across clues.

Not a bad start… a first run through the across clues got me a little under half of them, more in the top half than in the bottom half, and it looks like the instruction begins QUOTE (must be a quote somewhere in the grid, thinks smart George) and maybe BREWER near the bottom.

On to the downs… did OK with a first run through the down clues, as usually happens I got more of the lower half of the grid from down clues.  On the other hand SHOULD BE HIGHLIGHTED looked like a definite from the down clues.

There was a little hunt-and-pecking back to the clues, but in the end it was electronic aids central with liberal abuse of Word Matcher in particular to look for words that would fit [af].[iroltc][ait].[pros] to get FACTOR and similar searches to find SOLANO and UMPTY (at which point I left a note for Ms Curran at another place where you can find more elegantly illustrated grids, to note that her choice of moniker has appeared twice in recent weeks.

Around this point GRAMMATICA was poking out near the middle of the grid, and so it was time to poke in to Brewer.  Fortunately it’s there near the end of the entry for GRAMMAR: EGO SUM IMPERATOR ROMANO RUMET SUPRA GRAMMATICUM, which roughly translates to “Them they call the Romans they go on the house”.  And was said by SIGISMUND I, who was not a sea monster, apparently.

Well that’s a good find – the quote is in one big block, and I already had the bottom row finished, so completing the quote let met me confirm HEPATIC and UPROAR, and get my last down clue – COSECANT which was a pretty sneaky use of the extra word.

 

Two solving sessions, things never really got held up, and my Brewers finally let me find the thing I was looking for on a first check, so that was a lot of fun, and I think I can call this one a Victory to George!

Feel free to tell me how word matcher is vastly overpowered, and see you next week when Wasp hopefully has a puzzle that insults Robert Pinsky (who once told me I wasn’t particularly funny or clever).

A subtle message about gun control?

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, your source for bad jokes about 500-odd-people’s favorite weekly puzzle.  I believe I read somewhere that Schadenfreude shuns internet crossword commentary, so maybe I should just throw the grid in and be done with it.  Hi Schadenfreude if you really are looking in.

Been a while since we’ve seen the mysterious Schadenfreude – last appearance in 2011 with Brief Appearances, which I couldn’t come close to solving.  Before that was Language Balancing with the Maltese Cross theme, which I got, BAT which I was perilously close on, Terminal Suspension where I spotted the theme but missed the ending, Overhead Reduction (similar pattern).  So watch me be a square or two shy here as well.

Solving in unusual places once again, I was proctoring a 3-hour exam for the US National Chemistry Olympiad

What have we here – jigsaw-style clues, alphabetical order of answers, definition misprints.  Four blank entries, names and a cipher. Hmmm…

Well there is no 1-across but there is a first clue, and a wait a minute, there’s only three letters in the answer but no three-letter answers in the grid?  As the kids say, WTF, Schadenfreude?

Hmmm…

Before solving a single clue, it’s time to start asking questions…  I counted up the number of 8,7,6,5,4 letter answers in the grid, and the number of 8,7,6,5,4,3 letter answers in the clues.  Only two 8 letter clues, only two 7 letter clues.

Hmmm… are we putting two three-letter answers together, or jamming a three and a four together?  It’s a definite that two of the 8 letter entries have to be blank ones, and probably two of the 7 letter entries.  If those 7 and 8′s around the outside of the grid were the blanks, that would give me 6 3-letter entries.  AHA!  I think I know what’s going on with the grid.  Pat on back and let’s solve some clues.

Still couldn’t figure out that first one but with BAD,GE,RED and a misprint O I’m on my way.

Solving the clues was not too bad, and on a first run through I had more than half of them.  With only two 8-letter answers I was feeling pretty good about SIXAINES going on the bottom with the X in the unchecked entry and BLOOPED as my 7-letter in the upper half crossing BRA since it didn’t look like there was going to be a 3-letter entry starting with M to check MALTHUS.  I started building up a grid from those three entries, and that was looking pretty good… since BRA was one of the first that I placed, the names have to start with a C…  and then a Z from BERLIN.  CZ?  Someone CZECH?  O from BADGERED and L from INULAS and I had a pretty stunning (quite literally penny) dropping moment.

CZOLGOSZ was the guy who shot McKinley!

Why on Earth do I know that?  I’m studying for my US Citizenship exam, and since it’s mostly civics, dead presidents are things you are meant to know about!  And this fits – there have been four assassinated – LINCOLN, KENNEDY, MCKINLEY and GARFIELD – I couldn’t remember the name of the guy who offed GARFIELD, but the interweeb on my phone can clear that up – GUITEAU.  So CZOLGOSZ, GUITEAU, BOOTH and OSWALD together have 26 letters.  That’s neat!  Put in the names and we have real words around the outside of the grid.

Not quite done, there’s still this cypher to work out.  I’ll admit I did it backwards, since H could only be T,  C could only be A, and E could only be M, filling in those made it look like DEMOCRAT VICTIM at the end.  USE BLUE SHADING FOR THE MOST RECENT AND ONLY DEMOCRAT VICTIM.  So KENNEDY is in blue, and I think he’d like it that way.

This was a really excellent puzzle, with a theme that probably kept the Brits guessing more than the displaced Australians reading too much about US History.  Sneaky theme, but for once I managed to sneak up, and I believe I have a completely correct grid this time around, so Victory To George – woohoo!

2013 tally:   10-3-2.  Feel free to criticize me wanting to vote over here, and see you next week when Jaques asks me to mind my grammar.

 

More dread

A scene from a surprisingly unshot screenplay…

INTERIOR:  Code room at Bletchley Park, day

Computer machinery and pieces of paper with scribbling litter the cluttered room.  ALAN TURING, male, 20s, is crouched over a notepad.  He doesn’t notice the entry of BRIGADIER NATHANIEL MACTHWAIT until he speaks

BRIGADIER

Turing!  What have you there?

TURING

Terribly sorry, Brigadier, didn’t see you come in

BRIGADIER

No problem at all, old chap.  Been quite the week, hasn’t it?  You’ve cracked the Enigma code, ensured safety for Allied messages, predicted artificial intelligence, and taught young Mr. Benaud how to bowl a googly.  Whatever next?

TURING

I guess a quickie is out of the question?

BRIGADIER

It certainly is, Turing, it certainly is.  That’ll get you into trouble, you know?

TURING

Well Brigadier, I’ve been working on a new code, but I don’t think you want to see it

BRIGADIER

Whyever not?

TURING

I fear it makes no sense and will just frustrate the men even more sir

BRIGADIER

How does it work?

TURING

I noticed that you can make a square using all the letters in the alphabet

BRIGADIER

Hate to stop you there, young Alan, but there’s 26 letters in the alphabet

TURING

True, sir.  But we don’t use J much do we?

BRIGADIER

Don’t think I’ve ever used it in my life.  Carry on

TURING

We come up with a code word, but it can’t have any repeated letters.  Then put the rest of the alphabet in the remaining squares.

BRIGADIER

And how does this make a code?

TURING

You break up words into two letters at a time

BRIGADIER

But what about words with odd number of letters?

TURING

You’ll just have to avoid using them.  Every odd-letter-numbered word has an equally useful even-numbered word.  AIRCRAFT instead of PLANE, STUPID instead of IDIOTIC, BORING instead of TEDIOUS

BRIGADIER

So all our messages will have to have no J’s in them and only use even numbered letters of words

TURING

Yes, sir.  So when you want to encode a word, you use the two letters at opposite ends of a rectangle formed by the letters

BRIGADIER

I suppose now you’re going to tell me I can’t use words with two letters on the same line next to each other?

TURING

That was my original idea, but now I think we can just move the letters one space to the right… or up and down

BRIGADIER

Wrapping around the edges?

TURING

Wrapping around the edges, as it were

BRIGADIER

Turing, this has got to be the most obtuse, convoluted and repugnant code ever made.  What do you call it?

TURING

I was thinking of Playfair

BRIGADIER

You’re mad, Turing!  Mad!  There’s nothing play nor fair about it?  I insist you cover up this cipher at once.  It’s horrible!  No man must ever see it.

TURING (downcast)

Understood sir.

BRIGADIER

Good man.  Now about that quickie…

 

Count me among the target audience for this, I guess.  I do hate using Playfair codes, and the only puzzle I actually “solved” that had a playfair code, I did it by the solver in Quninapaulus.  So as soon as I saw the little square, I was ready to tear up the grid and resolve myself to a week without a Listener.

Mordred’s last Listener was just before I started this blog, though I thought I had done a Mordred puzzle somewhere before.  I started this on the worst flight I have had in a long time – I was going to a conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.  There’s a stereotype of the Louisianian as as gumboot-wearing, sweaty, thick hick, and I was wedged right in next to one who I think was blissfully unaware that I needed a little bit of seat.  I’m not the smallest person in the world, but I was perched on the edge of the seat and twisted about 60 degrees to minimize surface-to-surface contact.  I was just able to prop Bradford’s under the crossword.

What can I say?  All clues normal, all words in the grid (at least before the moving) normal, it was just down to solving and finding the “playfair” square.  WORDPLAY jumped out at me, and it was before the flight landed that I had figured out WORDPLAY GIVES FUN as the three-word code.  I was pretty impressed that there was only one of the rest of the 9 letters scattered somewhere in the grid, which means Mordred set a challenge of a grid with only one T.  I was kind of hoping the replacement scheme left real words but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

I didn’t get back from New Orleans in time to submit this, so it was two missed submission weeks in a row, sorry Mordred.  It was fun while it lasted, and was probably the closest I will get to actually enjoying something involving a Playfair.

I think I can call this one a Victory to George – putting me at 9-3-2 and finally getting things back in order.

Feel free to tell me why my screenplay was never picked up, and see you next week when Schadenfreude pays back his slaves.

 

Lions and tigers and squares, oh my!

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword – one man’s attempt to show that mental capacity peaks around the time he decides to start a blog, and it continues on a downslide ever after.

This week it’s Ron, with a carte blanche.  Almost a year ago to the day, Ron gave us Breach of Contract which made it into my top 5 of last year, so I was looking forward to this one!  There’s some twists I don’t think I’ve seen before – some extra letters in definitions, some extra words, alternating letters of which spell out a bit of a poem.  On top of that, down answers in alphabetical order, and 90-degree symmetry.  Phew!

There was a problem here – this arrived at about the worst time for me, and I barely got a chance to look at it over the next week.  So I didn’t even get started on it until after the deadline to send it in (a pattern that continued for another week).  Damn you real life getting in the way of me doing crosswords and mailing them across the ocean!

Well, with carte blanches, it’s worth trying to figure out some of the pattern, and since the enumerations were given, it looked like there had to be two across answers on each row (so the extra clue must be in the downs).  There is a 1 across, and it looks like BASS,I with DAMNEDEST being the extra word, so this poem looks like it begins AND S – it has to start in the top left or one square in, which means the fourth square has to be an S.  Yes!  One letter down, 143 to go!

Didn’t make much of the next clue, but then there’s an anagram for PEINS, which means the poem could be AND SO ME or AND SOME… this is looking promising.  Didn’t get the next clue, but “low-fat” seems to be sticking out, and could be added to what I’ve got to make it AND SOME OF T… O,PAL makes it AND SOME OF THE… couldn’t make out 6, but GALL,I,C and now we have AND SOME OF THE BIG, which is ringing a bell – a Googling later and there’s AND SOME OF THE BIGGER BEARS TRY TO PRETEND THAT THEY CAME ROUND THE CORNER TO LOOK FOR A FRIEND!

The title of that poem is LINES AND SQUARES which sounds appropriate!

I know it’s solving things back-ass-wards, but I used the rest of the poem to find the removed lines and started solving the removed word clues first, working from the end of the downs up – I saw S,ILLS and SEA L,ACE quickly, which confirmed the positions of BASSI, PEINS, OPAL and GALLIC and making the first down clue look like APPAYS.

The 90 degree symmetry was generous – I could slot in most answers as I got them – the last part of the grid to fill in was the top right, having no real confidence at putting in PIGSTY and AMIGO and needing to get to a dictionary to confirm GALA, KA,GO,S and the extra letters in TALI and COGUE.

Why were PIGSTY and AMIGO such a pain?  There had to be an extra letter in the definition.  No there didn’t… there had to be an extra CHARACTER in the definition… aaaaah… the 4 and 9 are the extra characters, giving 4 X, 9 Y and that means 4 lines and 9 squares – the grid pattern is a noughts-and-crosses grid!  That works – there’s two grid lines in each row and in each column.  The rest of the extra letters give CUT TWICE ALIGN SILLIES, and clue 42 is our solutionless one.

I thought we could have been looking for Winnie The Pooh characters in the solutionless clue, but we’re looking for sillies that can also be found in the grid… well SILL is there to make SILLY, and underneath is NUTTER – but if I slide the Y along using the new grid lines as guides, that moves HA over UTTER to make HATTER and NU to MPTY to make… well another blogger with far better artistic skills than I probably let out a squeal at that point.

There’s also DINGBAT or DINGBATS, but there’s only one S in the clue so it’s got to be DINGBAT.  That leaves me nine letters for two more sillies… FOOL looks like a possibility but I can’t find it in the grid – there’s GOOF and a good old Australian one GALAH!

Since it was past the deadline, I didn’t prepare a send in-version, so here’s what my original looked like with scribbling and circling.

Wow!  Ron had the setting bar high there – a fully-symmetrical grid of real words that could be manipulated this way, two different types of clue manipulation (and very few surfaces were ruined by removing the extra words).  Sorry I didn’t get it done in time to send a letter along with a solution, but if you’re checking in, Ron – I really am looking forward to the next one!

I’m going to call this a Victory to George (though Mr. Green will be none the wiser).

2013 tally:  8-3-2

Feel free to comment on my tardiness at solving (though the blog is up on time), and see you next week when Mordred makes me do another bloody wiyguapy.

Hello Dolly!

Welcome to George vs the Listener – I’ve resisted looking at the other blogs or the solution for 9 to 5 by Zag, even though I know it came out yesterday.  Got really caught up in the day job and then went straight to a They Might Be Giants concert, so a couple of crazy days.  TMBG are still a great show, for a band that was big when I was in university.  Geek rock doesn’t age… no “Ana Ng” but they did break out “Don’t Let’s Start”, “Istanbul (not Constantinople)”, “Birdhouse In Your Soul” from the classics list along with some new ones.

Oh yes, there’s a Listener I was meant to have written about already, wasn’t there.  9 to 5 by Zag.  We last saw Zag early last year with Bias and the story of the Seven Sages.  Lots of mutated words from the wordplay there.   In this one it looks like we have real words in the grid and thematic columns and all sorts of different types of clues to give unchecked letters in the columns and two other normal clues.  Looks tricky – I started off writing the types of clues to the side.

My first instincts was that this looks tricky, having to sort out five types of clues.

There was a 1 across, but my attention was drawn to the two italicized clues – would they drop a hint?  Well they have 9 and 5 in them… but they’re both easy solves – SA,V,ANT and UN(it),IX (a word I use almost daily).  So let’s work around them…   UNIX crosses S,HUNT and so we have an extra F in the definition.  It also crosses DANDELION (misprint F in wordplay) and this is starting to look less daunting. In fact by the end of my lunch break I had most of the left hand side clues solved, and since I knew all of the definition +1 letters, but one, HALF OF TWELVE was looking like a contender for 7 down.

Aaaaah… HALF OF TWELVE is 6, and the title is 9 to 5, so I wonder if column 7 (where I have about half the entries) works out to be another of the numbers… NINE MINUS TWO.  And it’s just before the 7 column, so maybe they are 9 8 7 6 5 in the five 12-letter downs?

Works for 10 – TEN INTO FIFTY… so now I have a full right hand side of the grid, a half-finished left side, and I think I’ve got the theme. Executive decision – let’s not end lunch right now, I may be able to knock this out in one session!

I got a couple of the left-hand side answers (SEXTET, HIRONS becoming HERONS) from figuring the theme and getting FOUR PLUS FOUR and THREE SQUARED for the left two long columns.  At the end of extended lunch, we are all done.  Pat on back time!

And then life got crazy, and instead of making a clean copy to send off straight away, I forgot about it or didn’t have time until it was probably too late to get it to Green Lane in time to get comments back to Zag.  So if you’re checking in, Zag, hi – hope you got the letter, and this was really fun – I liked how every clue contributed to the overall theme.

Now to check if I really can call this a Victory to George…

It appears I can – woohoo!

Things start to even out a little after Tuesday of this week, so maybe I’ll be back on track on Friday, so please feel free to tell me the virtues of not procrastinating (or tell me when you get around to it), and see you next week when Ron gives us a taste of his chromosomes.