Welcome back to the occasional series where I enter clueing competitions with mixed results. I entered the Azed January competition but then forgot to save my letter so I can’t remember for the life of me what my clue was. Not so that February jigsaw puzzle, which was kind of frustrating to solve with the incorrect clue and the incorrect clue length in one case, to the point where I thought maybe there’d only be three entries and I’d be in with a chance.
Don Manley may be mortified to discover that we had exactly the same idea for writing a clue for MISTREATMENT – take MISTRUST, remove the US and replace with EAT MEN. DM did come up with a much more concise clue for this idea, which is why he gets a VHC and I get nothing. Here’s my clue…
Suspect forcing us to become a cannibal, maybe in cruel action (12)
I was sorely tempted to put the wrong enumeration in as a tribute to the crossword, but thought better of it at the last moment.
I have to take my invisible hat off to the winning clue though! Tracey Emin’s “Everyone I have ever slept with” was one of the lowlights of a visit to the Brooklyn Gallery of Art to see the Sensation touring display. Although it was fun to have to go past protesters and be given pamphlets on how I was going to hell just to get in. The main cause of contention was the Chris Ofili Virgin Mary picture with elephant dung.
Congrats to those who made the cut, and feel free to share successes and failures!
Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword. In this supposed year of domination I’m almost through January with one letter awry. What I thought would help certainly has helped – making sure I make at least a start on Friday and setting aside some weekend time for each puzzle. Things I probably should have learned years ago, but I’m not always the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Though normally you’d keep the blunt knives in the drawer and the sharp knives in some sort of vertical position.
But I digress – we’re on to the fifth puzzle for 2012, and the setter is Ozzie. New setter? Not so – I wasn’t a regular solver when Ozzie’s last puzzle was published – “Musclied Miss Lued is Clumed”. I checked it out to see what was, and the thing that caught me more than any other was the note on the Listener website – “There was no prize offered for this puzzle”. Was that common for December puzzles at one point, or was there something funny going on with prizes in 2005?
Anyhoo – new territory! Clues are in ranks and files, but may carry across to the next one. Well at least it’s not a boustrophedron. All clues normal and it looks like real words in the grid, though finding where they go could be a challenge.
However a lot of the ambiguity disappears in the first line – there is a “1 across” and it’s an anagram for CUISSE-MADAME, and if there is another answer that starts in rank 1, then CUISSE-MADAME has to go in top right, and T(A)LC begind right after it. That makes it looks like CAST,AWAY similarly starts in the top right.
I did better with the files than the ranks, at least at the beginning. It was pretty obvious early on there were not a lot of gaps (though I had to find three completely empty cells), but having a complete top rank really helped.
Working on the files first proved useful as in File 7, there we have MULTI, PLY, BYTE – as those went in next to each other it was obvious that there was some MULTIPLY BY TENning likely to be going on. That N helped solidify the odd little clue for CHALCANTHITE.
Oh – Ozzie, I enjoyed your clues very much – working “CAN’T HIT” into wordplay as “no batsman” is brilliant! The surfaces of Catholics smeared with mayonnaise, those QUI PEDAL and the cryptic definition for EGGCUP (and I usually dislike cryptic definitions) made this worth the price of admission.
So multiplying by 10 would turn 0 to 0, 1 to 10 and 2 to 20. I see GAMES at the end of rank 4… can we be playing a number of TIC TAC TO GAMES? I think we just might! Especially since I don’t have any of the 2 letters in the grid in places other than Rank 4 and File 7. That’s very nifty!
It also explains why it appears these three empty cells are down in Florida. The only tic tac to game we have to worry about is in the bottom right.
The message helped me get the last of the entries. My last hold-ups were in the middle of the right (I’ll admit I still don’t understand LOLIGO, but all the letters in it are checked), with MIGMATITE, DOGIE and PELTED joining it as the last one in.
There’s far more possibilities for X’s than O’s, so I went through my grid and highlighted all the letters that would end up as O’s. Here’s my working grid.
X won a lot of those games around the grid, but it’s clear here that the only way to win the game in the bottom right is quite literally in the bottom right.
This was my first attempt at a re-transcription. I did another one for my submission, and drew a little line through the X’s with “I won, I won!” next to it. Hopefully this won’t disqualify me. Maybe since Ozzie’s last puzzle had no prizes, there’ll be double prizes this time and I’ll win something! It was in the mail on Wednesday.
This was a slow start but a fast finish and overall an awful lot of fun. Enjoyed the clues and the challenge, and I hope I’ve transcribed everything correctly. However on that hope, I’m going to call this one a Victory for George!
2012 tally (tentative): 4-0-1
Feel free to leave comments below, and see you next week when we are taken on a form of 3D trip with Quinapaulus. If you don’t get enough 3D crosswords in your life, might I suggest trying some more for a good cause?
Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, and the quest for an all-correctish year, which is thus far one letter away from happening. This week it’s Salamanca stepping up to the fray – and maybe Salamanca jumps on a theme and sticks to it – there were 47 “Plays of the Bard” crosswords, and now it appears we’re going two in a row with Sherlock Holmes, following up 2010′s The Glady Marsh (the less said about Mazy, the better).
So what have we here – a non-quotation running around the perimeter, some unchecked letters (including a P, G, Z and Y!) and some wordplay only clues. So it looks like we’re in the world of all real words in the grid, yay!
This is the first time a Listener title has made me literally laugh out loud. Before filling anything in the grid, I showed it to a few casual crossword fans who smiled with me and wished me luck. To the bar!
There is no one across, so no chance on the one-across test. There is a 9 across, and I couldn’t figure it out straight away, but 10 across is one of my pet words, CLERIHEW and we are away.
Maybe I’m getting better at these, but for the first few Salamanca Listeners I tried, I had real problems with the clues. I’m much more cottoned in to these minimalist clues, where you have to look for an abbreviation or a wordplay element from every word of the clue, and things started to fall pretty quickly.
First big boost was URANISM and ZINGARO being right next to each other – that makes it very likely that PUZZLE is one of the words around the outside. Similarly the positioning of ASPASIA and TSARS made it likely that WATSON was the last word of the quote – taking care of NAEVUS having A and V removed, like the title.
I solved this in probably the reverse order that Salamanca intended. The generous unchecked letters made the message pretty clear…
then the removal of A and V from several answers, then finally the “wordplay only” answers being teeth. Two sittings later, and this was all in the bag – it went into the mail on Monday morning.
Without the unchecked letters, this would have been a far greater challenge, and getting the message quickly really helped out on the right hand side. I did really like the title, and the quote – this was a few hours of great fun and I’m ready to call it a Victory to George! Now to see whether Salamanca comes out with another couple of Sherlock Holmes themed crosswords – by strange coincidence I’m going to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie at the second-run theatre tonight!
2012 tentative tally (alliteration!) 3-0-1
Feel free to leave comments below, and see you next week when we race Ozzie to the winning line!
Welcome back to George vs the Listener crossword, home to the most spectacular failed effort at an all-correct year in history. I will, however, press on – who knows, maybe Mr. Green does not read this blog, or thinks my E’s look enough like H’s that I can get away with it. The new goal is an all-correctish! So let’s start with Zag
Zag is a brand-new setter to me (Hi Zag if you’re looking in). Zig and Zag were ancient clowns on Australian TV in the 70s, so maybe one of them quit the duo to write crosswords.
The preamble looks straightforward, all clues have normal definitions, but wordplay to spinny versions. There’s some undefined entries and something to find and highlight. This is going to come down to how easy the clues are…
There is no 1 across, so no 1 across test. There is a 9 across and it’s a nice softball for this new style of clue – SITS,U,E is TISSUE with the first three letters reversed.
Oh, funny story, I started this in the dressing room before an improv show, and I was getting quite a few of these out, and the rest of the group were yelling at me that I was due on stage and should put the fucking crossword down. I did a pretty good show I thought, so maybe Zag’s spinning words got my improv brain going.
I did find I couldn’t spend long on this at any one time, the spinning words were making my head spin as well.
A few short sessions in and something was appearing – it looked like SPARTA, CORINTH and ATHENS would fit in the unclued answers. It said all would be revealed in Chambers, so I took my electronic copy of the 11th edition and searched the three to see where they might be – lo and behold, there were the SEVEN SAGES, one of whom is BIAS. The nine homes of the seven sages fit the unclued answers quite nicely, and there’s SEVEN SAGES running diagonally (in the opposite direction to where we are used to be looking).
Took a while to clean up the top right – with PILOT, DWELL and SLOP being the last to fall. But by Tuesday, I had a grid that was looking good.
Neat crossword, and I liked the method of mixing up the entries, though there were quite a few anagrams where the wordplay could have been almost anything. But I learned something – and it was worth the work for clues like 32 across where BINGO becomes BOGNI! Thanks, Zag.
So I’m going to call this one a Victory for George and tentatively set the tally for the year at 2-0-1
Feel free to leave comments below, and see you next week for Salamanca’s new literary entry.
Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword and it appears that the all-complete is intact after one crossword. Yes!
Sticking to this regimen it was an early printoff and liquid lunch for the second Listener of 2012 – Fruitless Effort by Hypnos. I hope we’re not going to have an all-fruit themed 2012, that would get tired quickly. Not that I dislike fruit, though I’m not sure if I’ve had an ANANA or an ANONA. I have had ACAI now (they’re pretty nice). Maybe a challenge would be to eat all the Fruit in Bradfords.
Hypnos we’ve only met once in 2009 with a puzzle about porridge that really stretched me at that point. I said late last year I was going to try to connect the title straight away, but nothing at all came out of looking at the title other than “more bloody fruit”.
OK, misprints (anywhere in a clue), quotation with something missing… doesn’t sound too onerous and for a second week in a row we’re in the “all real words in the grid” boat, woohoo!
There is a 1 across, but it was a big fail on the 1 across test. Couldn’t work that out at all. Ditto 6 across. This is not looking promising. In fact it took until WRIT(H)E to get something in there. Fortunately that crossed with BATHORSE, one of my better brainwaves figuring it was some sort of HORSE and looking for places to substitute the R, and a grid started to form.
The wankerphone was my saviour time after time here – I know it’s sloppy solving, but there was an awful lot of retrofitting… could I make ALL BLACKS word? SPORTS GROUNDS? TRAUCHLE? The bottom half of the grid proved to be the easier fill, and the key to the final puzzle.
I had AR–THN-T staring at me from the misprints in the down clues and it rang a bell from somewhere. Of all things, a few weeks ago I was reading about satire in the Enlightenment. Wasn’t there something written to ARBUTHNOT. Google search on the wankerphone and I’ve got it! It’s ALEXANDER POPE – EPISTLE TO DR ARBUTHNOT where we are asked WHO BREAKS A BUTTERFLY UPON A WHEEL?
The end of the liquid lunch left me with a two-thirds full grid, the source and it looks like there’s a butterfly hiding in there somewhere.
A second solving session (I like alliterative solving situations) got most of the rest of the grid out. It was helpful to have the rest of these misprints in place (and a laugh when I saw BROTE, remembering the porridge reference (Hypnos, have you tried grits? If you’re really looking for a bland warm filling but utterly tasteless dish, you should come this way and try the specialty).
A trip to Bradfords and there’s about four 16-letter butterflies, but there’s only two W’s in the grid, and one of them is next to EL… so tracing the rest of the CAMBERWELL BEAUTY worked just fine.
Small problem… what are 6 across and down and 38 across?
More blatant googling – I think it was “artists who drew horses” to discover STUBBS, and retroactively get the wordplay S, then BB in TUSK. I’d had STOWE as a possibility for 6 down, and there’s a few mentions to STOWE SCHOOL around, but it does seem kind of obscure. And googling “striker henry” gave me the head-smack moment, because I’d missed him in a Mephisto once, and then the wordplay is N in HERY.
So I think this all checks out – three sessions later, it’s in the mail on Tuesday.
Oh yeah, before looking up butterflies, I was trying to figure out how to make a butterfly shape in the grid with 16 cells. Here’s the shaded glory.
I was worried there for a bit that I’d never get those last three, but I think everything is in place and I’m going to claim this one as a Victory to George. Weird but fun puzzle, Hypnos – if there’d been any thematic modification in the grid I would most likely have messed this up.
2012 tally: 2-0-0. Current streak: George 4.
Feel free to comment below and check back next week when Zag takes us on a game of lawn bowls.
Well that didn’t last long, did it. Should have looked up that the abbreviation for Belize is BH and not BE, and my finding BROTE and thinking it was a nod to the porridge puzzle was very clever and it was actually BROTH.
Updated tally 1-0-1 and the all-correct lasted exactly one week. Yippee…
Welcome to a Brand New Year of George vs the Listener crossword.
This is the year I go for it.
Prompt submissions, deadlines, copies of Chambers everywhere, a phone app with SOWPODS for on-the-fly solving, attention to detail…
All of that nearly unraveled in the first minute when I printed off the crossword and saw it was Dipper.
Maybe I’m being a little harsh on Dipper, but botanical themes are up there with religion as my least favorite and sources of massive gaps in my cruciverbucation. And Dipper is a one-track solver (still waiting to see if Dipper and Hedge-Sparrow are one Jeckyll and Hyde setter wrapped up in one). My battles with Dipper have gotten easier over time – I made it through Half Thyme OK, but nowhere near on Green Cross Code, and really struggled to a finish on Flower Arranging.
What have we here – extra words, a title, some unclued entries and something to highlight. Looks like real words in the grid and clues that are normal aside from the extra words. Sounds deceptively straightforward.
I have made a promise to myself to have long liquid lunches on Fridays at my favorite pub and get a jump start on the weekend’s drinking and the Listener at the same time, so off I went.
There is a 1 across – and a near pass on it – I could see it would be some Scots form of SCREECH, but I can’t figure out what goes in the middle. I put in an S and C as the first two entries, and was immediately happy – the hidden STOA and COO(C)K,A,T,O,O went right in and we had a few letters of the message.
It was a curious grid fill – I got one or two entries at a time, and usually I have a complete quadrant done, but in this one, it was a scattered tangle of answers. The first penny drop was finding DENS as the last four extra words, so with dipper, when there’s DENS it’s usually GARDENS. KITC-EN—DENS looks like KITCHEN GARDENS so it’s something to do with Kitchen gardens (of which I know less than nothing).
Books about kitchen gardens? I have a wankerphone with me! Looks like one of the unclued entries is going to be GARDINER. Nothing shows up on Amazon. It wasn’t until I had about a third of my battery left and I was giving google search a long long bashing until I found it (I believe the search was for SOWING PLANTING KITCHEN GARDENS GARDINER QUOTE) that I got it… “Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchin Gardens…” by Richard Gardener, and his advice to SOWE CARRETS which at this point (apart from the W) was sitting pretty in the diagonal… does one sowe carrets diagonally?
Strange that the title appears to have KITCHIN but I think that the extra word in 15 down is EXCLUSIVELY (AM, then OR in PHASE) which makes the extra letters form KITCHEN.
Left the bar happy, full, and with most of this done – needed to look up the last few in California corner (EMYS, SCHAPPE, OBOLARY, PIRRARUCU), but I went from despair to jubilation over the course of a few short hours.
The first Listener of the year was in the mail on Saturday afternoon and the New Year’s Resolution is still alive after one week. Of course I write these up before the solution is published, so I can only guess if I’m JEG correct, and not delusional George correct.
This was my favorite by far of the Dipper crosswords I had attempted. It was fun to track down that reference and a relief to get the first one of the year out of the way.
So a reminder of the new scoring system for the year – I’m going to lump these as wins/losses/draws. Completely, utterly John Greenworthy solutions are a win, incompletes or complete brain farts are a loss, and silly slips or one letter in the wrong place (I got the idea, but was sloppy somewhere) is a draw. I might have to come back and update these after looking at the solution, but I think I’ve got this one out, so I’m claiming Victory to George!
2012 tally: 1-0-0
Current streak: George 3
Feel free to comment below, and see you next week when hypnos offers us less fruit (pity 4713 was not called “So long and thanks for all the fruit”).
Welcome back to George vs the Listener, for the last puzzle of 2011 and the fourth year of George vs Listener. As we move into Year 5, the next challenge is how close can I get to actually all-complete, including prompt submission. So this is the last of the legacy puzzles, and I must admit, when I wasn’t finished with it in the first week, it went on to the back-burner while I tackled the first puzzle of 2012.
We close out the year with Mango… as a team we’ve only met Mango once before in City Tour, which was a case where I got most of the clues but couldn’t crack the code, so I was apprehensive here.
Letters are dropping out, moving left or right, and it looks like there’s nine modified answers. So mostly real words, that’s a relief.
More random solving locations – I had a recall on the air bags in my car, so I was stuck for a few hours in the middle of nowhere, but there was a chinese place I remember being OK within walking distance. How my copy managed to stay really clean while I was solving eating Chinese food is a mystery, but I’ll roll with it. (hi-hat)
There is a 1 acorss, but I have no idea about it. There’s a 7 across and I like the Viz reference, but I can’t figure it out either. 12 looks like it should be a moving T but I couldn’t see the answer straight away. Nothing doing with 13 – it wasn’t until 14 across that something twigged and in went ETERNAL with a O dropping. Woohoo! We’re away.
This started a mini solving frenzy at the top right, with NARTJIE, the regular Azed word YRENT, and PRECLUDE going in.
I had a really hard time the rest of the way through the words and there were only scattered words here and there, and a lot of suspicions as to which letters might move, but no real inroads into the grid.
I had SCRABBLE with a question mark at 42 across, which did fit with CARIB, but didn’t seem to fit with GLITTER at 26 down. Of the seven clues the only I’d solved was TRANQUILLIZE, but I didn’t have any checking letters.
For well over a week this one sat at less than a third full, and glances back at it yielding absolutely nothing.
The last Listener of the Year has been a problem lately… couldn’t get Great Expectations at the end of 2010, couldn’t make that dead wren at the end of 2009, and had an almost empty grid on Without Bars in 2008. So I was bitterly determined to get a year-ender done, and crack that Mango (since part of Mango had already friended me on facebook and was threatening… threatening…).
Oh, Chambers Word Wizards… even though you warn me you are out of date and I should go to your new site, you are at least nice enough to tell me that D??EE????G??? is DUKE ELLINGTON
AHA!
IT DON’T MEAN A THING IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT SWING looks like a possibility from the letters, and a search of Duke Ellington quotes brings up “Playing bop is like playing scrabble with the vowels removed”. If I took those vowels out of TRANQUILLIZE and treat 9 down as a straight anagram then TRNQLLZ will work with NTRFLNT.
Two hours of poking, prodding and banging later, I think I’ve got it. It helped noticing that the seven modified form a pattern (knowing what was affected and what wasn’t affected was crucial in working out those last few clues). I actually went to a library to look at ODQ to find the version in there is PLAYING BOP IS LIKE SCRABBLE WITH ALL THE VOWELS MISSING. Wow, that was different to the popular version on the internets!
do wop do wop de wop do wop do wop doooo
I wonder how much Scrabble Duke Ellington played? I have a version of it on my wankerphone – invitations to play are often graciously accepted.
Finally! Victory over Mango and Victory over the last Listener of the year. Hopefully a good sign moving into the new one.
2011 tally: George 40, Listener 13. Current streak: George 2.
Check back later for a year in review, a new George vs the Azed clueing competition, and next week see how long the all-correct streak for 2012 goes as we swap fruit recipes with Dipper.
Welcome back to George vs the Listener crossword! Second-last puzzle for 2011 before we start the new, gung-ho, submit submit submit version of 2012. Our penultimate challenge comes from Monk. This is the first time a Monk puzzle has made it to the electronic pages of George v Listener, so hi to Monk if you’re looking in. What’s funny is I know a couple of people who know Monk, who is apparently some sort of local legend in Leeds. Two visits to Leeds later all I’ve done is heard stories. Maybe third time will be the charm, as I’ve enjoyed Monk’s puzzles in the Independent (and there was one last week) a lot.
So what have we here… wordplay with extra words, a line from an exchange, and all entries bar one need to be modified somehow. Looks like we’ll be starting in the world of cold-solving!
Based on a suggestion from a few weeks ago – my first thought from the title was to find anagrams of SEASIDE and immediately came up with DISEASE. So the first guess was that this will be some sort of gene therapy crossword where base pairs have to be transposed.
There is a 1 across and a big win on the 1 across test… with (S)AID,EALS making our first extra letter A. A quote that begins with A. That doesn’t narrow it down.
The cold solving section of this was a bit of a slog… IDEALS crossed with IBICES, ARNE, BAIT and SOAVE. So the I and S were OK, but not sure about the others. Under that were BROCCOLI and INDISCRETE. Both I’s and the B in IBICES could work with BROCCOLI. The S and I in SOAVE works… some letters in place, some in the wrong place, but which?
The breakthrough came rather quickly – after staring at those top right entries for a bit, I went back to the message… A-LT–R-GH–OT-S…. ALL THE RIGHT??? A google check of ALL THE RIGHT turns up “I’m playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order”, which is a quote from Eric Morecambe, which will fit in quite well.
So that means the letters corresponding to notes of the scale mix up - that makes sense with the checking I’s and S’s, and the rest of the words in the top right can be fitted now.
Now I can see where ERIC MORECAMBE can fit in, but where is ERNIE WISE? Google and YouTube to the rescue… It’s not ERNIE WISE, it’s ANDRE PREVIN who was the other half of the exchange
And since there’s only one note letter in PREVIN, then that’s the one left alone. By the way, nice touch in the preamble to say “Necessarily” short.
The hard work done, the rest should be easy…
But it’s not… I had a huge gaping gap in the middle. It took a lot of bashing away to sort out those last few entries – GRECO-ROMAN, ARROGANCE, CORNED BEEF, ROADSTER, GROCER and DOGBEE in particular, even though I knew the extra wordplay letter. Some of these were found by WordMatcher searches including a lot of [abcdefg] options.
In the end I was left with only 24 across unsolved, and in trying to sort out the translations, I had it as ASF? and couldn’t come up with anything for it.
Back to the transposing board
I suspected since I had a few other unresolved transpositions I may have done something wrong here. So time for a fresh grid. Careful re-writing of the grid convinced me that the other checked letter in 24 across didn’t have to be an F, it could be an E or an F. ASE.
ESAU! And it’s a hidden word of all things (I had to google up “Esau seller of right” to learn that ESAU sold his birthright). Now it all works!
Not only biblical but it's even a hidden word clue! Yikes
This must have been an asolute beast to create and I believe there is no guesswork at all in the transpositions, but you can’t get them until you have every single clue. What an impressive feat of setting, Monk! I was so close to giving up, but I’m glad I went back to another grid, and finally got there.
Victory to George!
2011 tally: George 39, Listener 13. Current streak, George 1.
Phew… feel free to leave comments below and check back next week as we round out 2012 in George v Listener by challenging Mango’s spelling of Aristocrat.
Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, and we’re sailing into the sunset of the 2011 battle versus barred-grid beasties. I don’t think I’ve made much of an improvement this year, so I’ve got to get into some better (or maybe worse) habits for 2012. As I type this the first puzzle of the year has just appeared, but no peeking yet!
Phiz arrived at an odd time – I was just about ready to take off on a junket to southern climes to have the craziest Christmas ever. So I printed it off, but didn’t start it until I was on an international flight. The title and the setter rang a bell – we’ve had two BeRo appearances in George vs the Listener – one based on a T.S. Eliot poem I had to really slog through in Oh Yes It Does, and an utter failure in the word zigzag of Fizz Buzz. This newer Listener resembles the latter.
3-D grid, wedges, a lot of clues, probably a lot of overlapping letters.
So I’m pretty sure I pegged this early – I looked up “phiz” in Chambers and it gives face – so the fourth grid is probably in the shape of a face.
There’s a 1, across and down I guess have no real meaning here, but it’s a pretty gentle anagram of JATROPHA, so we’re away and a J rather confidently goes into the 1 across cell.
There were a few sessions of sub-zero cold solving, and apart from finding (I think) where JATROPHA and most of MARQUETRY went, I was having a really hard time trying to keep track of these words. It seemed most of the words required at least two turns.
So here was the position I was left in – I’ve solved most of these clues – the only ones I don’t have are…
4, the first 12, 19, 22, both 26s, both 29s.
You would think that would be enough to start piecing together this grid, but it wasn’t. At least not for me. I think having the 26s (or at least that first letter) would help a lot to try to figure out where KITE and BUTEA wound up.
But after hours and hours of lying this on the floor, scribbling letters in all sorts of directions and three extra printed grids, I am no closer to figuring out how this works.
I’ve spotted a huge weakness – I don’t do turns and jumps very well – the knights moves gave me headaches and this (just like Fizz Buzz) was a road map of what. So just my luck next year every second puzzle will involve hopscotch, clues in knitting patterns, and maybe even the odd boustrophedron or two. It pains me to say it, but maybe I’m just a linear person.
What I can say is that I enjoyed the clues that I solved, and this did take care of a many hungover mornings on a lilo on a friend’s living room while he was successfully passed out and I wasn’t. But I have little to show for it, and this is a Victory for BeRo and the Listener crossword.
Though I’m pretty sure there’s a face involved somewhere.
Victory to the Listener! 2011 tally: Listener 13 (lucky for some), George 38. Current streak: Listener 1
Feel free to point out my inability to do jigsaw puzzles below, and see you next week when Monk shuffles (and hopefully deals us in) at the seaside.
Well my clue didn’t get in, but here’s an except from my note that accompanied the clue…
Interesting puzzle, this one – found the right hand side far easier than the left hand side, and the competition word was one of the last ones in. I have surveyed several of my friends over here of various ages, and nobody has heard of the term or the definition.
So I got a little shout-out in the slip, but no love for the clue. I found this a real struggle to make anything out of, but here was my clue – I think it may have stretched the rules a little too much (though a similar idea was employed in the third-place clue).
Damn Yankee, outspoken fan of political correctness (in short) (12)
Definition: Damn Yankee. Wordplay is that shortening political correctness leads to PC, and an outspoken PC fan would be an APPLE-KNOCKER
I suspected the slip would be full of compound anagrams, and it was. Maybe this upcoming year I’ll submit a clue of this type, but I’m honestly not that big on them.
I’ll confess – I couldn’t finish the Azed Christmas puzzle, so I didn’t submit a clue this time around. If there’s a big call for it, I can put up a post about the next competition, but I’ll probably just leave it out. Got a clue that didn’t make the cut, or worthy criticism? Feel free to leave it below!
