I probably would sow carets

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”).

The Thin Black Duke

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.

Nearly done in by the bible again! At least it wasn’t a disease

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.

Phizzled out – let’s face it

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.

so stuck...

Last part

George vs the Azed Clueing Competition – APPLE-KNOCKER (In which I make the slip, but not for a clue).

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!

 

 

Welcome to church, pull up a pew

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword.  I hope everyone got what they were hoping for over the holiday break.  I got a cricket bat signed by Mike Hussey, some caramello koalas and a sunburn, so I’m deliriously happy.  On the other hand, I started writing this in Firefox and WordPress told me I needed to update Firefox, and so I guess half the world is downloading the Firefox update which has stalled my computer a short while.  I am smarter than the average nobody, so I’ve switched over to Chrome and snuck in through the back door.  Soon we will have more browsers than any other programs on our computers.

All this and a Listener Crossword!  This week the challenge is put up by Stick Insect.  We’ve only met Stick Insect once before with a Henry the Eighth grid in Hexes, which I got out OK, so I was feeling good about this one.

There was another happy occasion here, as the grid appeared just after my last exam, so I was in a celebrating mood.  Off to the bar we go!  Side-by-side siamese twin grids, apparently joined by the 14-acrosses (sounds painful), and non-overlapping clues.  Challenge for setters, try one of these with overlapping grids and really confuse us.  Some clashes to work out along the way (20 of them) and something hiding in the final grid.  So normal clues…

Stick Insect has given us not just one 1-across but two!  And an instant pass on the 1-across test with a gentle hidden AFAR and A,SP,S meaning I can confidently write an A in at each 1 across marker.  Ha ha!  In what was to later prove a remarkable stretch of luck, I tossed a coin and put AFAR in the left grid and ASPS in the right grid.

The clues were fun, fair, and not too too difficult.  I started filling the right hand grid up pretty quickly, the left one was more of a trouble, and by the end of the first pint I was feeling very good about both myself and the grid, but I had no clashes yet.  I was starting to wonder if this was going to be like one from a few years ago where you had to shift words from one side to the other and create extra clashes.  Finally two clashes appeared in the one word!  CEILIDH clashed with both HEAT and CYST.  Hmmm…

You know how sometimes instincts turn out to be right.  I saw two C/H clashes and the title and thought “How awesome would this be if it’s a Listener about the second Law of thermodynamics”.  I’d found ACCELERATOR PRINCIPLE for one of the long answers, and it confirmed my lucky choice of AFAR left, ASPS right.  There’s three juicy Cs in ACCELERATOR PRINCIPLE, and sure enough – they all clashed with H’s in the downs.

OK, so I love the second law.  It’s basically my religion.  The Universe is tending to heat death and we’re just carrying it along.  There’s no point tidying your room, as the energy you expend in reducing the entropy of stuff all over the floor just contributes to the overall entropy of the universe.  How awesome is that!

There was nothing left to do but continue drinking and solving… sure enough there it all was – every C clashed with an H, MAXWELL’S DEMON was protecting a little DOOR and we have HEAT on the right hand side – so all the H’s go to the right and all the C’s go to the left.

Three pints, 20 clashes

I was an inspired solving monster here and managed a rare feat – a solution on Friday afternoon!  This was even in the mail before the post office closed on Friday.  Here’s the completed grid.

Thanks, Stick Insect – I never thought that I’d hook on to a theme as quickly, and that all those hours in Physics classes in the late 80s were going to pay off.  Let’s call this one a Victory to George!

2011 tally:  George 38, Listener 12.  Current streak – George 1.

Feel free to leave comments below – and check back soon for another edition of George vs the Azed clueing comp and see you next week for a bit of the old Phizzy with BeRo.

A very brief lack of appearance

Welcome back to George v the Listener crossword.  It´s the time of the year where I try to make a major disappearance.  So greetings from an internet cafe in Curitiba, Brazil, and I hope everyone has a great holiday season.

Schadenfreude instils fear into me and this was no different.  I managed to solve most of the clues, but I was struggling with most of the asterisked clues, and just could not get a grip on the theme.  It looked like some words could be made vertically across the empty squares (PUCK and the like), but nothing that could constitute a coherent theme.

I spent hours and hours bashing away at this creeping there one clue at a time, but eventually time ran out and I do no have a clue what is going on here.  We´re in a bit of a year-end slump at George v Listener, but hopefully with three (I think) more left in the year there can be a semi-surge to the finish.

Sorry, no scanned grid this week.

Victory to Schadenfreude and the Listener crossword!

2011 tally:  Listener 12, George 37.

Feel free to comment below, though I won´t be around much until the 29th, and see you next week when we break a law with Stick Insect.

In which we do a terrible job of drawing a cricket bat in a 1.5cm X 1.5cm square.

Welcome back to George vs the Listener crossword, and we’re getting to the business end of 2011 – good luck to those whose all-corrects are intactful!  Im bumbling along as usual, but next year I’m going to try something a little different for the blog.  I’m going to break the battles up into wins/losses/pushes.  A win will only be a win if it’s a bona-fide win as approved by a cottage in St Albans.  A push will be a close but no cigar (like with Brock a few weeks ago).  52-0-0 is a dream, but let’s see how it goes.

Nibor this week!  Now one thing struck me as funny looking at Nibor’s page on the Listener website – a puzzle from 1980 called “Enigma Variations” that appeared to require solvers to use an Enigma code to get to the answers.  There were 22 correct entries – and three prizes!  Man those are good odds.

We’ve only met Nibor once, in an homage to Haydn which I completed (after a run of failures).  So what have we here… big grid, square in the middle, lots of clues.  Extra words galore spelling out something, and some clashes.

This, by the way, is a theme I rather like – taking lines of verse literally.  So I was quite happy to get started on it.

Of all the strange places to start a crossword, I began this one in the YMCA.  A friend of mine had a digital pedometer and was in some fitness challenge where the pedometer (which is apparently not a device for measuring pedophiles) records how much she walked, and then uploaded it automatically to some site which then clocks rewards for being a healthy and fit worker.  The internet is in your feet now!  Anyway, hers wasn’t working, so while she was donating blood, I took her pedometer to the Y to reload the software.  So while sweaty unmentionables worked out and this little foot device of evil updated its operating system, I sipped coffee and got to unravelling.

Clues started unravelling pretty well – mostly on the right hand side of the grid.  Unfortunately as I write this up I only have the second page with my notes, so I can’t remember if there was a 1 across challenge met or not.  Oh yes, I do – I remember thinking it looked like BREAK but I couldn’t figure out why.

WINK and another WINK started forming from the extra words – aahh, we’re in twinkle twinkle little star territory and I’m going to have to draw a cute little star, and it appeared there in my almost complete right-hand side was a TWINKLE.   How festive!  Nope, that wasn’t what Nibor had in store at all – as TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE was easily removed from the across clues, but STAR was not to be.  It looked like it should be TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE B……

Twinkle twinkle little bastard?

Back at home, and it was Wikipedia of all things that sorted me out.  The wikipedia page for Twinkle Twinkle Little Start includes Lewis Carroll’s “Twinkle twinkle little bat” as a variation.  And there on the bottom row is LIKE and TEA-TRAY surrounded by SKY (if the misprints work out).

Now yet again I thought I was home and hosed, but this time you artophiles can look down on me because my very very very last entry was LE DOUANIER.   I know it was an anagram, but I googled the hell out of LEO DRANIEU, LEON RADIEU and a host of other likely looking anagram names before finding out that it was Rousseau’s nickname we were looking for.

I’d found one TWINKLE so that meant there was another left to find.  Probably in the shape of a bat or in the shape of a star?  There’s a T and W next to each other in the far left, and the rest of INKLE meeting up with my other TWINKLE… So I wonder if it’s meant to be a shooting star?  I’m torn on this one – if it’s a shooting star I think I should highlight the T that is to the lower left of the W, but there’s also a T right next to the W.  I wonder if both will be accepted?

So three solving sessions and one extremely ordinary picture of what is meant to be a cricket bat later…

And I believe we have a Victory to George.  Had a lot of fun with this one, Nibor, but there’s a few things worrying me…

- which T did you mean us to shade (unless I’m way off with this one)

- I’m surprised you got it past the editors with two non-Chambers words + a bunch of proper names.  This is mostly sour grapes because apart from Eritrea, I had no idea of the others.

- You’re going to get some pretty crummy-looking bats in that little box.

But still a good laugh!

2011 tally:  George 38, Listener 10.  Current streak:  George 3.

I’m travelling again next week so there may be a bit of a delay in George v the Listener, but check back later to see if anything happened in the most recent Azed comp, and then Shadenfreude’s briefs will make an appearance.

OK, posted this and checked the answers and I made two complete bonerhead mistakes.  Of course it’s the musical notes for “Twinkle twinkle” and I have highlighted the wrong T, and it’s RERUN not RERAN.  FAIL!

2011 tally:  Listener 11, George 30.  Current streak:  Listener 1.

eponumberous

Welcome back to George vs the Listener crossnumber.  It’s that time of the quadrennium again where we have a mathematical challenge.  And it’s Kea!  Now I know that Kea is going to read this, as he’s a registered email follower of this blog.  That makes him a glutton for punishment (or means that the Listener editors will be pulling the plug any minute).  So hi Kea!

George vs Kea has been a storied battle – most recently there was Table-turning, where I made a right mess of things, but suggested that Kea requests we eat or burn some of the grid before submission (a suggestion that has not yet been taken up).  Before that was Admission with the chopped cherry tree and a complete and utter dismal failure on my part.  Even more before that was Conflict Resolution, which required a Herculean effort of brainwork at the time.  So it’s Kea 2, George 1,  and now Kea is taking a trip into the world of numbers.

By the way, I regularly go to a pub trivia night on Monday nights, and the killer round is numbers – the idea of the round is you have to guess the answer to the question and you score points by how far wrong you are from the answer,  then it’s like golf, the lowest score at the end of the round gets the most points for their team.

I’ll admit, I didn’t keep very coherent solving notes on this one.  The first thing that came to mind was that 25 across had to end in 00.  Then I started with the largest numbers in the clues and was surprised at how few entries there really were that had this property from the preamble (overlapping numbers that are multiples of each other).

I got into a big mess in the top right hand corner early on and was then stuck with no working possibilities for 9 across, but then some back-scribbling and I found where I was wrong.  I know I finished up in the top right corner, and it may have been 1 down that was my final entry in.

This was all done in one session, I think about 2 hours or so while it was raining outside and my young nephews (who were visiting for Thanksgiving) wanted to know why I didn’t want to play games with them and what I was doing with that calculator.

Numerical crosswords seem to come in two forms – absolute beasts and ones that fall to some gentle nudging.  This appears to be in the latter camp.

Of course my nephews were happy when I finished, not quite so happy when I showed them that I was going to then have a final crack at “Carte Blanche With a Twist”.  They convinced me to be a good enabling uncle and take them to MagiQuest, where they could battle dragons and goblins.

Interesting little puzzle, Kea, but I think I can claim a Victory to George here…

2011 tally:  George 37, Listener 10.  Current streak:  George 2.

Feel free to leave comments below, and see you next week when Nibor will variate a theme for us.

George vs the Azed Clueing competition: ROBUST

Well this is a kind of a pointless post, as I had an error in my grid, thus disqualifying myself from the competition.

ROBUST was not a word that leapt out at me as being interesting to clue.  What’s funny is the first wordplay I thought of was BUS in ROT but couldn’t come up with a good clue to go with it.  Not so the case for R. J. Hooper, who came up with a really nice clue.  I laughed at 2 and 3 having the same wordplay.

I noticed regular reader Dr. E. Young had a nice clue as well.

My clue came from combing Chambers and finding BU as an abbreviation for “Bushels”, and another find that ROST was an alternative spelling of ROAST…

Stout old joint grabbing bushels (6)

to give BU in ROST with a definition of stout.  Alas, my little clue never saw the possibility of the light of day.

In honor of Azed’s request at the end of the slip, I’m thinking of sending my next clue in on a wet beer coaster.  What do you think?  Also feel free to share other non-slip clues.