Two slightly distorted grids (or de doop dee do dit dit da dadada doop dee do dit dit da dadada)

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword – and we’re late again.  I just got a phone call as I was getting settled in to write this up, and how time flies when you’re making holiday plans!

Let’s discuss an attempted rebound from last week, where GvL is holding up the standard, I think that could have been a record for most blogs of a Listener ever, but I am the one that admitted brain-sapping defeat.

And now to Samuel… Samuel was last spotted incognito hiding in a Fibonnaci series in 8 by 13,  putting a big T in the middle of a grid in Noye, having us construct an Advent calendar in Great Expectations, the poetry of Ali in Conversion, a game of Pachinko in Playtime, a parliamentary vote in Motion, and Newtons ups and downs in The Cause of Much pain.  Add to that his role in Qid in Printer’s Devilry - the age of this blog may well be measured in Samuels!

On Samuel puzzles I am 6-1, so I figured this would be fun, but I’ve got a good shot.  Now what is there – no gridlines (and none needed, but since they have symmetry I started bunging them in as I went), a curved surface (so probably some wrapping around – that seems to be confirmed by the enumeration of across answers not being symmetric), some thematic wordplay only entries and everything else is cycled.. and that’s just the across clues!  Down clues are… normal.  Well, OK.

Let’s get cracking, shall we – and since down clues are normal we’ll start with the downs.

Possibly 1 is FUMBLERS becoming MUMBLERS and our down message starts with a T.   Couldn’t get the next one, but then we have ONRUSH… so THE is looking good.

I wasn’t doing great with the down clues, until I got to RETUSE and saw there was an X in the message.  That’s not one you see everyday.  Then an R and a C, and the last gives me a T.  E’s usually come before X’s so this message probably ends EX?RC??T.  EXORCIST?  Pipes… EXORCIST… the theme from the Exorcist was “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield.  I used to own the CD (long since lost in a series of intercontintental moves).   Backtracking to the top – THEME FROM THE EXORCIST matches the letters I have so far.

George you clever clog!  You’ve got the theme before putting a single answer in the grid, and you now know one letter in each of the down answers (or at least narrowed it down to a few choices).  The result of this was I now about three-quarters of the down answers.

Time to look at the acrosses… I had a really tough time wrapping my head around these cycled clues.  First two  I got were OBOISTS and OF YORE.  Checking out the number of letters available, OF YORE should go in the fourth row, and OBOISTS should go in the eighth.  With MUMBLERS and CLATTERS being the only two 8-letter answers, they probably go in the top left and bottom right – and the T in OBOISTS could cross CLATTERS, SIENNA, and DOOMED, though there seems to be two places DOOMED could go.  That would make the other seven-letter answer in the acrosses begin with C – CLOSURE!  That could place ONRUSH and TEXTER and MUMBLERS

I had a rather ridiculous looking grid in the next 10 minutes or so – with a pretty full top left and bottom right, but a whole bunch of dead space at the opposite corners.  A bit more bashing and cobbling knowing a few of the letters and particularly for the 8 letter rows, typing in possible strings to Word Wizards and we have a grid, with the six wordplay-only entries all being bells…

 

OK – I know MIKE OLDFIELD and TUBULAR BELLS are hidden in there somewhere… the counting of letters in the across clues gives ROTATE EVERY ROW… I circled the letters, and they are symmetrically spaced from each other.  Looking good!

There are two ways this could be rotated to line up MIKE OLDFIELD and TUBULAR BELLS in a column, but the one that has MIKE OLDFIELD on the left would mean row 6 was not rotated, so there is only one solution.

I meant to scan my final version before I sent it in, but (as faithful readers of this blog know), foresight is not really my strong point.

OK, the solution has been out for almost an hour now, let’s take a peek…

And if I have transcribed it correctly, a Victory to George!  Woohoo!  This was fun, though it was a pretty amusing time of knowing where it was going but not being entirely sure how to get there.

2013 tally:  15-3-3

Feel free to let me know that there is a proper way to do a crossword and I rarely go that route, and see you next week when Chalicea appears to be offering us an unbreakable pair of glasses?

A game of 52 pick-up

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Cardnumber – I don’t think I’ve seen a puzzle based on a deck of cards before, but it’s an interesting idea.  gwizardry (possibly named after Wizardry 6, one of the better PC roleplaying games of the 90s), has posed this puzzle based on two players locked in a death match of three-card poker (wihch Player 1 appears to be winning).

I started off with a few pages of notes, and eventually dug out a deck of cards thinking that might help me sort out what could possibly go where.  There’s a few obvious starting points, I looked for all the numbers that were divisible by 11, 13 and 7 (that locked down which rows had jacks and sevens pretty easily), and row D has all clubs so it has to be 8, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2 with either a straight flush winning or the 8 being the highest card.

Unfortunately, after a few hours of scratching, here’s where I got, and I had some mistake which got me stuck.

If at first you don’t succeed – make a bigger printout of the grid!  Haven’t tried this before, but if you right click on the grid images in the Times Crossword Club you can print just the grid out on a whole sheet.  Surely this makes it better!

Another few hours later, I’m about at the same stuck spot.

 

If at second you don’t succeed – go do something else.  Sorry, gwizardry, but I could not penetrate this beyond the obvious (I’m probably missing some more obviousness).  That’s two numericals that have defeated me this year, yikes!

Victory to the Listener Crossword!  2013 tally 14-3-3

Feel free to tell me that I’m missing something superobvious, and see you next week when Samuel gets us started on smoking.

Dam I missed

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword – I had a minor panic attack last night when I logged on to the Times Crossword club late on Thursday night and there was a link to Listener Crossword 4244!  Not sure what’s going on over there in crosswordclubland, but I wondered if I’d slept through a day and it was Saturday already.  So I now have four Listeners sitting in front of me… weird!  Not sure if I like this new setup or not, I guess it does give me a chance to get a Listener in the mail before the weekend starts, but Thursday is usually a night to try to catch up on sleep.  Maybe it was just a scheduling flub.

Ifor time!  This is Ifor’s third Listener, last year we had A1 with the Flying Scotsman which was a pretty speedy solve, needing a bit of poking around in Brewers, and Frightened Catherine, which I thought I had, but fell for a trap with Fahrenheit and Celsius conversions.  Rubber match, here we go!

OK – a block has to be rebuilt, real words in the end.  Eleven letters dropped in wordpay, and some complicated instruction to get a thematic number.  Hmmm… well it looks like real words before and after in the grid and that sounds good to me!

OK – there is a 1 across and it looks like the answer should be POSIT but I don’t see a definition?  Could it be our wordplay only clue right off the bat?  It could be I in POST or I in POS,T… Maltby makes me think of Richard Maltby, who writes a thematic crossword once a month for Harpers (they’re usually pretty easy and have a ton of Americanisms).  Anyhoo, let’s put POSIT in and see if it works… it works with the compound anagram OARS, STILL, another subtraction anagram in IDOL and whatever 5 down should be that was left off my printout.

Grrrrrr….

Anyone else in the US have this problem?  A question or two is cut off between page 1 and page 2 of the printout? It happens with the Jumbo as well, though usually you can figure out what was meant to be there from checking letters.

Continuing with this top left corner… looks like there’s a MALTBY appearing again, across MALT and BYLINE.  That’s weird.  Surely the Listener isn’t producing a tribute to Harpers?  On we go…

The first missing letter appeared for me in 24 across – MOONTYPE…. oh great, it could be either O.  There’s another in ANGORA, no doubt about where that could be – and it’s another O.  NONQUOTA crosses ANGORA and is also missing an O – maybe it’s the same one… it’s yet another subtraction anagram.  With QUORUM it looks like a pattern is appearing in those O’s.

In about two hours I was in a very interesting (but not unusual for me) place – I had a complete grid.  I had a pattern of O’s that looked a bit like a metal detector.  I had a pattern of numbers to apply to the rest of the clues, took a few false steps before I eventually got REPEAT ONE ENTRY NUMBER SIX PLACES EAST.

And I am completely stuck…

 

Hmmm… those O’s look like they could be bouncing – is it The Dam Busters?  To Brewer!  Hmmm, there’s an entry but not much there.  To Google!!! Aha – MATLBY was one of the Dam Busters!  But the first attempt was a failure, and had GIBSON instead of MALTBY in charge, and didn’t blow up the MOHNE (though in Brewer it’s MOEHNE) dam.  So replace MALTBY with GIBSON and rebuild the MOHNE dam gives us all real words.  The squadron was 617 – so moving the 1 from 1 across six places to the left completes the number.

Wow – I don’t think I’d ever gotten to the bitter end of a grid without having a clue about the theme before!  I got a phone call while I was writing this up so the solution should be online now, let’s take a peek…

Looks like I can call this a Victory to George!  I really liked the puzzle but I thought it was odd that the final solution (ulp) contradicted information in one of the usual sources.  I don’t think any of it is in Chambers, but hooray for the interweebs!

2013 tally:  14-3-2

Feel free to tell me I don’t know my dam business, and see you next week when gwizardry tries to kill us with a queen.

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.

 

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.

murder mystery

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword – busy couple of days, and so I’m getting to this well after the solution is out, so not sure if I have that much to add to the general conversation, but here goes… it’s Hedge-sparrow, making a sixth appearance in George vs Listener world.  I have to say that Hedge-sparrow has made quite the impression on me, with the really tricky clash-resolution tour de force  Here and There, before that was some super colliding in Mass Production, the speed of light  in Metrical Variations, Charlie Darwin in S, and wormholes (hey, they popped back for a visit recently) in Travel Agents.  The first four had pretty sciencey themes, so in my note to Hedge-sparrow I beseeched a return to scientific or scienfictional themes.  Was I to get it with A Murder Mystery?

Three detectives, ciphers, evidence in the grid, a few DLM+1 clues (I may have coined that phrase, the device was in a Spectator puzzle a few months ago as well).  Side by side clues for down answers concealing a long message explaining the cipher.  OK… sounds like a wealth of thematic stuff, let’s get into it.

There is a 1 across, but I couldn’t get it on a first read-through.  No luck with 12 across either, but at 13 I hit the first of the DLM+1 clues with CAPO and we’re away.  That crosses 2 down, which has to be SWANS or BAYOU, but only one fits, so I can place both SWANS and BAYOU.  I got lucky with a number of the down clues that way, it seemed if I could solve one half I could solve the other half so it was a two-for-one.

With seven of the DLM+1 clues worked out it looked like it was going to be the HOUSEMAID who was the victim.  I was missing the I and S which helped confirm BUTTER.  The longer message took a bit more working out – I had KILLER and LETTERS and then tried to make the message meet in the middle.  KILLER FIRST THEN UNUSED LETTERS.

Moderate panic when I thought this was going to be a Playfair square!  But that wouldn’t work, not all of the messages are even numbers of letters.  Phew… So maybe it’s a simpler cipher – write HOUSEMAID then the rest of the alphabet and match it… Aha – now we have DRAPED OVER FLOOR, FLOATING ON LAKE and AT BOTTOM OF GARDEN, and we can work out the detectives as MAIGRET, FR BROWN and WIMSEY.  I’d already spotted BODY in the middle, and GROUND above the body.  So maybe it’s under the ground and Wimsey is right?  But there’s MERE under the BODY.  So it’s definitely floating on the lake.  Hmmm… I guess the bottom of the garden doesn’t mean under the garden does it?  So I changed my mind to B. FR BROWN.

Now I see I’d missed EDEN as the garden.

One long session later and we’re done – I think I had this in the mail on Monday, and I believe I can actually call this one a Victory to George.  Very fun puzzle (but how about the sciencey stuff next time, Hedge -sparrow?).

2013 tally:  5-3-2

Feel free to tell me that I need to get on to these earlier (I know I’m out of town next Friday so I should write it up before I leave), and see you next week when Wan gives us a puzzle in which to find my dear Watson.

Hey – I forgot the funniest part… I really do need to write these up earlier.  Looking at the conversation on the Crossword Center, and the note on the Listener site – looks like I lucked in to the weapon in a funny way – I saw DRAINO and thought “Oh, he’s fed her DRAINO and tossed her on the lake”.  Then looked at Chambers and saw that DRAINO isn’t there.  But it was still nagging at me, so I looked up  ?ONIARD and there was PONIARD!

I still think it should have been DRAINO

Three microscopic grids walk into a bar…

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword.  Time to right this ship, eh?  It’s been a pretty miserable start to 2013, with four failures already, ouch.  Let’s see what happens next?  It’s Elfman!  There’s only been one other Elfman puzzle to appear in George vs Listener (though I have it on reasonable authority that Elfman has contributed to at least one other puzzle as a grouponym), and that was the Rudyard Kipling themed Requisite Knowledge, which I solved without too too much trouble.

First thing I noticed was that this printed on one page!  And that’s one US letter page, the (probably appropriately) shorter and wider bastard child of the A4 page.  This feat was managed by there being a short preamble, no break between across and down clues, and a tiny tiny tiny long thin grid.  What is this?  Three 7X7 grids next to each other, with something joining them through the middle.

Stone cold solving again – it looks like half of these clues have  a lie in them.  Hmmm

There is no 1-across but there is a first clue, so let’s start there… and not be able to solve it.  Fail on the “1 across” test.  Ditto the next few.  Hmmm… a first scan through all the clues only yielded a dozen or so straight off, but fortunately the words that could be lies tended to stand out in the clues.

A few more runs through and I have a few places that could be a starting point – there’s only six 6-letter clues (though there’s seven clues that have 6-letter enumeration… aaaaah… one of them isn’t U PRISE, it’s U PRAISE and the lie is in the six letters!).

You know how sometimes you get really lucky?  Here’s how to be a completely lucky bastard in solving a Listener puzzle with about half the clues figured out

- the very last clue is fortunately quite easy – HAP,U (no lie)

- since all 4-letter answers are accounted for, it has to go in the bottom left of one of the three grids

- It crosses two seven-letter entries, which should be somewhere in the middle and have a U or a P as a second letter – I’m looking at you, U,PRAISE (lie)

- That means another seven-letter entry not too far past U,PRAISE has to have a U as the second letter.  TA,BAN,US – in you go

- One of the first 4-letter clues has to fit that B in TABANUS… hello B,ELT

- OUT,LEA,P fits down the middle, as does L(EFT)IE and ST(E)RLET

- Go to Word Wizards to find words that would fit the rest of the grid… EN L’AIR, ANNULET, KE(P)T and of course the very first answer is THE OAKS.  No clues seem to match SUSPECT… aaaaaah… that’s the unclued entry (not the bit in the middle)

- The middle line now reads AHALFTR – to Google!  A HALF TRUTH IS A WHOLE LIE

The luck of the Aussies is smiling on me!  Not only have I got the first grid, it’s the alternating truth/lie grid, I have the entry that goes all the way along the middle, and every other clue I’ve solved can be sorted to their grid by truth or lie!

About 90 minutes later, looks like we’re in action – UPRIGHT and ANANIAS complete our trio of unclued entries.

And if I’ve made a transcription error in the one I sent in, the squares will be too small for M. Green to make out!

Very fun puzzle, Elfman, and a stroke of luck that will hopefully get myself back up and in the solving habit.  The solution will be out in about 40 minutes, but for now I’m going to call this a Victory to George

2013 tally:  5-2-2

Of course it can’t be as simple as all that, can it?  As Dave pointed out in a comment (and misery loves company), it’s OBLATE, not OF LATE.  I even considered OBLATE, but didn’t look it up.  Hang head in shame, and see if we can manage a year with more silly failures than actual successes!

2013 revised tally:  4-3-2

Feel free to let me know that I took horrendous shortcuts and should be punished, and see you next week when Hedge-sparrow kills a mystery