If there’s enough deletions you can get to a grid as empty as mine!

While we are hot, here is part 3.  I have to leave for the theater soon, so the next three will come up later.

This was not a puzzle to come back to just a few days before the solution went live having not done any thematic puzzles for a couple of weeks. There’s a lot going on here, most entries are non-words, everything has a letter change.

Hmmm… Ifor. I have a terrible track record with Ifor, and it’s generally a two-parter, I cannot solve the clues and I cannot figure out the theme.

Yep.

Even after reading the solutions notes to this one, I have no idea how I could have gotten there. I only have about 20 of the clues solved, and the scattered deleted letters aren’t helping me get a verse. STUSHIE becoming SUSHI helped me get HIPPO on the opposite side, and SUNTAN becoming SUNN were the only ones I could write in to the grid with confidence.

Ifor remains my nemesis, and you would think that I would be on top of something that has an elements theme (my only published crossword to date had atomic symbols to be entered as the full name of the element). Of course, as happens with Ifor, the quote is by someone I haven’t read from a poem I haven’t heard of. But science!

Game over, 5% completion.

OK, time to get ready for tonight’s show – complete and utter victory to Ifor and the Listener crossword, for two weeks in a row! Maybe Samuel will stop the rot… find out tomorrow!