Golf? Don’t mind if I do!

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword on a rather unique circumstance – if you are reading this at the time it is posted, I am actually playing golf!  I’m in a rather silly tournament called the Mediocre Golf Association World Championships in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada.  I’m not even bringing my laptop, I am treating myself to a weekend of binge drinking and average golf.  I hope I win!

My ride will be here in a few minutes, so there’s the grid.  I was of course partial to this as I am a big fan of the game.  It wasn’t too difficult to figure out where the holes went, and after placing a few of the answers I noticed there were a lot of O’s and T’s at the ends or beginnings of words – AHA!  So each hole starts at a T and ends in a O and those get moved from the word.  That helped me get a few of the more tricky holes sorted out (I think 11-15 took me longer than the rest of the puzzle).

Hope everyone else had fun, and I’ll see you next week with possibly a recap of how I fared.

 

As sure as you are you and me am me and don’t pay the quarrymaster

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword – maybe this will be the day I remember to scan the grid and save the draft?  You never know…

Sabre time!  I did not solve the last Sabre and that was even after a discussion with Poat, so let’s see what we have here.  An interesting-looking grid, and a new way of entering in answers, coordinates as letters of a quote.  This probably means there’s some duplicate axes.

This grid entry method intrigued me, so without really looking at the clues that much I tried to see what I might be able to learn from the coordinates system.  After spending a lot of time getting my X and Y mixed up I came to the following set of conclusions…

• the last few columns were likely a set of W,R,H,D,O – maybe WHO or HOW
• the last few rows were likely Y,O, and U which sounds like a word
• A and S were near the top and the left hand side
• There’s definitely two A’s and two S’s in the x-coordinate and two A’s and probably two D’s in the y coordinate

OK, let’s work on some clues – some real stone-cold deep freeze solving again.  Maybe Sabre reels it in a touch on the carte-blanches, but I had pretty good luck with a number of the longer answers, and the ones where the coordinates were the same (not that it really means that they will start in the same place).

With more than two thirds of the clues solved you would think that I would be able to start putting this together, right?  Well just trying to match up acrosses and downs was getting me nowhere… even more so since it appeared there were far more letters in the clues than there were spaces in the grid.  Are we two letters to a cell in some place?  Do the clashes involve a ton of letters?

Time to go back to what I originally thought of – if the last three letters on the y-coordinate are YOU then NOTODONTIDAE can go all the way across the row, meaning opposite it is probably UNFATHOMABLE or WITHSTANDING. O contains PUNISHMENT and U contains RASPY and SCANTS.

Of all things, I can now line up THC, placing the N in the x-coordinate… this probably means OAT is 180 degrees separate and it’s UNFATHOMABLE that goes in the fourth rwo (R and one of the A’s placed).  Lining up THC gives me the ANT that is probably the end of GRANT (so it probably ends WHO) and on the opposite side RUNTS (one of the S’s placed).  THEGNS and SHEETS make up all of the O column, so two six-letter answers take up the left hand side – ABUSED and DAWNER are both A’s, and fit.

There’s nowhere at all to put QUARRYMASTER, WITHSTANDING and NAILROD. Hmmmm

I must be close to being able to figure out this quote, with about half of the letters placed…   AND YOU AND WHO SAID HE ASSURE?  Nothing doing with looking that one up.  It looks like the unclued entry across the top is going to be ARE YOU and another is AS?A?I  Taking “ASSURE” out of the search and putting in AS I AM I hits paydirt – Tristram Shandy!  So that means QUARRYMASTER and WITHSTANDING cross with the clashing letters jumbling to TRISTRAM SHANDY!

At this point my grid was a disaster area

Time to use the strange feature of the Times website – when I print default size the grid is HUGE.  Plenty of space to cram in all these letters and work out the clashes.  I also looked up the characters from Tristram Shandy, which I will admit I have never read.  Fortunately the character list is not too long, and I could resolve UNCLE TOBY, DR SLOP and the rest.  I was held up a while over the last unsolved clue – HAYRICK… kind of sneaky that there is really a 7-letter answer with only one truly checked letter, the rest being part of the thematic material.  Resolve the clashes into the letters of STERNE and at last a grid!

The rest of the quotation is DON’T PUZZLE SAID I – DON’T is already in the grid, and underneath it can be made PUZZLE and SAID leaving real words in the largely unreadable grid, and the I goes down the bottom.

What an intriguing solve – painfully slow at the start, must have taken three hours before I put a single entry in the grid.  Once I got the quotation it was a big cascade until about another half hour looking for that last solution.  Very tricky stuff there, Sabre, but I think I can cautiously call this one a Victory to George.

2015 tally:  32-2-5

Feel free to tell me that alas I have not known this well, and see you next week when Harribobs bases a Listener on an obscure ABBA song

 

Fils Dumas, meet George Dumbass

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, your weekly dose of poor deconstruction of everyone’s favorite barred-grid foe accompanied by shoddy unanimated and unillustrated grids.

Ottorino time! I’ve found the last few Ottorino puzzles quite difficult, so we could be getting a step up in the challenge level after a few easier ones.  It appears the beginning of the difficulty is dealing with the preamble.  Three different types of modification to clues (all of which are in definitions, so wordplay is normal), and then some things to find and change in the final grid after a set of relationships and connections between A, B and C.  Oooo… kkkk…

All real words in the grid and wordplay is normal, so maybe it’s best to focus on the wordplay and work around from there.

There is a 1 across, and I couldn’t make anything from it – though I figured “Rupees” meant it started with R and ended with R or S, but that was about it.  So a big fail on the 1 across test (though later on when I saw it was a modified clue I didn’t feel too bad about not seeing it).  Nothing doing with 7 across either, it wasn’t until the poet GO,E,THE appeared that I made a start in the grid.

OK… I made really really really slow progress through this one – I had a number of short sessions where nothing came, and there were just a few scattered entries.  I see now that I used three different pens for filling the grid (that might not show on the scan).

And then the flood came!  North Carolina was hit by tropical Joaquin and I was trapped in super duper shitty weather and failing power.  Laptop is fully charged though, time to really nut this one out!

First discovery was that I was working on two completely delusional propositions!  I’d messed up a definition change – in 18 across I had CAL becoming PEE to make the definition SPEEDS for RATES.  I also had thought the second type of clue change involved the first letters of the definitions, not the first letters of the keywords – so if it’s A for O making SCOLDS, then my other two definition changes I’d found were ALL for ONE or ONE for ALL and we’re in Dumas territory.

I already had POPADUM and AGMA in the grid so I could see where DUMAS was likely hiding (though 15 across was one of the last clues I got).  A little look at the fortunately still working internet on the phone leads to the connection between the son (in ORISON) and LA TRAVIATA by VERDI – and DUMAS could be replaced by VERDI though that turns POPADUM into POPAVER… is a POPOVER a plant?  No, but a PAPAVER is, and so is an AMARANT.

Guess what, gentle reader?  We now have almost all of the thematic material and still a half-empty grid!  I know I have to find PIAVE in there somewhere.  Bring on the sursolving!

Even with everything there and the hunt for PIAVE on, it took another two hours to scratch together the grid.  Ottorino and I are a long way apart on wavelength of solving clues, and whern STEMS and CZAPKA (I see now that CHAPKA was acceptable too) went in I think it was a bit of a sigh of relief.

So there you have it – I found this one really tough, but got there in the end, and I think the only weakness was so much of the thematic material clustered in one part of the grid.  I did like a few of the more cleverly-hidden ALL/ONE substitutions (particularly ONE-EYED becoming ALLEYED).  Phew!  Victory to George!

2015 tally:  29-2-5

Feel free to let me know I should have been ALL in on this ONE and see you next week when Calmac introduces us to that little-known war hero General Intelligence.

Professor Layton and the cruciverbial conundrum

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, your weekly dose of grids with squiggles.  Last week’s puzzle , managed to generate a fair bit of natter over the positioning of the 1’s in the grid, with some claiming the preamble has to be followed to Aspergers-level of exactness.  Which made me giggle even more when I passed a “Walk/Run for Autism” event last weekend.  I suspect a lot of people just stood at the starting line with internal conflict.

But that is beside the point – it’s Listener Day, and this time we are peeking at Monk… there’s only been one other Monk puzzle that has made it here, but I’m used to him appearing (often on a Saturday) in the Independent, so I’m ready for some tricky clueing.  Odd shaped grid, numbers around the outside – oh, it’s number of train track pieces!

I usually carry around with me a little red Nintendo 3DS and I love puzzle games on there – my absolute favorite is Picross 3D, but there’s a series of puzzle games centered on Professor Layton.  Those games have daily puzzles, and this looks like one of the ones from an early game where you have to lay down train tracks along very specific requirements.  Anyhoo, there’s a puzzle to do first!

Normal clues, but some cells need more than one letter… okeydoke, here we go.

I started on this one during a pretty-hung over lunch, but that’s neither here nor there – there is a 1 across and it is the 1 across to end all 1 acrosses – 15 cells!  Hooley dooley!  Couldn’t figure it out on a first look so although the amount of 1 across is impressive, that’s a fail on the 1 across test.  IAGO at 14 across got me going, and from there most of the right hand side, particularly along the bottom started to fill up fairly quickly.  The first two double-stuffed cells I found both had an S and an N in them, so I suspect we’re looking at directions the train line comes in and out of those cells.  That discovery really helped with filling in the much harder-to-crack left hand side of the grid (and THE TOWER OF LONDON at the top), and one confirmed bend in the track.  It was two fairly quick solving sessions that gave me the grid.

Now to the other puzzle… well the bottom row only has two so that’s the ways in and out.  There’s a 7 on the top right, so the track has to go all the way down from the top cell to the second from the bottom (it occurs to me now that I was excluding some zig-zagging, but since most of the numbers across the top row were fairly small, I didn’t think this would zig-zag much).  The path through the left hand side of the grid seemed to be easy enough to figure out from the double-letter cells and the numbers at the top, and I used the numbers on the sides more for joining up the right hand side of the track.  Practice with Professor Layton helped – it was less than 5 minutes to have the complete train track.  Woohoo!

I liked the combination of crossword puzzle and logic puzzle, and as happens when I do his puzzles in the Independent, Monk’s clues never cease to amaze me, which means it’s time to bring back something I had planned on doing every week, but when I don’t write these early enough, they get lost in the rush.

Clues of note:

19 down – Zip closed up to the front (5):  O then DRAWN reversed for ONWARD, N and W in the same cell

300% style points for the surface there, Monk

12 down – Old Scandinavians run into neutral territory, avoiding capture (6)  NO MAN’S LAND with an R inside and losing LAND to make NORMANS, N and S in the same cell

Another brilliant clue, and one of the clue types that I used to mess up a lot when I was getting started with the long subtraction

So I think I can claim this as a Victory to George – woohoo and choo choo!

2015 tally:  26-2-5

Feel free to let me know that wriggly trains are a thing, and see you next week when Colleague asks us to look at his spots and see what we think

What did Calais do to deserve Hitler?

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, your occasionally timely dose of weekly Listener nittering and nattering.  To make up for the last few weeks, this may even appear an hour early… oh dear, will I get letters?

The Tall’n!   What have we here – a ten-word message, wartime achievements, and codes.  OK… well it might be Turing and Enigma, or it might not.  Let’s find out…

1 across is part of the message, so we begin with a 4 across test… which I can’t figure out at all. Hmmm…

None of these clues seem to be making much sense… aaah, the wordplay has the encoded form.  Might help to know which letters are encoded.  I was stuck at a bar without a highlighter (now that’s a wonderful phrase) so I put circles around the letters that were part of the message.  OK – looks like most of them are across, so let’s start with the clues (mainly downs) that don’t have any coded letters.

Now we’re cooking!  Particularly in the bottom half of the grid, where 32 down seems to confirm we are in Turing territory, and that long entry at 5 down is likely to be an encoded form of BLETCHLEY PARK.

Now I had almost all of the normal clues it was time to look at these coded ones – again working from the bottom up, it became pretty clear a few letters in (although I wrote an alphabet to the side to code) that it was just a ROT-3.  So I penciled in what BLETCHLEY PARK would be in the circles and I was off.

I knew TURING was jumbled at the top – it looked likely ENIGMA was going to be jumbled at the bottom right, but I needed to use googlepedia to find out about HUT EIGHT and BOMBE to complete the grid, and a little bit of staring before spotting CALAIS and getting the last bit of thematic material.  How much of that is generalized enough knowledge?  I didn’t look it up in Brewers, and that use of BOMBE isn’t in Chambers.

In any case, after a very slow start, this was a pretty quick finish, and rather fun finding out the bits I didn’t know!

The solution won’t be out for an hour, but I think I can call this one a Victory to George and move on!

2015 tally:  24-2-5

Feel free to let me know that there’s a bomb in the bombe, and see you next week when IOA will turn it up!

Nobody’s ever been particularly fond of me for my sins…

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, your #2 source for all things barred-crossword-related.  Coffee is on, and if you’re me, you’re not enjoying the cricket one little bit.  So let us see if Aragon has dished up something enjoyable?

Aragon!  Oh dear, another puzzle by a setter who knows my personal email address.  I was surprised to see that there hasn’t been an Aragon puzzle in eight years, probably been too busy editing another puzzle I comment on every other week at another blog.  So hi if you are looking in, really I’m going to say nice things about your puzzle.

Let’s cut to the chase… I’m calling it – the Ascot Gold Cup is over!  This puzzle kept me riveted from start to finish and was rather fun all the way through.  Every classic element of the Listener was there, the starting off head scratching, the sneaky bits of the preamble, and the endgame that revealed all.  The only two mini drawbacks could be the two 2-letter entries (though they are both thematic) and that the poem itself wasn’t that easily available.  I had to hunt and peck online to find it, along with a list of all the names in the final grid.

Even Australia losing three wickets in the time it took to write that last paragraph isn’t going to dampen my enthusiasm for this puzzle.  Is it really going to be a two-day Test?

OK, there’s a crossword to talk about…

What have we here – a rather long and strange-sounding preamble.  Some clues have something, some are missing it.  OK… I guess we get to solving and see where it goes?

There is a 1 across but I had no idea what it was… ditto 7 across… ditto 10 across…

OK, plan B.  Let’s work from the bottom – 32 down looks like it could be wordplay for P,EST?

10 minutes in and one (ultimately incorrect) entry in the grid, I decided to take a break.  This one probably needed to be looked at in a venue other than the dressing room of a play that was about to go on.

Take 2…  fresh eyes, access to dictionaries, this should be better, right?  Let’s try downs first, shall we?  2 down looks like it could be RECUMBENT from the definition, and then the wordplay could be CM,BENT… so this could be a doubly-reduced clue, losing RE and U?  If 21 is STENTOR (normal clue) and 10 across is HUMBOLDT then it looks like the removal of U is a go.  So 4 down looked like an anagram… add a U into the anagram mix and there’s UNDERTOW.  Not sure what this has to do with shorthand or crosses, and I haven’t found another RE to lose.

Soon after I got HUMOUR which was shortened to HMOR and now the double removal is all U’s… could 2 down be CUMBENT?  Yep, that’s a word.   OK, the U’s are going.

At this point I think I’ve sussed the theme – since there was an EV last year (1149 – Common Usage by Raffles) that had the theme of U and non-U English.  So now the challenge is to fill the grid and find the poet (there was no mention of a poet in the Raffles puzzle).  All the clues with a U in them are normal, those without need to have U’s removed from the answers.

Late in the grid fill I had a horrible realization – I had five clues left and still four “double elimination” clues to find, most of them in the bottom left (one of them being my original mistake PEST which turned to to be BST,P being BUST-UP with the two U’s removed.  This also left a crucial J as part of the name of the poet.  Isn’t there a poet BETJAMEN?  Or BETJEMAN?  Yes, there was!

Finally a full grid, and down the middle is “THEIR SINS” – a google of “BETJEMAN and THEIR SINS” brings up the poem we are looking for…

The Mitford girls, The Mitford girls

I love them for their sins

Aaaaaah – so take THEIR SINS and replace it with I LOVE THEM… that makes DIANA, PAMELA and DEBORAH appear in the grid.

Hmmm… but that’s only 9 letters replaced, and there’s meant to be 6 more letters replaced.

On the right hand side in a column is UNISY… if the S in RLS is changed to T…  oh I see what you did there, Aragon – THE MIT for D GIRLS which appears in the fifth row.  Now there’s UNITY and JESSICA.  NANCY is nowhere to be found.

I left off my favorite part of the whole construction – although I had the thematic material and didn’t need it to complete the puzzle, there’s still the name of the essay… the characters after U’s in the Type 1 clues give it to us – THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY, NANCY MITFORD.  How all these letters were hidden in so few clues is a work of art.

Which brings me to our randomly appearing and disappearing feature… clues of note

39 across:  Pursuing horse, tire us out: hairy

At first glance an innocuous clue – H + an anagram of (TIRE,US) for HIRSUITE.  But the wordplay is hiding thematic content – four letters of the title are hidden, two in the one word!

My hat is off you you Aragon (and no more wickets have fallen in the time it took me to finish this blog – the Fourth 2015 Ashes Test may live into Day 3 – RAIN BLOODY HELL IN NOTTINGHAM!!!), and I think I can claim a Victory to George in by far my favorite puzzle of the year.

2015 tally:  22-0-5

Feel free to tell me that this poem in today’s society would have gotten Betjeman sent straight to jail, and see you next week when Raffles attempts to cover a continent in potatoes.

re: nets I, Leno did one listener

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, the second-longest running Listener blog, now with 300% less criticism (than other short-lived ventures).  It’s tea at the cricket, coffee here, and Wiglaf time.  I thought Wiglaf was a new setter or newdonym, but according to the Listener website, there was a Hitchcock-themed puzzle in 1999, well before I started trying the Listener.  So hi Wiglaf if you are checking in.

OK – what have we here – some definition-only clues, some extra letters in wordplay – normal definitions all round and a grid of real words, wooohoo!

Yet again we are denied a 1 across!  It all begins at 6 across with a SATRAP losing an A to make STRAP and no extra wordplay letter, but a pass on the 6 across test, woohoo!  STRAP does not appear to be an ideal starting point as it crosses two of the definition-only clues, and two I couldn’t solve on a first pass through.

Back to ye old drawing-board!  There’s a homophone for OLIVE OIL that slots in nicely under SRAP and means we have a TE and a RO to start two of the unclued.  Hmmm… I wonder if the soil-tilling machine is a ROTAVATOR, which is also a palindrome?  It fits the grid entry, and is checked by REPAID (extra E) and RAI (extra I).  That would make the thing held a TENET, and the language (which had just popped up in a daily Times puzzle) MALAYALAM, and worshipped DEIFIED.

I popped them in the grid and checked to see if they fitted with crossing answers… all well and good.

That was the end of my first lunchtime solve, and I put it away for a few days.  The theme came so quickly, that I was faced with rather a lot of sursolving.

A few days later I was craving a burrito for lunch so I grabbed this one from the pile to polish it off – the rest of the clues slotted in pretty nicely, and I was left with the extra letters reading AS I PEE SIR I SEE Esomething or other… I didn’t quite work out what was going on in the last five or six down clues… but clearly PISA was needed to complete the palindrome and there it is, leaning over.

Do you think the Pisa tourism board gets pissed off when people come and all they want to see is the tower?  I’m sure there’s other nice non-tower related stuff there.

Anyhoo – a fun finish, I ended up enjoying the finale more than I thought I was going to, so sorry Wiglaf for putting it down and going “oh, hum, palindromes”.  I believe I can call this one a Victory to George.

2015 tally:  19-0-4

Feel free to tell me that I cheated myself by not working out the last part of the failed attempt, and see you next week when Artix informs us that what has gone missing again.  Silly what.

Isn’t there a THIRTYTOO bridge near Edinburgh, or am I confusing it with the Fourth?

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, where WordPress has eaten the original post.  I hope there weren’t any great jokes in there now lost to the cosmos (yeah, right).  It also ate my scan of the grid, not that I know if this is the most exciting one ever.

Pilcrow time!  I’m still a little reeling over Pilcrow’s last few letter-turning Listeners, so let’s see what we have here – that’s a long preamble!  Unclued entries, definition misprints, omitted letters – looks like real words in the grid again, woohoo! I guess we should get to solving and let all this unclued stuff sort itself out.

Sidebar – doesn’t it seem like there’s more unclued lists in the Listener lately?  Seems to be the stock-in-trade of the Spectator, but I don’t recall a lot of it here.

1 across is unclued, as is 6 across, so Pilcrow has me resorting to a 9 across test… looks like an anagram of FLOUNDER and something – UNDERFLO,OR!  So we have a misprint L.  OK, maybe that was word not having a 1 across test as it gives a big word right near the top of the grid.

I should mention the first solving session of this was at the rather wonderful BearWaters Brewery Tasting Room.  It’s kind of out of the way, hidden in the back of an industrial park, but the beer is good and the patrons are friendly, if a little crazy.  Don’t sit too close to the darts boards.

Second sidebar – know what is in with kids these days?  Boy George!  While trying to type this out I was told by a friend’s daughter that her sixth birthday party is going to have a Boy George theme.  There will be much tumblin’ 4 ya.

OK, back to Pilcrow – the left hand side of this puzzle went in far faster than the right – I think I had a complete left side (except for 1 across) before much beyond OCTAPODIC was in on the right.  This meant I had ?YOT down the bottom left which has to be EYOT which is a small island.  Are we doing sizes of land masses?  More disturbing was it looked like the very middle was going to be SIXAINE… sizes of things?

From the omitted letters something was emerging – FRANCIS… Bacon?  But if that bottom right entry could be BENEDICT then it looks like we could be in the realm of recent Popes… FRANCIS, BENEDICT and then two (one rather short-lived if I recall) JOHN-PAULs.  Aaaah!  That is what 1 across is.

The definition misprints looks like they have INSTRUMENT and PEACE in there, so that leads me to LORD MAKE ME AN INSTRUMENT OF YOUR PEACE and now I have the last few sorted out.  I can see what popes might have to do with SIXAINES, but what does a pope have to do with an EYOT?

The top right is still pretty barren…

With EFTSOONS in the grid, it’s time to look at these unclued entries that are not popes…  ?YOT (presumably EYOT), WO?, ?OO, ?OR? and SIXAINE.

EYOT is pronounced EIGHT… WON, TOO, FORE, EIGHT?  But SIXAINE doesn’t sound like SIXTEEN?  Maybe it’s the OED, presumably non-chambers word.  Aaaah – and there’s CARDINALS in a row of the grid!

I don’t have OED, but a OneLook search of the unknown letters yields SIXTINE which is in Mirriam-Webster (hat tip to NPL-folk who are heading to Vancouver soon… I’ll make it to one eventually).  And the highlighting of CARDINALS and SIXTINE makes a cross.

Interesting puzzle – weird combination of elements, but it all works out in the end – and a rare case where there was no sur-solving, the last piece of thematic material was the last entry to go in!  I think I can call this one a Victory to George!

2015 tally:  18-0-4

Feel free to let me know that when you drop a pontiff from a tower you get a pope smear, and see you next week when Elfman strips John.

One for nein!

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossnumber.  Yes, it’s that time of the quarter again!   And it’s Elap.  Oh dear…

Surely every solver has a setter who is a nemesis.  For a long time with me it was a triple-header of Phi, Schadenfreude and Sabre.  As I got marginally better at solving, the fear that those setters brought into my brain was gradually softened.  That doesn’t mean I find them a cakewalk now, but I can usually get somewhere.

I now know who my real nemesis is – Elap!

Seven Elap puzzles, and rarely have I made it as far as a half-filled grid!  A few have been completely empty gridders!  At the end I’ve smacked my head and wondered why, but I bet you know where this is going, gentle readers.

OKeydoke – there’s letters in the clues that are numbers made up of perfect squares… I doodled all the possibilities between 1 and 99 on the bottom of the puzzle (I believe there are 18 of them).  Since 1 is a possibility, it seems the best place to start is to look at the shorter entries and see what appears.  I and Y figure quite prominently, and since IY + YY+ I is a 2-digit entry, that limits I and Y to be 1, 4 or 9.  I + Y is also a 2-digit entry, which eliminates I and Y being 4 and 1.  So I have come to the conclusion that one of I or Y is 9, and the other is 4 or 1.

Pretty slick sleuthing for an amateur, I must say.

It would have been even better if I’d gotten anywhere else!  Hours of playing with the possibilities for I, Y and T got me absobloodylutely nowhere.  From the preamble it appears solving the puzzle should have been the easy part, since there’s a whole second step.  Yikes!

Once upon a time I was good at the numericals – I guess the problem here is there’s either a trick or an obvious logic step that is completely eluding me, and there is probably only one way in.  I’m not about to give up on the numericals yet, but I am really struggling with them lately.

Victory (yet again) to Elap and the Listener Crossword!  This year’s Empty Grid awards may be all numericals!

2015 tally:  16-0-4

Feel free to tell me what blisteringly obvious logical step I’m missing, and see you next week when Shark apparently wants to work a muscle group.

whomdunnit?

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword – the blog that is updated far more regularly than the Listener Crossword site.  By the way – that site appears to be up to date again, and it tells me that this truly is Towser’s first Listener, so welcome Towser if you happen to stray into this darker corner of the interweebs.

OK – what have we here?  10 wordplay only clues, and an unclued thing in the middle.  Not a lot of extra guidance, but we could be in another week of real words in the grid, woohoo!

There is a 1 across… and it looks suspiciously like a wordplay only clue, most likely an anagram leading to CHRISTINE.  I wasn’t 350% sure on this one though, so I wrote it above the grid in case I wasn’t on the right path.  Though since it intersects what looks like another wordplay-only clue, CARE,R, TAENIATE and ENOW, then CHRISTINE looks like a good option.

I made a pretty good start on the grid and immediately went up a number of garden paths…

My set of CARER becoming CARR, CHILL becoming HILL and OVINE becoming VINE means that I’m definitely in the realm of comedians.  From the title, alternative comedians?  Was there another HILL besides BENNY?  Cue smacking bald guy on the head and chasing girls in nurses uniforms.  Members of the Comic Strip?

Didn’t Tim VINE win some joke award at the Edinburgh Fringe?  Joke of the year award winners?

I didn’t abandon this comedian thread until CHANDLERY appeared in the bottom row… aaah, it’s RAYMOND CHANDLER and BARBARA VINE.  They’re pseudonyms!  The rest have to be pseudonyms.  That doesn’t conform!

But it turns out DOROTHY SAYERS was her real name.

A bit of Googlyooglying brings up the DETECTION CLUB, but they weren’t all members.

Yes, dear reader, it took me that long to realise they were all mystery writers.  Actually it took all the way to a full grid, a list of names and getting the circled letters to read CONAN DOYLE (well – one O short since I didn’t know which letter needed to leave from TOEY) before I had the head-smack, rather than the penny-drop moment.

OKeydoke – now we are left with that middle entry.  Since it’s CONAN DOYLE we’ve got to be in SHERLOCK HOLMES territory, right?  A crypric clue for SHERLOCK HOLMES… maybe TRESS and IN somewhere…

?ABRTTRESK?

Huh?

A cipher maybe?  Isn’t there a Sherlock Holmes cipher?  Nope, that has something to do with stick figures, and the letters here don’t look like stick figures.

And stuck…

In fact, stuck until my blue pen ran out – it took a few days before I looked back at this to see if I could work out what on earth was going on with the middle row.

We haven’t used the title yet, since mystery writers who are not Thomas Pynchon seem to be conformists of the utmost degree, by the end of the book the case is solved and the detective is most likely still alive.  So what about CONAN DOYLE associates with NONCONFORMISTS?  IRREGULARS?  The BAKER STREET IRREGULARS… although maybe there’s just one in this grid, since if I add two E’s then there is an anagram of BAKER STREET.

Sly, Towser, sly.  And you created a puzzle where the last two letters took almost fifty times as long as the rest of the grid.

 

Clues of note

I may damn with faint praise here, but Towser’s clues were gentle, to the point the only mess I made was in a wordplay-only clue where I had NOPE instead of PONE for “Open out”.  I’ve never tried writing a wordplay only clue, and maybe without having to worry about both parts it makes the surface easier to keep together but I was pretty taken by some of Towser’s wordplay-only clues

45 across:  Scotsman follows curling closely (8)  CRISP,IAN

I know plenty of Scots-Canadians (I lived in Nova Scotia for two years) who follow it religiously!

12 down:  One who sets the table on board? (7)  S(LAYER)S

This and 47 across were the only “wordplay-only” clues that didn’t strike me as “wordplay only” right off the bat.

Anyhoo – time got away from me while I was typing this, and it appears I have a correct solution, so Victory to George, and thanks for a fun debut that lead me all over the place, Towser – maybe the next one could be about alternative comedy and you can reuse some of the devices!

2015 tally:  16-0-3

Feel free to tell me that I have an unhealthy obsession with non-viable themes and see you next week when Elap rubs it in that I’m single.