I'm a crosswordaholic (if such a word exists). But there's one thing that bugs me - I cannot regularly complete the Listener Crossword. Well 2008 is the year of George vs the Listener Crossword. I've bought reference books, I'm setting aside time, and I'm going to vanquish this barred-grid foe. Or blog trying.
Here we go with Intimacy - I haven't managed to finish a Bandmaster Listener before. First thing that hit me when I printed off the grid was "that's a lot of clues". The preamble sounded kind of gentle, 14 answers need modification, and with a very large number of clues, that shouldn't be too many. So most clues are normal and most answers are to be entered as normal.
And I stared at it
And I stared at it
And I stared at it
In my customary bar solve session, after a full hour I only had AGORA, CAPSULE, PERONIST, SHOELACE and ZOOTOMY. And a couple of Chambers and Bradfords sessions later, I'm still not much further along with the grid. And now I have clashes all over the place. Two of them seem to be N/S clashes, so maybe directions need to be changed in some of the words?
The shape of the grid may be a clue, it looks kind of like those truncated tennis courts they use for indoors singles matches, but I don't think that would be it. Maybe a scoreboard?
Well done Bandmaster, try as I might I could not get very far on this at all. I'm really curious to see what it was I missed, but I'm feeling pretty stupid right around now.
Victory to the Listener Crossword! 2009 tally: Listener 8, George 17. Current streak: Listener 1
Well, nothing says intimacy like remixes of Yoko Ono, so here's "Kiss Kiss Kiss" remixed by one of my favorite artists, Peaches (she can make Yoko listenable!).
Feel free to leave comments, criticisms, and advice on wordplay, and see you next week for shock and Hubris!
The inspiration for this blog was to be a little bit of a lowlife version of Listen with Others, which was started by Samuel, so he's a reader and occasional email correspondent, and there's a little pressure on when one of his Listeners appears. Fortunately, I've had a bit of luck and the last two (Motion, and The Cause of Much Pain) came out pretty nicely.
Hey, the grids got little circles in them. And it looks a bit like a pachinko machine. Could be some letter swirling going on here. Although that was in the back of my mind from the very start, I wasn't sure if it would be all that easy. Preamble sounds rather generous - two consecutive letters must be removed, leading to a rather long message. Long messages aren't my forte, but when you have to take two letters out of each clue then they're probably going to stick out.
And they do in 1 across - B,IA,S and we've got EN to start with and we're away.
The day this Listener came out was a rather happy one for me. I'm running a series of comedy shows over summer, and we serve beer at them because things are funnier with beer. Catatonia makes me hilarious. So the day this came out, my assigned task was to go meet with brewers and talk about sponsorships and beer options. Most of the time I had to wait to meet with the boss, so the only polite thing to do was to buy a beer, open up Playtime, and away we go.
First stop was The Wedge Brewery. They were having production limits and couldn't supply us, but I enjoyed a few of their Iron Rail IPA and got most of the top half of the grid filled. The clues are very well-written and fun, I like that most of them make sense when you remove the letters (I guess some abbreviations are necessary). I particularly liked clues where the last letter of one word and the first of another were removed, such as 15 across SHARPS FACE becoming SHARP ACE.
At French Broad Brewing (their Altbier wasn't on tap but 13 Rebels makes a fine replacement), I worked on the message to try to sort out the bottom half. It was those last 9 down clues that were stumping me, trying to get real words (if you can see on my scan, the only one I was sure of was 29 down - I started working out letter combinations on the second page of the printout which is where those clues were). Finally I had the last part of the message - WH EE LS HA LF TU RN. I still didn't have a solution to 27 across, 25 down, 28 down, 29 down 31 down or 26 down. Maybe Samuel listened to the argument that the easy clues are at the end most of the time and put the hard ones there?
Next stop was Green Man Brewing (who lack a website) - their production bar is called Dirty Jacks and is an interesting gathering spot for Asheville's soccer fans (is it true that Setanta sports shut down? the two TVs at Dirty Jacks have been set to Fox Sports Soccer and Setanta forever).
Did I mention that Asheville was also named Beer City USA recently?
Green Man were testing out a Pub Ale, so I gave it a go (they haven't quite worked out how to get a nice head on it, but kudos for trying). I had a small crowd gathered around me trying to figure out why on earth I was copying a crossword from one grid to another and ending up with something that looked like gibberish. I had almost all the grid done, and there it was - EUREKA, I'VE GOT IT, and ARCHIMEDES appear when the words form. The P falls through the wheels and ends up on the bottom (right side up, might have been an interesting twist to have one more wheel and have a P end up a D), and with P--NYA-R-P-, I was thinking PENNY ARCADE, but that's not two groups of five letters, so it's PENNY DROPS. I put in PENNY drops and went back to the first grid to figure out those last few clues (I hope I'm right).
Here's the end result
This was on the easier side, but I really liked re-copying the grid, and the way the messages appeared. Another fun day with beer and Samuel! Speaking of which, for a short time there was a drinking version of a Pachinko/Plinko machine that a friend got for me before they were forced to remove it from the shelves. You drop little counters into shot glasses. I tried using my old digital cam to make a movie of it - the sound doesn't work and the production values are shoddy, but in honor of this Listener, here's DRINKO!
Victory for George! 2009 tally - George 17, Listener 7. Current streak: George 3.
Feel free to leave comments, and see you next week for some Intimacy with Bandmaster (did he really mean that?).
Hedge-sparrow may be a person of science - last were we had warpholes, and this time around there's a very short-titled Listener - S. Preamble is a bit of a slog, extra letters in lots of the wordplay, something different for acrosses and downs. Thematic entering of four clues, and a name to be replaced later.
Since 1 across is unclued, I started with the downs. [T]EN,LARD at 1 down and I'm off - couldn't see 2, got ON[E],I(c)ON for 3 (T and E for extra letters, so probably an H as extra letter in 2), nice clue for 4 down - LO,MOVING, then move the M to get LOOMING and an extra V. SAP,O,TA(p) for 5, and BO(TT)LE for 6 and the gears are grinding... I've got E-OL----- for 1 across, and EVOLUTION is so tempting. There's a T in SAPOTA and an O in BOTTLE. That 6-letter name at 18 down could be DARWIN...
I'll confess - I felt I was on to something, and wrote in EVOLUTION and DARWIN and then looked for confirmation from the across words crossing DARWIN.
Couldn't get 18 across. 20 across - another nice clue for BAA[L]TH(e)ISTS. 24 - A[F]ORT(night)IC, 27 across GR[R]OWTH and 32 across somethingSMIT[E]H and DARWIN is looking like a good bet.
So I was feeling pretty smug with myself about having cracked this straight away, instincts being right, but there's a lot of grid to fill, and apart from the words clustered around DARWIN and EVOLUTION I was going nowhere fast. And I have 10 clashes to find, but in my first run through I could only find two (VIA crossing LEI) and CONDEMN crossing SAG.
Anything in the extra letters? Seeing FI-TE-T near the end of the across clues made me take a punt on SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST (looking at my notes, the I got that from -UR---AL--T-EFI-TE-T) - so maybe the clashes leave the letters from THE FITTEST, that would make sense. Just got to find 8 of them. Knowing the extra letters I can scrape together most of the across clues. How about those downs? Extra letter wise I have THEV---G------ (yes, I did badly on those down clues originally, got the four thematic ones, which I guess are jumbles, but the rest were a lot of blanks). THE V... 13 across is EAGLE, wonder if it's THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE and the B from BOTTLE goes in there?
And I'm off again with a few more down solutions.
In the end, I think I've gotten everything, and although it is a really nice puzzle, it gave me headaches forever. I saw everything thematic before I got close to the finish - though I ended up using it all to get the last couple of clues in. Seeing APE changing to MAN through single-letter substiutions down the middle helped me get DESTINE at 18 across. In the very very end, I was stuck with looking for words that fit the clashes - my last few clues solved - TEETH, G[O]AL,L, and AR,K accounted for 6 of the clashes! Maybe they make a map of the Galapagos?
My grid looked like a complete mess at the end of it all, so here's a final grid - I think apart from where DARWIN is erased, it's all real words.
So I'm going to claim a plodding, clumsy yet satisfying victory for George! The thematic stuff is impressive, Hedge-Sparrow (and if you are a regular reader, you'll notice I left Darwin off the list of notable anniversaries this year since I'd seen this puzzle).
2009 tally: George 16, Listener 7. Current streak: George 2
Since there was Evolution here, I wanted to put some DEVOlution up, but they are heavily policing their songs on youtube. But as I was browsing YouTube I noticed that one of my favorites, Cassetteboy have tried a video, so here's Cassetteboy vs The Apprentice
Feel free to comment using the link below, and see you next week for some Playtime.
Numericality time - Brimstone has one puzzle from 2007 that I don't remember doing, though it had an Orson Wells theme, so maybe Brimstone is US-based? Now I've been living in North America for 15 years and the only new sport I've gotten into since I moved here is baseball. It's a perfect length (abour 3 1/2 hours a game), plenty of breaks in the middle for drinking beer, and since I've been a cricket fan forever - you haven't seen statistics until you've seen the legion of numbers that can follow around a baseball player. So with all due deference to the editors, it might have been a litytle more subtle to leave off "35 years ago" in the preamble, because by the end of reading the preamble and seeing ths shape of the grid, I was 99.9% sure this was about Henry Aaron and Babe Ruth, and the chase down of Babe Ruth's 714 home run career record (Henry Aaron's record fell a few years ago under much controversy).
So that only left the crossword... I made a list of sets... A,B,H,U had to be 2,4,7, and 9 (and were all letters in BABE RUTH and HENRY AARON). The across set were D,G,I,J,K,O,P,Q,S,V and numbers 5,11,13,15,16,17,20,22,23,24 (and my money was on O to be 5 because the rest of the letters weren't needed), the down set were C,E,F,L,M,N,R,T,W,X and the numbers 1,3,6,8,12,14,18,19,21 and E,R,N would have to be the single figure ones. That leaves Y and Z to be 0 and 25, so if Y was 0 then we can make the names.
By the lenth of entries, H had to be 4 and we were away... I'll give it to Brimstone - the clues and the arrangement of the grid is amazing! Things fell into place really nicely, and there was 7-4 and 7-5 crossing each other in the middle waiting for a 1, and the character strings for HENRY AARON and BABE RUTH along the edges.
Here's the grid with the necessary adjustments.
Although I found it pretty easy, I can't go past how amazing the grid is - top stuff Brimstone!
So I'll declare victory for George here - 2009 tally: George 15, Listener 7. Current streak: George 2
The funniest piece I remember about baseball is very well protected by NBC and not on youtube (though I'll be meeting one of the stars soon), so here's the funniest thing on cricket I've seen in a long time.
Feel free to leave comments and see you next week for Hedge-sparrow's shortest name for a Listener Crossword EVAR!
Thanks to Oli Grant for pointing out my inadequacies last week, so the revised tally as of last week is back at George 13, Listener 7. That was a pretty silly mistake to have ARABIA instead of ARABIS as the plant, and it meant that all the letters of THE MIDDLE MAN were checked. I usually give myself a tiny bit of leeway, but that was a blunder.
Can we break the drought with Nibor? There wasn't a Nibor Listener last year, so although I've tried (and failed) several Nibor puzzles, I haven't written about any. So we have omitted letters from clues, so they could be in definitions or in wordplay, and those letters are inserted into answers (or at the start or end). Six unclued jumbles (whee, more jumbles!).
So there's a funny story about my beginning to this crossword. I had been doing some long travelling, and I'm not really a plane socializer. Just because I bought a seat and end up sitting next to you doesn't really mean I want to talk to you for insert number of hours of flight here. I was on a flight from Melbourne to Auckland, and the entertainment system in the plane was busted. This doesn't bother me that much, I had a book of short stories (Saki, as recommended in a thread on the Times for the Times blog), and a few crossword puzzles. I also had a bubbly travelling "companion" in the centre seat, who started up a particularly banal conversation with the gentleman in the aisle seat whose life depended on the acquiring of a working entertainment system. He eventually feigned sleep, leaving her to prey on me, and my distraction at the time, which was the May 24 Saturday Times crossword.
George enters an answer... Bubbly girl: "How does THAT fit with THAT" George: "Well there's a definition and there's wordplay, so the answer is in the clue twice, in this case it's an anagram" Bubbly Girl: "Who does these?" George: "They're pretty popular, not so much in the US, but you find them in every newspaper in Australia" Bubbly Girl: "Well I don't get it" George enters an answer... Bubbly Girl: "Now how did you get THAT??"
(repeat, but do not fade)
Eventually I got to the end of what was a pretty good Saturday puzzle.
Bubbly Girl: "So now what are you going to do?"
And thus it was that I started on Half a Dozen, entering letter possibilities in cells, scratching together a secret message, and causing bubbly girl's head to literally explode (I think she spent more time looking at the page than I did). Last thing she said to me before getting off the plane was "you're weird", which is pretty accurate.
Well, on the plane for a few hours, I made pretty good progress on this, starting with some cold solving and moving on to trying to make a phrase out of the extra letters. The Downs fell first, solving 14-25 gave me IGHTE which I thought was going to be part of EIGHT or EIGHTEEN, and 4-9 down gave me RS-MAY so I'm thinking FIRST MAY EIGHTEEN something. I got enough of the last few across clues to see TH-R-Y, so THIRTY FIRST MAY EIGHTEEN something sounded promising. At the end of the trip I had about half the clues solved, but without internet I didn't know what was so special about may 31st eighteen something (there were only 5 clues left after the EIGHTEEN and they were --IN-, so O'NINE?).
Didn't take long with Google to know that Joseph Haydn's death was just about 200 years ago, confirming that POLYP is made from LOPPY (J)UDDERS, and we have our theme. I did enough music to know that Haydn did a series, the "London Symphonies", and that the names of them were the right lengths (and letter combinations that I suspected) to fit in the unclued entries.
Still wasn't done - a lot of time in Q-space to work with these letters to get my last few answers - JOSEPH, ASS, ETAPE (it's always ones the intersect with each other that you end up missing).
So hopefully the drought has successfully been broken! I'm claiming (yet again) victory to George in this one!
2009 tally: George 14, Listener 7. Current streak: George 1
Since he's mentioned in it, here's a bizarre little video someone did on YouTube for Monty Python's "Decomposing Composers"
Feel free to leave comments (before anyone starts, there is the worst-drawn T ever in 5 down in the fifth cell), and see everyone next week for some number crunching with Brimstone.
Schadenfreude is back with another Listener puzzle that is going to require extra letters. Last year's offering, Terminal Suspension completely flummoxed me after I thought I had gotten the theme, so let's see how this one goes.
It's carte blankish - the clues are in order, and since the grid is 12x12, and since there's 20 across clues, each of length 5,6 or 7, then the rows have to be 7 and 5 (so no gaps), 6 and 6 (ditto), 6 and 6, 6, 7, 6 and 5, 5 and 6, 7, 6, 6 and 6, 6 and 6, 5 and 7. So I could immediately put in a few of the across clues.
Oh, I should say that my first solvins session (without aids) was at a pub, but not my regular Friday haunt, this was at the Clyde Hotel in Melbourne where I whiled away a misspent degree.
So in went PO(OR)I,S and EASIER, S,C(RIB)E and a knowledge of which row held RIFTED, EGEST, P,RATING and VANISH. A bit of guesswork on the down clues and I had the top left and bottom right corners out without needing Bradfords or Chambers.
Bradfords got me most of the rest of the grid in the next sitting, I was left then with the bottom right to get together (ROARING and INISLE heling me to get ENEMATA). Excellent, I've got a complete grid -really helped to know the symmetry beforehand.
Now what - the grid needs to be chopped up. Poor grid. But how? Looks like I'd disturb only a few words with a slice down the middle (eyeing that TAIN part at the end of DISTAIN), but if I cut from top to bottom along the middle I'd only disrupt AREOLAE (and keep it a real word), PRATING (ditto), TIERCES (yep) and ANICUTS (d'oh!). So I did what any good scissorbug would, and cut it into 4! Then spent ages trying to refit.
This was going nowhere slowly. Maybe I overestimated, maybe it's just two slices. Back to the vertical cut drawing board. I laid out my two slices and looked between.
OK - RIFTED could become GRIFTED or DRIFTED, which would mean (given the pattern) I need to add a letter to INISLE, which chould be D or S. PRATING could be PIRATING (arr harrr), which means TIERCE-S which could be TIERCELS or TIERCETS. This is getting somewhere. What about the top or the bottom? AREOLATE would be the only possibility, and ANNICUTS at the bottom.
SO there's an anwer and "the clue" there. The bottom part looks like it could be LEMON.
What if the top three letters are THE... that works, AREOLATE, POORISH, ESCRIBE. That means I need additions for MANTRA (could be P,M,S), and BREAST (A).
THE MAN!!!! OK, and MIDDLE fits there.
No down answers are disturbed (except for MIDDLE, in the middle, haha). Across modified answers are AREOLATE, POORISH, ESCRIBE, PIRTATING, INISLED, DRIFTED, MANTRAM, ABREAST and ANNICUTS. Woohooo! Schadenfreude, I think I've got ya! I was confident last week, but feeling better about it this week.
My cut up grid looks bad, this looks worse...
So I'm claiming victory for George!
2009 tally: George 14, Listener 6: Current streak: George 1.
Shameless self promotion today - Tommy Calloway (who is doing the intro) and I wrote this parody of certain styles of female vocalist. Here's Cherdonna - "Cougar"
Feel free to leave comments, and see you next week for Nibor!
What amounts to normality may have been resumed, I'm back in North Carolina, I have Chambers, I have Bradfords, I have my scanner and I have working internet. What more could one want (list begins soon).
Beat it was started on a plane much to the bemusement of the person sitting next to me. I was flying on one of the newer commercial jets and they were trialling having a trivia game going on using the headrests of the person in front. Brilliant idea, the person behind you was guaranteed to be thumping on the back of your head for four hours. In my case, I alternated between beating up the hapless passenger in front of me and trying to get a start on Beat It!
A Michael Jackson theme would be too much to hope for, but there's lots of missing letters, some in the wordplay, some in the definitions.
Last year, Lavatch brought us "Key Cutting" which was a beast I eventually tamed, involving finding out a bunch about a literary work that I had no idea existed. So I figured this would also involve a literary work I had never heard of.
So I'm an addict, and had Bradfords with me on the plane. Which helped, since 2 across looked like ----POST and sure enough there's GATE under "lecher" and we're underway. Useful to have on the plane too, since everything crossing GATEPOST was there... a check under "open" gave GIVE (two tenses in the one sentence, woohoo!), 3 down looked like THROB (extra letter B), 4 PLOD (extra letter D), from definition 5 very temptingly OATHS (curSes), but couldn't see wordplay, 6 S,PARER (extra letter R) - the extra letters are coming surprisingly easily. My big rush at the start didn't pan out to the bottom of the grid though, that huge entry at 42 a complete blank, 41 is our old chum AIGLETS (crossword fans, if you have frayed laces, go to a shoe-store and ask if they have any, it's a hoot), and although I can see 28, 21 and 37 are COME,T, PRO,FILE and SAR (with and extra A), they're all too short for the grid so I can't really put them in.
However, this was a pretty good start, and there aren't all that many asterisked clues, so maybe I can work on those titles. I didn't know the answer to 11, but I guessed it was either Brush calculus or Crush calculus making it LITHOsomething. I also didn't know 14, but it was likely to be gOod or goAd, so that made
(B/C),(A/O),T,?,D,?,O,U,?,E,D,?,G,Y,?,?,R,?
CAT AND MOUSE looks likely for the first title (are the words Toms and Jerrys?), so maybe DOG YEARS for the second? Seeing that the extra letters coming from those down answers to 2-6 were close together, I'd been circling them in the grid (didn't want to fall into the same trap as in Elitism). When I had a computer, it was straight to google and word wizards (WW threw up nothing for 11 across, but gave me LEON BLUM, confirmed SENUSSI, ASTELY and my final saving grace - TERGIVERSATES confirming that those three short answers were just written in with the final space blank). Then to Google to find that CAT AND MOUSE and DOG YEARS are both books by Gunter GRASS (who I couldn't find in the grid), but the third in the trilogy was THE TIN DRUM, and those circled letters looked like they could make a drum if I join them up.
The hero is Oskar Matzerath, which if added in the bottom left makes some real words, and GRASS makes the handle of the drum. ISSEN in the top of the drum probably means something. That helped me finish off the last few pesky clues, a double-check that there are 25 clues confirms that there's a stick pointing off the side of the drum (maybe TAAKTAA is a type of drum, since I'd already written a line over them I may not have the letters correct in the words).
And the slump is over! Victory for George and another Lavatch puzzle where I learned something (I'm not in a hurry to go read it though, sorry). 2009 tally: George 14, Listener 5.
I'm editing last week's post to include my pretty pathetic grid which had some nice doodles on it (want to see what ANIL looks like?).
For your viewing pleasure, here's an improv group that I have done some work with, the OxyMorons doing a show for a local TV programme called "The Pleasure Saucer". I wasn't performing that night, but I'm in the audience throwing out suggestions, listen for the random Australian in the crowd.
I am Asheville's most offensive, least-funny stand-up comedian. Come see my shows with the Feral Chihuahuas and other projects. Also read about intractable crosswords and my frustration at being unable to solve them.
