Je Suis Un Rock Star

Half of the entries are words that are spelled the same, but have (maybe) different meanings in French and English. Immediately main (hand) and pain (bread) sprung to mind and I thought this was going to be a fun puzzle, and one I had a good chance to finish for two reasons...

• I took French right through high school. And since I had a Scottish teacher, then an Australian teacher and then completed my HSC French by correspondence, (and lived for 4 years in Canada) my written French is much much better than my spoken French.
• All the answers are going to be real words, so I can cheat like crazy by hunt-and-pecking through Chambers Word Wizards.

Both of which ended up being absoultely necessary.

The NE corner ended up being the most amenable, with some long words (ON ONE'S PLATE, TROOPER) going in pretty quickly, and after a few days of poking and prodding I had almost the entire right half of the grid filled in. If you peer closely at the grid, you can see that I messed up 1ac, not once but twice, foruntately "RETICULATION" only had two incorrect words. Trying to fit words that checked with FAMOUS led me to fixing that up.

I kept a list of words - it helped to write down that there were 21 clues of each type, and I found it easier to spot the extra words than the French words, so when I got to the final hurdle, I knew there were three French words and one extra word to find.

The last hurdle was the SE corner. And thank you Monty Python, after being convinced this was my last extra word, and putting my thumb over one word at a time and trying to read it, SAMITE came to mind (from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", the description of the Lady of the Lake - "Her hand, clad in shimmering samite"). MIT (German "with") in SAE (self-addressed envelope, what you would include in the post). And we have our completed grid.



This was definitely fun. Lots of good times looking up French words (I'll admit, altavista's babel fish translator was broken out once or twice, in favor of stopping by the library for a French-English dictionary). And the streak is up to 4 for George and early in the year, I've managed to build up a little of a lead.

Tally: George 6, Listener 3

Postscript: As I was typing this, the solution came online, and I find I am incorrect in one spot - I had vite instead of cite, a smack-self-in-the-head error. I'm still claiming this one, not sure what the leeway should be, comments welcome.