I did the scan before I left for a conference, and on a plane I entered another 5 answers
6d = BOTHAM, making the extra word either WORD or SWORD
12a = UTTER, making the extra word NAKED
31d = ORISSA, making the extra word BOYCOTT
40d = NEUK, making the extra word DEFLECT
44a = THREADMAKER giving yet another extra NAKED. Double naked.
OK, this is my most pathetic grid in a while, before I scanned it I only had 6 answers entered and some of those are guesses. There are times when I guess you're not on the same wavelength as the setter and this is one of them.
And I haven't a clue what is happening... the preamble tells me that most clues have an extra word, and the rest have a misprint. Usually I'm good at spotting extra words, but the first two clues that leapt out at me were misprints (17a - misprint is Pick up again, giving RESORB) and 39a (On instead of An). And that's where the grid stood for a good week and a half, until I thought more about the preamble - extra words may mean shifting spacing, so maybe clues need to be rewritten...
This makes 1d look like "A group of tents don't make peace" with STYLE as an extra word, and makes 33a look like "Fingal let mill finally around edges of Staffa" with SCORN as an extra 5-letter word. Looking for 5 letter words to remove to complete clues gave me a few more entries, but that was about where this effort died a horrible death.
I write this blog before checking the answers, so I am dying to find out what I missed (I'll add it as a comment). I'm hoping this fell under the category of "intractably hard" because I feel like a real imbecile after slogging away at this and getting nowhere at all.
As a final effort I tried to collate all the 5 and 7 letter removeable words and after seeing BOTHAM (an answer) and BOYCOTT (a removed word) thought maybe "Cricketers I loved to hate when I was growing up in Australia" was a theme and started looking for WILLIS, DEV, KHAN, and AMBROSE. And I have two NAKEDs in the 5-letter column. If one solver wanted to turn in an empty grid, I was way ahead of him.
My lead in the battle has been nearly eroded!
Tally: Listener 5, George 6. Current streak: Listener 2
5 comments:
Wow, I really was on the wrong page... my guesses were wrong, and even on the misprints, I had the wrong misprints. Utter failure here...
The puzzle was really clever, too clever for me. I got so frustrated with not being able to figure out the clues that I didn't even notice that all the missing down clues were crossing 24a. One thing that really killed me was thinking that only three clues had to have the spacings changed, instead of nine. That meant that a full third of them needed rearrangement and I would have been on the lookout for it more often. Congratulations, The Magpie.
Commiserations, George, but I found this brutally difficult. A lot of blood, sweat and tears got me to the precipice, but I simply could not see the final leap.I most certainly would not fancy this level of difficulty week in week out.
I hope you got closer to the precipice than me. I'm fine with difficult crosswords, I want to be able to tackle this level of difficulty, but I can see I've got a fair way to go to get there. Practice, practice, practice and let it all hang out... thanks for the comment!
...I didn't even notice that all the missing down clues were crossing 24a.
That practice, practice, practice tends to engender habits that prove useful. One of the first things I did was run the highlighter over all the grid entries for the missing clues. This immediately highlighted the fact that 24A was the key. Still a hard slog though but very rewarding. Great puzzle. RT
Thanks for the tip, I'll try something like that next time there's missing clues. I agree with practice, practice, practice, that's one of the reasons for the blog, to keep at it.
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