It's anagram festival! I dig anagrams (as you can see from the grid I do anagrams by writing the letters in little patterns to try and figure them out). In every clue, a definition word had to be unscrambled with one letter removed, the letters forming a statement and an instruction. To me, this means look for wordplay in clues and then retrofit the answer. Take for example, 1ac. Ashlar's smashed in streams of dump is screaming out for the answer to be an anagram of ashlar (nothing comes to mind) and the definition to be dump jumbled with a letter removed, so probably mud. Let's find one I can actually do...
13a and 14a were where I really got started. EDAM being a cheese shaped into globes and IMMOLATION being ritual slaughter. The grid filled out kind of from the middle, FORETOPS and SYMPATHY came pretty quickly. A few more I learned from wordplay then finding a definition was that a NALA is a drain, a little opossum is a JOEY and a BIJOU is a gem.
At my usual "Getting stuck half-way through" point, I looked for the message and the instruction. Continuing my luck with wild stabs at phrases, I see ELL from the last three letters in the across clues, and CONTA from the second through eighth down clues. There's some cell shading going on! SHADE CELLS CONTAINING nets me a few more answers, 42 was particularly twisty before that, it's a Gandhi I'm looking for in the definition. There's only one H in 43, so the definition is idle, and 49 is either something about coins or scion. The removed letters from the last 5 down clues that I knew at this point gave me T-T-E, and I've seen a few TITLES around... Wooohooo!!! SHADE CELLS CONTAINING LETTERS NOT IN TITLE. And now I have a complete set of down clues. Really helped out since 16, 18 and 19 down were blank before that.
OK, to the top few... POETC-NBE--NI-R-D. POET CAN BE SEEN IN GRID, my favorite part of that being that that brooding becomes Borodin when a G is removed.
And we have a completed grid, and some shading to do. Say hello to the yellow highlighter of doom. Little square up on the top right. Big mass in the middle, bits and pieces on the bottom. Is it a letter? Is it a face? Is it a message? I can see GRAND running through unshaded cells in the middle. Please be part of a 4,5,4 phrase... no, it's THE GRAND CANAL. Hmmmm....
Isn't there meant to be a poet visible? Oh, dumbkpof, it's SHELLEY in the bottom row, if you were a dog you would have bitten it. Shelley (never read either of them, but I know there were two), and "The Grand Canal". Not ringing any bells... googly time. Shelley spent time in Venice, where there's a grand canal. And it's got a similar shape... oh, the grid is a map of Venice!
It took a little while looking at poems to figure out what could be the phrase, and here is where I may have fallen at the final hurdle... "under days, azure skies" seems to be what Harpy is looking for. So let's write AZURE SKIES under DAYS (there's not a lot of room for that).
I slogged and slogged at this one, but if finally fell. I like anagrams, so puzzles with lots of jumblies are good for me. Very much fun, Harpy, I hope I got your endgame, but I'm still going to claim this one as a victory (and a big 3-in-a-row!) for George.
Current tally: George 9, Listener 5. Current streak, George 3.
3 comments:
I can claim this one too, and happy with the quote. Although I have only JUST realised that "hard rectangle" is an anagram of "the grand canal"! Hey ho!
More to the point, I finished 3978 one minute before going to print out 3979.
We creep inexoraboy towards 4000; I wonder what is in store....
I expect there'll be something special for 4000. I didn't get the anagram either, nor that it's meant to be Venice under the day's azure eyes. I'm also going to try to restrict chatter about crosswords where the end date hasn't happened yet.
One special thing that IS happening for 4,000 is the publication of a collection of Listener crosswords this September. It's already available to pre-order on Amazon.co.uk – just in case you don't already have enough torment in your life ...
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