Friday, April 18, 2008

Take that, Newton!

My grid before required movement of answers

listener3975001

And after the movement

listener3975002

I solved most of this while I was away for work, so I didn't have my barrage of dictionaries with me. I had the interweebs, so I could use Chambers Word Wizards and google a few answers. My first query was to whether the "above" clues needed the letter removed in order to solve them. Fortunately this didn't take very long, as the first couplet was gentle, I got 5ac first, the Listener standard of the long anagram with missing words (SECONDARY PICKET) - (RED TONY) jumbled gives ICEPACKS, a means of reducing sWelling. When a message starts with W, then a H is soon to follow, so looking for a suspicious H (or lack thereof) in the next two clues gave me (h)eight and rut(h). The top half of the grid filled itself in pretty nicely, also aided by the long anagram at 26a (and yum, I was in cajun country, so some andouillettes found their way into me).

I came to my usual standstill with a little less than half the grid filled in. Most of the SW corner was empty, and there were some annoying gaps in the NE. Time to take a wild stab at the phrase, since so far wild stabs at phrases have worked pretty well for me. WHAT G----PM-S---M--WN. WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN??? Looky, there's a ROCKET and a BALLOON in the grid. I sense victory!

This is one of my favorite parts of a Listener, reworking the clues based on the preamble. Now I knew which letters had to be moved, it was fun re-writing the clues. Duress becomes dress and sites becomes suites. Gorged becomes gorge and off becomes doff... now the grid is getting close to full. Getting home and having Bradford's handy helps with the last few clues (TOOART, NICKAR, RETENE).

Five things that go up need to come down. By how much? All the way to the bottom or just a little bit? Let's try all the way to the bottom... I rewrote what the bottom row looked like with ROCKET, BALLOON, LIANA, LIFT, and COPILOT moved to the bottom. SITNNITANTITED. Ummm, no. Let's print off a fresh grid and start again... BULLET nearly appears. Aaaah, but here is almost the word GRAVITY... GRAVITATION... APPLE needs to move down almost to the bottom so GRAVITATION appears. Supposed event, the apple hitting Sir Isaac on the noggin.

This was definitely fun, and I got a thrill out of it coming together at last. Usually I am terrible at the "perform an action after filling the grid" crosswords (unless it's "erase every letter and write pataphysics at the bottom"), and worse at seeing hidden words. Thanks Samuel, this one pushed my solving skills about as far as they go at the moment. Being able to find the phrase early helped immensely.

Another victory for George, and a little bit of breathing room in the battle. Current tally: George 8, Listener 5. Current streak: George 2.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pretty much the same here, although I had been looking for "Newton" in full for a while. I was content with apple landing on "N" though, and I enjoyed it too.

I have to confess to doing better recently largely because of the acquisition of chambers on cd, which has features which reduce lots of donkey work. Is it cheating? Who cares!

George the Bastard said...

I've heard good things about Chambers on CD, there's meant to be a new edition sometime soonish, maybe I'll upgrade to CD then. I have the Big Red Slab 2003 edition. If I have more than one or two missing letters in a word I usually go for the word wizards. Nice job on finishing - I didn't realise until after blogging this that the N the apple landed on was Newton himself (or his head, or his unit).

Unknown said...

Hiya, George

There's a debate elsewhere about ambiguity, and the editors have allowed two possible solutions.

I'm a little bit iffy about that, but since I didn't see the alternative outcome,I would say that wouldn't I?

This was a good level for me and v. enjoyable.

George the Bastard said...

I give myself a little leeway most of the time, a letter or two (in trying to fill a new crossword for the blog, I see I messed up one column). To the striving for perfectionist people, I thought it was clear that the six letters of ROCKET were pushed to the bottom, displacing the URRELL up to the top - note this was the column I boshed in my quick rewrite so instead of being replaced by URRELL they were replaced by DURREL for some unknown reason. Glad to hear you were enjoying it too.