Belinda in the sky with twins!

Want to scare me straight off the bat? "Some of the across clues are "Letters Latent"". Crap. My least favorite form of clueing (I'd almsot prefer printers devilry). And only some of them, great.

My memory is a little flaky, but I think I tried one Lavatch puzzle before ("Fallout") and it was nearly an empty-gridder. What else do we have here...

Down clues are two clues side by side (and each has the same number of letters) with a separator word.

Well so much for my brilliant idea of working on the down and eaving etters atent unti ast.

Breathe easy, the first across clue isn't letters latent, it's A,B in G,BED. The second one looks like a definition of Noble and a Frenchman in P-E, Rene is too short, Alain? PALA(T)INE. I solved a letters latent! And I have a first row. 11 looks like it could be AIR(H)OLE and maybe these letters latents aren't going to be too bad. 12 is a straight out ODENSE. Thinking I'm going to get a lot more of these latent lettery ones, I attack the rest of the acrosses. I like 20 - SA(P)ONIFIES, 33 is a non-latent DAHLS, 36 is a nearly giveaway (H)EDGING, and 38 looks like some anagram of SSSNAT. I've got a decent part of the grid filled in!

Can we guess at some downs?

2,25 - I can see the first half is AIRMEN, which has to be 2. So NUCLEAR is the extra word
3,19 - I can see the second half is BIOLYSIS (Lavatch must be a scientist), which has to go in 19. CALLED is extra
4,24 - some atlassing tells me that PINEGA is a Russian river, and has to go in 24. IN extra

Having the first letter of most of these downs is helping.

5, 32: First half looks like GAES, the other half then has to be DE-- - DEAN?
6,30: POLIO is the rather uncomfortable second half (and fits the first two letters at 6).
7,28: Finally one where both halves appear - LE(H)AR and VIS,OR!
8,27: ANISE (fits 8), INFOLDS is extra.
9,26: WEALD is the second half (remember that one from Carte Blanche!), goes in 26.
10,13: TETRAHEDRA (more science!) is the second half, and goes in 13. A director starting with E and having 10 letters has to be EISENSTEIN, let's write him in at 10. OBVIOUSLY is probably the link word
14,21: ummmm, no clue
16,22: The second part is an anagram of SALE meaning a woman, ELSA or LESA, either would fit at 16. or 22...

This is looking more promising, back to the lers laen. 15 is HI--S which probably means HINGES without an E, and little cokehead Martina Hingis is our tennis player. And hello - this row reads TRIVIAL-HINGS. If 14d starts with a T we've found our phrase!

17 is (R)EASSU(R)E - E ASSUME minus the M.

Penny drop moment at this point... there's four whole words in those across clues, and so far it seems at least three of them don't have letters latent! THER-P-O--H- got to be THE something OF THE. RAPE? Google tells me that THE RAPE OF THE LOCK is a poem by Alexander Pope and it contains the words "What mighty contsts rise from trivial things"!!!! The first letters from the down clue words have to make an 11-letter word that comes before LOCK. I have NCIAMITO... COMBINATION!

Very excited by this find, I bashed out the downs... the B has to come from BRITAIN in 14,21. TENNO is the first part, and confirms my idea at 14d. Chambers Word Wizards suggests BRIAN ENO as a possibility for the letters in 3D (Hey, Brian, you're in Word Wizards!), wordplay words, BRAIN(move the A), E,NO. Knowing I need a latent A gives me TENAILLON (and suggests 4D wasn't BOVINE, but BOVRIL), and ANN(E)XATION for 23.

I have a completed grid!!!!! Now what... replace TRIVIAL THINGS with ALEXANDER POPE of course. That solves... nothing. Something's got to appear in another row.

Looking at the grid, head-smack moment... there's an X in the fourth column. It's a COMBINATION LOCK, I have to move the columns, and rather neatly, there's only one L in the second column, one E in the third and so on. Our three ambiguities are that there's three A's in the first column, two E's in the 8th and three E's in the last.

I printed off a new grid and wrote in the new columns and saw... nothing. Four rows looked like possibilities, so I wrote them out again, with all the possibilties for the ambiguous letters



Still nothing... back to the preamble... the theme's last line. Oh, what's the last line of the poem...
"And 'midst the stars inscribe Belinda's name". There's BELINDA, and if we choose our combination write, she's in GEMINI.

Lavatch - this was hard and fun. I spent lots of time on it, and where initially I was dreading it, the lttrs latnt didn't turn out to be so bad. This is one of the most involved Listeners that I've gotten to the bottom of, many many steps.

This is a long long report, but I really liked the puzzle. And I got it! Another point to George in the battle and a slight lead is restored.

Current tally: George 15, Listener 12. Current streak: George 2.

This blog is in another dimension...

We are at the half-way point in George vs the Listener Crossword!

This week, it's "Travel Agents" by Hedge-Sparrow. Hedge-sparrow appears to be either a new setter or another pseudonym (a neudonym?) of a previous setter. Preamble time - the grid represents a region containing a number of interconnected entries... across clues have extra expressions, down clues have wordplay leading to extra letters, but are entered normally.

So let's start with the downs and enter normally, shall we? I'm feeling good really quickly, because the wordplay doesn't seem too tricky. If you want to give me hope, start off with an anagram, and here we are, LESS RUST becomes RESULTS with an S, then EC(H)O,NOMIC,S (long aside - any other Hofstadter fans who tried to play Nomic, the card game where the rules change every hand? I nearly failed Organic Chemistry because I'd leave my lab bench to go join the game in the hall.), V,(O),OWING, EVE(R) and AIRN(T), and it looks like the first word in my down phrase is SHORT, 13ac is SOWER, and 17ac is UNI-N--- so if the entries turn out to be real words, it looks like it's going to be UNIONIST.

Got a good feeling, that was doomed to be short-lived. The rest of the down clues came in fits and starts, and I wasn't sure of a few of the extra letters. Near the end of the downs, I had DIET(R), IN(A)RE, P(V)ALP, and D(L)IE, so the last word of the phrase is likely to be ????RAVEL, and with TRAVEL in the title, 36 probably has an extra T.

At this point my extra downs letters looked like

SHORTC--SF--S-AC--IM--RAVEL, and I really want the second word to be CUTS, but can't make anything of the clue.

Acrosses: Found these a little unnerving. 1 is REVERSE.. and REVE goes into the grid, but the next letter is an A. Extra word appears to be BIBLICAL, but I don't know how that fits. 8 is PA,R,S, extra word ROWS, and my grid entry ends RT. 11 is COVE (hidden word), and extra POEM, and I have COVI-. 13 looks like S,ASH with extra word LEAD, and I have the complete entry, SOWER. 17 looks like UNI,ON,S, extra word CUTS, and I have UNI-N-S-.

It appears the first parts of words are intact, and something's got to happen to the second halves.

Stuck for a while, I took a lot longer on the across clues than on the first... until I saw that 25 could be G(ROW)ER - and there's my OWER sitting in 13!

No way... could it be the same deal as in one that I couldn't finish, "Reappearance"? The ends of words are moved? That would make SHORT CUTS make sense.

Back to the downs... SHORT CUTS FOR SPACE TIME TRAVEL!!!!! Guessing the phrase gets me a few more down clues - 7 is NE(U)ST, 26 is MOD(E)I. I then took the acrosses that I knew and started trying to fit in the first and second halves of letters.

Oddly enough, a few hours of bashing at this and I was still stuck for a while, particularly in the middle section. I thought about what needed to be highlighted, actually thinking it would probably be warp hole or wormhole, and there on the diagonal was WO-M-OLES. That convinced me that 22D was ASHEN, still not sure about the wordplay - SHE in (W)AN? and the end of 19 was the ER from DOCKER. And I'm not 100% on the first letter at 47, since everything else in the acrosses seems to be a word, but I can't think of anything else but WEEDING for 47ac.

And we're done. I still have no idea where the extra words in the across clues came in. You nearly had me, Hedge-sparrow, after all those down entries filled in and no clue on what to do with acrosses, I nearly gave up. Eventually I resorted to writing the bits out and crossing them off as I found spaces or words for them (you can see that on my grid). But the slide is halted at two and I'm just keeping above water in the battle.

Current tally: George 14, Listener 12. Current streak: George 1.

Half-time report.

If you told me a year ago I could solve 14 of these beasties I would have laughed myself silly. Off the top of my head, last year I completed maybe 5. Keeping the blog has helped immensely, both in keeping myself on track, and thinking about different solutions. That this blog gets read and commented on is an extra blessing, it's nice to know I'm not alone in solving mediocrity. Seeing themes and taking leaps of faith on phrases is a good thing. Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

1, 2, 3, 4, fizz, 6, buzz, 8, 9, fizz, 11, 12, 13, buzz, fizz - when do I get a drink?

Before I get on with the blog, a little personal sad note, today would have been my partner's 29th birthday. If you have a loved one, give them a smile today.



The horror of seeing a grid without bars! The only crossword without bars I've ever completed was Carte Blanche by Homer. The puzzle is by BeRo - one of the first Listeners I attempted, and one that got me hooked on trying to solve them was an earlier puzzle by BeRo that turned into a letter sudoku.

I remember "fizz buzz" from elementary school, but have never done it as a drinking game. It's too mathematical for my American friends. Answers change direction when they hit a wall (hey, so do I!), or when one of the fizz or buzz letters is encountered. That would be E, G, J, N, O, T, U Y. And they can start in any direction... off to solve as many clues as I can, so I can at least put the starting letters in place.

There's a lot of clues!!!!!!

Some of them start in the same box, so I can get a few starting letters. It looks to me like getting 32, 33, 36 and 37 would be really helpful (though that turned out not to be the case).

To cut a very long story short... I came up way short on this one. I got a little more than half the clues, but not enough to really construct the grid. With E, N, T, and O causing a change in direction, that's going to happen pretty often. I tried fitting some of the longer words with fewer direction changes first (BODHI TREES, TITANOMACHY, LYDFORD LAW), but I think starting from the middle and working outwards might have been a better approach.

My real problem here was being unable to solve enough of the clues to get moving. Sorry, BeRo, you had some clues I really liked, but I'm going to spend some time on the ones that really stumped me. It's complicated on this type of puzzle, because until you get a lot filled in, I can't see where I could get checking letters from, until I know that the twists and turns of the answers get me there.

Here is where I'm truly lost...

1) There is a 13-letter word for "outgrowth" in Bradford's, but I can't fit it to the wordplay at all.
3) I wanted IGNORAMUS or some form of that here, but trying to fit anagrams of IMAGES doesn't help me.
6) Less avant-garde?
12) Is this a subtraction anagram? It must be a well-written clue because I can't find a definition
15) ??? S-M-?
17) -ADL--- -ALD---... help me out, vocabulary
20) baffled
23) also looks like a subtraction clue, but can't see what to lose
25) Both of them. Eeeks
45) Can't wait to see what I was meant to do with this.

So well done, BeRo - it looks like a really nice puzzle, but it's got me today - and you have nearly erased my once-comfortable lead in this battle!

Current tally: Listener 12, George 13. Current streak: Listener 2.

Listener 3986: Terminal Suspension by Schadenfreude

I'm writing this on the morning of the 4th of July, and in true American spirit, I'm watching cricket and blogging about a British crossword, woohoo!

Terminal Suspension by Schadenfreude, who is the champion of setters that I can get most of the way with, and completely fail to finish. Last December brought "Misprinted Choice" which was way out of my comfort zone (though I liked the puzzle when I saw the answer), before that came three crosswords that lead to nearly-empty grids. So here we go with Terminal Suspension.

For the third week in a row I had preamble understanding issues. Lots of clues need a letter removed, but I can't tell if it's all of them except the six that need a misprint, or just the ones that don't need a misprint or need a letter moved up to the top of the grid. Across clues are entered normally and I know all but the last six need a letter removed, so let's get a start on those.

16ac gets me started on both the letter removal and the puzzle - Aragon looks like he needs to lose an A to make argon, and we have GAS,P.Y. Even though I'd looked at it once, that made me twig on 11 - it's rarer and we have ARE(a) bordered by (B)rooks. In 17, SNOTS looks like it needs to lose a N to make SOTS, and INsomethingANTS becomes INTEMPERANTS. I'm liking these across clues, the clue surface makes sense after the letter removal. 23 is a subtractanagram, 25 is LETO. Yes, I'm a clue-solving machine!

At least until the bottom half of the grid, which turns up depressingly empty at a first run-through.

A decent start on the downs, though I'm convinced that all of the clues have extra letters, it doesn't take me until much later to realise that the ones that need to have a letter moved to the top don't need a letter removed from the clue. Anyway, PROY, MENSE, GRIOT come quickly, and I have my first letter in the top row, the I from GRIOT! I have GYNIE for 6, meaning either a G or a Y go to the top, and 20 is ALDIS LAMP - the ALD are in place, don't have any other checking letters. 22 is a complex anagram of SHOOT-EM-UP (nice clue), and I move the H to the top row. Some thinking and I have WRYBILL for 11, so a W goes to the top.

What now... I can't get anywhere with the first letters - since I thought I had to remove letters from most clues, I have B---ANDT-ILI-NE---C-C-A-L-U-M---N-.

What now?

Odd thought moment - the bottom row is unclued (and not mentioned in the preamble). So there'd be no way of knowing if you had to remove the last or second-last letter if that was the one to go. So maybe the last letters of the downs stay in, and then I've got PE-P at the end of it, and LITTLE BO PEEP would go across the bottom! Woohoo! A Word Wizards search of W---I---H turns up WEEPING BIRCH as a possibility. It's the sheep and their tales!

It finally hits me that I don't need to remove letters from every clue, and so the phrase becomes BOYSANDTAILSINEACHCOLUMN (hmmm, though that makes the remaining word in 13 MONE?).

This gets me a grid that is almost full, there's a gap around that annoying 37A (where it seems I have to read pages of Chambers to find it). BOYS AND TAILS looks like a possibility, the first column has (reading down) YBILL - so the tail of BILLY has moved. The last column has YSOOT. Can the tails be at either end? That wouild give me ROYT in the third column, NSEA in the second. OTM? OBIN is in the sixth column, but the R is further down.

Well done, Schadenfreude, you've got me again. I have a nearly-full grid, a grasp of the theme, and can't make it to the finish line. I had a lot of fun, and I thought I was going to get there, but this one has just stumped me in the end-game.

Current tally: Listener 11, George 13. Current streak: Listener 1