Let the excuses begin... this puzzle came out in a week where I was away from printers and computers for most of the time, so I didn't get to really work on it until after the next puzzle came out. The grid shaped scared me. There's jumbled words and clues that are listed together. The only real words in the radials are thematic ones with no clue as to how to get them?
Crikey!
I present you with the effectively empty grid. A few years ago there were a lot of these, but since I started the blog, I haven't had a paltry effort like this. I'm dying to go back and see what it was that I missed.
I think there's something to do with the letters in the quadrants - I tried to figure these out by solving as many of the radial clues as possible and looking for extra letters. I thought I was off to a good start - the clues for 1 gave me CINERARIUM (anagram of RARE,I,CUMIN) and DIABLERIES. Both of these are 10 letters, meaning they're not the long entry in 1, and the common letters are IEAR, and the entries in 2 and 3 all have to have these letters. That makes the second half of 2 REANIMATE, but didn't help me with the rest of 2 or 3.
I think the second part of 4 is OBOVATE, but the rest of 4 and 5 elude me. 6 I do better on, DE(n)SO,LA,TE and SE(STET)TO. Each are 8 letters long, so there should be three letters in the quadrant, common ones are OTES, and if 4 is OBOVATE, then it's OTE.
7 Gives me JET,PLAN,E, and TULIPANTS - 8 letters and 9 letters, so JETPLANE goes jumbled in the middle one, and there's only two letters in the middle. Common are T,P,L,A. 8 gives me PENALTY for the last half, which has all of TPLA, but the first half of 9 is LIASE so it has to be LA in the quadrant.
10 I'm stuck on, the first half of 11 is DEMOCRATIC (10 letters), and it looks like the second half should be IDIOMISM (9 letters), not sure of the middle bit. The first part of 12 is INDAGATOR, the three words have IDO in common, and that would fit in the middle unless there's an 11-letter thematic word.
The rings don't help me at all... the answers for ring 5 appear to be INSURES, UNSEAMS and ENVOI, but that's only 19 letters and there's 36 space in ring 5?
I'm lost...
Well done MynoT, I am soundly thrashed on this one, I can't wait to find out what I missed.
Victory to the Listener Crossword: Listener 15, George 18. Current streak: Listener 1.
2 comments:
For once I trumped you - but it was touch and go. I had really struggled to enter anything, until I got the last letters in sector 1 sorted out. A quick check of chambers wildcard search and I got the month, when all became clear.
I think this was the hardest one I have managed to do this year - right on the cusp of my abilities - and patience!
That's impressive - I saw the thread on the Crossword Centre, I expected more people on there to own up to not finishing this. Maybe those months are better known than I think.
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