Throwing darts at Valentine's Day - Listener 3968

This one took me a loooooooong time. I initially threw it away in frustration after thinking for an hour that there needed to be a letter in the middle of the grid and therefore I was looking for 6-letter answers. After finding a few likely 5-letter answers, but nothing else, I decided that there was no letter in the middle and I needed to hunt 5-letter answers.

Next step, in the groups of three, there were a certain number of letters shared. I put those next to the groups and found a few more answers... we're slowly getting along. This eventually led to me having more than half of the centre ring, and a few in the middle ring.

Centre ring has four examples of the theme, I could see DEE and RAE, _EA, and __L. So a search on these turned up nothing other than popular girl's names (making _EA probably LEA and __L either LIL or SAL based on the ones I'd solved). Looking at the middle ring, I had a TTL from group 1 and from 10 and 11, an F next to a W (which even I can see is going to be the end of a word, if not a phrase). Penny drop moment - "What are little girls made of" has the right number of letters and fits around the middle (except for at 12, where I had a wrong letter!). We're away!!!!

This got me a few more clues. But not a lot of the grid filled in. Here we go, I need this 48-letter phrase to do with little girls. Writing out 48 spaces on a separate sheet, entering the definite letters (only about 9 of them) in and the "possibilities", and I could see "roses" fitting in 10 and 11, and "blue" fitting in around 1 and 2. Since I got lucky before, "Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you" neatly fit all the letters I was sure of.

I had stared at this one for almost two weeks getting nowhere and now I'm on course! The rest was just hunting to fit in the extra letters. There's one I'm not 100% on (if you can spot it in my grid you win half a biro), but I'm calling this a win for George, evening the score and stopping the slide at 2.

Tally: George 3, Listener 3.

Listener 3967 - Lots to Find

Replacement of one word by another, some clues have extra words. I didn't make the initial correlation that the sets of words were complimentary, and after solving a few clues I thought that animals and birds needed to be replaced by either scouting terms or army/fraternity terms.

The first letters of the extra words after a while gave me BOOK OF ??TAL??? which I thought for a while was "Book of Taliesin" which pops up when you start entering "book of t" into google live search. Returning to possibilities of there being a letter before the T got me to the Book of St Albans, which came to mind fairly quickly, having passed by St. Albans when I was in England last May. Wikipedia told me that the Book of St Albans contains collective nouns. AHA! I have to replace animals with collective nouns and vice versa... even for a while I didn't figure out that it was a direct placement. As you can see by the grid, even having worked out the theme, I couldn't find all the collective nouns needed. When there were several available, it seems I picked the wrong one, particularly in a clue like 2 down, where I had "leap special" meaning "peal" and "peal" being the collective noun for "bells" (not animals, I know).

I felt good about getting the theme, but bad about getting the theme and then having such a poorly-filled out grid.

Tally: Listener 3, George 2.

Catching up: Listener 3966

In this puzzle, wordplay in the across clues led to answers with one extra letter. And most of them stumped me. I only got 12 or so of the across clues from the wordplay, and it didn't help me much with the down clues. I got Klosters because it had been in a Mephisto a few weeks beforehand, but was left with a mostly empty grid and nothing that could be done with down answers.

In the end it was a fruitless. It was not a novel or a film I have heard of, and even if I'd gotten further, I would have had to do some googling or extra searching to find the theme.

Tally: George 2, Listener 2

Catching up: Listener 3965

Slow accumulation of clues was the theme for this one. A little here, a little there, and sometimes it helps to work backwards - I found the solitaire grid infinitely easier to complete than the key grid. To the point that I needed to use the squares I'd figured out (and even a little trickery based on how the solitaire game at the end - for example, knowing that "AT" was in square 1, then square 2 had to contain something that could be jumped over at that point in the game).

Two weeks after the grid came out, I was ready to play the game. I printed out another copy of the grid, cut it up into little pieces and played. It was fun for a while, then I figured it would be easier to just compare the solitaire grid to all the answers in the key grid, and found I was left with N, O, DI, AM, D which gave a pretty obvious word and order.

Tally: George 2, Listener 1

Catching up: Listener 3964

Buoyed by my victory over the first Listener of the year, an hour into staring at this one, I was at the heady position that 1 down was some butchering of the word "REHEARSAL" and I wasn't going to get much further without steady head-butting. I eventually finished up with answers for about half of the clues, and was trying to force them into the grid by assuming all were jumbled, and the extra letters could have come at the start, the finish or something in the middle. By the time the solution showed up online, I had less than a third of the grid filled in, hadn't figured out the theme, and was well and truly trounced. Victory: Listener

Tally: George 1, Listener 1

Catching up: Listener 3963

The first puzzle of the year, and from having a stab at the Listener for a few years, I'm keyed in to it having some sort of New Year's theme. It took me a while to find, pretty quickly I figured out that across clues produced answers that were two letters too long for the grid, and down answers were the correct length. Entering as many clues as I could get after a few days and I saw that the across clues had "I" and "L" in common, and clashes occurred near these. For a while I thought it was something to do with getting rid of Roman Numerals, and when I saw that "one" could be formed from the ommitted letters in across clues, that maybe I had to get rid of the word "one" in several languages.

Penny dropped after finding the two "f"s in the down clues, giving me "fitfty-one" fitting with the L's and I's. Pretty smooth sailing after that, and the year is off to an awesome start!

Tally: George 1, Listener 0

Welcome to George vs the Listener Crossword

So you've found me. Welcome, pull up a preferred beverage.

The Listener Crossword fascinates me. I discovered it in 2004, when I was starting to be pretty confident with the Times Crossword, being able to solve it regularly at least twice a week. Looking for a new challenge, there was the Mephisto. No blank spaces, lots of obscure words. First few attempts and I had nothing. So I invested in a Chambers Dictionary, home to obscure words. By the middle of 2006 I was solving, or getting very close to solving this beasty.

There remained one unsolvable crossword - the Listener. Meta-puzzles, clues within clues, themes, many obscure words. For two years I have bashed away at this with very very little success. How do you tackle this thing?

In 2007 three discoveries made me turn the corner. I found that there were blogs on livejournal for the puzzles. You can find them in the navigation bar on the right. One goes through exorbitant details on the solving of Listeners (don't expect that degree of detail here). The second was the Listener Crossword site giving more details, like how to solve individual clues. This meant I could take a partially-solved grid and go through it one clue at a time, and pretend I'd solved more than I actually did. Confidence is wonderful. The third is a series on tips to solving the Listener (start here and work backwards). It highly recommended getting reference books to help you.

So it's 2008 and I am armed with
Chambers Dictionary - 2003 edition
Chamber's Word Lists
Bradford's Crossword Solver's dictionary.

And I am ready to take it on. The battle royale for the ages, George vs Listener 2008. Hope you enjoy reading all about it.