Re-solved

Hope everyone overindulged yesterday and are feeling as good as I am this morning!

I was looking forward to a bash at this, since Listener 3806, "New Year's Revolution" was one of my extremely rare solves a few years ago and a really fun puzzle to boot. And I've been on a bit of a roll lately, so let's see what I can make of Conflict Resolution.

Lots of clashes, symmetrically places (one of the first things that struck me was the extra symmetry of the grid, we have 90 degree symmetry as well as 180). 12 normal clues, 12 with misprints in definition, 12 with misprints in wordplay (we are going for the symmetry), and a method for resolving clashes.

Clues time: I did pretty well the first time around and spotted some clashes quickly. Since there's only 12 clashes, and no more than one per word, confidently write in the rest of the letters. I found the bottom half of the grid easier than the top here, my first clash was 31ac SA,LI,CLAW (misspelling of sEx appeal) and 22 down (CANULA, anagram, misspelling of Narrow tube). Now if the 90 degree thing comes into play, then there is a clash where 17ac (LEAN-TO, misspelling of Power failing) meets 14d (which I didn't know), where 10ac (didn't know) meets 3 down (YOU BET, misspelling of undeNiably), and where 24ac (OPINED, misspelling sAid ones piece) meets 9d (LEASOWED, anagram with misspelling of leo Sawed).

This is looking probable, and means I only have two other clashes to find... NANNYISH at 1ac and ETHYLENE at 4d means there's one where 15d meets 18ac, 33ac meets 16d, 8d meets 21ac, and my last clash is 29a IMP,AWN (misprint of Hock), meets 26d (AMIE, misprint of uS).

At this point I had a mostly full grid, and the correct letters gave

S-MOF---SHESANDMISP--NTS. Sum of clashes and misprints! Seeing the message got most of the last clues, and at this point I had the grid above.

OK, let's add up the clashes and misprints. And to make sure there's no mistakes, let's do it in a spiral-bound notebook



The message looks like it's going to be MOVE ALL WORDS. It's a jigsaw! That's why things are so symmetrical, to keep the clashing/crossing pattern so close. Time for a fresh grid and a completion of the jigsaw...



The starting point here was the top right corner, looking for a four-letter word where the first two letters were also the first letters of six-letter words and then the last letter was the first letter of an eight-letter words came down to two possibilities, but once I saw where NACHOS could fit with AECIUM, ROSETREE and SAHIBA, I took the plunge and was done... almost.

I still had an empty entry at 19down (now at 27 across), and with no help from the movement (since anything that was unchecked before remains unchecked now). I don't have Collins, but they have a 9-day free trial on their website - no end of googling possible combinations gave me a suitable word, so I took the plunge on the trial and found ZILPAH. Sorry to take advantage of your generosity there, Collins.

Fun puzzle, Kea, and even better, a victory for George and a very late charge at the end of the year, might be able to end on a new high! Current tally: George 25, Listener 22. Current streak, George 4! And with only three puzzles left in the year I'm guaranteed at least a tie, woohooo!

Euclid's calculator-button mashing

We're on to the last numerical puzzle of the year, and it's something I haven't seen before, a circular numerical puzzle. Aedites has given us one circular puzzle this year (the first circular I had ever solved), and after my boast earlier in the year that I can usually do numerical puzzles, I have only finished one of the three (and I didn't get Big Holes either).

First thing, I thought something had gone wrong with my printer when it spewed page after page and most of them looked blank. When I print off the Listener, I usually limit it to two pages (I print on American letter size paper, so it's a bit shorter than A4), but since numericals typically have fewer clues, I didn't bother. And here come the pages!

All entries are 5-digit integers who only have single prime factors 2-79, no factors repeated. Intriguing... trying to do them from memory, I write down the primes from 2-79 and completely miss 41. I'm off to a great start...

Each clue is the common factors, if there are none, there's no clue. Intriguing... so next step is to write out the list of definite factors for each letter and each number. This may not give all the factors (in fact in 24 and C it appears there's no factors in common with anything), but it gives some juicy starting points. I know some have six factors...

Y = f a r t n l (heh, fart)
17 = f t w n k u (heh, ftw)

A bit of poking and prodding on the calculator shows that there has to be 2, 3, 5 present to have six prime factors and still be a five-digit integer. So several pieces of good news... f, t and n have to be 2, 3, and 5. Anything with these three factors is going to end in 0 (multiple of 30), so I can confidently write in a 0 at the end of anything that has f, n, t as factors. Which is only T and Y (and 17-21 that cross Y), and 30. Three whole numbers in the grid!

Now 19 doesn't have f as a factor - so f has to be 3 (otherwise it couldn't end in 0). One of n and t is 2, the other is 5.

So let's see - the five digits of Y...

first digit crosses 1-4 which have n but not t
second digit crosses 5-8 which has neither n nor t
third digit crosses 9-12 which has t but not n
fourth digit crosses 13-16 which has neither n nor t
fifth digit is 0

So look for combinations of those last three factors that give a number that goes...

even - odd - five - odd - zero

or

five - odd - even - odd - zero

30 x 7, 13, 19 gives 51870, but that won't work as 30 x 11, 23, 29 is out of range for 17

30 x 11, 13, 19 gives 81510 for Y, so that makes 17 30 x 7, 17, 23 = 82110 and we have our first two full numbers in!

This means n is 2 and t is 5, so any entry with t in it ends in 5. l a and r are 11, 13, 19 and w, k u are 7, 17 and 19.

Z now looks like -50-5 and has factors l,a,r (don't know what they are but know what they come to as a product), t and k, so 13585,w means w = 7 and the entry is 95095.

And we are off! Most of these were filled by getting the known factors and looking for multiples that worked with the numbers that I knew. I only used the "cross-checking" of making sure the remaining factors didn't cross a few times, notably in getting C (factors of 29, 31, 37).

This was a single-sitting solve, rare for me. Didn't check the time, but it clocked in at a few hours of hunting and pecking. I didn't use a spreadsheet, but I used one of those dinky old calculators that will repeat the last function if you press equals. I'm glad it printed on four sheets, I actually needed to spill over to a fifth to get all of my notes in. Here's how things looked at the end...



What looked like a daunting prospect turned out to be a pretty nice exercise in logic and patience - I had fun with this one. And a victory to George! With just a few crosswords left in the year I've stuck my neck out again, one more completion guarantees me at least a draw.

Current tally: George 24, Listener 22. Current streak: George 3.

If you're doing the holiday thing, have a safe and drunk one! I'll be in Houston next Friday, I'll have internet so I should be able to do the blog, but I may not have any images up, taking the scanner on the plane sounds like a bad idea.

Blog extra: two things

• Listen with Others has a new site, a new look, and some new bloggers. Are they taking a leaf out of my book by blogging failures? Not yet, but I'll be curious to see how it goes. I may submit a more "Listen With Others-y" style blog for a puzzle in the future, I might have to make a lot of it up...

"Sunday, 3pm, in Lear Jet passing over the FA Cup final while drinking 2003 Brunello de Montalcino. Solved the first 18 clues without thinking, looks like Bastrad's giving us an easy week. Put it down so I could get an eight-handed massage. Next morning, in conversation with the Aga Khan, he reminded me that TIA can be a Spanish aunt, so 8 across has to be 'whaT I Ate last night gave me the runs'. From there it was brisk solving remembering that letters from the names of the Pakistani openers from the 1980 (Taslim Arif and Sadiq Mohammad) went into the Playfair backwards, revealing, as I had suspected all along that alternate letters in the perimeter read 'If enough alcohol you do sup, rest assured you will throw up', and allowing MONK D'WALLY D'HONK to appear in the opposite diagonal. All finished in time for port on the deck of the QE 2".

I love Listen With Others - check it out!

• Congratulations to Gordius for getting a Sarah Palin reference in today's Guardian crossword. I haven't laughed so hard at a clue in months.

OK, now to work on the blog for 4010.

A dangerous crossword!

Franc is back! The setter of the first crossword I made a blog for here in the battle. And a round grid, which used to terrify me, but I've had a bit more luck on them this year, with good efforts on Babes and Squaring the Circle, but made a real mess out of Past Times.

Extra words in clues, first letters giving names. Jumbles, inwards, outwards, a name in the middle ring (an inventor with 12 letters - Thomas Edison came to mind). Second ring has others on the bill - is it an inventor who is on money? Ernest Rutherford is on New Zealand money, but he's a scientist, not an inventor. Let's try some clues.

The "wordplay only" clues in the second ring gave the game away pretty quickly... 2 is C,LOW,N, 6 is L(ION)S, and 3 is FIREATER (FIR,TREE,A)*,R. So it's something to do with a circus or a sideshow. Barnum/Bailey/Ringling? Let's try the radial clues.

I made a long slow slog of these clues...

I could often get two or three in each set, but not the fourth - finally I saw 33-36 (TALENT, S(LATE)R, JE(ST)ER, P(UR)EST and although all four have an S and a T, there wasn't two with the S at the start or the end, so I confidently had one letter entered in the grid, a T

Similarly, from 9-12, I had CH,ORAL, L(A,H)ORE, and BORE,AL - so there has to be an L in the center ring.

from 13-16 I had ESCHAR, CHEATS (yay, anagrams!) and INFECT (insect with F for S), so it had to be an E or a C.

From 5-8 I had SAMSHU, HAUL(M)S, and UL,TR,AS which meant either a U or an S...

Hmmm.... (U,S),L,(E,C).....T. Could the first name be JULES (The only one I knew from 1-4 at the time was SWARAJ, and it was very tempting to have J be the common letters).

Googling "circus" and "jules" gave JULES LEOTARD, who made his debut at the Napoleon Circus in Paris, and from the words I knew, I could fit JULES LEOTARD in the middle circle.

Now for the funny part - I had spent days agonizing over clues one at a time... I can't recall a puzzle I've spent longer to crack (I know this is being naughty, but there's one upcoming one that is taking a similar amount of time). I was so excited at seeing that Jules fit that I leapt out of the chair awkwardly and pinched something in my back and was in pain for hours.

Having seen the theme, it was piecing through the rest of the words to the finish. The exrta words kind of helped - I didn't know many of the last 8 answers straight away, but seeing HOUDINI as a possibility helped.

Victory to George! And I've got my nose in front again. Current tally: George 23, Listener 22. Current streak, George 2.

My DVD of this is broken, alas... when I think circuses, I think of the Marx Brothers film "At The Circus". Here's Groucho singing "Lydia The Tattooed Lady"



And here's me as a part of a circus sideshow from a burlesque show last St. Patrick's Day



See you for some numerology next week!

Knit where?

After my embarrassment of the last two weeks, I'm really eager to get one right... is this the week?

149 is a new setter, so I don't really know what to expect, but I was expecting a preamble. I actually thought that there was going to be a correction that included a preamble, but there wasn't, there was a two-letter correction of the title. Hmmm...

I guess it's some sort of knitting pattern, which could mean changing letters around, moving them up and down. Some of the clues has asterisks, is that where something is cast off? Jumbled? Am I overthinking this?

Cold solving time... 1ac is VALET,A so the answer has the same number of letters as the grid entry. 11 is C,LOW,NS with an appropriately creepy surface. 12 is MOUSER (O in MUSER), 15 is CANT, 16 is TRITON... so far some pretty accessable clues. Do the downs fit with them? No sirree... 1 is DEC,ODES which doesn't match any crossing letters, yikes! 2 is A,L,ARMS which matches a few letters, 3 is FOR,INT which also matches two letters.

This is becoming a mess, and what can the p and k mean?

I cold solved as many clues as I could, and filled in the grid with all the words I was "sure" of, putting the across answers in the top and the down on the side. That gave me almost the grid that you see at the start of the entry. There were some match-ups, and a few promising features...

27 down, which had an asterisk (and I had no idea what the answer was), read WOOLLY - knitwear, hmmm
28 down also looked like a name, ELSIE
8 down was GULLIVER. If I kept the U, then I could turn it into PULLOVER, another piece of knitwear. Does this mean k means "keep" and p means "change"? Is there a logic to why G becomes P and I becomes O. GP? IO?
If I apply that to 6 down, BRAN could become ARAN. Also 26 SWEATER, 38 JUMPER. And since 27 is all the second letter of across entries (which are "kept"), it is WOOLLY. That leaves 43, which is --R-E-... I guessed at JERSEY.

Time for a new grid...



Putting together all the letters that were "k", I then had to fill some breaks and come back to the unsolved clues. 31 down was not ROLLER as I thought, but BEETLE.

This didn't give me a complete grid - there were some squares that were "p" for both halves or were unchecked and "p". Since it's all real words, I did have to poke around in Chambers word wizards to find the last few letters to go in - I'm not 100% convinced about the upper right corner (New England). If there was a pattern to "p", I'm afraid I've missed it.

But I'm calling this a victory (I know I tried that last week) to George, and tying the battle up going into the last handful of puzzles. Current tally: George 22, Listener 22. Current streak, George 1.

I was trying to think of a song that went along with this one, and for some reason I thought Alexei Sayle had a song about wearing jumpers, but I can't quite trace it. I did find this one, where he (and Marshall and Renwick) predicted the demise of Jonathan Ross almost 20 years ago.



Edit: The much hipper and thinner than I Chris Lancaster in the comments (he's working on a newer betterer Listen With Others site), reminds me that the song was "Where's My Jumper" by the Sultans of Ping.