Numericality time - Brimstone has one puzzle from 2007 that I don't remember doing, though it had an Orson Wells theme, so maybe Brimstone is US-based? Now I've been living in North America for 15 years and the only new sport I've gotten into since I moved here is baseball. It's a perfect length (abour 3 1/2 hours a game), plenty of breaks in the middle for drinking beer, and since I've been a cricket fan forever - you haven't seen statistics until you've seen the legion of numbers that can follow around a baseball player. So with all due deference to the editors, it might have been a litytle more subtle to leave off "35 years ago" in the preamble, because by the end of reading the preamble and seeing ths shape of the grid, I was 99.9% sure this was about Henry Aaron and Babe Ruth, and the chase down of Babe Ruth's 714 home run career record (Henry Aaron's record fell a few years ago under much controversy).
So that only left the crossword... I made a list of sets... A,B,H,U had to be 2,4,7, and 9 (and were all letters in BABE RUTH and HENRY AARON). The across set were D,G,I,J,K,O,P,Q,S,V and numbers 5,11,13,15,16,17,20,22,23,24 (and my money was on O to be 5 because the rest of the letters weren't needed), the down set were C,E,F,L,M,N,R,T,W,X and the numbers 1,3,6,8,12,14,18,19,21 and E,R,N would have to be the single figure ones. That leaves Y and Z to be 0 and 25, so if Y was 0 then we can make the names.
By the lenth of entries, H had to be 4 and we were away... I'll give it to Brimstone - the clues and the arrangement of the grid is amazing! Things fell into place really nicely, and there was 7-4 and 7-5 crossing each other in the middle waiting for a 1, and the character strings for HENRY AARON and BABE RUTH along the edges.
Here's the grid with the necessary adjustments.
Although I found it pretty easy, I can't go past how amazing the grid is - top stuff Brimstone!
So I'll declare victory for George here - 2009 tally: George 15, Listener 7. Current streak: George 2
The funniest piece I remember about baseball is very well protected by NBC and not on youtube (though I'll be meeting one of the stars soon), so here's the funniest thing on cricket I've seen in a long time.
Feel free to leave comments and see you next week for Hedge-sparrow's shortest name for a Listener Crossword EVAR!
2 comments:
Congratulations - this was a complete mystery to me. just couldn't find a way to get started. And as a mathematician by trade, most irritating!
I am definitely not a mathematician either - and I generally fail on the mathematical Listeners (not least because they don't lend themselves to me making progress while my wife is shopping and I am looking after my daughter in the toy dept.). So I was delighted to crack this one, despite knowing nothing about baseball. And I agree with George that it was a delightful and satisfying puzzle - often I find the mathematical ones rather pointless, even on the rare occasions when I can solve them. Jason
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