SPWORKACE TIWORKME CONTINWORKUUM

I'm afraid this is meant to be a rush job (we'll see if it is), because I'm about to head out the door on another random travel. I didn't recognise the setter, Raich, but a peek at the Listener page shows that Raich is none other than Niall MacSweeney, regular commenter and sometime blogger at Times for the Times, who had one that I couldn't do in 2007. So hi to NMS if he's looking in. Interesting-looking grid, no symmetry, particualrly in the middle grid o'boxes, which will be filled out from the extra letters in wordplay. A grid of real words and definitions intact, sounds like I should be able to make a reasonable go of it, so away we go...

Omen #1 is when I can see 1 across, and here it is - TRANSPLANTING anagram +H. Message begins with H? Maybe it's saying hello to me? I did make a pretty reasonable go of it - there's a really generous number of checking letters, in several of the small answers there are none (37 across for example, fine by me because I had no idea who that old air company was). At the end of bar session, I had about half the grid filled in, and a good start on the message.

I needed the message to fill in some of the outer bits, but there's some of our old friend words - HIGHLIGHT, LETTERS and TWENTY-NINE were easily picked out of the message.

The clues were not too slippery, there was some general knowledge I couldn't figure out for a while, and after session #2 with chambers and bradfords I was done with the main part of the grid except for a few stragglers in the Florida corner (KENTE was the last one in - I had all sorts of answers in there at times, and it was really quite straightforward, KEYNOTE without the Y, extra letter O).

The message was revealed - HIGHLIGHT CONTAINER TWENTY NINE LETTERS USE PARKINSON'S LAW. I was familiar with Parkinson's law (and its variants) that work will expand to take up the available time and space (and more!).

So now how to end it? I can see TIME AVAILABLE wraps around the blank squares, and there's a W from STEW and a K from my lucky-last KENTE - so I guess the rest of it is WORK repeated in the middle? Are they all going down? Is there something more subtle about the CONTAINER?

So I think I've got it, but I'm not 100% on it... if I've missed something deeper I'll have to come back and fix things, but for now, I'm calling this a victory to George. I won't be able to see true solution until tomorrow morning most likely, so I'll keep fingers crossed.

2009 tally (tentative): George 20, Listener 10. Current streak, George 1.

AAARGH! I'm not getting away until late, so I did miss two things - I missed "for its completion" and the WORK was meant to be in a spiral. Bugger.

2009 tally (revised): Listener 11, George 19. Current streak, Listener 2.

Since we have work expanding, here's a mullet-tastic video of one of Australia's oddest bands, the Uncanny X-Men - "Everybody Wants To Work"



Feel free to comment (I'll be slow replying this time around), and see you next week for an admission of Kea's.