Friday, October 9, 2009

F'n bell!

listener4052

I don't know if Aedites looks in on here, but I have found each of his Listeners a real challenge, from the first circular grid I ever filled in (yes, there was one mistake) in Babes, to hunting down a massive number of permutations of prime numbers in Euclid's algorithm. My heart sank immediately in the preamble. The first part sounded fun enough, grid is divided into C,D,E,F,G - so away go checking letters, and the run of real words we've been having. And then - bell-ringing!

Please, someone help me!

There are two things I cannot wrap my tiny little mind around - the Playfair square (now watch, since I've written it, there'll be one soon), and bell-ringing. This I think will be the first time (apart from Quadrivium) that there'll be a complete solution on the Listener site for a bell-ringing puzzle and maybe I'll be wiser next time.

Anyhooo...

I spent a massive amount of time on this one (a theme with Aedites), and I thought I might even get there in the end. Funny thing is it took me a while to determine which set of letters went with D,C,G, and E, but I have no F's in the entire grid??? (I still can't solve 6D, so maybe there's an F in there). So I assume that F is by itself?

There also seems to be a lot of letters that match up with D.

Hmmm...

Filling the grid wasn't too too bad - there were some really helpful clues that raised an eyebrow, like learning of the existance of XYSTI (also known as EGDDC), and HOG PLUM as a cashew. There was a lot of use made of Word Matcher to find possibilities once I knew all the letters - that proved invaluable in figuring out the long answer in 1D,7D,12D - WITH A popped out quickly. Surely there was a BELL in there somewhere - the first four letters of the 8-letter word could be BELL but that wasn't going anwhere, but BELLS could be the last word. BUILDING WITH A ... BELLS? A google search on that threw up an old poem describing a CHURCH as "'TIS A TALL BUILDING WITH A TOWER AND BELLS"... so that looks like the quote, and CHURCH goes in the bottom.

But then I'm completely stuck, and wondering the following

- are there really no Fs? Surely there's one in 6 down but I can't find anything to work...
- how do the bell changes work?
- what are the answers to 17 across, 28 across and 41 across (all letters are checked)
- how do the bell changes work?
- what is a bell change anyway?

Aaaah, the anguish! So close and yet so far. The answer should be up now (I have to dash off for an hour or so after submitting this, but soon I will know what I was missing)! Great challenge, Aedites, wish I could finish it off.

Victory to the Listener Crossword! 2009 tally: Listener 16, George 22. Current streak: Listener 1

I'm off to the Grey Eagle tonight to see Carolina Chocolate Drops - they're a really fun show, preserving an unusual form of music from this region



Feel free to comment, and see you next week for Phoney Waspy goodness.

5 comments:

George the Bastard said...

Oh boy do I fell stupid now!

OBANI was my downfall - I saw OBANS and thought that OBANI would be the plural and didn't even consider KOBAN. That cross-pollinated my Ds and Fs so I ended up with all the letters that should be in both under D. There are only two F's in the original answer set, and both of them were in answers I didn't crack, so I never did get a chance to fix that.

I just tried the crossword again with KOBAN instead of OBANI and even without knowing the F words, I could see UKTNRZ go together and that would have gotten me a bit closer to the answer. The pattern of G (which was to be highlighted) sticks out a little more, and I might have gotten AMMO from it, I think I can follow - I didn't realise all 5 bells had to be together and there was only one of each in the column for changes.

To cap that all off, I feel STOOOOPID for not getting FLEE(t)S which would have saved me a ton of bother. Back to the drawing board.

Anonymous said...

I too ran into a "cross-pollination" (great coinage, by the way) problem except in my case I had half the alphabet equating to C. Never figured out where I went wrong, but eventually went back and started over, and this time things worked out better.

The main thing to remember about change-ringing is that the bells always follow diagonal patterns though sometimes (as here) they can turn back on themselves. So once you have a few letters in place it becomes fairly easy to follow the individual paths.

Better luck next week, George!

...Flocko

Anonymous said...

Oh, and at least you had the wit to light on the quotation, unlike many solvers, apparently!

...F

Duncan said...

No, I didn't get the quotation, which left me wondering how the missing word could be uniquely defined. I was musing over belfry and campanile from their definitions in Chambers!

I enjoyed the bell ringing methodology in Listener 4000 and was pleased to see it again here. Even though I didn't finish this one, it was fun matching the sets of letters together.

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