Friday, October 16, 2009

listener4053

Sorry about the crappy scan - I didn't get a chance to do it last night so I popped by the library on a break this morning where there's scanning machines that scan things but they come out kind of light (this was also a victim of the "end of the blue pen start of the black pen", but you can't see it from the scratch.

Before I started the blog, Wasp wrote one of the rare Listeners that I got out - "Two Down", with the Cluedo theme. Last year there was Symbolism, which ended up with a big M appearing in the grid. This time, we've got text messaging!

OK, I'll own up, I text message far more than I should. I caved about a year ago and added text messaging to my phone plan, and a quick check of my phone shows that thus far this month, I have received 147 text messages and sent 125. I don't like them, it just appears this is the now way to keep in touch. I have a twitter, but I have not used my phone to send anything to it (I haven't updated it in months).

So we have some eight-letter words that are mangled text messages, five letter words that are unclued and have something in common, and a big win in the 1-across department - with a hidden word of all things to give UVEA... we're away!

Except that UVEA only crosses two of the 8-letter entries and a five-letter entry. Oh well... those years of Inorganic Chemistry help out for 10 down - N(I)OB,ATE, 4 down is PUT with U replaced by AC for PACT, and I found the cluing to be on the easier (or on my wavelength) side, and the entire left half of the grid was finished in a first sitting, as well as sorting out which of the 8 letter words belonged to which of the numerical sequences (yes, there was a bit of peeking on Word Matcher initially, but the checking letters were generous enough that word wizards was all that was needed on the last few).

The five letter words similarly didn't prove to be a problem - in the left hand side I had G--IC crossing VI-WS and SC--E crossing TY-ES. So with VIEWS, GENIC, TYPES and SCOPE, we've got four words we could put TELE in front of to get real words (TELEVIEWS confirmed by Word Wizards), I'm on the way, and I thougt home and hosed.

The right hand side of the grid took two more sittings - mostly thanks to a stupid mistake - I had put MIT,TENS in 22, reasoning it that you could put cash in a bumbag. However that was wrong and confirmed by ARCHDUKE and USERNAME in the 8-letter entries. Chambers confirmed that MITUMBA was a real word, and Bradfords threw up BEHIGHT as a possibility for 37, and I was off again on the right hand side.

Nearly done - full grid, and now some extra numbers... U,I,S,R,P,U,O,S - hey, that's an anagram of SPURIOUS (which would work with "Phoney"). Was it a typo, did they mean to say the correct LETTERS instead of digits? Nothing on the stop press, but surely that's what it is, right?

So in goes SPURIOUS as the theme words, and I think we have it all done. After some of my recent catastrophes, this was a sigh of relief, and keeps my unbeaten streak with Wasp!

Victory to George! 2009 tally: George 23, Listener 16. Current streak: George 1

I'm heading out tonight to see an act that has come highly recommended, but I have to see it to believe it. I like what I've heard so far - here's "Tight T-Shirt" by Benji Hughes



Feel free to leave comments, and see you next week to find out more about the square root of 576 with Lato.

1 comment:

Duncan said...

Always good when they are finished by Sunday afternoon, says my wife! A very pleasant, nicely clued crossword with a straightforward theme. Nice one Wasp.