All good things must come to an end, and in this case it's my solving or nearly solving the Listener Crossword. Phi was one of the first setters to say he reads this blog and that he was surprised that I had so much difficulty with his Listeners, and, well, here we go again! I'm hoping this was meant to be tough, because I am completely flummoxed.
Phi's 50th contribution to the Listener (and he is almost weekly in the Independent, so that's one prolific setter!) follows two other failures reported here - in "We Interrupt This Programme..." - I had the theme and an idea of where it was going, but couldn't solve a bunch of the clues. Then in "Disorders" I didn't even get to the theme. Well I've outdone myself this time, not sure if I should even have a single answer in the grid. Epic fail!
I tried to make a really good fist of it - we've got an open grid, three complete names, and some of the clues have their wordplay mixed up. The grid is meant to go into two regions... when I read that I was thinking of those sometime Azed puzzles where there's two halves and one word crosses the two and you have to figure out which part of the clue goes into the left half and which part goes into the right half, you get my drift right?
So the clues have no entry lengths, and some of them have the wrong wordplay. This is not just cold solving, this has been put in the deep freeze for months!
Come on, George, you've done carte blanches before.
For the sake of argument, let's call the first clue 1 across... and we have a success on the "1-across" test - PAYS!
Hmmm... if the stars are in alignment, then maybe a clue that I will title "1 down" contains one of those letters. PORT,1,CO! Tempting as it was to bung those two in at the top left corner, I didn't do it straight away. Good thing too, because deep-freeze solving netted me precious little. The next across clue looked like wordplay heading to CHORL (not a word), CEOL (not a word), COL (a word, but nothing that jumped out as a potential definition).
Moving on - looks like an African leader starting with O... OCOMPO isn't a word. VIETASI looks possible for the next one, but also doesn't seem to be a word, maybe it's just VIET. Next one is a soldier, maybe REDCOAT or some variation. OK - then there's T,AS,T.E - which could potentially cross the T in portico, which if it goes in the top right meand unclued C could be Y--S---? ot S--T--. SCOTT someone or other?
Several sessions of this continued, and I'm stuck with the following...
across clues solved: PAYS, TASTE, some form of VIET...
down clues solved: PORTICO, DETHRONE, AFEAR, SUMMA
I found RESELLER as a wordplay in the acrosses and found a definition for it in the downs (subsequent trader). Some other leads from wordplay went nowhere... TASCO, OCTAV(e)IA, SHINED?
There's a lot of effort for very little result here. Trying to play with the symmetry thing, I started sketching in the opposite side of the grid... the last across clue should be 4 letters and so is probably A ONE. But that is all she wrote for me this week, I'm afraid.
Sorry Phi - you've hit everything I can't do here... I'm sure the symmetry is there so that once you get a few answers you know all the answer lengths, but I didn't get that far. I need to go back to cold solving, next time I'm doing a Phi Indy crossword I'll hide the grid and the answer lengths.
Victory to Phi and the Listener Crossword, and congrats on the big 5-0, Phi! (I hit a round number age next year, I'll probably celebrate by bombing a Phi Listener). Focus on the tally, George, it is showing that you're getting better...
2009 tally: Listener 17, George 30. Current streak: Listener 1.
OK - in six months the U.S. will be saying "Lady Who?", but right now Lady Gaga (or as I like to call her, Peaches Lite) is unavoidable. However, a few weeks ago, on "South Park" I fell out of my chair listening to them making fun of one of her songs by just having Cartman sing it. It's spawned a few videos on YouTube, so in case you haven't heard it, check this out.
Feel free to leave comments below - particularly if you want to sell viagara on this site (I'll be checking the solution later this afternoon when it goes online), and see you next week for the last numerical bit-o-fun for the year with Elap.
1 comment:
Not really wanting to sell you viagra, just to commiserate. I got a bit further than you, but nowhere near working out the correct grid shape, This is the first Listener for many months where I've had to throw in the sponge, so you're not alone, George. Judging from the few comments on Derek H's site, I suspect we are in good company!
Mike Grocott
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