Friday, January 15, 2010

Die, wren, die!

listener4066

I took a scan of my grid, but forgot to upload it earlier this morning, I'll add it here later.

I'm probably wrong in the final step, I think I know what I should be looking for, but I can't find it at all.

Hey, I'm working backwards - let's not do that.

This one appeared on Christmas Day in the US. I wasn't sure if there would be an upload on Christmas Day, but there it was. My Christmas Day was a pretty quiet one, up until 6pm. Some bars open at 6, and it was then that I printed off Rentokil and trudged around the corner to the Charlotte St Pub for a Christmas toast and Listener session.

Jago is making his first appearance in George v the Listener, though I did complete one of his puzzles before I started this blog (the one about the pretenders... 3796 - Theme and Variations). I winced originally when I saw the device, a definition with letter jumble, since I had tried the similarly-themed Azed crossword and gotten absolutely nowhere. This on the other hand, was a breeze to get started on (PRANK was the entry in), and by the end of my second pint I was almost done with the solving, had found ON THE FEAST OF STEVEN and TROGLODYTE. I still needed some entries in the top right-hand corner, but a poke through Chambers and Bradfords and I had a filled grid pretty quickly on.

The hidden message jumped out when I saw FOLD as the first set of letters in the across clues.

A funny thing is that a few days later, I read this... I had a fun little email chat with Brendan about the solving of this (I suspect Hotspur is also a fan of BEQ and left a message in the comments). I don't think he's going to become a regular solver, though I like the idea of this becoming G&B vs the Listener.

OK... got to fold an orgami bird.

Number of artistic skills George has: 0

Ability to fold paper: zilch.

I tried... I went to about eight websites on how to fold an origami bird, and after three solid hours of paper mutilation all I have to show for it is the crumpled mess you see in the picture. Funny thing is that the word RENT appears across the wing! I am pretty sure we should be looking for WREN, given the TROGLODYTE and the title.

So what looked like it was going to be a walk in the park ends up being a crumpled disaster. It was fun trying, sorry Jago, I can enter words, I can shade and highlight with the rest of them, but when you call for nimble fingers, that's all for me.

Victory to the Listener Crossword! Final tally for 2009: Listener 19, George 33.

Well, it's an improvement. Not a great improvement, but a slight one. Not into the upper echelon of solvers by a long shot. I wonder how long it takes (or does it take more talent, a copy of the Chambers CD-ROM, or something I'm missing) to get up there near the all-correcters? Suggestions welcome, though I did read on the Crossword Centre that having full-text search on Chambers helps, so maybe I'll see if I can get a hold of it.

Onwards to Year #3 of George vs the Listener, the blog for the average (yet hopefully improving) solver!

At the Chicago Sketchfest, we were performing after a duo from Boston called Hard Left productions. A lot of their stuff was really really funny - here's Suicide Baby



Feel free to leave comments, suggestions and help. Check back later for the end of year wrapup, and see you next week where I will be a guest of Mr. E.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi George,

Well I distinctly remember learning to fold this bird in elementary school and it's always seemed a pretty fundamental fact of life to me. But there you go, I guess if you've never encountered it you are at a bit of a disadvantage here. Come to think of it I wonder if the web doesn't work against you with this kind of thing. To me there is one standard origami bird but if you go googling it I guess you could easily find tons of designs and not know which way to turn.

As far as all-correct is concerned, I think you just have to stick with it, and work at the other barred puzzles as well, just for the practice (Azed, EV, etc). Your times for the Times are always competitive so you must have vanilla clue-solving down. I find as far as the vocabulary is concerned, after you've done enough of the puzzles you just learn a lot of it by osmosis, and a lot of words that once seemed (and by all decent standards are) obscure just seem to bubble to the surface when needed. And I think once you've been doing these long enough the themes become a little familiar -- totally new and baffling theme ideas are relatively rare.

You've been doing this intensively for what -- three years? It took me longer than that to get into the "list" and even now all-correct is a distant dream. I'm rarely totally stumped but I still manage to make several stupid errors with clues I don't totally understand.

Anyway best of luck for 2010, and just enjoy the puzzles as they come!

...Robert

Duncan said...

"Daddy, why do you keep folding up your crossword?" Questions from the children can be very difficult to answer.

I have the same lack of artistic ability as you George, and with so many origami birds around, I was stuck too. Nice puzzle though.

Gareth Rees said...

It helped to know that in origami there's a construction called the "bird base", which is the starting point for many different models.

Applied to Jago's grid, the bird base already brings together the WREN, so almost any way of completing the origami will do.