Blog extra: two things

• Listen with Others has a new site, a new look, and some new bloggers. Are they taking a leaf out of my book by blogging failures? Not yet, but I'll be curious to see how it goes. I may submit a more "Listen With Others-y" style blog for a puzzle in the future, I might have to make a lot of it up...

"Sunday, 3pm, in Lear Jet passing over the FA Cup final while drinking 2003 Brunello de Montalcino. Solved the first 18 clues without thinking, looks like Bastrad's giving us an easy week. Put it down so I could get an eight-handed massage. Next morning, in conversation with the Aga Khan, he reminded me that TIA can be a Spanish aunt, so 8 across has to be 'whaT I Ate last night gave me the runs'. From there it was brisk solving remembering that letters from the names of the Pakistani openers from the 1980 (Taslim Arif and Sadiq Mohammad) went into the Playfair backwards, revealing, as I had suspected all along that alternate letters in the perimeter read 'If enough alcohol you do sup, rest assured you will throw up', and allowing MONK D'WALLY D'HONK to appear in the opposite diagonal. All finished in time for port on the deck of the QE 2".

I love Listen With Others - check it out!

• Congratulations to Gordius for getting a Sarah Palin reference in today's Guardian crossword. I haven't laughed so hard at a clue in months.

OK, now to work on the blog for 4010.

A dangerous crossword!

Franc is back! The setter of the first crossword I made a blog for here in the battle. And a round grid, which used to terrify me, but I've had a bit more luck on them this year, with good efforts on Babes and Squaring the Circle, but made a real mess out of Past Times.

Extra words in clues, first letters giving names. Jumbles, inwards, outwards, a name in the middle ring (an inventor with 12 letters - Thomas Edison came to mind). Second ring has others on the bill - is it an inventor who is on money? Ernest Rutherford is on New Zealand money, but he's a scientist, not an inventor. Let's try some clues.

The "wordplay only" clues in the second ring gave the game away pretty quickly... 2 is C,LOW,N, 6 is L(ION)S, and 3 is FIREATER (FIR,TREE,A)*,R. So it's something to do with a circus or a sideshow. Barnum/Bailey/Ringling? Let's try the radial clues.

I made a long slow slog of these clues...

I could often get two or three in each set, but not the fourth - finally I saw 33-36 (TALENT, S(LATE)R, JE(ST)ER, P(UR)EST and although all four have an S and a T, there wasn't two with the S at the start or the end, so I confidently had one letter entered in the grid, a T

Similarly, from 9-12, I had CH,ORAL, L(A,H)ORE, and BORE,AL - so there has to be an L in the center ring.

from 13-16 I had ESCHAR, CHEATS (yay, anagrams!) and INFECT (insect with F for S), so it had to be an E or a C.

From 5-8 I had SAMSHU, HAUL(M)S, and UL,TR,AS which meant either a U or an S...

Hmmm.... (U,S),L,(E,C).....T. Could the first name be JULES (The only one I knew from 1-4 at the time was SWARAJ, and it was very tempting to have J be the common letters).

Googling "circus" and "jules" gave JULES LEOTARD, who made his debut at the Napoleon Circus in Paris, and from the words I knew, I could fit JULES LEOTARD in the middle circle.

Now for the funny part - I had spent days agonizing over clues one at a time... I can't recall a puzzle I've spent longer to crack (I know this is being naughty, but there's one upcoming one that is taking a similar amount of time). I was so excited at seeing that Jules fit that I leapt out of the chair awkwardly and pinched something in my back and was in pain for hours.

Having seen the theme, it was piecing through the rest of the words to the finish. The exrta words kind of helped - I didn't know many of the last 8 answers straight away, but seeing HOUDINI as a possibility helped.

Victory to George! And I've got my nose in front again. Current tally: George 23, Listener 22. Current streak, George 2.

My DVD of this is broken, alas... when I think circuses, I think of the Marx Brothers film "At The Circus". Here's Groucho singing "Lydia The Tattooed Lady"



And here's me as a part of a circus sideshow from a burlesque show last St. Patrick's Day



See you for some numerology next week!

Knit where?

After my embarrassment of the last two weeks, I'm really eager to get one right... is this the week?

149 is a new setter, so I don't really know what to expect, but I was expecting a preamble. I actually thought that there was going to be a correction that included a preamble, but there wasn't, there was a two-letter correction of the title. Hmmm...

I guess it's some sort of knitting pattern, which could mean changing letters around, moving them up and down. Some of the clues has asterisks, is that where something is cast off? Jumbled? Am I overthinking this?

Cold solving time... 1ac is VALET,A so the answer has the same number of letters as the grid entry. 11 is C,LOW,NS with an appropriately creepy surface. 12 is MOUSER (O in MUSER), 15 is CANT, 16 is TRITON... so far some pretty accessable clues. Do the downs fit with them? No sirree... 1 is DEC,ODES which doesn't match any crossing letters, yikes! 2 is A,L,ARMS which matches a few letters, 3 is FOR,INT which also matches two letters.

This is becoming a mess, and what can the p and k mean?

I cold solved as many clues as I could, and filled in the grid with all the words I was "sure" of, putting the across answers in the top and the down on the side. That gave me almost the grid that you see at the start of the entry. There were some match-ups, and a few promising features...

27 down, which had an asterisk (and I had no idea what the answer was), read WOOLLY - knitwear, hmmm
28 down also looked like a name, ELSIE
8 down was GULLIVER. If I kept the U, then I could turn it into PULLOVER, another piece of knitwear. Does this mean k means "keep" and p means "change"? Is there a logic to why G becomes P and I becomes O. GP? IO?
If I apply that to 6 down, BRAN could become ARAN. Also 26 SWEATER, 38 JUMPER. And since 27 is all the second letter of across entries (which are "kept"), it is WOOLLY. That leaves 43, which is --R-E-... I guessed at JERSEY.

Time for a new grid...



Putting together all the letters that were "k", I then had to fill some breaks and come back to the unsolved clues. 31 down was not ROLLER as I thought, but BEETLE.

This didn't give me a complete grid - there were some squares that were "p" for both halves or were unchecked and "p". Since it's all real words, I did have to poke around in Chambers word wizards to find the last few letters to go in - I'm not 100% convinced about the upper right corner (New England). If there was a pattern to "p", I'm afraid I've missed it.

But I'm calling this a victory (I know I tried that last week) to George, and tying the battle up going into the last handful of puzzles. Current tally: George 22, Listener 22. Current streak, George 1.

I was trying to think of a song that went along with this one, and for some reason I thought Alexei Sayle had a song about wearing jumpers, but I can't quite trace it. I did find this one, where he (and Marshall and Renwick) predicted the demise of Jonathan Ross almost 20 years ago.



Edit: The much hipper and thinner than I Chris Lancaster in the comments (he's working on a newer betterer Listen With Others site), reminds me that the song was "Where's My Jumper" by the Sultans of Ping.

Tempted to keep it at Tod Dylan...

This is a little later than usual because I'm recovering from a rather impressive Thanksgiving feast. Americans know how to do gluttony and I'm more than willing to do my part. And here we go with Songspiel by Dysart, and remember what happened last week with seeing the theme almost straight away and then finding I couldn't finish the puzzle even with the thematic elements in place... well it may have happened again. Quick start, long struggle to a finish.

This appears to be my first puzzle by Dysart - I see in the Listener archives a 2006 puzzle I don't recall attempting. Edit: I had overlooked "Mercury's Whereabouts" earlier this year in which I got absolutely nowhere.

Down clues, misprints in letters in the definition, alternating sequence spelling out a musical piece (nice twist). Answers to be modified... well I guess it's time to work on that musical piece then.

Promising start - look for odd words... 1 down looks like SMOOCHING should be SMOOTHING - can't see the answer yet.
2 down, the wordplay looks like OIMLA or OIDIA, it turns out OIDIA is the plural of a disease of GRAPES
3 down, misprint looks pretty obvious - LESS relaxed, so TEN(=NET<=),SER Already, my set of misprints/original letters would be THE or CEA... so I know the pattern. I put little circles next to the down clues so I know where I'm looking for a letter to change 4 down - TAME looks like its ripe for the altering, not sure what the answer is 5 down - has to be SITTING SAT, making it TES,TEE 7 down - can't see it, but MIME looks awkward 8 down - the misprint looks like it should be "unstimulating to EAT", an anagram search turns up INSULSE And already we have THE TIME... which makes me think it's THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGIN' - it has the right number of letters, and the song addresses writers, critics, senators, congressmen, fathers and mothers - six groups! So I write the alternating misprints/in my circles. We've already had "lost time" this year so it seems reasonable that we should have some changed time - either the letter T or words meaning time.

So I charged through the down clues and then back to the acrosses and found I was on the right track - an easy place to see was 37 d (WAN,T - LACK) crossing with 37 across (TEENY). Changing the T to the clashing letter made both entries real words. I still had a real struggle to fill in the grid, I wasn't familiar with a lot of these words so it was multiple hunt and peck sessions through Chambers and Bradfords. I made a lot of this hard on mysef, without thinking I wrote in URINARY for 27, thinking that RARY would be a showy plant, where of course it was the much more straightforward ROSE making URINOSE.

The T's on the top row can resolve themselves into BOB DYLAN, and that left a grid with all real words and no Ts.

The last part... hmmm... that guy who needed the spellchecker SPENSERis in 26 across, so there's the writers taken care of. 39 down GOV is our senators and congressmen gone. ONASSIS is there at 14, I assume that's the mother. 19 or 18 could be our fathers, so I hope I'm right in saying there's no critic represented in the grid - my missing group.

I'm not 100% on that final step, so I might have to correct the tally in the comments, but for now I'm calling this a win for George - current tally George 22, Listener 21, current streak George 1.

I'll admit, I'm not much of a Bob Dylan fan... I can't find an online clip of Eric Bogle singing this song, but this guy with a guitar does a pretty decent job (needs help with his microphone levels).

Am I really this dense?

Phi has always stumped me, actually I think this is about the furthest I've gotten on a Phi puzzle, but I read the preamble, looked at the title and the date, and I thought this was going to be an absolute cakewalk.

Halloween is the main reason for anyone to live in the US, and I was hoping for a Halloween themed crossword either October 25 or November 1. And this looked like it - interruptions to the programme, the timing, this has got to be Orson Welles radio verson of H.G. Wells' "The War of The Worlds", and the modification is probably adding an E or subtracting an E. And there's the right number of characters in 11, 17, and 29 for "The War Of The Worlds" (maybe broken up or jumbled, since it says "broadcast" in the preamble). And a clue even jumped out at me - 38 is DOSE, and leave the E off and it will cross with 24 down, ASSO(R)TS, 33 down VET,O and that D is in the title of "The War of the Worlds".

So what went wrong...

I just have to get better at Phi/Sabre/Dipper/Mr Lemon wordplay... I can't wrap my head around a certain style of clue and this appears to be it. I can't for the life of me solve any of the "snippets" even once I've gotten a few checking letters (it just occurred to me that maybe the snippets are jumbles and meant to be entered so?).

Even with the few I've put in the grid here I'm not overly happy with AFFLICTS or FOLIO.

So Fie on you Phi! I'm hoping that I'm barking up completely the wrong tree, but I just have this sinking feeling I've worked out the theme and the clues have just left me in the dust. Victory to the Listener Crossword and the battle is tied!

Current tally: Listener 21, George 21. Current streak, Listener 2

Since I understand Phi is in New Zealand, let's see if we can spot him in a video clip from New Zealand's greatest band ever, Split Enz.

Duck duck goose, mine is cooked!

Warning: this is not correct - it's my grid before the "flight path" changing, which I couldn't work out.



My copy of Bradford's arrived last year in the same week that the solution was published to Tea Leaves' last Listener (Band on the Run), so it was one of the first puzzles that I started to get closer to a full grid on. I was looking forward to this, and although I'm really flummoxed by what had to happen at the end, I spent a lot of time having fun here.

OK - double clues, one goes in the grid in pencil (I'm not much of a pencil fan, i was going to do it in pen and then start a fresh one for the second part - though I think it probably means things are going to be erased and the final grid has some blank spaces). There's 38 whopping clues to be solved cold with the answers falling into five groups.

My approach was to solve as many as I could and see if I could get the first grid before moving on to these sets and a hidden message. I'm at my best with normal clues, normal entry (who isn't), so it only took me two sessions to come up with the grid before you. Once I started the grid - with the rather helpful starting point being 5 across (CEDAR, hidden and SET,UP) crossing 7 down (HAG,LET - and a bird fitting with the title, PLAN,E-T) giving only one option, I looked through the clues for the half that fit in the grid.

So, complete grid, and I think I know the five categories - I had found five games (four of which are card games- is CHESS a card game too?), five birds, seven containers, five colors (NANKEEN refers both to the cloth and a color), and four trees/plants.

The title seems to hint that the birds are going to be the group of ten (and two of the clues that I have left to solve have types of birds in them, probably the definitions). So if I eliminate CRANE from the first five extra answers, it looks like I can make NEW by taking the first letter of NANKEEN, then second letter of CEDAR, third letter of PAWPAW... and that's it.

Stuck!

Even knowing that I'm looking for birds, games, colors or trees, there's 12 I can't figure out...

Across
13: Plane might be indicating a tree... C-----
15: The second half of this clue is making my head hurt - I was thinking a game with a girl's name
27: Second half of clue again. Do I just have mental blanks on 10-letter words?
29: SOT/SOP in IOU makes nothing
30: Six letter French girl? Maybe the name of a game
33: There's a bird called a RURU that might fit here
34: I thought this was CRATE originally, but I already have seven containers
35: ----ISA = hollow?

my unknowns come in bunches, which is killing me on trying to find that message

Down
2: I can't wait to find out the answer, because that is an awesome surface... "smack heroin in poison"
6: Is this WHITE?
19: Kite is usually ELANET, it probably is here too but I can't see why
23: If this involved the name of a rugby plater I'm done for, the only two I know are Mel Meninga and Wally Lewis
25: completely stuck, can't even find a likely definition.

Tea Leaves, you have foiled me again! Victory Listener crossword and the race is ever so tight with just a few puzzles to go. Listener 21, George 20. Current streak, Listener 1.

I still think that this has something to do with erasing or moving the names of the birds (though I can't find CRANE in the grid), which made me think of the Peter Gabriel/Laurie Anderson collaboration "Excellent Birds/This is the Picture".



now to go find out what I did wrong...

George AND Signal Boxes AND solved NOT easily AND with a lot of fun along the way = 1

This is the third Ploy puzzle I've tried - I got about a half-filled grid on "Travelling Light" and absolutely nowhere on "Pater and Son" (from a time where I'd print out the puzzle and be too bogged down in preambles to get started anywhere). Five elements have associated points, each has to be set appropriately, four thematic words (are they also the elements?), two names, two topics.

After my last few failures, a big sigh of relief that clues are normal! Not only that, but my "please make the first across clue an starter clue so I can get into it" plea has been heard, so we have a straightforward alphabetisation in 1A - So That Electric Points Use Power.

I enjoued the clueuing - Ploy seems to have gone for long surfaces here, which I think is my style of clue (apologies to Pieman, and also to Charybdis from last week). Theres some juicy substitution clues - DELAWARE becoming DE LA MARE at 13 is very nice.

First hint of something up comes with 2D and 17AC. 17 has to be VIOL, and 2 has to be TABOO. Combine that with a memory from earlier this year that a SIRI is a betel and we have clashing Is and Os... which would go with the theme - it's ON(1) or OFF(0) if I'm not mistaken.

I was giving a friend a ride home and talking about my exploits with the crossword when it clicked... I told him about the 1/0 thing and said "I bet those two right next to each other have a B and an LE in them to make BOOLE". After dropping him off, I couldn't wait, I grabbed the crossword and saw it... TABOO|LEAFFALL and there's my fellow George! And looky - two columns along has PUTLOG|I|C and there's Boole's logic. I have an almost full grid, but working from the other end, there's CERCI|R|CUITTLE (I learned along the way from Chambers that those crazy Italians decided NOON should be at 3pm). So there's CIRCUIT, and two more columns in there's PASHA|N|NONIRON (thanks for throwing a chemist a bone by putting LIGNIN at 34). A bit of googling tells me there is such a thing as a SHANNON CIRCUIT. Thematic words done.

But there's still some clashes, and they're in the middle... hmmm....

It took me another two days to see what was going on... the clashes were every second column, and what twigged it for me was seeing NAND in the middle of SYNANDRIUM. And things fell into place... OR, NOT, AND, NAND and NOR are in between the clashing Os and Is. The whole thing is a logic puzzle! Here's how it works...

the 0 from BOOLE is operated on by OR to give 0, making the PUTLOG/SIRI clash 0.

That 0 and the 1 underneath (from CIAO) are operated on by NOT to give 1, setting the PEREIA/OATY (great clue there by the way)

Had to look forward here... there's an AND and a NAND coming up to give me the O in SHANNON. The only way to get 0 in NAND is to give it 1 and 1, so my AND has to be 1 and 1, setting the CIAO/ILIA clash as I, also setting the CAPITOL/INNERS and BLINI/OCREA clash as I.

The NOR has to give the 1 in CIRCUIT making the RORTY/NON-IRON clash 0.

Brings back memories of Mathematics I from University, and a great "ending" to the puzzle... I still had two to fill after all of this, I couldn't quite verify 45, my guess was from the wordplay and it was being used as a screen name so I guess it's right. I'm still calling this one a very fun victory. Good stuff, Ploy - this was well put-together and a lot of fun at the end.

Current tally: George 22, Listener 20 (still tight), Current streak: George 1.

Nothing to do with circuits, but I'm quite excited that Danielson are doing another show in Asheville. They're either the most Christian rock band ever or they're making fun of it all, but no matter what, their shows are hysterically good fun. If you want to know more, check out this clip, and yes, all those people are in the band and they do use acoustic instruments.