She bang the drum machine

What amounts to normality may have been resumed, I'm back in North Carolina, I have Chambers, I have Bradfords, I have my scanner and I have working internet. What more could one want (list begins soon).

Beat it was started on a plane much to the bemusement of the person sitting next to me. I was flying on one of the newer commercial jets and they were trialling having a trivia game going on using the headrests of the person in front. Brilliant idea, the person behind you was guaranteed to be thumping on the back of your head for four hours. In my case, I alternated between beating up the hapless passenger in front of me and trying to get a start on Beat It!

A Michael Jackson theme would be too much to hope for, but there's lots of missing letters, some in the wordplay, some in the definitions.

Last year, Lavatch brought us "Key Cutting" which was a beast I eventually tamed, involving finding out a bunch about a literary work that I had no idea existed. So I figured this would also involve a literary work I had never heard of.

So I'm an addict, and had Bradfords with me on the plane. Which helped, since 2 across looked like ----POST and sure enough there's GATE under "lecher" and we're underway. Useful to have on the plane too, since everything crossing GATEPOST was there... a check under "open" gave GIVE (two tenses in the one sentence, woohoo!), 3 down looked like THROB (extra letter B), 4 PLOD (extra letter D), from definition 5 very temptingly OATHS (curSes), but couldn't see wordplay, 6 S,PARER (extra letter R) - the extra letters are coming surprisingly easily. My big rush at the start didn't pan out to the bottom of the grid though, that huge entry at 42 a complete blank, 41 is our old chum AIGLETS (crossword fans, if you have frayed laces, go to a shoe-store and ask if they have any, it's a hoot), and although I can see 28, 21 and 37 are COME,T, PRO,FILE and SAR (with and extra A), they're all too short for the grid so I can't really put them in.

However, this was a pretty good start, and there aren't all that many asterisked clues, so maybe I can work on those titles. I didn't know the answer to 11, but I guessed it was either Brush calculus or Crush calculus making it LITHOsomething. I also didn't know 14, but it was likely to be gOod or goAd, so that made

(B/C),(A/O),T,?,D,?,O,U,?,E,D,?,G,Y,?,?,R,?

CAT AND MOUSE looks likely for the first title (are the words Toms and Jerrys?), so maybe DOG YEARS for the second? Seeing that the extra letters coming from those down answers to 2-6 were close together, I'd been circling them in the grid (didn't want to fall into the same trap as in Elitism). When I had a computer, it was straight to google and word wizards (WW threw up nothing for 11 across, but gave me LEON BLUM, confirmed SENUSSI, ASTELY and my final saving grace - TERGIVERSATES confirming that those three short answers were just written in with the final space blank). Then to Google to find that CAT AND MOUSE and DOG YEARS are both books by Gunter GRASS (who I couldn't find in the grid), but the third in the trilogy was THE TIN DRUM, and those circled letters looked like they could make a drum if I join them up.

The hero is Oskar Matzerath, which if added in the bottom left makes some real words, and GRASS makes the handle of the drum. ISSEN in the top of the drum probably means something. That helped me finish off the last few pesky clues, a double-check that there are 25 clues confirms that there's a stick pointing off the side of the drum (maybe TAAKTAA is a type of drum, since I'd already written a line over them I may not have the letters correct in the words).

And the slump is over! Victory for George and another Lavatch puzzle where I learned something (I'm not in a hurry to go read it though, sorry). 2009 tally: George 14, Listener 5.

I'm editing last week's post to include my pretty pathetic grid which had some nice doodles on it (want to see what ANIL looks like?).

For your viewing pleasure, here's an improv group that I have done some work with, the OxyMorons doing a show for a local TV programme called "The Pleasure Saucer". I wasn't performing that night, but I'm in the audience throwing out suggestions, listen for the random Australian in the crowd.

Pleasure Saucer Epsidoe 28: The OxyMorons


Feel free to leave comments, and see you next week for some de-reduction of overhead, and a lesson in arts and crafts.

Edit: DAMN AND BLAST IT!!!! I had ERRANT instead of ERRING and so what makes more sense, GRASS should be a T inside the drum and isn't a handle.

Revised tally: Listener 6, George 13. Streak: Listener 3!!!!

odder sirs

Still travelling, so no scan of this one, though it's rather a sight. (Edit: added now I'm back)

Phi got in touch with me after I wrote up his puzzle last year and gave me some tips, pointers, a bonus puzzle and has been a genuinely nice guy. Which still staggers me that draw a mental block when it has come to his Listener puzzles. I thought I was going to make a good fist of this, I like the shape of the grid, symmetric but not conventional (and there's gridlines too!). Preamble may be giving the game away somewhat normal clues have a disorder, which means probably a jumble, maybe a letter astray. Clues entered normally have an extra letter. Let's go a-hunting.

The pub session did manage to happen on the day this Listener came out - things on the home front have become more hectic so a leisurely Friday lunch is no longer a guarantee. I had a hard time unravelling the clues, even though I've had a bit of luck lately with the extra letters thing. So I returned from the pub feeling pretty good about...

1 across - S,TAB so probably a jumble
14 across - some form of ADIOS in plural... ADIOSA ADIOSES ADIOSESAMAMUS - the wordplay seems to be only giving me ADIOS
15 across is probably HAWAII but can't quite think why. Just sounded nice
19 across and we're off -A,POO(R)P - and there's a word in the grid
21 G,ATE
22 I thought this was probably WAK(e),A
30 (N)B,RIGHT and another word in
34 F,IRE

and for the downs

1 Some form of SCUPPER? That wouldn't fit with that WAKA... hmmm
2 ANIL becomes ANUL - it may be worth scanning the grid to see that I had drawn a picture of it to the side
3 BIG from GIB(e) reversed
4 INSI(N)STED
5 Maybe ARAME but can't see the wordplay, had ARAME from definition
7 OU,ZO(E)???
8 SEA PURSE+D
9 SHIAH - another jumble
12 AGIT,A(S)TO,R
23 A,(S)TOP

But then craziness set in and I didn't get another chance to look at it until I was on the road and without Chambers (I should get the online version). I take Bradfords on the road with me, and saw that 3 was probably SAD (from DA(I)S), 28 down was most likely HIDE and 17 down probably TWITE (don't know about that roof ornament).

So with the extra letters I had R-N-IS-ED-S-S-ER (reorganised something?) but a pretty sparse grid and not a lot of time or options to check answers. Phi wins again!

2009 tally: Listener 5, George 13. Current streak: Listener 2

What amounts to normal service will be resumed next week when I will be back home. Feel free to leave comments, and see everyone next week for some beating of it.

I can't paint dogs playing poker in 77 squares!

Greetings from sunny Melbourne - no scanned grid this week, but it wouldn't make for fascinating reading, the thing is almost empty. I pounded my head against many blunted surfaces to tery to make any progress whatsoever.

Intriguing preamble - misprints in definitions, leading to charades in other languages and other artists. Down clues in order, across clues in alphabetical order of answers with one missing (a check of the letters show s that there's a seven-letter answer missing, probably the one right in the middle of the grid).

With this much thematic information and help, you'd think a grid would appear, but I am troolyrooly stuck! I started with the down clues, thinking that I could place them at least, but the only four of them came to me through cold solving - S(CAD)S (misprint heAps), prOVOLOne (misprint partly Ovoid), ODDER (RED,DO rev - misprint comparitively fisHy), and (d)ADDY - (misprint Adelaide lEss formally). So that gave me virtually nothing to go on for the across clues, of which I could also only cold solve 5! ARAISED - put Up art; D,ONE - finE; NODDY - inveRted pendulum; SO,DA - joHn collins and WELL,TOD,O - loTs of money. I could have a stab that ADDY and NODDY cross, ARAISED goes in the bottom left since it can't cross OVOLO and I think that centre spot is reserved for the unclued entry.

Next step was to look for misprint candidates to maybe decipher a message. My guesses for the acrosses were U-M-RTEMD-U--RH-T- and for downs SEAR-TOAOR-H---GR-EN--RE, which migth mean GREEN somewhere (CasE might be presented to this?).

Shackleton, you well and truly have the better of me! I am off to find the error of my ways. Victory to the Listener Crossword

2009 tally: Listener 4, George 13. Current streak, Listener 1

Feel free to leave comments - I won't be online much for replies.

hat and hy and hen and ho and here and ho

This is the first Elfman Listener I remember having a go at, a peek at the setters page shows two others, one from 2006 when I was not doing it every week. And there's Letters Latent (though not given as such), which used to be a turn-off, but I managed to complete last year's Letters Latent puzzle (though that was only part of the challenge - Key Cutting by Lavatch).

On a first run through the clues, I had most of the bottom half of the grid - the top stayed pretty empty for a long time. Most of the clues only lost one letter, so any repeating letters couldn't have been the latent ones - though knowing there were three latent letters in 35 helped a lot to see FEE(B)LER, taking a punt on B being flux density.

The good thing about having most of the bottom of the grid meant that I could get the phrase pretty quickly - looking at the very end, I had -I-(A/N)E(H/A/W) and given the title, it was probably going to be I KNEW. And knowing most of the across answers from 26-41, meant I could pluck out (E/A)-T-(A/D/S)ER(U/V)I - which looked like I could pick out "SERVING ". A bit of Googling later out popped the Rudyard Kipling (R.K. - Requisite Knowledge!) verse "I KEEP SIX HONEST SERVING MEN THEY TAUGHT ME ALL I KNEW".

Retrofitting words then got all of the bottom half out readily, sorted out that the W linking WHO, HOW, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, WHAT from the verse was in that blank centre spot. I was still stuck on the top left corner and had to do a lot of picking through and abusing the Quinapaulus search feature with adding in the letters I knew, the expected letter latent and the length of the clue to get NOMOS, ALRIGHT and PABULUM. But I got there in the end and my fear of Letters Latent is slowly evaporating.

Victory to George! Despite some agonizing hunt-and-pecking near the end it was a nifty finish, I like the little shape made by the words, and it was some nice work to get that long phrase into Letters Latent!

2009 tally: George 13, Listener 3. Current streak: George 2

I'm leaving for Australia next week (hopefully I'll have reliable enough access that posts for 4031 and 4032 will be made from down under, but they'll probably be brief). Very excited to be heading home, here's Melbourne's Greatest Band, TISM



Feel free to leave comments below, and see you next week for an art lesson.

My printer runneth dry

First off, wave bye bye to my old computer, aka "The Computer In The Cow Box". You didn't quite make it to 10, old fellow. I have a marginally newer laptop, but had to reinstall the scanner software. Eventually I got there, but the settings on scanning are oddly different, I hope the grids are viewable.

Duck. The Don. There's no secret as to the identity of Duck, you can buy his book on amazon, read bits about him on Wikipedia, and find him commenting regularly at the Crossword Centre. I don't know if he reads this, but we had an amusing back and forth on the Times for the Times site a while back about me claiming to have never heard of a Bible story. So I guessed this had to have some sort of religious theme, despite the title Office Block.

The preamble sounded kind of gentle, most clues normal, only 17 of them have extra letters. Some clashes, a lot of words get one misprint but always checked. Check. Words with extra letters in wordplay go in as normal.

Duck heard my plea to make 1 across an easy clue, and came up with GRAS(P)S. Awesome - in goes a P. LA(PP)ST gives me a first extra letter of T and we're away.

I found a lot of the clues difficult - at the end of my first sitting (didn't make it to the bar the day I printed it out, I was on the road) I had close to a half of the grid sort of filled in. Remembering some advice from earlier, I put circles around the misprints, I figured they would have something to do with the final words. I had a tough time finding the extra letters, most of the ones I had entered were the regular clues. I was guessing at where the misprints were, and starting to get a real mess of a grid, when I noticed that in the top right, I had three misprints in a diagonal and suspected that there would be a misprint where 18 met 11 (I had SNARK for 11, but didn't have CEILS for 18 yet).

Interetsing - my complete mess of a bottom left corner also had two places I thought there would be misptints in a row... all my misprints would fit on five diagonals that added up to 38 cells - AHA! I knew I had to toss this first version, so I drew the lines through the diagonals as a guide and started afresh. I wasn't sure if I had the right answers, so this time I'm going to be very careful with those misprints and correct words.



Something's not right here. LAUDS and PLINE???? What is PLINE? And where does PRLME fit in.

A trip to Chambers and things unravel... LAUDS is the morning office and one of the canonical hours. Something interesting is that my 2003 Chambers doesn't have this definition of LAUDS, but the new one does. A smart cookie like Duck probably knows things like this. Some googling later I know that they are LAUDS, PRIME, TERCE, SEXT, NONE, VESPERS and COMPLIN, but that's only 37 letters (grrr). Ahhhh - but i have PLINE, so a check of Chambers shows that COMPLIN can also be COMPLINE.

But this still doesn't fit my grid. Gah! And I have to have at least two clues wrong because my extra letters of THEANNICAURH can't make THE CANONICAL HOURS which would have 17 letters.

Time for Grid #3 - which is on garish paper since I was out of white



First problem taken care of was 6 down. Which was one of my first in (despite it being completely wrong). Initially I thought it was BOL(U)STER with an extra U, but now I see it was MO(L)ISTEN with an extra L. That also took care of 24, knowing now it had to have an extra O, so it is RENEGUER RE,(ONE,URGE).

And so I have a complete grid, my words, and a huge sigh of relief. I'm still stuck on two parts... 25 down needed to be the extra letter U, GINGLE matches the definition, but I'm still stuck on that wordplay. The wordplay to 17 should be the first C in CANONICAL, so is it just S,C,ILEX?

I thought I'd never get there, but victory to George! My first completed Duck listener, though I've done many of his puzzles in other places.

2009 tally: George 12, Listener 3. Current streak: George 1.

While working through the hours part of this, I couldn't get "Dance of the Hours" out of my head, so here it is, as performed brilliantly by Spike Jones and his City Slickers.



Feel free to comment, and see you next week for the revenge of Letters Latent!

Indication of lack of depth on my part

Sorry I'm later than usual in posting, for those of you eager to see how I bombed. OK, I knew I was in for it from the preamble. If I can't make much sense out of the preamble, I know there's too much in a crossword for me. And this time we've got misprints, numbers (but some single digits even though the numbers go to 26?), and some double digits that need multiples of 26 added to them, and some squares with two letters and possibly a number in them as well. Yikes!

Mr. E is also responsible for two almost-empty gridders in my experience, Workplace, and Yes. I poked and prodded at this one forever, got a few answers at a time, and started to put some bits together, but I still have only half the clues solved, and no idea what was meant to happen next.

The only two clashes I found were near the top right - and three of them in SCAPE. Since the letters (that so far) don't have clashes are C and E, then maybe they are part of the number region, that line would read 33335. Above that is an H and I that could be 8 or 9, not sure about the region under that. 40 across looks like where one of the two letters crammed together goes with A and I from B(AIL)OUT. I can't dream up anything that fits 27 down, so maybe that is another of the ones where the answer doesn't match the grid length?

This is not to say I didn't like the crossword, and I must single out 32 down (E for Ernie in Bert giving BERET) which is my favorite clue I've seen in ages! But after a good run there for a while, it looks like I'm slipping back into the old form of hit and miss. I only have a limited time online where I am right now, so when I get back home I can't wait to find out what it was I missed. Well played Mr. E - victory to the Listener Crossword!

2009 tally: Listener 3, George 11. Current streak: Listener 1.

ring e he ead f ohn he aptist

Quick post-script to last week, I did make a mess of it, but I honestly couldn't unravel a lot of those clues and once the answer was up, I did my usual routine of getting an answer at a time to see if I could have figured it out. I hadn't heard of the book nor the author (note to setters, the George challenge - the first setter to work in a Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Terry Pratchett or Robert Rankin theme wins me doing a video version of this blog declaring you awesome).

Oh, video blogs - I'm meant to start making them for a comedy project, so once I get the hang of them, I might add some vocality to this nonsense. George versus the Listener breaking all boundaries.

Now to this week - Centigram is back! And there's some more jumbles, down answers have missing words, 25 needs to be removed and replaced by some new words and there's two mystery squares. All tied in to a performance.

I started by hitting the downs - I read somewhere recently (was it Times for the Times) that you should start crosswords in the bottom right hand corner, also known as Florida, because by that point the setter has lost inspiration. In this case it seemed like a sensible place to start because that's where the performance lies, so I started with 41 down and worked myself up.

41: looked like it was going to be OCA or COC - Chambers confirms the first, so we have an E at the end of the performance
39: I in O,D,N and we've got our God and Cretan as the extra word
37: E,PIC and New is the extra word... with NCE confirmed I think we're headed to a dance
34: Let's test that logic out... remove appoints... LOCUM? LUM is a hat and it's back-patting time.
32: Well assuming I remove the DO.... ----NG? Actually this was one of the last in.

Certainly looks like dance, maybe RIVERDANCE (Michael Flatulence only has two names though), or TAP DANCE (KELLEY, ASTAIRE, DAVIS JR?). Thinking this would be a breeze since I'm looking for dancers and had cold-solved four of five turned out to be false hope, the rest of the cold solving only gave me another 10 or so of the down clues, and with B-OT-E-S it looked like there was going to be BROTHERS in the middle. I don't know any dancing brothers, and Google turns up some unlikely candidates.

So it was time to bite the bullet, stop trying to solve this entirely on the downs and get stuck into acrosses. My printed sheets are a mess, because I put the letters I thought I knew next to the clues.

I got off to a so-so start on the acrosses - I got 1 (T,ACTLESS), but was convinved 7 was SCRAP (since I had REVEL and POTATO), so it kept me from seeing IMPS and ENTICE that I should have gotten on the first go around.

So it was solve acrosses, back to downs, solve acrosses, back to downs... you can see from my grid that I put the letters I didn't know from the acrosses in (that worked out pretty well for me in Squaring the Circle and Au Contraire).

The penny drop moment was rather fun though - it was getting 2 down - CANNACH that I finally had HERO-(M or S)BROTHERS - and realise it was HEROD'S BROTHER'S and the last word had to be DAUGHTER.

I had S-LO-E in that second row with the closed-off square, so in went SALOME, allowing me to get M(EL)ONS (EL for O in MOONS), convince myself that 10 really was ENT,ICE and that SCRAP was wrong (I must have been firing on zero cylinders, because it took entering PIRE + 1 letter into Quinapius to see TRIPE).

25 was THE SEVEN VEILS (heh, they did get removed), which helped me get VENTOSE (how did I not spot an anagram?), VASE and TEETER.

So the conclusion would be off coming the head of John the Baptist, into the bucket made by the other square. That would give me all real words across the middle and a fun conclusion!

Except that there were a bunch of empty squares in Florida!!!

I didn't have an entry at 28 (though now I knew it had to be a real word starting with L or S), an entry at 32 across OR down, and though I knew 40 was CONNIPTION, 45 was STRANGER and 35 RUNNER, still didn't know where those last letters fit.

Took an extra hour of dictionary hunt and pecking to find that LANDERS worked as a double definition (kinda) at 28. I was concerned I was going to have everything here but a few leftover words, but in the end I was there - a very fun and topical crossword by Centigram. I didn't notice until the end that the jumbles were made a little easier by multiple unchecked letters being the same letter (the three N's in CONNIPTION).

Seasonal victory to George! And in a bizarre coincidence (there seem to be more of those popping up lately), I went to a performance of Godspell in the time that I was working on this crossword. So here's some 70s hippy awesomeness from the film of Godspell - "By My Side".



2009 tally: George 11, Listener 2. Current streak: George 1

Feel free to leave comments (in response to recent message, you can do that by clicking on where it says "n comments", and see you next week for an indication of height!