SPWORKACE TIWORKME CONTINWORKUUM

I'm afraid this is meant to be a rush job (we'll see if it is), because I'm about to head out the door on another random travel. I didn't recognise the setter, Raich, but a peek at the Listener page shows that Raich is none other than Niall MacSweeney, regular commenter and sometime blogger at Times for the Times, who had one that I couldn't do in 2007. So hi to NMS if he's looking in. Interesting-looking grid, no symmetry, particualrly in the middle grid o'boxes, which will be filled out from the extra letters in wordplay. A grid of real words and definitions intact, sounds like I should be able to make a reasonable go of it, so away we go...

Omen #1 is when I can see 1 across, and here it is - TRANSPLANTING anagram +H. Message begins with H? Maybe it's saying hello to me? I did make a pretty reasonable go of it - there's a really generous number of checking letters, in several of the small answers there are none (37 across for example, fine by me because I had no idea who that old air company was). At the end of bar session, I had about half the grid filled in, and a good start on the message.

I needed the message to fill in some of the outer bits, but there's some of our old friend words - HIGHLIGHT, LETTERS and TWENTY-NINE were easily picked out of the message.

The clues were not too slippery, there was some general knowledge I couldn't figure out for a while, and after session #2 with chambers and bradfords I was done with the main part of the grid except for a few stragglers in the Florida corner (KENTE was the last one in - I had all sorts of answers in there at times, and it was really quite straightforward, KEYNOTE without the Y, extra letter O).

The message was revealed - HIGHLIGHT CONTAINER TWENTY NINE LETTERS USE PARKINSON'S LAW. I was familiar with Parkinson's law (and its variants) that work will expand to take up the available time and space (and more!).

So now how to end it? I can see TIME AVAILABLE wraps around the blank squares, and there's a W from STEW and a K from my lucky-last KENTE - so I guess the rest of it is WORK repeated in the middle? Are they all going down? Is there something more subtle about the CONTAINER?

So I think I've got it, but I'm not 100% on it... if I've missed something deeper I'll have to come back and fix things, but for now, I'm calling this a victory to George. I won't be able to see true solution until tomorrow morning most likely, so I'll keep fingers crossed.

2009 tally (tentative): George 20, Listener 10. Current streak, George 1.

AAARGH! I'm not getting away until late, so I did miss two things - I missed "for its completion" and the WORK was meant to be in a spiral. Bugger.

2009 tally (revised): Listener 11, George 19. Current streak, Listener 2.

Since we have work expanding, here's a mullet-tastic video of one of Australia's oddest bands, the Uncanny X-Men - "Everybody Wants To Work"



Feel free to comment (I'll be slow replying this time around), and see you next week for an admission of Kea's.

The curse of the black thumb strikes again!

It's Dipper time! Almost exactly a year after Flower Arranging, we have Green Cross Code, and some more horticulture. Not my forte by a mile. Daunting preamble, there's green X's to go where trees are, five of them have had bark stripped and there's a jumble of the removed letters. Clues have extra words which are there to help Dipper (which I infer, means they're not there to help me, bugger).

Not sure what caught me, but for a week this sat there with two whole grid entries filled out, AMYL and CYMA. Had to wait until I was done with a few big shows before I could really sit down with Bradfords and Chambers and chip away. Chip away is right... everytime I worked through there were a few more answers at a time that came clear.

It took a long time for the elements to come clear. 5 down didn't work unless I used A,LESION,A as the anagram fodder to get NEOPLASIA. So some entries are longer than others, and where there needs to be more than one letter in a square (presumably a clash) is where the trees go.

The first tree I spotted was where CEL(I)A (at 34 down) met PEARLITIC at 39 across... if the cross was TI,LIA there's a tree. Glimmer of hope time! I didn't have to jumble any of those letters (I didn't look to see if there was a consistency between across first and then down to make the tree names). There needed to be one more clash in PEARLITIC, and it had to come from D(ART)R,O,US or CAL,MER(ino). 36 across was SP,A,R - so that could cross with CALMER to make PA,LM (so it's not always down first), leaving OU,AR, which isn't a tree, but SOUARI is (pat on back, you dredged up SOUARI from somewhere).

OK, so back to looking for trees and I've got the bottom half almost complete.

Nextr realization was from looking at 26 and 27. I knew 27 was F(LYS)LIP, but then there was nowhere to put the extra letter. Could a tree be in an unchecked square? Two letters outside LY? A search of ?LY? on word wizards and a browse of Bradford's proved useless. It wouldn't be fair to put a tree in an unchecked square, would it? YS,S - NYSSA! Aaaaaah, it can be a single letter from another answer that gives me the tree. That helps me place that annoying DISHEARTEN at 7 down with SHE,A crossing AID.

Still about 15 blank entries... is there anything that helps me in those extra letters? Working from the back, a search of ?AR?AR?L brings up CARBARYL, an insecticide. Well, if the rest are insecticides, I can get ride of the extra words and maybe solve some of these clues... a bit of a hunt and I've got DIMETHOATE (damn, there's two words in 1 across that start with D), BENOMYL, PYRETHROID (the insects in Dippers garden may have spread to his head if you're getting that out), MALATHION and I'm now only missing a handful of answers.

It took until this point to get two that I really liked - SPEEDFREAK at 41 across and AS,SIMILA(r),(ha)TE at 18 down. The latter is hall-of-fame material.

And that was about all she wrote... in the end I'm pondering a number of things...

- I think 15 across is P(L)AT, but I can't for the life of me resolve the U and L into a tree. Similarly the rest of the letters in DARRAINE - are there two (or even three) trees right next to each other?

- What is going on at 1 across? 2 down needs that DER taken care of, and CELC.... would fit some of the wordplay in the clue (and give EL,DER), but I can't find a word that works with the rest of the clue. AL,DER maybe suggests some sort of calcysomething rock, but I'm stumped.

- 19 across is a total mystery, but I think it needs two trees. I was tempted to just draw these crosses and make up letters, who knows, I might have been right. I suspect 29 across is just BET and there's a tree making up the rest of 29 down. I'd just have to guess at the five remaining unchecked letters.

You've got me, Dipper! I thought I was going to get past this, but I'm falling hard at the last hurdle (and as I'm typing this, I'm following the Fourth Test with a big smile on my face). In a final irony, although I used a green marker for the crosses, and specified my scanner to scan in colour, it appears that my green crosses have turned to black, a fate that awaits any plant that relies on me to take care of it. Maybe I should have my garden grow like Dippers, with a bucketload of pesticide!

Victory to Dipper and the Listener Crossword. 2009 tally: Listener 10, George 19. Current streak: Listener 1.

Even though it was trees rather than flowers this time, here's Gumby Flower Arranging



Feel free to comment - and see you next week for some OOOOPPPPsidaisy with Raich.

Allez Cuisine!

Another in the line of Listeners I was working on while I was out of town, this one was started in an airport. I like the shape of the grid - Charybdis must be into crazy grids, I got nowhere on "Wot No Lines", but it also turns out that Charybdis was one half of Harpy who had an interesting-looking grid that turned into a map of Venice in "Hard Rectangle" last year.

Preamble seems gentle enough - extra words in each clue, middle letters (there's a new one), make a quotation. There's a lot of clues, that is going to have to be one long quotation! Then some unclued thematic entries, highlighting at the end, an answer needs to be modified (maybe a letter goes on the inside?) and we're done. Perfect for a plane - looks like the grid is all real words with one to be modified later and the clues are mostly normal.

I drew little arrows to find the unclued entries. The cross each other! Hopefully this won't be too bad.

The clues were fun - I didn't get any of the first few on a quick read through, until ARM inside A LIST gave me 11 across. But it was the left hand side of the grid that filled fastest. Charybdis chose some obvious and some tricky extra words to hide the message, and I was surprised by the number of even-lettered extra words (my original thought was to look for words with an odd number of letters. The clues also had a sensible surface when the extra word was removed (8 down might be a stress, but with this many clues, that's pretty cool). The drawback of this was that a lot of the extra words were at the start or finish of clues, or extra adverbs or adjectives, which made them easier to find. Hey, look at me, I'm commenting on construction!

By the time I got back home from my long trip, I had all the left hand side, most of the top and bottom, and what turned out to be some horribly wrong answers in the right. Most egregious was being convinced 12 down was TULADI, which is a word I made up that didn't fit the clue or wordplay, and 24 was RIDE which fit the wordplay but not the definition. I had the quotation - THE DISCOVERY OF A NEW DISH CONFERS MORE HAPPINESS ON HUMANITY THAN THE DISCOVERY OF A NEW STAR, but didn't know who said it. My friend Steven picked me up from the airport and I told him about how far I'd gotten on the Listener, and he looked it up on his blackberry (first time that mastubatory aid has been useful) and said it was some guy "Brillat something".

Brillat-Savarin! I remember him from the opening of the English version of "Iron Chef" (where they use - "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are".

Finally home and with Chambers and the interweebs at my disposal, the rest of the theme comes together. Savarin cheese is a cheese with a hole in the middle, and a savarin cake is a cake with a hole in the middle with yeast, nuts, and booze inside. YUM! Now I want one!



In goes BRILLAT SAVARIN, and the rest of the unclued entries are things that would go in a savarin cake - ALMONDS, TAFIA (needed to look that up), WALNUT, CHERRY, PEACH, and BACARDI. Just a little Chambers hunt-and-pecking to get my last few answers (TRONCS, TAIGLE) and we have a completed grid! Now to that preamble - I'd spotted I at the end of POOR and thought that might have something to do with it (a dish, a dish!), and right near it is ASTRONOMY with G next to it, so I don't have to modify any entries, it's there in the grid. GASTRONOMY crosses RIGEL diagonally, and the R,I,E,L in RIGEL cross dishes - CHARGE+R,POOR+I, REGAL+E (thanks, Chambers), and BOW+L (RAKU+BOW+L?).

Thanks for making a few hours in D.C. National Airport, Charlotte Douglas Airport and two plane flights a lot more fun than they should have been, Charybdis! Can't wait for the next crazy grid.

With that I'll claim victory for George!

2009 tally: George 19, Listener 9. Current streak: George 1.

I'm very excited about Leonard Cohen doing a concert in my town in November. Leonard Cohen is awesome music to put on right when it's time for everyone to leave your apartment. Here's "Waiting for the Miracle"



Feel free to leave comments, and see you next week for floral fun with Dipper!

Ummm, well I printed it out. And scanned it. And. Umm....

Merlin is a kind of new to me setter, I looked up previous work by Merlin and saw "Olde Treasure Hunt" which I seem to recall being an empty-gridder. Clues are normal (whee), but everything gets modified. Some Letters Latent, the letters spelling out a name, and different modifications for the acrosses and downs.

Ye Olde Colde Solving time!

Ummmm... I was having a horrible time trying to cold solve these clues. It may have been the location, this was an "on the road" puzzle, so my first solving session was at a rather hysterical faux-British pub in a mall in Washington D.C. About the only thing I got on the crossword at that pub was Fullers. I could only solve six clues, most of them anagrams (N,I,TRAT,E, PENCIL CASES, LABRADOR RETRIEVER, HALICORES, LYDIAN STONE, IMPEL). Trapped without Chambers or Bradfords for five days, I stared and scratched my head. Has Merlin invented a new form of George-proof wordplay? It appears so.

Can anything help? Well it looks like a lot of the grid entries are three letters shorter than their numbers in parentheses. MOTLEY could be a set of two three-letter words. TOM and ELY? My few down answers look like they have three-letter boy's names in them (HAL)ICORES, LYD(IAN)STONE. ELY is a see, or a river or a town, do we take them out? What could be removed from RATTEEN and NITRATE - they both have RAT in them. Is it a Pied Piper thing? I actually scanned the grid before I came up with this, and tried entering in NITE, TEEN and the other modifications to see if they were getting me any closer. Maybe a bit longer with the acrosses trying to fit RAT into works and I may have come closer.

That's what I'm thinking this was meant to be, but it's just a guess... I am completely stumped. Very curious to see if I was on the right track. Victory to Merlin and the Listener Crossword!

2009 tally: Listener 9, George 18. Current streak: Listener 1.

Last night I got back from a sketch comedy festival that was a lot of fun (when it gets edited, I might be able to embed a little bit of me on stage with Saturday Night Live legend Garrett Morris). One group that really impressed me were called the Laughter League - the sound on this is a little wonky, but here's one of the bits that they did at the festival.



Feel free to comment, laugh at my ineptitude or just discuss the weather, and see you next week for some weight gain with Charybdis.

The appears to be more in opposition than in Labour?

Hubris is another new to this blog setter, and a browse through some earlier Listeners shows that I have gotten nowhere before with Hubris' puzzles. After last week, let's see if there's something I can cotton on to. The preamble sounds innocent enough, 28 misprints (I counted 53 clues, so a little more than half misprints), part of a description and the name of the person who said it. Some highlighting to do later, but it appears no manipulation in the grid so we're in real word territory!

Got of to a pretty brisk start on this one, though I got mostly straight (I think) clues first. I like the trick of some of the misprints being in the wordplay and some in the definition, makes it a little less obvious what to look for. First misprint I spotted was in 11 across (Wealth - Health, making F.I.L.T.H. which when capitalized like that looks like a good name for a bad-guy agency in a James Bond film). The game was kind of given away early on, since those first three rather gentle across answers - hidden ODES, PEAK (confirming PEAK = sneak in Chambers) and ERAS,E leave a pretty obvious SPEAKER sitting there. Early on I also saw 27 as MACER, so with a SPEAKER and a MASE, I think there's a parliamentary thing gioing on. With SCRUMPS and SKIMPS at 14 and 16, there's some MPS, so it seems, kind of like Samuel's Motion puzzle earlier this year, we've got a picture of parliament.

With almost all the grid filled (making liberal use of knowing there's real words and going to Chambers Word Wizards to get PHELLEM, STIVE, and PROTYL), the rest of the theme comes together - there's L A B O U R scattered on the left, and O P P O S I T I O N on the right, near their MPS.

Hmmm... I'm making this sound a lot easier than it was, because this was a puzzle I filled in painfully slowly, a first session got almost half the grid, but then it was tiny clue after tiny clue, and a last squeeze to get the rest of it. I think I've got it, but some things are really bugging me.

What on Earth is the quotation and the author? I only found 19 mipsints, and they make nothing! H BE LU N O N OS MRT DKE ML N? That sounds like me talking about politics after two bottles of cheap red wine. Is it Latin?

Is 25 across BARMY or BALMY? Or something else entirely? Can't cheat with the theme or the misprints here, since the letters aren't needed for the shading.

So there you go... I'm going to call a conditional victory to George, but I may need to update this later. I can't wait to see what I missed with those letters.

2009 tally (tentative): George 18, Listener 8. Current streak: George 1.

If my reports seem shorter lately it's because I've been hellaciously busy - so instead of a song or a dance, here's some media coverage of my summer shows. If anyone reading this is in Ohio (my apologies), come see me in a rare out-of-town non-standup show at Shadowbox next week.

Mountain Xpress article: they didn't interview me for this story, but I'm mentioned twice, which is rather amusing.

Asheville Citizen-Times article: In the paper version, it said the shows were going to be improv. I do improv shows, but this wasn't one of them.

Columbus Alive: They ignored our media packet and used an old picture, but I like the article.

The joys of being a largely self-promoted comedian and writer! Feel free to leave comments below and see you next week for a tackling of a motley collection.

Inability

Here we go with Intimacy - I haven't managed to finish a Bandmaster Listener before. First thing that hit me when I printed off the grid was "that's a lot of clues". The preamble sounded kind of gentle, 14 answers need modification, and with a very large number of clues, that shouldn't be too many. So most clues are normal and most answers are to be entered as normal.

And I stared at it

And I stared at it

And I stared at it

In my customary bar solve session, after a full hour I only had AGORA, CAPSULE, PERONIST, SHOELACE and ZOOTOMY. And a couple of Chambers and Bradfords sessions later, I'm still not much further along with the grid. And now I have clashes all over the place. Two of them seem to be N/S clashes, so maybe directions need to be changed in some of the words?

The shape of the grid may be a clue, it looks kind of like those truncated tennis courts they use for indoors singles matches, but I don't think that would be it. Maybe a scoreboard?

Well done Bandmaster, try as I might I could not get very far on this at all. I'm really curious to see what it was I missed, but I'm feeling pretty stupid right around now.

Victory to the Listener Crossword! 2009 tally: Listener 8, George 17. Current streak: Listener 1

Well, nothing says intimacy like remixes of Yoko Ono, so here's "Kiss Kiss Kiss" remixed by one of my favorite artists, Peaches (she can make Yoko listenable!).



Feel free to leave comments, criticisms, and advice on wordplay, and see you next week for shock and Hubris!

The Pachinko Parlor is open, win a pencil!

The inspiration for this blog was to be a little bit of a lowlife version of Listen with Others, which was started by Samuel, so he's a reader and occasional email correspondent, and there's a little pressure on when one of his Listeners appears. Fortunately, I've had a bit of luck and the last two (Motion, and The Cause of Much Pain) came out pretty nicely.

Hey, the grids got little circles in them. And it looks a bit like a pachinko machine. Could be some letter swirling going on here. Although that was in the back of my mind from the very start, I wasn't sure if it would be all that easy. Preamble sounds rather generous - two consecutive letters must be removed, leading to a rather long message. Long messages aren't my forte, but when you have to take two letters out of each clue then they're probably going to stick out.

And they do in 1 across - B,IA,S and we've got EN to start with and we're away.

The day this Listener came out was a rather happy one for me. I'm running a series of comedy shows over summer, and we serve beer at them because things are funnier with beer. Catatonia makes me hilarious. So the day this came out, my assigned task was to go meet with brewers and talk about sponsorships and beer options. Most of the time I had to wait to meet with the boss, so the only polite thing to do was to buy a beer, open up Playtime, and away we go.

First stop was The Wedge Brewery. They were having production limits and couldn't supply us, but I enjoyed a few of their Iron Rail IPA and got most of the top half of the grid filled. The clues are very well-written and fun, I like that most of them make sense when you remove the letters (I guess some abbreviations are necessary). I particularly liked clues where the last letter of one word and the first of another were removed, such as 15 across SHARPS FACE becoming SHARP ACE.

At French Broad Brewing (their Altbier wasn't on tap but 13 Rebels makes a fine replacement), I worked on the message to try to sort out the bottom half. It was those last 9 down clues that were stumping me, trying to get real words (if you can see on my scan, the only one I was sure of was 29 down - I started working out letter combinations on the second page of the printout which is where those clues were). Finally I had the last part of the message - WH EE LS HA LF TU RN. I still didn't have a solution to 27 across, 25 down, 28 down, 29 down 31 down or 26 down. Maybe Samuel listened to the argument that the easy clues are at the end most of the time and put the hard ones there?

Next stop was Green Man Brewing (who lack a website) - their production bar is called Dirty Jacks and is an interesting gathering spot for Asheville's soccer fans (is it true that Setanta sports shut down? the two TVs at Dirty Jacks have been set to Fox Sports Soccer and Setanta forever).

Did I mention that Asheville was also named Beer City USA recently?

Green Man were testing out a Pub Ale, so I gave it a go (they haven't quite worked out how to get a nice head on it, but kudos for trying). I had a small crowd gathered around me trying to figure out why on earth I was copying a crossword from one grid to another and ending up with something that looked like gibberish. I had almost all the grid done, and there it was - EUREKA, I'VE GOT IT, and ARCHIMEDES appear when the words form. The P falls through the wheels and ends up on the bottom (right side up, might have been an interesting twist to have one more wheel and have a P end up a D), and with P--NYA-R-P-, I was thinking PENNY ARCADE, but that's not two groups of five letters, so it's PENNY DROPS. I put in PENNY drops and went back to the first grid to figure out those last few clues (I hope I'm right).

Here's the end result



This was on the easier side, but I really liked re-copying the grid, and the way the messages appeared. Another fun day with beer and Samuel! Speaking of which, for a short time there was a drinking version of a Pachinko/Plinko machine that a friend got for me before they were forced to remove it from the shelves. You drop little counters into shot glasses. I tried using my old digital cam to make a movie of it - the sound doesn't work and the production values are shoddy, but in honor of this Listener, here's DRINKO!



Victory for George! 2009 tally - George 17, Listener 7. Current streak: George 3.

Feel free to leave comments, and see you next week for some Intimacy with Bandmaster (did he really mean that?).