Listen With Others

The junior 8 X 8 easy clues coffee break team shouldn’t, by rights, be here at all this week, as this was one of the dreaded number ones, but it didn’t look too threatening and there was the initial link with letters and the promise of some sort of verbal conclusion.

The mathematical half of the team soon sorted out that according to the lengths and natures of the clues 9, 7, 4 and 2 paired up with U, A, H and B respectively. Y and Z looked like being 0 and 25. With these in place, we were able to use number length and the concatenation to produce values for T, E and S. A lot of the solving was done by looking at the short entries and deducing the clue numbers from those. The clue B^(UR + Y) was the real break-through, and soon Mr Math had it all in place (with the odd characteristic red herring – a long hunt for C).

Naturally, we converted the entire diamond back into letters then sat and gazed at them – mystified. The Listener seems to have this effect on us but we are slowly learning that there must be something there to see. Henry emerged first and, of course, symmetrically opposite, Aaron. With those wonderful clues ‘New York Yankees’, ‘Di Maggio’,'Pitchers’ and ‘Boston Red Sox’, Babe Ruth had to be hiding somewhere, and, of course, he was. (Though we don’t know much about baseball and wonder about Joggers, Bathes, Quizzed, Hubbub and Jaded – were these just convenient words or do they mean something in the baseball world?)

The 8 X 8 red herring you ask? As usual there was one. The endplay should have been obvious. We had to find the number that would fill the central cell as the intersection of two relevant numbers. It looks so obvious now that a wise friend has explained about the significance of that event – the iconic moment in baseball when Hank Aaron equalled Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs, then, four days later, beat it with 715 home runs – so 1 had to go in the centre square. However, the Internet produced a batting average of 305 for Hank Aaron and that vertical number intersected with a diagonal that gave his total lifetime number of home runs – 755. I was blandly slotting a 5 into the centre square (until Erwinch’s warning rang in my ears – ‘If you have doubt about your answer to a Listener crossword, it is generally wrong!’ Hah!)

We were astounded to learn that not only had Brimstone fitted all that into his little figure but also that he had given at least a double significance to the title: BASE (2X7X17X3) gives 714 and JOG (11X5X13) gives Hank Aaron’s 715 home runs on that eventful day in 1935; apparently the victorious home runner jogs around the base and, of course BASE JOG almost paraphrases HOME RUN. This was magic!

Surely Brimstone’s masterpiece will figure among the favourites of the old hands. If the mathematical ones can be as rewarding as this one and the pentominoes three months ago, then perhaps we newcomers do not need to be so depressed about them.