Listen With Others

Well, I’ve been in a miserable mood ever since I posted my solution to this numerical puzzle. I am absolutely convinced that I have failed, and have told myself that I will need to see it in The Times on Saturday to experience the full horror of what is possibly my first fail of the year. I say ‘possibly’ because I haven’t checked any of my solutions since the last numerical, Oyler’s Pentomino Factory back in February. It was then that I adopted my ‘delayed checking’ method. I reckon that if I discover that I made a mistake six weeks back, then at least there’s a chance that I’ve got five successes in the bag for my next run of correct solutions. I remember one puzzle last year (3974, Lots by Viking) where I realised as soon as I got back from the postbox that I had forgotten to highlight Marcel Proust! That was truly depressing. Damn these annual stats!

So, I’m afraid that I will not be reading any of the blogs here (except this one!), or posts on the Crossword Centre message board, until tomorrow. It has also meant that uploading Shirley’s blog for her, getting a copy of Erwin’s post and seeing that Robert Bridge had submitted one as well, all needed to be done blindfold. No … don’t ask why I’m doing it like this, I just am!

So how did I get to this sorry state of affairs? Well, entering all the numbers into the grid went fairly well. I’ll leave it to the likes of Erwin to give a full breakdown, but my sequence of solving went something like this: X and Y are 0 and 25 (no entry or clue number); A, B, H and U are 2, 4, 7 and 9 (entries and clues both across and down); then HUH, HUBBUB, MAYS and AS were narrowed down based on length, and the rest of the answers were solved in fairly quick succession. I don’t know how long, but probably 2½ hours.

I then transcribed all the numbers into letters on a new grid, and it wasn’t long before BABE RUTH and HENRY (Hank) AARON popped into view. It had been evident all along that baseball was the theme, Base Jog being translated into Home Run. A quick Google, and it was clear that Hank Aaron’s surpassing of Babe Ruth’s record of 714 career home runs was the event being commemorated. So the central square was a 1, making 714 running through it NW-SE. And 715 going SW-NE, this being the new record. But what did the preamble mean by the title being doubly significant? I could only see the obvious meaning of it.

That was when all the agonising started. It wasn’t made any easier by the fact that Hank Aaron’s career home run record was 755. So was his 755 required to cross in the SW-NE direction. This would have 714 crossing 755, and 15 in the puzzle’s code was D … the abbreviation for diamond, and the grid was in the shape of a baseball diamond! I kept trying to make the title into something else that was relevant. Encode BASE JOG and you get 27173 11513 or 21/1/73 and 11/5/13; that didn’t relate to any appropriate date. And then there was 27/?/55 and 22/?/51 crossing the central square; again nothing seemed to gel.

Base is a common crossword clue for e, and perhaps Jog could mean PS, which would give EPs, or records and that would lead to 714/755. But no way could Jog be memo. And BASE couldn’t be anagrammed into anything, and by then I was running out of ideas.

In the end, I entered 714/715, with a great feeling that it just wasn’t right. What’s more, having bared my soul here on the trials and tribulations that the final step caused me, I will be mortified if the answer can be explained in a way that a 5-year old would have got. I know that my brain is beginning to miss things that I would have found easy a few years back, and perhaps this is one of those occasions. At least I didn’t, as I feared, stumble across the correct solution as I wrote this blog.

So, congratulations to all of you who got it without a moment’s thought. I’m off to check the 12 puzzles since Pentominoes to see if I’ve already messed up an all-correct run for this year.

Dave.

Saturday Update

Well, I’ve checked it and I’m right! Hurrah! A bit dismayed that having encoded BASE and JOG I didn’t multiply or add or divide or subtract the digits: add to list of things to try for numericals in future.

Ruth Aaron pairs, eh, who’d have thought it!! Great puzzle.