Listen With Others

Although Schadenfreude has an Inquisitor puzzle every month or two, his Listener visits (once or twice a year) are something to look forwrad to. His last (4060, BAT) revealed his PIN number, and the one before (4034, Overhead Reduction) was based on the phrase “cutting out the middle man”. In Language Balancing, one letter or word has to be removed from each clue to spell out the definition of a phrase. Schadenfreude (as Oxymoron) has used this letter/word technique at least once before (EV 910, All the Initials), and I seem to remember it was great fun. Once the grid is complete, there will be some empty cells which will need filling.

I started off quickly, with the river EBRO at 7ac (Clive becoming Live in the clue), followed by STRESS at 16ac, with the letter M being dropped. Don’t ask me how I got COMIC at 22ac! Bunty for Bounty seemed the only possible word that could lose a letter, and the comic for girls was the obvious reference, confirmed by the wordplay IC after COM (for commerce). (I must stress that I was a Dandy and Beano boy!) Here we also had our first answer that doesn’t fill its length, and COSMIC seems to be very likely for its entry.

No more acrosses made themselves known, and I wondered whether I should give the clues more of a chance on my first pass through; normally it’s only 20 or 30 seconds. Anyway, next is 4dn SIRS, with the last R dropped from ruler, and then PATINA at 6dn (with my first word to be dropped, ME). Both these were just one short of their entry length, so it didn’t look as though there would be too much empty space at the end. A few more clues finally got solved, and most were in the top half of the grid, so that is where I concentrated my efforts over the next hour or so.

I decided to look more closely at the entries that were likely to have empty cells: SHAM.ERS/S.IRS, AR.KS and P.ATINA. SHAMMERS/SMIRS, ARAKS and PLATINA seemed to be the main (if not only) candidates, and reading left to right, I got MAL. MALTESE FALCON or MALTESE CROSS perhaps. I also had MECHANISM being spelt out by the dropped elements of the acrosses, and MOVEMENT in the downs. A quick check in Chambers revealed a Maltese cross to be (apart from the medal) the “mechanism providing intermittent frame-by-frame movement in a motion picture film projector”. It didn’t take much more studying of my grid at this point to realise that the letters added to the grid to make new words, when connected as required by the preamble, gave the shape of the medal itself. A very pleasing result.

Sadly, all this meant that the clues could be corrected and the rest of the puzzle (ie the bottom half) solved reasonably quickly … probably about 2½ hours all told. However, they were some good clues on the way, and HOWFFS transforming into SHOW-OFFS was a delight. All in all, a fine puzzle by one of the masters.

Not uncommonly, I also got nicely distracted when I solved 1ac ALDIS LAMP, with a nice little foray into the world of Monty Python. Remember The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights and Julius Caesar on an Aldis Lamp?!

Finally, here’s a picture I found of the mechanical type of Maltese Cross on Wikipedia.

Mr E’s sixth Listener, and his second this year. His last two have been his golf score card and one with the instruction to cut part of the diagram, cut it in half and send it with the rest of the grid. As a result of these, and others, Mr E is a setter who’s puzzles I really look forward to, although one day I’m sure he will trip me up.

The preamble has no reference to clashing letters, my current bête noir, but states that most clues contain ‘what seems to be an arbitrary irregularity’. Hmmm, that sounds ominous. I may be hankering after clashes before too long.

Unfortunately (and I mean that), the challenge from Mr E didn’t last too long, and the irregularities unfolded pretty quickly. 14ac Old slave’s tongue nearly cut (4) must be good old ESNE, which here looks as though it’s trying to be a hidden word. Then 18ac Each lecturer held in care of Queen’s prison (6) looks like it’s COOLER with OL in CO plus ER, although the first O seems a bit of a mystery. A bit of a gap now, with 3dn being the next clue solved, European Union holding up half of team’s money (6) and we have EU and ELE(ven), with Bradford revealing EKUELE. So how about one word in each clue being a letter of the alphabet: O for each in 18ac, E for tongue in 14ac and K for up in 3dn? It looks promising, but this is the Listener, and I’ve still got to work out how to use this information in conjunction with two unclued entries and three normal clues. I’m sure trouble lies ahead.

4dn looks like it’ll be an anagram of Belém teams I and another letter, but a bit of doodling fails to reveal an obvious word. 8dn’s obligation must be ONUS and 28dn is ZARF, both seemingliy normal clues. So I’m guessing that they contain different letters of the alphabet. A quick count of clues, and there are 29, so how about three normal ones and 26 where one word in each is replaced by a letter of the alphabet, each being used once. Finally in my first pass through the clues, I get 29dn which is HIVE, another normal clue.

So I have six clues solved and the beginnings of the theme sorted, but no idea what to do next … except get solving! Despite knowing what I know about one word in each clue representing a single letter, some of them are reluctant to be teased out, although EMBLEMATISED/S is a good start (with help from Bradfords which has EMBLEM under Represent). I must say, however, that I thought the device great fun; does anyone know if it has been used before?

The grid is completed in a little over three hours, with some excellent clues on the way, and some nice surface readings, especically the sailors eating their rather poorly prepared tiramisu!! A minor trap is 1ac which could be either AGEE or AJEE, but is necessarily the latter in order for each letter of the alphabet to be replaced once in the clues. The next thing I do is to list all the letters of the alphabet in order against the word in the clue that they replaced. It reads gobbledygook of course, and certainly doesn’t reveal any message. Next I take the three normally clued words and read out their equivalents:

Looking at the four remaining unclued entries, we have 11ac P.CKM.W (PICKMAW?), 33ac L.DYB.G (LADYBUG?), and probably ROSETTA and ILLUSTRATEDS. My guess is that the first two use the letters of the alphabet not used for the three clues already constructed.

Using our letter substitutions for P.CKM.W, we get African ? grew up getting ? area, with city (J) and dry (Q) fitting the gaps to give a clue to ROSETTA (ROSE + TT + A). L.DYB.G gives Our ? started rioting after ? publications, the final two letters (X and T) being used to fill the gaps with people and hurtful, thus giving ILLUSTRATEDS (US + anag STARTED after ILL).

So, another nice puzzle from Mr E, although not as hard as some of his other offerings, but nevertheless very entertaining. He is still high on my list of setters to look forward to.

This is Llig’s 13th Listener; let’s hope it’s not unlucky for him … or me! There are misprints in down clues and 13 clashing letters. I have to confess that clashes are not my favourite grid device as they tend to addle my brain far too much. Anyway, mustn’t grumble.

My quick run through the clues is quite successful with over a dozen solved in about twenty minutes. Unfortunately, there isn’t a single clash to be seen. Luckily, SPACEMEN and GLAD in the first column should enable a few more answers to be entered here, and some (hopefully not all) will be clashes, won’t they? And so some more answers go in on the left of the grid … but still no clashes, although the Q in 2dn looks probable.

Meanwhile, the correct letters of misprintes in the down clues are far too sporadic to give anything but a small hint, starting as they do T.EL…E.. which will probably be THE LETTERS.

25ac finally resolves itself as COLLISION (COLL + IS + ON) and the central I clashes with the R of SUPERNOVA. Soon after this I get GNOMON crossing GONZO, and suss the method of resolving the clashes … wow! this is really early for me. I have I/R, C/Q and M/Z and it seems that the letters in one half of the alphabet would take preference; from the title, this is likely to be the letters N-Z.

Not that that helps much at all in completing the grid from this point on. Not to mention that some of the clues are, in my opinion, quite tricky, albeit totally fair! For example:

Finally I have a completed grid, with 13 first/second half of the alphabet clashes. The message spelt out by the correct forms of misprints gives THE LETTERS A TO M ARE ERASED. I have a moment of self-doubt as I consider that the letters A-M in the entire grid should be erased. After all that would, in a somewhat sledge-hammer way, resolve the clashing letters. However, if this were the case, I think the message would read ALL LETTERS A TO M ARE ERASED or EVERY OCCURENCE OF THE LETTERS A TO M IN THE FINAL GRID ARE ERASED. No … it is just the clashes that need considering, giving the final grid below.

This puzzle proved a bit of a struggle, but was very enjoyable nonetheless. Thanks to Llig for that. As I double-check my solution, I wonder if Llig is Welsh!