Listen With Others

Yes: another new setter (or partnership) to wrestle with. What a feast we are having.

The preamble wasn’t giving much away directly, but we were clearly going to be looking for a SUBJECT, probably a person rather than a topic, and three of their CONCEPTS to highlight. Six letters from clashes would reveal the subject (I was a bit slow in realising that that probably meant their name) and when joined they would make a thematic shape (something geometrical?).

Further lines joining those six squares would cross at other clashes and illustrate the “central” concept (I didn’t understand what that meant until later). Corrections to misprints in 10 definitions would give a further hint to the subject. And oh yes, four symmetrically placed entries had to be anagrammed. The setter had been VERY busy.

The way in for me was discovering quite quickly that 1d was one of four entries that needed anagramming. The answer INTEGRAL fitted with crossing entries when transformed into TRIANGLE. That was sounding usefully geometrical! Pascal has one of those named after him (in Chambers). 25d is symmetrically placed with WORDAGES emerging as its answer and DOWAGERS as its transformation. WAGERS – didn’t Pascal also have one of those named after him that I studied at college? That was looking like a Subject and two Concepts. What and where was the third? A bit of research revealed Pascal also had a THEOREM, and there it was in the centre of the puzzle (so that’s what “central” concept meant), unambiguously filling the central cell.

After a bit of grunt completing the grid I was confident I had the misprint message MATHS HOMME which is rather Frenglish but fitted Pascal fine, and eight clashes. By now I had looked up Pascal’s theorem and the associated diagram was – lo and behold – the same as the pattern of the clashes. Only then did I notice that the elements of the clashes needed to leave real words spelled out PASCAL while the unused ones added BLAISE for good measure. VERY neat, Mr Snaky. That almost makes you Mr SNEAKY. The cells were duly joined to make a thematic shape – but should that be the hexagon or an ellipse in which it inscribed? The theorem states that if a hexagon is inscribed in a conic, then the three points at which the pairs of opposite sides meet, lie on a straight line. First I went for the hexagon, then a conic (ellipse), but we shall see.

The final step was to look at the points of intersection of the interior lines, and three of them spelled out GOD, the topic of Pascal’s Wager, and forming the Pascal Line of the Theorem (red circles added for clarity). (The preamble wording says “the clashes at their intersections” spell the topic out, but there isn’t a clash in the central cell which is a bit worrying. There are two clashing squares involved, one with G/S in it and one with B/D, but I can’t make anything out of G+S+B+D and can’t see another option so am having to stay with GOD, as a Bishop probably should… Or am I muddling or overthinking this?).

All in all a very rich puzzle and a remarkable first outing. I hope there is another under construction and look forward to it slightly nervously as Mr Sn(e)aky certainly has the potential to get us up a gum tree.

Pressure Points is aptly named, as I was determined to finish it before leaving for holiday the next day. Hence I wrote this blog at midnight just before the deadline for posting (then failed to schedule it on LWO, hence it’s a bit late appearing).

So much going on in this thematically rich puzzle! At least 3 different entry methods; 10 misprints to find and interpret; 8 clashes to arrange (oh no, 2 are ambiguous); 4 answers to anagram (or are they clashes); 3 words to highlight and then, as I crawl towards the finish line – a dreaded drawing challenge! Freehand ellipses are not my strong point.

At least the pressure points line up nicely. Once I realised it wasn’t (Sylvia) PLATH’S HOME and I wouldn’t need to draw primroses or hills, MATHS HOMME, along with the clashes, led me in reasonable  time to Pascal (Laplace was a close 2^nd).

Two clues were especially tricky:

43ac Nice and racy frolicking of hedonistic philosophy – the anagram was obvious but Bradford’s unhelpfully gave CYRENIAC

41dn Northern holiday retreat with other king – surely a WAKE?

A complex, interesting puzzle, challenging & rewarding. Thanks Mr S

Aedites has served us up this time with the archetypal PDM puzzle. (Penny Drop Moment for the unitiated.) Unsignalled clashes all over the place seemed to be making the solve impossible, even though the clues were fair and not at all hard.

So after a very quick partial fill, I put my staring specs on – and as is always a good idea, looked at the preamble again. What was that sneaky little word “FULLY capitalised” doing there?

By that point I had also decided that whatever the word-play of 1d. NOUAKCHOTT had to be the answer. I decided to look it up more fully, and – yes! – it was the CAPITAL of Mauritania (which fitted the word-play of the clue nicely). So we are being asked to substitute the names of the countries given by the wordplay of the thematic clues with the names of their capitals. After that is was very plain sailing, and the biggest challenge in fact, given my handwriting (bad handwriting was probably the only reason I gained a doctorate…) was writing clearly enough in lower case. Good luck, Mr Green!

Another feature of the puzzle is the way that it all hangs on our clever setter having had the idea and presumably found a useful list of countries and their capitals that he could sort through easily enough to produce a master-list of matching-length possibilities, which he could then play with by hand or put into a dictionary file for one of the grid-building programmes to have a go at. It’s one of the ways setting gets to us, as our brains become wired to spot word-shapes and puzzle possibilities, and if we’re lucky stores them away for future reference. My memory leaks too much for that these days, but I have a Little List on the computer…

Thanks Aedites for a well-constructed puzzle with a neat twist, and for the handwriting exercise too.

PS Another slip here (and I didn’t even attempt 4863) so no Hosannas and I won’t be troubling the engraver on the silverware any time soon. If you look very carefully you can see my pencil A under the rogue second N of SANNA: inking in too quickly and not checking. Apart from my usual tendency to just want to get things done you may correctly deduce that my other vocation has been rather full-on recently.