Listener No 4416: Up to Ten Items? by Wan
Posted by Dave Hennings on 7 October 2016
Wan’s last puzzle (no 4538, The Other Letter) required us to highlight six birds in the final grid to form a large BEE. It nearly tripped me up, but I got there in the end (as did a fellow blogger here who won a prize). On seeing the title here, I was reminded of Charybdis’s puzzle from 2013 (no 4628, Check This Out) with its “unexpected item in bagging area”.
There would be lots of food this week, with corrections to misprints arranged to form a dish, answers having a letter replaced to form more food, and the replacements forming yet another dish. An ingredient of the second dish and a relevant phrase would need to be identified before “check-out”.
I decided it was time for a cup of tea and some cake.
Next came a quick run through the clues to see how many I could reel off. On the across front, the number was hopelessly small. I remembered that Wan could be a tricky cluesmith. Luckily, the downs were a bit more forthcoming (courtesy of 3ac PEAT, one of my few acrosses), and TUNS, ESSOIN, APACE, ADRY and OPUS DEI were soon running down from the top row.
I was perplexed by 6dn Carmen Miranda was one time away, told to leave music in Romania (7), since the only thing I could remember about her was that she often wore a basket of fruit on her head. [It wasn’t till later than I found out that she was Brazilian and a SENHORA.]
Did I say that Wan was a tricky cluesmith? Here are a few:
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