‘Clean-Up Operation’ by Aragon
Posted by Encota on 24 Feb 2017
Only a brief post this week as I have had to reconstruct this one from other notes 😦
I think this is the first of Aragon’s Listener puzzles I have ever attempted – and (for me, at least) it was hard! Excellent!! The endgame took much longer than the clue-solving.
After solving all the clues and spotting that DARK BROWN was one option for the clashing cell-based knight’s moves from bottom to top, I was pretty confident that I was looking to modify seven letters using AINOPTT. The DOORSTEP was of course easy to find as the Workarea, but the perpetrator took me much longer [I even diverted for a while looking up the American footballer M.SHAWNE who, as he was nicknamed “Lights Out” (for knocking other players unconscious) might have been the cause of the doorstep mishap]. What would Merriman Shawne be doing on the doorstep, though?
Eventually I found POSTMAN, which made a lot more sense. Deciding that the letter ‘I’ and ‘DOT’ clash could be combined into a pling(!) to ~resolve the 8th clash and I was sorted. And this year I then decided to double-check that my highlighting was correct (as I have been guilty of a crayoning error in some recent puzzles) – and it seems to be!
Thanks to Aragon for a really tough puzzle!
Tim / Encota
P.S. And I get a week off from writing a Solver’s Blog next week 🙂
Alastair Cuthbertson said
But you have two to write for the following week L1916 and L4438!!
Encota said
That’s a good idea!