Listen With Others

… aka ‘Catechism’ by tnap 🙂

First of all I’d like to thank tnap for an excellently-themed puzzle.

I have to say I was baffled for a long time with this one.  I had about three-quarters of the grid filled; I could see that the ‘former giant’ at 41ac had to be ETEN from the wordplay, that 12d was STEAM UP, & that 6ac’s SHELL-LIKE had two too many letters for the grid but could not get what I had to do at all!  When I finally solved ANTON at 15ac [I am assuming this is parsed as (w)ANTON ?] and the checkers suggested it might be ANTTTON then I did think of Lorenz transformations and time dilation.  Length contraction soon followed.

As my German doesn’t stretch much beyond “Noch ein bier, bitte”, I had no knowledge of the hidden phrase in German but there were enough ISTs and DERs appearing for it likely to be that language.  Eventually, in near-desperation(!), I resorted to a German wordsearch-solver to look up R.F..N..RT and RAFFINIERT appeared; it was then only a short hop to finding the whole phrase, attributed to Einstein.  Phew!

I had: RAFFINIERT IST DER HERRGOTT ABER BOSHAFT IST ER NICHT, and my grid looked like:

Some of the clues were tough work (but fair), given there was no hint as to where the misprint was to be found. I loved the two PDMs, especially the MC² being replaced by E!  And the Title: is this ATHEISE once the above transformation is applied?  I think so!

* Finally, I did like the Daily Mail headline hidden as a jumble of the above phrase from Einstein, namely:

“TERRORIST THREAT AFFECTING FINE BRITISH SHORTBREAD”

It has just the right feel of indignation to it, don’t you think?  And I’m sure it wouldn’t look out of place if created by the online Daily Mail headline generator (Yes, Google it if you don’t believe me!)

Cheers all,

Tim / Encota