Listen With Others

We often say that we learn a lot from Listener crosswords. The other Numpty woke me this morning saying that he had understood the CRNT of the title. “Of course, those are the letters missing from CLARK KENT when you write KAL EL”. I had never heard of Clark Kent or Kal El until last night. In asking Twin for a setter’s blog for his puzzle, I commented that he must be of a very different generation from me and he responded, amusingly, that this was his revenge for all the poetry he had had to look up after solving Listener crosswords. Touché!

Yes, I had heard of Spiderman, Batman, Robin, Flash and even Iron Man but hadn’t a clue about their real names and we came to those clues in a rather backward way, having decided, with an almost full grid, that those super heroes had to fill our empty cells, but not understanding the clues at all, or why they were the disguised versions of five ‘two word answers’.

It took my dear ally Wiki to tell me that Bruce Wayne is Batman, Barry Allen is Flash, Tony Stark is Iron Man, Dick Grayson is Robin and Peter Parker Spiderman (how can I have wasted my youth reading all of Shakespeare’s plays and learning poetry off by heart when those gems awaited me?) However, we didn’t really need to work out those clues as Twin’s clues were generous and, with a couple of missing letters, we had the message HIGHLIGHT KAL EL IN RED AND THIRTY-THREE LETTERS IN YELLOW. That was when Wiki told me that Kal El was the name of Superman when he came from the Planet Krypton and was adopted and given the name of Clark Kent.

I am sure I am not the only solver who scoured the grid for ages looking for one of his names before realising that, if we highlighted all the letters of Kal El in red and the spaces in yellow, we produced that thing Superman has on his chest (please will some aficionado tell me what it’s called.) A most satisfactory penny-drop moment – so thank you, Twin, for the education and the puzzle.

Oh yes, Twin, of course, confirmed his membership of the Listner setters’ topers’ outfit. The very first clue we solved was ‘Dry resort of Cowes (4)’ which gave us SECO* with an extra W. Then we found ‘Volume from Napa wine scholars (8)’ What a fine clue! We decided volume in the Napa Valley can be a LITER and that Twin has resorted to that crossword chestnut ASTI to produce his extra S and the LITERATI of ‘scholars’ (obviously comic book scholars!) Cheers, Twin – see you with your Asti at the bar in Stratford?