L4627: ‘Flappy’ by Shark
Posted by Encota on 23 Oct 2020
OMG!
Not only did it have left-right symmetry for highlighted cells, it also featured (at least?) nine different butterflies, eight of which could be described by having a butterfly in one’s stomach!
And not only that, it featured a pretty accurate diagram of a butterfly to be traced out by us the solvers – again (of course – it is Shark) symmetrically placed.
And not only that, it also chose to include (I think I have got this right), in the hidden letters to be extracted, four butterflies in the four stomachs of a ruminant in order – RUMEN, KINGSHOOD, BIBLE and MAW.
And not only that, the extracted letters came from the centre of words with an odd-number of letters that still remained words after the central letter of each was removed!! An astounding added layer of neatness from the setter.
I could try and claim that the fact that letters within the wings of the drawn butterfly might spell out “A rapid, beautiful, isolated comma” was done purposefully – but that might be stretching things somewhat. At least it gives me a (very feeble) excuse to quote the end of a poem by Robert Graves, woefully out of context:
So now, my solemn ones, leaving the rest unsaid,
Rising in air as on a gander’s wing
At a careless comma,
Beautiful stuff!
Tim / Encota
Listen With Others 
Andy Mullins said
I always dread puzzles which require the drawing of curved lines as I always make a mess of them – so I’m chuffed to bits to have won one of the prizes for this one. As with all Shark puzzles I’m astonished with how much thematic material he manages to include.
Alan B said
It seems a while a go now, but I remember this puzzle (not the first by Shark that I have solved) for its clues rather than its theme. I agree they were quite tough, but it’s the quality that I remember most.
I solved all the clues, got all the extra words and (obviously) all the letters that came out of them. I’m chuffed for a different and more mundane reason than Andy’s (above), and that is I got everything without any help from the thematic material, none of which I found!
I put this one down when I didn’t know what to do with the bottom row and couldn’t make much sense of the string of letters that came out of the clues. I do as little grid-gazing as possible, which may be why I missed some obvious cues.
I’m hugely impressed (after the fact) with how well the theme was executed, and also with something else I didn’t spot, namely, the fact that on removing the middle letters we were left with real words. (That’s something I would normally notice if I’m awake.)
As always, I enjoyed the blogs from the regular contributors.