Listen With Others

Some welcome pre-numerical fun from Twin! Regular readers of this blog will know that films and popular songs are not my strong point, but even I could see that Bob Dylan was deeply involved in this one. How clever to work in so very many song titles, and mostly very well indeed.

The art of solving here for me, though, was to defocus on the titles and as usueal treat their words as just so much fodder for the definition and wordplay. “Extra words to be removed” are one of the easier gimmicks to get to grips with, and it wasn’t long before words of the message were coming through, with DYLANS TENTH ALBUM leading to its title SELF PORTRAIT. Picking out the second half of the message took longer but eventually I had EVERY SECOND UNCHECKED CELL, which in due course produced CUT OUT GRID SUBMIT FRAME WITH YOUR X (X being SELF PORTRAIT as per the preamble).

One could reasonably just give up on the solving at that point and just get the crayons or camera out, but the blog deserves better, so I present both the filled grid and my apology for a self-portrait.

I wonder if the Rogues’ Gallery will be on display at the Dinner? I am tempted to add mine to my name-badge: after all we are bidden to wear something yellow (though in fact this may be a rare sighting of me in a tie rather than a dog-collar, as the “special” was too good an idea to lose out on.)

Oh yes – and the clues? A good set, where the only real difficvulty for me was in the bottom right corner where I persisted in trying to make the “Man of Constant” of 36a into RULER for quite a while. (EULER doesn’t appear in Chambers as far as I can see, which is a bit of a surprise.) Once the penny did drop (explaining the wordplay of RUE< round EL) then 32d “Dylan’s allowing Love Minus Zero/No Limit to finish immediately (4)” became T?EN not T?RN (which I couldn’t make work), with THEN defined by “immediately”. The wordplay was trickier but I went for THO for “allowing” minus its “zero” [“Love” being the extra word} followed by END for “limit” without its end.

Thanks Twin, and if there is Gallery remember to slip yours in too.