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Venation by The Ace of Hearts

Posted by shirleycurran on 8 Jul 2022

Now why didn’t I instantly look up that title? It would have taken me to ‘Hunting’ (or some obscure medical term about blood vessels). In the past The Ace of Hearts has given us a circle of wagons, a circle of friends and a circular building so this was likely to be some sort of encircling of animals, as it proved to be – but which of us chats of TINCHELs at the dinner table? It was certainly a new word for us. ‘A CIRCLE OF MEN WHO CLOSE IN ROUND A HERD OF DEER’.

Those ‘wordplay only’ clues were tough and it was only after we had the Chambers definition of a TINCHEL that we realised that GINGERBREAD, ARTILLERY, FRONTIERS, NEWSPAPER, LINES, GRAND-OLD, FREED, CATTLE, and WORKING could all be followed by MAN, so we had a circle of men, and, of course, the poor deer were stranded in the middle, the HART, the STAG and all the rest of the DEER.

These clues were challenging but rewarding to solve but with those extra letters coming out of the definition or the wordplay, we were fairly flummoxed at first. Take ‘Scours remains filled with earth’; I was vainly looking for something like PURGES (for Scours) until we knew the C had to come out, when REESTS gave us ‘Sours’; and TINKLE earned a smile (for ‘go’) once we were looking for a word for ‘reek’ without its opening instead of ‘creek’ (so [S]TINK) followed by ‘almost let’, = LE[T].

Yes, I did ‘scour’ the grid for the alcoholic references or even the little hare, though he would have scarpered with that mob of ferocious hunters surrounding the animals. Rather a TT grid, but thanks and cheers anyway, to the Ace of Hearts.

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L4616: ‘Disco Lovers’ by The Ace of Hearts

Posted by Encota on 7 Aug 2020

I found this puzzle a slightly strange one, in that I had pretty much all the endgame sorted with only a third of the clues solved.

The five perimeter clues were generous in their wordplay, resulting in five synonyms for the word ‘friend’:

  • ASSOCIATE
  • CATER-COUSIN
  • BELAMY
  • COMRADE, and
  • MATE

The spacing given in Ring 3 was very helpful, where I think I had .OGAN fairly early on as the character’s surname, and a message that looked much like BLESS ME FATHER FOR I HAVE SINNED. A quick bit of help from Google and this gave me MAEVE BINCHY for the central Author and BENNY HOGAN the Character. I liked the longer version of the quote, which was hiding a letter at a time in the Clues and which, according to quotes.net, reads:

Bernadette ‘Benny’ Hogan:
Have… have you ever gone all the way with a girl?
Jack Foley:
No. Not quite.
Bernadette ‘Benny’ Hogan:
Would you like to?
Jack Foley:
Now?
Bernadette ‘Benny’ Hogan:
No. It wasn’t an invitation – just a request for information.

Having got these thematic bits sorted this early (to be honest it took until near the end to confirm where the last pair of consonants from the Author’s name fitted in the asterisked cells), it still took until late Friday evening to polish it off!

And the Title? Are we to read that as Disc O’ Lovers? That’d seem a reasonable interpretation given the Dublin setting. Maybe?

Cheers all,

Tim / Encota

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L4537: ‘Rollerball’ by the Ace of Hearts

Posted by Encota on 1 Feb 2019

It was the first – that I can remember – of  ‘that‘ cinema-trailer-voice:
“In the not too distant future, wars will no longer exist.
But there will be … ROLLERBALL”
OK, so I’m showing my age, listening as a kid to early commercial radio in the UK.  But how might all that have any relevance to this week’s puzzle?

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I almost got caught out by Radial 24:

  • Decorates circle in umbelliferous plants (8)

Initially there seemed to be too many of said plants from which to choose.  However, given it appeared to need six letters and be a plural, then ANISES seemed a good bet.  This is where I nearly went astray.  I imagined ‘decorates’ to be ANODISES with one letter missing for the Grid Entry.  But the gaps made it look like AODISES was to be the entry, so I put that in.  It was only when double-checking the defining phrase of AN ENCLOSURE TO DRIVE HUNTED ANIMALS INTO, that I realised that it was the D that needed to be missing.  And only then did I realise that the word defined by ‘decorates’ was ADONISES, with the D missing in the entry.  That was a close shave, especially so early in 2019!

As someone who hasn’t been solving thematics for long, and there not being that many circular thematics amongst those, I did wonder initially if a solver could assume that ring-based answers are to be entered clockwise unless stated otherwise?  I began by assuming not, so may have been unnecessarily complicating things.  Luckily a few checked cells showed that – in this case at least – these were to be entered clockwise, so things got rolling again.

I particularly liked the very first clue:

  • Bit into chocolate bar, almost losing tip of tooth (7)

… which I parsed as BIT inside KI(t)KA(t), with a separate instruction to delete each of the  Ts – very neat!

And the Title?  ROLLER=Wagon plus BALL=Circle, with the film title bluff.  Maybe?

Tim / Encota

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Listener No 4537: Rollerball by The Ace of Hearts

Posted by Dave Hennings on 1 Feb 2019

This week we had TAoH’s third Listener following on from the fifth wheel last year and the Blarney Stone the year before. Here we had a circular grid, not that it should have been a surprise since the previous two were as well. (Confession is good for the soul — circulars aren’t my favourite.)

However, there was a lot going on, so it looked as though it would be interesting. Indeed it was. Most radials would go inwards, but seven (thanks for the info) would go outwards. Unfortunately, they all needed to lose a letter before entry and these letters would spell out a definition.

The perimeter and Ring 5 were clued by wordplay only, but TaoH was kind in making most of them very straightforward. Although I quickly slotted CAISSON, GONDOLA and TELEGA into the perimeter, I failed to see what they might have in common. The first two had a watery connection and the last was a Russian wagon. A quick check in the BRB showed that they were all types of wagon.

Fiddling around with the Radial clues took a fair amount of time, even though some were helpful. Sometime later and I had a few of the letters in Ring 5 such that I could solve its outstanding clues. Thus the definition was A MOVABLE PIECE OF FURNITURE WITH SHELVES. More failure to understand on my part, and it was some time before I looked up wagon in Chambers.

The remaining two perimeter wagons were DEMOCRAT and KIBITKA. The latter was clued as Bit into chocolate bar, almost losing tip of tooth, leading to BIT in KITKA(t) – T. KitKat in the UK was originally made by Rowntree’s. That company was bought out by Nestlé which subsequently closed it. Typical!! In the USA it is made under licence by Reese, a division of the Hershey Company — so heaven knows what it tastes like!

Finally, we had the letters dropped from the Radials giving An enclosure to drive hunted animals into and CORRAL soon went into the centre of the grid.

Thanks for an entertaining puzzle, Ace. (Confession number 2 — I hate westerns.)
 

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Rollerball by The Ace of Hearts

Posted by shirleycurran on 1 Feb 2019

We don’t see many circular grids these days and this was a rather unusual one with seven-letter radials and just two rings of clued words which were irregularly broken into words. Of course ‘Rollerball’ deceptively led us to suspect that we were going to construct a roulette wheel but our earliest solves of those perimeter clues (GONDOLA and PIECE) put paid to that assumption.

I hunted for the alcoholic clues and they produced a foregone conclusion: ‘Drunks using ride sharing app for old ruins (8)’. That gavels SOTS putting UBER in the place of O(ld) so SUBVERTS. ‘Waving luncheon voucher pours excess (8)’ {LV POURS}* gave us OVERPLUS so The Ace of Hearts really needs to control the intake – but ‘Cheers’ anyway.

Solving was initially a struggle as, until we had the perimeter and the fifth ring, we were unable to enter our radial solutions of which we had a dozen before a grid fill could be undertaken. However, once the grid fill was started, the procedure became easier and soon we realised that DEMOCRAT, KIBITKA, CAISSON,GONDOLA and TELEGA had a feature in common; they were all types wagon.

So what was a circle of wagons doing round the edge of that circular grid? As we solved, those six letters, CORRAL, in the asterisked cells appeared and what does Chambers tell us? It’s AN ENCLOSURE TO DRIVE ANIMALS INTO (and ‘A defensive ring of wagons’) so we had the message that was being produced by the ‘letter … omitted wherever it occurs’. More puzzling was the definition ‘A MOVABLE PIECE OF FURNITURE WITH SHELVES’ that appeared in the ring five in from the perimeter but surprisingly, the Big Red Book told us that that is a definition of a wagon. So it allotted together rather nicely. Thanks to The Ace of Hearts.

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