Listener No4341 What's On By Nod

Ruthrobin | 17:57 Fri 10th Apr 2015 | Crosswords

48 Answers

This has produced a giggle but it was a tough solve until the message appeared and we are going to have to be very careful with our checking of our final grid. What an amusing and original idea. Many thanks, Nod!

Take A Break Issue 15

Listener 4341: What's On? By Nod

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s_pugh

Got lucky with the theme after cold solving barely a dozen clues. Fantastic construction but frankly I found the subsequent completion a tedious slog. Over the line at last but can't say I enjoyed it by the end. Thanks Nod.

perseverer

Philoctetes - not sure what you think is wrong with the term used in the hint, and not easy to clarify without giving it away, though it does seem to me to be more of a pretty clear instruction rather than a hint!

jim360

I think the term used is correct, so not sure what Philoctetes means.

Philoctetes

As I said, about as far from my expertise as possible, but I thought the term referred to the internal properties of the various doodahs (as shown in the BRB definition), and not the appearance in the hit parade.

jim360

Ah, I see what you mean -- however, the usage in the puzzle still entirely correct because this particular "internal property of the doodahs" exactly coincides with the order of their "appearance on the hit parade".

The BRB is either out-of-date, misleading or just plain wrong on certain technical matters like this one.

Contrarian

Not my area, either, but I think that the internal properties of the doodahs does determine their position in the 'hit parade'.

icynorth

The hardest this year to complete, I would say. Some very fiendish clues and lots of new obscure words learned.

I'm happy to have defeated it, but I didn't really enjoy this one as much as the others.

qwerty99

Hello all. I haven't posted on here for ages, but I still log in to see how others have got on with a particular Listener.
I found this a hard slog before the penny-drop, and a hard slog thereafter. But got there in the end.
What I would really like to ask is: I have just bought an ipad, I can't do the Times crosswords on it...no keyboard. Am I just being really thick? I would be so grateful for any advice

jim360

You might be able to buy a keyboard for the iPad. Failing that I would have thought that tapping into one of the cells would make a keyboard appear on the screen. Don't own one myself so don't know, but any app worth its salt should have that feature.

qwerty99

Thanks Jim, the cells illuminate, but no keyboard appears. All fine on the laptop, but the ipad won't play. I only bought the bloody thing so that I could do the Times crosswords when I'm away from home!

u10

The Times crosswords can be solved on the iPad. Go to the "Mind Games" section of the paper in Newsstand. Tap contents at the bottom of the screen and scroll along to the puzzles. Tap a clue on the right of the screen and the keyboard springs into life at the bottom! I know it works because I have just finished Saturday 26070.

qwerty99

Thank you, u10. I haven't got there yet, but I'm pleased to know that the crosswords can be accessed via the ipad. I've always done the crosswords in the print version (which I much prefer) but I'll be working abroad a lot more now, and I need my crossword fix in the morning!

PS Re Listener 4341, respect to the setter, but I found the spadework involved took far too much of my time. Prefer pithier, wittier puzzles

Scorpius

Jim360 and Philoctetes pretty well sum up my feelings about the puzzle, particularly with regard to effective checking. I didn't star until mid-day yesterday and was plugging away at it off and on until midnight. Getting the last eight clues t took me as long as the rest put together. The first 20 cold solves took me about 90 minutes, at which point I had enough of the message to guess the entry method. After that, unlike most puzzles that get easier as the grid fills, this one got progressively harder.

I don't know whether I've parsed the clue wrongly but 24a appears to take the form, wordplay from definition, whereas the Ximenean convention (if not rule) is definition from wordplay. I've seen this on the odd occasion in the Times daily cryptic, but the only time I've risked it myself in a barred puzzle it was rejected by the editors (not unexpectedly).

Another issue is a more general one. In a number of Listeners over the past year (including the current one) French words have not been flagged as such (I'm not talking about ordinary imports that are now part of our everyday English vocabulary). It seems illogical that Scottish words must be indicated but French words need not. Can anyone throw light on this apparent inconsistency.

EAChaplin

I agree that the logical position to take would be that foreign words should be indicated in the same way as those by Spenser, Shakespeare, Scottish etc.
A further point is that some foreign words have accents (including one this week) which don't show up in the usual search patterns in Chambers. I'm referring to the (now old) CD version.

petefoxes

AngryUncle, thanks for the OT plug - I will give that a go.

Not sure when I will realistically get time to slog through the last clues in this week's, since as others have said it doesn't really get easier with each entry. But it's an impressive piece of construction, for sure.

contendo

The rest of life keeps intervening, but I keep coming back to this and, my goodness it's an uphill struggle. I still have 9 answers to get. I'm astonished by the ingenuity of the construction. Is it possible that Nod has a computer problem to sort out the entries? If not I just don't see how he or she could do it.