Scratchings

One of the things most amazing to me about the Listener puzzle is that, even though prizes go only to the first three entries drawn at random each week, every entry is checked, and a full record is kept of how each individual solver does through the year. Given that there must be a thousand or so people who submit at least one entry during the year, this seems both wonderful and awfully obsessive-compulsive to me. And a tribute to the cult-like following that the Listener crossword has acquired over the decades.

Around the end of each March, you can send in a self-addressed stamped envelope and receive a ten-page report about the previous year’s puzzles. This report lists:

• all the year’s puzzles, identified by number, name, and constructor, along with statistics about how many correct and incorrect entries were received for each and how many of those entries were from new solvers
• a list of the most common errors made in each puzzle
• the top 200 or so solvers, along with the numbers of the puzzles (if any) they got wrong
• a table summarizing how many of the people who sent in x errors during the year got y correct (for example, of the seven people who sent in exactly 27 entries during the year, one got 26 correct and two each got 25, 21, and 20 correct, and what possible interest there is in these data I cannot fathom)
• a report of the annual dinner that is held for the constructors (in British terminology, setters) of that year’s Listener puzzles, which many solvers also attend

I made the list of top solvers this year (yay!), getting only three puzzles wrong out of the year’s 53. The first page of the list is taken up by those who made none, one, or two errors, so my three are enough that I only make it to the second page. And not even near the top of the second page! Those who miss the same number of puzzles are further ranked by when they made their errors (the longer your string of correct solutions from the beginning of the year, the better), and as I made my first error on the second puzzle of the year, I am near the bottom of those who made three errors. I haven’t yet counted exactly where I am in the rankings, but it looks like somewhere around 70th or 75th. Not a dazzling performance, but not too bad.

I knew about one of the errors already — while looking at the published solution to one of the puzzles, I spotted that I’d put in the wrong spelling of an archaic word that has several spellings given in Chambers Dictionary, apparently having never taken the time to go back and double-check that my chosen spelling fit the wordplay in the clue (it didn’t quite). As this puzzle was late in the year, my excuse is that I was preoccupied with finishing The Manga Flute. But the other two errors were a surprise, both of them looking like silly copying errors I must have made when preparing my entry.

Into the stapled packet of photocopied pages is folded a single, additional, loose piece of paper. It is a list of the exact errors that you personally made during the year — yes, it really tells you that you got 18 Across wrong on this puzzle and 25 Down wrong on that puzzle and so on. Do you not find it both wonderful and freaky that, in this day and age, there is somebody in England, who cannot possibly be getting more than a modest stipend at best for all this, who week in and week out is actually keeping track of these things for a thousand or so solvers, and will send you your individual stats for the year just for a self-addressed stamped envelope? Overseas solvers like me don’t even have to send stamps, just the self-addressed envelope.

But even this is not the part I find most wonderful and freakiest of all. It is that this list of your own personal errors is neatly written out — yes, I mean by hand — on a sheet of lined paper, the three-hole looseleaf notebook kind. Amazing. Just amazing.

I finished this Friday’s Listener crossword, “Ballad” by Elgin, late Saturday morning after a longer struggle than usual.

It’s a tough puzzle. The across clues aren’t given entry numbers for the grid, and they are listed not in order of their appearance but in the alphabetical order of their answers. Now, this actually helps a lot in solving them: You can figure that a clue, say, about a third of the way down in the list probably starts with a letter around F or G or H. Then as you find some of the answers, that helps narrow down the possibilities for the rest; if one answer is GENERAL and the answer two clues down is GOLDFISH, then you know that the answer to the clue between them starts with a G and the second letter is somewhere between E and O, which probably means GE, GH, GI, GL, GN, or GO. So even without any help from crossing letters, the possibilities for the across clues narrow pretty rapidly, and it wasn’t all that long before I had close to half of them solved.

However, you could solve all the across answers and still not know where to put any of them in the grid. For that, you need help from some down clues. Down clues are ordered normally, so once you solve one you know exactly where in the grid to place it. But you don’t get any help from crossing letters till you’ve placed a few of the across answers, and you can’t place any of the across answers till you’ve solved some of the down answers, so you have to solve at least a handful of the down clues without any help from crossing letters before you can start filling in any of the grid.

But on top of that, the across answers may be entered either left to right or right to left, and there are no vertical bars to show where across entries begin and end, so that has to be deduced as you go along, and there are additional strange things in the instructions about a missing column in the grid and two across answers that have to be entered overlapping and some unknown number of across answers that aren’t entered in the grid at all, and these things also have to be figured out as you go along.

And on top of that, the clues are a lot harder than usual, though inventive and fair, I’d say. So all in all I found filling the grid to be a slo-o-o-o-ow, gradual process.

I didn’t figure out what the theme of the puzzle was until I’d just about finished filling the grid. But it’s a delightful surprise to discover the theme and see how it is worked into the puzzle in several amusing ways, justifying all the odd things about the puzzle. Everything comes together very satisfyingly. All in all, a tough puzzle, but worth the struggle.

There are a few clues where I know from the completed grid that I must have the right answer but I still don’t understand the wordplay. For another clue, I think I understand the wordplay but the clue seems to involve an alternative spelling that, while perfectly familiar to me, is nevertheless not given in Chambers Dictionary, or at least in the iPhone version (the only version that I have the latest edition in). That seems like it shouldn’t be kosher according to the rules of the Listener puzzle, but I’m not really sure.

This morning I finally finished this week’s Listener puzzle, “Sinecure” by Franc. Not a very hard puzzle at all, really, but I got a late start on Friday and then was busy with other things much of Saturday. Still, by bedtime on Saturday I’d solved everything except for unscrambling the ten-letter theme word. Turned out I didn’t have quite the right combination of letters. This morning I spotted where I’d made an unjustified assumption and got the right combination and found the word. I’d never heard of it, but it was a nice surprise to discover that it meant exactly what I’d suspected it had to mean, given the rest of the puzzle. (Turned out that it was a familiar word to Dave, though.)

Woo hoo! My Chambers Dictionary iPhone app is updating free to the new 12th edition! I wasn’t expecting that — if you buy a print dictionary, you don’t get a free update to a new edition, so I was just figuring they’d bring out a separate app for the new edition.

As I cannot even remotely afford to buy the new edition at the moment, and as I don’t seem destined ever to have any of my entries drawn in the weekly competition for the Listener crossword, this is very welcome. Thank you, Chambers people!

I don’t have much time today for working on the Listener puzzle, as I’ve got to finish laying out the libretto for Manga Flute so I have printed copies for sale on Sunday, and then there’s the final dress rehearsal tonight. But I took the puzzle (“O Gather Twelve”) with me on a break from work, and in five minutes had solved one clue and figured out from its answer what the theme of the puzzle is. So it doesn’t look like it’ll be a tough one this week.

That’s good for me, as I may not have much time for it till after the show Sunday, and I try to get my entry in Monday’s mail if I can so it has a decent chance of reaching England by the deadline.

Sunday morning: I started on the puzzle again last night, after I picked up the printed librettos for The Manga Flute, and I’d finished all but 29 Down by bedtime; this morning I saw what I was overlooking and finished it. Now to get ready for the show.

Despite my starting late in the day and some of the most impossible looking instructions I’ve ever seen, this week’s Listener crossword, “Confused” by Tea Leaves, turned out to be easier than it looks. After seven or eight clues solved, I started figuring out what was going on and finished before midnight. Very nice puzzle with several sweet surprises along the way.

I’ve been working on this week’s Listener puzzle — a number puzzle this week, called “Number or Nummer” — for only about twelve minutes, and I’ve already narrowed down the possibilities to just 393,120.

Later: Is too much to ask in a number puzzle to have math that looks like math? With minus signs (HTML code: −) or at least en dashes (–) instead of hyphens, and exponents that are actually raised (<sup>2</sup>) and not just in a different font?

Plus: In the clue for 13 Across, which is in the form X − Y / Z, could you maybe have added parentheses so we could be 100% sure whether you mean X − (Y / Z) or (X − Y) / Z? I hope I find out I’m wrong, but I have a growing suspicion that you mean the latter.

Still later: The order of operations in 13 Across is correct.

I finished this week’s Listener puzzle, “Toga” by Nod, this morning. I really thought I was going to finish last night — around 9:00 I had only solved about half the clues, but that turned out to be enough for me to figure out the “advice” spelled out by the extra letters, how to apply it, and what to do with the result. By figuring out in advance what was supposed to be the final step in the puzzle, I obtained several letters in the grid that I hadn’t actually solved yet, and that quickly gave me a few more answers. I was quite sure that I’d have it all nailed before I went to bed. But I got sleepy and ended up crashing with one clue still unsolved, and two more for which I was pretty sure I had the right answer but hadn’t yet worked out how the wordplay was supposed to work.

I finally solved them this morning — I was right about the two answers and worked out the wordplay, and the third clue turned out to involve some proper nouns I didn’t know that aren’t in Chambers Dictionary; thank goodness for the Internet. All in all, an enjoyable and not overly brain-busting puzzle.