Listener 4176 : Small But Perfectly Formed by Quinapalus

[starwalker]

My heart sank when I saw the length of the preamble, but simply followed the straightforward instructions and the grid came together nicely. Quotation and play identified, now it's just a case of filling the odd gaps. I thought that 8, 13 was wonderful. Thanks Quinapalus.

[tilbee]

My avatar seems to have disappeared though still says it is active on my profile. Any suggestions anyone ?

[Tarraco2]

Yabba-dabba-doo! Got there! There was a moment of doubt until we realised we hadn’t gone to the previous line of the quotation (it helps to read the preamble several times, very slowly!) As newbies we didn’t mind having all the information given in the preamble – especially as it meant that we still have 100% for the year!

[perseverer]

tilbee - don't know if your avatar has reappeared for you, but it's certainly visible to me for both your posts on this thread

[sunny-dave]

Gentle but fun, with some lovely clues - 7,20 and 8,13 both in the 'v v good' category.

Somewhat ironically, the most useful tool in the solving box this week was Q's own Word Matcher ...

http://www.quinapalus.com/cgi-bin/match

[tilbee]

Thanks perseverer - as suddenly as it disappeared it reappeared again !

[sunny-dave]

The avatar thing is a glitch somewhere getween AB and gravatar - but AB forces an update every hour, on the hour, so any missing/weird avatars are corrected at that point ...

[contendo]

I didn't find this as easy as some (not that that's unusual). I was held up for some time by the absence of one of the words in the quote from the index of the ODQ. There were quite a few unchecked letters which also caused me some grief, but got there in the end.

[magichour]

One or two wordplays to fathom, but all solved and highlighted otherwise. Slightly worried at first sight that this was going to be another Phiz, but turned out to be a lot easier. Clever construction, which must have taken some time to work out. Enjoyable and leaves me with Sunday free!

[trux]

Was over the other side of the Channel and only back to the Siberian conditions here in Geneva tonight, so only just got to this. For once, the title pretty much summed it all up. Neat, small, pretty perfectly formed. Many thanks, Mr/Mrs. Q ...

[tramart]

As another Maths graduate I too appreciated 7,20. Also enjoyed 8,13 although I wonder what aliens ("from elsewhere") would have made of it.
A lengthy rubric often presages an easy solve - it's the short, or non-existent, ones that are more likely to cause me problems.
Could have done without the answer lengths for the Widths and, as others have said, the 4/5 positions made it a tad too easy. Enjoyable, nevertheless.

[Coalminers]

Yes, very enjoyable but not too demanding. Given the setter, I feel a little as if I have been using a sledgehammer to crack a sledgehammer. Is that the correct expressions?

[IainGrace]

Agree that this was enjoyably different but the preamble could have been less generous. Expected maybe lines from a play appropriate to Valentine's Day - far from it.

[Cruncher]

Not as fearsome as first thought although I found a few clues a bit loose. Now wondering whether I need to construct my cuboid to trace the missing information. Why not!

[borealis]

Fun. Not too hard to start, then several clues needed every letter I could get in them to make them do-able, so I found the whole thing progressed nicely. I would guess a variant of this: http://www.quinapalus.com/crux.html was used for the construction. Very glad the setter didn't restrict Qat (http://www.quinapalus.com/qat.html) to eliminate the answers to this puzzle - which he might have done!

[Walterloo]

I'm not one of the elite who solves them but is next week's Listener a numerical?

[Ruthrobin]

Yes, Walterloo, I fear that it is. They were moved from the last week in February, May, August and November to the penultimate week about a yer ago.

[Philoctetes]

While I agree that 7,20 is fine and 8, 13 is a tad unfair, may I promote 6,19 as being a cracker

[jim360]

First post in a while here! I've been trying to keep up with listeners, but had a major fail over the Christmas period - one out of the three released around then?

This year I'm trying to hand in as many as I can. Well, why not? So far I managed 4171, 4173, 4174, and this one. A pretty cute puzzle I thought. I had a couple of hiccups, though! Misspelling the answer to *+13 didn't help matters, for example... but overcame it in the end. Roll on the numbers puzzles...

[IainGrace]

Seems to be general consensus about this week's puzzle. Enjoyable and different, but trouble with these little tapas grids , rather than the full thing, is that they are so small that, once you've solved two or three clues in any of them, you get lots of assistance very quickly with the remaining entries (even if, as here, some of the answers are not proper words).

[Alan7777]

As a late contributor to these threads all I can say is that I agree with what's gone before. I particularly liked 17 across. It was also pleasing to see that both spellings of Mitylene were accepted in 4173. Before last year the only Listeners I attempted were the numerical ones and so I should be looking forward to next weekend but .......