Listener 4204 by ?

[midazolam]

Another week and we don't know who set it (no clue on the Times or Listener sites)

This was a fun, enjoyable, clever solve that all fitted together nicely in the end...thanks setter

[Ruthrobin]

Yes. Great fun from start to finish. Just the kind I like!

[midazolam]

..wasn't looking properly...thanks Triple (another début?)

[starwalker]

Yes, all coming together quite nicely, after a struggle to break in.

[jim360]

Second Friday club in a row - I'm on a roll!

I was about to give up on this one before I even started. Turns out to have been easier than it looked, albeit tedious (lots of "nine-letter dragging"). Worked my way along the bottom, then the next row and so on, snakes-and-ladders-like. But totally worth it for an amusing finish!

[Zabadak]

Don't think I've seen one of these for years: starting is the hard part, and once you have some fixed squares (mine started at the bottom) it gets progressively easier.
Triple (not on the Listener list, so presumably on début) wasn't kidding about the verbiage, was he/she? I'm still wondering whether there's any significance in the superfluous words, but they don't seem to be germane to the solution.
My source for the quotation doesn't match the observation. Does anyone else's (a simple yes or no will do)?
A decent, challenge with an off-beat cluing conceit, tough to solve and aid-resistant, even using wordsolver.net - stick in any feasible number of letters and see what 8-letter words emerge form the mess. It worked a few times, but mostly this had to be solved properly, with applied skull sweat. Cute dénouement, which I should have seen coming but didn't until the very last letter was in place. Regards all
PS: in the end, I managed 4 entries on last week's numerical. Numbers, like cats, can take care of themselves, so I left them to it.

[Zabadak]

I suggest that, for the next numerical, we all go round to Jim's place and watch him do it.

[TheBear69]

I did not find this one particularly interesting. It was pretty easy once I found an entry point; for me it was the upper left. I think the clues suffered from lack of uniform structure - I understand that it might have been difficult, but it would have been a lot more consistent if all of the 'headwords' had a part of speech abbreviation. "perh", "(Ind)" and "e.g." seemed incongruous.

[tnap]

I had an alternative solution to 33 which threw me for a while, but all in all pretty straightforward.

I agree with Zabadak that the source for the quotation doesn't quite match the observation. However, I do think that this particular crossword was highly amenable to mechanized solution, especially once the first couple of adjacent clues had been solved.

[IainGrace]

Identifying a slightly unusual letter that was common to three adjacent clues was our way in. Still early days but cracked the NW and SE corners and slowly invading the rest of the grid.

[Coalminers]

The last clue I solved was the one which, with all the letters in, still had three possibilities. I was only considering 2 of them.
Like others, still getting my head around what all the final bit is about, and any relevance, apart from the obvious, of the title.
Enjoyable until now.

[jim360]

I might be wrong, but all those guys puzzling about the observation - have you tried humming it?

Oh, and Z... Flattered!

[teuchter2]

I'm amazed that people have finished this so quickly. I was entertaining guests last night, but only solved two clues yesterday and three more so far this morning. Unfortunately none of them are adjacent. These are definitely not my type of clues, so I couldn't describe them as fun, but hopefully I'll get in to it.

[crosswhit99]

Too much verbiage really, but an interesting variation on a theme nevertheless. Not particularly aid-resistant either - the 'anagram minus' feature of Wordfinder comes in very handy for these (DLM + 1) puzzles.

[trux]

After guests keeping me up to the wee hours, finished this off today at gentle pace. Relatively easy once a few adjacent answers were filled, but some very interesting vocabulary (several words entirely new to me) and some amusing clues. My favourite was 24. Thoroughly enjoyable, entirely unambiguous finish, so many thanks to Triple.

[emcee]

I wouldn't agree with those who thought this was relatively easy. It wasn't ... until two or three were correctly placed in the grid when it became 'easier'. I'm not a fan of DLM puzzles although this was tougher than the normal ones as we didn't know where to start in the jumbles (jumbles begin at the beginning or end at the end of words is more the norm). However, I did like this one and the denouement was neat.

Still smarting over my incompetence last week. I should have solved it much quicker than I did (I'm relearning the factors of 20).

[emcee]

...doh! I meant 40.

[tenflags]

I thought this was fun and a nice change.

I am still bemoaning the fact that I put KOHB and not KOHb within 4201.

I want a retrospective Z cup as I think it was a bit unfair. I thought KEEP IT DOWN related to wordplay ASS = A*SE = IT , in any event I don't think that was a fair way to indicate the specific typescript manner of an entry of a foreign word.

I was expecting others to also moan on here but obviously others had no PROb with it.

[crosswhit99]

I think we had learnt our lesson with 4198 tenflags !!

[Texasetes]

Others have moaned, tenflags, but in the thread for 4201.

[contendo]

Struggling again with this one. It's certainly been a tough few weeks. I've managed to solve 9 clues, mostly non-contiguous. Still haven't figured out whether the bits in italics and in brackets are included in the letter-mixture.