Listener 4060 - BAT by Schadenfreude

[turnerjmw]

Quite an entertaining puzzle which may take a little bit of thought at the end.

[sunny-dave]

Agree with everyone - a cracking challenge for a quiet Sunday without going into brain overload.

PS - have you had an identity crisis robinruth/ruthrobin ?? :-)

[emcee]

Just adding my thanks to the compiler for such an entertaining puzzle. A wonderful unexpected finish!

[Ruthrobin]

Yes, sunny-dave - a sex change :) It is a different machine and I was refused under the normal pseudonym.

[shelouse]

Lovelu puzzle, Schadenfreude - thanks.

I've finished, and liked the endplay, but still can't satisfactorily justify 9d. I only got the first and last letters from the required decoding. I see the definition, but not the wordplay

[perseverer]

Shelouse - check the last 2 letters of the answer in Chambers.

[danielmason]

I have just added a question to Answer Bank question on Listener 4059. Anybody care to look there and make a comment?

[shelouse]

Thanks, perseverer. Obvious. I was looking far too hard for somthing much more complex.

Incidentally I tried decoding line 9 just for the hell of it. Mostly rubbish but there is a coincidental sequence of five letters more or less in the middle.....

[Patch49]

Still baffled by the coding. Assuming I have filled the grid correctly and found alternative starts and endings it looks as if two adjacent code letters correspond to two correct letters which are not adjacent. So does 'permutation' imply it's not a simple substitution code?

[Ruthrobin]

Patch49, your twenty letters are, in effect, shuffled to give a different twenty (with none actually corresponding with itself). It isn't a system or calculated shift. Getting the meaning of the first and last rows of the grid (decoding the title is a good way in!) will give you most of the equivalents and the means to guess at, or decode, the hidden encoded message. email me at [email protected] if you need more help than can be given here.

[Cruncher]

I tangled myself up by using Word Wizard to supply alternative first letters for the top row down answers which only gave one alternative for 6dn which rather messed up my code. But finally unscrambled. Very pleasing and nice to have a puzzle that didn't give away too much too soon. I personally got to the message before I sorted out the grid phrase so lots of PDMs at the last moment. Thanks Schad.

[Philoctetes]

I wonder how many solvers have shrieked "That's mine!" at the final denoument

[Cruncher]

Philoctetes - I wish I could remember......

[Patch49]

Thanks for the ofer Ruthrobin but I woke up with the answer!

[daagg]

Yay - just finished after starting late this week. Several answers remained a bit uncertain until the deocding was well under way. Is 41ac a Private Eye clue?

PS Stupid question from a newbie - Does PDM stand for "personal discovery moment" or something more exciting? I can't find any definition on the web.

[daagg]

That's 2 doses of Mr S's puzzles in one week. Does he enjoy inflicting pain on other people?

[milford15]

daagg,

as far as I know, PDM is the 'Penny Drop' moment! Still struggling with this one - hope penny drop soon!

[Mysterons]

Just like buses, tough puzzles by the same setter tend to come in threes - the latest edition of CAM (avilable online if you are a glutton for punishment) also has a puzzle by Schadenfreude.

41a is certainly not an 'Eye' clue, rather a simple homophone - (a/u for the third letter)

[daagg]

Ahh, thanks Mysterons. I'm still learning the myriad ways of expressing the standard wordplay operations.

[Clamzy]

Well mysterons the only CAM mag I could find in Google was the Complementary and Alternative Medicines and it contained no crossword. Will you kindly supply the url to the correct one?

[sunny-dave]

CAM magazine link

http://www.alumni.cam.../File/CAM58/CAM58.pdf

Excellent crossword - thanks for pointing me at it mysterons :-)