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

[cluelessJoe]

The biter bit?
I guess that if the bar is being raised, it's only back towards a level from which it has been progressively lowered of late. I don't want to tar all with the same brush, but if you feel you have been cheated by the statistician, then ask yourselves whether you have ever cheated him by e.g. submitting a 'completed' Listener as all your own work when in fact you would never have solved it without a huge leg up from someone else? I'd condone the occasional very gentle hint for sure, but if you do receive significant help, maybe ask yourself before you submit if you would have ever got to the finish line without it - let's afford Mr. Green the respect he warrants and keep it truly clean.
Sorry Triple, I'm deviating, as so many here have. I enjoyed your puzzle at the start but found it became progressively more tiresome - but then I am getting old. I finished it unaided, but will not be submitting anyway.

[olichant]

Triple - I enjoyed this hugely and (on a very slow train from Paddington) completed the majority with only a small amount of googling, so feel I can submit with pride. A really neat, fun, well-made puzzle. And I like the verbiage.

I did not submit Sabre's puzzle (because I shamelessly sought assistance on this very forum) but I share others' disappointment. My in-between-B-and-b would, I'm sure, not have been accepted. Such a shame, as the puzzle was so very, very good - what a silly hurdle. I feel that, had the instruction been in the preamble, it would have had to be entirely without ambiguity. A Russian friend assures me the knight can be "seen" either way.

Hey ho. For all that, I thank Sabre for a truly wonderful puzzle - I am still proud that I managed the gridfill and the KMs!

OC

[fortyseven]

The observation was worked into the grid cleverly, but this type of grid is a bit of a slog. Of course, you could use your brain to solve the clues but the temptation is to use one of the pieces of software available on the internet. For me, repeatedly typing groups of nine letters into the Quinapalus Word Matcher meant that an answer would drop out every five to ten minutes. Is there anything quicker than that?

[contendo]

Fortyseven - I find TEA (www.crosswordman.com/tea) more helpful and faster than Quinapulus. It lists words in 4 groups: Core English (65,000 "common" words), Edited English (265,000 words in a selection of 13 dictionaries), Unedited English (another 780,000 words, mostly not valid, but including some multiple word entries) and Wikipedia English (rubbish mainly). Most of what you need is in the first two categories, whereas with Quinapulus much rubbish is mixed in with the valid words.

[contendo]

PS. The only trouble is you have to pay for it, currently a one-off payment of $39.95.

[tilbee]

Having been on holiday for 4202 (sounds like good timing ?), and having focussed on getting my Magpie submission for August completed with what time I have had over the long weekend, I have now finally come back to 4204. Sounds like a long slog, and after the exertions of the E-Grader one I may forgo. With respect the suggestion that this can be solved via available on-line assistance, my first thought is that in this case what is the point ?

[tilbee]

Sorry that should have read, having been on holiday for 4203 (the numerical).

[jim360]

My own answer to "what is the point?" is that I don't see what's gained by examining every possible nine-letter string in the clues by hand - rather like little is really gained from working out some complicated sum with large numbers without a calculator. I still had to work out the method to apply to the problem, and the ability to recognise a possible anagram matching a possible definition, and do all the jigsawing needed to check that it fit together. I just speeded the process up tenfold, probably, over solving by hand - at least, by my hand. Perhaps more veteran solvers would be able to guess at the definition more quickly and then would know where to look for the letter mixture, so that they wouldn't need the exhaustive searching.

[Anapice]

CluelessJoe I don't think anyone here was criticising JEG - heaven forbid. If the editors wish to cut down the number of all corrects they should raise the level of difficulty and not resort to jiggery-pokery. Having said that I agree with your point that we should examine our consciences. There was so much discussion of 4201 here and elsewhere before the deadline that I wonder how many who didn't post early altered their B to a b.

[crosswhit99]

I'm with James on this - there's no compulsion, but if time is limited and you need assistance then the Wordfinder is a most useful tool:

http://cfaj.freeshell.org/wordfinder/

[Pivert]

I believe the wordplay to Clue No.9 is incorrect. Does anyone agree? Pivert

[jim360]

No, I think 9 does work well - though I think I had to work backwards from answer to wordplay. Obviously can't justify it here, though.

[freiheid]

Nice to have a bit of variety in puzzle types, though I agree there was a little too much excess verbiage here. I noticed early on that 18 could have yielded the answer CHAMFRON (if not for the two words stipulation), and wondered if there were red herrings in every clue, possibly even leading to an alternative grid fill - now that would have been a denouement and a half!

[crosswhit99]

It's a 'container' clue Pivert ('brackets')

[Staurologist]

If jim360 is right about humming the message, solving this puzzle could take you all day long :>)

I happened to solve 5 first, and since it could have been either type of clue (with two different rogue letters) I thought that other clues, or at least some of them, were going to be just as ambiguous, but perhaps it was unintentionally so. Presenting the clues in alphabetical order of the lemmas was a neat touch. And, unlike some others, I was amused by the denouement.

This reminded me of Apex's number 2394, "Mastermind" (9 September 1976). The across clues were all DLMs couched in the form of Mastermind questions, and in the preamble Apex recommended Chambers and "Jude's Obscure Encyclopaedia" as reference texts. Some solvers made enquiries of their local bookshops and libraries about where they could find a copy. As Apex later wrote in an apologetic letter to The Listener, "Apparently, Norwich was in a tizzy, Plymouth was ransacked, and harassed librarians telephoned THE LISTENER in a desperate and vain attempt to locate ‘Jude’s Obscure Encyclopaedia’. ... I did not expect anyone to take an ‘Obscure’ encyclopaedia seriously, but now, having established the need for such a volume, perhaps some enterprising publisher will see fit to, humorously, satisfy the demand." So, does anyone have a copy of Triple's "Lexicon of Bizarrerie"?

[I agree with the grumbles about KOHb. Had it not been for 4198, with its typographical peculiarity, as crosswhit99 points out, I would have got it wrong too (see the last sentence of my posting, number 43, for 4201). The Wikipedia entry that lists the foreign names of chess pieces prints the Russian knight with a lower case Roman b, and I suspect that that's where Sabre got it from.]

As to solving aids, as a scientist I would think it odd, not to mention foolish, if I didn't use every possible method at my disposal to solve a research problem ... But perhaps artificial problems are different.

[ichkeria]

A great puzzle with the obvious drawback that it was easily, if presumably tediously, blitzable using a decent anagram engine.

[ichkeria]

I don't see a valid comparison between the lower case issue in puzzle 4198 and the Sabre puzzle. KOHB is quite simply wrong as it had neither the appearance of the Russian word for knight nor does it pass muster as an English transliteration. The letter ь isn't a lower case B. But it needs to be represented as such as it's the nearest equivalent shapewise in English. So quibbling about the case is missing the point

[sunny-dave]

Eventually got round to this today - sorted in about three or four hours.

Simple enough, and I have a soft spot for the grid format used, but I don't care much for letter mixture clues (never been that good at word search puzzles) and I just can't see how this one could have been done in a sensible time without using Word Matcher or something similar.