Listener Crossword 4104: Merchandise by Adam

[Zabadak]

I have a nice full grid, but not a clue what's going on. I don't want to know what the solution is, just that someone out there has seen a regular pattern (or whatever) that makes sense of the thing. Apologies if this thread has already started somewhere, but neither searching the site nor searching with google give any hits.

[Ruthrobin]

Yes. Teuchter2 but however did you find that without the quotation!
Contendo, think in another way. (What silly advice, but I don't know how else to say it. Change a six-letter word in what you are doing!)

[teuchter2]

I was scanning through the bold words in the index for suitable possibilities and my eyes landed on one with a hyphenated product underneath. I now see where the quotation comes in the grid, but still need to understand 37a to get my last letter (a pity it isn't in the quotation). Is the definition at the start or end of the clue?

[contendo]

Teuchter2 - The definitiion's at the end. If you have all the letters apart from the unch you can use the Chambers wordwizard anagram facility to go through the possibilities for the last letter.

[IntoTheBlue]

Teuchter2 for 37a read "boy's" as "boy has".

IntoTheBlue

[JackDeCrow]

dr b, Clamzy et al - would you not say that the two lines before the quote give a reasonable justification for what Adam has done? (I would if I were him!)

[JackDeCrow]

though he has perhaps missed a bit of a riddle-related opportunity!

[teuchter2]

Thanks contendo. I've got it and it's not a phrase I've heard of before. Neither had I used the Chambers wordwizard, but I have now bookmarked that as I can see it will be very useful. I do have an electronic gadget that does similar things, but doesn't cope with anagrams of muddled letters, just actual words.

[dr b]

Jack DC, That's being pretty charitable towards the setter, I think. Still, "I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world", so I will be charitable and agree that's no doubt what he meant.

The two lines before the two lines you mention - something I ask myself with increasing frequency.

[Clamzy]

Jack. Do you recall the puzzle where the young George Washington chopped down the tree? That's the sort of thematic which floats my boat.

[Antmark]

Have also completed grid and have been unable to find the quotation, but a hyphenated word (5-3) stares out at me from the grid, which is also connected to the setter's name. Is this relevant?

[JackDeCrow]

Indeed I do Clamzy! Though, continuing in charitable vein, wasn't that considered to be one of the greats, at least of that year? I was just trying to get from "no thematic links" to "some thematic link" for this one!

[Ruthrobin]

I am not sure which of the many possible words you are looking at Antmark but think not. The quotation really is regularly embedded - 11 words within the 143 letters and thus clearly must regularly fill the entire grid in the way Contendo has been suggesting - or in one other way.

[Zabadak]

Curious Ruthrobin, isn't it. There are times when (and I say this with a big and smarting puncture wound in my pride) when we can't even handle two dimensional thinking!
And of course there *is* a thematic link, it even goes in the right direction, and may explain why the quotation starts where it does, so the right letters turn up in the right places.

[Antmark]

I still can't work out where the quotation starts and am feeling really thick!

[pushmi-pullyu]

Have kept coming back to this message board in the hopes that something someone said would activate my baffled brain, and I can't believe it's actually happened! Now maybe I can attend to the rest of my life.

[Ruthrobin]

Yes, indeed, Zabadak and from the amount of 'off-line' communication I have read, it would seem that we were all suffering from the same mono-dimensional limitation - even the super-brain hares. A great tip for compilers there - how to hide your messages in order to render the solving more difficult. Antmark, email [email protected] if you need putting out of your misery.

[JackDeCrow]

Maybe this is always the case, but I do think for this quotation if you did start at the beginning and just wrote down the first few (maybe even 8 or 9) letters, you could quite easily move on thinking you weren't getting anything. (I'm pretty sure I did). In the end I stumbled across the middle of it rather than the beginning.

[qwerty99]

Eureka! I've been staring at the completed grid on and off since Sunday, and had all but thrown in the towel. I just had a quick look when I got back from work, and it hit me straight away! I'm annoyed with myself because I was pretty sure what the frequency of letters would be, and I thought I'd covered all possibilities. Obviously not!

[Jogler]

We have finally extricated ourselves from our weekend away (my daughter wants you to know, daagg, that the only place a hypen shouldn't be put is between style and group on my last post). Indeed, I was slightly taken aback to find that I had previously posted.... and very embarrassed to see that I was laughing at the time - believe me, we are not laughing now at all! Like nearly everyone else, it took us entirely too long to finish and we are identifying completely with the previous line of the quote. An interesting puzzle which we are glad to be on the other side of.

[Mysterons]

Antmark - suggest you look for the ninth word in the ninth column (Zabadak's early observation was well made in this respect) and work back and forth from there.