Listener 4562: My Nap By Mr Ed

[midgler]

Are we the first? My daughter and I enjoyed this introduction to a little known theme while waiting for the beef to cook (rare). Ingenious use of the instruction. Thanks Mr E, now we have time to watch the cricket tomorrow.

[Flocker14]

A coincidence you should mention cricket... The final step was challenging and took a bit of looking for. I only found it after fortuitously stumbling on the key to the jumbles. Not quite sure how the title fits in yet. Enjoyed this a lot. Right up my street as far as Listeners go and no colouring, thank goodness, this week.

[midgler]

I don't do coincidences! But apologies to the setter for the typo which turned him into a talking horse.

[Hagen]

A surprisingly gentle puzzle from Mr E, who has defeated me a few times in the past. All very neat and as Midgler says, an ingenious use of the quotation. Most enjoyable!

[Liathach]

Although familiar with just about everything the author wrote, this was a new one on me and it took a long time to track down the quotation. Having said that, a novel way of interpreting it

[Askival]

Very much agree with Hagen on the difficulty point - I've come to expect a 'what do I do now??' moment, but (thankfully?) that never came. I've yet to tackle his B grade in this month's Magpie, so maybe that's when the head-scratching will come...

Still a couple of tricksy parsing to do yet. Liked 11a, although the choice of entry and wordplay seemed a little on the unnecessarily tough side. Clue of the puzzle goes to 33a - I eventually went from 'eh?' to 'd'oh!'

All in all very neat, with some lovely vocab along the way (filling a grid with interesting words is something Mr E does particularly well).

[Scorpius]

Very nice puzzle with a good final PDM. Easier than Mr E's usualu fare. I also had some trouble tracking down the work.

A minor disappointment is that were not two or three more thematic entries to make a fuller thematic implementation.

[NickorWan]

That was indeed surprisingly gentle, rather Mr E-lite. Very enjoyable to solve, and a nice pdm, though like Scorpius I would have preferred a few more ‘funnies’. Lovely cluesmith Mr E, not surprising that he tends to either win, or come close to winning, the Round Robin competition each year on the Crossword Centre.

Good time to take on his Magpie puzzle, which I suspect won’t be as easy, plus I have a poor track record with Magpie B grades!

[sunny-dave]

Jolly good - a very nicely pitched puzzle with some interesting vocab and elegant clues.

Thanks Mr E

[pushmi-pullyu]

Well I've finally made it to the finishing line, but without identifying the work or indeed the last of the jumbled entries. But at least my non-existent drawing skills are not being called upon.

[sunny-dave]

Oh My ... I've just noticed that if you take the original answer to one of the jumbled entries alongside the first half of the word generated by the jumble you get a very unfortunate word indeed ...

[Hagen]

Well spotted Sunny Dave, I thought there might be a further PDM hidden in there! BTW how did you do the italics?

[sunny-dave]

You put the three characters [z] at each end of the (single) piece of text you want italicised - only put an i instead of a z

and this happens

[agchristie]

Thanks for your help and I will have to do it for the

[Hagen]

Thanks

[contendo]

Googling the quote got me nowhere. The prospect of trawling through the Collected Works doesn't lift the spirit.

[sunny-dave]

Contendo - try googling with just the first four words of the quote (put the phrase in quotation marks) and the name of the author.

[contendo]

Thanks Sunny-Dave. That's a relief. All done now.

[olichant]

Enjoyable puzzle - I didn’t find it at all easy, but I have been neglecting the Listener for most of this year, so I am a bit out of practice. I thought the clues looked trivial at first, but really struggled with some of them - all were fair and enjoyable. Some of the extra words (not my favourite gimmick) were very neatly disguised.

Hope all who gather here are well. Am determined to get back into solving regularly!

[emcee]

Nice to have you back, Olichant.

I was a late starter to this puzzle. Past performance with Mr. E's offerings always leaves me with a certain amount of trepidation when I see his name at the top of the puzzle.

This one wasn't too bad (nor his last one IIRC) -- still fiendish clues in part but not as tricky as those from, say, 9 or 10 years ago.

The PDM was nice in the endgame.

Thanks, Mr. E, for a decent puzzle.