Listener 4243 Pipes By Samuel

[dr b]

Quite a doozy this week but very enjoyable. Not necessary, of course, but I made copious use of the LEN, MID and VLOOKUP functions in Excel to count string lengths, pick out the Nth letter of the clue, and turn numbers into letters and vice versa. Thanks Samuel, or can we call you Sam? or Sammy? or Sammy baby?

[me99]

Thankyou Jim. I've now made my choice!

[TheBear69]

Oliphant, you can email me at [email protected] if you want.

And there is only one valid solution to this Listener. Any alternative solution will definitely be marked wrong.

[Ruthrobin]

Or me at [email protected] but I will only confirm what I know the Bear will say.

[JackDeCrow]

Thanks for the messages of support on the cards! Got there in the end late on Monday night having, like iamamoose, wasted a number of days by thinking it would all come good once I'd made a certain amount of logical progress and built a helpful spreadsheet. That'll teach me!

[JackDeCrow]

Happily caught up now and finished this one. Funnily enough, was very happy that any ambiguity had been resolved but am now thinking that, if you take things literally and allow for all possible outcomes of you know what, technically it isn't.

[Alan7777]

Finally managed to finish 4242 yesterday morning using trial and error at the end as I could find a way forward using logic.

Unusually for me I identified the theme and knew what to highlight after solving a few of the down clues but it didn't really help in solving the rest of the clues. I did however make good steady progress through to the final grid and I agree that there is no ambiguity.

Thanks Samuel

[Alan7777]

The second paragraph onwards refers to 4243 obviously.

[iamamoose]

Did anyone else think that one of the down clues had a singular definition that should have been plural?
There is no correction on the crossword club site so obviously I'm wrong

[Cruncher]

Iammoose - if that's an answer that appears in one the bottom corners then check your BRB and all will be clear. Fun puzzle. Brings back memories

[iamamoose]

cruncher - you are right of course

[grace_slick]

How refreshing not to have to suffer another tedious wodge of extra letters arising from wordplay / extra words / misprints. Well done Samuel, one of the few I troubled to complete this year, and well worth the effort.

(... and congratulations by the way)

[crosswhit99]

Far from being pointless, I suspect that the highlighting is requested to assist JEG in sifting the wheat from the chaff, given the potential alternatives discussed above. However the second word of the instruction surely explicitly debars one of these alternatives with specific respect to one of the rows.

[Alekhine]

I confess that I wasn't totally convinced by the endgame here.

"Symmetrically opposite column"? Not the curved surface surely? But maybe I've missed something.