Friday Foxer #80

Every Friday at 1300 hours, Tally-Ho Corner’s cleverest clogs come together to solve a ‘foxer’ handcrafted by my sadistic chum and colleague, Roman. A complete ‘defoxing’ sometimes takes several days and usually involves the little grey cells of many readers. Don’t be shy. All are welcome to participate.

A form of foxer rarely seen these days is the manhunt foxer. Like solo foxers, these geographical puzzles require a mixture of inspired guesswork and Street View legwork. Traditionalist setters always set manhunts on the island in the Irish Sea that gave them their name. Roman is less hidebound, but has opted for a Manx setting for the inaugural THC example.

To solve the manhunt foxer below, simply show my Chief Foxer Setter (with the aid of Street View links) where precisely on the Isle of Man the following can be found:

1. A bronze Honda

2. A speedboat next to a triangular conifer plantation

3. ‘1643’ painted on a wall

4. A triskelion on an aircraft’s vertical stabiliser

5. A pub with a corvid on its sign

6. A ‘FOR SALE’ sign erected by Quayles Estate Agency

7. A Station Road moggy

8. A white Rolls-Royce a stone’s throw from a golf course

9. A Chinese restaurant with a junk on its sign

10. The words “St. Brevin Les Pins”

11. Two lambs relaxing on the grassless verge of a hairpin bend

12. A view that includes a dog, a ride-on mower, and a prison

13. A corpse dumped close to an industrial ruin

* * *

SOLUTIONS

Colonel K’s ‘33 things wot you might find in a James Bond movie or novel’ missing vowels foxer:

1. NFL MNG SST PCSN – IAN FLEMING’S STEP-COUSIN (Nutfield)
2. CHLLB RGN – ACILLE AUBERGINE (Electric Dragon)
3. CMTB LTH ZRDB LVLL – COMTE BALTHAZAR DE BLEUVILLE (Nutfield)
4. SCRWN NNGS NDF FCTS – OSCAR WINNING SOUND EFFECTS (Viscount)
5. NVRSLX PRTS – UNIVERSAL EXPORTS (Electric Dragon, ylla)
6. RML TRX PLR R – ARMALITE AR-7 EXPLORER
7. DW Y NTHR CKJHNS NSMTRNLG RNDFTHR – DWAYNE THE ROCK JOHNSON’S MATERNAL GRANDFATHER (Electric Dragon)
8. HSN NT HSNG L – A-HA’s NINTH SINGLE
9. NNVL LYR LWY – NENE VALLEY RAILWAY (Electric Dragon)
10. T HMS TF MSB K NFL LTM – THE MOST FAMOUS BIKINI OF ALL TIME (Nutfield)
11. ML TPLCH RCTRSPL YDB YBRTK WK – MULTIPLE CHARACTERS PLAYED BY BERT KWOUK (Electric Dragon, Viscount)

12. PLZP STLKRMNL – POLIZEIPISTOLE KRIMINAL
13. BLLRC KTB LT – BELL ROCKET BELT (Nutfield)
14. W LL SWG L – WALLIS WA-116 AGILE
15. PN TMDN NDL LSTLL – PONTE MADONNA DELLA STELLA
16. SNB MLPN – SUNBEAM ALPINE (Nutfield)
17. CNT SSTR SDVCN Z – CONTESSA TERESA DI VICENZO (Nutfield)
18. STRSP RL – ASTRO SPIRAL
19. MXT RFG NVD KN DK NLL LT – A MIXTURE OF GIN, VODKA, AND KINA LILLET (Electric Dragon)
20. SY NDC TDSVR RSDLSC – SYNDICAT DES OUVRIERS D’ALSACE
21. C BLM DFLQ RC – CABLE MADE OF LIQUORICE (Nutfield)
22. RY LL SX – ROYALE-LES-EAUX

23. B RDSFT HWS TND S – BIRDS OF THE WEST INDIES (ylla)
24. RBSN NSFF CT – ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
25. BNP RTG NCGLL – BONAPARTE IGNACE GALLIA (Nutfield)
26. CRS TRJT – ACROSTAR JET (Nutfield)
27. MLL CQ – EMILE LOCQUE (Electric Dragon)
28. SRML SMSS RVY – SIR MILES MESSERVY (Electric Dragon)
29. FL TNSR FCTRR CV RYS YSTM – FULTON SURFACE TO AIR RECOVERY SYSTEM (Viscount)
30. DNTGRPH – IDENTIGRAPH (Nutfield)
31. VLLRSVN DCTR – VILLIERS VINDICATOR (Electric Dragon)
32. TRTD RK – TARO TODOROKI
33. M VS TT MW RK DN – A MOVIE SET TIM WORKED ON* (captaincabinets, Nutfield, Fishbreath)

* Not as exciting as it sounds. For one of the helicopter stunts in The World Is Not Enough, a portion of a Russian caviar factory was constructed on a heath in Surrey. As the heath had been used as a military training area, before any poles or pegs could be driven into the ground, the relevant spot had to be checked for potential UXO. For a spell I was the chap operating the mine detector. I only found one showstopper and that turned out to be a harmless mortar bomb tail. (Tim)

18 Comments

  11. I forgot to say thank you, Colonel_K, for your lovely foxer last week! It completely stumped me, but that’s by no means a bad thing.

    And that’s a better story than you think Tim. I would argue that in a way, you saved Pierce Brosnan’s life, or at least from a nasty toe-stubbing.

    • Thanks. I was moderately downhearted at the below average level of engagement, not sure whether it was a less-than-magnetic topic, too hard, or just that people were away.
      Roman/Tim should have a good few more answers in the bank (including a couple that I thought were golden Foxer factoids). I guess they might make an appearance as a mini-Foxer part of a competition, or a hodge-podge Foxer for the dog days of summer.

      • I was struggling with the topic – I just didn’t know enough about it to pull possibilities out of the recesses of my mind, especially when a lot of it was names. And also braindead from the end of exam board season.

        But as well, although missing vowels ones are self-checking to an extent (I mean, ‘this fits the letters AND it fits the theme, therefore…’ – there’s probably a proper mathematical word for it), they’re still a bit like 33 separate puzzles – they don’t give me the Can’t Stop Must Fill The Gaps sense I get from a wordsearch or cluster or chain.

        This one, too, a bit – it kind of reminds me of the House of Games round with the three clues, where you can guess the answer from the KIND of clue that was important, even if the filled in bit is completely wrong (it would be silly to have to search the whole island for a Honda, therefore it must be in a Honda kind of place), but I still feel like I should be eventually joining the dots to draw a cat or something, rather than throwing answers into a foxer void!

        • I agree with this – the best thing about the Foxers are the communal aspect of them. With the themed cluster foxers, for example, I can look at the 30 images and get maybe two, but then when others decipher some, that may spark me to get a theme, or someone deciphering the theme gives me a fresh angle for an image and piece by piece, over the course of a day (or weekend) we solve them all despite none of us initially knowing very many.

        • “It would be silly to have to search the whole island for a Honda, therefore it must be in a Honda kind of place.”

          Perspicacity only gets you so far in an average manhunt foxer. Finding some of the things on the list without a coordinated search effort is likely to be difficult.

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