XWord Muggles Forum

Finally joining the shore horde. Looks like it is five deep at the bar!

On shore for the first time this month.

Finally got done,
A busy weekend - what fun!
Beach is overrun!

Final call

We have our newest muggle - rosiegirl - always great to have more muggles

The final total is 5 on the ship and 180 on the shore with muggles getting to the shore all afternoon

Getting to the shore since lunch are:
ALS
copperriver
Eguinan
Jarrod
ReB
halseymac
Domenic
Paul D
Susan G
Grover
Tom Wilson
mitchel674
and Colin.

Long odds this week with about 2000 entries.

On shore!

Tom Wilson wrote: ↑Sun Nov 22, 2020 6:32 pm Made it to shore, with relative moments to spare!

And speaking of relatives ... here's wishing all of you a blessed, safe and satisfying Thanksgiving with family and friends, whether around the table or across the country. Better days ahead! But in the meantime, please know how grateful I am for this forum and the clever souls who inhabit it.

I agree! Grateful for you all!

First time on shore in months!!

Nothing - Staring at the grid for four days like:

After a brief hiatus from solving, always nice to come back and get on shore.

BrianMac wrote: ↑Fri Nov 20, 2020 2:10 pm That took way too long, but I finally saw it.

Been itching to post this since Friday --- I guess it's safe enough now.
Wonder no more, BrianMac. These are MALLSISTAS:

I was not taking the title literally enough, and so was looking at words situated at the top of the grid and comparing them against words at the bottom of the grid. After a day of trying different things fruitlessly, finally decided to look for AS and SO in the grid; but because the hints are situated at 7D and 48D, started looking for those letters in the DOWN direction. That led nowhere, and so eventually had to look for those letters in the horizontal direction. Bingo! Sure took a long, hard and circuitous route.

I did notice that there was a lot of "ASS" in the grid - thought it tied to "bottom" somehow, but it didn't.

I was way off in every way I tried - I wouldn't have gotten this if I stared at it for another week.

My favorite rabbit hole too! ^^

When I first saw the title, I wondered if a key part of the mechanism was vertical rather than horizontal as in the common Theme Entries. While filling out the grid, I wondered if 7D and 48D would be important beyond the connection they had in the cluing.

Was I able to carry those thoughts around in my head? Of course not! Did I follow the suggestion of many and write down interesting things I saw along the way? Of course not! Sigh.

Later in the day, the light finally came on and I found the short, quick path to the solution.

Here's what I was hinting at in my earlier post about Easter eggs. Easter egg is not quite right, because they're not exactly hidden, but I was using the term to apply to something that one of us would notice and maybe get a kick out of it.

The first thing I saw was pASSOvers and lASSO. They have AS and SO right next to each other and are both down clues. It could be a coincidence, but with 2 of them, I think Matt did it on purpose. It's close to the solution, but not quite.

The other one is the answer itself. The title of the July 10 puzzle was "Missing Links". That was a Shenk puzzle, but it has a very similar solve method.

As Dplass reminded me, we have AT SEA for 15A.

As another Muggle pointed out to me, APES is in 10A, an homage to the Missing Links puzzle?

7D/49D Were an expression I never heard of and then seconds later my eyes saw AS and SO separated by a line in the grid and Bob's your parent's sibling.

After the past several weeks, it’s nice to have a meta solution for which the explanation fills less than five lines.

Was I the only person who saw "PASSOVERS ENTRE" and started looking for Brisket?

I also noticed the similar mechanism appearing in the 7/10/20 puzzle (see Eric Porter's post above). Made me wonder whether there were three more steps to go through.