#590 - "Flights of Fancy" - September 20, 2019

An excellent puzzle written by one of the innovators of the meta crossword format. It comes out every Friday at noon and increases in difficulty throughout the month. Available for modest subscription (worth every cent) here: www.xwordcontest.com
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Beth Tyrpin
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#41

Post by Beth Tyrpin »

I wondered if Jangler was a test solver for Matt. Also curious that he has either not answered or submitted wrong answers on MMMM.
Laura M
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#42

Post by Laura M »

Sent in my Hail Mary guess last night and am unsurprisingly not on the leaderboard this morning. Just as well, because I wasn't happy with my answer (or at least my reasoning). I look forward to hearing the real expanation!
jakeorjacob
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#43

Post by jakeorjacob »

Somewhere in the limbo between ship and planet, confidently thinking to myself "well, once you see it, that was the only option."

We'll see if I get put back together correctly on the other side.
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hcbirker
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#44

Post by hcbirker »

jakeorjacob wrote: Mon Sep 23, 2019 3:55 pm Somewhere in the limbo between ship and planet, confidently thinking to myself "well, once you see it, that was the only option."

We'll see if I get put back together correctly on the other side.
Good luck! (Heidi)
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jakeorjacob
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#45

Post by jakeorjacob »

hcbirker wrote: Mon Sep 23, 2019 8:58 pm
jakeorjacob wrote: Mon Sep 23, 2019 3:55 pm Somewhere in the limbo between ship and planet, confidently thinking to myself "well, once you see it, that was the only option."

We'll see if I get put back together correctly on the other side.
Good luck! (Heidi)
Whew! Made it back up to the ship, and appear to be in one piece.
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BrianMac
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#46

Post by BrianMac »

Finally saw step 1 late last night. Took all weekend. Step 2 (I think / hope) came to me in the shower this morning. Now in limbo waiting for the update. I actually feel good that I'm not 100% about it since that seems to be others' experience as well.
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BrianMac
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#47

Post by BrianMac »

Phew, made it!
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hcbirker
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#48

Post by hcbirker »

I don't feel bad about missing this one. Too much googling! I misinterpreted the instructions, too. I got all the connections, but thought it was another entry that didn't have an airport code in it. The only word I found was "Snocap", minus the "s" . Didn't think to link the airports, and I don't know how I would have figured out how to do that! (Heidi)
Heidi
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FrankieHeck
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#49

Post by FrankieHeck »

Yeah, I didn't care for this one. I didn't mind googling the airline codes. That was fine. I thought I'd be looking for a six-letter entry that wasn't made of airport codes, but saw they all were. Then I blame my poor flight googling skills, because I thought there were direct flights for both SFO-RNO and DAL-IAH. At one point my husband insisted there were not direct flights between DAL and IAH, but then as we kept googling deeper and deeper, I insisted that metas just don't work this way. None of the ones I'd done before required that level of research. So I just submitted DALIAH, thinking there was no big intervening city. I certainly didn't feel good about it, but oh well. I am still on my quest for a perfect solo month, and of course a mug. Gives me something to live for!
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Thurman8er
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#50

Post by Thurman8er »

I really hate puzzles that I have to solve with Google. This is my least favorite puzzle I've ever worked on Matt's site.
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Jacksull
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#51

Post by Jacksull »

Probably my least favorite MGWCC.

I slogged through the airport lookups, listed the cities and airport names. Then I briefly considered SFORNO (No connecting flight) and GUMBOS (No reasonable connection). No, the solution could not be that lame.

Matt accepted two answers (split about 2/3 - 1/3). That’s means the meta was just too fuzzy for me.
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Laura M
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#52

Post by Laura M »

I probably should have realized that there was only one possibility for a direct flight, after all that Googling, but when I found that it was possible to get from any of the airports in a pair to the other one via some number of connections, I pretty much gave up on that path. I eventually submitted DALIAH because, while you can fly from DAL to IAH, it would involve a far-away stopover and take longer than driving, so why? But I didn't like my answer and hoped for a more elegant solution that I just didn't see. Not sure I feel rewarded there.
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FrankieHeck
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#53

Post by FrankieHeck »

Laura M wrote: Tue Sep 24, 2019 3:15 pm I probably should have realized that there was only one possibility for a direct flight, after all that Googling, but when I found that it was possible to get from any of the airports in a pair to the other one via some number of connections, I pretty much gave up on that path. I eventually submitted DALIAH because, while you can fly from DAL to IAH, it would involve a far-away stopover and take longer than driving, so why? But I didn't like my answer and hoped for a more elegant solution that I just didn't see. Not sure I feel rewarded there.
Looks like he's giving it to us now?
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BarbaraK
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#54

Post by BarbaraK »

Maybe this week was a case of ignorance is bliss, because I never seriously considered anything other than finding which route had a nonstop flight. I saw airport codes while solving (in an airport, as it happened, waiting to get a flat tire changed on my plane.) Then the WiFi failed, so I waited til I got home to look up flights.

My only concern was that flight schedules change; what if a flight was added or dropped. So I looked for reservations for a random date a couple months in the future and also that day's actual flights and was pleased when I found only one that had no connection required in both searches.

I think Matt is being very generous in accepting GUMBOS too.

And I just saw on Fiend that he's also taking DALIAH because when you search for those flights, google sometimes tries to be helpful by showing you DFW-IAH instead. That one I really don't get. If that did happen, wouldn't you have found two city pairs with non-stops and then gone and looked more closely at your results. Yeah, he's nicer than I am:)
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Hector
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#55

Post by Hector »

I too googled flights & thought it was too arbitrary to read "with no connection" as meaning "it's possible to fly commercially between them with no connection." So I looked at the three-letter strings that "connect" the outer ones in the theme answers, and found that only GUMBOS lacks an airport code that "connects" the outer two (neither "UMB" nor "MBO" codes an airport). Lucked out on this one.
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FrankieHeck
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#56

Post by FrankieHeck »

Hector wrote: Tue Sep 24, 2019 5:59 pm I too googled flights & thought it was too arbitrary to read "with no connection" as meaning "it's possible to fly commercially between them with no connection." So I looked at the three-letter strings that "connect" the outer ones in the theme answers, and found that only GUMBOS lacks an airport code that "connects" the outer two (neither "UMB" nor "MBO" codes an airport). Lucked out on this one.
I started doing that, too, but gave up on it before I finished going through the list. I forget my rationale for dropping it, but for some reason I thought it wasn't working out.
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TMart
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#57

Post by TMart »

Wow, everybody hated this one! From Crossword Fiend, it looks like Matt is now accepting DALIAH and GUMBOS as correct answers (along with the intended answer SFORNO) due to the mass confusion around what "no connection" meant. Apparently, Google would substitute DFW for DAL in looking for direct flights to IAH, and while you can get to Guam from Boston with one stop, you have to switch airlines in Honolulu. (I've been to Guam a few times, and it's not close to anything - as they say there, it's not the end of the Earth, but you can see it from here!)

So a random guess had a 50% chance of being correct. The leaderboard has been updated and everyone's streaks are now intact.

This was pretty confusing, but once I decided that "no connection" meant "no connecting flight needed" i.e you can go direct, it was just a tedious Googlefest to get to SFORNO as the answer. Not one of my favorites.
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Hector
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#58

Post by Hector »

FrankieHeck wrote: Tue Sep 24, 2019 6:04 pm I started doing that, too, but gave up on it before I finished going through the list. I forget my rationale for dropping it, but for some reason I thought it wasn't working out.
It wasn't super elegant in that just one of the other themers has only one "connection" in that sense, the others having two. But one or two connections is not none, so it made enough sense at the time to try it.
damefox
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#59

Post by damefox »

Yeah, wow, if the answer really was googling which airports do and do not have connecting flights, then I'm with everyone else who's saying this is an AWFUL meta. (Btw, how do you all know that? I thought the solution wasn't posted until Friday.) For one thing, I did do that googling but gave up when my results showed me there was more than one answer whose two airports codes had no direct flight between them (I think it was SFORNO and GUMBOS I stopped at), but this could be because I didn't search a wide enough date range. A good meta can be pretty challenging, but it shouldn't be too challenging to be fun. And it can involve some googling, but in my opinion, the time spent googling should not have to be orders of magnitude more than the time spent studying the actual grid.

I eventually submitted GUMBOS because I thought of it as connections between the cities the airports serve in terms of state they're in or words in their name. So, Myrtle Beach and Daytona Beach are "connected," as are Las Vegas, NV, and Reno, NV. Guam and Boston are the only two locations that don't have a connection to any other city served by one of these airport codes. This seemed less abstruse than the which-airports-have-direct-flight-between-them logic, but still a little messier than usual. And really I just have no idea.
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Hector
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#60

Post by Hector »

joon blogs the MGWCC metas at crosswordfiend once the deadline has passed. Matt typically replies in the comments.
Last edited by Hector on Tue Sep 24, 2019 7:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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