MGWCC #781 — “Square Meal”

[tonyrobots]

You are on the leaderboard at #359! The website shows that pop-up of "Submissions are now closed" whenever something is submitted after noon on Tuesday, even if Matt has extended the deadline. The answers still get through and Matt will count them based on the revised deadline.

Aha, you are so right! Sorry for the false alarm. And very happy to be back amongst the beamed up after a rough few days (and a whiff on last week’s puzzle.)

[edestlin]

Thanks to a fellow muggle for her nudge, I saw what I needed and found my way to the answer. WOW. What an impressive construction and clever meta!

[Joe Ross]

[ricky]

I didn't care for (and didn't finish) the grid for this one. I figured out the square aspect of the theme entries and spent about a half hour thinking we were supposed to figure out a letter for the center of each that would produce a valid entry in two directions, which produced something like GLPPES. Finally decided to start looking for the squares in the grid by filling in squarish areas, hit FUNGI and got confirmation.

The final meta answer - and realizing how it related to the grid - redeemed the whole endeavor. Totally expected it to be something like WAFFLES. Matt got me.

[HunterX]

Ditto for me @ricky. Except I did slog through the grueling grid, and may have spent less than 30 minutes on figuring out potential "filler" letters.

I figure it was a week 3 because the metanism was a week 1 or 2, but the grid was a week 4 or 5. So an average of 3...?

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

I got the turn-the-themers-into-squares thing right off because we something similar in a WSJ puzzle a couple years ago. But I also spent too long looking for fill letters for the center squares, including looking for clue alternates. EAU could have been "Word in many Quebec place names" and HAA could been "dismissive snort", for instance. I tried to find potential three-letter-words in the grid, too, but didn't notice the actual duplicates for a while.

I think most frustrating was when I said to myself, "OK, if that X in AXE is used to form an across word, then there must be another X in the grid." and then I didn't see the other X in RELAXED when I went looking! The grid was just too big and my fill letters too small for my squinting eyes. But eventually I got there with a forehead slap.