MGWCC #825 — “Take a Little Off the Sides”

[Joe Ross]

11½th-hour solve.

202. Joe Ross 03/27 - 11:30

[BrennerTJ]

[MattGaffney]

I am not a music aficionado especially of anything after 1970 so I expected to do a lot of Googling. And I had a ton of help from @KayW which I appreciated as I would have and should have thrown in the towel early on. Skipping through all the many intermediate emails between Kay and myself, here are my issues that result in two thumbs down on this one.

Because of my lack of knowledge I googled “top songs of the 1990’s” and had that page open. After I was put on the right track by Kay, I went through and got all the related clues and grid answers I could and that led nowhere. However I had the X and figured that there could not be very many songs with X in the title in the early 90’s. And there weren’t – zero songs on the top songs of the 90's web page (back to this later).

Also what I found was that many of the two letters from the outsides could lead to multiple clues that were as good or better answers. Or clues that I felt were not correct. For example

NO – instead of 75A, I had 6D as NO (number since CAM was an abbreviation also) as a phone feature and that gave me a C rather than a G.
CA – instead of 81A I had Circa which could be an alternate to 15A and that gave me an N instead of an E
CA – and when I got Kay’s thoughts on 81A, my reaction is that I have never seen a college URL with the state abbreviation in it, so I would never have thought of this as an answer. My UMass Lowell email and their web site are UML.EDU. Same thing for every other college that I or my family have attended.
And there were others were questionable paths to the right letter or several that had to be backsolved or both.

So when I got the answer and looked at my list of top songs of the 1990’s “I Go To Extremes” was not on the list. So I looked at “Top Songs of 1990” and found that this song was #83. So I looked at Billy Joel’s songs and found that this one was released at the end of 1989. So my googling efforts were doomed.

Not a great meta. To the extent that I did not submit the answer.

Bob -- the CA ending is for "Canada" -- if you look at Canadian college names their URLs end in .ca instead of .edu

[sharkicicles]

Bob -- the CA ending is for "Canada" -- if you look at Canadian college names their URLs end in .ca instead of .edu

I thought they ended in .eh...

[rjy]

And there were others were questionable paths to the right letter or several that had to be backsolved or both.

For AS, I had 62A Letters on Cardinals' caps - thought this was clever given that there are also Arizona Cardinals. Until I backsolved to the the TWINS.

CA and (especially) BO were inspired entries.

And if my back-of-the-envelop scribbling is correct, it looks like 42% of the gridfill (not counting spaces) was meta-related. Wow! Way to squeeze a brilliant meta in there, Matt!

[woozy]

I don't know how I feel about how after figuring out the metanism and knowing exactly what to do... that is was still an extremely difficult puzzle to solve (which I could not do by the way. I figured out 5 of the two letter clues and had soliid but unsure guesses of 4 more [one of which was dead wrong] and never would have gotten the last five in million years). On the one hand puzzles ore supposed tricky and multistep and theres no rule that says after figuring out the metanism there shouldn't be more puzzle. Except... it's not that much fun as a solver to finally crack the code only to find instead of a bunny slope to put it together, another five mile hike uphill. And ... if you can't get a toe-hold on the *correct* mechanism you have no reason to think it *is* the correct mechanism. But on the third hand this is a week 4. Actually, that it was *still* hard to complete after cracking the metanism I think puts this in the week 5 category.

For the record, I didn't get *any* of this on my own.

[BarbaraK]

I did this one on Sunday evening, in a bit of a rush as I hoped to submit before the Last Call Zoom.

Looking at the sides, IQ down at the bottom had me pretty confident that that was the right track as I remembered trying very hard to put IQTEST in the grid where SMARTS ended up. Then AC on the top, sharing a row with "Summertime cooler" ICE, which had also seemed odd while solving, made the metanism a lock. So I listed the two letter words and started going through the clues looking for matches.

Once I got CT/XRAY I did try to take a shortcut by googling 1990s hits and looking for something with an X. No luck. So had to find the letters.

When I had I GO TO ?XTRE?ES, it was obvious enough what the answer had to be. Much to my surprise, that is a song I remember. And google confirmed that it was released as a single and became a hit in 1990. (It was on an album that came out in 1989.) So good enough to submit.

While I was going through the clues, in addition to noting the ones I was sure of, I also marked half a dozen that seemed obvious candidates for an alternate answer. "Letters ending some North American college URLs" was one of those. Why the "North American" qualifier? So when looking for a way to get CA, I looked up a Canadian university website and that clicked.

My last one was OA (sic:) That didn't ring any bells. Google gave me osteoarthritis (what, does google think I'm old?) Knew it had to be an M word, and there weren't that many of those. Thought maybe one of those texting abbreviations the kids these days use. Chatting with a friend, he pointed out that that should have been OH, not OA. Sloppy handwriting bites again.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this puzzle.

[Laura M]

Didn't someone else write a meta with this song as the answer? @benchen71? I'm sure I remember this. Was it a similar metanism?

[woozy]

Did any one think that because AC and ICE, NU, and OMICRON, and DR and OBGYN were all colinear that all fifteen would have to be, and spent fruitless seconds to see how NO could apply to MAL or UBU or AP to ALG, etc.?

[benchen71]

Didn't someone else write a meta with this song as the answer? @benchen71? I'm sure I remember this. Was it a similar metanism?

I have a Billy Joel themed crossword that uses this song title in the central entry hint. The puzzle is part of the MOAT Music Meta Pack, which is still available for purchase here.

[schmidzy]

Did any one think that because AC and ICE, NU, and OMICRON, and DR and OBGYN were all colinear that all fifteen would have to be, and spent fruitless seconds to see how NO could apply to MAL or UBU or AP to ALG, etc.?

I did for a minute! But figured even Matt himself couldn't possibly pull off such a feat. I didn't, however, ever figure out AP and BO, which I was certain would be the test and body odor, respectively. Can someone fill me in on what AP means in this context? Looks like Xinhua is a Chinese news source... can't say that's an area I'm knowledgeable on.

[BarbaraK]

Did any one think that because AC and ICE, NU, and OMICRON, and DR and OBGYN were all colinear that all fifteen would have to be, and spent fruitless seconds to see how NO could apply to MAL or UBU or AP to ALG, etc.?

I did for a minute! But figured even Matt himself couldn't possibly pull off such a feat. I didn't, however, ever figure out AP and BO, which I was certain would be the test and body odor, respectively. Can someone fill me in on what AP means in this context? Looks like Xinhua is a Chinese news source... can't say that's an area I'm knowledgeable on.

Associated Press, source of much news that papers print when they don't report it themselves.

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

Like BarbaraK, IQ and AC were the odd clues where the grid answer didn't quite jibe and helped me see the metanism, but the first guidepost for me was 33D: _____ a living (make ends meet) I put a question mark on that one right away because "make ends meet" seemed both superfluous and not quite accurate as a synonym. It led me to tie the first and last columns of the puzzle together rather than looking at what was left after I removed them. I then got enough of the letters to suss out the full song title and back solve the rest.

[woozy]

As = seems and AS=A's was the one I just could not see no matter what. Arizona Cardinal cap letters was the one I felt had to be something but reality insisted the was no such thing.

[KayW]

If Matt made us show our work I would have had only an 84% solve.

I found enough entries to get the title but only guessed at CA/EDU and AS/TWINS. As Bob mentioned, I attributed CA/EDU for the wrong reason. I knew I needed an E and just assUme-d that California or its universities were full enough of themselves to somehow get their own domain suffix My US-centric brain never thought of Canada. I assumed AS was some sportsing thing for TWINS but didn't pronounce/parse it properly to grok Oakland A's. And since by that time I had enough to get the answer, I figured I'd just wait for the reveals to see what the intended matches were.

I had heard of the song but interwebbed the date to make sure it qualified. I was perplexed at first when I saw a 1989 album release date but then saw that the "US single" (wow! they still had singles at that point?) was released in 1990 so I was happy enough to submit.

And since my first toehold was IQ/SMARTS, I luckily side-stepped the co-linear quagmire.

Another brilliant metanism, but very difficult for me. And yipes - we still have a week 5 to come next week?!

[Laura M]

Didn't someone else write a meta with this song as the answer? @benchen71? I'm sure I remember this. Was it a similar metanism?

I have a Billy Joel themed crossword that uses this song title in the central entry hint. The puzzle is part of the MOAT Music Meta Pack, which is still available for purchase here. :D

Sorry I didn't mean to give away spoilers, good thing that was a hint and not the answer! I was thinking it was a past MOAT or MEOW.

Anyway, even though apparently I don't remember all all of the puzzles clearly, my recollection is that this puzzle pack was very enjoyable and well worth getting!

[benchen71]

Didn't someone else write a meta with this song as the answer? @benchen71? I'm sure I remember this. Was it a similar metanism?

I have a Billy Joel themed crossword that uses this song title in the central entry hint. The puzzle is part of the MOAT Music Meta Pack, which is still available for purchase here.

Sorry I didn't mean to give away spoilers, good thing that was a hint and not the answer! I was thinking it was a past MOAT or MEOW.

Anyway, even though apparently I don't remember all all of the puzzles clearly, my recollection is that this puzzle pack was very enjoyable and well worth getting!

You're fine - no spoilers involved! And I would love it if more people bought the MOAT Music Meta Pack.
That said, I am still waiting for someone to solve the mega meta in the MOAT MEOW Mashup Pack. No one has, as far as I can tell!