"Just A Step More" - October 23, 2020

[JeanneC]

Not sure but submitting an answer. Looks like it’s right. It doesn’t contain that sense of Gaffney elegance, though. Mentally I went over other Gaffney puzzles I remembered and came up with something. Will see in about 30 minutes whether it’s the right something. Good luck all.

[KscX]

An 11th hour swim to shore after someone nudged me off the boat. Many thanks and I will not submit.

[TPS]

This is the note I made in Word once I realized that I had figured out the method. Unfortunately, initially I typed an (E) for the first part so I had EMELL - and it took me a good 10 minutes to realize my mistake during which time I assumed there must be a 3rd step before realizing it was SMELL which is funny because when I first read the prompt I decided my Hail Mary was going to be one of the 5 senses.

Step 1 Step 2
CHEERIEST (ERIE) 5 – GREAT LAKES – HURON (S) (4D)
INDOCHINE (DOC) 7 – SEVEN DWARVES - SNEEZY (M) (32A)
SORRY TO HEAR THAT (EARTH) 8 – PLANETS - MARS (E) (24A)
APENNINES (PENN) 8 – IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS - YALE (L) (56A)
FLUSTERED (LUST) 7 – DEADLY SINS GREED (L) (49D)

[Martin]

RED (one of the 7 colors of the rainbow) was my rabbit hole for a while. But my LUST won out in the end.

[TPS]

RED (one of the 7 colors of the rainbow) was my rabbit hole for a while. But my LUST won out in the end.

A lot of people had RED and a lot of people had HEART at first. I thought more people would struggle with PENN because not everyone knows Ivy League schools.

[TPS]

The second step for this puzzle was also basically the same 2nd step in Mike Shenk's "Less and Less" (DEDUCT) puzzle and then the following week in Matt Gaffney's "We're in this together" (COCO CHANEL) Aug 21 & Aug 28 of this year.

[ImOnToo]

I was so fixated on the clue for 52 Down followed by 60 Down. You Castle in chess before you "do anything else" with the king and castle in chess.
Then saw "Rois" (Kings?) at 5 Down.
I tried SO may iterations of moving either two to the right or three to the left of the (x) letters in each clue. I was WAY down a rabbit hole that my mind wouldn't release me from!

[Martin]

RED (one of the 7 colors of the rainbow) was my rabbit hole for a while. But my LUST won out in the end.

A lot of people had RED and a lot of people had HEART at first. I thought more people would struggle with PENN because not everyone knows Ivy League schools.

Mike Shenk is famously a PENN alum, so I wouldn't miss that in a puzzle he edited.

[TMart]

I had the alumni advantage on this one (and I happened to be wearing a Penn shirt when I solved) so I got it pretty quickly. PENN and LUST jumped out at me (for some reason, those two words are linked in my brain from my younger days ) and the rest followed pretty easily from there (although the ENZYMES/SNEEZY anagram took a while to find.)

This was a nice combo of some of Matt’s techniques- he’s done ordered sets and (anagram +1) lots of times before.

I was worried that after finding SMELL there would be another (anagram +1) step in the grid somewhere, since taste, sight and touch and sound all have five letters as well, (and TASTE + 1 is pretty close to CASTLE, as well as SIGHT + 1 and ITSHIM) but I got comfortable after searching all the six-letter words that there was “just another step” after the initial “aha” and no pageantry going on.

[Laura M]

Great first step, but after that there were so many different ways it could go... most of them involving anagrams, which I am not great with. 30 other possible words to look for, anywhere the grid or the clues, scrambled or not, probably with an extra letter, and that was only the most likely set of possibilities. I actually thought that this would too much of a slog to be in a WSJ meta, so I wasted a bunch of time looking for other alternatives. For example, I considered whether "a step more" might mean an extra member of each set: Pluto was an obvious one, but I also found that Lake Champlain had been considered a Great Lake for a short period of time, and there was an 8th original dwarf called Stealthy. But there weren't obvious candidates for the other two and it wasn't spelling anything, so I finally held my nose and dived into the anagrams. Eventually I found one, and then one more, and I knew I was on the right track, but it still took a while. So, not my favorite puzzle, but the first part was cool and the second part seems to have been not as much of an obstacle for other solvers as it was for me :-)

The odd thing that I noticed (after getting all this practice on anagrams) was that SMELL plus an I anagrams to 12D MILLES. I couldn't tell if that was supposed to be a confirmation, or just a coincidence?

[JAQT]

I just want to acknowledge TPS, publicly, for gentle, patient and encouraging nudges, with exactly the right amount of tiny details to get you going.

IMO, as a learning experience, expertly given nudges are better than waiting for the full answer, since at least you learn how to work out some part of the puzzle.

[Jaye]

I came up with another of the senses as my answer. I saw that ERIE appears as consecutive letters in cheERIEst, DOC in inDOChine, EARTH in sorry to hEAR THat, etc. So I took one more step using the very same mechanism to extract the consecutive letters TASTE that appear in the puzzle title: jusT A STEp more.

It seemed legitimate to me!

[Plymouthrock]

Well, I submitted salsa, the dance, (part of a set).
I added “one more step” to the steps in the grid, taking the letters from those blocks blackened by creating the step. Brother!!!!!was pretty pleased with my answer and myself.

[Joe Ross]

[Joe Ross]

So many rabbit holes with what seemed to be 2/5ths to 4/5ths validity. There were at least 5 where the AHA! was halfway exclaimed, only to fall short. This weekend was a riot of color.

[Streroto]

As always, extraordinarily clever. Again would not have gotten there without a little help from my friends. Did not see either TASTE or SMELL (in MILLES) thought in retrospect the latter grid entry should have screamed “look at me” given it’s unusual nature.

Stay well all

[CPJohnson]

The second step for this puzzle was also basically the same 2nd step in Mike Shenk's "Less and Less" (DEDUCT) puzzle and then the following week in Matt Gaffney's "We're in this together" (COCO CHANEL) Aug 21 & Aug 28 of this year.

And the first step was like the puzzle from 10-28-16, THREE OF A KIND (numbers indicated sets).

[CPJohnson]

At first, I failed to think of the 7 dwarfs....I thought maybe the set was seven notes of the musical scale (do, re, mi.....) or the 7 continents (Asia somehow related to Indochine...I know, I know, it's not like the others.) Then, seeing anagrammed Huron crossing Erie, I assumed the other "finds" would be grid words that crossed Doc, Penn, etc. They weren't, of course. But Daughter saw the light; she reached shore first.

[eagle1279]

Well, I had ERIE (as a Great Lake), but then had CHIN, HEART, NINE and LUSTER (the final letters of which are ENTER, which of course was meaningless). Congrats to those who could SEE the correct words and worked out the rest, I ENVY your SUPERIOR puzzling skills and I feel DOPEY for not getting it.

[ADS]

I got hung up on the first letters of the categories which anagram to D-PLUS (dwarfs, planets, lakes, universities, sins). And I thought it was too coincidental that the clue for 20-across was so similar to the puzzle title (overlap of “more”) and the answer to 20-Across was PLUS, which was so similar to my anagram. It seemed to indicate to me that I should start with the second letter of those words (i.e., “a step” over from the first letter). The second letter of those categories anagrams to “in-law.” Obviously that is hyphenated, which made me hesitate for a long while, but i was running out of time and it seemed to fit the “part of a set” criteria enough so I went with it. Congrats to all who got the right answer to this tough one.