"Oh And One More Thing" September 8, 2023

[whimsy]

Yah, sure, PAIGOW -- just your average everyday crosswordese fill --
Gotta be there for some reason --
There it is! It's got the letters of IOWA embedded in it. Ta-da!

Step away from the hole, whimsy; it only leads to a fall into this den of iniquity --

(I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!)

[Nycerjohnnie]

FYI - I solved this with "Ohio State", not Penn State, which is why I didn't see the PS confirmation piece.

I also had the duo of Simon & Garfunkel, so lacked it there also.

But with boharr's help, I got from 99.99% to 110% on my answer.

Lol and this is why this was not a “tight” or “elegant” meta. Not a knock on you.

[MMe]

There are all sorts of alternative paths here, but I think the intended solving experience is very nice: notice that the themer clues are all suspiciously non-specific (there are multiple alternative answers to each, though not dozens of them); make lists of the alternatives, notice that there is a P* S* in each; slap your head and say, "Of course! PS as in a letter's postscript, which means exactly, *Oh, And One More Thing*!"; now that you confidently have the first step, it's a "standard," which is not to say easy, path to the finish.
You didn't actually *have* to notice the significance of P* S* to solve, but only that it was a commonality among alternative answers, and so many of us found that only after solving as an "added elegance".
Great example of a meta that we old hands had a reasonable shot at solving, but which is not at all beginner-appropriate. I.e., "week 3."

[Nycerjohnnie]

Forget the rabbit hole of PAIGOW, what about the rabbit hole of KNOWING it has to be Palm Springs (CA native), seeing POM, seeing STRINGS, and being 100% sure that what I’m meant to do is somehow change POM STRINGS into PALM SPRINGS? Obviously right? I mean everyone is saying how elegant and tight this is, so surely the POM at 1 down wouldn’t just be for nothing? Surely the P words aren’t just absent entirely from the puzzle such that people can think the answer is OHIO state and DESERT HOT springs and still solve it right??? Couldn’t be!

[pjc]

There is no way in the name of all that is good and holy that I would have come up with that. Mega-congrats to those that figured it out!

Losing streak is starting anew!

[Justmarebear]

Congrats to all who figured it out without the zoom meetings… this one was way out of my league. But looking forward to a new challenge this week.

[ship4u]

Knowing nothing about sports, we were immediatley intimidated by the sports theme appearing in the themers.

The "Big Ten", what's that? Oh, it's actually 14. But it has to do with football.

"Utah Jazz", what's that? Jazz in Mormon country? Oh, it came from New Orleans. But it has to do with basketball. Sport #2.

"Top Spin Lobs?" Well, it has to do with tennis. Sport #3.

Google "Rancho Mirage sports". Rancho Mirage happens to be the name of a varsity softball team. Oh, brother..... Sport #4

Now what?

Google "Kenny Loggins sports". NBC Sports used his song "This is It" as the theme song for 2 years for NCAA tournament coverage. Hmmmm.

This whole exercise got us nowhere except that we were stuck with the song "This is It" playing in our head all weekend!

[SamKat9]

Here's a survey to all of the people who were ashore (and may be drinking):
What do you think is the age cutoff at which the elegant element of this puzzle will not be appreciated?

I’d say Gen X would be it given what the elegance is and how it would be used.

As a millennial, I'll admit I thought of BTW (by the way) quite a while before P.S.

[HunterX]

I, too, solved without noticing the PS connection. But I did think it odd that for STATE/STARE there were multiple teams that worked. My son, who is in his 20's and more into sports, was able to rattle off Big 10 schools and NBA teams in the 4 corners. I, being much older, remembered We Are The World and thought of Paul Simon before I realized Kenny Loggins was the real answer. (Always loved L&M's "Angry Eyes.") Looking up the Coachella Valley and Palm Springs seemed the obvious choice, being most well known.

We actually tried to incorporate 1D POM as a phonetic version of PALM to go along with STRINGS, but as it didn't work for other alternative answers, rejected it. Oddly, it caused us to reject using STRINGS as well. It was only after our brief family zoom that I thought of SIXON, which was a really odd answer, as a clue that we were only looking for the second word/name of each alternative. And quickly came up with EXTRA.

Wish I'd put 2+2 together for the P.S. while solving. That was clearly the intended path.

[Merry Potter]

Google "Kenny Loggins sports". NBC Sports used his song "This is It" as the theme song for 2 years for NCAA tournament coverage. Hmmmm.

This whole exercise got us nowhere except that we were stuck with the song "This is It" playing in our head all weekend!

Kenny Loggins is also famous for the theme to another sports movie- it's the great golf movie Caddyshack! "I'm Alright"!

[Susan Goldberg]

I was almost there. But, fell short. Even though I didn’t end up solving, I really liked this one. Oh well. Perhaps the thwarted solving experience will help with future puzzles…

[woozy]

I figured that it could be just about *any* mechanism. Alternative solutions, additional solutions, words added to solutions to get other concepts, solutions where you add a letter, remove a letter, and as we were talking about long and uninteresting lists (Beg 10 schools, there's fourteen of the them; singers in We are the world, there's a hundred and fourteen of them; offenses in tennis, that's a collection of concepts unparseable to an outsider and probably unformalized to an insider) that I figured the whole thing wasn't worth trying for. I got unsolicited nudges that I figured it out (didn't submit) and I figure my assessment was correct.

[JetStream]

Wow. Congrats to the solvers. I don't think I would have gotten this one in a hundred years...

[kgiano]

Missed this by a country mile.

"Oh, and one more thing..." - this was what Steve Jobs used to say at his press conferences when doing a big reveal about a cool new Apple product coming out. Of course that idea led me directly to nowheresville.

My eminently logical rabbit hole:
Maryland - land - 69A Asia
Kenny Loggins - log in - 71A ISP
Top spin lobs - a tennis reference - 11D Evonne
Rancho Mirage, part of clue "Coachella Valley" - 54A Napa as in Napa Valley
Utah Jazz - one of the many singers in the grid was a jazz singer - 17D Horne

Asia ISP Evonne Napa Horne <> EXTRA - and ran out of time.

[HunterX]

"Oh, and one more thing..." - this was what Steve Jobs used to say at his press conferences when doing a big reveal about a cool new Apple product coming out. Of course that idea led me directly to nowheresville.

And it was close to Peter Falk's catchphrase as Lieutenant Columbo, "Just one more thing..."

[Nlobb]

I had to google a lot knowing little about tennis shots, the Big Ten (go SEC), the Coachella valley, the singer clue (thinking Loggins and Messina) or NBA teams… that’s my fault but I still liked doing the puzzle as always. Hope Mr G is having a well deserved vacation!!

[Sleepy]

I don’t know…. If you have Paul Simon, Passing Shot, Palm Springs, Phoenix Suns, and then go with Ohio State for the big ten school choice, not so sure that saying the Meta was inelegant is the way to go. P.S. = Oh, and one more thing

[mheberlingx100]

Mr G was my best friend in solving this week. Coachella Valley towns? Woodstock line-up? Big Ten teams? Yikes!

I first saw Palm Springs (strings) and Phoenix Suns (sans).
Paul Simon (six on) clinched it. After that, I back solved, positive that “extra” was the answer.

[MatthewL]

I found the 5 alternates to the themers by literally typing out all the alternatives for each one in alphabetical order in their own separate columns, and then the PS thing became clear fairly quickly. I thought -- heck, that's clever -- P.S. -- postscript -- an alternate answer to the title. Okay. What next? Well, it's Gaffney, so I started looking at the clues and I quickly saw two across clues that were 2 words, one starting with P and one starting with S (8A and 32A). Aha! I've got you now Gaffney! But alas, no joy, as no further clues employed that convention. But, still being focused on PS, I noticed that there were exactly 5 clues that contained a word that began with P and ended with S (8A, 37A, 3D, 15D, and 55D). The first letters of the corresponding grid entries are S, T, E, S, and P). Backwards, that almost spells PESTS, which is a word that, conveniently enough, begins with P and ends with S. And, people who say "oh, and one more thing" can be pests, so it's an alternative answer to the title (kind of, if you squint hard enough). But whichever way I pushed it, I couldn't come up with a logical mechanism to get to PESTS short of anagramming, and that just didn't seem right. Nor did the fact that one of the clues was for a themer, which definitely didn't seem right. So after about 30 to 45 minutes of wrestling with that, I reached out to a friend, who let me know I was down a rabbit hole, and to focus on the grid entries. So I did, and pretty quickly saw what I was supposed to see. But wow, I was so convinced I was on the right track. Not saying he did that intentionally, but 5 clues with words that start with P and end with S? Dastardly.

[MikeMillerwsj]

The contest answer is EXTRA. Each theme clue could also clue an answer with the initials P.S.: Penn State, Paul Simon, passing shots, Palm Springs and Phoenix Suns. One grid answer is a letter off from the second word of each. In grid order they are: SHOES, SIXON, STRINGS, STARE and SANS. Those changed letters spell the contest answer.

We thought this multi-step trail was quite a tricky one, and that was reflected in the relatively modest number of submissions: 776. But those of you who entered the contest did very well--91% correct, above our typical level around 75%. Incorrect entries arrived in dribs and drabs: BONUS (2), TREAT (2), plus ALTER, TEENS, SMART, ENTRY, and a handful of others.

Congrats to this week's winner: Gregg Smalley of Holliston, MA!