XWord Muggles Forum

By now, I should have learned to look for Step Two in the grid. Instead, my first strategy was to think of other animals that shared the feature. I thought that the initial letters of those animals would spell out the feature of the answer.

W alrus (or Elephant)
K oala (or Wallaby)
C amel
H edgehog

and so on. Obviously, that path led nowhere. So I went back to the grid and immediately saw BUSK and QUELL.

btw, BALEEN sounds to me like the name of country singer. As in, Here’s Baleen McDonald singing her hit “You Know You’re Cheatin’, and So Do I.”

oldjudge wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 1:14 am Now that the solution is out, I thought it was strange that one of the creatures in the grid, the narwhal, is a whale which was the answer. It was an easy meta to solve, but I think the puzzle could have been improved if whale wasn’t effectively used twice.

I thought the same thing. It made me second guess my answer until I saw the order for BALEEN matched the order of the clues and not just placement on the grid.

oldjudge wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 1:14 am Now that the solution is out, I thought it was strange that one of the creatures in the grid, the narwhal, is a whale which was the answer. It was an easy meta to solve, but I think the puzzle could have been improved if whale wasn’t effectively used twice.

In Matt's defense, the NARWHAL does not have the feature BALEEN (See what you can learn on the internet.) So the WHALE that is the answer to the meta is a different kettle of fish.

I (and some other folks) thought that the weak element of the puzzle was having WINGS as the feature of STARLING. Well yes, starlings do have wings but I wouldn't call them a distinguishing feature like a tusk or hump. I backsolved this part. Instead of searching the grid for a word that was close to an animal feature, I searched it for the E that I knew had to be there.

Anyway, Starling is a feature of Pirates.

In the 2 wrongs don’t make a right answer category: if you think a Narwhal has a HORN not a TUSK (IRON becomes the grid entry) and then think Starlings have a MIMIC characteristic (no grid entry), then you can find ALIEN instead of BALEEN. That was my not-really-an-animal answer, until I grokked the WINGS-WINES.
I also tried to make FLOCK work for a while, but realized it’s not a feature of the creature.
And all the talk of backsolving made me look at BUSK and IRON in top left, so I thought maybe it was HORN > RHINO for a while. But it didn’t pass the sniff test either.

I had all but one E of BALEEN and had to backsolve . I felt like an idiot when I finally realized starlings would have....wings. I actually had googled starlings, a familiar bird, to try to find an unusual feature I had overlooked. Cute puzzle. I like the ones where there are a couple of steps, but none of the steps are too hard, and I like the moment before getting the solution when you see that the path you are on is working.

Bird Lives wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 6:56 am

oldjudge wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 1:14 am Now that the solution is out, I thought it was strange that one of the creatures in the grid, the narwhal, is a whale which was the answer. It was an easy meta to solve, but I think the puzzle could have been improved if whale wasn’t effectively used twice.

In Matt's defense, the NARWHAL does not have the feature BALEEN (See what you can learn on the internet.) So the WHALE that is the answer to the meta is a different kettle of fish.

I (and some other folks) thought that the weak element of the puzzle was having WINGS as the feature of STARLING. Well yes, starlings do have wings but I wouldn't call them a distinguishing feature like a tusk or hump. I backsolved this part. Instead of searching the grid for a word that was close to an animal feature, I searched it for the E that I knew had to be there.

Anyway, Starling is a feature of Pirates.

My thought process was exactly the same as Bird's.

First tried to write down the salient feature of each theme animal. Several gave me trouble: porcupine could be spine or quill, scallop could be shell or hinge or ridge, but starling was really a challenge — had written sheen, gloss, shine, black.

My second step was the DOH - thought I next had to come up with a creature that included ALL of the salient features, possibly an exotic deep-sea animal, sci-fi or mythological chimera! Kept at this for a ridiculously long time. Had to physically shake my head to remove the idea, and give myself a third-person talking-to: “Beth, this isn’t how these things work!!”

Sort of stuck, so go back and look over the grid. There’s BUSK right at 1A practically screaming at me! DOH.

I thought the weak point most people were talking about was the STARLING/WINGS one, which I also had to backsolve. I never gave a thought to NARWHAL already being a type of WHALE, fortunately, or would have been concerned. Ignorance was bliss!

Bob cruise director wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 8:03 am

Bird Lives wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 6:56 am

oldjudge wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 1:14 am Now that the solution is out, I thought it was strange that one of the creatures in the grid, the narwhal, is a whale which was the answer. It was an easy meta to solve, but I think the puzzle could have been improved if whale wasn’t effectively used twice.

In Matt's defense, the NARWHAL does not have the feature BALEEN (See what you can learn on the internet.) So the WHALE that is the answer to the meta is a different kettle of fish.

I (and some other folks) thought that the weak element of the puzzle was having WINGS as the feature of STARLING. Well yes, starlings do have wings but I wouldn't call them a distinguishing feature like a tusk or hump. I backsolved this part. Instead of searching the grid for a word that was close to an animal feature, I searched it for the E that I knew had to be there.

Anyway, Starling is a feature of Pirates.

My thought process was exactly the same as Bird's.

But, Matt and the other puzzle creators can do whatever they want, right? So, "narwhal" is OK and "wings" is OK. I'm just glad they create these puzzles for us to enjoy.

For some reason my family members were all convinced it was Whale. The word Whale is practically contained within Narwhal, plus a Narwhal is a whale. I found all the creature features and worked at finding a step 2 for a long time. Found Busk, but didn't go any further at that time. The rabbit hole I spent the most time in was trying to see if Whale could be linked somehow to all the identified creature features. It's amazing what you can learn when you get googling... There was an obvious connection between whale and narwhal. Imagine my delight when I learned of the Arizona Whale-Kangaroo (it's a psychology thing). And then I learned that a whale does indeed have a pouch (used in sound production). *Hump*back whale provided a weak connection to Dromedary. Instead of Quill, I had Spine for a while. Of course a whale has a spine... pretty tenuous connection... I got excited again when I googled "whale wings" as I found all sorts of information about humpback whales' fins being used in the design for airplane wings, particularly because of the *scalloped* edges of the fins. Fast forward to the Starling Whale connection... this one's worth looking up... many sightings of Starling flocks forming the shapes of whales in the sky. And then there's the Shell/Whale connection (to do with oil) and the Whale's Eye Seashell. As you can see, I spent a lot of time trying to make it work. But I was unconvinced. MG's method was certainly much more elegant! Lol. Once Bob and others suggested that solvers would be 100% certain, I looked back and found the mechanism. Great puzzle.

As I suspected, a lot of us backsolved starling after getting BALE_N. But even though that link was a bit weaker, it was a really fun meta! I think it would be a good one for introducing regular crossword solvers to metas.

PS. Wasn’t it scary that there were SIX theme answers, and yet the desired meta answer was a FIVE-letter word?? I had to keep saying to myself, “don’t panic” and “trust the puzzle”.

Toby wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 8:02 am I had all but one E of BALEEN and had to backsolve . I felt like an idiot when I finally realized starlings would have....wings. I actually had googled starlings, a familiar bird, to try to find an unusual feature I had overlooked. Cute puzzle. I like the ones where there are a couple of steps, but none of the steps are too hard, and I like the moment before getting the solution when you see that the path you are on is working.

Haha, my experience solving the puzzle was exactly the same! I even wrote out all 5 letter words in the grid with an 'e', then finally got it when I looked at a diagram for parts of a bird. Too many animals have wings for me to think of it.

BethA wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 9:29 am PS. Wasn’t it scary that there were SIX theme answers, and yet the desired meta answer was a FIVE-letter word?? I had to keep saying to myself, “don’t panic” and “trust the puzzle”.

I noticed that right away, but I took it as a hint that there would be a third step that those six letters led to.

JJD wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 7:42 am ..., until I grokked

I'm so glad someone else uses this phrase in real life. Most of my friends don't grok when I say "I grok." They must not be Heinlein aficionados.

CPJohnson wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 8:35 am
But, Matt and the other puzzle creators can do whatever they want, right? So, "narwhal" is OK and "wings" is OK. I'm just glad they create these puzzles for us to enjoy.

Hear, hear! As much as I enjoy the post-mortems, sometimes it seems like hair-splitting. At this point in life, I'm happy to have hairs on my head to split.

And thank you Bee for your Melvillesque account of falling down the blowholes...

Good, enjoyable puzzle, but as others have said, WINGS stands out as not as distinctive to starlings as the other features are to their creatures, and also, not all whales have a BALEEN filter---so, a couple of not-quite on the nose aspects. It's okay to split hairs, I think. Subtleties like these can important evidence for or against a solution. And it's important, as a solver, to know when a solution is good enough and when an infelicity is a sign to keep looking.

At the risk of beating the proverbial horse, the starling/wings thing was definitely the outlier.

When one thinks of a narwhal/camel/porcupine, the one thing they think of is their (answer)

When I think of a starling, I think of a bunch of dots in the sky. It doesn't define them as any different from a significant population of animals.

But as has been said, we figured it out and the constructors did what they could do so we all survive. It just made for a more backwards solution than normal.

- Sean

I mistakenly dropped wings as the starling creature feature, as all of the other creature features were singular (over thinking an MG meta, which is usually not possible). I backfilled using "quill" as the starling creature feature, not only as the porcupine feature, so the needed double "e" dropped from using quell twice. Pays to be lucky.

Here's this week's contest report:
We heard from almost every possible 5-letter animal. Any ideas why TIGER (18), CAMEL (11) and SABLE (10) were particularly popular? Also LLAMA (5), SNAKE (5), PANDA (4) HUMAN (4), SKUNK (4) and many others.

In all we had 1451 entries, an impressive 90% correct.
Congrats to this week's winner, Charlie Lewis of Livonia, Mich.!

OK, I see I'm not the only one who got momentarily stuck on wings. I was sure it had to be something more distinctive, so kept looking for my missing piece. Finally I alit upon wines/wings.