XWord Muggles Forum

CallMeShane wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 4:57 am

It didn’t take too long to find the other three double word answers.

Now what?

ksbfl wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 7:43 am Playing on an iPhone (a tiny old beloved SE no less) in the middle of the Adirondacks is not conducive to grasping the gestalt. I “jotted down” the sets of initials, eliminated the duplicates and was left with J G (Ballard.) Violated my rule of never submitting an answer I have to justify.

ksbfl wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 7:43 am Playing on an iPhone (a tiny old beloved SE no less) in the middle of the Adirondacks is not conducive to grasping the gestalt. I “jotted down” the sets of initials, eliminated the duplicates and was left with J G (Ballard.) Violated my rule of never submitting an answer I have to justify.

Larrry wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 1:43 pm I am in the club of having to google to get to the final step (I also had never heard of KT Oslin), then being concerned there could be more than one "N.K." I went to Google Trends to see if there was a sudden increase of searches for N.K.Jemisin and was amused by the related topics (see screenshot). Since people who searched for N.K.Jemisin also searched for P.G.Wodehouse, the Wall Street Journal, and Coir, I was reassured that if i was on the wrong track at least I wasnt alone. (further down the list were also J.D.Salinger, H.G. Wells, and "Muggle").

Limerick Savant wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 10:50 am It occurs to me Mike could have referenced another famous author in the puzzle by including a clue like:

Scout’s likely confession to her best friend after killing that annoying bird outside the Finch house

Larrry wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 1:43 pm I went to Google Trends to see if there was a sudden increase of searches for N.K.Jemisin

ZooAnimalsOnWheels wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 1:34 pm I'm new to the cruise, as you can see by my post count, but I had to come aboard to discuss this one. I quickly noticed the author double initials and the associated answers, but wasn't sure where to go from there, even though NK stood out as an unused two-word entry. I hadn't taken note of NK Jemisin until now.

But I was drawn to the books used in each author's clue. It was always one well-known example, and another seemingly plucked from their works at random. The more well known work was always listed first, except in the case of JD Salinger. Then I noticed the titles of all the books listed second contained 'Out' (for Lovecraft) or 'In' (for the three others).

But like @MatthewL and @woozy above, I had found 'helipad' as my HP clue and never saw 'hot pot'! And it continued to bother me that 'helipad' wasn't really a two-word answer. But I then connected it with the fact that Lovecraft's second work was the only one that contained 'out', and so I thought he shouldn't be part of the grid.

I eventually had to google "NK science fiction" to find Jemisin, but when I saw her name I said, "Oh, Lovecraft is out, and Jem-is-in!" I continued to look around the grid to see if I could find 'JEM' anywhere significant. I was still fairly sure that Jemisin was correct based on 'Nice Kid', but like other solvers said, it wasn't 100%. I'll be interested to see the discussion with the setter and whether those example works had any significance.

Kas wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 12:56 pm

LadyBird wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 12:16 am I got the 4 authors and the double initials and then saw the 4 two-letter answers with corresponding initials. I was then convinced that the answer HAD to be HG WELLS. Try as I might, I could not backsolve that answer from the grid. For some reason, I went looking through the grid for 2-word answers and noticed that there was an "extra".

Wondering if there were a lot of HG WELLS submissions.

Yep. "H.G. Wells" was my top-of-mind answer, too...but I went back to the well, and luckily, my bucket came up with Jemisin. In any event, this illustrates my comment last week about the likelihood of this Meta causing a lot of, uh...back-paddling. (And I'm chuckling at the mental image of a bunch of people putting their Maitais down at the cabana, walking despondently back to the shore and swimming back to the ship...)

ZooAnimalsOnWheels wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 1:34 pm
I eventually had to google "NK science fiction" to find Jemisin, but when I saw her name I said, "Oh, Lovecraft is out, and Jem-is-in!"

Tom Shea wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 8:49 am

I had JG Ballard via a similar route.

On to next week.