#687 - “Fifth-Fifth Friday”

An excellent puzzle written by one of the innovators of the meta crossword format. It comes out every Friday at noon and increases in difficulty throughout the month. Available for modest subscription (worth every cent) here: www.xwordcontest.com
User avatar
ajk
Posts: 925
Joined: Mon Dec 21, 2020 4:22 pm
Location: Colorado

#81

Post by ajk »

Yeah, I don't think I was ever getting this one, despite having thought of at least the category of answer early on. :)

In retrospect it's clear that I was looking for something more complicated than the end of the words, but despite many signals that it shouldn't be complicated I couldn't make my brain give it up. Like I knew I needed to simplify but just...couldn't somehow. Oh well. Mind you, it's only after the multiple nudges that I should have gotten it. No chance I'd get it from scratch. So probably a DNF is the right result here anyway. :)
Check out this very cool project by many of your favorite muggles to raise money to fight cancer. You get a fun puzzle bundle and good causes get $. Win-win: Crosswords for Cancer
User avatar
Hector
Posts: 1297
Joined: Thu Apr 11, 2019 8:15 pm
Location: San Francisco
Contact:

#82

Post by Hector »

802puzzler wrote: Tue Aug 03, 2021 1:16 pm I was stuck on the fact that the fifth fifth Friday of the year will be 12/31/2021. So I was forcing all kinds of round pegs into those square holes. Oh well, next Friday is a week one! 😊
And can ONLY be 12/31 on a non-leap-year. Etc., etc., etc.

Congrats to the solvers!
User avatar
lbray53
Posts: 1194
Joined: Fri May 08, 2020 8:34 am
Location: Elkhorn, WI

#83

Post by lbray53 »

Bird Lives wrote: Mon Aug 02, 2021 1:24 pm
Al Sisti wrote: Mon Aug 02, 2021 12:44 pm ...kinda what I meant. I need a sarcasm font.
I thought so.
There might be an emoji to indicate sarcasm, but I'm emoji-illiterate.
When I was still working I declared the Comic Sans font to be the sarcasm font in my department.

One of the people in the department was a strict literalist. He really struggled with my banter in text even though we got along great in person. When we instituted the sarcasm font he would automatically read the text with my voice in his head. It worked like a charm.

We had a lot of fun with it. I would get responses like, "Was that supposed to be in the sarcasm font?"
My avatar proves that it is sometimes better to be lucky than good!
User avatar
RPardoe
Posts: 736
Joined: Tue Jul 23, 2019 4:09 pm
Location: Houston, TX

#84

Post by RPardoe »

MikeyG wrote: Mon Aug 02, 2021 11:14 am The difficulty of this might minimize the surge, but I think we'll still push over the all-time low since I started, which was the infamous MASS IN B MINOR at 115 back in November.
127 was the final number, so just a bit more than MASS IN B MINOR.

Interestingly enough - both are "letter banks" or "charades" of a sort in that the answer is read from groups of letters from the grid.

I am aware that a common technique is reading initial (or other) letters from themes. I am trying to describe where groups of letters are joined together. In a cryptic puzzle, this would be a CHARADE type of clue/solve. But getting verbose even at tiny font, so shall stop now.
Laura M
Posts: 1384
Joined: Thu Apr 11, 2019 11:49 am

#85

Post by Laura M »

DNF. I noticed the grid asymmetry early on and knew it was important, but never hit on the right thing to do despite spending way more time on this than I could really afford! Excellent concept and puzzle, although I'm slightly annoyed by the (I think?) unnecessarily hyphenated title... Removing that dash wouldn't have helped me solve it, but maybe I could have spent less time trying to figure out why it was punctuated that way :-) Anyway, congrats to the solvers!
User avatar
Bird Lives
Posts: 2605
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 6:43 pm
Location: NYC
Contact:

#86

Post by Bird Lives »

I wonder if there were solvers who immediately noticed the JA an CK at the end of the across entries and coasted the rest of the way from there.
Jay
User avatar
DrTom
Posts: 3763
Joined: Sat Apr 20, 2019 6:46 pm
Location: Jacksonville, FL

#87

Post by DrTom »

I will not even go into the Bizarro world I ended up on with trying to solve. It involves chemical symbols, atomic numbers and metals that are liquid at room temperature. I had seen the one 5 letter word, I realized there were two 15 letter words, but the Fifth Fifth never tripped the right buttons for me. I have a list of 5th letters that spell nothing though.....
NUDGES!I am always willing to give nudges where needed; metas should be about fun, not frustration. Send me what you have done so far because often you are closer than you think!
User avatar
MikeyG
Posts: 1346
Joined: Wed Dec 30, 2020 2:52 pm
Location: Chicago
Contact:

#88

Post by MikeyG »

It's funny how I tried six ways to Sunday to get this to no avail - and then last night, with one last look right before bed (albeit with some nudging, so group solve), I suddenly saw the "ANI" and "ELS." I sometimes have a bad habit of assuming all long entries (i.e. BEDROOMEYES) are involved in some way, though that's not necessarily the case.

I was thinking about the title on my walk today after all was said and done; it really was a tough one to parse. There was alliteration, the repeated word, the numeric fraction, etc. A rightfully placed Week 5, then, I take it!
Less cross words, more crosswords.

Solve my latest "Pun of a Kind" Meta!: 89. That's Not Right!
User avatar
HeadinHome
Posts: 1066
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2020 9:06 am
Location: Charlotte, NC

#89

Post by HeadinHome »

Laura M wrote: Tue Aug 03, 2021 4:17 pm Excellent concept and puzzle, although I'm slightly annoyed by the (I think?) unnecessarily hyphenated title... Removing that dash wouldn't have helped me solve it, but maybe I could have spent less time trying to figure out why it was punctuated that way :-) Anyway, congrats to the solvers!
Are we gonna talk about hyphens again? Cuz I'm up for that! :lol: (Didn't care for the one in the "well-known fifth" cue either, BTW... I don't WANT these rules to change.)

Personally, I really wanted GUY FAWKES DAY (5th of Nov., remember) to be the answer. Something with holidays in general woulda been grand, since Hanukkah and Eve and Rudolph were all in the puzzle, and there's an actual nip in the air today. But I got Jack Daniels by (finally) considering that "fifth" can be an ordinal AND a fraction... the fifth FIFTH of something... now what could be neatly divided into fifths? A fifteen-letter word? check. and a ten-letter word? check. and... Ohhhhh -- there it is!
The other Wendy. :roll:
Laura M
Posts: 1384
Joined: Thu Apr 11, 2019 11:49 am

#90

Post by Laura M »

DrTom wrote: Tue Aug 03, 2021 5:11 pm ...metals that are liquid at room temperature...
Hahaha, I know exactly which rabbit hole you're talking about, I was there too!
User avatar
TMart
Posts: 816
Joined: Thu Apr 11, 2019 7:13 am
Location: Malvern, PA

#91

Post by TMart »

I noticed the asymmetry as well as the fact that there was only one five-letter word. But that wasn’t enough to get me anywhere, so this week was a big nope.
Locked