#668 - "Asked and Answered"

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
MikeM000
Posts: 579
Joined: Mon Aug 24, 2020 11:31 am
Location: Metro Detroit

#81

Post by MikeM000 »

Thurman8er wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 12:59 pm and I felt like there was a Magic 8-Ball somewhere to be found.
Turn the grid 45 degrees counter clockwise, and take off your glasses or whatever other method you can use to blur your vision.
Is that a magic 8-ball? I can't say for sure....

He threw in weird stuff in the other spots of the grid as well - GNAR (clued starting with "Angry"! Almost an anagram; also CANT SURE is 73% of = "Is uncertain") and NIRO (geographic bias to be sure, but I've never seen nor heard of this Kia model) stood out in that regard...
User avatar
ajk
Posts: 925
Joined: Mon Dec 21, 2020 4:22 pm
Location: Colorado

#82

Post by ajk »

Noticed the asymmetry and the 14x14 right away, but not being a constructor thought initially that maybe that was required to make the grid spanners work. Eventually saw that you could make SPEAKING TOO SOON and GASTRONOMICALLY and then looked harder at the asymmetry and thought it was too pronounced to be accidental, and figured we were supposed to make it 15x15. Then just started guessing letters that would work, and came up with ICET and ASHER, which tipped me to look at other first words.

Last hurdle was realizing that 15x15 meant 15x15 and not 15x15 minus one. Once I looked for the 4-letter versions instead of 3 in the upper left, the rest fell quickly, and then I just tried grid order, across then down order, and finally across the top then down the side. Last mini-click was that M could go in front of the title, and that it made a 15 character string if you include a black square between the two words.

Also occurred to me after the fact that the title might have been hinting at a dual use for some of the words in the clues--that they were used to both ask and answer things. But it seems like maybe that was just in my head. :)
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
Bird Lives
Posts: 2607
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 6:43 pm
Location: NYC
Contact:

#83

Post by Bird Lives »

KayW wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 1:34 pm <snip> noticing that PEAKING TOO SOON could become a much more common phrase SPEAKING TOO SOON. I eventually found the right path.
I know that "peaking too soon" is a fairly recent coinage, but I thought that by now it might have overtaken "speaking too soon." Boy was I wrong, and KayW was right.
.
too soon 50.jpg
Jay
User avatar
BarbaraK
Posts: 2591
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 2:37 pm
Location: Virginia

#84

Post by BarbaraK »

I was absolutely sure that the one and only question in the puzzle, "Is Pepsi OK?" was going to be the key. Besides the nearby YES and NOS, there's CANTSAY, FORSURE, and, and, there must be two more, right, but it's a stretch from there on.

Google says there's a meme:
Is Pepsi OK.png
Monopoly currency? Nothing useful there either, but not for lack of trying.

I thought I was jumping ahead by trying to figure out how to 'fix' the grid since I expected the Pepsi answers to tie in there. Can I get other drinks by filling in the missing row/column - either with the expanded grid words or the totally new words? Rail drinks? Tazo tea/tuzo? Stemware?

Since some of the words to be expanded really only had one possible letter, I decided to go ahead and look at the possibilities and see if I could narrow down anything and maybe backsolve the missing Pepsi piece. And there was AS[CHP]E[ER] which only leads to Asher, which I did not immediately remember from the clues, but when I googled it and a Bible reference popped up, all the pieces fell into place quickly.
User avatar
boharr
Moderator
Posts: 3182
Joined: Fri Sep 06, 2019 8:57 am
Location: Westchester, NY

#85

Post by boharr »

Screen Shot 2021-03-23 at 4.29.50 PM.png
higgysue
Posts: 334
Joined: Thu Dec 19, 2019 7:43 pm
Location: Duluth, MN

#86

Post by higgysue »

Thurman8er wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 12:59 pm Two things in particular gave me grief.

First was the fact that the two partials in the upper left (also my last two to solve) could fit with the first three letters of two other clues! I had OCEan with DAM for a while, forming ODEA, CAMS, and EMOTIONLESSNESS. Then I had ANGry with DEA, forming ADAM, NEMO, and GASTRONOMICALLY. It took me a while to realize they both needed the H to form words making the grid symmetrical.

The other part that bothered me greatly (and I truly believe that Matt is sinister sometimes) was that I couldn’t get the title to fit. What am I asking and answering? Well, there are a LOT of answers in the grid, including the obvious (I thought) YES and NOS. Throw in I DEFER, I CAN’T SAY FOR SURE, and maybe even DO IT, and I felt like there was a Magic 8-Ball somewhere to be found.

It took me a while to find the answer and realize how diabolical (and genius) the title actually was. An excellent puzzle indeed.
I was also thinking Magic 8 Ball!
User avatar
TMart
Posts: 816
Joined: Thu Apr 11, 2019 7:13 am
Location: Malvern, PA

#87

Post by TMart »

This one is up there with some of my all-time favorites. It reminds me a little of Matt's Atlantis puzzle from a few years back, where some island names were hanging off the edge of the grid.

First thing I noticed was the hastag-shaped long entries - but they were slightly off kilter. That led me to noticing the asymmetry in the grid, and realizing that an added row above and a column on the left would create symmetry, given the shorter black square sections on those sides. "GASTRONOMICALLY" also jumped out at me for some reason, but when I found APPS along the top, that revealed the full mechanism, because I remembered that word from the clues. Then it was off to the races trying to make the first words of clues fit the grid areas.

I got stuck for a bit looking for 3 letter words along the northwest corner - I had ANG (from angry) and ICE from (ICE-T) for awhile before I realized I needed an extra letter in the corner to really make it symmetrical, and came up with HANG and HIDE.

I also considered some Magic 8 ball stuff early and briefly ("can't say for sure"), but that led nowhere.

Great puzzle!
User avatar
sharkicicles
Posts: 798
Joined: Fri May 10, 2019 12:03 pm
Location: Chicago

#88

Post by sharkicicles »

I didn’t get this but I was way closer than I thought. I immediately saw the asymmetry and was able to fill in most of the missing 15x15 letters... I just didn’t pick all the RIGHT letters and was unable to backsolve. Still, a great puzzle.
User avatar
MikeyG
Posts: 1346
Joined: Wed Dec 30, 2020 2:52 pm
Location: Chicago
Contact:

#89

Post by MikeyG »

Joe Ross wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 1:01 pm
MikeyG wrote: Mon Mar 22, 2021 6:12 pm I'm projecting this one might cap around 300 or so, maybe a bit over.

I'm a stats nerd, sorry! (He went data way!)
Which horse is your early pick for the Kentucky Derby?

Image
The fastest one, bahaha. I got a bit lucky there!!

Man alive, the rabbit holes, and I'm probably missing some:

*It was 6 letters long (the answer), so I thought of the classic 6 questions: Who, What, Where, When, Why, How. This was tough to let go.
*Is Pepsi OK? Thinking about situations when Pepsi would be okay, which in my mind is never (Coke all the way, sorry!!)
*The title: Initials AAA and *ends* with words DDD. So I thought about triple A batteries, three letters in the grid, etc. It's almost always meaningless, but I get a "OH!" moment whenever there's a string of the same letter in the grid.

Then, though I didn't realize it in the solve, I had one of those weird, "Is this a word moment?" afterward: "There's no way that's how 'peak' is spelled in 'peaking too soon.'" It was so bizarre to me - but, I mean, I knew it wasn't "peek" or "pique" but it was weird.

I did not notice the asymmetry first - and I didn't notice the asymmetry with TOP HAT (one square, likely only to make the theme work?). I did notice the fact that CANT SAY FOR SURE was 14, since I like mentally storing 15-letter phrases. And that made me go, "Hmmm."

The kicker was (G)ASTRONOMICALLY for me, since I thought it was cool when I was younger that there was a word so long that can be made into another word by placing a different letter in front. Then it was (E)MOTIONLESSNESS and I was like, "No way."

It took me a bit to get that the words were in the grid - I thought we had to reverse-engineer them and just figure it out, which would've been a bit trickier! Someone else earlier mentioned the importance of the clues, and that's something I tend to forget if I'm not actively paying attention to it.

A great one - we shall see what Week 4 holds!!

Mike
Less cross words, more crosswords.

Solve my latest "Pun of a Kind" Meta!: 89. That's Not Right!
Pembroke
Posts: 25
Joined: Tue Feb 02, 2021 4:25 pm
Location: Broomfield, CO

#90

Post by Pembroke »

ajk wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 2:25 pm ...Last hurdle was realizing that 15x15 meant 15x15 and not 15x15 minus one. ..
Haha. I had the exact same problem for way too long, inexplicably picturing a black square in that space. So embarrassing for a mathematician to forget what symmetry means...
User avatar
KayW
Moderator
Posts: 3124
Joined: Wed Apr 10, 2019 12:10 am
Location: Chicago

#91

Post by KayW »

I have one question this holiday season:

Is PEEPSI OK?


https://www.wnep.com/amp/article/news/n ... 3ad97df9b5
Contest Crosswords Combating Cancer (CCCC) is a bundle of 16 metapuzzles created to help raise money for cancer-related charities. It is available at CrosswordsForCancer.com.
User avatar
Janet P
Posts: 553
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 6:29 pm

#92

Post by Janet P »

KayW wrote: Fri Mar 26, 2021 6:09 pm I have one question this holiday season:

Is PEEPSI OK?


https://www.wnep.com/amp/article/news/n ... 3ad97df9b5
That made me LOL :lol:
Locked