Hope Springs Eternal - August 2023

[spotter]

Anybody free to help me along on this one? I have a big observation that I can’t take anywhere.

Edit: on the board

[Googly]

[BarbaraK]

I needed a generous nudge from a generous muggle to find this one late last night. I'd noticed lots of DOs and SPAs but never tried putting them together. BOX was not on my radar at all.

So congrats to the speedy solvers, and may I ask, how? Out of 100 grid entries, why did Hesiod/box seem important? Is there some connection to the title that I'm missing?

I'm looking forward to hearing Pete play Dream On, and wondering which song with that title he'll do. Probably the Aerosmith one as that's more famous, but I'll be delighted if he does the Righteous Brothers one as it's always been a favorite.

[TMart]

Great construction, but there weren't enough bread crumbs for me to get to the solution on my own. I had highlighted all the SPAs, which really stood out, but never connected the title to Pandora's Box, and the two clues didn't stand out enough as hints. Solid "week 5" meta with the nebulous title and generic "well known rock song" as the answer, which should have told me look to the grid and clues for more ideas. I wish I had spent more time on it, because I really like the idea. I solved it within seconds after reading Pete's hint to look at the two clues.

[m5rammy]

@BarbaraK

(the way I see it)
Just as a cluer might say "big apple something something" when the answer has NY in it (eg NYSE or CUNY), ie "I'm telling you, but I can't say it explicitly, because it's in the answer", so Pete didn't just say "a kind of container", but "a container, in a poem, by that other guy, in the other clue, slow down here this is a hint, pay attention, but I can't say more explicitly" so you would say, what famous poem, and look it up. I mean "box" is easy enough to get with the crossing letters, if it was just fill.

As for the title, when Pandora's box was opened then closed, Hope was still in the box. So you should look what is in each of the "box"es in the grid.

I will say, as I posted at crosswordfiend.com, (despite what I wrote above) if I hadn't found the less hidden, but incorrect Pan/dora in the middle, I probably wouldn't have found the others.

[Streroto]

Although I did not get this, I was really impressed with this grid/meta. I saw all the DO immediately but never made the connection. I should have done EXACTLY what @barbarak suggests-and had I done so, I would not be licking my (many) wounds.

Stay well all

[damefox]

So congrats to the speedy solvers, and may I ask, how? Out of 100 grid entries, why did Hesiod/box seem important? Is there some connection to the title that I'm missing?

I actually solved this without ever noticing that (although @Laura M gave me a hint about googling, I never did figure out what to google). I noticed a lot of DOs, some in symmetric places, but what eventually made it click was that strange A in the center of the grid. AAR/DOSADOS... why not AIR/DOSIDOS? That would've been MUCH better fill. So that A had to be relevant. Eventually, after staring at it long enough, the word PANDORAS surrounding it jumped out. And then the connection with "Hope" in the title clicked and it fell into place.

BOX and HESIOD are not in places in the grid where one would expect a revealer to be. Clever but devious or just not playing fair? I think that's up for debate. This meta could've been made easier (and, to me, more satisfying) with a more instructive title. Perhaps he didn't want to reuse the title "What's in the Box?" since that was the title for the December 2022 puzzle. Or perhaps he really wanted to have "Hope" in there. So, the expectation that people would google BOX and HESIOD I think was a little weird, but the mechanism itself (letter inside a 8-letter "box") I did enjoy.

[HoldThatThought]

Curiosity about why an unfamiliar (to me) ancient Greek poet would have written a historically significant poem about "a box???" is precisely what led to my solve. Once I Googled to learn more about this mysterious box, the connection to the title seemed to confirm that Pandora's Box was the key to solving the meta.

My first thought was to search both the grid and clues for any sign of "evils" (e.g. jealousy, spite, frustrating meta puzzles), but, in the course of grid scanning, I spotted the actually irrelevant L-shaped "P-A-N-D-O-R-A" in the center of the grid. I was certain that couldn't be random, but a search for other right-angled words was fruitless. From there, though, it didn't take me that much longer to spot the first Pandora "box", and the legend of there being "one thing left in the box" drew my immediate attention to the center squares of the 7 boxes. Most impressive to me was the added fact that Aerosmith released a '91 compilation album called "Pandora's Box".

So, yeah, for me, at least, my curiosity about an ancient Greek dude writing a famous poem about a box, is exactly what enabled my solve.