"Unfinished Business" September 29, 2023

[mheberlingx100]

One of my rabbit holes was leaving off the first two letters on the left and replacing them with “co” (an unfinished business?). Worked great for rural area which became coral area which pointed to the reef entry. Didn’t work for any others though.
Also looked at adding a letter to left of words so chinfests aligned with gabs. Not much on that front either.

[Merry Potter]

There were ten "in"stances of "IN" in the puzzle if you include unfINished busINess and of course "TEN" appears in 58 across and 65 across (forward and backward)!

[MikeMillerwsj]

The contest answer is DISCONTINUED. Reparsing the central Down answer LEFT OFF as LEFT OF F suggests looking at the letters to the left of the F’s in the grid. In topto-bottom order, those letters spell the contest answer.

The secret to this one was sitting in plain sight but it stumped a lot of our solvers. We had just 544 entries--though among them the batting average was higher than usual with 88% correct. Other guesses came in dribs and drabs: PAUSED (3), ENDED (3), UNDONE (2), DROPPED (2), BOUGHT (2) and some others.

Congrats to this week's winner, Steven Petto of Moraga, Calif.!

[Laura M]

Noticed all of the Fs before anything else: 1 per row, in all but 3 rows. It was the last letter of one of the words, so after the Fs wouldn't work; I looked at the letters before the Fs and got DISCONTINUED, which absolutely couldn't be random chance. But the reason for the mechanism stumped me for another hour or so :-)

[The XWord Rabbit]

First of all, The X-Word Rabbit would like to apologize to those of you who were unfortunate enough to witness his unravelling near the end of last Friday’s Zoom call over Mr. Shenk’s “Unfinished Business” puzzle.

He could not see it. Could Not See It! COULD… NOT… SEE… IT…!!!!

So take heart, Muggles, he is more sympathetic to your pain than he has been of late. Just explaining the method on this one causes his whiskers to twitch.

25D told you everything you needed to know: LEFTOFF. The trick was parsing it out correctly: LEFT OF F. There were 12 letter F’s in the puzzle and the 12 letters immediately to the left of those F’s spelled out the answer: DISCONTINUED.

(Twitch)

Now, with apologizes to Robert Frost:

Benchen71’s nomination was in the bag, as he so clearly mapped out the road taken that should not have been. Post#213

And then we have MikeyG’s college dissertation on the subject. A minefield of rabbit holes, deep and shallow. An amazing analysis Post #241

Your Rabbit would like to join in the chorus of comments directed at Mr. Shenk, regarding his amazing construction of a puzzle that seemed so straightforward and yet so elusive.

And regarding rabbits and rabbit holes: It brings to mind this title sequence from the 1972 movie, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, but Was Afraid to Ask.” Until next week, then…

[Yoda66]

Spent time on various combinations (most of them covered by other posts). Then went back to basics. First this a Shenk puzzle, so don't overcomplicate. With that in mind I decided to ignore the long entries. Past tense? Ok let me look at the bottom for an E and a D. Refi, pdfs, refi pdfs, refi pdfs, wait the E and the D are before an F. Son of a gun, left of f