"Look Inside" - April, 3, 2020

[UTHfan]

Did any folks notice?
If you take the letters to the left and right sides of the four vertical "IN"s:
DECO (INDEED) ANO (STRAINED) LIST (DINERO) and take "NONE" (EMINENCE) as a literal direction to ignore, you can anagram the results into 11 letter CONSOLIDATE.
Another way to "LOOK INSIDE" and SELFCONTAIN?
That was my first rabbit hole but didn't feel 100% like some of the early commenters felt so definitely started looking for the telltale clues.
Good luck winning the mug!

yup, total time suck of a red herring trying to make something out of those tidbits.

[Wendy Walker]

I'm afraid I'm just not going to get around to my favorite crossword puzzle this weekend. I haven't even had time to read everyone's posts since Thursday, which always makes me smile (and often laugh out loud). I learned earlier this week that one of my dearest friends since college days has been diagnosed with inoperable metastatic cancer. Her prognosis is not good, but she is going to undergo chemo and hope for the best. I have been trying to get in touch with all of our mutual friends and still have quite a few more to reach, so that is at the top of my agenda for now. Hope to be back on board next week - better yet back ON SHORE!

So sorry to hear this. You are being a very good friend in a dreadful situation.

[Commodore]

Well my problem initially was that I was stuck on the Self Contained. There were a lot of ME, US, WE that were separated by a few letters (I think last week was still ringing in my ears). That yielded 11 letters as it turns out but not a word that was even vaguely human. The I got caught up in things that were INSIDE people. I saw INNARDS, BOWEL, GUMS, TEETH , PUPIL, ILIA (had to twist and turn to get them but they were there) and again got 11 letters that were even less earthlike. I recognized that some of the clues were "odd" but not that they "contained" their own answers. I'd have loved to have been clever enough to get that one though because it was magnificent in its construction.

COLONOSCOPY has 11 letters. Jes sayin', Doc.

[MajordomoTom]

my break was the fact that I'm hunkered down at home in my dining room with our rescue parrot, named 4A, yes, she's RASCAL.

I was looking back through the clues, and tripped over "SCALAWAG" - why, why, why was that SCAL there? Seemed ... sloppy. Then ... DOH - NOT SLOPPY, DELIBERATE, and that led to UMP and then the other 9.

so our little 4A is forever going to be called that by me.

EDIT: this one was perhaps my favorite so far. Yes, the way that you can LOOK INSIDE the answer also ... fantastic.

[Nlobb]

I got hung up on the current situation. I spent a lot of time getting stuck in one rabbit hole which was disease/virus/sanitizing related: Lister, enol, aerobe, sore, cure, and strain (of virus). After escaping, I noticed "auto" which is a synonym for self. Thinking of self quarantine, I came up with isolate. The letters that spell isolate are neatly isolated in 4 corners of the puzzle and a little distanced from each other. So I submitted auto-isolate. After all, if you are isolated, you look inside yourself for things to do.... I don't understand how you would find the words in the clues that were used to come up with the answer. Amazing!! Keep safe everyone!!

[Tom Wilson]

I was truly grasping at tattered straws on this one. Among my many dead ends, I even wondered if there were more than that one instance of "Nina" in the grid ... then realized that "Al Hirschfeld" has 12 letters.

[BarbaraK]

My first rabbit was the grid entries where the middle letters were another word - eNOl, vOILa, aTONEd, etc. Besides not spelling anything, I found myself wandering exactly what counts. nONOs - are proper names OK? eNOl - two letter words. When I hit on ambiguity, that's usually a good sign I'm in the wrong rabbit hole.

Next was the small words that were also inside larger words - ACA and ALPACA, ONO and NONOS, COO and DANECOOK, AGE and AMPERAGE, LET and AMULET, and then... nothing, that was all I saw and couldn't do anything with them. That probably happens often, just because there are common three letter patterns in the language, but I just don't see them til I'm looking.

The next rabbit hole was the right one.

Don't know about Mike, but Matt has commented that he rarely puts intentional red herrings in his puzzles because so many of them turn up on their own.

[Al Sisti]

I was truly grasping at tattered straws on this one. Among my many dead ends, I even wondered if there were more than that one instance of "Nina" in the grid ... then realized that "Al Hirschfeld" has 12 letters.

Hey, I remember counting "Nina"s! But if he ever used "Al Hirschfeld" as a meta answer, that would bump Margaret Cho and Yma Sumac from #1 in the Hall of Who.

[Tony S]

I was truly grasping at tattered straws on this one. Among my many dead ends, I even wondered if there were more than that one instance of "Nina" in the grid ... then realized that "Al Hirschfeld" has 12 letters.

Hey, I remember counting "Nina"s! But if he ever used "Al Hirschfeld" as a meta answer, that would bump Margaret Cho and Yma Sumac from #1 in the Hall of Who.

Al Hirschfeld would be less obscure to me than either Marie Kondo or the Wonder Twins!

[Eric Porter]

My first rabbit was the grid entries where the middle letters were another word - eNOl, vOILa, aTONEd, etc. Besides not spelling anything, I found myself wandering exactly what counts. nONOs - are proper names OK? eNOl - two letter words. When I hit on ambiguity, that's usually a good sign I'm in the wrong rabbit hole.

Next was the small words that were also inside larger words - ACA and ALPACA, ONO and NONOS, COO and DANECOOK, AGE and AMPERAGE, LET and AMULET, and then... nothing, that was all I saw and couldn't do anything with them. That probably happens often, just because there are common three letter patterns in the language, but I just don't see them til I'm looking.

The next rabbit hole was the right one.

Don't know about Mike, but Matt has commented that he rarely puts intentional red herrings in his puzzles because so many of them turn up on their own.

I went through those exact same steps to solve it. In my opinion, words inside of a grid entry fit the title better than what the answer actually was.

Fortunately I only spent 10-15 minutes on the first rabbit hole and happened to notice the right method within a few minutes of giving up on my first idea. Unfortunately I spent 15 minutes unscrambling the answer because I didn't realize it was mostly sorted. I tried top to bottom and left to right, but I was doing it online and couldn't circle the answers. I'd expected to solve it within seconds of finding all 11 grid entries.

[MarkL]

My first rabbit was the grid entries where the middle letters were another word - eNOl, vOILa, aTONEd, etc. Besides not spelling anything, I found myself wandering exactly what counts. nONOs - are proper names OK? eNOl - two letter words. When I hit on ambiguity, that's usually a good sign I'm in the wrong rabbit hole.

Next was the small words that were also inside larger words - ACA and ALPACA, ONO and NONOS, COO and DANECOOK, AGE and AMPERAGE, LET and AMULET, and then... nothing, that was all I saw and couldn't do anything with them. That probably happens often, just because there are common three letter patterns in the language, but I just don't see them til I'm looking.

The next rabbit hole was the right one.

Don't know about Mike, but Matt has commented that he rarely puts intentional red herrings in his puzzles because so many of them turn up on their own.

That and RAG and AGE overlapping in AMPERAGE.

[LaceyK]

Glad to see that I chased the same rabbits others noticed. The one I thought was going to be the answer for me was letters inside words that started and ended with A (which would be self-contained). (ACA, ANNA, AMOEBA, ALPACA). When I saw there were 11 letters, I got very excited, but they couldn't be arranged for any words. The funny things is that my rationale for the letter A was that pesky OF THE A I kept seeing inside of SOFTHEAD. I knew OF THE was important. But because I must have been stuck on "insides" of words and dropping outside letters, I was seeing it as OF THE A, and not OF THE AD, which would have put me that much closer to addlepated. I knew that clue was odd, and I circled both of the OF THE s in the clue. Plus the STERN clue right above it was also very odd. And I saw the FIRE, IRE as well, and thought why clue it so close the actual word?
All I needed to read in the nudge was "previous puzzle 'Location Finder'" and I went straight to the clues. I started cryptics about the same time as metas, and I only figure out a few, but I should have been familiar with the mechanism. I think as a relative newbie, the toughest thing is knowing when to abandon strategies and when to pursue one further.

[Jazzvibist]

For me (and I’m not being facetious), the next best feeling compared to my solving a meta is the one I get in being snookered and not solving a meta that turns out to have been squarely in my wheelhouse, such as this one (I start each and every day solving a cryptic crossword in which hidden words are routine wordplay). Although the hidden word convention appeared 11 times in this puzzle, I never looked at any of the clues to search for a path (a mistake I have unfortunately made multiple times in the past but from which I don’t seem to profit) yet I quickly gave up on this one when I couldn’t locate in the grid a path involving “I,” “me,” “ego,” or similar words connoting self. Bravo Mike.

[pookie]

I didn't see MULTIMEDIA. I didn't get MONOTONOUS. I didn't even have the wherewithal to get through the explanation of the answer. (I've read more interesting insurance policies) Zzzzz.
I cannot , and probably will not ever get this week's answer. The title, for me, gives me no hint where to start.
Best of luck to you all in winning a mug. (sigh)

You have disabled private message receipt somehow. Check your profile

I have no idea how to do that. What should I read to tell me how?

[MajordomoTom]

click on your name at the upper right of the home screen
select User Control Panel
select the Board preferences tab
make sure you have yes, yes, yes for those first three questions.

[jenirvin]

Forgot to check back in, but I enjoyed this puzzle. Got sucked down a couple of rabbit holes, then forgot about it with late-weekend craziness. Hope all is well with everyone!

[pookie]

click on your name at the upper right of the home screen
select User Control Panel
select the Board preferences tab
make sure you have yes, yes, yes for those first three questions.

Thanks I will attempt it. Just finished baking biscotti. Cobbler is now in oven. HELP! Get me out of this house!
Think I've watched every Noir movie there is on the channel that plays them all the time.

[TPS]

Think I've watched every Noir movie there is on the channel that plays them all the time.

What channel is that? My GF loves old Noir but I don't think we have a channel that exclusively plays them.

[MajordomoTom]

Biscotti isn't terribly hard to make, just takes pretty specific baking. That's a fun one. Save a piece for me, as long as there's chocolate involved.

[Bob cruise director]

click on your name at the upper right of the home screen
select User Control Panel
select the Board preferences tab
make sure you have yes, yes, yes for those first three questions.

Thanks I will attempt it. Just finished baking biscotti. Cobbler is now in oven. HELP! Get me out of this house!
Think I've watched every Noir movie there is on the channel that plays them all the time.

We (2 of us) are wolfing our way though both a peach cobbler and date nut bread that my wife made (that we don't need). Don't overcook the biscotti as it makes it too hard unless you like dunking it in coffee or something.

p.s. I picked this up from my wife especially when she ran her baking business.