"Measure Twice, Solve Once" December 13, 2024

[woozy]

Hard part was "Lose your footing" and "prefix with light" also have 15 letters (as did "___ wester (kind of hat)" but that doesn't count because of the extra punctuation) but not the word enumeration and somehow were much more visible and obvious than "making cat noises" or "consequentially". So i floundered about a bit.

[Tom Shea]

Never in a lifetime. Not my type of mechanism.


Isaac's cocktails however, continue to be outstanding!

[Streroto]

DNF. Saw some things and got a nudge with which I was able to get it.

Stay well all

[Bird Lives]

I got PRONE. That is to say, this meta flattened me. Here’s my story

The title is a variant on “Measure Twice, Cut Once” — an adage suggesting the importance of two looks at the same thing. Unfortunately, no matter how long I stared at the five 15-letter entries, no matter how I turned them up and down and inside-out, I found nothing about measurement, nor could I see how they offer two views of the same thing. But did I give up on that idea? Of course not.

I directed my attention away from the grid and towards the clues. And there I found exactly five clues based on the doubling-for-certainty principle. These clues consist almost entirely of two examples linked by “or.” In descending numerical order these are:

66D Word with special or photo. . . . O P S
34D Grande or Bravo preceder. . . .. . . R IO
20A “Tommy” or “Tosca”] say. . . .. . . O PERA
13D Frankincense or amber, e.g. . RESI N
09A Banks or limits preceder. . . . . OUT E R

The five-letter adjective snaking its way through these is PRONE, the position a solver might be in after discovering that those five two-example clues were irrelevant and that the preferred mechanism never occured to him.

[Flying_Burrito]

I got ashore but in one of my rabbit holes I came out with STAID as my answer (which could have hypothetically worked since 'measuring twice' indicates self-restraint.

The mechanism for STAID revolved around word association with words in the long entries.
1. 'Catch' associates to 'Put Away for Now' (according to Thesaurus synonym ==> S (from Stow)
2. 'Lichtenstein' is a town very close to 'Reutlingen' ==>T (from Tante)
3. 'Behind' associates to 'Toward wake': ==> A (from Aft)
4. 'Thanksgiving' associates to 'About to receive': ==> I (from In for)
5. 'Personification' is where my story folded. Pushed it to associate to 'determination': ==> D (from Drive)

[Joe Ross]

The grid was not difficult and the Theme Entries were obvious, but I stared for awhile.

Measure Twice, Cut Once is a construction term, which is my background. Laying out a project of macro and micro scenarios is a constant verification on making every component fit in terms of plumb, line, elevation, grade, area, and volume. Rework and material waste directly affects the bottom line. Crews will wait, if necessary, until 2 people agree on independent summations of measurements.

Also, "measure" has a musical aspect to it, similar to fitting notes and rests into a composition. While I can't sight read music, I am a church and choral singer of a number of years and can carry a tune, keep a beat, blend with others, and fake it fairly well.

So, I started "measuring" the Theme Entries. It took me a while and a lot of misdirected gozintas and takeaways on other grid components before frustration lead me to the clues. Fortunately, the nerd in me had set up an Excel sorting spreadsheet [ =len() ] for the frustrating grid entries and the answer fell out soon after.

I re-learned one thing: @MikeyG is a freak. Seriously. Even if he grokked the Mx upon sight, how? Bravo, Mr. G. BRAVO!

Muggle minds never fail to leave me impressed.

[Colin]

Nice! My framing project (#122) and a Page 1 red herring decoy (and nice pun) that I assumed related to the word PLUMB, had me convinced this was carpentry related and so I spent a few hours trying to back solve. When my dogged determination to bark up that wrong tree wore thin, I went for repeating pairs of letters in 4 of the five long answers and some other grid entries. But that was messy and Mr Gaffney is never messy. Onwards…

[femullen]

No way I was getting this one, except...

@Andrew Bradburn wrote, "unusual that the grid included (Spoiler), as it is not a word one sees every day." What word was that, I wondered. Must be KNAVE at 16A, I figured, because who besides puzzleers uses that any more?

Never one to follow the direct path, I led myself down the following rabbit hole. I noticed that the first three theme answers included the letters for INCH (with which to measure twice, yet there are three of them, but let's see where it goes), but the fourth had only I, N, and H. (The fifth had the letters for FOOT.) So, that fourth theme was missing the letter C, i.e., it had lost its C, so it must be lost at sea, like me. What would "lost at sea" have to do with KNAVE? Must be that KNAVE is supposed to make us think NAVAL, a five-letter adjective.

I almost went with NAVAL out of desperation, but there was clearly no Aha! So, assuming the moderators had a reason for bleeping it, I did a more careful dissection of KNAVE. Even then I was flailing until finding the 40A/70A pair.

Yes, you can bet I'm going to parade this solution past The Smarter Half.

[Deb F]

Nope. No way was this a meta for me. I barely had a rabbit hole. It was a nice weekend with Isaac!

Congratulations to all the Muggles who solved it.

Have a great week, Muggles!

[Red Inker]

OK, I was never going to get that in a million years... Even if I'd gotten it, I would not have had much confidence that I'd correctly solved the puzzle rather than forced a weird pattern into existence.

[regfish7]

Oof I was not even close. Clever one! I’m going to blame not getting it on mom brain but honestly it was just a good construction. I’m happy to see I was not the only one keeping Isaac company all weekend.

[Momo]

Never gonna happen. I don’t mind missing them when they are this abstract. Better luck this week. Hope we get a Christmas theme one. That could be fun!

[JoeFlanders]

"Measure Twice, Solve Never" might be a better title

[ELSavage]

My rabbit hole was deep and circular, since it led me back to AROAR (59D):

Seeing nothing in the themers, I looked around for five of anything to go together and saw that there were exactly 5 alliterative clues:
52A (Time to talk turkey)
63A (Yankee Yogi)
11D (Reutlingen relative) - what other explanation for choosing such an obscure place?
26D (Dancing duds)
29D (System starter, sometimes) - in retrospect, maybe the third S was meant to avoid having too many doubles.
This gave me TYRDS (so tempting to read that phonetically, and maybe a sign that I should have stopped here?)

Given that I was short on vowels, I thought about adding some, but anything with added letters (e.g. STURDY) would be too long to be the answer.

Maybe the themers would be useful after all: the first letters of the clues for those spell ANDTV (and in order, no less!)
Suddenly, the alliterative five (with a 'golden' touch) spelled Saturday. No sooner was I thinking Saturday TV when the close proximity of Yogi and Bear (63A and 61A - for an A) got me thinking maybe this wasn't so convoluted after all.
After that I found [Johnny] Bravo (34D - for R), Tommy from Rugrats (20A - for an O), Thunder Cat(s) (9D and 59D - for another A), and not knowing much about recent Saturday TV, figured there must be an Amber (13D - for another R) in some show I've never heard of.

And voila, I was back to AROAR. Maybe the title allowed for reusing an entry this time, once for the the grid, once for the solve?
I did try to backsolve to get BROAD (an anagram of board, something that would be measured and cut), but "Determination" (58D) didn't sound as much like Saturday TV as Amber did.


The real solution was definitely more elegant, but not any more obvious - to many of us anyway.

[Katiedid]

Darn, sorry I didn't get this one, I like the idea. I was too busy, but at least I measured once!

[michaelm]

I re-learned one thing: @MikeyG is a freak. Seriously. Even if he grokked the Mx upon sight, how? Bravo, Mr. G. BRAVO!

100% agree @MikeyG is unbelievable.
But I believe the fix was in this week.
One of the key clues was "Making cat noises".

[DeuceMTN]

After a LOT of tilting at windmills, 47A, “One of four of 52” became my final rabbit hole. 52A, “THANKSGIVINGDAY” has exactly 4 pairs (pair?) of letters, N, G, I, and of course, A. Since the answer to 47A was “ACE,” and there was also a “KNAVE” which I believe could also be used for “jack,” I just sorta went bananas looking for playing card ideas, especially pairs. I even went so far as to cross out any letter in the theme answers that appeared in other answers as a pair. Nada. At 2055 PST, I decided that joining the family in watching Kevin torture the hapless burglars attempting to rob his house was a better use of my time. John Hughes wins again.

[Mr. Tex]

I reactivated my account just to grouse about this puzzle. When I finally saw the solution, I thought, "That's no fun." All my many rabbit holes seemed more clever than the final answer.

This isn't even the gripe of an unsuccessful solver. Through a totally wrong mechanism, some logic and some wishful thinking, I actually submitted the correct answer.

[mheberlingx100]

I re-learned one thing: @MikeyG is a freak. Seriously. Even if he grokked the Mx upon sight, how? Bravo, Mr. G. BRAVO!

100% agree @MikeyG is unbelievable.
But I believe the fix was in this week.
One of the key clues was "Making cat noises".

I was not a fan of that clue. We have three cats in the house and they mostly purr, meow, and chirp, with the very occasional hiss or snarl. They have never been aroar. I realize there are big cats in this world that do this but they are a rarity in my neighborhood.

[Red Inker]

I thought I was onto something when I noticed "HALF" and "ONE OF FOUR" (a quarter) and "FULL" and "III" (one third) in the clues. Those certainly seemed to me like measurements... But there wasn't a 5th measurement to be found anywhere.