"Spell Casting" March 28, 2025

[hcbirker]

[hcbirker]

[mheberlingx100]

First thing I thought of was the Marie Kondo puzzle of years ago. Solving this sparked Joy.

[Relic]

What a fantastic puzzle! I absolutely found joy in solving it! Epic one Mike Shenk!

[Miki]

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT23hkd3a/

Lyrics:
Romeo, Romeo, where art thou, Romeo?
You asked me.
Well, if you must know,
I took Delta to Quebec,
Heard my Echo in Lima,
Played Golf with Mike,
Drank whiskey with Oscar
Danced foxtrot with Charlie

And where art thou, oh my fair, fair, girl
Oh, what's your name...?

[JoeFlanders]

Somewhat circuitous path to the answer:

Got the Delta Mike Charlie Victor right away thanks to a graduate course in graph theory where the professor insisted we learn the code to clearly name vertices. I didn't even notice the clue for 54 down, because I solved that area via Across clues.

Then, realized D, M, C, and V are Roman Numerals, which together add to 1515, therefore, it must have something to do with 15 across and 15 down, right? 15 down doesn't really exist, so nothing there, so...

...then realized that there were a lot of code names embedded, so did a QUICK mental scan and realized ROMEO and JULIET were missing. Ahah...the answer!

...except that didn't make any sense. Did a SLOWER scan and realized I had missed ROMEO because once I saw ALFA I didn't process the rest of the clue. So, ahah again! Just JULIET, except then wasn't sure if the JULIET / JULIETT discrepancy was important. Also, JULIET doesn't make sense, so then...

Went SLOWLY through and realized that OSCAR was never mentioned...I had a faulty memory because of the "Grammy winner" clue, and that YANKEE wasn't there, faulty memory due to "Phillies" and "Astros" being present.

So finally, 6 minutes too late to make Page 1, got JOY. And had joy. And was sad.

[ship4u]

Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea,
Joy to you and me.

That song was stuck in my head since Friday morning.....

[mikeB]

Title, prompt and a fabulous clue – such harmony! The double entendre SPELL in the title plants the idea that our solve may involve letters. But a doozy of a boost is given by the prompt, whose power emanates from a single word: “missing”. Trying to discover an item missing from this puzzle might be like trying to discover where a needle, missing from a haystack, had been situated before it disappeared. The prompt helps, and the word “missing” is crucial. For there to be something we can discover as missing, there must be an incomplete list of items, some of which are “present”, but one or more of which are “missing”. The items that are present will help us to identify the complete list and ultimately to detect the missing item(s) – leading us to the solution. An additional prerequisite is that the list must be of a fixed and known number of items, or we couldn’t be sure how many missing items we need to identify. Thus, our quest raises the question: What is a known, fixed-length list on which the missing item(s) might belong? Fortunately, there’s a powerful nudge at Clue 54D in the gratuitous reference to NATO’s “phonetic alphabet”, which happens to be a known and fixed-length list of 26 items. (Why gratuitous? Think of the many ways to clue the entry NATO without referring to their phonetic alphabet. This fairly reeks of being a targeted clue, deliberately tailored to help the solver.) Clue 54D dovetails beautifully with the prompt to suggest: We are looking for letters missing from an otherwise complete listing of the NATO phonetic alphabet found in this puzzle. Armed with such a comprehensive insight, we experience a joyful Easter-egg hunt around the grid and the clues, to discover what it is we don’t see. As suggested by others here, there is a lovely paradox implicated in this meta: Reflecting the prompt’s innuendo, the solver finds Joy in a puzzle in which Joy is omitted by design. Imagine that. This twist is a very clever and creative feature of this puzzle. One might say that such features add real personality to these ingenious constructions. Hats off to Mr. Shenk for designing such a gem.

[JRS51]

On my first pass through the alphabet, checking off the letters that were used, I noticed that Juliet and Romeo were missing. I thought that “Romeo and Juliet” would make a satisfactory answer that fit the title, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with Oscar and Yankee, that were also missing. JORY??
It took literally two more slow passes through all of the grid answers and all of the clues, convinced that I had overlooked OSCAR and/or YANKEE, before I saw the missing ROMEO in Alfa Romeo! Isn’t it funny what our brains can see or not see, depending on the context or what we think we know?
Then of course I realized JOY is a much better answer than ROMEO and JULIET. This was a remarkable puzzle, fun to solve and very amazing to look back at the construction involved.

[Big Mac]

Didn’t get to the puzzle until Monday so couldn’t submit but late on shore! Fun one, joyous.

[Brian K]

I first tried looking for letters missing in the grid: JQXY.
Second try and JOY! Very fun and very satisfying.

Did anyone else notice that MIKE could be found on the page three times: MIKE NICHOLS and MIKE SHENK twice. Omitting MIKE NICHOLS from the construction would have left the solver with JMOY, and searching for MIKE somewhere, anywhere. There are no rules in the metaverse.

Thank you Mike for a great solving experience.

[Momo]

Ok so I was wrong! Was talking with friends on the train (after seeing good night and good luck )while I was doing the meta. Didn’t notice Y was missing. Thought just Juliette and Oscar. Since Grammy, Emmy and Tony’s were mentioned as winners or nominees I thought the answer had to be a Juliette who won an Oscar. What are the odds that Juliette Binoche actually won an Oscar! If there was no Juliette winner I probably would have rechecked my letters. Oh well! What a bummer!! So not a good night or good luck!!! Didn't get served at the beach bar! No meta ID!!

[The XWord Rabbit]

Your Rabbit has a theory about Mr. Shenk’s “Spell Casting” puzzle: 26 “nudges” are simply too many to expect
any juicy tales of being lost.

But never fear, he still found something to talk about.

With minimal internet searching he learned that the NATO alphabet was “developed in response to the need for clear and unambiguous communication, especially in aviation and military contexts, where even slight misinterpretations could have serious consequences.” It was further suggested in a Popular Mechanics article that “Familiarizing yourself with (The NATO alphabet) could help you spell out your name over the phone while paying bills or placing food orders.”

But tomorrow is April Fool’s Day so what’s the fun in that?

Instead, your Rabbit offers up one of his favorite children’s books: P Is for Pterodactyl – The WORST Alphabet Book Ever
by Raj Haldar and Chris Carpenter. Want to torture that order taker on the phone? Or maybe that smug second grade speller
in your family? Well, here you go… (And see you next week.)

[KayW]

That Alphabet Book reminds me of the BNL song:

[Penny_Keatley]

Oh man, sloppy work at the end may have cost me the mug! I somehow ended up with Y-O-U instead of J-O-Y, not noticing that "uniform" was in one of the clues and thinking that I had seen Juliet in their somewhere as I hastily fired off my email to WSJ. I thought that the prompt..."we hope YOU find by solving it" had a double meaning...by solving it you will find YOU!

[sharkicicles]

“Familiarizing yourself with (The NATO alphabet) could help you spell out your name over the phone while paying bills or placing food orders.”

I mentioned on zoom I had a leg up on this because in high school I got a ham radio license, which requires you to know the alphabet. I often use it when spelling out things on the phone and more than once I’ve had the exchange “oh, were you in the service?” “Nope, just a nerd.”

[MikeMillerwsj]

The contest answer is JOY. As suggested by the mention of “a phonetic alphabet” in the clue for NATO, 23 of the letters of the NATO phonetic alphabet appear in either the grid or the clues. The three missing letters are JULIETT, OSCAR and YANKEE, which, in alphabetical order, spell the contest answer.

Bravo to the many solvers who were Victors of Mike's clever puzzle. We had 2019 entries, with a robust 92% correct. Most of the incorrect answers were down the right path (NATO alphabet) but missed a few cleverly hidden code-words. So we had OSCAR (9), ROMEO & JULIETT (8), BRAVO (4), YANKEE (4), JULIETT-OSCAR (3) and a few others. Plus TONY (5, related to OSCAR?), DRAFT (3) and J LO.

Congrats to this week's winner: Rachel Tan of Rochester Hills, Mich.!

[krf]

Quick, but not quick enough

[M and M]

No heads banging on the wall, no forehead slap, no pulling out of hair, just a regular old happy weekend solve, getting the answer and partying together on the beach with all you friendly folks.