MEOW #228 A Good Place to Stop

[lbray53]

Scat cat!

I needed the first nudge. I should not have needed the first nudge.

[rjy]

Ahhhhh - got it! Looked at the nudges, but they were not a giveaway (I do love artful nudging that doesn't spill the beans). I had already stumbled around the notions of the first two anyway, and was amidst typing up a request for a nudge when I thought "Let me try just one more thing..." Voila!

Nicely constructed, with a nice aha! at the end of it all - thanks DrT & Ben!

[MatthewL]

Submitted my answer and pretty sure it's right, so I'll go ahead and free the cat now, before something unfortunate happens. Thanks for the puzzle, Dr. Tom and Ben!

[Meg]

Cat's out. He's giving me that "you should have seen it without nudges" look. Snooty cat.

[ky-mike]

Cat barely made it out of the bag this week. Nice, original meta.

[whimsy]

End of the (Fe)Line, indeed!
I was taking the Local instead of the Express; made way too many stops and had way too many letters so nudge #3 was my big help.
Thank you, DrTom and Ben!

[DrTom]

"ACK!", as Bill the Cat would say, we've more than doubled out solvers after the nudges...but we are still up to only 15 !!!!


8 lbray53
9 Meg
10 rjy
11 MatthewL
12 ky-mike
13 CPJohnson
14 whimsy
15 Berto


Lets try this and see if we can double it again!

Three more nudges of considerably increased blatancy:

If you were filling in a regular crossword and had a row of 9 squares, where would be a good place to stop?

The answer that I suggested "screams out", isn't it odd that it sounds so much like a word associated with a crossword, AND is the last letter in 5 rows of the puzzle?

13 letters, what might give you 13 letters? Well there are 9 rows, now if only there were 4 more "things" in this puzzle, then that would add up to 13.

[woozy]

Okay, finally got it. It's not that the nudges were hard to interpret (quite the opposite-- they were pretty obvious) but dang it was hard to figure out what to *do* with them

Cat's out of the bag and looking at me crosseyed. (He's kind of annoyed at as as we shaved him, glued a glucose monitor to him, and bounded him in bandages and a t-shirt he can't walk in. He says whether he stays in or out of the bag is his decision and has nothing to do with my stupid obsession with putting stupid letters in little grids.)

[Thruster17]

I still have no idea what nudges 2 and 5 are trying to tell me. But solved nonetheless with nudge 6.

[KayW]

Cat finally freed with remedial nudges, and wondering what took me so long.


Thanks Tom and Ben!

[DrTom]

Well that moved the needle a bit, 6 more people marched in:


16 johnaldape
17 KayW
18 woozy
19 Thruster17
20 hoover
21 Carolyn

[DrTom]

Two more people joined the "band"

22 Fedexpope
23 Beth Tyrpin

[DrTom]

REVEAL

Trust me MEOW fans Ben and I NEVER meant this to be so difficult. Gosh, we both thought this would play a LOT easier:

Where is a good place to stop – the end? Are there any “ends” in this puzzle? Yep 13 of them, 9 rows and 4 bands. PLUS one of the words, and one that was in 5 of the “last” squares was the word QUARE which we thought would evoke SQUARE in most everyone’s mind.

If you take the last squares in order (Row and, Band) they spell out THE LAST SQUARE; which you have to admit is a good place to stop.

23 of you found it and we thank you for your dedication. Working in collaboration with Ben was great and we have another in the planning stages. Ben is the “Leader of the Bands” because I cannot fill these no how, no way and he just seems to dash them off.

This week’s MEOW will be, I hope, somewhat easier and maybe even cause a chuckle. It is, however, all me. So if it is not to your liking I can’t share the blame with Ben this time.